Reflections on Wolfe's Before the Law

I am in the process of composing a review for Cary Wolfe's Before the Law: Humans and Other Animals in a Biopolitical Frame. In my first crack at a review, I tried to stick as close as possible to the text, tracing the main argument through the entire book, and carefully crafting my language to condense the argument of each section while staying under the 2000 word limit.

 I'm not sure how that turned out yet -- but it seems like it hardly reads like a review. The theoretical background required to understand the arguments are daunting. Wolfe both critiques and preserves moves and arguments from prominent theorists in the same section. He vacillates between abstract theory to concrete examples that illustrate how the theoretical lens makes visible aspects of the political previously ignored through politics grounded in the concept of sovereignty or humanist 'rights' discourse.

In this blogpost, I'm going to do the complete opposite of my first try at the review. I am going to contextualize the text as a whole within my own recent readings in ANT, Object Oriented Ontology, and New Materialist philosophy. I want to show how Wolfe's methods and arguments differ and correspond to these other theoretical paradigms.

Harman's Object-Oriented Philosophy may be the furthest from Wolfe's own project. Harman's philosophy, at least as elucidated in Guerilla Metaphysics, departs from particular phenomenological figures: Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, and Alphonso Lingis. For the most part, it seems that Harman picks out passages from these thinkers that deal with objects in a quasi-mystical way; indeed, it seems that Harman is less concerned with their major arguments (particularly his treatment of Levinas, so concerned with ethics as first philosophy) than tracing thinkers who use the same rhetoric he wishes to preserve in his own philosophy. No doubt, these passages are beautiful, but one cannot help thinking that Harman does not take seriously the legitimate critiques of phenomenology, particularly those of Jacques Derrida, which he dismisses as an instance of tortured self-reflexivity. Furthermore, even Harman's use of Heidegger rarely addresses the fact that Heidegger's work is oriented toward the meaning of Being itself (late Heidegger) and the meaning of Being for Dasein (Being and Time). Harman's uses of Heidegger Heidegger make almost no reference to temporality, Being-towards-death, or even Dasein. I would argue that Harman's appropriation of Heidegger ignores Heidegger's desire to move beyond thinking of Being in terms of the "present-at-hand," as it preserves the idea of 'substance'.  

Harman quite unashamably develops a metaphysical system of relation based on autonomous 'withdrawn' substance.Harman uses the concept of "withdrawness" in order t avoids accusations of a return to naive metaphysics. While Harman's articulation of a grand metaphysical system of relations is impressive, it says little about the crucial distinctions among these entities. Because Harman does not believe the physical world should be left for scientific investiation (an epistemological endeavor) he posits a general metaphysical account of the world's constitution. But where does this ontological/metaphysical description get us if it cannot make meaningful distinctions among objects? Is this not still left to epistemological and empirical inquiry? Harman admits that the human relation to everything else is surely "more complex" than other relations among objects, but not different in kind. How is our relation more complex? What is the difference between a rock, a deer, and a human being? 

Harman's metaphysics, and his rhetorical decision to use "lists"  random objects that fascinate him (usually objects in the natural world or objects not specific to our contemporary time), flattens rather than thickens and multiplies kinds of relation. Even as Harman says that we should populate our texts with objects and things, he does little (if anything) to articulate the object's concrete specificity apart from naming it in a list with other objects. Objects are not considered in terms of their meaning but, Harman argues, should be considered because they are part of the world. Harman's metaphysics, then, is framed as an autonomous realm from ethics or politics; for Harman, we need to articulate a foundational metaphysical system first and only then can we consider and decide on these other issues. If I'm not mistaken, Harman has argued that metaphysics do not necessarily imply a particular political or ethical stance. Even if we accept that, it still might be worthwhile to 'speculate' on how his metaphysical position can be used to support and even justify particular political or ethical orientations. 

Levi Bryant's Onticology (or OOO) fares a bit better in relation to Wolfe's work, since he recognizes that each object is an autonomous system with its own structured relation to its environment. Like Wolfe, he draws on Luhmann's systems theory. However, as Wolfe's points out in a footnote to Before the Law, Bryant still remains tied to Harman's theories of relations and objects on an ontological level (with the addition of the realm of the 'virtual' drawn from Deleuze).  That is, Bryant agrees with Harman that each new relation creates a 'new object' so that objects are nestled inside other objects. Bryant and Bogost have both maintained that ontological problems are often mistaken for epistemological ones, a position I do not think Wolfe shares.  In a blog post on What is Posthumanism?, Bryant writes that the weakness of Wolfe's book, citing Harman, is that

  Wolfe still seems to think these issues in epistemological terms. Rather than seeing selective relations entertained towards other objects as a general ontological feature ofeach and every object or as a fundamental feature of the world itself, Wolfe seems to adopt the pessimistic thesis that this marks the impossibility of our knowledge.

For Wolfe, this does not just mark the impossibility of a complete knowledge (which Wolfe addresses in Before the Law as the God's Eye View) but also assures that no matter what entities we choose to consider as possessing what he calls, drawing on Heidegger, a "self-contestatory" relationship, that we will have been wrong in our decision. Does this relegate knowledge of how other beings 'see' to scientific inquiry? To a certain extent, yes, but I do not think Bryant would necessarily disagree with this delegation.. Indeed, is not scientific inquiry (or at the very least, empirical inquiry) the mode of 'second-order observation' (how something observes rather than how we observe it) occurs? If we do not rely on such empirical inquiry, then our method results in anthropomorphization. Sure, we do this anyway, but without the check of empirical inquiry into a system's observational systems, then perhaps we go too far in assuming that ALL objects function as autopoietic, closed systems. 

Wolfe argues against the ontologizing of relations in a footnote to Before the Law. Even though Wolfe agrees with Bryant's ethico political position, in the following passage, he argues "we do not need the either/or-ism of 'literally different agents': 

"when we relate to something, we literally become a different entity," that "an entity that enters into a relational network with a hammer or a computer has different powers and capacities than an entity that does not exist in these relations and is, therefore, by this logic, a different agent." (Bryant qtd. in Wolfe n131)

Wolfe responds: 

"we can simply say that we are and are not the same agents depending on the context, Bryant's 'pre-hammer' entity does not vanish when the hammer is picked up (and if he did, he, naturalistically speaking, couldn't pick up the hammer in the first place). We are (to put it in Derrida-ese) constituted by differance pre- and post- hammer" 

In other words, Wolfe does not see much benefit to following Harman's ontological distinction of separate objects. . 

