Volume 13, Number 2
January, 2003 Every issue of Postmodern Culturecarries notices of events, calls for papers, and other announcements, free of charge. Advertisements will also be published on an exchange basis. If you respond to one of the ads or announcements below, please mention that you saw the notice in PMC.
Susan Laxton
Art History and Archaeology
Columbia University
Sjl16@columbia.edu
Review of: Catherine de Zegher and Mark Wigley, eds., The Activist Drawing: Retracing Situationist Architectures from Constant’s New Babylon to Beyond. New York: The Drawing Center, and Cambridge, Mass.: MIT P, 2001.
How can a drawing be activist?
Can a graphic mark constitute direct, vigorous, oppositional action? Graffiti, at its gouging best, comes to mind. But then, that’s writing. Drawing, traditionally conceived, withdraws from the public sphere, a fugitive trace, mute consort to the creative process. And even considering the historical shifts in drawing’s significance–from its function as ideational armature in the Renaissance to a model of spontaneity and expression in the early twentieth century to recent revaluations based in lability, erasure, and obsolescence–to advance its physical presence as an intervention capable of effecting political change is to take up the question of the efficacy of art in general.
Specifically, it is to ask the dreadful question, “Does art matter?” and to consider further the implications of what it might mean “to matter.” This is the daunting project launched in The Activist Drawing: Retracing Situationist Architectures from Constant’s New Babylon to Beyond, co-edited by Catherine de Zegher, director of The Drawing Center in New York, and architectural historian Mark Wigley. While its authors would not claim to have found conclusive answers (they cannot seem to agree on a common enemy), opening discussion of the Great Unspoken of art historical discourse gives the book its contemporary urgency. Through their examination of architectural drawing as a hinge between the immateriality of representation and the materiality of lived experience, the authors probe the outcome of nearly a century’s effort toward a positive breakdown between art and life, and they address the possibilities of drawing in general as a conduit for revising lived experience. What emerges is a productive examination of the medium itself: drawing’s historical construction and theoretical participation in the vagaries of artistic practice, and the suggestion that the very characteristics of banality, flexibility, and disposability that have produced drawing as marginal to the arts are the grounds for its historical consideration as a site of resistance.
The book is an expanded record of a symposium organized by Wigley and art historian Thomas McDonough; its title, The Activist Drawing, reflects a shift in emphasis from the more monographically named exhibition at the Drawing Center from which it derived–“Another City for Another Life: Constant’s New Babylon” (2 November to 30 December 1999). Rather than merely documenting the “visionary architecture” of the Dutch artist Constant Nieuwyenhuys as it is projected in the drawings and multimedia presentations of his imagined city New Babylon (1956-1974), the participants–Benjamin Buchloh, Rosalyn Deutsche, Elizabeth Diller, Martha Rosler, Bernard Tschumi, and Anthony Vidler, in addition to Wigley and McDonough–subject Constant’s project to a scrutiny that takes seriously the ideological implications of architectural projections, with their dimensionally driven aura of “realizability,” and the historical imperatives that might call for their revision. The critical dimension of the book, which stands out in opposition to the laudatory conventions of the typical exhibition catalogue, is underscored by de Zegher’s focus on New Babylon’s own idealism. In her introduction, she draws attention to the book’s emergence “in the context of a citywide celebration of ‘utopia’” driven by the New York Public Library’s exhibition “Utopia: The Search for the Ideal Society in the Western World” (14 October 2000 to 27 January 2001). New Babylon, as a fully automated city whose inhabitants, freed from labor, “play” by endlessly reconfiguring their environment to suit their individual and collective desires, is recast in this context as a plan for an experimental lifestyle which in retrospect seems to land somewhere between Fourier and Disney.
The Drawing Center’s exhibition and symposium took place a year in advance of the “Utopia” show, so there is no direct reference to the materials or theories made available there. But founding a theoretical critical practice such as Constant’s, in which the inhabitant of New Babylon “will not have to make art, for he can be creative in the practice of his daily life” (qtd. in Constant 9), and establishing that practice as dependent on yet enacted outside of technological support, is a utopian notion which in academic circles today is widely regarded as suspect. The difficulty of attributing an unqualified materialist activism to Constant’s work is first communicated in Buchloh’s introductory conversation with him at the symposium. After Constant’s early assertion regarding his involvement with the COBRA group–“We didn’t consider ourselves avant-garde. The word is never used in COBRA1“(16)–Buchloh leads him, not without resistance, through a succession of encounters with apparently contradictory models of vanguard influence: DeStijl, Giacometti, the Soviet avant-garde. Through an unflinching examination of the problems implied by what de Zegher calls “the dynamic intersection of drawing, utopianism, and activism in a multimedia era” (9), this book emerges as an exploration of the eclipse of avant-garde artistic practice as it is understood from its original, that is, political definition, as Constant and his project are interrogated for foreknowledge of the obstacles to such practices today.
With irony worthy of the postmodern, Thomas More named “Utopia” to signify both “good place” and “no place.” As the symposium participants focus on the problem of how to receive both the virtuality and the technological utopianism of Constant’s project as relevant to the contemporary situation in which, as de Zegher admits, “the imagined homo ludens . . . has not brought about a daily life of invention and action but of leisure and consumption,” the faint outlines of a prognosis for goodness materialize (10). Recasting Constant’s utopian project as artistic practice–a mediated, semiotic intervention rather than a program with ambitions for material realization–shifts the question into the field of representation, where drawing, the point of intersection between the materiality of architecture and the idealism of artistic practice, is advanced as a space of resistance. Yet in a postmodern culture in which the master of détournement turns out to be capitalism itself, it is the “no place” of graphic utopia of which we are made acutely aware: the disappearance in turn of paper support, the analog mark, practical accountability, and political activism.
Mark Wigley takes on the challenge of reconciling the mechanical and the creative by arguing for their ontological presence in drawing itself. In his essay, “Paper, Scissors, Blur,” Wigley establishes drawing as the very ground of architecture’s acceptance as a fine art in the Renaissance, and drawing’s own emergence as “origin” and site of authenticity as having been established only through the sacrifice of paper: a disappearance of the ground in the presence of the graphic mark. This deconstructive observation alone, of an origin based in absence, places drawing at the center of the current theoretical fray over virtuality, simulacra, and digital processes as they relate to representation. But Wigley goes further, to establish the historical “rise” of drawing as utterly coextensive with the mass production of paper and the widespread use of the printing press, that is, as dependent on early modern technological innovation and the appearance of a “cult of reproduction.” For Wigley, drawing at its inception is at once essential and dependent, ideational and expressive, somatic index and symbol of the utterly rational. As he traces drawing historically through the pressures of modernism to the prevailing ideologies of Constant’s postwar context, what emerges is an image of drawing’s inner plurality, of a medium constituted by complementary differences. He writes,
The project turns on the fragility of the line between originality and reproduction, unique unpredictable events and mechanization, spontaneous play and automated machinery. In the very techniques of drawing, Constant encounters the logic of the project that he is trying to represent. As the drawings of New Babylon slide from “mechanical” to “expressive,” the relentless smoothness of the slide, the extremely minor variations from drawing to drawing, and the repetition of the same images in different media, effectively undermine the standard oppositions. A sense of reproduction is embedded in a string of originals and thereby conveys the organizing principle of the project. The effect of a hundred unique works on paper is that vast mechanical structures assume an atmospheric immateriality and expressive flashes assume a structural physical presence. The collapse of the distinction between mechanization and spontaneous originality that is meant to be enacted by New Babylon is first enacted on paper. (41-2)
New Babylon’s political potential is here located in an indeterminacy and play of meaning that finds its ideal medium in drawing. This ideology of infinite flow is identified as a founding principle of the Situationists, the overtly political movement of the 1960s with which Constant was associated at New Babylon’s inception. The Situationist critique of commodity-driven spectacle centered on an idealist revision of urban experience (and the architecture that determines it) through the practice of experimental counter-behaviors such as dérive, aimless wandering in a city designed for productive use. Thomas McDonough’s contribution, “Fluid Spaces: Constant and the Situationist Critique of Architecture,” identifies what he calls a “fundamental misrecognition” at the heart of the project: that the endless mobility and dynamism of New Babylon, set in opposition to instrumental reason, could also strike a blow against capitalism–a movement which is itself dependent on fluidity and incessant change. In its ambition to set in motion the salutary demise of drawing and art in general, New Babylon “forgets” the divisiveness and alienation that results from the vagaries of individual desire (an outcome of which Constant became convinced after the events of May 1968, resulting in a protracted autocritique that produced considerably darker versions of the project in the 1970s). And while Constant’s détournement of architecture–his use of architectural means to critique its static conventions–is meant as an attack on functional space, it ends up paradoxically prefiguring the dystopia of present-day public spaces. This is the theme taken up by Martha Rosler’s untitled presentation of her Airport Series, photographs of the anonymous spaces that characterize the architecture of postmodern transit and mobility. Mobility in the grip of commerce, she argues, relinquishes its activist potential along with its humanist aspirations:
…the closely controlled empty spaces of transit, the terminals and lounges, promised (and symbolized) safety from the urban transients and the threats of disorder they represented . . . . The minimalism of such spaces, which appear to answer to the disjunct needs of modern transit and commerce, mutely promise the giant empty room that Adorno and others used as the presiding metaphor of the modern surveillance society–the society of total administration. (128)
Rosler’s project asserts that global technology and industrialization, which promise unlimited freedoms and the fulfillment of every desire, actually subordinate social relations to quantifiable units of exchange to the extent that they deliver only freedom’s effect. The critique of Constant’s project is never made explicit, but it is clear: New Babylon’s premise of infinite traversal, far from presenting a model for resistance, is the perfect vehicle for the confidence game of pure exchange. Rosler’s position implies that where a century of political action has failed to refract the trajectory of extreme regulation, to consider that drawing, with its overtones of ideational purity and rarefied audience, could possibly succeed in doing so is laughable. Yet in her unflinching account of the unfolding postmodern condition, Rosler insists on drawing as a kind of creative humanist recourse set against the mechanization and homogenization that are equated with technological rationalism.
By contrast, Anthony Vidler finds qualified potential for activism in Constant’s project precisely in its generation from the most mechanical of drawings. In “Diagrams of Utopia,” Vidler examines the New Babylon drawings through the conceit of the “diagram,” theorized here as a drawing with a mandate to action–directions, as it were, for the achievement of a plan. The diagram’s performative, machine-like function, if administered politically, serves not only to alter the internal conventions of architecture, but also to galvanize social change. While Rosler’s and Vidler’s respective positions could be seen as representative of the rift between the pragmatic and the theoretical within intellectual discourse (and consonant with radically divergent notions of line enclosed in the definition of drawing, that is, line as bodily expression and as pure abstraction), Vidler’s characterization of the diagram as the trace of process aligns it with action, effectively breaking down the separation of the practical and the conceptual to produce a third, transgressive category that is essential to the notion of any representation’s political efficacy. Rosalind Deutsche extends this abstraction into the material field in her essay “Breaking and Entering: Drawing, Situationism, Activism” by insisting on the urgency of critical responsibility in artistic practices. Deutsche invokes the urban theories of Henri Lefebvre to demonstrate the importance of critical practices at the formal level in the work of Gordon Matta Clark (who called his “building cuts” drawings)–an instance in which drawing broke with its paper ground to physically assert itself against the homogenization of the city.
At apparent loggerheads with the material activism of Rosler and Deutsche, the essays by architects Elizabeth Diller and Bernard Tschumi present two different facets of theorizing architectural drawing into the “beyond” of the book’s title–the time/space matrix made available by the advent of digital processes. Diller’s “Autobiographical Notes” step off from the moment in the 1970s when architectural drawing became freed from practice, and drawing for its own sake was widely pursued. Diller’s own conceptual projects, reproduced in her essay, are the natural extension of this replacement of the tectonic with the graphic, a trajectory that inevitably resulted in “the denaturalization of building to emulate the abstraction of drawing” (131). That this abstraction, in its withdrawal from material imperatives, would slide easily into the virtual world of digital processes with consequences for social relations that might not have been entirely salutary is suggested in her projects, but never overtly stated. Rather, Diller celebrates the “uncanny disembodiment” marked by the shift from analog to digital drawing as a “new [way] of rethinking the relation between drawing and space” (133). As a result of her neutral delivery, activism seems out of the question in media in which pragmatic realization is eliminated as a possibility.
This is not the case for Tschumi, who also delivers a detached analysis in “Operative Drawing,” yet insists that all of the strategies described in his overview of drawing are deployed in the service of function and utility. While his codification of architectural practices is generated out of a cybernetic matrix that Tschumi seems to take for granted, it is also made clear that he means to subordinate digital processes to an end result that will enter, and alter, the built environment as a functioning structure in the traditional sense. That is, Tschumi’s drawings are ultimately meant to be realized as buildings; drawing for him is a useful means to a higher end. The question of whether buildings generated from a digital medium can escape the imperatives of technological control to the extent that they could critique, rather than reproduce and reinforce them, is not addressed by Tschumi, although it seems clear from the premises of the symposium that it should be. Particularly questionable in this context would be the last of Tschumi’s four drawing strategies, the terrifyingly opaque “interchangeable scalar drawing” (136), described as a universally applicable unit of expression that transforms polar opposites (such as solid and void) into a heterogeneous whole.
Such transcendent expressions of the sublime skate far afield from the populist strategies posited by the other contributors, which tend to preserve difference and happenstance as fields of resistance against the hegemony of standardization. The advantage of the symposium form from which The Activist Drawing is derived is that it stimulates a multivalent, critical dialogue on its subject, generating spontaneous and unexpected exchanges and responses. This sense of the fortuitous is the special potential of collaborative work: the “lucky find,” at the intersection of widely divergent, often unconceivable ranges of experience. Faced with increasing uniformity in the lived environment, the unknowability of the subject emerges as a last recourse to human engagement, if humanity is the figure that is to be set against technology. Likewise, drawing’s value to the arts, as well as its value to activism, lies in its own predisposition to the aleatory, what Henri Michaux has appraised as drawing’s bias toward the unanticipated: “Could it be that I draw because I see so clearly this thing or that thing? Not at all. Quite the contrary. I do it to be perplexed again. And I am delighted that there are traps. I look for surprises.” The aberrant mark, the false start, the doodle or marginalia, the incomplete erasure, all serve the unpredictable, and all are lost to digital processes. This revelation is the trouvaille of The Activist Drawing.
1. COBRA, the expressionist art group named from the first letters of the three capital cities of the countries of its founders, Asger Jorn (Copenhagen), Corneille (Brussels), and Karel Appel (Amsterdam), was founded in 1948 and disbanded by 1952. Constant was associated with the group in Amsterdam at around the same time that he began to assimilate the tenets of architecture through the work of the radically opposite De Stijl movement.
Rekha Rosha
Department of English and American Literature
Brandeis University
rosha@brandeis.edu
Paul Virilio, A Landscape of Events. Trans. Julie Rose. Cambridge: MIT P, 2000.
Architect, political theorist, and cultural critic, Paul Virilio is best known for his phenomenological critique of technology and militarism. In this work, as in his other writings, Virilio contends that recent developments in technoculture can best be understood by studying changes in military and political transportation and information transmission. “Dromology,” his term for this study, emphasizes the impact of speed on the organization of territory and culture.
Originally published in French in 1996 under the title Un paysage d’événements, A Landscape of Events continues Virilio’s study of “dromocratic culture” and “the disastrous effects of speed on the interpretation of events” (31). Virilio’s major premise in this book is that space has been replaced by time; the Kantian argument for absolute space as the first principle of human experience is no longer applicable because space has imploded. In Kant’s discussions, the coherent visual field in which the multitude of appearances is organized is a consequence of spatiality, which is given a priori to our experience. Today, Virilio argues, what we see is not spatially organized: it is a swarm of fragmented images beamed at us at ever more furious speeds. Cyberspace is not a physical space–there are no coordinates of length, height, or depth; it exists only in time. The Internet is only one example of how space has drifted away from time. Virilio takes as his starting point mathematician Hermann Minkowski’s claim that only a union between space and time will preserve an independent reality and then works through various causes for the implosion of space.
Perhaps it is because Virilio so strenuously advocates for the redemption of space that his book begins in the least redeemed space of all–metropolitan cities. The sun never sets on the urban empires of New York, Paris, and London. Electric lights blaze 24/7; people move through the city at night as if it were daylight, and this gives him pause. In the book’s first chapter, “The Big Night,” Virilio argues that the constant flicker of urban light has prevented our bodies from producing melatonin, a chemical related in the body’s nocturnal phase. Melatonin tells our bodies that night has fallen and we should go to sleep. The increase in the number of prescriptions for melatonin suggests not only that our bodies’ ability to produce necessary chemicals and biological agents on its own is in jeopardy, but also that our bodies can no longer distinguish the difference between night and day. Our twenty-four-hour clock never winds down; we are speeding up, we are always on. The loss of this chemical, Virilio contends, indicates that our adaptation is no longer to our natural surroundings, but to our urban ones.
While our bodies are becoming synchronized with our man-made surroundings, these very spaces are undergoing similarly significant transformations. In Virilio’s view, space is dwindling into time not because of increased urbanization, but because of the increasing importance placed on information–the intangible data, facts, perceptions, interpretations, and propositions that obtain in different cases at different times. In an interview with Andreas Ruby (“Architecture,” 180), Virilio explains this process using the example of a mountain. In this case, the mass and energy of a mountain is linked to a fixed source or foundation: the density of the mountain. By contrast, information is not linked to a fixed source or foundation; it evolves constantly. The mountain’s name, its national location, climate, mineral composition, and topography are all relative to a particular point in time. In this sense the mountain is shaped and formed by technological advances in politics (the nation could change and thus the national location of the mountain could change, too), meteorology, geology, and cartography. Given the real impact of political events and technological developments, the information about the mountain matters more than the matter that composes the mountain.
One could easily insist that the density of a mountain matters less than its name, be it Mount Everest, Mont Blanc, or Kilimanjaro. Privileging the discourse produced about the mountain over its physical reality effectively removes matter from considerations about the mountain’s “meaning.” For Virilio, this demotion of matter signals its disappearance, which he in turn reads as a new mode of appearance. The fluidity of information releases the mountain from any fixed relationship to space. Its only relationship, or reality, is to information. The object (Mount Everest, Mont Blanc, Kilimanjaro) is perceived through information about its location, size, and so on. This dematerialization occurs in multiple ways: “In some way, you can read the importance given today to glass and transparency as a metaphor of the disappearance of matter” (“Architecture” 181). Just as information is used to turn mountains into bits of ephemeral data, and the military turns countries and the people who inhabit them into fly-over space, contemporary architects and artists use transparent materials to construct a world that appears as if it isn’t there. This transparency, what Virilio calls the “aesthetics of disappearance” (Landscape 35), is a mutation of a militarized mode of representation in which matter is untethered from its physical dimension.
This examination of multiple efforts to reduce perceived objects to information, or to seeming nothingness, reiterates Virilio’s long-held interests in war, speed, and perception, and remains at the forefront of his thinking throughout A Landscape of Events. He continues to add provocative examples to his argument regarding the catastrophic effects of technology. In the chapter “The Avant-Garde of Forgetting,” Virilio argues that the small size of the TV screen diminishes the enormity of events. Four-dimensional events are compressed into three–“the temptation of the West is the small format” (26). The TV image thus becomes the format of violence; television provides the formal design and structures the tragic images of military destruction it broadcasts. Television reduces human misery and trauma to a scale far out of proportion to its reality. Re-broadcast documentaries and newsreel footage of historic events such as D-Day transform seismic events into tightly edited, condensed versions of reality. And if this truncated version becomes the official document, tagged and archived, what will become of the war? Once the cinematic version of the event becomes the only trace, when all the participants, victims, agents, and witnesses are gone, what can we know of that event? Like the mountains and glass buildings in the earlier examples, wars and history are also subject to the aesthetics of disappearance. The image, particularly the television image, facilitates the forgetting of events; it does nothing, in Virilio’s terms, to promote the memory of events. This reductio ad absurdum is practiced at an even more insidious level in the military.
Virilio offers a fairly convincing argument that there is no qualitative difference between a beneficent application of technology and a sinister application; technological developments, as well as aesthetic ones, never remain contained or restricted to the purposes for which they were designed. Yet, in spite of such compelling claims, Virilio is really at his best making wildly provocative connections rather than offering persuasive arguments based on proof. While Virilio’s work connects various strands of thinking in a breathtaking intellectual performance, such an approach can sometimes backfire, particularly in his discussion of the triumph of Nietzschean man and the death of God in his chapter “The Near-Death Experience.”
He starts with the claim that in the absence of Judaic etiological stories, science posits its own account of the origins of species. Darwin’s theory of evolution, which assigned to the ape all materials that evolve into man, is similar to current attempts to create androids with artificial intelligence. Virilio argues that the ape, the Ur-human, is later replaced with machines, the über-human: “And so we went from the metempsychosis of the evolutionary monkey to the embodiment of a human mind in an android; why not move on after that to those evolving machines whose rituals could be jolted into action by their own energy potential” (35). The problem is not evolution or artificial intelligence, but that these concepts are routinely used to diminish human agency. So much so, in fact, that Raymond A. Moody’s book Life after Life, which encouraged people to simulate clinical death as a way of achieving spiritual insight, sold 10 million copies (99). Virilio, who cites this book as the reason for the near-death experience movement, takes this fact as an index of something much larger; the quickening of artificial life marks the slowing down and near immobilization of human life.
What is difficult to accept in this account of a comatose human agency is that it identifies the removal of a God-centered account of humankind as its cause:
If one eliminates God and if, soon after, it becomes fashionable to declare Him dead, it is only normal that through successive shifts, one ends up getting a little anxious about the origins of this ‘man’ who, once removed from the Judeo-Christian Genesis, suddenly finds himself robbed of his inheritance, deprived of identity. (34)
Though Virilio implicitly accepts that the biblical narrative provides a template for scientific narratives–he calls it “a substitute faith” (33)–he doesn’t explore the role the prior narrative plays in shaping the succeeding one. To call science a poor reflection of Christianity seems insufficient. (It is unclear why he links two vastly different religions together in the hybrid term Judeo-Christian that functionally dissolves that difference.) More to the point, Virilio doesn’t explain how the theory of evolution supports an agenda similar to that offered in Christianity’s version of human origins. So why does it appear to be the villain here? Perhaps Virilio wants to retain Christian rhetoric as a kind of counter-Enlightenment narrative, but he doesn’t delineate this idea clearly enough to succeed in the task.
Certainly Virilio’s harrowing visions of humans in suspended animation waiting out the end times, of mountains crumbling into data, of buildings without substance, and of wars without trace have apocalyptic overtones that urge the reader to question the influences on his argument. While technology requires sustained, careful critiques, if for no other reason than its mammoth presence in contemporary life, it is unclear what Virilio intends to gain by attaching this sort of millenialism to his critique. Which is also to say: things end badly in this book. Virilio offers no suggestions as to how we might intervene in the processes he describes, or how we might stave off the horrific end he sees for us. In the final sentences of A Landscape, he explains that in fact no intervention is possible: “The countdown has in fact begun. In a few months, a few years at most, there will no longer be time to intervene; real time will have imploded” (96). While the dire tone of this prediction might be meant to galvanize the reader into action, it unnecessarily closes down the efficacy of that action–for what kind of intervention can be accomplished in a few months, a few years? This prompts a second, more cynical question: If the world has become so hostile to humans to the extent that we are barely animate with only months to live, why bother sounding the alarm at all?
Indeed, there seem to be few, if any, means to re-appropriate, re-direct, sabotage, or poach the mechanisms of disappearance that Virilio critiques. Apparently, no subject, neither man nor woman, Westerner nor Easterner, rich nor poor, black nor white can find new ways to connect with one another under the given conditions. While other theorists–Deleuze and Guattari come immediately to mind–have suggested that possibilities for resistance remain even amidst the most limiting of circumstances, Virilio seems unconvinced. At times he seems so committed to his own apocalyptic vision that he does not pursue the possibilities his own arguments make available–that is, if information can dismantle matter, it might also be able reconstitute matter in perhaps radical and useful ways. With the increased, though exaggerated, emphasis on information, bodies disconnected from space might be free to renegotiate certain limitations. Yet in Virilio’s critique, there is apparently no exit.
Virilio’s strength is in identifying overlooked relationships and patterns among disparate domains of contemporary life, such as the military organization of space, human perception, and architecture. In spite of his bleak outlook, he draws important connections that need to be pursued. By jumping from one small consequence of technology (the loss of melatonin, for example) to vast claims (the growing inability to respond to our natural environments), Virilio uncovers unanticipated links between our current condition and its cause. Yet the way he switches from biology, to architecture, then to history, to pop culture and fashion, and back to technology is a little like channel surfing. As a result, the book is both fascinating and unfocused–as dizzying as the landscape he describes. Even so, Virilio demonstrates a fascinating mode of intellectual engagement with the contemporary moment; he places urgent injunctions alongside wordplay and puts serious content into a playful structure. And as for the book’s bleak conclusion: at worst, it is hopelessly discouraging; at best it is a call for a more rigorous explanation of–and intervention in–the relationship between speed and space.
Char Roone Miller
Department of Public and International Affairs
George Mason University
cmillerd@gmu.edu
Review of: Slavoj Zizek, On Belief. London and New York: Routledge, 2001.
“God is dead,” proclaimed Nietzsche’s madman. Many readers, particularly undergraduate students, have been surprised by the passing of God; Nietzsche’s implication that God once lived does not comfortably fit their sense of Nietzsche as an atheist. More than a century later, Slavoj Zizek surprises readers with his suggestion that God is still alive and kicking in a post-Hegelian/post-Marxist/post-modern world. Zizek’s project shares many elements with Nietzsche’s, in spite of its opposite account of God’s health, including, most importantly, the interest they share in liberating people from their infatuation with the Other that dominates their lives–most significantly for Zizek, from the Big Other that governs the ideological systems of meaning in which our “choices” occur. Zizek, Senior Researcher at the Institute for Social Sciences, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, and amazingly popular critical theorist, attempts in On Belief to bring Christ back as the herald of a politics by which the choice, the real choice (as well as the choice of the real), of meaning can be faced.
The support for this argument is not easy to follow: Zizek’s language is brisk, lively, and smart, but it is not clearly structured. Nor does his style of writing in pithy aphoristic paragraphs lend itself to broad summary (much like Nietzsche’s style). But this book is clearly an attempt by Zizek to reposition the social meaning and power of Christianity in order to dispose of a range of social hierarchies (race, nation, sex, and class, at least); it is difficult to think of a more challenging yet rewarding political project. Zizek is unwilling to leave the territory of Christianity to the ostensibly Christian institutions and interpretations currently acting to maintain the liberal-capitalist empire. In a way similar to the destruction that Pauline Christianity wrought on the Roman Empire, Zizek wants to use a reconfigured Christianity to ease the grip of liberal-capitalist hegemony. “What Christianity did with regard to the Roman Empire, this global ‘multiculturalist’ polity,” he confides, “we should do with regard to today’s Empire” (5).
This re-imagined Christianity, Zizek claims, is the suppressed truth of Christianity, the liberating power of love for the imperfections of the Other: “the ultimate secret of the Christian love is, perhaps, the loving attachment to the Other’s imperfection” (147). Affection for the sins and weaknesses of others is coupled with the erasure of a final judgment, in part because our attachment to the gap in the perfection of others is exactly what God loves about us. Furthermore, this gap is the way in which humans are created in the image of God. “When I, a human being, experience myself as cut off from God, at that very moment of the utmost abjection, I am absolutely close to God, since I find myself in the position of the abandoned Christ,” explains Zizek (146). Because Christ is like us, an abandoned and imperfect sinner, he is loved by God and by us. “And it is only within this horizon that the properly Christian Love can emerge, a Love beyond Mercy. Love is always love for the Other insofar as he is lacking–we love the Other BECAUSE of his limitation, helplessness, ordinariness even” (146-7). Thus Zizek’s Christianity subverts the idealization we feel toward the Other by filling this connection with not our desire so much as our affection for the empty desire of the Other.
Zizek’s version of Christianity is, he claims, a way to will the return of the repressed as a symbolic act.
The symbolic act is best conceived of as the purely formal, self-referential, gesture of the self-assertion of one's subjective position. Let us take a situation of the political defeat of some working-class initiative; what one should accomplish at this moment to reassert one's identity is precisely the symbolic act: stage a common event in which some shared ritual (song or whatsoever) is performed, an event which contains no positive political program--its message is only the purely performative assertion: "We are still here, faithful to our mission, the space is still open for our activity to come!" (84-5)
Zizek wants to keep this space open for positive political action. He is the symbolic voice for the “truth” of Christianity.
Following the logic through, as Zizek attempts (with Hegel and Nietzsche on his team), allows him to expect the return of the repressed within Christianity–or at least to exploit the miraculous return of freedom and choice in a world where it has been crushed and exploited by international corporate power. Hegel’s dialectic allows the suppressed to return in defeat as the significant real. Nietzsche’s debt to Christianity is very similar to Zizek’s program, in that Nietzsche often found himself and his truth-telling about God to be the fulfillment of Christianity. Zizek believes that Christianity can undercut the liberal-capitalist empire in the same way, by demanding that the truth be told. This is in resistance to the great temptation of the postmodern world: that in the way we flit from identity to identity and desire to desire, we will flit from one logic to another. The truth should be told. “Thought,” Zizek writes, “is more than ever exposed to the temptation of ‘losing its nerve,’ of precociously abandoning the old conceptual coordinates” (32). Christianity can provide the coordinates by which the ways we understand good/evil, right/wrong, and valuable/insignificant can be re-coordinated. In this redeployment of Christianity, through the pursuit of the conclusion of its logic, Zizek attempts to make the death of Christ stand for the death of the envy of the Other’s jouissance. From this claim Zizek works out a seemingly endless range of insights and thoughtful observations on culture, society, and politics.
One of the remarkable twists to Zizekian Christianity is its defense and romanticization of sex by filling that romance not with fate but with accidents and fortune. Zizek inquires at one point: “What if sexual difference is not simply a biological fact, but the Real of an antagonism that defines humanity, so that once sexual difference is abolished, a human being effectively becomes indistinguishable from a machine?” (43). Sex and sexuality become absolutely necessary to the continuance of human subjectivity as we know it–a subjectivity that Zizek does attempt to maintain–not because sexual difference and desire provide a firm, “natural” foundation but because they constitute the negative trauma around which human symbolization spins.
The passage from animal copulation to properly human sexuality affects the human animal in such a way that it causes the human animal's radical self-withdrawal, so that the zero-level of human sexuality is not the "straight" sexual intercourse, but the solitary act of masturbation sustained by fantasizing--the passage from this self-immersion to involvement with an Other, to finding pleasure in the Other's body, is by no means "natural," it involves a series of traumatic cuts, leaps and inventive improvisations. (24)
There is no given to the human condition, human relations, or human subject. All of what we take to be naturally given to us and naturally ours–tastes, desires, sex, and loves–are the product of a haphazard yet skillful “tarrying with the negative.” Humanity, like Christ, is not at home in this world and will never recover her authentic self, natural desires, or proper place. Our success is our displacement.
On Belief raises many questions: what, for example, is the function of the Others that dominate this text, Hegel and Lacan? In a text that ostensibly attempts to renegotiate the machinery by which others determine our choices, Zizek spends a lot of time defending and deferring his insights to Lacan. I’m highly sympathetic to his defense of Lacan against those who would classify Lacan as overly obscure, willfully obfuscating, ahistorical, and ham-fistedly structuralist, but I’m not sure how it fits within the larger project of Zizek’s writings or his attempts to reduce the authority of the Other.
Additionally, the selection of friends and foes seems rather random and chaotic. Why, for example, the apparently willful disavowal of ideas that Zizek could easily appropriate, such as Gnosticism? Perhaps this is the inverse of the previous question or a way to suggest that there are people missing from this book who could provide useful aides and foils for Zizek, particularly Elaine Pagels (see The Gnostic Gospels). Zizek ridicules Gnosticism without dealing with Pagel’s work, work that in many ways is very similar to his, particularly through its emphasis on the absence of a final judgment.
Finally, what are the stakes in asserting a monotheism instead of a polytheism, or more broadly, how are Zizek’s decisions concerning the true Christianity and its corruptions being made? This reading feels like Freud’s Moses and Monotheism, in which Freud admits that in order to make his point concerning the creation of racial and national identities he is forced to construct an edifice that any fool could knock over. These sorts of choices and assertions seem to be part of the attempt to willfully articulate a new position and organization for the things that give life meaning, a process that would be more effective if made less tentative.
Admittedly, to ask Zizek to play by these rules, by which his choices are fully explained, is to expect more of him than anyone else can give, and probably to miss the point that accounts of the meaning of Christianity really do not have a point of closure. It’s that lack of a point of closure, or determinative point, that makes counter-hegemonic political action possible.
