Living On: Borderlines

According to a note in the text, the first version of "Living On" was published in a book that exemplified the "Yale School's" deconstructive method. Apparently, the authors, Derrida included, decided they would give themselves the arbitrary rule that they must "treat of Shelly's long poem The Triumph of Life" (103).

The question I hope to answer is how does Derrida interpret this responsibility. "In other words," how is the essay "Living On" both about and not about Shelly's Triumph of Life. In order to investigate this question, I looked at the recommended reading in Paul De Man's Rhetoric of Romanticism. While I was reading, I was often perplexed at how this related whatsoever to Derrida's essay. But then I realized that in order to get De Man's points, I really needed to read Shelly's poem (at least the finished version). Of course, according to Derrida in "Borderlines," I would also have had  to read all of Blanchot's stories, and his essays including The Step Not Beyond and The Infinite Conversation, and Rousseau, and his own Glas, and parts of Dissemination, and "Ousia and Gramme" (in Margins of Philosophy), and probably more Shelly, and Spenser, and Dante, and and and and and. . . . .perhaps the entire Western Canon?

Of course, this is an impossible task, relating to the "impossible wager" of merely treating Shelly's Triumph of Life (see note on pg 102).

So I contented myself with Shelly, de Man, and Derrida (as well as the Blanchot stories). The best way I found into this question is through de Man. de Man points to the infinite regressive structure (and the re-citative structure) of Shelly's poem as characteristic of all its tropes. The poem is a series of questions that are never answered. When Rousseau asks what is his origin, de Man writes,

[Rousseau] is granted a vision of the same spectacle that prompted the poet narrator's questioning in the first place; we have to imagine the same sequence of events repeating themselves for Shelly, for Rousseau, and for whomever Rousseau chose to question in his turn as Shelly questioned him. The structure of the text is not one of question and answer, but of a  question whose meaning, as question, is effaced from the moment it is asked. (98)

 It is this effacing and "infinite regress" structure that I think "legitimizes" (if such a thing can be said) Derrida's forays into Blanchot's texts, such that they become the focus of the essay. Derrida puts into question the very possibility of remaining within the text of Shelly, affirming that there may be a way in which the two texts "read" each other. This sort of comparative literary analysis, which I am very familiar with, seems to legitimated by many things, but Derrida suggests that it is by the fact of mere language. For instance, in the discussion in "Borderlines" of Blanchot's use of "perfect rose," Derrida muses on the many "roses" in Shelly's Poem (see pg 167 of the essay). Or the connection between Shelly's use of "Brain turning to sand" and the imagery of the "pulse scattering like sand" in Blanchot. Although this would not be "serious" it still seems like there is a connection--an affection at a "distance." This is precisely the wager.


The structural connection I see between Blanchot and Shelly stems from the de Man quote above. This idea of infinite regress, of a repetitive structure that repeats the event within the story. In this sense, perhaps we can ask if Shelly's poem is a recit [?] in Blanchot's sense (Derrida writes: "the Triumph of Life [. . .] belongs in many ways to the category of the recit" pg 112). Rousseau repeats the *same* questions that the narrator of the poem asks and no one is given an answer.


This recitative structure is present also in Blanchot's story, the Madness of the Day, which was initially titled "un recit?" (with a question mark). The narrator begins the story demanded by some forceful men,  "I am not learned. I am not ignorant," which is how the story we as readers read begins as well. It is impossible to tell which came "first." Derrida writes, "it is impossible to say which one cites the other and above all which one forms the border of the other. each includes the other comprehends the other, which is to say that neither comprehends the other" (126).


In the same way, Derrida opens his essay with the question of citing: "In other words on living? This time it sounds to you more surely like a citation" (103). On level, yes, we have already seen this "in other words," but was it in the same context? Can we say that this is a citation of the "first" "in other words on living"? Thus his essay tries to perform the conflict and weird space of "invagination" that he describes. The recit of Madness of the Day has the structure of "the recit of deconstruction in deconstruction" (127). In de Man's language, it is the de-figuring of figuration.



In a way, though, since Madness of the Day re-cites its story verbatim (or is it?), Death Sentence is a better analogy to the Triumph of Life (but can I say analogy?). In Death Sentence, which really should be left in the French: "L'arret de mort." The structure of the l'arret de mort is two "separate" recit's within the same 'title' of "l'arret de mort."


Derrida will ultimately argue that even though we cannot show how these two 'recit's' are connected--indeed, that they may even have entirely different narrators, he thinks that the connection lies in the two women: "they--the two women, the two voiceless voices, tele-phone one another: come. And the relationship, the connection, between the two recits would be telegraphic in nature" (187). The word "telegraphic" can be translated as "that which writes at a distance." Somehow, the language that the two women use connect them--they connect them through the narrator as a kind of "medium."


I keep trying to work out how Derrida arrives at this "mad hypothesis." On one level, we want to connect the two seemingly independent and separate recits, because we want to believe there is a reason for them united under one title: L'arret de mort. We assume the narrators are the same and that these are two different women in his life. Blanchot's language does suggest a connection between these two women, particularly describing them as "statues" or almost like a statue. Derrida picks up this image and runs with it, claiming that "each woman lives off and dies of the other [. . .] each woman preserving the other's narrator" (184).


I suspect that this notion of "preserving" or "monumentalizing" or "statue"-esque themes are why the narrator is so initially disturbed at Nathalie's decision to make a death mask and a cast of her hands. Derrida asks (and qualifies): "Should we say that he gave her the idea of or the desire for the death mask, as he had wished to embalm the other woman, in order to preserve both of them, to keep them alive-and-dead, living on? Yes and no" (189). It is through him that the woman finds the card, but she is the one who finds it, so we cannot simply ascribe agency to the narrator or the woman, exclusively.


This theme of "monumentalizing" brings me back to the de Man reading of Shelly, which it is quite possible Derrida read or knew about (or perhaps these two texts "love" each other): "Is the status of a text like the status of a statue?" (de Man 95). de Man also writes that in order to deal with Shelly (and the Romantics) we "bury them [. . .] to bury them in their own texts made into epitaphs and monumental graves. They have been made into statues for the benefit of future archeologists" (121). How might we understand de Man's reading of Shelly in terms of Derrida and Blanchot?


To me, Derrida's "mad hypothesis" about the two women calling one another to "come" (and, I may add, I cannot but think the erotic connotations of two women telling each other at a distance to "come"), is also the possibility that the two texts, L'arret de mort and Shelly's Triumph of Life call each other, love each other, can be "superimposed" on one another and made to "live on" in a way, perhaps, that does not merely "monumentalize" and bury both Shelly and Blanchot.

Derrida:

I say what must not be said: for example, that a text can stand in a relationship of transference (primarily in the psychoanalytical sense) to another text. And, since Freud reminds us that the relationship of transference is a 'love' relationship, stress the point: one text loves another" (165).

Jacques Derrida, "Acts of Religion," and "University Without Condition"

Introduction/Conclusion


I feel the need to introduce this batch of half-conceived questions and notes that I have put together in the past few days as preparation for my class on these two incredibly dense and rich essays by Jacques Derrida.


