Strange Foreign Bodies

The body exposes itself to the depths of its guts, between the fibers of its muscles and along its vessels. It exposes the inside to the outside and always escapes further, deeper into the abyss that it is. However this is the truth of the world: it comes out of nothing, it is created, which means that it is unproduced, unformed, and not constructed. It is an alteration and a spasm of nihil. The world is an explosion and an expansion of an exposure (which can be called “truth”, or “meaning”). The chiasm of the body and of the world exposes exposure to itself—and with it, the impossibility to finally bring the world to the spirit, and bring meaning to significance.
The body is a strangeness which is not preceded by familiarity.

-Nancy

Desiring Disability

Affirming the disabled body risks losing oneself – itexposes our shared phantasm of invulnerability; our irreconcilable fragility.Can we resist the capture of the world, close off every pore of our bodies and hermetically seal the soul from the excess of desire? On the other hand one mayalso embrace an affirmative critique that moves beyond a politics of the lowestcommon denominator – one that seeks an ethics beyond the baseline definition ofthe politics of pity.

Working through the question of deficiency means a movementbeyond desire as lack. From Plato’s androgyne to Hegel’s ‘Negativity as theintegrity of determination’ or Freud’s Thanatos and the haunting lack that impingesitself around every corner of the symbolic order, intellectual currents havehabitually sedimented deficiency as prima facie. How can these modes ofcritique and/or methodological orientations toward desire account for theexperience of being denied sexuality? Not that some people with disabilitiesare biologically or otherwise asexual, but simply that there exists amaterialized social structure which seeks to delimit the disabled body from therealm of sexual possibility.

Even if one grants a claim to authority or priority to therealm of sexuality, what is lost in the reading of desire as lack? If weunderstand the desire for the other primarily as an object oriented or goalfocused approach then what happens to the self in the moment of fulfillment (ifsuch a thing is possible) under this approach?

An indissoluble trap haunts understandings of desire aslack. If desire is constitutive of self-identity in the sense that through theidentification of the object of desire the self delimits the realm of itssubject position by marking that which is other, then in the moment offulfillment does the self not risk complete dissolution and loss? Is this notPlato’s point in the Symposium? Does the momentthat marks the eruption of absolute fulfillment not force the motivating lifeforce to resign?

Is this not living refutation of the closed system? Proof ofits inevitable implosion upon itself? Or is it simply a denial of themotivating negativity constantly stirring the pot of radical relationality?

Bernard Stiegler on the Trace-ability of our Times

The contours of our contemporary horizon are composed of an infinite marking, tracing and erasing - the apparatus of technological prosthesis has become more than cathartic but compulsive, cthonic even. 


The edges of the current spiraling dance of crisis are not clearly identifiable but definitively multiple - this state burdens the subject - breeds heavy spirits - born free but everywhere enchained to a spirit of gravity. 


It would be not only ill-conceived but impossible to try and prevent the tracing of the times - the constant recording of the self and others in everyday contact. 


The true question remains: How can we cultivate techniques adequate to a time entangled in the trace? 


How can we reckon with the excess of the trace over the task but not over the tale?

Bernard Stiegler speaks to the trace-ability of our times. 


Marcel O'Gorman of the University of Waterloo published a conversation he had with Stiegler in Volume 18 Issue 3 of the Journal Configurations entitled: "Bernard Stiegler's Pharmacy."  



 Here's an excerpt:

Yes, this is a very important issue. I would like to say one thing about it. There is this question of the traces that we produce. When I called you earlier today, I produced traces; every time I do a search on Google, I produce traces. But I do not believe anything that consists in saying we must prevent the development of trace-ability. We are now in an industrial society that rests on the recording of traces. And it is not worthwhile trying to make us believe that we should prevent it—it's just wrong. That's what I personally believe. The question is not how to prevent the recording of traces; the question is to create a consciousness of the recording of traces, a politics of the recording of traces.

Here in France, along with some students, in particular at l'Université de Compiègne, we're developing work on how to become conscious of traceability, and how to open up debates about traceability, how to create new systems of traceability, for example, and how to create laws so that this traceability is actually individuated by what it is tracing. This does not mean that the conscious mind will be able to master all of this—I do not believe in mastery—because behind the trace there is always the unconscious, and the unconscious is multi-layered, which is what I was saying earlier. And so the question is: How do we reorganize the conscious and the unconscious? And I say that this is a question of technology—that which is able to link the conscious and the unconscious is always a technique. And, by the way, Freud speaks of the psychoanalytic technique. Psychoanalysis is a technique. But such a technique must be able to think through today's industrial technics, and, sadly, psychoanalysis does not know how to do this (467-468, Configurations 18.3, 2010) 

The Ends of Man, Derrida & The Animal That Therefore I Am

I remember being thoroughly perplexed when I first read this work last spring when Dr. Diane Davis gifted me a copy of it. I didn’t know what was a pretense from a feigned feint, a joke from a wit, science from myth. These limits, "that is to say, indivisible threshold[s]" (133)  are still very difficult, if not impossible, to locate, but fixing them is not my main concern upon my return and re-tracing of the text.  I still am confused, but I have since ceased to view this wounded state of unknowing in a negative light. 