Zizek knows a thing or two about political action; for example, he ran for president of the Republic of Slovenia in 1990. More significantly, as a member of the Committee for the Protection of the Human Rights of the Four Accused in Slovenia in 1988, Zizek worked to free four journalists arrested and brought to trial by the Yugoslav Army in Slovenia and in doing so struggled for the liberation of Slovenia. The strategy was pursued by articulating a demand to change the conditions under which the journalists were arrested, which meant a change in socialism; by pursuing the literal meaning of the commission, Zizek helped to bring down the socialist government. He is working in a similar vein here–by pursuing a literal meaning of Christianity, he hopes to change the ruling linguistic and intellectual co-ordinances of the fictional rules that govern our lives. By asserting the “true” value of Christianity, Zizek and Nietzsche seem like the two most Christian madmen since the one who died on the cross.
Sandy Baldwin
The Center for Literary Computing
West Virginia University
charles.baldwin@mail.wvu.edu
Review of: Loss Pequeño Glazier, Digital Poetics: The Making of E-Poetries. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 2002
A poem is a small (or large)
Machine made of words.
–William Carlos Williams
The odd thing about innovative literature is that no literature is innovative. The familiar but unsolvable paradox of Ezra Pound’s rallying cry to “Make it new!” (147) was exactly what made modernist aesthetics so persuasive and productive for the last century of literature. Pound’s statement is paradoxical from the first: he seems to call for new forms and subjects for literature, for a rejection of tradition, all the while using a quote from the tradition-bound world of Confucius. Of course, the critical problem involved is nothing new. In the simplest sense, the “new”-ness of literary innovation occurs against the background of a tradition that novelty ends up reinforcing. Any literary work will be innovative in purely conventional ways, readable for its experimentation and for its relation to a stable tradition of experiment. On the other hand, the deep thrill of the new remains in its claim on the future, where each innovation opens a temporal difference within the continuities of literary history. Making it new seems to enliven the present with the future. Innovation is always possible, for the odd thing about innovative literature is that all literature is innovative. It is hard to see literary history without Pound’s axiom. Or, better: at once novelty and tradition, surprise and repetition, the paradox of innovation–and the degree to which we resolve or displace it–explains something of the role of literature today.
If we are to take Niklas Luhmann seriously, the paradox of innovation underlies “art as a social system” (199-201). The systematicity of literature, as an institution, is built on this paradox of an innovation that is never more than a repetition. Literary innovation and the modern identification of literature as innovation allow for the observation of processes of historical novelty. This is not the place for an extended exposition of Luhmann’s general social theory, but literary innovation plays a fundamental though paradoxical role in his understanding of modernity as a system of interlocking subsystems.1 The functional differentiation of each closed, self-maintaining subsystem means that theory can only offer partial accounts of system functioning.2 Each theoretical account is focused on the subsystem’s particular mode of differentiation. For systems to differentiate themselves, they must internally copy and reflect the distinction between system and environment. The system of artworks differentiates itself through its concern with innovation. The focus on novelty is the form of self-reference unique to artworks in the social systems of modernity. Moreover, the particularity of the written medium codifies and universalizes the self-referential, auto-telic function of artworks (284-5). As a result, all modern artworks tend toward the medium of writing. Meanwhile, if innovation is central to the self-production (autopoeisis) of all systems, then the specific role of literature is the observation of this self-production “itself” (Roberts 33-5). Literature is how modernity describes the kinetics of its own historical evolution. “Making it new” is a dynamic maintaining the openness of sub-systems to the environment. One implication is that the language-focus of contemporary poetries is less a response to a postmodern loss of reference than a self-referential code within a language increasingly employed as an instrumental tool for exchange and commerce. This is evident in the popular role of literature: it must produce results that are declared to be important but are not taken seriously.
The first-order theories of cybernetics and informatics that underlie Luhmann’s theories already presupposed a concept of literature as information density. While Luhmann’s concern is with observation and differentiation between systems, these “first order” theories approached “control and communication in the animal and the machine”–in the words of Norbert Wiener’s subtitle to Cybernetics–as a matter of coding and transmitting messages within a given information system. For example, Claude E. Shannon’s crucial Mathematical Theory of Communication argued that information was unrelated to meaning (31). The problems of information theory were instead a matter of efficient coding and transmission of messages. For Shannon, the more complex and difficult the encoding of a message, the more information it contained. Inversely, information-dense messages contained little redundancy, that is, little of the message could be lost without compromising the communication involved. Now, the novelty of literature was Shannon’s singular example of information density (56). Literature consistently supplied the limit concept of a message with little or no redundancy. Since information theory addresses systems of coding and transmission, literature remains necessary to the definition of information while lying outside its space of application. Literature is the medium of information “itself.”
From a systems-theory point of view, innovative literature is a meta-code ensuring the stability of the systems through pure self-reference. “Innovation” is the doubleness of a paradox that literature thematizes. The proximity of literature to the root association of poetry as poeisis or “making” suggests a more dynamic role than internal self-maintenance. No doubt Luhmann’s description is accurate enough, though it does little to explain why literary innovation remains so compelling despite all paradoxes. That is, it works well as a description of “art as a social system” but less well as an account of literature “itself.” The insistence on systematicity does not solve but merely displaces the paradox of innovative literature. Rather than take this as a failure of Luhmann’s rather grandiose theory, it should be seen as pointing out the asystematicity of literary innovation. Luhmann’s theory offers a displaced version of literary aesthetics within the rigorous sociological rubric of systems theory. Literature becomes a provisional closure, the institutional site for the introduction and assimilation of innovation. The poetic point of systems theory is that innovative literature–as making, poeisis–rather than simply thematizing the integration of newness into the system, is what creates the dynamism of the system in the first place. So-called digital literature only underlines the point, since it automates processes defined by and identified with modernist innovation: instant surrealism or Burroughsian cut-ups via text generators; instant seriality and collaboration via email or IRC; instant concrete and animated poetry via Photoshop or Flash; instant procedural and concept poetry via hypertext or HTML forms; and so on.
It is exciting, then, to read the persuasive call for “electronic space as a space of poeisis” (5) in Loss Pequeño Glazier’s Digital Poetics: The Making of E-Poetries. Invoking poetry as making or poeisis both broadens the scope of poetic innovation and raises the question of “What are we making here?” (the title of the final section of Glazier’s book). Opening the field while raising the stakes is typical of Glazier’s approach. This is a challenging, sometimes frustrating, but always important book. Digital Poetics fascinates as a reflection of its subject matter, as an attempt to grasp the textuality of e-poetry in the antique textuality of the book.
At first glance, one finds in Digital Poetics an assemblage of diverse essays reflecting disparate occasions and sources, but unified by a singular insistence that innovative poetry practice informs how we might explore digital media. This first reading finds in Glazier a kind of policeman of innovative writing, laying down the law declaring who is in, who is out. As one might expect, such maneuvers produce a reaction. Brandon Barr’s review in Electronic Book Review argues that Glazier’s “prescriptions and descriptions seem to narrowly define precisely where he wants […] expansion to occur.” Other early responses have similarly focused on these efforts to fix and monumentalize a canon and criteria for innovative literature. These critiques confuse particular moments in Glazier’s argument with crippling errors.3 Suspiciously, such readings find Glazier’s book too easily repeating the modernist paradoxes of the new and innovative, too explicitly positing the oxymoron of normative innovation. Let it be said that Glazier is fundamentally committed to an inclusive poetics, open to diverse technologies, forms, and modes of authoring–as his pioneering work as creator and Director of the Electronic Poetry Center (<www.epc.buffalo.edu>) makes clear. In fact, the book is much more subtle in staging the processes of innovation within institutional thematizations of the new. If there is a performative contradiction here, between Glazier’s commitment to innovation and his insistence on distinguishing the innovative from the non-innovative, it reflects the tight, reflexive relation of poeisis to conceptualization. Innovation will be institutionalized, will become part of the dynamics of the system of literary history. Glazier recognizes his book as part of this process: he insists on the radical openness of innovative practice while insisting on its particularity to certain modes and traditions. Glazier’s criticism is as much a result of as an interpretation of its object.
Make no mistake: Digital Poetries is a paradoxical book. Read this book against the grain, but the grain is multiple and branching. Glazier offers an appropriate description of e-text: “Because much or all of your text may not be received, you must, to be successful, create a text that is somehow suspended between various possibilities of reading.” He continues that such a text is “provisional, conditional, and characterized by its multiple renderings,” or better: it is a “program” (15). Glazier’s book is a kind of “program.” Like the web-based poetries Glazier uses as examples, the book oscillates between display and markup, a “dance between possibilities of representation” (15). The skeleton key to understanding innovative literature is not this or that innovative literature but literary innovation itself, and it is this poetic principle with which Glazier dances. Innovation or poeisis occurs. The result is a kind of model of how to read poetry, focused on a background of innovation against which all making occurs. Glazier’s central claim bears close attention: through the over-reaching of poetry as the exemplification of digital media, particularly within the current interest in programmable poetry and codework as literature, innovation shines through as a cultural process within and against literary tradition. Still, Glazier’s exclusionary moves in establishing criteria and a canon for innovative digital poetry are what first get the reader’s attention. These moves amount to three major claims.
First claim: prose and prose concepts dominate discussions of digital literature. This means that the primary examples of digital literature are in prose form and are situated in the prose tradition. A simple reading of the major scholarly works on digital writing shows this claim to be non-controversial. More interestingly, Glazier shows how discussions of digital writing continually adopt prose concepts and terms as paradigms. Prose, with its narrative trajectory and linearity, swallows all other forms of literature when it comes to the digital. Glazier’s alternative is no surprise: innovative poetry.
Second claim: the emergent canon of thinkers and practitioners of digital literature excludes other possible writing practices. These figures largely overlap with the dominance of prose: they are the writers whose work circulates in discussion of digital literature, the texts taught in universities, cited in the press, and so on. The configuration is something like Moulthrop/Joyce/Landow/Bolter. Glazier’s response is to suggest that equally important work emanates from the field of digital poetries. He presents an alternative configuration something like Cayley/Kac/Rosenberg and Glazier himself.
Final claim: innovative writing can be distinguished from non-innovative writing. Glazier argues that innovative writing is marked by two central concerns: 1) it “offers the perspective of the multiple ‘I’” and, 2) it “recognizes the importance of the materials of writing to writing itself, an engagement with its medium” (22). He goes on to identify the non-innovative with specific features: “narrative, plot, anecdotal re-telling of human experiences, logical descriptions, chronological sequences of events, a reliance on factual information, a view of language as a transparent (or at most, tinted) bearer of meaning, and an attachment to a Modernist aesthetic” (47). The innovative lines up very clearly with the poetic, and with a very particular line of poetic tradition.
What are we to make of these three claims? Glazier is persuasive in showing the exclusive focus on digital narratives, and there is no doubt that this focus limits the field of literature and enforces a concern with rules, ordering, and territories. Just as certainly, nothing is gained by replacing one canon with another and one set of rules with another. The point-counterpoint quality of aligning constellations of names must be understood as a tactical maneuver rather than as the absolute declaration of a new canon: it is not that Cayley/Kac/Rosenberg/Glazier must now be read to the exclusion of all others, but that they open the field of digital poetries circumscribed by Moulthrop/Joyce/Landow/Bolter. No doubt, none of the figures on these lists (including Glazier himself) is committed to a single and monumental view of digital literature. Glazier’s targets are instead our easy institutionalization of “major figures” and the almost subterranean assimilation of exemplary works to models for all work.
The criteria distinguishing the innovative from the non-innovative are somewhat more complex. At first they seem easy to dismiss, since any writing can be shown to exhibit Glazier’s criteria for innovation. Adorno’s assertion that “even demystified artworks are more than is literally the case” (45) applies: even the most non-reflexive writing shows, in its resistance to reflection, a concern with its medium and its mode of authorship. The criteria of innovation can be generalized into meaninglessness. Furthermore, there is an arbitrariness to his list of non-innovative features. A “Modernist aesthetic” would describe many of the writers Glazier valorizes as precursors to electronic poetry: Pound, Williams, Stein; who could be more Modernist? Moreover, Modernism is typically seen as challenging the other items in the list (narrative, plot, linearity, etc.). As a tactical approach to reading poetry rather than as an empirical feature of poems, however, “the perspective of the multiple ‘I’” offers insight into writing that emphasizes the conditions enabling voice, the polyphonous messages crossing even the most transparent communication, and the agency of various informational nodes and programs (47-54). Again, looking past the prescriptive rhetoric, Glazier’s criteria function less as restrictions on how to write than as a pedagogy applying equally to the reading of innovative poetry and digital media.
Glazier’s connection between innovative writing and a recognition of “the importance of the materials of writing to writing itself, an engagement with its medium” is complicated by a conceptual slippage. Is the point the materials or the medium? The distinction is not trivial, implying the difference between a focus on the tools of making and the way these tools are reflected in the object. Glazier’s use of “materiality” derives from Jerome McGann’s work on textual “conditions,” situating the poem “within specific conditions of textuality” (20). Glazier further elaborates McGann’s point in terms of the “licensing” of textual experimentation by “the cultural scene” in which it moves. These conditions “not only inform, but facilitate the emergence of specific types of writing” (55).4 The slippage from material to medium is stabilized in the notion of informing “conditions.” Here literature is roughly an example of historically contingent conditions of text production, a mimetic reflex to the cultural scene. In terms of digital media, literary writing remains of interest as a reflexive example of digital media. Poetry works like the doubleness of code (as something to be read and something to be performed). In the background is a rhetorical schema binding the immateriality of digital information and the materiality of particular instantiations. That is, we read digital media, and we do so because they are like innovative literature. The consistency of this reassuring schema rests on the critical gamble of a mimetic likeness between literature and digital media. The slippage between medium and material is indicative of this mimetic relation.
The crucial point–the crux of Glazier’s argument–is the nature of the exemplification involved. Is the poem simply a repetition of the conditions that license it? Does an emphasis on materiality dissolve the poem into its medium? Or can we speak of engagement with the medium as a more complex negotiation? Similarly, does an emphasis on materiality, both in innovative writing and in digital media, materialize poetic innovation? Can innovation be grasped in this way? Is the status of the material in fact a concealed concern with the reception of novelty, that is, with the reading of innovation?5 Curiously, though he invokes McGann and other theorists of textual materiality, close attention to Glazier’s argument reveals a difference between Glazier’s theory of the material and the materialities that he examines. In fact, Glazier’s use of materiality rescues an explicitly poetic materiality, closer to Robert Duncan’s “first permission” (7) than to McGann’s “licensing.” Glazier balances an awareness of the ideological frameworks in which poetry occurs with the material conditions created through acts of poeisis.
The best instance of this conditional making is the work of Jim Rosenberg, invoked by Glazier as “one of the most valuable investigations currently underway” in digital poetry (137). There is as yet no adequate critical discussion of Rosenberg’s poetry–which is as much rooted in mathematics, music, and philosophy as in poetic tradition–but Glazier provides an excellent opening, and with good reason: Rosenberg offers a poetic practice rooted in poeisis or innovation prior to any particular material instantiation. At first this seems paradoxical, given Rosenberg’s tight identification with digital poetry (and his place in Glazier’s alternative canon). In fact, Rosenberg challenges the digital orthodoxy by defining hypertext in the abstract, as a way of representing a network that could represented by “other means than using a computer–on paper, for instance.” At the same time, Rosenberg takes hypertext as a way of thinking not yet possible in any given technology. That is, hypertext is in no way a function of technology but rather a particular approach to writing practice. This resulting provisionality of the poem situates poetic innovation in the reader and not the material text.
Rosenberg’s diverse works share an interest in simultaneity. While we are familiar with simultaneous musical notes or simultaneous visual figures in painting, writing is largely understood as a linear, sequential medium. As Rosenberg is at pains to point out, even such a purportedly multilinear form as hypertext–at least in the dominant link-node model–is intrinsically rooted in the line. While structurally there might seem to be many possible choices for the reader, reading or navigation is a disjunctive process of choice and elimination. The link-node follows a logic of “or.” There are other possibilities. Just as category theory offers divergent forms of mathematical inclusion and exclusion, Rosenberg proposes that the disjunctive link-node is only one of a multiplicity of hypertexts. His work seeks a logic of “and,” rooted in conjunction or gathering.
Rosenberg’s poetic simultaneities are piles of words, stacked clusters of word “skeins,” following his insight in “The Interactive Diagram Sentence” that such juxtaposition is “the most basic structural act.” Mousing over “opens” the simultaneity to reveal an individual skein, a scatter of words and phrases, with “vertical” relations indicated by changes in font. The simultaneity is a poem that emits readable texts. Each text is the outcome of the user’s mouse interactions with Rosenberg’s programmed relations between skeins. Appearances are conditioned by the user’s attention via the structure perception-mouseover-poem. The poem is an opening.
While it is possible to speak of particular textual conditions enabling Rosenberg’s work–the tradition of Mac Low’s simultaneities, the availability of easily programmable Hypercard stacks, and so on–none of these adequately accounts for what happens as individual skeins appear and disappear. The simultaneity remains in a kind of quasi-space and -time prior to the text. Mousing over is the real time of the poem. The resulting words are not inscriptions but transcriptions of the user’s movement and attention. Following Rosenberg’s definition in “The Interactive Diagram Sentence”: the simultaneity is a “fundamental micromaneuver at the heart of all abstraction,” producing a minimal possible world, a phenomenology of momentary objects.
Rosenberg argues that we should think of hypertext as “a medium in which one thinks ‘natively.’” The paradoxical task is to think of the technology that would be adequate to “an individual thought” that “is entirely hypertext.” Rosenberg writes a poem for technology not yet available. In this disjunction of grand conceptual apparatus with its instantiation in digital media, Rosenberg’s work is innovative by means of its own failure. These poems mark the structural relation between a poem and itself as an act of innovation. The poem is innovation’s “mode of disappearance,” as Jean Baudrillard puts it (213).6
The recent convergence of code and writing offers an extended test ground for the notion of provisional materiality developed in Glazier’s and Rosenberg’s work. Glazier’s argument for the structural similarity of poem and code (164) and the assimilation of the poet to programmer (176) comes in the context of emergent writing practices such as Alan Sondheim’s “codework” and MEZ’s “net.wurk.”7 In much of this work, code is invoked as a mode of citation, distortion, and linguistic play; in some cases, the work itself is the outcome of executable code. This “uneasy combination of contents and structures” (Sondheim) would seem to fulfill Glazier’s claims that innovative poetry will inform how we might explore digital media. What makes these works is their thematization of the coupling between code as an artificial language instructing and interacting with a microprocessor, and code as something to be read.
Literary innovation continues to provide the model for what is new about new media. The poem does not exemplify the work of digital media, but we understand digital media through literary writing. Our experience of innovative writing provides the particular, reflexive experience we seek in digital media. In the end, code is a kind of extra or “ternary” sign added to text. To call this sign “materiality” is to acknowledge the conditional, procedural, and rhetorical quality of the material.8 “Code” metaphorizes poetic invention, and it is this metaphor that makes codework so fascinating today. Innovative writing practice makes digital media new.
The value of Digital Poetics is its identification of the systematic relation between innovative poetry and digital media. Digital poetry reflects on processes of organization and development in the systems of communication and media we live in today. Glazier starts his book with the observation that “we have not arrived at a place but at an awareness of the conditions of texts” (1), and in this respect his book seems to mime its object, offering less of a conclusion than a sustained reflection on its own conditions of possiblity. The prescriptive veneer of Glazier’s argument is a reaction to a rigorous attention to literary innovation. The text integrates Glazier’s own poetry with critical reflection and reverie, and further adopts and adapts terminology from UNIX and other computer environments, dissolving the distinction between acts of programming and poetry writing. If this book frustrates, it is in part because it is written through William Carlos Williams’s attitude toward the poem and the program–toward the program-poem–as “active,” where the poem is itself “an instrument of thought” (6). The paradoxical self-reflexivity involved is obvious: the poet “thinks through the poem” (6) to discover the very poem being thought through. Glazier convincingly shows that digital media is a site of just such poetical activity today.
1. See Rasch on Luhmann as “modernity’s most meticulous theorist” (10).
2. Lyotard’s critique of Habermas, directed at the desire for an “organic whole,” hardly applies to Luhmann. Luhmann’s modernity offers not so much a lack of unity but a unity composed of functions and relations that cannot be surveyed from outside. See Rasch 29-52.
3. See, for example, Weishaus’ review in Rain Taxi and the debates in the archive of the venerable POETICS listserv. Compare Hartley’s review, with its emphasis on poeisis paralleling my own.
4. Compare the influential “media materialism” of Friedrich Kittler where the conditions of information processing are defined as material for a given cultural moment.
5. N. Katherine Hayles’s influential How We Became Posthuman is a parallel example of this presupposition that literary texts provide insight into the material structures of digital media.
6. This concluding chapter of Baudrillard’s Symbolic Exchange and Death is a valuable contribution to the analysis of poetry, often overlooked for his better-known essays on simulation.
8. A useful comparison is Michel Foucault’s analysis of the “enunciative function” that requires a “repeatable materiality” (102) in order to organize those institutions that facilitate possibilities of reinscription and transcription (103).
Piotr Gwiazda
Department of English
University of Maryland, Baltimore County
gwiazda@umbc.edu
Review of: Marjorie Perloff, 21st-Century Modernism: The “New” Poetics. Malden: Blackwell, 2002.
The title of Marjorie Perloff’s new book seems, at first, a little confusing. Does she mean 21st-century postmodernism? No. Then perhaps she means the idea of modernism in the twenty-first century–our continuing obsession with the series of artistic and literary revolutions that took place almost a hundred years ago mainly in Europe? But why is the book publicized as a manifesto (specifically, as a part of the Blackwell Manifestos series)? Manifestos usually look toward the future, not the past, so what does modernism have to do with today’s (or tomorrow’s) poetic theory and practice? Apparently a lot, judging by Perloff’s subtitle: The “New” Poetics. The book’s final chapter is entitled “Modernism” at the Millennium–the quotation marks again hinting at something both forward- and backward-looking in Perloff’s provocative reappraisal of modernism and its significance for contemporary writing.
Some of these questions are answered for us in the book’s preface. Here Perloff suggests that we jettison “the tired dichotomy that has governed our discussion of twentieth-century poetics for much too long: that between modernism and postmodernism” (1-2). What we normally think of as postmodern poetry–the Projectivists, Beats, San Francisco poets, confessional poets, New York School, and “deep image” school–now appears less revolutionary than it did in the late fifties and early sixties; these poetic schools and movements were “indeed a breath of fresh air” (2), but only so far as they redefined the terms of opposition to the high modernism of Yeats, Frost, Stevens, Moore, later Eliot, and the New Critical orthodoxy that dominated the American poetry scene in the years immediately after World War II. In Perloff’s view, it is the avant-garde modernism of the early twentieth-century that, following a “curious poetic lag” (10), now emerges as a vital precursor to what she considers the most ambitious and adventurous writing of today. “Indeed,” Perloff observes,
what strikes us when we reread the poetries of the early twentieth century is that the real fate of first-stage modernism was one of deferral, its radical and utopian aspirations being cut off by the catastrophe, first of the Great War, and then of the series of crises produced by the two great totalitarianisms that dominated the first half of the century and culminated in World War II and the subsequent Cold War. (3)
Perloff envisages her book as a sort of paradigm shift, a reconsideration of the standard narrative of modernism with four chapters devoted to the poetic praxis of the early T.S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, Marcel Duchamp, and Velimir Khlebnikov, and the final chapter discussing the importance of these avant-garde modernists to the work of Susan Howe, Charles Bernstein, Lyn Hejinian, and Steve McCaffery. These, and presumably other poets and artists associated with the Language writing movement (broadly conceived), take up the challenge of experimental modernism; it is through their work, rather than the work of, say, Charles Olson or Allen Ginsberg, that the spirit of modernism lives again. As Perloff says in the concluding sentence of the book, “ours may well be the moment when the lessons of early modernism are finally being learned” (200).
Perloff begins her revision of twentieth-century poetics with a fresh look at the early work of T.S. Eliot. In a gesture of critical bravado, she links Eliot’s early poetry (not The Waste Land, it is worth noting, but “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and other poems from Prufrock and Other Observations) to the main emphasis of Language writing aesthetic: language as the object, rather than the tool, of representation. Perloff suggests a parallel between Eliot’s idea of “impersonality” (with its implied separation of writing and experience) and Charles Bernstein’s call for indirection, artifice, and impermeability featured in his own manifesto “Artifice of Absorption” (published in A Poetics). Both Eliot in the first decades of the twentieth century and Bernstein in the last ones reject the notion of sincerity and explore the idea of language as the site of meaning-making. Eliot’s theory of a poet as a “medium” that fuses together particular impressions and experiences can be said to anticipate, in some ways, the contemporary notion of poetry as a construction, rather than a reconstruction, of experience.
In her discussion of Eliot’s early poetry, Perloff is especially interested in demonstrating how the poet’s Flaubertian quest for le mot juste, or simply his technique, enhances the idea of materiality of language. In her close reading of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” she notes Eliot’s penchant for producing “aural excitement” (21); thus, at the start of the poem, the monosyllabic line “Let us go then, you and I” creates, she says, a note of torpor; in the line “half-deserted streets,” she continues, “the s’s and t’s coalesce in what seems to be a whispered proposition coming from a doorway: ssstt!” (20). The point Perloff is trying to make is this: for the early Eliot, sound pretty much equaled subject matter. Accordingly, his work from the period reveals an ongoing preoccupation with the constructedness of poetic language (Prufrock himself being a composite of various sensibilities). This preoccupation can be seen not only in his effective use of sound effects, but also in the abrupt tense and mood shifts, tenuously interconnected syntactical units, juxtapositions of formal and informal idiom, and borrowings from foreign languages. These strategies, Perloff continues, “relate ‘Prufrock’ to Constructivist notions of ‘laying bare the device,’ of using material form–in this case, language–as an active compositional agent, impelling the reader to participate in the process of construction” (26).
In her attempt to paint two pictures of T.S. Eliot–one before World War I and one afterward–Perloff doesn’t rely on textual demonstration only. Looking at the poet’s correspondence from the prewar period, she describes him as a youthful, carefree student living in Paris, at one point sharing quarters with his close friend Jean Verdenal, and writing some of the most imaginative and experimental verse of the day. The outbreak of the war put a stop to Eliot’s idyllic lifestyle; the correspondence from the war years reveals him as a perpetually worried man living in a “curious form of exile” in London (33), and longing to return to Paris in order to be able to write poetry again. It was in London that the news of Jean Verdenal’s death at the Dardanelles reached him in 1915 (his friend would become the dedicatee of Prufrock and Other Observations, published two years later). In the period following the war, Eliot seemed a changed person. He no longer yearned to return to Paris, and his poetry no longer featured the same propensity for Laforguean playfulness, inventive use of syntax, and explorations of the semantic possibilities of sound. At this point, perhaps in anticipation of potential criticism of her characterization, Perloff says: “I do not want to suggest anything as vulgar or simplistic as that Eliot’s own avant-garde writing died in Gallipoli with Jean Verdenal [. . . .] I am merely suggesting that between Eliot’s radical poetry of the avant guerre and its postwar reincarnation, a decisive change had taken place” (39). A change did indeed take place in Eliot’s poetry, and the chapter by and large succeeds in revealing how “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and, by implication, the other poems from the period pave the way for, rather than merely precede, the radical parataxis, multivocality, and fragmentariness of The Waste Land.
In the chapters that follow, Perloff offers an extended reading of Stein, Duchamp, and Khlebnikov (all of whom she has discussed in her previous books) as major precursors to late twentieth- and early twenty-first century avant-garde writing. Looking mainly at Tender Buttons, she notes Stein’s preoccupation with the verbal, visual, and aural properties of language, especially her pre-Cubist strategy of rearranging the syntactic parts of a sentence (nouns, pronouns, conjunctions, etc.) so that each equally contributes to the whole. Stein’s endless syntactic permutations emerge as the result of her attraction to Cezanne’s all-inclusive treatment of the canvas surface, but also to Flaubert’s economy of form and subordination of subject matter to style. Perloff continues with a well-informed discussion of some of Duchamp’s readymades (including With Hidden Noise and Fresh Widow), as well as some of his boîtes en valise and verbal objects she calls “texticles,” all of which underscore his conceptual perspective: the constant examination of the medium, the incessant interrogation of the function of art itself. Duchamp’s contribution to twenty-first century poetics lies also in his ability to transform our understanding of visual and verbal language–and of their purported incompatibility. The focus of Perloff’s next chapter is the Russian avant-garde poet Velimir Khlebnikov, specifically his exploration of the graphic and phonic aspects of language. Khlebnikov’s poems reveal his lifelong fascination with word origins and, in a larger sense, his utopian pursuit of what he called the “magic touchstone of all Slavic words”–the first step toward formulating a universal, etymology-based language of beyond-reason or zaum (in Russian “za” means beyond, “um” means reason or mind). Khlebnikov’s fascination with sound-effects, puns, neologisms, and etymologies accounts for his inventive merging of sonic, visual, and semantic characteristics of language. By violating established linguistic norms, Khlebnikov pushes the limits of verbal possibility in a programmatic refusal to treat words merely as names.
A similar position with regard to the transparency of language, and to the long-discredited assumption that language conveys meaning rather than constructs it, informs the poetics of twenty-first century Language writing. In her final chapter, Perloff applies the experimental methods of the four early modernists to four contemporary Language writers, seeing evidence of the early Eliot’s verbal density in Susan Howe’s Thorow, of Lyn Hejinian’s debt to Khlebnikov and Stein in Happily, and of Charles Bernstein’s and Steve McCaffery’s active engagement with Duchamp’s legacy in the former’s dysraphism and the latter’s inventive mixing of the verbal and the visual. These sections are rather brief, spanning only a few pages each, as though in a determination not to steal the spotlight from the real focus of the book–the experimental phase of modernism initiated in the early twentieth century and only now entering into a kind of “special relationship” with contemporary writing (164). Hence Perloff’s use of quotation marks in her subtitle: the “new” poetics is really the return of an older poetics, a millennial extension of the modernism of Eliot, Stein, Duchamp, and Khlebnikov.
Perloff has without question played a key role in shaping our attitudes toward the complex and often contradictory nature of modernism; more than any other critic she has helped to bring avant-garde poetics to the center of today’s academic discourse. In her previous books, starting with The Poetics of Indeterminacy in 1981, Perloff formulated a distinction between two strands of modernism: the post-Symbolist mode initiated by Baudelaire and sustained in the last century by Stevens, the later Eliot, Lowell, Bishop, etc., and the anti-Symbolist mode, originating with Rimbaud and continuing with Pound, Stein, Williams, and their post-World War II descendants (vii). The distinction quickly became a kind of critical dogma, so much so that her astute question “Pound/Stevens: whose era?” (the title of her essay in The Dance of the Intellect) still resonates as a compelling inquiry and elicits new commentaries. A recent issue of The Wallace Stevens Journal, for example, is entirely devoted to a reappraisal of Perloff’s essay, with new perspectives by Perloff herself, Charles Altieri, Alan Filreis, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, and Leon Surette, among others. It is interesting to see how Perloff gives another turn of the screw, so to speak, to her ongoing revision of twentieth-century poetics by separating what she considers the genuine avant-garde impulse of the early modernism, now vigorously resuscitated by Language writers, from the legacy of the postmodern “breakthrough,” which merely questioned the assumptions of high modernism and New Criticism. The final result is an enlightening and extremely thought-provoking book. Paying equal attention to texts and their contexts, her study is historically well-informed and intellectually stimulating. On occasion Perloff makes comments that appear overly dismissive and polarizing, as when she writes about “the unfulfilled promise of the revolutionary poetic impulse in so much of what passes for poetry today–a poetry singularly unambitious in its attitude to the materiality of the text” (5-6). Such statements may be inevitable, considering the oppositional nature of the texts she examines as a critic (and this is, after all, Perloff’s “manifesto”), but eventually they do more harm than good to her book. Here is why.
The poetry that doesn’t seek to foreground the materiality of the signifier is not automatically less “ambitious” or of a lesser order than poetry that does. Much of today’s mainstream poetry can be dull and unexciting, but much of it also can be inventive and inspiring; Perloff’s way of describing the so-called establishment poetry as “tepid and unambitious” is no more useful or critically penetrating than a mainstream book-reviewer calling experimental poetry meaningless and badly written; both kinds of evaluation mean nothing and lead nowhere. Perloff overstates her case when she says that the dominant “epiphanic” mode of the last three decades, which is largely a continuation of the Romantic lyric tradition, “has evidently failed to kindle any real excitement on the part of the public” (4). Evidently? All evidence points to the contrary. Rita Dove, Robert Pinsky, Stanley Kunitz–the Poet Laureates she herself cites in her argument– have produced considerable followings among both specialized and general audiences, and they even sell books. Granted, poetry is still largely marginalized in the United States, but doesn’t the rising number of literary publications, poetry festivals and slams, even poetry workshops (no matter what Perloff thinks about them), testify to the existence of some real excitement among the public? And what about Nobel Prize laureates Czeslaw Milosz, Joseph Brodsky, Octavio Paz, Derek Walcott, Seamus Heaney, and Wislawa Szymborska? Though one wouldn’t call them experimental poets, they certainly manage to attract large numbers of readers in the United States, as well as around the world, something that can’t be said of any of the contemporary poets Perloff discusses in her book. If public enthusiasm is to be the criterion of a movement’s poetic success, as Perloff seems at times to suggest, then it is hard to share her faith in modernist experimentalism as a continuing force in the new century. Referring to the poetic innovations of Eliot and Pound, Randall Jarrell once said that a great revolution is hardest of all on the great revolutionists. This is not always true, for revolutionists may also grow into reactionaries, as Eliot did. But Perloff’s catastrophic reading of the modernist avant-garde as a vibrant movement tragically stopped by the historical realities of the twentieth century makes one wonder, at times, whether its “unfulfilled promise” can ever be realized.
