Category: Volume 23 – Number 1 – September 2012

 
Sohail Daulatzai’s Black Star, Crescent Moon: The Muslim International and Black Freedom beyond America ambitiously addresses a highly impactful topic in African American culture that has been largely ignored by the US academy. Islam has greatly affected Black popular cultural production (as in the case of the hip hop that Daulatzai explores in his book), it has inspired the Third World internationalism of giants such as Malcolm X and Jamil Al-Amin, and it has contributed to the politicization of figures such as boxer Muhammad Ali. Daulatzai traces the widespread influence of Islam through African American cinema, literature, popular culture, and global politics. With an admirably wide-ranging scope, he examines African Americans’ imaginative, social, and political participation in what he terms a “Muslim International,” which he takes great pains to explain is “not monolithic; it even resists homogeneity and encourages radical difference…. [It] is not universalist, nor is it cosmopolitan in the European humanist tradition” (xxiv). Instead, Daulatzai argues that the Muslim International “represents a shape-shifting and fluid demand for subjectivity in the face of modernity’s horror” (xxiv). Black Star, Crescent Moon argues that African Americans have both significantly shaped and been shaped by the Muslim International.
 
Daulatzai’s project is grounded in an exploration of the political culture of the postwar period, in which, he argues, “the Cold War was a coded race war against Black and Third World liberation movements” (191). States Daulatzai in his introduction, “Part of my interest has to do with exploring the ideological similarities between the current ‘War on Terror’ and the emergence of the Cold War in the late 1940s, both of which have radically altered domestic and international politics” (xvi). Indeed, one of the book’s major contributions is to explicitly chart out the historical as well as the ideological interconnectedness of the figures of the “Black criminal” and the “Muslim terrorist,” which Daulatzai calls “the twin pillars of U.S. state formation in the post-Civil Rights era” (97). As Daulatzai writes, “to be Black is one thing in America that marks you as un-American, but to be Black and Muslim is quite another, as it marks you as anti-American” (xiv).
 
Impressively far-reaching as it is, Black Star, Crescent Moon touches many other subjects, locations, and perspectives. Beginning with a chapter entitled, “‘You Remember Dien Bien Phu!’: Malcolm X and the Third World Rising,” Daulatzai opens with the figure of Malcolm X, whose work had a broad cultural and political impact. Daulatzai will later argue that Malcolm X “emerges in this narrative as having arguably the most defining influence on the politics and art of the nexus of Black radicalism and the Muslim Third World” (190–91). Like the work of Malcolm X, Black Star, Crescent Moon straddles the divide between the cultural and political, seeking the generative space within which the two overlap. In “To the East, Blackwards: Black Power, Radical Cinema, and the Muslim Third World,” Daulatzai explores the joint roles of the Muslim International, Third Cinema, and the Black Arts movement in the creation of a radical cinematic language in the US. In “Return of the Mecca: Public Enemies, Reaganism, and the Birth of Hip Hop,” he provides one of the most complete academic accounts of the role of Islam in the formation of the ethos and aesthetics of hip hop culture. “‘Ghost in the House’: Muhammad Ali and the Rise of the ‘Green Menace’” gives a fascinating account of boxer Muhammad Ali’s transformation from a social and cultural pariah of mainstream US culture in the 1960s and 70s, into a celebrity embraced by the likes of both George W. Bush and Barack Obama in recent years. Daulatzai ends this examination by juxtaposing Barack Obama’s 2009 trip to Egypt with Malcolm X’s 1964 visit to the country, during which he sought support for his newly created Organization of Afro-American Unity. This comparative analysis highlights the contradictory position of the notion of Black Islam in postwar US culture.
 
In the final and most provocative chapter of his book, “Protect Ya Neck: Global Incarceration, Islam, and the Black Radical Imagination,” Daulatzai concludes that the project of US imperialism abroad is intimately linked to the domestic project of Black mass incarceration, illuminating the often startling connections between the latter and the global incarceration and torture of Muslims. The case of Charles Graner, “one of the ‘most feared and loathed of American guards’ at Abu Ghraib,” is particularly telling (Daulatzai 178). Graner had previously been implicated in violence while serving as an officer at the Greene County Prison in Pennsylvania, where guards “were charged with sodomy with a nightstick, unlawful nude searches, and using prisoners’ blood to write ‘KKK’ on the floor of the prison” (Daulatzai 178). According to Black Star, Crescent Moon, Graner was “given supervisory roles at Abu Ghraib” precisely because of his past guard service in US prisons (Cusac, qtd. in Daulatzai 179). In the time that Graner worked at the Greene County Prison almost 70 percent of the prisoners were African American, while over 90 percent of the guards were white (Leiberman). Several other guards connected with abuse at Abu Ghraib had also served as civilian guards in the US.
 
The connections between domestic violence against African Americans and international acts of violence against Muslims go beyond the individual guards associated with Abu Ghraib who had formerly served as prison guards in the US. Daulatzai argues that such linkages are not incidental; rather, they indicate the structuring logics of incarceration and torture in Iraq and Afghanistan. He notes:
 

 

What is especially revealing is that many of the prison officials whom Ashcroft sent to Iraq were not only employed by private prison firms around the United States but were also heads of various state departments of corrections throughout the country, including Terry Stewart (Arizona), Gary Deland (Utah), John Armstrong (Connecticut), and Lane McCotter (Texas, Mexico, and Utah). In fact, all of those listed here have been involved in legal cases and accused of a range of human rights abuses by inmates in the United States, including denial of medical treatment, harsh conditions, sexual harassment, torture, and even death. McCotter, who was forced to resign as head of Utah’s State Board of Corrections as a result of the death of an inmate shackled naked to a chair, was…later chosen by then attorney general John Ashcroft to head the reopening of Iraqi jails under American rule and also to train Iraqi prison guards, just one month after the Justice Department had released a report following the death of a prisoner due to the lack of medical and mental health treatment at one of the Management and Training Corporation’s jails, a private firm in which McCotter was an executive.

(177–178)

 

Black Star, Crescent Moon thus makes explicit the joint destinies of African Americans, African American Muslims, and the Muslim International. Daulatzai writes, “the Muslim International is constituted within the context of incarceration and even despite it. For it also sees the world as a prison” (175). Further meditating on the cultural effects of this social reality, Daulatzai’s project importantly concludes, “for if prison is about disappearance and erasure, silence and violence, then epiphany, conversion, or politicization is a kind of ontological resurrection against social and civic death, redefining one’s existence and challenging the panoptic power of the state” (174).

 
Since the book is in many ways a “first,” it is hard to avoid wishing that it had done more. One wishes, perhaps, that there had been further time spent historically contextualizing the many rich trajectories of African American Islam, especially those of groups beyond the Nation of Islam. The philosophy of Five Percent Nation has had a tremendous impact on the lyrics of hip hop artists from Jeru the Damaja to Eric B and Rakim to Erykah Badu, and has contributed to the popularization of phrases like “What’s up, G?” and “word is bond” yet the group merits only a brief mention in Daulatzai’s study. Additionally, the Moorish Science Temple of America, a group founded by Noble Drew Ali in 1913, barely receives any attention, although there is much evidence to support the idea that its philosophy and structure were formative for the creation of the Nation of Islam. Jamal Al-Amin (formerly known as H. Rap Brown) is discussed at length, but the historic rift that created the powerful organization headed by Al-Amin before his arrest is not discussed. Without exploring these and other important variants of Islam that exist within the African American context, Black Star, Crescent Moon not only risks missing some of the significant nuances and debates that shaped the Islamic tradition in African American communities; it also risks framing Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam as the monolithic voice of African American Islam. This is less a critique of Black Star, Crescent Moon than it is an indication of the research that has yet to be conducted on this important topic.
 

 
“Who are you wearing today?” The question is an awards show cliché, asked of every female celebrity making her way down a red carpet. The repeated asking and answering of this question drives and shapes the multi-billion dollar fashion industry that designs, markets, and manufactures the clothes; the stylists who curate clothes and accessories; the television and film industries which seem to increasingly exist in order to create these profitable red carpet spectacles; and the many magazines and websites whose primary content is photos of celebrities in designer garments. These symbioses have existed since the birth of film as a popular medium, but the mutualism has been especially adaptive to our current digital ecology.
 
But really, who are you wearing today? Asked of a cultural critic, the question will get a different reception. Trained to turn such cultural tropes and clichés inside out, we immediately begin to examine their seams and construction. Looking at the question critically, we might show how the question points us to the deeply exploitative labor conditions in which most clothing is produced today (and, truthfully, has been in almost all time periods). We know that the complex stories behind each t-shirt or formal gown are grossly undersignified by the tags that reveal the garments’ country of origin. We might look at the clothing on a celebrity’s body and try to tell the stories of whom she is really wearing—the farmer who grew the cotton, the tanner who skinned the calf, and everyone else who moved the garment from its rawest state into her closet. We’re good at seeing that this is a question worth attention, that it tells us something about the state of a particular commodity fetish in our current moment, that it might lead somewhere interesting.
 
But who are you wearing today? It’s not a question offered up for critical interrogation this time, but rather a real question, meant to make you look down at your body and see what clothes you put on earlier today. For most of us, this is a much more difficult question to answer, since it now becomes a question that cuts through our own individual gender, class, and professional identities, down to our often ambivalent senses of who we think we are and who we wish others to think we are. A December 3, 2012 photo-essay by Stacey Patton in the Chronicle of Higher Education suggests the volatile nature of this question among academics. It profiles three scholars who are identified in the piece as “black dandies.” The term “black dandy” is clearly grounded in a scholarly context by the introduction to the photo-essay, which references Monica L. Miller’s 2009 book on the topic, Slaves to Fashion. The piece presents Miller’s argument that African-American “men in particular have ‘styled their way from slaves to dignified human beings.’” (The CHE also offers an ancillary audio interview with Miller in a blog post by Brock Read.) The act of dressing oneself is, we are reminded, a deeply political act in which each one of us participates every morning of our lives. Our clothing choices make our personal identities and politics visible—open to interpretation and misinterpretation by anyone who can see us. The extent to which we remain unaware of this often correlates with the kinds of cultural privilege to which we have access.
 
In the “Black Dandies Fashion New Academic Identities” photo-essay, scholars Hasan Kwame Jeffries (History, Ohio State), Sharon P. Holland (African and African American Studies, Duke), and Ernest L. Gibson (English, Rhodes College) are all photographed in their homes, outdoors, and on campus, modeling their favorite looks. Quotes from each scholar accompany their pictures; these quotes make clear both their keen senses of the complex politics of their sartorial choices and their genuine pleasure in the selection and wearing of carefully chosen clothes. When I first encountered this piece online, I was struck by the bravery of those who accepted the invitation to be part of it. We are used to putting our ideas into wide circulation for critique, but it is another thing entirely for a scholar to offer his or her body up for national critical analysis. The responses to the article in the comments section are laced through with explicit and implicit racism in ways that probably come as little surprise to the participants in the piece. While that deserves attention, what is more remarkable in the comments, to me, is a pervasive acceptance and even excitement about its combination of the personal, the scholarly, and the sartorial. Comments applauding these models far outweigh those denouncing an interest in clothing as frivolous.
 
There’s nothing conclusive to be drawn from a single article, let alone from the comments it elicits, but a wider look suggests that scholars are growing more enthusiastic not just for scholarly approaches to fashion, but also for attempts to tether that scholarship back to identity in a personal way. Among several recent academic publications focusing on fashion, the four volume Habits of Being seems to anticipate a new epoch in the study of dress. (The first two volumes of the series have been released so far, Accessorizing the Body (2011) and Exchanging Clothes (2012)). The series consists primarily of essays published since 1995 in the Italian cultural studies journal Abito e Identitá: Ricerche di storia letteraria e culturale (Clothes and Identity: Research in Literary and Cultural History). In the book series Paula Rabinowitz, a contributor to Abito e Identitá, partners with Cristina Giorcelli, its editor, to make this work more accessible to an English-speaking audience. Most of the essays originally appeared in Italian and are now translated for the first time, though a handful were initially published in English. Each volume also includes several newly commissioned pieces.
 
Taking a pool of eighty journal essays and creating four distinct, cogent books out of them isn’t an easy task. The preface of each book proffers the phrase “habits of being” as a way of redefining identity: “Identity is perhaps little more than a matter of habit, of what is put on every day, to construct one’s being” (xv). The argument that identity and dress are constitutively linked is widely accepted after having been developed in such well-regarded and diverse critical works as Roland Barthes’s Système de la Mode (originally published in 1967, translated into English in 1990), Dick Hebdige’s Subculture: The Meaning of Style (1979), and Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (1989). But in the preface to the Habits of Being books, the idea that identity is reducible to one’s habits of dress overreaches, as the hedge word “perhaps” immediately acknowledges. The much looser argument actually driving Exchanging Clothes makes this clear in the introduction: “exchanging clothes shapes identity—a habit of being otherwise, something imperfect and complete” (Rabinowitz 14). The overreach and hedge in the first presentation of the organizing concept may be a symptom of the challenge of binding together essays that are more diverse than those in a typical academic collection. Exchanging Clothes reads as already-published essays that have been yoked together under a capacious theme, rather than essays that were developed in response to a pre-existing theme. This potential strength of the book may frustrate some readers, especially because it is treated with ambivalence in the prefatory material. For example, Rabinowitz’s Introduction to Exchanging Clothes briefly explains each essay in the book, covering one or two per paragraph. But there is also a final concluding paragraph in which Rabinowitz runs through each essay again quickly, pointing out their points of contact; the paragraph ends up seeming intriguing and inconclusive at the same time. I couldn’t help but think of a fashion show in which looks supposedly in keeping with a certain theme are sent down the runway for our initial inspection, one or two at a time. The audience begins to build a sense of whether the collection coheres. Then there is the final parade of all the looks together, on the catwalk at once, with the designer onstage to claim them. Rabinowitz narrates both the first look and the encore, trying to convince us that it does indeed all belong together.
 
The circulation of clothing is both the collection’s theme and its method. The editors seem to hope that by presenting these essays on the same catwalk, they might inspire readers to put some of them together in interesting new ways. The essays in Exchanging Clothes demonstrate extreme variety in methodology, style, and argument, as well as differing degrees of relevance to the theme of exchange and circulation. It is difficult to imagine the academic reader who would be interested in both a close reading of the literary symbolism of the ring in James Merrill’s poetry (Andrea Mariani’s “Rings in James Merrill’s Poetry”) and in an ethnography of a contemporary thrift store in Minneapolis (Katalin Medvedev’s “An Ethnography of the Savers Thrift Department Store in Minneapolis”), but I think this series wants to hail those readers into existence and provide a location where they can congregate. In fashion parlance, the imagined wearer of a certain collection or label is called its “girl”—the “Versace girl” and the “Chanel girl” call to mind very different images for those familiar with each brand’s semiotic history and style. I think that the Habits of Being series might exist in part to call into being a new “girl,” though the actual gender identity of the critics it wishes to hail may or may not be feminine, of course. (Two of the thirteen essays in Exchanging Clothes are written by men.)
 
One key innovation of the series is that each book begins with two essays from non-academics, the first from a female psychoanalyst and the next from a female fashion designer. Exchanging Clothes opens with an essay by Italian psychoanalyst Laura Montani and moves on to a piece by fashion designer Mariuccia Mandelli. Montani’s essay, “Accessory Questions,” ranges around, investigating the psychoanalytic view of accessory; to many American readers, it will seem like a working draft, generative but unruly. She starts with a quick scroll of dictionary definitions of “accessory”—a classic strategy of the writer who isn’t sure where to start, but perhaps also of an analyst scanning symptoms—pointing out briefly that the very existence of the fashion accessory reveals our “structural incompleteness.” She then leaves any sustained interest in clothing behind, and offers three mini-essays on (1) how the concept of accessory fits into “part-object theory,” (2) female pain (nominally in the context of piercing), and (3) female desire and fetishism (but not fetish culture). Montani’s writing is theoretical, abstract, dense, intertextual, and suggestive. By contrast, Mandelli’s essay, “Krizia and Accessories,” is written in simple and direct magazine prose and from personal experience; Mandelli references zero sources in comparison to Montani’s twenty-nine. Mandelli writes like a businesswoman accustomed to the value of clarity in communication. Her essay moves through various accessories made by her fashion line, Krizia, and describes her own idiosyncratic first-person view of each type of accessory. She makes claims such as: watches and shoes reveal who someone really is; we should commit to one pair of spectacles until they break; ties are okay for women and are often dreary nooses for men.
 
Having encountered these two essays with vastly different styles, purposes, and forms, the reader may be surprised to find that the next three essays are relatively traditional examples of literary criticism. Anne Hollander’s essay turns a perceptive eye toward the depictions of clothing in Homer, Virgil, Dante, and Ariosto, drawing out the major similarities and differences in how clothing is (and isn’t) depicted by these influential writers. Andrea Mariani, as mentioned earlier, looks primarily at how the figure of the ring functions across James Merrill’s poetry. Cristina Giorcelli offers a close reading of Kate Chopin’s short story “A Pair of Silk Stockings,” historicizing the symbolic and economic value of the titular stockings in late 19^th century America. The essays are all valuable individually, but to someone reading the whole book, they may feel disappointingly traditional after such an adventurous opening. Also disappointing is the fact that although many disciplinary methodologies are represented in the rest of the book, there is very little work that is methodologically interdisciplinary. After the literary analysis essays, the collection marches through different approaches to dress and identity, offering an essay each from the perspective of history, film studies, cultural studies, fashion studies, sociology, anthropology, and ethnography. The topics covered in these essays range broadly, from the symbolism of French hats in mid-century American cinema to the circulation of symbolic jewelry in Algerian culture. As one completes the book, one wonders, does the “Habits of Being girl” exist? Can we imagine the reader who can take in such diverse essays, which do not seem to be at all in conversation with each other, and work to put their ideas, methods, and styles into exchange?
 
Historians and anthropologists have traditionally paid special attention to dress. The cultural studies turn made possible new kinds of scholarly work on fashion, the body, and identity, but the kind of transdisciplinary critical fashion studies that Exchanging Clothes may wish to promote is still an unfulfilled project. Fashion Theory, a journal that began publication in 1997, represents the more traditional scholarly approach, studying the culture of fashion. Exchanging Clothes and the series of which it is a part want to study the fashioning of culture. As Giorcelli explains in the final “Coda” to Exchanging Clothes, “clothes and accessories are treated in these essays as a means of delving into, exchanging and circulating, an identity: psychic, ethnic, and social, including gender identity” (259). In this series, the preface reveals, most of the authors are distinguished scholars writing about “clothing here for the first time in their careers” (xiii). It remains to be seen whether new academic programs such as the Parsons Fashion Studies M.A., new journals such as Critical Studies in Fashion and Beauty, and new books such as this one will produce and sustain scholars who are willing and able, in our scholarly marketplace, to spend entire careers traversing traditional disciplines and looking at the “social and economic processes of dress as well as psychic and ontological aspects of identity” (xii). Though many, many factors impact what kinds of work future generations of scholars will do, I return now to the point I made earlier: our individual willingness to critically confront our own sartorial choices is a necessary precondition to valuing the kind of work Exchanging Clothes seems to want to elicit from its readers.
 

 
There is quite a lot one might say, and that has already been said, about Gilles Deleuze. In the wake of the first wave of general guides and overviews, there are now a number of Deleuzes from which to choose. There is the political, revolutionary, and transformational Deleuze who co-authored with Guattari, supplementing the latter’s anti-institutional mode of psychoanalysis with a broader notion of life as desire, which in turn inflected Deleuze’s single-authored works. There is the Bergsonian Deleuze focused on time, the Spinozist Deleuze of immanence, the Humean Deleuze who poses the problem of the imagination in its social and political forms, the Leibnizian Deleuze who affirms the perception of the infinite, and even the Kantian Deleuze concerned with the distinct and divergent faculties of thinking. There is—against all this—an anti-Deleuzian Deleuze: a Deleuze who (according to his better known critics) is so rarefied in his vision of the virtual that he has nothing to say about practical political intervention. Slavoj Žižek has insisted that it is this Deleuze—the Deleuze of the single-authored works, and not the political and revolutionary Deleuze who worked with Guattari—who arrives at a sterile dualism, in which thinking is isolated, subjective, and cut off from the world of action and events. Deleuze, Žižek insists, wants to be an immanent monist with a world of being that just is becoming, but ultimately something like a subject as nothingness returns:
 

 

This, then, is what Deleuze seems to get wrong in his reduction of the subject to (just another) substance. Far from belonging to the level of actualization, of distinct entities in the order of constituted reality, the dimension of the “subject” designates the reemergence of the virtual within the order of actuality. “Subject” names the unique space of the explosion of virtuality within constituted reality. According to The Logic of Sense, sense is the immaterial flow of pure becoming, and “subject” designates not the substantial entity whose “predicate” (attribute, property, capacity) is the sense-event but a kind of antisubstance, a negative/inverted substance—the immaterial, singular, purely abstract point that sustains the flow of sense. This is why the subject is not a person. To put it in Deleuzian terms, “person” belongs to the order of actualized reality, designating the wealth of positive features and properties that characterize an individual, whereas the subject is divided precisely in the Deleuzian sense of “dividual” as opposed to individual.

(61)

 
Now it is this Deleuze—the Deleuze that most Deleuzians claim is not Deleuze at all so much as the consequence of a violent misreading—that Kaufman wants to claim as a Deleuze worth reading. The stakes would at first appear to be very low indeed, mainly to do with ontology and lineage. Kaufman asserts that Deleuze is closer to scholasticism (and especially to Aquinas) than we might think, and that he is not quite the philosopher of free, unbridled, and dynamic becoming that we might believe (and want) him to be. But there might be more to this rereading than a squabble amongst Francophile theorists: the Deleuze criticized by Peter Hallward, Slavoj Žižek, and Alain Badiou is a counter-political Deleuze, one whose conception of the virtual—because it is not subjective—does not allow us to think of how the virtual might amount to a decision or a transformation of this world. Indeed, Alain Badiou’s criticism of Deleuze links the problem of ontology to a certain mode of ethics (of which he happens to approve):
 

1. 1.
   This philosophy is organized around a metaphysics of the One.
2. 2.
   It proposes an ethics of thought that requires dispossession and asceticism.
3. 3.
   It is systematic and abstract. (17)

 
Dispossession and abstraction, for Badiou, are worthy of affirmation, precisely because contemporary ethical projects of inclusion, conciliation, and recognition ultimately yield a homogeneity that precludes any form of decision (and therefore any revolutionary change). For Badiou, thought is thought of the subject (and it is never quite clear how subjects are not coterminous with humans). The problem, for Badiou, lies between points one and two: if thought is ultimately at one with the world, then there is no distance of the subject. Without a subject abstraction and asceticism will not generate a political difference. Key here is the status of the virtual. As articulated by Žižek, the virtual reemerges with an “explosion.” In this respect the events that will disrupt the actuality of constituted life must take the form of disruption, and can only do so if we grant the existence of something like a subject; it may be that insofar as we are persons we are bound up with identity politics and already-formed interests that can only yield the same dull round of party politics. But the subject is not the person so much as the gap, distance, nothingness, or thinking negativity that will always be other than any designated, objectifiable self. For Badiou and Žižek, then, the break in actuality occurs by way of the subject, not because of some blessed rationality of human political sense, but precisely because we are always other than any of our rationalizations and interests. If, as they insist, Deleuze does not grant the subject this potentiality of distance, what we are left with is not so much a politics—a task of intervention and decision—but a passive affirmation, in which we are nothing more than the witnesses of events, and never their decisive cause. As articulated by Hallward, who for Kaufman offers the most incisive reading of a Deleuze less focused on revolutionary becoming than on a passivity or inertia that short-circuits the world of praxis and action, Deleuze offers nothing more than a philosophy of alignment:
 

To grasp an event is thus to align yourself in keeping with its determination, to embrace it as your destiny, as “yours” in a way that is utterly intimate (because it concerns you more profoundly than your actual interests or identity) and yet utterly impersonal (because it is both disinterested and non-identical). Consider again the event of a wound, or wounding. Deleuze will embrace unreservedly the amor fati of Stoic ethics: “my wound existed before me; I was born to embody it.” Understood as an event, the wound is not the result of inter-actual relations or causes. To accept my virtual wound is to disregard the process of its actual causation (and thus to forgo any temptation of regret).

(43)

 

The decision one makes about ontology—monism or dualism—yields an ethics: the break of the subject in a moment of ungrounded decision, or the passive affirmation of the One.

 
Perhaps, still, the pertinence of this philosophical dispute appears less than overwhelming. The opening of Kaufman’s book—a scholarly journey (or, as she refers to it, a “small study”) that pursues the gap of the virtual that is broken off from the subject of praxis, by way of Aquinas, Blanchot, Sartre, Kerouac, Melville, and others—does not seem to promise much in the way of what we might like to call political “relevance”:
 

At its most basic, this study argues for Deleuze as a powerful—perhaps the French twentieth century’s most powerful because most unrealized—thinker of stasis (which in Greek indicates both a standing still and an internal revolution or disturbance). But beyond that it claims this thought of stasis to be an outgrowth of ontological commitments, often downplayed in the critical literature and arguably by Deleuze himself, that are presented as a question of the genesis of structures, and what is beyond or outside the given structure, yet for that all the more crucial to its operation—essentially the zero or empty point of the structure, to draw on a structuralist vocabulary that Deleuze helps refine. It is the ongoing and implicitly generative role of the empty static point (the third synthesis of time) that this study seeks to consider in all its implications.

(1)

 

Great: the planet is hurtling towards ecological catastrophe; the former super power of the United States has become party-politicized to the point of paralysis; the global financial crisis has yielded nothing more than the cut, paste, and papier-mâché response of fix-as-you-collapse expediency; and now we have a philosopher of revolution and becoming hailed as the great thinker of stasis. With this much worldly, political, ideological, and economic stasis do we really need to provide an ontological and scholarly underpinning?

 
Yes, and the answer lies, clearly enough—after Kaufman’s exegesis of Aquinas, Sartre, Blanchot, and others—in running: “One might be led to ask, especially in light of Baudrillard’s celebrated analysis of America, whether it is possible for an exercise-obsessed American to think while jogging—or working out at the gym” (127). We get to the paralysis of running and the gym by way of Baudrillard, Blanchot, and America. So, let us accept something like Locke’s liberal individualist idea that, “in the beginning, all the world was America.” The self is born not as an individual with history and predicates, but simply as a power to… set over and against a virgin space. If that were so, one might lament the ways in which that same America of open freedom became a land of personal identity, of asserting who I am. And one might further lament the same American culture of self-affirmation becoming one of self-movement: becoming who you are; being nothing other than yourself; refusing to be limited by any external, transcendent, or other force. Once individuals become persons with integrity, self-affirmation, and self-cultivation as their end, it makes sense—as Badiou, Žižek and Hallward will do—to emphasize the otherness of the subject: that I am not the self that has made the world and the self its own. There would then be another America: not the America of property, identity, self-promotion, or winning friends and influencing people, but an America of the road, of flight, of open space—of a becoming that is not limited by the being of the individual.
 
This America has perhaps been a primarily literary phenomenon, one that tends to be rather European (and therefore complicated). One might think of the ways in which Henry James seemed at once to celebrate the open, history-free, and childlike gaze of the American girl (Daisy Miller), against the weight of the prestige, received ideas, and property of old Europe. But that same Henry James also presented the ugly emptiness of new world money that had rid itself of taste, tradition, and languid perception, with James’s refined Europeans finding some solace in the remnants, ruins, and fragments of aestheticism. This problem of America—at once the land of new, open space freed from the rigidity of the past, and an infantile haven of unthinking movement and puerile renewal—brings us back to running. For Kaufman, the “out of this world” Deleuze that emerges from Peter Hallward’s critique might offer us the most fruitful way to think about America and the paralysis or absence of thought epitomized by running and gym-going.
 
Kaufman argues against life, vitalism, becoming, and movement for a Deleuze of inertia. This Deleuze will probably not be political, and he may not be human, but he may well be ethical. The argument proceeds in this fashion: at the level of exegesis Kaufman wants to mark a Deleuze who is distinct from Guattari, and even from the Deleuze of monism. The virtual cannot be aligned with desire, and certainly not with human potentiality, and therefore not with a subject. What if the virtual were given in what Kaufman describes, following the Deleuze of Difference and Repetition, as the third synthesis of time? Imagine time not as the tracked movements that occur across space (such as the arc of the sun rising and setting, the hands of a clock moving, or the time taken to run one mile), nor as the way in which we think about history or our past and future. Imagine time as sub specie aeternitatis. If one were not oneself, not located in the here and now, but present at all points of the world, all at once—out of this world, as if nowhere—then the events of the world would be neither in the past, nor about to arrive, but would at once be present in this infinite time and not present because not now. It is this time and this virtual separation and distance from the actual that Kaufman finds in the Deleuze she wants to save both from his fans (the Deleuzians who take the virtual to be the political potentiality of freedom, action, and becoming) and from the anti-Deleuzians who want to grant potentiality a site of subjective political force. Why? Running.
 
Treadmill running, running to get fit, running to get high, running to burn off that pizza, running to win: these are movements of survival and of the body. I run to become, and I become and run. We could expand this “running on the spot” to include most of what counts as politics: keep moving, working, improving, and feeling good in order to survive. Running is biopolitics par excellence: we humans need to sustain ourselves, to avoid the inertia of being static consumers. We are not running to go anywhere else, but running to achieve what only running can—the maximization of the body’s potentiality and becoming. Banking is akin to running: plenty of exchange, relations, movements, trading—even desiring—but movements and exchange freed from anything other than itself. Surely what we need, then, is real movement. And this is Hallward/Badiou/Žižek’s point: Deleuze gives us no way of allowing the virtual to make a political difference. Indeed, Deleuzism appears almost like a philosophical treadmill: think because thinking itself is a type of movement (immaterial, ungrounded, not subjective, and certainly not mine.)
 
Kaufman has other ideas. Let us counteract this frenzied motion of running and moving for movement’s sake with inertia: that dead spot or point of cramped space where we seem unable to go anywhere. To this end, she turns beyond the America of wide, open spaces, away from movement and towards character. Much has been written about Melville’s Bartleby and—to use the Italian Marxist rhetoric of Giorgio Agamben—the power of inoperativity. Bartleby’s inaction, his preference “not to,” might appear a form of inaction if one reads his actions from the point of the view of law, work, and writing; but there are two other modes of time according to which his gesture of refusal might be read. The first is that of a revolutionary break from the world of convention, purposive action, and already inscribed norms: Bartleby opens a space beyond the law that is not yet that of a determined other law. His seeming inaction, in terms of the actual law, is a revolutionary move in terms of an imagined future beyond the law. Kaufman finds in Bartleby, and in the possibility of character more generally, something other than a subjective break: there is an ethics, she insists, that is not that of movement, becoming, relationality, and encounter; but one of inertia, the interior, and a time that is not of this world: “It is my claim that this inertia, rather than marking a lesser or pathological state, may point to a new path for ontology” (152).
 
