The Human Idea

Let us be human. –

~Wittgenstein

            Four words.  Laß uns menschlich sein, in the original text (Culture and Value).  What does Wittgenstein mean?  Are we not human, but should be?  Is something prohibiting us from being human?  Are we already human, but we insist on confirming our nature?  Is “human” functioning here as a noun, or as an adjective?  Are we to behave humanely to one another?  To animals?  To everything?  Furthermore, what is “human”?  The simplicity of Wittgenstein’s comment is deceptive in only a way that Wittgenstein could ever intend.

            We who practice in the Humanities face a difficult challenge today.  No longer can we put dogmatic faith in the universal standard of the human.  If modernism (or modernity) has taught us anything, it is that history has left humanity behind.  Yet we maintain our profession as being “the Humanities”; we insist that we study the art and culture of humanity.  In addition, we profess humane action and behavior, the ethical treatment of others.  Even amidst the rapid development of technology and the onset of the digital age, we seem to resist abandoning this category, and have introduced the controversial field of the digital humanities.  We are relentless humans in a relentlessly nonhuman world.  We cling to this identity, refusing to cast it aside.  But what is this identity?  Is it something that we are; or is it something that we make?

            Let us be human.

            How can we “let” ourselves be human?

I.                   The Inhuman

            Ambivalence toward the human is a popular attitude these days.  Several critics and philosophers have put forth convincing and, sometimes, antagonist theories of the human and humanism.  Among them, N. Katherine Hayles and Cary Wolfe have produced some of my favorite work: How We Became Posthuman (1999) and What is Posthumanism? (2010), respectively.  While much of the debate circles around a kind of ontology of the posthuman, my primary interest lies in what I perceive to be an epistemology of posthumanism.  That is, I figure posthumanism as a gradual development, an epistemological shift, in which humanism becomes self-conscious in a structural sense.  This gradual awakening invites a singular, startling question: what does it mean to be human?  Furthermore, as we become aware of ourselves as human, we also begin to realize that something else lingers in the liminal spaces, along the borders of our being.  Something unknown and unthinkable.

            This idea came to a head in Foucault’s The Order of Things (1966):

Man and the unthought are, at the archaeological level, contemporaries.  Man has not been able to describe himself as a configuration in the episteme without thought at the same time discovering, both in itself and outside itself, at its borders yet also in its very warp and woof, an element of darkness, an apparently inert density in which it is embedded, an unthought which it contains entirely, yet in which it is also caught.  The unthought (whatever name we give it) is not lodged in man like a shriveled-up nature or a stratified history; it is, in relation to man, the Other: the Other that is not only a brother but a twin, born, not of man, nor in man, but beside him and at the same time, in an identical newness, in an unavoidable duality […] In any case, the unthought has accompanied man, mutely and uninterruptedly, since the nineteenth century. (326-7)

Foucault claims that in order for us to know what “man” is, we must also have some concept of what it is not.  Thus, the very birth or invention of “man” entails the simultaneous invention of something else: non-man, the unthought, the inhuman.  In The Order of Things we encounter the epistemological emergence of the posthuman itself through Foucault’s identification of that (poststructuralist) shape and figure which is opposed to the human.  Of course, in typical poststructuralist tradition, we cannot maintain these categories, and they are not identified in order to be maintained; rather than oppose the human to the inhuman in order to reinforce the former, poststructuralism exposes the arbitrariness of the division between the two.

            Posthumanism asks us to go one step further.  It asks us to see how the human is always-already inhuman.  The inhuman is the dissonance that eviscerates the human from the inside.

            In many senses, posthumanism adopts a polemical position.  It maintains that the human, as an institution of Western Cartesian rationalism, can only ever be an instrument of exclusion.  Jean Baudrillard (1976)  asserts that the human, and humanism, has inspired an entire history of racial prejudice: “Racism is modern.  Previous races or cultures were ignored or eliminated, but never under the sign of a universal Reason.  There is no criterion of man, no split from the Inhuman, there are only differences with which to oppose death.  But it is our undifferentiated concept of man that gives rise to discrimination” (Baudrillard, Symbolic 125).  This racism is only possible with recourse to the human – anything that falls outside the purview of Man (i.e. white, Western, liberalist-capitalist, male) is thus excluded to another sphere, the realm of the inhuman.  The inhuman thus offers a revolutionary position, but at the same time remains exiled.

            Jean-François Lyotard (1989) projects the inhuman even further, insisting that the human itself betrays its own inhumanism through its technological being: “Any material system is technological if it filters information useful to its survival, if it memorizes and processes that information and makes inferences based on the regulating effect of behaviour, that is, if it intervenes on and impacts its environment so as to assure its perpetuation at least.  A human being isn’t different in nature from an object of this type” (12).  Lyotard’s comment blurs the line between the natural and the artificial, suggesting that the human body does not need robotic prostheses or enhancing drugs to become an artificial/technological apparatus.  If we wish to describe the technological as artificial, then the human body is already artificial; or, should we choose to come from the other direction: technology is nothing more than a natural, evolutionary development.  John Gray (2002) puts it simply: “If we are replaced by machines, it will be in an evolutionary shift no different from that when bacteria combined to create our earliest ancestors” (16).  Posthumanism breaks down these hierarchies, dissolves these divisions.

            The inhuman appears as a figure that drains the human from the human; it subtracts what the human purports as its essential substance.  Let us put forth the following claim:

1.      Posthumanism implements figures of the inhuman in order to put the human in a context of which it is not an epistemological center; that is, posthumanism proceeds, in all its efforts, with the modern knowledge that the hierarchies we use to navigate the world are dangerously one-sided.  Therefore, if posthumanism constitutes an epistemological shift, then it cannot simply be a theory of the way in which we talk about things.  It must be implemented at the level of practice as a way in which we do things: business, medicine, scientific experimentation, etc.

II.                The Human

            The posthuman, then, is not a zombie, a cyborg, or an alien per se; these are images of the inhuman.  The posthuman is the epistemology that makes room for these categories on a level that is equal with the human; and along with such fantastical categories, we must also make room for flora and fauna, bacteria, viruses, the microbes and creatures of the sea floor, et al.  Posthumanism entails an ethics of the treatment of others, including animal others.[i]  In order to accomplish this, we have to embrace an epistemological view that displaces the human from its throne as the saviors and protectors of all life.  In other words, we have to rewrite the narrative of human existence; or, even more difficult, acknowledge the absence of any narrative in the first place.

            One of the most difficult points for many to accept regarding posthumanism is its displacement not only of the human, but of the universalism of what many believe to be the central aspect of the human: namely, its conscious ability to craft a self, an I.  Through the use of this central, first-person narrator (the human being), we devise stories about our place in the world; narratives about ourselves, the narrators.  Posthumanism asks us to acknowledge that not only is this narrative an illusion; but it also asks us to acknowledge that our consciousness is an illusion.[ii]  While much has been done in the realm of cognitive science, an earlier and far more speculative tradition interrogates the stability of human consciousness: the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein and his private language argument.[iii]

            Wittgenstein does not attempt to prove that interior experiences are not real, or even that mental processes are not real.  He would almost certainly say that they are; however, Wittgenstein is interested in demonstrating that inner mental processes are not necessary for communication to take place:

[…] the difference between a broken and an unbroken tooth I can exhibit to anyone. – For the private exhibition, however, you don’t have to give yourself actual pain; it is enough to imagine it – for instance, you screw up your face a bit.  And do you know that what you are exhibiting to yourself in this way is pain and not, for example, a facial expression?  And how do you know what you are to exhibit to yourself before you do it?  This private exhibition is an illusion. (311)[iv]

Wittgenstein’s argument puts forth two important points:  first, if communication occurs between two individuals, it need not be substantiated by any mental process; and second, while mental states exist, it is impossible to indulge in a private language through which one communicates her own mental processes to herself.  Stated simply, the immediacy a person has to her own mental processes precludes the possibility of communicating them to her own mind.  The entire event is too sensational, or experiential, for meaning to take any kind of priority.