For Wolfe, distinctions between system and environment, as for Luhmann, are functional distinctions. These functional decisions are based, in some cases, on  our current state of knowledge.  I think that for Wolfe, these new forms for ontology go too far in considering any and every object as worthy of speculative inquiry. We have pressing political and ethical questions that call for pragmatic action, informed by empirical inquiry, and even though, as he puts it, we will always have been wrong in our choice, we must make one conditioned action at a time. 

This is not to say that Wolfe exclusively privileges the living or even carbon based life forms. He writes, 

"The relevant question, which I cannot explore in detail here, would be the mode of embodiment in relation to recursive developmental change that allows not just requisite plasticity in the organism's individual ontogeny, but also, and therefore, its ability to thereby enter into an essentially prosthetic relation to the external technicities of code, semiosis, archive, and so on--regardless of whether the organism is made of 'flesh and blood' or silicon and silicone" 

We have to seriously ask whether it is worth thinking about the relations between a banana peel and the floor, given that the banana peel (at least so far as we know) cannot enter into a prosthetic relation as the condition for the possibility of having its relations matter to it. This is why the speculative realism of Harman and to a certain extent, Bryant, goes too far in its kind of object fetishism. Bryant even speaks of "abstractions" as "objects" that act in the world and Bogost even asks if we have an ethical responsibility to these "ideas." Ideas and abstractions are 'embodied' in particular material instances, as Bryant has argued, but do ideas matter to ideas? Do ideas mean to each other? Are ideas and abstractions really "whos" that can relate to other whats? I have my doubts. 

And Bryant recognizes, in a way that Harman never even begins to address, that entities have different capabilities. Relying on Maturana and Varela's distinction of allopoietic and autopoietic entities in Democracy of Objects, he writes, 

"where allopoetic systems often appear to have a greater degree of elasticity with respect to their qualities, autopoietic systems seem to have a greater degree of elasticity with respect to distinctions or what we might refer to as 'channels'" (173)

 Bryant's term, "channels" refers to an autopoietic system's ability to make new distinctions "thereby enhancing their capacity to be irritated or perturbed by other objects" and this is what we mean when we say that certain autopoietic entities have different degrees of 'freedom' (the freedom to develop different distinctions) (173). 

Bryant thus addresses a major problem I have with Harman: his offhanded description of relations between human and other objects as "more complex." In Bryant's terms, then, we might say that Wolfe is much more interested in investigating autopoietic systems than allopoietic systems -- at least in terms of biopolitical choices. 

The key distinction for Wolfe, however, drawing on Stiegler, is that the nonhuman animal (or the nonhuman entity) must be able to have a prosthetic relation that constitutes it as a 'who' in the first place. 

I find the following passage in Before the Law as making a similar point as Bryant, referring to evidence of 'neuroplasticity' of certain animals:

"their individual ontogenies are quite rigid and subject to a very limited set of variations. Thus, their individual ontogenies are of little importance in explaining their behavior. For creatures of sufficient neurophysiological plasticity, however, it is a different story, one in which the correspondingly high degree of individual variation in individual ontogenies give rise to more complex social and communicational behaviors necessary to coordinate them" (70). 

He expands on this in a later passage, 

"the animal behaviors and forms of communication we have been discussing are 'already-there', forming an exteriority, an 'elsewhere', that enables some animals more than others to 'differentiate' and 'individuate' their extistence--and thus to be 'thrown'-- in a manner only possible on the basis of a complex interplay of the 'who' and the 'what', the individual's 'embodied enaction' (to use Maturana and Varela's phrase) and exteriority of the material and semiotic technicities that interact with and rewire it, leading to highly variable ontogenies, complex forms of social interaction, individual personalities, and so on" (76). 

I think this relation -- the individuation of 'whos' is what Wolfe will compare later to Dasein later in the text, but not Dasein as understood by the Heidegger of Being and Time, but the 'limited' Dasein given to the 'animal' in Heidegger's Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: "having a world in the mode of not having" (79). 

Bryant agrees that each entity has its own 'world' as it appears to it and this is why it is necessary to use second-order observation. But for Wolfe it is crucial to distinguish between having a world in the mode of not having and simply that any entity (or even abstraction) always has a limited way of seeing the world.  That is, because of pressing political and ethical issues, Wolfe is most concerned with the nonhuman animal just as much as the 'human' as  'thrown' Dasein. This is because the world matters and means to a Dasein -- the Dasein cares for its own individuated being and is constituted as a 'who' by relation to a prosthetic what. The block of wood outside is not a 'who' because, so far as we know, it does not have sufficient neuroplasticity to make new distinctions, which would eventually result in a collective memory shared among the community of wood-beings. 

Indeed, Wolfe seems to make the argument that this position may even be more 'posthumanist' than Bryant's, who (at least in a blogpost) restricts the conditions of value to the existence of the human. Bryant writes, 

"No case could here be made [. . .] that there's something of intrinsic value in nonhumans such as animals or planets. Rather, we would be committed to the thesis that there are only relative values of some sort of another. . .the planet, for example, would only take on value-predicates in relation to humans. Were humans to not exist, the planet would neither be valueless or valuable, it would just be." (Bryant, qtd. in Wolfe 84). 

In contrast to Bryant, Wolfe maintains that we need to leave open the possibility that the 'to whom' it matters might not be a human being; he leaves open the possibility that "the addressee of value--and indeed of immunitary protection--is permanently open to 'whoever it might be'" (84). 

One thing is for sure, though: Wolfe emphasizes that there must be a qualitative difference (not just a difference in 'degree' as if there was a 'biologistic continuum') among "the chimpanzee in biomedical research, the flea on her skin, and the cage she lives in--and a difference that matters more (one might even say, in Derridean tones, 'infinitely' more) to the chimpanzee than to the flea or the cage?" (83). 

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Of course, we might ask, why should we have an ethical and political obligation to those beings that we learn 'have a world' in the sense of Dasein, but not to other nonhuman objects or ideas? I think this returns us to the basic question posed by Bentham: not can they reason ,but can they suffer? Although 'suffering' is  an insufficient criteria as we are not quite sure of its extra-human meaning--it is already an anthropomophism-- it seems as though that being a 'who' to which the world matters is a condition for 'suffering'. A block of wood, so far as we know, does not suffer,  nor does a cage: it just 'is'. It seems like Wolfe may suggest that an originary technicity may be a necessary condition for something to 'suffer' in the sense of Bentham. 