First, these notes were not fashioned "linearly," questions are mixed with notes and notes with questions in the good spirit of not trying to make my "questions" merely questions that ask what "is" (let us avoid ontology when possible).


The notes gathered here I hope to turn into a solid post with a point (a? point--at least one point) perhaps with a bit more focus after our discussion.


One of the things that I am pleasantly surprised by in these essays (and really in all Derrida essays) is how he makes abstract theoretical and philosophical speculation relevant for concrete political, cultural, and "religious" phenomena. I enjoy how he is able to lay out the way he stays on the border without ever seeming like he is "noncommittal."


For instance, I think "Faith and Knowledge" bears on a lot of current (and i mean the last 10 or 20 years) events:


Genocides (pick your incident)
The "Rushdie" affair (FATWA)
Osama Bin Laden's tapes to America and their subsequent circulation
The circulation of images of beheadings (see what he says about taking vengeance on the "body proper") and what these come to mean (because they can be distributed globally)


I'm sure there is more and if I were more politically aware (which I am striving to become better at) I would be able to say something.


And of course, "The University Without Condition," urges us to take on a deconstruction of the Humanities and to open up the question of the human (and the animal) again by re-thinking the history of our discipline. It asks us to be self-reflexive (which I believe we are on our way to doing) in the way that Ronell thinks "Science" needs to be become self-reflexive. We must inquire into our grounds (and our histories, our traces) in order to understand.


Furthermore, "University Without Condition," although it focuses at the end on the "event," seems committed to understanding a Professor's work as prescriptive rather than merely descriptive. In other words, Derrida seems to support the idea that professors profess--that there can be no ideologically "neutral" professor and that we have the right (perhaps, academic freedom?) to teach from those interested standpoints. Of course, our "profession," according to Derrida, needs to be an affirmation of an impossibility--a University Without Condition"


These are all moments and motifs, points and particulars that stand out for me in the two essays, but the following notes should give those who have not read the essays a glimpse into the wide ranging issues taken up on merely 1 or two pages (or across pages!). These essays are rich and demand not only attention but ACTION. I found myself again and again looking up words (German, Latin, French, even English) in order to grasp their various implications.


Derrida's texts strive to be "unreadable," but this unreadability should not merely cause us despair. Rather, as he writes in "Living-On: Borderlines," :

If reading means making accessible a meaning that can be transmitted as such, in its own unequivocal, translatable identity, then this title is unreadable. But this unreadability does not arrest reading, does not leave it paralyzed in the face of an opaque surface: rather it starts reading and writing and translation moving again" (140). 

Derrida's essays force us outside of his text into other texts (which is also, sometimes, his other texts). Rather than think Derrida's emphasis on the "sliding of the signifier" as an interminable task that erases meaning, we should think of the setting-into-motion (which is also the moment--although here we get too much into presence) as a pedagogical imperative. We as readers are forced out of our comfort zones--out of our chairs , for instance, on the balcony and back into the sea of texts that we are constantly trying to arrest in an article or what we call a "book."


So is this my introduction to the notes? Or are the notes a propaedeutic (cf. Kant and "University Without Condition,")  to what I am calling my "introduction"? Which comes first? what is the "important" part?


Cormac McCarthy: "The ugly fact is books are made out of books" (out of texts[?] 

Post-Scriptum (cf. Derrida, "Faith and Knowledge," pg. 60)

“University Without Condition” notes

Professional Professors

Ronell—We need to go back to pgs 196-203 and put Weber’s ideas in conversation with Derrida’s ideas about the University. Weber, like Rorty, seems to want to avoid a confrontation with the dangerous. In Weber’s case, the possibility of transference: “The debasement of a teacher to an implicit word-salad [. . .] puts a restraining order on the possibly devastating politics of transference that teacher’s function could otherwise prime” (197)–Concerned with  the “prophetic professor”—meaning, a professor who actually professes, rather than transmits knowledge  through exchange value (rather than even use-value): “The American’s conception of the teacher who faces him is: he sells me his knowledge and his methods for my father’s money, just as the greengrocer sells my mother cabbage” (196).

This is the teacher, but what is relationship between the professor and the professional—the professional “renders services.” As Sam Weber puts it

“The incommensurability of the professional, of the ‘services’ he rendered, and did not merely sell, sought to place his activities outside of the pale of ordinary commodity relationships. This was, and has remained, a decisive feature of the professional who, while offering his services for pay, nonetheless claims for them a value irreducible to that determined by the market” (Weber 26).

Thus, the professional frames his or her services in terms of a “social need”: “the professional professes to be concerned primarily with the public good, with the necessities of life and welfare” (Weber 27).

This puts the Humanities in a precarious position though, does it not? Or perhaps puts the university and the professor into a precarious position because  it is concerned with public good and indeed we frequently have to frame our ‘work’ (this problematic term will be explored later) in terms of “use value,” but the Humanities in particular refuses such use value. As Ronell puts it, “The professor comes in handy as figuring the university’s tendency to undermine its cause. Academic speech consistently fails the test of scientific integrity by lapsing into prophecy” (200). Ronell’s word “prophecy” may be akin to what Derrida speaks of in terms “professing” as “performance”—even a professing of faith.

Notes/Questions

How can we claim a "crime against humanity" when we are still in the process of redefining and clarifying what man "is"? The New Humanities doesn't seem to merely call for protection of already constituted "human rights" but rather to rethink the very concept of "man" (and, I assume, Derrida includes women?)

What is this mondialisation? A “humanization,” but a humanization in terms that have not been properly thought?

Derrida writes that,  paradoxically, the university is exposed in its unconditionality because “it is a stranger to power, because it is heterogeneous to the principle of power,  [. . .] without power of its own” (206). Thus, there is always a risk that it may be appropriated by institutions and structures that have power. But this seems to be the condition of its unconditionality. Derrida asks whether the university can affirm a sovereignty “without ever risking the worst, namely [. . .] being forced to give up and capitulate without condition, to let itself be taken over and bought at any price” (206). If the university is a “stranger” to power then it must take this risk. But this risk must be confronted by resistance (but a resistance that is not a power?)

The university as a meeting of faith and knowledge: “In an original way, this professional faith articulates faith to knowledge in the university above all in the place of the self-presentation of unconditionality that will go by the name ‘Humanities’” (208).

What is the connection between mondialisation (a ‘humanization’) of the world and the advent of the technology of cyberspace. As Derrida asks, “Where is to be found the communitary place and the social bond of a ‘campus’ in the cyberspatial age of the computer, of tele-work, and of the World Wide Web”?  It is not that virtualization is absolutely new, but “what is new, quantitatively, is the acceleration of the rhythm, the extent, and the powers of capitalization of such a virtuality” (210).

Is this virtualization eroding the boundaries between the ‘university’ and ‘public space’?  Derrida claims that the discussions of the New Humanities must “in pricinple find its space of unconditional discussion and, without presupposition, its legitimate [!] space of research and reelaboration, in the university”  (203). Derrida says that the unviersity allows us to find “the best access to a new public space transformed by new techniques of communication, information, archivization, and knowleedge production”  (203). But it is precisely this “space” that Derrida puts into question on the following page, when discussing how “the topology of the event” has been upset.

