Nietzsche and Altered States (1980)

My friend Phil has recently brought the film Altered States to my attention and his simultaneous thinking through Nietzsche's "Truth and Lie in the Extra-moral Sense" has me thinking about  the status of truth in the film. Not so much in that Nietzsche text, but the rather an odd beginning sentence in Nietzsche's prologue to Beyond Good and Evil:

"Suppose truth is a woman, what then? Wouldn’t we have good reason to suspect that all philosophers, insofar as they were dogmatists, had a poor understanding of women, that the dreadful seriousness and the awkward pushiness with which they so far have habitually approached truth were clumsy and inappropriate ways to win over a woman?" 


A brief synopsis of the film (also see trailer above):


Edward Jessup (William Hurt) is a university professor of abnormal psychology who, while studying schizophrenia, begins to think that "our other states of consciousness are as real as our waking states."^[2] Jessup begins experimenting with sensory-deprivation using a flotation tank, and he travels to Mexico to participate in what is apparently an Ayahuasca Ceremony, although his guide states that the Indigenous tribe they are meeting works with Amanita muscaria which they are collecting for next year's ceremonies. An indigenous elder was seen with Banisteriopsis caapi root in his hand prior to cutting Jessup's hand, adding the ingredient of blood. Immediately after consumption he experiences bizarre, intense imagery. The professor then returns to the U.S. with a tincture and begins taking it orally before each session in the flotation tank where he experiences a series of increasingly drastic psychological and physical transformations.

Edward's mind experiments cause him to experience actual, physical biological devolution. At one stage he emerges from the isolation tank as a feral and curiously small-statured, light-skinned Primitive Man. In a subsequent experiment he is regressed into a mostly amorphous mass of conscious, primordial matter. It is only the physical intervention of his wife Emily which brings him back from this latter, shocking transformation in which he seems poised on the brink of becoming a non-physical form of proto-consciousness and possibly disappearing from our version of reality altogether.

The experiments worsen, as Professor Jessup experiences episodes of involuntary spontaneous temporary partial devolution. This occurs outside of the isolation tank and without the intake of additional doses of the hallucinogenic tincture. His early reaction is more one of fascination than concern, but as his priorities gradually change due to Emily's determination to keep from losing him, he finally begins to act like someone who values his humanity (Wikipedia). 

Now that everyone has an idea of what goes on in this film, its time to start the analysis. In some ways, the film begins with Truth being anything but a woman. Indeed, after we find out how they meet and they have sex, we jump to a point where their marriage is falling apart -- and Eddy is the one who wants the divorce, as he seeks truth beyond the contingent, every day existence of their lives together. 

It is important that Eddy is studying schizophrenia and religious experience. Schizophrenia is "characterized by a breakdown of thought processes and by poor emotional responses and most commonly manifests itself as auditory hallucinations, paranoid or bizzare delusions, or disorganized speech and thinking" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schizophrenia). The film wants us to understand that there is a deep connection between Eddy's object of study and Eddy himself, who is unable to tell his wife that he loves her; rather, the best he can do is say that he "doesn't want to lose her."  In a conversation we are told that she is "crazy about him" and that "he's still crazy," drawing an explicit parallel between the schizophrenics he studies and his own state of mind. When we are crazy "about" someone we are in love, but if we are just "crazy" --well, we haven't formed a proper desire in terms of society then. Is that not what crazy really means? Our desires are all out of wack? Eddy, in fact, has a very simple and detached definition of what his wife means when she says she "loves" him: "What she means is that she prefers the senseless pain that we inflict on each other rather than the pain that we would otherwise inflict on ourselves." In contrast, he prefers the pain he would inflict on himself. 

That's because Eddy is incredibly self-centered because he believes, a la some mystical traditions, that the Truth can only be sought for within the self and its encounter with reality. At a bar he goes on an at once enlightening and manic rant about how "memory is energy," everyone is "looking for their true selves, expand ourselves" and most importantly: "ever since we dispensed with God we've got nothing but ourselves to explain." At this moment, the camera cuts to his wife who looks despondent and whose expression says: what about the mystery of relationships? What about the mystery of love" (you self centered prick). Indeed, as a little aside that I might want to elaborate on later, is this not merely the colonization of God as the self? The self as God -- the individual as the source of truth? But if we have not dispensed with God (and, as Nietzsche points out, science essentially maintains the god-function), and if we think of God as otherwise than being -- as, perhaps, "love" or "relationship" or the mit-sein (to use Heidegger's terminology) between us, then Eddy is wrong that the only thing left to explain is "ourselves." In other words, against all that post-structuralism has taught us, Eddy is seeking the Origin, the Original, Primal Man, the Ur-Myth -- the Truth, with a capital T. 

With this task in mind, as the synopsis goes, he goes to participate in a ritual taking of a hallucinatory drug with the Indian tribes. The leader of the tribe says that the experience will lead him to a "nothing" and that after this nothing will come "your unborn soul." Nietzsche hopes that such metaphysical entities such as "the soul-superstition, which, in the form of subject- and ego-superstition has not yet ceased  doing mischief" will be relegated to its proper place as "perhaps some play upon words, a deception on the part of grammar, or an audacious generalization of very restricted, very personal, very human, ALL-TOO-HUMAN, facts." This philosophy of the soul -- even, perhaps the unborn soul or of some mystical void that contains it -- is the philosophy of "dogmatists." 

I don't want to dwell on too much of the imagery of the first hallucination, but I must talk about a few images. First, I want to dwell on the connection between the Mushrooms and a clear reference to the mushroom cloud as a sign of the A or H-bomb. Altered States, as a 1980s film, is still technically within the Cold War scenario. That is, we had enough bombs to erase the human species (and every other species for that matter) from earth. The significance of this will return in a moment. But first we must take a little detour. 