Still, we are left with the question: what is to be done? That is, if we cannot simply extend "rights" to various animals, then how do we enact our choice through law? Do we need to think law in terms of 'immunitary protection'? According to Wolfe, we cannot depend on outmoded terms of political sovereignty. 

And just who is this "we" that decides? I t think Wolfe is aware of the problem of assuming a 'we', but his pragmatic bent means that 'we' as human beings who are reading this book, who are helping to shape and enforce laws, must choose. We must choose to want to know rather than not want to know about the animal Holocaust taking place in service of globalization -- the mass 'letting die' so that we might live. We must choose to want to know that our consumption of meat may endanger the ecological sustainability of the planet. We must choose, we must decide, we must act conditionally -- and we must do this satisfied that we should never be content with a 'good conscience': no matter who we choose for "immunitary protection" we will have been wrong. We must act on our incomplete knowledge and hope that we will come to know and make ever more subtle distinctions, thickening and multiplying the lines rather than flattening relations through an all-encompassing metaphysical ontology. 

Wolfe writes, 

"This very act of immunitary selection and protection on the basis of the capacity to 'respond'--a capacity itself based on a constitutively prosthetic relation to technicity--can never be juridical, however, because is is always already traced with the automaticity and mechanicity of a reaction. It is a 'line', to use Derrida's formulation, that is always already 'multiple' and nonlinear, always folded and in motion, always under erasure" (103). 

The benefits of thinking in a biopolitical frame is that "it puts us in a position to articulate the disjunctive and uneven quality of our own political moment, constituted as it is by new forces and new actors not very legible by the political vocabulary of sovereignty we have inherited" (104). 

Biopolitical thinking is to think the apparatus or dispotif (the institutional practices!) that subject both humans and nonhumans. We no longer just think about the ethics of eating "animals" (as if they were a unified category) but of what Wolfe provisionally calls "flesh." 

One of the best examples Wolfe gives to illustrate the complexity of Biopolitical thought is the problem of 'synthetic meat', which, now that I think about it, challenges my idea that the notion of 'suffering' is sufficient to decide (to draw a line, make a cut) of who counts and who does not. Wolfe argues that synthetic meat according to someone like Peter Singer, would be perfectly ethical, since (presumably) no animals had to suffer in order for it to be made. Leaving aside the fact that most synthetic meat production requires serum derived from other killed animals in order to grow (and issue explored in The Tissue Culture and Art Project's artworks), Wolfe argues that from a biopolitical standpoint, the issue is not so clear: 

"From this vantage, synthetic meat might not even appear to be an 'animal' issue per se, and would be seen as utterly continous with the technologies and dispotifs that are exercising a more and more finely tuned control over life and 'making live' at the most capillary levels of social existence. Indeed, it would seem continuous with the practices of domestication, manipulation, and control of life that characterize factory farms" (96-97). 

Because it even further distances us from the animals we kill, leaving it to industrial production, some groups are against the production of synthetic meat. 

Thus, it is not only that we need to choose which animals might fall under the criteria of Dasein, but the institutional practices that fundamentally change our relationship to the nonhuman world. 

Embodying Technesis: Part 1

Chapter 3: From Metaphor to Embodiment: Resisting Technesis

Systems Theory

In a response to a review of the book Embodying Technesis, Mark Hansen agrees that he may have given short shrift to systems theory. His discussion of systems theory, which he sees as a “positivation” of the deconstructive moment takes its departure from William Paulsen’s book that explicitly attempts to show how systems theory can help us to understand literature; from this example, Hansen argues that systems theory is still committed to a “relative exteriority” that ultimately leaves materiality out of the distinction of system and environment. The problem is that Hansen chooses one specific application of systems theory that is committed to explaining how it functions within literature (the domain of representation). Hansen argues that “commitment to representationalism” and the collapsing of literary and techno-scientific systems is the major problem he has with cultural studies’ appropriation of poststructualist theory (and some of the poststructuralist theory itself).

Hansen argues that systems theory actually isolates the system from environment, but Cary Wolfe’s reading of Luhmann argues that it is only through the closure of the system that the system can connect to the environment. He writes,

This self-referential closure, however, does not indicate solipsism, idealism, or isolation but is instead crucial to understanding a fundamental principle of what I call ‘openness from closure’ [. . .] in the self-referential mode of operation, closure is a form of broadening possible environmental contacts; closure increases, by constituting elements more capable of being determined, the complexity of the environment that is possible for the system (Wolfe 15).

Furthermore, the system that makes a distinction is not limited to human beings, but every system that can “make distinctions.” For instance, a cell makes a distinction between what is and what is not itself – creating an outside environment that is not the system. In contrast to the systems theory approach, Hansen, appears to argue that complexity arises autonomously from systems. He writes, “technology also functions as a key agent in the macroevolution, or complexification of the material world. Whereas technologies are always results of culturally determined processes, they are also privileged vehicles of the natural process of material complexification” (56). For Hansen, then, the rule is that technology is increasing material complexification and that this complexity is “negantropic.” In other words, it seems to me that for Hansen there is a “natural” negentropic force of technology that complexifies our world, a force having little to do with a “relative” exteriority. So even if Hansen maintains that this movement is “non-teleological” there still seems to be a telos: the elimination of entropy.

The question is – who is “positivizing” the deconstructive moment? Does Wolfe “positivize” Derrida when he claims,

Derrida and Luhmann converge on the same point from opposite directions; while Derrida emphasizes the final undecidability of any signifying instance, Luhmann stresses that even so systems must decide, they must selectively process the differences between information and utterance if they are to achieve adaptive resonance with their environment. Thus underneath this apparent divergence is a shared emphasis—against ‘relativism’ and ‘anything goes’ reflexivity—on the determinate specificity of the signifying or communicative instance that must be negotiated, which is precisely why in Limited Inc. Derrida rejects the term ‘indeterminacy’ because it occludes an understanding of the determinate oscillation between possibilities (for examples, of meaning, but also of acts). (23)

I would argue that, no, he does not. Indeed, it is important to see that Hansen is the one using thermodynamic theories of entropy/negentropy in service of his ontological claim of material complexification that results in negentropic force. Luhmann’s distinctions go further than the second-order cybernetic theories Hansen depends on that simply distinguish between information/noise (another distinction critiqued by Hansen).

