Embodying Technesis: Technology beyond Writing (Studies in Literature and Science)

Embodying Technesis



Embodying

Technesis

Technology Beyond Writing

Mark Hansen

Ann Arbor

THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN PRESS

Copyright © by the University of Michigan 2000

All rights reserved

Published in the United States of America by

The University of Michigan Press

Manufactured in the United States of America

O Printed on acid-free paper

2003 2002 2001 2000

4 3 2 1

No part of this publication may be reproduced,

stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form

or by any means, electronic, mechanical, or otherwise,

without the written permission of the publisher.

A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hansen, Mark, 1956-

Embodying technesis : technology beyond writing / Mark Hansen.

p. cm. - (Studies in literature and science)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-472-09662-1 (alk. paper) - ISBN 0-472-06662-5 (pbk. :alk.

paper)

1. Technology-Philosophy. 2. Technology-Social aspects.

I. Title. II. Series.

T14 .H287 2000

601-dc21

99-050879

Foreword: Clearing the Ground

N. Katherine Hayles

A decade ago, when Michael Benedikt, Sandy Stone, and others decided to

organize a series of cyberspace conferences, the idea seemed promising.

Bring together a gaggle of software engineers and a pride of critical theo-

rists, throw them together for three or four days, and see what happens. Sev-

eral months later shock waves were still reverberating through the listservs,

with the engineers complaining that the critical jargon was obscure non-

sense that had nothing to contribute to their real-life technologies, and the

critical theorists grumpily responding that the software engineers were

incredibly naive about language and representation. The stand-off, which

has achieved the status of legend in cyberspace circles, is symptomatic of a

larger rift between the lowland fields of the history of technology on the one

hand, and the high plains of critical theory on the other. From the point of

view of the technologist, the critical theorist knows nothing about the work-

ings of technology and demonstrates it by talking in terms so abstract that

material objects are vaporized into mere words; from the point of view of

the theorist, the technologist is so stuck on nuts and bolts that he remains

oblivious of the fact that these objects are never simply present in them-

selves, being always already enframed by cultural assumptions and medi-

ated by discursive practices.

Since then, a number of important initiatives have aimed at integrating

the technoscapes that surround us with the intimate bodily terrains through

which we understand language and culture. In Reading Minds Mark Turner

suggests that the field of literary studies should reformulate itself through

understandings based on the cognitive sciences; George Lakoff and Mark

Johnson have sought to show how language emanates from bodily experi-

ence and remains marked by it. Andy Clark has articulated an "extended

mind" model that enrolls technical objects into the human cognitive system;

Edwin Hutchins argues that change propagates across extended cognitive

systems through self-organizing swirls of activity which include human and

vi * Foreword

nonhuman actors.1 Diverse as these programs are, they share a conviction

that human cognition does not stand apart from the world of technical

objects but remains deeply immersed within it.

Cognition, in this view, does not issue from the mind alone but extends

beyond the neocortex into the lower brain, the limbic system, the central

nervous system, and the peripheral nervous system. Cognition also reaches

out into the techno-environment, dissolving the boundary between inside

and outside into fluid assemblages that incorporate technical artifacts into

the human cognitive system, not just as metaphors but as working parts of

everyday thoughts and actions. For these researchers, understanding lan-

guage and culture means first of all grasping how cognition emerges from

bodily and physical realities. Yet the very everyday-ness of these models iso-

lates them from the complex linguistic performances that are the subject and

vehicle for critical arguments espousing the self-enclosing nature of lan-

guage. Moreover, although the models assume the physically real nature of

technology, they tend to emphasize the interfaces connecting technology

and human cognition rather than technology as a thing in itself.

We are long overdue, then, for the rigorous, thorough, and far-reaching

analysis that Mark Hansen mounts in Embodying Technesis: Technology

Beyond Writing. Hansen argues that technology is much more important

for everyday life than scientific theories are, reminding us of Isaac Asimov's

comment that it would make far more difference in our lives if the automo-

bile had not been invented than if Einstein had failed to formulate the the-

ory of relativity. For Hansen, technology is the primary determinant of the

human lifeworld and has been so for thousands of years. He finds it partic-

ularly ironic, then, that contemporary critical theory has consistently

treated technology as a trope or representation rather than a physical real-

ity in the world, a move he calls technesis, or "the putting-into-discourse of

technology" (4).

Ranging widely across influential theorists of the twentieth century,

including Freud, Heidegger, Derrida, Lacan, and Foucault, Hansen exhibits

the crucial moves that reduce technology from material reality to discourse.

Paying meticulous attention to each theorist's overall project as well as to

the details of the arguments, Hansen displays an awe-inspiring erudition

and a remarkable ability to analyze complex arguments. This book is

polemical in the best sense, for Hansen's project does not pretend to be a

neutral examination of the question of technology. Rather, this is a book

with a mission and a quest. The mission is to show how pervasively techne-

sis has infected contemporary theory, and the quest is to find theoretical

Foreword * vii

tools he can adapt to give a robust account of technology in its irreducible

materiality that exists beyond discourse and representation.

For him the most promising avenue lies in Walter Benjamin's essays about

Baudelaire's poetics, in which Benjamin develops the idea of material inter-

ventions that deliver a "shock" to the human nervous system by operating

below the level of the neocortex. Hansen follows Benjamin in picking up on

Freud's speculation about a "dead cortical layer" that insulates the neocor-

tex from precognitive perceptions. Although Freud's neurophysiological

speculations have been discredited, there is ample contemporary evidence

from such researchers as Antonio Damasio that cognition extends through-

out the body and includes emotions, kinesthesia, proprioception, and other

sensations located in the lower brain, limbic system, and central nervous sys-

tem.2 Although such sensations can be given verbal expression, they origi-

nate as nonverbal perceptions and need not be brought into language at all.

The important point here for Hansen, as for Damasio, is that a highly sensi-

tive and interactive realm of experience exists that precedes linguistic expres-

sion and legitimately counts as cognition. Hansen argues that such experi-

ences function as nonverbal avenues through which humans experience

technology in its robust materiality. By attending to these "shocks," we can

understand technology as an important experience in our lives beyond how

it is represented in language. What Hansen is after is "a process of embodied

reception-of reception as embodiment-that culminates in a nonrepresen-

tational experience of embodied physiological sensation" (261).

This quest engenders a paradox that is not likely to escape the notice of

technologically oriented readers. We can uncover the paradox by compar-

ing the route through which Hansen comes to his quest to the path taken by

Damasio. Damasio's conclusions are based on three decades of work with

neurologically damaged patients at the University of Iowa Hospital, which

serves as the tertiary care facility for patients throughout the central Mid-

western area. When Damasio writes about emotions as the body murmur-

ing to the mind, underlying his poetic language are his experiences with

hundreds of PET scans, X-rays, CAT scans, and other diagnostic proce-

dures, as well as his examinations of literally thousands of patients.

Hansen's body of evidence, by contrast, consists not of intimate physical

knowledge of medical imaging technologies and damaged human neural

systems but rather the very theoretical writings he wishes to go beyond in

order to grasp technology as a thing in itself. His analysis is remarkable for

the absence of particular technologies used either as examples or as occa-

sions for analytical exploration. Skeptics might wonder if Hansen suffers

viii * Foreword

himself from the disease that he so brilliantly diagnoses, for he seems to shy

away from actual technologies and our experiences with them in favor of

verbal articulations, which according to his own argument are always in

danger of stripping technology of its physical reality.

I am willing to grant the paradox but not the judgment, for I think that

Hansen's project fulfills an important role that could not be accomplished in

any other way. As the schism between the software engineers and cyber-

space theorists demonstrated, no amount of talking about technology as a

thing in itself will convince the theorists that technology as such plays an

important role in human culture, for they can always revert to cultural and

linguistic interpretations that embed technology in discursive productions.

Arguing that it is these productions which give technology meaning and

significance, they will continue to pooh-pooh any thought of technology as

a thing in itself. Only a systematic analysis such as Embodying Technesis

can prevail, for it takes the argument onto the high ground of theory and

uncovers the moves by which technology is not just embedded in language

but erased by language. Through such analysis, Embodying Technesis aims

to clear the ground so that space can be opened to ask what technology

might be outside of its embeddedness in discursivity.

Having cleared the ground, Hansen then seeks to establish a physiologi-

cal basis for human interaction with technology that is not based primarily

on language. As more theorists become interested in this question of tech-

nology (which is virtually the opposite of the question of technology as Hei-

degger framed it), it may be that the answers Hansen suggests will not long

endure, for this question is now the focus of wide-ranging inquiries emerg-

ing from an interdisciplinary convergence of cognitive science, anthropol-

ogy, literary studies, computer science, and media theory. What will come

out of this convergence remains to be seen, but enough research has already

been done to make clear that much more can be said about the question

than Embodying Technesis articulates. The fact that Hansen's speculations

may soon become outdated is proof of the success of his larger argument,

however, for the resources to answer what technology is in itself can be fully

mobilized only after the question is recognized as legitimate and important.

In my view, the enduring contribution of Embodying Technesis is likely to

be its tenacious insistence that it makes sense to ask this question and its rig-

orous analysis of the theoretical moves that have kept us from asking it in

full force until now. If Embodying Technesis does nothing else (and it does

much more), the ground that it clears will establish it as one of the impor-

tant books concerning the question of technology, for it frees us to ask and

answer that question in new and embodied ways.

Foreword * ix

Notes

1. Mark Turner, Reading Minds: The Study of English in the Age of Cognitive

Science (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994); George Lakoff and Mark

Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and the Challenge to West-

ern Thought (New York: Basic Books, 1999); Andy Clark, Being There: Putting

Brain, Body, and World Together Again (New York: Bradford Books, 1998); Edwin

Hutchins, Cognition in the Wild (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994).

2. Antonio R. Damasio, Descartes's Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human

Brain (New York: Avon Books, 1995); The Feeling of What Happens: Body and

Emotion in the Making of Consciousness (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1999).



Acknowledgments

This book began as a dissertation in comparative literature at the University

of California, Irvine, and would never have come into being without the

generous support of many teachers, mentors, and friends. The project

evolved under the direct guidance of two fantastic teachers whose examples

have continued to motivate me to this day and whom I would like especially

to thank. Juliet Flower MacCannell has provided me with perhaps the most

important gift a teacher can give-the trust and open-mindedness that nour-

ishes and sustains confidence. For this, I am deeply grateful. J. Hillis Miller

has furnished an example of what a scholar should be-someone who con-

tinues to grow in new and exciting ways, who is not afraid to challenge his

own most deep-seated critical assumptions. I only hope that I can emulate

their fine examples in my own future growth as a scholar and teacher.

I would also like to thank three other teachers who have challenged and

supported me in the long period of revision during which this work acquired

its cross-disciplinary form. I am grateful to Richard Shusterman for his

sober-minded, pragmatic outlook on popular culture; his insights have been

instrumental for my effort to bridge the gap from theoretical speculation to

concrete analysis. I thank Thomas Pavel, from whom I have learned the

importance of maintaining a critical vigilance in the face of intellectual

seduction; his example helped me find the confidence necessary to assert the

value of bodily experience against the discursivist tide of contemporary lit-

erary studies. Finally, Kate Hayles has literally opened a new scholarly

world for me; her generous support for my project and her own example as

a sophisticated cultural critic of science and technology have reaffirmed for

me the urgency of rethinking our received linguistic and literary paradigms

in our ongoing efforts to grapple with the fundamental shifts currently

underway in our culture.

I wish to thank other teachers who have provided support and inspira-

tion at various stages along the way: Julia Lupton, Wolfgang Iser, Barbara

Spackman, Martin Schwab, Alexander Gelley, Joseph Margolis, J. N.

xii Acknowledgments

Mohanty, John Carvahlo, and Andrzej Warminski. I am deeply indebted to

friends and colleagues from Irvine, Austin, Princeton, and Santa Cruz-

especially Jacques Duvoisin, Jeffrey Belnap, Susan Morrison, Jim Kilfoyle,

Rebecca Bell-Metereau, Stephen Schwartz, Ziad Elmarsafy, Michael Ran-

dall, and Taylor Carmen. I also thank my students at Southwest Texas State

University and at Princeton University; their enthusiasm and eagerness to

learn convinced me of the value of sustained critical reflection on contem-

porary culture, at moments when I most needed convincing. Somewhere out

there are two excellent anonymous readers whose generous constructive

criticism helped me reconceive my sense of purpose and fathom the

demands of my intended interdisciplinary audience.

I am grateful to the following institutions for financial support that, in

both direct and indirect ways, helped me bring this project to fruition: the

University of California, Irvine; Temple University; the Fulbright Scholar-

ship Program; Southwest Texas State University; DAAD (Deutscher

Akademischer Austauschdienst); and the National Endowment for the

Humanities.

I want to thank Laurie Clark Klavins, Shelly Emmett, and the rest of

Team X at the University of Michigan Press for guiding the manuscript to

print, and I especially thank my editor, LeAnn Fields, for her belief in the

project and for her generosity in understanding my repeated requests for "a

little more time."

I also thank my parents, Howard and Yvonne Hansen, and my sister,

Natalie Hansen, for their direct and indirect support over the years. In ways

I am still coming to understand, their influence stands behind my persistent

engagement with subjectivity in the technological age.

Finally, I thank Mimi Lukens for her friendship and support from the

project's inception and for helping me to appreciate the value of saying what

you mean and meaning what you say.

Contents

Introduction: The Resistance to Technology

1

PART 1. Technology, Embodiment and Cultural Critique

Chapter 1. Technoculture and Embodiment

25

Chapter 2. Locating the Technological Real

53

PART 2. The Machine Reduction of Technology

Chapter 3. From Metaphor to Embodiment: Resisting Technesis 77

Chapter 4. Questioning the Machine Basis of Techne:

Heidegger on Technology

102

Chapter 5. The Mechanics of Deconstruction:

Derrida on de Man, or Poststructuralism in

an Age of Cultural Studies

122

INTERLUDE 1. Psyche and Metaphor:

Derrida's Freud

141

PART 3. Tracking the Technological Real

Chapter 6. Technology and External Experience:

Reconsidering Freud's Project for a

Scientific Psychology

151

Chapter 7. Technology beyond Thought, or

How Real Is the Lacanian Real?

170

xiv * Contents

Chapter 8. Ontological Revolution at What Cost?

Ambivalence in Deleuze and Guattari's

Capitalism and Schizophrenia

186

INTERLUDE 2. Breaking with the System:

Technology beyond Semiotics

212

PART 4. Corporeal Mimesis

Chapter 9. On Some Motifs in Benjamin:

(Re)Embodying Technology as Erlebnis,

or the Postlinguistic Afterlife of Mimesis

231

Notes

265

Bibliography

307

Index

323

Introduction: The Resistance to Technology

Isaac Asimov once suggested that the lived experience of modern man has

been shaped far more by practical inventions than by arguably more conse-

quential paradigm shifts in scientific knowledge. Life as we know it, Asimov

implies, would be more drastically altered by the absence of the automobile

than, say, had Einstein never discovered the theory of relativity. This alto-

gether banal observation perfectly captures the ethos shared by many recent

critics in the various fields comprising contemporary science and technology

studies. Despite an almost bewildering diversity of interest, these critics

stand united against traditional philosophy of science and the sanitizing

privilege it grants the theoretical. Not only do they self-confidently assert

the primacy of the practical, but they do so to probe the messy extraphilo-

sophical "logic" of scientific and technological change-its constitutive

embeddedness within a thick cultural context. Their work collectively oper-

ates what amounts to a paradigm shift in the analysis of science and tech-

nology: for the traditional top-down "diffusion" model, they substitute a

model far more attentive to the wealth of interactions and linkages com-

prising technoscience in action, what sociologist Bruno Latour dubs the

model of "translation" (Latour 1987, 132ff.).