            Wittgenstein’s private language argument holds consequences for humanism because it removes an important component from the process of linguistic communication: the liberal humanist subject, or self.  Self-based theories of communication posit atomic subjects, comprised of centered selves, communicating interior thoughts and mental states.  Wittgenstein challenges this assumption by demonstrating that interior mental states are not the origin, or the directing principle, of linguistic communication.  Communication takes place externally, and is comprised less of originally intended meanings than of socially constituted meaning.

            Foreshadowing later cognitive science, poststructuralism, and posthuman theory, Wittgenstein levies a serious criticism at traditional humanism.  Proceeding from the private language argument, we discover an increasingly skeptical philosophical tradition that takes humanism as one of its central targets.

            The human is, above all else, an idea; a sublimation that is also an effect of highly evolved conscious organisms.  The human does not precede consciousness, but is the product of a consciousness organizing its interests and values.  Furthermore, consciousness does not precede language, but emerges as a side effect of language-using bodies.  The human is thus twice removed from the organism which adopts this as its name; the only ontological status it holds is as a creation of thoughtful minds that have already entered into consciousness and language.  It is an image that has been retrospected into the past as an originary point, but it is actually the effect of conscious organisms.

            Put as simply as possible: the human is a fiction, a story we tell ourselves about what we are.

            This does not mean in the least that the thing we take to be human – this body and blood, this nexus of nerves and limbo of limbs – is not real.  We, as organisms, are very real, materially real.  The idea that we craft of ourselves, however, the narrative that organizes itself around the human, which then takes the position as a beginning (origin) and an end (telos), is not real despite its existence as fantasy.  It is the greatest fiction ever conceived in the history of humanity.  And now, we arrive at a second claim:

2.      The history of humanity is not the same thing as what I have been calling the narrative of the human, although they are related in an interesting way.  The history of humanity signifies a predominantly (multi)cultural discursive institution that provides literal explanations of the course of humanity throughout the world over millennia; these explanations can mythological or scientific, but they are always believed (at the time of their creation, by at least one person or another) to be literal.  The narrative of the human must be constructed and retrospected prior to any history of humanity.  However, upon its construction (which occurs collectively and yet unconsciously), it is viewed as happening within human history.  The human preexists its own history, and yet it can only be seen to occur, or develop, within its history.  It is thus located, paradoxically, both within the course of human history (as that which human history is supposedly about), and external to human history (as that which must necessarily precede any conception of a history that is about humanity).  The human, as an institution of evolved consciousness, appears to us as a miracle because it functions only as paradox.

III.             The Posthuman

            The human is a grand narrative, told again and again throughout recorded history, manifesting in our institutions, our events and moments, our literature and our lives.  Wittgenstein tells us all we need to know: we must “let” ourselves be human.  We must tell ourselves that we are human.  The human only makes sense as a story we tell ourselves about ourselves, and yet we perceive it as something tangible and universal; something which exists concretely as an original point.  However, if we actually attempt to explore our past, we would find that the human has no origin.  In the parameters of deep time, or geologic time, the boundaries that frame the human are frighteningly arbitrary.  Culturally, we ignore this aporia of our past, this absence of origin, because to confront it is to acknowledge a horrifying truth: that our story makes no sense, and that we are already far from “human.”  So we maintain our limits, our borders and our boundaries.  We maintain the thought of the Outside.

            The human only makes sense against the backdrop of what it is not.

            The Wikipedia page for posthumanism is remarkably short, although it includes numerous links to other sites.  It is also nested under the broader category of Humanism, which raises some concern over their relationship – the “-post” being more confusing than illuminating, in my opinion.  Does it mean “after,” “beyond,” or something entirely different?  While its most obvious meaning would seem to be chronological in nature, I don’t find that this makes much sense.  If the human only makes sense against the backdrop of what it is not, then the inhuman must present itself along with the human; they appear simultaneously.  As Foucault tells us, the unthought (the space of the inhuman, in my reading) has accompanied man since his birth, or invention.  The inhuman is not a recent phenomenon, birthed from the 20^th-century tales of Lovecraft.  It is one with the human, equally arbitrary and constructed: it is the other side of the border, that which constitutes the human in its finitude.

            The posthuman does not place greater emphasis or concern on the inhuman, nor does it lessen the importance or value of those organisms we call “human.”  In a very recent online piece, Reza Negarastani argues that inhumanism should be seen as an effort to widen the institution we call humanism: “Inhumanism is the extended practical elaboration of humanism; it is born out of a diligent commitment to the project of enlightened humanism” (“The Labor of the Inhuman”).  Where Negarastani uses inhumanism, I choose posthumanism; but I feel our goals are the same (as are the goals of posthumanists such as Hayles and Wolfe): namely, to expose the arbitrary and exclusive parameters of humanism and to attempt a widening of those parameters, to reinscribe the human into a more egalitarian position within the world.  As Derrida once remarked, we cannot do without metaphysical categories and concepts – they infiltrate and (some might say) infect our being.  But other creatures exist in mutually symbiotic relationships, so why might we not embrace the concepts that claim us?

            In a very strong sense, Deleuze was the premier deconstructionist; not Derrida.  Derrida acknowledged the permanence and permeation of metaphysical concepts, but encouraged a constant awareness of them.  Deleuze’s endorsement of anti-interpretation would have all parameters melt away, every boundary and definitive limit bleed into a Body without Organs.  Deleuze was, beyond all doubts, the true anti-humanist.  Derrida certainly clings to a brand of humanism; but it is what we might call (along with Negarastani) an enlightened humanism.  A strongly self-reflexive humanism.  A humanism that grants its entitlements to all things.

            Thus the final claim (for now…):

3.      If posthumanism is an epistemological shift, then it does not constitute a disintegration of boundaries, concepts, and definitions.  It merely endorses a wider frame, a newly-conceived set within which to place the human, and an eternal commitment to the questioning of the definitions we deploy.[v]  In a sense, this stance takes us back to Wittgenstein and what his successors have deemed “ordinary language” (and Derrida, in some sense, might be considered a part of this group).  Let us continue to speak, but let us be conscious of the words we choose.  Let us be critical.  Let us expand our awareness to others whom, one hundred years ago, our ancestors might have derided and exiled.  Let us look closely at our institutions and perceive how they might liberate some while imprisoning others.  Let us be mindful of the things we condemn as dangerous and threatening, and closely consider the source of that purported danger.  Let us be always skeptical, and let us be always speculative.  Let us be inquisitive.  Let us mean, and let us matter. 

Let us be (post)human.[vi]

Works Cited

Baudrillard, Jean. Symbolic Exchange and Death. Trans. Iain Hamilton Grant. London: SAGE, 2012. Print.

Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things. New York: Vintage, 1994. Print.

Gray, John. Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Girous, 2002. Print.

Lyotard, Jean-François. The Inhuman: Reflections on Time. Trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1991. 8-23. Print.

Negarastani, Reza. "The Labor of the Inhuman, Part I: the Human." E-flux. 2014. Web.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Culture and Value. Trans. Peter Winch. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1984. Print.

-. Philosophical Investigations. Trans. G.E.M. Anscombe, P.M.S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009. Print.

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[i] The question of animal ethics is at the heart of Cary Wolfe’s work on posthumanism.

[ii] This has been the task of several recent efforts by cognitive scientists and philosophers of mind.  Two of the most successful contributions to this line of thought are Thomas Metzinger’s Being No One (2003) and Daniel Dennett’s Consciousness Explained (1991).