Indeed, I think that it is important to note that Hansen’s more recent essay, “Media Theory” uses systems-theoretical terms to describe the media’s function in connect system and environment:

The medium, we might say, is implicated in living as essentially technical, in what I elsewhere call ‘technical life’; it is the operation of mediation—and perhaps also the support for the always concrete mediation—between a living being and the environment. In this sense, the medium perhaps names the very transduction between the organism and the environment that constitutes life as essentially technical; thus it is nothing less than a medium for the exteriorization of the living, and correlatively, for the selective actualization of the environment, a demarcation of a world, of an existential domain, from the unmarked environment as such” (300, italics mine).

Taking this quotation as a departure point and translating it into the language I used a minute ago, we might say that the medium (which is basically any exteriorizing medium – language, but, moreover, writing (Derrida) or communication (Luhmann)) helps to make a distinction, actualizing a different relation between system and environment.

Furthermore, I think we should read Hansen’s argument about “medium” as corresponding to the position he ascribes to Derrida in what Hansen calls Derrida’s ‘machine reduction of technology’: “Functionally, technology is limited to the role of material support for the ‘possibilities of the trace’; like writing in the restricted sense, it is merely the means by which differance exteriorizes and expresses itself” (84).Replace “differance” with the “exteriorization of the living” as a selective actualization of the environment and I think you will see why his position corresponds with Derrida’s, except that Derrida uses the “machine” metaphor and Hansen calls this “medium” (which is also what systems theory would call it if we remember Gumbrecht’s quote).

Hansen argues that Derrida and others who put technology into discourse, reducing technology to a text-machine, is “a defense against the threat posed by the radical material alterity of technology: by safely situating technology as the ‘other’ within thought, as the machinery of language integral to thought’s genesis, technesis neutralizes a more formidable ‘other’ that threatens the wholesale dissolution of the much cherished closure of representation” (87). Here, I would argue that the idea that human ‘thought’ or ‘writing’ as communication is integral to ourselves, to any human being – that we are always already “inhuman” would be much more terrifying. Thus, I think Hansen in a sense is defending against this position, which he partially amends in his essay “Media Theory.” Following Bernard Stiegler, Hansen argues that the break of the human from everything is else is also the invention of technics (299).  However, Hansen still maintains that, a bit contrary to his Lyotardian position in Embodying Technesis, that “no matter how cognitively sophisticated these technologies become, they operate only through their coupling with the human” (302). In this way, technology is not an “autonomous,” radically exterior force; rather, technology is only “quasi-autonomous”

Metalepsis

The key rhetorical move by which the poststructuralists reduce technology is metalepsis. Hansen defines the term as

a rhetorical figure describing the metonymical substitution of one (figurative) word for another or several others. Most often involving extreme compression and an ensuing obfuscation of the literal sense of the statement, metalepsis also, in certain cases, designates an inversion or conflation of cause and effect (91).

Thus, Hansen argues that metalepsis designates “the triumph of having so stationed technology, in one’s own work, that particular aspects of technology seem to be not preconditions of one’s description, but rather to be caused by one’s own production” (Hansen 92, original italics).

One of the issues with Hansen’s use of the text-machine is that he is reducing the text to an ideal form rather than a material artifact/medium that is one way “writing” happens. He is confusing “text” and “writing” with language, particularly language as representation: “As long as technology is made to derive from language, the postructuralist and constructivist idioms can confidently maintains their enabling conflation of technology’s robust materiality with the relative materiality that it possesses within the theater of representation” (93).

Greek ontology and the Machine Reduction

I hate to sound snotty, but if Derrida has reduced the machine to a textual metaphor, then Hansen has reduced the supplement to only one of its significations. Hansen quotes Aristotle on the meaning of techne, which contains two specific forms of mimesis: that which “carries to its end what physis is incapable of effecting” and the usual sense of “imitation” (Lacou-Labarthe qtd. in Hansen 95). Hansen argues that Derrida’s description of the supplement “could well be a gloss on Aristotle’s passage: “The supplement adds itself, it is a surplus, a plenitude enriching another plenitude, the fullest measure of presence. It is thus that art, techne, image, representation, convention etc. come as supplements to nature and are rich with this entire cumulating function” (Derrida qtd. in Hansen 95). Then Hansen moves on to say that in this form, the supplement, “retains a basic fidelity to Aristotelian techne” (95).

First, we must contextualize the passage that Hansen tears out of Derrida. The passage stems from the section From/Of Blindness to the Supplement, a section that discusses the function of the supplement in the text of Rousseau. Derrida says many times surrounding this passage quoted from Hansen that he is speaking about the supplement “in the text of Rousseau” (although, it might be worth pointing out that in “Typewriter Ribbon,” Derrida says that in de Man, the text of Rousseau becomes “exemplary of the text in general”)  It is extremely important to the rest of his argument to read what Hansen did not quote. Directly before the passage, Derrida writes,“For the concept of the supplement—which here determines that of the representative image—harbors within itself two significations whose cohabitation is as strange and as necessary” (144).

So, we already know that Hansen has not quoted the second signification. But even before we get there, directly after the passage Hansen quotes, Derrida writes, “This kind of supplementarity determines in a certain way all the conceptual oppositions which Rousseau inscribes the notion of Nature to the extent that it should be self-sufficient” (145). This part is quoted to show that the type of supplement is articulated within the context of the text of Rousseau specifically regarding nature. But let’s see what the other signification is:

substitute, it is not simply added to the positivity of a presence, it produces no relief, its place is assigned in the structure by the mark of an emptiness. Somewhere something can be filled up of itself, can accomplish itself, only by allowing itself to be filled through sign and proxy” (145). More importantly, the next paragraph states, “this second signification of the supplement cannot be separated from the first [. . .] But their common function is shown in this: whether it adds or substitutes itself, the supplement is exterior, outside of the positivity to which it is super-added, alien to that which, in order to be replaced by it, must be other than it” (145).

Although I am not quite sure what this means, the question is whether or not Hansen can really claim that Derrida’s notion of the supplement is a “gloss” on Aristotle’s concept of “techne” if he erases the context of the passage (Rousseau) and the second signification of the supplement. I think we may find that Derrida does not recuperate the supplement into the domain of thought, as Hansen claims.