Darren Tofts
Department of Media and Communications
Swinburne University of Technology
dtofts@groupwise.swin.edu.au
The world may be fantastic. The world willbe Tlön.
The cartographers of antiquity have left a profound and fearsome legacy. Only now can we speak of its dread morphology. Spurning the severe abstractions of scale, they achieved exact correspondence: the map occupies the territory, an exact copy in every detail. Here, after centuries of vanity, is exactitude in science, pitiless, coincident, and seamless. I have stood on the threshold of the cave, having escaped the bondage of shadows. I have climbed to the top of the mountain and sought out the tattered ruins of that map. I have discoursed with the scattered dynasty of solitary men who have changed the face of the world. I have come to offer my report on knowledge. I have come to tell you that the world will be Tlön.
The figure of the map covering the territory has become an indexical figure in discussions of postmodernism. It has come to stand for a problematic diminution of the real in the wake of a proliferating image culture, obsessed with refining the technologies of reproduction, making the copy even better than the real thing. As Hillel Schwartz, author of the remarkable Culture of the Copy, notes, with untimely emphasis, “the copy will transcend the original” (212).
Preoccupied with the relationship between reality and its copies, postmodernism deflects the idea of an absolute reality in favor of high-fidelity facsimiles. The passage from postmodernism to virtuality involves a shift from copying to simulating the world, from the reproductive practices of photography and film, to post-reproductive or simulation technologies such as telepresence, advanced digital imaging, virtual reality and other immersive environments. This journey from reproduction to simulation involves the disappearance of difference, the breakdown of binary metaphysics and all that we understand by the term representation. The movement from analogue to digital media is a significant event in the diminution of reality’s a priori status. It comes on the heels of a long artistic tradition of exploration into the relationship between reality and its representability.
Fantastic literature is one such mode that has actively explored this nexus of reality and representation, traditionally doing so through the distorting glass of allegory–whether it be in the writings of J.R.R. Tolkien, with his mythical Middle Earth, the dark and insular labyrinth of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy, or the miraculous world of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Macondo. In such writing, the creation of imaginary “other” worlds is astonishing, seductive in its realism, in the persuasive weight of presence it delivers. For the time of reading, Mordor’s fire and cobwebs are oppressively real, as is the stench and menace of Swelter’s kitchen, or the jungle’s embrace of a Spanish galleon, festooned with orchids. While fantasy is seen as a discrete form of writing, like science fiction or the gothic novel, it is still an art of fiction, a conjuror’s verisimilitude, all smoke and mirrors, sleights of hand, and verbal prestidigitation.
While the realities of such writing are convincing, they fall short of actually supplanting our own sense of the real. That is, they don’t disturb our sense of what is real and what is not. Like all fiction, they are temporary zones, carnivalesque moments in which anything is possible. Without thinking too much about it we know that they are realistic. But we also know they are not real. This intuitive understanding is the safety valve of catharsis, the limit point of identification within the boundaries of a particular cultural technology, whether it is literature or cinema. This certitude, that we are immersed in realistic unrealities, is the metaphysic that allows us to tune into fantasy, live there for a time, and then re-inhabit the real without believing that the fantasy continues beyond the book or the film. It is fantasy’s exit strategy. Without this strategy, this metaphysical way out, we run the risk of psychosis, certainly as Sigmund Freud had imagined it, as a sustained and problematic over-identification with a fictional character or world. Please allow me to introduce myself: I am Titus Groan, and my quest in life lies somewhere beyond the agonizing rituals of Gormenghast. I must flee its stone lanes and unforgiving walls. Can anyone here help me?
Cultural theorists, such as Umberto Eco and Jean Luis Baudrillard, have given other names to such extreme identifications with fictions, names that defined the cultural climate of the last decades of the twentieth century–terms such as simulacrum, hyperreality, the desert of the real, faith in fakes, the culture of the copy. Not wanting to be seen to lag behind the po-mo cognoscenti of Europe, Hollywood has manufactured a genre of cyber-technology films that equally responds to this perception of the closure of fantasy’s exit strategy, in which there is no longer a way out, a return to the real. Films such as The Truman Show, The Matrix, and Dark City, to name but a few, postulate worlds of hard-wired false consciousness, in which what is taken for reality is, respectively, the most insidious reality TV, the ultimate simulation, the perfect virtual reality. To be outside the deception is not to be mad, as Michel Foucault would perhaps have it, but rather to be all-powerful, in control of reality and its representations, the architect of representation as reality–the auteur, in other words, as demiurge.
This brings us to the qualitative and disquieting difference between the fantastic and the virtual. In the realm of the fantastic, we don’t need anyone to welcome us to the real world, since we reliably know what it is and what it is not. When the exit strategy of fantasy is closed, or denied, we have no way of knowing that we don’t even know there is a difference anymore between fantasy and reality. Unless we are liberated from the simulacrum, like Neo in The Matrix, or find the out-door to a reality we never knew existed, like Truman, it’s business as usual in the real world, where people go to work, go to the football on the weekends and catch the occasional paper at cultural events, such as the Biennale of Sydney. Welcome to the desert of the real.
In the desert of the real you can still find, if you are lucky, ruptures in the seam of things, little tears in the otherwise flawless surface of the map that covers the territory. One of these is in fact a parable about maps and territories, simulation and fabricated reality–a parable about the creation of the world. This artifact is a short fictional text written by the Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges. First published in 1940, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” occupies an important place in the history of twentieth-century speculation on the relationship between fantasy and reality. It is at once a meditation on and an example of this relationship. Indeed, for Borges, terms such as fantasy and reality are in no way absolutes, nor are they dependent figures within a binary opposition. They are rather manifestations of possible worlds, projections of the world as it may be.
We have much to learn from “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.” Although he died in 1986, Borges is still very much our contemporary. His presence, more than we can perhaps ever realize, or imagine, is everywhere felt but nowhere seen at the start of the third millennium, this year, this day, this afternoon. As we invest more time, money, and metaphysical capital in the cultural technologies of virtuality, we are perhaps closing off our own exit strategies, dissolving the liminal zones of genre and metaphysics that partition the fantastic and the real. We can learn something of how we are doing this, as well as the consequences of doing it, from “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.” It is worthwhile, therefore, briefly to review the fiction in this context, to refresh the memory of those who are familiar with it, to submit it to the memory of those who are not. For those of you from the border, who have difficulty with me describing Tlön as if it is a fiction–and not an assured commentary on your world–I humbly beg your indulgence.
As with many of Borges’s stories, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” begins with a found object. It is a single volume, number 46 to be precise, of a pirated edition of the Anglo-American Cyclopaedia, published in New York in 1917. The volume is unremarkable in every way, apart from four extra pages that are contained in this singular volume only and not in any other copy of this particular edition. The superfluous pages contain a detailed account of a previously unknown and uncharted region of Asia Minor called Uqbar. The narrator and his companion, Adolpho Bioy Cesares, search in vain for further references to Uqbar, but nothing in the way of corroborating evidence emerges from their labors, even from hours spent at the National Library of Argentina. The entry on Uqbar contains detailed information on the history, customs, geography, and literature of this mysterious region. One piece of information will suffice to impart a flavor of the piece:
The section on Language and Literature was brief. Only one trait is worthy of recollection: it noted that the literature of Uqbar was one of fantasy and that its epics and legends never referred to reality, but to the two imaginary regions of Mlejnas and Tlön. (29)
After further research, “events,” the narrator observes, “became more intense” (40). It is discovered that the documentation of Uqbar was in fact the aborted precursor of a more ambitious project, undertaken by what is subsequently revealed as a secret society, originating in the seventeenth century–a kind of enlightenment Sokal hoax on a trans-historical scale. More ambitious and sublime in its conception and scope, this society, which included George Berkeley as one of its number, set out to invent the fictitious history of an entire planet, called Tlön. The imprimatur of this society, Orbis Tertius, is found in a similarly unlikely volume–of which there exists, again, only one copy–entitled A First Encylopaedia of Tlön. In this one volume we encounter the eclectic miscellany of detail, the reassuring kind of data and information that adheres reality to representation, the documentary veracity that endows the encyclopedia with the solidity of truth, authenticity, and knowledge:
Now I held in my hands a vast methodical fragment of an unknown planet’s entire history, with its architecture and its playing cards, with the dread of its mythologies and the murmur of its languages, with its emperors and its seas, with its minerals and its birds and its fish, with its algebra and its fire, with its theological and metaphysical controversy. And all of it articulated, coherent, with no visible doctrinal intent or tone of parody. (31)
As James Woodall, Borges’s most recent biographer, has noted, “The discovery of another. . . planet in science fiction is generally a cue for extravagant fantasy; for Borges in this story it was a way of reviewing the world, of offering a critique of reality” (115). In this respect history is everything. Just as Mervyn Peake had used his fiction to explore his time spent at Belsen as a war-time illustrator, so Borges attempted to come to terms with the chaotic horrors of war and the spurious symmetries of the day–dialectical materialism, anti-Semitism, Nazism–in the creation of a harmonious world. But in coming to terms with it he did not attempt to understand it, but rather to replace it altogether. For a world at war, the desire to submit to Tlön, to yield to the “minute and vast evidence of an orderly planet,” was overwhelming (42). But such is the stuff of allegory, the tidy protocols of hermeneutic neatness. What better way to explain the embrace of a fictitious reality that is superior in every way to the wreckage of contemporary history?
But this is not all there is to the story. Borges in fact turns the allegorical mode of fantasy in on itself, closing off its exit strategy and interpolating us, the readers outside-text, along the way. There are a number of things in this fiction that can’t be simply written off as allegorical parallel (that is, the interpretation of Tlön as metaphor, as the projection of an ideal world). The world of Tlön, we quickly realize, is palpable and capable of affecting dramatic outcomes in the real world. The First Encylopaedia of Tlön first makes its appearance in 1937, received, as certified mail, by a mysterious person called Herbert Ashe. Little is known about Ashe, other than the inscrutable, yet forthright detail that in his lifetime “he suffered from un-reality” (30). What is beyond doubt is that Ashe was one of the collaborators of Orbis Tertius, and three days after he received the book of Tlön, the book he helped bring into this world, he died of a ruptured aneurysm. We know, too, that as part of their process of rhetorical corroboration, the society of Orbis Tertius disseminates objects throughout the world that cohere with information to be found in the First Encylopedia of Tlön. Such objects, like the forty volumes of the First Encyclopedia of Tlön, are attenuations, material reinforcements, simulacra that solidify the fictitious detail of the books in memory. We could call these objects “proof artifacts,” like the scattered ephemera of a holiday never actually taken in Philip K. Dick’s 1962 story, “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale” (the text which became the basis of the film Total Recall), or the family photographs coveted by the replicant Leon in the film Blade Runner.
But there is a difference, of a metaphysical kind, between a suggestive corroboration, a simulated mnemonic device, and something that can’t be accounted for in material terms, such as the small, oppressively heavy cone that is found on the body of a dead man in 1942. Representing the divinity in certain regions of Tlön, it is, according to the narrator, “made from a metal which is not of this world,” and is so heavy that a “man was scarcely able to raise it from the ground” (41). No one knew anything of the man in whose possession the cone was found, other than the fact that he “came from the border” (41). Here is an instance of the imaginary made flesh, the uncomfortable collision of worlds that we expect to forever remain discrete. It is a kind of perverse, Eucharistic event, the transubstantiation of the fictional into the material, the crossing over from one border to another, from one ontological realm into another–the “intrusion of this fantastic world into the world of reality” (41). Holding this enigmatic object in his hand, the narrator reflects on “the disagreeable impression of repugnance and fear” it instills in him (41). Here is the nausea of the simulacrum, the supplanting of reality by fantasy. Rachael Rosen encounters this dread in Blade Runner when Deckard exposes her childhood memories as belonging to someone else. The contemporary technological shift from one media regime to another, from reproductive to simulation or virtual technologies, entails a similar ontological blurring of worlds that may not be so easily resolved through allegory.
How do we comprehend, for example, the ability of Neo in The Matrix to “know Kung Fu” without ever having been taught it, without learning its philosophies and techniques as a discipline? The fact is there is little “ability” to his knowing Kung Fu, because he has not acquired it, but rather he has been programmed to know it (together with its cultural resonances and quotations, from Chuck Norris roundhouse kicks to Bruce Lee’s trademark cockiness). His experience of Kung Fu is a simulated rather than an actual thing, akin to the competence that airline or military pilots derive from spending hours in flight simulators. The ability to know how to do Kung Fu, repeatedly and without thinking about it, is an issue of second nature, of acquired habit that has become intuitive. The difference here is that second nature, in Neo’s case, is not preceded by first-hand experience.
Such is the consequence of the shift from one media regime to another. In a fine essay that discusses virtuality in relation to Ray Bradbury’s 1952 short story “The Veldt,” Ken Wark argues that the futuristic, holographic nursery in that text is a technology of the “too real.” This virtual technology–which is a cross between a children’s playroom and the Holodeck from Star Trek–exceeds the real by manifesting simulacra, such as lions, into the real world. Such manifestations are akin to psychiatric irruptions of the unconscious in waking life. They are affects capable of real and, as it turns out, destructive consequences. This is no allegorical wunderkammer, since the logic of representation has ceased to exist within its machinations.
If Bradbury’s holographic nursery has anticipated anything achieved so far in the name of new media, it is not so much the immersive, virtual-reality environment as the new, “total realism” of hybrid cinema (that is, the convergence of film and digital effects). Lev Manovich, in The Language of New Media, describes how the use of digital technologies in the pursuit of greater realism in cinema has created effects that are “too real” (199). That is, the ability to simulate three-dimensional visual realities–such as the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park–has created a perfect visuality that, paradoxically, has to be “diluted to match the imperfection of film’s graininess” (202). For Manovich, digital simulation has precipitated a new order of experience, a synthetic reality that exceeds the limitations of film’s attempts to represent real-world experience.
As evidence of the persuasiveness of synthetic reality, I submit the following image:
| Figure 1 |
This image, created by artist Troy Innocent, represents the kind of fusion of real people with computer-simulated objects that Manovich describes in relation to the formation of synthetic realities. Created at my request, this image beautifully illustrates the point that synthetic realities can blur the distinction between formerly discrete worlds. Bill Mitchell, author of The Reconfigured Eye. Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic Era, would probably refer to this image as a “fake photograph,” an example of the new aesthetic possibilities of digital imaging. I prefer to think of it as a snapshot from Tlön, the infiltration of one world by another. Mitchell is sensitive to the metaphysical implications of digital imaging, noting that “as we enter the post-photographic era, we must face once again the ineradicable fragility of our ontological distinctions between the imaginary and the real” (225).
It is such forecasts of the consequences of our embrace of the virtual that confirm the continued importance of “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” in today’s world. As a “critique of reality,” it not only documents an account in the 1940s of the changing of the face of the world, but also anticipates the technological reinvention of the real. Such reinvention, in the name of virtual and simulation technologies, prompts the question: do we need a reality any more, when multiple realities can be created synthetically? As a synthetic reality, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” draws us, the readers of Borges the writer, the people outside-text, into its perplexing ontological orbits. That is, our experience of the world is affected by our involvement in the story. Like the inhabitants of Tlön, we find ourselves engaging with metaphysics as if it were a “branch of fantastic literature” (34). Borges defiantly teases the readers’ desire to believe in the reality of the discovered world, secure, as they are, in their assured, known world outside-text. He tests, in other words, the extent to which readers are prepared to forestall their exit strategy, to explore the outer limits of credulity to do with this previously unknown world. After all, all the reference points in the story are verifiably factual, such as the Brazilian hotel, Las Delicias, in which Herbert Ashe is sent the mysterious First Encylopaedia of Tlön, or the narrator’s companion, Adolfo Bioy Cesares, the person who brings the troubling issue of Uqbar to his attention, in reality one of Borges’s closest friends and literary collaborators. Borges’s style is clearly documentary-like in approach: prudent, well researched, and sound, with very few literary flourishes or overt metafictional moments. Indeed, it is more accurate to call “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” an essay rather than a fiction, reading, as it does, with the impersonal, measured factuality of the encyclopedia entry. In the hands of an essayist documenting the conceit of Tlön, Borges’s methods of persuasion–or are they in fact forms of evidence?–are compelling. In reflecting on one of the theories of time subscribed to by the inhabitants of Tlön, for example, he notes that “it reasons that the present is indefinite, that the future has no reality other than as a present hope, that the past has no reality other than as a present memory” (34). Furthermore, he notes, in a footnote, that this question had detained the attention of the great Bertrand Russell, who supposed “that the planet has been created a few minutes ago, furnished with a humanity that ‘remembers’ an illusory past” (34). He identifies the reference as The Analysis of Mind, 1921, page 159. You can pursue the citation if you like, but take it from me, it is not bogus.
This is one of the many troubling moments in which information from outside-text corroborates the collaborative, invented world of Borges’s fiction. That is, facets of this grand guignol can be chased down as referential points in our own world. We can confirm these references from scholarly sources, such as The Analysis of Mind, or volume 13 of the writings of Thomas De Quincey. As with the people within the diegetic world of the story, it is difficult to rationalize the feeling that our reality, or at least my reality, is not yielding to Tlön. In considering the parallels between “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” and The Matrix, I was startled when I re-read the story and came upon one of the doctrines of Tlön: that “while we sleep here, we are awake elsewhere and that in this way every man is two men” (35). The duality of actual self and digital representation in The Matrix is the anchor that smoothes out and reconciles the split between the worlds of meat and of virtuality–the conduit between different ontologies, different metaphysical states. So, in playing around with this parallel, looking for an angle, an opening gambit, you can imagine my concern, when reading of the progressive reformation of earthly learning in the name of Tlön, at discovering that “biology and mathematics also await their avatars” (43).
| Figure 2: A Surreal Visitor |
Events became more intense as I moved deeper into the vertigo of writing about Tlön. On reading the Melbourne The Age Saturday Extra on the 20th of April 2002, it was with a mixture of fascination and alarm that I came across an account of a little-known visit to Melbourne by Borges in the late Autumn of 1938. Written by Guy Rundle, under the title of “A Surreal Visitor,” the piece took me quite by surprise. My first inclination was to check the date: it wasn’t the 1st of April. To my knowledge Borges had never traveled to Australia, a view quickly confirmed in the pages of the biographies at my disposal. Yet the detail was all here: he arrived on May 16th at the invitation of John Willie, a member of Norman Lindsay’s bohemian circle and admirer of Borges’s work, gave a lecture at the Royal Society entitled “The Author’s Fictions,” and spent much of his time in the domed reading room of the State Library of Victoria. These were all likely, Borgesian places, places that I would expect the great man of letters to frequent if he was in Melbourne, right down to the oneiric epiphany of a set of locks in a Glenhuntly shop window. In all, Borges spent ten days in Melbourne before returning to Buenos Aires, the smell of eucalyptus no doubt still lingering in his mind (a sensation that would seem to have found its way into the remarkable opening line of his story “Death and the Compass,” published in 1944).
On closer inspection, it became clear that Rundle was playing a very erudite joke on his readers, treating Borges by the rules of his own game, so to speak. Indeed, the first line read like a Borges pastiche, citing an author, a prodigious event and an ironic allusion, all within the strict economy of a single sentence: “Devotees of the writings of Jorge Luis Borges will not be surprised by the recent discovery that the great Argentinean writer once spent some time in Melbourne.” The rhythm and balance of the syntax recalls the opening sentence from “Death and the Compass”: “Of the many problems which exercised the reckless discernment of Lönnrot, none was so strange–so rigorously strange, shall we say–as the periodic series of bloody events which culminated at the villa of Triste-le-Roy, amid the ceaseless aroma of the eucalypti” (106). The suggestion that Borges’s admirers “will not be surprised” is the ironic allusion, a rhetorical maneuver gesturing to the fact that a devotee of Borges, well versed in the art of fabulation, would recognize that Borges is the perfect subject for such a fiction.
Rundle’s piece cannily imitates distinctive features of Borges’s writing and, in particular, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”–a text famous for its challenge to readers to accept, or at least consider, the reality of a fictitious world. For all we know, Rundle may have written his story with “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” at his elbow, open at page twenty-eight. On that page you will find one of Borges’s own ironic, reflexive allusions, as the narrator and Bioy Cesares discuss the article on Uqbar in the Anglo-American Cyclopaedia. The key detail here is that they found the piece “very plausible” (28). Rundle’s piece is crowded with plausible detail that is very specific and combines known facts about Borges’s life–such as his involvement with Victoria Ocampo and the important literary magazine, Sur–with previously unknown information. It sounds plausible that someone in Norman Lindsay’s bohemian circle would have been aware of Sur and passionate enough to mentor the Argentinean writer’s visit to Australia. Most of all, Rundle exploits Borges’s delight–especially indulged in “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”–in inviting the reader to trust in evidence that is confined to fugitive or lost documents, missing or unverifiable detail. The record of Borges’s visit, for instance, is “confined to a few notes made for a poem (never written) that Borges made in a notebook, which recently came to light at a house in Cordoba, and some letters written to fellow novelist Bioy Cesares” (5). The reference to Bioy Cesares is a delightful touch, an unquestionable source offsetting the potential unreliability of such fragmentary, incomplete records. Borges’s lecture, presented to the Royal Society is, not surprisingly, “also lost, if ever written down” (5). Nor should we be surprised to detect the occasional flash of audacity as Rundle warms to his work, noting that a vernacular reference to a “strange lecture by a Spanish chap” is attributed to Harold Stewart, who, along with James McAuley and writing under the pseudonym of Ern Malley, perpetrated one of the great literary hoaxes of the twentieth century.
I have reflected that it is permissible to see in this story of a visit never taken a kind of palimpsest, through which the traces of Borges’s “previous” writing are translucently visible. It is especially noteworthy that Rundle exploits the plausible conveyance of tenuous information, or what Borges, in “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” refers to as a tension between “rigorous prose” and “fundamental vagueness” (28). This is noteworthy. Of the Borges stories Rundle refers to in the piece–and they are some of his most well known–no mention is made of “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” arguably his most famous work. This absence is also a tour de force of citation by omission, implicit in the gesture to a line from “The Garden of Forking Paths,” in which the word “chess” is the answer to the following question: “In a riddle whose answer is chess, what is the only prohibited word?” (53).
One can imagine that such a persuasive piece of writing would be not only plausible, retrospectively writing Jorge Luis Borges into Melbourne’s literary memory, but revelatory to many readers. Once again a line from “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” came to mind: “a fictitious past occupies in our memories the place of another, a past of which we know nothing with certainty–not even that it is false” (42-3). A trip to the Exhibition Gardens or the reading room at the State Library would never be the same again, knowing that the great Borges had left his trace there. But literary hoaxes don’t fool everyone. Nor are they to everyone’s taste.
| Figure 3: Disclaimer |
On the following weekend, I can’t say that I was surprised to read the following disclaimer:
An article in Saturday Extra on April 20 called “A surreal visitor” about writer Jorge Luis Borges’s apparent visit to Melbourne was in fact a piece of fiction, mimicking Borges’s own style of placing people in imaginary situations. The editor of Saturday Extra regrets this was not acknowledged at the time of publication. (2)
Now this is a real Borgesian test of credulity. I find the idea of Jason Steger, the literary editor of the Saturday Extra, forgetting to mention this fact far less plausible than the idea of Tlön itself. Jason Steger is clearly the Herbert Ashe of this conspiracy. This disclaimer, while predictable, was actually quite dissatisfying and ruined what, for me, was a marvellous piece of invention. I could see it now, many years down the track, my students wondering, with restrained awe, if they had sat where Borges had in the domed reading room of the State library. So out of some peculiar nostalgia for the lost memory of a visit that never was, I decided, in the spirit of Rundle’s piece, to look into the some of the “facts” he assembled, to re-trace and re-claim some of the steps of this sublime, phantom visitation. I didn’t expect to find any corroboration, but I wanted to at least participate in the fiction, to walk in the ubiquitous shadow of this rigorous Latin American genius. Now this is where this story gets really weird.
On the 23rd of April I went to do some research at the State Library of Victoria. Had the domed reading room been open (it was then still under renovation), I would have sought out that imaginary vibe. Mindful of the lessons of “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” I suppose I wanted to imaginatively place Borges in the scene, to fill the gaps that I knew, full well, I would find. A strange inclination, I know, but then we are dealing with a writer who, more than any other, has encouraged us to question what we accept as real, as verifiable, as truth. I wanted to find the spaces of his absent presence. After all, Borges was a deconstructionist avant la lettre and he would have known only too well that if there are no traces, there is no presence.
| Figure 4: National Register of Shipping Arrivals |
My first reference, the National Register of Shipping Arrivals: Australia and New Zealand, was promising, but by no means conclusive. The volume was in fact an index of passenger lists between the years 1924 and 1964, held elsewhere, at the Melbourne Office of the National Archives of Australia to be precise, which is part of the Public Record Office of Victoria. While a deferral, it was at least a start. That reference would have to wait for another day. Cook’s Australasian Sailing List was my next port of call. When requesting the book, I received every indication that it was available, and as the stacks are not open to public access, it was highly likely that I would get a return.
| Figure 5: Cook’s Australasian Sailing List |
I was disappointed, then, to receive my request slip and no book. The slip indicated that the volume could not be found. The librarian on duty acknowledged that this was indeed unusual, but I was prepared to accept it as part of the hit-or-miss process of library research.
I started to get concerned, though, when my next request also bounced on me. Consistent with Rundle’s imaginary itinerary, I wanted to consult the Author Index of the Proceedings of the Royal Society of Victoria to find no evidence of Borges’s guest lecture there.
| Figure 6: Author Index of Proceedings of the Royal Society of Victoria |
Not only did I receive a note saying that the volume was not found, but on the request slip there was also a handwritten note indicating that the volume was “Not on shelf.” I left the library with nothing to show for my efforts. While, as I had expected, I did not find any positive evidence of Borges’s visit to Melbourne, I did not find, either, any negative evidence to prove that he did not visit.
I returned to the library the following day. On the way there, I stopped off at the Royal Society. The person with whom I spoke, while decidedly brusque and unhelpful, did confirm that a guest speaker would indeed have been registered in their Proceedings.
| Figure 7: Proceedings of the Royal Society of Victoria |
This time at the library, the exact volume of the Proceedings, containing everything from 1938, was not found. A trip around the block to the Public Records Office was more promising. A database search of passenger ships yielded no records whatsoever of the Koumoundouros, nor did a search of passengers coming into Melbourne as “legal aliens” in 1938 include a Jorge Luis Borges, though, as you will see from this sample of the inventory, the name Borges was not an uncommon one for arrivals in Melbourne that year:
| Figure 8 Click on image for larger view |
But what was starting to disconcert me, in an odd, metaphysical kind of way, was that this confirmed evidence sat cheek by jowl with inconclusive, irresolute results. Nothing, it seemed, could be proved false. The whole thing was actually starting to resemble “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”–real life as an uncanny form of allusion or repetition. It was as if the very task of researching Borges’s imaginary visit to Melbourne had unleashed a kind of strange code or virus, a meme, a Borges meme that had the potential to change the way we perceive reality. But unlike the genetic or ideological connotations of this notion that we find in Richard Dawkins and Douglas Rushkoff, the Borges meme was of a metaphysical nature, short-circuiting all attempts to confirm its unreality, even in the face of other plausible evidence that declared that the whole affair was a fabulation (not the least of these being Jason Steger’s disclaimer printed in The Age). Indeed, for a fleeting instant, the idea did cross my mind that along with Steger, Rundle belonged to the same secret society of intellectuals, Orbis Tertius, who made the world Tlön. Their quest, it could be argued, was an attempt to animate what Rundle called, referring to Melbourne, an “unremarkable and overfamiliar city” (5). This could be achieved through projecting the city anew through the exotic eyes of a “mysterious visitor” (5). The tantalizing possibility that this imaginary event might be real, or the more interesting dynamic of its ambivalent veracity, is the occasion for a kind of belief, a virtual, simulated belief in the reality of the unreal. To paraphrase a line from Borges’s “The Library of Babel,” it suffices that his visit to Melbourne be possible for it to exist.
To conclude, the idea of a Borges meme gets us to the disconcerting heart of this writer’s metaphysics. Unlike fantasy in its allegorical mode, Borges’s metaphysical fictions intrude into what we understand to be real, the obvious world outside-text. Borges writes of the undecidable, the interzone between fiction and non-fiction, documentary writing, and fabulation. It is an unclassifiable space of paradox and contradiction, the sensation, vague yet familiar, that what seems unlikely may be a forgotten reality–a confused sensation akin to the afterglow of a vivid dream, before it vanishes in wakefulness. As we have seen, this is a paradox that we have been confronting for some time in the name of postmodernism and more recently in relation to virtual technologies. In the age of virtuality, we are once again retracing Borges’s footsteps as he guides us, a latter-day Ariadne, through the labyrinthine fantasy that we call the real.
In the days leading up to my departure for Sydney, I received a parcel from the Royal Society. Unaccompanied by a letter or note of explanation–they were as perfunctory as ever–I found this photograph.
| Figure 9 |
It is without doubt a photograph of Borges, probably in his late thirties. This would date it around 1938 or 1939. The intriguing detail is the plaque at his feet. On closer inspection–thanks to my friend Chris Henschke–it reveals the State of Victoria coat of arms. The botanical name of the tree on which he is reclining, the Ribbon Tree of Otago, grown in Melbourne since the nineteenth century, can be verified in Guilfoyle’s Catalogue of Plants Under Cultivation in the Melbourne Botanic Gardens, published in 1883.
| Figure 10 |
The only other thing of note about the photograph is that its verso bears an inscription in an elegant copperplate. For some reason this would not scan properly, but I offer the following transcription:
I remember him, with his face taciturn and Indian-like and singularly remote, behind the cigarette.
Meyda Yegenoglu
Department of Sociology
Middle East Technical University
meyda@metu.edu.tr
The increasing political presence of refugees and immigrants in post-Cold war Europe has generated considerable debate about the nature of multicultural society. The demand for the recognition of cultural, racial, and ethnic differences has come to occupy a central place in the forms of post-national politics emergent today. Yet, a closer examination of the juridico-political regulations developed in response to these demands reveals a troubling tendency: cultural/racial difference is translated into an understanding of cultural diversity that treats minorities, to use David Bennett’s term, as “add-ons” (5) to the existing nation form. Thus the question becomes whether such an “additive model” (5) is capable of inducing a radical transformation in the concept of the sovereign position of the national self. This essay addresses the limitations of this procedural multiculturalist valorization and argues that the liberal imperative to tolerate and respect cultural difference is far from displacing the sovereignty of the host society in question. In discussing these limitations, I will situate liberal multiculturalism in the context of today’s capitalist globalization.
When we examine the policies and programs through which the culturally different is valorized today, it becomes clear that liberalism has become the regulative principle in many metropolitan countries. Yet it is far from clear whether such a liberal valorization and the granting of legal rights to non-normative citizens, the ethnically and racially “different,” will prove to be a counter-hegemonic political force. Is the legal codification of respect for identities in their particularity adequate for reinventing a democratic political space? If such politicization does not flourish in particularist liberal multiculturalism, then we need to be vigilant about what is being left intact. In fact, we need to take our vigilance one step further and question the ways in which such codification regulates the destabilizing force of the political and entails its repudiation, suspension, limitation, or foreclosure.
We are witnessing an increasing proliferation of literature trying to understand the new economic, political, and cultural arrangements that are inaugurated by global capital. The accelerating rate of the international division of labor, the extended capacity of multinational production, the development and concentration of global financial and banking services and culture industries, the rapid development in telecommunications, and the growth of a global mass culture have led many to talk about a process by which the world is now becoming a single and unified space. Globalization, according to the advocates of this position, marks the beginning of a process whereby difference is dissolved within the logic of sameness and cultural homogenization. Consequently we are reminded of the hazards and shortcomings of limiting our inquiries with nations and nation-states, for the sovereignty of nation-states has been declared to be undermined in the age of cultural, economic, social homogeneity, and integration.
On the other side of the debate, there are those who emphasize the impossibility of envisioning a unified global culture. For example, in “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy,” Arjun Appadurai suggests that when forces are brought from various metropoles into different societies they tend to become indigenized in some way. To understand the complexity of the process of globalization, he suggests that we examine the fundamental disjunctures between economy, politics, and culture. For Appadurai the global cultural flows occur in and through the disjunctures between five “scapes”: ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, finanscapes, and ideoscapes. Such disjunctures and flows point not only to the fluid and irregular nature of international capital but also constitute the building blocks of the replacement of Benedict Anderson’s “imagined community” with “imagined worlds.”
