Words Edgewise

Today, I attended a talk by Eric Hayot at the University of Minnesota, which took as intertext his essay "Against Periodization," although the talk concerned cosmology and poetics; the connection between these is interesting--the desire to challenge periodization of course comes from a perspective that values history. So it's not just that this value produces an ideological blind spot, which goes by the name of "aesthetic experience," as if this is the kind of exception upon which the value of the historical then emerges. Perhaps it's true that every theory has such a spot, but what seems untenable about Hayot's approach is that the critical value of history, which emerges out of a desire to raise the value of the humanities on its own turns, emerges as a theory of everything, a cosmology, if you will. Hayot claims that his interest is in thinking about concepts that can themselves overcome a split that itself functions to signify cosmological worlds and post-cosmological worlds: a split between the premodern and modern.

What my interest is in is looking at the figure of this split. I don't think I would dispute the idea that periodization produces a rupture or fracture that is, perhaps, not all it is cracked up to be. I'm curious about the desire or gesture to unify around this split or to step outside of it from a distance that would render it invisible (Hayot uses the idea of asking his students what we will look like in 1000 years as an example of a distance that would render the division between Victorian and modern periods, for example, invisible), and mostly I'm curious about it because it seems to emerge from the shortcomings of the model of the split or fracture, which, I would propose, seems to assume the psychoanalytic model of projection or projective identification as its fundamental operating procedure. This models presents as the problem to be overcome the difficulty of stepping outside of your own aesthetic experience. When Hayot described the problem of not knowing if the split or rupture was there at the conceptual level (i.e. in terms of a presentist scholarly perspective) or at the level of the event (i.e. actually in history), he was invoking this model of the projection in order to conceptualize this split. Projection usually involves the idea of projective identification; it is there in formulations that make use of the figure of a self and other, in other words to think about how objects are set against and become external to individuals. As is often the case, the ethical problems associated with this model emerge from the difficulty in formulating a relation to the other that involves a problematic understanding of difference. The impulse to find a transconcept, or an idea that would assert the sameness of what lies on either side of the split, or a more general form that could traverse these sides can be understood as a way to negotiate with the difficulty of maintaining an adequate relation between these sides, to manage anxiety about one's blindspots actually--to include everything.

So, to return again, my interest in this moment lies perhaps in my desire to maintain the ambivalence of this split, and the psychical experience that it entails. It leads me, in fact, to a point where I wonder whether one of the real values of psychoanalytic theory is that it allows us to understand aesthetics not merely as a theory of beauty or perception, but as a theory of experience, in particular of sensory experience, or as Freud says in "The Uncanny," "a theory of the quality of feelings." From this perspective, the value of the historical, which I mentioned above, does not just have aesthetic experience as its blind spot, because it would say that it includes it, but the value exerted by the historical encloses the aesthetic within it as a kind of foundational gesture of the split it then goes on to critique. Much like the theory of projective identification, which includes the aesthetic as a form of perception or identification, this model of the rupture-to-be-overcome includes the aesthetic but is not able to let aesthetic experiences stand, as "things" in their own right, "things" that are experiences before they are reified or turned into objects.

This is, we might posit, the value of thought--which is not nearly equatable but always replaced in the institution with the idea of the value of the humanities. The value of thought, however, is less codifiable, less professionalizable, less justifiable. It made me think about how yesterday, when I showed students in my class on the rhetoric of everyday life Masao Adachi's film AKA Serial Killer, they had kind of set up some terms for thinking about being bombarded with the environment. Within the first twenty minutes, it becomes possible to experience even the image of a sunflower as a menace, or as demanding something from the viewer/the camera. In this way, it's about information overload before information overload (1969) and about how becoming desensitized is also, perhaps, a demand. I cite this because the film is the opposite of the mode discussed by Hayot; the mode that would relieve a viewer or reader of the perspective of rupture was one that "humbled" one, a view from a distance. Adachi loses sight of a rupture, split, or fracture because it is continually recast, and recast as the instantiation of environment. Rather than representing desensitization, the film produces an environment in which one is made to feel the demand or need for it. And by doing so, the film refigures the model of projective identification, which is generally assumed as the model of primary relating.

