The Question Concerning Technology and Writing

There are so many things to talk about in these few short texts we are supposed to explore for next week, but today's class has given me a more specific focus: what is technology and is this even a legitimate question; that is, taking a cue from Derrida and others, should we ask after the ontology of technology--its "is," its "whatness."

In "Question," Heidegger maintains that technology cannot be thought of as a tool in the sense that it is something we can control or master. He writes, "So long as we represent technology as an instrument we remain transfixed in the will to master it" (Heidegger 337). In other words, we see ourselves as the agents and subjects that determine being or truth. We see ourselves, to put it in Descartes terms, as the "masters and possessors of nature," who will be able to use technology to further our own ends. Let us take the example of writing (which, initially, we will treat as "a" technology rather than the basis for technological being), particularly in relation to the teaching of writing. As teachers/instructors/institutions, we maintain that we can "teach" writing. To be more specific, we maintain that we can teach our students to "use" writing instrumentally as a means to an end. But writing in its very structure resists this plan, which is, I would argue, why it is so difficult to write. Writing is not merely a tool just as technology is not merely a tool, but rather, according to Heidegger, a mode of revealing. Heidegger will call this "enframing" and he contrasts this with a "poetic" way of revealing. However, as with his analysis in Being and Time concerning "idle talk" or "inauthentic existence" enframing is still a mode of revealing just as "idle talk" is still a mode of being in the world. Heidegger writes that "As the one who is challenged forth in this way, man stands within the essential realm of enframing" (329). The danger here, Heidegger claims, is that enframing as a mode of revealing will hide a more "original" mode of revealing which he will call poiesis. 

For Heidegger, human beings do not have the power to fully control or direct technology, just as any writer is limited by the language he or she speaks and even further by the materiality and, to draw on Derrida, trace-structure of language: "Does such revealing happen somewhere beyond all human doing? No. But neither does it happen exclusively in man, or definitively through man" (329). We should neither blindly follow through with technology unthinkingly nor should we (nor can we) "rebel helplessly against it and curse it as the work of the devil" (330). Thus, despite Heidegger's rhetoric of a loss of "rootedness," soil, homeland, grounding, in "Memorial Address" Heidegger is not suggesting some Luddite position.

Rather, it seems that Heidegger wants us, perhaps, to think of other modes of revealing. That is, to realize that enframing, the realm of the "calculable" and ordering, is not the only way of revealing being. But again, it seems as though we cannot simply rid ourselves of enframing. Nor should we see enframing as categorically, to be simple, "bad," but simply that it is a "danger." But as the poet (for Heidegger, Holderilin) says, "where the danger is, grows the saving power also" (340). It is important to emphasize once again, and Heidegger is clear about this in "Question," that "What is dangerous is not technology. Technology is not demonic; but its essence is mysterious" (333).

Another way Heidegger puts this "mysterious" aspect of technology is that it is ambiguous: "the essence of technology is in a lofty sense ambiguous. Such ambiguity points to the mystery of all revealing" (338). Heidegger wants to maintain a kind of distance from technology; in other words, he does not want us to become merely fascinated with it because that leads us to think that the essence of technology is somehow a "genus" into which we can fit specific technologies. We need to understand the profound impact technology can have as a mode of revealing--something hinted at in "The Telephone."

So if we as human beings cannot master technology and nor can we simply reject it in favor of some sort of anachronistic return to Nature (although Heidegger's tropes suggest otherwise: soil, homeland, ground, foundation, growth), what can we do?

In "Question," his answer is that we need to "safekeep truth," a "piety of thought" ("questioning is the piety of thought" 341) that retains a kind of "mysteriousness" and "distance" from our technology. To not let our technology integrate into ourselves such that we do not reflect on it. In a way, is not this class taking up this project? We will (and Sid has before) raised questions like: What about people with glasses? Are not glasses a technology that makes us a kind of cyborg or posthuman? Or, as he said in class today, what about pills for indigestion? At his best, this is what Heidegger suggests we need to continue doing--asking after the boundaries of our terms.

In "Memorial Address," Heidegger suggests something similar: "I call the comportment which enables us to keep open to the meaning hidden in technology, openness to the mystery" (Heidegger 55). In this way, says Heidegger, we can find a new grounding/foundation/autochthony.

Openness to the mystery of technology and its ambiguity, to me, sounds like a good idea, but then we get statements from Heidegger like this:

Still we can act otherwise. We can use technical devices, and yet with proper use also keep ourselves so free of them, that we may let go of them any time. we can use technical devices as they ought to be used, and also let them alone as something which does not affect our inner and real core. We can affirm the unavoidable use of technical devices, and also deny them the right to dominate us, and so to warp, confuse, and lay waste our nature. (54)

A couple things regarding this passage. First, this passage seems to be discussing the "concrete" technologies rather than in "Question" the "essence" of technology. Second, we see Heidegger here advocating a separation of us as "human being" and technology. We want our prosthetic phalluses to be detachable--to be "let free." Let us consider this a moment. Heidegger's rhetoric in his later work suggests a "letting be" or a "freeing" but this also suggests that we not incorporate too much technology into ourselves so that our nature transforms, even though this seems to contradict his claim in "Question" that technologies are not tools or things, but a mode of revealing. For instance, in "Question," although Heidegger asserts that man could never become a mere standing reserve, this very possibility is his nightmare:

As soon as what is unconcealed no longer concerns man even as object, but exclusively as standing reserve and man in the midst of objectlessness is nothing but the orderer of standing reserve, then he comes to the very brink of a precipitous fall; tha tis, he comes to the point where he himself will have to taken as standing reserve (332)

 This is an interesting passage for me, because it seems that here Heidegger is saying that we need things to face us as "objects" in their mysteriousness--not yet having been "enframed." I'm not sure what to make of this, but its something I'd like to explore further.

Interestingly enough, the above lengthy quotation from the "Memorial Address" resonates with a logic of "purity" or the "unscathed," something that Derrida brilliantly puts into question in "Faith and Knowledge" (Acts of Religion). But I digress (although this may be a useful avenue to pursue at another time)

I'd like to move on to the essay "I, Pencil," in which the pencil calls itself a "miracle" and a "mystery," citing G.K. Chesterton's assertion that "We are perishing for want of wonder, not for want of wonders." Here, it is not the "essence" of technology that is mysterious, but a particular technology that is mysterious precisely because no one person knows how to make it. To return briefly to "Faith and Knowledge," Derrida claims

Because this evil is to be domesticated and because one increasingly uses artifacts and prostheses of which one is totally ignorant, in a growing disproportion between knowledge and know how, the space of such technical experience tends to become more animistic, magical, mystical. (Derrida 91)

Admittedly, this quotation from Derrida applies to the divorce between the technologies we use and the technologies we understand "how they work." In some sense, we all know how a pencil "works" but we do not know how to make the pencil, so that the pencil in a way becomes something we use but we do not know how it came into being. Perhaps a microwave or a DVD is harder to explain how it "works," but if we are to take Heidegger (at least as I have read him these past few days) and the author of "I, Pencil" seriously, we should acknowledge, with a kind of attitude of 'wonder' the miracle of such simple things.

"I, Pencil" traces the genealogy of a pencil's development, showing that a lot of different "intellectual technologies" (I think is how Sid put it) were required to make this "tool." I am astounded at the similarities (which I first thought were radical differences) between Heidegger's "Question" and "I, Pencil." In "Question," Heidegger maintains that "there is no such thing as a man who exists singly and solely on his own" and that "the essential unfolding of technology gives man entry into something which, of himself, he can neither invent nor in any way make" (Heidegger 337). Similarly, the pencil writes that, "Man can no more direct these millions of know-hows to bring me into being than he can put molecules together to create a tree."

That is, in both Heidegger and "I, Pencil" there is a limitation to the mastery of the human being. Even though Heidegger sets up the "chalice" example in a re-reading of Aristotle, he uses the language of "giving thanks to" and "being responsible for" rather than "making" or "inventing" or "efficient causes" for the silversmith. Rather the silversmith "gathers together the aforementioned ways of being responsible and indebted" (315). These three ways "owe thanks to the pondering of the silversmith for the 'that' of the 'how' of their coming into appearance" (316).

But is this the case in "I, Pencil"? That is, is there a "gatherer" of the pencil, a "pondering" mind that brings together the other causes? No, rather there are "millions of tiny know-hows configuring naturally and spontaneously in respnse to human necessity and desire and in the absense of any human master-mind."