[iii] Debate still occurs over Wittgenstein’s intentions with this argument, as well as which aphorisms from Philosophical Investigations constitute the argument.  For one of the most influential contributions to this discussion, see Saul Kripke’s Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language (1982).  For my own purposes, I will proceed based on a personal (and somewhat substantiated) reading of Wittgenstein’s work.

[iv] All numbers for Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations correspond to aphorism, not to page.

[v] There is some controversy to this declaration, I am aware.  Specifically, it calls to mind the ongoing debate over questions of cultural identity, especially racial identity: are we to maintain racial difference and celebrate it (the problematic tone of multiculturalism); or are we do dissolve race entirely and surpass it as an institution (the equally problematic tone of post-racialism)?  I have no answer except to insist that we remain mindful of this issue.

[vi] Fortunately, if we believed N. Katherine Hayles, we already are.

“Vision is Meaning. Meaning is Historical”: HBO’s True Detective – Part I

The title is excerpted from a line in HBO’s True Detective.  I included it here for two purposes: first, it’s a fantastic quote that I happen to agree with; and second, it has profound implications, which I will briefly cover now.  If meaning is historical, then this must lead us to the conclusion that meaning is neither a) objective, in the sense that it cannot be found in reality as it exists external to our own minds, but neither is it b) subjective, in the sense that it cannot be reduced to the singular intentions of an atomic individual.  However, this does not mean that meaning is illusory.  It is very real – but it exists on a plane, or in a manner, or functions among us in such a way that it is neither absolute (or universal) or individually created.

            This conundrum could lead us down a path similar to the one trodden by Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose Philosophical Investigations is profoundly concerned with the operations of language.  After turning away from the strong, mathematically informed positivism of his dissertation, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Wittgenstein set off on a far more speculative brand of intellectualism that has had a tremendous impact on the “post”-modern cynicism sometimes referred to as “relativism.”  Wittgenstein was not a relativist, however, nor is his Philosophical Investigations – but all this is merely a convoluted way of saying that the complex problem of meaning can take us down a difficult path of trying to understand, via language, the very ways that language functions and how it came to be.  Such an attempt is fascinating to read, but it is not what I am primarily concerned with at this time.

            What I am concerned with – and what the writers of True Detective are concerned with – is identifying and critiquing the process of meaning-making.  As a television show, True Detective is most interesting to me because it is materially aware of itself as a narrative; that is, its content actively speaks to the construction of its form.  “Nothing in this world is ever solved,” mutters Rust Cohle to his more traditional partner, Marty Hart.[i]  Cohle not only evokes the difficulty of forensic investigation, but more importantly he evokes the concept of the retroactivity of narrative.

            When we typically think of solving a mystery – in our normative, acculturated manner – we tend to think of something that makes total sense but remains unseen, or hidden from us.  The point of the investigation is to retrieve this hidden meaning, which exists in fact prior to the investigation itself.  The investigation is, for all intents and purposes, a retrieval of lost meaning.  This is how many people also approach the act of reading itself: it is something that already means something complete, unified, total, but that must be retrieved, or put together, by the reader.  The illusion in this approach lies in the belief that the meaning precedes the act of reading – or, that meaning preexists its discovery (or recovery, in an even more ideological sense).

            In his fantastic work of literary criticism, Reading for the Plot, Peter Brooks challenges this traditional approach to notions of reading and meaning; and, even more appropriately, he uses the example of detective fiction to make his point.  Recalling one of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes tales, Brooks argues that Doyle reenacts the procedure of reading itself as a retrospection of meaning back onto a series of events that have already occurred.  Meaning, in this alternative conception, does not reside in things, but must be interpreted into them by the detective-reader: “all narrative posits, if not the Sovereign Judge, at least a Sherlock Holmes capable of going back over the ground, and thereby realizing the meaning of the cipher left by a life.”  When Rust Cohle mutters that nothing is ever solved, he is acknowledging the illusory nature of meaning as something to be discovered, or recovered; rather than the uncovering of a hidden secret, Cohle admits that nothing is ever “solved” because, in the most literal sense, there is nothing to be solved.  The procedure of forensic investigation, like the act of reading, is not a process of discovering meaning but of actively making it.

            At this point it is important to emphasize that meaning is not thereby reduced to the interpretation or emotional response of a singular reader, an argument that has been successfully dismantled and is often referred to as “the affective fallacy.”  The complex act of reading – like the act of writing, and like the act of investigation – is a social one.  It cannot exist without a culture, or a collective.  If it could, then it stands to reason that individuals could harbor private languages; but this too has been dismantled by Wittgenstein himself, and later by Saul Kripke, in what has come to be known as Wittgenstein’s private language argument:

[The] difference between a broken and an unbroken tooth I can exhibit to anyone. – For the private exhibition, however, you don’t have to give yourself actual pain; it is enough to imagine it – for instance, you screw up your face a bit.  And do you know that what you are exhibiting to yourself in this way is pain and not, for example, a facial expression?  And how do you know what you are to exhibit to yourself before you do it?  The private exhibition is an illusion.

To be brief and simple, the notion of private language constitutes an immediacy that precludes the possibility of communication occurring at all.  The claim to private language rests upon the illusion of an interior expression taking place.

            Therefore meaning is not private – it does not issue from an individual, even if that individual takes on the task of interpreting a text; but neither is it universal, in which case it would exist in an idealistic crystalline form prior to any conscious mind apprehending it.  The communicative kernel, the expressive kernel, the origin of meaning itself – where are we to locate such an ephemeral thing?  This is the central concern of True Detective.  Cohle understands that humans create meaning, but he also knows that meaning is not individual: “meaning is historical.”  Meaning is thus, and can only ever be, a collective operation.  Language only arises from the need for communication, as Marx said; and the creation of meaning does not originate with a single person who picks and chooses words that mean certain things, and then tells this to others: for how could a person educate others on what words mean before those others know what words mean?  Education of any sort presupposes the embedment of an individual within a collective symbolic network.  If we proceed from this juncture, we arrive at a confounding paradoxical axiomatic (does it even make sense to say this?): that is, in order for meaning to happen, for it to emerge collectively, language must somehow precede meaning.

            Similar claims are to be found in the poststructuralist writings of Derrida and Lacan.  In “Signature Event Context” Derrida argues convincingly that communication evokes the apparent necessity of some sort of arche-writing, or writing that precedes communication.  In order for humans to understand one another in a meaningful way, must not the institution for that meaning somehow already exist?  Derrida is no mystic (although some may claim otherwise), but he does force a difficult conclusion: the vehicle, or apparatus, for communication must somehow already be there, waiting for us.[ii]  Lacan, in an obscure argument that expands the breadth of at least two essays (“The Signification of the Phallus” and “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire”) and multiple lectures, arrives at a similar conclusion: a human subject, at some point in its early development, must pass through the level of the symbolic (social language, perhaps even the most abstract and general version of what Wittgenstein called “language games”).  This phenomenon, the biological workings of which are entirely ignored by Lacan, also happens paradoxically.  The subject that passes through the chain of signifiers must take up its existence as a gap in the chain, as the locus of the absence of meaning: “The cut made by the signifying chain is the only cut that verifies the structure of the subject as a discontinuity in the real.  If linguistics enables us to see the signifier as the determinant of the signified, analysis reveals the truth of this relationship by making holes in meaning the determinants of its discourse.”  Not only does meaning occur retroactively, but it only succeeds because of its failures.