The connection of the “as if” to the “event.” While it is generally believed that the event must interrupt the order of the “as if” so that its place is “real,” Derrida asks “What happens when the place itself becomes virtual, freed from its territorial (and thus national) rootedness, and when it becomes subject to the modality of an ‘as if’. In other words an event that may (perhaps) come “through the university,” “thanks,” to it—the university which is now virtual?

“to profess” has the structure of a promise, a performative act and engagement: “it is to promise to be that, to pledge oneself on one’ word to be that,” “to give oneself over to philosophy, to bear witness” (215).

Derrida seems to perform what he argues for—thinking the university’s history, laying it out. So he inquires into the religious connotations (and ‘origins’) of the “professor” in the university. He is tracing how we got from profession (of faith) to professor.

Work

Working (or le travailleur) seems to imply a market concept—work is recognized only if it is connected to a salary (the teaching assistant). Insofar as the student “studies” the student is not a worker. However, is he/she working toward being a professor? In order for someone to be recognized as a “worker” it must have market value.

Types of work:

1.)    Work in the sense of “product” or “ouevre”

a.       Products that are “objectivizable use or exchange values without deserving the title of ouevres.

b.      Ouevre—something like fine art.

2.)    Work that does “not give rise to substantial or real products, only to virtual specters”

In the classical/modern tradition we usually do not think of the professor’s authority as a professor like we think authority of an “author.” He does not “sign” his work. Rather, to be a professor was to produce a knowledge that does not consist in this kind of product—It was “to teach a knowledge even while professing, that is, even while promising to take a responsibility that is not exhausted in the act of knowing or teaching” (217). Derrida speculates that this has been changing because of the thin line between creation and criticism, reading and writing. Of course, Derrida himself “signs” for his work, for his professing. He becomes a kind of “author” as much as a professor, even though he frames this entire essay in terms of “profession of faith.”

Performative/Constantive: 

The traditional university’s knowledge  is not “in principle” performative: “The act of professing a doctrine may be a performative act, but the doctrine is not” (218). Somehow we must ‘conserve” this and “change” it but NOT through a hegelian dialectical mode.

Derrida argues, we have to realize that the “unconditional theoreticism” will itself always suppose a performative profession of faith, a belief, a decision, a public pleged, and ethico-political responsibility. “ (218).

This view of the non-performative goes back to Kant, where he argues Humanities as a ‘propadeutic’ to Fine Arts: “The Humanities must prepare without prescribing: they would propose forms of knowledge that remain merely preliminary” (Derrrida 219).

Thus, Kant separates the University from public space in order to render the knowledge constative rather than performative (or prescriptive). Derrida points out the (impossiblity?) of saying “publically all that one believes to be true and what one believes on must say, but only inside the university” (220).

Regardless of the fact that this is basically impossibelwe must believe that “this is an idea we must reaffirm, declare, and profess endlessly—even if it always means addressing ourselves to the university’s outside without neutrality” (220). Meaning, we must continue to commit ourselves to this view of truth even as we realize that we too are caught up in the questions of the university in the marketplace, which Derrida says that he will “leave aside.” This is why we must think the university’s history, because it allows us to realize our position within this system.

Questions that arise then: If indeed the Humanities is foreign to the production of ouevres, what could it possibly mean “to profess,” “to be a professor.”

What happens when we accept that “a professor produces oeuvres and not just knowledge or pre-knowledge? (Derrida 221).

Looking back at again the question of the “end” of work (its termination; its object or aim). “Work” and production is not the same, but work (travaille) connotes “the passivity of a certain affect (221).

Derrida writes, like Sam Weber notes, a profession (or a professor) implies a sort of “social responsibility” and “duty” (here is the Kantian language again). There is a commitment, a faith, a testimony to render an account (see Derrida 222).

“Work” is related to the event , but an actual event, in the sense that we do not think that what “happens or comes about in general “ can be virtual (223)

“as if the world began where work ends” is a difficult phrase. Here, Derrida lays out two interpretations of this phrase: 1) a utopia (without work) to come or 2.)  an originary, earthly paradise. Similar to the way we articulated Nietzsche’s in-between the teleological and the original (or archaeological) (223).

Derrida plays on this notion of the world coming into being where “work” ends in the sense that at the same time that we are witnessing the end of work, the ‘world’ seems to be coming into being in the meaning of “globalization.”

225—something is happening to our conceptions of “work” and “world” (through mondialisation) that will change our conceptions of “the being-in-the-world of what is still called man”

“What is happening is indeed an effect of techno-science ,with the world-wide-izing virtualization and delocalization of tele-work” (226).

Rifkin (in ‘the-end-of-work) argues that the “teachers,” in the “sector of knowledge” will be spared this end of work, but Derrida points out that he does not mention the unemployed teachers or aspiring professors (particularly in the humanities)

In general, those who are overly optimistic about the possibilities of globalization “ending work” exclude the victims of this movement who suffer either because “they lack the work they would need” or “because they work too much for the salary they receive” (Derrida 227).

228—The Figure of the Humanist is a response to the question of work.

                --the “unity” of the world of work

229-230—“The difficult task of the Humanities to come is to think their own history” in a cross-disciplinary way that will not necessarily be ‘interdisciplinary’ or ‘cultural studies’.

Derrida’s 7 professions of Faith (see pgs 231-237)

--these studies will not be merely “theoretical” or “neutral” but “practical and performative transformations” Sam Weber echoes this sentiment in the studying of disciplines: “On way of exploring such limitations might be precisely to demonstrate how the apparently objective, denotative language of individual disciplines entails, necessarily but implicitly, a precise series of prescriptive ‘speech acts’, involving injunctions and commands such as those that comprise the professional ethos in general” (Weber 32).  The problem for Weber, said differently than Derrida, is that the university instituted areas of research that could “ignore the founding limits and limitations of the individual disciplines” (Weber 32).

1.) These new Humanities will treat “these performative productions of law or right (rights of man, human rights, the concept of crime against humanity) where they always imply the promise and, with the promise, the conventionality of the as-if.  With regard to the distinction between human and ‘animal’.

2.) These humanities will treat the history of democracy and the idea of sovereignty.

3.) These new Humanities would treat the history of ‘professing’ of the ‘profession’ (and its Christian and Abrahamic origins)

4.)the history of literature

5.) the history of profession, the profession of faith, professionalization, and the professoriat.

6.) the history of the ‘as-if’ and the “precious distinction between performative acts and constative acts

7.) the event—that which comes about and is outside a horizon of expectation.  “only the impossible can arrive”

---------

235: “It would be necessary to dissociate a certain unconditioned independence of thought, of deconstruction, or justice, of the Humanities, of the university, and so forth from any phantasm of indivisible sovereignty and of sovereign mastery” (It is the “what if” rather than the “as if”

The key to this quotation is “indivisible,” meaning that the university has a kind of unconditioned independence, but it ALSO has a history, a history that must be interrogated.

Preliminary Questions

In class, Dr. Leavey argued that Ronell thinks that Nietzsche wants to kind of stay somewhere in the middle (so to speak) between the archaeological and the teleological. In “University Without Condition,” Derrida discusses two different “ways” to interpret the “as if” as utopian or ‘earthly paradise’.  Is there a relationship between this Nietzschean attitude and the kind of ‘middle ground’ Derrida is going to try and lay out?