From a broad, anthropological perspective, what is most significant

about this paradigm shift is the central role it accords experience; regardless

of the specific disciplinary or interdisciplinary approach taken, the human

impact of scientific and technological change must be assessed according to

its concrete experiential effects, not its abstract theoretical significance.

While such an imperative introduces an empowering flexibility into the cul-

tural study of technology, it simultaneously calls on us to undertake a major

methodological revisioning: eschewing our ingrained proclivities, we must

learn to embrace language not as the ontological ground of cultural analy-

sis but rather as an admittedly central tool for such analysis. Put another

way, the displacement of language as universal medium and the correlated

recourse to experience confronts the contemporary poststructurally smart

cultural critic with what amounts to a significant theoretical quandary: for

2 * Embodying Technesis

all our readiness to confirm Asimov's altogether commonsensical observa-

tion, the long-standing logocentrism of our (often inimical) methodologies

renders us hard-pressed to discover concrete instances through which we

can reflexively grasp technology's practical impact on our experience. While

we can confidently assert that the lifeworld would be markedly different

without modern technologies like the automobile or the computer, we are

not so readily able to specify in exactly what ways it would be so.

This theoretical quandary is, I suggest, connected to the constitutive

embeddedness of human practice within concrete and local contexts-what

Ludwig Wittgenstein so aptly termed "forms of life." According to (the

later) Wittgenstein, every human agent necessarily exists within a given

form of life (or "habitus," to use Pierre Bourdieu's more recent idiom) that

performs the central function of orienting (giving meaning to) shared lin-

guistic and, by extension, cultural practices. Any effort to clarify such forms

of life philosophically is bound to fail, since it would require what for the

later Wittgenstein is an impossibility: a descriptive language not similarly

rooted in a particular form of life. As the precursor to the so-called linguis-

tic turn in philosophy, Wittgenstein's account of language forcefully asserts

the immanence of human experience within language-more precisely,

within specific language games that comprise everyday life in a given cul-

tural context.

For Wittgenstein and the philosophical tradition beholden to his later

work, this necessity serves the philosophically significant function of pro-

hibiting the advancement of absolute, fully clarified knowledge claims. It

furnishes the theoretical basis for philosophy's recent turn away from foun-

dationalism and for its contemporary "conversational" style.1 Applied to

technology, however, this same necessity helps to explain why the rich expe-

riential impact of technology, despite its obvious practical impact, nonethe-

less remains so abstract and difficult to grasp. Like language games, tech-

nologies play a constitutive role in structuring the worlds within which they

exist. To the extent that we humans necessarily act within such prestruc-

tured worlds-worlds we in fact share with our technologies2-our prac-

tices presuppose technology in ways that foreclose all possibility for analytic

isolation and cognitive recuperation. Despite its irreducible concreteness,

technology's experiential impact must accordingly be considered to be first

and foremost indirect and holist. More fundamental than all the intentional,

explicit-dare I say cultural?-uses we make of our technologies are the

largely unmarked alterations they operate on our basic perceptual and sub-

perceptual experiential faculties. As philosophers of technology have

recently contended, technologies underlie and inform our basic "ways of

Introduction * 3

seeing" the world and thus cannot be thematized as "objects" that are con-

stituted by such paradigmatic holist perspectives (Ihde 1991).

In this book, I shall expand the holist approach to technology in order to

counter the recent culturalist assimilation of technology. Without repudiat-

ing the culturalist position as such, I shall reject one of its central underlying

implications: that the cultural construction of technologies somehow

exhausts the extent of their impact on our experience. Although technocul-

tural critics are undoubtedly right to suggest, for example, that "save sheer

accident, technology has no force outside of a system of social practices"

(Stone 1996, 170), much hangs on how such claims are understood. In my

opinion, critics all too often assume that technologies must be "one hundred

percent" social, as it were-that they must be entirely a product of cultural

construction simply because they cannot exist outside social networks.

Countering such a misconception requires a more subtle understanding of

technology's social basis, one that can distinguish the concrete effects of

particular technologies from the general conditions of their efficacy. If it is

true that technologies cannot exist outside social systems, that in no way

precludes them from having effects that cannot be captured by the interpre-

tative tools germane to such systems.

To explore just one example of this enabling confusion, technocultural

critic Sandy Stone, in speaking of social context as the irreducible back-

ground for understanding technologies, collapses their significance into the

impact they have on ideology: ". . . technologies are visible and frequently

material evidence of struggles over meaning. They don't exist outside of

complex belief systems in whose social and political frames they are embed-

ded. Their apparent obduracy is an artifact, a technology of its own" (1996,

176). Technologies may in fact form important sites for carrying out such

struggles, but-as material elements that structure our experiential world(s)

holistically and beyond thematization-they are also much more than that.

Their impact on experience is at once so primitive and so pervasive that any

effort to fathom it through cultural critique will have already presupposed

what it sets out to isolate and clarify. In seeking to localize the extracultural,

extrasocial dimension of technological change, I thus mean to suggest that

technologies function much like language games on Wittgenstein's model.

Within the contemporary postmodern lifeworld, they are simply more basic

than other social phenomena: not unlike language for Wittgenstein, tech-

nologies play an essential role as part of what allows for the very existence

of the social as such.

Given the extensive role that technology's indirect and amorphous

impact has on our basic modes of perception and experience, we can easily

4 Embodying Technesis

make sense of the common imperative guiding recent cultural investigations

of technology-the imperative to secure technology's impact within some

delimited, theorizable "space." For all of the diversity of approaches

employed by contemporary cultural critics, this imperative seems time and

again to result in an analysis of technology insofar, and only insofar, as it

impacts representation. By focusing on representation-and specifically by

substituting an analysis of technology's impact on representational thinking

for an analysis of technology itself-modern and contemporary critics aim

to overcome the difficulties involved in delimiting technology's ubiquitous

and subthematic impact. Yet if, as I shall argue, technology affects our expe-

rience first and foremost through its infrastructural role, its impact occurs

prior to and independently of our production of representations: effectively,

technologies structure our lifeworlds and influence our embodied lives at a

level, as it were, below the "threshold" of representation itself.3 As long as

cultural analysis restricts its focus to the technical modification of represen-

tation, it cannot but compromise the richness and multidimensionality of

technology's impact on our experience-what, in the following, I shall

repeatedly refer to as the robust materiality of technology.4 What is lost in

the representationalist reduction is not simply some abstract alterity of tech-

nology but the host of concrete materializations through which technologies

impact our practices (and not just our communicational practices) accord-

ing to "logics" that are strongly posthermeneutical.5

The Argument

By critically evaluating the role technology plays in twentieth-century theo-

retical discourse, I seek to prepare the ground for an expanded analysis of

technological materiality, one capable of exploring specifically those mate-

rializations through which technologies mediate the material rhythms of

embodied life. Through what amounts to a critical genealogy of contempo-

rary cultural studies of technology, I trace the latter's extensive, though

largely unrecognized, allegiance to poststructuralism and in particular to the

(philosophical and rhetorical) strategy of what I call technesis, or the

putting-into-discourse of technology. For many of the so-called master-

thinkers of (technological) modernity-in particular, for Freud, Heidegger,

Derrida, Lacan, Foucault, and Deleuze and Guattari-technesis forms a

common, though variously implemented, reductive strategy that allows for

a progressive assimilation of technology to thought. Technesis allows these

critics to open their respective systems to a form of material exteriority

Introduction * 5

(technology) without imperiling or abandoning the priority accorded to

thinking by our philosophical modernity. To the extent that contemporary

technocriticism absorbs this same strategy in the process of adapting post-

structuralism for its own ends, my critique of modernist technesis will oper-

ate simultaneously as a critique of technocultural criticism in the postmod-

ern age.

In recounting the story of the twentieth century's halted efforts to

embrace technology, my primary aim will be to disabuse cultural critics of

technology (myself included) of our lingering allegiances to vestiges of the

hermeneutic mode. From the groundbreaking explorations of Heidegger

and Freud to the more localized interventions of Stephen Greenblatt and

Donna Haraway, technology has been repeatedly invoked as a means of his-

toricizing theoretical claims, of stamping them with the indelible mark of

the empirical. In the phenomenological and psychoanalytic paradigms

whose trajectories I track, the appeal to technology comprises an ever

increasing ontic turn-a localization of thought and memory, if not always

directly in the concrete, technically mediated lifeworld, then at least against

the more general background of technological modernization. So, for

example, Heidegger's conjunction of modern technology and Being in his

Nietzsche functions to delimit a specifically modern epoch; and Freud's

hydraulic model of the psyche, as Lacan has shown, situates the birth of psy-

choanalysis and the discovery of the unconscious at an irreducibly concrete

moment within the history of technology.

Yet even as this ontic turn has been amplified in the work of the post-

structuralists (Derrida, the later Lacan, Foucault, and Deleuze and Guattari)

and again with the advent of cultural studies and of specific cultural

approaches to science and technology, there is much reason to question its

adequacy as a means of capturing technology's robust materiality. Post-

structuralists and contemporary cultural critics alike tend to invoke tech-

nology not for its own sake but as an enabling means and a material support

for a more pressing account of subject constitution, whether on ontogenetic

or strictly empirical grounds. In case after case, technology is invoked as a

concrete placeholder for the alterity that has become, at least in the post-

modern academic scene, a compulsory component of any respectable

account of subjectivity. In this role, technology lends a spatiotemporal

specificity to diverse forms of alterity dear to our philosophical modernity,

including Heideggerian Being, the Freudian unconscious, Derridian dif-

ferance, and the Lacanian objet petit a. In each of these cases, the invocation

of technology remains subordinate to a more central overriding theoretical

purpose.

6 Embodying Technesis

More recently, technology has been variously invoked by cultural critics

as one of the many material factors that structure the world of social prac-

tice. For those cultural critics who focus specifically on contemporary

technoscience or technoculture, technologies most often play the role of

material condition for new forms of subjectivity-for a subjectivity either

wholly liberated from former (logocentric) limitations or one constrained in

new and ambivalent, though always somehow enabling, ways. Viewed in

this manner, technologies generate new types of human (or posthuman)

embodiment that should lead us to question the privilege we grant thought

in determining what constitutes identity or agency. While such questioning

has been taken up by a minority of today's cultural critics (Kittler, Hayles)

and has been a central focus in such emerging fields as cognitive neuropsy-

chology and linguistics (Varela, Mark Johnson), the majority of cultural

critics remain incapable, often despite their own intentions, of overcoming

their dependence on a representationalist conception of subjectivity. As long

as it is held to be the privileged vehicle by which materiality acquires cul-

tural value, technology will remain pigeonholed into the reductive role of

mere material support for the all important-and all engulfing-process of

subject constitution.

We can observe this subjectivist assimilation of technology in at least

four important and influential recent variants of technocultural criticism.6

First, the mode of criticism found in "science studies" or "technoculture"

views scientific discourses and technologies as cultural phenomena like any

others. While it is attentive to the constraint imposed by capitalist institu-

tions, such as the military and the global economy, this approach finds

solace in the fact that scientific discourses and technologies are constructed

entities. Not only are they potentially open to alternate, noncoercive theo-

retical constructions, but they are in fact always simultaneously constructed

according to alternative popular desires.7 Indeed, scientific discourses and

technologies appear on this account not primarily as constraints (except

when they are employed by powerful elites) but as the enabling tools for

oppositional practices of identity constitution and community formation.8

Second, the mode of criticism found in "social studies of science" views

scientific facts and technological machines as processes rather than prod-

ucts. In this view, facts and machines come to exist and to have an impact

as a result of struggle within robust social networks involving various levels

of extrascientific practice from the most immediately relevant (relation to

previous research and experimentation) to the most distant (general goals of

society).9 From the perspective of a cultural analysis of technology, the most

interesting aspect of this approach is its call for a new constitution or con-

Introduction * 7

tract between the human and the nonhuman-a fresh conception of knowl-

edge that refuses the modern division between knowledge of people (power)

and knowledge of things (science). By denying mastery to either things or

people, this new constitution would follow the delegation of power to both

humans and nonhumans along the trajectory of networks that produce both

as material effects of a shared world (Latour 1993b).

Third, what I shall call the "virtual-reality-is-an-illusion" school counters

the exuberant claims of "visionary proponents" of cyberspace by insisting

on the "indebtedness" of virtual-reality technologies to their "logocentric

past."10 By remaining cognizant of the inherent and unbreachable limita-

tions of metaphysical discourse, the critics of this school are able to interpret

the derealizing "consensual hallucination" of cyberspace as a collective fan-

tasy "that the more technologically sophisticated our society becomes the

less it has to worry about the distribution of wealth and resources"

(Markley 1996, 4). Specifically, they insist on distinguishing the virtual tech-

nologies that materialize our consensual hallucination from the content of

that hallucination-the abstraction "cyberspace." While the latter promises

a fantasy resolution founded on denial, attention to the former suggests that

virtual reality "can never separate itself from the politics of representation

precisely because it is a projection of the conflicts of class, gender, and race

that technology both encodes and seeks to erase" (ibid.).

Fourth, a diffuse research program grouped under the rubric of the

"materialities of communication" expands the function of exteriority as it is

developed in Derrida's early work.11 Employed as a general term for the

"physical side" of language, exteriority plays an important antihermeneutic

role within what nonetheless remain so many forms of human self-refer-

ence. Exteriority, that is to say, furnishes a significant resistance to the reign

of interpretation and calls for a new model-that of "meaning constitu-

tion"-which brings into view "situations where couplings between human

bodies, psychic systems, and new communications technologies ... produce

specific subject-effects" (Gumbrecht and Pfeiffer 1994, 400).

No matter how forcefully these approaches claim to engage technology

in a robust, postrepresentational, post-theoretical fashion, all of them work

with an impoverished concept of technological materiality that, I suggest,

effectively undermines their intentions. In one way or another, all of them

equate the materiality of technology with cultural materiality-with the

material markings that technology (like all cultural productions) acquires

on entering the cultural domain. Though its advent as a means of conceptu-

alizing technology can be traced back to Aristotle (as I shall argue in chap-

ter 3), this impoverished concept of materiality owes its contemporary

8 Embodying Technesis

currency to French poststructuralism. The various materialities invoked by

the aforementioned cultural critics-materialities encountered in cultural

and social life, in virtual hardware/software, and in the nonsignifying ele-

ments of language-all comprise examples of the quasi materiality (or rela-

tive exteriority) that Derrida's critique of logocentrism unleashes within the

domain of thought. As mere supplements or material supports for the pro-

duction of knowledge/thought/desire, none can furnish the site for a resis-

tance against the imperialism of theoretical (or linguistic) idealism.