            As a final example, these odd claims on the paradox and retroactivity of meaning are not isolated to a group of erudite and obscurantist philosophers puttering about in 1960s France.  In his 1991 book Consciousness Explained, Daniel Dennett writes something that sounds oddly like poststructuralism despite his dismissal of the movement: “At this extreme, the communicative intentions that exist are as much an effect of the process as a cause – they emerge as a product, and once they emerge, they are available as standards against which to measure further implementation of the intentions.  There is not one source of meaning, but many shifting sources, opportunistically developed out of the search for the right words.”  Dennett provides us with what is perhaps the most illuminating explanation of the paradox of meaning, although its origin still remains (and likely will always remain) obscure.  Dennett claims that meaning is never complete until the words that are taken to mean that meaning are spoken; in a twist as compelling as that offered by Derrida, your words, which you take to mean what you intended them to, actually mean something else.  They alter the meaning itself.  Meaning, then, in any abstract or originary sense, ceases to exist in a way that can be communicated.  The meaning of your spoken words is only envisioned and retrospected after language arrives on the scene.

            What does all this have to do with True Detective?  I’ve already said that the show is aware of itself as a narrative, and that it comments on its form in its very content – mostly in the shape of Cohle’s dialogue.  Cohle is a cynic (to put it lightly) who has educated himself on the instability and strange nature of meaning: something that is both real and imaginary, but neither subjective nor objective.  It is bound up ceaselessly in a feedback loop of sorts; or, if we borrow his own language (which he borrows from Nietzsche), a circle.

            This is the first of (hopefully) a brief series of commentaries on the show, which I have enjoyed immensely despite some issues with the conclusion (none of which are major).  So much as already been written on this show – between roundtable discussions on The Atlantic’s website to interviews with Nic Pizzolatto himself – that I feel the need to be cautious lest I repeat what others have already said.  However, I have felt the need to really emphasize what I feel is a strong awareness that the story has of itself as a story.  More than simply a murder mystery, True Detective is a metanarrative in all its grand, postmodern glory.  In the finale, Cohle admits as much to Marty: “It’s all the same story […] Light versus dark.”  But we must not read this as a total summation of what this season of True Detective has been about.

            Series writer Nic Pizzolatto has enjoyed a lot of publicity lately over the fandom surrounding his show.  In a recent interview, he substantiates some of what I have said:

And to me, if there's one governing thing in True Detective that encompasses everything that is happening in True Detective, and that the show is telling you — constantly, the show keeps telling you — is that everything is a story. Cohle tells you that who you think you are, your identity, is a story you tell yourself. He tells us that religion and philosophy are stories we tell ourselves. Cohle describes them as cathartic narratives, but in confession he's so good at getting confessions from suspects because he gives them room to create a cathartic narrative. Hart says an investigation is the act of trying to put together a story after the fact, and when he goes over his story in episode 5, you can tell that Hart used to tell himself one story and now he tells himself another story. The show was never concerned with the supernatural, but it was concerned with supernatural thought, and it was concerned with supernatural thinking to the degree that it was concerned with storytelling. So if there was one overarching theme to True Detective, I would say it was that as human beings, we are nothing but the stories we live and die by — so you'd better be careful what stories you tell yourself.

Why this overarching, emphatic insistence on True Detective as being about storytelling?  In one sense, it evokes the heart of what is at the Gothic tradition of literature.  Edgar Allan Poe, one of the most influential Gothic writers, understood the elemental nature of the Gothic as a concern over meaning and narrative, as evident in his tales of ratiocination (which introduced Auguste Dupin, the prototype to Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes) and his shorter tales such as “The Man of the Crowd” and “The Sphinx”; all stories that revolve around a mystery, but are far more concerned with exposing how a story is told rather than what the story is telling.  However, in another sense, I believe that Pizzolatto is commenting and critiquing a very typical, normative response we have toward not only stories, but the institutions that we surround ourselves with every day, including the institution of investigation (which has since infiltrated countless primetime slots since the success of CSI).  Pizzolatto wants us to realize the historical conditioning of the stories we have told (and continue to tell) ourselves.  He wants us to come to terms with the material circumstances of our identities, to expose the contingencies on which we have built them.

            For this reason, I believe that the conclusion provides an impressive balance of optimism and cynicism.  I do not, for my part, believe that Cohle has found God, as some have claimed.  I prefer Pizzolatto’s explanation: “I don't think Cohle is ever lying. I just think he wants that ultimate nullity to be true in the way that a born again Christian might want the transubstantiation of Christ to be true, right? It's the kind of thing where if you know this, then you don't have to go around saying it all the time, do you?”  To put this another way: if the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves are ultimately illusory, then isn’t Cohle’s own story – his insistence on the material conditioning of meaning, or his reduction of the self to an accumulation of sensations that projects a central empowered being – just as illusory?  If we as viewers were allowed to see an extra scene – Marty and Cohle ten years down the line – I don’t think we would find them sitting side by side on their front porch, drinking beers and bitching about their wives.  I think we would find Cohle very similar in fact to his portrayal throughout the show; but I think we would find in him a deeper consolation and commitment.  At its conclusion, True Detective does not give us Cohle’s renunciation of cynicism and/or conversion to some kind of faith (despite what Matthew McConaughey may have read into the script – meaning is historical, remember?); rather, it gives us a portrait of a person who has become disillusioned with disillusion.

            A person who can find unwavering comfort in the brutal fact that the universe is ancient, complex, both creative and destructive, both aesthetically pleasing and disgusting, ethically just and unfair, simultaneously mysterious and present, infinite and divisible. 

            Meaningful, and meaningless.

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[i] I apologize for the lack of exact references.  I’m recalling my sources from memory.

[ii] Noam Chomsky has voiced an alternative approach which has come to be known as “deep grammar”; that is, the idea that very inchoate forms of grammatical instruction/composition, which are somehow innate, were then developed into more complex forms of speech and writing.  

The Challenge of Posthumanism

            From Reza Negarastani's blog:

It is through this operative fog that some of the more insidious mechanisms of neoliberal capitalism are directly plugged into the cognitive infrastructure under the guise of a world that appears determined to extend the plasticity of imagination and expand frontiers of action. But this is a world in which the financial closure of capitalism is cloned and grafted onto a cognitively maimed economy for accumulating false alternatives in the name of liberation of imagination and action. A suture of different overambitious vocations and driven by the wealth of waste it generates, the resulting beast is a prophetic vision of a tightly connected and controlled society with a single closed alimentary circuit, the human centipede. Those who scheme to infiltrate this world in order to militantly or cunningly liberate it from the inside are locked into the compactly segmented structure of the metameric organism. At once necessary for the growth yet expendable, every insider is a new addition to the iterated sequence of mouths and rectums through which the art world bootstraps itself - a miracle made possible by a simple but efficacious financial and cognitive algorithm. Dreams of acceleration or deceleration, speculative enthusiasm for the outside or critical self-reflection are revealed to be simply changes of frequency in the rate of the said iteration.

This is actually a very Land-ian (i.e. Nick Land) take on art, in that it critiques the institutionalization of art (although I like to believe that Land and Negarastani have radically differing political visions).  I basically read this as a fancy way of saying that all art has become commodified; but “commodification” is still a drastically human concept.  Instead of seeing this institutionalization as a process that continues to benefit the privileged and exclude the disenfranchised, perhaps we need to redefine (or recreate) our terms.  Or, if we want to remain somewhat loyal to the “scientific” version of Marxism, we need to resist the lure of the hypothetical puppet-master; that is, we have to resist the illusion that there is a master actor, or agent, pulling the strings and making a secret killing off all commodification while the rest of us shiver in our hovels and eat Ramen noodles.  Of course, there are those who make unfathomably large amounts of money while others make unfathomably little; but, if we adopt Negarastani’s posthuman machinic view (which might coincide with a version of scientific Marxism), nobody is manipulating the machine.  The machine manipulates everybody.