I would suggest that despite the modest opening claims of Kaufman’s book—that she is completing a work of Deleuzian exegesis that ties Deleuze to scholasticism, and that her claims are primarily ontological—the importance of this book may indeed be quite major. Return to the two motifs that Kaufman draws from scholasticism and ontology: the distance between this world and potentiality (which she describes as a “dualist monism”), and the new figure of America (not as a land of wide open spaces and movement, but of interior immobility). Kaufman is arguing for a dualism that would break with the space and time of this world, so here she agrees with the criticisms of Deleuze made by Badiou and Hallward, but also sees this dualism as an opportunity. The virtual would not be grounded in life, and certainly not in human life, so we would avoid that always strange problem of French philosophy’s embrace of the subject and contempt for the human. This Deleuzian virtuality of inertia and cramped space would not be that of a separate substance as subject, but a virtuality that is not only not subject, but also not human, not organic, and not living; it is the “life” or power of difference that is radically other than the living, and abstract:
 

I would insist that Deleuze’s is no ordinary dualist dualism. It is more nearly a dualist monism, because it is a structural dualism and a hierarchicizing procedure used at the service of an undermining of dualism, which debatably might then form a non-Hegelian higher unity, or univocity. . . . I wish to dwell more squarely on the often static building blocks of the Deleuzian conceptual apparatus, for example the inorganic Life as an abstract entity that grounds the living, the point of immobility that grounds becoming, or the counterintuitive static part of the genesis of the actual from the virtual—in short, a bevy of stuck, dead, eternal dual structures that are more nearly categories rather than concepts.

(16)

 
Surely, today, with the pressures we humans feel with regard to life (our life, animal life, plant life, planetary life) we might imagine this third synthesis of time as a thought experiment worthy of the twenty-first century. If we could abstract from living beings, and this earthly life, and imagine a virtual power to live that was not ours, we would be brought towards an ethics without ethos, without a place or time that is ours. Then, and only then, we might start to ask not how we might survive or reinvent ourselves, but about what it is to live, and whether our living on is something that we can prefer to do, or whether (with Bartleby) we might prefer not to. If there is not just movement, dynamism, space, and becoming, but a certain inertia that is outside our time, space, and connected world of relations, then we might begin to ask about other worlds.
 

 
In Counterculture Colophon Loren Glass argues that in the 1950s and 60s Grove Press was singularly important in bringing into the mainstream writing that was once considered sexually, politically, and aesthetically avant-garde. Glass suggests that by targeting a growing college and university population with quality paperback books, and by creating an identifiable countercultural brand to which readers swore allegiance, Grove succeeded in both democratizing and incorporating the avant-garde. Grove was thus a premier instigator of a considerable transformation in US culture, whereby dissonant values such as pacifism, anti-colonialism, and sexual experimentation became available to common sense.
 
It is to Barney Rosset, Grove’s daring founder, that Glass attributes much of Grove’s output, which included—in addition to its main list—the Evergreen Review, founded in 1957; the Black Cat mass-market paperback line, founded in 1961; and a film unit that became more of a focus in the late 1960s. Glass interviewed Rosset for the book, and states that while he sees the press as “a collective endeavor enabled by specific historical conditions,” he must acknowledge that Rosset’s “aesthetic tastes, political convictions, and entrepreneurial spirit were central to the identity of the company” (2). Borrowing a term from Max Weber, Glass treats Grove less as a corporation than as a “‘charismatic community’” made up of people who came together out of loyalty to a particularly dynamic leader (7). His focus is often the titles put out by the press—whose impact is measured through advertising copy and sales figures—rather than the social and cultural milieu they entered and affected.
 
Glass acknowledges that there is little evidence that the average reader is aware of a book’s colophon. Yet Grove’s brand does seem to have been uniquely identifiable, as it tapped into and fostered countercultural niches to develop its loyal following. Cover art was one element in its branding effort. Abstract expressionism had become palatable to many people just as Grove was getting off the ground, and the press worked consistently with Roy Kuhlman, one of the first book designers to use abstract expressionist techniques. But if, as Serge Guilbaut maintains, abstract expressionist painting became a tool for consensus building just after WWII, selling American intellectuals on the idea that they lived in a nation that earned its political dominance through cultural sophistication, Grove’s success prompted and reflected a subsequent moment: the 1960s breach of that consensus by the rise of the New Left and countercultural movements, in which experimental artists rearticulated the aesthetic to the political.
 
Three sources of avant-garde work stand out in Glass’s account as particularly important to Grove’s enterprise. The first was a late modernist literary avant-garde, which primarily originated in Paris but which encompassed US experimental writers and a new world literature as well. Grove built its cultural capital on writers who were first published in Paris, including Samuel Beckett, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Eugène Ionesco, and Jean Genet. It then used this capital to consecrate US writers like Frank O’Hara, Allen Ginsberg, Charles Olson, Denise Levertov, William Burroughs, and a coterie of non-Western figures who tended to be presented as worthy of interest to the extent that they adhered to and revitalized Western modernist techniques, whether deliberately (Kenzaburo Oe wrote a dissertation on Jean-Paul Sartre) or otherwise (Amos Tutuola was envisioned as an “unconscious modernist” [Glass 53]).
 
Many Grove titles came with critical introductions in which credentialed experts explained why the work was important. The Evergreen Review, which looked like a standard quality paperback, additionally disseminated both avant-garde literature and works of criticism and context supporting it. Ionesco’s “There is No Avant-Garde Theatre,” Robbe-Grillet’s “A Fresh Start for Fiction,” and Jean-Paul Sartre’s interview with L’Express on the Soviet invasion of Hungary (in which the term “New Left” made one of its earliest appearances) all appeared in the journal’s first few issues.
 
Grove developed a special interest in drama, putting out work by Genet, Beckett, Brendan Behan, Joe Orton, and Tom Stoppard among others, turning some of these writers into household names. Waiting for Godot had sold 250,000 copies by 1968. By then, students were so familiar with the “formal and philosophical difficulties of the avant-garde” that they would readily indicate “the ironies of [this] easiness” (Glass 98). Grove marketed printed plays as supplements to or substitutes for live performances; it also produced off-Broadway playbills and eventually acquired a theatre in New York. Advertisements encouraged people to experience works that were already making theatre history. A roster of academic critics stated that the especially poetic quality of the plays made reading them even more worthwhile than seeing them, and also appealed to the image of the modernist auteur in contrast to the collaborative producers of a staged play. These twinned analytical frameworks—the play as poetry to be read and reread with care, and the play as the work of a lone genius—helped suit printed plays to classroom study.
 
Similar techniques were involved in the publication of film scripts. The sole film put out by Grove’s film production unit, Evergreen Theater, Inc., was Beckett’s Film (1964), but it distributed titles by Jean-Luc Godard and others. The unit also produced film texts in a series edited by Robert Hughes, which featured illustrated and annotated screenplays for works that one could not easily catch at the local movie theater. These publications stressed that a film should be read as much as viewed, and, in the case of works like François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, were accompanied by scholarly introductions and numerous screenshot images. Once again, Grove Press translated the prestige of Parisian culture into something mass-produced and academically available.
 
The second of Grove’s major avant-garde publishing interests was sexually explicit literature. Rosset fought court battles against obscenity laws so that he could publish risqué works. Indeed, Glass argues that Rosset “almost single-handedly” precipitated a relaxation of censorship in the 1950s (20). During these trials, the “test of time” standard of literary excellence was displaced by the “patina of professionalism” (Glass 103). Experts were called in and their credentials were exhibited to prove that they were qualified to say what should be considered art and what obscenity. In Glass’s treatment, the idea of the “modern classic” emerged in the courtroom as an aid to the legal defense and commercial promotion of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Tropic of Cancer, and Naked Lunch. He argues that as a result, obscenity was “contained by its aesthetic consecration” (105). It became a marketing feature rather than a liability in the literary field. Court decisions were published in the Evergreen Review and incorporated into new editions.
 
What also arose at this time was the appeal to one’s “freedom to read”—a useful idea when a work, such as one of Henry Miller’s novels, was likely to reach a wide non-professional audience. Courts began to balance the likelihood that an intended audience for a work would deem it obscene against the recognition of an individual’s right to choose her own reading materials. The result was a niche market in which literature intended for adults and sold as “underground” would not be deemed obscene because its likely audience would not be scandalized by it. Grove cashed in, publishing numerous works of what Glass calls “vulgar modernism” because they combined aesthetic experimentation with popular appeal and erotic tendencies (these include Genet’s oeuvre, John Rechy’s City of Night, and de Sade). Over the years Grove became a disseminator of anything explicit, including sex manuals, gay porn, stag films, and erotic art catalogues. The Evergreen Review often featured erotic cover art, and it sold the idea of membership in a semi-scandalous club through campaigns like 1966’s “Join the Underground” (Glass 131).
 
The third and final form of avant-garde writing that Grove supported was politically revolutionary. So to his first two trajectories—the movement from avant-garde to mainstream, and from obscenity to “underground” market niche—Glass adds the movement from radical political possibility to defanged academic appropriation of revolution’s romantic aura. Grove established, through the book design and promotion of works by Franz Fanon, Malcolm X, Régis Debray, Che Guevara, and others, the generic category of the revolutionary handbook, advertising the practical application of particular techniques. Yet one survey of Grove’s readership suggested that it was mostly comprised of white male professionals making good salaries in stable jobs. People were invited to imagine themselves in league with global struggles against colonial domination and its repressive effects on psychology and identity, and of course many did. Grove was an affective instigator of political identification. Che Guevara’s romantic aura makes a great case. The cover of the February 1968 Evergreen Review featured a painting by Paul Davis based on Alberto Korda’s famous photograph of Che with characteristic black beret and implacable expression. The issue was heavily promoted on posters throughout New York, which widely disseminated this iconic image for the first time, capturing many imaginations to be sure.
 
Glass reads the publication of the New Left Reader in 1969 as a sign of transition. This was a “reader” rather than a handbook, and its placement of academic philosophers alongside political operatives “anticipates the turn to theory and the retreat into the university that quickly ensued” (170). My own tendency would be to see this political foreclosure not as the culmination of a history but as a perennial possibility. As Glass acknowledges, it was always possible to conceive of the revolutionary handbook as a source of insight into new revolutionary thinking and distant political struggles rather than as an actual call to arms. Some of what Grove did at this time was simultaneously opportunistic and avant-garde. Black Power and other movements had prompted publishers to take an interest in attracting black readers. Articles in trade magazines said that “Black is Marketable” and noted that books with “revolutionary themes” were a growth area for the industry (Glass 151). It is telling that while Grove made appeals to black and radical audiences, it was only in 1969 that an African American, Julius Lester, was hired as a contributing editor.
 
As it turns out, Lester soon denounced Rosset as insincere in his commitment to revolutionary politics. Lester was reacting to what had occurred when the company was taken over by women’s liberationists. Valerie Solanas was often seen standing outside the Grove offices with an ice pick, and in 1970 a group led by Robin Morgan occupied Rosset’s castle keep, claiming—not inaccurately—that he earned his money “off the basic theme of humiliating, degrading, and dehumanizing women through sado-masochistic literature, pornographic films, and oppressive and exploitative practices against its own female employees” (qtd. in Glass 195). When Rosset had them forcibly handcuffed and removed by police he did serious damage to his reputation. Lester wrote to Rosset that “for Grove, revolution is a matter of profit, not of lifestyle, behavior or attitude toward others” (qtd. in Glass 202).
 
At the same time it was becoming clear that Grove was, however countercultural, nevertheless a corporation. It was publically incorporated in 1967 and its employees soon tried to form a union. Ultimately, however, they voted against membership, with some voters on record stating that they did not feel alienated from their work the way regular employees did, and that they loved working for Grove in a way that offset any desire for union membership. This attitude seems to me particularly illuminating given the incorporation charted by Glass. Grove had helped to foster a personal politics of individual expressiveness and freedom that would define creative labor in the decades to come and, as Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello suggest, support the capitalism against which it once imagined itself.
 
There is much to be debated here, of course. Some will reject the treatment of the transition from avant-garde to mainstream as a linear process, and will prefer a more dialectical approach in which these currents exist and counter each other: the avant-garde does not die when European modernism and its offshoots become a kind of radical chic; instead, its energy travels as new avant-gardes form and gain recognition. Second, though it is undeniable that Grove helped to popularize some forms of social and political radicalism, some readers will want to stress the social and cultural currents that Grove tapped into, and will wonder if it can really be successfully shown (via sales figures for literary works) that a given press caused or heralded particular ways of thinking. Third, some readers will want to emphasize in more exact terms—perhaps by attempting some study of readership—the limitations and affordances of reading as a mode of revolutionary action and of books as a form of revolutionary affiliation. Glass’s narrative of the avant-garde’s gradual defanging suggests that the radical energies of genuinely disruptive work were domesticated by the movement of a packaged counterculture into academia. This begs the question: how disruptive was this work? Glass says in his final pages that Grove expanded the range of voices but didn’t really change the conversation. His book is, in a way, a cautionary tale about how not to defeat one’s enemies. What did Grove get wrong? Why wasn’t more possible? Glass’s focus on Rosset and the titles he acquired prompts one to wonder how this literature was taken up by buyers and readers. Was it sociologically interesting? Enticingly different? A badge of belonging to a particular group? A substitute for worldly action? Lastly, scholars may consider how Glass’s narrative fits with existing conceptions of the relationship between modernism and postmodernism. Glass briefly treats postmodernism as a reaction to the ruins of the modernist avant-garde. It comes in the wake of Beckett’s ironic success, and of the so-called exhaustion of the narrative of Europe’s aesthetic mastery. But how exhausted is this narrative really, given that we continue to celebrate the authentic challenge presented by avant-garde writers and lament their incorporation into the institutions they despised?

 

 
In her audacious and accomplished 2009 debut Delinquent, transgressor extraordinaire Mina Pam Dick lovingly travestied the lingoes and conceptual frameworks of analytic philosophy, particularly the works of Ludwig Wittgenstein, even as she demonstrated an adept’s awareness of the intricacies of identity and reference, the semantic slippages that such theory tries ceaselessly to contain. Here Hildebrand Pam Dick, who has pursued graduate work in both philosophy and painting at the University of Minnesota, turns her attention to an even more notoriously knotty denizen of the borderlands between philosophy and poetry: Friedrich Hölderlin. This discussion of Dick’s “I Wear Long Hair,” an excerpt from the fourth part of ALP HAIR, an extended engagement with Holderlin’s prose poem novella Hyperion (1797–9), will draw out some of the strands in Hölderlin’s elusive thought and artistic practice that bear upon Dick’s poem, towards a view of Hölderlin’s work as a matrix out of which Dick’s writing emerges.
 
A further signal quality of Dick’s writing to date is its use of academic philosophy and neighboring disciplines not as the masterful, static enframing characteristic of much contemporary conceptual writing, but rather as a dynamic and reciprocal thematization of its own thematizations: her work continually reflects upon making a topic of philosophical discourse, while a central concern of that discourse, especially the instantiations that concern Dick, is the very question of the nature of representation and intentionality. The recalcitrance of the source, philosophy’s legendary reluctance to cede authority over its accounts of account-giving to poetry, gives rise to a conceptual scape of attunements and dissonances, enacting an ongoing play of identity and difference with a family resemblance to the self-theorizing translations of Jack Spicer and Erin Mouré or the heteronymity of Pessoa. Benjamin discerned the creation of the poetized (das Gedichtete) as the essential and characteristic effect of poetic activity, particularly visible in the work of Hölderlin; we might describe the fundamental concern of Dick’s writing as the investigation of poetization itself.
 
Dick’s characteristic, serious play with translation, philosophy and poetry, identity and difference, and heteronymity involves a constellation that almost circumscribes the name Hölderlin, enough so that her encounter with the German poet seems foreordained. Her self-dismantling, erotically-charged writing speaks in an undeniably 21^st century argot. But that quality is complicated by an untimeliness arising out of the complex transactions across temporal, not to say political, cultural, linguistic, and gender borders which animate “I Wear Long Hair.” For both Hölderlin and Dick, translation as a linguistic practice opens a space for the exploration of a larger, overlapping cluster of concerns.
 
Arguably, Hölderlin’s immersion in the question of translation was the crucial step that enabled the emergence of his sublimely paratactic late style. His versions of Sophocles and Pindar sought to convey the untranslatability of their Greek originals as resolutely as they brought forth what could be carried over from language to language. But, as Aris Fioretis has observed, Hölderlin’s translations may be most remarkable for the internal differentiation that they create within the German language itself: “His actual renditions of Sophocles offer acts of linguistic transferral based on a consideration not of the language of the original as much as that of the translation” (278). The concern, verging upon obsession, with similar matters in “I Wear Long Hair” is evidenced in a remarkable series of versions Dick offers of Hölderlin’s gnarled “Hälfte des Lebens,” (“Half of Life”), one of the last poems he completed before his 1805 nervous collapse. Dick first ventures a reasonably traditional translation, albeit one that, like many of Hölderlin’s own, hews close to the original word order. One crux of the translation concerns the German compound heilignüchterne, which Dick translates as “holy-sober”; she follows this translation with a long, tortuous meditation on the impossibility of getting that German twin word into English, as if the whole problem of splitting and doubling, whether in the form of duplicate versions, twinned languages, or the poles of subject and object, could be distilled into a single double lexical crisis. Then we are given seven different retranslations of “Hälfte des Lebens,” ranging from homophonic English-to-English reworkings to a punctuation-only instance. The effect of such efforts is a figuration of the ever-retreating enigma of the original; its central image of reflection accrues an unsettling gravity as the succession of repetitions suggests its potential for infinite, eternal recurrence.
 
Another particularly striking sequence in “I Wear Long Hair” opens with “Wrong Key/Grundton/Doppelgänger (A Night Night Song),” which uses semantic and homophonic translation, association, and free invention to create a rendition of a pair of Hölderlin poems, “The Blind Singer” as well as its later revision,¹ published as one of the poet’s nine “Nightsongs” and entitled “Chiron.”² Dick’s version fuses the two earlier poems. Her opening stanza simultaneously translates the first quatrains of both works:
 

 

Where are you, young licks! Doused, I’m more mussed,

Destroyed, decked-out suicide, where are you, licks?

The hurt waits, decks wrath,

Stammering night straightjackets my shimmer.

 

For comparison’s sake, here are the opening lines in German of “The Blind Singer,” along with a version by Paul Hoover and Maxine Chernoff:

 

Wo bist du, Jugendliches! das immer mich

Zur Stunde wekt des Morgens, wo bist du, Licht!

Das Herz ist wach, doch bannt und halt in

Heiligem Zauber die Nacht mich immer.

Where are you, young one, who would always

Wake me in the morning, where are you, light?

My heart is awake, but the night always

Holds and binds me in its holy magic.

(150–155)

 

And “Chiron,” again presented with the Hoover and Chernoff version:

 

Wo bist du, Nachdenkliches! das immer muß

Zur Seite gehn, zu Zeiten, wo bist du, Licht?

Wohl ist das Herz wach, doch mir zürnt, mich

Hemmt die erstaunende Nacht nun immer.

Where are you, thoughtful one, who now

Must move beside me, where are you, light?

The heart is awake but angry, always now

The astounding night confines me.

(157–161)

 

Dick’s idiosyncratic Englishing flips in the first line from a straight translation of “Wo bist du” to the aural approximation of “das immer muß,” from “Chiron”: “Doused, I’m more mussed.” And the line is bridged by the portmanteau semantic-homophonic “young licks” for “Jugendlicht,” now taking as its source “The Blind Singer.” As the poem proceeds, Dick happens upon the brilliant transpositions of “suicide” for the morgue lurking within “The Blind Singer”’s Morgen, as if German were anticipating English’s more familiar morning/mourning pun; the word simultaneously sonically picks up the Seite and Zeiten of “Chiron.” The halting rhythms of “doch bannt and halt in” may have suggested the substitution of “stammering” for halt—perhaps reinforced by the hint of hemming in Hemmt. Finally, in a rather uncanny bit of linguistic displacement, Zauber (magic), which gets no apparent literal translation in the final line, seems to reappear in the shimmer that emerges out of mich immer.

 
Wending its way through similar transformative defamiliarizations of the twin German originals, Dick’s “Night Night Song” opens up hidden correspondences between German and English; at the same time, it morphs Hölderlin’s mythopoesis into a hymn to teen angst and apotheosis: “To soft wild ones on the jungle gym,” “Teen rockers stomping in young light past a/Doorman w/gold braids.” Over against a shared topos of liminality, Dick’s writing marks its distance and difference from its source, exchanging centaurs and demigods for adolescence and transgendering. Hölderlin’s poems enact now-familiar Romantic journeys from youthful innocence to alienation to an uncertain but hoped-for reconciliation. Yet however much Dick’s reconfigurations tangle such threads, her process of translation nonetheless retains the thrust of Hölderlin’s poetry, through its embodiment of estranging intimacies and intimate estrangements.³
 
The issue of intimacy is indeed at the core of what Dick calls “transverse” or “translit”: translational, transgenre writing that embodies and performs “incestuous poetics (making out and off with sibling books).” If translation has traditionally been troped in terms of a natural filiation with a parent text from which it maintains an appropriate distance, Dick produces translit through “inappropriate contact” with sib texts, creating a hybrid writing that is simultaneously ostentatiously autonomous and derivative (Dick, “Re:”).⁴ In her work-in-progress METAPHYSICAL LICKS THE LP, which takes up the life and poetry of Georg Trakl and his sister Greta (a musician, and fellow addict and suicide), Dick overtly thematizes incest; in “I Wear Long Hair,” though we might note its attentiveness to Hölderlin’s marriage-breaching passion for his employer’s wife that fired Hyperion, incestuous poetics is more a method that audaciously brings every means of textual exchange to bear on the act of transliterary production. Yet, obviously, “I Wear Long Hair” does not simply violate the discretion of discrete works, versions, genres, languages, disciplines, logics, but commits these outrages through a concomitant displacement and hypertrophying of the author-function, on one hand frenetically multiplying authorial sibs and on the other shadowing Hölderlin with the alternate authorial persona “Hildebrand,” who is in turn trailed by all of that name/identity’s cognate mutations.
 
The very possibility of logical as well as subjective identity was certainly at issue for Hölderlin himself. In recent decades, the profound acuity with which in his youth he confronted the problematics of Kant’s Copernican revolution has become increasingly appreciated,⁵ and “I Wear Long Hair” refers repeatedly to the issues that led him ultimately to abandon philosophy as a conceptually articulated discourse in favor of poetic composition. Characteristically, Hölderlin’s philosophical production took the form of fragmentary, fugitive reflections rather than sustained argumentation; the most assiduously examined of his writings is a brief sketch (which only came to light in 1960) jotted on the flyleaf of an unidentified book, which has come to be known as “Judgment and Being” (“Urtheil und Seyn”). Here, Hölderlin appears to demolish the basis of Fichte’s subjective radicalization of Kant in a few observations, which also cast a skeptical eye upon the potential for any discursive account of the human conceptual apparatus to provide a satisfying specification of its own foundational possibility. Roughly, the problem for Fichte is that he seeks to ground his version of Kantian idealism on the certainty of the self-positing proposition, “I is I.” But, Hölderlin objects, the very propositional form here introduces a split in the subject: the grammatical subject “I” is not exactly identical to the “I” predicated of it. Fichte’s grounding principle can therefore never manifest the absolute identity that his theory claims for it. Dick alludes directly to such reflections when writing that “The problem is with reason, i.e. discursivity,” or “The question of what is below the I.” Further, Dick manifests I’s ungrounding through divagations of gender: she intensively and intricately transgenders Hölderlin’s text through feminization yet also continually destabilizes gender tout court as the controlling persona re-dissolves among fluid, promiscuous characters. And even as Hildebrand et al at times replace Hölderlin, this congery is also in conversation with Hölderlin, positing him now as the counterpart of Stanislaw Lem, now as an 18^th-century Holden Caulfield. Likewise, Dick exponentializes the semi-scandalous practice of literary heteronymy, which already corrodes the integrity of the social fiction of the author by repeatedly collapsing this putatively external guarantor with the main fictive persona in the text. (Note (again), for instance, that the author of Dick’s Delinquent is “Mina Pam Dick.”)
 
Equal parts parodic treatise on ordinary language and LiveJournal sprawl, “I Wear Long Hair” is also a tour de force of heteroglossia, another way in which it glances off of Hölderlin’s thought and practice. In his theory of the alternation of tone (“Wechsel der Töne”⁶ ), Hölderlin, in classical German fashion, discerns three fundamental tonalities in poetic composition—the ideal, the naïve, and the heroic—but what’s distinctive about his account is that the patterns of alternation or the modulation among tones, rather than the tones themselves, define genres for him. This discovery, that traditional genres comprise patterns of alternation, inspires the creation of new poetic forms foregrounding that very activity of alternation, forms that would thereby incorporate the entire system of poetic genre and simultaneously constitute a reflection upon the nature of genre itself. Hölderlin indeed constructed an astonishing set of so-called “Poetological Tables,” charts that lay out in combinatorial fashion potential sequences of tones: “id. na. her. id. / naiv her. id.,” “naiv her. id. na./ her. id. na.,” and so on. Dick, who cannot have missed the resemblance between the permutations of Hölderlin’s tables and the truth tables of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, refers explicitly early on to the issue of tone, not just in the opening confession that “I can’t quit thinking tone,” (a statement worthy of “Urtheil und Seyn” in the way that it both unifies and splits its “thinking”), but also in the somewhat goth translingual pun of “die tone.” Later, this motif resurfaces when Dick alludes in the title of the poem quoted above and in surrounding commentary to the oppositional play of Grundton and Kunstcharacter, the former referring in Hölderlin’s thought to a generative tonality which can only be manifested via implication in the form of the latter, its opposite number. More fundamentally still, “I Wear Long Hair” draws upon and extends Hölderlinian ideas about the alternation of tone as it veers from the chatty to the formidably intellectual to the urgently confessional.
 
For Hölderlin, the method of alternation of tones was one way in which aesthetic production could evoke that unitary Being which necessarily eluded conceptual articulation. Indeed, Hölderlin’s means to this telos was a violent yoking together of disparate materials. “Hölderlin’s mature language approaches madness,” Adorno writes; “it is a series of disruptive actions against both the spoken language and the elevated style of German classicisism. . . . [His] method cannot escape antinomies, and in fact, it itself, as an assassination attempt on the harmonious work, springs from the work’s antinomian nature” (138–139). Resolutely unsystematic, the similarly hyper-charged, theatrical fissures in Dick’s writing figure and extend her poetry’s radical commitment to the multiplicity of being, and to the poetic generation of ever more ways of being multiple, being trans-.
 

 

 
Queer theorists have long had a vexed relationship to Slavoj Žižek, and for good reason. Notorious for the sexist and homophobic statements that pepper his writings, he has understandably attracted considerable criticism from prominent queer theorists for the last 20 years, from Judith Butler in Bodies That Matter (1993) to Judith Halberstam in The Queer Art of Failure (2011).¹ Despite these critiques, a revised version of Žižek’s theoretical framework could be useful for queer theory because his politically-oriented reinflection of Lacanian psychoanalysis offers strategies for altering existing social structures. One of the most compelling features of Jacques Lacan’s rereading of Sigmund Freud is the way in which his theory of the interlocking of the imaginary, symbolic, and Real orders accounts for the way in which desiring subjectivity arises through engagement with existing social formations. Žižek brings the French psychoanalyst’s account of subjectivity and the social to bear on cultural and political concerns by asking how existing ideological formations are constituted and how they might be changed. One strategy Žižek proposes is a politicized twist on Lacan’s argument that the goal of analysis is for the analysand to “traverse” and thereby go beyond the fantasies that structure his or her subjectivity. Whereas the point of traversing the fantasy in the clinical setting is to open up alternative ways of structuring experience, for Žižek its objective is to reconfigure the symbolic by intervening in the idea of the Real. Rather than a technique for individual transformation, then, for Žižek traversing the fantasy is a strategy for social change.
 
Despite the appeal of this approach, Žižek’s insistence that sexual difference is real and thus intractable has been a stumbling block for queer theorists interested in developing an account of subjectivity that can apprehend the workings of desire across the full range of genders and sexualities. However, Žižek’s argument for the intransigence of sexual difference—which I will also call “(hetero)sexual difference”—contains the seeds of its own undoing. I use the phrase “(hetero)sexual difference” to describe the way in which certain uses of Lacanian psychoanalysis—including Žižek’s—rest on a circular ideology in which sex, gender, and sexuality are mutually constituted in heterogendered terms through the inscription of a putatively foundational antagonism between masculine and feminine. It is important, however, to understand that Žižek’s iteration of this ideology takes place in the context of a body of writing that has a different aim than that of other Lacanians, for he does not seek to explicate the “true” meaning of Lacan’s texts. Instead, he grafts the psychoanalyst’s work into new philosophical and political contexts, seeking possibilities for altering existing social formations. This essay, too, is not a return to a “true” or “pure” Lacan, but rather a critical reworking of Žižek’s ideas in the service of queer theory. I turn his political version of Lacan’s theory of traversing the fantasy against itself to argue that, despite Žižek’s protestations to the contrary, (hetero)sexual difference is the fantasy that Lacanian psychoanalytic theory needs to traverse in order to fully register the many possible configurations of desiring subjectivities.
 

 

I. (Hetero)sexual Difference and the Real

 
I emphasize the need to traverse the fantasy of (hetero)sexual difference because such a move dislodges the point de capiton that quilts together the imaginary, symbolic, and Real orders. In Lacanian theory, these three orders are inextricable. Though the imaginary order can be roughly described as the realm of the specular image and the symbolic as that of the signifier, they are bound up in one another. Lacan explains that within the “symbolic matrix in which the I is precipitated in primordial form,” imaginary identification “situates” yet also alienates the ego through the subject’s misrecognition of his or her image in the mirror (Écrits 2). The symbolic—the realm of the signifier, the big Other, and the law—is, in turn, linked to the Real, a concept that has been the site of frequent conceptual misprisions in debates over the status of sexual difference. The Real takes on two distinct but related meanings in Lacan, one “presymbolic,” and the other “postsymbolic” (Shepherdson, “Intimate Alterity” 27, and see the discussion of Ernesto Laclau’s use of Bruce Fink’s formulation below). As Charles Shepherdson observes, the process of “symbolic retroaction”—which Freud describes as Nachträglichkeit—produces the former as a mythological effect of the latter (37, 47). I use the term “Real” in its postsymbolic sense. This Real is not radically unreachable by the symbolic (as would be the presymbolic version), but rather, as Joan Copjec points out, is the site at which the failures of symbolic mandates are inscribed (Read My Desire 201–236).
 