     In a sense the desire for self-certainty in thinking turns the home into a citadel. Does the House or Truth of Being require a Guardian? What if one “awakens and leaves, without turning back to what he leaves behind him[?]. He burns his text and erases the traces of his steps. His laughter then will burst out, directed toward a return which no longer will have the form of the metaphysical repetition of humanism, nor, doubtless, “beyond” metaphysics, the form of a memorial or a guarding of the meaning of Being, the form of the house and of the truth of Being. He will dance, outside the house, the active Vergesslichkeit, the “active forgetting and the cruel (grausam) feast of which the Genealogy of Morals speaks. No doubt that Nietzsche called for an active forgetting of Being: it would not have the metaphysical form imputed to it by Heidegger” (136). This quote comes from a lecture Derrida gave in October of ’68 in New York. The lecture was later published under the title, “The Ends of Man.” In this younger Derrida one sees the beginnings and/or the ends of The Animal That Therefore I am.

     In a footnote to “The Ends of Man” Derrida writes, “The deconstruction of the end and of man takes place on the margins of philosophy: in titles and footnotes” (Note 15). The title of the essay reveals the playful possibilities of the limits and question of man. “In the thinking and the language of Being, the end of man has been prescribed since always, and this prescription has never done anything but modulate the equivocality of the end, in the play of telos and death. In the reading of this play, one may take the following sequence in all its senses: the end of man is the thinking of Being, man is the end of the thinking of Being, the end of man is the end of the thinking of Being. Man, since always, is his proper end, that is, the end of his proper. Being, since always, is its proper end, that is, the end of its proper”(134).

Where to being in teasing out such a statement? I’m not sure, “naturally I am going to skip a lot, I am going to walk by skipping, we don’t have time to follow things in a continuous way” (142). Derrida puts the trace of ‘man’ under erasure.

     In the Essay “And Say the Animal Responded” Derrida reframes the question of the critique of humanism in a way that opens up new avenues for thinking ‘the animal’ and ‘the human.’ In a way it resuscitates a more ancient meaning but also breathes a new life into the meaning of ‘the animal,’ etymologically derived from the PIE *ane- "to blow, to breathe" and related to the Greek anemos meaning "wind.”

It is not just a matter of asking whether one has the right to refuse the animal such and such a power (speech, reason, experience of death, mourning, culture, institutions, technics, clothing, lying, pretense of pretense, covering of tracks, gifts, laughter, crying, respect, etc.-the list is necessarily without limit, and the most powerful philosophical tradition in which we live has refused the “animal” all of that). It also means asking whether what calls itself human as the right rigorously to attribute to man, which means therefore to attribute to himself, what he refuses the animal, and whether he can ever posses the pure, rigorous, indivisible concept, as such, of that attribution. 

     Man has not been able to cover the tracks of its “wounded reaction not to humanity’s first trauma, the Copernican (the earth revolves around the sun), not irs third trauma, the Freudian (the decentering of consciousness under the gaze of the unconscious), but rather to its second trauma, the Darwinian” (136). Lacan was not able to cover his anthropocentric tracks, even though he roots man’s superiority over the animal as based in a lack, defect, or fault. And neither am I, but I can erase them, or should I say...

Eros, Economics, and Analysts: Working Through Ahmed's Affective Economies

Sara Ahmed’s essay “Affective Economies” toes the ephemeral threshold between the ordinary and the fantastic. Ahmed returns to a previous reading of Marx as the first analyst of the symptom by analogizing affective intensities to the circulation of commodities. Signs are converted into affective intensities not because of a property that inheres to them, but due to the surplus of sticky associations they gain as an effect of the process of circulation.