To end these rambling reflections, I want to think about the status of "freedom" in both Heidegger and "I, Pencil." For Heidegger, freedom is a kind of "letting be," but this letting be lets be what is. "I, Pencil," in contrast, seems to be about possibility--free creative energies roaming free such that something is made or created through a gathering (although not necessarily by a particular human subject). "I, Pencil" ends with,

The lesson I have to teach is this: Leave all creative energies uninhibited [. . .] Let society's legal apparatus remove all obstacles the best it can. Permit these creative know-hows freely to flow. Have faith that free men and women will respond to the Invisible Hand 

The Invisible Hand? Are we really in the realm of Adam Smith economic theories here? Does this reveal something about Heidegger's particular mode of "letting be" so that destining is set on its way? Questions worth pondering. . .and writing about.

 

Atwood's Oryx and Crake and Year of the Flood

In Cormac McCarthy's novel The Road, the narrative voice, assumed to be that of the unnamed protagonist, thinks:

The world shrinking down about a raw core of parsible entities. The names of things slowly following those things into oblivion. Colors. The names of birds. Things to eat. Finally the names of things one believed to be true. More fragile than he would have thought. How much was gone already? The sacred idiom shorn of its referents and so of its reality (89)

McCarthy's novel is perhaps one of the most popular dystopian novels to come out in the last couple decades. The novel shows a bleak post-apocalyptic world where vegetation, animals, and most human beings have become extinct. The cause of the apocalypse is left in the dark, although we are told that there was a flash of light. Extinction has led to the emptying of language and its power. The only ethical actions left are between the few nomadic human beings left scrounging for scraps of food and a semblance of saftey.

But why am I speaking about The Road? Perhaps because Atwood offers a different kind of dystopia. Indeed, now that I re-think it, it is hard to think of Oryx and Crake and Year of the Flood as post-apocalyptic, even though the main characters sometimes speak from a position after the "apocalyptic" event. But this is an apocalypse in reverse: it is not the wiping out of all of the earthly and the animal, leaving the solitary humans to carry the "fire," but rather the extinction of a majority of the human race through a carefully planned (but surreptitious) bioterrorist act, resulting in a plague. The human race has (apparently) been replaced by human made, transgenic organism referred to as the "Crakers." They are engineered to behave simiarily to animals in some ways (such as their mating rituals) but are also model human specimens with perfect bodies. Furthermore, the Crakers also possess language, although at the time of the books they have a limited vocabulary.

I want to look at the function of language, particularly related to art and rhetoric, in both Oryx and Crake and Year of the Flood.  Snowman/Jimmy, who is the main protagonist in Oryx and Crake is a rhetorician and a "word person." He is a "word person" in the sense that this is what he is good at and in the sense that he uses language in order to manipulate others. In the "present" of the novel (although this is a problematic designation itself--most of the novel takes place as a flashback), Snowman currently plays the position of a priest to the Crakers. He has improvised a whole mythology about where the Crakers come from and pretends to "talk" to Crake through his watch. Crake, who we will later find out plays a Mad Scientist kind of role in the text, did help "create" the Crakers, but not as the God Snowman/Jimmy makes him out to be.

Jimmy (before he becomes "snowman") majores in Problematics at the Martha Graham Academy. Martha Graham Academy seems like the equivalent of a Liberal Arts and Humanities college. The college was set up by "liberal bleeding hearts from Old New York" and Jimmy compares the college to "studying latin, or book-binding: pleasent to contemplate in its way, but no longer central to anything" (187). However, the college tries for utilty: "Our Students Graduate With Employable Skills, ran the motto underneath the original Latin motto, which was Ars Longa Vita Brevis [Art is long, life is brief]" (188).

Indeed, Jimmy does have "employable skills" because Crake eventually hires him to help sell the BlyssPluss pill, the pill that secretely contains the plague that will wipe humans off the face of the earth. Later in the novel, when Crake tells Jimmy what his Paradice project is aiming for "immortality," Crake explains:

Immortality, said Crake, is a concept. If you take 'mortality' as being, not death, but the foreknowledge of it an the fear of it, then immortality is the absence of such fear. Babies are immortal. Edit out he fear and you'll be. . . (303).

Jimmy says that that sounds like "Applied Rhetoric 101." Rhetoric, as the art of persuasion, persuades people that they can achieve "immortality," but only if we understand and define immortality in this way. Crake says the Crakers are "floor models" that represent the "art of the possible" rather than the kind of being everyone would want. Of course the irony to this, as we soon find out, is that Crake means for the Crakers to replace the human race rather than serve human interests. Immortality in Crake's sense is really only given to the Crakers.

Jimmy functions as an Adman (rather and Adam), who first works at spinning products, then spins a tale for the Crakers that will satisfy their curiosity. But Jimmy seems to be much more interested in words beyond their utilitarian use (at least the rhetorical use put to advertising). That is to say, Jimmy/Snowman still finds words "useful" but mostly for himself. Examples:

"You scoundrel," says Snowman out loud. It's a fine word, scoundrel; one of the golden oldies. (191)

He compiled lists of old words too--words of a precision and suggestiveness that no longer had a meaningful application in today's world, or toady's world, as Jimmy sometimes deliberately misspelled it on his term papers [. . .] He memorized these hoary locutions, tossed them left-handed into conversation: wheelwright, lodestone, saturnine, adamant. He'd developed a strangely tender feeling towards such words, as if they were children abandoned int he woods and it was his duty to rescue them. (195)

Supposing, that is, he could manage to sleep. At night he'd lie awake, berating himself, bemoaning his fate. Berating, bemoaning, useful words. Doldrums. Lovelorn. Leman. Forsaken. Queynt. (312)

Sometimes he'd turn off the sound, whisper words to himself. Succulent. Morphology. Purblind. Quarto. Frass. It had a calming effect. (344)

A list of words without apparent connection one to the other. Rather, a seemingly random list that comforts Snowman. He enjoys listing these words for their "precision and suggestiveness." In contrast (?) to Jimmy's logophilia, Amanda, a girlfriend of Jimmy's, was an "image person, not a word person" (244). Amanda is a bioartist who "vulturizes" words:

The idea was to take a truckload of large dead-animal parts to vacant fields or the parking lots of abandoned factories and arrange them in the shapes of words, wait until the vultures had descended and were tearing them aparnt, then photograph the whole scene from a helicoptor [. . .] The words she vulturized--her term--had to have four letters. She gave a great deal of thought to them: each letter of the alphabet has a vibe, a plus or minus charge, so the words had to be selected with care. Vulturizing brough them to life, was her concept, and then it killed them. (245).

The words she "vulturizes" are not the precise, old words that Jimmy loved so much, but words like "PAIN," "WHOM," and "GUTS," and, finally, "LOVE." Is this an erasing of language or its materialization (or both?). Perhaps we could contrast this vulturization with what Jimmy is hired to do based on his dissertation about Self-Help books. These words are all concepts or nouns, whereas Jimmy claims "the adjectives change [. . .] Nothing's worse than last year's adjectives" (246). How to describe the noun--how do we sell the noun rather than materialize it/make it 'live'. The self-help process is explicitly connected to Crake's work at the Paradice dome, as it is also described as the "art of the possible [. . .] But with no guarantees, of course" (246).

No guarantees. Para-dice.

I'm not sure what to do with the phrase the "art of the possible." In a way, Crake's project is more similar to certain "bioart" (transgenics, genomic art, tissue culture, etc.) than Amanda's Vulturizing. Bioart, however, while creating the possible. also show sthe limits of the possible. Perhaps the "vulturizing" speaks to the limits of language?

Furthermore, what does "vulturizing" have to do with writing? In Year of the Flood we find out that 'writing' was discouraged by the group the God's Gardeners, a group that Amanda had once been a part in. Ren, one of the protagonists, tells us that the Gardeners thought writing was "dangerous" because "your enemies could trace you through it, and hunt you down, and use your words to condemn you" (6). They also have a theological reason goes back to Plato:

They told us to depend on memory, because nothing written down could be relied on. The Spirit travels from mouth to mouth, not from thing to thing: books could be burnt, paper crumble away, computers could be destroyed. Only the Spirit lives forever and the Spirit isn't a thing. (6)

 The series Amanda does she names The Living Word--"she said for a joke it was inspired by the Gardeners because they'd repressed us so much about writing things down" (56).