Toward the end of the vision, Eddy sees a komodo dragon in the sand, and after a camera cut to Eddy's face,  it cuts back it is his beautiful naked wife in a yoga-pose (I want to say its like reverse-downward-dog--I'm not sure. I'd find the image but I'm on my public library network and don't want them to think I"m checking out pornography). From there is probably one of the most potent moments of the film because sand (dust? ashes?) begins to cover both man and woman slowly and with no music -- in contrast with the tripped out shit just a minute ago-- this is a moment of calm, but a destructive calm, a calm that might come over a city that has just been bombed. That is, I see this scene as the aftermath of the nuclear holocaust. Eddy and Emily are slowly turned to ashes (from dust to dust) but before their flesh is blown away and merges with the rest, they begin to resemble statues. Particularly Emily, as her breasts begin to sharpen into points -- recalling "primitive" statues. They also recall to my mind the volcano eruption of Pompeii (indeed, there is volcano imagery in the hallucination as well) except that no one is preserved here-- in negative space where the bodies used to be or otherwise. This is an obliteration of history. 

Almost as suddenly as the rest of the hallucination, the camera cuts from a long shot of dust blowing in the wind to an eviscerated Komodo dragon. The viewer discovers that the tribe thinks he killed the lizard, but Eddy claims he didn't. Still, if the dragon is supposed to be a kind of spirit animal that would guide eddy to the truth (just as, one might argue, Emily could), then he could not approach the animal in any way but to kill it. Listen to Nietzsche, again, on truth as a woman: 

""Suppose truth is a woman, what then? Wouldn’t we have good reason to suspect that all philosophers, insofar as they were dogmatists, had a poor understanding of women, that the dreadful seriousness and the awkward pushiness with which they so far have habitually approached truth were clumsy and inappropriate ways to win over a woman?" 

Eddy has no idea how to approach, how to seduce, how to "win" over the woman, truth -- Emily/Woman/truth is seducing him, is telling him to come-hither, but he does not understand this mode of discovery. Instead, he wants to experience it directly, without mediation, without a cover (without metaphor, with figurative language). He insists on penetrating the truth, but all he finds is death, destruction, void, nothingness. 

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In the beginning of the film, Eddy claims, "There is a great amount of religious delusion among acute schizophrenics – its almost as if they are trying to change their physical bodily state to adapt to the image of themselves." For anyone familiar with what is going to happen in the film, this is important foreshadowing because its precisely this changing of the physical state that happens to Eddy. After his first experiment with the drug in the isolation tank, Eddy discovers that the "hallucination has been externalized" and that he "regressed into a quasi-simian state." He then believes that our altered states of consciousness are as real as any other state and these can be externalized -- and he has figured out how to do it. 

Eddy decides that he must try the experiment again (like a good scientist) to see if the same thing happens. When he does, he does more than transform part of his neck, he transforms into a full blown ape-cave-man, devolving further back in time (or so we assume). He bursts out of the isolation tank, (almost) kills a guard, and rushes out into the city. Interestingly, Eddy winds up in a Zoo, observing all of the animals in their cages. The Zoo is a complex institution-- at once desiring to mimic a "natural" environment while still maintaining cultural and institutional control. Eddy, as, essentially, half-man, half-animal is in the only institution which is also half-'natural', half-'cultural' -- although the human element predominates. We see that the human element dominates in a Zoo because Eddy approaches a gift shop and stares at the stuffed elephants when he just saw "real" "live" elephants. Although, one might argue that the elephants in the cages are as stuffed and "unreal" as the ones in the giftshop -- tamed, and rendered a harmless spectacle.

But while in the Zoo, Eddy devours a small sheep, which is a parallel to the killing of the Dragon in the first mystical experience. This death is foreshadowed when Emily says that despite what we thought, apes showed a strong carnivore behavior. I'm not quite sure what to make of all of this, but in my notes I linked it to Emily's description of Eddy's bed behavior as a "spiritual experience." Is such a spiritual experience linked to consumption?

Eddy and Emily have a conversation after this experience and when Eddy asks "How did you put up with all of this," Emily brings up the dreaded word: "I loved you." Rather than respond, Eddy changes the subject and narrates/comments on his experience of his quasi-simian state, claiming that this primal, primordial state was "the most extremely satisfying moment of my life." In other words, not love, not marriage, but an experience of the "primordial," of the "real." 

But the real isn't material for Eddy. Remember, the transformations are figured as externalizations of the hallucinations. That means that the hallucinations are primary. Eddy tells Emily,  “We’re beyond genetics, we’re beyond mass and matter, we’re beyond even energy. What we’re back to is the first thought” The first thought -- the first form -- again, we are expected to believe that the origin is not in the material world, but the ideal.

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jj         Eddy's final transformation results in him resembling a gooey worm like creature whose screams couldn't help but recall to my mind Edward Munch's famous painting. Like Munch's character, Eddy is alone and isolated with his pain. We may recall Eddy's first statement regarding love, that he would rather endure the "pain inflicted on the self by the self." Also, I think it is worth considering some basic speculations on the influences that resulted in The Scream: 

AAmong theories advanced to account for the reddish sky in the background is the artist's memory of the effects of the powerful volcanic eruption of Krakatoa, which deeply tinted sunset skies red in parts of the Western hemisphere for months during 1883 and 1884, about a decade before Munch painted The Scream.^[8]This explanation has been disputed by scholars, who note that Munch was an expressive painter and was not primarily interested in literal renderings of what he had seen. Alternatively, it has been suggested that the proximity of both a slaughterhouse and a lunatic asylum to the site depicted in the painting may have offered some inspiration.^[9] The scene was identified as being the view from a road overlooking Oslo, the Oslofjord and Hovedøya, from the hill of Ekeberg. At the time of painting the work, Munch's manic depressive sister Laura Catherine was a patient at the asylum at the foot of Ekeberg.^{[citation needed] (}http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scream)

   Thus, we might understand some of Volcanic imagery in the first hallucinatory experience as connected with this final scream-state. Its proximity to the lunatic asylum and Munch's sister also suggests that the picture depicts an externalization of insanity or madness, which Eddy's character certainly expresses (this ties back to his work in schizophrenia). 