Žižek’s inflection of Lacan’s theory turns not only on the three orders’ inextricability, but also on the possibility of transforming their coordinates by altering the point de capiton. As Mari Ruti explains, in Lacanian theory the fundamental fantasy—that is, the unconscious fantasy that structures the subject’s experience—drives psychical life and “perpetuate[s] unconscious patterns of behavior” that constrict the subject; the objective of analysis is to traverse this fantasy and thereby loosen its grip on the psyche (“The Fall of Fantasies” 498). Grafting this theory into the realm of politics, Žižek argues that by targeting the quilting point, traversing the fantasy seeks not to undo the subject’s surface-level “symbolic identification,” but rather to gain “distance towards”—and ultimately undo—the underlying, “fundamental fantasy that serves as the ultimate support of the subject’s being” (Ticklish Subject 266). This involves an intervention in the postsymbolic Real that prompts a radical disinvestiture in the terms that govern the symbolic order and that clears ground for them to be supplanted by a new paradigm. I explain the technical workings of this process further as my argument proceeds. But at this point, it is most important to note that traversing the fantasy offers a more trenchant challenge to the symbolic’s coordinates than Butler’s argument (first put forth in Gender Trouble [1990] and refined in Bodies That Matter [1993]) that it is possible to change the symbolic order simply by resignifying its phallogocentric terms.² As Žižek and others have pointed out, a central problem with Butler’s strategy of symbolic resignification—as well as with her readings of Lacan—is that it engages only the symbolic and imaginary orders without targeting the Real. By contrast, traversing the fantasy has the potential to unsettle the symbolic, imaginary, and the postsymbolic Real by dislodging the point de capiton.
 
Butler, like Žižek, is concerned with the interplay between psychical and social resistance, and with the way in which—as they and Ernesto Laclau put it in the introduction to their dialogues in Contingency, Hegemony, Universality—“new social movements often rely on identity-claims, but ‘identity’ itself is never fully constituted; in fact, since identification is not reducible to identity, it is important to consider the incommensurability or gap between them” (1). My own argument for the queering of Žižek’s writings carries forward this joint project of undercutting categories of identity, a project that the Contingency volume shares with queer theory more generally, which initially emerged as a challenge to identity-based formations of gay and lesbian studies. While sometimes uneven in their grasp of the particulars of Lacan’s thought, queer theorists align themselves with Lacan in this persistent refusal of the notion of a stable identity. If Butler, Laclau, and Žižek agree that social movements cannot remain “democratic” without engaging “the negativity at the heart of identity,” however, they disagree in significant ways about the form and consequences of that negativity (2).
 
Butler often presents negativity as the result of the imaginary undercutting of symbolic law. She focuses on those two orders in her critique of Lacanian arguments that the psyche is capable of resistance, and rightfully notes that the mere failure of symbolic mandates does not necessarily ensure their transformation. However, her argument depends on the assumption that “Lacan restricts the notion of social power to the symbolic domain and delegates resistance to the imaginary” (Psychic Life 98). Arguing that the domain of the imaginary “thwarts the efficacy of the symbolic law, but cannot turn back upon the law, demanding or effecting its reformulation,” she concludes that “psychic resistance thwarts the law in its effects, but cannot redirect the law or its effects” (Psychic Life 98). She thereby downplays the potential for transformation via the Real, which is quilted to the other two orders and which in several bodies of queer theory is understood to be the deepest source of resistance.³
 
When Butler addresses the negativity at play in Laclau’s and Žižek’s accounts of the Lacanian Real, she emphasizes that order’s role as “the limit-point of all subject-formation”—that is, as “the point where self-representation founders and fails” (Contingency 29–30).⁴ Reading the Real in Žižek as “that which resists symbolization” (Bodies 21) and as the “limit-point of sociality” (Contingency 152), she asks,
 

why are we then compelled to give a technical name to this limit, “the Real,” and to make the further claim that the subject is constituted by this foreclosure? The use of the technical nomenclature opens up more problems than it solves. On the one hand, we are to accept that “the Real” means nothing other than the constitutive limit of the subject; yet on the other hand, why is it that any effort to refer to the constitutive limit of the subject in ways that do not use that nomenclature are considered a failure to understand its proper operation? Are we using the categories to understand the phenomena, or marshaling the phenomena to shore up categories “in the name of the Father,” if you will?

(Contingency 152)

 

While Butler is right to question the tautology through which Žižek and many other Lacanians often prop up the law of the Father and its corollary, sexual difference, through appeals to the “foreclosure” of “the Real,” the questions of terminology at stake in their disagreement are more significant than she suggests. In the above passage, she misinterprets Lacan’s concept of foreclosure, a term that—as I argue in Insane Passions (18–22)—she sometimes misuses in her work on the Real. In Seminar III: The Psychoses, Lacan uses the term “foreclosure” to refer to a psychotic’s rejection of the primal signifier that anchors the symbolic order and grounds “normal” subjectivity. In Bodies That Matter, Butler correctly notes that foreclosure happens to signifiers: she writes that “what is foreclosed is a signifier, namely, that which has been symbolized” (204). However, she goes on to generalize that mechanism as foundational to all forms of subjectivity rather than as specific to psychosis: she writes that foreclosure “takes place within the symbolic order as a policing of the borders of intelligibility” (204). But she misses the way Lacan’s Seminar III presents foreclosure as the governing mechanism of psychosis alone—not necessarily of all forms of subjectivity. Upon this error Butler builds a case that the symbolic order itself is capable of effecting foreclosures that consign queer bodies to the Real.⁵ This difficulty leads Butler erroneously to conceptualize the Real as itself foreclosed. Similar misprisions inform her claim, in an interview in Radical Philosophy, that Žižek’s work relegates those who do not conform to hegemonic definitions of gender to the “permanent outside” of the social and figures “a whole domain of social life that does not fully conform to prevalent gender norms as psychotic and unlivable” (“Gender as Performance” 37).⁶ But to claim—as Lacanians such as Žižek often do—that the Real is the site at which the symbolic fails is not the same as to say that the Real is constituted through foreclosure in the technical sense. And to argue that foreclosed signifiers return in the Real or that the symbolic fails there is not the same as to say that the Real is reducible to these phenomena.

 
These difficulties lead Butler to overlook the potential role of the Real in transformative resistance, even though she is right to argue that it is problematic to insist—as Žižek often does—that the Name of the Father must always be the primal signifier. Moreover, she is well justified in criticizing the circularity at work in the claim that sexual difference is unalterably inscribed in the Real because of the presumed inalterability of paternal law. These assertions do have pernicious consequences for the theorization of same-sex desire and transgender subjectivities alike. But as I will go on to show, the central problem that Žižek’s work poses for queer theory is not that he situates negativity in the Real or that the Real is radically unchangeable. Rather, the central problem is that he resists the possibility that the Name of the Father might be supplanted by another master signifier and that sexual difference, too, might be ideologically contingent.
 
Whereas Butler sees little prospect for a politics of the Real, Žižek offers an account of the Real as the site of both resistance to and possible rearticulation of the terms of the symbolic. For him, traversing the fantasy is crucial to such a transformation. Yet, despite the potential that his work holds for queer theory, Žižek (and similarly-minded Lacanians such as Copjec) insists that sexual difference is transhistorical and unchangeable because it is located in the Real.⁷ This brings us to a key difference in the significance that the term “contingency” takes on in Contingency, Hegemony, Universality. Whether explicitly (in Laclau’s case) or implicitly (in Žižek’s), Laclau and Žižek distinguish between contingencies and universalities, whereas Butler considers that everything—including sexual difference—is historically contingent and subject to change. Thus over and against Butler, who assumes that sexual difference is an effect of social and cultural structures, Žižek argues that a fundamental antinomy in the Real provides a negative structure for a diverse field of contingent empirical possibilities. Criticizing Butler for interpreting sexual difference as a contingent opposition between two positive terms that she views as subject to displacement through resignification within the symbolic, he asserts that both sexual difference and the Real are instead transhistorical and unchangeable. He further claims that it is unfair to charge Lacan and Lacanians with heterosexism because the “masculine” and “feminine” subject positions can be occupied by persons of any sex. Indeed, Lacan claims in “The Signification of the Phallus” that the “relation of the subject to the phallus is . . . established without regard to the anatomical difference between the sexes” (Écrits 282).⁸ The assertion that these aspects of Lacanian theory obviate critiques of the ideology of (hetero)sexual difference is at the very least insufficient, however, for the false naturalization of sexual difference poses significant problems for theorizations of gender and desire.
 
Such interpretations of Lacanian theory can only conceive of desire as heterogendered—as a matter of an antinomy between “the masculine” and “the feminine”—and so fail to capture the multiplicity of possibilities for genderings and erotic investments. Certainly some progressive Lacanians have pushed beyond this reading by observing that in Lacan’s account of desire in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, the objet a—the object-cause of desire—“conceptually precedes gender” and is only subsequently subject to inscription by a symbolic order whose terms and effects are far from consistent (Dean, Beyond Sexuality 194–7). However, work still needs to be done to separate what Tim Dean calls the “scaffolding” of Lacanian theory—the claim to the primacy of the phallic signifier that has rightly caused much feminist and queer suspicion—from the structural elements of Lacan’s account of desire that open up possibilities for queer theorizing (Beyond Sexuality 47).⁹ For instance, Laclau argues that the “‘Phallus,’ as the signifier of desire, has largely been replaced in Lacan’s later teaching by the ‘objet petit a’” (Contingency 72). However, during this period, what Lacan claims to be “something symbolic of the function of the lack, of the appearance of the phallic ghost” haunts his texts (Four Fundamental Concepts 87–8). The survival of the phallus can be seen, for example, when he uses the distortions of a tattoo on an erect penis to explain the effects of the shifting gaze. Lacan mentions this tattoo as an example of “[t]he objet a in the field of the visible” in anamorphic painting (Four Fundamental Concepts 105). While Lacan’s invocation of the spectrality of the phallus points to its status as a second-order symbolic inscription, that signifier’s persistence in The Four Fundamental Concepts demonstrates the residual phallogocentrism of his discourse.
 
Žižek and others’ insistence that sexual difference is the fundamental antagonism that prompts varied symbolic inscriptions is even more pernicious than Lacan’s lingering phallogocentrism. Such arguments fallaciously assume that (hetero)sexual difference is a motivating fantasy for all people across place and time. They uphold a discourse that supports the hegemony of such a fantasy by presenting an antagonism between the “masculine” and the “feminine” as the only possibility. Indeed, as Butler has observed, the very positing of sexual difference as a transcendent structure is theological, as the claim to the universal status of sexual difference rests on the assertion of belief rather than on evidence and argumentation (Undoing Gender 46; The Psychic Life of Power 120–131). Such claims create problems for theorizing same-sex desire as anything other than a permutation of (hetero)sexual difference. Moreover, this reasoning also leads to an account of the body that elides the existence of intersexed persons and renders transsexuality pathological.¹⁰ While intersexed and transsexed subjectivities are distinct from lesbian and gay male subjectivities—and while all identities, these included, are undercut by the gap between identity and identification—the inability of current accounts of Lacanian psychoanalysis to theorize them adequately is a consequence of the hegemony of the fantasy of (hetero)sexual difference.
 
The tenuous nature of the ideology of (hetero)sexual difference suggests that it operates within certain Lacanian circles as a fundamental fantasy. I view the most important task of psychoanalytically informed queer theory as that of traversing this fantasy, given its potentially oppressive consequences for queer persons. While Frances Restuccia has suggested that queer theorists such as Leo Bersani, Butler, Dean, Lee Edelman, and David Halperin have challenged the “fundamental fantasy” that she—following Edelman—describes as that of “reproductive heterosexual normality,” existing work in queer theory has yet to dislodge the ideological kernel that keeps this fantasy in place (“Queer Love” 94).¹¹ That kernel is the doctrine of sexual difference. Despite Žižek’s claims to the contrary, his politicization of Lacan’s theory of traversing the fantasy offers a means of rearticulating the terms of the Real and of grafting Lacanian theory into contexts other than those governed by (hetero)sexual difference. It thereby creates the possibility of reworking Lacanian theory to revise and expand psychoanalytic accounts of gender and sexuality.
 
Edelman’s 2006No Future, the most Žižekian work of queer theory to date, takes a promising but incomplete step in that direction. Edelman argues that queers are called to traverse the fantasy of reproductive futurism by embracing the role of the sinthomosexual, who rejects the politics of the symbolic and its orientation toward a better future in favor of embracing the jouissance of the drive in the Real. Edelman thus goes well beyond the strain of Lacanian queer theory that focuses on the implications for queer representation of Lacan and Žižek’s insistence that the Real remains unsymbolizable. In her influential but misguided critique of Žižek in Bodies That Matter, for example, Butler argues that Žižek presents the Real as the realm to which queerness is consigned as unsymbolizable and psychotically incomprehensible. Similarly, for Lynda Hart, the Real is the site at which the lesbian is rendered unrepresentable by the “dominant discourse” of a heterosexist society (Fatal Women). Hart asserts that “in the psychoanalytic symbolic,” and in society more generally, “lesbians are only possible in/as the ‘Real,’ since they are foreclosed from the Symbolic order” (Between the Body and the Flesh 91).¹² Whereas Butler and Hart both err by locating queers in the symbolic idea of the Real, despite or because of its lack of positive content, for Valerie Rohy, lesbianism works analogously to the Real by functioning as “the limit of symbolization, the ‘rock’ on which figurality founders” (23). And for George Haggerty, Žižek’s work demonstrates that “[i]f ‘what was foreclosed from the Symbolic returns in the Real of the symptom,’ then . . . woman returns as the symptom of man . . . [and] the predatory homosexual, foreclosed from the symbolic . . . return[s] as the symptom of a culture so caught up in its own sexuality that it cannot see its sexual obsessions for what they are” (189). In these formulations, the Real is construed at worst as inimical to queer theorizing (Butler) or at best as a means of elucidating the structural mechanisms and effects of homophobic discourse (Hart, Rohy, Haggerty). Edelman’s emphasis on traversing the fantasy, by contrast, appeals to the Real not only to elucidate homophobia’s mechanisms but also to undermine their force. No Future repudiates both Butler’s erroneous interpretation of Žižek and what Edelman views as her overly optimistic emphasis on resignifying the symbolic order.
 
However, as I argue elsewhere, Edelman’s book overlooks the way in which not only reproductive futurism but also (hetero)sexual difference itself might be a fantasy that queer theory needs to traverse (“The Sinthomosexual’s Failed Challenge”). The book’s reception—which has focused discussion on its exemplification of what Robert Caserio calls queer theory’s “anti-social thesis”—has obscured other problems with Edelman’s argument.¹³ One of these is that the relentlessly nihilistic No Future overlooks Žižek’s highly political orientation and the ambivalent mix of pessimism and optimism in play in his reworking of Lacan’s theory of traversing the fantasy.¹⁴ Both Ruti and Michael Snediker have criticized No Future for its excessively negative interpretation of Lacan.¹⁵ Though Ed Pluth makes a similar assertion about Žižek, I find more cause for optimism in Žižek’s theories than in the use to which Edelman puts them in No Future.¹⁶ However, the optimism in Žižek’s work is not to be found in a naïve vision of a better future—an attitude that Edelman rightfully skewers—but rather in what Snediker identifies as “immanence.” Whereas for Snediker, optimism can be found in the immanence of brief moments of “positive” affect, in Žižek’s theory, this immanence lies in the unpredictable, ground-clearing process of fantasy’s traversal (Snediker 3). Žižek’s commitment to politics animates his argument that, in traversing the fantasy, an act in the Real can prompt changes in the symbolic by altering the point de capiton. Edelman ignores this aspect of Žižek’s theory. In the close reading of Žižek’s texts that follows, I offer an alternative to Edelman’s interpretation in order to create an opening for a different mode of Žižekian queer politics—one focused on the possibility of altering the symbolic through intervention in the Real.
 

II. The Radical Contingency of (Hetero)sexual Difference

 
In The Sublime Object of Ideology, Žižek considers how the symbolic’s failures in the Real create the potential for social change. He explains that a “tautological, performative operation” halts and fixes “free floating…ideological elements” into a “network of meaning” structured around the lack that is the point de capiton (99, 87). In The Ticklish Subject, he concurs with Butler that imaginary resistance to such a congealed network of meaning is a “false transgression that reasserts the symbolic status quo and even serves as a positive condition of its functioning” (262). He distinguishes imaginary resistance, which manifests clinically in the transference, from the socio-political resistance available at the intersection of the symbolic and the Real. Žižek claims that the latter can take place through an “actual symbolic rearticulation via the intervention of the Real of an act,” through which a “new point de capiton emerges” to displace the socio-symbolic field and to change its structuring principle (Ticklish Subject 262). Žižek’s claim is useful in opening up the possibility of the wholesale transformation of the symbolic.
 
In Sublime Object, Žižek explicitly identifies the point de capiton with the Name of the Father. However, his insistence in The Ticklish Subject on the possible supplantation of the point de capiton by a new master signifier holds out the possibility of the radical abandonment of foundationally paternal law. If we understand Lacan’s assertion that law is paternal as a gesture that contingently installs the Name of the Father and its corollaries, we open up new, potentially non-phallogocentric ways of thinking of the law that grounds the symbolic.¹⁷ Kaja Silverman argues that, in Lacan’s seminar on The Four Fundamental Concepts, the Name of the Father appears as “one of the signifiers that impart a retroactive significance to the lack introduced by language, rather than as a timeless Law that will always preside over the operations of desire” (112). If we understand Lacan’s assertions about paternal law in this fashion, Žižek’s argument that the symbolic can wholly be rearticulated through the “Real of an act” suggests that the Name of the Father could be supplanted by another signifier. The symbolic would thereby be restructured according to a law that would not necessarily be paternal.
 
While Žižek’s allowance for possible rearticulations of the point de capiton makes the prospect of supplanting the Name of the Father thinkable, other aspects of his work resist that very possibility. His logic, both in Ticklish Subject and in Contingency, Hegemony, Universality, is characterized by a contradictory movement that both reinscribes sexual difference as a foundational doctrine and contests the priority of the Law of the Father. As Butler persuasively argues in Bodies That Matter, Lacan’s argument in “The Signification of the Phallus” both opens up and precludes the transferability of the phallus. Similarly, Žižek’s reasoning in Contingency, Hegemony, Universality both opens up and precludes the possibility of revoking the privilege given to the phallic signifier. Yet any attempt to enlist his work for queer theory must first work through the resistances within his texts to the project of contesting the priority of sexual difference.
 
Even though he argues that it is possible to rearticulate the point de capiton and completely overhaul the symbolic, Žižek strangely continues to insist on the primacy of the paradigm of sexual difference, falsely elevating its status to what Butler calls an unchangeable, phallogocentric “’law’ prior to all ideological formations” (Bodies That Matter 196).¹⁸ In The Ticklish Subject, for example, he insists on the intractability of (an always already failed) sexual difference over and against the possibility of more progressive readings that his own theory of symbolic rearticulation enables. Assuming the heterosexual dyad to be paradigmatic, he asserts that what Lacan calls the “impossibility of the sexual relationship” lies “in the fact that the identity of each of the two sexes is hampered from within by the antagonistic relationship to the other sex which prevents its full actualization” (Ticklish Subject 272). This formulation of sexual difference as “the Real of an antagonism, not the Symbolic of a differential opposition” continues to privilege binary sexual difference, if only through its negation (Ticklish Subject 272). The heterosexism of this formulation is evident in Žižek’s framing of “the sexual relationship” as an antagonism between “the two sexes.”
 
However, in Contingency, Hegemony, Universality, Žižek positions the Real as site of the failure of sexual difference, and claims that,
 

for Lacan, sexual difference is not a firm set of “static” symbolic oppositions and inclusions/exclusions (heterosexual normativity which relegates homosexuality and other “perversions” to some secondary role), but the name of a deadlock, of a trauma, of an open question, of something that resists every attempt at its symbolization. Every translation of sexual difference into a set of symbolic opposition(s) is doomed to fail, and it is this very “impossibility” that opens up the terrain of the hegemonic struggle for what “sexual difference” will mean.

(110–11)

 

Because every attempt to symbolize the fundamental antagonism as a simplistic opposition between “masculine” and “feminine” inevitably fails, Žižek allows that positive manifestations of sexual difference could be the site of hegemonic struggles—struggles that feasibly could include opposition to heterosexual dominance. In the above formulation, he both sidesteps binary formulations of sexual difference—which he characterizes as merely “a deadlock, a trauma . . . an open question”—and allows for contestation over its positive meaning. He still misses, however, that his insistence upon calling this antagonism “sexual difference”—rather than merely “difference,” for example—is misleading.

 
Similarly, in Tarrying with the Negative, he draws on Lacan’s sexuation diagrams to conceive of sexual difference as a Kantian antinomy. Rather than allowing “us to imagine in a consistent way the universe as a Whole,” as does the binary logic of all-encompassing oppositions, viewing sexual difference as an antinomy presents us with the simultaneous and contradictory presence of two “mutually exclusive versions of the universe as a Whole” (Tarrying 83). For Žižek, the value of considering sexual difference in this fashion is that it allows us to view it not as “the polar opposition of two cosmic forces (yin/yang, etc.)” but as “a certain crack which prevents us from even consistently imagining the universe as a Whole” (Tarrying 83). In The Indivisible Remainder, he further argues that
 

What the Lacanian “formulas of sexuation” endeavor to formulate, however, . . . is not yet another positive formulation of the sexual difference but the underlying impasse that generates the multitude of positive formulations as so many (failed) attempts to symbolize the traumatic real of the sexual difference. What all epochs have in common is not some universal positive feature, some transhistorical constant; what they all share, rather, is the same deadlock, the same antinomy.

(217)

 

The notion that empirical data are mere covers for a more fundamental fissure in the universe presents an alternative to the more common claim that the universe is organized through binary oppositions that produce a false sense of totality. This approach accounts for much of the appeal of Žižek’s political thought. However, questions remain about the way in which Žižek conceives of the fundamental antagonism he believes to provide a negative, structural backdrop for empirical reality.

 
Though in the above passage from Indivisible Remainder Žižek acknowledges the multiplicity of past and present genders, his references to “the sexual difference” are symptomatic of the blockage in his own thinking about it (217, emphasis added). The singular “the” implies that the fundamental antagonism is mobilized by a singular split rather than by multiple fractures. His insistence on this point is particularly peculiar given his openness in other strands of his work to considering forms of antagonism—nationalism and ethnic hatred, for example—that can be driven by more than two divergent points of view.¹⁹ In Contingency, for instance, he presents both sexual difference and national difference as divisions that are falsely naturalized as causes for what he views as a more “fundamental antagonism” that cannot itself be symbolized (112–114).
 
At other points, Žižek takes the antinomy of sexual difference as a model for other forms of fundamental antagonism that he conceives as sites of ideological struggle and transformation. In Contingency, for example, he uses ideological differences as examples of the fundamental antagonism’s effects, explaining that “the notion of antagonism involves a kind of metadifference: the two antagonistic poles differ in the very way in which they define or perceive the difference that separates them (for a Leftist, the gap that separates him from a Rightist is not the same as this same gap perceived from the Rightist’s point of view)” (215). Jodi Dean observes that for Žižek, one of these antinomies underpins class struggle (57–60). Yet Žižek curiously resists considering sexual difference as subject to the same kinds of transformations he would allow for similarly positioned political struggles. Though he rightly observes that theorists such as Butler mistake the negative space of antagonism for a positive terrain of social contestation by viewing sexual difference as a potential site of ideological struggle and transformation of the terms of the symbolic, he refuses to consider that a change in point de capiton could radically overhaul the symbolic. Though Žižek’s emphasis on the negativity of antagonism is a useful correction to Butler’s reading of Lacan, he errs in staging sexual difference as an antinomy that is entirely exempt from transformation. This is in direct contradiction to his claims about the potential for radical overhauls of other sorts of political antagonisms. While he views the fundamental antagonisms underpinning other sorts of political struggles as available for wholesale transformation, he does not question the presupposition of paternal law through which he inscribes the antagonism of sexual difference as fundamentally inalterable. Nor does he openly acknowledge the possibility that this antagonism might be subject to challenge. To pose the fundamental antagonism as a matter of the inevitable failure of the “masculine” and the “feminine” to understand each other is still to present the problem of sexual difference in heterosexual terms, even though they are not ideals but sites of failure. Most importantly, this formulation continues to ignore the complicity of Žižek’s own arguments in upholding the Name of the Father and the reign of paternal law by insisting on the primacy of sexual difference.
 
Yet what displacement could Žižek possibly be referring to besides that of the phallus—which Lacan famously designates “the privileged signifier of that mark in which the role of the logos is joined with the advent of desire”—when he emphasizes the possibility of rearticulating the structuring principle of the symbolic through a change in the point de capiton (“Signification” 287, emphasis added)? Even though they are inconsistent, the overall arguments of Ticklish Subject and Žižek’s contributions to Contingency, Hegemony, Universality background castration in such a way that the substitution of another point de capiton for the Name of the Father becomes thinkable. In Ticklish Subject, Žižek drops the language he used in Sublime Object to describe the Real as an unsymbolizable “rock” or “kernel,” and instead foregrounds the position of the Real as the site at which symbolic mandates fail. This suggests that we need not read his emphasis on the structuring role of negativity as an affirmation of a timeless doctrine of castration. Instead, following Silverman’s reading of Lacan, we might read Žižek’s presupposition of the role of castration in structuring sexual difference as the result of his installment of the Name of the Father as master signifier in the first place (Sublime Object 112).
 
In The Metastases of Enjoyment, Žižek comes close to acknowledging the tenuousness of sexual difference, but ultimately falls short of doing so. He writes,
 

Apropos of the two asymmetrical antinomies of symbolization (the “masculine” side that involves the universality of phallic function grounded in an exception; the “feminine” side that involves a “non-all” field which, for that very reason, contains no exception to the phallic function) a question imposes itself with a kind of self-evidence: what constitutes the link that connects these two purely logical antinomies with the opposition of female and male, which, however symbolically mediated and culturally conditioned, remains an obvious biological fact? The answer to this question is: there is no link. What we experience as “sexuality” is precisely the effect of the contingent act of “grafting” the fundamental deadlock of symbolization on to the biological opposition of male and female.

(155)

 

Žižek acknowledges that this grafting makes the link between sexual difference and biological sex contingent, but he does not press this observation far enough to recognize that this process of grafting makes sexual difference itself contingent. This impasse in Žižek’s reasoning comes from his continued reiteration of the false notion of binary sex, an ideology that facilitates the parallelism involved in “grafting” the antinomy of sexual difference (itself questionably formulated in terms of masculinity and femininity) onto an idea of sex that he misrecognizes as natural rather than cultural. His unqualified assertion that “the opposition of female and male” is “an obvious biological fact” ignores a long history of feminist work concerned with intersexed persons and living species. This work demonstrates that the idea of a binary sex distinction between male and female is a social construct, one maintained not only discursively (through the dominance of the false idea that there are only two sexes) but also surgically (through the performance of surgery on intersexed children to align their genitals’ appearance with dominant expectations for “males” and “females”).²⁰ That Žižek has not assimilated this information is especially surprising given his sustained engagement with Butler’s work, which raises this very problem and observes that American feminism draws a false distinction between “sex” as natural and “gender” as cultural even though it can be demonstrated that the concept of “sex,” too, is cultural.²¹ The false naturalization of “sex” in Žižek’s language continues in his assertion that the “parasitic ‘grafting’ of the symbolic deadlock on to animal coupling undermines the instinctual rhythm of animal coupling and confers on it an indelible brand of failure: ‘there is no sexual relationship’; every relationship between the sexes can take place only against the background of a fundamental impossibility” (Metastases 155).

 
As Lacanians are quick to point out, because sexual difference is merely structural, a person of any sex can occupy the “masculine” and “feminine” positions. And Lacan himself writes in “The Signification of the Phallus” that the “relation of the subject to the phallus is . . . established without regard to the anatomical difference between the sexes” (282, emphasis added). Moreover, he writes in The Four Fundamental Concepts that “[i]n the psyche, there is nothing by which the subject may situate himself as a male or female being” (204). I observe elsewhere that this passage conceives of the psyche as asexed but that Lacan continues to refer only to the genders “man” and “woman” in The Four Fundamental Concepts (“Sinthomosexual’s Failed Challenge” 7–8). Žižek and similarly-minded contemporary Lacanians seize upon this language and formulate sexual difference as an antinomy that drives the “relationship between the sexes” (Metastases 154–55). Through this maneuver, Žižek’s conception of sex as the “biological opposition of male and female” becomes particularly insidious once it is aufgehoben into a difference that is neither material nor phenomenal but rather a differential opposition between the masculine and the feminine (Metastases 155). Žižek is right that this is not quite a gender difference, for it takes negative rather than positive form.²² Given its role as that which sets phenomenal reality into motion, we might think of Žižekian sexual difference as that which prompts positive manifestations of gender and sexuality. Nonetheless, within his thought, sexual difference—however Real—is the dialecticized consequence of his false assumptions about binary sex.
 
Laclau’s intervention in Žižek’s debate with Butler over the status of the Real offers another way of approaching this problem. Like Žižek, Laclau argues that Butler misses the way in which “the Real becomes a name for the very failure of the Symbolic in achieving its own fullness. The Real would be, in that sense, a retroactive effect of the failure of the Symbolic” (68). Laclau further clarifies, however, that the name of the Real thus becomes “both the name of an empty place and the attempt to fill it through that very naming of what, in de Man’s words, is nameless, innommable. This means that the presence of that name within the system has the status of a suturing topos” (68). Drawing on Bruce Fink’s formulation of the distinction between the presymbolic real (R1) and the postsymbolic Real—the latter “characterized by impasses and impossibilities due to the relations among elements of the symbolic order itself (R2), that is, which is generated by the symbolic”—Laclau argues that the postsymbolic Real effects a “hegemonic operation” of suture that “involves both the presence of a Real which subverts signification and the representation of Real through tropological substitution” (68). In my view, what Žižek describes as “the contingent act of ‘grafting’ the fundamental deadlock of symbolization on to the biological opposition of male and female” can be seen as the kind of “suture” that Laclau describes (Metastases 155). Laclau’s explanation is crucial to understanding the ideological character of Žižek’s claim. The “grafting” Žižek describes is, in Laclau’s terms, a “hegemonic operation” that uses substitution to represent R2 as R1—that is, to suggest that R2 (the aporias produced by the symbolic order’s failures) is somehow connected to R1 (“the biological opposition of male and female”).
 