Those who, like Appadurai, are critical of the global homogenization argument suggest that the globalized world is a contested and contradictory space. These critics point to the increasing proliferation of ethnic and racial struggle to argue that the homogenizing pressure of globalization paradoxically produces cultural heterogeneity. It is the encounter of the local with the global that is deemed to force the recognition of alternative histories, traditions, and cultures that have hitherto remained silent under the ruins of the project of modernity and colonialism. For example, Ulf Hannerz, in “Cosmopolitans and Locals in World Culture,” points out that cultural differences now exist not between cultures but within cultures and suggests that world culture implies a reorganization of diversity rather than a replication of uniformity. It is no longer possible to talk about the homogenization of systems of meaning; between the different regions of the globe there are now flows of meanings, people, and goods. The globe can be imagined as a homogenized unity only when localities are discarded and when power relations among its constituting parts are ignored.
Thus globalization increasingly reveals the limits of Western modernity: various ethnic and racial minorities, their traditions, memories, myths, and symbols are now woven together in the increasingly dense web of metropolitan culture. In an attempt to understand how particularity and difference are articulated in this global culture, Stuart Hall, in “The Local and the Global,” questions attributing a singular and unitary logic to capital. The notion of the global which is capable of getting hold of and neutralizing everybody and everything and thereby contains all marginality in an uncontradictory and uncontested space does not accurately capture the specificity of this decentralized and de-centered form of globalization. Hall suggests that with the accelerating rate of migration, older unitary cultural formations are now breaking down. The emergent form of globalization simultaneously valorizes the local and the global. Hall does not deny the homogenizing form of this new cultural representation, but he argues that it is a peculiar form of homogenization–one that simultaneously absorbs and recognizes difference. This form of global homogenization does not obliterate difference but rather works in and through difference. While capital is spreading globally, it works through specificity. Although the growing global culture is now located in the West and speaks English, it is increasingly invaded by other languages and accents. It is therefore forced to negotiate and incorporate a difference that it formerly tried to conquer. In a paradoxical turn, as minorities reclaim representation for themselves, marginality has been turned into a powerful space. The identities that have hitherto been excluded now signal the emergence of new subjects, new ethnicities, and new communities, and they have acquired the means to speak for themselves. Although Hall acknowledges that resorting to such localities by retreating into exclusivist and defensive enclaves might become dangerous and can lead to forms of fundamentalism, he nevertheless thinks that ethnicity is the necessary position of enunciation from which the formerly excluded marginality speaks and grounds itself.
As is clear from this brief review of current critical discourse, one of the characterizing features of the debate on globalization is the opposition between homogenization and heterogenization or between universalization and particularization. Moreover, the particular or different is presumed to be endowed with some resistive and liberative capacity in the face of the universalizing tendency of global capital. I would suggest that this is a misleading opposition as it identifies globalization with universalization1 and consequently locates the counter-hegemonic political struggle against the global force of capital in the affirmation of particular identities. In “A Leftist Plea for Eurocentrism,” Slavoj Zizek rightly points out that it is deeply misleading to posit the rising globalization in opposition to particular identities since the true opposition is between globalization and universalism. For him, the new world is global but not universal; it is an order, which, rather than negating the particular, allocates each and every particular a place.2 Therefore, what is threatened by globalization is not particularity but universality itself. Universalism, for Zizek, is the “properly political domain” as it implies “universalizing one’s particular fate as representative of global injustice” (1007). If we want to go beyond the rather simplistic praising of the particular, one of the tasks that awaits us is to develop a conceptual framework that will allow us to rethink globalization and the apparent counter-tendency of valorization of particular identities as a double gesture of capital. What needs to be questioned is whether the particular that is valorized in multiculturalist politics constitutes a destabilizing political force in the wake of global abstraction of transnational capitalism which now operates completely divorced from its specific origins in Europe, as Dirlik argues in “The Global in the Local,” and whose immanent logic remains indifferent to the boundaries of the nation-state, as Zizek suggests in “Multiculturalism, or, the Cultural Logic of Multinational Capitalism.”
The decentering of capitalism, its deterritorialization and abstraction, implies the difficulty of pointing to any nation or region as the center of global capitalism. This has led many to emphasize the qualitatively different nature of global capitalism from its earlier forms. For Dirlik, this qualitative difference of global capitalism can be discerned in the authentic global abstraction capitalism has achieved, in the decentering and production of networks of urban formations without a clearly definable center–a network which is then relinked via transnational corporations (30). Likewise, in “Ambiguous Universality,” Etienne Balibar delineates the transformations created in the geographical and geopolitical pattern of the world and points to the multiplication of centers, which form a network rather than a “core” area (52). Similarly, Zizek suggests that the final moment of capitalism entails the cutting of the umbilical cord of global companies with their mother-nation. It is thus no longer possible to pin down a colonizing agency as in the case of traditional imperialist colonialism. The paradox of this form of colonization resides in the fact that it takes place without a colonizing nation-state, as the colonizing agents now become the global companies themselves (“Multiculturalism” 43-52). Dirlik finds the concern with the local in the wake of global capitalism ironic for the following reason: while disorganizing earlier forms and reconfiguring global relations, global capitalism enhances an awareness of the local so as to be able to render the local manipulable in its hands, pointing to it as the site of resistance to capital (35). Therefore the privileging of the local without the recognition of this context and the concomitant ideological criticism of global capitalism voiced from the presumably resistive site of the local falls prey to the ideological legitimization of the structures which are indeed the very production of global capitalism. For Dirlik, the limitations of such criticism stem from the fact that global capitalism leaves no local that is not already worked over, continually disorganized, reconstituted, or assimilated as part of its universalizing and homogenizing operations (37).
What do we make of the growing liberal multiculturalist dictum to respect and tolerate the racially, culturally, and ethnically different in the wake of the tendency of capital for global abstraction? Can these two trends be regarded as contradictory? In other words, does multiculturalist tolerance for difference, which not only acknowledges the value of each and every group’s cultural characteristics but also tries to amend the wrong each one of them is subjected to through various juridical and legal procedures, signal the emergence of a counter-political force against the global hegemony of capital?
Slavoj Zizek, in his reading of the three different meanings of universality distinguished by Balibar, sees multiculturalist tolerance, respect and protection of human rights, democracy, and so forth as the hegemonic fiction of the real universality of today’s globalization. (“Multiculturalism” 41). The concrete universality of global order is supplanted by allowing each particular lifestyle to flourish in its particularity. For Zizek, the modern era, whose predominant form of concrete universality is the nation-state, worked by seizing the individual directly, restraining his or her freedom as the citizen of a nation-state. Against the de-nationalization of the ethnic into the national of the modern period, the intensification of global market forces entails the ethnicization of the national and renewed reconstitution of ethnic roots. Respect and tolerance for the ethnically different is a reaction to the universal dimension of the world market and hence occurs against its background and on its very terrain (42). Multiculturalism, in Zizek’s formulation, is the form of the appearance of universality in its exact mirror opposite and is therefore the ideal form of the ideology of global capitalism. In A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, Gayatri Spivak also points to the bond between liberal multiculturalism and global capitalism. She suggests that “liberal multiculturalism is determined by the demands of contemporary transnational capitalisms” (397) which secure the means of gaining the consent of developing nations in the financialization of the globe.
Perhaps the originality of Zizek’s argument does not lie in the link he establishes between multiculturalism and the interests of global capitalism. Spivak, Jameson, Dirlik and Hall, in their different ways, have developed similar arguments. But there is more to Zizek’s formulation. Focusing his attention particularly on the implications of the notions of respect and tolerance, he suggests that multiculturalism entails a Eurocentric distance when it respects and tolerates the local and particular cultures (44). In this sense, multiculturalism is based on a disavowed and inverted self-referential form of racism as it empties its own position of all positive content. The racism of multiculturalism does not reside in its being against the values of other cultures. Quite the contrary: it respects and tolerates other cultures, but in respecting and tolerating the different, it maintains a distance which enables it to retain a privileged position of empty universality. It is this emptied universal position which enables one to appreciate (or depreciate) other local cultures. Thus multiculturalist respect for the particularity of the other is indeed a form of asserting one’s own superiority and sovereignty. As David Lloyd cogently describes in “Race under Representation,” the alleged neutrality and universality is at the same time a process that secures a sovereign status for the subject:
The position occupied by the dominant individual is that of the Subject without properties. The Subject with “unlimited properties” is precisely the undetermined subject . . . Its universality is attained by virtue of literal indifference: this Subject becomes representative in consequence of being able to take anyone’s place, of occupying any place, of a pure exchangeability. Universal where all others are particular, partial, this Subject is the perfect, disinterested judge formed for and by the public sphere. (70)
In Colonial Fantasies: Towards a Feminist Reading of Orientalism, I have suggested that it is the centering of the self, which, by setting itself off from the particular, allows its universalizing gesture (103). But, as Zizek suggests, the critical task here is not to expose the truth of multiculturalism, which is presumed to be the concealment of particular roots behind the mask of universality. Rather, the problematic of multiculturalism, premised on the hybrid co-existence of diverse cultural forms, “is the form of appearance of its opposite, of the massive presence of capitalism as universal world system; it bears witness to the unprecedented homogenization of the contemporary world” (“Multiculturalism” 45). Therefore, for Zizek, “the true horror does not reside in the particular content hidden beneath the universality of global Capital, but rather in the fact that Capital is effectively an anonymous global machine blindly running its course, that there is effectively no particular Secret Agent who animates it” (46). Precisely for this reason, the fight for cultural difference and respect for minorities leaves the basic universalizing operation of global capitalism unharmed and intact and hence needs to be seen as symptomatic of the suffocation and regulation of “politics proper” (“A Leftist Plea” 988-999).3 The task, therefore, is to understand the mechanisms by which this regulation, suffocation, and foreclosure are managed. If the institutionalized multiculturalist pluralism that characterizes the post-national global order implies a foreclosure of politics proper and is far from offering a potential for democratic politicization, then where do we locate the possibility of a politics that interrupts this foreclosure? To discuss this, allow me to make a detour through Jacques Derrida’s argument concerning conditional and unconditional hospitality.
In Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, Derrida reads Kant’s writings on cosmopolitan law and draws our attention to his essay “Toward Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Project,” particularly the “Third Definitive Article for a Perpetual Peace” which pertains to the “right of hospitality”: “The Law of World Citizenship Shall be Limited to Conditions of Universal Hospitality.” Derrida notes that this article is limited by a number of conditions. From the very beginning we are confronted with the question of conditional hospitality. The question of hospitality in Kant’s writings pulls us into the domain of law, citizenship and the relation the state has with its subjects. Universal hospitality here is only juridical and political. Cosmopolitan law is about international agreement and refers to the condition of justice and law that is to be decided by nations. Hospitality is treated as a question of rights, justice and obligation that is to be regulated by law.4 Resting on a juridical and political definition, the Kantian formulation is based not on granting the right of residence but only the right of temporary sojourn. As a juridical regulation, it concerns the rights of citizens of states that are to be regulated and deliberated by a cosmopolitical constitution. As such, it suspends and conditions the immediate, infinite, and unconditional welcoming of the other (87).
Derrida directs our attention to the fact that conditional hospitality is offered at the owner’s place, home, nation, state, or city–that is, at a place where one is defined as the master and where unconditional hospitality or unconditional trespassing of the door is not possible. The host, the non-guest, the one who accepts, the one who offers hospitality, the one who welcomes, is the owner of a home and therefore is the master of the home.5
As I mentioned above, Derrida directs our attention to the fact that in Kant’s essay, hospitality is framed as a question of law, an obligation, a duty, and a right: it refers to the welcoming of an alien/stranger other as a non-enemy. The formulation of hospitality as a question of law weaves it with contradiction because the welcoming of the other within the limits of law is possible on the condition that the host, the owner of the home, the one who accepts, remains the master of the home and thereby retains his/her authority in that place. The law of hospitality is the law of oikonomia, the law of one’s home. Offered as the law of place, hospitality lays down the limits of a place and retains the authority over that place, thus limiting the gift that is offered, retaining the self as self in one’s own home as the condition of hospitality. In making this the condition of hospitality, it affirms the law of the same. Hospitality is a giving gesture. But with the hospitality as law, what this gesture in fact does is to subject the stranger/foreigner to the law of the host’s home. In this way, the foreigner is allowed to enter the host’s space under conditions the host has determined. Hence conditional welcoming entails a way of insinuating a place from which one invites the other and hence lays down the conditions for “appropriating for oneself a place to welcome the other, or, worse, welcoming the other in order to appropriate for oneself a place and then speak the language of hospitality” (15-6). Therefore the law of hospitality is characterized by a limitation. The host affirms the position of a master in his/her own home; in the space and things he/she provides to the stranger/guest, the host assures his/her sovereignty and says: this space belongs to me; we are in my home. Welcome to me. Feel at home but on the condition that you obey the rules of hospitality (14). This gesture affirms one’s sovereignty and one’s being at one’s own home. For this reason, hospitality as law limits itself with a threshold.6
Drawing on Derrida’s deconstructive reading of the contradictions inherent in conditional hospitality, we can suggest that multiculturalist tolerance of minorities within the host nation-state is not for nothing. Welcoming the other in the form of codified multiculturalist tolerance implies a conditional welcoming, as the hospitality offered remains limited within law and jurisdiction. But more importantly, this kind of tolerance does not result in a fundamental modification of the host subject’s mode of inhabiting the territory that is deemed to be solely within his/her possession. Far from laying the grounds for an interruption of sovereign identity of the self, multiculturalist respect and tolerance implies the conditional welcoming of the guest within the prescribed limits of the law and hence implies a reassertion of mastery over the national space as it enables the subject to appropriate a place for itself–an empty and universal and therefore sovereign place–from which the other is welcomed. Thus the place from which multiculturalist tolerance welcomes the particularity of the other, fortified by codifications such as affirmative action and other legal measures, is what precisely enables the disavowed and inverted self-referentiality of racist hospitality which by emptying the host’s position from any positive content asserts its superiority and sovereignty.
The inherent paradox of multiculturalism’s conditional and lawful welcoming of the other as guest can be productively understood as conforming to “the structure of exception” that Giorgio Agamben discusses in Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. In discussing this, I want to refer to the German case where the paradox of the inclusion of minorities within the limits of law can be illustrated. All of the laws that regulate the conditions of arrival, presence, and departure of “guest-workers” in Germany reveal that the overriding concern is that of recruitment of a short-term labor force. For this reason, residence permits are conferred only as work permits. Laws explicitly anticipate that the workers will leave Germany when the needs of capital are fulfilled. The fact that the workers’ presence is regarded as temporary makes clear that the new regulations are seen as an exception: a parenthesis to be opened and eventually closed. The logic underlying these laws is that the acceptance/welcoming of foreign labor is a conditional one, as the workers’ presence, which is expected to be temporary, is deemed to be an exception to the general rule. Tellingly, the term “migrant” is not typically used to name this group. As guests, these workers are accepted as an exception to the general rule of membership in the German polity. Their welcoming is not regulated within the framework of the general rule of law. In accordance with the persistent and widespread sentiment that declares that “Germany is not a land of immigration,” the conditional welcoming or the temporary hosting of foreign labor appears at first glance to be set outside the purview of general law. Hence these regulations are nothing but the name of an interim, an exception.
Following Agamben, we can ask whether as an exception, the conditional welcoming of workers indicates that they are left outside the sovereign law of the host society? It is clear that this temporary foreign labor force has been included in the German territory without being turned into proper members of the polity. Their membership is undecidable from the perspective of the German self and law since their inclusion exceeds membership, testifying to the impasse of a system based on law, which is incapable of making their inclusion coincide with membership. As guests having temporary abode, they are not properly inside. But does this indicate that they are outside the purview of sovereign and general law? One way to approach this dynamic between outside and inside is to see them as a limit figure which brings into crisis the clear distinction between what is inside and what is outside. Surely this not an altogether invalid way of grasping the dynamic between the guest and the host that is structured through the law, but it is a limited one insofar as the paradox of exception is concerned.
Exception, Agamben notes, “embodies a kind of membership without inclusion” (24). What defines the German sovereign claim of ownership of the land can be understood with Agamben’s following remarks: “what defines the character of the sovereign claim is precisely that it applies to the exception in no longer applying to it, that it includes what is outside itself . . . . What cannot be included in any way is included in the form of the exception” (24). It seems that we can talk about a paradoxical inclusion of guest-workers, which is indeed an “inclusive exclusion” (21). For Agamben, the regulation that is exercised by the law is achieved not by a command or prescription, but by the creation of “the sphere of its own reference in real life and make that reference regular” (26). The sovereign claim of the general law is constituted by having a grip over the exception and by articulating it into its domain through an inclusive exclusion. It is through the exception, through the inclusive exclusion of the exception, that the law is able to generate and cultivate itself. The apparent exclusion of the exception is in fact an indication of its paradoxical inclusion in the juridical order.
For Agamben, when we see exception as fundamental to the structure of the constitution of sovereignty, then sovereignty can be grasped neither as an exclusively political nor as a juridical category; it is not “a power external to law (Schmitt)” or to the supreme rule of juridical order (Hans Kelsen): it is the originary structure in which law refers to life and includes it in itself by suspending it” (28). Following Jean-Luc Nancy’s suggestion, he gives the name ban to “this potentiality . . . of the law to maintain itself in its own privation, to apply in no longer applying” (28). The law, in excluding or banning, does not place the exception to its exteriority, but abandons or threatens it on a threshold where the distinction between outside and inside, life and law, becomes blurred. It becomes difficult to say in a definite manner whether the one who is banned is outside or inside the juridical order. The paradox of sovereignty is that it leaves nothing outside the law as it has a hold on life even when it abandons what it interdicts.
In offering hospitality that is conditional, the German national self appropriates a place for himself/herself so as to be able to say welcome. This entails not only maintaining the status of the German national self as master, but more importantly it institutes a welcoming in order to nourish the sovereignty of the German subject that was already in place. To understand the dynamic that is operating here, we can establish a link between Derrida’s understanding of “conditional hospitality” and what Agamben calls “inclusive exclusion.” Though pushed outside, the provisional acceptance of the guest-workers enables the regeneration and nourishment of the German national self, which needs to reconstitute its sovereignty each time anew. Such a sovereign self maintains and nurtures itself not by pushing particular others to its exteriority or outside the purview of general law. On the contrary, it is their inclusive exclusion, which the conditional welcoming enables, that is indispensable for a reassertion of a sovereign German national self. The empty and universal position of the sovereign claim enabled by the general rule of law is capable of instituting conditional hospitality as an exception and this enables the means to codify respect and tolerance for the different and confer upon them rights in the form of law. It is precisely at this point that we need to be vigilant and to problematize this codification by asking what is being negated and foreclosed here. Does this codification entail the opening of the space of politics or does it effectively signal the circumscription of what Zizek calls “politics proper” or what Antonio Negri calls “constituent power”?
In his discussion of the three forms of universality, Balibar gives the proposition concerning human rights as the example of ideal universality (65). Reversing the traditional relationship between subjection and citizenship, ideal universality justifies the universal extension of political (civic) rights by explaining that equality and liberty are inseparable, which Balibar calls “equaliberty.” As such, it introduces the notion of unconditional into the realm of politics: “equaliberty is an all-or-nothing” notion and hence cannot be relativized. It is either recognized or ignored as a principle or as a demand. Balibar links this characteristic of equaliberty to what Hannah Arendt calls “the right to have rights,” which is distinct from having this or that specific right that is guaranteed by law. Nor is it a moral notion. It is a political notion and delineates a process, which starts with resistance and ends with the actual exercise of constituent power (66). For this reason, for Balibar, the “right to have rights” can also be called the “right to have politics.” As an unconditional force, the demand for equaliberty sets in motion a permanent insurrection that can never be gentrified or “fully integrated into the harmonious whole of the concrete universality” (65). But does this mean that constituent power, as the irreducible excess (to use Zizek’s formulation), is allowed to exercise its full destabilizing potential of the political? Certainly not. The question thus becomes: what are the means through which this insurrectionary demand is domesticated, suffocated, limited, regulated, neutralized, or congealed?
To answer this question–to understand the dynamic by which the “right to have rights” or the “right to have politics” of minorities and foreigners is regulated and hence limited through institutionalized multiculturalism and through the granting of a set of rights guaranteed by law–it is useful to turn to (and to revise) Antonio Negri’s conception of constituent and constitutive power as articulated in Insurgencies: Constituent Power and the Modern State. I have already suggested, following Zizek, that it is through liberal multiculturalist institutional and juridical regulations that the post-national global order renders its global universalizing tendency indiscernible and thereby forecloses the possibility for a right to have politics or democratic politics. But does the current global management of the conditional and legal hosting of immigrants mean that any change in the law or any attempt to modify the law will by definition play into the hands of the forces of globalization? Can the legal conditions of hospitality or laws on immigration be improved? The analysis that Negri offers regarding the relation between constitutive and constituent power seems to imply that any attempt to improve or change the law is a vain effort; that it’s futile to attempt to replace existing laws with better ones, for any politics that remains within the purview of law is doomed to fail as it implies suffocation of democratic politics through constitutional arrangements. After a brief discussion of the analysis Negri offers and its limitations, I will discuss Derrida’s deconstructive reading of the relation between law and justice on the one hand and conditional and unconditional hospitality on the other hand and suggest that the latter offers a radically different opening of politics.7
For Negri, to speak of constituent power is to speak of democracy for it is constituent power that regulates democracy. It is not only all-powerful, but also has an expansive and unlimited quality. It emerges from the vortex of the void and is characterized by the openness of its needs and the absence of determinations and finalities. Its strength lies in the fact that it never ends up in power, nor its multitude results in a totality. As an open multiplicity, it is always based upon a set of singularities. Its all-powerful and expansive tendency, its strength, which opens a horizon, never results in a vertical or totalitarian dimension. The active elements of constituent power are resistance, desire, and an ethical impulse. It does not seek institutionality but aims at constructing an ethical being. It is for these reasons that Negri emphasizes the strong link between constituent power and democracy. Democracy is the political form of constituent power. The concept of democracy in Negri’s formulation is not treated as a subspecies or a subcategory of liberalism but refers to a form of governability that enables the freeing of constituent power, because it entails a totality without a closure and the exclusion of any sign of external definition. It is a project of the multitude and is a creative force. This multitude is not an ungraspable multiplicity but is the strength of singularities and differences. As a singular multidirectionality it refers to an irreducible concept of the political and to an ethics that recognizes singularities. Like democracy, constituent power resists being constitutionalized.
The opposite of democracy and constituent power is not totalitarianism but sovereignty itself and constitutional power. The establishment of constitutional power presents a closure to the always-open nature of constituent power. When constituent power is articulated in juridical definitions, it is limited, closed, reduced to juridical categories, and is restrained in administrative routines. The State’s constitutionality and its various other regulatory activities bring a form of control, well-defined limits, and procedures to the all-expansive force of the constituent power. Once it is situated in the concept of the nation and absorbed by the mechanism of representation, constituent power is perverted, desiccated, congealed in a static system. Representation is one of the fundamental juridical-constitutional instruments in exercising control and in segmenting constituent power. Its dilution in representative mechanisms manifests itself in political space but is disguised in the activity of the Supreme Court and other organs of the State. These mechanisms restore traditional sovereignty and close the possibility of democratic innovation. The taming and suffocation of constituent power by constitutionalist arrangements entails the mediation of inequalities and hence the neutralization of its strength. The fixing and institutionalization of constituent power implies its de facto termination and negation. And in this way, the sovereignty inverts the ostensible foundation of democratic polity and reconstructs itself as the foundation.
Although Negri’s analysis of the ways in which constitutive power tames and suffocates constituent power is a useful one to think how laws of conditional hospitality limit the unconditional welcoming of foreigners, it nevertheless suffers from certain limitations. Negri does not use the concept of constituent power as a theoretical or philosophical device that enables him to better understand how constitutive arrangements limit a more expansive politics. Rather, he treats constituent power as something that can actually be established as such by its affirmation or as a self-affirming power. Moreover, Negri posits the relation between constitutive and constituent power as an opposition or a dialectical contradiction; he poses the relation between constitutive and constituent power as an either/or question. The heterogeneity between the two is reduced to an antinomy. As such, his analysis risks leaving intact the very structure it aims to criticize; it risks repeating the same desire for a sovereign position, shifted now to the side of the hegemonized second term.
In an attempt to rethink another philosophical and theoretical framework that might help us to envision the possibility of reinventing a political space that is neither locked within the limits and congealments of conditional hospitality nor one that pretends to go beyond the law by simply reversing it, I want to discuss Derrida’s reading of the relation between conditional and conditional hospitality and law and justice.
How does Derrida think the relationship between conditional and unconditional hospitality? Are they mutually exclusive of each other and hence standing in a relation of opposition? Does unconditional hospitality simply imply that nation-states make it their official policy and open their borders and unconditionally welcome anyone who wants to come? Does it have the status of a regulative idea and hence constitute the name of a correct politics? Or does it have the status of a deconstructive tool devised to read the limits of conditional hospitality?
While Kant is concerned with hospitality as law and thereby with the conditions and limitations of hospitality, Levinas engages with it as a question of ethics or as the question of ethicity itself. In his reading of Levinas’s formulation of the ethics of hospitality, Derrida orients our attention to the fact that in the lawful admittance of the other as guest there is a level that exceeds and hence cannot be captured by those analyses that take the nation-state and the juridical regulation as the model to work on. Or rather, his question is whether the ethics of hospitality, in Levinas’s thought, is conducive for “a law and a politics beyond the familial dwelling, within a society, nation, State, or Nation-State” (Adieu 20). It is this level that Derrida’s reading of Levinas’s ethics of hospitality brings to the fore.
Pointing to a hiatus between the law and ethics of hospitality, Derrida underlines how the ethics of hospitality cannot be treated as a decree nor can it be imposed by a command. The hiatus between the law and ethics of hospitality also pertains to the fact that it is unthematizable, implying that a particular law or politics of hospitality cannot be deduced from Levinas’s discourse of the ethics of hospitality, for it is irreducible to a theme, thematization, or some kind of formalization. Ethics as such is an attentive intention, a welcome and tending toward the other, an unconditional “yes” to the other. Hospitality as ethicity is infinite (it is either infinite, unconditional or not at all) and cannot be limited in the sense that Kant talks about it; it cannot be regulated by a particular political or juridical practice of a nation and therefore cannot be circumscribed.
Derrida notes that the ethics of hospitality, the welcome made to the other, entails the subordination or putting in question of the freedom of the subject and an interruption of the self as other. But this interruption is not something that can be enforced by a decree or law. It is an interruption produced in the intentional attention to the other. The subordination of the freedom of the subject does not imply depriving the subject of its birth. Rather it implies the subjection of the subjectum and enables the birth of the subject along with freedom: the coming of the subject to itself as it welcomes the other. Responsibility for the other, the being-host of the subject, puts the subject into question; it puts the subject’s being in question. Therefore, for Derrida, “the host is a hostage insofar as he is a subject put into question, obsessed (and thus besieged), persecuted in the very place where he takes place, where as emigrant, exile, stranger, a guest from the very beginning, he finds himself elected to or taken up by a residence before himself electing or taking one up” (20).
Unconditional hospitality entails a reversal, since the owner of the home can perform hospitality on the condition that she is invited to her own home by the one whom she invites, by being welcomed, accepted by the one whom she welcomes or accepts, and shown hospitality in her own home by the guest. Unconditional hospitality or hospitality as ethics implies the interruption of a full possession of a place called home and when its inhabitant becomes a guest received in her home–that is, when the owner becomes a tenant in her place. The inexorable law of hospitality therefore involves a situation in which
the hote who receives (the host), the one who welcomes the invited or received hote (the guest), the welcoming hote who considers himself the owner of the place, is in truth a hote received in his own home. He receives the hospitality that he offers in his own home; he receives it from his own home–which, in the end, does not belong to him. The hote as host is a guest. The dwelling opens itself to itself, to its “essence” without essence, as a “land of asylum or refuge.” The one who welcomes is first welcomed in his own home. The one who invites is invited by the one whom he invites. The one who receives is received, receiving hospitality in what he takes to be his own home, or indeed his own land . . . . (41-2)
Hospitality in this sense precedes property, since home, in this unconditional welcoming, is not owned, or is owned only in a very singular sense. That is, only insofar it is already hospitable to its owner, when the master of the house is already a received hote or a guest in her own home. When home is no longer a property but a place that welcomes its owner, the question of hospitality cannot be reduced to a multiculturalist tolerance, for there is no longer a question of limiting, restricting, or regulating tolerance for the other. As Derrida puts it:
That a people, as a people, “should accept those who come and settle among them–even though they are foreigners,” would be the proof [gage] of a popular and public commitment [engagement], a political res publica that cannot be reduced to a sort of “tolerance,” unless this tolerance requires the affirmation of a “love” without measure. (Adieu 72)
In the hospitality without conditions, the host should, in principle, receive even before knowing anything about the guest. A pure welcome consists not only in not knowing anything or acting as if one knows nothing, but also in avoiding any questions about the Other’s identity, their desire, their rules, their language, their capacity for work, for integration, for adaptation . . . From the moment that I formulate all of these questions, and posit these conditions . . . the ideal situation of non-knowledge–non-savoir–is broken–rompue. (“A Discussion” 9)
Above I have delineated the characterizing features of what unconditional hospitality is. To be able to understand its relation to conditional hospitality, I want to briefly review how Derrida understands the relation between law and justice in “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority,’” as it has a parallel structure with conditional and unconditional hospitality. This will enable us to better comprehend the nature of the relation between conditional and unconditional hospitality and thus better understand how unconditional hospitality is not simply the name of a political program.
For Derrida, there lies an aporia within the drive for justice because it has to respect universality on the one hand and absolute singularity on the other. One faces difficulty in justice precisely because of the necessity to speak in terms of the universal principles when one is deciding about particular cases. Since law includes these two conditions simultaneously, the singularity has to be translated into universality. The aporia resides in the principle of universality which cannot directly speak to the particular case: in the fact that it is not possible to be just for everyone and for every single case. This is what Derrida means in saying that “justice is impossible.” However, justice is the principle in the name of which law is deconstructed; that is, it is possible to change and improve the law, the legal system. Law can be criticized and therefore is deconstructible, but justice is not deconstructible. Thus despite the absolute radical heterogeneity between the two, the relation between them is not one of opposition. Law is not opposed to justice, nor is justice opposed to law. Derrida makes clear that justice and law are indissociable because it is in the name of justice that one deconstructs the law. The relation between them will remain endlessly open and irreducible. To tend to justice one has to deconstruct and improve the law, but it is never just–and it is there, in the space between law and justice, that one negotiates between the universal and the particular.
Like justice, unconditional hospitality is also impossible. But this impossibility does not mean that one does not aspire to pure hospitality. Its impossibility lies in the very structure of unconditional hospitality itself. In principle, it is offered to an unlimited number of Others and to an unlimited extent, without asking any questions. The Other’s welcoming is not to be contingent upon the Other’s identity or the questions asked. The very notion of pure or unconditional hospitality assumes that one must offer to any stranger the right of entry to a territory, home, or nation of which one is legitimately in possession.
With the concept of unconditional hospitality, Derrida is not trying to offer a political program about how a pure hospitality might be implemented; rather, he is trying to expose the presuppositions of conditional hospitality and the series of concepts that it is based upon–such as one’s proper residence, proper identity, and proper cultural identity. For Derrida, there is an essential link between society or culture and hospitality. In every society there is space allocated for those who are invited and this enables the welcoming of the strangers who arrive. In other words, conditional hospitality is what enables one’s being at home. There is no culture, no home, no nation or family without a door. It is the opening of this door that functions as a means of welcoming strangers. When the stranger, the Other, is welcomed on the condition that he adjust to the chez soi, the hospitality that is offered is a conditional one, one of visitation: the stranger is welcome only as long as he respects the order and rules of the home, the nation or culture, and learns to speak the language. In contrast (but not in opposition) to conditional hospitality is unconditional or pure hospitality: the pure welcoming of the unexpected guest or anyone who arrives or visits, the hospitality of invitation. Conditional hospitality of invitation is distinguished from the unconditional hospitality of visitation by the fact that in the former, the master remains the master, the host remains the host at home, and the guest remains an invited guest. As an invited guest, one is expected not to alter the rule and order of the home. Derrida imagines the hospitality of visitation in order to distinguish it from the hospitality of invitation where the stranger is not an invited guest, but one who arrives unexpectedly, where the host opens the house without asking any questions.
Derrida reminds us that the relation between the two forms of hospitality has the same structure between law and justice (and let’s remember that according to Derrida justice is impossible); they are heterogeneous but at the same time absolutely indissociable. These two forms of hospitality refer to the legal and just forms of hospitality. Like justice, unconditional hospitality is impossible as one cannot deduce a rule from it. In other words, it is impossible to make it a rule that nations, families, cultures, or governments should open their house unconditionally to everyone and hence to turn it into an official policy. Although it is impossible, Derrida nevertheless designates with the term unconditional what hospitality should be in principle. Thus the concept of conditional hospitality enables Derrida to conceive of unconditional hospitality. As he puts it:
to think of this conditional hospitality one has to have in mind what would be a pure hospitality to the messianic Other, the unexpected one who just lands in my country and to whom I simply say: come and eat and sleep and I won’t even ask your name. (“A Discussion” 13)
If we have a concept of conditional hospitality, it’s because we have also the idea of a pure hospitality, of unconditional hospitality. (15)
If unconditional or pure hospitality is impossible, then what is the possibility of the politics of hospitality? Like the relation between law and justice, where it is in the name of justice that one deconstructs the law, it is in the name of unconditional hospitality that conditional hospitality can be deconstructed. To tend to unconditional hospitality one has to deconstruct and improve the laws on hospitality (such as immigration laws), but these laws will never guarantee unconditional hospitality as such. The relation between them will remain open and irreducible. As Derrida notes, the law is perfectible and there is progress to be performed on the law that will improve the conditions of hospitality. The condition of the laws on immigration has to be improved without claiming that unconditional law should become an official policy. The very desire for unconditional hospitality is what regulates the improvement of the laws of hospitality.