Derrida writes about world-widization and cyberspace virtualization upsetting “the topology of the event, the experience of the singular taking place” (210). My question is: Can an ‘event’ still take place? Derrida asks (and can we respond): “what happens, then, when the place itself becomes virtual, freed from its territorial (and thus national) rootedness, and when it becomes subject to the modality of an ‘as if’” (213).

What is the relationship between the “world-widization” discussed in “University Without Condition” and “Faith and Knowledge”? Obviously, it is the same phenomenon, but how is the effect different.

In “University without Condition,” Derrida writes that the research into humanity “in principle” must take place in the university and above all in the Humanities. “Not so that it may enclose itself there, but, on the contrary, so as to find the best access to a new public space transformed by new techniques of communication, information, archivization, and knowledge production” (203). The question of access is also brought up in “Faith and Knowledge”: “the religious cultures, states, nations, or ethnic groups that they represent have unequal access, to be sure, but often one that is immediate and potentially without limit to the same world market [. . .] <At stake in the struggle> is thus the access to the world (transnational or trans-state networks of telecommunications and of tele-technoscience” (79).  How might we address this issue of access?

In a footnote in “Faith and Knowledge,” the translator makes a point about the shift from “mondialisation” and “globalization”—what is at stake in this shift from world to globe? Or rather, what is the significance of ‘mond’ being translated into English as “globalization,” a phenomenon the West has named? What bearing does Derrida’s discussion of “world” have on the Christian and Heideggerian ideas of “world,” (and being-in-the-world)?

In “University Without Condition,” Derrida argues that the University is able to have an independence, but an independence without power However, it is this independence without power that also exposes us to the risk of being appropriated by other institutions with power.

When we discussed Ronell, we talked a lot about how the book was organized. Moreso with “Faith and Knowledge,” why is Derrida’s text set up like it is? Why are there phrases in bold? Is it for easier navigation? Is it because he wants them to look like hyperlinks (going along with the techno-science idea)? Is it because they are “key terms”?  Related to this, Derrida explains why he organized his text into sections:

Let us choose, then, I told myself, a quasi-aphoristic form as one chooses a machine, the least pernicious machine to treat of religion in a certain number of pages: 25 or a few more, we were given; and, let us say, arbitrarily, to decipher or anagrammatize the 25, 52 very unequal sequences, as many crypts dispersed in a non-identified field (Derrida 76).

Do we trust Derrida here? What is the significance of the word “crypt” (and cenotaphs)?  Why is the Post-Scriptum longer than what we usually think is the ‘body’ of the work?

Faith and Knowledge: Notes

Etymology

Faith

• ·         Belief and Truth
• ·         Sacredness, holiness, healing

Religion: Two possible “sources” (etymologically)

1.) Relegare—“To bring together in order to return and to begin again

2.( Religare—“To bind, in sense of obligation or debt”

·         It is this second sense that “binds” religion to respondeo (acc. To Beneviste) and spondee (promise and “to answer for”) which stems from the Greek spondē, which means a sacrifice to the gods”

Etymology/Form of essay

Pg 73—How does Derrida get from relegare to this sense of “scruple, patience, modesty”? (this may be answered on page 74)

Pg 76—“crypt,” “cenotaph” A ‘cenotaph’ is an "empty tomb" or a monument erected in honour of a person or group of people whose remains are elsewhere.” This concept of monument, tomb, crypt—this sense of “burying”—the empty tomb, linked with death, resurrection, a S(crypt).

Respect for Life

Pg 86-> about “respect for life” (how does this relate to the “University without Condition’s ‘crime against humanity’)  

Life and the Posthuman

How might we take Derrida’s claim that “This dignity of life can only subsist beyond the present living being [. . .] This excess above and beyond the living, whose life only has absolute value by being worth more than life, more than itself—this, in short, is what opens the space of death that is linked to the automaton (exemplarily ‘phallic’) to technics, the machine, the prosthesis” (87). Does this concern what we tend to call in our discipline the “posthuman”?

See also:

Pg 78—“the machinic”

Pg 80—“immunity/autoimmunity à What is this relationship (see footnote)

82-84—Seems like Derrida is laying out a future project about life, sacredness, and swelling

Life of a Co (auto) mmunity

Pg 87— About Community (Co-auto-immunity) as the alive community –“open to something else, more than itself” –this more than itself—the “to come”? This relates to the concept of hospitality? The opening to any other that is every other?

Religion –Sacrifice? Prayer?

88-Religion sans Sacrifice/prayer—Is it possible? What side is the sacrifice/prayer on? Is prayer in the “faith” category rather than the “sacred” category? Can these things be separated?

Religion and Violence—

Derrida looks at different violences committed in the name of religion (and sometimes not in the name of religion, but basically as “religious” wars)

Pg 89—Vengeance of the body proper against the delocalizing tele-technoscience. It’s a claim to “rediscover roots” and such violence is “auto-immune.” The irony is that they have align themselves with this very technology to get the effect—what has been known as the “Rushdie” affair wouldn’t be such a big deal if it wasn’t able to be picked up by the media and distributed through the very science that this revenge on the “body proper” tries to recover its sacredness (its “purity”).

This search for “roots” is a complicated one as Derrida also acknowledges that the violence of “abstraction” and “radical extirpation” can be just as harmful.  “Extirpation” means “to pull up from roots” and it has a meaning in (ecology?) as “local extinction.” This “local extinction” is at the expense of mondialisation/globalization/abstraction/tele-technoscience. 

Derrida points out though that the reasons for reactionary violence are tied to a notion of “sacredness,” “purity,” “un-contamination” that is simply not there (for the same reason that we cannot see the University as completely divorced from its history, which is a history of interaction with institutions of power).

Derrida also contrasts this localized violence (that still must employ the forces it fights against) on the ‘body proper’, which can be imaged and calculated to the “incalculable” (see page 90) which I think is related to the many deaths that we do not count (as the United States—or any nation). What do we do with events that simply are incalculable? The holocaust? Genocides?

Our relationship with science is interesting as well, considering there is a divorce between our scientific knowledge and our manipulating competence. We put “faith” in technology like animists—as if there really were a ghost in the machine rather than wires and chemicals. Technology  is something we can manipulate but (many of us) do not understand. Derrida seems to suggest there is a kind of religio, a kind of bind and obligation to technology.

Religious Reactions to Technology: 2 Forms (neither of which are inherently democratic or anti-democratic (pg 92)

1.)  The fervent return to national citizenship 

2.) A protest that is universal, ecumenical. We get this from “ecologists, humanists” who want to unite in an anti-technology movement. (who have to employ the mechanisms they oppose in order to gather and garner support)

Heidegger and Thought (pgs 94-98)

--Here Derrida shows how Heidegger tries to exclude the first sense of religion (faith, belief, glaube) from a notion of the “sacred” and the difficulties of doing this. Derrida refers explicitly to the idea of the “attestation” of conscience. Indeed, is not phenomenology’s project (or at least existentialism’s project) of “authenticity” always tied up in a faith or belief that one is being-authentic? That there is no external criteria that we can apply and say: yes, you, you are authentic.