By subjecting this impoverished concept of materiality to criticism, I shall

demonstrate that the extensive invocation of technology by twentieth-cen-

tury philosophers and theorists from Freud and Heidegger to contemporary

cultural critics remains faithful to the logocentric foundation of philosophi-

cal humanism-the privilege of thought and/or the thinking agent. Viewed

under the genealogical gaze, the phenomenological and psychoanalytic tra-

ditions on which I focus are marked by the repetition of a shared reductive

pattern. An initial move to embrace technology is in each case compromised

by a defensive gesture: at some point or other, the radical alterity of tech-

nology is sacrificed to preserve thought as the ultimate tribunal of experi-

ence. Analysis of this sacrifice in the theorists already mentioned reveals a

rigorous and inflexible logic behind the various twentieth-century invoca-

tions of technology. Though introduced as a concrete instance of alterity,

technology has in all cases already undergone a fundamental reduction: a

dogmatic stripping away of its robust materiality that I shall refer to under

the rubric of the machine reduction of technology. Rather than embracing

technologies as materially robust entities, the aforementioned critical dis-

courses constrain technology to the figure of the machine-a static and

mechanical figure that is by nature secondary and posterior to the primary

and constitutive movement of thought and to whose sway, consequently, it

can pose no threat.

Though our recent intellectual history displays an undeniable and pro-

gressively evolving interest in embracing technology, the machine reduction

appears only to have been rendered more forceful with the passage of time.

If Derrida's exemplary poststructuralist declaration concerning the "closure

of representation" served to efface traces of the enabling prior reduction of

technology, the empirical approach favored by contemporary cultural crit-

ics compounds the reduction and effectively renders representationalism

hegemonic. By assimilating the poststructuralist representationalist ontol-

ogy without subjecting it to critique (and without preserving its negative or

antihermeneutic moment), cultural studies adds a further layer of distance

between its positivist methodology and the enabling reduction that lies

Introduction * 9

behind it. Far from lending theory a concrete historicity, the culmination of

the ontic turn in contemporary cultural studies thus threatens to efface

wholesale the entire history of technology's reduction-to wipe out those

traces of technology's radical exteriority that remain discernable in the

fissures that cleave the poststructuralist machine reduction of technology.

Accordingly, while the ontic turn toward technology can be cited as one, if

not the most important, factor motivating the contemporary shift from

hermeneutics and textual analysis to a more inclusive and less monological

approach to culture,12 the field of contemporary cultural studies insures in

the most effective form yet imaginable the subordination of the technical to

the social and the reduction of technology to a "relative exteriority."13 By

treating technology exclusively as the material support for ideology critique

and/or identity performance, cultural criticism simply amplifies those ten-

dencies of poststructuralist thought most inimical to a robust account of

technology. In the process, it further obscures any possibility for an engage-

ment with technology's essentially material historicity-an engagement that

would situate technology beyond the grasp of representational thought and

the forms of practice arising from it. By tracing contemporary cultural crit-

icism's extensive reduction of technological materiality to its uncritical

assimilation of poststructuralism, I intend to work through these deep, the-

oretical limitations, with the constructive aim of exploring alternative

avenues toward a cultural criticism more appropriate to our ever increas-

ingly technological, and perhaps (as some recent commentators propose)

properly posthuman, world.14

Poststructuralism in the Age of Cultural Studies

Contemporary cultural criticism of technology, I have suggested, gains

much of its critical force from an extension of certain claims advanced by

French poststructuralism. Unifying the various approaches to cultural prac-

tices and representations that comprise contemporary cultural studies is a

shared embrace of Derrida's sweeping claim (which, for the moment at

least, can stand in for poststructuralism as a whole) that we live in an era

marked by the "closure of representation." In assimilating French post-

structuralism, however, cultural criticism has largely failed to appreciate the

philosophical context and the profound (anti)hermeneutic and (anti)prag-

matic consequences of the various poststructuralist deconstructions of the

subject.

To lend substance to my call for a recontextualization of poststructural-

10 * Embodying Technesis

ism within the new cultural horizon, let me briefly evaluate the contribu-

tions of several cultural critics who have made an explicit effort to apply the

insights of deconstructive criticism transformationally. The work of these

critics-Terry Eagleton, Stephen Greenblatt, and Donna Haraway-exem-

plifies the most fruitful assimilation of poststructuralism in three significant

fields within cultural criticism broadly considered: British materialism, the

new historicism, and (cyborg) feminism. Consideration of their respective

merits and limitations will thus go far toward establishing both the heuris-

tic importance and the methodological limitations of contemporary cultural

studies for the development of a robust, holist account of contemporary

technology's experiential impact. While all three critics deserve praise for

their efforts to suture deconstructive analysis with material reality, they

must all be criticized for their refusal to think rigorously about the disjunc-

tion of the linguistic and the phenomenal. Though the task these critics set

for themselves is admirable and urgent, they articulate concrete suggestions

that too hastily invoke or reinvoke various aspects of the traditionally priv-

ileged cognitive subject.1s

The work of Eagleton, Greenblatt, and Haraway should be situated in

the passage from poststructuralism to postmodernism as the dominant par-

adigm of academic criticism. With the advent of the so-called postmodern

condition, the various core distinctions underwriting the poststructuralist

ethos became largely untenable. In particular, postmodernism witnessed the

collapse of the great divide between literature and popular culture-the very

divide that informed and reinvigorated the modernist assumptions from

which poststructuralism drew its strength (Huyssen 1986). Compelled by

this collapse to confront the ideological assumptions underlying poststruc-

turalism, critics who matured during this transitional period have tended to

direct their attention beyond the formal gymnastics of ecriture to the social,

economic, and technological background of cultural production. Thus, ever

expanding groups of critics representing positions as diverse as neo-Marx-

ism, new historicism, media theory, postcolonialism, queer theory, femi-

nism, and now science and technology studies have stormed the poststruc-

turalist arsenal, claiming its major theorems as tools for developing (often

overtly political) critical agendas far removed from the pristine neutrality

and high-art aura indissociably bound up with poststructuralism's textual-

ist focus. To a certain extent, this deflection of critical sensibility can be

ascribed to a phenomenon known as the Americanization of deconstruc-

tion: the "translation" of theory from a monological society into a pro-

foundly and provocatively dialogical one. Even more fundamentally, this

critical shift would appear simply to reflect the new urgency with which

Introduction * 11

agents living in the ever more confusing and paradoxically ever more inter-

connected postmodern environment seek to discover reference points for

their activity in the social and economic context of their lived experience. As

the impetus for the cultural, social, and political contextualization of post-

structuralist tenets, this urgency has introduced a healthy concern for the

relevance or pragmatic function of criticism; wrested from its abstract and

neutral analytic framework, the deconstructive account of subjectivity can

be viewed more productively as a concrete consequence of late capitalism's

impact on traditional modes of experience. Yet for all the freedom such a

shift introduces, to avoid succumbing to the thrill of such a consumerist

utopia-to avoid commodifying theory as our personal means of appropri-

ating the world-we must refrain from abandoning our critical duty to post-

structuralism. Such a duty enjoins us never to forget that the critical possi-

bilities opened by this newfound perspective can fruitfully redeploy

poststructuralist arguments only if they respect-and to some extent only if

they embrace-the poststructuralists' critical rigor.

With this proviso in mind, let us examine the three critics just mentioned

as they engineer critical negotiations with poststructuralism. Terry Eagle-

ton's evaluation of deconstruction in "Capitalism, Modernism, and Post-

modernism" furnishes a splendid example of the contextualization of

deconstruction in the material domain. For Eagleton, hardly a card-carrying

postmodernist, the deconstruction of the traditional "unified subject"

obtains its force not so much from a theoretical necessity (the literariness of

language) as from a material one: "late capitalism," he states with typical

aplomb, "has deconstructed [the unified subject] much more efficiently than

meditations on ecriture" (Eagleton 1988, 396). A similar valorization of

context underwrites Stephen Greenblatt's endorsement in "Towards a Poet-

ics of Culture" of the fluid circulation between the no longer distinct realms

of fiction and reality. Though couched as a remedy to the complementary

insufficiencies of Jameson's and Lyotard's versions of postmodernism,

Greenblatt's argument can more interestingly be viewed as a postmodern

retooling of the deconstructive motif of the "invagination" of fictive and ref-

erential discourse.16 Where deconstruction ascribes the motive force for

such invagination to a theoretical insight concerning language, Greenblatt

situates it squarely within the postmodern mutation of capitalism. Nothing

but the "power of capital" itself can explain the oscillation "between the

establishment of distinct discursive domains and the collapse of those

domains into one another" (Greenblatt 1989, 8). Donna Haraway's practi-

cal deployment of the deconstruction of binary oppositions in "A Cyborg

Manifesto" furnishes yet another example. For Haraway, "high-tech

12 * Embodying Technesis

culture" itself conditions the deconstruction of persistent dualisms that have

"been systemic to the logics and practices of domination . . . of all consti-

tuted as others" (Haraway 1991a, 177). By undermining the distinction

between human and machine, the electronics revolution and the advent of

what Haraway calls the "integrated circuit" facilitate a practice of "liminal

transformation" that, by submitting hitherto unassailable binary opposi-

tions to radical destabilization, affords new possibilities for overcoming

oppressive constraints.

Poststructuralist arguments are central in all three of these examples; in

varying ways, deconstruction-of the subject, of the fiction-reality divide, or

of dualism itself-furnishes a theoretical principle that simultaneously

demands and facilitates a sociopolitical project. For Eagleton, late capital-

ism's deconstruction of the subject indicates the need to preserve those

aspects of modernism that might mitigate its effect. For Greenblatt, capital-

ism's dissolution of the fiction-reality divide calls for a theoretical model

capable of accounting for "the unsettling circulation of materials and dis-

courses" characteristic of aesthetic practice in its contemporary, thoroughly

worldly form (1989, 13). For Haraway, capitalism's electronic revolution

activates the feminist deconstruction of dualism in a manner far more

urgent, far more productive, and finally far more actual than that developed

by the French feminists of the 1970s.

By applying poststructuralist techniques within a larger social, economic,

and technological context, these critical projects perfectly illustrate how

contemporary cultural criticism seeks a new relevance for the claims of the-

ory. Yet they also exemplify the decidedly ambivalent attitude cultural crit-

icism takes toward poststructuralism. While they all deploy the critical

power of deconstruction (linked directly to late-capitalist material reality) as

the motive force of their respective critical programs, they simultaneously

play down or simply jettison the crucial philosophical rationale behind post-

structuralism: its fundamental critique of logocentrism. By neglecting the

profound antihermeneutic consequences ensuing from the incompatibility

of the linguistic and the phenomenal, such transformational critical projects

fail to grapple with the most unsettling, but also most provocative, conse-

quences of the worldly localization of deconstruction: the eclipse of lan-

guage as a medium capable of brokering our contemporary experience.

Since it reproaches deconstruction with anachronism, Eagleton's analysis

furnishes an apt illustration of the consequences of such an ambivalent

appropriation. To the extent that late capitalism has produced a new kind

of agent, "a dispersed, decentred network of libidinal attachments" lacking

any common ground with the unified subject of the modernist age, post-

Introduction * 13

structuralism is disingenuous, suggests Eagleton, in directing its critique

against the traditional humanist subject. In the context of postmodern cul-

ture, he argues, "the 'unified subject' looms up . . . as more and more of a

shibboleth or straw target, a hangover from an older liberal epoch of capi-

talism, before technology and consumerism scattered our bodies to the

wind" (1988, 396). Rarely equaled for its ferocity and bluntness, Eagleton's

judgment nonetheless expresses the rather reactionary sentiment shared by

most practitioners of what we might call "post-poststructuralist" cultural

criticism: an impatience and skepticism concerning the complicated trajec-

tories of deconstructive logic. In the very act of situating the cause inform-

ing the deconstruction of the unified subject within the postmodern mater-

ial domain, Eagleton's analysis fails to account for (if not simply to

recognize) the basic philosophical thesis underlying the textual practice of

poststructuralism: the homology it posits between textual structures and

thought.17 Insofar as they presuppose that thinking itself functions like a

text, textualist analyses posit a coequality between the structure of thought

and the structure of textuality, which they then deploy to distance thought

from the hermeneutic and/or phenomenal models that have traditionally

served to account for it.18 Transformative analyses like Eagleton's ulti-

mately fail to appreciate the irreducibility of this disjunction. Whether it is

caused by the "literariness" of language or by the material realities of the

late-capitalist lifeworld ("technology and consumerism"), the deconstruc-

tion of the subject has lasting consequences: once thought is divorced from

phenomenality, it simply loses its jurisdiction over the experiential domain.

Correlatively, language loses its force as the faculty governing our lived

experience. Despite a constructive effort to (re)ascribe the cause of the sub-

ject's deconstruction directly to the domain of social and material reality,

contemporary cultural critics ultimately undermine their transformative

programs by retaining an analytical methodology (focus on language)

and critical commitments (to traditionally humanist political agendas,

hermeneutical goals, etc.) that are themselves deconstructed in the same

process.

Insofar as they reproduce Eagleton's oversight, today's cultural critics

commit themselves to a reductive strategy. Far from extending the disjunc-

tion of thought and phenomenality into the wider arena of culture, they seek

to historicize the cause of deconstruction in order to render it a "positivity,"

a concrete and local, tangible and fully transparent-and thus temporary

and reversible-impingement on cognition and identity formation as they

have been traditionally conceived. By thus positivizing a theoretical disjunc-

tion that questions the very viability of positivized modes of experience,

14 * Embodying Technesis

cultural critics are able to script the triumph of the cognitive subject over the

deconstructing forces immanent to the late-capitalist lifeworld. Among the

critics I have been discussing, such a triumph takes form along two lines:

through an allegedly more "sophisticated" form of criticism that can

embrace the aporia it introduces (Eagleton, Greenblatt) or through the cog-

nitive adaptation of our experiential faculties to a point where the new

social "logic" can be understood, strategically and locally deployed, or

"cognitively mapped" (Haraway, Jameson).

Rethinking Poststructuralism in the

Technological Age

Against this common historicizing strategy, we can develop a more empow-

ering refunctionalization of deconstruction if (and only if) we focus on the

ways in which its cultural-and specifically, its technological-localization

radicalizes the disjunction of language and expression beyond the narrow

textualist frame. With the advent of postmodernism, the divide between

thought and materiality takes on new proportions, since the increasing

complexification of the material world makes materiality ever more alien

and elusive to thought. One striking example of such material complexifi-

cation-the ever increasing convergence of linguistic materiality with

machine code-has led recent critics to abandon the models of signification

developed in the print era in favor of models derived from information the-

ory (Serres 1982a; Kittler 1987; Porush 1985; Hayles 1990, 1993). Such

developments stress the critical necessity of grappling with the worldly

anchoring of theory: once it is localized in the postmodern real, the disjunc-

tion of thought and materiality can no longer be conceived as an abstract

formalist divide between thought and language. Language simply can no

longer assert its claim to be the exclusive or privileged faculty of experience

(Godzich 1994). In the information age, the disjunction between thought

and linguistic materiality becomes one local and particularly marginal case

of the broader and more forceful disjunction of thought (together with its

material support) from materiality considered robustly. No mere assimila-

tion of deconstruction to the cultural domain will suffice to address the

experiential consequences of this shift: to succeed in this latter task-and

thus to accomplish what I take to be the central task of contemporary criti-

cal theory-we will have to acknowledge the diminution of thought as the

privileged faculty of experience. Only by radicalizing deconstruction's dis-

junction of thought from experience will we be able to emancipate experi-

Introduction * 15

ence from the supposedly unbreachable-though in truth thoroughly reduc-

tive-closure of representation; our very ability to rearticulate the "mean-

ing" of experience, once it is divorced from language, requires nothing less

than a thorough working-through of the philosophical consequences of

poststructuralism in the context of postmodern culture.