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   After this intense hallucinatory experience that leads Eddy into a swirling hole out of which Emily drags him, Eddy is put to bed and Emily and Arthur discuss the experiment. Emily says (these may not all be exact quotations:  "nothing in the human condition was ever real to him he’s a truth lover; reality, for Eddy, is that which is only changeless” “He finally got it off with God, he was finally ravished by truth” etc. etc. “we’re all just transitory matter to him.”

The claim that Eddy finally "got it off with God" is important, as it links back to Emily's claim that sex for him is a "spiritual experience." He doesn't make love to a woman -- he's trying to fuck God through her. This idea leads me to yet another cultural relay, NIN's "Closer"

"

I wanna fuck you like an animal

I wanna feel you from the inside

I wanna fuck you like an animal

My own existence is flawed

You get me closer to God

Here we have the juxtaposition of a primal urge to procreate and what one might call the "religious impulse." As human beings, it seems to suggest, it might not be our most "human" sides that seek God and Truth. Rather, it may be that this is connected to our animal urges. Thus, in order to become-human, we would tame this desire into affection for an object (a woman, for instance). 

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When Eddy can finally speak and communicate again, he tells Emily that he has seen the error of his ways:
“you saved me, you redeemed me from that awful pit – it is nothing [. . .]

The final truth of all things is that there is no final truth. truth is what is transitory. It’s human life that what’s real" 

Finally, Eddy recognizes that there is no origin, no Primal Man -- that truth is a mobile army of metaphors?

But just when we think that everything is all good, one final moment of horror. Eddy begins to transform again and Emily claims that  “If you love me, you can make it unreal [. . .] you made it real you can make it unreal” At this point, Eddy is reduced to a kind of digital static that changes color -- he essentially looks like a TV gone on the fritz. In a modern version of Dr. Johnson's proof for reality (kicking a stone), Eddy bangs his arm against the wall, changing states every time he hits it, until he looks human again. Meanwhile, after Touching Emily, she looks like molten rock from a volcano about to explode. 

 Eddy comes to her aid, hugs her, and she turns into a (naked) woman again. He finally has figured out how to approach woman, how to approach truth, how to approach 'reality' without Truth and says "I love you."

But what are we to make of this ending? Does the film essentially collapse into a justification of the "human" emotion of love for one individual? On the one hand, the film critiques the desire for Truth and it affirms that it is the transitory rather than the ideal that is what's "real." Indeed, perhaps this is the mistake of people who think that drugs can lead them to an eternal truth: drugs produce transitory states -- perhaps they are as "real" as any other state of consciousness, but we should not draw from this that it is more real or more authentic. 

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One final point about how such 'externalized" states are represented, which I hope will lead to further reflections at another time. I noticed that the aesthetic of the final transformation at the end of the movie presents Eddy as a kind of virtualized or digitized image. I think that the last point I made about consciousness also applies to media/virtual states. That is, images are as "real" as an altered state of consciousness (or Virtual Reality or Altered Consciousness) but again, we should not then essentialize or hypostatize this real into all of Reality or believe that it can lead us to some authentic way of being. At the same time, it is important not to dismiss it as "false" a mere "illusion" because it is by this very move that we posit something authentic beyond these mediations. And indeed, this may be where the movie leaves us, since it is only once they have returned to their full, naked, embodied states --once they become fully human again -- that he is able to say "I love you" and they are united in a human -- perhaps All Too Human --embrace. 

T

BwO -- Or rather, Body dis-organized

I figured I owed a post on Ch. 6, since most of my last post dealt with Chapters 3 and 4 in a quasi- "poetic" or "indirect" way. Here, I will retain a semblance of my control over my discourse as I simply recount what I "got" from this chapter.

The BwO is, minus the rhizome, probably D&G's most cited concept. Until I read this chapter, I really don't think I understood the point of the concept, excepting the idea that without organs, the body would be a free-flow of desires rather than blocked. In other words, I understood the BwO as a trope for a system of desire, but now I see that the plane of consistency is the ABOLITION OF ALL METAPHOR, its got to be a bit more (and a bit less) than that.

First, we can never BE a Bwo: "You never reach the Body withotu Organs, you can't reach it, you are forever attaining it, it is a limit." (150)

Second, there are many "false" BwO that are sometimes mistaken for the real deal. One of these appears to be the Junkie (cf. Burroughs).

Third, and most importantly, ""The BwO is opposed not the the organs but to that organization of the organism called the organism" (158).

The second and third point are related because the people who think they have achieved the BwO have actually emptied themselves out rather than disturbed or distributed (or deterritorialized?) their organization. Indeed, the becoming-BwO is couched in musical terms (making it minor again) rather than physical:

"The important thing is not to dismantle the tonal by destroying it all of a sudden. You have to diminish it [musical pun intended?], shrink it, clean it, and that only at certain moments" (162)

Thus, becoming a BwO is a slow process, a process of increasingly incremental "diminishing" of your c(h)ords. Becoming a BwO is also about becoming a-signifying -- not allowing your body to be articulated as unified into an organization of the organism. 

The key to becoming the BwO and "schizoanalysis" will not to denounce "false" desires (psychoanalysis's phantasies) but rather: 

"to distinguish the BwO from its doubles: empty vitreous bodies, cancerous bodies, totalitarian and fascist. The test of desire: not denouncing false desires, but distinguishing within desire between that which pertains to stratic proliferation, or else too-violent de-stratifying, and that which pertains to the construction of the plane of consistency” (165)

Indirect Discourse, Modernism, and Theory (D&G ch. 3, 4, 6)

“The first language, or rather the determination of language, is not the trope of metaphor, but indirect discourse” -- (ATP 77)

When I went to college I learned that many had mis-characterized James Joyce's main technique as "stream-of-consciousness." In Ulysses, for example, there is really only one "stream-of-consciousness" chapter -- "Penelope," or "Molly's chapter" (the very last chapter, the coda). The rest of the novel (with a few exceptions) was written in free indirect discourse. The Penguin guide to literary terms and theory defines free indirect discourse/style as "The presentation of thoughts of speech of fictional characters which seems by various devices to combine the character's sentiment with those of a narrator" and that this style of writing" (330-331). In other words, free indirect style is when one cannot mark the distinction between the voice of the narrator and a voice of a character. This can be as simple as incorporating the character's perspective into the narrator's own voice, such as this example: "Archer tried to console himself with the thought that he was not quite such an ass as Leferts." Or in Joyce's Ulysses, "--the sense of beauty leads us astray, said beautifulinsadness Best to ugling Eglinton" Here, as we can see, its as though the dialogue is bleeding into "the narrative" and who is speaking (the narrator, the "focalizer," the characters themselves) is hard to discern.