            There is nothing particularly new or groundbreaking in such an analysis, but let me push a bit further.  Another post by Negarastani that I find interesting:

The Labour of the Inhuman

Inhumanism is the extended practical elaboration of humanism; it is born out of a diligent commitment to the project of humanism. A universal wave that erases the self-portrait of man drawn in sand, inhumanism is a vector of revision, it relentlessly revises what it means to be human by removing its supposed evident characteristics and preserving certain invariances. At the same time, inhumanism registers itself as a demand for construction, to define what it means to be human by treating human as a manipulable and re-orientable hypothesis. Inhumanism is in concrete opposition to any theoretical paradigm that seeks to degrade humanity either in the face of its finitude or against the backdrop of the great outdoors. The force of inhumanism operates as a retroactive deterrence against anti-humanism by understanding humanity historically - in the broadest physico-biological and socio-economical sense of history - as an indispensable runway toward itself. But what is humanism, or precisely speaking, what specific commitment does 'being human' represent and how does the full practical elaboration of this commitment to humanity amount to inhumanism?

I've been thinking a lot lately about the conflation of posthumanism, inhumanism, and anti-humanism; what these terms mean and how they relate.  I have recently completed a paper that investigates posthumanism’s relationship to modernism, and how posthumanism is less of a push toward actual human-machine hybrids and more of an epistemological shift.  I believe this holds some kinship with Negarastani’s excerpt immediately above.  If we want to preserve the benefits and practical applicability of posthumanism, we need to distance ourselves from the purely speculative and hypothetical.  And by “distance ourselves,” I do not mean retreat from such speculations; I mean embrace and push beyond them.

            Contemporary British novelist Tom McCarthy, co-founder of the International Necronautical Society, describes posthumanism as an “intellectual folly”:

The desire, as expressed, for example, in the novels of Michel Houellebecq, to leave behind the fury and the mire of human veins, thereby achieving some imagined “freedom” or “autonomy.” This is not post-anything: it is merely Humanism 2.0. To rid the self of its contingency, its meshing in desire and networks of relationships, was humanism’s aspiration in the first place. It’s a reactionary aspiration, one that forecloses any type of genuine agency or ethics.

McCarthy argues that these types of fantasies do nothing to think beyond the human, but merely perpetuate the ideology of an essential, pure component of humanity that might be preserved through various material embodiments (computers, transubstantiation, as it pertains to the concept of the accident, Saṃsāra, etc.).  I agree entirely with McCarthy on this point, and it is for this reason that I believe posthumanism is in dire need of revision (and similar suggestions have been made by numerous posthuman critics, such as N. Katherine Hayles and Cary Wolfe).  Posthumanism must enable itself to think beyond human essence without abandoning the human entirely (that material organism that has certain biological needs); posthumanism is not anti-humanism, but the latter is required (to some extent) to think the former.  We have to resist the centrality of the human – its universality and, most importantly, its eternal quality (i.e. that “the human” is a permanent essence that will persist in some form or other).

            Ironically, McCarthy may have identified one of the most effective means of doing so in the manifestos for his International Necronautical Society (INS).  In its platform, which we can find inscribed at the bottom of its manifestos, McCarthy and co-founder Simon Critchley proclaim the purpose of the INS: “the INS constantly reiterates (or reenacts) its First Manifesto commitment to “map, enter, colonise and, eventually, inhabit” spaces that open up around the sign of death.”  Death, for McCarthy and Critchley, is the ultimate field of the nonhuman (perhaps McCarthy would be happier with this terminology…), and he claims that it should be the role of art to thrust humanity toward its own death, toward death’s immanence.  This is also not entirely original, as it draws from certain strands of speculative thought going as far back as Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle.  But it is worth noting for its resistance toward the coincidence of art with the human.  For McCarthy, art must purge itself of humanity as it nears the realm of death; the obliteration of the human.  Even this should not be read as “anti-humanist,” in my opinion; instead, it should be read as something radically posthuman, despite McCarthy’s distaste for this term.  Posthumanism, as an epistemological shift, heralds a new organization of knowledge as it relates to matter; pure organic, and inorganic, matter, void of subjectivity or selfhood.

            Throughout the twentieth century, modernist literature has increasingly come into contact with the posthuman as it brushes up against the consequences of death.  And through this contact, it has gradually developed its own posthuman epistemology, which philosophy as well as science have subsequently pursued.  In the terrifying world of the unliving (is it any wonder we today find pop culture fascinated with images of monsters, zombies, and aliens, all of which continually challenge our conceptions of life?) we must confront that the abject and the alternative, that the Other, might, in fact, exist entirely in that unthought space of our own nonexistence.

            This is not an argument for human extinction, and the practicality might seem far-off; but it is, in fact, quite near, and its applications are presenting themselves more each day; in the fields of animal studies, cybernetics and information technologies, emergence theory, assemblage theory, and physics, not to mention countless others.  While it remains true that our Western ideology (indeed, most modern ideologies as they have been subjected by the ubiquity of a global modernity) is still entrenched in the human, it is also true that our profound engagement and concern over what it means to be human is opening up doorways and possibilities for what it means to be nonhuman.  And this, I believe, is the true import of Negarastani’s quote on the inhuman as the “extended practical elaboration of humanism.”

            We’re still working out the chinks in the armor.  We’re still figuring out how exactly posthumanism fits into our worldview.  We’re still managing the differences between what it means to be human and what it means to be inhuman, since our knowledge of objects remains circumscribed by the materiality of our perceptions.  But the mere possibility of the implacable Other, which did not present itself until very recently (the eighteenth century, I would claim – as early as Robinson Crusoe’s mysterious footprint…), has now gestured to us, from the unfamiliar outside, that our sciences, our philosophies, and our literatures, might provide us with very real means of negotiating a posthuman existence.

The Fictionalization of Theory

            Over the past half-century, the West has witnessed what I refer to as the “fictionalization of theory.”  This process is necessarily related, in a dialectical fashion, to the “theorization of fiction.”  Most of us would infer that the latter means the theoretical treatment of fictional texts; however, it cannot preclude the infiltration of fiction by theory, or the gradually increasing appearance of theoretical treatment within fiction itself – an OFL, Occupy Fiction Literature, the subsumption of fiction by theory.  The fictionalization of theory, on the other hand, describes a reversal of the infiltrative process; that is, rather than theory occupy fiction, fiction begins a parasitic takeover of theory.  This is no more obvious than in the very recent phenomenon known as, appropriately enough, theory fiction, of which Reza Negarastani’s Cyclonopedia is perhaps the most obvious example.  While this brief description does not claim to offer an explanation of the phenomenon – the “fictionalization of theory” – it does attempt to offer a conceptual/historical view of the phenomenon.

            Most scholars recognize Martin Heidegger as the last true Western philosopher, or practitioner of that laudable field known as Philosophy.  After Heidegger, according to literary critic Fredric Jameson, the Western tradition witnessed the birth of something called theory.  This phenomenon, distinct from philosophy, was attributed mostly to the emergence of French poststructuralism (as it was later termed) and was characterized by a variety of intensely abstract regimes that all sought to properly account for various cultural institutions from language to history, psychology to gender, and many theorists found themselves on opposite sides of equally various methodological fences: deconstruction or Marxism, psychoanalysis or historicism?  The disagreements are innumerable; but most (if not all) of these theoretical programs shared the following commonality: they all were intensely concerned with what philosophy was about, and how philosophy – or philosophies – approached its object.  In short, theory became an attempt to organize and critique philosophy.  Amidst profoundly new cultural developments, from cybernetics to cyberpunk, theory became philosophy’s way to redefine (and re-identify) itself for the modern age.

            Although not apparent at first, one major component of this reassessment was the implementation and/or administration of a decidedly fictionalist methodology.  Many brands of theory concerned themselves with popular culture, fiction and cinema, on a level far beyond traditional philosophy.  This is perhaps most apparent in French poststructuralism, and in the methodologies of figures such as Derrida, Lacan, and Baudrillard.  Derrida’s “Plato’s Pharmacy” plays upon the very notion of the text as storytelling – speech versus writing – and participates in the Greek myth in order to develop its theory; Lacan’s illumination of ethics in psychoanalysis only comes out through a close reading of Antigone; and Baudrillard’s work frequently references science fiction, J.G. Ballard and others.  Baudrillard’s most famous work, Simulacra and Simulation, even opens with the following epigraph:

The simulacrum is never what hides truth – it is truth that hides the fact that there is none. The simulacrum is true.