--I’m also interested in how  this section seems to deal with Heidegger’s idea  of the mit-sein, which is assumed in his phenomenology. It is assumed in Heidegger that we are all “being-in-the-world’ in the same world (the phenomenological world). What is the significance for Heideggerian thought when we speak about “globalization” as a particularly Western (perhaps even American) force that is a wide-spread conversion that extirpates? How can we harness the power of tele-technoscience without potentially welcoming the “other”—radical evil.

Radical Evil

The idea of “radical evil” comes from Kant. Kant's idea of ‘radical evil’, so far as I understand it, affirms that we are responsible for evil because we are not following the right (and reasonable) actions. We must enact a “moral conversion”—I’d like to explore how this ‘moral conversion’ relates to Derrida’s idea of “faith/belief” as well as Derrida’s mention of Kant’s “reflective” judgments as opposed to deliberative judgment.

Rhetorical Situation

In every Derrida essay, it is important to pay attention to what Derrida is “responding” to and how immediately makes the very call for this response a problem. In “Faith and Knowledge” the problem is that of the academic conference, which necessarily (?) excludes others. Gil Anidjar is going to make a major point that Derrida harps on the question of Islam. Derrida emphasizes that we are expected to  speak of Monotheisms that do not fall under the Latin word “religion.” And so, he emphasizes that they are all speaking a derivative of Latin and suggests that the word “religion” is a Christian and Latin conception (globalatinization). 

On the "Deaths of Roland Barthes" and Camera Lucida

Blanchot and Barthes

Last class, we discussed Derrida's seemingly banal conclusion from his reading of Blanchot; namely, that Derrida's point ends up sounding like reader-response theory where it is a question of a (partial) identification with the character. Derrida speaks of the idea of the "singular in general" (93). For me, this is the passage that comes closest to yielding this conclusion: 

But this attestation both secret and public, fictional and real, literary and non-literary--we only judge it to be readable, if it is, insofar as a reader can understand it, even if no such thing has ever 'really' happened to him, to the reader. We can speak, we can read this because this experience, in the singularity of its secret, as 'experience of the unexperienced' beyond the distinction between the real and the phantasmatic, remains [demeure] universal and exemplary. (93)

On one hand, Derrida is right that the situation of an always impending death is an exemplary condition. He writes before this passage on the 'lightness' in Blanchot's story as a "confirmation of finitude" (90). But this seems to appeal to an unproblematic humanist notion of the subject. As we pointed out in class, does Derrida really need Blanchot's story to get to this point? If this is his point (or one of them), I think we answered no. 

However, he returns to Blanchot as a relay for Barthes in his essay, "The Deaths of Roland Barthes." Here, Derrida argues that Blanchot’s writing on Bataille’s friendship is absolutely unique: “And yet the metonymic force of the most poignant writing allows us to read these pages” (Derrida 290). When he discusses Barthes’ mother, he argues for a similar metonymic force. Derrida’s language here is hard to parse out. He asks (I assume rhetorically) how the text about Barthes mother could be poignant if that metonymic force was not there. However, in this essay, he seems to think less in terms of ‘understanding’ the text while reading and more about being affected by the text—the possibility of a punctum. The metonymic force is “not to be mistaken for something that facilitates the movement of identification” (Derrida 289). 

I am perplexed at the next few lines where Derrida writes, “I do not put myself in his place. I do not tend to replace his mother with mine” (Derrida 289). So if he does not “tend” to replace his mother with his own and he maintains that Barthes is right in distinguishing his mother and the Figure of the Mother (see Camera Lucida pg 75) perhaps Derrida is thinking here of “a quality (a soul): not the indispensable, but the irreplaceable” (75). Perhaps the reader associates qualities of the mother. Or, rather, we understand Barthes mother through the adjectives that force into our minds—this is our way of feeling Barthes loss. But in Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, the narrator writes, “a relationship which adjectivizes is on the side of the image, on the side of domination, of death” (Barthes 43). So can the soul—that which animates the body (the air) be grasped through adjectives, if adjectives are on the side of death?

Barthes describes the air not as an ‘image’ (and thus, embodied in adjectives) but as “ultimately something moral, mysteriously contributing to the face the reflection of a life value” (110). The ‘air’ is not my identity, so we should agree with Derrida that this metonymic force cannot be a move of identification. Rather it is an “intractable supplement of identity, what is given as an act of grace” (109). So perhaps (and I use perhaps intentionally, following Derrida’s hypothetical, “as if” style) what Derrida would argue we “read” in Blanchot is that irreplaceable value—or maybe it’s a “feeling.”

I feel as though I may not be getting where I need to go (or returning to what I need to return to). Furthermore, I think these texts, as fragmentary, preliminary, and scattered, authorize my own response text to be in pieces, pieces that try and grasp without grasping too hard, so as to contain what the text say within a concept.

The Referent

Derrida reads Barthes generously. When I think of Barthes thoughts on the referent, the “this has been,” I think it in the naïve way of saying that the photograph offers a certainty that this person indeed has been in the sense that the photograph cannot lie as to its truth. Barthes writes, “because it was a photograph I could not deny that I had been there” (85). For Barthes, writing cannot give this kind of certainty because it is not able to “authenticate itself” (85). In the age of digital image manipulation, it is hard to think that this is a structural necessity of the image, even though we persist in calling digital photography, photography. Perhaps we can save Barthes from the accusation of being before his time in a few ways.

One way is that he allows that if we can prove that an “image is not a photograph” then its having-been-there is not a necessity. In this sense, there is no more photography and Geoff Dyer’s introduction will have been right: “Far from invalidating Barthes’ arguments, however, the self-fueling, self-consuming present of the digital tense means that Camera Lucida has acquired the internal glow of its own preoccupation with photography as a technology in the process of becoming past, part of what has been” (Barthes xvii).

Another way may be to realize that the Referent that Barthes (and later Derrida) talks about has nothing to do with the truth of the object or person it portrays: “The important thing is that the photograph possesses an evidential force, and that its testimony bears not on the object but on time. From a phenomenological viewpoint, in the Photograph, the power of authentication exceeds the power of representation” (Barthes 89).

It is this possibility that Derrida holds onto. Rather than reading the Photograph as a specific and irreplaceable instance, Derrida takes Barthes logic of the “having been” to be characteristic of language as well: “this conjugation of death and the referent did not have to wait for the Photograph to have an essential relationship to reproductive technique, to technique in general” (Derrida 284).

Derrida initially distinguishes between the Referent, which is “noticeably absent, suspendable,” but the “reference to this referent” call it the “intentional movement of reference,” “implies just as irreducibly the having been of a unique and invariably referent” (Derrida 284). Even though Derrida says that this does not happen with any other image or discourse, it seems to me like he is implying that it does happen with other discourses—or at least autobiography. If not, how could he call the Winter Garden Photograph (which is never presented to the reader) the “punctum” of Barthes text? It seems to me that Derrida is saying that this supplementary, contrapuntal movement of the studium/punctum is not limited to what we consider (ontically) the Photograph. As he says earlier in the essay, “Ghosts the concept of the other in the same, the punctum in the studium, the completely other, dead, living in me.  This concept of the photograph photographs every conceptual opposition: it captures a relationship of haunting that is perhaps constitutive of every logic” (Final italics mine, Derrida 272).