 Or, even more complex, I think, is Samuel Beckett's playing with indirect discourse in his short story/novella/prose poem Company: "Another devising it all for company. In the same dark as his creature or in another. Quick imagine. The same." So many voices and different tenses. We are never quite sure who is speaking; The story is filled with images culled from Beckett's own persona history, but these are in a different "person" than other parts of the story, as if the 'narrator' (but what narrator? there is no subject called narrator) were simply imagining them, asking us to imagine these scenes with him. Sometimes the voice (who is a "character" and "narrator" all at once) is speaking "to" the reader but may also be speaking to "another" who is with him in the dark -- or maybe who is with us? In Company, metaphor is abolished. Indeed, Beckett's work in general abolishes our ability to grope for meaning of any one signifier because it is as if language is not treated as signifer/signified, but, as D&G write,

That is why every statement of a collective assemblage of enunciation belongs to indirect discourse. Indirect discourse is the presence of a reported statement within the reporting statement, the present of an order-word withint he word. Language in its entirety is indirect discourse. (ATP 84)

Language in its entirety is indirect discourse. Why? Because ""My" direct discourse is still the free discourse running through me, coming from other worlds or other planets" (ATP 84). 

Every word that I write comes through me, through the other. Every signifier I place on this page does not correspond with one signified, but rather a whole set of enunciations and conventions. I draw from the language of D&G when I write something like "strata" or "rhizome," but, in turn, they draw from the reservoir of language of "science." 

If all language is indirect discourse, then so is all Theory, and Philosophy, and Poetry. (Is this "me" speaking? It does not have quotations -- surely it cannot be "from" ATP). 

I dwell on free indirect discourse so much because it relates to a question that has always fascinated me and that should fascinate any lover of language, literature, and philosophy: style. On style, D&G write, 

"Because a style is not an individual psychological creation but an assemblage of enunciation, it unavoidably produces a language within a language" (ATP 97). 

That is, a style does not come from some psychological state of mind that we then "translate" into language, but it is a particular marking of language, a "signature" if you will (and whose discourse is speaking through me now?). A language within a language -- not even in the sense of "dialect" but another language, a way of speaking, which leads, perhaps, to a way of being.. Thus, as Derrida (my style, my language within a language, may have foreshadowed this path) says of Celan: 

"it seems to me he touches [touche] the German language both by respecting the idiomatic spirit of that language and in the sense he displaces it in the sense that he leaves upon it a sort of scar, a mark, a wound" (Sovereignties in Question 100). 

And how close is this, in a sense, to D&G's claim that "one must find the minor language, the dialect or rather idolect, on the basis of which one can make one's own major language minor" (105). 

Celan -- making the major language (German), minor -- making it speak of that which Germany will not speak, cannot speak. Taking the German "order words" (Arbeit! Arbeit! Achtung! --just for instance) and finding the "revolutionary potential" in it-- as poetry. 

Order-words: "The relation of every word or every statement to implicit presuppositions, in other words, to speech acts that are, and can only be, accomplished in the statement" (ATP 79). 

Language is made up of order-words --the performative, the non-discursive. Its not about communication (Philosophy is not about communication): 

"Communication is no better a concept than information; intersubjectity gets us no further than signifiance" (ATP 78). 

"Language is a map, not a tracing" (ATP 77) (and who might they be speaking to here? Derrida?) 

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D&G, too, use "indirect discourse," as Chapter 3 begins with a frame tale: "The same Professor Challenger who made the Earth scream with his pain machine, as described by Arthur Conan Doyle, gave a lecture after mixing several textbooks on geology and biology in a fashion fitting his simian disposition. He explained that the Earth--Deterritorialized, the Glacial, the Giant Molecule-- is a body without organs" (ATP 40). 

Wait a minute, Conan Doyle talking about BwO? 

Wikipedia: 

"George Edward Challenger, better known as Professor Challenger, is a fictional character in a series of science fiction stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Unlike Conan Doyle's laid-back, analytic character, Sherlock Holmes, Professor Challenger is an aggressive, dominating figure."

"He was also a pretentious and self-righteous scientific jack-of-all-trades."

"Challenger was, in many ways, rude, crude, and without social conscience or inhibition."

Professor Challenger, the "character" who explains D&G's odd pseudo-scientific theory about the "strata."  Professor Challenger being the "opposite" of Sherlock Holmes -- the SF counterpart to the Detective novel (cf. Difference and Repetition). 

D&G speak "through" Professor Challenger, his lecture intermingling with the indirect discourse of theory and D&G's concepts seeping into the frame tale. Everyone keeps leaving the lecture (although this reader stayed right with them to the bitter end)

"We had to summarize before we lost our voice. Challenger was finishing up. His voice had become unbearably shrill. He was suffocating. His hands were becoming elongated pincers that had become incapable of grasping anything but could still vaguely point to things" (ATP 72). 

Challenger was becoming-Lobster (God is a Lobster), a double articulation, a becoming-animal (more on that later). And during his becoming (or after he became?), he flees toward the "plane of consistency." 

"The plane of consistency is the abolition of all metaphor; All that consists is real." 