So how, then, can we rethink the forces of capitalist globalization and institutionalized multiculturalism, which I suggested are working hand in hand, in light of the Derridian notion of unconditional hospitality? This essay has not meant to imply that the operation of the forces of globalization are limited by the laws that regulate the welcoming of immigrants or through institutionalizing multiculturalist respect and tolerance. Globalization works on many fronts, and we need to be vigilant: about the complicated links between globalization and the workings of nation-states in the so-called Third World; about the novel ways in which the rural is now accessed by global capital; about the interventions of the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank which impose as international law the laws of the national economies of the global North; about the reinstitution of the repressive powers of the nation-states in the Third World so as to enable the smooth operation of global capital.8My analysis here engages with the question of globalization in terms of its ideological and political presuppositions. The reason for my discussion of how liberal multiculturalism functions as the ideal form of global capitalism and how it is conditioned by its demands is twofold: first, to examine the hegemonic ideological form of global capitalism as it relates to the ethnically and culturally Other; second, to challenge the idea that the valorization of particular identities can be seen as a destabilizing counter-hegemonic political force in the wake of the global abstraction of transnational capitalism. I have suggested that Derrida’s concept of conditional hospitality is a useful philosophical and theoretical apparatus for deconstructing the ideology embedded in liberal multiculturalism.
But let me be clear: I do not mean to suggest that conditional hospitality should be dismantled, that the welcoming of immigrants based on legal regulations should be done away with, or that unconditional hospitality should be substituted as the official policy of the host nations. I do not recommend the concept of unconditional hospitality as a technical application of a rule or norm. Unconditional hospitality is not to be regarded as the name of a counter-political program against the global management of the ethnically and culturally different. Nor is it a command that can be conformed to or deviated from, as it cannot be treated as a rule or an injunction that can organize the nature of the relation with immigrants. Unconditional hospitality is neither a means of determining judgment nor a rule of action. It is, rather, the condition of the possibility of the perfection and improvement of conditional hospitality. Speaking of unconditional hospitality, Derrida notes:
It’s impossible as a rule, I cannot regularly organise unconditional hospitality, and that’s why, as a rule, I have a bad conscience, I cannot have a good conscience because I know that I lock my door, and that a number of people who would like to share my house, my apartment, my nation, my money, my land and so on so forth. I say not as a rule, but sometimes, exceptionally, it may happen. I cannot regulate, control or determine these moments, but it may happen, just as an act of forgiveness, some forgiveness may happen, pure forgiveness may happen. I cannot make a determinate, a determining judgement and say: ‘this is pure forgiveness,’ or ‘this is pure hospitality,’ as an act of knowledge, there is no adequate act of determining judgment. That’s why the realm of action, of practical reason, is absolutely heterogeneous to theory and theoretical judgments here, but it may happen without even my knowing it, my being conscious of it, or my having rules for its establishment. Unconditional hospitality can’t be an establishment, but it may happen as a miracle . . . in an instant, not lasting more than an instant, it may happen. This is the . . . possible happening of something impossible which makes us think what hospitality, or forgiveness, or gift might be. (“A Discussion” 15-16)
This “possible happening of something impossible” can be seen as the condition of a democratic possibility. To use Derrida’s formulation in The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe, this condition of democratic possibility is something “to be thought and to come [à venir]: not something that is certain to happen tomorrow, not the democracy (national or international, state or trans-state) of the future, but a democracy that must have the structure of a promise–and thus the memory of that which carries the future, the to-come, here and now” (78). It is the introduction of the notion of unconditionality into politics–or to put it in Balibar’s term, the politics of equaliberty, which is an all-or-nothing notion–that can open the possibility of a democratic politics. As we saw earlier, Balibar argues that as an unconditional force, the demand for equaliberty or the right to have rights cannot be relativized. The unconditional nature of equaliberty, like the unconditionality of hospitality, is distinct from this or that specific right guaranteed by law. However neither equaliberty nor unconditional hospitality in themselves are possible. But their impossibility should not be taken as the closure of the possibility of democracy; on the contrary, it is the principle of unconditionality which is the driving force behind the condition of possibility of a democratic opening and, with it, a revision in law.
At this point, it might be useful to situate the demand for equaliberty and the ethics of hospitality in the context of contemporary global capitalism, as my aim is not to theorize them as pure, atemporal and context-independent forces ultimately separated from forces of economy and politics.
From the point of view of politics proper, globalization can be characterized as a contradictory process: on the one hand, the very processes of globalization produce the demand for equaliberty. The globalization of production and other market forces necessarily create the conditions for the welcoming of immigrants as well as the granting of certain rights. These very same groups, as a consequence of the production of new political and ideological needs, make claims that may be against the interests of global capitalism. On the other hand, however, globalization is a law-governed process, and institutionalizing forces such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank absorb the demand for equaliberty through the mechanism of the law. Thus, the ideal of the right to have rights or the demand for equaliberty is necessarily compromised as it becomes articulated within global capitalism. And it is in this regard that Negri’s analysis becomes useful for understanding the constriction of politics proper through constitutional means. Such institutionalization coincides with the direction global capitalism has taken. Demands for equaliberty are always compromised, always diluted and contained by their expression within lawful and institutionalized processes.
In the face of this compromise, where can we situate the possibility of a democratic politics? In the face of this containment of the politics for equaliberty in global capitalism, must we forfeit the desire for unconditional hospitality? In a word: no. But the task is to rethink the very force of the demand for equaliberty not in terms of its full realization–as this would imply a total transcendence of global capitalism, which at the very least will not come any time soon–but precisely in terms of its inevitable containment or dilution by global forces. For unconditional hospitality or the demand for equaliberty is not exhausted by or reduced to the current historical context of the granting of conditional and legal rights. Neither is its full realization contingent upon the transcendence of the capitalist world system. Instead, unconditional hospitality has to be understood as immanent to the present–“the possible happening of something impossible”– demanding, in the present, the immediate transformation of the present conditions of hospitality.
I am grateful to Kenneth Bar and Mahmut Mutman for their close reading of the essay and for providing suggestions which helped me to clarify the arguments developed here.
1. The distinction Etienne Balibar makes between three forms of universality, namely “real universality,” “fictitious universality,” and “ideal universality,” is a very useful one to rethink the difference between the nature of the universality that globalization implies (which Balibar calls “real universality”). He differentiates it from “ideal universality.” The latter refers to a subversive element and is intrinsically linked with the notion of insurrection and rebellion in the name of freedom and equality. See “Ambiguous Universality.”
2. Balibar designates this “new world order” with the term “real universality.” See “Ambiguous Universality.”
3. For Zizek the term “politics proper” “always involves a kind of short circuit between the universal and the particular; it involves a paradox of a singular that appears as a stand-in for the universal . . . . This singulier universel is a group that . . . not only demands to be heard on equal footing with the ruling oligarchy or aristocracy . . . but, even more, presents itself as the immediate embodiment of society as such, in its universality, against the particular power interests of aristocracy and oligarchy” (“A Leftist Plea” 988-89).
4. Derrida notes that the German word for hospitality is about the stranger’s right, upon arrival to the domain of another, to be treated not as an enemy. Hence hospitality is in opposition precisely to opposition itself, that is, to hostility. The guest, who is hosted as the opposite of the one who is treated as an enemy, is a stranger who is treated as an ally.
5. Kant adds the word Wirbarkeit as synonymous to the word hospitality. The word Wirt(in), Derrida writes, refers to host and guest, the host who accepts the guest. Derrida notes that the word Gastgeber refers to the owner (proprietor) of a hotel or restaurant. Like Gastlich, Wirtlich, also means the one who hosts or accepts. Wirt, Wirtschaft thus refers to the domain of economy, the governing of home.
6. By this way, hospitality becomes the threshold itself. For hospitality to exist there has to be a door. But when there are doors that means there is no (unconditional) welcoming as this implies that someone has the key for the door and thus controls the condition of hospitality.
7. As it will become clear in the following pages, it is legitimate to discuss the relation between these two as they have the same structure.
8. For a fuller discussion of these issues see Yegenoglu and Mutman.
Zafer Aracagök
Department of Graphic Design
Bilkent University
aracagok@bilkent.edu.tr
The evocative remarks of Giorgio Agamben on the concept of whatever have received relatively little attention. In opening the question of the whatever and its implications for the nature of representation, my intention is to investigate the possibilities for another concept, that is, the whatever image.
For Agamben, language depends upon the notion of singularity, a concept he derives from an investigation of the “the Scholastic enumeration of transcendentals” that begins “quodlibet ens est unum, verum, bonum seu perfectum–whatever entity is one, true, or perfect.” Agamben points out that the adjective “whatever,” the Latin quodlibet, is the term that “remaining unthought in each, conditions the meaning of all the others” (1). “Whatever” is that which is neither universal nor particular; it is being “such as it is” (66). I will elaborate this critical notion in a moment, but at this point I would simply point out that, when considering language and writing, Agamben is drawn to the sensation of whatever from the viewpoint of the singularity that this whateverness endows the being with. The whatever singularityin a singular language calls into question the pre-eminence of central linguistic conventions, such as the I and its representations. It is this that enables Agamben to assert that “the perfect act of writing comes not from a power to write, but from an impotence that turns back on itself and in this way comes to itself as a pure act” (36). His figure for the perfect act of writing that is not-writing is Melville’s Bartleby, “a scribe who does not simply cease writing but prefers not to, . . . [who] writes nothing but its potentiality to not-write” (36).
The body has emerged as a subject of much recent critical and theoretical concern, and I believe there is merit in reconsidering the body in terms of whatever singularities. This would entail thinking of the body as the locus or the generator of representation. But if the body is seen as a generator of representation, what happens to art, to image, and to the broader question of representation in art criticism? And what happens to the relationship between art theory and politics, or indeed what happens to the “political” itself?
My intention here is to attempt to draw the possible relationships between the body and the image, understood as the singular experience of a singular language, largely ignoring the difference between visual and verbal language. To that extent the following investigation can also be seen as a contribution to the development of art criticism that will be based on a new community, a coming community of whatever singularities. My discussion will move through Leibniz and his interpreters Benjamin, Deleuze, and Adorno, and then return, at last, to Agamben.
“The Epistemo-Critical Prologue” of Benjamin’s Trauerspiel study conceptualizes Adam as the father of philosophy. Adam’s naming of the things foregrounds for Benjamin the linguistic base of representation of philosophical truth. The name before the Fall is thus the linguistic being which captures the intended object in its singularity. The period that comes after the Fall is the one in which names are transformed into words, and now they fail to capture the singularity of the objects to which they refer. For Benjamin, naming refers to a kind of mimesis that is a one-time-only configuration. The name pays attention to the object’s non-identity by identifying it as singular; in this way it imitates nature, whereas the concept or the word subordinates it. Words as concepts can never grasp the singularity of singularities because concepts are formed by means of class names that erase the particularity of the phenomenon.
Given the necessity of the conceptual moment in philosophy, the problem for Benjamin in the Trauerspiel is how to philosophize without falling into the prisonhouse of the concepts or yielding to class names. Or, to articulate this concern in Agamben’s terms, the question is how to move beyond the logic of “belonging,” that is the characteristic relationship between a class name and its subset, between the universal and the particular? Benjamin’s solution in the Trauerspiel is to rely on clusters of concepts in order to get away from the totalizing tendency of the concepts. It means to work with continuous combination and arrangement of words–in constellations–for the representation of philosophical truth.
Philosophical experience, for Benjamin, is concerned with the representation of truth and therefore raises the question of the objectivity of the structure of ideas constituted by the subject. For the structure of ideas to be objective, it should be constituted by the particular phenomena themselves, that is, by their inner logic. Philosophical experience–“the objective interpretation of phenomena”–is a representation of ideas gathered from out of empirical reality itself (The Origin of German Tragic Drama 34). Concepts thus function as the mediators between empirical phenomena and ideas without yielding to a totality. Here the crucial difference between cognitive knowledge and philosophical representation lies in the difference between the concept’s claim to capture the phenomena and the conceptualization process undertaken by a subject for each singular phenomenon–the difference between concepts and conceptualization as such.
In this way, Benjamin inverts Plato’s theory of ideas, in which ideas are transcendental forms whose likenesses appear within the empirical objects as pale reflections of their own eternal truth: he constructs the Platonic absolute (ideas) out of empirical fragments. Here ideas do not constitute a metaphysical first principle; rather, they are derived from various configurations of the phenomena in the form of constellations. In other words, ideas are treated as empirical phenomena: phenomenal elements are the absolutes while the ideas, hence the truth, are historically specific and subject to change.
For Benjamin this was a way of rescuing phenomena from temporal extinction by redeeming them within the name–Utopia for him was the reestablishment of the language of names through a theory of constellations. One-time-only configuration of names meant for him the production of a quasi-objective interpretation of phenomena whose truth is only momentary. When elaborating this theory with respect to a claim for objectivity, Benjamin supported his argument by referring to an infinitesimal calculus, and, unavoidably, to Leibniz. Perhaps this was for him the only way of defeating the conceptual prisonhouse of language, or the Platonic representation of ideas. However, Benjamin’s account of Leibniz deserves special attention at this juncture for it will throw light on both how Benjamin’s claim for objectivity through a theory of constellation leads to a certain production of truth, and also on how this truth is interpreted by him as a means for constituting an image, or rather a total image.
As can be witnessed in Benjamin’s inversion of Platonic idealism, “The Epistemo-Critical Prologue” can be seen as an attempt to ground philosophy on a materialist base. However, toward the end of the “Prologue,” where he discusses the finite number of ideas that deserve to be redeemed by philosophy, Benjamin with a strange move seems to be approaching a phenomenology of essences:
Ideas are displayed, without intention, in the act of naming, and they have to be renewed in philosophical contemplation. In this renewal the primordial mode of apprehending words is restored. And so, in the course of its history, which has so often been an object of scorn, philosophy is–and rightly so–a struggle for the representation of a limited number of words which always remain the same–a struggle for the representation of ideas. In philosophy, therefore, it is a dubious undertaking to introduce new terminologies which are not strictly confined to the conceptual field, but are directed towards the ultimate objects of consideration. Such terminologies–abortive denominative processes in which intention plays a greater part than language–lack that objectivity with which history has endowed the principal formulations of philosophical reflections. These latter can stand up on their own in perfect isolation, as mere words never can. And so ideas subscribe to the law which states: all essences exist in complete and immaculate independence, not only from phenomena, but, especially, from each other. Just as the harmony of the spheres depends on the orbits of stars which do not come into contact with each other, so the existence of the mundus intelligibilis depends on the unbridgeable distance between pure essences. Every idea is a sun and is related to other ideas just as suns are related to each other. The harmonious relationship between such essences is what constitutes truth. Its oft-cited multiplicity is finite; for discontinuity is a characteristic of the “essences.” (37)
I quote this long passage because it is here that Benjamin asserts a strange relationship between materialism and an obscure phenomenology: if from the materialist tradition he borrows the term “objectivity,” he borrows “essence” from phenomenology. And the resolution of this problem–the reconciliation of materialism and phenomenology–rests on the production of a limit which not only frees the rigid boundaries of conceptual knowledge but also marks the reconciliation with a finite multiplicity. “The discontinuous finitude” on which Benjamin bases his resolution is also that which, according to him, is neglected by Romanticists in whose “speculations truth assumed the character of a reflective consciousness in place of its linguistic character” (38). I will return to this “linguistic character” of truth later, but for the time being we must dwell a bit more on how Benjamin makes a move from this question of “discontinuous finitude” to Leibnizian monadology.
If Benjamin resolves the question of limit by introducing the idea of discontinuous finitude, his intention is probably to give flesh to his idea of “objective interpretation” by means of which the truth of a system of constellations could be maintained. In the following paragraphs it is not in vain that he opens his discussion by taking on the question of origins:
Origin [Ursprung], although an entirely historical category, has, nevertheless, nothing to do with genesis [Entstehung]. The term origin is not intended to describe the process by which the existent came into being, but rather to describe that which emerges from the process of becoming and disappearance. Origin is an eddy in the stream of becoming, and in its current it swallows the material involved in the process of genesis. (45)
The objective interpretation–that is, the moment of coming-into-being of a constellation and its truth–should therefore be understood not as a moment of “genesis” but as a moment of “origin”: as coming-into-being and going-out-of-being. This characteristic of a constellation is what makes both itself and its truth momentary. Once redeemed under a name, the empirical phenomena are supposed to yield to a truth that is momentary due to its being conditioned by this limit, that is, discontinuous finitude.
Given the limited number of names (essences) in contrast to the infinite multiplicity of concepts or words that attempts to define them conceptually, such moments of reconciliation, or, such momentary moments of coming-into-being of truth, could not be easily maintained by Benjamin without referring to this limit in the form of a discontinuous finitude which he apparently found in Leibniz:
The idea is a monad. The being that enters into it, with its past and subsequent history, brings–concealed in its own form–an indistinct abbreviation of the rest of the world of ideas, just as, according to Leibniz’s Discourse on Metaphysics (1686), every single monad, in an indistinct way, all the others. The idea is a monad–the pre-stabilized representation of phenomena resides within it, as in their objective interpretation. The higher the order of the ideas, the more perfect the representation contained within them. And so the real world could well constitute a task, in the sense that it would be a question of penetrating so deeply into everything real as to reveal thereby an objective interpretation of the world. In the light of such a task of penetration it is not surprising that the philosopher of the Monadology was also the founder of infinitesimal calculus. The idea is a monad–that means briefly: every idea contains the image of the world. The purpose of the representation of the idea is nothing less than an abbreviated outline of this image of the world. (47-48)
However, as can be observed in the paragraph above, what Benjamin finds in Leibniz with a concern for a limit yields to another expression: “image.” One thing that is obvious in this paragraph is that Benjamin’s appropriation of the Leibnizian monad is conditioned by its relation to the visible, to that which is representable in the form of an image. The possibility of redeeming ideas for Benjamin lies in the capacity to represent them, and he is at pains to find a way to establish a relationship between an idea and its representation that is not based on the question of “belonging,” or on the question of a hierarchy of representation. Yet, as Benjamin conceives it, the momentary representation of an idea that is found resonating in a constellation is an image.
I would like to argue at this point that although Benjamin formulates ideas as that which can be derived from empirical phenomena, there is still a relationship between an idea and its image based on belonging, on the hierarchy between an idea and its image. This is so because Benjamin’s theory of constellation still preserves a sense of idealism. For him, an idea is necessarily that which should be represented in the finitude of an image.
At this moment, I think it will be illuminating to divert the question from the relation between an idea and its image to the question of the possibility of such a moment of representation, such an image. For this purpose I would like to compare Benjamin’s reading of Leibniz (of the necessity of a discontinuous finitude, a limit, an image) with Deleuze’s reading of Leibniz. This, I believe, will also foreground why such a moment of visibility is necessary for Benjamin and at what cost he obtains these results that he adopts from Leibniz.
As Deleuze recounts clearly, neither seeing nor the production of an image can be a function of a monad. For Deleuze, a Leibnizian monad is not something whose perception can be projected in the form of an image, not even momentarily: a monad is made of infinite “folds” that cannot be limited. As Deleuze reads Leibniz, there is no “consciousness interpolating images, a third element, between itself and what it thinks.”1 Leibniz’s position does not emanate from a ban put on images, but it develops as a result of his formulation of the monad and its body with respect to perception. The Benjaminian theory of constellation, on the other hand, produces representations, images, finite totalities which are continuous in themselves and yet, although momentarily, have a moment of coming into being.
Every monad in Leibniz contains the entire world: the monad is finite and the world is infinite. However, this opposition between the two does not mean that they constitute oppositional pairs because if the monad contains the entire world then it is itself made of infinite and infinitely small parts. What makes a monad finite is not that it can have or represent the world to itself in clear images but its capacity to have perceptions– clear zones of expression. As Deleuze puts it:
In brief, it is because every monad possesses a clear zone that it must have a body, this zone constituting a relation with the body, not a given relation, but a genetic relation that engenders its own “relatum.” It is because we have a clear zone that we must have a body charged with traveling through it or exploring it, from birth to death. (The Fold 86)
Thus, having a body is a necessary part of having perceptions: either clear or obscure, such perceptions owe their state-of-being-perceived to the body, which is itself made of infinitely small parts. To put both the world and the monad into such an infinite structure of constitution, however, does not lead to chaos but to flux. At this point Deleuze draws our attention to the passage between microperceptions and macroperceptions: microperceptions are those minute, obscure, confused perceptions from which a monad obtains its conscious or macroscopic perceptions. The relationship between the two kinds of perceptions is not of the parts to the whole, but it is structured as a passage from “ordinary” to what is “notable” or “remarkable.” This passage from the ordinary to the remarkable is marked with the constitution of a threshold in the monad. The constitution of this threshold creates a qualitative difference between the sum of minute perceptions and what is perceived as conscious perception.
This is an important move in Deleuzes’s reading of Leibniz because here we observe a consideration of inconspicuous, infinitely small, minute perceptions within the finite monad that will mark the monad’s finitude with a strange obscurity. Having a clear, a conscious perception never means a completely clear zone of expression, for if the monad is finite, it is not because it can have basically clear perceptions out of obscure perceptions but because, given the infinite number of representatives of the world within itself, it can reach only an obscurely clear or clearly obscure perception. Comparing it with Cartesian “clarity” of reason, Deleuze has the following remarks:
What then is the implication of the Cartesian expression “clear and distinct,” which Leibniz nonetheless retains? How can he say that the privileged zone of every monad is not only clear but also distinct, all the while it consists of a confused event? It is because clear perception as such is never distinct. (91)
Rather, it is “distinguished,” in the sense of being remarkable or notable (91).
Once the difference between clear and obscure perception is understood as a question of being “distinguished,” Deleuze stresses that inconspicuous perceptions are included within conscious perception not in a relation of parts to the whole but as a qualitative difference between two heterogeneous parts. The part still remains the part before and after the threshold. Conscious perception is not separated from infinite inconspicuous perceptions: it is only “distinguished” from the latter by simply stressing its heterogeneity which does not only apply to the relationship between parts but also to the ones between “wholes” and “parts.” The moment of heterogeneity is what puts the conscious perception and inconspicuous perceptions into a differential relationship. What would be called a totality in a metaphysical framework is still considered a part here–a part that includes all the other parts within itself and that differs qualitatively from the others without being separated from them.
Fold over folds: such is the status of the two modes of perception, or of microscopic and macroscopic processes. That is why the unfolded surface is never the opposite of the fold, but rather the movement that goes from some to the others. Unfolding sometimes means that I am developing–that I am undoing–infinite tiny folds that are forever agitating the background, with the goal of drawing a great fold on the side whence forms appear; it is the operation of a vigil: I project the world “on the surface of a folding …” [Jean Cocteau, La Difficulte d’etre, Paris, Rocher, 1983, pp. 79-80]. At other times, on the contrary, I undo the folds of consciousness that pass through every one of my thresholds, “the twenty-two folds” that surround me and separate me from the deep, in order to unveil in a single movement this unfathomable depth of tiny and moving folds that waft me along at excessive speeds in the operation of vertigo, like the “enraged charioteer’s whiplash…” [Henri Michaux, “Les 22 plis de la vie humaine,” in Ailleurs, Paris, Gallimard, 1948, p. 172]. I am forever unfolding between two folds, and if to perceive means to unfold, then I am forever perceiving within the folds. (93)
When Deleuze makes us aware of the folds between the finite and the infinite, he is relying on one of Leibniz’s fundamental principles of philosophy: “inseparability.”2 This latter enables Deleuze not only to see an obscure zone of separation between clear and indistinct perceptions but also to make us aware that this ensuing flux of perception in Leibniz leads to one of the most original points in philosophy: a monad’s level of perception is dependent upon its body’s relation to other bodies, that is, to the infinite. However, if this is so, we must first answer the following question: if the monad includes all the monads within its infinite inconspicuous, minute, obscure perceptions, then how can it have an extrinsic possession, such as a body, outside itself?
For Leibniz, as Deleuze puts it,
Every perception is hallucinatory because perception has no object. Conscious perception has no object and does not even refer to a exclusively physical mechanism of excitations that could explain it from without: it refers only to the physical mechanism of differential relations among unconscious perception that are comprising it within the monad. And unconscious perceptions have no object and do not refer to physical things. (93)
Hence, Leibniz, at one stroke, refutes not only the possibility of having one finite perception (for if body cannot be thought without its relationship to other bodies, then what is produced as a perception is never free from echoes that open it to an infinity), but also the question of belonging by denying an exteriority to the monad. Even if one should insist on the exteriority of the body to the monad, this exteriority will be included within the monad because the body is a materiality that has its own monad or, simply, the body is just another monad within which differential perceptions comprise, and which, get into infinite differential relationships with the monad called “I.” Thus, if the monad “I” has a body, this body is related to the “I” not in a relationship of belonging but on the principle of inseparability. Neither the monad “I” nor its body truly belongs to the other because each is already included in the other.
Deleuze’s reading of Leibniz is remarkable in two senses: first, it locates the body in the process of perception and, second, it produces a critique of Gestalt such that the constitution of an image as such is put into question:
That we were always perceiving in folds means that we have been grasping figures without objects, but through the haze of dust without objects that the figures themselves raise up from the depths, and that falls back again, but with time enough to be seen for an instant…I do not see into God, but I do see into the folds. The situation of perception is not what Gestalt theory describes when it erects the laws of the “proper form” against the idea of hallucinatory perception, but what Leibniz and de Quincey describe: When a herd or an army approaches, under our hallucinated gaze …–the event. (94)
Given the limited scope of this essay, I cannot dwell here on the importance of the Stoic concept of “event” for Deleuze’s philosophy; suffice to say that it is through such a dynamic conception of event that Deleuze sees in perception a sense of “becoming.” To look at the relationship between body and perception from the viewpoint of becoming so that none of them truly comes to the fore as such raises questions about the individuation of the “I” and the particular certain body. In other words, if, as everything else, the body does not exist outside the monad, then it is what becomes, or comes into being when the monad perceives it as a difference between at least two heterogeneous parts–or, say, when the monad expresses what happens to its infinity of perceptions. Simply put, here the body is what is perceived or what is expressed through perception where “expression” is understood not only as a verbal activity but also as what appears as conscious perception.
Now, if we return to one of our earlier considerations of Benjamin, there is a special point where Benjamin and Deleuze, or Deleuze’s reading of Leibniz, come closest: this is where we quoted Benjamin saying: “Origin is an eddy in the stream of becoming.” The question of origin that post-structuralist thought elaborated thoroughly seems to be one of Benjamin’s most serious concerns, where the proximity between Benjamin and Deleuze occurs with the latter’s conceptualization of “becoming” based on “event.” However, as we slightly adumbrated earlier, there is a cost that Benjamin pays in concluding his discussion on constellations with a “discontinuous finitude”: forgetting the body, the body as the locus of generator of perceptions.
Given the discrepancy between the Leibnizian monad on the one hand, and its appropriation by Benjamin in his theory of constellations on the other, it is interesting, at this juncture, to look at what Adorno might have said about similar issues in Negative Dialectics, and in some of his earlier work.
For example, one can observe such passages in Adorno’s inaugural lecture:
The task of philosophy is not to search for concealed and manifest intentions of reality, but to interpret the unintentional reality in that, by the power of constructing figures, images, out of the isolated elements of reality, it negates questions whose exact articulation is the task of knowledge. (“Die Aktualitat der Philosophie” 95)
What kind of an image is Adorno talking about here?
According to Frederic Jameson, the project of constructing constellations in the form of images led Adorno in Negative Dialectics to put a ban on images, as in the case of the ban on graven images (119).
However, let us look briefly at the context in which Adorno mentions this so-called ban.3 At the end of the second chapter (“Concepts and Categories”) of Negative Dialectics, Adorno critically reconsiders the possibility of representational thinking. Adorno suggests that representational thinking is merely “a consciousness interpolating images, a third element between itself and that which it thinks,” and that the “materialist longing to grasp the thing” aims at the “absence of images where the full object could be conceived” (207). However, his evocation of the body in the same paragraph does not in any sense allow for an interpretation as a ban on images. For Adorno critically maintains this ban only to the extent of formulating materialism at its most materialistic moment where he claims that this materialistic ban has resulted in a prohibition of picturing a positive Utopia. Adorno’s immanent criticism of materialism sees it as the possibility of the “resurrection of the flesh” (207), the body, and it does not necessarily mean that resurrection can take place only within the absence or prohibition of images. As a dialectician without a position, Adorno is silent on whether the reconsideration of the body necessitates a ban on images or requires a new constellation of representation. I believe that Adorno’s position cannot be put into an either/or framework and can best be interpreted as opening up the possibility of reconsidering the body as the locus of representation. At this point I would like to raise the following question: is it possible to formulate an image, a form of representation, without necessarily dealing with the question of its belonging or not-belonging to a body?
If Adorno’s thoughts on image resonate well with Leibniz’s monadology, it is because, for both, image is that which cannot be thought of as separate from the body. Yet Adorno does not elaborate this thought in the rest of Negative Dialectics, and Benjamin, as we have seen, closes the matter with a “discontinuous finitude.” I would like to suggest it is precisely in this sense that Agamben’s The Coming Community can be read as the unthought of Benjamin’s theory of constellations and Adorno’s questions about the image. One of the main problems–the question of belonging, which Benjamin criticizes but then reappropriates in his theory of constellations–remains a problem for Agamben; however, the question of belonging is no longer seen within a program of redemption or sublation but is now understood with respect to “whatever.”
Whatever, as Agamben formulates it, is not something that can be logically deduced from a series of properties that condition the belonging of a certain particular to a certain universal. For example, if a class name is constituted by the properties it contains, it is the presence of the properties which makes a class name belong to a universal, whereas the “whatever” is that which, “remaining unthought in each, conditions the meaning of all the others” (1). Consequently, whatever is that term whose inclusion among properties is that which creates the difference between particular and singular, or that which transforms particularity into a whatever singularity. Up to that point, the proximity between Agamben and the Benjamin of the “Epistemo-Critical Prologue” is unmistakable, for in the two accounts of singularity one observes a debt to Leibnizian monadology. This is a question of the “countables” which, as we have seen, is answered differently by Benjamin and Leibniz: discontinuous finitude for Benjamin and discontinuous infinitude for Leibniz. For Agamben, however, the question of the countables is considered in terms of properties that constitute a singularity such that the concepts of property and singularity are put into question. What are those properties that go into the constitution of such entities? Can they be counted as things that have an identity, the summation of which will endow an identity to that which is consequently constituted?
First of all, the whatever, within the context of the questions above, is not only a term whose inclusion among properties can be translated to a “being such that it always matters” (1) but also the whatever is that which “remains unthought” in each singularity. This peculiarity of the term, the whatever, thus opens the thought of singularity to a space where “its being such as it is” (1) is valued as the unthought with respect to properties, or common properties. This means that the space of the unthought puts to the test not only countability but also the definition of the properties of a singularity. One immediate question that concerns the whatever singularity, then, is the one related to the individuation of a whatever singularity. If the properties that go into the constitution of a singularity are put at stake, then, how is it possible to individuate whatever singularities? Such questions also underline the suppositions concerning common nature, or the speculations on form, which Agamben traces in Duns Scotus:
…Duns Scotus conceived individuation as an addition to nature or common form (for example, humanity)–an addition not of another form or essence or property, but of an ultima realitas, of an “utmostness” of the form itself. Singularity adds nothing to the common form, if not a “haecceity.” … But, for this reason, according to Duns Scotus, common form or nature must be indifferent to whatever singularity, must in itself be neither particular nor universal, neither one nor multiple, but such that it “does not scorn being posed with a whatever singular unity” (16).
Agamben builds this argument on a previous introduction of the whatever according to which whatever is that whose addition to a singularity creates the singularity’s difference from others–not because whatever’s addition brings about another, a different identity, to the singularity in question, but because it endows the singularity with an indifference to difference. Thus, with this move, what creates the difference–the inclusion of certain properties within a certain singularity and, also, what went into the constitution of properties–is made irrelevant. This indifference, however, cannot be thought without whatever singularity’s relation to common nature because the moment of addition of the whatever also abolishes the singularity’s concern with common nature or properties in the sense of installing indifference as the main trait of a whatever singularity. In Agamben’s words:
Whatever is constituted not by the indifference of common nature with respect to singularities, but by the indifference of the common and the proper, of the genus and the species, of the essential and the accidental. Whatever is the thing with all its properties, none of which, however, constitutes difference. In-difference with respect to properties is what individuates and disseminates singularities, makes them loveable (quodlibetable). (18)
The whatever is that whose addition does not mean “being, it does not matter which” but “being such that it always matters” (1). Within the context of singularities, what happens to our earlier considerations related to the questions of continuity, discontinuity, finite and infinite–the question of countability? Agamben’s formulation of whatever singularities as “being such as they are” makes irrelevant not only such concerns (because a question concerning countability can only be relevant where entities come into being as such), but also the questions of representability of such moments of being, whether they be in the form of images, concepts, constellations, or identities.