To return, then, to psychoanalysis, this is where both Balint's and Winnicott's ideas about the destructiveness of primary love become significant. According to Balint, primary love is a state in which one partner has all of the interests, desires, and needs and the other partner has none. It replaces or is prior to the scene of projection, because, as Winnicott describes, it is a state that precedes integration/disintegration--a state he calls nonintegration, in which what can be seen is that the primary relation assumed by projective identification (between a self and other, in whatever conceptual terms undertaken) already moves to turn an environmental provision into the demand of an other, an object, a thing. This is always a destructive move. Trying to turn it into an ethical or moral relationship (to an other) or to use it as a "humbling" experience misses the point that Winnicott identifies: that these various attitudes do not help us to "repair" our destructiveness, though they can function as a signal that we could "get to" it, or experience it, and therefore take responsibility for it. The problem is, though, I think, that any sort of ethical or moral or epistemological or whatever gesture often functions to defend against or prevent one from taking what Winnicott calls "full responsibility for one's destructiveness." The destructiveness he's talking about--to return to where I started--and the reason that it's defended against has to do with the otherwise very meaninglessness of aesthetic experience, which is also something that does not sit well with those who value history or (inter-)disciplinary professionalism--in the sense that such meaninglessness becomes intolerable, or always seems to be in need of a rationale, justification, or schematization. This is the scene of obliteration that Denise Ferreira da Silva describes in Toward a Global Idea of Race, the scene that is produced via the deployment of the racial. In the schema I've been describing, it might be possible to see how the state of nonintegration or primary love enforces the idea that the deployment of reparative knowledge (as Silva describes via the racial) always contains within it a moment of violence or destructiveness that it seeks to cover over. What's interesting about Winnicott is that because he's so interested in the psychical usefulness of his theoretical information, he does end up "prescribing" the usefulness of this insight into one's destructiveness. Taking responsibility in this sense is not an ethical or positive formulation; Winnicott suggests that what experiencing feelings of destructiveness allows us to do is "not to mobilize it in the service of hate." To do more than this, to think that one is doing more when one takes responsibility, certainly seems today to be the basis of so many misperceptions about where, for example, the problems of this system of racialized state violence lie.

picture: Sunflower, from AKA Serial Killer (Masao Adachi, 1969)--film reference, Rei Terada. 

the cunning of negative accumulation

It must be the affinity I associated with reading Denise Ferreira da Silva's Toward a Global Idea of Race that brought me to actually open Hegel's Science of Logic again (although the chain of connections that I right now have the luxury of making actually went from the question of sky coloration to the question of why sea water is blue to the idea of quantity transforming into quality) and from here to his description there of the transformation of quantity into quality. This is perhaps the most poignant part of the Science, the part of it I most remember from my reading of it almost ten years ago. In my post on Silva, I described how she identifies the duplicity of the moment in which the others of Europe are produced as global subaltern subjects, and that this Hegelian moment is related to this moment is indicated, textually, in Hegel's description, here, of the cunning, not of reason, but of "the concept [Begriff; notion]." The notion he is referring to is the notion of "quantity"; its cunning aspect is its appearing as an "indifferent limit," that is, its capacity not to signal that qualia is always already inherent in quantum. When we misapprehend this, Hegel explains, we feel embarrassment. He describes the moment:

At last the qualitative alteration is revealed: the head or tail is bald; the heap is vanished. In conceding the answer, it was not only the repetition that was each time forgotten, but also that the individually insignificant quantities (like the individually insignificant disbursements from a patrimony) add up, and the sum constitutes the qualitative whole, so that at the end this whole has vanished: the head is bald, the purse is empty. (21.332; "Specific Quantity," 290)

The "embarrassment"is nothing more than a contradiction, and Hegel aligns this logical problem with Aristotle's notion of elenchi, a refutation that rather easily leads to fallacy in syllogistic or deductive reasoning. It is worth nothing that Hegel's examples both entail the loss of a whole rather than the constitution of a whole (for example, adding drops of water to a body of water that changes from colorless to blue), since this initiates a logic of accumulation and dispossession (David Harvey, "accumulation by dispossession," cited in Chakravartty and Silva, "Accumulation, Dispossession, Debt"), which Hegel also signals by extending the example of the purse:

Quantum, when it is taken as indifferent limit, is the side from which an existence is unsuspectedly attacked and laid low. It is the cunning of the concept that it would seize on an existence from this side where its quality does not seem to come into play—and it does it so well that the aggrandizement of a State or of a patrimony, etc., which will bring about the misfortune of the State or the owner, even appears at first to be their good fortune. (21.332; "Specific Quantity," 291)

What I get from this (Silva's grammar sticks) is Hegel's positioning of the subject who observes (who misapprehends) the cumulative effect of subtractive projects. Forgetting you've debited your account is one thing; not getting that these cumulative debits add up is another. Hegel highlights subtractive processes here, we might say, because the dialectic writ large is a catalog of the additive moments, of moments in which the subject overcomes the loss of the transformation of quantity into quality because it does "add up" to a new whole.