So much more to say about these two chapters, but it will have to wait. Let me end with an idea I broached earlier; that is, that "my" direct discourse is (always) already the indirect discourse of language, of some other -- not only the signifying parts, but the a-signifying as well. Quotations from D&G bleed into my own discourse, my "own" words. Although, I never am able to fully appropriate their discourse or language (not to mention, its a translation). As Derrida reminds us (and surely not just him): 

"It is of the essence of language that language does not let itself be appropriated. Language is precisely what does not let itself be appropriated, but, for this very reason, provides all kinds of movements of appropriation" (Sovereignties 101). 

The best we can do is make it minor. . .to make it stammer. . .to mark it, wound it, touch it. 

The Beginning of Writing

The end of the book, the beginning of writing

The end of philosophy, the beginning of writing

The speculative realists, particularly those advocating OOO, are frustrated with philosophy primarily concerned with texts, writing, “signifiers,” and feel that, while we need to take account of these things), philosophers have limited themselves by refusing to think of words as material things that are always mediated, just like any other ‘object.’ For instance, the words I am using now are “material” as they exist in the blogosphere and, as such, may be read by anyone – or not. The results depend on my circulation of these signifiers—do I post this on facebook? Do I email it to friends (to whom I know I’ll read). Texts, then, are not ideal but material and thus should take their place amidst all other objects, which includes everything from a corporation to Jacob Riley to the straw currently sitting on my table. A couple quotations from Levi Bryant’s recent blogposts will serve to illustrate what I mean by an attempt to de-center texts as the main concern of philosophy:

“When speaking of society or culture, the story goes, we will only speak of mental entities, norms, ideologies, and linguistic entities.  We will here only speak of texts.  When speaking of nature we will only speak of causes and so-called “material things” [. . .] The problem is that this way of proceeding entirely distorts our understanding of society.  We speak as if the glue that holds people together were only beliefs, ideologies, norms, texts, language, signs, etc.”

“Instead, those working in the tradition of the early Frankfurt School (and primarily Horkheimer and Adorno), post-structuralism (Foucault, Derrida, Butler, Baudrillard), structuralism (Althusser, Levi-Strauss), and psychoanalysis (Zizek), tend to treat the social world as merely a text to be deciphered and power as residing in texts alone”

I can understand Levi’s frustration with this focus on texts, particularly if all we do with texts is “decipher” or “interpret” them.  We in the humanities do tend to treat the world and its components in a “textual” manner. Furthermore, despite the insights that Derrida, Blanchot, Jean Luc-Nancy, etc. (and their followers) have yielded for philosophy including OOO, they maintain metaphors related to writing: trace, line, significance, sense. Writing in the “vulgar” sense seems to be their default structuring metaphor and, as such, privileges “text” over the material world—or so it seems (we will return to this later).

But we might ask: why do these philosophers talk about “writing”? I would argue very simply: because they are writers rather than philosophers first and foremost, believing that writing disrupts our usual ways of comprehension. Levi recently posted on the problem of “philosophical style.” Levi identifies his work within the continental tradition and even a cursory glance at Democracy of Objects provides more than enough evidence for this claim. Levi claims, and again, there is significant evidence for this, that he does not abandon the “correlationist” thinkers, but rather learns from them and then seeks to expand from their philosophy. However, of their “styles” he writes,

“A number of us Continentals have abominable style as well (I’m looking at you Hegel, Derrida, Lacan, Deleuze, and Adorno). Yes, yes, I know some folks delight at the “poetry” of these guys. I don’t. I generally read these thinkers despite their style, not for their style. In this regard, it’s perfectly appropriate to ask for clarity. I know the arguments as to why these styles are necessary. Nonetheless, you’re still asking readers to invest their time. You should take some time in return.”

First off, I agree that we can ask for “clarity” or, as he puts it citing Harman, “vividness,” but to suggest that these thinkers are not taking their time writing and that this is why their style and points are so convoluted is to miss the point these thinkers are trying to make, which I would claim is something like the end of philosophy and the beginning of writing. That is, even though Levi’s writing is lucid and powerful, supporting and defining of his position with “real world” examples, he and the other OOO’s want to still do philosophy. To say that Derrida, Deleuze, or Nancy (although his name is not explicitly mentioned) do not take time in their writing is to assume that it is more difficult to write “clearly” in support of a position then it is to write a different style of thinking. That is, to write in such a way that is powerful and inspires more thinking, but does not devolve into meaningless nonsense. The way that Levi uses the word “poetry” as a way to dismiss the style of thinking that these writers (I will not call them philosophers) advocate and practice, is to think that the style has little to do with the thinking involved. In one sense, this claim in understandable, since he may be able to reduce the style to a position that jives with Levi’s own and that “teaches us” or “reminds us” of a certain claim (phrases that every academic uses in order to get away from the interminable introductions like “Derrida writes,” “Deleuze states” – I will use these in this post etc.).  Maybe it’s not academically worthwhile to struggle with their text’s styles or poetry, but for me, the passion of literature (to borrow a phrase from Derrida) is to undergo these folks’ texts and deal with their texts as texts. Yes, texts have a materiality in the sense that they are deployed in a medium, but at the same time, language itself has a materiality, a resistance to meaning.  Derrida writes in “Typewriter Ribbon Ink” on the ‘materiality’ in De Man,

“The materiality in question – is not a thing; it is not something (sensible or intelligible); it not even the matter of a body. As it is not something, as it is nothing and yet it works [. . .] this nothing that therefore operates, it forces, but as a force of resistance. It resists both beautiful form and matter as substantial and organic totality. This is one of the reasons that de Man never says, to seems ot me, matter, but materiality” (350).

Call this philosophical idealism if you must, but is not this resistance, this ‘materiality’ of a text or a body or an object or whatever, a resistance to understanding – a kind of “withdrawnness” of whatever we attempt to write about or understand, but without the metaphysical OOO claim that objects are “withdrawn”?

While Levi may be pushing philosophy further in terms of content, I think it can be argued that these  other folks are resisting the categorization of “philosophy,” “theory,” or “poetry,” by their styles (Tim over at fragilekeys has a great post on the difference between ‘poetry’ and ‘theory’ HERE.) Indeed, Derrida, for instance, reads Being and Time as an event, a ‘work’ rather than a philosophical text. In Aporias he writes, 

“Being and Time would belong neither to science, nor to philosophy, nor to poetics. Such is perhaps the case for ever work worthy of its name: there, what puts thinking into operations exceeds its own borders or what thinking itself intended to present of these borders. The work exceeds itself” (32). 

