on the possibility of critique

There is no history of history; that is an illusion and a pernicious one. Any historiography that represents itself as a history of history or a representation of all histories that have been constructed or all types of history has failed to understand history’s basic gesture, to recast everything in a different shape, with different meanings, different relations, different orders, and different tendencies, such that historiography would be one among many meanings, relations, orders, tendencies, one in which everything is again recast, and thus it wouldn’t represent anything about the histories it claimed to represent, each of which would have presented its viewpoint as unique and total, inclusive of everything worthy of including. The one thing, we could say, that a history can never do is represent events as autonomous and whole. This prohibition applies to itself above all. History is total, but it cannot show it, and especially if, in these democratic times, it seeks to represent itself as one viewpoint among others. Nevertheless, it offers us a whole of which other viewpoints are elements of its holism, and not accidents, tangents, chaff, or invisible things, non-beings. Even the most distanced views of history writing—like much of what goes under the name of “philosophy of history”—that claim to include what was excluded from other moments, from other historiographies, itself makes another totalizing and exclusive perspective. The task for the theorist of history, for the thinker about history, is to describe this peculiar refusal of an overview without pretending to give it an image or even perhaps a name. We should rigorously distinguish this from the concepts of history, progressive certainly, that show its general shape to be something like a set of shifting constellations or a movement between dispersal and collection, construction and destruction, or any universal, any structure. On the contrary, such absorption, revision, and totalization, underlined by a recurring amnesia differs fundamentally from a universal, a form, or an idea. Precisely how remains to be formulated. Even Derrida can’t. Neither difference nor différance achieve this. Both of these noble words are spoken in too much ignorance, too much knowledge.

This peculiar and so popular act, the act of _taking_ a photo as one says in English, rips a piece out of the world and makes it into a thing. Without fail, there is one thing, most often at or near the center, in a photograph. Even those photographs destined to remain undeveloped or stay in files have this quality of storing a thing, separated, sifted, withdrawn from interaction, weighed, and set aside for later. Any aspect of any place, any node in an operating relay, a shade of a meaningful conjunct, loop in a pattern, etc. can be uprooted and added to your trove. Focus, zoom, exposure, capture, frame, among other words, indicate the amount of thought behind the scopic mechanics of the act of photography: reduction and removal that make available for reflection, examination, analysis and other abstractions. Almost no matter what the wielder of the camera does, there is always a subject, and almost always a single subject, of a photograph, in a way that is not true of painting, and much less of the other arts. Perhaps this has to do with the transparency of photographic style. Even in cases where it reflects on this obsession and plays with it, photography holds out a target and shoots it, be it other photographs, or people with cameras, or windows that frame their own subjects, these framed in turn by the ironic shutter, whose opening is always followed by shutting. When it becomes art, photography strains against its shutter. It ceases to imagine itself as shooting, focusing, framing out, or closing in. Freed from the compulsion to depict, it leaves things, like memory does, barely distinguishable in places and circling in relays outside themselves.

Another way to say something similar: dephotography does not let the eye rest, even within the putative edges of the frame, but makes you circle around and slip in and out.

Photographs by Dan Abbe ~ http://street-level.mcvmcv.net/

Doctors, Socrates explains, speaks differently to slaves and the free-born.  To the latter they only prescribe and command; only with the former is it necessary to explain the cause of disease and the nature of the cure, and to persuade them of the need for the given remedy. This distinction is critical: it has everything to do with the nature of philosophy, and the logos.  But above all it suggests the political decisions and distinctions that underly metaphysics. If philosophy is a kind of therapy, this does not allow us — as the analytic tradition wants us to believe — to look past the historical and political dimensions, or the need for decisions and interpretations that defy positivist grounding.  Philosophy is a therapy, perhaps; but every therapy begins with a decision, which for the most part it finds itself already thrown into, about what it means to therepeuein, and who the subject is whose health, and what health, is to be achieved.

But the decision now, nevertheless, is not the same one that Socrates’s doctor faced. The distinction between the free and the enslaved can no longer be made in the same way, and not only because, under the economic conditions of capitalism, these categories no longer have the same binding force. It is also because the expansion of technological knowledge, and its saturation of our very notion of self, world, and action, has made it clear that, in vast realms of our existence, we can no longer hope to fully understand the forces at work in us.  The self-willed stupidity of metaphysics — Socrates was very clear about this in the Phaedo — consisted in accepting as an explanation only the sorts of things that could be grasped by reasoning, and thus disregarding material causes in all their vast complexity.  But this subterfuge, without which philosophical rigor would have never been possible, has been called increasingly into question.

The logic of technology, of instrumental reason, and of bare life, comes down, in the end, to this: we are neither free or enslaved, no line of demarcation between the two is possible, since we are free in our enslavement and enslaved in our freedom. The soul, which in its immortality, separation, and divinity had been the guarantee of our freedom, has dispersed completely into the body. But if the soul, for Socrates, could become assured in its freedom merely by  understanding the true, non-material nature of causality, the body-soul becomes free through submission to the necessity that governs over it through the mystifying, but never absolutely mysterious, process of life.  Knowledge of life is fateful precisely because it is possible: the wondrous agency of God, who could enter through the cracks of a perfect opacity, has been excluded by a limited transparency.