Precisely the waning of language as the privileged medium of experience

motivates much of the research of contemporary cultural critics of science

and technology. The wide-ranging interest in the technological mediation of

language and the technological embodiment of subjectivity should be under-

stood as a response to this very shift in the media that broker our experi-

ence.19 Yet even among broad-minded, fundamentally technophilic critics,

there persists a strong resistance to technology-a resistance that prevents

them from addressing this fundamental experiential shift. Following in the

footsteps of Haraway and Jameson (and, more distantly, Eagleton and

Greenblatt), recent cultural critics of science and technology have variously

and persuasively deconstructed the dualisms central to traditional techno-

scientific critique (e.g., instrumental vs. substantive theory [Feenberg

1991]), only to compromise their deconstruction because of a recalcitrant,

if not always explicit or intended, commitment to representationalism.

To illustrate this resistance to technology, let me briefly discuss an exam-

ple of the strategy previously outlined-the "positivizing" of an irreducible

theoretical disjunction-which occurs in the work of a recent cultural critic

whose position explicitly refuses to "exclude technological processes and

artifacts as ontologically antecedent to the human" (Kendrick 1996, 144).

In her insightful article, "Cyberspace and the Technological Real," cultural

critic Michelle Kendrick attempts to develop an approach to technology

that would avoid reduction on two fronts: on the one hand, within tradi-

tional dualist schemes where technology is assimilated to the inessential

body; on the other hand, in a more contemporary form of this dualism in

which (virtual-reality) technology facilitates a similar rejection, or more pre-

cisely a transcendence, of the body. According to Kendrick, what both

reductive approaches overlook is the "technological real," a "symbiotic and

contentious-hence dialogic-relationship between the human and the

machine." Attention to the technological real-to the concrete ways in

which technology intervenes in our "selves"-requires a recognition "that

subjectivity is always in the process of being reconstructed by the technolo-

gies-material and semiotic which it purports merely to manipulate"

(ibid.).

To develop the significance of the technological real, Kendrick focuses on

two concrete examples that are marshaled to illustrate the intervention of

16 * Embodying Technesis

technology in our minds and bodies "in the localized and multivalent ways

in which real life assaults us" and not merely in "a vaguely holistic fashion"

(146). Both examples concern the relationship between cyber-personas and

actual persons, and both are marshaled to undermine the contention that

cyberspace represents some sort of utopian escape into an alternate reality.

The first example, borrowed from technocultural critic Sandy Stone (and

ultimately from Ms. journalist Leslie Van Gelder), involves a cyber-persona,

"Julie," an older disabled woman who developed intimate electronic rela-

tionships with a group of cyber-companions. When it was revealed that

"Julie" was actually a middle-aged, able-bodied male psychiatrist, the

women "she" had helped reacted with outrage, employed the rhetoric of

rape to describe their sense of violation, and in some cases even "went so far

as to repudiate the genuine gains they had made in their personal and emo-

tional lives" (Stone 1991, 83). The second example, borrowed from Village

Voice journalist Julian Dibbell, recounts a so-called rape within a computer

database named "LambdaMOO," a shared, textually described computer

space that allows interaction among multiple users. By juxtaposing two ver-

sions of the rape-a virtual-reality and a real-life version-Dibbell is able to

complicate the notion of alternate realities. On his account, the response of

the community-and in particular the virulent and vengeful outrage of the

actual user behind the cyber-victim-demonstrates that "MUDs [multiuser

domains] are not places of alternate subjectivities, of a transcending of one's

social and biological identity, but of simultaneous subjectivities" (Kendrick

1996, 158). Together, these examples aptly illustrate Kendrick's sweeping

claim that "the construction of subjectivity is a process of intervening social

and technological forces, in many ways beyond the control or agency of the

user" (159).

One might, however, read these examples along somewhat different

lines. Far from serving to establish the "instability of simultaneous subject

positions" (Kendrick 1996, 159), they could both be interpreted as attesting

to the practical priority of actual persons over cyber-personas. In both cases,

the defensive reactions on the part of the actual users demonstrate the super-

venience of feelings of violation that stem from embeddedness within the

actual world and in an actual body. By showing (contra Kendrick) the per-

durance, in practice, of an actual agent who preexists and supports the con-

stitution of any virtual identity in cyberspace, these examples attest to the

irreducibility of the "embodied mind" (to appropriate Francisco Varela's

felicitous term) as the processing center for all experience, actual and virtual

alike. At the same time as it would support and even expand Kendrick's cri-

tique of dualism, such a reading would highlight the intrinsic limitations of

Introduction * 17

her approach-the constraints imposed by her commitment to representa-

tionalism. By defining cyberspace as "a discursive site of ideological strug-

gles" (160) and by restricting materiality as such to the (relative) "material-

ity of subjectivity" (150), Kendrick effectively pigeonholes her own

approach to technology in a manner only marginally less reductive finally

than what she opposes. Although she posits the inextricability of embodied

identity and technology, her penchant to explore it exclusively "in the con-

struction of working fictions of subjectivity" (145) evacuates embodiment

of any content and insures the restriction of technology's impact to its effect

on representation-in this case, on the subject's capacity to represent itself

as a self. Within such a scheme, there is no room for the molecular and sub-

representational material impact of technology "outside" or "beneath" the

frame of fantasy or the closure of representation. In the end, by preventing

us from attending to the impact technology has on our bodies prior to and

independently of our discursive constitution as subjects, Kendrick's exclu-

sive attention to identity formation compromises whatever promise her

antidualist view might have for reorienting our approach to technology.

Kendrick's analysis furnishes an exemplary contemporary target for the

criticism of cultural studies I developed earlier in this introduction: it opens

a promising cultural approach to technology that falters because of a too

facile appropriation of poststructuralism, one that fails to respect its pro-

found antihermeneutic consequences. While Kendrick's postulation of the

technological real takes an important first step beyond dualism, it too read-

ily positivizes the real as a "dialogic relationship" between humans and

their technology. Through her reliance on (Bakhtinian) dialogism, Kendrick

suggests that technology's impact can be captured as a social or cultural

materiality inscribed within the "life" of signs. Indeed, by restricting tech-

nology's impact to the destabilization of narratives (or "working fictions")

of subjectivity, she renders it essentially linguistic. Nothing, I suggest, could

be more antithetical to Lacan's understanding of the real or, for that matter,

Althusser's materialist appropriation of it (to mention just two of the

inevitable sources for Kendrick's term). Viewed through a Lacanian or

Althusserian lens, the technological real would raise a different and far more

destabilizing problem than Kendrick's appropriation admits: it would force

us to ask how we could grasp technology's impact on our experience if it

intervenes, outside of the phenomenal field of subjectivity, as the material

support for the "object cause of desire" or as an impossible object of expe-

rience. Within a Lacanian or Althusserian frame of reference, in short, tech-

nology belongs to the real precisely because of its role in the constitution of

the split subject or the subject of ideology, a role that is predicated on its

18 * Embodying Technesis

absolute resistance to representational capture. By positivizing this role,

Kendrick simply conjures away the robust materiality she claims to address,

substituting in its place a relative materiality that resists (without invalidat-

ing) the narrative construction of subjectivity.

The internal contradictions that plague even such a technophilic and

antidualist analysis as Kendrick's are important less as criticisms of

Kendrick than as testimony to the difficulties involved when cultural critics

attempt to analyze in a nonholist manner technology's pervasive structuring

impact on our experience. In the end, Kendrick's example makes a funda-

mental contribution precisely because it foregrounds the urgency for a fun-

damental reorientation on our part: we must reject the privilege accorded

the discursive construction of subjectivity in our efforts to describe technol-

ogy's presubjective impact on our bodily experience. Only then will we be

able to realize the implicit desideratum motivating contemporary techno-

criticism: the foregrounding of the body as the site for technology's molecu-

lar material impact.

Technocultural Studies beyond Technesis

Having now established the need for a fundamental reassessment of the

legacy of poststructuralism in contemporary technocultural criticism, let me

briefly sketch the critical genealogy I propose to develop in this study. By

reconstructing the turn toward technology in twentieth-century thought

along Heideggerian and Freudian trajectories, I shall track, on the one hand,

the progressive infiltration of technology into theoretical discourses of dif-

fering sorts and, on the other, the compensating defensive reduction of tech-

nology imposed ever more forcefully to preserve the integrity of theory in

the face of this infiltration. In my reconstruction, twentieth-century theoret-

ical discourses seek to answer the call of two incompatible demands. They

pursue what I previously called the "ontic turn" toward the actual, a turn

that requires, among other things, an embrace of the technological media-

tion of the lifeworld; at the same time, however, they develop within the

horizon of a theoretical model inherited from the Greeks (more specifically,

from Aristotle) that appears to presuppose (but actually imposes) the sub-

ordination of materiality to thought. Considered against the background of

the "complexification" of the material domain, a process primarily cat-

alyzed in the modern period by technological development, these two con-

tradictory demands impose on theory a fatal double bind that spells the end

of its traditional jurisdiction over the real (Lyotard 1991). Technology, on

Introduction * 19

this account, comprises a privileged "index" of the material stratum

(Deleuze and Guattari), the real (Lacan), or the unmediated flux (Hayles).

As actual forces immanent to the real, technologies furnish an immediate

material source of movement (active force) that does not rely on the activity

of thinking for its ontogenesis. Yet because technologies so drastically and

fundamentally impact the process of thinking, they seem to afford an ideal

site for analyzing the encounter between thought and the all-too-amorphous

real.

While this peculiar ontological duplicity of technology does much to

explain its allure as a privileged topic for twentieth-century critics, it cannot

justify an all-too-common feature of recent efforts to analyze technology as

the site for thought's encounter with the real: the wholesale assimilation of

technology's materiality into the domain of thought. Technology must not

be construed as a mere figure or metaphor; its role within thought must not

be reductively equated with its far more robust ontological status as "agent"

of material complexification. For this reason, my account of technology

draws more from a functionalist model like Deleuze and Guattari's (despite

my local criticism of it in chap. 8) than from a far more influential contem-

porary representationalist approach like Jameson's. In suggesting that tech-

nology is the "representational shorthand for something else"-for the vast

and altogether unfathomable global, multinational network that comprises

the world of late capitalism, Jameson perfectly illustrates the predicament

theory encounters when it seeks to confront technology's increasing media-

tion of the lifeworld (Jameson 1991). Like the theorists I discuss at length in

this study, Jameson attempts to open theory to materiality through the priv-

ileged index of technology; yet to preserve the priority of thought-or more

precisely because he cannot conceive of our relation to the real as anything

other than a cognitive relation (a relationship culminating in a successful

"cognitive mapping")-Jameson is compelled to construe technology not as

a direct force in the real but as a metaphor for the real itself. Like its coun-

terpart in the Romantic sublime, the ensuing moment of crisis in this process

(what Jameson calls "the technological sublime") remains graspable only

negatively, through the imagination's failure to give it form.20 Moreover,

the negative presentation of technology, like the negative presentation of the

absolutely great or small, remains a merely temporary setback, a provisional

phase on the way toward a successful cognitive adaptation. In Jameson's

allegedly materialist "cultural logic," "technology" is simply the (provi-

sional) "stand-in" for our representational incapacity.

Like Jameson, the critics on whom my critique focuses-Heidegger,

Freud, Derrida, Lacan, and Deleuze and Guattari-all turn to technology as

20 * Embodying Technesis

a privileged site where the human encounters the material. Yet in all of these

cases, a promising start again ultimately comes to naught, since the explo-

ration of technological materiality is quickly and surreptitiously translated

into an exploration of technology's effects on thought-of the way in which

thought, in coming to rely on technological means of support or embodi-

ment, undergoes a relative exteriorization. In this process, technology is

stripped of its robust materiality in order to serve as a figure for the impact

of materiality on thinking. By variously imposing this same reduction on

technology, the master-thinkers of technological modernity demonstrate

their common allegiance to the strategy that I shall call technesis, or the

putting-into-discourse of technology. An updated form of the Husserlian

phenomenological epoche, this reduction constrains worldliness within the

form of what we might call a technema, the correlate of an act of techno-

thinking (technesis). This correlation is far more inclusive than that imposed

by the phenomenological epoche, since technesis explodes the purity of

Husserl's reduction by encompassing language, the unconscious, and other

sources of materiality that complicate the suspension of the natural stand-

point. But it nonetheless retains the noiesis-noema correlation as its basic

principle. Thus, like the classical phenomenological reduction it updates,

this reduction continues to privilege the ontogenetic role of thinking: like

noiesis, technesis reductively determines the field of exteriority as the tech-

nema that forms its correlate.

Ultimately, this general allegiance to the basic form of phenomenological

reduction is the reason that various twentieth-century theoretical discourses

explored in this study have failed to give a robust account of technological

materiality. While each master-thinker makes some important contribution

toward the assessment of technology's impact on experience, each is ulti-

mately compelled to sacrifice technological materiality in order to maintain

the integrity of thought. Each is compelled, that is, to repress technology at

the point where it threatens to exceed the particular technematic field con-

ditioning whatever serves as the motive principle of analysis in the respec-

tive critics at issue (e.g., Heidegger's horizon of thought, Derrida's closure

of representation, Freud's psychic space, Lacan's objet a, and Deleuze and

Guattari's social assemblage). In each case, the result of this residual phe-

nomenological commitment is the wholesale repression of what I shall call,

adapting Levinas's term, the "radical exteriority" of technology. Like Lev-

inas's primordial "Other" with whom we are in relation prior to all phe-

nomenality, technology possesses a fundamental alterity with respect to

thought. It simply cannot be reduced, without essential violence, to the form

of a technema.21

Introduction * 21

In their quest to open theory to its constitutive material outside without

jettisoning the basic enabling principle of theoretical phenomenology, the

neo-Husserlian master-thinkers of modernity must forge a difficult compro-

mise: they must find a way of acknowledging, pace Husserl, technology's

undeniable material exteriority without abandoning the governing privilege

of thought. Faced with this dilemma, these master-thinkers adopt a defen-

sive strategy: they reduce technology to an ontological status compatible

with nouocentrism and pass this status off as natural. Bound by the privilege

they lend thought, the master-thinkers can only account for technology by

thematizing it. They must, in short, treat technology descriptively, through

the category or figure of the machine. In this study's exploration of this

descriptive thematization, I will uncover the pervasive operation of a

machine reduction of technology whose effect is to naturalize technology's

status as the relative exteriority of thought. By reducing the broad experien-

tial impact of technology to its restricted impact on thought, twentieth-cen-

tury theoretical discourses effectively function to "enframe" technology

within a linguistically or semiotically constituted field. In any such frame of

reference, technology can only attain a positive ontological status in the

form of the machine metaphor, a figure for some (mechanical) operation of

thought.

