Ruined Vitality

Adam R. Rosenthal (bio)
Texas A&M University

A review of Wills, David. Inanimation: Theories of Inorganic Life. U of Minnesota P, 2016.

Inanimation is the third installment of David Wills’s technological trilogy of the human, which began with Prosthesis (1995) and Dorsality: Thinking Back through Technology and Politics (2008). Like those prior works, Inanimation traces the difficult-to-sound border between life and death, the human and non-human, humanity and animality, and man and machine. In distinction to those first two forays, however, Inanimation‘s focus on figures of inorganic life sets it on a new path, one still concerned with but in no way determined by the human’s technological hang-ups. Instead, it explores the supposed dead-ends of vitality: a search for life in “all the wrong places,” as Wills puts it in his preface, including such unlikely concerns as punctuation, mechanical angels, and plush stuffed birds (x). Inanimation thus emerges out of the rubble of Wills’s now twenty-year long deconstructive project, rising up like a mechanical phoenix whose passage through life’s technicity allows it to speak (and sing) from the other side of this ruinated notion of vitality. As such, its song is both compelling and at times difficult to make out, for like any “new” species that doesn’t conform to traditional taxonomic principles, the foreignness of its cry strains the ear. At its most daring moments, Inanimation takes this risk—which is also that of catachresis—and initiates a re-education of the senses to perceive what “lives” within those inorganic structures whose ostensibly merely nominal claims to vitality Wills forces us to rethink.

The process of sensorial retraining, and above all of hearing and seeing life otherwise, is a theme that recurs throughout Inanimation, beginning of course with its title. “Inanimation,” Wills reminds us, is not a figure of his own coinage but one born in the early seventeenth century whose verbal form, “to inanimate,” would become largely obsolete by the eighteenth (ix). Before any hint of privation or lifelessness entered its semantic field, inanimation referred to the act of enlivening or animating. Only by the mid-seventeenth century did the privative sense of dis-animation emerge. This key figure, like a Freudian primal word, thus serves to name the interpenetration of the living with the non-living, which is to say the inseparability of animate and inanimate structures that problematizes our most basic and fundamental assumptions about what it is to live. At the same time, the resuscitation of the term “inanimation” from near obsolescence constitutes the first of what we might now consider to be Wills’s acts of necromancy, in which he gives an old word new life. Like Derrida’s practice of paleonymy (the re-inscription of an old word with a new meaning), Wills’s revitalization of certain strategic figures within Inanimation— a practice he repeats with each of the work’s three main headings—alters not only their meanings and conceptual bearing but their historical trajectory, opening them to alternative survivals. It is no exaggeration to say that a kind of vital paleonymy is at the heart of Inanimation, or to note that the metaphorical value of such resuscitative acts has never been more in question. If the concept of life should not be adopted from the natural sphere but instead applied to everything that has a history (as Wills, following Benjamin, suggests), then it is precisely the vital signs of language that must above all be reckoned with, for it is a central tenet of Inanimation that “language itself generates and self-generates as a privileged form, perhaps the privileged form, of inanimate life” (xii). This also means that Inanimation is as much a force of in/animation as it is a strictly theoretical venture, and this ambivalence is inextricable from the project itself.

What, then, is life? Inanimation enters the contemporary fray surrounding this ancient question by way of three somewhat improbable motifs. For while the prospects of artificial intelligence and androids today pose high-tech specters of the automation of the organic, by comparison Wills’s selection of the topoi of “Autobiography,” “Translation,” and “Resonance” for his work’s three parts comes as an (ostensibly) low-tech surprise. Indeed, turning back in this way to such traditional figures lends this timely work a distinct air of untimeliness, as it shows, time and again, that many of the most compelling sites of inorganic life lie less in the technological reproducibility of the human than in the structure of a textuality that has always been technological and whose performances, in spite of originating in the living subject, nevertheless remain independent of it. On each of these old figures depends a certain conception of the animate and inanimate, and Wills’s project both demonstrates the vital stakes implicit in the conceptualization of each term and rethinks—or revitalizes—the term itself as in-animated/in-animating. As such, the interrogation of each figure becomes a matter of life and death.