One thing that renders whatever singularity unrepresentable can be found in the parallels that Agamben draws between the unbaptized children in limbo and the location of whatever singularities. Limbo is a non-place, where the inhabitants, lacking a conception of a first metaphysical principle, experience a condition of being lost. This lack of a first principle incapacitates any moment of representation and, thus, any possibility of having a memory and not having a memory, both remembering and forgetting. Since there is no sense of redemption, limbo is also marked by a temporality that is a not-yet-taking place. Time can only take place in the end, at the apocalypse; however, even then the inhabitants of limbo will not be absorbed into it, for they are characterized as “letters with no addressee” with no destination (6). Time is only relevant for those who have a destination to reach, who have committed an act to be punished, or for those who have something to redeem.
If life in limbo describes the whatever singularities’ relation to the first metaphysical principle and temporality, and in this way describes their unrepresentability in terms of an identity, the question of whether language as such can grasp them is explained by Agamben by referring to whatever singularities’ indifference to antinomies such as the universal and the particular, or in short, to class names. Language as such transforms singularities into members of a class. Subsumed under a class name, the meaning of the singular is defined by a common property shared by dissimilar particulars–meaning is a condition of belonging to a name. “Linguistic being,” on the other hand, is different from that which is signified by a name for linguistic being comes into being only by being-called something such as “the tree, a tree, this tree” (8). The being-called of tree, that is, for example, the tree, signifies both one certain tree and also its belonging to a class of trees, and this is why linguistic being is a class that both belongs and does not belong to itself.
Linguistic being in this sense is a whatever singularity that is best exemplified by the concept of the example. Considering a class name and any particular subsumed under it as the example of this class name, the difficulty that arises when giving an example of the concept of example is what endows the latter with a singularity. Here the impossibility of giving an example of the concept of example is due to the concept’s lack of its own properties or its lack of a common property with other examples. In this sense, an example is a singularity that does not have any common property with other examples; that is, it comes into being by being-called, by referring to properties that neither belong to itself nor to the class name it constitutes. Each example in this sense is both a class name and a singularity on its own. In Agamben’s words,
Exemplary being is purely linguistic being. Exemplary is what is not defined by any property, except by being called. Not being-red, but being-called red … defines the example. (10)
If nothing could be tied to a classifying concept–if it were possible to get rid of the linguistic convention, that is the first principle–then everything could be an example. Pure singularities with no property of their own would communicate “without being tied by any common property, by any identity” (11). Singularities would exist with no identities, no selves, no belonging to any class name. In Agamben’s words, this would be “an absolutely unrepresentable community” (24).
Agamben’s theory of such an unrepresentable community, based on whatever singularities, without doubt, is a critique of today’s linguistic situation which he, building on Debord’s theory of the spectacle, describes with a story (Shekinah) from the Talmud. This story, according to Agamben, bears witness to the separation of knowledge and the word with the following risk:
The risk here is that the word–that is, the non-latency and the revelation of something (anything whatsoever)–be separated from what it reveals and acquire an autonomous consistency. Revealed and manifested (and hence common and shareable) being is separated from the thing revealed and stands between it and humans. In this condition of exile, the Shekinah loses its positive power and becomes harmful. (80-1)
For Agamben, this risk transforms language, spectacle, image, or indeed, any representative claim, into an autonomous sphere or, as Adorno puts it, into a third term between consciousness and what it thinks. What has happened to the body is closely related to what has happened to representation in the modern era with respect to language and image, or, to the verbal and the visual.
Describing the process with a chapter entitled “Dim Stockings,” Agamben sees in the commodification of the body–in mass-media reproductions of body images–its redemption from theological foundations.4 The invention of the camera, photographic reproduction, and the ensuing businesses of advertisement and pornography signal the end of a kind of a ban on graven images which has left no part of the body unrepresented in technologically manipulated images. The emergence of such images by the beginning of the nineteenth century held a promise for the body to come: “Neither generic nor individual, neither an image of the divinity nor an animal form, the body now became something truly whatever” (47). The technologically reproduced image of the human body had no resemblance now with its archetypal model formulated in Genesis.5 Still preserving a certain sense of resemblance without having any archetype, now the body severs its ties from an obligation to belonging, or to belonging to a class name. In Agamben’s words, this situation bore witness to becoming-whatever of the body where the whatever should be understood as a “resemblance without archetype–in other words, an Idea” (48).
If the emancipation from an archetypal resemblance had a promise of a whatever-body-to-come, it was because it claimed to abolish the “third term,” any claim of representation determined by belonging; however, the reason why it has never been realized must be sought, according to Agamben, in the failure of technology which technologized only the image, that transformed not the body, but its representation.
To appropriate the historic transformations of human nature that capitalism wants to limit to the spectacle, to link together image and body in space where they can no longer be separated, and thus to forge the whatever body, whose physics is resemblance–this is the good that humanity must learn how to wrest from commodities in their decline. (50)
At this point, it is useful to remember what Adorno offered in the passage from Negative Dialectics that I cited earlier and the critique of Benjamin’s reading of Leibniz. If Benjamin insisted on an image, though a momentary one, we have seen how Adorno defended a position in which the image is questioned by opening the possibility of the “resurrection of the flesh,” the body. Earlier, this question of whether the body can become the locus of representation received a certain explanation in Deleuze’s reading of Leibniz; yet after bringing Agamben’s whatever into our discussion, we are faced with slightly different question: whether the whatever body can lead to a formulation of a whatever image? If there is such a thing as whatever image, can it be said to come between “a consciousness and what it thinks”?
Now, as can be concluded from Agamben’s discussion of the body in “Dim Stockings,” separation of the representation of the body from an archetype not only saves the image from being a third term, but also introduces the “whatever” into the body-as such itself. The addition of the “whatever” to the body-as such does not transform it into another body–does not deepen the body/consciousness distinction–it only gives birth to whatever singularities, thereby blurring such oppositions between antinomies. Addition of whatever, one can argue, brings along an indifference of body and consciousness with respect to whatever singularities.
I mentioned earlier the space of the unthought that the whatever adds to the singularities. Considering such an addition, such an opening to singularities, is it still possible to talk about image as a third term?
If we follow Agamben to the end of the book, there is a passage in which he summarizes this space in the following terms:
Whatever adds to singularity only an emptiness, only a threshold: Whatever is a singularity plus an empty space. . . But a singularity plus an empty space can only be a pure exteriority, a pure exposure. Whatever, in this sense, is the event of an outside. Quodlibet is, therefore, the most difficult to think: the absolutely non-thing experience of a pure exteriority. (66)
Agamben reaches this point, the “non-thing experience of a pure exteriority,” by recounting Spinoza’s concept of extension in relation to the common. “All bodies, he [Spinoza] says, have it in common to express the divine attribute of extension. . . . And yet what is common cannot in any case constitute the essence of the single case” (17). The extension in question here is what opens the singularity to a space, the space of the unthought, to an exteriority. This outside, or “the threshold,” in Agamben’s terms, is determined not by an essential commonality; this is a commonality with neither substance nor no property. “The threshold is not, in this sense, another thing with respect to limit; it is, so to speak, the experience of the limit itself, the experience of being-within an outside” (67). This passage from common form to singularity, or, the limit-experience, which is the “event of an outside,” should thus be understood not as an event accomplished once and for all, but as an experience of “an infinite series of modal oscillations” (19).
If singularities are accomplished in “an infinite series of modal oscillations,” then it means, in a Spinozian sense, that they exist as substanceless extensions–with no property of their own–but it is each singularity’s way of establishing a neighborhood with others that determines its accomplishment. Agamben illustrates the coming-to-itself of each singularity with a life story:
Toward the end of his life the great Arabist Louis Massignon … founded a community called Bahaliya, a name deriving from the Arabic term for “substitution”. The members took a vow to live substituting themselves for someone else, that is, to be Christians in the place of others. (23)
For Agamben, the moment of substitution signifies the interconnectedness of each singularity’s existence. The place where this substitution takes place does not belong to anyone nor to itself: the coming-into-being of each singularity is a common thing. One is singular and common at the same time in the process of its taking place.Hence, the unrepresentability of such a community where there would be no identity, for the latter will be a substanceless extension always in the form of its taking place. For Agamben, this is the space of becoming whatever of each singularity, and he calls this unrepresentable space the “Ease”:
The term “ease” designates, according to its etymology, the space adjacent (ad-jacens, adjacentia), the empty place where each can move freely. … In this sense, ease names perfectly that “free use of the proper” that, according to an expression of Freidrich Hölderlin’s, is “the most difficult task.” (25)
Without doubt, the difficulty of this task arises from the possibility of acting within the space of the Ease where identity and representation as such disappear: or, rather, in the Ease, in this “being-within an outside,” what disappears is the possibility of an image that comes as a third term between a consciousness and what it thinks. The constitution of such an image is determined by the way the passage from potentiality to act is formulated. For Aristotle, as Agamben explains, the decisive potentiality is the “potentiality to not-be.”
In the potentiality to be, potentiality has as its object a certain act in the sense that for it energhein, being-in-act, can only mean passing to a determinate activity …; as for the potentiality to not-be, on the other hand, the act can never consist of a simple transition de potentia ad actum. It is, in other words, a potentiality that has as its object potentiality itself, a potentia potentiae. (34-35)
What happens to the antinomy of “a consciousness and what it thinks” in this framework is that, having the potentiality to not-think, thought turns back to itself and, without having an object, or, without being able to form a pure image, it thinks of its own potentiality to not-be.
Whatever-singularity’s affinity with the potentiality to not-be, with such a limit-experience of “being-within an outside,” eases not only the question concerning the possibility of action within the space of the Ease, but also trivializes the question of the disappearance of representation. Representation, or the image, does not disappear but is absorbed into whatever singularity’s potentiality to not-be.
Given this limit-experience, can one still preserve the body as such at the moment of the potentiality to not-be? Do whatever singularities leave room for a possibility of raising distinctions such as that between body and consciousness? Are we still talking about something visible when we talk about “whatever image“?
Does this potentiality to not-be or this limit-experience point toward a direction where whatever singularities might ask for the abolition not only of the possibility of a politics of identity but also the establishment of art and art-criticism? Our answer would be “yes,” if the whatever image were simply “no image.” But if a character like Bartleby in Melville’s story is still in our heads with “no image,” or if it behaves like a ghost whenever we are put into a position of “preferring not to,” I would like to conclude this essay without an answer.
1. See Adorno, “Die Aktualitat der Philosophie.”
2. “One of Leibniz’s essential theses consists in positing at once the real distinction and the inseparability: it is not because two things are really distinct that they are separable” (The Fold 107-8).
3. “Representational thinking would be without reflection – an undialectical contradiction, for without reflection there is no theory. A consciousness interpolating images, a third element, between itself and what it thinks would unwittingly produce idealism. A body of ideas would substitute for the object of cognition, and the subjective arbitrariness of such ideas is that of the authorities. The materialist longing to grasp the thing aims at the opposite: it is only in the absence of images that the full object could be conceived. Such absence concurs with theological ban on images. Materialism brought that ban into secular form by not permitting Utopia to be positively pictured; this is the substance of its negativity. At its most realistic, materialism comes to agree with theology. Its great desire would be the resurrection of the flesh, a desire utterly foreign to idealism, the realm of the absolute spirit” (Negative Dialectics 207).
4. “In the early 1970s there was an advertisement shown in Paris movie theaters that promoted a well-known brand of French stockings, “Dim” stockings. It showed a group of young women dancing together. Anyone who watched even a few of its images, however, distractedly, would have hard time forgetting the special impression of synchrony and dissonance, of confusion and singularity, of communication and estrangement that emanated from the bodies of the smiling dancers. This impression relied on a trick: Each dancer was filmed separately and later the single pieces were brought together over a single sound track. But that facile trick, that calculated asymmetry of the movement of the long legs sheathed in the same inexpensive commodity, that slight disjunction between the gestures, wafted over the audience a promise of happiness unequivocally related to the human body” (The Coming Community 46).
5. Here Agamben refers to a phrase in Genesis: “in the image and likeness” (48).
Saul Newman
Department of Political Science
University of Western Australia
snewman@cyllene.uwa.edu.au
Max Stirner and Michel Foucault are two thinkers not often examined together. However, it has been suggested that the long-ignored Stirner may be seen as a precursor to contemporary poststructuralist thought.1 Indeed, there are many extraordinary parallels between Stirner’s critique of Enlightenment humanism, universal rationality, and essential identities, and similar critiques developed by thinkers such as Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, and others. However, the purpose of this paper is not merely to situate Stirner in the “poststructuralist” tradition, but rather to examine his thinking on the question of freedom, and to explore the connections here with Foucault’s own development of the concept in the context of power relations and subjectivity. Broadly speaking, both thinkers see the classical Kantian idea of freedom as deeply problematic, as it involves essentialist and universal presuppositions which are themselves often oppressive. Rather, the concept of freedom must be rethought. It can no longer be seen in solely negative terms, as freedom from constraint, but must involve more positive notions of individual autonomy, particularly the freedom of the individual to construct new modes of subjectivity. Stirner, as we shall see, dispenses with the classical notion of freedom altogether and develops a theory of ownness [Eigneheit] to describe this radical individual autonomy. I suggest in this paper that such a theory of ownness as a non-essentialist form of freedom has many similarities with Foucault’s own project of freedom, which involves a critical ethos and an aestheticization of the self. Indeed, Foucault questions the anthropological and universal rational foundations of the discourse of freedom, redefining it in terms of ethical practices.2Both Stirner and Foucault are therefore crucial to the understanding of freedom in a contemporary sense–they show that freedom can no longer be limited by rational absolutes and universal moral categories. They take the understanding of freedom beyond the confines of the Kantian project–grounding it instead in concrete and contingent strategies of the self.
In order to understand how this radical reformulation of freedom can take place, we must first see how the concept of freedom is located in Enlightenment thought. In this paradigm, the exercise of freedom is seen as an inherently rational property. According to Immanuel Kant, for instance, human freedom is presupposed by moral law that is rationally understood. In the Critique of Practical Reason, Kant seeks to establish an absolute rational ground for moral thinking beyond empirical principles. He argues that empirical principles are not an appropriate basis for moral laws because they do not allow their true universality to be established. Rather, morality should be based on a universal law–a categorical imperative–which can be rationally understood. For Kant, then, there is only one categorical imperative, which provides a foundation for all rational human action: “Act only on that maxim whereby thou canst at the same time will that it should become a universal law” (38). In other words, the morality of an action is determined by whether or not it should become a universal law, applicable to all situations. Kant outlines three features of all moral maxims. Firstly, they must have the form of universality. Secondly, they must have a rational end. Thirdly, the maxims that arise from the autonomous legislation of the individual should be in accordance with a certain teleology of ends.
This last point has important consequences for the question of human freedom. For Kant, moral law is based on freedom–the rational individual freely chooses out of a sense of duty to adhere to universal moral maxims. Thus, for moral laws to be rationally grounded they cannot be based on any form of coercion or constraint. They must be freely adhered to as a rational act of the individual. Freedom is seen by Kant as an autonomy of the will–the freedom of the rational individual to follow the dictates of his own reason by adhering to these universal moral laws. This autonomy of the will, then, is for Kant the supreme principle of morality. He defines it as “that property of it by which it is a law to itself (independently of any property of objects of volition)” (59). Freedom is, therefore, the ability of the individual to legislate for him or herself, free from external forces. However, this freedom of self-legislation must be in accordance with universal moral categories. Hence, for Kant, the principle of autonomy is: “Never choose except in such a way that the maxims of the choice are comprehended in the same volition as a universal law” (59). It would appear that there is a central paradox in this idea of freedom–you are free to choose as long as you make the right choice, as long as you choose universal moral maxims. However, for Kant there is no contradiction here because, although adherence to moral laws is a duty and an absolute imperative, it is still a duty that is freely chosen by the individual. Moral laws are rationally established, and because freedom can only be exercised by rational individuals, they will necessarily, yet freely, choose to obey these moral laws. In other words, an action is free only insofar as it conforms to moral and rational imperatives–otherwise it is pathological and therefore “unfree.” In this way, freedom and the categorical imperative are not antagonistic but, rather, mutually dependent concepts. Individual autonomy, for Kant, is the very basis of moral laws.
But that the principle of autonomy […] is the sole principle of morals can be readily shown by mere analysis of concepts of morality; for by this analysis we find that its principle must be a categorical imperative, and that [the imperative] commands neither more nor less than this very autonomy. (59)
Nevertheless, it would seem that there is a hidden authoritarianism in Kant’s formulation of freedom. While the individual is free to act in accordance with the dictates of his own reason, he must nevertheless obey universal moral maxims. Kant’s moral philosophy is a philosophy of the law. That is why Jacques Lacan was able to diagnose a hidden jouissance–or enjoyment in excess of the law–that attached itself to Kant’s categorical imperative. According to Lacan, Sade is the necessary counterpart to Kant–the perverse pleasure that attaches itself to the law becomes, in the Sadeian universe, the law of pleasure.3 The thing that binds Kantian freedom to the law is its attachment to an absolute rationality. It is precisely because freedom must be exercised rationally that the individual finds him or herself dutifully obeying rationally founded universal moral laws.
However, both Foucault and Stirner have called into question such universal rational and moral categories, which are central to Enlightenment thought. They contend that absolute categories of morality and rationality sanction various forms of domination and exclusion and deny individual difference. For Foucault, for instance, the centrality of reason in our society is based on the radical and violent exclusion of madness. People are still excluded, incarcerated, and oppressed because of this arbitrary division between reason and unreason, rationality and irrationality. Similarly, the prison system is based on a division between good and evil, innocence and guilt. The incarceration of the prisoner is made possible only through the universalization of moral codes. What must be challenged, for Foucault, are not only the practices of domination that are found in the prison, but also the morality which justifies and rationalizes these practices. The main focus of Foucault’s critique of the prison is not necessarily on the domination within, but on the fact that this domination is justified on absolute moral grounds–the moral grounds that Kant seeks to make universal. Foucault wants to disrupt the “serene domination of Good over Evil” central to moral discourses and practices of power (“Intellectuals” 204-17).
It is this moral absolutism that Stirner is also opposed to. He sees morality as a “spook”–an abstract ideal that has been placed beyond the individual and held over him in an oppressive and alienating way. Morality and rationality have become “fixed ideas”–ideas that have come to be seen as sacred and absolute. A fixed idea, according to Stirner, is an abstract concept that governs thought–a discursively closed fiction that denies difference and plurality. They are ideas that have been abstracted from the world and continue to dominate the individual by comparing him or her to an ideal norm that is impossible to attain. In other words, Kant’s project of taking moral maxims out of the empirical world and into a transcendental realm where they would apply universally, would be seen by Stirner as a project of alienation and domination. Kant’s invocation of absolute obedience to universal moral maxims Stirner would see as the worst possible denial of individuality. For Stirner, the individual is paramount, and anything which purports to apply to or speak for everyone universally is an effacement of individual uniqueness and difference. The individual is plagued by these abstract ideals, these apparitions that are not of his own creation and are imposed on him, confronting him with impossible moral and rational standards. As we shall see, moreover, the individual for Stirner is not a stable, fixed identity or essence–this would be just as much an idealist abstraction as the specters that oppress it. Rather, individuality may be seen here in terms similar to Foucault’s–as a radically contingent form of subjectivity, an open strategy that one engages in to question and contest the confines of essentialism.
The exorcism that Stirner performs on this “spirit realm” of moral and rational absolutes is part of a radical critique of Enlightenment humanism and idealism. His “epistemological break” with humanism may be seen most clearly in his repudiation of Ludwig Feuerbach. In The Essence of Christianity, Feuerbach applied the notion of alienation to religion. Religion is alienating, according to Feuerbach, because it requires that man abdicate his essential qualities and powers by projecting them onto an abstract God beyond the grasp of humanity. For Feuerbach, the predicates of God were really only the predicates of man as a species being. God was an illusion, a fictitious projection of the essential qualities of man. In other words, God was a reification of human essence. Like Kant, who tried to transcend the dogmatism of metaphysics by reconstructing it on rational and scientific grounds, Feuerbach wanted to overcome religious alienation by re-establishing the universal rational and moral capacities of man as the fundamental ground for human experience. Feuerbach embodies the Enlightenment humanist project of restoring man to his rightful place at the center of the universe, of making the human the divine, the finite the infinite.
Stirner argues, however, that by seeking the sacred in “human essence,” by positing an essential and universal subject and attributing to him certain qualities that had hitherto been attributed to God, Feuerbach has merely reintroduced religious alienation, placing the abstract concept of man within the category of the Divine. Through the Feuerbachian inversion man becomes like God, and just as man was debased under God, so the individual is debased beneath this perfect being, man. For Stirner, man is just as oppressive, if not more so, than God. Man becomes the substitute for the Christian illusion. Feuerbach, Stirner argues, is the high priest of a new universal religion–humanism: “The human religion is only the last metamorphosis of the Christian religion” (158). It is important to note here that Stirner’s concept of alienation is fundamentally different from the Feuerbachian humanist understanding as alienation from one’s essence. Stirner radicalizes the theory of alienation by seeing this essence as itself alienating. As I shall suggest, alienation in this instance may be seen more along the lines of a Foucauldian notion of domination–as a discourse that ties the individual to a certain subjectivity through the conviction that there lies within everyone an essence to be revealed.
According to Stirner, it is this notion of a universal human essence that provides the foundations for the absolutization of moral and rational ideas. These maxims have become sacred and immutable because they are now based on the notion of humanity, on man’s essence, and to transgress them would be a transgression of this very essence. In this way the subject is brought into conflict with itself. Man is, in a sense, haunted and alienated by himself, by the specter of “essence” inside him: “Henceforth man no longer, in typical cases, shudders at ghosts outside him, but at himself; he is terrified at himself” (Stirner 41). So for Stirner, Feuerbach’s “insurrection” has not overthrown the category of religious authority–it has merely installed man within it, reversing the order of subject and predicate. In the same way, we might suggest that Kant’s metaphysical “insurrection” has not overthrown dogmatic structures of belief, but only installed morality and rationality within them.
While Kant wanted to take morality out of the domain of religion, founding it instead on reason, Stirner maintains that morality is only the old religious dogmatism in a new, rational guise: “Moral faith is as fanatical as religious faith!” (45). What Stirner objects to is not morality itself, but the fact that it has become a sacred, unbreakable law, and he exposes the will to power, the cruelty and the domination behind moral ideas. Morality is based on the desecration, the breaking down of the individual will. The individual must conform to prevailing moral codes; otherwise, he becomes alienated from his essence. For Stirner, moral coercion is just as vicious as the coercion carried out by the state, only it is more insidious and subtle, since it does not require the use of physical force. The warden of morality is already installed in the individual’s conscience. This internalized moral surveillance is also found in Foucault’s discussion of Panopticism–in which he argues, reversing the classical paradigm, that the soul becomes the prison for the body (Foucault, Discipline 195-228).
A similar critique may be leveled at rationality. Rational truths are always held above individual perspectives, and Stirner argues that this is merely another way of dominating the individual. As with morality, Stirner is not necessarily against rational truth itself, but rather against the way it has become sacred, transcendental, and removed from the grasp of the individual, thus abrogating the individual’s power. Stirner says: “As long as you believe in the truth, you do not believe in yourself, and you are a —servant, a–religious man” (312). Rational truth, for Stirner, has no real meaning beyond individual perspectives–it is something that can be used by the individual. Its real basis, as with morality, is power.
So while, for Kant, moral maxims are rationally and freely obeyed, for Stirner they are a coercive standard, based on an alienating notion of human “essence” that is forced upon the individual. Moreover, they become the basis for practices of punishment and domination. For instance, in response to the Enlightenment idea that crime was a disease to be cured rather than a moral failing to be punished, Stirner argues that curative and punitive strategies were just two sides of the same old moral prejudice. Both strategies rely on a universal norm which must be adhered to: “‘curative means’ always announces to begin with that individuals will be looked on as ‘called’ to a particular ‘salvation’ and hence treated according to the requirements of this ‘human calling’” (213). Is not the individual, for Kant, also “called” to a particular “salvation” when he is required to do his duty and obey moral codes? Is not the Kantian categorical imperative also a “human calling” in this sense? In other words, Stirner’s critique of morality and rationality may be applied to Kant’s categorical imperative. For Stirner, although moral maxims may be ostensibly freely followed, they still entail a hidden coercion and authoritarianism. This is because they have become universalized in the Kantian formulation as absolute norms which leave little room for individual autonomy, and which one cannot transgress, because to do so would be to go against one’s own rational, universal “human calling.”
Stirner’s critique of morality and its relation to punishment has striking similarities with Foucault’s own writings on punishment. For Stirner, as we have seen, there is no difference between cure and punishment–the practice of curing is a reapplication of the old moral prejudices in a new “enlightened” guise:
Curative means or healing is only the reverse side of punishment, the theory of cure runs parallel with the theory of punishment; if the latter sees in an action a sin against right, the former takes it for a sin of the man against himself, as a falling away from his health. (213)
This is very similar to Foucault’s argument about the modern formula of punishment–that medical and psychiatric norms are only the old morality in a new guise. While Stirner considers the effect of such forms of moral hygiene on the individual conscience, where Foucault’s focus is more on the materiality of the body, the formula of cure and punishment is the same: it is the notion of what is properly “human” that authorizes a whole series of exclusions, disciplinary practices, and restrictive moral and rational norms. For Foucault, as well as for Stirner, punishment is made possible by making something sacred or absolute–in the way that Kant makes morality into a universal law. There are several points to be made here. Firstly, both Stirner and Foucault see moral and rational discourses as problematic–they often exclude, marginalize, and oppress those who do not live up to the norms implicit in these discourses. Secondly, both thinkers see rationality and morality as being implicated in power relations, rather than constituting a critical epistemological point outside power. Not only are these norms made possible by practices of power, through the exclusion and domination of the other, but they also, in turn, justify and perpetuate practices of power, such as those found in the prison and asylum.
Thirdly, both thinkers see morality as having an ambiguous relation to freedom. While Stirner argues that on the surface moral and rational norms are freely adhered to, they nevertheless entail an oppression over ourselves–a self-domination–that is far more insidious and effective than straightforward coercion. In other words, by conforming to universally prevailing moral and rational norms, the individual abdicates his own power and allows himself to be dominated. Foucault also unmasks this hidden domination of the moral and rational norm that is found behind the calm visage of human freedom. The classical Enlightenment idea of freedom, Foucault argues, allowed only pseudo-sovereignty. It claims to hold sovereign “consciousness (sovereign in the context of judgment, but subjected to the necessities of truth), the individual (a titular control of personal rights subjected to the laws of nature and society), basic freedom (sovereign within, but accepting the demands of an outside world and ‘aligned with destiny’)” (Foucault, “Revolutionary” 221). In other words, Enlightenment humanism claims to free individuals from all sorts of institutional oppressions while, at the same time, entailing an intensification of oppression over the self and denial of the power to resist this subjection. This subordination at the heart of freedom may be seen in the Kantian categorical imperative: while it is based on a freedom of consciousness, this freedom is nevertheless subject to absolute rational and moral categories. Classical freedom only liberates a certain form of subjectivity, while intensifying domination over the individual who is subordinated by these moral and rational criteria. That is to say that the discourse of freedom is based on a specific form of subjectivity–the autonomous, rational man of the Enlightenment and liberalism. As Foucault and Stirner show, this form of freedom is only made possible through the domination and exclusion of other modes of subjectivity that do not conform to this rational model. In other words, while morality does not deny or constrain freedom in an overt way–in Kant’s case moral maxims are based on the individual’s freedom of choice–this freedom is nevertheless restricted in a more subtle fashion because it is required to conform to moral and rational absolutes.
It is clear, then, that for both Stirner and Foucault, the classical Kantian idea of freedom is deeply problematic. It constructs the individual as “rational” and “free” while subjecting him to absolute moral and rational norms, and dividing him into rational and irrational, moral and immoral selves. The individual freely conforms to these rational norms, and in this way his subjectivity is constructed as a site of its own oppression. The silent tyranny of the self-imposed norm has become the prevailing mode of subjection. While for Kant, moral maxims and rational norms existed in a complementary relationship with freedom, for Stirner and Foucault the relationship is much more paradoxical and conflicting. It is not that transcendental moral and rational norms deny freedom per se–indeed in the Kantian paradigm they presuppose freedom. It is rather that the form of freedom brought into being through these absolute categories implies other, more subtle forms of domination. This domination is made possible precisely because freedom’s relationship with power is masked. For Kant, as we have seen, freedom is an absence from coercion. However, for Stirner and Foucault, freedom is always implicated in power relations–power relations that are creative as well as restrictive. To ignore this, moreover, to perpetuate the comforting illusion that freedom promises a universal liberation from power, is to play right into the hands of domination. It may be argued, then, that Foucault and Stirner uncover, in different ways, the authoritarian underside or the “other scene” of Kantian freedom.
This does not mean, however, that Stirner and Foucault reject the idea of freedom. On the contrary, they interrogate the limits of the Enlightenment project of freedom in order to expand it–to invent new forms of freedom and autonomy that go beyond the restrictions of the categorical imperative. Indeed, as Olivia Custer shows, Foucault is as engaged as Kant in the problematic of freedom. However, as we shall see, he seeks to approach the question of freedom in a different way–through concrete ethical strategies and practices of the self.
For Foucault, the illusion of a state of freedom beyond the world of power must be dispelled. Moreover, freedom’s attachment to essentialist categories and pre-ordained moral and rational coordinates must at least be questioned. However, the concept of freedom is very important for Foucault–he does not want to dispense with it, but rather to situate it in a realm of power relations that necessarily make it indeterminate. It is only through a rethinking of freedom in this way that it can be wrested from the metaphysical world and brought to the level of the individual. Rather than the abstract Kantian notion of freedom as a rational choice beyond constraints and limitations, freedom for Foucault exists in mutual and reciprocal relations with power. Moreover, rather than freedom being presupposed by absolute moral maxims, it is actually presupposed by power. According to Foucault, power may be understood as a series of “actions upon the action of others” in which multiple discourses, counterdiscourses, strategies, and technologies clash with one another–specific relations of power always provoking specific and localized relations of resistance. Resistance is something that exceeds power and is at the same time integral to its dynamic. Power is based on a certain freedom of action, a certain choice of possibilities. In this sense, “power is exercised only over free subjects, and only insofar as they are free” (Foucault, “Subject” 208-26). Unlike classical schema in which power and freedom were diagrammatically opposed, Foucauldian thinking asserts the total dependency of the former on the latter. Where there is no freedom, where the field of action is absolutely restricted and determined, according to Foucault, there can be no power: slavery, for instance, is not a power relationship (Foucault, “Subject” 221).
Foucault’s notion of freedom is a radical departure from Kant’s. Whereas, for Kant, freedom is abstracted from the constraints and limitations of power, for Foucault, freedom is the very basis of these limits and constraints. Freedom is not a metaphysical and transcendental concept. Rather, it is entirely of this world and exists in a complicated and entangled relationship with power. Indeed, there can be no possibility of a world free from power relations, as power and freedom cannot exist without one another.
Moreover, Foucault is able to see freedom as being implicated in power relations because, for him, freedom is more than just the absence or negation of constraint. He rejects the “repressive” model of freedom which presupposes an essential self–a universal human nature–that is restricted and needs to be liberated. The liberation of an essential subjectivity is the basis of classical Enlightenment notions of freedom and is still central to our political imaginary. However, both Foucault and Stirner reject this idea of an essential self–this is merely an illusion created by power. As Foucault says, “The man described for us, whom we are invited to free, is already in himself the effect of a subjection much more profound than himself” (Discipline 30). While he does not discount acts of political liberation–for example when a people tries to liberate itself from colonial rule–this cannot operate as the basis for an ongoing mode of freedom. To suppose that freedom can be established eternally on the basis of this initial act of liberation is only to invite new forms of domination. If freedom is to be an enduring feature of any political society it must be seen as a practice–an ongoing strategy and mode of action that continuously challenges and questions relations of power.