Ahmed reads against the grain of traditional interpretations of emotions in arguing that it is the nonresidence of emotions that makes them binding. Emotions are not a positive presence that may be possessed or contained nor are they psychological dispositions that originate solely within the subject. She takes the Marxist analogy further through the concept of commodity fetishism. Just as commodities in their ‘objective’ form conceal the hidden histories of labor and exchanges within a capitalist economy, “feelings appear in objects or as objects with a life of their own, only by the concealment of their personal histories, of production and labors, and circulation and exchange” (120-1). The analogy she says breaks down without reference to the exchange value/use-value distinction. It is here where she aligns herself more closely to the psychoanalytic school of thought. (I think it’s interesting that in an essay about the materialization of borders, she both entrenches and breaks down the borders between disciplines and academic pedantry.) Psychoanalysis offers a method of understanding emotions in relation to the unconscious. She differs from a strictly Lacanian version of psychoanalysis because she views “the subject” within the affective economy as “simply one nodal point in the economy, rather than its origin and destination” (121). Lacan, according to Ahmed, on the other hand adopted a view in which the subject is the “settlement” (121) of the signifier. She indicates that this would lead one to conceive of affects as a positive presence. Rather she would see the unconscious as a lack of presence or “the failure to be present – that constitutes the relationality of subjects and objects (a relationality that works through the circulation of signs)” (121). The unconscious in this view is not an unconscious that is possessed by or contained within the contours of the subject, but represents the absence of such a possibility or the grappling with fixing or materializing those contours. Repression then operates not as a repression of a feeling but through the displacement of the idea that caused it. Understanding affect as a form or language of the unconscious that works through the process of differentiation and displacement allows her to analyze the associative or metonymic process of substitution that occurs in the slippage between the figures of the asylum seeker, the terrorist, and the criminal. These figures gain a calcified affective value, being associated primarily with the fear of loss, yet remain spectral in their ties to particular, physical manifestations. Through temporal and rhetorical juxtaposition the figures become substitutable for one another. 


The Australian Tampa crisis illustrates this point in a dramatic fashion. Here the red ship loomed on the horizon of the public's imagination as an object of terror, even though people were fundamentally unaware as to what the threat actually was. Since media coverage was restricted, the incessant barrage of the same image of the lone ship gained an intensity through its circulation. Lone Bertleson and Andrew Murphie analyze in detail the event in an essay titled "An Ethics of Everyday Infinities and Powers: Felix Guattari on Affect and the Refrain" in the Affect Theory Reader. The perception of the ship was anything but merely representational, all people had was the repetition of a singular image. Bertleson and Murphie  said that the ship 

becomes the mark, the possibility of a new event (a new virtual potential for things to happen differently), of a set of new physical territories (actual borders, detention centers, ship's decks, islands, bodies), and of a set of new existential territories (these include virtual potentials, physical places, new modes of living, new laws, new sign systems, discourses, rhetorics, new feelings and emotions, new powers to affect and be affected). In sum a new field of expression arises, a refrain that potentializes other refrains (142). 

Here the relationship between a singular image and the question of alignment is especially explicit. The crisis occurred during a time when a conservative government needed an issue to rally around to justify its recent increases in security policies. The ship offered a new opportunity for the possibility of redirecting affective investments into a highly mediatized figure of the asylum seeker. The asylum seekers were denied access because of the possibility that they had ties to Osama bin Laden and other terrorist organizations. Since it becomes increasingly difficult to mark or differentiate exactly what a good asylum seeker looks like, any potential stranger or alien can be metamorphosized into a 'bogeyman.' 

On this basis Ahmed is able to twist the typical distinction between fear and anxiety. Fear, since at least Aristotle, if not earlier, is often argued to be in reference to a particular object, whereas anxiety lacks a stable referent. Ahmed on the other hand contends that fear is often less a question of the approach of a particular object than an approach to a vaguely outlined object. The lack of a stable referent intensifies rather than diminishes fear. Fear evokes the ontological questions of security, vulnerability and the bordering of bodies and nations.

Ahmed writes:

My argument is not that there is a psychic economy of fear that then becomes social and collective: rather, the individual subject comes into being through its very alignment with the collective. It is the very failure of affect to be located in a subject or object that allows it to generate the surfaces of collective bodies (128).

Fear is first an impersonal affect, or the condition, and it is through the process of alignment that a subject establishes its borders. There is first a state of insecurity a la Dillon, and then the marking of dangers allows us to create ideas of security. Ahmed argues that it is the fear of the loss of an object that is more profound than the actual object of fear. For example we fear what an inauthentic asylum seeker would steal from us more so than an actual asylum seeker. We fear their supposed disruption to the traditional family values, economy, and stability of the nation more so than the actual threat posed by a person to us. We are not afraid of the black other because actually seeing them instill fear that is completely contained within this body, but because affects open up past histories of intense signs that are attached to the present figure. In this way fear affects “relation between the objects feared (rather than simply the relation between the subject and its objects)” (128). In this way too affects operate within an economy that implies a socialized and materialized totality of values or affects rather than simply a subjective state felt. To a certain extent fear is contained within particular figures, but this is only as a result of the histories and sticky association temporarily evoked in relation to this figure. It makes sense that these negative affects would be intensified by not being able to locate them. It is the inability to designate who is and is not a terrorist that gives terrorism its force as an idea. When one hears an alarm but does not know what it is referencing is more powerful of a feeling because one does not know how to act in relation to the alarm. The inability know, the absence of a referent, seems to be at the heart of the feeling in the first place.