Curiously, though, when Laclau concurs with Žižek that sexual difference is that which “is linked not to particular sexual roles but to a real/impossible kernel which can enter the field of representation only through tropological displacements/incarnations,” he does not point to the suturing effects of this operation or to its role in consolidating hegemony (72). Instead, he claims that “[i]n terms of the theory of hegemony, this presents a strict homology with the notion of ‘antagonism’ as a real kernel preventing the closure of the symbolic order . . . antagonisms are not objective relations but the point where the limit of all objectivity is shown. Something at least comparable is involved in Lacan’s assertion that there is no such thing as a sexual relationship” (71). I have no quarrel with Žižek and Laclau’s insistence that a fundamental antagonism mobilizes the symbolic order’s failed attempts at coherence. However, they both fail to consider the ideological character of their characterization of desire as driven by difference that is consistently brought back—through what Laclau calls the “hegemonic operation” of suture—to the failures of what Žižek repeatedly terms the “relationship between the sexes.” To choose different diction—to say, for example, that desire emerges from a fundamental antagonism, negativity, or trauma—would avoid this suturing of the effects of the antagonism to heterosexist conceptions of sex. But to call this operation sexual difference introduces confusion by recalling a polarity that invokes the bodily materialities that appear within Žižek’s discourse even as he tries to get past them.
 
Because Žižek does not see the ideological character of the effects of this suture, the heterosexism at play in his appeals to the supposed unchangeability of sexual difference remains a significant problem in his work. In his diction, relationships are “between the sexes,” and this wording matters, because it sets up a parallelism between “female” and “male” sexes and Kant’s mathematical (“feminine,” to Lacanians) and dynamic (“masculine”) antinomies that Žižek then uses to render (hetero)sexual difference’s status as Real as beyond dispute. This creates the false impression that as an antinomy, sexual difference—rather than other kinds of difference—must be the motivating force behind all forms of desire, and in turn, desire’s manifestation in sexuality.²³ I use this diction to describe the consequences of Žižek’s assumptions and to mark the difference between, on the one hand, Lacanian psychoanalysis’s theorization of sexual difference as a negative antagonism that motivates desire, and on the other hand, the resulting experience of sexuality as it could be described in positivist terms. The presence of these different vocabularies in the ongoing dialogue between Žižek and queer theorists has muddied the issues considerably. What has been lost in the resultant fractiousness is that Žižek’s suturing of the “masculine” and “feminine” antinomies to binary categories of sex causes his account of desire to render many contemporary sexual practices and sexed embodiments untheorizable, for they cannot be accounted for as consequences of the failure of sexual difference. Žižek’s oversights call into question the presumed universality of his theory. What might it mean to think of the fundamental antagonism itself as motivated by multiple differences rather than by the difference between “masculine” and “feminine”?
 
Moreover, an even larger question lies behind Žižek’s narrow reasoning about sexual difference: why does symbolization have to be about sex at all? Such an assumption is evident in his explication of the difference between Foucauldian and Lacanian perspectives on sex:
 

It is here that Foucauldian “constructionists” and Lacan part company: for the “constructionists,” sex is not a natural given but a bricolage, an artificial unification of heterogeneous discursive practices; whereas Lacan rejects this view without returning to naïve substantialism. For him, sexual difference is not a discursive, symbolic construction; instead, it emerges at the very point where symbolization fails: we are sexed beings because symbolization always comes up against its inherent impossibility. What is at stake here is not that “actual,” “concrete” sexual beings can never fully fit the symbolic construction of “man” or “woman”: the point is, rather, that this symbolic construction itself supplements a certain fundamental deadlock.

(Metastases 160)

 

Although it is quite plausible that sexual difference might be one of the differences that could emerge “at the very point where symbolization fails” and that it “supplements a certain fundamental deadlock,” there is nonetheless a logical problem with the assertion that “we are sexed beings because symbolization always comes up against its inherent impossibility.” Žižek offers no proof for this circular claim about causality. The same problem besets his assertion that “sexual difference has a transcendental status because sexed bodies emerge that do not fit squarely within ideal gender dimorphism” (Contingency 309). For this, too, he offers no proof of causality, and falls back upon the circular assertion that “sexual difference is that ‘rock of impossibility’ on which every ‘formalization’ of sexual difference founders” (309). Elided here is what is at stake in calling the fundamental antagonism “sexual difference” at all. Moreover, many of Žižek’s writings graft the notion of the fundamental antagonism into political contexts that have nothing to do with sexual difference. If symbolization’s failure could have consequences other than that of making us sexed beings, then his claim that failures of symbolization are its cause is far too strong.

 
To read the Real not as “the rock of castration,” as Žižek does in Sublime Object, but as the space of excess produced through the failure of symbolization, as he does elsewhere, is to understand it as a site of possible rearticulation. As Jodi Dean argues, Žižek theorizes the means through which “one can intervene in, touch, and change the Real” by engaging the symbolic order (181). While Žižek’s claim that sexual difference is “real”—that it is “that which, precisely, resists symbolization”—may appear on the surface to be a stubborn insistence on essentialist doctrine, he nonetheless acknowledges that the contours of the Real can change (Contingency 214). He concedes in Contingency that “Butler is, in a way, right” to insist that the Real is “internal/inherent to the symbolic,” stipulating that the Real “is nothing but [the symbolic’s] inherent limitation, the impossibility of the symbolic fully to ‘become itself,’” and that therefore the Real “cannot be symbolized” (120–1). The insight that the Real is unsymbolizable yet circumscribed as such by the symbolic suggests that the Real can serve as a site of radical ideological struggle. If the Real is the site of the symbolic’s failures, it is consistent throughout time only in its structural function—that is, only in its position as the realm in which whatever is in the symbolic fails. To the extent that the terms of the symbolic can change, the ideological material that fails in the Real can change as well: Žižek asserts that “There will always be some hegemonic empty signifier; it is only the content that shifts” (Contingency 111). If what he calls the point de capiton changes, then a different set of failures could be inscribed at and as the Real.
 
Elsewhere in Contingency, Žižek points out that to focus on the Lacanian order of the Real is to open up a means of understanding the regime of the father as an imposture. He notes that “the very focus on the notion of the Real as impossible . . . reveals the ultimate contingency, fragility (and thus changeability) of every symbolic constellation that pretends to serve as the a priori horizon of the process of symbolization” (221). Noting that “Lacan’s shift of focus towards the Real is strictly correlative to the devaluation of the paternal function (and of the central place of the Oedipus complex itself),” Žižek explicitly names paternal law as one “contingent” formation that is “susceptible to a radical overhaul” (Contingency 221). Observing that Lacan’s “constant effort from the 1960’s onwards . . . is . . . to expose the fraud of paternal authority,” Žižek asserts that the “‘Name-of-the-Father’ is for Lacan a fake, a semblance which conceals [the] structural inconsistency of the symbolic” (Contingency 255, 310). As a consequence, he asserts, “paternal authority is ultimately an imposture, one among the possible ‘sinthoms’ which allow us temporarily to stabilize and co-ordinate the inconsistent/nonexistent ‘big Other’” (Contingency 221). Žižek does not, however, reconcile this insight with his continued insistence on the relevance of the paradigm of sexual difference. In failing fully to dislodge the regime of the father and the logic of (hetero)sexual difference, Žižek fails to pursue the most radical implication of his work for queer theory: the possibility that the Name of the Father could be supplanted and the terrain of ideological struggle remapped through a change in the point de capiton.
 

III. The Real of the Act

 
Even though Žižek disavows the possibility of such a remapping, his work clears theoretical ground for it when he argues that by traversing the fantasy, we can completely overhaul the terms of the symbolic order (Indivisible Remainder 166). He elaborates this idea through a revision of Althusser. In so doing, he offers an account of the processes through which ideological contents pass themselves off as natural through reification in the “kernel” of the “Self,” and holds out the possibility of radically altering those false naturalizations (166). He argues that “the crucial dimension of the ideological effet-sujet” lies “not in my direct identification with the symbolic mandate . . . but in my experience of the kernel of my Self as something which pre-exists the process of interpellation, as subjectivity prior to interpellation” (166). Traversing the fantasy brings about “subjective destitution” by “induc[ing] . . . the subject to renounce the ‘secret treasure’ which forms the kernel of” subjectivity (166). Traversing the fantasy is thus “[t]he anti-ideological gesture par excellence,” the means by
 

which I renounce the treasure in myself and fully admit my dependence on the externality of symbolic apparatuses—fully assume the fact that my very self-experience of a subject who was already here prior to the external process of interpellation is a retroactive misrecognition brought about by that very process of interpellation.

(166)

 

This process of gaining distance from the fantasy that supports subjectivity undoes its power as “the ultimate ‘passionate attachment’ that guarantees the consistency of . . . being” (Ticklish Subject 266).

 
What is sexual difference in Lacanian and Žižekian theory if not an ideology that passes itself off as natural, as the true “kernel” of the “Self”, and that can only be dislodged through a traversal of the fantasy? Sexual difference is the fundamental fantasy structuring Lacanian and Žižekian theory, and that which it needs to traverse in order to be fully useful to queer theory. The vehement resistance manifested across all of Žižek’s texts to queer theorists’ assertions of the contingency of sexual difference is an indication of how trenchantly this fantasy is lodged within his texts. Here, it is crucial to read Žižek’s (and also Lacan’s) texts with an eye to their manifestations of “resistance” in the psychoanalytic sense. Read in this fashion, Žižek’s and other Lacanians’ assertions of the fundamental intractability of sexual difference are unpersuasive, and all the more so because of their proponents’ increasingly desperate insistence in the face of challenge. This resistance points to the status of sexual difference not as an outside to ideology that pertains to all persons across place and time, but rather as an ideology that has falsely installed itself as natural and as subsisting prior to interpellation.
 
To view the subjective kernel not as ideology’s outside but as the most deeply seated space of its entrenchment is to re-open the questions of how it becomes lodged as such, and of how its terms can be rearticulated. Countering Butler, who is suspicious of the Lacanian Real and seeks transformation in acts of linguistic performativity that resignify the symbolic order, Žižek asserts that only an act of the Real can radically reconfigure “the field which redefines the very conditions of a socially sustained performativity” (Ticklish Subject 264). He opposes the “Real of an act” to the psychotic’s passage à l’acte. The latter is a “false” act, a mere acting-out that does not “confront the real kernel of the trauma (the social antagonism)” to prompt a traversal of “the fantasy towards the Real” (Contingency 126–7). According to Lacan’s argument in the Third Seminar, the experience of psychosis is structured by the permanent foreclosure, or repudiation, of a privileged signifier, causing language to be distorted and hallucinations to appear in the Real as if it were radically external to the symbolic. Psychotic foreclosure pre-empts the establishment of a point de capiton, and, consequently, renders impossible an act that would intervene in both the symbolic and the Real. “[H]ysterical ‘acting out,’” too, takes place in the imaginary and cannot effect change (Kay 155). From Hitler’s initiation of the Holocaust to psychosis, hysteria, and obsession, any action that disavows or avoids—rather than directly confronts—the fundamental “social antagonism” is for Žižek a “false act” (Contingency 124–6).²⁴ By contrast, the “act” is a form of “symbolic suicide,” of “withdrawing from symbolic reality, that enables us to begin anew from the ‘zero point,’ from that point of absolute freedom called by Hegel ‘abstract negativity’” (Žižek, Enjoy 49). This gesture temporarily voids symbolic mandates to open up the possibility of adopting different ones and assuming a new symbolic identity.
 
For Žižek, only such an act provides the resistance that enables symbolic rearticulation. For him “the act proper”—with its capacity to intervene in the Real—“is the only one which restructures the very symbolic co-ordinates of the agent’s situation: it is an intervention in the course of which the agent’s identity itself is radically changed” (Žižek qtd. in Kay 155). As Sarah Kay puts it, this kind of act allows us to “‘treat the symbolic by means of the real’—that is, allow us to reboot in the real so as to start up our relationship with the symbolic afresh” (155). Such a “reboot” could change the point de capiton, thereby supplanting the Name of the Father with another master signifier and opening ground for a regime unlimited by the parameters of sexual difference.
 
Such a transformation involves not the psychotic foreclosure of the Name of the Father but instead the traversal of the fantasy that structures our experience. For Žižek,
 

What the Lacanian notion of “act” aims at is not a mere displacement/resignification of the symbolic coordinates that confer on the subject his or her identity, but the radical transformation of the very universal structuring “principle” of the existing symbolic order . . . the Lacanian act, in its dimension of “traversing the fundamental fantasy” aims radically to disturb the very “passionate attachment” that forms, for Butler, the ultimately ineluctable background of the process of resignification.

(Contingency 220)

 

He further explains that this “act disturbs the underlying fantasy” that traps us in restrictive patterns while disavowing the fundamental kernel of our being (Contingency 124). The proper act

 

does not only shift the limit that divides our identity into the acknowledged and the disavowed part more in the direction of the disavowed part, it does not only make us to accept as “possible” our innermost disavowed “impossible” fantasies: it transforms the very coordinates of the disavowed phantasmatic foundation of our being. An act does not merely redraw the contours of our public symbolic identity, it also transforms the spectral dimension that sustains this identity, the undead ghosts that haunt the living subject, the secret history of traumatic fantasies transmitted “between the lines,” through the lacks and distortions of the explicit symbolic texture of his or her identity.

(Contingency 124)

 

As an example of an “authentic act,” Žižek points to the moment in the film In and Out at which closeted schoolteacher Howard Brackett says “I’m gay” instead of “Yes!” at his wedding after having been outed several days earlier by a former student, Cameron Drake, during the Academy Awards ceremony (Contingency 122). It’s worth noting that this act takes place in language—in the symbolic—yet successfully intervenes in the Real. It not only rejects the symbolic apparatus—heterosexual marriage—that would have sustained Brackett’s public identity as a person presumed to be straight, but also blasts away the “disavowed phantasmatic foundation” that had supported his own and others’ fantasy that he was heterosexual. Brackett’s change is both internal, in that he recognizes and accepts that he is gay, and external, in that he changes how he identifies publicly.

 
As Žižek argues in Sublime Object, this kind of change rearticulates the point de capiton that quilts the symbolic and the Real. He understands the symbolically transformative act as the installation of a new point de capiton through the traversal of the fantasy, and he implies that this act, while “irreducible to a ‘speech act’” and distinct from Butler’s performative resignification, produces that new point de capiton by engaging all the Lacanian orders (Ticklish Subject 263, emphasis added).²⁵ Writing about the theory from which Žižek‘s account is derived, Pluth clarifies that while “Lacan’s notion of an act is . . . not far removed from what Austin called a performative speech act,” the former’s theory importantly differs from the latter’s in its consequences: “Lacan shares with Austin the idea that [speech] acts are transformative, and such acts are clearly ‘signifying,’ but Lacan’s focus is not on acts that change the situation of the world or the set of facts within it. Instead he focuses on acts that change the structure of a subject” (101). These acts are “transgressive” because “[i]t is not the case that someone is simply changed by an act: he or she is reinaugurated as a subject” through a change in point de capiton that touches both the symbolic and the Real (Pluth 102).²⁶ Somewhat differently than Lacan, Žižek also addresses acts that challenge the fundamental structure of a political terrain. Restructuring this landscape through a change in point de capiton would be analogous to the reinauguration of the subject that Pluth describes.
 
Žižek offers neither a promise that change will be for the better nor a clear picture of the future that will emerge through traversing the fantasy. As Lorenzo Chiesa observes, not all individual traversals of the fantasy lead to structural change. He notes that during traversal of the fantasy, “the subject’s encounter with the real lack beneath his ideologized fundamental fantasy forces him to assume the lack in the universal” (191). After that point, “the resymbolization of lack is . . . always carried out at the level of the particular” (191). That is to say that it may or may not lead to the symbolic order’s rearticulation. That is only a possibility if the subject that traverses the fantasy goes on to “name a movement, promote a new Symbolic . . . and struggle politically to establish its hegemony” (191). Thus if, as Edelman argues in No Future, queer theory should work to implode homophobic culture from within by traversing the fantasy, a close examination of Žižek’s work shows us that this does not require Edelman’s refusal of politics, futurity, and the symbolic order.²⁷
 
Here we encounter the limit of Žižek’s reading of In and Out. This film demonstrates that not all traversals of the fantasy at the individual level immediately lead to broader transformations. After Brackett comes out, the principal fires him despite his record of acclaimed teaching. However, at the students’ graduation ceremony, Drake appears to support Brackett, inspiring large numbers of graduating students—and eventually his parents—to a show of solidarity in which they all declare themselves to be gay. While this scene mobilizes a radical transformation within the community that affirms Brackett’s coming out, the film eventually rehabilitates him for paternal law. The closing sequence teases the viewer with the possibility that he and the reporter whose kiss caused him to recognize his own desires might be heading to the church for their own wedding. However, the film quickly cuts to their arrival as guests at the service in which Brackett’s mother and father renew their wedding vows, and then ends with a celebration in which the entire community dances to the gay classic “Macho Man.” Though the closing scene highlights the shift from the community’s initial shock at the idea that Brackett might be gay to their eventual acceptance of his sexuality, it also shows him being recuperated by paternal law in a way that is not entirely surprising. The film’s closing emphasis on the restoration of (hetero)sexual difference within the context of the patriarchal Christian church—to which two earlier scenes in the film had appealed to guide Brackett toward being honest about his sexuality—points to the way that challenges to homophobia do not always represent challenges to sexism. In and Out grates for its misogynist portrayal of two women characters as vacuous. Emily Montgomery, Brackett’s fiancée, is a self-hating wreck who—herself a teacher—nonetheless expresses the desire to be educated by her future husband. Sonia, Drake’s girlfriend, is a whiny and entitled supermodel who cannot even operate a circular telephone dial. In and Out systematically upholds paternal law and even perpetuates misogyny despite its progressive critique of hypocritical silences around sexuality in educational and religious institutions.
 
As such, In and Out illustrates that it is impossible to predict the consequences of the authentic act, a point that Žižek misses in his brief gloss of the film. At other points, he emphasizes that there is no certainty about the nature of such an act. Elaborating on the nature of the ultimate act that would prompt a traversal of the fantasy, he argues that the structure of the Kantian categorical imperative is “tautological,” an “empty form” that “can deliver no guarantee against misjudging our duty” (Indivisible Remainder 170). Coming up with “a minimal positive definition” of the act is a “game” involving guesses that “fill up the abyss of tautology that resonates in ‘Do your duty!’” (The Indivisible Remainder 170). Žižek presents as the “best candidate” for such an uncertain act the case of a man who “dress[es] up as a woman and commit[s] suicide in public” (Indivisible Remainder 170). This example’s misogynistic and transphobic character is outrageous and inflammatory, suggesting that revolution be purchased at the price of the lives of those who challenge the binary gender system. By no means do I wish to endorse this example as a program for queer theory. As both Butler and Gayle Salamon compellingly argue, queer and trans theory should instead work to make gender diversity more rather than less livable.²⁸ Yet Žižek’s example also points to an aspect of his thought that allows for his ideas to be appropriated and reworked for queer-theoretical ends. The relativism and ambiguity he attaches to acts—including the example he gives here, which he presents as “the best candidate” rather than a sure success—concedes that they take place within an inherently conflicted field of competing ideologies that are subject to challenge and transformation (Indivisible Remainder 170). In this context, Žižek’s example of the man who commits suicide in drag represents a startling concession that the fundamental fantasy of (hetero)sexual difference is contingent, ideological, and subject to traversal.
 
A strength of Lacanian theory is its potential to offer a flexible account of the structure of desire and of its consequences: of desire as motivated by lack and as potentially productive of all manner of genderings. And at its best, Žižek’s politics of the Real offers queer theory not a release from the symbolic order but rather the possibility of changing its coordinates. It is thus unfortunate that debate over the more radical implications of his theories has largely been grounded by his and others’ insistence on presenting them in the language of sexual difference. This move limits his work’s usefulness for queer and feminist theories alike by constricting accounts of desire and by tacitly upholding the assumption that the symbolic order must be grounded by the Name of the Father.
 
Even though orthodox Lacanian writings—including some of Žižek’s books—attempt to forestall challenges to the claim that sexual difference is unalterably lodged in the Real, the more radical strain within the latter’s texts opens up the possibility of contesting them. Both Copjec and Žižek argue that (hetero)sexual difference is a fundamental antinomy, but the latter’s own theory of traversing the fantasy makes (hetero)sexual difference itself available for traversal. And if—as Žižek states—paternal law is an imposture, and the Name of the Father could be supplanted by another master signifier, the phallogocentric structure of (hetero)sexual difference could be radically overhauled (Contingency 221). And even if—as he and other Lacanians argue—the structure of desire is indeed subtended by a fundamental antinomy that dictates that “there is no sexual relationship,” there is no good reason to insist on calling this antagonism sexual difference or on formulating it in terms of the masculine and the feminine (The Ticklish Subject 272). Numerous other differences would do just as well.
 
By traversing the fantasy of (hetero)sexual difference, the entire ideological apparatus of what Gayle Rubin calls the “sex/gender system” could be overhauled through a change in the point de capiton.²⁹ This transformation would not necessarily render (hetero)sexual difference entirely obsolete, but would instead allow us to understand it as having an incidental—rather than a determining—effect on the structuring of subjectivity and desire. Thus, as a provocation to fantasy’s traversal, I close with a sole injunction, directed to all who remain invested in insisting that the fundamental antinomy that mobilizes desire must ever and always be called sexual difference: Give it up!
 

 
Writing in 2004 for Economic and Political Weekly, one of India’s leading journals, T.H. Chowdary recalled that until about 1994, at any given moment over 3 million applicants were waiting to get a telephone connection in India. Some of them had waited for more than ten years. In Mumbai, applications were accepted only if they were in the “Own Your Telephone” scheme, in which a “hefty, non-interest bearing deposit” was required of the applicant (2085). Even then, though, there was no guarantee of getting a phone. Obtaining a colored phone, a push-button phone, or a phone with an extension cord required waiting in interminable queues or getting a recommendation from a Member of Parliament or minister. “One wit suggested that the telegraphic address of the telephone department could be ‘wait list.’ One communications minister introduced a ‘cash and carry’ telephone scheme. For Rs. 30,000 cash to his agent he would sanction an ‘out of turn’ phone; in his four months, he made Rs. 900 million” (2085). Apparently, his successor legalized the scheme, which meant that the Rs. 30,000 for a “tatkal,” or immediate, phone connection, was paid to the department itself for the sake of appearances. When members of parliament complained about non-working phones and sky-high bills, the minister of communications shot back, “It is not compulsory to have a telephone; anyone could surrender it any time he liked” (2085). Remarkably, as Chowdary recalls, the “‘left, progressive, democratic, socialist’ theoreticians occupying the commanding heights in the Planning Commission said that telephones and other telecom services were elitist. The common man had no need for them and therefore investment in telecom should be restricted to serve governments and a few other essential needs” (2085).
 
This Kafkaesque testimony to the corrupt political bureaucracy that for decades surrounded landline telephony in India highlights the self-satisfied myopia of elite Indian political cultures. Yet telephony in the subcontinent has a long history, thanks to the communicative needs of British colonialism. In fact, the first telephone service in the subcontinent was introduced in 1881 by the colonial government in Kolkata; the first central battery of telephones was introduced in Kanpur in 1907; the first automatic exchange was commissioned in Shimla in 1913–14 with a capacity of 700 lines; by 1947 India had 84,000 telephones for a population of 350 million (India 177). In the fifty years following independence in 1947, the technocratic stranglehold on telecommunications deepened, limiting or denying access to communication technologies to hundreds of millions of Indians, and greatly hindering the development of telecommunication technologies as a whole.
 
Following the liberalization of the Indian economy in the early 1990s, the telecom industry was marked for rapid reform. In 1994, a process of privatization was initiated. But events surrounding the Emergency in 1976 prepared for privatization. A qualitatively different experience of representative democracy emerged in India, leading to more intensive capitalist expansion into consumption practices in the 1980s, and new force relations surrounding the formation of voting blocs. Crucial to this process was the nation-building event of the Asiad in 1982, during which TV, cable, the cassette and the VCR, satellite broadcasting, and an explosion of media piracy created a new field of potential and capture for the concrescence of media ecologies. India is uniquely positioned to allow us to grasp this history of media potentiality as a lesson of ethics.
 
Consider: Sixteen years after privatization, governmental discourse narrates that event as a milestone for postcolonial India:
 

 

The telecommunication services have improved significantly since independence with the sector witnessing a series of reform measures that included, announcement of National Telecom Policy in 1994 that defined certain important objectives, including availability of telephone on demand, provision of world class services at reasonable prices, ensuring India’s emergence as major manufacturing/export base of telecom equipment and universal availability of basic telecom services to all villages. Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI), the independent regulator was established in 1997 and New Telecom Policy was announced in 1999, which further laid stress on providing an enabling framework for the development of this sector and to facilitate India’s vision of becoming an IT superpower and develop a world class telecom infrastructure in the country.

(India 177–78)

 

In charting a course from “post-colonial development” to “world-class superpower,” Indian governmental discourse has gone through torsions wrought by liberalization, rapid economic growth, growing internal disparities, ongoing communal tensions, emergent sexualities and gender roles, an explosion of consumer-as-citizen pedagogies, and a reorientation of work toward flexible, precarious, globalized services. These changes are nicely summed up in Ravi Sundaram’s phrase: pirate modernity (2010). Despite the tendencies of transnational capital toward monopoly, corruption, and elite hegemony, forms of piracy throughout South Asia and the rest of the global south have deepened the habituation of populations to copyrighted materials, software, and forms, while simultaneously transforming these technologies into a constantly mutating flow of assemblages of silicon- and carbon-based life. There are over one billion mobile handsets in India, and the national market continues to be the most competitive mobile service market in the world. What happened to the assemblage of populations, perception, and telephony in the twenty years from 1991 to 2011? What are the implications of mobile telephony’s becoming the third largest attractor of foreign direct investment (after services and computer hardware and software)? How has mobile telephony become one of the fastest growing contributors to India’s gross domestic product? What kinds of innovations in the informal economy are facilitating and are in turn catalyzed by this rapid proliferation of mobile media? How has the elite telephone become the mundane mobile, and what are the effects of this transformation at the level of habit, movement, affect, sensation, and perception?

 
In other words, why and how is such a virtual ontology of mobile telephony specifically relevant to contemporary postcolonial India? What is specific to India and perhaps to South Asia about the use of mobile phones? On the one hand, what is at stake in diagramming virtual ontologies of machinic affect is an approximation of the singularity of habit, perception, information, and power flowing through India’s media ecology. On the other hand, the abstract diagram, or resonance machine, immanent to what happens in Mumbai, Bhopal, Delhi, or Bangalore has a broader relevance and strategic importance because it is a way of understanding how to practice assembling with media in ways that shift and potentialize our capacities to affect and be affected, “acting counter to our time and thereby acting on our time and, let us hope, for the benefit of time to come” (Nietzsche qtd. in Berardi 64).
 
India’s economic, social, and political terrain has been undergoing massive changes. As with all such historical upheavals, the opportunities for radical democratic change subsist side by side with new modes of surveillance, capital accumulation, control, and subjugation. Sundaram is again illuminating in this regard. His non-romanticizing mode of analysis shows how questions of resistance must in fact be understood in terms of the numerous dimensions of change immanent to piracy ecologies, only one of which is the juridical order. Indeed, for Sundaram, the contagion and virality of bazaar media are as important as, for instance, the police raids to stop piracy in Palika Bazaar in Delhi. In his analysis, the parasitic, adaptive mode that piracy sets up makes it difficult to produce piracy that is clearly outside the law. Police raids are an acknowledgment of the “viral nature of piracy.” As regimes of control, raids are singularly ineffective in their attempts to “[slow] down the endless circulation of pirate media through pincer-like violence, and securing temporary injunctions in court.” Rather, “Piracy [is] a profound infection machine,” which affects heterogeneous spaces, flowing through all firewalls. Sundaram shows that the dominant dream of securing the digital (which I note in Untimely Bollywood) is part of the boutique solution to piracy for dominant media corporations. However, piracy’s “non-linear architectures and radical distribution strategy [render] space as a bad object; the media industry’s yearning for secure consumption ghettos is in many ways an impossible return to the old post-Fordist days” (Sundaram 135).
 
In this essay I attempt to diagram the architecture of one aspect of India’s contemporary non-linear media assemblages: mobile phone practices. This method of media assemblage analysis takes ethical experimentation as its mode of expression and machinic sensations as its ontology of becoming. In other words, this essay analyzes mobile telephony (focusing on the strategic example of India) by foregrounding an embodied ethics of habituation as central to an understanding of contemporary media assemblages. Clearly, this history of habituation must be situated in the colonial and postcolonial legacy of modulating populations through communication technologies; for instance, the STD-booth revolution pioneered by Sam Pitroda in the 1980s furthered the habit of non-elite populations to move outside the home to communicate through telephony. Today, as the most competitive and fastest growing mobile market in the world, India’s heterogeneous mobile culture provides an excellent window into the processes of globalization, consumerism, digital control, piracy, bodily habituation, and new media assemblages. In this essay, I take affective capacities (the bodily capacity to affect and be affected) as the starting point for understanding the history, mutations, effects, force, value, and sense of the mobile phone in India (Deleuze, Pure Immanence; Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy). Drawing on the work of Henri Bergson (Matter and Memory), Alfred North Whitehead (Process and Reality), Gilles Deleuze (Spinoza: Practical Philosophy), Brian Massumi (Parables for the Virtual), Manuel Delanda (A New Philosophy of Society; Deleuze: History and Science), Arun Saldanha (Psychedelic White), and Patricia Clough and J. Halley (The Affective Turn), I argue for a method of media analysis that focuses on affect-as-capacity, shifting analysis away from language, discourse, and representation toward emergent, habituated sensations in historically specific media assemblages (within which representation and language form one feedbacked dimension of change). In the broader study of which this is a part, I attempt to move materialist “empiricism toward a higher power” (Deleuze, Pure Immanence 37) through wide-ranging ethnographies of mobile usage and value-added companies in Mumbai and Delhi. These ethnographies diagram virtual-actual circuits of bodily intensity, emergent properties, and changing capacities. They are coupled with broad archival research in the history of telecommunications in colonial and postcolonial South Asia. My itinerary in this essay, however, is more focused on the creation and exploration of a concept that is adequate to diagramming the becomings now afoot in Indian mobile media: an ecology of sensation. To clarify: the argument develops a method of analyzing sensation as it is embedded in material, discursive, embodied ecologies. I argue that such an analysis is particularly relevant to India at the present conjuncture.
 
In the broader literature on the politics of affect, affect is often reduced to emotion or even sentiment. In such work, affect is abstracted from its immanent ontology in bodily and technological processes to become a figure of consciousness or a symptom in psychoanalysis.¹ While much of this work is useful in situating the ideologies of manipulating emotion in dominant political and mass media discourse, it must be connected practically with an experimental ontology of becoming within and through embodied media. I want to focus more specifically on the creation of a concept of embodied, technologically imbricated sensation that resists the reduction of affect to emotion (or what Baruch Spinoza called the “passions”² ). Instead, I elaborate a concept of ecologies of sensation as an ethical common notion, that is, a notion that is common to at least two multiplicities. I address the notion of ecology first.
 