Before I turn to the theoretical stakes of each of Inanimation’s three parts, it is worth noting that the thematic and conceptual links that bridge each of its nine chapters also tell a compelling story—one that, at times, threatens to overshadow these very partitions. From the autobiographical birth of the father of modern philosophy (1) and the origin of life in the father of psychoanalysis (2), to the proto-technicity of the breath that is the ostensibly organic origin of poetic spacing (4) and the spaceless frontier that marks the heartlessness of war (6), to the bloodless beating heart at the origin of love (7) and the mechanical repetition that grounds the sounds of life’s most animated mating rituals (9), Wills’s recurrent attentiveness to the automated yet bodily figures of shame, the heart, breath, and blood generate a second set of citational relations at the border of what we might think of as the organic body of the book. The effect of such underground or unconscious pathways is not so much to contradict Inanimation’s three-part structure (which certainly captures the broadest conceptual interests of the text) as it is to raise certain questions about this structure’s historical and theoretical pertinence. In what, after all, consists the urgency of juxtaposing these three problematics? And what sort of relation do they bear to modernity, or, at least, to post-Cartesian thought? Even if the “autobiography” that concerns Wills will always already have been at work in the writing of life, in reading Inanimation one wonders whether something vital within “autobiography,” or “resonance,” becomes visible only after Descartes and the emergence of the philosophico-theoretical milieu out of which modern biology surfaces.

Whatever the historicity of these terms, one cannot read Inanimation without sensing that something radical is happening to each in the course of Wills’s meticulous analyses. In what can be classed as his cinematic style of reading, each chapter weaves together its problematic by cutting back and forth between theoretical, literary, visual, and filmic texts. The result is a juxtaposition not only of unexpected theorists and artists but also of unthought connections and constellations among the disseminated senses and conceptual fields of each term. Take, for example, the problem of “autobiography,” whose centrality to the notion of the human orients the first part of Inanimation. The question of autobiography goes straight to the heart of humanity’s claim to species superiority, or the human-animal divide; for Wills it is not merely a form or genre of writing produced by human authors, but one that embodies the alleged human privilege of autodeixis, or self-referentiality. By combining readings of explicitly autobiographical moments within the work of Descartes, Freud, and Derrida with these authors’ theoretical writings on the human and animal, and life and non-life in the Discourse and Meditations, Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Introductory Lectures, and The Animal that Therefore I am, Wills extends the autobiographical beyond its traditional, anthropomorphic sense. As Wills, following Derrida, asks in chapter one: How could we ever rigorously differentiate between the human reliance on a naming language and the organism’s writing of itself in general? The question of autobiography thus becomes not only that of anthropomorphic life writing, but a “minimal autodeictic or autobiographical ‘impulse'” as it may manifest in an organism’s tendency to replicate and self-(re)generate its vital codes in response to environmental factors (44). Such an impulse, although manifest in Descartes’s philosophical project and Freud’s psychoanalytic one, also becomes indissociable from every form of “graphic automation or inanimation that precedes and even gives rise to life” (52). In chapter two such a notion is explored through the question of “instinctual reinscription” as treated by Freud, most notably in figures of the pseudopodium and the lifedeath drive (59). If, on the one hand, the practice of autobiographical writing serves to extend (automatically) the life of the writing subject who lives on in the text and prolongs his life in its inscription, on the other hand, life itself—engaged in the automated practice of autoextension in space and time—must also be read as a form of auto-bio-graphy. Additionally, if life is understood on the basis of autokinesis and autodeixis, then language itself must be included within the living as soon as it is a matter of iteration. Thus, while autobiography may initially be understood to refer to the writing of life or the writing of the self, Wills shows that it must encompass as well something like the life of writing, which is to say, the mechanical positing of a graphic self that constitutes a kind of minimal kernel of vitality, and one that is shared by organic and inorganic entities alike. Autobiography thus comes to name, for Wills, a structural point of contact between the inorganic productions of an organic subject attempting to survive, and the vitality of a textuality whose self-differentiation is no less a marker of autoextension.