I wonder what the flipside would like. It seems that Socrates makes a similar point about Love in The Symposium. Socrates takes Eros through a topsy-turvy turn. Rather than viewing Eros as the attempt to unify a particular person with their unique lost half, Eros is understood as a form of Beauty that can be seen in many things. In the traditional view love would end the second the chase is over, once the object of desire was obtained. Eros for Socrates can be embodied in multiple and many referents and it is in viewing Eros as an eternal form that allows for a more intense experience of connection. Acknowledgment of the fact that there are many things rather than a singular person that are worthy of love lets one truly bask in its glory. Yet it also entails an understanding that one cannot ever completely obtain the feeling of love. The lack is still omnipresent but it is in the act of detaching the affect from a particular object or subject that intensifies it and lets it circulate more freely. 

Projectively Identifying with Brennan

The fact that Teresa Brennan’s The Transmission of Affect is “not a history of the affects”(22) inhibits some of its ability to draw its conclusions out beyond the clinic. While Brennan is willing to agree “that what defines the significant affects varies, especially across time or through history as well as cultures” (22), she also argues, “that there are constant potentials at work, and they are universal-for  now-in that they are potentially present in all human psyches as we know them” (22). Her paradox between the proliferation of boundaries and the denial of affect seems reductive in a few ways. Is it true that “boundaries may matter now because there is too much affective stuff to dispose of, too much that is directed away from the self with no place to go” (15)? Isn’t the opposite just as likely, that there are now too many places where the self can invest its affective energies, in negativity toward terrorists, immigrants, homosexuals and so on or against neoconservatives of any religious flavor? Doesn’t knowledge of the increasing complexity of a globalized economy and its subsequent production of new threats and risks of catastrophe give birth to a whole new series of anxieties for the modern subject to deal with? How can one choose between investing themselves in preventing ecological catastrophe or nuclear proliferation? Are we truly “in a period where the transmission of affect is denied” (15)? Or is it the case that everything from cyber fandom to the electronic displays of the national security threat level at the airport calls for our affective energies?

Brennan is very conscious of the possibility that this is the case. What is relevant to her is not “whether the negative affects are increased by a social order that abets their production or diminished in a civilization that counters them” (22) but just that “their potential is present” (23). I think that people repress the idea of a subject that is not self-contained because the current state continually reminds them that it is not such a pervasive manner. By this I mean, that the subject is continually forced to realize the ways in which it is insufficient and finite in a material sense as existential threats become more real to its imagination. But further in a psychological sense the ways people are increasingly aware of ways that they can exist virtually and in a multiple places and times. The fantasy of agency and individuality is a great fabulation to deal with our radical ineptitude in fundamentally altering historical circumstances, let alone our personal state.

On the one hand, it seems that Brennan’s anxiety that emotion has been turned away from in recent times is misplaced since so much attention has been paid to it, at least recently in the academy. On the other hand, within public discourses the fantasy of individuality still rules supreme in many contexts, especially political ones. Brennan’s examples of some of these new ‘maladies of the soul’ point to the contradictory nature of our contemporary condition. There are problems on both ends of the spectrum, psychoses both of hyperactivity and depression. The interpretation of this dynamic could lend itself to a couple paths; it could either follow Brennan in searching for the universal aspects of affect which exist or it could reject the clinical interpretation as a fictional analytic that should not be applied trans-historically.  But then again perhaps this is a false choice.. What is hard to reconcile however, is that if these forms of affective investment oscillate throughout history, what exactly is remaining universal? And how can people develop the capacity to receive or transmit more affect? Is there a certain reserve of affect people have always had and they simply materially evolve to develop more? It can’t be purely cognitive though either so what drives this change?

In Brennan’s analysis of ADHD and FMS she points to the relationship between the infant and their mothers. But it seems that alcoholic parents and poor mothers have been around for a significantly longer time then the uniquely contemporary condition of pharmacology. There must be forces which are particular, rather than universal in this case than simply a relationship between an infant and a mother.

And as a small aside, I feel Brennan’s off-hand dismissal of Deleuze is rather misplaced. For someone who has contributed so much to the field of affect studies its odd she would relegate him to the dustbin of poor theorists so quickly. Perhaps she is still recovering from the traumatic experience of reading Anti-Oedipus? But what is problematic in my view of her reading of Deleuze is that she reduces his theory simply to the BwO as some sort of primal state “that preexists and underpins the horrors of the Oedipus complex” (14). A Thousand Plateaus seems to do exactly the work she points to when she writes “The point is that energies and affects, after the Oedipus complex, still cross over between us” (14). Isn’t this exactly D & G’s point in writing their work, that affects and the self can invest itself in ways beyond the reductive aspects of psychoanalytic theory. I think her work and Object-Relations theory based interpretations of Freud are far less reductive, but that this is a part of the project Deleuze and Guattari were also very intimately concerned with.