In its late twentieth-century embodiment, this machine reduction of tech-

nology takes the form of textualism-the reigning ideology of literary stud-

ies from formalism on. In this form, technesis functions covertly and, as I

shall argue, according to the operation of figural compression or reversal

governed by the rhetorical figure of metalepsis. Since the reduction is

imposed in the very same instant that technology is thematized in terms of

textuality, the resulting technema appears to be foundational. In this way, a

reductive account of technology is passed off as a robust one: the funda-

mental alterity of technology is simply effaced in a sweeping move that

asserts the primacy of its derivative, reductive form. Yet while the operation

of metalepsis makes detection of the machine reduction more difficult, by

submitting it to deconstruction in the texts of each of the critics discussed in

this study, I will uncover the presence of a prior, extensive, and dogmatic

reduction of technology to the textual figure of the machine. By liberating

technological materiality from its illegitimate, rhetorically imposed reduc-

tion, I will reposition it as the motive mechanism of an antiformalist, exter-

nally oriented neodeconstructive critical practice responsive to the

"demands" of embodied reality. As an index of the technological real itself,

the deconstruction facilitated by such a practice will testify not to the auton-

omy of language but to the profound resistance that contemporary

22 * Embodying Technesis

technology mounts to the psycho-phenomenological modes of criticism that

have long functioned to contain it. By critically reconstructing the machine

reduction of technology in twentieth-century theoretical discourse, I intend

to trace this resistance to the point at which theory's defenses against tech-

nology break down-to the point, that is, where we can begin to see beyond

our ingrained (and to some extent self-inflicted) theoretical proclivities. In

the end, I suggest, it is only by grappling with this collapse that we can even

begin to address the robust impact contemporary technologies have on our

embodied lives.

Part 1

Technology, Embodiment,

and Cultural Critique



Chapter 1

Technoculture and Embodiment

In the famous "Book of Machines" from his 1872 utopian satire, Erewhon,

Samuel Butler conceives the man-machine relationship in a hitherto

unprecedented manner. Cutting through the impasse of the well-worn vital-

ism-mechanism opposition, Butler foregrounds the more important issue of

machinery's experiential impact. His is a vision of the machined man, one

that crystallizes the profound complicity of machines in the ontology of the

human: "Man's very soul is due to the machines; it is a machine-made thing:

he thinks as he thinks, and feels as he feels, through the work that machines

have wrought upon him, and their existence is quite as much a sine qua non

for his, as his for theirs" (Butler 1968, 269). Butler goes on to compare

machines with breathing: both, he suggests, literally condition our existence

at the deepest level, thus impacting us in ways that cannot be captured in

purely cognitive, representationalist terms. His vision of the quasi-evolu-

tionary symbiosis of man and machine imposes an enabling holist frame-

work on analysis, one that forbids the analytical isolation of technology so

common in more recent theorization. Thus, even though he ends by pro-

hibiting machines from Erewhon, Butler readily entertains a thinking of the

impact of technology that does not restrict itself to its impact on thinking.

In sharply distinguishing the rich and varied experiential domain from

the narrow realm of cognition, Butler's analysis succinctly expresses the

deep divide separating the diffuse practical impact of technologies from

their narrow function as handmaidens of science. Indeed, by engaging tech-

nologies as material forces in and of themselves, Butler's analysis makes

common cause with much recent work in the anthropological, historical,

and social studies of science (science studies for short), one central aim of

which has been to demonstrate, in a concrete and local frame, how tech-

nologies both furnish the material background for scientific experimenta-

tion and, in the process, generate unintended effects that diverge from and

(potentially) compromise anticipated or desired scientific results. Because it

engages technology beyond the confines of science itself, Butler's analysis

helps us retool the methodology of this recent work to combat the narrowly

26 * Embodying Technesis

scientistic view of technology that is (as I shall demonstrate in this study) all

too common in the discourses of "high" theory. With its understanding of

scientific practice as an ongoing and imperfect negotiation with an unpre-

dictable, "noncompliant" material domain, the field of science studies opens

an avenue to engage technology nonreductively, in the rich context of

embodied reality. By expanding such engagement outside the narrow

domain of scientific practice, we can situate technology beyond writing and

thus begin the crucially important task of embodying technesis.

Insofar as it operates such an expansion, Butler's analysis establishes the

pattern for a responsible cultural studies of technology. To encompass the

unthematizable contingency of technology's diffuse material impact on cul-

ture, we must follow Butler in stressing its practical dimension not simply as

it effects scientific procedure but, more broadly, as it permeates the very

core of our embodied practical lives. Accordingly, we need to introduce a

subtle yet fundamental shift in the tenor of cultural studies of technology-

an exteriorization and generalization of its operative deconstruction of the

science-technology correlation. While science and technology have certainly

become (and perhaps have always been) so deeply coimplicated that no sim-

ple hierarchy can tenably divide them,1 efforts to eschew the reduction of

technology to applied science must be thought of not simply as the end point

of particular critical acts but-in the larger cultural frame-as a first step

toward a more global reconfiguration of technology studies. By insistently

foregrounding the broader, extrascientific context in which technologies dif-

fusely impact our embodied lives, such a reconfiguration institutes a

methodological double vision as its operative principle. Thereafter, we will

find it necessary to account for technologies in a double register-to view

them, at once, as concrete embodiments that both condition and are condi-

tioned by the specific scientific principles they translate and also, in a far

broader context, as material forces that expand the role of embodiment and,

in the process, alter what I shall, adapting Walter Benjamin's analysis, call

the "economy" of experience.

Bringing such a double vision to bear on the analysis of technology's

experiential impact comprises one of my major aims in this study, and it

obliges me to draw and maintain a distinction between two divergent con-

cepts of embodiment that are too often either conflated during analysis or

simply collapsed from the beginning. In its predominant definition-a

definition that is, curiously enough, shared by cultural critics of science and

technology and by the practitioners of high theory on whom my critique

focuses-embodiment demarcates the materialization in artifactual form of

some given process of inscription. Whether this process of inscription is

Technoculture and Embodiment * 27

understood as an autonomous act of language (e.g., Derridian differance) or

a pragmatic intervention (e.g., Latour's notion of translation), such embod-

iment in a technical artifact (and even, at the limit, in a body) serves to sta-

bilize and exteriorize something that is by nature amorphous and highly ten-

uous-for example, meaning (for Derrida) or intention (for Latour). Since

this definition focuses on the constitutive role of embodiment for the analy-

sis of socially constructed institutions of knowledge, I shall call it epistemo-

logical (or artifactual) embodiment.

A second (and, within the theoretical field I explore, certainly secondary)

concept links embodiment directly to the (human) process of living through

the body. Not surprisingly, this concept emerges from critical traditions

phenomenology of the body, Deweyian pragmatism, Bergsonian meta-

physics-that have been marginalized with the advent of both high theory

and cultural constructivist criticism (not to mention Anglo-American phi-

losophy following the so-called linguistic turn). By making bodily experi-

ence primary, this concept reverses the direction of analysis imposed by the

epistemological projects previously mentioned: rather than moving from

inscription to (technical or artifactual) embodiment, it stresses the funda-

mental role of (corporeal) embodiment as the necessary background out of

which all acts of inscription emerge and take on meaning. Moreover, far

from imposing an enabling and allegedly nonreductive, if instrumental, fit

between inscription and embodiment, the corporeal concept of embodiment

insists on the irreducible excess of embodied life; it asserts the impossibility

of ever completely clarifying-bringing to discursive articulation-the

embodied background underlying human practice. Philosopher Mark John-

son concisely explains this concept: ". . . because of the limitations of our

propositional modes of representation, we have a hard time trying to

express the full meaning of our experiences . . . [W]hile we must use propo-

sitional language to describe these dimensions of our experience and under-

standing, we must not mistake our mode of description for the things

described" (Johnson 1989, 4). Clearly, for Johnson, as for certain other

recent critics (e.g., Bourdieu, Shusterman, Dreyfus, Varela, to name those

most immediately relevant to my study), the lived body is the site of this

experiential excess. Accordingly, I shall refer to it under the rubric of phe-

nomenological (or corporeal) embodiment.

Drawing this crucial distinction allows me to correlate the general criti-

cal program I develop in this study-the critique of technesis or the putting-

into-discourse of technology-with the specific priorities and the larger con-

text(s) motivating recent science studies. In essence, my program explores

the limitations of a purely epistemological (or in the case of high theory,

28 * Embodying Technesis

onto-epistemological) engagement with technology, in order, ultimately, to

expand our understanding of the rich and varied role(s) technologies play in

our embodied lives. Without denying the importance of concrete study of

the complex coimplication of science and technology, my critique exposes

the necessary partiality of all such study and calls on critics to expand their

perspective by approaching the extra-scientific, practical impact of contem-

porary technologies through the frame of phenomenological embodiment.

The affirmative component of my program should thus be seen not as an

alternative but as a necessary complement to contemporary science stud-

ies-an effort to fill out the extra-scientific and practical register of the dou-

ble methodological vision proposed earlier.

Accordingly, my project bears a markedly different relation to science

studies than to high theory, despite the root privileging of inscription com-

mon to both. Whereas high theory imposes on technology a purely abstract

discursive (or technetic) ontological frame that effectively forecloses all lim-

its to its theoretical dominion, science studies champions a cautious empiri-

cism specifically designed to obstruct the institution of such dominion. If sci-

ence studies (not to mention actual science) cannot always avoid reducing

embodied reality to fit the inscriptional models it introduces, this particular

necessity stems less from an unassailable theoretical framework-from

some metaphysical need-than from the very nature of scientific practice.

To the extent that scientific activity involves the development of models

expressly designed to simplify reality, scientists, it would seem, could hardly

refrain from acknowledging (if only implicitly) that the "nature" they

experimentally produce is not, and can never be, fully commensurate with

embodied complexity. Given this key difference, my critique of the abstract,

metaphysical model of technesis need not entail a blanket rejection of the

inscriptional model(s) introduced by science studies, and it in fact points the

way to a robust understanding of technology that would combine the con-

tribution of science studies with a broader opening to the phenomenological

dimension of technology's experiential impact. Even as it urges a flat rejec-

tion of technesis as a model for thinking about this impact, my critique thus

facilitates a broader engagement with technological materiality that would

function to supplement, not displace, the account of technology generated

by the empirical, scientific paradigm. Where science enacts a process of sim-

plification by moving from embodied complexity to inscription, the corpo-

real phenomenology I propose moves in the other direction-from whatever

narrow slice of embodied complexity is at issue in a particular scientific

operation to the robust materiality that forms the rich background for our

practical, embodied experience of reality as such. By restoring the uncon-

Technoculture and Embodiment * 29

strained domain of embodied complexity as the locus where technologies

impact us immediately and practically, I seek, in sum, to counterbalance the

blindness imposed through the narrow epistemological perspective animat-

ing contemporary science studies.

Still, for all of the constructive promise of the phenomenological frame I

introduce, this study will focus fairly insistently-for some, perhaps too

insistently-on exposing and criticizing the role technesis plays in various

twentieth-century discourses of high theory. In what might be thought of as

a propadeutic to a future technocriticism, my principle aim here is to con-

front a particularly strong philosophical tradition of inscription with the

embodied reality it would subsume in language and to do so from the inside,

so to speak, of that very tradition. Accordingly, the argument I develop

undertakes an immanent "deconstruction" of the philosophical reduction of

technology, rather than an extrinsic appeal to other, related traditions that,

like the various fields comprising science studies, certainly do have more

direct ties to embodied reality and technological materiality. This said, my

study is nonetheless intended to comprise more than simply one stage

among others on the way toward a robust model of technology's experien-

tial impact, and it will, I hope, stand as adequate testimony to the important

contribution high theory can still make to such a model, even in the age of

its obsolescence. If, as I ultimately suggest, the rich corporeal dimension of

technology's impact on embodied experience can only be opened by a fun-

damental exhaustion of the epistemological perspective and not solely by

the kinds of local (and still epistemologically focused) interventions pursued

by science studies, the perspectival shift I urge-to a phenomenological con-

cept of embodiment-can in turn only emerge out of a definitive destruction

of inscription's claim to encompass embodied reality, a thorough critique of

technesis that would uncover anew what it sublated in the first place: the

preinscriptive or prediscursive processes comprising corporeal embodiment.

Carrying out such an immanent destruction requires us to address tech-

nesis not simply in the abstract, as the general principle of a philosophical

reduction of technology, but concretely too, via the particular configura-

tions it assumes in contemporary technoculture. Accordingly, we will have

to criticize at least two, relatively independent "models" of technesis: one

rooted securely in French poststructuralism, which we might, with some

significant irony, call "traditional," and one derived from more recent per-

mutations given to it by researchers interested in the cognitive properties of

advanced systems. In the end, our task of overcoming the onto-epistemol-

ogy of inscription will thus call on us to eschew not just the narrow repre-

sentationalist framework of analyses that view technology as a metaphor or

30 * Embodying Technesis

embodiment of thought but also the broader framework of postrepresenta-

tionalist, posthumanist analyses that model technology systemically. While

the former analyses impose a traditional nouocentric standpoint as the tri-

bunal for evaluating our experience of technology, the latter divorce tech-

nology (which they restrict to the quasi-epistemological function of mater-

ial support for an abstract cognitive system) from the practical domain

altogether. The result is the same in both cases: technology's impact on

embodied life is all too readily reduced to its impact on thought, with the

only meaningful difference being whether techno-thinking (technesis)

remains rooted in the human or whether, through the process of systemati-

zation, it becomes irrevocably inhuman.

The structure of my argument in this book mirrors this division in the

contemporary configuration of technesis. Following a brief sketch of the

growing disjunction between epistemological and phenomenological modes

of experiencing technology in the modern period (chaps. 1 and 2), I recon-

struct two overlapping twentieth-century genealogies of technesis-the

onto-phenomenological and the psychoanalytic-through their respective

representationalist and systemic phases (chaps. 3-8). Since both genealogies

rely on a common, deeply problematic reduction of technology, my critique

will serve as a call for a more fundamental break with representationalism

than is offered by the various contemporary forms of technocriticism,

including those that draw on informational and systems theory. From my

perspective, these latter forms can be viewed simply as the apex of the legacy

of technesis-its mature, state-of-the-art form. In their place, what I urge is

a total break with this heritage; if we are to rethink technology's experien-

tial impact from the ground up, we must reconceptualize the role of human

embodiment and lend a renewed attention to the fundamental role that

noncognitive and nondiscursive affective bodily life plays in contemporary

technoculture.

The Return of Realism

The constructive payoff of my sustained critique of technesis-the call it

advances for a new realism in the cultural study of technology-can most

effectively be contextualized against the backdrop of sociologist of science

Bruno Latour's recent critique of modernity. In a certain sense, my project

could be characterized as an effort to round out the new constitution Latour

develops by dismantling the great divide separating nature from society, the

universe of things from the human world: while Latour attends to the epis-

Technoculture and Embodiment * 31

temological dimension of this dismantling, I seek to engage the broader

experiential consequences that ensue from the (re)distribution of agency

across what Latour calls "the parliament of things" (Latour 1993b).