The epigraph is said to be found in Ecclesiastes; but no such quote appears anywhere in the Bible.  It is a craft of fiction.  Baudrillard states the influence of fiction for his theoretical approach more profoundly in Symbolic Exchange and Death when he clarifies that the only way to combat contemporary “hyperrealist” culture is via “some form of pataphysics, ‘a science of imaginary solutions’; that is, a science-fiction of the system’s reversal against itself at the extreme limit of simulation, a reversible simulation in a hyperlogic of death and destruction.”  If this sounds confusing and unreasonable, it is because Baudrillard is already participating in the science-fictional process he espouses.

            While literary criticism and analysis emphatically takes fiction – books – as its object of study, developing 20^th-century theory increasingly deploys fictional instances as examples of its abstract models, as though fiction already beat theory to the punch and has performed its methodologies in an aesthetic fashion.  But contemporary theory, I believe, exhibits its own brand of obscurantist aesthetics, which some have misinterpreted as a flaw or difficulty of the texts.  In contrast, I claim that obscurantism is not something that we must overcome or resolve, but something that should be incorporated as part and parcel of the theoretical work being done.  That is, the obscurantism itself contributes to the goal that the theorists have in mind.  In this way, however, a distinction should be maintained between what I am calling “theory” and what has been traditionally called “philosophy.”  While philosophy is not always easily accessible, it typically maintains a level of textual and cognitive logic that avoids contradiction or paradox; or, at the least, attempts to overcome paradox.  Theory, in contrast, revels in paradox.  In the words of Philip K. Dick, the paradox “does not tell; it points.  It is a sign, not the thing pointed to.”  Paradoxes must be read in new ways, and in different ways than traditional logic has told us; more specifically, they should be read as expressions of formal limitations.

            Derrida’s work circles an imaginary point between writing and speech, both of which seem necessary in order to permit the other.  Lacan’s semiotic study of the unconscious attests that meaning – that which we presume to speak from – is only created in retrospect.  Baudrillard’s particularly confounding model precludes the possibility of any real or original reality; rather, everything is already a copy.  Many have criticized these theorists and their work as lacking in logical rigor, or occasionally even as saying nothing substantial at all.  This accusation misidentifies what I see as the most useful aspect of “theory”: theory, more than traditional philosophy, is not concerned with ontology, actuality, or reality; theory, in its strongest application, is interested in form.

            This is why theorists become topics of study for Fredric Jameson, who seems to be in on the joke.  The work of theorists such as Derrida, Lacan, and Baudrillard – even if they do have some intelligent and logical points to make – are worth our time more as literary objects than as philosophical treatises.  To put it another way; they are worth our time as explorers and manipulators of fictional form.

            The association of theory with forms of popular narrative has only increased with the work of Slavoj Žižek, who often measures the accuracy of his claims by how many concrete examples he can find in popular cinema.  Since Žižek, the advent of what has been called “speculative realism” has exploded the relationship between theory and fiction.  Despite the severely serious and highly philosophical work done by figures such as Quentin Meillassoux, Manuel DeLanda, and Ray Brassier, several scholars involved in the current “speculative turn” compose what looks more like fiction than theory.  Nick Land (who has since abdicated from the realm of speculation and appropriated that of neoreaction) writes in his more recent work about “hyperstitions,” which are (to put it simply) fictional elements that make themselves real.  To be sure, some of Land’s writings are admittedly fictional, often expressing his ideas through the imagined researches of fictional scholars or professors.  Reza Negarastani expands on this idea in his text Cyclonopedia: complicity with anonymous materials, which cannot be described as novel, treatise, essay, or possibly even book.

            Negarastani’s text turns on its mysterious narrator’s (of which there are multiple – the text itself appears to be mostly comprised of a fictional manuscript) privileging of “plot holes,” particularly as they manifest in “Hidden Writing.”  The text relates the notion of geopolitical “( ) hole complexes” (subterranean terror networks) to the instances of plot inconsistencies in narrative texts.  The narrator claims that plot holes are not flaws or problems to be fixed – explained, covered over, or dismissed – but openings into the crosshatched layering of plots.  This layering is not reducible to layers of meaning, which could all potentially be retrieved through “deep reading”; no hermeneutic process will uncover or explain them.  Rather, the schizophrenic presence of plot multiplicity is only activated via the reader’s participation in the narrative.  Negarastani tells his readers that to “interact with Hidden Writings, one must persistently continue and contribute to the writing process of the book.”  For this specific reason, the text is never reducible to a single authorial voice; and Negarastani introduces this multi-authorial concept into his text, not only through the presence of multiple narrators, but also through the transcription of discussions from online forums which actively contribute to the text’s themes.

            The process of decrypting and re-encrypting, of rewriting the text, is not an uncommon theme in much late-20^th-century literature.  Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves embraces such a concept, as do the short works of Jorge Luis Borges.  Meillassoux even engages in such a method in his most recent work, The Number and the Siren, in which he sets forth an innovative and exciting reading of Mallarme’s “Un Coup de Dés Jamais N'Abolira Le Hasard” (“A Throw of the Dice will Never Abolish Chance”).  Several authors of late have been profoundly concerned with the nature of text, narrative, book, and author, and have attempted their own explorations of these concepts, to varying degrees of success.  Ultimately, I believe it is time to stop seeing what the infamous theorists of the twentieth century (Derrida, Lacan, Baudrillard, etc.) have to say about fiction, and to start considering them as fiction; or as, at least, a form of fiction, theory fiction, as Negarastani brings to the fore in his challenging text.

            This is merely a preliminary attempt to properly historicize the phenomenon I am identifying as the fictionalization of theory.  I currently offer no ontological or conceptual explication of the phenomenon.  But I wish to argue, as a final note, that not only is this fictionalization an unconscious historical phenomenon.  It is an imperative.  Eugene Thacker, an outlying participant in the speculative turn, recently made the claim that philosophy is intimately linked to horror; that is, to the genre of horror fiction.  Philosophy, so to speak, is horror.

            This assertion is the most explicit acknowledgement of theory as the gradual coming-to-consciousness of a new modern philosophy.  As a kind of coming-to-consciousness, theory must be conceptualized as an interrogation of formal limitations.  That is, we must read theory – particularly poststructuralist theory – in a dialectical sense, even when it adamantly proclaims its opposition to the dialectic.  The dialectic is necessary in order to better understand how 20^th-century theory appears as a cultural and philosophical process.  I claim that the fictionalization of theory provides philosophy with a necessary perspicuity of form in order to achieve its next logical step: the ability to devise practical and applicable ontologies of the inhuman world.  The epistemology of posthumanism is gradually coming into clearer focus.  As it does, we will be able to more properly develop ontologies of the Other.

Toward the Nova: the Role of the Dialectic in Modern Thought

*The following is a work in progress, intended for panel presentation soon.

            What connects modernity to the future?  What does the future tell us about modernity?  What relation is there between modernity and the future?  The more I stare at the word modernity, the more I realize that the modern world is only beginning to come into focus.  High Modernism may have passed in the 1930s, but modernity – and its aesthetic counterpart, modernism – is alive and well.  So what does it care about the future?