Luck and the automatic (pgs 98-101) (some notes and Questions)

Chance:

Luck—“restricted domain of events, those capable of choosing” (humans)

Automatic—“to animals other than man, objects” etc.

The Difference:

1.)    luck ‘former’ “are for something in a sense that could be determined by their agent (i.e. according to the category of thought), while the latter are for something in a sense that cannot be so determined, that remains-in itself-indeterminate.

2.)    The final cause of an automatic event is external and thus can only make sense if understood by an intentional agent.

Hansen points out that Aristotle does not hold to the radical exteriority of the automatic and assimilates it into the domain of the mind. The automatic is “para physin in the sense that it cannot be tied down to a purpose immediately graspable by and attributable to an agent of thought or to nature. Its efficiency derives from something purely contingent and external in the subject it qualifies” (100). If we look back to Derrida’s description of the supplement, we see that is much more akin to “the automatic” than to Aristotle’s restricted definition of techne.

Chapter 4: Questioning the Machine Basis of Technology: Heidegger on Techne

In Rutsky’s book, he interprets high-tech as technology that reveals in the mode of poesis; For Heidegger and for Rutsky, poesis, as a revealing that brings-forth, puts us in a positive, “science-fictional” relationship with the future. Rutsky writes at the end of his book,

“These ‘other’ futures cannot be represented through rational analysis and predictions; they can only be imagined through a science-fictional process, an imaginative, aesthetic process that is similar to the bringing-forth that Heidegger saw in the Greek techne” (158).

While Rutsky sees this shift as promising and productive, following Heidegger’s lead, Hansen reads Heidegger’s “Question Concerning Technology” as another symptom of technesis, arguing that “Heidegger’s reduction of technology thus functions to insure the domestication of modern technology within the frame of poiesis” (104).

Hansen first reads technology as an ontic supplement that contributes to our “fallenness” and “inauthentic” existence in idle chat and curiosity. The argument is that basically, technology infiltrates the purity of language: “What cybernetic technologies do is present the being of language as mere words cut off from their connection with a [. . .] ‘context of involvements’. In this sense, what Heidegger says of the typewriter is all the more true of the computer” (109).

Hansen argues that Heidegger only considers technologies which “can be thematized in explicit terms” because these are the only ones that can have a direct impact on our lives. He argues that there are two mediated practices which are left out of this category:

1.       Experiences in which there is no breakdown and hence no motivation to cross from the practical to the theoretical domain.

2.       Experience in which technology’s impulse (because it is molecular and diffuse) isi n pricinpel not recuperable through thematization.

I think we need to explore particularly what number 1 could possibly be referring to in terms of concrete technologies that Hansen seems to be referring to here.

In terms of “Question Concerning Technology,” it seems like Hansen comes to the opposite conclusion of Rutsky; namely, that far from the mode of poiesis being able to engage with high-tech, it actually cannot extend to the question of high-tech: “Whereas poiesis could coherently be applied to the forms of production known to the Greeks (“handcraft manufacture,” “artistic and poetical bringing into appearance and concrete imagery,” and physis) it simply cannot be extended to cover the category of modern production” (115). Instead, Hansen argues that “as long as it comprises a mode of poiesis or the revealing of Being, modern technology, in other words, can distinguished solely through its negativity—the way it obscures the meaning of Being” (118).

Given what we said about Rutsky’s tracing of the development of technologies back to an artisan, a producer – that such an origin of production is rare these days (see I, Pencil) I think we would be more apt to agree with Hansen’s critique rather than Rutsky’s affirmation of the Heideggerian poiesis.

Chapter 5: The Mechanics of Deconstruction: Derrida on De Man, or Poststructuralism in the Age of Cultural Studies

Hansen claims that Derrida effectively preserves the priority of Heideggerian poiesis, claiming that “privileging the trace as the withdrawl of truth, Derrida retains the very same priority of ontology for which Levinas rebukes Heidegger” (124). And again, on the next page: “by taking the being of what is and making it thoroughly dependent on the metaphysics of the text (and thus on the operation of techne), Derrida simply effaces the very category of radical exteriority and, along with it, all traces of materiality outside the space governed by textuality” (125).

“The functional analogy linking text with machine begins to function ontologically—and hence reductively—from the moment when deconstruction generalizes its claims to technology as such, rather than restricting them to technology in its textual form” (128).

“matter” is reduced to playing “the purely abstract role of that which resists idealization” (129)

We should recall Hansen’s understanding of the supplement, as it is crucial to his argument in this chapter on Derrida as well. Hansen writes, “technology simply supplements thought ith a material basis without which it could not function” and also, on the opposite page, “technology is made wholly coequivalent with the supplement and thus loses its truly radical force as a material obstacle to the onto-phenomenological movement of thought, a threat to thinking itself” (133). I have a hard time thinking how technology isn’t a threat to thinking itself while at the same time being the enabling condition for thought. It’s a threat to the purity of thought or to thought without any mediation – ideal thought.

De Man and Derrida’s ‘materiality’ of the text

Hansen argues that Derrida “ignores de Man’s introduction of the ‘material’—a category, I suggest, holds the relation of radical exteriority with respect to phenomenological thought or consciousness [Erinnerung]” (read pgs 138-`139 for a general summary of Hansen’s argument)

In Psyche: Inventions of the Other 1 Derrida is adamant that de Man’s notion of textual “materiality” is not matter. I will quote a few passages from the essay,  “Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2) (within such limits),” which we would do well to read closely:

The materiality in question—is not a thing; it is not something (sensible or intelligible); it is not even the matter of a body [. . .] this nothing therefore operates, it forces, but as a force of resistance. It resists both beautiful form and matter as substantial and organic totality. This is one of the reasons that de Man never says, it seems to me, matter, but materiality [. . .] I would say that it is a materiality without matter (350)

This force of resistance without material substance derives from the dissociative and inorganic, disorganizing, disarticulating, and even disseminal power that de Man attributes to the letter “ (351)

First of all, the inscription of a textual event—and this will later be one of the traits of the materiality of matter—is a machine like deconstruction of the body proper. This is why I said, using a formulation that is not de Man’s, that materiality becomes a very useful generic name for all that resists appropriation (353).

The materiality of this event as a textual event is what is or makes itself independent of any subject or any desire (357).