I. Ecological Thought and the Jugaad Image

 
An ecology is necessarily transversal to social, subjective, and material “Universes of reference” (Guattari, Three Ecologies 43). Félix Guattari had famously argues against technologies of socio-machinic reification, affirming instead a “reconstruction of social and individual practices” under three complementary headings, “all of which come under the ethico-aesthetic aegis of an ecosophy: social ecology, mental ecology and environmental ecology” (41). In order to comprehend the interactions, he suggests, between ecosystems, the mechanosphere (or technological evolution), and the social and individual Universes of reference, we must learn to think transversally (43). For Guattari, this transversal thought will diagram ecologies beyond the “intelligibility of interlocking sets or the indeterminate interlocking of fields of signification” (44). The logic of ecological assemblages is “a logic of intensities,” of auto-referential, auto-catalytic existential assemblages engaging in “irreversible durations.”³
 
Writing within the context of the philosophy of cognitive science, Andy Clark understands this logic as an important characteristic of embodied, embedded cognition, one that may be called the Principle of Ecological Assembly (PEA) (which is better understood as a processual practice rather than an always already given principle).⁴ “According to the PEA, the canny cognizer tends to recruit, on the spot, whatever mix of problem-solving resources will yield an acceptable result with a minimum of effort” (Clark, Supersizing the Mind 13). Clark’s insights into ecological assemblages, especially his insistence on the machinic or technological nature of pragmatic cognition, have important implications for a virtual ontology of mobile phones. Intensive, auto-referential, auto-catalytic ecologies evolve slowly by correlating sensory, motor, and neural capabilities. Hence, at a certain threshold, they reach a momentary balance between potential and the actual, the organismic bundle and its ecological niche. “Ecological balance of this latter kind is what a flexible ecological control system seeks to achieve” (13). We could question whether the final cause of balance is indeed the basin of attraction, or merely a force within such a basin, in which case a flexible ecological control system would better be thought of as open, moving sets of fuzzy, volatile, felt interactions of energy, information, matter, and forms.
 
What Guattari calls ecosophy demands a thoroughgoing realist ontology involved in diagramming the interconnections and fluctuations between “Universes of reference.”⁵ Time assumes its fully ontological role as an irreversible dimension of becoming that traverses ecologies; affective durations correlate timescales of assemblages of assemblages (interpenetrating, yet singular multiplicities⁶ ). Ecologies are pragmatic assemblages, or feedbacked compositions of human neurology, technologies, energy, information, and material fluxes. Assemblages are both irreducible and immanent: their emergent properties are irreducible to their parts, and they are immanent to the interaction of those parts.⁷ Ecologies are extensive (actual, material, metric: quantitative multiplicities), intensive (self-differentiating and self-diverging: qualitative multiplicities), and virtual (possessing potential tendencies and capacities that may never be actualized). In other words, virtual ecologies are composed of three different immanent dimensions of change, as Manuel Delanda suggests. First is a domain of final, or actual products, apprehended by their extensive properties such as the length, area, or volume of the space they occupy, their various components, or their differing levels of matter and energy. But this level of actual extensity is produced by processes that are not apparent at first sight. Thus, there is a domain of production processes, defined by intensive differences that have gradients of belonging. These intensive gradients drive specific populations of flows and are characterized by critical thresholds that change quantity into quality. But, in their turn, these intensive flows marked by critical thresholds open ecologies to the virtual itself. This is the domain of virtual structure, which in a purely immanent way modulates the processes and the products of an ecology in terms of potential capacities to affect and be affected, and co-evolutionary tendencies (that is, tendencies that evolve through the interaction of the components of the ecology itself).
 
A media assemblage analysis of mobile phones in India must grapple with how new communicative and media technologies and practices have emerged from historically variable and also dynamically open forces, senses, and values.⁸ This is a nonlinear process that diverges without resembling, because the divergences are qualitative shifts in intensity and capacities. Because of this variability and openness to change and territorialization, we must situate mobile telephony within a framework that can account for the temporality, intensity, and virtuality of ecologies of sensation. In this ontology, concepts are defined not linguistically but as the structure of a space of possibilities. Multiplicious ecologies, then, are virtual, that is, real but not actual, and capable of divergent actualization. Taking an example from chemistry, Delanda notes that the tendency of liquid water to become ice or steam, for example, is real at all times even if the water is not actually undergoing a phase transition (Deleuze 127).
 
What is the status of virtual ecologies in terms of knowledge, or, better, what are the conditions of possibility of their epistemology? Evolutionary ecologist Tim Ingold offers us a first approximation in his consideration of reindeer herders and hunters of the Taimyr region of northern Siberia. Without fetishizing the otherness of these people, he notes that they operate with a sentient ecology. Such ecologies of sense and sensation produce an informal, unauthorized knowledge transmissible in contexts outside those of its practical application.
 

On the contrary, it is based in feeling, consisting in the skills, sensitivities and orientations that have developed through long experience of conducting one’s life in a particular environment. This is the kind of knowledge that Janácek claimed to draw from attending to the melodic inflections of speech; hunters draw it from similarly close attention to the movements, sounds and gestures of animals. Another word for this kind of sensitivity and responsiveness is intuition. In the tradition of Western thought and science, intuition has had a pretty bad press: compared with the products of the rational intellect, it has been widely regarded as knowledge of an inferior kind. Yet it is knowledge we all have; indeed we use it all the time as we go about our everyday tasks. What is more, it constitutes a necessary foundation for any system of science or ethics. Simply to exist as sentient beings, people must already be situated in a certain environment and committed to the relationships this entails. These relationships, and the sensibilities built up in the course of their unfolding, underwrite our capacities of judgement and skills of discrimination.
 

(Ingold 25)

 

Assembling sentient ecologies requires a shift from epistemological perspectives that are rooted in representation and analogy. Instead, ecologies of sensation demand a thoroughgoing pragmatism of knowledge or ethical know-how, the vectors of which overturn the domination of a rarefied and abstract rationality. They further demand embodied experimentations with perception, sensation, matter, value, and force.⁹

 
To summarize: I have defined an ecology as an extensive, intensive, and virtual multiplicity that becomes through correlated, resonant processes with intercalated timescales; it is a non-coinciding, resonant unity that, because it never attains absolute closure or totalization, passes imperceptibly through phase transitions and critical thresholds.¹⁰ This definition of ecology allows us to critically approach the immanent dimensions of change through which virtual-actual circuits mutate and evolve. Now, as is well known, Marshall McLuhan was the first critic to apply the term ecology to media. Writing at the moment of the transition to electronic media such as the TV, McLuhan famously declared that “hot and cold” media should be differentiated on the basis of definition level (how filled with data they are) and the degree of “filling in” or participation by the receiver. For McLuhan, a hot “specialist” media technology tends to detribalize and individuate (film), whereas cool media (TV) reaggregates populations. While his definition of media ecology as the speed, scale, and pattern of interaction between technologies of perception and the human sensory apparatus remains relevant for my own analysis of virtual ecologies of media and their sensations, McLuhan’s argument problematically proceeds by analogy and binary opposition. The gradients that seem to define hot and cool media are quickly assimilated to a kind of universalizing pendulum in which “Oriental” or “primitive” societies fall into the cool while Western modernity remains essentially hot (McLuhan 24–28). By contrast, my definition of virtual ecologies of mobile media does not rely on any pre-constituted categories of interactivity, nor does it typologize cultures according to the nature of its interactivity. Virtual ecologies are non-coinciding resonant unities, qualitative multiplicities that, while having a dominant or actual form (a certain functional, yet fuzzy unity), are nonetheless traversed by flows whose scale, speed, and pattern are constantly and imperceptibly diverging from themselves (the non-coincidence of a moving whole).
 
The term I propose as a first approximation of the ecology of sensation at the heart of contemporary mobile cultures in India is a Hindi word that has a wide, common usage in different parts of India today: jugaad (pronounced ju-ghaar’).¹¹ This term has also been adopted by transnational corporations to describe the drive toward innovation in neoliberal accumulation strategies (Radjou). Its provenance cuts across accumulation strategies and subaltern autonomy in India today. According to Wikipedia, the jugaad refers to “a creative idea, a quick, alternate way of solving or fixing problems”; colloquially it means a quick workaround that overcomes commercial, logistical, or legal obstacles. As such, “the jugaad movement has gathered a community of enthusiasts, believing it to be the proof of Indian bubbling creativity, or a cost-effective way to solve the issues of everyday life” (“Jugaad”). To think through the orientation of jugaad with the assemblage of mobile media experimented with here, I suggest we consider it an emergent machinic sensory-motor circuit of globalized digitality itself, in which any given obstacle in the way of a flow of desire through an ecology is pragmatically considered and worked around with whatever resources are to hand (recall Clark’s canny cognizer). In other words, if jugaad is halfway between a representation and a thing (what Bergson calls an image¹² ), this image has an ontological status in people’s perceptions, memories, and habituations when considered from the point of view of what Clark calls above the process of Ecological Assembly. Thus, if we consider that at any given time the majority of mobile phone users in India cannot place a call, having no more than 5 rupees on the phone, and use it instead for a functional semiotics of missed calls (people with a low balance on their account make a call and hang up after one or two rings, signaling to the receiver to call back), the mobile is the jugaad device par excellence.
 
As Robin Jeffrey and Assa Doron suggest, bureaucrats and politicians seek “to control the technology for proclaimed reasons of national security, taxation, social equity and public interest.” They write,
 

Some, no doubt, also value the bribes and favors that such control can bring. Between these people at the top and those people near the bottom, new workforces of manufacturers, technicians, tower builders, distributors, agents, marketers, salespeople, repairers, recyclers and second-hand dealers take shape. And even poor people can own cell phones. At the base of the pyramid, we hear stories of fishermen and farmers, rickshaw drivers and vegetable sellers, making “missed calls,” taking pictures, checking prices, downloading screen savers, doing pujas – all with a device that would have mystified most of India before the year 2003. More important, the cell phone appears to arm its owner with possibilities to leap over barriers, not merely of distance but of power. The cell phone does not eradicate power structures, but it can sometimes subvert them.

(398)

 

I want to further this definition of the jugaad image in terms of some of the dimensions and processes of contemporary mobile phone cultures noted by Jeffrey and Doron. Let us take extensity first, and gradually move toward its plane of potential capacities and tendencies. India currently has the most competitive mobile market in the world, adding on average around 15 million new subscribers each month. Mobile connections surpassed landlines in 2004, and in early 2011 the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) gave the green light to providers for third generation mobile connectivity (after a great deal of controversy and accusation of corruption and malfeasance; see Jeffrey and Doron). Consequently, mobile connectivity is among the cheapest in the world, allowing for a wide array of uses: transferring money back to home villages, participating in missed call techno-lects, creating new business models for small and medium scale entrepreneurs, renegotiating largely male public spaces, and improvising ad-hoc uses on the run. These jugaad uses are also accompanied and enabled by a proliferating pirate economy, as Sundaram has analyzed so well (2). Moreover, these rapidly changing parameters render the Indian mobile phone network a far-from-equilibrium ecology of media and pragmatic perception (a key mode of the jugaad). Today, cheap handsets and relatively affordable pre-paid packages for voice, SMS, and data transmission are widely available across India, with an adoption level of over 90% in the major metros, falling to less than 20% in some rural areas (although rural subscriptions are increasing by around 30% a year) (Russell). According to the mobile operators, there are about 700 million subscribers in India, although these metrics are not fully reliable given the quick diffusion of double-SIM handsets and the number of double, or even triple service subscriptions (Singh). There are about a billion handsets in India. What is beyond doubt, however, is that mobile diffusion has passed a critical threshold of density in India, changing quantity into quality. The quantitative expansion has phased into a qualitative contraction of perception, movement, and teledensity.

 
More specifically, what characterizes the singularity of mobile phone usage in India is that, in a country where the landline phone has never been widely used, across a highly heterogeneous population of more than 1.3 billion people (a vast number of whom, however, have used a makeshift STD/PCO booth to place a call at some point in their lives, thanks to the work of “information technology for development” guru Sam Pitroda),¹³ where the rural sector still accounts for around 60% of GDP, the standard feature mobile phone has become an instrument of revaluing and refunctioning life itself. Thus, in 1987, at the celebration of “forty years of telecommunications in independent India,” the country had 2.7 million phones for a population of 730 million people, about 4 phones for every 1000 people. By January 2010, India had 688 million phone connections for a population of about 1.15 billion people, or almost 600 phones for every 1000 people. Indeed, 60% of the population might have had a phone “if phones had been evenly distributed.” Crucially, more than 90% of the phones by 2010 were mobile phones (Jeffrey and Doron 399). Given India’s deep divisions of caste and class, in the past, wealthy, high-status people had far greater ability to travel and transmit information than low-status people. Indeed, elites could often control the movements and communications of subalterns directly. But the mobile phone has disrupted, without simply overturning, these relations of dominant communication; it has the potential to open to subaltern populations possibilities that they have never had before. The far-from-equilibrium conditions of India’s new media ecology assemble convergent media, new consumption patterns and marketing strategies, new target and niche markets, globalizing intellectual property regimes, emergent hacker cultures, mutating black market accumulation strategies, liberalized investment criteria, a highly competitive mobile service provider market, and national and regional discourses of technological dominance, producing an unprecedented situation of change.
 
The mobile ecology in India changes with variable speeds, as different postcolonial histories inform the concrescence of its habituations. Indeed, radio, TV, audio cassettes, and the STD/PCO booth were far more important and widely-adopted communication technologies in India than the landline telephone. The mobile phone has not replaced the STD booth, radio, or TV in India, but because of the convergent tendencies of the technology and the massively intensive and rapid uptake of the device, the mobile has potentialized media habituation itself.
 
Consider this case study from my field notes: Vinita is an active 30-year-old female, whose extended family, originally from rural Tamil Nadu, has settled in the outlying wards of Mumbai. The tight-knit family has been Christian for two generations (self-identifying as dalits). Vinita is separated from her husband, a fisherman, who was a heavy drinker and physically abusive toward her. Taking her 9-year-old son with her, she moved out and currently works three jobs, doing more or less affective work (the term is too capacious) as a domestic cook, a caretaker for a house (both in the M Ward region of Chembur-Deonar), and a caregiver for an elite, elderly woman (who lives in Colaba, in South Mumbai). Vinita is functionally literate (she can read recipes and headlines), educated to the sixth standard, and fluent in Marathi, Hindi, Tamil, with a smattering of English. One way to characterize the life of this second-generation internal migrant is along a gradient of precarity and instability. Her husband repeatedly harasses her for money, and consequently her living situation is renegotiated almost month to month, adding to her bad reputation. Her finances are unstable and informal, making saving money difficult. She is constantly travelling from one end of Mumbai to another, so she relies on family and friends to help with minding her son after school and during holidays.
 
Vinita has been using a mobile phone since 2004; she replaces it about every six months, and uses a prepaid plan, which gives her flexibility to top up (recharge) depending on her cash flow. Her current phone is a pirated Nokia smart phone, which she got from a male relative as a present. This relative seems to take an active interest in tinkering with and teaching others about the capacities of the mobile. Given her high level of precarity, the mobile has become a kind of life line. She uses it to communicate with friends and family during work, and it is always on in case her various employers need her for one thing or another. She frequently uses the common missed call protocol; she also listens to music and news radio and uses the device for basic gaming (her son is the family mobile game enthusiast and uses the phone to play a variety of games).
 
We are speaking in the kitchen, where we most often seem to be together, as she cooks and arranges. I have just shown her a photograph I manipulated on the computer: the Ferris wheel in Juhu. She laughs with delight, putting her hand to her mouth. And we fall to talking again. We are speaking of cooking, and she is telling me how to make the tarka for daal just so (with hing and ghee at the right moment). Her phone rings, she checks it, sighs, and carries on giving me instructions. We speak of home banking in the meantime, where to put the cash she has saved after she has paid expenses and loaned money to family members. I tell her that she must open a bank account, but she says you need an address for that (wrongly it turns out, but I didn’t know that then). She laughs at my Bollywood Hindi, and I wonder at her constant energy level. Again, she asks me what I am doing in India. Again I try to explain why the mobile interests me, why in India it interests me more. We speak of her use of the mobile, and as the conversation progresses she begins to eye it more frequently, wiping the scratched screen, sometimes just holding it while speaking, gesturing with it, but mostly it remains away from the heat and sweat of the stove area, set on top of the washing machine. She tells me of what the owners of another home have been saying about her, that she is a sex worker at night rather than a caregiver to an elderly pensioner. She begins to cry. I shake my head, grit my teeth, our eyes meet. Her phone rings, she wipes her eyes, and takes the call. It’s from her sister in Virar. She is speaking in Marathi. I step away from the kitchen.
 
What knowledge does this conversation offer us? Or, better, what are the active and reactive processes of becoming in this woman’s life, and how is the mobile immanent to these events? We can say that what is happening is a series of struggles over the force, sense, and value of forms of domesticity, ethnicity, religion, age, media consumption, money, reputation, status, motherhood, work, migrancy, and translation. An entire material assemblage of desire is at stake here. Paolo Virno says in an interview, “Experience is always measured—either in an insurrection, a friendship, or a work of art—through the transformation of the interpsychical into intrapsychical. We constantly have to deal with the interiority of the public and with the publicity of the interior” (Penzin 83). This passage of the world through the potential and actual connectivities our bodies and psyches offer is the duration of affect itself (Deleuze, Essays 143–44), which contracts and tenses imperceptibly and habitually, and, like an elastic slackening its tension, expands with greater and greater indetermination and variability. In attempting to engage with Vinita’s interaction with me, I have to consider pragmatically the jugaad ecology, and, hacker-like, consider its condition of possibility, its open, or fuzzy, or intensive set or multitude of individuations or singularities–what we call it is less important than how effectively we diagram its becomings. The reason the diagram of the mobile ecology is different from the landline, the STD booth, the TV, or radio is that it traverses singularities of emergent capacities and speeds of flows, and involves these fluxes in the production of a new ecology of sensation (Ingold’s sentient ecologies pragmatically assembled), the individuation of which can be experimented with bodily, intensively, by modulating this processes of individuation. Each of the dimensions of change that I listed above in Vinita’s life traverses this ecology, and every point is connected more or less intensively with every other point in a modulation of infinite sponginess. This happens at a practical level when Vinita answers the question of how she will be able to save money for a house given the meteoric rise in property values and fees for brokers, or how she will recharge her phone before she gets paid. Thus the events of this dalit woman’s life are prehensions of prehensions,¹⁴ and only an experiment in the “arbitrary forms of possible intuition” could make such a life a practice of becoming, which it no doubt is in varying degrees (Deleuze, Essays 34).
 
In other words, the jugaad image of mobile phones catalyzes the pragmatic exploration of forms of life that are, on the one hand, flexible, and on the other hand intensively exploitative, normalizing, habit-forming, and consumption-oriented. This brings out another aspect of the method of media assemblage. The method shifts scales to question the nature of becoming, its set of processes and practices, flows and institutions. The question concerning Vinita’s life struggles then, does not stop at resistance, but moves on to the question of what is common to and divergent in her multiplicities, their specific composition of tendencies and affects diagramming another arrangement of things, for a time to come. But beyond the lure of hope, the speed, scale, and pattern of her habitual engagement with the mobile foretells a once and future potentiality, plastic and feedbacked to her actuality.¹⁵ More specifically, in Vinita’s hands the mobile functions at a population-specific threshold between weapon and tool. Deleuze and Guattari, drawing on anthropologist Leroi-Grouhan, mark a distinction of vectors (not an opposition) between weapon and tool:
 

As a first approximation, weapons have a privileged relation with projection. Anything that throws or is thrown is fundamentally a weapon, and propulsion is its essential moment. The weapon is ballistic; the very notion of the “problem” is related to the war machine. The more mechanisms of projection a tool has, the more it behaves like a weapon, potentially or simply metaphorically. In addition, tools are constantly compensating for the projective mechanisms they possess, or else they adapt them to other ends. It is true that missile weapons, in the strict sense, whether projected or projecting, are only one kind among others; but even handheld weapons require a usage of the hand and arm different from that required by tools, a projective usage exemplified in the martial arts. The tool, on the other hand, is much more introceptive, introjective: it prepares a matter from a distance, in order to bring it to a state of equilibrium or to appropriate it for a form of interiority. Action at a distance exists in both cases, but in one case it is centrifugal and in the other, centripetal. One could also say that the tool encounters resistances, to be conquered or put to use, while the weapon has to do with counterattack, to be avoided or invented (the counterattack is in fact the precipitating and inventive factor in the war machine, to the extent that it is not simply reducible to a quantitative rivalry or defensive parade).

(Deleuze and Guattari 395)

 

This is not a metaphor: if the contemporary 3G broadband spectrum was opened precisely by occupying frequencies reserved for national defense and the military, if contemporary mobile technologies developed out of military research and development and continue to be central to strategies of counter-insurgency, the mobile phone is a switch securitizing data sets for neoliberal governmentality, a projectile of communication, and a tool to modulate subjectivity and work: the jugaad image.¹⁶

 
In short, mobile technologies in India are extending and qualitatively changing the intensive flows within cognitive, social, work, security, and financial networks (Clark, Supersizing xxvi; see also Donner). For instance, consider this set of fragmentary observations on how a mobile functions in the everyday from the 20-year-old Mumbaite:
 

If I’m travelling—daily travelling—like from place A to place B, whether I’m going to hurry or not has to [do] with whether I’m using my phone or not. So if I’m going somewhere and I’m in touch with someone who’s already there I’ll tend to hurry up a bit or speed up my trip. Or it might work the other way as well where if I’m going for some work and someone’s already there having taken care of it—I would know on the phone and probably relax. So the phone has a bearing on how urgent I consider a trip. If I’m going to meet someone somewhere, I’ll call to check if they’ve left so that I don’t have to wait. Or if I reach early I’ll call someone up and talk to them while I’m waiting. If I’m outside and I’m alone for a while and I have nothing else to do then I’ll call someone up or I’ll start fiddling with my phone. When I don’t know what to do with my hands I take my phone out and start to use it. Also if I’m walking across the room and another person is sitting somewhere on the other side and I’m going towards them—because I’m a somewhat awkward, shy person—most of the time if I’m walking and I think someone’s watching, I’ll take out my phone and fiddle with it. It changes the way I walk—in these situations—I can’t say how, but I use it as a…um…decoy. If I want to avoid someone I’d pick up my phone and start talking or pretend. I’d say, “excuse me.” I use this for awkward moments. Out of all my numbers maybe four or five I communicate with on a regular basis. And obviously I use the cell—it’s different from a landline…more personal.

(Desai)

 

The human-mobile assemblage produces an extraordinary range of affective dispositions as emergent capacities. What happens among this woman’s body, her halting gestures, public space, and the mobile phone? An assemblage of speeds and information flows weaponize the mobile, while simultaneously provoking a new care of the self. The mobile becomes an affective trigger, a fashion statement, a decoy, an early-warning device, an excuse, sometimes a phone, and it even allows for a different bodily comportment in space (Venkatesh). There is a gendered dimension to this mutation in embodiment: for a city whose public spaces are, at least according to one influential account, still constituted by no more that twenty-eight percent women in any given space or time, the mobile seems to have become for some (and more and more) women a way of renegotiating male-dominated spaces (Phadke). As one 20-year-old in her third year of college in Mumbai puts it:

 

When you stay connected so you usually remember to call up someone when you are going somewhere or you are just walking on the street or if you have to go to a public place to meet someone then coordinate with that person that it’s ok I am reaching at this place in so much time and you be there. Where are you? I can’t see you (after reaching the location), things like that, you end up just using it while traveling or when you are in public….Coordinate any kind of meeting, basically it’s a lot more convenient than actually going and finding a PCO because firstly you never have change (coins) and secondly it’s always a hassle like if you are in a new area and if you don’t know where the PCO (public telephone booth) is? It takes a lot of time, so it’s a lot more convenient to have a cell phone.

(qtd. in Matanhelia 96–7)

 

Yet, as a 40-year-old male interviewee from Mumbai notes, this very capacity of the mobile can be a source of anxiety and tension:

 

Before mobiles everyone was punctual. You didn’t need to call and find out where they were. Also if you give a stipulated time now, even before that you start getting anxious that the person might change it. Otherwise if there is no constant communication people would always be on time. Now everyone’s connected and traceable all the time.

(Shetty)

 

Such jugaad networks, notes Clark, typically depend on multiple, independently variable, causally interacting sub-states that “support great behavioral flexibility” by being able to alter the inner flow of information efficiently and in a wide variety of ways. A standard computational device like the mobile and its jugaad practices is a continuous correlation of multiple databases, procedures, and operations. The capacities of the device consist in the ability to rapidly and cheaply reconfigure the way these components interact: the jugaad image is a work of speeds and slownesses. “Information based control systems thus tend to exhibit a kind of complex articulation in which what matters most is the extent to which component processes may be rapidly decoupled and reorganized” (Clark, Supersizing 26). These processes of coupling, neoliberal value production, and self-organization constitute the ecology’s intensive plane, which is defined by flows and critical thresholds, the importance of which will always be specific to the singular assemblages at play in a fast-changing political economy such as India. Anna Munster, herself invested in producing diagrams of new media that think through “embodiment in information,” suggests that the intensive plane of the digital is embodied in the capacity of, for instance, silicon to conduct electrons at particular speeds, or in finding functional correlations that modulate silicon’s resistance to deterioration. Digital mobile networks’ ecologies of sensation are further intensified in silicon’s ability to change its composition and properties according to the device’s temperature, its combination with other flows, and its properties of superconductivity at high speeds (Munster 13).

 

III. Conclusion: Toward a “Common Notion” of Mobile Phones: Ecologies of Sensation as Ethical Thought

 
Sundaram concludes his brilliant chapter on Delhi’s pirate kingdom thus:
 

Piracy is that practice of proliferation following the demise of the classic crowd mythic of modernism. Piracy exists in commodified circuits of exchange, only here the same disperses into the many. Dispersal into viral swarms is the basis of pirate proliferation, disappearance into the hidden abodes of circulation is the secret of its success and the distribution of profits in various points of the network. Piracy works within a circuit of production, circulation, and commerce that also simultaneously suggests many time zones—Virlio’s near-instantaneous time of light, the industrial cycle of imitation and innovation, the retreat of the commodity from circulation and its re-entry as a newer version. Media piracy’s proximity to the market aligns it to both the speed of the global (particularly in copies of mainstream releases) and also the dispersed multiplicities of vernacular and regional exchange.

(Sundaram 137)

 

Sundaram’s close historical and comparativist analyses help us to grasp the complexity of contemporary media ecologies—they help to open up new domains of experimentation in modulating media intensities through processes of assembling sentient ecologies. In that sense, pirate modernity as a concept is aligned with what I have been arguing should be termed ecologies of sensation. I believe, however, that we need methods that are more rigorously material in regards to the habits of the body, and that we would create more practical diagrams if we foregrounded the analysis of these habits in the body’s capacity to affect and be affected.

 
In this essay, I have attempted to unfold the concept of ecology of sensation as a common notion. The jugaad image is common to the multiplicities engaged in biopolitical life in India today. These bodies are composed in sensation-flows, and their common notion is directly expressive: the jugaad image as an ecology of sensation involves/evolves physiochemical, neurological, and biological processes in which difference is determined by relative, but mutable capacities or affordances (affectivity) rather than analogy, contradiction, opposition. In ecologies of sensation real distinction is not numerical.¹⁹ For any given ecology of sensation, and there is an infinite number of them (and in a certain sense infinity in them), a set of definite but oscillating affects passes through the maximum threshold of that which is common to all bodies, yet is specific to the unity of at least two multiplicities entering into relations of composition. Tweaking intensities of sensation is itself an ethics through which we affirm the capacity of any process of bodily concrescence or becoming-active to affect and be affected in such ecologies. Another word for this is attunement: the composition of at least two multiplicities happens through graduated temporal resonance. Two temporalities involve/evolve by folding together and mutating through their emergent properties. To make an affirmation of becoming-active is another name for ethics, as the work of Brian Massumi has reminded us in different ways (28).
 
What conclusions are produced by these methodological choices? Perhaps it would be more pertinent to pose the question of methodological conclusions in terms of the capacities of such a method itself to affect and be affected. The aims of the method of counter-actualization, or media assemblage analysis, are several, but one stands out as particularly relevant to an analysis of mobile media: a thoroughgoing break with the representational analysis of mobile media by a systematic, boundless disorganization of all the senses (Deleuze, Essays 33–4), values, and forces that are territorialized in the mobile ecology of sensation. This would be both a practical and aesthetic ethic of composing multiplicities, or a multitude of singularities. By turning thought to the organization of sensation in the ecology itself, its dominant tendencies, capitalist values, repetitions, networked algorithms, habits, stammers, exhaustions, its emergent capacities, and its critical thresholds, a feedback diagram of causality, self-creation, and discourse can be produced (Toscano). The importance of such practical diagrams of becoming is increasingly clear in the emergence of insurrections, force relations, friendships, radical care/reproduction networks, and self-creations that the mobile helps body forth: Naxalism (in the past two years Naxals have destroyed hundreds of mobile mast towers, and they regularly confiscate mobile phones in areas under their control [Manchi 7]), middle-class protests against corruption (Munster’s gluppies—globalized yuppies—are Blackberry/iPhone activists), hacktivism, radical chauvinisms (the VHP and the Taliban), panchayat democracy, the proliferation of art movements, new petty entrepreneurial strategies (what Virno calls the “socializing of the entrepreneurial function” [Penzin 86]), and habituations of mass consumption—all these phenomena are understood more practically in terms of their potentialization in mobile ecologies of sensation.
 

 

 

 

Televisual “Liveness” and the Bottom of the Sea

 
The viewer of a live image of a bomb exploding in a faraway country might well find him or herself sighing in relief: “I’m glad I’m not there; I’m glad that’s not me.” Unfeeling though it may be, this response acknowledges a real vulnerability. Wherever the unfortunate other is, there the viewer could have been, had this or that variable been otherwise. Nothing much more reliable than good fortune protects the viewer from the exploding bomb seen live on the screen.
 
Of course, there’s plenty of fiction in that liveness—a thousand good reasons to put “live” in quotes. What Derrida calls the “artifactuality” of televisual liveness was, by 1996, when he gave it this spin, already settled law in the theory of television.¹ That this law has long been settled does not mean, however, that law-abiding watchers of “live” imagery have nothing to fear. The fiction of liveness is not the comforting kind. The bomb one watches explode “live” is no less real for those scare quotes. Nor does the televisual screening of the explosion place the event in the past in the way that a cinematic screening would; the technical delays and the technological différance of the “live” transmission do not add up to anything approaching a safe distance between the time of recording and the time of projection. The viewer who shudders in relief at having escaped a disaster he or she watches “live” is not lost in a fantasy. Right now, somewhere else, something terrible is in fact happening.
 