I have really fascinated with so-called "Bioart" in the past couple months.The question for me is--what constitutes "bioart" in the novels? Is Crake's project a kind of 'bioart'? Is the bioterrorist group, MaddAdam also doing a kind of "bioart" or, to use the language of a recent collection of essays by Beatriz de Costa, "tactical biopolitics"? Amanda's art is relatively harmless--symbolically powerful, but tactically almost useless. She creates images and not new forms of life.

In an essay in Tactical Biopolitics (my computer is out of service at the moment, so I cannot find the exact quote, essay, or author), the author claims that bioart tends to be transmitted through 'documentation' of the art event (including photographs) rather than seeing the art itself. Amanda's project then would fit this kind of art. Only a very few people have seen this artwork first-hand and rely on accounts--witnesses, if you will.

On this topic, allow me close these scattered reflections on these two powerful books with an acknowledgment of their extensions. For both Oryx and Crake and Year of the Flood, Atwood has created websites: www.oryxandcrake.com  and www.yearoftheflood.com  I was half hoping these would experimental websites, a la the Critical Art Ensembles Cult of the New Eve, but the site was relatively easy and standard to navigate--except for a couple things.

God's Gardeners are a fiction created by the author, but it seems that they have burst out of the book into the world. Someone actually set the Gardener's hymns to music. This is pretty cool in itself (and a little wierd), but Atwood has taken it even farther and, luckily, there is someone to document it:


In the Wake of the Flood (Teaser) from filmswelike on Vimeo.

Atwood says in this video teaser that she thinks that more people "would attempt to save the planet if they believed it was their duty," which seemingly endorses the God's Gardener's message. Furthermore, for the book release, people were given scripts (including hymns) and put on their own show of the book, an interesting and artistic way for people to experience the book and completely revoultionizing the idea of a 'book tour'. This may relate to other fan communities' projects springing up for various books/series.

I'm a bit put off by Atwood's serious suggestion of making a kind of religion out of protecting the environment and the earth. The Year of the Flood pokes fun at the God's Gardener's and its hard not to read the text as satirical. However, we would have to admit that the God's Gardener's are really some of the only people to survive the "waterless flood" and they are flexible in their creeds and beliefs. God's Gardener's actually come across as incredibly practical as well as 'human' in the sense of fallen, imperfect, beings.

But, and this is another question I'd like to explore, are the texts "posthuman" in a sense? What would Haraway's take on the text be? Derrida's? I am not suggesting that we merely dismiss the text if it does not hold up to such posthuman (unhuman, whatever) critiques, but rather that the books deal with the same territory in a very accessible and emotional way. Atwood's characters, especially the God's Gardener's are not mere caricatures--they read like plausible human beings. The swear, they lie, they cheat, they break rules, they manipulate, they're hierarchal, secretive, full of love, hate, jealousy, indifference, coldness, warmth, etc. The God's Gardener's life is not a utopia nor an Eden before the Fall. As Adam One says, the Fall is ongoing.  And then, of course, where do the Crakers fit in? Are they the posthumans? What is the role of 'art' in the text and in the new society that seems to form toward the end of Year of the Flood.

I realize I haven't ended yet. When I went to yearoftheflood.com, I clicked on a link called "neat stuff" and looked at the entires. One of them, to my surprise, was Victimless Leather, a project of the Tissue Culture and Art Project, artists I have been recently researching. Little comment was made on Atwood' site about the project. But I will venture to call their art--the art of the possible, in the best possible sense.

Steven Johnson's Where Good Ideas Come From

Steven Johnson’s Where Good Ideas Come From

I just finished reading Steven Johnson’s Where Good Ideas Come From. Unexpectedly, the book connected with a lot of my reading from a recent seminar called Queer Indigestion and the University. Thierry Bardini’s Junkware was the first text that I thought of when I read Johnson’s notion that good ideas are composed of spare parts: “Part of coming up with a good idea is discovering what those spare parts are, and ensuring that you’re not just recycling the same old ingredients” (Johnson 42). He uses an example from Stephen Jay Gould, who praises the ingenuity of sandals made from old tires. Johnson refers to Gould later because of his concept of exaptation, a concept in evolutionary biology where a trait developed for a specific purpose is re-purposed for a different function. Gould himself “exapts” the ‘tire sandals,’ translating it to nature: “The tire-to-sandals principle [. . .] [makes] nature as inventive as the cleverest person who ever pondered the potential of a junkyard in Nairobi” (Gould qtd. in Johnson 29). Johnson will refer several times to the innovative power of recycling. Brent Constanz, for instance, in his project to grow coral reef that may eventually result in material for cities, discovered a new way to use excess CO2 from factories. We consider CO2 as “waste,” but through innovative thinking it becomes useful again. This may be one issue with Bardini’s narrow definition of junk, which he wants to distinguish from forms of garbage, waste and trash for (admirably) semantic reasons. He tries to describe junk as something that retains some of its affect (whereas trash, garbage, and waste, we just want out of sight, out of mind). This affect gives us “hope” in junk and possibly a “redemption,” language he draws from Phillip K. Dick’s SF Gnosticism. Toward the end of the text, he further generalizes: “junk is always the present potentiality of a renewed function” (Bardin 213).

 Either Johnson is not careful enough in his distinctions, or Bardini’s distinctions earlier in the text fall apart right here. Should we think junk as a renewed function in the sense that its initial function returns? I do not think Bardini means it in this sense, since he also wants to speak of “spare parts,” but in more ‘organic’ terms, drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s Bodies without Organs. He uses the term Organs without bodies. Bardini cites the Tissue Culture and Art Project as claiming that their work is about “producing spare body parts” (204). Both of the texts seem to point toward innovation, but Johnson’s concept of “platforms” takes us out of the rhetoric of redemption/salvation. At the same time, we have to recognize that while Johnson’s work succeeds at discussing innovation, it rarely touches on the difficult subject of ethics of innovations and technology. Thus, Johnson avoids any discussion of the ethical consequences of “good ideas.” This is a limitation of Johnson’s book that should be acknowledged, but not harped on. Johnson hints at political and organizational concerns, but never directly addresses them, as it is not the thesis of his book. So, in a sense, perhaps it is disingenuous of me to compare Johnson and Bardini’s work.

Yet, we may want to look at one more moment in Johnson’s text that intersects with Bardini. Junkware begins with a historical narrative of Crick and Watson’s discovery of the Central Dogma. Bardini points out that a lot of the decisions made concerning the Dogma was made outside of the laboratory, in letters and informal meetings. In our course, we were a bit surprised by this and poked fun at the kind of arbitrary decisions made. Johnson offers a slightly alternative reading, where he shows how Watson and Crick’s tinkering and combining different disciplines led to their theories of DNA (Johnson 168-69). Bardini admits that Watson and Crick’s Central Dogma was useful at one time, but eventually grew into an actual dogma that limited possibilities of research (Bardini 211). Thus, the issue for Bardini is not the innovation/idea itself, but rather its rigidity and its ability to exclude work that, we have since learned, is less “counter-productive” than W&C initially had thought. How would we understand Watson and Crick’s work in Johnson’s terms of platforming?

Johnson modifies the basic Kuhnian paradigm structure, arguing that “modern scientific paradigms are rarely overthrown. Instead, they are built upon. They create a platform that supports new paradigms above them,” such as the molecular genetics revolution triggered by Watson and Crick’s discovery of DNA (190). Although Johnson is clearly right here, he does not take into account that the way Watson and Crick defined what was “useful” and what was “garbage” within the DNA would marginalize certain research as invalid or, frankly, crazy. Perhaps Johnson would explain this phenomenon in terms of the concept of the adjacent possible? Bardini refers to one of the (now) famous Barbara McCintock, who was dismissed early in her career but eventually won the Nobel Prize. Perhaps Johnson would argue that McClintock’s ideas could not flourish in the early environment. But maybe it was because of Watson and Crick’s Dogma that they closed off the adjacent possible.

We may be able to see such definitions/dogmas of Watson and Crick as an elimination of “commons.” By calling most of DNA “junk” or “garbage,” actually get a very politically charged conception of human body where there are “productive” genes (‘coding’) and parasitic genes that have little function and just sort of ‘tag along’. I am struck by the similarity of this to the dominant trend in thinking that there are job “creators” and then there the people who depend on these job creators for their livelihoods. The 99% sucking off the 1% etc.