On the one hand, we can read these statements as Hansen would – as a reduction of robust materiality into the relative exteriority of the text. However, might we also consider that these passages mean that the world is not a text in the sense that everything is “textualized” (turned into and object for literary hermeneutics). Indeed, in these above formulations, the textual event/world is not appropriable, which means that is not something that is simply “given to thinking.” Or at least, it cannot be subsumed and appropriated by the thinking subject.  Let us now look at how Derrida defines the text in his work:

In his essay “But beyond. . .,” Derrida writes that the text is,

always a field of forces: heterogeneous, differential, open, and so on . . .[Deconstructive readings and writings] are not simply analyses of discourses, such as, for example, the one you propose. They are also effective or active (as one says) interventions, in particular political and institutional interventions that transform contexts without limiting themselves to theoretical or constative utterances even though they must produce such utterances (168).

So the text is metaphorically described as a machine in some essays, but it is also described in other ways. Perhaps we can take this as a sign that Derrida finds the machinic metaphor convenient to describe the disarticulation of the text, but does not restrict technology (in the more “robust material” sense to an object (a text) for thinking. Furthermore, it’s not as though Derrida is unaware of the actual effects of material technology on someone, for instance, being filmed (see my last blog post on Echographies of Television).

Ch. 6: Psyche and Metaphor: Derrida’s Freud

“Through his proposed generalization, technology remains, in its essence, a means of archivation, of information storage; only now, in the postFreudian era, it finds itself spread over global dimensions. Stripped of all hints of autonomy, of a proper materiality, technology—as the materialization of the world’s resemblance to memory—is made to fit within a teleological history of the psyche and its ontogenetic production of thought and memory. Integrated into the textually given play of the world, technology comprises nothing more than a support for the Being-in-the-world of the psyche.” (147)

The question here is whether or not there is something wrong with conceiving of technology as forms of memory; specifically, exteriorizations of memory, as Stiegler puts it, tertiary retentions. In Katherine Hayles essay “Tech-TOC,” she argues that Stiegler’s privileging of tertiary retentions is problematic:

the biological capacity for memory (which can be seen as an evolutionary adaptation to carry the past into the present) is exteriorized, creating the possibility, through technics, for a person to experience through complex temporality something that never was experienced as a first-hand event, a possibility that Stiegler calls tertiary retention. This example, which Stiegler develops at length and to which he gives theoretical priority, should not cause us to lose sight of the more general proposition: that all technics imply, instantiate, and evolve through complex temporalities[JR1] . 

It seems that in Hansen’s “Media Theory,” he is following Stiegler, arguing that there is an “essential correlation of storage with life” (301). Even though he seems to follow Stiegler, Hansen seems less concerned with tertiary retention and more with secondary retention. Hansen writes,

As Stiegler has shown, the contemporary culture industries strive to exercise and maintain a stranglehold on cultural memory (secondary memory) by offering pre-programmed, media artifactual memory objects (tertiary memories) that, because of their seduction and their ubiquity work to erode the role of personal consciousness and to displace lived experience as the basis for secondary memory (304). 

The priority of secondary memory for Hansen is because, continuing his project in Embodying Technesis, he wants to still focus on lived experience. According to Hansen, digital technologies

empower personal secondary memory to reassert some control over the production of presencings [. . .] because they allow personal lived consciousness control over the flux of the media artifact that is its surrogate temporal object, they allow consciousness to live time (at least to some extent) according to its own rhythms. In sum, digital technologies restore some sense of agency that personal lived consciousness has (apparently) lost (304).

Hansen wants to create a “politics of presencing” to…supplement?... Stiegler and Derrida’s “politics of memory,” that both refer to in Echographies of Television.

My next blog post will address the Hansen’s last chapter of Embodying Technesis and the distinction Benjamin makes of different kinds of experience/memory and Stiegler’s reading of tertiary and secondary retentions. Is it plausible to see Stiegler’s tertiary retentions as “voluntary memory”? If so, how would this different from Hansen’s current project of a politics of presencing?

Getting the Terminology Right. . .

After finishing Hayles' wonderful book, How We Became Posthuman, which gives an excellent background of first-order and some second-order cybernetics/systems theory that really helps me understand Wolfe, I decided to re-read the introduction and Ch. 1 of thee Wolfe book. I have all these terms wandering around in my head that I decided I needed to distinguish for myself ("make a distinction") in the blog. Ch. 1 is particularly good since it deals with systems theory and Derrida. 

First, we have to understand that the distinction between system and environment (at the very least this distinction) is a functional distinction rather than ontological claim (see pg xix). It seems that this is true for many of the distinctions made. As Wolfe puts it, "A preference for meaning over world, for order over perturbation, for information over noise is only a preference" (18). I take this to mean that whatever we designate and distinguish as a "system," the system at the same time includes "the environment," which is NOT a pre-given 'nature' or any other sort of ontological entity, but only a functional designation of that which is heterogeneous to the system. 

Wolfe distinguishes three levels of any given system: 

1.) the self-referential autopoeisis of a biological system's 'material substrate' 

2.) The self-referential formal dynamics of 'meaning' [. . .] that some (but not all) autopoietic systems use to reduce environmental complexity and interface with the world.

3.) The self-reference of language proper as a second-order phenomenon and  a specific medium. (pgs xxii-xxiii)

Language is a medium that can help "psychic systems" and "social systems" interpenetrate, but these systems are independent, closed, autopoeitic systems. That is "psychic systems" (which I assume means the same as "consciousness" or that "consciousness" is a particular type of psychic system) and "social system" (which is associated with communication) are completely separate. This is how we get the idea that "humans cannot communicate" in the sense that communication does not happen by a "transfer" of meaning "from" one consciousness to another--this is impossible. Rather "communication communicates"

It is crucial to understand that Luhmann and Derrida use the word "communication" in two different senses. Derrida, according to Wolfe, is critiquing the communication of first order systems of theory (13). Instead, we should think of Luhmann's communication as synonymous with Derrida' notions of "writing" in the largest sense of "trace structure." This allows us to understand how Derrida and Luhmann both do not ontologically distinguish between man writing and other nonhuman writing--writing/communication is inhuman. But writing/communication is not synonymous with "language." 

Wolfe writes, "For Luhmann, then, language is not constitutive of either psychic or social systems, but is rather a specific second order phenomena--a type of "symbolically generalized communication media" that those systems use in the service of the first order process of meaning" (22). Thus, communication can happen without language--and--substituting Derrida's terminology--writing can happen without "language" because writing is the iterable mark, the trace. 