The viewer of a live image of oil washing up on faraway beaches might well feel the same kind of relief at having escaped disaster, especially if he or she lives near a beach. “I’m glad that’s not my beach,” the viewer might well say. One can feel possessive about a beach. The ocean floor, however, is another story. Even the most robustly self-interested viewer of the live streaming video of BP’s spewing well at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico could not have felt the familiar relief that it wasn’t him or her in the frame. It was nobody. Nobody was down there—that’s what was frightening.
 
It would have taken the eyes of a fish to see the broken well from the perspective of life. We could see it only through the eyes of ROVs. These mesmerizing machines are not inhuman in form, with their delicate arms and hands, capable of lacing and unlacing wire. But unlike robots in a car factory (or in any number of dystopian movies), they do not take the place of human beings. What their cameras show us is a place that cannot truly be ours, no matter how many licenses BP may hold to drill there, and no matter what right the United States may have under international law to that part of the ocean floor. William Empson’s “Legal Fiction” puts nicely the absurdity of extending land ownership deep underground: “Your rights reach down where all owners meet, in hell’s / Pointed exclusive conclave” (l. 9–10). Possession of the bottom of the sea is hardly less a matter of fiction. Indeed, BP’s name for the part of the sea floor from which this disaster sprung—the “Macondo Prospect,” after the fictional town of One Hundred Years of Solitude—nods to this unconsciously.
 
The world of the Gulf floor is not quite ours, however much our oil companies may prick at it. It is part of the earth, of course, but it is no closer to being ours than the moon is. The idea of a colony on the ocean floor stretches imagination just as much as the idea of a colony on the moon. If Atlantis is down there somewhere, then Atlantis is indeed utterly irrecoverable. The image of the ocean floor evokes lost civilizations, lost ships, bones turned to coral; any power that it evokes is lost, a drowned book. The image of the broken well spewing forth day after day is an image less of the abuse of power than of the limits of power. A thousand abuses led to it, but if the broken well were merely an instance of the abuse of power, then the same power that produced it could fix it.
 
BP had to be forced by the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming to let its video stream live, but it is not at all clear that the committee was right to do this if its aim was to sharpen sensitivity to BP’s crime.² BP’s powerlessness was ultimately our own; we couldn’t, through the government or any other agency, descend to the ocean floor and fix what BP couldn’t. Faced with such helplessness, it is difficult to resist apathy.
 
Though the live image of an exploding bomb is equally problematic ethically, the problem is not the same. Apathy is not quite the issue. The viewer is not at the same remove from what he or she sees. The exploding bomb is the successful expression of a human power—the bomb is doing what the power that made it designed it to do—and there is no position from which to watch it other than that of power. That position is relative—“I’m glad that’s not me” expresses its frightening contingency—but the viewer cannot entirely disavow the power of the bomb, even if he or she is not a part (as citizen or member) of the power that fired it.³ Watching and surviving has that price. Though it may remain irresponsible, relief at having survived the bomb is not a sign of apathy, and it can in some cases grow into empathy, according to something like the Golden Rule. The stare of the viewer of the live streaming video of BP’s broken well was bound to be more blank, the nature of his or her concern less clear.
 
The image was hypnotic. The movement of ROVs is slow and sleepy. Like dreamers, they alone light what they see, independent of the sun or any other star. And what they see, they see silently. The video they shot of the spewing well was soundless. Only live chats provided commentary, elaborating and multiplying theories in response to the underlying question: “What are we seeing here?” But it was the oil itself that bound the spell. Its dumb flow was the spitting image of the time spent viewing it. Any live image is, along with whatever else it may be, a reflection of the time invested in it; the time of the event you are watching live is your time, not some other time. Any live image separates you from your time this way, lets you see it passing.⁴ But this particular live image was particularly reflexive. The literal fluidity of the oil made it work as a metaphor for the already metaphorical fluidity of the “live stream.” The second metaphor reinforced the first, in the looking glass of which the viewer’s time was “flowing.”⁵ This doubling back upon itself of the viewer’s time had the strange effect of lightening the loss of it. There went your time, your life, bleeding out. And why not let it go, if you could still see it going even after you’d let it go—if letting it go didn’t mean that it all went black? (The oil spilled upward; at five thousand feet, the water was clear.) Watching such a scene, it was easy to dream that death would somehow not be the end.
 
So, thanks to the live stream, an environmental disaster became an occasion to dream of immortality. Of course, some hearty viewers of the live stream may have managed to stay awake, out of the undertow of the double metaphor of flow. But the strong undertow was there, in the image. In pulling this way, was the image calling the viewer to anything other than a kind of apathy?
 

Affirming Life on Earth: “Live” Imagery Versus Film

 
Were we talking about a film of the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, the question would be very different.⁶ Fictional though it is, the “liveness” of a “live” image means that the life of the viewer is never completely safely out of the picture. Even if the picture is of a place the viewer could never be, as it was in the case of the live streaming video of BP’s spewing well, every “live” image is a kind of mirror. In its reflection of the time spent watching it, the live streaming video of the well pulled the viewer, however ironically, into the picture. Because the viewer could not in any real scenario be down there live on the ocean floor, the live streaming video of the well offered a safety that the live image of a bomb exploding in a faraway country does not—the viewer could enter the picture only figuratively—but that safety is not the same as the safety offered by film.
 
While the viewer of live imagery is protected from what he or she sees by space, the viewer of film is protected by time, which is in fact more reliable. Some distances in space—like the one between the Gulf floor and anywhere on the surface of the earth—are safer than others, but the gap between the time of shooting a film and the time of its projection is always safe. No matter how far it is narrowed (for example, in the case of “rushes”), it can never be crossed. There is simply no possibility of watching oneself live, or even “live,” on film. The time-based removal of the film viewer’s life from the picture he or she views, ghostlike, gives birth to intimations of immortality quite different in kind from any to which the viewer of the live stream of BP’s broken well might have been lured. In the final gesture of The World Viewed, Stanley Cavell describes a feeling of “immortality” based on “nature’s survival of me.” The experience of film is, according to Cavell, a vision of that survival:
 

A world complete without me which is present to me is the world of my immortality. This is an importance of film—and a danger. It takes my life as my haunting of the world, either because I left it unloved (the Flying Dutchman) or because I left unfinished business (Hamlet). So there is reason for me to want the camera to deny the coherence of the world, its coherence as past: to deny that the world is complete without me. But there is equal reason to want it affirmed that the world is complete without me. That is essential to what I want of immortality: nature’s survival of me. It will mean that the present judgment upon me is not yet the last.

(160)

 

However fantasmatic it may or may not be, such a vision certainly cannot happen live; it is born of a clear difference between the time of recording and the time of projection.⁷ For Cavell, television, in its capacity for liveness, is a mortal threat to film’s saving vision. In the final gesture of “The Fact of Television,” an essay that meditates on what distinguishes television from other media—and from film in particular—Cavell returns to the final gesture of The World Viewed, asserting darkly that “the medium of television makes intuitive the failure of nature’s survival of me” (85).

 
In opposing television to film in this way, Cavell falls in with a major line of post-WWII thinking about the moving image. Like Cavell, though in a very different idiom, Gilles Deleuze and Serge Daney develop (and, in Deleuze’s case especially, radically transform) the story sketched by André Bazin, according to which cinema releases the world from our death grip, freeing us to see it in such a way that we can affirm it in all of its excess over us. And, like Cavell, Deleuze and Daney see television as a threat to cinematic freedom—a threat that may harbor within it a saving power but that in any case calls for far greater concern than the kind expressed in commonplace lamentation about the evil of TV.⁸
 
Film saves, according to this Bazinian line of thinking, by letting the viewer see an image of the world without him or her—by removing the viewer from a world that nonetheless remains his or hers. Protected by time from the action projected on the screen (and watching, according to Deleuze’s account of postwar film, the image of time itself), the viewer can open his or her eyes anew to the world, which is otherwise sealed under a protective crust of clichés.⁹ The story is rather grand, and good arguments can be made that it is not entirely clear-eyed when it comes to the grand illusion or myth of realism. But whether or not you believe that film’s protection of the viewer from what he or she sees on screen makes possible a saving vision of the world, the protections offered by live television—television in the exercise of the power most proper to it—are certainly far thinner than those offered by film. Though television does not really shrink or homogenize space in the way that utopian and dystopian theorists alike have surmised (I explore the reasons for this below)—though it does not spell, as Heidegger feared, the “abolition of every possibility of remoteness”—the spaces it traverses are traversable as well by “smart,” televisually guided bombs (to whose “point of view” the coverage of the first Gulf War introduced us).¹⁰ The trajectory of these bombs, through the eyes of which one watches war “from the inside” while resting on one’s couch, could always be reversed; such blank, lifeless eyes could just as well be turned on you. You could, in theory, watch on television the arrival of the bomb that will kill you, right up until the moment of impact.¹¹
 
Television is tied from the start to the dream of a missile with eyes. Long before smart bombs fell on Baghdad and Judith Butler gave the “optical phallus” its name (Butler 44), television already gave us a bomb’s eye view. Richard Dienst tells the stunning tale:
 

In 1928, engineers at General Electric broadcast “the first television drama production” over the experimental station W2XAD. It was called “The Queen’s Messenger”… Shortly afterward, another drama was broadcast, of quite a different kind: it simulated a guided missile attack on New York City, from the missile’s point of view, a slow aerial approach ending in an explosion.

(128)

 

Television shares a trajectory with the bombs it covers, and the age of its reign is that of the bomb of bombs. Cavell tunes in to something essential to this age in his description of television as a medium for the live confirmation of rumors of the destruction of what he calls “nature” (by which he means the world’s inhabitability by us).

 
If, in his association of television with the nuclear threat, Cavell, like Heidegger, misses some of the ways in which television keeps the distances it seems to destroy, it is at least partly because of his sensitivity to a new need for distance from our threatened existence.¹² When the formerly divine power to destroy life on earth comes to rest in human hands, as it does with the invention of the atomic bomb, the persistence of life on earth has to be willed in a new way. The political theorist George Kateb lays out the difficulty: in order to attach ourselves to earthly existence in such a way that we are disposed to seek its continuation, we’d have to find enough remove from our unchosen immersion in it to have a fresh look at it and find new wonder in it; but though we take on a divine power in the nuclear age, we do not simply replace God—we cannot take a God’s eye view. So a new mode of detachment—a non-theological, non-metaphysical twist on transcendence—would be needed.¹³
 
Film responds powerfully to this need. So do other arts, of course. Kateb himself privileges poetry as an avenue to this detachment—he likes Whitman’s counsel to be “both in and out of the game and watching and wondering at it” (167). But if you are avid for the experience of being “both in and out of the game and watching and wondering at it,” it is easy to see how you could find yourself frequenting movie theaters and loving film for the very reason that Cavell outlines in The World Viewed: its peculiar removal of the viewer from a world that remains his or her own.
 
In what follows, I try to show that there is in fact such a thing as televisual satisfaction of the need for a new, not quite transcendental distance on earthly existence. But there is little analogy between the televisual satisfaction of that need and the cinematic satisfaction of it. Not only does time not protect the tele-viewer from what he or she sees—the big difference that we have already seen—but while film is born of silence, television is a chatterbox from the start. A child of radio, television is a social medium that serves the purpose of company (not to mention the purposes of companies, whose direct address of the viewer is the mode of chatter most characteristic of the medium). Though television, as it becomes “old media,” may be coming fully into its own as a medium for art (in some of the high-end shows on HBO, for example), the medium does not allow for anything quite like the aesthetic distance valued by Kateb and Cavell. (Ironic disavowal of one’s vulnerability to what one sees there—a staple of talk about television, modeled for us by the gods of the late night shows—is meager compensation for the lack of such distance.)¹⁴ Television is rather an endless occasion to feel, unfeelingly, the nearness of disaster and a sense of company in that misery.
 
This is not to say that television is aesthetically (and/or morally) “bad,” exactly, but rather that the distances to be explored in it—the vistas it opens for thought—cannot be recognized so long as we’re looking for the same sort of distance that film affords. Television no more allows its viewer that sort of distance than Clarence’s nightmare of the bottom of the sea in Shakespeare’s Richard III gives Clarence room to breathe. The ocean floor, to which Clarence sinks in his dream and to which Prospero says he will consign his book in The Tempest—that distinctly earthly and unmagical region beyond our power—is, I argue in what follows, the ultimate vista of television.¹⁵ TV proper—the “old medium” watched by Cavell, Deleuze, and Daney—opens this vista but keeps the view clouded; reaching televisually beyond TV proper, the live streaming video of BP’s broken well in the Gulf made it clear.
 

In the Televisual Distance

 
I say “TV proper” just to name very loosely the kind of television that live streaming video supplements. In fact, the intimacy of the relationship between “TV proper” and the live streaming video that plumbs its depths renders the boundaries of “TV proper” highly uncertain. We are dealing here with supplementation, not opposition. Though many of the most exciting developments in online video involve the exploitation of truly new possibilities, the existence of a real distinction between “new” and “old” in these cases does not mean that any strict opposition can be drawn between “TV proper” and “new media.”¹⁶ “Television,” notes Lisa Parks, “has always been a site of media convergence” (9), and, as such, it is right at home in the contemporary “culture of convergence.”¹⁷ Indeed, one can argue that the more its “content” is parceled out and distributed via “new media,” the more central the place of TV becomes. John Caldwell, for example, sees the interactivity of the Web sites that supplement TV shows not as a departure from “TV proper” but as a realization of TV’s oldest, and greediest, wish: “any interactivity (good, bad, or indifferent) is economically valuable to producers and has been a defining goal of broadcast television since its inception in the 1940’s” (Convergence Television 53). Of course, “new modes of media delivery and television-Net convergence also have an impact on television’s textual forms and the ways we relate to television” (Convergence Television 43), but the result is still television—more television than ever. As Jennifer Gillan puts it in Must-Click TV, “these changes are more about evolution than revolution” (3).
 
Caldwell offers his comments on the continuity between TV and Web interactivity as sober correctives to the heady rhetoric of revolution (as in, “the digital revolution”) that dominated a first wave of writing about the Internet. This rhetoric has not disappeared, of course, and it is not entirely unwarranted: talk of “evolution” can be too sober to account for those ways in which traditional TV has been radically, violently displaced by its Web supplements. If talk of revolution tends to be too rosy, too close to the happy hum of marketing blather, talk of continuity can miss real openings.
 
So I am happy to report that the continuity I see between TV and the live streaming video of BP’s broken well is not entirely unbroken. What the live stream showed is what TV would show were it to show all that it can see—if it did not cover up something essential about itself in its coverage of the world.¹⁸ The live stream let us see the real reach of TV’s powers of vision. In doing so, it can hardly be seen as a counter-power to TV. But in showing TV’s full powers of vision, the live stream of the broken well did not deliver at all the same rush of power that TV ordinarily delivers to its viewer. That familiar rush is what makes the pleasure of TV so inevitably guilty: my house has not been bombed; the proof is that the explosion has happened, and I am still here watching; I am on the side of the bombers, whether I like it or not; I cannot really claim to be on the side of the dead, dead to the world though I may seem to be. The TV watcher’s guilty watchword: “I am alive!” He or she is merely playing dead. Meanwhile, the live stream of the broken well was more genuinely mortifying.
 
The live stream could be accessed in a number of ways: right from the source, on the BP Web site; on the Web site of the House Select Committee; on UStream; or through the double mediation of any of the many news sites—some “local,” as in the case of WKRG in Mobile, Alabama, and some national, as in the case of the PBS NewsHour—that had embedded UStream’s channeling of BP’s video. In the case of the news sites, the “convergence” of TV and live streaming video was explicitly part of the show. The rhetoric of media convergence came directly into play, which made the question of the real relationship between TV and the live stream particularly pressing.
 
Needless to say, the drama of media convergence staged on the news sites involved plenty of smoke and mirrors. The embedded video was offered there as a supplement to TV, not unlike the live feed offered on the Web site of Big Brother, the long running prime-time surveillance show. We were being let into the kitchen, allowed to see the “raw” material from which the news was clipped and cooked. To the extent that this presentation of the live stream encouraged the viewer to dream that, having gone “behind the scenes,” he or she had entered the circle of power of the production room, it was clearly just an illusion in service of the greater glory of the TV news. And it certainly served this end to some extent. Indeed, if it could not be made to serve the greater glory of the TV news, the news sites would never have embedded it. (Again, Caldwell, Gillan, and Andrejevic, among others, have shown how TV has made the powers of the Web its own.) But in its amplification of the power of TV, it also allowed the viewer to see something that the TV news really can’t contain, can’t frame and recuperate as TV news.
 
The news showed only a few seconds of the video of the spewing well before moving on to the next image (the oil covered beaches, the pelicans). Within the ideological scheme of the news, those few seconds were cast as representative parts of the whole live stream, of the unremitting image of the unremitting spill. But the real “whole” of the image was something more, or less, than the sum of such parts—something incalculable, beyond this kind of figuring. It is not that the uncut image was in any sense perfectly raw, beyond any figures that might be cooked up for it. It is just that the figures that the TV news cooks up—for example, that of the “rawness” of the footage it clips from—won’t take you, figuratively speaking, to the bottom of the sea, a place you can go only figuratively speaking (even if you had access to a deep-sea submarine, you couldn’t disembark the sub at your underwater “destination”).
 
In its double reflection of the life spent watching it (the time of watching being marked both by the flow of oil and by the “streaming” video itself), the live stream pulled the viewer’s life down into the depths where it can go only figuratively. I don’t mean to suggest that it was impossible to resist the downward, ironic pull of this current, only that this current had a very different currency from the kind circulated by the news. Watching the live stream, one was not constantly called back to the oil-slicked surface from which the reporters gave their live, up-to-the-minute reports. Life was not a beach, even an oil-slicked one. Of course, to see one’s life reflected in the flow of oil is to find oneself caught in a dream: oil is not life, not blood; the earth does not bleed with us, does not live and die with us. But the indifference to life that one can feel in the spell of such a (tele-)vision of its expenditure is not entirely dreamy. To see human life in what is alien to it is purely a projection of figurative language, but to feel the earth’s indifference to human life in one’s trope-induced moods of indifference to death—to feel intimate with the earth in those moods—is not an illusion. The figure is not symmetrical, perfectly reversible: there can be no human life on the ocean floor, but there is alien earth in us—earth of the kind we find on the ocean floor. Not everything about us ends with the life in us. The dust, of course, remains. And this remainder is already there in life, underlying it and lying in wait. You don’t have to be dead: a real connection to the dust in us can be felt wherever the real contingency of such a possession as life is felt.
 
The absoluteness of that contingency was the whole drift of the live streaming video from the Gulf floor. If the live image of a danger in a habitable region of the earth gives the viewer a sense of the contingency of his or her particular location, the live image of a broken oil well on the ocean floor gives the viewer a sense of the contingency of human existence period. The earth would go on without us. Even if companies like BP were ever to succeed in destroying the earth’s habitability for human beings, the earth would survive. In film, Cavell finds a vision of “nature’s survival of him”—the world complete without him—on which he bases a paradoxical claim to a kind of immortality. In the live streaming video of the spewing well, there was a strange assurance of the earth’s survival of all of us—a vision of the earth in the absence of the human beings who prick at it. We saw that part of the earth where we can’t be—the greater part of it, which, if the flood ever comes (man-made this time), will become the whole.¹⁹ For this asymmetrical, troubling part-whole relationship, the TV news offered a superficially comforting substitute, in which the shot from the ocean floor coupled with the shot of the beach gave us a picture of the whole disaster, which, pictured that way, would always allow for human survivors—for lucky viewers like us.
 
To minimize the greatness of that part of the earth where we can’t live: this is certainly to shorten distance, to shrink the earth fantasmatically in something like the way that Heidegger feared. But the distance closed by TV news is the very one television itself opens to view. The live stream from the Gulf floor testified to the priority of that opening, to the secondary, belated nature of the closure. It let us see live a part of the earth where we can’t live and made clear television’s real scoop, which the TV news desperately tries to hide: our power over the earth does not go very far below the surface. It does not extend to the ocean floor, no matter how much drilling we do there. It doesn’t extend, that is, as far as television lets us see.
 
Discerning the chiastic figures by which television turns the inside out in bringing the outside in—by which television makes the home uncannily faraway in bringing the faraway into it—deconstructive critics have perhaps responded best to the apocalyptic worry (and, on the other side of the coin, the utopian hope) that television shrinks distance.²⁰ To take the real measure of the chasms in these chiasmi is to see the wideness of the world anew—to see it televisually, even as TV tries incessantly to convince you that it in fact makes the world small, life-sized, by showing you faraway places “live.” The dominant picture of the world-wideness of the World Wide Web has only reinforced the small-world picture TV tries to sell. The fantasy TV peddles—what Lisa Parks in her book on the “convergence” between TV and satellite technology calls “the Western fantasy of global presence” (37)—has never been more powerful, the widespread scholarly claim to be wise to the ruse notwithstanding. If scholarly weariness with the “critique of the metaphysics of presence” is so widespread—if most scholars today are desperate to “get beyond” all that, as if it were so much positive knowledge that could simply be added to the general fund of knowledge—this may be at least partly because the task of that critique today is truly overwhelming. The fantasies of presence are today more powerful than ever, more capable than ever of including and neutralizing any critique of them.
 
In the age of live streaming video on the Web, there is more TV to be watched, and more to be seen on and in TV, than ever. And so long as there is TV to be watched, the ironic meaning of TV’s introjection of the outside will remain to be seen. It will always need to be seen again, anew in order for TV’s ever-renewed fantasy of global presence to be seen through. What the live stream of BP’s broken well—that opening in the world-wide webbing of the televisualization of the world—singularly, eventfully, and therefore ungeneralizably allowed to be seen (until the well was finally “killed,” and the illusion of human power over the ocean floor was, however weakly, restored) was at once a place pointedly in the world and a place to which human beings pointedly could not be present. That scene, that earthly spectacle of human absence, gave a singular twist to the inside/outside chiasmus that is structural to all televisualization: in this image, the absolutely elsewhere, the elsewhere that can never become a here to us, is not outside the world. Thus, not only was the tiny, individual home from which one viewed this faraway scene turned inside out uncannily in its hosting of this vision, but our entire home planet revealed itself to be deeply alien, by no means naturally hospitable to human life.
 

The Coldness of the Earth

 
Human being is being of the earth—so scripture says, and etymology seems to agree. Life is breathed into earth. Life lost, the earth in us returns to earth. We know the story too well. But what would it look like rewritten for television, as it were—for the age of long distance vision that we live in? I have argued that, exercising the power most proper to television in a way that “TV proper” does not, the live streaming video of BP’s broken well revealed a strikingly alien earth. How would a myth of the creation of humanity starting from this televisually revealed earth go? Of course, the myth would have to cover up to some extent the true story of the live stream, which was the absence of a God-figure who might stop the well—who is capable not only of causing floods, as humanity can, but also of reversing them. The rewriting exercise is certainly awkward. Still, something instructive happens to the traditional story if we revise it such that the fistful of earth from which we are made is taken not from the land, where we can live, but from the bottom of the sea. Recast this way, the relationship between earth and breath is more antagonistic than it is in the old story (because the bottom of the sea is so openly inhospitable to human life), but this exacerbation of the traditional, metaphysical opposition is not simply more of the same. Rather, it upsets the hierarchy of the terms in the opposition. Earth ceases to be merely the passive vessel for human life, waiting to receive it and to be completed by it. In its hostility to human life, this underwater earth is another kind of substrate of life, not active exactly in its creation (I’m talking myth here, not science), but not docile, secondary, or otherwise subordinate to divine breath either.
 
However the rewriting of the story for the age of television might or might not go, it is certain that what television actually shows is profoundly out of keeping with any of the familiar scenarios in which the earth is cast, however well-meaningly, in the role of the helpless victim of big oil. Seen from the at once earthly and otherworldly perspective of the deep ocean floor—a perspective we can occupy only televisually—big oil looked terribly small. The live stream of BP’s broken well in the Gulf upset the familiar moral scheme according to which it is up to the human beings who have allowed their human power to be seized and invested in the monstrosity of big oil to reclaim that power and reinvest it in such a way as to protect the helpless earth. Of course, big oil is a product of the alienation of human power, and there can be no bringing it down to size without reclaiming that power. But a claim to that power will only contribute to the general heating of the air if, casting the earth in the role of helpless victim, it denies the radical powerlessness that the live stream showed.
 
If humanity really had dominion over the earth, then we wouldn’t have been seeing what we were seeing in the live stream of the Gulf floor. Humanity would have been heroically plunging to the depths to seal the well and stop the bleeding. There was no lack of will, on anyone’s part; what was lacking was the power. Unlike any agent that could be called “God,” humanity does not have a power to save equal to its power to destroy, or equal to its technologically supplemented power to see. Its power to destroy itself—the earth, to which the poisonous oil after all belongs, will survive the end of humanity. No matter how much, how globally we warm it, we can never warm it to the point that it lives and dies with us. We may die of the heat we create in our environment, but the earth to which we return in dying will always be cold.
 
Indeed, the cold of it is such that there is no earthly possibility of embracing the actual earthliness of life—our actual humanity—without lifeless, mechanical arms such as those that televisual technology gives us. This is not a question of compensating for our “natural” weakness. In giving us these arms, these technologies do not give us more power, exactly, though their blanket coverage of the world from the bomb’s eye covers this up quite effectively. Think again of the uncanny form of those ROVs that shot the well even as they tried to repair it. Their arms were not able to repair what their unliving eyes could directly see. Those delicate and beautiful arms are ours, real prostheses, with all their horrifying insufficiencies, to stretch out or not in the place of the gigantesque phantom limbs with which, in our inevitably globalizing dreams, we convulsively wrap the cold earth in a warm clutch, desperately trying to bring the whole thing to life in the image of the tiny, highly contingent part that we are.
 

 

“The capacity to feel pleasure and pain, affectivity, aisthèsis, is independent of its possible articulation…. This time before the logos is called infantia”

(Lyotard, “The Affect-Phrase” 109).

 

“[A]n ‘infancy,’ thus, which would not be a period of the life cycle, but an incapacity to represent and bind a certain something”

(Lyotard, Heidegger and “the jews” 17).

 

Introduction

 
An infant child cannot speak; it murmurs and gurgles, grunts and groans, cries and screams, as the facility to speak in articulated language, though potential (held in abeyance, Lyotard repeatedly tells us), is not yet realized. Through a constant array of urgent needs, the infant reminds the adult world of all it lacks. Unwittingly negating the qualities of adulthood, the infant simultaneously seems to seek their restoration; the child is distressed, therefore comfort is sought from a parent; the child is hungry, so food is given; the child is frightened and cries, therefore assurance is given to prove that love and harmony are plentiful. We all pass through this time of infancy, yet little or no memory of it exists; we live this time before language through the stories told to us about our birth and of the type of baby we once were, and through photos and various other media that form a pastiche of a life that is ours, but not ours, in that we cannot remember it in any conscious sense. Memory is unprepared and ill-equipped to cope with this mysterious time in life, and any attempt at recollecting this radical “before” is bound to fail. In saying this, we acknowledge and accept that this infancy has been with us, even though it is recounted through others. In a special kind of way, this infancy makes its presence felt as a thread amongst threads in the polyphonous fabric of lived life that is “colored” by the present; this infancy, though not directly accessible, is singularly one’s own.
 
Lyotard’s notion of infancy incorporates these traits as part of an exegesis outlining the necessity of “an openness to non-being” that continues as “a debt that persists” and that we are obligated to honor in and through artistic action (“The Survivor” 163). This paper traces the contours of Lyotard’s approach to infancy as a pre-linguistic site whose sense of temporality differs from notions of lived and conscious time. The purpose of the paper is to explore both the dimensions of the debt that infancy demands of a body open to the touch of sensorial affect, and the requirement to pay in some way for this openness and affectivity. Lyotard evokes the nature of the infant body’s touch and its openness and receptivity to being touched in order to show how the aesthetic affect is both unavoidable and inescapable. The infancy born from this inevitable openness to affect comes at a price, however, as is graphically depicted in Lyotard’s essay on Kafka. The cruel incision of “the law” explored in the second section of this paper is described by Lyotard as the culturally “normed” and disciplined body that must “pay” for its infancy as the state of aesthetic openness. The infancy that Lyotard explores as a zone of indeterminacy inherent to the body that is open to affect eludes and escapes the determinations and certainties of the adult laws from which it emerges. This potential for aesthetic affectivity is described as infancy because of the affective state of inarticulacy and muteness that occurs before meaning and signification. The affective state of infancy means that art exists, and no system or apparatus of the law can harness that creativity as energy precisely because this mute infancy lies outside the “adult” world of articulation.
 
To many North American readers, the association of Lyotard with the notion of infancy will not be immediately recognizable. While the United States was famously receptive to the French “migration” of thought embodied in Foucault, Derrida, and Lyotard himself, particularly from the mid-1980s onwards, Lyotard’s corpus is still being translated into English. A notable example of this is the work Discours, figure (1971), originally Lyotard’s thesis submitted as part of his doctorat d’état in 1954, later translated by Antony Hudek and the late Mary Lydon, and released to English-speaking audiences in 2011 as Discourse, Figure. Another example pertinent to this paper is the set of essays entitled Lectures d’enfance, which, although translated and published in English, remain scattered in various journals and compilations that have emerged gradually over a thirty-year period and that continue to do so. The haphazard and nonlinear publication of many of the essays and works into English has meant the Anglo-American reception of various ideas such as infancy remains relatively unexplored. Lyotard was not one for teleological development, linearity, or explicit modes of communication. The context-specific nature of those essays that, as a whole, methodologically perform and explore “infancy” in a specifically Lyotardian vein has furthermore meant that links between infancy and other essays by Lyotard (such as “Prescription,” the one engaged in this paper) remain opaque to English-speaking audiences.
 