Thus, this haunting logic of the photograph, this having-been is less a having been existing, but rather a having-been-unique, in the same way that the narrator’s (or, perhaps, Blanchot’s) experience cannot be “experienced” again by the one who testifies in his place. In the same way that we can never fully understand or grasp the “deaths” suffered by Roland Barthes, such as the death of his mother. The name “Roland Barthes” is an absent referent, haunting Derrida’s text without ever presenting itself. It is impossible to present him to the reader.

Derrida himself reads these two texts (the first and the last: Writing Degree Zero and Camera Lucida) as if

the negative of an idiom were finally going to appear and develop before my eyes, as if the place, step, style, timbre, tone, and gesture of Roland Barthes [. . .] were all of a sudden going to yield their secret to me. (Derrida 268)

Derrida’s Task

The question Derrida is asking (in different ways throughout the text) is how to speak on Roland Barthes on (near?) the occasion, at the instant? of his death. He initially promises himself that he would never speak near someone’s death because it would be “unbearable” (280). He then proceeds to list several different ways that someone speaks about the individual who has just died, laying out what he could have done. So to get around this, he decides to talk less about Barthes deaths, but the deaths he has endured.

So one of the questions Derrida is asking is what should we say on the occasion of someone’s death. He writes at the beginning that he is writing this for Barthes even though it may never get to him. Thus, Derrida seems to be writing less for the living than for the dead: “The interaction of the living must be interrupted, the veil must be torn toward the other, the other dead in us though the other still” (Derrida 282).

Thus, Derrida decides that he will talk about who Barthes was for him rather than in a particular context. He undergoes a passion for Barthes and the religious connotations of his language are not accidental. Derrida ends his essay on a quasi-religious note, using stigmata for wound and referring to anamnesis. While I am most familiar with the doctrine of anamnesis in Plato, where knowledge is framed as a process of remembering, it also refers to the Last Supper: “Do this in memory of me.”

Interestingly, these words are uttered, repeated, again and again at every Catholic mass as each communicant seeks to enter into the Mystery of Christ. In a religious sense then as well, Derrida is right that “anamnesis, even if it breaks off always too soon, promises itself each time to begin again: it remains to come” (Derrida 298). It remains “to come” because it is necessary to repeat it week after week. 

The Question of Irony in The Test Drive

Yep, that's right. We are back to the *trope* of irony in the blog. I just can't seem to stay away from it. What with all my De Man reading and now. . .and now--Ronell takes it up! And of course, we can't forget Rortry. But let us not be content with being a Rortyan liberal ironist. I agree with Ronell that Rorty wants to put this test drive in "reverse." But Ronell productively asks:

Can this vehicle or compulsion kick into reverse, disengage strong theoretical accelerators, or even come to a standstill? Assuming that the warning lights flashing in Rorty's work are worth heeding, how would one responsibly answer to irony's excessive positings in scientific spaces, political sites, and ethical gateways? (Ronell 236)

For Ronell, Rorty does not go far enough: "his argument splices and dissociates, redistributes and cancels what ironic thinking can do" (238). Rorty calls for a split between the public and private sphere--we need to stop linking  self-creation and politics. But can we do this? Are not the various feminism(s) right that the private is already political?

I want Ronell (or someone) to take up the question of an "ironic ethics" (239). Rorty positions himself as offering one, but irony only belongs in the private sphere. But the private and public, no matter how much Rorty wants to make a distinction, are tied up in one another. Perhaps this is that concept of the "commons" we will get at later in the course.

Anyway, as I already said in my post on De Man and Jameson, I think that modernist 'irony' is something we need to deal with. According to Ronell, "Irony, as allegory of tropes, acts as interruptive potentiality; it is the nature of irony to threaten persistant and systematic disruption" (225).

Related to Irony (which Ronell notes may not be a  "trope" in the strict sense) is related to two other tropes: anacoluthon, "where the syntax of a sentence that raises certain expectations is 'suddenly interrupted and, instead of getting what you would expect to get in terms of syntax that has been set up, you get something completely different, a break in the syntactical expectations of the pattern'" (Ronell 224, quoting de Man). And parabasis, or, a direct address to an audience (an interruption of the play's 'action').

We can read Ronell's book as using anacoluthon and parabasis for a certain effect--an effect of unreadability?   Strangely enough, it seems that the photographs represent a kind of 'parabasis'--they directly confront the reader and force us to ask "what?" This also is an anacoluthon because it disrupts the 'syntax' of the typical academic book.

Is Ronell's book 'ironic'? It certainly does seem to contain an infinite negativity (Kierkegaard) and interminable self-reflexivity. If we see Ronell's book as a "test" itself, as a testing out of ideas while also taking them apart, then, according to Ronell's reading of Benjamin, her book participates in this very movement: "both irony and testing are tempted [recall Versuch meaning both test and temptation] by the recovery of ground when they are instead committed, as in Benjamin's sterring of irony, to the inecessant work of building by taking apart [De-Construction?]" (Ronell 226).

Jacques Derrida and Maurice Blanchot: Instant of My Death

Derrida's writing always asks for a response, just as his work is frequently contextualized as a response to a call for papers. The problem with responding to Derrida (rather than merely "using" him for our own purposes) is that his writing is hard to summarize and understand. This is the problem I see with a lot of literary criticism who use Derrida's critique of Saussure and then proceed to talk about the problem of "signification" in a given text.

Instead, Derrida's writing almost calls for a creative response, a response that somehow pays tribute to his method rather than his points. I'm not sure I am a strong enough writer to truly respond to Derrida's work.

Rather than appealing to experts on Blanchot, Derrida for the most part, uses Blanchot's other texts and his biography to make his points. Derrida has a personal relationship with Blanchot and so he wants to be faithful to the spirit of his work as a whole.

However, rather than begin directly with Blanchot, Derrida calls attention to his title and his rhetorical situation, citing something he had written about Paul De Man: "Funerary speech and writing would not follow upon death; they work on life in what we call autobiography. And this takes place between fiction and truth, Dichtung and Wahrheit" (16).

Dichtung is translated as "fiction," but Derrida wants to look at Warheit (truth) in terms of testimony. If

truth becomes testimony here, it is perhaps because as in Dichtung und Warheit, it will often be a question today of lies and truth: more precisely, of the biographical or autobiographical truthfulness of the witness who speaks of himself and claims to be recounting not only his life but his death, his quasi-ressurection, a sort of Passion. (16)

 This is how he gets into his topic of the "passions of literature." Derrida then detours (ish) into a discussion of the status of literature: is it particular or universal (as Goethe would have it)? Derrida answers: no. Even "literature" as a term is a latin word, an origin we cannot simply bypass. Derrida connects literature to death (a theme Blanchot takes up; thus, here, already, we see Derrida engaging Blanchot without engaging Blanchot) through a discussion of those authors who risk their lives in order to write literature (Rushdie, for example). This leads into a discussion of literature and politics and the judicial (bringing us back to testimony).

In all, we have these signifiers playing around each other: passion, religion, literature, death, fiction, testimony.