Maybe that’s the problem: maybe this phenomenon called “thinking” (that Heidegger took as an explicit challenge) which is related to writing is too anthropocentric and too “correlationist.” “Thinking” might be different from philosophy. Maybe this is an attempt at an “ideal” rather than “material” entity. But I don’t think it can be because thinking never coincides with itself, but is always on the way (again, I recognize the kind of quasi-poetic, unclear language I put this in – maybe that’s what makes it an idealism in disguise).

Tim’s blog, fragilekeys, have prompted me to revisit Jean-Luc Nancy to a greater degree than I ever have before, which has gotten me to think once again about “writing.” Nancy is really talking about the end of philosophy rather than its reconstitution or its salvation. He writes,

“The end of philosophy is, without a doubt, first of all a question of style in this sense. It is not a matter of stylistic effects or ornaments of discourse, but of what sense does to discourse if sense exceeds significations. It is a matter of the praxis of thought, its writing in the sense of the assumption of a responsibility for and to this excess” (Sense of the World 19).

We need another style, another gesture, tracing, or marking of what Nancy calls “sense.”  In contrast, the “style” of literary effects would be OOO’s constant reference to example and “vivid” writing. But “vivid” writing implies that the goal would be to represent the real – to describe it in the most accurate terms possible. In contrast, “style” has something more to do with what Tim has called “syntax.” This is not necessarily that it has to be “poetic,” in the general sense of “flowery” or “beautiful” but rather “poetic” in the sense of resisting a fullness of sense (a fullness which would correspond to a kind of “mythic” sense – that is, that we know exactly what that word signifies).  As someone who has studied literature, it is not the outside of the text that is the most interesting, but rather, how the text resists me as a reader – oh wait, I’ve fallen back into correlationism – it’s what it is “for me” again.

 I quote again from Nancy (due to the style of the thoughts):

“the end of philosophy is consequently not the reconstitution of myth—of which romanticism still dreamed—but rather to renewed tension, the exigency of writing, with any ideal or model of ‘style,’ turning style against style, “philosophy” against “literature,” sense and truth against each other, both of them being “auseinandergeschrieben,” to use Paul Celan’s untranslatable word”

When Nancy calls for these ‘styles’ to be against each other, we must take “against” not in terms of dialectics or as an agonistic contestation, but rather in the sense of up against one another, leaning on another, if you will. Nancy is a thinker of surfaces and of bodies rather than flesh. Matter is always singular or singularized it is signed, but not signified – to be signed is “sense as a singular coming” – the signature is always “a body, a res extensa in the sense of an extension—areality, tension, exposition—of its singularity [. . .] signature along the surface of the hide, the hide of being. Existence tans its own hide” (58).

Here again, we encounter the privilege of writing metaphors again: the signature of being. Nancy’s “description” (if we can call it that) is not an attempt to make any particular object vivid by choosing a signifier that conjures up a particular image of an object, but rather an attempt to describe how the “signature” of being operates/functions. The last line “existence tans its own hide” is a phrase that some may call “poetic,” a phrase that does not give us much “meaning,” or “clarity” but rather than ignoring it, I am pricked or touched by it. I linger over it and am hesitant to try and explicate it or interpret it in any definable manner or within any definable system. All matter—all existence-- in Nancy’s text, is a singularity in the sense of an idiom:

“But writing as an idiom is also the fact of the voices, silences, and gestures that do not appear as or in the work. The words, their concepts and images, provide for this praxis its relays of signification and communication. In the end, each one is a ‘new idiom’ in the process of being born, and the world is the common space of idiomatic significances” (163).

I want to focus briefly on the last clause of this quotation, “and the world is the common space of idiomatic significances” because this seems to compare the ‘existence’ of the world (another term that would need more clarification—existence rather than ‘subject’ or ‘object’ – the “there,” etc.) to a linguistic idiom. In other words, the “signatures” of matter are the idiomatic marks of being. Perhaps what OOO’s are so concerned about with this is that this does not take into account the other metaphors that we might use rather than “writing”?  That by reducing “existences” (at least on the level of the word) to “signatures” we are trapped in a kind of correlationsim because even though we know that “writing” does not merely mean “text” or does not merely mean what I am doing right now, the term still maintains that common denotation. And perhaps this is what Ian Bogost means when he writes that “writing is dangerous for philosophy—and for serious scholarly practice in general. It’s not because writing breaks from its origins as Plato would have it, but because writing is only one form of being” (Bogost 90). Bogost goes on to cite Levi Bryant, who writes “The differences made by light bulbs, fiber optic cables, climate change, and cane toads will be invisible to you and you’ll be awash in text, believe that these things exhaust the really real” (90).

That writing is only one way to engage with being is correct. Even if we understand other objects as “writing” too (in the Derridean use of “writing” to mean trace, mark, etc.) we are still using writing as the dominant metaphor to describe our relation to being. I have a difficult  time arguing against this claim and when Bogost writes (I cannot find the quote right now) that we should multiply correlations and multiply relations. Furthermore, for Bogost, we should think about “doing” philosophy in different ways other than writing texts—by making things. He calls this, drawing on Harman, “carpentry.” Bogost suggests that “perhaps a metaphysician ought to be someone who practices ontology” (91).  

But by making things are we really “practicing” ontology? If this is so, then this is where Bogost’s ontology gets interesting because the ontology he sets up in the book is simple and flat (following Levi Bryant’s ‘flat ontology), but he calls it a tiny ontology: 

“I call it tiny ontology precisely because it ought not demand a treatise or tome. I don’t mean that the domain of being is small—quite the opposite, as I’ll soon explain. Rather, the basic ontological apparatus needed to describe existence ought to be as compact and unornamented as possible” (21).