The vanishing whole, however--perhaps better, the threat of the vanishing whole as an index of the inherence of dispossession in accumulation--signals the duplicity of reason via quantity, emphasizing how the production of the others of Europe, as an effect of modern reason, involves a similar misapprehension of the "indifference" of quantity. I don't, of course, follow Hegel's assertion that quantum and qualia are inherent and eternal extensions of one another, but I do think that this problem is the problem of thinking about the relation between individual instances of racialized inequality, death, and dispossession and the institutional, structural, or global dimensions of these acts. For while, as Hegel claims, it's only natural (or moreover, only human) to misapprehend the situation and think that the basic assurances of life are there, even though yet another individual is plucked from them, the knowledge of this loss is always retrospective. Unlike his description of the dialectic, Hegel does not here account for the recuperation of loss. This is interesting because the relationship posed here between the "whole" and the subtractive processes as something to be defended against reveals the extent to which the dialectical process is engaged with the production of the "whole"; in Silva's terms, I think, this is the production of "globality" (29) "as a modern context of signification, one that refers to a mode of existing before historicity, the horizon of life, that the ontological context transparency thesis produces."

What my reading of Toward a Global Idea of Race left open were questions about the way that so much non-truth can be produced about the global and why this does not, as is the case for Hegel's bald head or empty purse, result in the evacuation of this site as productive for reason. For how closely do the terms of quantity and quality map onto Silva's terms of interiority and exteriority? The problems that emerge for Hegel from the transformation of quantity into quality reveal how globality, like totality, as a harmonious sublation of quantity and quality, is an achievement for Hegel. Even where these relations are subtractive and not recuperated, they still allow us to imagine the heap, the head, the purse as an entity. In this regard, globality is an "embarrassment," a quantity about which an "indifferent limit" can be assumed. But what is the process of signification that for every sun finds a sun dog, a false sun, that does not just produce globality or reproduce the relations of globality but that reproduces globality?

on not extending transparency (denise ferreria da silva)

I have gotten to the end of Denise Ferreira da Silva’s Toward a Global Idea of Race (University of Minnesota Press 2007) and I feel much in its aftermath. In attempting to understand da Silva's argument in the past months, I have read through these notes on Seminario Permanente de Teoria y Critica a number of times, which I have found extremely helpful. 

Descriptively, da Silva’s writing is iterative, generating its logic; the experience of reading it often reminded me of reading Hegel’s The Science of Logic, although these are very different books, of course. The book is a study and critique of modern representation, specifically of how the racial has functioned as a “signifier of globality,” producing “the others of Europe as modern subaltern subjects.” She contrasts this project with the project of what she calls “post-theory,” which she understands as the valuation in postmodernism, poststructuralism, and postcolonialism of historicity, or the deployment of “a good version of historicity.” She finds that this move reproduces the logic of historicity, which “relies on the modern construction of distance as a temporal metaphor to circumscribe the place of emergence of the colonized as a transparent I” (168).  Understanding that the project of modern representation is the project of the transparent I is key to being able to understand the duplicitous condition that produces “the others of Europe as modern subaltern subjects.” I use the word duplicitous to characterize this process because it denotes the doubleness (the being “twice affectable” that da Silva describes of the female slave in colonial Brazil (241)) but also the question of truth/falsity that science brings to the scene of modern representation. But this is also a duplicitous condition because da Silva suggests throughout the book that this process is informed by both “European desire” and by the “displacement” of race through the play of other key signifiers and strategies in modernity.

This points to the position held by the term “exteriority” in da Silva’s argument, which signals the overlap of the productive and reproductive in her project, by which I mean to point to the way that the subaltern subject’s exteriority is both assumed by and produced in the scene of modern representation. Da Silva describes how this logic informed early anthropological projects:

When deploying the cultural to incarcerate the others of Europe in their traditions and to safely keep post-Enlightenment Europe in the moment of transparency, these social scientific projects have already been approaching their objects as racial things. Not because these versions of these disciplines failed to refute the “original sin,” the writing of man as an effect of the tools of productive nomos, scientific reason in the guise of Spirit, but because, as they did so, they incorporated racial difference as a substantive trait of the human body. Had this not been the case, it would not have been possible to carve their separate niches in such a way as not to distinguish them from history. (150)