Rather than speaking of philosophy "as literature," which is what many people seem to think Derrida is claiming (collapsing the distinctions), Derrida here claims he wants to test the claim that "there is no essence or substance of literature: literature is not. It does not exist. It does not remain at home" (Derrida 20). Thus, literarity is not intrinsic to this or that artifact. Playing on a meaning of passion, Derrida argues that literature's "passion consists in this--that it receives its determination from something other than itself" (28).

Thus, Derrida suggests a kind of endless choice (that has no answer) to read something as testimony or as fiction. However, he then deconstructs this distinction.

Testimony and Fiction

Derrida argues that in order for testimony to remain testimony it "always goes hand in hand with at least the possibility of fiction, perjury, lie" (27). But Derrida doesn't make us take his word for this deconstruction.

Derrida attacks the distinction from two sides: the idea of the "instant" and the necessary diachrony of experience and the fact that to "bear witness" to something is the impossible task of making a secret public. 

Following his previous deconstructions of "presence," Derrida argues that the instant becomes divisible within testimony even though the assumption in testimony is that we testify to an instant. We must be physically present (in the courtroom, for example) to testify to an instant, but at the same time, it implies that we are testifying (at this very instant) to another instant, but this instant is divided by the temporal sequence of the testimony itself.

Furthermore, Derrida points out that testimony is always heard by a third person, a witnessing to the witness. In order for testimony to be "true" we have to assume an addressee that has sufficient mastery of the language (as well as an addressor) and that this person to whom the witness is testifying is "capable of the same mastery, that is, of hearing and translating in univocal fashion" (35). In other words, testimony involves interpretation and a decision (that may be without criteria) as to the 'truth' of the testimony. 

But testimony ideally cannot be reduced to a narrative (that is--a fiction?) Instead, Derrida argues, that testimony is always testifying to an act: "it does what it says at this very instant; it cannot essentially be reduced to narration" (Derrida 38). Derrida uses two examples. One i will modify for the sake of the language I am speaking: "I am speaking English." If I were to say "I am speaking French," (in English) then it would not be true. The English sentence, however,   performs what it says. Just as a martyr's testimony does not "tell a story," but rather offers his body. Testimony is an act.

Derrida then takes on a related word to "instant"--instance. Meaning, "exemplary." I think that this may be his strongest argument for how testimony's structure makes an impossibility necessary. In order to give testimony, I have to have had an experience that makes me irreplaceable. AND YET, my testimony has to be exemplary, that is, "anyone who in my place, at that instant, would have seen or heard or touched the same thing and could repeat exemplarily, universally, the truth of my testimony [. . .] The singular must be universal" (41).

Blanchot's Story

Blanchot's story, then, concerns the impossiblity of testifying to one's death. On one hand, I am the only one who could ever testify to my death--on the condition that I survive it (Derrida 45). But its not only that we can never testify to our death, we can also not testify to a previous experience because at every "instant" we are someone different. We cannot even replace ourselves, we cannot put ourselves back in that position: "And yet is there not a witness who must not say this, in all conscience, namely: 'At the moment of my attestation I am no longer the same as the witness who lived that and how remains irreplaceable" (Derrida 65). He cannot analyze what he experienced at the previous time (when he really was the "witness" to an event, but a witness to who? The bearing witness always involves another instant than the instant of my experience).

Like the passage we read from Specters of Marx, Derrida here is questioning the possibility of death, concluding that it is the "necessary impossible." We cannot testify to the instant of our death, only the imminence of our death, the death to come. Indeed, we can understand our lives as a perpetual dying--death is always to come. We know its coming, eventually. We do not know when. Furthermore, there does seem to be a 'general death' that is very different from Heidegger's sense of Being-Toward-Death, Jemeingskeit.

The narrator begins the story with the claim that the man was "prevented from dying by death itself" (3). This is not "his" death (is it?) but rather the death of another, which he bears responsibility for. Blanchot writes, "prevented from dying by death itself--and perhaps the error of injustice" (3). Derrida comments that "two orders" intersect the ethical and the epistemological even though the "remain incompatible" (54). The question of death is inevitably tied into the question of the ethical and the question of the (im)possiblity of justice.

The young man may have "saved himself" in one sense--that he was able to "move away" (not escape!). But on another level, "he has benefited from an injustice, and he will not case to suffer from this privilege. This torment will be the torment of an entire life, life as the torment of an injustice, as an inexpiable fault" (87). The "error" in injustice is his home, his abode (demeure)--the Chateau. By 'accident', by what Sartre would call his 'facticity', he is spared death, but is he spared dying? Is he spared a different kind of death? Is he ever spared death "in general"? No, he must suffer, he must undergo this suffering.

The "death" that the young man undergoes is the realization of his finitude, his substitutability. The "lightness" he experiences at the instant of his death "neither frees nor relieves of anything; it is neither a salvation through freedom nor an opening to the infinite because this passion is without freedom and this death without death is a conformation of finitude (Derrida 90).

This is the paradoxical condition that Derrida claims Blanchot gets at: a logic of a neither/nor, and "X without X." For instance, Blanchot writes in The Step Not Beyond: "To live without living, like dying without death: writing returns us to these enigmatic propositions" (Blanchot qtd. in Derrida 89). Indeed, we return to the "unexperienced experience." The 'experience' (that is not an experience) of literature remains an x without x. To read a novel, we have an "experience" without an experience--on both the side of the author and the reader! As Derrida writes,

It is on this condition (the condition of the possibility of fiction in experience) that we understand something of this narrative, to the extent that we understand anything at all about it [. . .] we only judge it to be readable, if it is, insofar as a reader can understand it, even if no such thing has ever "really" happenned to him, to the reader. We can speak, we can read this beacuse this experience, in the singularity of its secret, as "experience of the unexperienced," beyond the distinction between the real and the phantasmatic, remains [demeure] universal and exemplary. (Derida 93)

 

This takes us back into the question the film After. Life asked (perhaps poorly): what does it mean to live? (rather than what does it mean to die). The mortician (played by Liam Neeson) argues that this girl wasn't really "living" but just taking up space. But who has the right to claim that we are not 'living"? Who has the right to actually declare the instant of my death? 

The Test Drive

"The Test Drive" yields many different meanings. The most obvious one refers to the testing of a new vehicle. We 'test drive' a car in order to see if it is "right" for us, if the 'feel' of the car is right. But test drives may also refer to test crashes, where we are trying to find the limits of the car. How much force can it take before it breaks? Its only by smashing the car that we are able to assess a certain quality.

We can also understand the 'test drive' as a drive to test. This seems to be a drive common to human beings--we want to try things out and we want 'tests' to confirm that it will act in such and such a way again. We claim that if something is "testable" it can be proven. If it 'passes the test' then a degree of truth can be found (so we usually think).

Ronell is interested in playing with (and interrogating) of the valences of "to test," including a "test" in the educational/pedagogical sense. Although she does not go into depth with this, it may be a way into looking at her argument in terms of the university.