Modern medicine is a practice not only for doctors, but for patients. And it is for the latter, rather than the former, that it gains its fullest significance. The doctor, qua doctor, is shielded from medicine in his or her very activity as agent. Needed then, more than anything, is a phenomenology of patient-hood; of patience — of the practice of an active suffering.

Interpretation is not for them. They are gone: it is for us, through them. Insofar as we may be them, or made out of them, they are not gone, and the situation grows exponentially more imbricated.

Why, if we believe this, do we ask for precision in scholarship? When we read a text it already conforms to our desires; this is at least partly–some say wholly–why we read it. Precise scholarship, philology if you will–of a certain kind–should help prevent the text from corresponding completely to our desires, or put another way, from being solely a matter of our interpretation. Research is there to find what you do not expect; thus true scholarship should repel us, until, in lucky cases, it transforms our desires. Fashion springs from research.

On the contradiction between scholarship and interpretation, then, we can say that it is not enough to accuse, or confess, that scholarship is a kind of interpretation, according to the rule that everything is interpretation, through and through. For even if we accept this rule, in order for it not to be simply tautological (as opposed to complexly or enfoldedly so), we must admit that there are hues of interpretation, intensities of interpretation, modalities of interpretation, and of course: interpretations of interpretation (the highest instance). So, scholarship is one modality, deconstruction another, critique yet another. How do they relate to one another? In an ideal situation, scholarship relates to critique as an instrument, a tool to gauge its lines more deeply, to shock its opponents, to scare even itself. Scholarship on the notion of critique would do this.

The simple hermeneutic tautology runs something like this: if all facts are interpretations why bother to look for facts? On the contrary, the distinction between facts and interpretations is  crucial and operative and true, but it is a question of modality and of habit. For what is truly irksome about hermeneutics is that, when it gives itself completely over to itself, it loses itself in glibness, repetitiveness, and vacuity. Nothing ever changes if everything is just an interpretation. In contrast, if facts serve interpretations, if the precise, even pedantic or silly minute details of coming to write a text, the author’s private life, education, family history, political activities, and so forth, not to mention the most careful analysis of the marks of the text itself, if these small fulcra are used to shift our interpretations by a millimeter, they will have shifted the world by this much as well, or perhaps more.

One conclusion to be drawn from this is the following: interpreters who scoff at scholars are equally as wrong as the reverse. Another is: both are historical, in the political sense.

There are two regimes in the university, and they are constantly at war. One is a remnant of the medieval system, in which there always had to be a full complement of apprentices and masters moving through to guarantee the stability and longevity of the institution. What is meant by institution is always the physical structures and the people who maintain them as well as the intellectual structures that motivate the construction and maintenance of the physical structures. The stability of the institution is hierarchical; its longevity depends on marketing.

This is of course the regime of teaching and learning, and it reaches up past the school years into the tenure process, with its ceaseless kowtowing. The second regime, constantly and secretly at war with the first, is the regime of ideas. Or rather, it would be better to say that the first regime makes war on the second regime, a war of lords and vassals against beasts. Their weapons are made for fighting other lords, and so they are inadequate, and often lead to comedy or to accidentally wounding themselves.

Academic books should be seen as vengeful attacks on those who follow the path of ideas to the detriment of the hierarchy. In them, the masters appropriate and use vocabulary they barely understand, in order to warp it beyond recognition. A second reason for the misuse is that, when they quote Derrida or Deleuze without citing them, for as long as they remain unintelligible, their students can’t catch up with them. Some are content, for this reason, to remain unintelligible during their whole careers. They destroy the very ideas that are the beasts’ only sustenance by taking them out of context, applying them where they make less than sense, mixing together terms and arguments in a way that reduces their historical effectiveness. The worst of the misuses is perpetrated by the older professor who, in a late book, lets go all inhibitions and writes a book of “theory.” In this type of book the half-digested remnants of others’ rigorous thinking come back to stink up the bookshelf.

No one should be astonished when the beasts, who use the language of the tradition with care, deepening it, critiquing it, but with respect–awe even–for its precise meanings, before tearing it apart… no one should be astonished, however, when the beasts of ideas fail to excoriate the masters and their fawning vassals for abusing their language and thought. They need these warped receptions, these hunched men and women who hear but cannot listen. These ears are the echo chamber of their thoughts, and through them they can gauge precisely how far from the institutional sandtrap they are, by the level of misprision with which their words are reiterated. In the institution but not of it, the beasts, the clear-headed, cause enormous damage. What is it that the masters master in their apprentices? The desire to become beasts.