Fair enough. But if the ontology is that simple, then we wouldn’t be practicing ontology¸ but practicing phenomenology through making things, right? Or is it that each time we make something – getting our hands dirty in material things – we are building an ontology – contributing to the different types of being?

 “Practice” vs. “Praxis”

I will write more about Bogost later, as I’m at odds with his strategy of “ontography” and Latourist litanies, but for now I want to return to Nancy.

In The Sense of the World, Nancy claims that he, too, is concerned with praxis (slightly different than “practice”). But it seems to me like Nancy sees writing as praxis, which is different than “practice.” For example, Nancy (and, if I remember correctly, I think Blanchot has similar sentiments) says that “writing is thus political ‘in its essence’, that is, it is political to the extent that it is the tracing out of the essenceless of relations” (119). Nancy here is clearly stretching the “sense” of the political. But Nancy does not harbor some sort of delusion that by describing the world or writing the world we can therefor forget about acting on the world. He writes,

“Every discourse on the sense and significance of the world can be suspended, tipping over in insignificance, through a conflagration of misery or sovereignty, through a major technological mutation, through an unheard-of genetic manipulation, through a catastrophe inextricably mixing “nature” and “society,” as well as by an accident, a suffering, a joy, in my immediate surroundings [. . .] delivering my discourse up to the derision of ‘all talk, no action. But this in itself bears witness to sense” (79)

I’m not quite sure what to make of this passage, given that many would argue that his discourse is already offered up, by most people, to the derision of “all talk, no action.” Is this to say that this writing is to spur us on to action or to force a response in writing? If the former, could not the OOO’s argue that by dealing with “the great outdoors” or concrete examples they are able to philosophize in a better way that would lead to better action? If the latter, are we just swimming in an endless array of texts in obscure idioms that break the easy categories of “philosophy,” “theory,” “poetry,” or “literature”? Does that lead us toward anything? Does it lead us toward the world (as Nancy puts it)?

Works Cited

Bogost, Ian. Alien Phenomenology

Bryant, Levi. http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/

“Hominid Ecology,” “Reflections on Style,”

Derrida, Jacques. Aporias

            --“Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2) (“within such limits”)

http://fragilekeys.com/

Nancy, Jean-Luc.  The Sense of the World

On Learning to Speak/Write D&G

I just read, quite fast actually, the last two "chapters" of Thousand Plateaus, which are short and almost summarizing. By going backwards, we will encounter terms that will mean little until they are repeated (becoming a 'refrain') in the previous sections. All of the "buzzwords" are there: Abstract machine, plane of consistency, (de)territorialization, smooth and striated space, assemblage, war machine, nomad, line of flight, etc. And some "new" ones that I feel may be essential to D&G's point, particularly their distinction between form/substance (which they claim are not really different) and content and expression. These are the two terms that I want to focus on, not necessarily in this post, but in subsequent posts: how are these distinctions an attempt to get away from the traditional philosophical distinction between form/substance? 

In this first post, I can but note a general feeling or mood, a kind of "orientation" that the text gives me. In the "Smooth and Striated," D&G offer multiple "models," distinguished by their topic: Smooth and striated spaces cut across many different areas of study: physics, mathematics, music, "maritime," etc. D&G, perhaps the thinkers of "mulitiplicites" write and mark multiple distinctions that, they claim, are necessary to "define" in order to then think about their intertwining, their connection to one another. So, "smooth" space is compared to the space of felt rather than weaving (a distinction that is interesting given my own focus on texts, texere -- to weave). They are careful to point out, however, that "smooth" does not imply homogeneous, on the contrary: "it is an amorphous, non formal space" (477). Smooth space is the space of intensities, of affect, of haptic perception rather than optic. Smooth space is a space of becoming, a space of deterritorialization. 

It is clear that smooth space is D&G's name for a kind of space of potential; although they purport that they are not making value judgments and that, indeed, the "minor science" they associated with smooth space must be "translated" into major and that "major science" yields new insights for the minor. Indeed, for every moment of becoming or deterritorialization, there is a risk of re-territorialization. Smooth space, for instance, can be associated, its seems, with a certain de-localized capitalism, but the potential that capitalism may open up is always swallowed up in further re-territorializations. Thinking in terms of the metaphor of the "machine" the "war machine" does not necessarily have as its object "war," -- that is, war machines contain an ambiguous potential for becoming, but when it is adopted by the "State apparatus," it becomes used for war. 

"Of course, smooth spaces are not in themselves liberatory. But the struggle is changed or deplaced in them, and life reconstitutes its stakes, confronts new obstacles, invents new paces, switches adversaries. Never believe that a smooth space will suffice to save us" (500). 

--------

Intensity/Duration

One of the most potent metaphorical formulations I found in these last chapters has to do with a characterization of nomad existence in terms of voyage: "Voyage in place: that is the name of all intensities, even if they also develop in extension. To think is to voyage [. . .] Voyaging smoothly is a becoming, and a difficult, uncertain becoming at that" (482). 

What can it mean to voyage in place? Furthermore, why characterize nomad existence as a voyaging in place -- is not an empirical fact that nomadic implies wandering, moving from place-to-place?

To voyage in place is like a line of flight as a line of force, a pushing a drawing out towards. It is, to use Heideggerian language, an "on the way" to thinking. But D&G seem to distance themselves from this Heideggerian language of destination and sending because, indeed, that does imply movement. But intensity is not a movement as a journey -- it is a voyage in place. Is it a holding together of heterogeneous elements on a plane of consistency? 