            In a fantastic novel by Richard Powers, Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance, the narrator conceptualizes something he calls “trigger points”:

As with free-falling bodies, it seems apparent that such quickening change, whether evolutionary, cultural, or technical, cannot accelerate indefinitely but must reach some terminal velocity.  Call that terminal velocity a trigger point, where the rate of change of the system reaches such a level that the system’s underpinning, its ability to change, is changed.  Trigger points come about when the progress of a system becomes so accelerated, its tools become so adept as self-replicating and self-modifying, that it thrusts an awareness of itself onto itself and reaches the terminal velocity of self-reflection. (Powers 81)

Something is coming to consciousness in this description by Powers.  Complex systems are achieving a state, or level, at which their inner workings become self-sufficient and, in the process, become reflexive in a way that allows them to represent themselves back to themselves.  They acquire the ability to conceive of themselves as a system, along with the capacity to critique their own composition.  At this point, Powers claims, the system reaches a point of critical mass, beyond which it cannot evolve.

            Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance, which covers three narratives strands from the early 1900s to the contemporary 1980s (the novel was published in 1985), identifies here the moment of modernity itself.  That is, the moment at which history objectifies itself and thus fragments itself.  To put it in psychoanalytic terms, the subject is split, Lacan’s $ (coincidentally also the sign of the dollar, the ultimate alienating symbol of modernity).  History, at this moment, also becomes “about history,” as Powers puts it: “the century has become about itself, history about history: a still, eclectic, universally reflexive, uniformly diverse, closed circle, the homogeneous debris in space following a nova” (83).  The self-divided whole organizes itself, in Powers’s terminology, around what will eventually become a singularity, or perhaps already is.  The nova – a phenomenon that occurs when a star collapses and builds an accretion disc of matter and gases – is fated to become a gravitational singularity, but Powers means it in a metaphorical sense, as a figure of representation.  Here we have to enter into the tricky business of keeping the figurative constructions separate from their objective correlates, and in order to do this I choose to employ that ever feisty device: the dialectic.

            In recent decades, the dialectic has become an increasingly controversial term, drawing criticism from new Right conservative philosophers,[1] new Left speculative philosophers,[2] and even from its once loyal bedfellow, literary studies.[3]  To invoke dialectics often means to conjure the specters of Hegel and Marx, along with their two late 20^th-century innovators: Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Žižek.  Despite the recent skepticism toward dialectical methods of analysis, I insist on their presence in this piece and elsewhere for one primary reason: dialectical thought remains the most convincing and challenging conceptual form for representing our reality to this day.  Aside from dissolving the subject entirely – even admitting its existence as an illusion, a mental construction that emerges from brain activity – there exists a fundamental correlation between the external world and the world as perceived by human individuals.  This is not to say that the external world does not exist except in our perceptions; rather, it is to emphasize that we remain beholden to our empirical observations of the world, even if these observations are executed by instruments of modern technology.  The closest we may come to thinking the external world in-itself is the epistemology of posthumanism; coincidentally, the emergent epistemology of modernism itself.[4]

            The dialectic does not propose to grant access to objective reality.  Furthermore, the dialectic (as I deploy it here) does not threaten to hermetically seal us off from objective reality entirely, leaving us blind to the external world.  Rather, the dialectic must be recognized as the privileged form of representation which simultaneously constructs, and exposes the fragility of, the human subject as it exists in reality.  Powers’s “trigger points,” demonstrate the coming-to-consciousness of the modern world, but they also purport to establish a conceptual and ontological boundary beyond which knowledge no longer develops.  The boundary casts consciousness retrospectively onto the system that gives rise to it, but no longer constitutes the (preconscious) acquisitive expansion of material information.  Instead, the subject that emerges out of the system must conceive of itself dialectically in relation to that which exists (ideally) beyond the point of terminal velocity.

            This is how Powers arrives at the image of the nova, which will eventually become a black hole.  In terms of the physics of the universe, black holes are not only epistemologically unavailable to us; silent objects in dark rooms which would become luminescent if we could simply turn on the light.  They are, based on the very forms (space and time) that human beings require for knowledge, ontologically unknowable.  They are physical implosions of space and time, anomalies that warp the material universe immediately surrounding them (and likely, judging from their apparent ubiquity in the universe, they exert considerable force on physical reality as a whole).  Powers’s choices to describe the development of modernity, of history itself, as the matter orbiting a nova, and as a series of trigger points reaching terminal velocity, express a dialectical concern over historiography.

            On the one hand, the novel attempts a cohesive representation of history by tying its third-person narratives together through the central motif of the eponymous photograph taken by August Sander; the first-person narrative, in the voice of “Mr. P”, comments on the impact of photography and other technological media, and offers some speculations on the nature of history.  On the other hand, the novel disrupts this attempt, failing to draw together any ultimately meaningful narrative.  In fact, the novel’s conclusion is almost deflationary; Peter Mays, after having discovered his inheritance of a large sum of money from his ancestors, subsequently learns that it is worth almost nothing due to inflation.  Its most obvious narrative strand thus loses all steam, coming depressingly to an abrupt and nearly inconsequential halt.

            The text reflects what Powers defines as hyperprogress: “Hyperprogress transmutes, paradoxically, into stillness.  It is still true that things have changed more in the last thirty years than in all the time since Christ.  Since it is still true, then nothing has changed since Peguy.  Social culture has taken tail in mouth and rolled a benzene ring” (83).  What appears as progress exposes itself as meaningless, valueless development; but this does not mean that the ideal of progress – the object of desire – disappears.  Powers identifies the tendency of modern history to disguise itself as progress while being nothing more than senseless accretion, as the matter surrounding a nova; the Benjaminian storm that rages against the Angel of History.  The fantasy that is a progressive society constructs an imaginary ideal – an image of cultural improvement and/or perfection – and conceives of itself as striving toward this ideal.  However, history never achieves this ideal, but can only ever approach it as a curve approaches an asymptote: “Change in these fields [of science] does not stop at a trigger point.  Only the curve of progress reaches a critical moment, the second derivative goes to zero, and a new curve begins, pushed forward into a new country” (82).  Powers conceives of history in an asymptotic fashion.

            Fredric Jameson, recounting Derrida’s reading of Hegel, expresses the French philosopher’s latent dialectical conclusion.  Derrida, Jameson notes, declares that the Hegelian Aufhebung is “not an event, but a repetition”: “Nothing happens; all Aufhebung are the same.  They all seem to involve the transcendence of nature; yet the latter is merely a name for whatever is transcended in any of these processes, it is purely formal, the name of a moment, it has no content in its own right” (“Hegel’s Critics” 105).  Jameson moves deftly from poststructuralist to poststructuralist, explicating Derrida’s, and then Deleuze’s, critique of Hegelian Aufhebung; but the emptiness, or ideal figuration, of Aufhebung lurks as a constant specter (to invoke Derrida’s own terminology) in the background of his analysis.[5]  What emerges in Jameson’s intense study of Derrida’s and Deleuze’s critiques of Hegel is the understanding of Aufhebung not as material development, but as a representation of what matter develops toward.

            This representation, as Jameson declares, is purely ideological (106).  Powers confirms as much when he totalizes it as a modern synthetic image: “Nothing can take place in this century without some coincident event linking it into a conspiratorial whole” (Powers 83).[6]  The reflexivity of history – its self-awareness – does not give birth to some genuinely metaphysical, or essential, notion of history that is at work in the world.  Reflexivity results in the image, or the figure; above all else, the representation.  History appears on the horizon as something predestined or predetermined, as a course of necessary progression; but at the same moment that it appears as such, it also undermines its necessity.  It gives rise to the “conspiratorial whole” but emphasizes that this whole is purely figural.  It does not subsist in reality; but it shapes our relationship to reality because it is the only way in which we can conceive of this relationship.  And in this sense, the representation of reality confronts reality itself dialectically.  It is true that we cannot know the in-itself; but this does not dissipate the in-itself into nothing more than a cognitive illusion.