Perhaps the most relevant work on the problem of the “commons” is elucidated by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in Commonwealth. The “commons” is neither private nor public, but autonomous from both. Indeed, the commons goes beyond the idea of “property” and so even “public property” is still in some sense “private” compared to the openness of the commons (Hardt and Negri 282). “The common” and what Hardt and Negri, following Foucault, call biopolitical production create surplus value, but are not subject to the logic of scarcity:

Biopolitical production puts bios to work without consuming it. Furthermore, its product is not exclusive. When I share an idea or image with you, my capacity to think with it is not lessened; on the contrary, our exchange of ideas and images increases my capacities. (283-284)

This new “social sensorium” is what much labor (at least in the United States) now works towards. We need to start thinking the commons because the internet has allowed for increased and productive circulation of ideas and images. It is through the free circulation of ideas and tools that innovation comes about.

Indeed, since ideas and imagesdo not operate on the logic of scarcity, we have to construct artificial barriers that protects them from circulation. Stephen Johnson writes that, although efficiency tends to be the goal of every economy, and economy that “traffic[s] in ideas”  must build inefficient markets:

And so where innovation is concerned, we have deliberately built inefficient markets: environments that protect copyrights and patents and trade secrets and a thousand other barricades we’ve erected to keep promising ideas out of the minds of others. (232)

Of course, ideally, there is one place where ideas should circulate freely: the university. The modern research university, argues Johnson, participates in “fourth quadrant” research; that is, it is decentralized and nonmarket driven. Of course, as many writes have recently pointed out, markets have taken over funding for research and many people consider the Humanities type of research (what Christopher Newfield refers to as “cultural knowledge”) as useless. So, in one sense, the University may be in danger of becoming a market-driven institution. But, again, ideally, university research goes like this: “new ideas are published with the deliberate goal of allowing other participants to refine and build upon them, with no restrictions on their circulation beyond the proper acknowledgment of their origin” (Johnson 233).

Johnson and Hardt and Negri, I think, are actually remarkably close in what they seem to be arguing for, even though Johnson is less extreme. Johnson admits that there is no “ready-made political vocabulary for the fourth quadrant, particularly the noninstitutional forms of collaboration that have developed around the open-source community” (235). I would suggest that this type of thinking may correspond to what Hardt and Negri calls “the multitude.”

Both Hardt and Negri see the concept of the city and the metropolis as a key requirement for what Hardt and Negri call “biopolitical production” and what Johnson calls simply “good ideas.” The city, also, is the location of the political collective Hardt and Negri call the multitude: “The metropolis is the site of biopolitical production because it is the space of the common, of people living together, sharing resources, communicating, exchanging goods and ideas [. . .] The metropolis is a factory for the production of the common” (250). For Hardt and Negri, the city is important because it fosters “unpredictable encounters,” the task of which is to transform “conflictive encounters” into “joyful and productive ones” (252-255). This focus on encounter and collisions corresponds with Johnson’s idea of ‘collisions’: “Collisions [lead to creativity]—the collisions that happen when different fields of expertise converge in some shared physical or intellectual space” (Johnson 163).

But Johnson argues that the idea of the ‘commons’ is limited for two reasons. First, he notes that it is conventionally used in “opposition to the competitive struggle of the marketplace” and innovation environments are not necessarily hostile to market competition (244). I think Hardt and Negri would respond that biopolitical production is, rather than ‘hostile’, simply overflowing the market. That is, it creates surplus value that is difficult for capital to appropriate and hold onto: “Cognitive labor and affective labor generally produce cooperation autonomously from capitalist command” (140). The second limit Johnson points out is that the commons (which, admittedly, maybe this is different from the “common” without an ‘s’)

doesn’t suggest the patterns of recycling and exaptation and recombination that define so many innovation spaces. When you think of the commons, you think of a cleared field dominate by a single resource for grazing. You don’t think of an ecosystem. The commons is a monocrop grassland, not a tangled bank (244)

Indeed, Johnson argues for a metaphor ‘drawn from nature’ that more explicitly recalls an ecosystem. I think both Johnson and Hardt and Negri are trying to go beyond a state-controlled socialism or capitalism. Both are interested in a careful balance between order and chaos and both believe that creativity and innovation stem from decentralized, non-hierarchal aggregates that allows a free flow of ideas. It’s possible that Hardt and Negri have a larger task, as they are seeking to think of a new way of governance. Johnson, too, however, points to the possibility that the ideas he identifies toward innovation should be applied to government, but in a different way.

Hardt and Negri argue that revolutionary institutions must be

1.) Based in conflict

2.) create their own forms of habits and practices

3.) open-ended, susceptible to change give the singularities that make it up

They go on to say that this form of institution can be derived through the metaphor of network in cybernetics (357-358). 

However, I think Hardt and Negri, although attuned to the environment of the metropolis, lack discussion of how we are related to other beings besides other humans. Johnson's metaphor of the "coral reef," which emphasizes recycling and sustainability as well as innovation and 'common' spaces I think is a powerful addition to Hardt and Negri's book. Rarely is what we typically call "nature" introduced into Hardt and Negri's discourse. The only except is the Wasp and Orchid, uh, 'parable' if you allow the misnomer:

Wasps who love orchids, instead, point toward the conditions of the biopolitical economy. How could these wasps be a model for economic production, you might ask, when they don't produce anything? The bees and flowers produce honey and fruit, but the wasps and orchids are just hedonists and aesthetes, merely creating pleasure and beauty. It is true that the interaction of wasps and orchids does not result primarily in material goods, but one should not discount their immaterial production. In the encounter of singularies of their love, a new assemblage is created marked by the continual metamorphosis of each singularity in common. Wasp-orchid love, in other words, is a model fo the production of subjectivity that animates the biopolitical economy. (188)

Perhaps it would be prudent here to at least note the difference of Johnson's project and Hardt and Negri's. Hardt and Negri are trying to elucidate a theory of radical institutions and governance that would produce new subjectivities. Johnson, however, is simply trying to think about how innovation happens and what we can do to foster it. Both, again, are focusing on the creative potential of the overflow of ideas in a kind of "commons," but Hardt and Negri clearly lay out a political project.

I think what Johnson can add to the conversation is language focusing on environment, recycling, and sustainability that spurs on innovation and creativity. Bardini's definition of "junk" also helps this project. Maybe the important aspect is in realizing that institutions do not only have to exist to preserve the status quo, but that institutions can be creative in a similar way that technologies and "platforms" are created.

I am not sure if any of these connections matter, but, as Johnson recommends, I am simply trying to write it all down. It's just a slow hunch, albeit poorly defined.

A long drive with Zizek

Over thanksgiving break, I had to drive for 8 hours to and from Asheville, NC. During that time, rather than singing loudly to music, I decided to listen to various lectures and podcasts I had downloaded. Although I listened to many episodes of Entitled Opinions, a podcast from Robert Harrison at Stanford, the most enlightening thing I listened to was various recorded lectures from Slavoj Zizek.

A long time ago, I read a couple of Zizek's books and have been following recordings of his work online since college. Zizek is generally considered a legitimate "authority" in my current institution on literary theory, politics, and philosophy. His arguments and readings of texts are interesting and clear. But more importantly, he is simply a blast to listen to while driving.  When describing my activities in my car, I would say I was listening to "Father Zizek's sermons" because it is really like listening to a preacher. He has even described himself as "dogmatic." Of course, I am aware of the ironies in designating him "Father" Zizek. For one, as a Lacanian, "father" recalls the Name of the Father and the symbolic order. While Zizek is a brilliant reader of the symbolic order (the various texts, films, and more often than not, jokes), many consider him as the one that has done the most to elucidate Lacan's Real.

But I'm less interested in pondering the Real as traumatic event. As a nascent rhetoric and composition scholar and a graduate instructor, I began to focus on how Zizek makes his arguments. Interestingly enough, I found that Zizek uses the very basic device I was teaching my students (although in a very unique way): "Most people read this/think this as x, but I am going to argue that it is really y." Indeed, he tends to take a "common sense" way of thinking and turns it on its head. I am aware that this is not unique to Zizek, but it screamed out at me that this was the main thing he was doing.  Some examples are in order.

Instead of Dostoevesky's "If there is no God, everything is permitted" (although in an interesting digression he indicates when this famous quote was attributed to Dostoevesky), he argues that "If there is a God, then everything is permitted." He begins with this simple transformation and proceeds to draw implications from this. If I remember correctly, related to this statement, he argues that while most people see Christianity as a restrictive, moralistic, joyless religion and paganism as the religion of enjoyment, it is really the opposite.