This practice of freedom is also a creative practice–a continuous process of self-formation of the subject. It is in this sense that freedom may be seen as positive. One of the features that characterizes modernity, according to Foucault, is a Baudelairean “heroic” attitude toward the present. For Baudelaire, the contingent, fleeting nature of modernity is to be confronted with a certain “attitude” toward the present that is concomitant with a new mode of relationship that one has with oneself. This involves a reinvention of the self: “This modernity does not ‘liberate man in his own being’; it compels him to face the task of producing himself” (Foucault, “What” 42). So, rather than freedom being a liberation of man’s essential self from external constraints, it is an active and deliberate practice of inventing oneself. This practice of freedom may be found in the example of the dandy, or flâneur, “who makes of his body, his behavior, his feelings and passions, his very existence, a work of art” (Foucault, “What” 41-2). It is this practice of self-aestheticization that allows us, according to Foucault, to reflect critically on the limits of our time. It does not seek a metaphysical place beyond all limits, but rather works within the limits and constraints of the present. More importantly, however, it is also a work conducted upon the limits of ourselves and our own identities. Because power operates through a process of subjectification–by tying the individual to an essential identity–the radical reconstitution of the self is a necessary act of resistance. This idea of freedom, then, defines a new form of politics more relevant to contemporary regimes of power: “The political, ethical, social, philosophical problem of our days is not to liberate the individual from the State and its institutions, but to liberate ourselves from the State and the type of individualisation linked to it” (Foucault, “Subject” 216).
For Foucault, moreover, the liberation of the self is a distinctly ethical practice. It involves a notion of “care for the self” whereby one’s desires and behavior are regulated by oneself so that freedom may be practiced ethically. This sensitivity to the care for oneself and the ethical practice of freedom could be found, Foucault suggests, among the Greeks and Romans of antiquity. For them the freedom of the individual was an ethical problem. Because the desire for power over others was also a threat to one’s own freedom, the exercise of power was something that had to be regulated, monitored, and limited. To be a slave to one’s own desires was as bad as being subject to another’s desires. This regulation of one’s desires and practices required an ethics of behavior that one constructed for oneself. In order to practice freedom ethically, in order to be truly free, one had to achieve power over oneself, over one’s desires. As Foucault shows, in ancient Greek and Roman thinking, “the good ruler is precisely the one who exercises his power correctly, i.e., by exercising at the same time his power on himself” (“Ethics” 288).
This ethical practice of freedom associated with the care for the self begins, however, at a certain point to sound somewhat Kantian. Indeed, as Foucault says, “for what is ethics, if not the practice of freedom? […]. Freedom is the ontological condition of ethics” (“Ethics” 284). Does this not appear to re-invoke the categorical imperative where, for Kant, morality presupposes and is founded on freedom? Has Foucault, in his attempt to escape the absolutism of morality and rationality, reintroduced the categorical imperative in this careful regulation of behavior and desire? There can be no doubt about the stringency of this form of ethics. In The Use of Pleasure and The Care of the Self, Foucault describes the Greeks’ and Romans’ prescriptions concerning everything from diet and exercise to sex. However, I would suggest that there is an important difference between the ethics of care and the universal moral maxims insisted on by Kant. The regulation of behavior and the problematization of freedom central to the ethic of care are things that one applies to oneself, rather than being imposed externally from a universal point beyond the individual. Foucault’s practice of freedom is, in this sense, an ethics, rather than a morality. It is a certain consistency of modes and behaviors that has as its object the consideration and problematization of the self. In other words, it allows the self to be seen as an open project to be constituted through the ethical practices of the individual, rather than as something defined a priori by universal, transcendental laws. Moral laws do not apply here–there is no transcendental authority or universal imperative that sanctions these ethical practices and penalizes infractions. According to Foucault, morality is defined by the type of subjectification it entails. On the one hand, there is the morality that enforces the code, through injunctions, and which entails a form of subjectivity that refers the individual’s conduct to these laws, submitting it to their universal authority. This, it could be argued, is the morality of Kant’s categorical imperative. On the other hand, argues Foucault, there is the morality in which
the accent was placed on the relationship of the self that enabled the person to keep from being carried away by the appetites and pleasures, to maintain a mastery and superiority over them, to keep his senses in a state of tranquility, to remain free from interior bondage to the passions, and to achieve a mode of being that could be defined by the full enjoyment of oneself, or the perfect supremacy of oneself over oneself. (Use 29-30)
We can see, then, that Foucault’s notion of freedom as an ethical practice is radically different from Kant’s idea of freedom as the basis of universal moral law. For Foucault, freedom is ethical because it implies an open-ended project that is conducted upon oneself, the aim of which is to increase the power that one exercises over oneself and to limit and regulate the power one exercises over others. In this way, one’s personal freedom and autonomy are enhanced. For Kant, on the other hand, freedom is the basis of a metaphysical morality that must be universally obeyed. For Foucault, in other words, ethics intensifies freedom and autonomy, whereas for Kant, freedom and autonomy are ultimately circumscribed by the very morality they make possible.
So, there are two related aspects of Foucault’s concept of freedom that must be emphasized here. Firstly, there is the practice of freedom that allows one to liberate oneself, not from external limits that repress one’s essence, but rather from the limits imposed by this very essence. It involves, in a sense, the transgression of these limits through a transgression and reinvention of oneself. It is a form of freedom which operates within the limits of power, enabling the individual to make use of the limits in inventing him/herself. Secondly, there is the aspect of freedom that is distinctly ethical–it is a practice of care for the self that has as its aim an increase of the power over oneself and one’s desires, thus keeping in check one’s exercise of power over others. In this way, the practice of care for the self allows the individual to navigate an ethical course of action amidst power relations, with the aim of intensifying freedom and personal autonomy. Therefore, freedom is conceived as an ongoing and contingent practice of the self that is not determined in advance by fixed moral and rational laws.
In his later essay “What Is Enlightenment?,” Foucault considers Kant’s insistence on the free and public use of autonomous reason as an escape, a “way out” for man from a state of immaturity and subordination. While Foucault believes that this autonomous reason is useful because it allows a critical ethos toward modernity, he refuses the “blackmail” of the Enlightenment–the insistence that this critical ethos at the heart of the Enlightenment be inscribed in a universal rationality and morality. The problem with Kant is that he opens up a space for individual autonomy and critical reflection on the limits of oneself, only to close this space down by re-inscribing it in transcendental notions of rationality and morality that require absolute obedience. For Foucault, the legacy of the Enlightenment is deeply ambiguous. As Colin Gordon shows, for Foucault there are two Enlightenments–the Enlightenment of rational certainty, absolute identity, and destiny, and the Enlightenment of continual questioning and uncertainty. According to Foucault, this ambiguity is reflected in Kant’s own treatment of the Enlightenment.
There is perhaps a Kantian moment in Foucault (or could we say a Foucauldian moment in Kant?). Foucault shows how one might read Kant in a heterogeneous way, focusing on the more libratory aspect of his thinking–where we are encouraged to interrogate the limits of modernity, to reflect critically on the way we have been constituted as subjects. As Foucault shows, Kant sees the Enlightenment (Aufklärung) as a critical condition, characterized by an “audacity to know” and the free and autonomous public use of reason. This critical condition is concomitant with a “will to revolution”–with the attempt to understand revolution (in Kant’s case the French Revolution) as an Event that allows an interrogation of the conditions of modernity–“an ontology of the present“–and the way we as subjects stand in relation to it (Foucault, “Kant” 88-96). Foucault suggests that we may adopt this critical strategy to reflect upon the limits of the discourse of the Enlightenment itself and its universal rational and moral injunctions. We may in this sense use the critical capacities of the Enlightenment against itself, thus opening up spaces for individual autonomy within its edifice, beyond the grasp of universal laws.
This critical stance toward the present, and the practice of the “care for the self” with which it is bound up, outline a genealogical strategy of freedom–a strategy that, as Foucault says “is not seeking to make possible a metaphysics that has finally become a science; it is seeking to give new impetus […] to the undefined work of freedom” (“What” 46).
As we shall see, it is precisely this desire to give new impetus to freedom, to take it out of the realm of empty dreams and promises, that is reflected in Stirner’s theory of ownness. He adopts a “genealogical” approach similar to Foucault’s in making the focus of freedom the self and situating freedom amidst relations of power.
The idea of transgressing and reinventing the self–of freeing the self from fixed and essential identities–is also a central theme in Stirner’s thinking. As we have seen, Stirner shows that the notion of human essence is an oppressive fiction derived from an inverted Christian idealism that tyrannizes the individual and is linked with various forms of political domination. Stirner describes a process of subjectification which is very similar to Foucault’s: rather than power operating as downward repression, it rules through the subjectification of the individual, by defining him according to an essential identity. As Stirner says: “the State betrays its enmity to me by demanding that I be a man . . . it imposes being a man upon me as a duty” (161). Human essence imposes a series of fixed moral and rational ideas on the individual, which are not of his creation and which curtail his autonomy. It is precisely this notion of duty, of moral obligation–the same sense of duty that is the basis of the categorical imperative–that Stirner finds oppressive.
For Stirner, then, the individual must free him- or herself from these oppressive ideas and obligations by first freeing himself from essence–from the essential identity that is imposed on him. Freedom involves, then, a transgression of essence, a transgression of the self. But what form should this transgression take? Like Foucault, Stirner is suspicious of the language of liberation and revolution–it is based on a notion of an essential self that supposedly throws off the chains of external repression. For Stirner, it is precisely this notion of human essence that is itself oppressive. Therefore, different strategies of freedom are called for–ones that abandon the humanist project of liberation and seek, rather, to reconfigure the subject in new and non-essentialist ways. To this end, Stirner calls for an insurrection:
Revolution and insurrection must not be looked upon as synonymous. The former consists in an overturning of conditions, of the established condition or status, the state or society, and is accordingly a political or social act; the latter has indeed for its unavoidable consequence a transformation of circumstances, yet does not start from it but from men’s discontent with themselves, is not an armed rising but a rising of individuals, a getting up without regard to the arrangements that spring from it. The revolution aimed at new arrangements; insurrection leads us no longer to let ourselves be arranged, but to arrange ourselves, and sets no glittering hopes on “institutions.” It is not a fight against the established, since, if it prospers, the established collapses of itself; it is only a working forth of me out of the established. (279-80)
So while a revolution aims at transforming existing social and political conditions so that human essence may flourish, an insurrection aims at freeing the individual from this very essence. Like Foucault’s practices of freedom, the insurrection aims at transforming the relationship that the individual has with himself. The insurrection starts, then, with the individual refusing his or her enforced essential identity: it starts, as Stirner says, from men’s discontent with themselves. Insurrection does not aim at overthrowing political institutions. It is aimed at the individual, in a sense transgressing his own identity–the outcome of which is, nevertheless, a change in political arrangements. Insurrection is therefore not about becoming what one is–becoming human, becoming man–but about becoming what one is not.
This ethos of escaping essential identities through a reinvention of oneself has many important parallels with the Baudelarian aestheticization of the self that interests Foucault. Like Baudelaire’s assertion that the self must be treated as a work of art, Stirner sees the self–or the ego–as a “creative nothingness,” a radical emptiness which is up to the individual to define: “I do not presuppose myself, because I am every moment just positing or creating myself” (135). The self, for Stirner, is a process, a continuous flow of self-creating flux–it is a process that eludes the imposition of fixed identities and essences: “no concept expresses me, nothing that is designated as my essence exhausts me” (324).
Therefore, Stirner’s strategy of insurrection and Foucault’s project of care for the self are both contingent practices of freedom that involve a reconfiguration of the subject and its relationship with the self. For Stirner, as with Foucault, freedom is an undefined and open-ended project in which the individual engages. The insurrection, as Stirner argues, does not rely on political institutions to grant freedom to the individual, but looks to the individual to invent his or her own forms of freedom. It is an attempt to construct spaces of autonomy within relations of power, by limiting the power that is exercised over the individual by others and increasing the power that the individual exercises over himself. The individual, moreover, is free to reinvent himself in new and unpredictable ways, escaping the limits imposed by human essence and universal notions of morality.
The notion of insurrection involves a reformulation of the concept of freedom in ways that are radically post-Kantian. Stirner suggests, for instance, that there can be no truly universal idea of freedom; freedom is always a particular freedom in the guise of the universal. The universal freedom that, for Kant, is the domain of all rational individuals, would only mask some hidden particular interest. Freedom, according to Stirner, is an ambiguous and problematic concept, an “enchantingly beautiful dream” that seduces the individual yet remains unattainable, and from which the individual must awaken.
Furthermore, freedom is a limited concept. It is only seen in its narrow negative sense. Stirner wants, rather, to extend the concept to a more positive freedom to. Freedom in the negative sense involves only self-abnegation–to be rid of something, to deny oneself. That is why, according to Stirner, the freer the individual ostensibly becomes, in accordance with the emancipative ideals of Enlightenment humanism, the more he loses the power he exercises over himself. On the other hand, positive freedom–or ownness–is a form of freedom that is invented by the individual for him or herself. Unlike Kantian freedom, ownness is not guaranteed by universal ideals or categorical imperatives. If it were, it could only lead to further domination: “The man who is set free is nothing but a freed man […] he is an unfree man in the garment of freedom, like the ass in the lion’s skin” (152).
Freedom must, rather, be seized by the individual. For freedom to have any value it must be based on the power of the individual to create it. “My freedom becomes complete only when it is my–might; but by this I cease to be a merely free man, and become and own man” (151). Stirner was one of the first to recognize that the true basis of freedom is power. To see freedom as a universal absence of power is to mask its very basis in power. The theory of ownness is a recognition, and indeed an affirmation, of the inevitable relation between freedom and power. Ownness is the realization of the individual’s power over himself–the ability to create his or her own forms of freedom, which are not circumscribed by metaphysical or essentialist categories. In this sense, ownness is a form of freedom that goes beyond the categorical imperative. It is based on a notion of the self as a contingent and open field of possibilities, rather than on an absolute and dutiful adherence to external moral maxims.
This idea of ownness is crucial in formulating a post-Kantian concept of freedom. Perhaps, in Stirner’s words, “Ownness created a new freedom” (147). Firstly, ownness allows freedom to be considered beyond the limits of universal moral and rational categories. Ownness is the form of freedom that one invents for oneself, rather than one that is guaranteed by transcendental ideals. Foucault, too, sought to “free” freedom from these oppressive limits. Secondly, ownness converges closely with Foucault’s own argument about freedom being situated in power relations. Like Foucault, Stirner shows that the idea of freedom as entailing a complete absence of power and constraint is illusory. The individual is always involved in a complex network of power relations, and freedom must be fought for, reinvented, and renegotiated within these limits. Ownness may be seen, then, as creating the possibilities of resistance to power. Similarly to Foucault, Stirner maintains that freedom and resistance can always exist, even in the most oppressive conditions. In this sense, ownness is a project of freedom and resistance within power’s limits–it is the recognition of the fundamentally antagonistic and ambiguous nature of freedom. Thirdly, not only is ownness an attempt to limit the domination of the individual, but it is also a way of intensifying the power that one exercises over oneself. We have seen that for both Stirner and Foucault, Kant’s universal freedom is based on absolute moral and rational norms that limit individual sovereignty. Foucault and Stirner are both interested, in different ways, in reformulating the concept of freedom: through the ethical practice of care of the self and through the strategy of ownness, both of which are aimed at increasing the power that the individual has over himself.
These two strategies allow us to conceptualize freedom in a more contemporary way. Freedom can no longer be seen as a universal emancipation, the eternal promise of a world beyond the limits of power. The freedom that forms the basis of the categorical imperative, the freedom exalted by Kant as the province of reason and morality, can no longer serve as the basis for contemporary ideas of freedom. It has been also shown by Stirner and Foucault to exclude and oppress where it includes, to enslave where it also liberates. Freedom must be seen as no longer being subservient to absolute maxims of morality and rationality, to imperatives that invoke the dull, cold inevitability of law and punishment. For Stirner and Foucault, freedom must be “freed” from these absolute notions. Rather than a privilege that is granted from a metaphysical point to the individual, freedom must be seen as a practice, a critical ethos of the self, and as a struggle that is engaged in by the individual within the problematic of power. It necessarily involves a reflection on the limits of the self and the ontological conditions of the present–a constant reinvention and problematization of subjectivity. A post-Kantian freedom, in this way, is not only a recognition of power, but also a reflection upon power’s limits–an affirmation of the possibilities of individual autonomy within power and of the critical capacities of modern subjectivity.
2. This rejection of the anthropological foundations of freedom is also discussed by Rajchman. Indeed Rajchman sees Foucault’s project of freedom as an ethical attitude of continual questioning of the borders and limits of our contemporary experience–a freedom of philosophy as well as a philosophy of freedom. My discussion of Foucault’s reconfiguration of the problematic of freedom in terms of concrete ethical strategies of the self may also be seen in this context.
3. See Lacan. In this essay, Lacan shows that the Law produces its own transgression, and that it can only operate through this transgression. The excess of Sade does not contradict the injunctions, laws, and categorical imperatives of Kant; rather, they are inextricably linked to it. Like Foucault’s discussion of the “spirals” of power and pleasure, in which power produces the very pleasure it is seen to repress, Lacan suggests that the denial of enjoyment–embodied in Law, in the categorical imperative–produces its own form of perverse enjoyment, or jouissance as a surplus–le plus de jouir. Sade, according to Lacan, exposes this obscene enjoyment by reversing the paradigm: he turns this perverse pleasure into a law itself, into a sort of Kantian categorical imperative or universal principle: “Let us enunciate the maxim: ‘I have the right of enjoyment over your body, anyone can say to me, and I will exercise this right, without any limit stopping me in the capriciousness of the exactions that I might have the taste to satiate’” (58). In this way the obscene pleasure of the Law that is unmasked in Kant is reversed into the Law of obscene pleasure through Sade. As Zizek remarks in “Kant with (or against) Sade,” the crucial insight of Lacan’s argument here is not that Kant is a closet sadist, but rather that Sade is a “closet Kantian.” That is, Sadean excess is taken to such an extreme that it becomes emptied of pleasure and takes the form of a cold-blooded, joyless universal Law.
Eugene Thacker
School of Literature, Communication, and Culture
Georgia Institute of Technology
eugene.thacker@lcc.gatech.edu
It is often noted that progress in biotechnology research is as much a technological feat as a medical one. The field of “bioinformatics” is exemplary here, since it is playing a significant role in the various genome projects, the study of stem cells, gene targeting and drug development, medical diagnostics, and genetic medicine generally. Bioinformatics may simply be described as the application of computer science to molecular biology research. The development of biological databases (many of them online), gene sequencing computers, computer languages (such as XML-based standards), and a wide array of software tools (from pattern-matching algorithms to data mining agents), are all examples of innovations by means of which bioinformatics is transforming the traditional molecular biology laboratory. Some especially optimistic reports on these developments have suggested that the “wet” lab of traditional biology is being replaced by the “dry” lab of “point-and-click biology.”1
| Figure 1: Production Sequencing Facility at Department of Energy’s Joint Genome Institute in Walnut Creek, CA |
While current uses of bioinformatics are mostly pragmatic (technology-as-tool) and instrumental (forms of intellectual property and patenting), the issues which bioinformatics raises are simultaneously philosophical and technical. These issues have already begun to be explored in a growing body of critical work that approaches genetics and biotechnology from the perspective of language, textuality, and the various scripting tropes within molecular biology. The approach taken here, however, will be different. While critiques of molecular biology-as-text can effectively illustrate the ways in which bodies, texts, and contexts are always intertwined, I aim to interrogate the philosophical claims made by the techniques and technologies that molecular biotech designs for itself. Such an approach requires an inquiry into the materialist ontology that “informs” fields such as bioinformatics, managing as it does the relationships between the in vivo, the in vitro, and the in silico.
Such questions have to do with how the intersection of genetic and computer codes is transforming the very definition of “the biological”–not only within bioinformatics but within molecular biotechnology as a whole. Thus, when we speak of the intersections of genetic and computer codes, we are not discussing the relationships between body and text, or material and semiotic registers, for this belies the complex ways in which “the body” has been enframed by genetics and biotechnology in recent years.
What follows is a critical analysis of several types of bioinformatics systems, emphasizing how the technical details of software and programming are indissociable from these larger philosophical questions of biological “life.” The argument that will be made is that bioinformatics is much more than simply the “computerization” of genetics and molecular biology; it forms a set of practices that instantiate ontological claims about the ways in which the relationships between materiality and data, genetic and computer codes, are being transformed through biotech research.
The first computer databases used for biological research were closely aligned with the first attempts to analyze and sequence proteins.2 In the mid-1950s, the then-emerging field of molecular biology saw the first published research articles on DNA and protein sequences from a range of model organisms, including yeast, the roundworm, and the Drosophila fruit fly.3 From a bioinformatics perspective, this research can be said to have been instrumental in identifying a unique type of practice in biology: the “databasing” of living organisms at the molecular level. Though these examples do not involve computers, they do adopt an informatic approach in which, using wet lab procedures, the organism is transformed into an organization of sequence data, a set of strings of DNA or amino acids.
Because most of this sequence data was related to protein molecules (structural data derived from X-ray crystallography), the first computer databases for molecular biology were built in the 1970s (Protein Data Bank) and 1980s (SWISS-PROT database).4 Bioinformatics was, however, given its greatest boost from the Human Genome Project (HGP) in its originary conception, a joint Department of Energy (DoE) and National Institutes of Health (NIH) sponsored endeavor based in the U.S. and initiated in 1989-90.5 The HGP went beyond the single-study sequencing of a bacteria, or the derivation of structural data of a single protein. It redefined the field, not only positing a universality to the genome, but also implying that a knowledge of the genome could occur only at this particular moment, when computing technologies reached a level at which large amounts of data could be dynamically archived and analyzed. Automated gene sequencing computers, advanced robotics, high-capacity computer database arrays, computer networking, and (often proprietary) genome analysis software were just some of the computing technologies employed in the human genome project. In a sense, the HGP put to itself the problem of both regarding the organism itself as a database and porting that database from one medium (the living cell) into another (the computer database).6
| Figure 2: Commercial bioinformatics application by Celera Genomics |
At this juncture it is important to make a brief historical aside, and that is that bioinformatics is unthinkable without a discourse concerning DNA-as-information. As Lily Kay has effectively shown, the notion of the “genetic code”–and indeed of molecular genetics itself–emerges through a cross-pollination with the discourses of cybernetics, information theory, and early computer science during the post-war era, long before computing technology was thought of as being useful to molecular biology research.7 Though there was no definitive formulation of what exactly genetic “information” was (and is), the very possibility of an interdisciplinary influence itself conditions bioinformatics’ possibility of later technically materializing the genome itself as a database.
Against this discursive backdrop, we can make several points in extending Kay’s historiography in relation to contemporary bioinformatics. One is that, while earlier paradigms in molecular biology were, according to Kay, largely concerned with defining and deciphering DNA as a “code,” contemporary molecular genetics and biotech research is predominantly concerned with the functionality of living cells and genomes as computers in their own right.8 What this means is that contemporary biotech is constituted by both a “control principle” and a “storage principle,” which are seen to inhere functionally within biological organization itself. If the control principle derives from genetic engineering and recombinant DNA techniques, the storage principle is derived from the human genome project. Both can be seen to operate within bioinformatics and biotech research today.9
| Figure 3: The genetic code. Triplet codons each code for a particular amino acid. |
To give an idea of what contemporary bioinformatics researchers do, we can briefly consider one technique. Among the most common techniques employed in current bioinformatics research is the sequence alignment, a technique which can lead to the identification and characterization of specific molecules (e.g., gene targeting for drug development), and even the prediction of the production and interaction of molecules (e.g., gene prediction for studying protein synthesis).10 Also referred to as “pairwise sequence alignment,” this simply involves comparing one sequence (DNA or protein code) against a database for possible matches or near-matches (called “homologs”). Doing this involves an interactive pattern-matching routine, compared against several “reading frames” (depending on where one starts the comparison along the sequence), a task to which computer systems are well attuned. Bioinformatics tools perform such pattern-matching analyses through algorithms which accept an input sequence, and then access one or more databases to search for close matches.11 What should be noted, however, is that despite this breadth of expandability and application, bioinformatics tools are often geared toward a limited number of ends: the isolation of candidate genes or proteins for medical-genetic diagnostics, drug development, or gene-based therapies.
However, if bioinformatics is simply the use of computer technologies to analyze strings, access online databases, and perform computational predictions, one question may beg asking: aren’t we simply dealing with data, data that has very little to do with the “body itself”? In many senses we are dealing with data, and it is precisely the relation of that data to particularized bodies which bioinformatics materializes through its practices. We can begin to address this question of “just data” by asking another question: when we hear talk about “biological data” in relation to bioinformatics and related fields, what exactly is meant by this?
On one level, biological data is indeed nothing but computer code. The majority of biological databases store not biological nucleic acids, amino acids, enzymes, or entire cells, but rather strings of data which, depending on one’s perspective, are either abstractions, representations, or indices of actual biomolecules and cells. In computer programming terminology, “strings” are simply any linear sequence of characters, which may be numbers, letters, symbols, or combinations thereof. Programs that perform various string manipulations can carry out a wide array of operations based on combinatorial principles applied to the same string. The most familiar type of string manipulation takes place when we edit text. In writing email, for instance, the text we type into the computer must be encoded into a format that can be transmitted across a network. The phrase “in writing email, for instance” must be translated into a lower-level computer language of numbers, each group of numbers representing letters in the sequence of the sentence. At an even more fundamental level, those numbers must themselves be represented by a binary code of zeros and ones, which are themselves translated as pulses of light along a fiber optic cable (in the case of email) or within the micro-circuitry of a computer processor (in the case of word processing).
In text manipulations such as writing email or word processing, a common encoding standard is known as ASCII, or the American Standard Code for Information Interchange. ASCII was established by the American Standards Association in the 1960s, along with the development of the Internet and the business mainframe computer, as a means of standardizing the translation of English-language characters on computers. ASCII is an “8-bit” code, in that a group of eight ones and zeros represents a certain number (such as “112”), which itself represents a letter (such as lower case “p”). Therefore, in the phrase “in writing email, for instance” each character–letters, punctuation, and spaces–is coded for by a number designated by the ASCII standard.12
How does this relate to molecular biotechnology and the biomolecular body? As we’ve noted, most biological databases, such as those housing the human genome, are really just files which contain long strings of letters: As, Ts, Cs, and Gs, in the case of a nucleotide database. When news reports talk about the “race to map the human genome,” what they are actually referring to is the endeavor to convert the order of the sequence of DNA molecules in the chromosomes in the cell to a database of digital strings in a computer. Although the structural properties of DNA are understood to play an important part in the processes of transcription and translation in the cell, for a number of years the main area of focus in genetics and biotech has, of course, been on DNA and “genes.” In this focus, of primary concern is how the specific order of the string of DNA sequence plays a part in the production of certain proteins, or in the regulation of other genes. Because sequence is the center of attention, this also means that, for analytical purposes, the densely coiled, three-dimensional, “wet” DNA in the cell must be converted into a linear string of data. Since nucleotide sequences have traditionally been represented by the letter of their bases (Adenine, Cytosine, Guanine, Thymine), ASCII provides a suitable encoding scheme for long strings of letters. To make this relationship clearer, we can use a table:
| DNA | A | T | C | G |
| ASCII | 65 | 84 | 67 | 71 |
| Binary | 01000001 | 01010100 | 01000011 | 01000111 |
In the same way that English-language characters are encoded by ASCII, the representational schemes of molecular biology are here also encoded as ASCII numbers, which are themselves binary digits. At the level of binary digits, the level of “machine language,” the genetic code is therefore a string of ones and zeros like any other type of data. Similarly, a database file containing a genetic sequence is read from ASCII numbers and presented as long linear strings of four letters (and can even be opened in a word processing application). Therefore, when, in genetics textbooks, we see DNA diagrammed as a string of beads marked “A-T” or “C-G,” what we are looking at is both a representation of a biomolecule and a schematic of a string of data in a computer database.
Is that all that biological data is? If we take this approach–that is, that biological data is a quantitative abstraction of a “real” thing, a mode of textuality similar to language itself–then we are indeed left with the conclusion that biological data, and bioinformatics, is nothing more than an abstraction of the real by the digital, a kind of linguistic system in which letters-molecules signify the biological phenotype. While this may be the case from a purely technical–and textual–perspective, we should also consider the kinds of philosophical questions which this technical configurations elicits. That is, if we leave, for a moment, the epistemological and linguistic debate of the real vs. the digital, the thing-itself vs. its representation, and consider not “objects” but rather relationships, we can see that “biological data” is more than a binary sign-system. Many of the techniques within bioinformatics research appear to be more concerned with function than with essence; the question a bioinformatician asks is not “what it is,” but rather “how it works.” Take, for example, a comment from the Bioinformatics.org website, which is exemplary of a certain perspective on biological data:
It is a mathematically interesting property of most large biological molecules that they are polymers; ordered chains of simpler molecular modules called monomers….Many monomer molecules can be joined together to form a single, far larger, macromolecule which has exquisitely specific informational content and/or chemical properties. According to this scheme, the monomers in a given macromolecule of DNA or protein can be treated computationally as letters of an alphabet, put together in pre-programmed arrangements to carry messages or do work in a cell. 13
What is interesting about such perspectives is that they suggest that the notion of biological data is not about the ways in which a real (biological) object may be abstracted and represented (digitally), but instead is about the ways in which certain “patterns of relationships” can be identified across different material substrates, or across different platforms. We still have the code conversion from the biological to the digital, but rather than the abstraction and representation of a “real” object, what we have is the cross-platform conservation of specified patterns of relationships. These patterns of relationships may, from the perspective of molecular biology, be elements of genetic sequence (such as base pair binding in DNA), molecular processes (such as translation of RNA into amino acid chains), or structural behaviors (such as secondary structure folding in proteins). The material substrate may change (from a cell to a computer database), and the distinction between the wet lab and the dry lab may remain (wet DNA, dry DNA), but what is important for the bioinformatician is how “biological data” is more than just abstraction, signification, or representation. This is because the biological data in computer databases are not merely there for archival purposes, but as data to be worked on, data which, it is hoped, will reveal important patterns that may have something to say about the genetic mechanisms of disease.
While a simulation of DNA transcription and translation may be constructed on a number of software platforms, it is noteworthy that the main tools utilized for bioinformatics begin as database applications (such as Unix-based administration tools). What these particular types of computer technologies provide is not a more perfect representational semblance, but a medium-specific context, in which the “logic” of DNA can be conserved and extended in various experimental conditions. What enables the practices of gene or protein prediction to occur at all is a complex integration of computer and genetic codes as functional codes. From the perspective of bioinformatics, what must be conserved is the pattern of relationships that is identified in wet DNA (even though the materiality of the medium has altered). A bioinformatician performing a multiple sequence alignment on an unknown DNA sample is interacting not just with a computer, but with a “bio-logic” that has been conserved in the transition from the wet lab to the dry lab, from DNA in the cell to DNA in the database.
In this sense, biological data can be described more accurately than as a sign system with material effects. Biological data can be defined as the consistency of a “bio-logic” across material substrates or varying media. This involves the use of computer technologies that conserve the bio-logic of DNA (e.g., base pair complementarity, codon-amino acid relationships, restriction enzyme splice sites) by developing a technical context in which that bio-logic can be recontextualized in novel ways (e.g., gene predictions, homology modeling). Bioinformatics is, in this way, constituted by a challenge, one that is as much technical as it is theoretical: it must manage the difference between genetic and computer codes (and it is this question of the “difference” of bioinformatics that we will return to later).
On a general level, biotech’s regulation of the relationship between genetic codes and computer codes would seem to be mediated by the notion of “information”–a principle that is capable of accommodating differences across media. This “translatability” between media–in our case between genetic codes and computer codes–must then also work against certain transformations that might occur in translation. Thus the condition of translatability (from genetic to computer code) is not only that linkages of equivalency are formed between heterogeneous phenomena, but also that other kinds of (non-numerical, qualitative) relationships are prevented from forming, in the setting-up of conditions whereby a specific kind of translation can take place.14
Thus, for bioinformatics approaches, the technical challenge is to effect a “translation without transformation,” to preserve the integrity of genetic data, irrespective of the media through which that information moves. Such a process is centrally concerned with a denial of the transformative capacities of different media and informational contexts themselves. For bioinformatics, the medium is not the message; rather, the message–a genome, a DNA sample, a gene–exists in a privileged site of mobile abstraction that must be protected from the heterogeneous specificities of different media platforms in order to enable the consistency of a bio-logic.
We can take a closer look at how the bio-logic of bioinformatics operates by considering the use of an online software tool called “BLAST,” and the technique of pairwise sequence alignment referred to earlier. Again, it is important to reiterate the approach being taken here. We want to concentrate on the technical details to the extent that those details reveal assumptions that are extra-technical, which are, at their basis, ontological claims about biological “information.” This will therefore require–in the case of BLAST–a consideration of software design, usability, and application.
BLAST is one of the most commonly used bioinformatics tools. It stands for “Basic Local Alignment Search Tool” and was developed in the 1990s at the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI).15 BLAST, as its full name indicates, is a set of algorithms for conducting analyses on sequence alignments. The sequences can be nucleotide or amino acid sequences, and the degree of specificity of the search and analysis can be honed by BLAST’s search parameters. The BLAST algorithm takes an input sequence and then compares that sequence to a database of known sequences (for instance, GenBank, EST databases, restriction enzyme databases, protein databases, etc.). Depending on its search parameters, BLAST will then return output data of the most likely matches. A researcher working with an unknown DNA sequence can use BLAST in order to find out if the sequence has already been studied (BLAST includes references to research articles and journals) or, if there is not a perfect match, what “homologs” or close relatives a given sequence might have. Either kind of output will tell a researcher something about the probable biochemical characteristics and even function of the test sequence. In some cases, such searches may lead to the discovery of novel sequences, genes, or gene-protein relationships.