While a scientific test has to be taken many times over in order to confirm that it has provided "proof" for knowledge, tests in schools only have to be taken once. As Ronell puts it, "even if a test, to fulfill its bald constative claims, assumes the function of providing providing definitive results or minimally of confirming that cognition occurs, testing, for its part and imprating, is always temporally determined" (186). This is basically common sense for students. Students take the test and once they have "proven" that they have grasped the information quickly throw it in the recycle bin of their minds. Thus, a 'test' in this sense is not really a "prototype" that will eventually form into something executed. Rather, it remains a prototype--a playing at knowledge rather than an enacting of it: "The normatively secured test does not generate knowledge but confirms what already exists as 'knowable'" (187).

Ronell asks whether it is possible for a test to generate knowledge. She argues that only in the test's failure does it generate knowledge and, furthermore, that this is the "unpretended aime of a test." She wrties, "Generous failure, productive disclosure, concerns a type of testing that probes more than the workability or conformity of its object to an already regulated norm" (188). By definition, 'standardized' tests cannot produce knowledge. It is knowledge-telling.

I'm not sure we need Ronell for the basic arguments I am making here against standardized testing, but its the scene that came to mind.

Ronell's Deconstruction of Popper

In the first chapter, "Proving Grounds," Avital Ronell takes on one of the canonical philosopher's of science: Karl Popper.  She is not 'against' the spirit of Popper or science per se.  In fact, Ronell seems convinced that the 'test drive' if channeled in a productive fashion helps to "undermine dogma" (25). What she objects to in Popper is his narrow definition of a 'testable' (or falsifiable) theory, arguing that the line Popper draws  metaphysics and science is extremely thin: 

Popper offered that science cannot be distinguished from metaphysics or pseudo-science in terms of confirmation by experience or observations. "Rather, Popper claimed that the hallmark of a metaphysical theory--such as Marxism, psychoanalysis, or Adlerian psychology--is that it leaves its adherents free to transmute any seemingly refuting observation into a confirming instance. Popper, who equated "falsifiability" with "refutability" or "testability," claimed that "not the verifiability but the falsifiability of a system is to be taken as a criterion of demarcation. It must be possible for an empirical scientific system to be refuted by experience. (Ronell 28)

 The first quotation is drawn from an essay by Schwartz, interpreting Popper's own inquiry in a tradition more consonant with Ronell. We should notice that Ronell claims before this quotation that the line between metaphysics and pseudo-science cannot be confirmed by "experience or observations." However, the second quotation (from Popper himself), which says directly that an empirical scientific system must be able to be "refuted by experience," refutes Ronell's claim. While this confused me as an initial reader, Ronell will back up her arguments by referring to the problem of "experience" later on.

For now, let us assume that the major claim is the one made by Schwarz--that we can turn a refutable observation into a confirming instance. Ronell argues later that one of the opponents--psychoanalysis--actually depended on such testability. In a close reading of Freud's own case studies, Ronell shows that Freud took into account evidence that refutes his theory ("Freud admits this case into evidence as 'a refuting instance of the aetiology he had postulated for that disorder" (65)). But two points need to be made about the relation between this Freudian example and Popper's theory.

1.) Ronell argues that in the case of "The Rat Man" the analysis's "failure was its success" (67). Is this not an instance of Ronell turning the "refuting" position into a confirmation? "Freud complains that his cure came about too quickly, the lessons too quickly learned" (67).

2.) How are the theories of Freud enacted differently in the clinical setting and in literary (or philosophical) criticism. Are not Freud's actual clinical successes a different thing entirely from the success of a literary interpretation? If we begin from Freudian theories and go on to interpret a text through the lens of Freud, will we not find Freud in the text? Perhaps this is why literary interpretation is always "outside" the distinction true/false; or, at the very least, outside the possibility of "proof"?

This is neither a new or surprising claim. Ronell's surprising claim comes when she draws a parallel between the uncertain status of literature and the uncertain referential status of laboratory experiments. Ronell's arguments  depend on a difficult assertion to swallow: She makes a parallel between laboratory culture and other 'texts' or semiotic systems, arguing in both cases that reference is suspended. Nature cannot even be a reference point:

That means 'Nature' itself only becomes 'real,' in scientific and technical perspective as a model. And so also 'in vivo experiments' are model systems. There is no absolute point of reference for what becomes involved in the game of representation. The very necessity of representation implies that any possibility of any immediate evidence is excluded.(49)

 Essentially, lab culture is a self-contained, representational system. She then moves on to discuss the "rhetorical dimension of the experimental elaboration, the levels of fictioning, allegorization, and noncoincidence of sign and signified that lab culture can tolerate" (49).

The intrusion of fiction/poetry/'the literary' is the way Ronell gets at a deconstruction of Popper, later claiming that science and art have more common ground than we usually think: "Science and art continue to share a knowledge of the unreliability of the referent [. . .] both understand experiment as a freedom from the constraints of referential truth" (228).

However, art is the primary term. For Ronell, as for Nietzsche, art has prepared the way for science: "If art was invented for us, it was in order to heal us from the persistent wounding of necessary error and delusion. Art cooperates at a level of inoculation by administering general untruth in order to immunize us against untruth" (212). Without art, we would have been terrified by, say, the death of God and the unstable ground of scientific experiment. This is a fascinating and, I think, useful way to think about the function of art.

Let us return to Popper's essay. Ronell shows how Popper's language undermines his own claims. She begins by citing the opening of one Popper's books, which includes a quotation from the Romantic poet, Novalis: "Hypotheses are nets: only he who casts will catch" (32). Even though we can just chalk this up to the convention of a poetic epigraph is books, Ronell seriously considers what follows from "the most important scientific axioms" as "cosigned by poetic insight" (33).

If we do not buy this argument, Ronell provides more evidence for her further deconstruction of Popper's argument. Ronell summarizes the scientific stance as one involving "the strength to try to overthrow rather than to establish the solution at which thought arrives" (34). In other words, science has to invite critique from others within a community ("to communicate is to be prepared to be overthrown). Ronell does not disagree with this fundamental attitude. However, she notes that Popper himself relies on unquestioned metaphysical propositions: "The above argument, he writes, 'expresses the metaphysical faith in the existence of regularities in our world (a faith which I share, and without which practical action is hardly conceivable)" (37). The "argument" referred to is that an "old theory" retains its validity as a "limiting case of the new theory" (37). For Ronell, this comes off as Popper trying to "safeguard the law" (37). I think Popper may be right though that a lot of practical action would not be possible without the belief in some regularity. Still, this is probably a matter of degree than a hard and fast rule or metaphysical truth.

For Popper, everything rests on the test: "The test is posed as the answer to the answer, as meta-answer, and is never considered from the angle of a possible collapse" (42). For Popper, the "test" is a ground for science; for Nietzsche, the test is a performative activity that endlessly throws the scientist for a loop. Ronell's task for the rest of the book is to put the "test" to the "test." Ronell objects that for popper science is on a firm ground such that it can proceed without further justification.

In contrast, Ronell will show the slipperiness of the 'test', deconstructing it in the manner of Derrida's deconstruction of the promise (see pg 242 for "experience"). Furthermore, she will link "test" and "testimony," drawing on historical and literary examples of the master/slave relationship implied in a concept of 'true' testimony (a term deconstructed by Derrida in his analysis of Blanchot's Instant of My Death).