Zizek points out that by taking into account that we all we meet with his death at the end, paganism is shot through with knowledge of death and decay. In contrast, Christianity allows us to enjoy life with the knowledge that there is eternity--you don't have to worry about death. If Christ has died on the cross for our sins, he has taken the "price" of death, decay, and sin upon himself, so that sin becomes possible. If you are a believer, you put all of the debt on Christ/God himself and then you are free to enjoy.

Zizek makes a very convincing case for this latter position. Surprisingly, Zizek admires certain aspects of Christianity. The essence of Christianity as the death of god "for himself," is the killing of God as the "big Other." According to Zizek's reading, it is God saying, "ok, now you are by yourselves." There is no big Other to judge us, but we must work out our own salvation, in fear and trembling.

My own personal realization comes from thinking about the nature of this big Other. For Lacan, the point is to realize that there is no big Other. The problem is thatwe think there is a big Other figured as maybe "society"  that wants something from us. In the psychoanalytic situation, the analyst plays this role of the fantasy big Other. We think that the analyst is looking for something--as if he was a torturer that wants to bring out the truth. We may go in and say "you probably want me to talk about my mother, but the problem really isn't my mother--you psychoanalysts are all the same." This is why Lacan thinks that the analyst needs to be silent. The analysand  thinks the analyst as this big Other that wants something from him or her.

This is why psychoanalysis aims at its own termination. The analysis is over when the analysand no longer needs the analyst. The analysis is over when the analysand understands that the analyst does not want anything from him.

So why am I going on about the big Other? Because I must confess that I feel like I certainly still believe in a big Other that somehow will judge my actions in reference to some truth or in reference to what that Other wants. Allow me to digress here to another article I was reading concerning art and politics. In the book Tactical Biopolitics,Claire Pentecost tells  how she is bothered by her students' declarations that they do not want their work to become "too political" or "too didactic." Political is like a dirty word for artists. Why?

According to Pentecost, to be political is to have a common opinion, an opinion that is not "one's own." Earlier in her article (or maybe it was another one in that book, I forgot), she talks about the current "rhetoric of the personal." We tend to think about opinions as my opinion. I have an opinion, I have a position. Art, however, tends to be more ambiguous, not necessarily taking a definite position or an opinion. If I remember correctly,  Deleuze and Guattari say in What is Philosophy, "art does not have an opinion." Artists want their work to be somehow unique.

I bring this up because this relates to "my" big Other (it is not really 'my' big other), a call of conscience that speaks from god knows where. Perhaps a "call of conscience" is not quite correct here. Perhaps a better way of saying it is a "devil's advocate" reaction. It is the knee jerk reaction to question whatever position is presented to me, be it liberal, Marxist, or conservative--I seek its flaws whenever presented. If a conservative speaks to me, I present the liberal argument and vice-versa.

An example: I would like to think that given my own generally liberal position (or at least a position that I'd like to believe I take), I would be unequivocally in support of Occupy Wall Street, which paints a certain part of the population (rich corporate executives) as the problem. Now, I tend to think that to claim that the occupiers are engaging in "class warfare" is a bit ridiculous, but I still have the conviction that it is a bit more complicated than the protesters make it. I still have this knee jerk reaction to defend the 1% as those who are probably decent people just trying to make a living and love their family.

Now we are getting to the crux of the problem: the distinction between interpersonal relations and how those people function in society given their roles of power and privilege. It's the idea that if we could only "understand" those people,  if we could "get their side of the story."we could excuse their acts  Zizek thinks this is problematic because the "stories we tell ourselves about ourselves" are always flawed and we are always going to put ourselves in a positive light. The point is that we can't understand everyone completely--that there remains some "radical other" within ourselves that we cannot know. In order to show that this is false, Zizek uses extreme cases: would we say that if only we understood Hitler he would not have done what he did or we could understand what he did? Most of us would say no.

So here we must speak of preserving the otherness of the other. Perhaps this is the only way we can avoid meaningless relativism and absurd justification.

At the same time, we cannot merely dismiss someone like Hitler as a "monster" or some sort of Force of Evil (nor can or should we do to the same to George Bush, President Obama, whoever the media wants to compare to Hitler these days). The terrifying part is that we are all possibly "monstrous" but not in a sublime, transcendent sense, but in the very way we allow ourselves to be part of a system of extermination. This is precisely the point of realizing our non-innocence in what we would call "monstrous" acts in the world. Pretending that we could ever "understand" this, as if it is merely a question of something we would say, only perpetuates a world where we seek to justify our acts rather than a world of responsibility.

And this is really what ethics comes down to: responsibility. The responsibility for our actions, for our words, and not only for "our own," but others as well.  In a world where our slightest action has an indirect but potent effect on others--in a globalized and networked world--we are responsible for more and more even if it is easier and easier to hide it.

Derrida, Disaster, and Sovereignties in Question--For Celan

I can now, perhaps, address the significance of Blanchot’s dis-aster.

Disaster: “ill starred,” a calamity blamed on “an unfavorable aspect of a planet”

Constellation: “conjuncture,” “set with stars.” OED: “Originally, in astrology, of position of planets,  (“stars”), in regard to one another on a given day, usually one’s birthday, as a determination of one’s character”

Sternbild (constellation): Stern, star. “bild” –image, picture, figure from bild (verb) – “build, shape, construct,” etc. “Star-image”

In Writing of the Disaster (I am still tempted, every time I write this title, to say Writing the Disaster, omitting the genitive possessive), Blanchot writes,

Levinas speaks of the subjectivity of the subject. If one wishes to use this word-why? But why not?—one ought perhaps to speak of a subjectivity without any subject, the wounded space, the hurt of the dying, the already dead body, which no one could ever own, or ever say of it, I, my body [this is my body, take this an eat it, do this in memory of me]. This is the body animated solely by mortal desire: the desire of dying—desire that dies and does not thereby subside. (30)

Could we substitute the notion of a “subject” with the name “identity”? To take one example of the “subjectivity without subject,” the Jew does not possess any determinate characteristics; rather, according to Derrida, “Anyone or no one may be a Jew. Jew, no one’s name, the only one. No one’s circumcision” (55). Or, more concretely, “what is proper to the Jew is to have no property or essence. Jewish is not Jewish” (35). “Jew” is not an identity, a knowledge, but a secret, a crypt, and perhaps most importantly a performance of the body. The performance is the “shibboleth” that requires a certain pronunciation. So to be a Jew (to be anything) is subjectivity without the subject, without the “sovereign” subject that says I. This is related to Heidegger’s notion that Dasein is both near and far, which we may associate with Celan’s line: “it is now possible to conceive a meeting of this ‘wholly Other’ and an ‘other’ which is not far removed, which is very near” (180).

Could the disaster be understood as the ripping apart of constellations, constellations that determine and tie us to our fate as such and such a being or such and such a person? Celan offers the hypothesis: “But are we all not descended from such dates? And to which dates do we attribute ourselves?” (180). But if our dates disseminate into other dates, if our dates are not entirely “our own” this may be the disaster—the planetary drift. Astrology is useless because it pretends that these are our stars , that the stars determine our character, which is at once individuating us too much and at the same time not enough! It does not individuate beings or events enough and yet it is still singular.  That January 20^th signifies no one event unequivocally since it calls out and sends itself toward a future (or past date) than the one “intended” by its author. January 20^th, Derrida finds out, is also when Hitler and his collaborators finalized “the final solution” (113). What if Celan had included the year? Still, there might be strange, unheimlich, coincidences. Some one reader may read January 20^th and notice it is his or her birthday! Imagine being part of the constellation that would link your birth and the final solution!

 Rather than constellation of singularities, if we take astrology as constituting our identities, we become a type of person, a type of being (according to astrology). But might this not foreclose the possibility of an encounter, if the encounter is a “random occurrence, as chance, as luck or coincidence” (9)?  This random occurrence might be something like the ‘disaster.’  The disaster that does not, according to Blanchot, “acquire meaning” but “a body” (41). The disaster might be something along the lines of what I discussed above—finding oneself entwined with other events, from other years, on the same date as one’s birth. Is this “meaningful” or does it acquire body? The disaster of dates that opens us up to other events and other persons.

In this sense, the ego, the self, is like a date, which brings together a constellation: “several heterogeneous singularities [] consigned in the starry configuration of a single dated mark” (35). The date, like any mark, also risks the meaning of other dates. The date “was already a sort of fiction, reciting singularity only in the fable of conventions and generalities, of what are, in any case, iterable marks” (47). In this sense, the date is an “image,” (the reason I translated constellation into German), one might say a metonymic and ‘poetic’ “image.”