There are certain struggles which, frivolous and insignificant, and hence so easily forgotten, nevertheless contain the greatest social, historico-political, even metaphysical weight. Consider the battle between teenagers (and, above all, teenage girls) and their parents over the household telephone.  (That this was, above all, a staple of domestic comedy does not speak again its significance).  Much was at stake:  for the parents the home telephone was, above all, the channel through which the world of work was able to insinuate itself the domestic sphere. The telephone’s ring announced professional emergencies. It shattered the private sphere from within with the constant intimation of the contingency upon which everything natural and essential (love, children, food, happiness) depended. But for the teenager, it became the means for the pure pleasure of friendship and gossip.  Of course: this was also true for the housewife during the daytime hours, but then no conflict could emerge. The house, and its appurtenances, was her uncontested dominion.

In the end: teenagers won. When I was growing up, having a private telephone line was the unique privilege of the gratuitously wealthy and hopelessly spoiled.  But now, the telephone has become a private affair, and the tensions animating its use have dissipated. But this victory, like so many, turned against the victors.  The parents, and the government, had the last laugh.  If before the private was interrupted by the outside, now it is wholly subsumed: and it is no longer a question of monitions and directives, but of constant surveillance.

It is interesting, in this regard, that the use of email and social networking has been so strictly confined to the purely social. There has been so little talk of using Twitter as a emergency warning system, and even when appropriated by politicians it serves the cult of celebrity rather than the immediate ends of the state.  There is nothing surprising in this, though: surveillance, if it is to be effective, requires a very light touch.

Once personality is stolen from the grip of metaphysics, that is, from psychologists, and defined as imitation of imitation, or imitability, as a new relation between personae and their masks, a new relation between persons can be glimpsed. The intellectual world begins to appear as a traveling theater troupe, and one wonders often when someone will write them new material.

A prolegomenon to a different script may be a catalogue of the stock characters in the present comedy. These would include: Alain Badiou, the pundit; Agamben, the Messiah; Slavoj Zizek, the clown; Jürgen Habermas, the ernest—these limitations, these monopotentials, these revelations of impotencies.

Where are the janus-faced, the dangerous ones? Not the split personalities but the manifolds. You might suggest Zizek as an answer, and you would not be wrong. There are two ways to reach the apathy of the nerd, however: by rejecting all but one object and by apoplectically accepting all possible objects. There is such a thing as too much personality. As an intellectual style, this appears as a steaming, roiling charisma that changes its spots so fast it is as though nothing ever changes. One name for this is “mashup,” another “method.”

The shopping mall has a special relation to time. Even if the individual retail spaces change hands countless times, and are constantly refurnished and updated, they cannot escape the obsolescence of the whole.  From the start, they become marked by the ruination peculiar to the suburbs: nothing will break off or fall apart, nothing will turn derelict and dilapidated, everything  will remain in working order. No dust will accumulate. But a slight hue of grime insinuates itself deeper and deeper into artificial substances  that were designed to last forever, but never to age.

Experience has this sense above all for consumerism: it is the experience of the new, latest thing. The mall turns shopping itself into an experience: the venue itself, where the commodity is put on display and up for sale, becomes a commodity, and every subdivision of the venue becomes a genre of experience.  But in this way, the logic of the commodity is turned upside down: it loses its status as the primary fetish. The venue itself becomes the source of the attraction and charm of the thing, and the thing nothing more than an empty signifier of the venue.  It is not that the thing has only exchange value, but that it no longer even has this. Exchange value itself only stands in for the charms of the site of exchange, whose only real charm, however, is the attractive force of its emptiness.

If one ever purchases anything, it is out of an odd sense of guilt: as if to redeem oneself post facto of the charge of having loitered.

The economics of the mall demands that the customer pass through, but the charm of the venue rests on the prospect of indefinite loitering.  It is a place where time itself could be consumed, where it is possible to pass time, yet without the melancholic solitude that we must feel whenever we allow ourselves to become occupied with things.  The obsolescence of the mall is the direct function of this contradiction. 

A secret correlation exists between the mall rat and the grime in the linoleum.  And every new mall begins with the dream of getting rid of both, of restoring the pristineness of retail space, and resurrecting its (impossible) function as a place of pure transit.   

The utopian moment of the internet is to enable an existence of absolute loitering.  But it is a loitering without the  traces of obsolescence.  And hence without true boredom.

What if every conversation added a chapter to the descriptive grammar of the language. What if instead of deep or high structure, each utterance provided a model of structure for the next, so that only by listening and responding, imitating and distorting–not by learning or habit, and least of all by innate grammar—language became speakable and hearable. “I hear you” would then mean, I receive this unheard of string, and at the same time, I accept and hold it, borrow it for myself, play it and play with it. Instead of Language or even “a language” then we would find a telephone game of utterances of which no eternal image was possible, only a snapshot of an unrepeatable moment. This would be the confluence of historical linguistics and the theory of language.

There is something slightly paradoxical about the gentle warmth that radiates out from electronic devices.  Electronics is supposed to be cool: The heat — a byproduct of other operations, a sign of an irreducible inefficiency — betrays this coolness.

Can a semiconductor be a superconductor? This is a question for physicists. But this much, at least, seems clear: as long as the world is still warm, there is no way around the needless production of heat.