Currently, the NCBI holds a number of different sequence databases, all of which can be accessed using different versions of BLAST.16 When BLAST first appeared, it functioned as a stand-alone Unix-based application. With the introduction of the Web into the scientific research community in the early 1990s, however, BLAST was ported to a Web-ready interface front-end and a database-intensive back-end.17
| Figure 4: Sequence search interface for BLAST. |
BLAST has become somewhat of a standard in bioinformatics because it generates a large amount of data from a relatively straightforward task. Though sequence alignments can sometimes be computationally intensive, the basic principle is simple: comparison of strings. First, a “search domain” is defined for BLAST, which may be the selection of or within a particular database. This constrains BLAST’s domain of activity, so that it doesn’t waste time searching for matches in irrelevant data sets. Then an input sequence is “threaded” through the search domain. The BLAST algorithm searches for closest matches based on a scoring principle. When the search is complete, the highest scoring hits are kept and ranked. Since the hits are known sequences from the database, all of their relevant characterization data can be easily accessed. Finally, for each hit, the relevant bibliographical data is also retrieved. A closer look at the BLAST algorithm shows how it works with biological data:
| Figure 5: The BLAST search algorithm. |
In considering the BLAST algorithm, it is important to keep in mind the imperative of “bio-logic” in bioinformatics research. BLAST unites two crucial aspects of bioinformatics: the ability to flexibly archive and store biological data in a computer database, and the development of diversified tools for accessing and interacting with that database (the control and storage principles mentioned earlier). Without a database of biological data–or rather, a database of bio-logics–bioinformatics tools are nothing more than simulation. Conversely, without applications to act on the biological data in the database, the database is nothing more than a static archive. Bioinformatics may be regarded as this ongoing attempt to integrate seamlessly the control and storage principles across media, whether in genetically engineered biomolecules or in online biological databases.
Though databases are not, of course, exclusive to bioinformatics, the BLAST algorithm is tailored to the bio-logic of nucleotide and protein sequence.18 The bio-logic of base pair complementarity among sequential combinations of four nucleotides (A-T; C-G) is but one dimension of the BLAST algorithm. Other, more complex aspects, such as the identification of repeat sequences, promoter and repressor regions, and transcription sites, are also implicated in BLAST’s biological algorithm. What BLAST’s algorithm conserves is this pattern of relationships, this bio-logic which is seen to inhere in both the chromosomes and the database.
BLAST not only translates the biomolecular body by conserving this bio-logic across material substrates; in this move from one medium to another, it also extends the control principle to enable novel formulations of biomolecules not applicable to the former, “wet” medium of the cell’s chromosomes. One way in which BLAST does this is through the technique of the “search query.” The “query” function is perhaps most familiar to the kinds of searches carried out on the Web using one of many “search engines,” each of which employs different algorithms for gathering, selecting, and ordering data from the Web.19 BLAST does not search the Web but rather performs user-specified queries on biological databases, bringing together the control and storage principles of bioinformatics. At the NCBI website, the BLAST interface contains multiple input options (text fields for pasting a sequence or buttons for loading a local sequence file) which make use of special scripts to deliver the input data to the NCBI server, where the query is carried out. These scripts, known as “CGI” or “Common Gateway Interface” scripts, are among the most commonly used scripts on the Web for input data on web pages. CGI scripts run on top of HTML web pages and form a liason for transmitting specific input data between a server computer and a client’s computer.20 A BLAST query will take the input sequence data and send it, along with instructions for the search, to the server. The BLAST module on the NCBI server will then accept the data and run its alignments as specified in the CGI script. When the analysis is finished, the output data is collected, ordered, and formatted (as a plain-text email or as HTML).
BLAST queries involve an incorporation of “raw” biological data that is ported through the medium (in this case, computer network code) so that it can be processed in a medium-specific context in which it “makes sense.” The output is more than mere bits, signs, or letters; the output is a configured bio-logic that is assumed to exist above the domain of specific substance (carbon or silicon). From a philosophical-technical perspective, BLAST is not so much a sequence alignment tool as an exemplary case of the way bioinformatics translates a relationship between discrete entities (DNA, RNA, and synthesis of amino acids in the cell) across material substrates, with an emphasis on the ways in which the control principle may extend the dimensions of the biological data.
In different ways, tools such as BLAST constantly attempt to manage the difference between genetic and computer codes through modes of regulating the contexts in which code conversions across varying media take place.
BLAST also aims for a transparent translation of code across different contexts; such software systems are primarily concerned with providing bio-logical conversions between output data that can be utilized for analysis and further molecular biology research. Presenting an output file that establishes relationships between a DNA sequence, a multiple pairwise alignment, and other related biomolecular information, is a mode of translating between data types by establishing relations between them that are also biological relations (e.g., base pair complementarity, gene expression). The way in which this is done is, of course, via a strictly “non-biological” operation which is the correlation of data as data (as string manipulation, as in pairwise alignments). In order to enable this technical and biological translation, BLAST must operate as a search tool in a highly articulated manner. A “structured query language” in this case means much more than simply looking up a journal author, title of a book, or subject heading. It implies a whole epistemology, from the molecular biological research point of view. What can be known and what kinds of queries can take place are intimately connected with tools such as BLAST. For this reason, such tools are excellent as “gene finders,” but they are poor at searching and analyzing nested, highly-distributed biopathways in a cell. The instability in such processes as cell regulation and metabolism is here stabilized by aligning the functionalities of the materiality of the medium (in this case, computer database query software) with the constrained organization of biological data along two lines: first in a database, and secondly as biological components and processes (DNA, RNA, ESTs, amino acids, etc.).
In the example of BLAST, the interplay of genetic and computer codes is worked upon so that their relationship to each other is transparent. In other words, when looked at as “biomedia”–that is, as the technical recontextualiztion of the biological domain–BLAST reinforces the notion of media as transparent.21 The workings of a BLAST search query disappear into the “back-end,” so that the bio-logic of DNA sequence and structure may be brought forth as genetic data in itself. However, as we’ve seen, this requires a fair amount of work in recontextualizing and reconfiguring the relations between genetic and computer codes; the regulatory practices pertaining to the fluid translation of types of biological data all work toward this end.
The amount of recontextualizing that is required, the amount of technical reconfiguration needed, is therefore proportionately related to the way the bio-logic of DNA sequence and structure is presented. In a BLAST query and analysis, the structure and functionalities of computer technology are incorporated as part of the “ontology” of the software, and the main reason this happens is so that novel types of bio-logic can become increasingly self-apparent: characteristics that are “biological” but that could also never occur in the wet lab (e.g., multiple pairwise alignments, gene prediction, multiple-database queries).
This generates a number of tensions in how the biomolecular body is reconceptualized in bioinformatics. One such tension is in how translation without transformation becomes instrumentalized in bioinformatics practices. On the one hand, a majority of bioinformatics software tools make use of computer and networking technology to extend the practices of the molecular biology lab. In this, the implication is that computer code transparently brings forth the biological body in novel contexts, thereby producing novel means of extracting data from the body. Within this infrastructure is also a statement about the ability of computer technology to bring forth, in ever greater detail, the bio-logic inherent in the genome, just as it is in the biological cell. The code can be changed, and the body remains the same; the same bio-logic of a DNA sequence in a cell in a petri dish is conserved in an online genome database.
On the other hand, there is a great difference in the fact that bioinformatics doesn’t simply reproduce the wet biology lab as a perfect simulation. Techniques such as gene predictions, database comparisons, and multiple sequence analysis generate biomolecular bodies that are specific to the medium of the computer.22 The newfound ability to perform string manipulations, database queries, modeling of data, and to standardize markup languages also means that the question of “what a body can do” is extended in ways specific to the medium.23 When we consider bioinformatics practices that directly relate (back) to the wet lab (e.g., rational drug design, primer design, genetic diagnostics), this instrumentalization of the biomolecular body becomes re-materialized in significant ways. Change the code, and you change the body. A change in the coding of a DNA sequence in an online database can directly affect the synthesis of novel compounds in the lab.
As a way of elaborating on this tension, we can further elaborate the bio-logics of bioinformatics along four main axes.
The first formulation is that of equivalency between genetic and computer codes. As mentioned previously, the basis for this formulation has a history that extends back to the post-war period, in which the discourses of molecular biology and cybernetics intersect, culminating in what Francis Crick termed “the coding problem.” 24 In particular, gene sequencing (such as Celera’s “whole genome shotgun sequencing” technique) offers to us a paradigmatic example of how bioinformatics technically establishes a condition of equivalency between genetic and computer codes.25 If, so the logic goes, there is a “code” inherent in DNA–that is, a pattern of relationships which is more than DNA’s substance–then it follows that that code can be identified, isolated, and converted across different media. While the primary goal of this procedure is to sequence an unknown sample, what genome sequencing must also accomplish is the setting up of the conditions through which an equivalency can be established between the wet, sample DNA, and the re-assembled genome sequence that is output by the computer. That is, before any of the more sophisticated techniques of bioinformatics or genomics or proteomics can be carried out, the principles for the technical equivalency between genetic and computer codes must be articulated.
Building upon this, the second formulation is that of a back-and-forth mobility between genetic and computer codes. That is, once the parameters for an equivalency can be established, the conditions are set for enabling conversions between genetic and computer codes, or for facilitating their transport across different media. Bioinformatics practices, while recognizing the difference between substance and process, also privilege another view of genetic and computer codes, one based on identified patterns of relationships between components–for instance, the bio-logic of DNA’s base pair binding scheme (A-T; C-G), or the identification of certain polypeptide chains with folding behaviors (amino acid chains that make alpha-helical folds). These well-documented characteristics of the biomolecular body become, for bioinformatics, more than some “thing” defined by its substance; they become a certain manner of relating components and processes.
The mobility between genetic and computer codes is more than the mere digitization of the former by the latter. What makes DNA in a plasmid and DNA in a database the “same”? A definition of what constitutes the biological in the term “biological data.” Once the biological domain is approached as this bio-logic, as these identified and selected patterns of relationships, then, from the perspective of bioinformatics–in principle at least–it matters little whether that DNA sample resides in a test tube or a database. Of course, there is a similar equivalency in the living cell itself, since biomolecules such as proteins can be seen as being isomorphic with each other (differing only in their “folds”), just as a given segment of DNA can be seen as being isomorphic in its function within two different biopathways (same gene, different function). Thus the mobility between genetic and computer codes not only means that the “essential data” or patterns can be translated from wet to dry DNA. It also means that bioinformatics practices such as database queries are simultaneously algorithmic and biological.
Beyond these two first formulations are others that develop functionalities based on them. One is a situation in which data accounts for the body. In examples relating to genetic diagnostics, data does not displace or replace the body, but rather forms a kind of index to the informatic muteness of the biological body–DNA chips in medical genetics, disease profiling, pre-implantation screening for IVF, as well as other, non-biological uses, all depend to some extent of bioinformatics techniques and technologies. The examples of DNA chips in medical contexts redefine the ways in which accountability takes place in relation to the physically-present, embodied subject. While its use in medicine is far from being common, genetic testing and the use of DNA chips are, at least in concept integrating themselves into the fabric of medicine, where an overall genetic model of disease is often the dominant approach to a range of genetic-related conditions, from Alzheimer’s to diabetes to forms of cancer.26 However, beneath these issues is another set of questions that pertain to the ways in which a mixture of genetic and computer codes gives testimony to the body, and through its data-output, accounts for the body in medical terms (genetic patterns, identifiable disease genes, “disease predispositions”).27 Again, as with the establishing of an equivalency, and the effecting of a mobility, the complex of genetic and computer codes must always remain biological, even though its very existence is in part materialized through the informatic protocols of computer technology. In a situation where data accounts for the body, we can also say that a complex of genetic and computer codes makes use of the mobility between genetic and computer codes, to form an indexical description of the biological domain, as one might form an index in a database. But, it should be reiterated that this data is not just data, but a conservation of a bio-logic, a pattern of relationships carried over from the patient’s body to the DNA chip to the computer system. It is in this sense that data not only accounts for the body, but that the data (a complex of genetic and computer codes) also identifies itself as biological.
Finally, not only can data account for the body, but the body can be generated through data. We can see this type of formulation occurring in practices that make use of biological data to effect changes in the wet lab, or even in the patient’s body. Here we can cite the field known as “pharmacogenomics,” which involves the use of genomic data to design custom-tailored gene-based and molecular therapies.28 Pharmacogenomics moves beyond the synthesis of drugs in the lab and relies on data from genomics in its design of novel compounds. It is based not on the diagnostic model of traditional pharmaceuticals (ameliorating symptoms), but rather on the model of “preventive medicine” (using predictive methods and genetic testing to prevent disease occurrence or onset). This not only means that pharmacogenomic therapies will be custom-designed to each individual patient’s genome, but also that the therapies will operate for the long-term, and in periods of health as well as of disease.
What this means is that “drugs” are replaced by “therapies,” and the synthetic is replaced by the biological, but a biological that is preventive and not simply curative. The image of the immune system that this evokes is based on more than the correction of “error” in the body. Rather, it is based on the principles of biomolecular and biochemical design, as applied to the optimization of the biomolecular body of the patient. At an even more specific level, what is really being “treated” is not so much the patient but the genome. At the core of pharmacogenomics is the notion that a reprogramming of the “software” of the genome is the best route to preventing the potential onset of disease in the biological body. If the traditional approaches of immunology and the use of vaccines are based on synthesizing compounds to counter certain proteins, the approach of pharmacogenomics is to create a context in which a reprogramming will enable the body biologically to produce the needed antibodies itself, making the “medium” totally transparent. The aim of pharmacogenomics is, in a sense, not to make any drugs at all, but to enable the patient’s own genome to do so.29
To summarize: the equivalency, the back-and-forth mobility, the accountability, and the generativity of code in relation to the body are four ways in which the bio-logic of the biomolecular body is regulated. As we’ve seen, the tensions inherent in this notion of biological information are that sometimes the difference between genetic and computer codes is effaced (enabling code and file conversions), and at other times this difference is referred back to familiar dichotomies (where flesh is enabled by data, biology by technology). We might abbreviate by saying that, in relation to the biomolecular body, bioinformatics aims to realize the possibility of the body as “biomedia.”
The intersection of biotech and infotech goes by many names–bioinformatics, computational biology, virtual biology. This last term is especially noteworthy, for it is indicative of the kinds of philosophical assumptions within bioinformatics that we have been querying. A question, then: is biology “virtual”? Certainly from the perspective of the computer industry, biology is indeed virtual, in the sense of “virtual reality,” a computer-generated space within which the work of biology may be continued, extended, and simulated. Tools such as BLAST, molecular modeling software, and genome sequencing computers are examples of this emerging virtual biology. From this perspective, a great deal of biotech research–most notably the various genome efforts–is thoroughly virtual, meaning that it has become increasingly dependent upon and integrated with computing technologies.
But if we ask the question again, this time from the philosophical standpoint, the question changes. Asking whether or not biology is philosophically virtual entails a consideration of how specific fields such as bioinformatics conceptualize their objects of study in relation to processes of change, difference, and transformation. If, as we’ve suggested, bioinformatics aims for the technical condition (with ontological implications) of “translation without transformation,” then what is meant by “transformation”? As we’ve seen above, transformation is related technically to the procedures of encoding, recoding, and decoding genetic information that constitute a bio-logic. What makes this possible technically is a twofold conceptual articulation: there is something in both genetic and computer codes that enables their equivalency and therefore their back-and-forth mobility (DNA sampling, analysis, databasing). This technical-conceptual articulation further enables the instrumentalization of genetic and computer codes as being mutually accountable (genetic disease predisposition profiling) and potentially generative or productive (genetically based drug design or gene therapies).
Thus, the transformation in this scenario, whose negation forms the measure of success for bioinformatics, is related to a certain notion of change and difference. To use Henri Bergson’s distinction, the prevention of transformation in bioinformatics is the prevention of a difference that is characterized as quantitative (or “numerical”) and extensive (or spatialized).30 What bioinformatics developers want to prevent is any difference (distortion, error, noise) between what is deemed to be information as one moves from an in vitro sample to a computer database to a human clinical trial for a gene-based therapy. This means preserving information as a quantifiable, static unit (DNA, RNA, protein code) across variable media and material substrates.
However, difference in this sense–numerical, extensive difference–is not the only kind of difference. Bergson also points to a difference that is, by contrast, qualitative (“non-numerical”) and intensive (grounded in the transformative dynamics of temporalization, or “duration”). Gilles Deleuze has elaborated Bergson’s distinction by referring to the two differences as external and internal differences, and has emphasized the capacity of the second, qualitative, intensive difference continually to generate difference internally–a difference from itself, through itself.31
How would such an internal–perhaps self-organizing–difference occur? A key concept in understanding the two kinds of differences is the notion of “the virtual,” but taken in its philosophical and not technical sense. For Bergson (and Deleuze), the virtual and actual form one pair, contrasted to the pair of the possible and the real. The virtual/actual is not the converse of the possible/real; they are two different processes by which material-energetic systems are organized. As Deleuze states:
From a certain point of view, in fact, the possible is the opposite of the real, it is opposed to the real; but, in quite a different opposition, the virtual is opposed to the actual. The possible has no reality (although it may have an actuality); conversely, the virtual is not actual, but as such possesses a reality. (Bergsonism 96)
We might add another variant: the possible is negated by the real (what is real is no longer possible because it is real), and the virtual endures in the actual (what is actual is not predetermined in the virtual, but the virtual as a process is immanent to the actual). As Deleuze notes, the possible is that which manages the first type of difference, through resemblance and limitation (out of a certain number of possible situations, one is realized). By contrast, the virtual is itself this second type of difference, operating through divergence and proliferation.
With this in mind, it would appear that bioinformatics–as a technical and conceptual management of the material and informatic orders–prevents one type of difference (as possible transformation) from being realized. This difference is couched in terms derived from information theory and computer science and is thus weighted toward a more quantitative, measurable notion of information (the first type of quantitative, extensive difference). But does bioinformatics–as well as molecular genetics and biology–also prevent the second type of qualitative, intensive, difference? In a sense it does not, because any analysis of qualitative changes in biological information must always be preceded in bioinformatics by an analysis of quantitative changes, just as genotype may be taken as causally prior to phenotype in molecular genetics. But in another sense the question cannot be asked, for before we inquire into whether or not bioinformatics includes this second type of difference in its aims (of translation without transformation), we must ask whether or not such a notion of qualitative, intensive difference exists in bioinformatics to begin with.
This is why we might question again the notion of a “virtual biology.” For, though bioinformatics has been developing at a rapid rate in the past five to ten years (in part bolstered by advances in computer technology), there are still a number of extremely difficult challenges in biotech research which bioinformatics faces. Many of these challenges have to do with biological regulation: cell metabolism, gene expression, and intra- and inter-cellular signaling.32 Such areas of research require more than discrete databases of sequence data, they require thinking in terms of distributed networks of processes which, in many cases, may change over time (gene expression, cell signaling, and point mutations are examples).
In its current state, bioinformatics is predominantly geared toward the study of discrete, quantifiable systems that enable the identification of something called genetic information (via the four-fold process of bio-logic). In this sense bioinformatics works against the intervention of one type of difference, a notion of difference that is closely aligned to the traditions of information theory and cybernetics. But, as Bergson reminds us, there is also a second type of difference which, while being amenable to quantitative analysis, is equally qualitative (its changes are not of degree, but of kind) and intensive (in time, as opposed to the extensive in space). It would be difficult to find this second kind of difference within bioinformatics as it currently stands. However, many of the challenges facing bioinformatics–and biotech generally–imply the kinds of transformations and dynamics embodied in this Bergsonian-Deleuzian notion of difference-as-virtual.
It is in this sense that a “virtual biology” is not a conceptual impossibility, given certain contingencies. If bioinformatics is to accommodate the challenges put to it by the biological processes of regulation (metabolism, gene expression, signaling), then it will have to consider a significant re-working of what counts as “biological information.” As we’ve pointed out, this reconsideration of information will have to take place on at least two fronts: that of the assumptions concerning the division between the material and informatic orders (genetic and computer codes, biology and technology, etc.), and that of the assumptions concerning material-informatic orders as having prior existence in space, and secondary existence in duration (molecules first, then interactions; objects first, then relations; matter first, then force).33 The biophilosophy of Bergson (and of Deleuze’s reading of Bergson) serves as a reminder that, although contemporary biology and biotech are incorporating advanced computing technologies as part of their research, this does not necessarily mean that the informatic is “virtual.”
1. For non-technical summaries of bioinformatics see the articles by Howard, Goodman, Palsson, and Emmett. As one researcher states, bioinformatics is specifically “the mathematical, statistical and computing methods that aim to solve biological problems using DNA and amino acid sequences and related information” (from bioinformatics.org).
2.The use of computers in biology and life science research is certainly nothing new, and, indeed, an informatic approach to studying biological life may be seen to extend back to the development of statistics, demographics, and the systematization of health records during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This proto-informatic approach to the biological/medical body can be seen in Foucault’s work, as well as in medical-sociological analyses inspired by him. Foucault’s analysis of the medical “gaze” and nosology’s use of elaborate taxonomic and tabulating systems are seen to emerge alongside the modern clinic’s management and conceptualization of public health. Such technologies are, in the later Foucault, constitutive of the biopolitical view, in which power no longer rules over death, but rather impels life, through the institutional practices of the hospital, health insurances, demographics, and medical practice generally. For more see Foucault’s The Birth of the Clinic, as well as “The Birth of Biopolitics.”
3. Molecular biochemist Fred Sanger published a report on the protein sequence for bovine insulin, the first publication of sequencing research of this kind. This was accompanied a decade later by the first published paper on a nucleotide sequence, a type of RNA from yeast. See Sanger, “The Structure of Insulin,” and Holley, et al., “The Base Sequence of Yeast Alanine Transfer RNA.” A number of researchers also began to study the genes and proteins of model organisms (often bacteria, roundworms, or the Drosophila fruit fly) not so much from the perspective of biochemical action, but from the point of view of information storage. For an important example of an early database-approach, see Dayhoff et al., “A Model for Evolutionary Change in Proteins.”
4.This, of course, was made possible by the corresponding advancements in computer technology, most notably in the PC market. See Abola, et al., “Protein Data Bank,” and Bairoch, et al. “The SWISS-PROT Protein Sequence Data Bank.”
5. Initially the HGP was funded by the U.S. Department of Energy and National Institute of Health, and had already begun forming alliances with European research institutes in the late 1980s (which would result in HUGO, or the Human Genome Organization). As sequencing endeavors began to become increasingly distributed to selected research centers and/or universities in the U.S. and Europe, the DoE’s involvement lessened, and the NIH formed a broader alliance, the International Human Genome Sequencing Effort, with the main players being MIT’s Whitehead Institute, the Welcome Trust (UK), Stanford Human Genome Center, and the Joint Genome Institute, among many others. This broad alliance was challenged when the biotech company Celera (then The Institute for Genome Research) proposed its own genome project funded by the corporate sector. For a classic anthology on the genome project, see the anthology The Code of Codes, edited by Kevles and Hood. For a popular account see Matt Ridley’s Genome.
6. In this context it should also be stated that bioinformatics is also a business, with a software sector that alone has been estimated to be worth $60 million, and many pharmaceutical companies outsourcing more than a quarter of their R&D to bioinformatics start-ups. See the Silico Research Limited report “Bioinformatics Platforms,” at: <http://www.silico-research.com>.
7. See Kay’s book Who Wrote the Book of Life? A History of the Genetic Code, as well as her essay “Cybernetics, Information, Life: The Emergence of Scriptural Representations of Heredity.”
8. Kay provides roughly three discontinuous, overlapping periods in the history of the genetic code–a first phase marked by the trope of “specificity” during the early part of the twentieth century (where proteins were thought to contain the genetic material), a second “formalistic” phase marked by the appropriation of “information” and “code” from other fields (especially Francis Crick’s formulation of “the coding problem”), and a third, “biochemical” phase during the 1950s and 60s, in which the informatic trope is extended, such that DNA is not only a code but a fully-fledged “language” (genetics becomes cryptography, as in Marshall Nirenberg and Heinrich Matthai’s work on “cracking the code” of life).
9. Herbert Boyer and Stanley Cohen’s recombinant DNA research had demonstrated that DNA could not only be studied, but be rendered as a technology. The synthesis of insulin–and the patenting of its techniques–provides an important proof-of-concept for biotechnology’s control principle in this period. For an historical overview of the science and politics of recombinant DNA, see Aldridge, The Thread of Life. For a popular critical assessment, see Ho, Genetic Engineering. On recombinant DNA, see the research articles by Cohen, et al. and Chang, et al. The work of Cohen and Boyer’s teams resulted in a U.S. patent, “Process For Producing Biologically Functional Molecular Chimeras” (#4237224), as well as the launching of one of the first biotech start-ups, Genentech, in 1980. By comparison, the key players in the race to map the human genome were not scientists, but supercomputers, databases, and software. During its inception in the late 1980s, the DoE’s Human Genome Project signaled a shift from a control principle to a “storage principle.” This bioinformatic phase is increasingly suggesting that biotech and genetics research is non-existent without some level of data storage technology. Documents on the history and development of the U.S. Human Genome Project can be accessed through its website, at <http://www.ornl.gov/hgmis>.
10. At the time of this writing, molecular biologists can perform five basic types of research using bioinformatics tools: digitization (encoding biological samples), identification (of an unknown sample), analysis (generating data on a sample), prediction (using data to discover novel molecules), and visualization (modeling and graphical display of data).
11. Bioinformatics tools can be as specific or as general as a development team wishes. Techniques include sequence assembly (matching fragments of sequence), sequence annotation (notes on what the sequence means), data storage (in dynamically updated databases), sequence and structure prediction (using data on identified molecules), microarray analysis (using biochips to analyze test samples), and whole genome sequencing (such as those on the human genome). For more on the technique of pairwise sequence alignment see Gibas and Gambeck’s technical manual, Developing Bioinformatics Computers Skills, and Baxevanis, et al., eds., Bioinformatics: A Practical Guide to the Analysis of Genes and Proteins. For a hacker-hero’s narrative, see Lincoln Stein’s paper “How PERL Saved the Human Genome Project.”
12. See MacKenzie, Coded Character Sets.
13. At <http://www.bioinformatics.org>.
14. “Translation” is used here in several senses. First, in a molecular biological sense, found in any biology textbook, in which DNA “transcribes” RNA, and RNA “translates” a protein. Secondly, in a linguistic sense, in which some content is presumably conserved in the translation from one language to another (a process which is partially automated in online translation tools). Third, in a computer science sense, in which translation is akin to “portability,” or the ability for a software application to operate across different platforms (Mac, PC, Unix, SGI). This last meaning has been elaborated upon by media theorists such as Friedrich Kittler, in his notion of “totally connected media systems.” In this essay it is the correlation of the first (genetic) and third (computational) meanings which are of the most interest.
15. See Altschul, et al., “Basic Local Alignment Search Tool.”
16. For instance, “blastn” is the default version, searching only the nucleotide database of GenBank. Other versions perform the same basic alignment functions, but with different relationships between the data: “blastp” is used for amino acid and protein searches, “blastx” will first translate the nucleotide sequence into amino acid sequence, and then search blastp, “tblastn” will compare a protein sequence against a nucleotide database after translating the nucleotides into amino acids, and “tblastx” will compare a nucleotide sequence to a nucleotide database after translating both into amino acid code.
17. Other bioinformatics tools websites, such as University of California San Diego’s Biology Workbench, will also offer portals to BLAST searches, oftentimes with their own front-end. To access the Web-version of BLAST, go to <http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov:80/BLAST>. To access the UCSD Biology Workbench, go to <http://workbench.sdsc.edu>.
18. A key differentiation in bioinformatics as a field is between research on “sequence” and research on “structure.” The former focuses on relationships between linear code, whether nucleic acids/DNA or amino acids/proteins. The latter focuses on relationships between sequence and their molecular-physical organization. If a researcher wants to simply identify a test sample of DNA, the sequence approach may be used; if a researcher wants to know how a particular amino acid sequence folds into a three-dimensional protein, the structure approach will be used.
19. A query is a request for information sent to a database. Generally queries are of three kinds: parameter-based (fill-in-the-blank type searches), query-by-example (user-defined fields and values), and query languages (queries in a specific query language). A common query language used on the Internet is SQL, or structured query language, which makes use of “tables” and “select” statements to retrieve data from a database.
20. CGI stands for Common Gateway Interface, and it is often used as part of websites to facilitate the dynamic communication between a user’s computer (“client”) and the computer on which the website resides (“server”). Websites which have forms and menus for user input (e.g., email address, name, platform) utilize CGI programs to process the data so that the server can act on it, either returning data based on the input (such as an updated, refreshed splash page), or further processing the input data (such as adding an email address to a mailing list).
21. For more on the concept of “biomedia” see my “Data Made Flesh: Biotechnology and the Discourse of the Posthuman.”
22. Though wet biological components such as the genome can be looked at metaphorically as “programs,” the difference here is that in bioinformatics the genome is actually implemented as a database, and hence the intermingling of genetic and computer codes mentioned above.
23. The phrase “what a body can do” refers to Deleuze’s reading of Spinoza’s theory of affects in the Ethics. Deleuze shows how Spinoza’s ethics focuses on bodies not as discrete, static anatomies or Cartesian extensions in space, but as differences of speed/slowness and as the capacity to affect and to be affected. For Deleuze, Spinoza, more than any other Continental philosopher, does not ask the metaphysical question (“what is a body?”) but rather an ethical one (“what can a body do?”). This forms the basis for considering ethics in Spinoza as an “ethology.” See Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, 122-30.
25. Crick’s coding problem had to do with how DNA, the extremely constrained and finite genetic “code,” produced a wide array of proteins. Among Crick’s numerous essays on the genetic “code,” see “The Recent Excitement in the Coding Problem.” Also see Kay, Who Wrote the Book of Life?, 128-63.
25. For an example of this technique in action, see Celera’s human genome report, Venter, et al., “The Sequence of the Human Genome.”
26. For a broad account of the promises of molecular medicine, see Clark, The New Healers.
27. While genetic testing and the use of DNA chips are highly probabilistic and not deterministic, the way they configure the relationship between genetic and computer codes is likely to have a significant impact in medicine. Genetic testing can, in the best cases, tell patients their general likelihood for potentially developing conditions in which a particular disease may or may not manifest itself, given the variable influences of environment and patient health and lifestyle. In a significant number of cases this amounts to “leaving things to chance,” and one of the biggest issues with genetic testing is the decision about the “right to know.”
28. See Evans, et al., “Pharmacogenomics: Translating Functional Genomics into Rational Therapeutics.” For a perspective from the U.S. government-funded genome project, see Collins, “Implications of the Human Genome Project for Medical Science.”
29. This is, broadly speaking, the approach of “regenerative medicine.” See Petit-Zeman, “Regenerative Medicine.” Pharmacogenomics relies on bioinformatics to query, analyze, and run comparisons against genome and proteome databases. The data gathered from this work are what sets the parameters of the context in which the patient genome may undergo gene-based or cell therapies. The procedure may be as concise as prior gene therapy human clinical trials–the insertion of a needed gene into a bacterial plasmid, which is then injected into the patient. Or, the procedure may be as complex as the introduction of a number of inhibitors that will collectively act at different locations along a chromosome, working to effectuate a desired pattern of gene expression to promote or inhibit the synthesis of certain proteins. In either instance, the dry data of the genome database extend outward and directly rub up against the wet data of the patient’s cells, molecules, and genome. In this sense data generate the body, or, the complex of genetic and computer codes establishes a context for recoding the biological domain.
30. Bergson discusses the concepts of the virtual and the possible in several places, most notably in Time and Free Will, where he advances an early formulation of “duration,” and in The Creative Mind, where he questions the priority of the possible over the real. Though Bergson does not theorize difference in its post-structuralist vein, Deleuze’s reading of Bergson teases out the distinctions Bergson makes between the qualitative and quantitative in duration as laying the groundwork for a non-negative (which for Deleuze means non-Hegelian) notion of difference as generative, positive, proliferative. See Deleuze’s book Bergsonism, 91-103.
31. Deleuze’s theory of difference owes much to Bergson’s thoughts on duration, multiplicity, and the virtual. In Bergsonism, Deleuze essentially re-casts Bergson’s major concepts (duration, memory, the “élan vital”) along the lines of difference as positive, qualitative, intensive, and internally-enabled.
32. There are a number of efforts underway to assemble bioinformatics databases centered on these processes of regulation. BIND (Biomolecular Interaction Network Database) and ACS (Association for Cellular Signaling) are two recent examples. However, these databases must convert what are essentially time-based processes into discrete image or diagram files connected by hyperlinks, and, because the feasibility of dynamic databases is not an option for such endeavors, the results end up being similar to sequence databases.
33. As Susan Oyama has noted, more often than not, genetic codes are assumed to remain relatively static, while the environment is seen to be constantly changing. As Oyama states, “if information . . . is developmentally contingent in ways that are orderly but not preordained, and if its meaning is dependent on its actual functioning, then many of our ways of thinking about the phenomena of life must be altered” (Oyama 3).