But this meaning of “image” does not seem quite appropriate for this text, as Derrida will speak of the date as “a cut, or incision that the poem bears in its body like a memory” (18). And further on claims that “there is a holocaust for every date, and somewhere in the world at every hour” (46). The idea of the burning of the word, turning it to ashes, recalls Blanchot’s image of knowledge that burns thought: “When knowledge is no longer a knowledge of truth, it is then that knowledge starts, a knowledge that burns thought, like knowledge of infinite patience” (43). This image recalls to my mind a kind of burning of an experience into one’s retina or into one’s mind—and indelible experience. Derrida generalizes this branding: “As one might engrave a date in a tree, burning bark with ciphers of fire” (48). This, in turn, recalls a poem by Celan Derrida discusses in another essay, “onto a ram’s silicified forehead/I brand this image, between/the horns” (141).  The date is also a circumcision: “The circumcision of a word must thus be understood as an event of the body” (59). Again, the image of a cut, a burn, a brand on the body—even if it is on the body of “language.”

This incision, cut, opening, burn, on the body of language may be the tropes that Derrida uses for what he calls in the interviews an “idiom.” Derrida writes, “but it seems to me he touches the German language both by respecting the idiomatic spirit of that language and in the sense that he displaces it, in the sense that he leaves upon it a sort of scar, a mark, a wound” (100). So this is what we are able to do with language—touch it, leave a mark, a scar, maybe burn it into brains; However, one thing we can never do is appropriate it: “it is the essence of language that language does not let itself be appropriated. Language is precisely what does not let itself be possessed but, for this very reason, provokes all kinds of movements of appropriation” (101). Writing (and language—are these two synonymous?), as for Blanchot, always remains other.  Perhaps we cannot appropriate ‘dates’ either as dates are part of language, fictions that “constellate” events?

I want to shift gears here and ask a few questions about Celan’s poem “Meridian,” particularly concerning his reading of Buchner and Art. If art is that which “produces a distance from the I,” and Art is somehow “at home” with mechanism, marionette, and monkey, then art is something distinct from the human, and perhaps something distinct from “life.” I am trying to figure out how (and if) Celan is distinguishing his own conception of art from Buchner, which he calls “naturalism” (176). Celan quotes Lenz saying that there is “life in the thing that has been created” is the most important aspect of art (176). He contrasts this lifeless art (the marionette? Mechanism? Robot?) with “that which is natural. With all living creatures” (176). Buchner writes, “at times one might wish to be a Medusa’s head so as to be able to transform such a group into stone, and call out to the people” (176). So would this frozen tableau constitute art?

Celan then writes, “Here we have stepped beyond human nature, gone outward, and entered a mysterious realm, yet one turned toward that which is human, the same realm in which the monkey, the robots, and accordingly. . .alas, art seem to be at home” (177).

This is a really strange passage to me. Somehow we have stepped “beyond human nature” yet turned toward the human. But the human here is in the same realm as what we would generally consider not human: monkeys and robots. So is Celan deconstructing this idealized notion of Nature as opposed to wooden puppets? It does not seem like Celan is so much interested in naturalism or art as representation (image). He writes,

The poem attempts to pay careful attention to everything it encounters; it has a finer sense of detail, of outline, or structure, of color, and also of the ‘movements’ and the ‘suggestions.’ These are, I believe, not qualities gained by an eye competing (or cooperating) with mechanical devices, which are continually being brought to a higher degree of perfection. No, it is a concentration which remains aware of all our dates. (182, emphasis mine)

So, an art of “representation” would try and mimic life so as to try and capture all of its movements in mechanical detail. In contrast, Celan’s poems, “take form and gather around the I who is addressing and naming it” (182). It is a movement of gathering and concentration rather than representing in some “naturalistic” detail. It is an encounter with the other, which may be construed as the reader? “But the one who has been addressed and who, by virtue of having been named, has, as it were, become a thou also brings its otherness along into the present, into this present” (182). Who is the one who is addressed and who is the one who addresses? Does the poem address the reader or the reader the poem?

I suppose that this is not a gathering toward a unity, but rather a collection—and it is not only a collection of present things but sends itself into possible future dates. Furthermore, there is always an expropriating gesture in the encounter that may constellate and concentrate, a gesture that expropriates an I. As Derrida puts it in his essay on (for) Gadamer, “To carry now no longer  has the meaning of ‘to comprise, to include, to comprehend in the self, but rather to carry oneself for bear oneself toward the infinite inappropriability of the other [. . .] the infinitely other in me” (161).

Here, there is no reassuring cosmos: “the cosmic reassures us, for we can identify with the measureless vibration of a sovereign order even if in this identification we venture beyond ourselves entrusting ourselves to a holy and real unity” (Blanchot 88). Nor may there be Heidegger’s being-in-the-world (162). Heidegger conceives of poetry as a way of opening up possibilities of new worlds, but for Celan,  “The world is gone, I must carry you,” but the world is not necessarily “gone” but “far” (fort as opposed to da). Derrida asks about Fort-sein as something distinct from the stone, the animal, and the human and their respective relationships to world:

But what would happen if, in our poem, the departure, the Fort-sein of the world, in its proper instance, did not answer to any of these theses or categories? What if the Fort-sein exceeded them, from a wholly other place? (163)

Derrida claims that this is one thing he would want to ask Gadamer for help—I would want to ask Derrida for help. In a way, these few words at the end of an essay point beyond anything else we have read on Heidegger’s concept of “world.” What is the Fort-sein, the far-being? To ask this another way, what if Heidegger worked on the ontology of the fortsein—does that even make sense as a question? Could the Fort-sein be an ontological project? The being that is not there—the being that is far (from itself)? Perhaps this could be a useful way to understand Derrida’s project for is not the ghost, the specter, the revenant, all “living without being,” living far-being (110)? I cannot answer these questions, but the questions intrigue me.

Maurice Blanchot--Writing the Disaster

Vigilance, insomnia, wakefulness in the night--one might imagine Blanchot (or whatever the 'subject' of Blanchot' reflections is) as a strung-out grad student at 4 am, thinking in a chair on the verge of madness.

Blanchot writes both in and 'about' the fragmentary. He writes, "fragments, destined in part to the blank that separates them, find in this gap not what ends them, but what prolongs them" (58). Fragmentation is only an interruption, but an interruption that also pushes forward to continue--it as if the fragments cannot stop--the gap that stops is also that which allows it (forces it?)  to continue. As Blanchot puts it, “the interruption’s somehow having the same meaning as that which does not cease” (21).  Furthermore, fragments are not simply isolated, but because of their juxtaposition (even though there might be “nothing in the text”) suggest meaning and connection at the same time that they deny meaning—or create absent meaning. Blanchot distinguishes the ‘fragmentary’ from the “isolated sentence,” which is “aphoristic” not fragmentary. Aphoristic, isolated sentences, “tend to reverberate like an oracular utterance having the self-sufficiency of a communication to which nothing can be added” (132). The aphoristic sentence “affirms definitively,” the allusive sentence “makes ambiguity a positive value,” whereas the fragmentary is exposure to these two kinds to risks: normativity and that which thinks it escapes the illusion of truth only to “succumb[] to the illusion itself as truth” (133). The fragmentary is related to citation (and incitation). Blanchot writes (fragmentally),

“If quotations, in their fragmenting force, destroy in advance the texts from which they are nto only severed but which they exalt till these texts become nothing but severance, then the fragment without a text, or any context, is radically unquotable” (37).

I am not sure what to do with that bloc quote given Derrida’s ideas about citation, quotation, and context.  I think we should think through the relations among these different types of utterances.

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The last word of the book: disaster. We as readers are still left wondering what this "disaster," 'is'. References to the holocaust and the immemorial suggest that the disaster is that which cannot be justified (in ethical terms) or sublimated (aufhebung) in Hegel's terms. But most importantly, the disaster (besides its "proper" meaning relating to 'star'--although we will have to question the notion of the proper as well) is an experience which is not experienced. Thus, the disaster is not an event that arrives or comes. Like death (and is ‘death’ the disaster? Are these two terms synonyms?), it is “imminent” (1) and at the same time always-already past (the immemorial). It is that which we can neither forget nor remember, because in order to forget we would have to have been able to remember it as something that ‘happened,’ and that is experienced.