Da Silva describes this “incorporation” of racial difference as a strategy of engulfment, through which “racial difference” becomes a “substantive trait.” She describes how Boas (1911), who sought to classify the impact of “natural environment” on primitive races, supposed a fundamental difference between “civilized” and “primitive thought,” which was based on his finding that the “primitive mind” is determined by its environment, whereas the “civilized” mind, via Descartes’s efforts to secure the transcendental subject as its non-determination by exteriority (42). Thus it is the valorization of the interiority of the mind as what is “true” that occasions the displacement of “exteriority.” Because this exteriority, per Descartes, is seen to be based on  its identification as an “extended” thing, that is, as “body,” it allows for, in fact, inaugurates, the displacement of bodies that are not “minds,” that are not, in other words, containers of the transcendental mind. This gesture is already a gesture that is reproductive, or reconstructive, not just projective. By this, I mean to refer to the way that da Silva identifies the forward- and backward-facing aspects of the productive moment—that the others of Europe are “produced” as the reproduction of the transcendental I. Behind this is the moment in which race is transformed into the racial:

My first move is to describe the first moment of the analytics of raciality, the science of man, to show how, although it inherited the eighteenth-century naturalists' correlation between global regions and bodily and social configurations, it is the first project of knowledge to write post-Enlightenment Europe's particularity by deploying the apparatus of scientific reason manufactured in the account of productive nomos. Its arsenal does this when it transforms race (a term previously employed to describe collectivities in terms of blood relationship) into the racial (a scientific concept), the strategy of engulfment that produces the human body as an exteriorization of productive nomos. (116)

The moment that da Silva describes is key to modern representation, because it accounts for the transformation of a something descriptive (the manifoldness of human bodies) into a concept. This process of signification thus turns on the process in which the exteriorization of the mind is made manifold. Literally, it hinges on this moment, but this is also the moment in which modern representation, the working of the transcendent I, deceives or betrays, or can be seen as duplicitous in its movement of self-realization. It would be a stretch to call this moment intentional, in da Silva's schema, and yet, it also does not really seem sufficient to call it structural either. This is the problem that da Silva encountered, it seems, in trying to get to the limits of her own understanding, as she describes the development of the project:

Yet earlier I had failed to comprehend so many events! Events that are, to be sure, fully explained by what and how I know: another death of a black or brown youth at the hands of law enforcement, another death related to drug trafficking, another prison rebellion where many prisoners die, another suicide bombing, another legal act whose objective is to place more and more "others of Europe" in a state of illegality. When I learned about them, I got mad. Because that which enables my "understanding" explains away these events (and the fear they entail), resolving them in neat sociological formulas that write the deaths I hear about and the ones I can only imagine as events foretold....Haunted and mad, I engaged in the project of mapping the trajectory of the racial, that modern signifier that delimits all the murders producing the place where the lives, the social trajectory, of the racial subaltern subjects unfold. (261)

Here, da Silva describes how sociological or structural (institutional) analysis of race and racism deploys the logical gesture that "explains" away these deaths, which is, I think, a method that could similarly be ascribed to the explanatory gesture of biopolitics today. She begins the book with a discussion of Foucault, and specifically of the limit of Foucault's critique of "truth," which she attributes to his separation of the racial as a "symbolics of blood" from the "production of minds" (24). Thus, she finds that he does "not reach the place where European particularity is but an effect of the strategies of this productive ruler [universal reason]" (25).  She describes this as his inability (refusal?) to "relinquish" interiority. Thus, the question that occupies me, I suppose, is how to relinquish interiority. In what is arguably one of the more prescriptive moments of the text, and in its last lines, da Silva writes: 

We need to trace every and each articulation of raciality, including those that profess its irrelevance, trace at each moment how it rewrites the racial subaltern subject in affectability, producing statements that not only excuse the violent effects of this rewriting but also redeploy the transparency thesis. (267)

I think the operation that da Silva calls for here involves thinking about how one can talk or think about race without it being folded into raciality. Indeed, this seems to be Seminario Permanente de Teoria y Critica's question as well, phrased differently: "My question: if racialization is inevitably part of the modern paradigm, then is there is no way to revise it out of that paradigm?" For it seems that each "articulation of raciality" implies the relation in which "interiority" is not relinquished and comes to displace race, so that tracing such articulations would account for the displacement of race from the scene of representation and its revision as culture, etc,. I believe this still leaves, however--and perhaps this is the point?--the question of what race is, nonsubstantively: collectivities of blood relationships, symbolics of blood, manifoldness of human bodies. Is it the nonsubstantivity that is key, a "mix-up"? And finally, how is this related to the question of how to not extend transparency, how to not "redeploy the transparency thesis," a question I am always afraid to ask for fear that it also already always reproduces my own transparency. There is so much more to say about this book.