Following Shapin and Schaffer in Leviathan and the Air-Pump, Latour

overcomes the dual impasse of the "modern constitution" by locating a

"new position" between Nature and Culture. On this view, modernity

arises in the wake of the Boyle-Hobbes debate, when the knowledge of

things was split from power and human politics. For Latour, this polariza-

tion installs an impoverished epistemology, for it alleges that natural objects

and social subjects are either real, social, or discursive, rather than a mix of

all three at once. While, in actual fact, there are always hybrids circulating

within networks of mediation/translation, the moderns do everything possi-

ble to situate them securely as either subject or object, social agent or nat-

ural thing. Against this tendency of modernity, Latour's project urges a

more robust epistemology: instead of ossifying into mutually incompatible

and strictly demarcated domains (Nature vs. Culture), knowledge should be

constructed by pursuing both human and nonhuman agents through the

hybrid networks they trace together. Following Latour's rejection of denun-

ciation, this imperative should not be understood as critique; instead, it

results directly from a certain paradox of modernity: the fact that the more

clandestine the hybrids are, the more they are able to proliferate. Latour

does not so much reject modernity tout court, then, as champion an amal-

gam of elements from both the modern and the premodern worldviews, one

that adopts premodern categories to conceptualize the hybrids, while retain-

ing the moderns' work of purification for the purpose of conceptualizing an

external Nature distinct from subjects (Latour 1993b, 134). In this way,

Latour is able to claim the advantages of both worldviews for his new con-

stitution: following the premoderns, he can recognize hybrids as the basic

ontological units of nature-cultures; following the moderns, he can preserve

the capacity to differentiate a transcendent nature from an immanent soci-

ety, though no longer as distinct, pregiven ontological domains but as sepa-

rate objects generated through the construction of concrete networks.

With his contention that "the very notion of culture is an artifact created

by bracketing Nature off" (104), Latour can persuasively establish the irre-

ducible codependence of Nature and Culture. Regardless of whether he is

right to do so, however, his exclusive focus on epistemology compels him

to overprivilege representation and inscription as the correlated operative

principles of the inclusive democracy of humans and things he proposes.

To grant representational status to the hybrid "quasi-objects" constitutive

of the nature-culture(s) in which we live, Latour has to impose an inscrip-

32 * Embodying Technesis

tional ontology as a governing framework for analysis. The convincing

account he offers both of the construction of nature in the laboratory and

of the production of technical artifacts thus comes at a significant cost, for

it requires him simply to leave out all mention of the extrascientific context

in which technologies impact our everyday, embodied experience. By

focusing on this "surplus" impact of technology that escapes any delimited

form of inscription and by situating it within the domain of corporeal

embodiment, my project aims to supplement Latour's epistemological pro-

gram precisely on this point, to furnish a practical account of the profound

transformation(s) modern and contemporary technologies have wrought

on embodied reality.

Even given its narrow epistemological focus, however, Latour's project

takes an important step beyond the discursivist position central to the high

theory I critique in this study. Like Shapin and Schaffer's study of the early

modern air pump, Latour's intervention does manage to recognize the real-

ist basis of science, at least in principle, even if it neglects it in practice and,

more importantly, refuses to extend it to technologies. Such recognition is

crucial to the status Latour (following philosopher Michel Serres) claims for

so-called quasi-objects that occupy the new, middle position between

Nature and Culture. Unlike prior determinations that alternatively view

objects as "shapeless receptacles of social categories" or "hard facts,"

Latour's quasi-objects are aggressively hybrid, simultaneously "real, collec-

tive, and discursive." Latour insists:

Quasi-objects are in between and below the two poles, at the very place

around which dualism and dialectics had turned endlessly without being able

to come to terms with them. Quasi-objects are much more social, much more

fabricated, much more collective than the "hard" parts of nature, but they

are in no way the arbitrary receptacles of a full-fledged society. On the other

hand they are much more real, nonhuman and objective than those shapeless

screens on which society-for unknown reasons-needed to be "projected."

(55)

At the same time as it deconstructs the polarization of Nature and Culture,

Latour's mobilization of the quasi-object anchors the constructions of sci-

ence squarely in the extralinguistic domain of the real. More precisely, the

focal shift to the quasi-object brings the real into the sphere of the experien-

tial, making it relative not simply to the human but to the larger "parlia-

ment of things" that (for Latour) constitutes lived reality. By repudiating the

false opposition between constitution and discovery, in other words, Latour

is able to overcome the "ghettoizing" of the object performed through phi-

losophy's Copernican revolution, the relegation of the object to a transcen-

Technoculture and Embodiment * 33

dental status-noumenon, or thing-in-itself-that places it forever outside

the domain of experience. If Latour thereby sacrifices the radical alterity of

the material domain, he gains something significant in return: a distance on

the three strategies for "absorb[ing] . . . the Middle Kingdom" (55). Substi-

tuting a nature "extracted from the scientific laboratory and . . . trans-

formed into external reality" for "transcendent/immanent Nature" (77),

Latour secures the right, on the one hand, to invoke the "new position"

between subjects and things against the Kantian divide and, on the other, to

resist efforts by discursive and onto-hermeneutic monists simply to collapse

the divide altogether. Ultimately, his position-and the privilege he accords

science studies-stands or falls with the broad reciprocity he claims to dis-

cover between construction and discovery: according to Latour, when we

construct nature in the lab, we do not just bring the real into the sphere of

experience; we also submit our experience to its constraints. Contrasted

with critical and monist strategies, then, the great advantage of science stud-

ies stems from a willingness to embrace the enabling paradox of the quasi-

object: the fact that, in experiencing nature through experimental construc-

tion, we cannot help but open our experience to something outside the

domain of construction.

On this general point, Latour's valorization of the quasi-object makes

common cause with my critique of technesis. His move to cast science as a

sort of reality check on the power of discourse anticipates and, to a certain

extent, parallels my own effort to embed the deconstruction of the subject

in the material infrastructure of the real. Scientific discourse introduces a

pragmatic perspective that, Latour contends, hampers all attempts to privi-

lege discursive autonomy at the expense of reference.

When [science studies] applied semiotics to scientific discourse, and not only

to literatures of fiction, the autonomization of discourse appeared as an

artifice.... [R]hetoric... changed its meaning entirely when it had truth and

proof to absorb instead of conviction and seduction. When we are dealing

with science and technology it is hard to imagine for long that we are a text

that is writing itself, a discourse that is speaking all by itself, a play of

signifiers without signifieds. It is hard to reduce the entire cosmos to a grand

narrative, the physics of subatomic particles to a text, subway systems to

rhetorical devices, all social structures to discourse. (64)

With this eloge to science studies, Latour introduces a crucial methodologi-

cal principle that will increasingly come to govern not just explicit accounts

of science and technology but all forms of cultural analysis that engage the

rapidly proliferating domain of quasi-objects:2 grappling with the complex,

hybrid ontology of the "Middle Kingdom" requires, Latour suggests, a

34 * Embodying Technesis

double analytic framework that focuses simultaneously on the active contri-

bution of the social and discursive and on the constraints imposed by the real.

At a general level, then, the ontology Latour erects around the quasi-

object can help inform an account of technology that would embrace both

its social and discursive constitution and its anchoring in the real. Latour

helps us see that, as ontic or mundane entities, technologies (like scientific

facts experimentally produced in the laboratory) only emerge from and exist

in the divide between Nature and Culture, the domain of nature-culture,

and are consequently (like all quasi-objects) "simultaneously real, discur-

sive, and social." Yet in seamlessly assimilating technologies into his model

of inscription-as constructions essentially similar to the production of facts

in the laboratory-Latour not only runs roughshod over some crucial onto-

logical differences between scientific facts and technologies; he also imposes

an overly narrow epistemological frame-of-reference on technology. As a

consequence, technology is largely stripped of its anchoring in the real, of

the very dimension that Latour's model promised to preserve against both

Kantian and poststructuralist reduction.

To grasp the rationale for this reduction and to expose its complicity

with Latour's governing epistemological orientation, we need to go back to

the model of inscription he develops initially, with Steve Woolgar, in Labo-

ratory Life. There, Latour readily acknowledges the inevitable reduction

involved in inscription: since science functions by translating embodied

complexity into manageable formulations, it simply cannot avoid some sim-

plification or abstraction of the real (Nature) and of the embodied processes

of laboratory practice. On this early model of science as "translation,"

inscriptions explicitly draw their force as direct mediators of the real only

on the condition that the material processes giving rise to them are brack-

eted off. Latour argues:

"[I]nscription devices" transform pieces of matter into written documents.

More exactly, an inscription device is any item of apparatus or particular

configuration of such items which can transform a material substance into a

figure or diagram.... An important consequence of this notion of inscription

device is that inscriptions are regarded as having a direct relationship to "the

original substance." The final diagram or curve thus provides the focus of

discussion about properties of the substance. The intervening material activ-

ity and all aspects of what is often a prolonged and costly process are brack-

eted off in discussions about what the figure means. (Latour and Woolgar

1986, 51; emphasis added)

To attain their role as stand-ins for embodied material processes, inscrip-

tions, in short, require the actual effacement of the very embodied context

Technoculture and Embodiment * 35

that makes them possible: "Without the material environment.., none of

the objects could be said to exist," and yet this environment "is required to

be easily forgotten" (ibid., 69).

Insofar as it is both recognized and tolerated by working scientists, this

inevitable reduction comprises a part of the normal activity of science, an

occupational hazard as it were, that only becomes an issue if and when the

nature produced by scientific inscription is taken as fully commensurate

with embodied complexity. Indeed, the scientist's activity is actually

directed not toward the material real but rather toward statements or

inscriptions that have been produced in the laboratory and that have taken

the place of nature: "reality is the consequence rather than the cause of

[the] construction [of facts through operations designed to effect the drop-

ping of modalities which qualify a given statement]" (ibid., 237). Yet in We

Have Never Been Modern, Latour expands this constructionist ontology to

the point of claiming that inscription need involve no meaningful loss of

embodiment at all. In this text, not only is the nature extracted from the

laboratory every bit as real as the "transcendent/immanent Nature" it

replaces (1993b, 77), but the very production of nature as quasi-object has

been accorded the all-important duty of opening nature to our knowl-

edge-of giving us "access to things themselves, not only to their phenom-

ena" (90).

While perhaps tolerable as an inevitable occupational hazard-and cor-

responding limitation-of scientific activity, such a position cannot be car-

ried over to the analysis of technology without significantly reducing the lat-

ter's practical impact. Routed through Latour's inscriptional model,

technologies can only attain significance by contributing to scientific episte-

mology; as forms of capture of the real, they constitute embodied inscrip-

tions (or embodiments of inscription) that function, like scientific facts, to

reduce the real to manageable proportions. In essence then, as we will later

see in detail, Latour's constructivist model reduces technology to the status

of supplement or materialization of inscription. Despite (re)introducing

some form of embodied reality, the "shifting-out" involved in the produc-

tion of technology-shifting out from inscription to materiality-serves

exclusively as a means of expanding the epistemologist's control; rather

than foregrounding technology's robust anchoring in the real, it functions to

solidify the power of inscription to harness the real and render it accessible

to cognition. Regardless of whether shifting-out succeeds in this task, tech-

nology is effectively stripped of its immanence within the embodied real. In

assimilating technology to science, Latour thus brackets out more than just

the material processes of translation that occur within the narrow techno-

36 * Embodying Technesis

scientific context: he quite simply eschews the entire extra-scientific dimen-

sion of technology's material impact on practical life.

Accordingly, to restore technology's anchoring in the real, we need to

reintroduce the ontological differences between technology and science that

Latour finds himself compelled to efface. Following both media theorists

and engineers, we must recognize, first, that technologies exist and perform

within a far larger and more heterogeneous social field than do scientific

programs. Situated within the real world (embodied reality), technologies

are never simple materializations of thought (or scientific protocol) but are

composite and complex results of often multiple, concrete and practical

efforts to solve local problems. Moreover, insofar as they form an important

part of the material infrastructure of the lifeworld, technologies generate

unintended and emergent practical consequences that not only have a broad

social impact well beyond the domain of science but can actually alter the

very material conditions for perceptual and cognitive social life. Grasping

this excessive "share" of technology's impact will require us to study it at

once as a social construction and a material "component" of Nature, to

impose a methodological double vision that can supplement the act of con-

structing technologies as quasi-objects with some recognition of the irre-

ducible, though hardly monolithic, autonomy peculiar to technology.3

Accordingly, I urge a stronger differentiation of technology from science

than the functionalist one that the contemporary field of science studies con-

structs entirely within its inscriptionally generated frame of reference.4 By

tempering the constructivist program with a recognition of the hard materi-

ality of technology, such a differentiation can combine the undeniable social

and cultural context underlying the production of technologies with an

account of their equally irreducible status as material components of the

"unmediated flux" (Hayles 1991b). To grasp this peculiar autonomy of

technology and to understand better how it complements the culturalist

account, I suggest that we adopt what the late Jean-Francois Lyotard called

a "cosmological" perspective-a perspective that treats technology as the

privileged vehicle in the autonomous material "complexification" of the

cosmos. Such a perspective would require us to situate technology simulta-

neously within the "Middle Kingdom" where the real, the discursive, and

the social converge in the construction of quasi-objects (the domain of

nature-culture) and within the unmediated material flux (the domain of

Nature).5 Precisely this irreducible, though not incompatible, duality of

technology necessitates the methodological double vision I am calling for:

insofar as they enter into practical networks where the nonhuman interfaces

with the human, technologies are open to the culturalist analysis that has

Technoculture and Embodiment * 37

recently been offered for scientific (and other like) practices of inscription

that seek to bridge the gap between the natural and the social; yet to the

extent that they contribute directly though not without human mediation to

the autonomous process by which matter "self-complexifies," technologies

always exceed the grasp of culturalist analysis and inscriptional models.

What I call technesis names the reduction that ensues when we forget this

duality, when we assimilate the material dimension of technology's impact

into its social contextualization.

Lest my position here appear retrograde (since it self-consciously returns

us to the Kantian terrain diagnosed by Bruno Latour as the root evil of

modernity), let me clarify my invocation of realism (Latour 1993b). My

qualified endorsement of Kantian empirical realism aims to counter

Latour's blanket dismissal of the Copernican revolution. In sum, I think that

a heuristic commitment to Kantian realism provides a timely recipe, as it

were, for restoring the realist vector bracketed out in Latour's presentation

of the quasi-object. In my opinion, Latour's dismissal of Kant rests on an

overly narrow construal of Kant's complex conception of nature, one that

privileges the figure of nature underlying Kant's epistemology at the expense

of the radically divergent nature conditioning his aesthetics and moral phi-

losophy. Only by ignoring Kant's explorations of the noumenal in the

notions of freedom (second Critique) and teleology (third Critique) can

Latour effectively hypostatize the topic of knowledge; to make knowledge

the sole mediator of our relation with nature, Latour must simply conflate

the two vastly different domains of nature in Kant.