But now we have to deal with the process of "meaning": 

Meaning enables psychic and social systems to interpenetrate while protecting their autopoeisis; meaning simultaneously enables consciousness to understand itself and continue to affect itself in communication and enables communication to be referred back to consciousness of the participants. (21)

Thus, "meaning" is something different from "communication," communication is a specific instance of meaning. All "forms of meaning [. . .] operate by means of difference" (22). However, there is yet another distinction (and more) to be made: meaning and information.

Communication is  process of three selections: information (the 'content'), utterance (the specific, pragmatic communicative event, and understanding (a receiver's processing of the difference between information and utterance that completes the communicative act) (Wolfe 22). 


Within Luhmann's schema, it is important to realize that something can be meaningful without being information because in order for something to be information it has to be the 'first' time a receiver receives it--it cannot be repeated.

Some may think here--but wait! Is this not separating form and content? Is this not another way to say that a message "holds" information that it transfers or communicates? Yes and no. Wolfe brilliantly points out that,

while Derrida emphasizes the final undecidability of any signifying instance, Luhmann stresses that even so systems must decide they must selectively process the difference between information and utterance if they are to achieve adaptive resonance with their environment. (23)

Thus, the observer has to choose if it is information or not--he or she has to make a distinction. How many times have I read the text, "the medium is the message," a short snippet of Marshal Mcluhan, but within a certain context, I may find that the communication "means" more than it did before. Or, to take another example, I "read" the word "consensual domain" when I first read the Wolfe text, but because I had barely any background on Varela and Maturana (which was today provided by Hayles) I hardly realized its meaning--no understanding really took place. But now, because the "the state of the system" (the 'me' system I'll call it) has changed, something that may have been "meaningful" becomes information--understanding takes place. The form of the text did not change, but the system (the observer) has.

So we have several terms here.

System/Environment

System
       Psychic
           Consciousness

                                     Language

       Social
           Meaning
           Communication (Luhmann) Writing/Trace (Derrida)
                 1.) information
                 2.) utterance
                 3.) understanding

From what I can gather from the text, perception is, along with communication, a form of meaning--but this is not quite correct, since meaning is formed through difference and in that sense communication is not really a "form" of meaning.

According to Wolfe, "perception  (and beyond that, consciousness) and communication operate in mutually exclusive, operationally closed, autopoietic systems, though they are structurally coupled through media such as language" (231).

Here it appears that perception is linked to the "psychic system" and communication linked to the "social system." But then Wolfe writes, "At the same time, however, consciousness and perception are a medium for communication" (232).

Luhmann gets around this by claiming that there is asymmetrical relationship between the mind  and communication. Although the mind remains "invisible to communication" it is clear that "communication can hardly come into being without the participation of the mind" (232). That is, there is no "unperceived communication" and since communication is only a "functional" distinction made by an observer and not an ontological thing in itself, it needs a mind in order to communicate.

I still can't quite grasp what Wolfe/Luhmann mean by " 'the mind  has the privileged position of being able to disturb, stimulate, and irritate communication' " (339). It cannot instruct or direct communications--reports of perception are not perceptions themselves'--but they can 'stimulate communication without ever becoming communication' (379-80)" (Wolfe 232).

At first, I thought that this excluded animals from communication, but then I remembered that "mind" does not necessarily mean 'human mind' or 'consciousness' in any sort of phenomenological philosophical sense, but rather, just a perceiver, so that we can imagine an animal 'mind' stimulating communication too.

All of this brings me to the role of art that it plays in both Luhmann's theories and Wolfe's. How does art, thinking in Luhmann's terms, differ from 'writing' or 'communication'? It seems to be a mode of communication  as opposed to other modes of communication. Indeed, I think that we can safely say that art is not something that can be defined ontologically (in its being or its nature) and that art, like all other distinctions in systems theory, is a functional distinction: "Here we need to remind ourselves that questions of form are not questions of objects" (229).

Thus Wolfe phrases the question like this: "What is the relationship between discourse about art and the art object itself?"

We can find the answer by realizing that the work of art can form the question of whether a work of art is a 'work of art' as distinguished from all other 'natural' objects or discourse, but it cannot answer that question. Thus, the work of art  becomes a question: How is this a work of art? The artist, we may presume, as a first order observer says "This is a work of art," but that allows the "second order observer," the one who comes in and experiences the work of art to then to try and figure out its significance or its meaning:

For Luhmann, such questions index the situation of art as a social system under functionally differentiated modernity of art struggling to come to terms with its own raison d'etre--in systems theory terms, to achieve and justify its operational closure, or autonomy. (230, italics mine). 

Thus, art asks the question, as Wolfe does in a previous chapter, "what does art add?" (152). What justifies the art system?

For Wolfe the answer is that

the artwork copresents the dfference between perception and communication, and this difference is what allows art to have something like a privileged relationship to what is commonly invoked as the 'ineffable' or the 'incommunicable', and it uses perception to 'irritate' and stimulate communication to respond to the question 'what does this perceptual event mean? (Wolfe 233)

In Luhmann's words:

The function of art would then consist in integrating what is in principle incommunicable--namely, perception--into the communication network of society [. . .] communication guided by perception relaxes the structural coupling of consciousness and communication (without destroying it, of course). . .In a manner that is matched neither by thought nor communication, perception presents astonishment and recognition in a single instant. (Luhmann qtd. in Wolfe 233)

Art then, has a critical function in society because it forces us to pay attention to the meaning of the split between the 'real world' and the 'imaginary world'--a functional distinction that each work of art makes. In this way, so Wolfe and Luhmann claim, artworks "in calling our attention to the realm of the 'socially regulative,' cast light on precisely those contingencies, constructions, and norms that mass media, in their own specific mode of communication, occlude" (Wolfe 235). It thus allows us to deconstruct the constructions of reality provided by the mass media, perhaps, by offering a different construction of reality.

What is Posthumanism? Art, Self-Reference, and Systems Theory

I know we aren't reading this text for a few more weeks, but I started in on a couple of the chapters before the end of the semester, became hooked on the ideas, and was convinced that this text would stand as the most important book for my own work in this course. Wolfe's work harkens all the way back to the course that probably most changed the way I thought as an academic and as a scholar, Visual Rhetoric; particularly, Wolfe's work reminded me of my favorite text we read, Picture Theory by WJT Mitchell.