The Primacy of "intelligence" in "popular" posthumanism

"For they caused me to see that it is possible to attain knowledge which is very useful in life, and that, instead of that speculative philosophy which is taught in the Schools, we may find a practical philosophy by means of which, knowing the force and action of fire, water, air, the stars, heavens and all other bodies that envrion us, as distinctly as we know the different crafts of our artisans, we can in the same way employ them in all those uses to which they are adapted and thus render ourselves the masters and posessors of nature" -- Descartes, "Discourse on Method" (italics mine)

 "But it turns out that we are central, after all. Our Ability to create models -- virtual realites -- in our brains, combined with our modest-looking thumbs, has been sufficient to usher in another form of evolution: technology. That development enabled the persistence of the accelerating pace that started with biological evolution. It will continue until the entire universe is at our fingertips" -- Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity is Near 

I set these two quotes against each other, so we can recognize that at the outset, Kurzweil's teleology is close to Descartes. In fact, his claim that humans will eventually "saturate" matter with intelligence and that the universe will "wake up" and become conscious sounds vaguely similar to Hegel's notion of Absolute Consciousness at the end of history. Consciousness is indeed a focus of Kurzweil's book, as he also, per Descartes, appears to uphold the privilege given to consciousness and intelligence. But rather than a soul or 'mind', Kurweil argues that we are a pattern that may gradually shift but essentially holds firm, regardless of the material medium on which it is instantiated. Kurzweil's work exemplifies N. Katherine Hayles' claim that we have shifted from presence/absence to pattern/randomness. For Kurzweil, the goal is increasing order and harmony in the universe, which will most likely increase complexity, but not necessarily; Throughout the text, we get the sense that his caveat about reduced complexity from order is actually a desire.

The desire is that technology and greater intelligence that comes with it can solve all our problems -- disease, death, war, income inequality, etc. His relentless assumption that if we can become more intelligent and then the "nonbiological" machines that will be 'us' will eventually surpass human intelligence, we can solve problems. Sure these technologies will bring in new problems, that mostly concern issues of control and possible terrorism, but those age old problems that humans just haven't been intelligent to solve yet -- we'll solve those. Eugen Thacker has recently cautioned against the view that biotechnologies offer "technical solutions to social and cultural problems." To assume that we will be able to solve our problems once we have become more intelligent implies that intelligence consists of rational understanding that we can communicate and agree upon in order to act. Kurzweil assumes that intelligence also corresponds with "creative" capacities, but, we have seen throughout history that a lot of creative work is not associated with rational or even 'emotional' intelligence.

I focus on this particular avenue because Kurzweil has assembled a large amount of research and argumentation for his position based on on countless scientific studies (although some more credible than others). We could sit here and critique him for thinking that by 2040 or whatever the Singularity will be here because of exponential growth of technology or we could critique his neglect of the animal (for the most part), but his argument more than any of that hinges on this slippery concept of intelligence, a focus I also found in Fukuyama with the exception that Fukuyama was defending an inherently complex and standard human IQ that we should attempt to maintain (at least on a bell curve).

Kurzweil defines intelligence (if it can be called a definition) on pg 296: "Intelligence is the ability to solve problems with limited resources, including limitations of time."

So intelligence is framed as the ability to solve problems, the very thing Kurzweil says super-intelligence will enable us to do. But is intelligence really measured by problem-solving capability?

Intelligence, as a word, derives from the Latin verb, intelligere, which in turn derives from inter-legere, which means to "pick out or discern." Wikipedia continues (and I realize that this may not be entirely accurate):

Intelligence derives from the Latin verb intelligere which derives from inter-legere meaning to "pick out" or discern. A form of this verb, intellectus, became the medieval technical term for understanding, and a translation for the Greek philosophical term nous. This term was however strongly linked to the metaphysical and cosmological theories of teleological scholasticism, including theories of the immortality of the soul, and the concept of the Active Intellect (also known as the Active Intelligence). This entire approach to the study of nature was strongly rejected by the early modern philosophers such as Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and David Hume, all of whom preferred the word "understanding" in their English philosophical works.^[2][3] Hobbes for example, in his Latin De Corpore, used "intellectus intelligit" (translated in the English version as "the understanding understandeth") as a typical example of a logical absurdity.^[4] 




Historically, then, its not a surprise that we link transhumanism with immortality and a kind of hyper-rationalist, masculinist, transcendence-laced -- discourse (I have yet to hear of a female extropian/transhumanist). 


But etymologically, if intelligence is meant to signify discerning or picking out, this means that is not limited to a kind of problem-solving approach. Instead, following the more recent continental theory, we could think of intelligence as picking out or discerning problems -- or even picking out something and then inventing with it. But again, not to solve a problem, but to make it more apparent or to show the aporias that confront us (here I am drawing loosely on some of Greg Ulmer's work). 


But what about privileging intelligence in general? Why intelligence? Why not stupidity? Why not not-knowing? I am not saying this as a Luddite reaction to Kurzweil's extensive accounts of developments in GNR technologies (Genetic, nano, robot) but in the sense that how does intelligence solve our problems? Have we not seen intelligence been used for ill-conceived ends? Most everyone would agree Hitler embodied the wickedness of a certain ideology (I hesitate to call him a 'bad man" because it sounds so silly and utterly inadequate), but how many people would say he was "stupid" "unintelligent," "ignorant"? 


So here we have to add that if Kurzweil wants to maintain a kind of technological-intelligence optimism that the assumption is that we (and the non-biological entities that follow us) becomes more "morally intelligent" too. 


But what the hell is "moral intelligence" ? Or "ethical intelligence" ? The moral/ethical/political principles discussed in Kurzweil's book are not radical. Rather, despite his speculative technological imagination, he does not imagine any new political or ethical arrangements that would come out of this (just ethical "problems" that need to be solved). 


What is the relationship between intelligence and values? 


Now we're in really deep shit. Once you start saying "ah, that value clearly reflects on that person's intelligence" you start to use intelligence as a bludgeon against people you don't agree with, and, of course, this leads to ad hominem attacks galore. We don't want to start questioning people's values based on their intelligence do we? And is it really their intelligence that came up with these values or their cultural, social, and political position? 


This focus on intelligence, at once a narrow and vague understanding of it, is the Achilles heel of popular posthumanism: Its always about the mind, consciousness -- AI rather than AL. The seat of all problem solving is the (bio or non-bio) intelligence of the individual innovator -- a convenient narrative for Kurzweil to perpetuate as an inventor and innovator himself.