Given this hypostatization, it is not surprising to discover a distinct cog-

nitive bias behind Latour's characterization of Kantianism as the final

ratification of the modern constitution. If the Boyle-Hobbes debate can be

credited with introducing the basic modern divide between society and

nature, knowledge and things, Kant (so Latour contends) is responsible for

turning this divide into a metaphysical principle, for codifying it as the divi-

sion between radically separate ontological domains.

It is with Kantianism that our Constitution receives its truly canonical for-

mulation. What was a mere distinction is sharpened into a total separation,

a Copernican Revolution. Things-in-themselves become inaccessible while,

symmetrically, the transcendental subject becomes infinitely remote from the

world. The two guarantees remain clearly symmetrical, however, since

knowledge is possible only at the median point, that of phenomena, through

an application of the two pure forms, the thing-in-itself and the subject.

Hybrids are indeed accepted, but solely as mixtures of pure forms in equal

proportion. (Latour 1993b, 56)

38 * Embodying Technesis

As long as our access to the real remains mediated through epistemology,

Latour's argument is irrefutable: Kant's Copernican revolution institutes an

epoche of the thing-in-itself as the condition of possibility for the produc-

tion of cognitive representations (Vorstellungen). In this sense, Latour's cri-

tique facilitates an important minirevolution of its own: it brings the world

of things back into the epistemological fold.

Matters are quite otherwise, however, once we move out of the narrow

field of knowledge production to consider our relation with Nature in the

broader terms developed by Kant in the second and third Critiques.

Whereas Kant's concern with Nature in the first Critique centers on its role

as (one essential part of) the transcendental cause of phenomenal represen-

tations of the external world and is thus limited to its contribution to the

task of constituting the objects of experience, in the Critique of Practical

Reason and especially in the Critique of Judgement, Nature cannot be

assimilated into the form of an object, since it corresponds, as supersensible

nature, to freedom and, as teleological nature, to the final unity of things.6

In a recent article, philosopher Kate Soper usefully glosses nature in just this

sense: she speaks of "the nature whose structures and processes are inde-

pendent of human activity (in the sense that they are not a humanly created

product) and whose forces and causal powers are the condition of and con-

straint upon any human practice" (Soper 1996, 31). Understood in this

way, Kantian empirical realism requires us to distinguish two natures-the

"nature" that results from a process of construction (nature as quasi-object

produced in the laboratory) and nature (or Nature) as the material stratum

underlying and conditioning all human activity (including the very con-

struction of nature as quasi-object).

Constrained Constructivism: The Return of

Kantian Dualism

Employed as a heuristic means for conceptualizing that dimension of our

relationship with the real that remains ungraspable through cognition and

representation, a qualified return to Kantian empirical realism will help us

to recognize and respect the particular autonomy of technology I have

attempted to expose. For this purpose, accordingly, a contemporary model

designed to foreground the radical exteriority of nature-a model like

N. Katherine Hayles's "constrained constructivism"-will have certain dis-

tinct advantages over Latour's inscriptional model.7

What differentiates Hayles's constrained constructivism from Latour's

Technoculture and Embodiment * 39

inscriptional paradigm is less a deep philosophical divide than a variant

emphasis: whereas Latour is most interested in explaining the complex

process of social translation that underlies all technoscientific production,

Hayles focuses on the limitations of epistemology, on the "cusp" separating

representation from the real. Latour's inscriptional model is predicated on a

denial of the external referent, such that reality becomes the creation of a

constructed system of internal reference (e.g., the adequation and superim-

posibility of reports). Hayles's constrained constructivism, by contrast, fol-

lows the relationship between representation and "unmediated flux" to the

point at which it breaks down. Beginning from the (constructivist) position

that "everything we perceive, think, or do is always already a representa-

tion, not reality as such," Hayles pressures the role of constraint and its rela-

tionship to representation. Specifically, she argues that constraints act as

limits on social constructivism and representationalism; by ruling out cer-

tain possibilities, they "enable scientific inquiry to tell us something about

reality and not only about ourselves" (Hayles 1991b, 79).8 In short, con-

straints introduce negation into representation and thus permit some mini-

mal form of escape from the confines of language.

To explain how this happens, Hayles maps the relationship between rep-

resentation and constraint onto a modified Greimasian semiotic square as

shown in figure 1.9 Such a mapping helps to reveal the fundamental inca-

pacity of our representations to coincide with reality and, in so doing, to

open a different, nonrepresentationalist or antirepresentationalist form of

contact with the real (what Hayles calls "elusive negativity").

exclusion

(inconsistent) False

(unknown)

Not-True

_

exclusion

True

overlap

Not-False (consistent)

(unoccupied)

By contrasting the positions of true and false, Hayles is able to establish

that language's capacity to touch on the world must stem from the function

of negation: while the position of the true cannot be occupied since we can-

not step outside representation to verify the congruence between it and the

unmediated flux it represents, the false is occupied in cases where a given

representation is inconsistent with specific aspects of the reality under inter-

rogation. With the shift to the more complex relation between the not-false

(consistent with the flux as it is interactively experienced) and the not-true

(unknown because untested in relation to the flux), Hayles expands the

asymmetry in a way that reinforces the crucial role played by negation:

"Between the negated categories of not-false and not-true, two kinds of

40 * Embodying Technesis

oppositions are in play. One is a polarity between negation and affimation

(false/true), the other between indefinite and definite (unknown/consistent).

This ambiguity folds together the ability to negate with the ability to spec-

ify. In doing so, it opens an escape hatch from the prison house of language"

(81; emphasis added). In expanding this argument, Hayles stresses the

excess negativity of the not-true; as the "negative of a negative," the not-

true yields a double-marking that renders its status indeterminate and inar-

ticulable. Ultimately, Hayles argues, this ambiguous double negativity of the

not-true permits the reintroduction of external reference in a highly con-

torted, doubly inverted form.

The relation of constraints to representation can now be articulated more

precisely . . . At the cusp [of the theater of representation], the interactions

expressed by these representations [of constraints] have no positive content.

The inability of language to specify these interactions as such is itself

expressed by the elusive negativity that exists within the not-true position.

... At the positive ("true") end of the diagonal [connecting the true and the

not-true], the limits imply that we cannot speak the truth. At the negative

("not-true") end, they paradoxically perform the positive function of gestur-

ing toward that which cannot be spoken. Elusive negativity, precisely

because of its doubly negative position, opens onto the flux that cannot be

represented in itself. (83)

Unlike Latour's internalist semiotic, Hayles's model seeks to address pre-

cisely that dimension of the material flux that lies beyond the grasp of rep-

resentation and the inscriptional model Latour shares with most proponents

of science studies. Through its extrinsic resistance to the textualist ideology,

constrained constructivism thus preserves the dualism that Latour rejects.

Where Latour takes pains to deny the cogency of an external Nature that

would preexist, rather than be derived from, the process of construction,

Hayles strives to preserve the autonomy of the material flux (Nature), while

nonetheless developing a means of accessing it through language.

Elusive negativity reveals a synergy between physical and semiotic con-

straints that brings language in touch with the world. Physical constraints, by

their consistency, allude to a reality beyond themselves that they cannot

speak; semiotic constraints, by generating excess negativity, encode this allu-

sion into language . . . Our interactions with the flux are always richer and

more ambiguous than language can represent. Elusive negativity, acknowl-

edging this gap, gestures toward this richness and so provides a place within

semiotic systems to signify the unspeakable . . . (83)

Precisely such acknowledgment of the excess of the material flux forms the

prerequisite for a nonreductive engagement with technology beyond the

narrow frame of epistemology and language.10

Technoculture and Embodiment * 41

Because her aim is to locate the unspeakable excess of the real within the

space of language, however, Hayles does not actually consider what I would

see as the broadest implications of her argument: how we actually do expe-

rience the richness and ambiguity of our nonlinguistic interactions with the

flux. Still, simply by indicating the incapacity of representation to account

adequately for our interactions with the flux, she indicates the direction for

such an analysis. Indeed, her effort furnishes a strong testament to the need

for a postrepresentationalist, postconstructivist account of our practical,

embodied existence.

It is therefore not surprising to find Hayles, in another of her recent arti-

cles, engaged in an attempt to bridge the divide between a semiotic and a

phenomenological account of technology. In "The Materiality of Informat-

ics" (1992), she turns her attention explicitly to the relation between tech-

nological change and embodied experience, in what I cannot help but see as

an inchoate gesture toward a postepistemological engagement with the real.

By stressing the irreducibility of embodiment in our experience of techno-

logical change, Hayles is able to counter the persistent identification of tech-

nology with dematerialization and decorporealization that has become a

staple of postmodern cultural criticism. For Hayles and the theorists on

whom she draws (Paul Connerton, Merleau-Ponty, Bourdieu, Varela, Mark

Johnson, etc.), cognitive and representationalist constructions are them-

selves rooted in precognitive, prerepresentational embodied experience.

Accordingly, if we expand the field of her argument beyond the "theater of

representation," we can see that embodiment in fact forms a kind of practi-

cal analogue to the negatively inscribed material flux central to the con-

strained constructivism model; as a prerepresentationalist locus for experi-

ence prior to its mediation through representation, the body negotiates

between the flux (identified with the technological infrastructure of the

world) and our discursive knowledge systems. Embodiment, in short, con-

stitutes our practical means of interaction with the material flux and with

the material reality of technology beyond the theater of representation.

Latour and the Socialization of Technology

Perhaps the advantages of Hayles's approach can most easily be grasped by

way of contrast with Latour. Where Latour thematizes technology exclu-

sively as the materialization of (scientific or extrascientific) human, social

intentions, Hayles accords it a far more complex role as mediator (via its

impact on

embodiment) between

autonomous material flux itself.

the discursive domain and the

42 * Embodying Technesis

In We Have Never Been Modern, in Aramis, or the Love of Technology,

and in several recent essays, Latour explicitly extends the social ontology of

the quasi-object to embrace technology (Latour 1993b, 1996, 1992). As I

have already suggested, the operative principle behind this extension is an

alleged homology between science and technology: just as the successful

production of scientific facts hinges on processes of inscription and transla-

tion that accord them importance and solidity, the development of tech-

nologies centers on the materialization of textual-or as Latour puts it in

Aramis, purely fictional-technological projects. In a sense then, technolo-

gies can be understood as extensions of the translation networks underlying

science as such. Since they culminate, if successful, in the production of

material (and not simply textual) artifacts, they add one last step to the

process of translation: they "transform into an object" what otherwise

would remain "a project in the file drawers" (Latour 1996, 24).

The processes of translation that produce technological artifacts do,

however, differ in one important respect from those underlying the produc-

tion of scientific facts. Latour argues that since a technological project "does

not exist . . . at the outset" and cannot exist as long as it is in the project

phase, the analysis of technologies has a certain measure of freedom to

evade the burden of realism that weighs on science. He maintains that sci-

entific analysis must grapple with the heritage of realist epistemology, with

the constitutive notion that the sciences "seem to have discovered a world

that came into being without men and without sciences." By contrast, tech-

nologies emerge from a protected, fictional space and come into contact

with embodied reality only in their final stages. As Latour puts it, "[n]o one

is a Platonist where technology is concerned," since it would be absurd to

assert that a technology "was always already there, even before it was dis-

covered" (23). On his reckoning, this measure of freedom enjoins the tech-

nological analyst to deconstruct the divide separating signs and things, to

understand it as a nondiscrete and progressive functional differentiation.

The observer of technologies has to be very careful not to differentiate too

hastily between signs and things, between projects and objects, between

fiction and reality, between a novel about feelings and what is inscribed in the

nature of things. In fact, the engineers the observer is studying pass progres-

sively from one of these sets to another. The R-312 [a bus project in Paris]

was a text; now it's a thing. Once a carcass, it will eventually revert to the

carcass state. Aramis was a text; it came close to becoming, it nearly became,

it might have become, an object, an institution, a means of transportation in

Paris. In the archives, it turns back into a text, a technological fiction. The

capacity of a text to weigh itself down with reality, or, on the contrary, to

Technoculture and Embodiment * 43

lighten its load of reality, is what endows fictional technologies with a beauty

that the novel we've inherited from the nineteenth century has difficulty man-

ifesting nowadays. Only a fiction that gains or loses reality can do justice to

the engineers. . . A fiction with a "variable geometry": this is what needs to

be invented, if we are to track the variations of a technological project that

has the potential to become an object. (24-25)

By isolating technology in this way, however, Latour decisively narrows the

scope of his account. Bluntly put, he privileges the genesis of technology at

the expense of what I would call its "perverse performativity." His exclusive

focus on the trajectory leading from textual project to technological materi-

alization simply leaves out an entire dimension of technological materiality:

the unintended, "after-the-fact" effects technologies have once they enter

into existence. Not only does Latour thus trivialize the functional autonomy

that technologies do enjoy after they "gain reality," but he also imposes a

reductive frame on embodiment as such. While technologies would appear

to invert the path of science and to involve a recovery (not a forgetting) of

the material processes underlying them, their contact with embodied reality,

though not always predictable and expected, remains limited in scope. Inso-

far as it constitutes a challenge to be conquered, embodied reality is

restricted to material factors that bear directly on the social and scientific

intention that a particular technology would materialize. All other material

effects that a technology does or could produce-and indeed, the entire

dimension of technology's extrascientific practical impact-simply gets

bracketed out.

To observe this reduction in action, let us focus on a concrete example of

Latour's technological analysis-his account of an automated door-closer.

In exposing the impoverished "ontology" underlying his procedure, my

intention is not to harp on the limitations of Latour's model but to broaden

his focalization of embodiment in order to address the realist dimension of

technology-the potential of any technology, once instituted, to generate

effects outside the "fictional" space governing its genesis. As we will see,

Latour's exclusive concern with challenging the asymmetry structuring the

human-nonhuman relation orients his thematization of technology too nar-

rowly around functional issues directly embedded in the particular con-

structed situation (or quasi-object) at issue.

In "Where Are the Missing Masses? The Sociology of a Few Mundane

Artifacts," Latour offers a concrete analysis of a particular technological

lineage to illustrate a general methodological claim: that any technology,

insofar as it instantiates a program of action, involves a complex network

composed of both human

and nonhuman

elements. "Students of

44 * Embodying Technesis

technology," proclaims Latour, "are never faced with people on the one

hand and things on the other, they are faced with programs of action, sec-

tions of which are endowed to parts of humans, while other sections are

entrusted to parts of nonhumans" (Latour 1992, 254). To illustrate the

force of his claim, Latour presents an example involving a particular door

on which is posted a notice reading (in French): "The Groom Is On Strike,

For God's Sake, Keep The Door Closed." ("Groom," Latour reminds us, is

"Frenglish" for an automated door-closer or butler [227].) Since the notice

could apply equally to a doorperson and an automated door-closer, it inter-

ests Latour as an expression of the reciprocal symmetry structuring relations

between the human and the nonhuman: it captures the crossover from the

nonhuman to the human sphere that is involved in attributing an intentional

action (going on strike) to an inanimate mechanism (an automated door-

closer). And it does so, importantly, without relying on the asymmetrical

figure of anthropomorphism, a figure that would privilege the human (and

"rhetoric") as a "general equivalent," a "literal" term onto which every-

thing else would be mapped. By guarding the nonhuman from such reduc-

tion, the network constituted by this notice-a complex fusion of "labor

relations, religion, advertisement, and technique"-opens up what Latour

calls "the missing masses of our society" (227).