            That which escapes our representation, but which does not dissipate, is epitomized by the mathematical (and, I’m inclined to say, ontological) existence of the gravitational singularity; and this material singularity shapes and constructs all other theoretical singularities.  That which Aufhebung purports to represent – the historical singularity, the virtual space of all possible historical trajectories – is unavailable to us as human subjects.  We can only ever approximate the historical singularity through representation, which nears the asymptote of the singularity but can never surpass it.  The asymptote, in this conception, is equivalent to the black hole’s event horizon,[7] beyond which no matter (not even light) can escape the black hole’s gravity, thus making the black hole epistemologically and ontologically unavailable to us as observers.  We organize time into linear constructs, and space into geographic mappings; but black holes break down space and time, organizing an accretion disc of matter around the physical implosion of space-time.  Analogically, the historical singularity (represented through the image of Aufhebung) organizes time around perpetually collapsing matter: Benjamin’s Angel of History protesting the encroaching storm of progress.

            The “black hole,” the mathematical evidence for the gravitational singularity (according to which there exists a supermassive black hole at the center of most, if not all, galaxies), forms in our minds but remains unrepresentable except through its unrepresentability.  It is dark, lightless and soundless (empirically absent), because it deconstructs the forms by which human subjects can know – Kantian space and time.  Similarly, the historical singularity forms in our minds only through the idealistic and ideological representations of Aufhebung; but the actuality of what we might term history – what others have termed “deep time” or cosmic time[8] – exists beyond notions of linear time and geological space.  The event horizon of the historical singularity is insurmountable according to the Kantian forms of space and time, remains insurmountable even by our technological instruments.  We can only approach it on an increasingly shallow curve, representing it to ourselves as that which we approach in hopes of achieving, as Don DeLillo describes in his novel, Point Omega: “‘The omega point,’ [Elster] said.  ‘Whatever the intended meaning of this term, if it has a meaning, if it’s not a case of language that’s struggling toward some idea outside our experience’” (72).

            DeLillo brings us even closer to the gravitational singularity than Powers.  As a singularity that organized matter around collapsing spatiotemporal reality, the black hole reflects our inconsequential materiality back to us: “‘We want to be the dead matter we used to be.  We’re the last billionth of a second in the evolution of matter’” (50).  Recalling the Freudian death drive, Thanatos, DeLillo echoes Deleuze’s (and Nick Land’s) transplantation of the death drive into matter itself.  We all orbit black holes, subjective accretion discs, preparing for inevitable spatiotemporal implosion.  The construct “human” exposes itself as merely one more idealism: “‘De we have to be human forever?  Consciousness is exhausted.  Back now to inorganic matter.  This is what we want.  We want to be stones in a field’” (53).  Forget time, forget space; eventually, neither will be ours to remember.

            There is one important difference to illuminate between the historical and gravitational singularity.  The historical singularity exists, as does the gravitational, beyond the standard form of time.  We cannot traverse the singularity’s event horizon because beyond this limit we would descend into multi-dimensional time, into virtual time.  However, the event horizon of the historical singularity is still an ideal construct; if Aufhebung represents the unachievable, but remains an ideal, then the line of demarcation also remains ideal.  We can never cross the event horizon of Time because we have sealed ourselves off epistemologically, experientally.

            But you, I, we, can all traverse the event horizon of a black hole.

            The black hole is epistemologically and ontologically unavailable for the primary reason that to access it literally equals death.  We cannot know it, in our forms of space and time; and we cannot access it because of these same forms, but also because the black hole is a monster that eats us.  Eats everything; it eats space, time, gas, sound, light, the matter of universal reality collapses in the gravitational anomaly.  Human bodies are broken down, halved infinitesimally, until nothing more than the subatomic particles that comprise them (if not less…).  Black holes are the ontological instantiation of the material universe – reality, the real – that remains inaccessible for human knowledge.  Thus, if we maintain the analogy, we must ask ourselves a daring question:

            Is the historical singularity – which we represent to ourselves via the peaceful, utopian, desirable figure of Aufhebung – also that which is only available to matter itself; to the non-conscious?  To the ground known to Wordsworth’s Lucy?

            No motion has she now, no force;

            She neither hears nor sees;

            Roll’d round in earth’s diurnal course,

            With rocks, and stones, and trees.

What connects modernity to the future?  I would venture that it is this very quality of modernity by which it turns its objectifying lens onto itself, and thus relates itself representationally to the future it desires to achieve.[9]  Futurity, closely aligned with the concept of historical singularity, must exist in a virtual sense in that it possesses an openness; but we must impose on it the representation of Aufhebung.  That is, we must narrow our scope so that we accommodate the Kantian impositions of space and time.  Futurity, as it actually exists – the dark reality that wells up around our ankles – would kill us, consume us.  The dialectic thus serves two purposes: it protects us from the spatiotemporal apocalypse that awaits us beyond the event horizon; and it provides us with the form by which we can simultaneously understand and critique our own relation to the world.

            What Derrida perhaps unconsciously realized – and what Jameson certainly realizes – is that the dialectic is its own critique; its own deconstruction.  The dialectic does not destroy reality or seal us off entirely from it.  The dialectic is the self-refuting form of our relationship to reality.

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[1] See Nick Land’s neoreactionist denunciation: http://www.xenosystems.net/against-dialectics/

[2] The new movement known as Speculative Realism has demonstrated considerable resistance to dialectical thought.

[3] For an example, see Susan Stanford Friedman’s criticism of Jameson in “Planetarity: Musing Modernist Studies.”  Friedman accuses Jameson of a “reductionist” view that results in “singularity”; namely, the reduction of modernism to the effect of global capitalism.  In opposition to Friedman’s argument, and building on Jameson’s, this essay contests the following: a) the emergent “singularity” produced by dialectics is not interior to dialectics, and b) the dialectic is not dismissive to that which is exterior.

[4] This paper resists Quentin Meillassoux’s daring circumvention of all post-Kantian “correlationist” philosophy, as argued in After Finitude: an Essay on the Necessity of Contingency.  Meillassoux’s compelling argument about the possibility to think a world without thought – for the object of thought to be non-thought – provides a momentous and exciting departure from the tradition of Western philosophy.  However, the threat (if we may call it such) of human extinction, and its ramifications on thought, are broached already in 1987 by Jean-François Lyotard in book, The Inhuman, in a poststructuralist manner quite different from Meillassoux’s method.  Without succumbing entirely to Lyotard’s postmodern pessimism, I venture a via media that allows the dialectic to persist, but to accommodate the possibility of thinking the non-thought.  The following pages will lay out a preliminary argument for such a possibility.

[5] The title of the section in which the essay is included is ‘Hegel Without Aufhebung’.

[6] See the first essay in Jameson’s Postmodernism: the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism for commentary on the ideological structure of conspiracy theories.

[7] I am tempted here to invoke Alain Badiou’s concept of the event; a common philosophical concept, but one that Badiou conceives of as blasting the finitude of the State beyond its inherent limitations (see Badiou’s brief essay “The Idea of Communism” in the eponymously titled collection.  This language recalls Benjamin’s Messianic force of blasting history open in his Theses on the Philosophy of History.

[8] See Stephen Jay Gould’s Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle and Quentin Meillassoux’s After Finitude (respectively).

[9] One must be careful with psychoanalytic language lest one imposes a psychoanalytic reading onto an objective ethos, a Weltanschauung; but if Aufhebung is an ideological construct – that is, a fantasy – then psychoanalysis has something to offer, to an extent.  At the moment, all I will say is that if we maintain the Freudian/Lacanian structuralism of a subject that desires and an object of desire, then we can read our historical narrative accordingly: that is, that history only appears retrospectively, that its object is imaginary (and thus unattainable) but that it is simultaneously “written” by the object that it pursues.  The fantasy, as Žižek tells us, actively constructs our reality.  Jameson unveils a very similar theory of history in The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act.