Familiar to North American audiences, on the other hand, is the notion of the “postmodern” and Lyotard’s pivotal articulation of its “condition” in his eponymous The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. While Lyotard later eschewed much of this essay’s content and moved to a more Freudian psycho-literary framework, it left an indelible and profound mark both on the mass recall of what Lyotard stood for and on the body of intellectual and cultural work from the mid-1980s onwards. I don’t engage with The Postmodern Condition at great length here, but I do note its striking theme of “performativity” as the computerized version of cultural and intellectual “performance,” in which nuance, subtlety, and sensorial affect risk being annihilated or “deleted” from the apparatus of the cultural memory. Although linking the later notion of infancy to performativity simplifies Lyotardian thematic coherence to the extreme, it also indicates his persistent concern with “bearing witness” to those elements of lived sensorial life that cannot necessarily be turned into “data.” The notion of infancy explored by Lyotard was furthermore heavily influenced by Freud, as I explain below, but also bears the ethical stamp of “the other” and of human responsibility to otherness per se as developed from the work of Levinas and Arendt, with perhaps the most notable development and recent engagement emerging from Giorgio Agamben’s work. The latter, particularly, develops a Lyotardian iteration of infancy as a “state of exception” in the juridical processes of Western culture and politics—a “zone” that is unknowable in the eyes of the law and, as a consequence, lies outside the realm of justice. Agamben develops this aspect of infancy in greater detail not only in his Infancy and History: The Destruction of Experience, but also in the poetic Idea of Prose, which frames infancy and—pertinent to this paper—Kafka’s In the Penal Colony within an argument that engages with a Lyotardian-inspired analysis of the political/affective/juridical apparatus of Western culture.
 
Another dimension of Lyotard’s oeuvre that remains underdeveloped in English-speaking contexts that anticipate the last decade of his writings in the 1990s, to which the infancy writings belong, is his engagement with avant-garde art and artists. While relatively famous for his activity as a radical left-wing activist in the Marxist organization Socialisme ou Barbarie (Socialism or Barbarism) during the late 1940s and 1950s, and then later as a fierce critic of Marxism in general, Lyotard’s work with painters in Central Europe and the United States is less well known in academia.¹ The “artistic” thread arguably runs through all of Lyotard’s thinking and writing on politics. This aesthetic theme is evident in his earlier formulation of the “differend” as the methodological device used to depict the inherent injustice of finding appropriate “phrases” (or idioms) in which to “phrase” political affect (The Differend: Phrases in Dispute). Lyotard sharpens his powers of aesthetic analysis, however, through the perspective of the figural dimension of the art space and the unknowability of aesthetic affect. Traversing a few nodal points on the surface of the Lyotardian oeuvre—the “figure” during the 70s, the “immaterial” and immateriality of artistic “matter” of the 1980s, the “inhuman” of the late 1980s, and the “inaudible” of the final set of writings dealing with Malraux and Augustine—indicates a distinctly artistic flavor of engagement with the temporal and spatial dimensions of thought, politics, and, indeed, art itself.
 
Lyotard’s infancy, however, is uniquely his. To arrive at this infant state, Lyotard works over the Freudian infantia and re-inscribes it as the persistent and relentless fissure within “bodily” space: an incalculable “blank” or “monstrous” presence that demands the body be both penetrable to the infant touch and indebted to this infancy precisely because of this penetrability. Lyotard dissipates the body, expanding it beyond anthropomorphic parameters and the logos into formations of immaterial matter that exist as a way of being in and toward space and time. He calls this positionality the “anima minima” or “minimal soul” that exists through the touch of the aesthetic event. Lyotard explores infancy as a zone in which the “work” in art is conveyed through an inaudible gesture that touches and alters temporality. He stretches the borders of the body to include infancy as a zone of pure affect at work inside the art object. This zone mobilizes the capacity to be touched from the outside by that artwork as a sensorial affect. In what follows, I trace the contours of Lyotard’s writing on aesthetics by investigating these touches within the full spectrum of the body as both an artistic and “fleshly” apparatus in possession of, but also held to ransom by, a specifically Lyotardian formulation of infancy as the space of bodily receptivity to the aesthetic event.
 
The paper is split into three sections that elaborate a notion of infancy in slightly different guises and according to different approaches. The first section gives an overall impression of Lyotard’s use of the term “infancy,” covering the use of the term “childhood” that becomes interchangeable with it in the later decade of writings that return to the influence of Freud. This section details why Lyotard would take such an active interest in the notion of infancy and childhood as a special space of Orwellian-inspired bodily resistance. The next section takes a different approach, and instead engages with one important text to provide a different perspective that explores the more complex nuances of this notion of infancy. I explore a literary appropriation of a short story by Kafka that depicts the violence to which the body is subjected when initiated into dominant social constructions described under the rubric of the “law.” In the essay “Prescription,” infancy is situated as the zone of indeterminacy that escapes constructs of determination and mastery and remains elusive to modern tendencies to prescribe and control differing modes of the law. The final section draws on the previous iterations of infancy and explores the way infancy incorporates a dimension of both pleasure and pain. “Blood” is the symbolic trace that testifies to the pleasure and pain and to the joy and suffering of the aesthetic affect. Debt and reparation make up the conceptual thread connecting these three depictions of infancy to each other, and thus the first section considers debt as an obligation to honor the infant state, the second section considers the violent price a body must pay for harboring its own infancy, and the final section considers the payment of affect as the cost the infant body must bear.
 

Beginning Anew: Honoring the Infant

 
Why and how is this artistic-oriented honoring of the infant necessary? Here we embark on a particularly elusive and vexing dimension of Lyotard’s “writing.” In an essay dedicated to his own son in Le Postmoderne expliqué aux enfants, the collection of essays addressed to children, Lyotard exhorts the infant David—and the readers he knows will come later—to “extend the line of the body in the line of writing” (96).² By providing a connecting conceptual thread between the body and writing, Lyotard encourages an expansion of the zone of affectivity as a space that harbors its own resistance to dominant modes of discourse. This connection of the body to creative force expands the fleshly borders of the body into an affective site in which an unpredictable event might happen. Extending the lines of the body in lines of writing extends the possibilities of an infant encounter, as well as providing greater flexibility and the possibility of thinking and creating outside the already known. Lyotard’s notion of “writing” both embodies infancy and connects the body to a site of infancy understood as an aesthetic event and affective state that exceeds the borders of the sensing body.
 
The essay entitled “Gloss on Resistance” draws on George Orwell’s 1984 and the resistance posed by the lead character Winston’s diary entries as the only moment in which freedom could ever be exercised within the oppressive and totalitarian system he inhabits. The infancy “within” Winston as indeterminacy and lost memory extends to the infancy of language in the creative labor of Winston’s diary entries. Lyotard sees Winston’s desire to express himself in ways that escape the confines of the prescribing and controlling system as the most potent form of resistance; Winston’s childhood is his alone. No matter how ubiquitous and controlling the present society, this childhood can never be erased. For Lyotard, Winston’s writing is a labor “allied to the work of love, but it inscribes the trace of the initiatory event in language and thus offers to share it, if not as a sharing of knowledge, at least as a sharing of a sensibility that it can and should take as communal” (96–97). This sharing of a sensibility is far more important to Lyotard, in that everyone has their own singular expression and occurrence of infancy and childhood. The “facts” of these childhoods are not important; what is important is simply that everyone has a childhood, at the very least in terms of an unknown past or area of indeterminacy. For Lyotard, Winston has his “real life” equivalents in the form of Adorno and Benjamin. The childhood that Lyotard ascribes to the writings of these two writers cannot be captured, and remains elusive while still providing the impetus for new beginnings. A story-like manner befitting the subject matter initiates the reader into this open sense of childhood:
 

Let us recall—in opposition to this murder of the instant and singularity— those short pieces in Walter Benjamin’s One Way Street and A Berlin Childhood, pieces Theodor Adorno would call “micrologies.” They do not describe events from childhood; rather they capture the childhood of the event and inscribe what is uncapturable about it. And what makes an encounter with a word, odor, place, book, or face into an event is not its newness when compared to other “events.” It is its very value as initiation. You only learn this later. It cut open a wound in the sensibility. You know this because it has since reopened and will reopen again, marking out the rhythm of a secret and perhaps unnoticed temporality. This wound ushered you into an unknown world, but without ever making it known to you. Such initiation initiates nothing, it just begins.

(90–91)

 
To complement and expand this notion of childhood, as an aging man Lyotard increasingly develops a notion of infancy informed by Freud’s “sexuated (sexuée)” body (“Freud, Energy and Chance” 11).³ For Freud, the “sexual” mobilizes the body’s receptivity to excitation and affection, and Lyotard incorporates this “excitable” dimension of the body in his own continuing investigation into the negative presence of a “formless mass” that arrests, moves, and excites in a work of art (“Anima Minima” 17). Lyotard weaves these Freudian-sexual and affective-artistic conceptual threads into a complex yet malleable web encompassing art, presence, and time. The formulation of infancy that incorporates artistic and sensorial dimensions preoccupies and colors the final decade of his writings, of which the major works Heidegger and “the jews,” Postmodern Fables, The Inhuman, Lectures d’enfance, Misère de la philosophie, Signed Malraux, Soundproof Room, and The Confession of Augustine are emblematic. These last works, along with the various journal articles and essays from this period, employ the constant pedagogical task of rewriting and re-working the enigma of “presence” in art. They try to elaborate this artistic presence as a gesture emerging from within the artistic space. Proceeding from his philosophical engagement with the inarticulate unconscious via Freud, Lyotard incorporates a re-articulation of the Kantian sublime “spasm” as constitutive of the aesthetic experience. From this angle, art as testimony “remembers” its infancy, recalling the sublime as “the ungraspable and undeniable ‘presence’ of a something which is other than mind and which, ‘from time to time,’ occurs….” (“Time Today” 75). These qualities render infancy with a temporality that separates it, when given artistic co-ordinates, from chronological measurements of time. For Lyotard, this bears significantly on later thoughts of resistance within late-capitalist formulations of captured and pre-programmed notions of time.⁴
 
As pointed out by Geoffrey Bennington, this transition to a notion of infancy can be tracked alongside a career-long preoccupation and attachment to “[s]ignifying the other of signification” (“Figure, Discourse” 57).his emerges at the very least, and even if not fully acknowledged as such, as the theme or motif of an “evasive configuration” (5). Through the “libidinal band” in Libidinal Economy, the “figure” of Discourse, Figure, the “unpresentable” in the works of the postmodern, and the ethically incommensurable and heterogeneous language idioms and games in The Differend, Lyotard “finally” arrives at infancy, which Bennington describes as “less a self-present state, still less a period of life that is to be brought to presence, as it were, and more a mute (or all but mute) accompaniment or lining of all my more adult-seeming utterances, accessible always only indirectly or laterally, inventively, ‘artistically’, in ‘writing’” (“Figure, Discourse” 58). Infancy is seen here not as chronologically prior to adulthood, but more as a baffling and un-graspable zone that, Lyotard muses provocatively, squats over, within, and alongside the expanded body of the artwork or “adult” as signified or presented discourse or apparatus. Direct access to infancy, a clandestine visitor of the adult body, is never granted but instead must be creatively coaxed out of hiding. Infancy does not answer to direct demands.
 
Traversing these later writings are the artistic “names” of this silent infancy, all of which are endowed with a certain negativity. Arakawa’s “blank,” Paul Klee’s “uncolor” grey, and Pascal Quignard’s mute death rattle are mentioned alongside other literary and theoretically inspired “names” such as Jacques Lacan’s “Thing” or la chose and Samuel Beckett’s “unnameable.”⁵ These infant modalities are delicately filigreed throughout Lyotard’s writing and into his renewed engagement with psychoanalysis. Bennington further points out that the focus of these late writings shifts more to the silence of the differend itself and to its “affective dimension” (8), something Lyotard spoke of as being the “supplement” to his eponymous book.⁶ The gap between signification and presentation is never resolved and must not be, for it is the condition of silence that marks itself as a differend. The notion of infancy articulated in the later writings bears on the silent affect provoked by the differend and aligns with the destitution and “misère” of the infant encounter as incomplete, inarticulate, ungraspable, and unprepared.
 
In the set of essays The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, Lyotard’s focus intensifies around the figure of the infant as articulated through a notion of a childhood that is depicted alongside an indebtedness never to be paid off. (“This debt to childhood is one which we never pay off” (The Inhuman 7).) Recalling Fynsk’s proposition of speaking of the passage from an infancy of the body to an aesthetic mode of encounter, these writings emphasize a critical approach to a humanism that hermetically seals off childhood as a past period of the life cycle. Lyotard warns, however, that that the creative impetus (or drive [“Trieb”]) emerges precisely through the traits of indeterminacy and unpreparedness, and these qualities make their appearance in their “childish” guises of distress, anxiety, and fear. In line with the questioning of the human in this set of essays, Lyotard maintains that distressed childhood as a figure of infancy “appears” and haunts the human long past the end of its supposed anthropological determination and, by doing so, heightens the very possibilities of existence. He explains further: “Shorn of speech, incapable of standing upright, hesitating over the objects of its interest, not able to calculate its advantages, not sensitive to common reason, the child is eminently the human because its distress heralds and promises things possible” (3–4). The negative dimension of this formulation is clear: the child is human because of the qualities that make it less than human (or “inhuman”), and the delay in entering humanity is what makes the infant figure so potent. Lyotard continues, “Its initial delay in humanity, which makes it the hostage of the adult community, is also what manifests to this community the lack of humanity it is suffering from, and which calls on it to become more human” (4).
 
The passage between a childhood that outlines a non-representational oblivion of infancy as constitutive of a negative-ontological mode of being arrives at a creative encounter of infancy as a “remainder” that cannot be assimilated by discursive and representational forms of signification. In Lyotard’s lexicon at this point, infancy names a radical encounter engendering an enigmatic silence that both appends itself to and distends discourse. In its radical excess, Lyotard’s formulation of infancy pushes past the limits of a specifically psychoanalytic theory. To listen for the enigmatic silence of the infant figure is, for Lyotard, to acknowledge the wound that infancy inflicts on the maturation of thought, discourse, and aesthetic matter; we write against words, we compose music against silence, we paint against the visible. Infancy haunts, but it does not speak. The text discussed in the following section is testimony to this haunting.
 

“Prescription”⁷

 

We speak of a “blood debt.” But there is blood and blood. Sanguis: the blood of life in the arteries and veins; and cruor: the blood that is spilled. The first nourishes the flesh. It gives it its hue of blueness, its pinkness, its pallor, its sallowness, its early-morning freshness, the infinite juxtaposition of nuances that drive the painter and the philosopher crazy; an immaterial matter. As for the law, this innocence of the flesh is criminal. It must expiate this fleshly innocence. The blood that flows is called cruor. Expiation requires cruelty, crudelitas versus fidelitas.

(“Prescription” 180)

 
Written in the aftermath of a virulent backlash to his provocative polemic Heidegger and “the jews,” “Prescription” turns to literature to elaborate a sense of violence, guilt, and manipulation that mirrors the horror of the Holocaust and also elaborates a certain dimension of infancy as existing alongside a notion of inescapable and interminable “originary” guilt. Given first as a lecture in 1989 and published in Lectures d’enfance, the essay draws upon Kafka’s darkly ironic short story In the Penal Colony and supplements Heidegger and “the jews” (hereafter referred to as HTJ) by creatively drawing on Freud’s unconscious in covert and enigmatic ways. Both HTJ and “Prescription” deal with infancy in a way that elaborates on what can exceed and escape the clutches of what is known and heard. The earlier text deals with the inaudible affect that is “heard” in exemplary fashion in Talmudic law and that became the object of termination in the anti-Semitism of National Socialism. “Prescription” deals with a corporeal infancy that escapes the determination of a law that wants to claim and remove it as the part of the body that resists legal prescription.
 
That these two texts can be considered companion pieces is not immediately obvious, apart from their proximate publication dates. Avital Ronell first hinted at this in her review, and Lyotard himself mentioned the links in a late interview (“Before the Law, After the Law”). It is tempting to read “Prescription” as an alternative approach from a man frustrated by negative feedback, and Christopher Fynsk reports Lyotard’s genuine distress and anxiety at the negative view many of his colleagues and readers held toward his work on “the jews.” The essay also depicts the theme of originary guilt first articulated in HTJ in a more violent but perhaps more palatable version because of the fictional framework. Lyotard explains: “Heidegger and ‘the jews’ was a first attempt, written very quickly and impatiently (for which I have been much criticized); the text on Kafka was written more patiently, though apparently, if I may say, under the law of Kafka himself” (40).
 
“Prescription,” then, creatively embellishes and improvises on HTJ’s depiction of testifying to that which escapes the “apparatus.” The notion of the political as a historical scene and apparatus was used in HTJ along with the accompanying application to the site of the conscious and unconscious derived from Freudian metapsychology. Here the political/psychical usage of the apparatus provided the site for demonstrating how the annihilation of the Jews testified to what was supposed to disappear through their annihilation. Conversely, the acts of killing and of bringing onto the political apparatus the anti-Semitism in “Enlightened,” “modern” Europe actually testified to the indeterminate and uncontrollable dimensions that such an “Enlightened” modernity failed to harness or acknowledge. What escapes the apparatus cannot disappear or be forgotten, precisely because nothing is remembered. The mute indecipherability of “the jews” could not be exterminated because its “existence” lies outside the political apparatus capable of hearing. In Lyotard’s fictional demonstration of this, the body’s infancy lies forever outside the reach of the apparatus of death, no matter how effective the execution.
 
Lyotard turns to Kafka’s fictional torture device to help explain the inhabitancy of an infancy that renders the body guilty before any “touch” of the “law” as language, discourse, knowledge, or memory (even education) can “discipline” or know it. In describing Kafka’s brutally clear writing as “white with hallucination,” Lyotard opts for a metaphorical bloodletting of the story that drips from his pen and stains his own text with the “blood” of Kafka’s condemned man (“Prescription” 76). Evocative descriptions of incising and engraving flesh and of draining blood that the body “pays” for are presented as constitutive, precisely, of a flesh-and-blood body. This is the infancy, like the immaterial matter that colors and breathes life into the human body through warm blood and blue veins in the above quote, that must be “expiated,” drained, and annihilated by a law demanding that it know and control the body. The law, however, can never know this translucent beauty inherent to the infancy within it, and as such is “jealous” of this enigmatic radiance “before” the touch of the law.
 
As Lyotard declares, his essay “Prescription” is written “under the law” of Kafka, which indicates a shared sentiment whose stakes could be described as “not to create beauty, but rather to bear witness to a liability to that voice that, within man, exceeds man, nature, and their classical concordance” (“Return Upon the Return” 198). Rather than direct explication, Lyotard steers clear of an explanation of Kafka’s intentions in terms of the mechanics of the story, and instead creatively interprets the feeling and nuance of Kafka’s writing as a way of continuing and “honoring” Kafka’s artistry. The “law” that is obeyed in this approach means that the meanings of both Kafka’s story and of Lyotard’s appropriation of Kafka remain elusive. This might explain why Anne Tomiche describes Lyotard as being particularly cautious when dealing with literature, despite his frequent references to literary sources as a way of explaining philosophical concepts. Tomiche explains Lyotard’s care to “always underscore how the commentary is never adequate to the literary text” (150) in his use of these literary examples throughout his writing. In this context, Lyotard is more interested in the tone and “diffracted” traces within the infancy of language deployed by Kafka (in extreme form, according to Lyotard) than he is in a literary commentary or character analysis. Lyotard does, however, outline the sweep of the story, and it is worth a brief excursion here to do the same.
 
Set on a nameless, geographically isolated tropical island, Kafka’s short story In the Penal Colony follows a Western explorer who observes the execution of a criminal at the behest of the colony’s recently appointed Commandant. The execution is officiated by a loyal officer who was an ardent supporter of the former (Old) Commandant of the island. It is the Old Commandant who bequeathed the “fabulous” machine of death to the stewardship of the officer (and thereby inspired the continuing frenzied ardor of his officer-disciple). The machine, simply called the “Apparatus,” is a complex conglomeration of mechanisms set in a structure that sits in the open next to a deep pit in the earth. The officer takes great delight, while climbing a ladder to check the Apparatus, in explaining to the (slightly nonplussed) explorer its differing elements and the various functions of its different parts. Lyotard explains these parts and their uses in the following:
 

The officer describes to the Western explorer—in French—the machine for execution and how its parts work: the tilting Bed, the box of cogwheels called the Designer, and the Harrow, with its glass needles irrigated by water. The machine writes the sentence on the body of the condemned, recto and verso. Or rather, it cuts it into his body until he dies, bloodless. The coup de grace is delivered by a long steel needle (the only one in the apparatus) that pierces his forehead. After which, the bed tips the tortured body into a pit.

(176)

 

Further details are revealed. The “Bed” is molded to fit the human body with appended belts to keep the accused pinned down, and is smothered in a layer of absorbent cotton wool to help soak up the blood he will shed. The Bed, evocative of a pig on a spit, slowly rotates once the victim has been securely fastened, to allow fresh flesh to be exposed for inscription. The “Harrow,” consisting of glass needles, is contoured around the human form, and the incisions of its needles are controlled to gouge the skin evenly and uniformly as they go deeper. The “Designer,” consisting of the cogwheels, has been pre-programmed to control the length and administration of the written sentence that is followed, literally, to the exact letter of the law.

 
Not fully comprehending these details at first, the explorer becomes in equal measure more intrigued and horrified as his knowledge grows, until he finally asks what heinous crime the condemned man has committed to warrant such a brutal and tortured demise. The answer, of course, is that the condemned man does not know his crime, has not been convicted through a trial, nor has he even had the chance of defending himself; his guilt is original and certain. “Guilt,” says the officer to the explorer, “is never to be doubted” (Kafka 145). The officer’s farcical explanation is drawn directly from Kafka’s text, with Lyotard quoting it for full impact:
 

If I had first called the man before me and interrogated him, things would have got into a confused tangle. He would have told lies, and had I exposed these lies he would have backed them up with more lies, and so on and so forth. As it is, I’ve got him and I won’t let him go.

(Kafka qtd. in “Prescription” 181)

 

The Violent Touch of the Law

 
What can we make of this “originary” sin when considered next to Lyotard’s notion of infancy?⁸ In tracing a line from the guilt of the condemned man to a guilt that is both singular and universal, Lyotard honors his own methodological dictum of extending the lines of the body in writing. Kafka’s story can be read primarily as a critique of the aestheticization of the political, with violence inflicted as punishment on the “political” body through the touch of the law that is inscribed onto its adult surface. In Heidegger and “the jews,” the Apparatus was a construct of modernity that held an arrogant fidelity to certainty and mastery and was exemplified by the rise of the Nazi Party. In “Prescription,” the Apparatus is a more obvious construct of brutality that leaves a mark on the flesh of the body by trying to acquire, through draining the blood, the beauty that renders the body an infant through this blood. The body must pay for its infancy by relinquishing the ungraspable and elusive infant quality that it shelters. In the elegantly written passage that speaks of the blood debt, Lyotard takes us one step closer to illuminating the infancy that the Apparatus is so desperate to acquire, and that kills as soon as it takes hold.
 
Kafka would succumb to tuberculosis-induced starvation in 1924 before the horrors of the Holocaust, but as Czech Jews, his sisters would all be transported, first to the Lodz Ghetto, and eventually to deportation and death in the gas chambers of Auschwitz. The blind faith of Kafka’s officer and the ruthless performativity of the Apparatus point a prescient and chilling barb at the dangerously inhumane dimension of the bureaucratic-inspired terror that would begin to grip Europe a mere ten years after Kafka’s death and that was steadily gaining ground during his lifetime. Although Lyotard sees the inscription of the law onto the body in a more figurative sense, there is something extremely disconcerting about the image of the fine needles cutting into the flesh of the condemned man for a crime that, beyond the title “convict” or “Jew,” remained incomprehensible and secret. The devoted officer in the penal colony points out there is no use in knowing the crime: “There would be no point in telling him. He’ll learn it on his body” (Kafka qtd. in “Prescription” 180).
 
The death camps of the Second World War would be the literal application of the Harrow’s inscription on the skin of the “condemned,” and the crime would be just as baffling. Kafka’s “hallucinatory” powers would be prophetic when history became literally tattooed onto skin in the form of concentration camp serial numbers and “guilt” would be beyond scrutiny and recrimination. As Rosi Braidotti so eloquently states (here evoking the analogy of the tattoo), this inscription on the flesh that history inflicts is inherently violent and, at the very least, leaves a decisive impression: “One may be empowered or beautified by it” she goes on to say, “but most people are not; some just die of it” (3). Kafka’s fictional penal colony, always intended as a satirical comment, instead started to colonize the realm of real life in ways that would have directly affected his personal situation and indeed impacted tragically on that of his family. History’s inscription did indeed prove lethal.
 
No doubt tainted with this historical bloodlust as reparation for perceived “crimes,” Lyotard’s interpretation of the story takes a slightly different tack and intensifies the temporal disjuncture between the incision, the bleeding wound, and the debt of the crime. If we are to view the chronological order of Lyotard’s writing within a schematic structure (which is problematic for many reasons⁹ ), the analogy of the first touch of the law “before” the punishment of cut flesh would be emphasized within the rubric of technological efficiency and the “blind” performativity that Lyotard identified in the writings of the late 1970s and early 1980s, of which The Postmodern Condition is the most famous example. In Lyotard’s interpretation of the story, the Designer carries out the inscription of the crime, which remains secret to everyone but the Old Commandant. The instructions that are fed into it (let’s say programmed) ensure the entire Apparatus “knows” exactly how it will go about inscribing the condemned body before the execution takes place. The analogy of the computer is drawn directly: “This box [as a component of the Designer] is what we now term the ‘dead memory’ in a computer, the text of the program being its living memory. Once the program is inserted, one presses the Enter key” (“Prescription” 177). Lyotard takes the analogy of a computer further when considering the performance of the Apparatus as a whole: “The machine is blind not because it does not know how to read,” he explains, “but because it can read only the prescriptions inscribed in the language of the former Commandant” (177). This is crucial to the performance of the Apparatus; it follows instructions that have to have been entered and “prescribed” ahead of time. There is no ability to judge or to experiment; the Apparatus, like the computer, simply obeys the orders that have been prescribed without the necessity for reflection or thought.
 
Clearly Lyotard is interested in more than a straightforward analogy between the penal colony’s torture device and the blind performativity of technology, and here a further subtlety emerges in his interpretation of the story. The violence inflicted by the Harrow is, in a more nuanced reading, the reparation the body “pays” for having been touched a “first” time before the law of the Harrow. Lyotard reaches beyond the performative mode of the Apparatus as a blind technical device to a figurative analysis of the violence that any induction inscribes upon the body, particularly in such unavoidable and potentially calamitous examples as language and discourse. The infancy constituting an innocence of unfettered openness before the law (of language, of adulthood, of knowledge, of education) requires a payment as a wrong—this innocence, Lyotard paradoxically asserts, is guilty precisely because it is innocent and this in itself reveals complicities between the law and infancy. Nothing can stop the violation of this innocence in its induction processes, and to a certain extent this is inevitable: a necessary evil. The law, then, also needs this infancy in order to be enacted as the law.
 
The complicity and reciprocity that Lyotard identifies within the paradox of infancy is aptly illustrated by Claudia Benthien’s observation that Kafka, when writing of the quivering body as the flesh is inscribed, seems to anthropomorphize the Apparatus by describing it as leaning forward with anticipation toward the body. Benthien, through Kafka, isolates the almost ecstatic dimension exhibited by the Apparatus in the act of penetrating and puncturing skin. In the context of Lyotard’s analysis, this ecstasy is channeled into the enthusiasm to cut out, expose, or capture the immaterial matter and “infant” quality that lies under the skin. The fluid that escapes these wounds, though, is not the blood that provides the aesthetic beauty as the immaterial matter of the skin that Lyotard calls sanguis. Instead, this is the murderous black blood of cruor, the blood made visible when reaching for the life-blood of the veins that colors the skin and, innocently, gives it its “hue” and immaterial radiance. Infancy as innocence is the crucial point because of the implication to the body and its aesthetic potentiality. “Innocence,” continues Lyotard in regard to the law, “is in all certainty the sin because it knows nothing of good and evil…. The heading, what comes first, is not the commandment; it is birth or infancy, the aesthetic body” (182). In this reading, innocence as infancy is akin to Lyotard’s formulation of the affect-phrase. This innocence is embedded in the silent but always present potentiality of the infant body.
 

The Blood of Affect

 

But the wound we are talking about … bleeds incessantly, it demands, of course, to be treated, but also not to be treated, to be respected…

(“Before the Law, After the Law” 52)

 
Lyotard’s notion of infancy is developed further. The temporality of the “wound” of childhood as an event now needs to be reintroduced, and the “body” that has been strapped into the torture device and cut into by the Kafkaesque law needs to be repositioned. This final iteration of infancy is a culmination both of the Benjamin-inflected event of childhood as an opening into “secret temporalities” outlined in the first section of this paper, and of the elusive intangibility of infancy as constantly under threat in the second section. This third iteration of infancy requires a transformation of Kafka’s punctured body from a human/political apparatus to one far more amorphous and temporal—a “surface” on which the cut of the law shifts to a “touch” of aesthetic affect. This touch is no less violent in its own way, and Lyotard will call upon the violence shared by “cut” and “touch” as a necessary mechanism of displacement that occurs through aesthetic affect. The epigraph above, however, forces a reconsideration of the attempt at shutting down infancy that Kafka’s parable seems to signal, and the needles and the Harrow dissolve to leave, instead, a constant bleeding wound.
 
What is curious in the above quote is Lyotard’s urge to respect as well as to alleviate the seeping blood of the wound, to honor the cut in some distinct way so that “blood” can continue to flow. This iteration of infancy is perhaps Lyotard’s most mysterious, and yet innovative, theoretical musing. Different from the Marxian-inflected structure of the apparatus that we saw in the above section, the “body,” in Lyotard’s last attempt, must have the perishable fragility of flesh, blood, and beating pulse. Lyotard now positions the immediate violence of Kafka’s needles drawing blood within the immediacy of the bodily context of sensing the temporal aesthetic affect. Rather than taking or shutting down infancy, the bleeding wound referred to above is the inscription of being “touched” by art. The quality of being cut into, the positionality involved in the receptiveness of the touch, and the seeping blood all serve to complicate the notion of capturing the infancy “under” the skin. This slightly altered perspective turns the “uncapturability” of infancy into the trace of what is left behind. Instead of capturing infancy through puncturing skin, the wound is repositioned as the instantaneous inscription etched through the temporal coordinates of the event. Blood is the proof that “something” has occurred, the sign that the body has been exceeded and that sensibility has been affected beyond what it can sense.
 
The demands Lyotard makes on us here can be described in this way: We pay for what we are at the expense of ourselves. Put otherwise, art is the reminder that infancy, as the quality of human negation, is precisely what makes us human. We pay to live, to think, to create, and what we pay with is the instant threat of never doing any of those things again, of being, essentially, anaesthetized to the vibrancy of life. Kafka’s brutal tattooing of flesh, of violent bloodletting, serves for Lyotard as both the depiction of the inscription of the law, a predominantly brutal form of power, and as the celebration of the touch of the event as a clearing of potentiality and life. Blood is the symbol of both the debt and the answering of a demand, of both the threat and the joy of the event that “occurs” instantaneously and without warning or meaning. Lyotard describes this simultaneous affection that consists of both pleasure and pain as a double bind, held within the temporality of the aesthetic event. “Art, writing give grace to the soul condemned to the penalty of death, but in such a way as not to forget it” (“Anima Minima” 245). Infancy, as a state of pure and open reception, is the reminder of a vulnerability that is imbued with both privation and potentiality.
 