Much of the provocation of Inanimation lies in the absolute seriousness with which it approaches the question of the vitality of text. The figures of “Autobiography” in part one, and “Translation” in part two, present points of access through which to do just this: to ask how the “life” of text, grounded in iteration, can be understood to relate in a nonmetaphorical way to the vitality of organic life. “Translation,” as a figure of transportation, metaphor, and displacement, and of literary as well as non-literary provenance, vehiculates just such an interrogation of the transitions between ostensibly divergent domains: from life into non-life in “Living Punctuations: Cixous and Celan”; from a pre-linguistic divinity into a linguistic mundanity in “Naming the Mechanical Angel: Benjamin”; and from pre-modernity into post-modernity in “Raw War: Schmitt, Jünger, and Joyce.” In each case, Wills problematizes the narrative of a fall (which is to say, of a translation) from a living, ideal, or natural state into a mechanized, automated, or technologized one. Instead, it becomes necessary to think life and afterlife in the same breath, to understand—as Wills suggests through a reading of Benjamin’s “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man” in chapter five—how the absence of “literal transfer,” or the “impossibility of such an uninterrupted passage,” makes life possible in the first place (161). Only once we have rethought the life/afterlife dichotomy through translation will we begin to be able to understand “how an afterlife retains its vital relation to life…[or] to develop an unprejudiced concept of life” (161).

In “Living Punctuations,” such a translative critique aims at dealing a double blow, by demonstrating both the originary technicity within the organic breath of the poetic voice and the unpredictability of the life of the graphic text that is, through the diacritical punctuation mark, ostensibly tasked with re-inscribing both the presences and absences of the “original” pneumatic flow. No synopsis can do justice to the force of Wills’s considerations of Mallarmé’s and Cixous’s graphic signifiers, or to his expounding of the effects of iterability, which turns “[e]very phoneme, syllable, or word—indeed, every blank space that utters…[into] a homonym of itself, no longer being enunciated a single time but instead resounding within the echo chamber of its own space” (125). Through such iteration, the blank of the page or the point of the period are shown to live no less than the material letter, and their collective survival in literature becomes inextricable from the organic life thought to precede them.

“Translation” thus ultimately comes to name for Wills less a process of linguistic transcription, or even, more broadly, the process of doubling that turns an original presence into a secondary, artificial representation, than it does an act that betrays the originary technicity that haunts any displacement and that makes displacement im/possible in the first place. Indeed, before there is even any translative “act,” the translatability of life, we could say, renders it always already prosthetic, and thus structurally dependent on an afterlife to come.

In turning from “Translation” to “Resonance,” the third and final section of Inanimation moves from the problems of borders and thresholds towards those of harmonies and compatibilities. It takes up the assumed synchrony of sonic and bodily couplings to show the impossibility of immediacy within these figures of fusion. In this way, through explorations of Nancy’s “exscription” in chapter seven, Godard’s struggle with music and image in eight, and Descartes’s meditations on animality in nine, Wills asks whether an immediate contact—between bodies, the elements of filmic narrative, or birds in song—could ever be possible. If not, if the natural effusions of the heart and the amorous embrace (like the hand-to-hand combat between enemy combatants explored in chapter six) can never express themselves without succumbing to some degree, however slight, of rhetorical flourish or technical prostheticization, then, Wills concludes, the animacy of the animate will also necessarily be contaminated by inanimacy, automation, and technicity. Resonance thereby turns from a figure of harmonious or organic continuity, into one of originary discontinuity and mediacy, and life, whether cinematic or sexual, begins only on the condition of this disjunction.

Like both Prosthesis and Dorsality, Inanimation tirelessly draws out the structural parallels between so-called organic life and its inorganic others. Like those other works, its writing betrays an adeptness, sprinkled with playfulness, that culminates in Wills’s distinct, even unmistakable voice. Yet for all that, this voice somehow remains unfamiliar and perhaps even unclassifiable, indistinguishably human and inhuman, autobiographical and auto-bio-graphical. What kind of animal is Inanimation? I proposed, in beginning this review, that its call was that of a hybrid beast: both animal and machine, living and dead, yet also, and irreducibly, fantastic, as any new addition to the bestiary must at first appear. The forms of inorganic life that Inanimation advances lie at the edge of comprehension, and this is its greatest risk and reward.