 I wrote an extensive analysis of the first half of the book here, so I will try not to repeat too much of the same material. That being the case, permit me to cite a few words from that post to contextualize my comments here. The question Cary Wolfe's  theoretical apparatus--Niklas Luhmann--raises is whether or not what Mitchell calls a "metapicture" is possible as well as complicates (or perhaps echoes) Mitchell's position on ekphrasis. 


Metapictures

Both Mitchell's work and Wolfe/Luhmann is concerned with self-referential representations (or. . .non representations?). For Mitchell, a metapicture is a "picture about itself." The examples Mitchell gives, the duck-rabbit and Magritte's Pipe are useful because of their relatively obvious staging of meta-pictures. The question is whether or not every picture has the potential to be--and this is the condition of representation--a metapicture. Mitchell seems to answer, yes:

"The metapicture is not a subgenre within the fine arts but a fundamental potentiality inherent in pictorial representation as such" (Mitchell 82).

Does this inherent self-reference extend to text? I think Mitchell would say yes to this, as he tries to make clear that there is not a clear ontological (and maybe even epistemological) distinction between text and image--or that there may be "differences" but not a fundamental difference. As we will see in a moment, Luhmann's systems theory may be able to make this distinction in different terminology.

Another key aspect of the metapicture is to recognize that the picture does not "explain itself" but simply resists interpretation. That is, the picture does not have a "message" that it can communicate. This will become important again once we get into Luhmann's thoughts about art.

Suture and Ekphrasis


We need to think about the relationship between suture and ekphrasis. Ekphrasis refers to the verbal description of a visual work of art. Mitchell outlines three attitudes toward ekphrasis and here I will simply cut and paste from my previous post:

1. Ekphrastic hope: "the impossiblity of ekphrastic is overcome in imagination or metaphor, when we discover a 'sense' in which language can do what so many writers have wanted it to do: 'make us see' (152). It is also when "the estrangement of the image/text division is overcome and a sutured, synthetic form, a verbal icon or imagetext arises in its place" (154). 
2. Ekphrastic fear: "the moment of resistance or counterdesire that occurs when we sense that the difference between the verbal and visual representation might collapse and the figurative, imaginary desire of ekphrasis might be realized literally and actually (154).
3. Ekphrastic indifference: ekphrasis is strictly impossible, it is a curiosity--an obscure literary genre and of a more general topic (the verbal representation of visual art (152).


Mitchell works from the last position, "ekphrastic indifference," which essentially makes the claim that no one can perfectly describe a work of art. 


Luhmann via Wolfe on Art


I want to relate Mitchell's thoughts on ekphrasis, metapictures and 'suture' to Wolfe's What is Posthumanism? 


Instead of thinking in terms of text and image, Luhmann moves even more abstract into a distinction of system/environment, which Wolfe consistently points out is a functional distinction. In other words, the "environment" can only be defined as everything 'outside' a particular system. Systems are closed, autopoetic, and self-referential, but, as Wolfe will argue (and cite repeatedly) the system's closure is what allows for its "openness to the environment." 


At the most 'general' level (although I am loathe to use that word), Luhmann claims that communcation (not humans) is the only thing that communicates. Thus, and this is perhaps the most important disarticulation (to use Wolfe's language) in the whole book:

Perception (and beyond that, consciousness) and communication operate in mutually exclusive, operationally closed, auto-poietic systems [. . .] the relationship between them is asymmetrical. (Wolfe 271)

That is, what we perceive (like, for example, in an artwork--although artwork "communicates" but communicates a specific thing) and what communicates are distinct. Thus, although "communication is also possible without language," language is a "a specific, second-order phenomenon--that those systems use in the service of the first order processes of meaning for maintaining their own autopoeisis while at the same time enabling them to interpenetrate and use each other's complexity to mutual benefit" (22).

Would it be too strong to say that only through language can we recognize art as art? Or does art "communicate" something without the interference of language? Another way to ask this is "is there 'art' in nature?" The answer is in the deconstruction of the term "nature," because according to Wolfe there is no pre-given environment we could call "nature." Instead, something could be considered 'nature' only from the perspective (is that the right word?) of a particular system.

The work of art poses the question of what 'is' a work of art--or whether it is a work of art, but, and this is crucial, the work of art cannot at the same time answer this question (229). Here we have a similarity to Mitchell's idea about the metapicture communicating something, but without 'content' if you will--or--perhaps more accurately, without saying what it means. Its as if the metapicture or any work of art can communicate the question of difference, and this is all. . .

A couple of passages that I think are useful to explain this more clearly:

Luhmann's point is not to deny the phenomenological aspect of the artwork but to point out--which seems rather obvious upon reflection--that the meaning of the artwork cannot be referenced to, much less reduced to, this material and perceptual aspect. Rather, the work of art copresents perception and communication (Wolfe 231)

Thus, the artwork copresents the difference between perception and communication, and this difference is what allows art to have something like a privileged relationship to what is commonly invoked as the 'ineffable' or the 'incommunicable' and it uses perception to 'irritate' and stimulate communication to respond to the question 'what does this perceptual event mean? (233)

Do we buy this? Does art have this privileged status? Is the privileged status conferred on it by human beings and in this sense do animals "have" art, or can they "produce" artwork? Of course, perhaps the question is not one of production but of observation and meaning--it seems this would be the case for Luhmann and Wolfe. Perhaps some of these answers can be found in Wolfe's text if I look hard enough. It may also be worthwhile to look back at Mitchell's thoughts on animals and illusion in Picture Theory. 




And perhaps the most important question for our class (rather than my own interest in art and representation): Is Wolfe/Luhmann's theory of art 'posthumanist'? What makes it so? Or alternately, is there something about Mitchell's Picture Theory that makes his analysis a "humanist' posthumanism rather than a posthumanist posthumanism to use Wolfe's distinction? (see pg 125).

If we assume that Mitchell and Luhmann are arguing about art in a similar vein, perhaps the real question is what does the terminology of Wolfe/Luhmann get us that we don't get from Mitchell? I'm sure there are many things, so I do not offer this question as antagonistic. This  may be one way to approach Wolfe's dense, well-researched, well-argued, analytically precise and yet continentally aware text on Posthumanism.