Ending and Beginning

 
This paper has explored the notion of infancy, arguably not a well-known dimension of Lyotard’s work, that informs the guiding methodology he uses as a theoretical and performative approach to writing. I have described Lyotard’s depiction of infancy as a state of unadorned openness and receptiveness. Lyotard’s writing on this topic heralds the final decade and works of his career, and complicates the work on the Kantian sublime as the instantaneous mixture of both the pleasure and pain of sensuous affect. I also contend that infancy, for Lyotard, serves as a pivotal methodological device in which the Aristotelian dimension of affect as a disturbance of the “soul” is reinscribed so as to reposition his earlier work on the “political.” This paper, finally, has presented the complexity of Lyotard’s exploration of the temporal and affective dimensions of the event, which he continues to address in his last three major works (Soundproof Room, Signed Malraux, and The Confession of Augustine).
 
For Lyotard, the body is always in excess of the law, always “there” beforehand, always an untamable cluster of potentialities that are open and receptive to the inscriptions and touches of affect. This potentiality comes at a price, however, and this paper has explored the privation of infancy as the negation of all modes of expression, meaning, and articulation. Infancy allows the body to exceed itself to reach beyond the borders of what it can sense, but this capacity for affectivity exists as the debt that must be paid at the expense of the body. Infancy can be approached only as a series of beginnings, which ensures that artistic creation will continue as long as people are subject to birth and death. This is the debt that is paid for in Kafka’s blood, but also in never fully exhausting the ability to create anew.
 

“It is only in the burning house that the fundamental architectural problem becomes visible for the first time.”

–Giorgio Agamben

“Enmity is the motor of the whole.”

–Michael Haneke

 

Introduction

 
Let me open with a sweeping statement: Biopolitical cinema, exemplified by Michael Winterbottom, Lars von Trier, Michael Haneke, Alfonso Cuarón, David Cronenberg, Gabriel Range, Roland Emmerich, David Fincher, and others, has questioned the ability of representative democracy to handle a catastrophic situation. Beyond that, biopolitical film has undermined the moral and political legitimacy of the democratic system as a whole, mostly—but not always—criticizing it from a left-wing perspective. The first step we must take to appreciate this is to return to the formative moments of biopolitics as a concept: the creation of the concept and its affirmative use by German post-Nietzscheans of the 1920s and ‘30s, the French critique during the late 1970s, and the current translation of both to a set of post-9/11 images. What unites all three historical moments is, first, the use of a presumed state of emergency or a “cultural crisis” in order to plead for urgent reform, and, second, the use of biopolitics as a critical concept aimed at a false liberal claim to legitimate power and its abuse. The concept of biopolitics identified—from its first moment seventy years ago—the hidden but shared power structure that both liberalism and totalitarianism use in favor of their eukonomia of life. The shared radical legacy has convinced directors of recent biopolitical films to turn back to sources of inspiration from 1920s Germany and to their attempt to ground a fair, simultaneous critique of totalitarianism and democracy. As a hint of the argument that follows, I’ll just say that the current attraction to a distant era has its roots in three phenomena:
 

1. 1.
   Politically: A growing suspicion of democratic politics in its current form.
2. 2.
   Philosophically and culturally: A fascination with biological catastrophes and cultural crises, as it appears in the German Kulturkritik.
3. 3.
   Historically: A renewed interest in the 1920s marked by radical experiments in aesthetics, philosophy, and politics.

 

In this context, one thinks of Roland Emmerich’s The Day after Tomorrow as a good example of a conservative and authoritarian approach and Michael Winterbottom’s Code 46, Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men, or Lars von Trier’s trilogy Dogville, Manderlay, and Melancholia as exemplary of the progressive, anti-authoritarian perspective. Similarly to the radical critique of the 1920s, put forth by radicals from both left and right of the center, contemporary biopolitical film seems to focus on the urgent need to expose and undermine the fallacy of centrism and consensus. From a biopolitical perspective, authority means much more than a democratic norm or a social contract and should not be confused with those.

 
As a distinct strand in current cinema suggests, our political culture sees itself reflected in the dark horizon of 1920s Germany: a state of extreme creativity on the verge of extinction. A catastrophic, dystopian view of Western culture controls the narrative for Winterbottom, Cuarón, Cronenberg, Emmerich, and von Trier. All use the science-fiction genre to question a present process via its futuristic horizon, covered with flames. Other films, like Gabriel Range’s mockumentary Death of a President, research the mechanism of control and power and use biopolitical critique, including the presumed state of emergency (the murder of a president), in order to depict it. Lars von Trier goes the other way, and constructs—similarly to Giorgio Agamben’s biopolitical argumentation in The State of Exception—a narrative that adopts the aesthetic tools of 1920s Germany in order to criticize the American politics of the present. Von Trier’s Zentropa (1991) along with his more recent Dogville (2003), Manderlay (2005), and Melancholia (2011) can be seen as a sequence relying on the same biopolitical logic. The gist of von Trier’s own version of a biopolitical critique owes much to his post-Nietzschean thrust: His attempt to expose a will to power at the heart of liberal ethics revolves around modern democracy’s biopolitical interest in the individual body of the citizen. The implied conclusion is a plea to destroy liberal society for the sake of exposure and correction.

From Nietzsche to Foucault

 
Analyzing in detail representative examples from both “artistic” and “popular” cinema shows that the fascination with “something powerful and dangerous” in general, and with Nietzschean politics in particular, has not faded. As Nietzsche says in Ecce Homo (1888), “I am no man, I am dynamite” (782). Ecce Homo, one should recall, is a Latin translation of Pontius Pilate’s call in the Gospel of John 19:5: “Behold the man.” The end of “man” and the transformation of the human into a dynamite-carrier implies the end of one civilization and the beginning of a new one.
 
A new—albeit strangely familiar—plea to put an end to existing political culture is echoed strongly in recent films, but its first moment of popularization occurred in Germany in the 1920s (Aschheim). Developed by post-Nietzschean philosophers, a daring fusion of aesthetics and politics opened the way to Nietzsche “beyond politics” by using the idea of exception in order to reflect back on politics and norms from the perspective of their negation (Schnädelbach). This line of thinking, sometimes referred to as nihilism, identifies the “philosophy of destruction” and the catastrophic Nietzschean “annihilator par excellence” with Europe’s most “advanced critique of itself, one more radical and open, more serious and penetrating, than [any] foreign critique” (Löwith 206, 175). Affiliating the theme of catastrophe with a form of radical critique has itself a past, as Hans-Joachim Lieber showed; he addresses the political exception and the concept of the Endzeit (end of time) in the post-Nietzscheanism of the 1920s (2).
 
Nietzsche was probably the first to point out the capacity of exceptionalism and to expose destruction as a tool, and, in more concrete political terms, to uncover the democratic-urban culture of secrecy and exception. First he pointed out the finality of the human itself: He used the “present consciousness” of the animal—“the animal lives unhistorically”—to ridicule the humanist: “He who wants to strive for and promote the culture of a people should strive for and promote this higher unity and join in the destruction of modern bogus cultivatedness for the sake of a true culture.” The place of “cultivatedness” is of course the city, where culture is commodified and used to mask both individual helplessness and political illusions:
 

The history of his city becomes for him the history of himself; he reads its walls, its towered gate, its rules and regulations. . . . Here we lived, he says to himself, for here we are living; and here we shall live, for we are tough and not to be ruined overnight. Thus with the aid of this “we” he looks beyond his own individual transitory existence and feels himself to be the spirit of his house, his race, his city.
 

(On the Uses 61, 80)

 

The result is a renewed emphasis on exceptionalism and an urgent plea to avoid the temptation of urbanism offered by the consensus, a democratic collective offering nothing but a retroactive justification for the exception.

 
Rethinking those same lines in “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” Michel Foucault returned to the very roots of historical thinking and examined Nietzsche’s impact on it. He translated Nietzsche’s critique in Untimely Meditations into a reformulation of history’s understanding of power: “Humanity installs each of its violences in a system of rules and thus proceeds from domination to domination. . . . [This is] a history whose perspective on all that precedes it implies the end of time, a completed development” (378–79). The end of time here would also be the end of political action, and as a result of politics as such. In Power/Knowledge Foucault expresses this in explicit terms, describing Nietzsche as not only beyond political convention, but beyond political theory as well: “Nietzsche is the philosopher of power, a philosopher who managed to think power without having to confine himself within a political theory in order to do so” (Gordon 53). Nietzsche, in other words, is an ultimate point of reference, the end of the end, the point of no return.
 
In The History of Sexuality Foucault explains sovereignty through a contemporary notion of power, inverting the Enlightenment idea of a body politic and arguing that the constraints imposed on sexuality for the sake of governmental codification in the eighteenth century became in the twentieth century a more totalizing “biopolitical” intrusion. From a mere codification of normative and non-normative aimed at strengthening the rule of the sovereign, modern sovereignty claims dominion over each and every organ of the body as well as each and every action of the mind that operates it (133–60). Foucault explicitly connects this process with the post-Nietzschean crisis of culture and democratic politics that culminated with the German election of 1933: a principal form of end-of-time, “the peak of power.” It is unsurprising that Foucault’s concept of biopolitics returns to 1920s and ‘30s Germany; the era of totalitarianism is for him the ultimate realization of biopolitical power. Yet the rise of totalitarianism only extended and materialized an embedded potential of power/knowledge that first appeared in the liberal context. As Foucault himself explains in his late lectures on The Birth of Biopolitics, “Liberalism is a word that comes to us from Germany.” And even more specifically: “The [Liberal] German form is linked to the Weimar Republic,” culminating with a model of
 

unlimited growth of the state . . . : Everything presented by the Nazis as the destruction of the bourgeois and capitalist state are in fact supplements of the state, a state in the process of being born, institutions undergoing stratification. A consequence of this, and what enables the ordoliberals to draw a different conclusion, is that there is in fact a necessary link between this economic organization and this growth of the state.

(22, 78, 112–13)

 

In Security, Territory, Population Foucault continues to ground and substantiate biopolitics as the control of population via “mechanisms of security” “in relation to the desert or desertification due to major human catastrophe” (67) or “the application of an economy…that is to say, supervision and control over inhabitants, wealth, and the conduct of all and each.” (95).” In short, as Judith Revel argues, “for Foucault, the radical essence of the neoliberal agenda is evident in its wide-ranging application,” which is no less radical than its opponents from both left and right (qtd. McNay 59). The power of this analysis lies in its ability to expose “individual autonomy … at the heart of disciplinary control” (McNay 62). Giorgio Agamben brings this logic to its more general, anti-Liberal, conclusion when he argues that “it was during this period that exceptional legislation by executive [governativo] decree (which is now perfectly familiar to us) became a regular practice in the European democracies” (State of Exception 13).

 
In a sense, Foucault (and following him, Agamben) is himself a symptom of our contemporary post-1945 obsession with the post-Nietzschean critique of the 1920s as the first configuration of a secularized end of time. The return of current cinema to 1920s Germany can be understood as a Foucauldian move meant to expose the inherent cultural and political structure of biopower. Identifying the fault of liberalism, still an unresolved issue for the public imagination, seems to stand at the center of contemporary political film from both the left and the right. The key to identifying this fault is the ability to imagine the end of liberalism, and possibly democracy with it.
 
The tight connection between post-Nietzschean critique and a biopolitical critique has drawn infrequent but interesting commentary during the past few years. Pointing to Nietzsche as the first biopolitical critic, Friedrich Balke refers to “Nietzsche’s high regard for the creation of distance” and his absolute rejection of any “zone of normalcy” and “petty politics.” Balke assesses this “[Nietzschean] logic . . . as biopolitical” (706). Nietzsche’s radical critique opened a space wherein critics like Foucault and Agamben could reconstitute modern man, inverting Aristotelianism by referring to man as “an animal whose politics places his existence as a living being in question” (706). Nietzsche, Balke concludes, “is undoubtedly the philosopher of this modern man and his politics.” His view of “great politics” is one of systematic shifts between poles of screening and extinguishing; these are the “politics of selection (Auslese)” (708). Returning to Nietzsche, and Foucault following him, Agamben speaks of this as the principle “by which it is only in the burning house that the fundamental architectural problem becomes visible for the first time” (Man 115).
 

The Day after Tomorrow (2004): A Conservative Ec(h)o-Film

 
One line of contemporary political film follows a culturally conservative strand. The supposedly subversive character of Emmerich’s The Day after Tomorrow (2004)—the most “Hollywood” and the least critical of the films I’ve mentioned—is interesting precisely because the film says explicitly what it dislikes about current democratic politics and has a simple and clear relation to the three conditions stated above for biopolitical film. The plot is grounded in the predictions of ecological catastrophes so common in 1910s and 1920s Germany, and this Gaia paranoia becomes a means for protesting conventional norms and Enlightenment ideals.
 
The Day after Tomorrow depicts an ecological catastrophe that freezes Manhattan and the subsequent inability of conventional politics to handle the situation (see Figs. 3 and 4 below). The film pursues two storylines, the first of which concerns a father on a mission to save his son, himself a young leader who organizes a small group of survivors in the New York Public Library. The second storyline presents the inability of an old-fashioned democratic and idealist president to decide how to divide his country between those he can save and those he can’t save and whom he must therefore sacrifice. The old, avuncular president, good-hearted but clearly incompetent to lead a nation in a state of emergency, then passively risks the whole nation in favor of avoiding a cruel but necessary decision about selection and recuperation.

The Nietzschean paradigm is used explicitly to weigh different critiques of democratic politics, suggesting an answer only once an actual state of emergency is declared. Biopolitics strides onto the scene before the state of emergency takes over, at the point where the conventional devices of democratic politics are ridiculed and a more radical gesture aims an explosive bullet at the very heart of power-dispersion. Nietzsche and biopolitics are then joined in the central scene of the film, which takes place midway through the film: terribly cold, the protagonists weigh different ways to warm themselves in the freezing temperature and discuss the selection of books they are carrying to the fire. What lies beneath is weighing the philosophical options of the new era in keeping with Nietzsche’s demand to use history (the canon) to benefit life:

Critics have missed the sarcasm in the exchange along with its philosophical-historical tone as the agent of cultural critique. The dialogue plays like an ironic reworking of Heinrich Heine’s humanistic attack on religious fundamentalists who burned books, and the later iconic value the warning received in anti-totalitarian rhetoric: Emmerich seems to be suggesting that such warnings—representing the standard humanist position—have been turned around and have lost relevance; now, after large sections of humanity are threatened with extinction, it is possible—even recommended—to burn books. But the only one capable of translating the urgent physical need to a political declaration is the black man “from below,” the only one who knows how to locate the center of power, the only “true Nietzschean” or, in our terms, the only biopolitical critic. In other words: only the black man as the “third,” a “homo sacer” of American society, is able to figure out intuitively where the old moral opposition between democratic ethics and totalitarian evil has collapsed. The tax law is, of course, the Leviathan’s immediate tool for supporting his divine rule and controlling his subjects. Viewed against the horrors of progress, democracy is seen as an equal if not worse evil than any medieval sovereign. The only difference lies in how elaborate and sophisticated—hence also how much less transparent—its legal codifications and its system of money collection are. In historical terms, current threats of human catastrophe dwarf the Holocaust in scale and measure, relieving the Enlightened free market of its ethical prestige or burden, depending on one’s perspective. Rather than debating the relevance of the philosophical canon, the film suggests, a new era would turn to a new form of politics, ignorant of historical debates that relate politics to morality. Nietzsche shows us how. The black man who carries his legacy is the only true radical and the only one who is willing to focus on the act rather than on empty slogans.
 
In addition to this sort of amusing dialogue, we should consider the film’s title, an allusion to the famous passage from Beyond Good and Evil in which Nietzsche warns the “Europeans of the day after tomorrow” to consider pessimism their current political horizon; he concludes with a prophetic sentence: “Alas! If only you knew how soon, how very soon, things will be . . . different!”¹ In his most political project, Politics of Friendship (1994), Jacques Derrida quotes Nietzsche’s prophecy, remarking excitedly, “What a sentence!” (31). The close affinity between a declared “state of emergency” and a plea for radical reform is typical of biopolitical film. Other directors—take for example David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ (1999)—portray exactly where this prophecy is realized: in the thin layer that separates the imagination from real life, the “game” from “life,” the body from a control room in a remote corporation; they all give in to a language and logic of “bio-ports.” The Europeans-of-the-day-after-tomorrow would not be able to separate themselves from such total control, unless they decided to “play the game” and take a risk, to turn themselves into “dynamite” and dive into danger. Cronenberg, in his commentary on the film, admits that the existentialist creed is taken from Martin Heidegger and his post-Nietzschean view of life oriented toward danger.
 
In contrast to Cronenberg’s sophisticated net of references, the crude references in Emmerich’s film—as well as its simplistic narratology—indicate a much broader cinematic reception of Nietzschean radicalism, as writers and directors return to the issues of the early 1900s: The president should solve the problem by declaring “a true state of emergency.” His decision—an incarnation of Carl Schmitt’s portrayal of the sovereign as “the one who decides”—must include a political selection between those who will survive and those who will be sent to their deaths. The president has to decide, and fails to decide, about who the state could not evacuate under such exceptional conditions. Emmerich portrays the humanist president as a feeble and incompetent ruler, and glorifies the vice-president, who is more capable of rescuing as well as sacrificing. (A similar structure and opposition between a decayed democratic impotence and capable decisionism recurs in Emmerich’s more recent 2012.) The biopolitical element in the story pops out when the president is called to divide the population between those who deserve help thanks to their attempt to reach the end of the catastrophe zone, and those who failed to do so and are sentenced implicitly to extermination. A critical stand from the left would have used this decisionist moment to criticize the very need in hierarchical systems of the will to power, in favor of a more individual decision-making according to conditions on the ground. For Emmerich, freedom and hope enter the picture when the subplot describes those survivors who make it on their own, in spite of their political abandonment. Emmerich chooses the Schmittian-Heideggerian path rather than the one marked by Brecht and Benjamin, which operates within the same state of emergency and exceptional hermeneutics. For Benjamin, such a situation means employing negative judgments—for example, in his subversive use of Schmitt’s state of exception to describe the “permanent state of emergency” of our time—in order to avoid an affirmative voice and a plea for a stronger sovereignty rather than a revolution. This is—in narratological terms—the reason that Emmerich’s film turns back to the vice-president’s recuperation and the father’s successful mission to save his son. A president de facto, the symbol of sovereignty turns away from a helpless democracy to totalitarian tools of domination; the father turns to his instincts as a hunter; and the son is saved as a symbol of the “remains” of the people, as predicted by the prophecy of destruction in Isaiah and by Paul’s messianic notion of the “remains.” There is no need to burn Nietzsche for now, not as long as he serves the revival of total sovereignty. The burning of legal codes is nothing more than destroying the nomos of the non-functional polis.

Biopolitical Film Misconceived

 
Movies have recently explored these interpretive routes. This may signal, as Ben Dickenson argues in a recent book, the emergence of a “Hollywood radicalism,” an alliance between radical elements inside and outside Hollywood that use cultural critique to distance themselves from the very idea of legitimate critique. Dickenson points out those “elements” in Hollywood willing to risk their reputations for something adventurous. Known political activists such as actors Tim Robbins and Danny Glover—anarchists by Hollywood standards—have exhibited this courage in their work with foreign and critical directors. As Pierre Sorlin demonstrates in European Cinemas, European Societies: 1939–1990, European writers and directors have long mobilized a subversive system of references, borrowing from Hollywood and forming a dense net of intertextuality that enables them to criticize Hollywood and American politics with the latter’s own tools and images (1). As Jill Forbes and Sarah Street describe it, following David Bordwell, “Classic Hollywood cinema is . . . transparent, easy to read, goal-oriented, and structured around narrative closure. Art cinema, on the other hand, rejects cause and effect and favors narratives motivated by realism and authorial expressivity” (37). Recent directors, however, have done something more radical than adding a few Hollywood radicals to their casts.
 
None of them American, filmmakers such as Haneke, Cuarón, Cronenberg, von Trier, and Winterbottom share a strong political and critical aversion to simple categorizations. They insist on liminal figures—much like the figure of the refugee, or “the third” in the Nietzschean and Schmittian opposition between enemy and friend. Creating an interim entity between the two expected sides of the political equation, neither a true master nor a slave, allows narrators in films such as Haneke’s Caché, Winterbottom’s In This World, von Trier’s Dogville, and Cronenberg’s Signs of Honor to expose a false discourse of freedom and equality. Behind democratic politics, so the narrative seems to offer, there is the same will to power, or the same willing submission to it.
 
In contrast to popular perception, “biopolitics” was not invented by Michel Foucault. In fact, the term biopolitics was an invention of the 1920s and ‘30s, when politics was fused with the absolute power of biological or “organic” images. The term itself was probably first used by Rudolf Kjellén, in his Outline for a Political System (1920), and then adopted by post-Nietzschean thinkers who realized its zoological, anthropological, and political implications. Roberto Esposito briefly describes this semantic shift:
 

What begins to be glimpsed [in Kjellén] is the reference to a natural substrate, to a substantial principle that is resistant and that underlies any abstraction or construction of institutional character.… this process of the naturalization of politics in Kjellén remains inscribed within a historical-cultural apparatus… Baron Jakob von Uexküll [speaks about] not any state but the German state with its peculiar characteristics and vital demands. … Here we can already spot the harbinger of a theoretical weaving—that of the degenerative syndrome and the consequent regenerative program—fated to reach its macabre splendors in the following decades.

(16–17)

 

Indeed, biopolitics became a theoretical model for anti-statist and anti-Liberal inclination during the following decade. Ernst Lehmann (1888–1957), director of the Botanical Research Institute at Tübingen University, in a celebratory 1932 speech to the congress of biological and botanical researchers used the word to denote the connections among biological categories, the Germanic Lebensraum, and an artistic model for life. Lehmann did not fail to salute the Nazi Minister of the Interior for Thuringia, Wilhelm Frick, and he framed the new method within a wider context of bio-language, using biology in order to define a new approach to the body: “In current literature,” Lehmann stated, “it is always the concept of biology that characterizes different issues of human life. This is the reason we hear of biological economy and biological therapies, as much as about biology in the philosophical fields.” “Everyone knows the numerous sad volumes of the present that attest to the declining number of births, and how our German people (Volk) would fail the plea made by selection theory. Biopolitically speaking, one should consider a much higher birthrate of different people inhabiting our eastern borders” (125, 138).²

 

The artist works on his artwork by controlling the matter, out of which he shapes the forms. However, the material from which the capable leader (Führer) forms the people, is—to speak again with the land—the biological raw material of our blood. . . . Here the spirit elevates the human above the biological basis. The biologist would never want to believe that the raw material alone could become an artwork. The German biologist continues to see how biology can be used as a weapon in the shaping of our people . . . into a new German life.

(142)

 
Neologistically speaking, Lehmann was not operating alone. In such fields as alternative psychology, popular philosophy, and avant-garde art, the 1920s was a time of theoretical hybridization. For example, Felix Krueger, head of the Leipzig School of Experimental Psychology and the rector of Leipzig University, embraced a Biopsychologie and Biogenetik—both terms he coined (31). Although it is tempting to translate such a discourse into the racial politics of the 1930s, this would amount to crude anachronism. For Krueger, the attempts to apply his Biotheorie to National Socialist psychology were grotesquely Procrustean (Asch 47). Another who was thinking along these lines was the Hungarian biologist Raul Francé. Like other radical thinkers of the time, Francé had been embraced by the ideological leadership of the National Socialist party, only to be cast aside later (Roth 133–41). He argued that the sign of the present—his present—was the fusion of biology and technology, which he considered a mythical response to the world. In the 1920s Francé became the first person to coin such neologisms as Bionik (bionics) and Biotechnik (biotechnology):
 

Such an understanding of the world (Weltverständnis) is, of necessity, drawn to the biotechnology (Biotechnik) formulated during the last few years, and is already producing practical results. This whole thing would never have been possible without the biological logic presented in terms of purely mechanical thoughts. This leads to the biological ethic, which Nietzsche, so keenly intuitive, constructed.

(18)³

 

Francé’s observations suggest the importance of the Nietzschean view, particularly its relation to technologizing images and technological innovation, for those early-twentieth-century hybrids of biological and social concerns. In spite of what some have said about an “anti-technological” Nietzsche, one finds during the 1920s a sustained discussion of technology’s ability to reproduce primary images of “the mythic” and to help in shaping the politics of selection that lies at the heart of all modern biopolitics (Herf 1984).

 

Code 46 (2004)

 
Michael Winterbottom and Frank Cottrell Boyce’s sci-fi Code 46 is a reinterpretation of a passage from Thus Spoke Zarathustra: “In one’s friend one shall have one’s best enemy. Thou shalt be closest unto him with thy heart when thou withstand him” (63). The passage is quoted in the movie’s pivotal scene, when the investigator, William Geld (Tim Robbins), meets the investigated, Maria Gonzales (Samantha Morton), and enters her home for the first time, shortly before they make love. In this vision of a dystopian future, where all aspects of life are controlled by a figure known as the Sphinx, who is never seen, the investigator discovers that the object of his desire, as well as of his investigation, is in fact his cloned sister. The implication of this discovery is catastrophic for both protagonists: “code 46,” the paramount law, forbids any “carnalization” between “close sets of genes.” When Geld and Gonzales violate the taboo, the state is in the midst of a campaign, typified by the slogan “The Sphinx knows best,” that involves greater penetration into the realm of everyday life, both in its political and its nonpolitical aspects. Planting everyday reality with a set of biological rules makes total interference possible and allows the Sphinx to control both the bodies and the minds of individual people.

Conclusion: Biopolitics and the Death of the Polis

 
Is understanding Nietzsche really necessary for understanding contemporary political practice? Lebenskraft (force of life), we should recall, is a key Nietzschean concept, used and abused by the post-Nietzscheans of the 1920s.⁶
 
Biopolitical critique moved beyond liberalism and democracy, beyond modernism and post-modernism, beyond Derrida’s ethics of deconstruction as well as beyond and against any politics of hope or tragedy. Nevertheless, its call for action is a real one, and carries immediate political implications. Beyond post-Nietzschean perspectivism, it shares values and aims with a growing anti-globalization movement. Agamben linked the dispersion of sovereignty with the suspension of the juridical discourse in the modern state of exception that, he claims, is the basis of modern Western democracy: “From this perspective, World War One and the years following it appear as a laboratory for testing and honing the functional mechanism and apparatuses of the state of exception as a paradigm of government.” Showing that the same thing occurred in other Western democracies, and dwelling on recent events in the U.S., Agamben reaches the conclusion that “at the very moment when it would like to give lessons in democracy to different traditions and cultures, the political culture of the West does not realize that it has entirely lost its canon” (State 7, 18). His definition of biopolitics owes much to its final aim: “an elusive gesture toward a new form-of-life as the ground of a coming politics over and against the bloody nexus of sovereign violence and biopolitics” (Mills 42). Such a gesture enables, even triggers, the destruction of existing institutions. As Samuel Weber demonstrated recently, such a plea for a radical reconsideration can be taken beyond Agamben’s own political-theological (Paulinian) horizon, beyond the hermeneutic circle that starts and ends with transgression and guilt, execution, protection and revival, or rebirth. Biopolitical film has shown how thinking through catastrophe can be an emancipatory power for the reconsideration of norms, whether political, political-theological, or aesthetic. Every one of the biopolitical films mentioned above–by Emmerich, Winterbottom, von Trier, Haneke, Cronenberg, and Fincher–discusses what Cesare Casarino characterizes in a recent essay as
 

the symbiotic relations between, on the one hand, bio-politics understood as a complex assemblage of modern technologies of power for the direct management, organization, and domination of life in all its forms, and, on the other hand, capitalism understood as a complex assemblage of modern technologies of production for the management, organization, and exploitation of labor-power in all of its modalities.

(157–8)

 

Both Emmerich and Winterbottom explore a life-image or “the image of an era in which life and labor-power are torn apart irreparably from each other” (Casarino 160). The broken city in Emmerich’s film and the controlled city in Winterbottom’s film function as an illustration of the death of a democratic dream about unity and egalitarianism, shared responsibility and individual autonomy. A way out, the directors agree, should adopt radical means, whether they are operated by the absolute sovereign or the radical critic, the president or the sphinx, the rebel or the exile. A post-Nietzschean era of radical thinking, beyond good and evil, is the perfect model for such a cry to life as life-force.

 
Biopolitical film, which has recently taken up political and catastrophic subjects, has internalized the need for a certain distance from the automatic affirmation of democracy, understanding the link that ties the internal and the external enemy, as well as the immediate relevance of catastrophe or the end-time, to our political imagination. None among the directors discussed in this article seems to realize the potential of this thinking better than Michael Haneke. As Haneke admits in different interviews: “The destruction machine has taken on a new meaning in the West” (56). The polis, the democratic city, is falling apart. When an ethics-based politics begins to fail, a decisive distance imposes itself, and men and women turn to destruction, total critique, and radical aesthetics. In other words, such a failure leads to the radical language of the 1920s, one minute before radicalism yielded to the choice between total mobilization and destruction.
 
What still distinguishes the critical directors from Emmerich, the conservative, is not only the opposite ideological conclusion, but the intellectual challenge they put to the viewers in the form of a set of critical tools meant to develop rather than destroy critical thinking. As Haneke puts it: “we are all prisoners of our liberalism, and fear is our daily companion . . . We lie to ourselves willingly, in order to sleep better” (55). The method (for correction) is a post-catastrophic regression to the primary relation between existence, or naked life, and politics. If both biopolitical films—Code 46 and The Day after Tomorrow—criticize liberal democracy as impotent, Haneke, Von Trier, and Winterbottom use catastrophes in a way opposite to Emmerich’s: “I wanted to direct a film without the superfluous spectacularity of a catastrophe movie. For in catastrophe movies there is always the redeemer who solves the problem. Then the world goes back [to normalcy]” (Haneke 60–1). Pointing out where the present sense of crisis and end-time meets with the theory, images and language that stream unacknowledged to us from 1920s Germany, can—in principle—help us bring the crucial issues to the foreground. The biopolitical film as a new form of political film offers us something different from what Hollywood critics know from the past. It offers something that is consciously anti-Hollywood and that is not afraid to ask the questions that cannot be discussed in conventional filmmaking. A return to 1920s Germany, to the heyday of aesthetic and political radicalism and the tight connection between them, only helps sharpen those questions. The question is: Are we ready to deal with them? Are we prepared to rattle that dynamite?