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I think we must ask after the status of theory. First, so we can determine whether Blanchot’s notion of theory is related (or the same as) what we call in literature Theory (which is, as Greg Ulmer once put it to me, philosophy done in literature departments); second, in order to attempt to determine the relation (or nonrelation?) among theory, philosophy, and poetry, and what Blanchot understands as writing; third, to figure out why theories are “necessary and useless” (75).  Is theory what Blanchot understands by “System,” who is designated by the name Hegel? If this is true, then should we take Blanchot at his word when he writes,

“shouldn’t we have done with theory to the extent that ti does not ever get over and done, and also to the extent that all theories, however different they may be, constantly change places with one another, distinct each from the next only because of the writing which supports them and which thus escapes the very theories purporting to judge it?” (80).

Have we all not had the feeling that the theories of Levinas, Derrida, and Blanchot as theories of “the other” collapse into one another? Can we even call these thinkers “theorists?” Are they creating theory, writing, poetry—all of these?

Blanchot decides to investigate three thinkers that we in our department may refer to as “theorists” (alternately, philosophers—alternately, poets)—Levinas, Bataille, and Heidegger. Although Blanchot, like Derrida, seems indebted to Heidegger, he seems more indebted to Levinas. I think this is because that Blanchot agrees with Derrida that death is never one’s “ownmost possibility,” that death is not an authentic relation to being and to self. Both Blanchot and Levinas are thinkers of the “other.” For Heidegger, our relationship is with being and truth, something that language allows us to access (even as it reveals-conceals). Indeed, the “they” is the realm of inauthenticity and idle talk, just as ‘dying’ (or merely perishing) is not an “authentic” relation to death. For Heidegger, we do not know death from the other’s death, but rather because it is our ‘ownmost possibility’ as that which individualizes us.  In contrast, Blanchot writes that death is “never individual” and Derrida rejoins that Blanchot speaks of “death in general.”   Levinas and Blanchot (along with Derrida) think our relation to the other. More precisely, language is not the “house of being” but something radically other than being. Language is not “proper” to human beings. Rather, as Levinas puts it, “Language is in itself already skepticism” and as Blanchot continues, “to write is to be absolutely distrustful of writing, while entrusting oneself to it entirely” (110). 

For Heidegger, language gives, but for Bataille and Levinas, “the gift as the inexhaustible (the infinite) demand of the other and of others” (110). Blanchot sees Heidegger’s focus on language (perhaps, at the expense of writing) as a “dangerous leaning toward sanctification of language” (110).

On the topic of “language,” we should return to the question of etymology, something incredibly important for Heidegger. Before we get into Blanchot’s extensive discussion of etymology, we should remember that etymology is the study of words. We treat words like independent entities. This is why it is problematic to ask what the disaster “is” as if we can isolate a proper meaning of it. Blanchot suggests, following Valery, that we neglect “sentences”—one might add, fragments (96). The idea that words are the “seminal cell of language” is something etymology takes as its object. The issue with etymology is that it presupposes a “proper” and “original” meaning. Etymologists wish to trace back words to some ‘concrete’ or ‘first’ meaning.

Blanchot discusses two words of Heidegger’s that uses etymology for his philosophical analysis. The first I will discuss is aletheia, a word that is usually translated into English as “un-veiling.” Heidegger relates aletheia to lethe because his claim is that philosophy has “forgotten the meaning of being.” The river lethe, in mythology, is the river or forgetting. So, in a way, aletheia is a kind of “un-veiling” the meaning of being—that which appears, the phenomenon—that which shows itself. On Heidegger’s use of the word, Blanchot writes,

Was the Greeks’ understanding of aletheia based upon the meaning of lethe. This is doubtful. And that we should be able to substitute ourselves for them—saying that they were nonetheless determined by this unthought element in their understanding—is a philosophical move to which there would be no objection, if it were not that we make it by wielding a philological experitise, thus making philosophy dependent on a particular discipline. This contradicts the relations clearly affirmed by Heidegger between thought and determined bodies of knowledge. (104)

Blanchot’s analysis may remind one Derrida’s move on “cultural” and “anthropological” understandings of death. Heidegger would argue that this is not getting to the “existential structure” of death because they assume they know what death is (Derrida 25). In this sense, Heidegger’s analysis is much more than the cultural writings on death. But at the same time, Derrida points out “neither language nor the process of this analysis of death is possible without the Christian experience, indeed, the Judeo-Christiano-Islamic experience of death to which the analysis testifies” (Derrida 80). We could say with Blanchot that Heidegger’s analysis of “aletheia” would not be possible without the discipline of etymology.

Blanchot reveals the essentially metaphoric language of etymology. The “root” of the word is the “germinating principle” by which words receive “the power of development and creative enrichment” (107). Etymology presupposes filitation rather than “affinity” (93). Etymology by “affinity” may describe better Heidegger’s operation on lethe, aletheia. Etymology by affinity may be another way to elucidate what Greg Ulmer calls “conductive logic.” It uses the play of the material signifiers, the associations that it calls up for inventive purposes rather than to believe that one is getting at an “origin.” Blanchot uses this to investigate Heidegger’s term, Ereignis, which usually is translated into English as “event of propriation” (see pgs 97-98).

Rather than thinking etymology by filiation let us think by affinity. There is some sort of seduction and attraction to etymologies: “What attracts us to etymology is its unreasonable part more than what it explains: we are interested by the form of enigma that it preserves or doubles as it deciphers” (106). We are subject to “etymological clues which we take for proofs from which we draw philosophical conclusions that secretly influence us” (104). Is Blanchot here endorsing this kind of “unreasonable thinking.” Or is it the case that language is always seductive in this way—seductive and yet prone to skepticism, or rather, makes us skeptical.

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Returning to an earlier question, it seems that the disaster is the dissolution of the possibility of etymology (that there can be a natural meaning to a word). Blanchot writes, “Naturally [haha], disaster can be understood according to its etymology [. . .] But the etymology of ‘disaster’ does not operate in these fragments as a preferred, or more original insight [. . .] On the contrary, the indeteriminateness of what is written when this word is written, exceeds etymology and draws it into disaster” (117).

One gets the sense that for Blanchot, we cannot take comfort in Being,  in the cosmos (in the fixity of the stars—no, there is dis-aster), or in language, but rather that we “keep watch over absent meaning.” Whereas for Heidegger, man is the preserver and keeper of truth, we (?) keep watch over absent meaning. True, Blanchot is much closer to  Heidegger than he is to the more “action” oriented existentialists, namely, Sartre, but he revels in the neutral rather Being. The neutral, it is important to understand is not the same as “giving neutrality to language as a characteristic,” as if to refute that language has weight, values, and history, but rather the neutral is that which cannot be grasped and held theoretically as “knowledge.”

The positive value we usually ascribe to knowledge, meaning, and totality is turned to a horror show in Blanchot’s text. The absolute meaning is the absolute justification—Hegel’s system, were it right, would justify the Holocaust. In the most harrowing anecdote of the work, Blanchot mentions a certain man who was “saved” from death only to be “obliged to hold the victim’s head so that the bullet could be more easily lodged in the neck” (82). When asked how he could bear this he said he “observed the comportment of men before death” ( 82). Blanchot comments that “when he was faced with an impossible question, he could find no other alibi than the search for knowledge, the so called dignity of knowledge: that ultimate propriety which we believe will be accorded us by knowledge” (82).  We may recall here Blanchot’s Demeure, where the protagonist is “saved” and yet not saved—there is no salvation. 

Commonwealth--Hardt and Negri

Besides an extraordinary amount of repetition of their points (which, who knows, may have bee necessary to connect all of their analyses) Hardt and Negri offer an immensely powerful critique of capitalism in light of biopolitics and biopower. Their philosophical geneology traces from Augustine, to Spinoza, to Deleuze and they draw on a diverse range of political and economic theories along the way.

If I have complained before about the lack of clear cut distinctions in other texts, Hardt and Negri may be guilty of the opposite. Their characterizations of positions such as modernity, anti-modernity, and altermodernity (corresponding in part to what Haroway mentions as autremondalisation) are broad concepts, but they deploy them with such purpose and confidence that such distinctions are effective. If modernity is characterized by oppression and colonial forces, and anti-modernity is characterized by resistances to this modernity (an important, but, according to H&N insufficient because it is stuck in opposition), altermodernity "constitues a dispotif for the production of subjectivity" (115). 

Altermodernity, as concerned with producing subjectivities, differs from hypermodernity and postmodernity. Hypermodernity, aligned with theorists  such as Jurgen Habermas, contends that do not propose to break with but to reform and transform modernity's basic institutions. According to H&N, hypermoderniity, "simply continues the hierarchies that are central to modernity, putting its faith in reform, not resistance, and thus does not challenge capitalist rule" (113). Postmodernity, in contrast, is characterized by "negative thought," whose solutions are "weak" and "aesthetic," often drifting into theology (114). 

Alternmodernity is necessary in the age of the biopolitical, where much of what is produced cannot be controlled by capitalists even though they can draw wealth from it. Labor does not only produce products, but produces "forms of life" and various subjectivities, characterized by immaterial products: cognitive and affective. In a way, does this not correspond to the shift in advertisement from the 'product' itself to selling the lifestyle that one could have should one buy the product? But now, it is not even a matter of product. Rather, according to H&N such production happens in the realm of the common rather than privatized copyright and patents. Since biopolitical labor no longer corresponds to the law of scarcity, an idea, image, affect, etc. does not exhaust itself. Rather, "if you use that idea productively, I can use it too, at the very same time. In fact the more of us that work with an idea and communicate about it, the more productive it becomes" (381). This kind of labor and value is increasingly autonomous from capital: "an increasingly autonomous labor-power and, consequently, a capital that becomes increasingly pure command. Labor-power is thus no longer variable capital, integrated within the body of capital, but a separate and increasingly oppositional force" (292). 

So, what social form corresponds to altermodernity in the age of the biopolitical? The multitude. The multitude of the "poor" is where H&G suggest we start. However, the "poor" is not necessarily just those who we consider 'poor' today materially, but basically consists of those who are marginalized and who are for what H&N call "the common." The multitude is composed of singularities who set up encounters which in turn transforms their subjectivities. The multitude shifts from identity to singularity. In a particularly powerful chapter on identity politics, H&N argue that we must start with identity politics but cannot end with them. In fact, identity politics should "strive for their own abolition" (332). Not, mind you, to rid us of difference, but in order to prepare the way for further becoming. In order to become something other, something else, you have  to forget identity. Then, the way is open for differences to flourish. H&N rightly characterize this process as monstrous and violent: "the most terrifying violence confronting revolutionaries may be the monstrous self-transformation we find in the revolutionary streams of identity politics" (371). 

The imagery of the singularity, multitude, swarm, the monstrous, etc. stem from the alternative geneology of philosophy I mentioned earlier--headed mostly by Spinoza and Deleuze (and his reading of the former). Another theorist that seems to be working in a similar vein (although perhaps a bit more ambivalent than H&N) is Gerald Raunig, in his book A Thousand Machines. If nothing else, Raunig explores the importance of a new conception of cognitive labor. Labor is less about new products and more about creation and innovation: "the raw material and means of production of living labor is the capacity for thinking, learning, communicating, imagining, and inventing" (Raunig 115). Both H&N describe the multitude in musical terms as a composition with a composer or orchestra without a conductor. No one person or force seems to be "in charge" of this multitude. I think Raunig's conclusion is a great summary of both his book and H&N's: 

It is precisely in this that the quality of the machine beyond humanist, mechanistic, and cybernetic interpretations consists: in the insistence of a dissonant power, a monstrous potency and enjoyment, in the ambiguous re-invention of verker as a non-conforming concatenation of differences, singularities, and multitudes in an a-harmonious composition without a composer. (119)

However, H&N go much further in their book with more specifics on what they would like to see and their analysis of society. Raunig is working primarily with the concept of the machine--a concept of the machine as a social entity rather than how we generally understand machine: "the thesis of this book is that there is an AND, living and mechanical, that is nto all to be found only in the progressive merging of man and technical machine" (110). Both are working out of D&G, but H&N are more attentive to organized resistance and revolution than Raunig, who almost has an an-archic strain in his thought.

In contrast, H&N propose that the multitude needs to create institutions, but institutions based in conflict rather than institutions that solidify an already pre-formed identity: "the central difference, perhaps, has to do with the locus of agency: whereas according to the conventional sociological notion institutions form individuals and identities, in our conception, singularities form institutions, which are thus perpetually in flux" (358). Institutions that are not created based on what people are, but always moving toward becoming something other.

revolt becomes powerful and long-lasting only when it invents and institutionalizes a new set of collective habits and practices, that is, a new form of life [. . .] common practices and behaviors as well as their original set of gestures and affects. (356)

The way H&N propose this creates a different way of thinking revolutionary event. Indeed, H&N are critical of many thinkers of the Event, including Alain Badiou: "In Badiou an event [. . .] acquires value and meaning primarily after it takes place. He thus concentrates on the intervention that retrospectively gives meaning to the event and the fidelity and generic procedures that continually refer to it" (60). For H&N, Foucault's notion of the event requires a more "forward looking gaze," and has a bit more 'queerness' to it:

The biopolitical event, in fact, is always a queer event, a subversive process of subjectivization that, shattering ruling identities and norms, reveals the link between power and freedom, and thereby inaugurates and alternative production of subjectivity. (63)

Later in the book, queer is associated not with a particular identity but a "critique of identity" (335). We see this same move toward an acknowledgment of the multiplicity of differences in Donna Haraway's When Species Meet. How can we foster queer indigestion in the political and economic realms? Complementary to Donna Haraway's language, H&N suggest that we must "nourish indignation," which they think "love" may  help to foster (246).

The Common and Occupy Wall Street

Reading this text I could not stop thinking about how Occupy Wall Street may be a practical enactment of the multitude. They have created their own gestures and behaviors and guidelines for self-organization. A recent segment of Colbert Report explained the various gestures they use to signify consensus. While I have a difficult time not laughing at such ridiculous gestures and behaviors, I am at a loss to explain why! Its like a whole new system of parliamentry procedure! Furthermore, we see the movement formed of what Raunig deems the "precariat," a term that H&N almost use as well. The "precariat" are the people whose jobs are unstable and whose 'class' is hard to define (see Raunig 80-83). H&N write that what is also precarious is the division between work and leisure time: "precarity is a mechanism of control that determines the temporality of workers, destroying the division between work time and non-work time, requiring workers not to work all the time but to be constantly available for work" (146). When you are working in precarious situation "none of your time is your own" (147). But biopolitical production requires the "freedom of producers to organize their own time" (147). To me, this sounds an awful lot like academic labor.

But space is another important aspect of the common. In fact, H&N argue that "the metropolis is to the multitude what the factory was to the industrial working class" (250). In other words, it makes sense that people are occupying an entire city. In fact, the Occupy Wall Street logic has analogies to the piquetos in Bolivia who decide to 'picket the city' (see H&N 259) as well as events Raunig discusses in his book. Raunig writes, "the machinic practice of inventing and concatenating bodies and signs, the theatricality and the flight from representation generated different qualities and quantities of reappropriating the city and discuvsive space in the various local contexts" (88).

Practical Actions


Hardt and Negri suggest some really radical proposals toward the end of the book that would move us toward a more democratic and just society. This is, in my opinion, the most radical:

A reform that would grant freedom of time is the establishment of a minimum guaranteed income on a national or global scale paid to everyone regardless of work. Separating income from work would allow everyone more control over time. (309)

Wouldn't this be nice? Perhaps their diagnosis of biopolitical labor as labor that is immaterial, cognitive, and separated from capitalists is a justification for their position that everyone should have a guaranteed income. Is this not, basically, the ultimate welfare state? Who would pay for this? What kind of utopia do these guys live in where people will just "do work" even though they don't have to work to get an income for the basic necessities of life? What are these "basic necessities of life" or "bare life" --food? shelter? tvs? computers? How do we define "life" here?

In order for this to work at all, we would have to have a major culture shift--something I think H&N thinks can be done. But really, we have to be realistic when we realize that many people just don't give a shit.

On the other hand, could we say that I am actually living under this system? I have a "fixed income" every 2 weeks, which is for teaching classes, prep work, grading papers, etc, but I have relatively complete control over my time. Still, the process of organizing one's own time productively is a terribly difficult thing to do--even for an intelligent, educated man such as myself--with such meaningless distractions of the entertainment industry. What incentive do I really have to produce ideas? Mostly it is a feeling of "I need to work." However, I am convinced that not everyone believes that.

In other words, although I find H&N's critique and formation of the multitude productive--particularly with regard to institutions and their becomings, I find their concrete practices that they suggest a bit optimistic about human potential in general.

On another note, is it not the case that H&N's points have been made by others in less bulky (and less explicitly Marxist terms) by John Dewey in his Reconstruction in Philosophy?

Society is the process of associating in such ways that experiences, ideas, emotions, value are transmitted that made common. (161)