To trace the network underlying the posting of this statement, Latour

begins by considering the role of the door. Doors allow us to pass through

walls without having first to break holes through them. By measuring the

work a door spares us from, we can isolate the role of "displacement or

translation or delegation or shifting"-the core notion of Latour's model of

technology. As Latour explains, we thereby acquire a basic counterfactual

method, a sort of practical calculus, for assessing the function of technolo-

gies: "As a more general descriptive rule, every time you want to know what

a nonhuman does, simply imagine what other humans or other nonhumans

would have to do were this character not present" (229). In accordance with

this rule, technologies are thematized as functional equivalents of specific

tasks that would otherwise have to be delegated either to human or other

nonhuman actants.

Far from standing alone, as some kind of abstract governing principle,

this descriptive rule immediately returns us to the practical; specifically, it

inaugurates an analytic path that traces the dialectical series of translations

involved in solving the particular practical issue of how to insure that a door

closes properly at all times. On the analysis Latour offers, this series begins

with one specific problem with doors: their tendency to remain open if peo-

ple passing through them do not remember to close them. This problem can

Technoculture and Embodiment * 45

be solved in (at least) two ways-either by disciplining all the people who

use a given door or by hiring a doorman (also a "groom" in French). While

promising for its sheer simplicity, even this latter expedient cannot guaran-

tee a solution, since the doorman may be unreliable or occupied with other

tasks. Of course, the groom may be disciplined, but only at a cost far out of

proportion with the minimal effect it would bring about. At this point,

Latour suggests, one can take recourse to the nonhuman, substituting for

the unreliable human a "delegated nonhuman character" devoted solely to

opening and closing the door. Yet even this move cannot entirely resolve the

matter, since it introduces other difficulties, such as the door's slamming too

violently (231). If this and all subsequent problems may be solved through

further intermediate steps, all such local solutions will potentially introduce

new difficulties of their own, following an apparently never-ending dialecti-

cal pattern.

While it might appear to engage embodied reality in a robust manner, the

attention Latour lends the small "realities" of context remains purely instru-

mental: far from actually foregrounding the recalcitrance of material con-

text, he invokes local factors as provisional obstacles that are important

only insofar as they stimulate further translations and thus extend particu-

lar networks or quasi-objects under construction in particular instances.

Even if he remains enough of a realist to acknowledge the impossibility of

any "perfect" technological solution, Latour finds himself compelled to

abjure the qualified autonomy he would accord embodied reality, in order

to champion a monist ontology of social actants. To deconstruct the cate-

gorical divide between the human and the nonhuman, that is, he must focus

narrowly on the paths traced by actors, both human and nonhuman, skilled

and unskilled, as they exchange properties according to the logic of transla-

tion. Such a restricted focus, Latour would seem to suggest, is required if we

are to understand the implications of the notice posted on the door; only by

bracketing embodied reality as such will we be able to articulate the hybrid

ontology that would allow us, coherently, to attribute the property of being

"on strike" to an inanimate technical object. On such a view, claiming that

the groom is "on strike" does not so much anthropomorphize an automated

door-closer as expose the process of delegation that underlies its function;

since the groom performs the very same program of action that might alter-

natively be performed by a human actor, the practical effect of its no longer

functioning is equivalent to the effect of the human actor leaving his or her

post. In either case, to say that the groom (nonhuman or human) is "on

strike" is simply to say that this program of action, of which the groom is

an essential part, is not being performed.

46 * Embodying Technesis

Under the guise of advancing a radical symmetry between human and

nonhuman actants, however, Latour seems quite content to perpetuate the

long-standing subordination of technology to human and social intentional-

ity. For Latour, and for science studies more generally, it remains the case

that humans alone make machines and hence that the origin of every

machine can be traced back to some originary human function that it either

extends or replaces. Because of his exclusive focus on the genesis of tech-

nology, Latour's effort to treat technologies as quasi-objects effectively

insures a privileging of the intention of the human actor and perhaps even

of the technological analyst himself. Not only does he make no effort to hide

his belief that technologies cannot have purposes on their own, but-as the

following example will demonstrate-he seems to think that technologies

are fully accounted for when we understand how they embody or material-

ize what is ultimately a concrete human purpose, intention, or desire.

After fruitlessly imploring his young son Robinson not to sit in the mid-

dle of the rear car seat, Latour describes how he purchased and installed a

device that connects the headrests of the two front seats of his car. This

process allows Latour to materialize his intention in an artifactual form: "I

have," he concludes, "delegated the continuous injunction of my voice and

extension of my right arm . . . to a reinforced, padded, steel bar" (249).

Drawing on the analogy between technological shifting-out and similar lit-

erary procedures, Latour roots his analytic method in a literary process-

translation-that moves outward from a privileged source text.11 By appro-

priating the method of linguists with certain modifications, Latour

maintains, students of technology can combine syntagmatic and paradig-

matic dimensions to describe the "dynamic of an artifact"-how an artifact

translates what was originally a human intention or desire: "The syntag-

matic dimension becomes the AND dimension (how many elements are tied

together), and the paradigmatic dimension becomes the OR dimension

(how many translations are necessary in order to move through the AND

dimension). I could not tie Robinson to the order ["Don't sit in the middle

of the rear seat!"], but through a detour and a translation I now hold

together my will and my son" (251).

In focusing narrowly on the genesis of a given technological solution, this

account (and even this choice of example) neglects the other side of tech-

nology-what I have called its "perverse performativity." By subordinating

technology to human intentionality and by thematizing it narrowly as the

materialization of an articulated human or social program, Latour conflates

embodiment and discourse in a way that simply brackets out the far vaster

domain of embodied experience where human beings actually live through

Technoculture and Embodiment * 47

the diffuse and unrepresentable impact technologies have as material forces

of the real. As Latour readily admits, all attempts to embody disciplinary

processes in concrete technologies involve the delegation of "the selective

attitudes" of engineers to nonhuman actants (233). By thus restricting tech-

nologies, Latour simply turns his back on their broader, arguably more

significant experiential impact-on the way, for example, that they funda-

mentally alter our experience of space and time or of our own bodies,

beyond the scope of all inscriptional or representational processes.12

Embodiment beyond Cultural Ritual

Hayles's account rescues embodied experience from the neglect it suffers in

Latour's analysis. Because she readily acknowledges the inevitable reduction

involved when we move from the domain of embodied practice to the dis-

cursive constructions that bubble up from it, Hayles retains the separation

between discourse and embodiment that the concept of the quasi-object

tends to collapse. In so doing, she is able to introduce a crucial distinction

between two forms of embodiment: the bodily dimension proper to human

experience and the materialization of information in a physical medium.

Not only does she focus her analysis of technology on the former, properly

human form of embodiment, but she differentiates it from the normative

abstraction of the body in a way that exceeds the grasp of inscription. Inso-

far as it is "contextual" and "enwebbed within the specifics of place, time,

physiology and culture," embodiment defines the excess characteristic of

robust experience against the abstraction inevitably involved in construc-

tions of the body (Hayles 1992, 154-55). While embodiment, during any

given period, is in "continual interaction" with contemporaneous construc-

tions of the body, it also possesses a materiality and concreteness that dis-

tance it from those constructions and undermine their descriptive sway.

Hayles gives the example of vaginal orgasm during the early twentieth cen-

tury, noting that women's experiences interacted with the normative con-

cept in a variety of ways, only one of which was correspondence. By stress-

ing how embodied experience is always "imbricated" within culture,

Hayles's example urges a deeper understanding of the experience of culture;

specifically, it suggests that embodied culture is more basic, as a means of

experiencing material reality, than the cultural constructs that spring up

from it: ". . . because embodiment is individually articulated, there is also at

least an incipient tension between it and hegemonic cultural constructs.

Embodiment is thus inherently destabilizing with respect to the body"

48 * Embodying Technesis

(155). Following the lead of Elaine Scarry, Hayles's analysis of embodied

experience thus demonstrates that "bodily practices have a physical reality

which can never be fully assimilated into discourse" (153); they generate an

excess that becomes all the more significant, I suggest, given contemporary

technology's role in the material complexification of the cosmos.

Despite her effort to foreground the individuality and physicality of

human bodily experience, however, Hayles's decision to explicate it through

(what anthropologist Paul Connerton calls) "incorporating practices" effec-

tively reimposes the subordination of embodiment to the articulated logic of

culture. Even if it involves a more subtle, prediscursive form of articulation,

the very appearance of such a subordination in the work of a theorist

devoted to resisting the reduction of embodiment testifies both to our deeply

ingrained bias toward discursivity and to the extreme poverty of the con-

ceptual vocabulary available to us in our effort to rethink technology's

experiential impact. In the final instance, the lasting consequence of

Hayles's move is thus to lend a distinct, if covert, privilege to discursivity. As

the privileged category for describing the domain of embodiment, incorpo-

rating practices assimilate our embodied experience of technological change

into the space of structured cultural ritual and, in so doing, form a kind of

relay station on the path toward inscription. By predigesting the nondiscur-

sive, as it were, they make it ready for conversion into language. Hayles

explains:

First, incorporated knowledge retains improvisational elements that make it

contextual rather than abstract, tied to the circumstances of its instantiation.

Second, it is deeply sedimented into the body and highly resistant to change.

Third, it is partly screened from conscious view because it is habitual. Fourth,

because it is contextual, resistant to change, and obscure to the cogitating

mind, it has the power to define the boundaries within which conscious

thought takes place. To these four [characteristics] I want to add a fifth.

When changes in incorporating practices take place, they are often linked

with new technologies that affect how people use their bodies and experience

space and time. Formed by technology at the same time that it creates tech-

nology, embodiment mediates between technology and discourse by creating

new experiential frameworks that serve as boundary markers for the creation

of corresponding discursive systems. In the feedback loop between techno-

logical innovations and discursive practices, incorporation is a crucial link.

(162-63; emphasis added)

Notwithstanding her insightful positioning of embodiment as both the

ground for the experiential processing of technological change and the

background for the production of discursive systems, Hayles's effort to link

these two functions in a causal relationship ultimately strips embodiment

Technoculture and Embodiment * 49

of its constitutive excess over discourse.13 In the role of mediator between

technological change and discourse, embodiment does not emerge as an

autonomous experiential mode in its own right but instead retains its sub-

ordinate function as a means toward the production of discursive sys-

tems.14 In Hayles's own wording, embodiment creates "new experiential

frameworks that serve as boundary markers for the creation of corre-

sponding discursive systems." Though she does not say so explicitly, these

discursive systems remain the privileged focus of the critic, since they ulti-

mately furnish our sole means of cognitive access to our own robust

embodied response to technological change. What connects technology to

discourse is therefore not so much a bidirectional "feedback loop" as a lin-

ear process of emergence: via practices of incorporation, robust embodi-

ment is distilled into discourse. Consequently, though she opens the robust

domain of embodiment well beyond the normative boundaries of Fou-

cault's "body," as long as she assimilates embodiment to incorporating

practices, Hayles cannot entirely evade the critique she launches against

Foucault: she, too, tends to subordinate embodiment, if not to a normative

construct of the body, then at least to the discursive systems that make it

available to knowledge.15s

To avoid the philosophically overdetermined slide (back) into our default

mode of the theoretical,16 we must accordingly resist Hayles's identification

of embodiment with incorporating practices. Insofar as it narrows the dis-

tance between bodily and discursive action, such an identification risks col-

lapsing the autonomy so central to the promise of embodiment. By follow-

ing Connerton, Hayles in effect betrays her stated commitment to

embodiment: more precisely, she validates a reductive culturalist account of

embodiment as incorporating practice, as "an action that is encoded into

bodily memory by repeated performances until it becomes habitual" (157).

On this account, incorporating and inscribing practices are largely continu-

ous with one another and share the aim of "creat[ing] cultural constructs."

Hayles explains:

Posture and the extension of limbs in the space around the body, for exam-

ple, convey to children the gendered ways in which men and women occupy

space. These nonverbal lessons are frequently reinforced verbally: "boys

don't walk like that," or "girls don't sit with their legs open." It is significant

that verbal injunctions often take a negative form.., for the positive content

is much more effectively conveyed through incorporating rather than inscrib-

ing practices. It is easy to show someone how to stand but difficult to

describe all the nuances of the desired posture in words. Incorporating prac-

tices perform the bodily content; inscribing practices correct and modulate

the performance. (157)

50 * Embodying Technesis

Applied to such cultural practices as the performance of gendered behavior

or any of the examples Connerton develops (rituals, commemorative cere-

monies, etc.), this account of the continuity of incorporating and inscribing

practices remains perfectly coherent. When, however, we extrapolate it to

explain the role of embodiment in situations involving fundamental techno-

logical change, things appear altogether different. In such cases, embodi-

ment is not the product of logically ordered nonverbal sequences of actions

and movements designed to achieve specific, if not always acknowledged,

cultural goals; rather, embodiment here involves a far more passive, undi-

rected, and indeed emergent adaptation to new, largely unanticipated, and

certainly unthematized alterations in the material flux underlying and con-

ditioning the cultural horizon of experience. As the privileged vehicle for

our experience of material technological change, embodiment functions

beyond the scope of the kind of explicit, preconstructed, cultural hermeneu-

tic that ritual furnishes; accordingly, it must not be restricted to the cultur-

ally coded content of incorporating practices.

This conclusion echoes Pierre Bourdieu's defense of embodied experience

against the unnoticed but fundamental alterations that occur when it is

translated into theoretical representation. Contending that we simply can-

not account for the "pernicious alteration" that is "constitutive of the oper-

ation of knowing," Bourdieu argues for a discrete divide between the theo-

retical and practical attitudes (Bourdieu 1990, 27). More specifically, he

insists on the autonomy of what he calls the "practical sense," its status as

a bodily hermeneutic that is not only independent from cognitive-linguistic

understanding but situated below the level of conscious awareness. By artic-

ulating this practical sense with his concept of "habitus," Bourdieu suggests

its close ties to cultural ritual and other incorporating practices; yet his insis-

tence on the absolute divide between habit and intellection makes it clear

that practical sense cannot be clarified through ritual decoding, as it can in

Connerton's (and Hayles's) account of incorporating practices. In a key pas-

sage also cited by Hayles, Bourdieu insists on the ossification and imperme-

ability of values once they are "given body."

... principles em-bodied in this way [through habit] are placed beyond the

grasp of consciousness, and hence cannot be touched by voluntary, deliber-

ate transformation, cannot even be made explicit; nothing seems more inef-

fable, more incommunicable, more inimitable, and, therefore, more precious,

than the values given body, made body by the transubstantiation achieved by

the hidden persuasion of an implicit pedagogy. . . . (1977, 94; emphasis

added)17

Technoculture and Embodiment * 51

What distinguishes Bourdieu's account of embodied experience is the irre-

ducible autonomy he grants it; for him, bodily practice-the embodiment of

nonverbal (i.e., felt or sensed) stimuli-constitutes a form of experience dis-

tinctly separate from and inaccessible to conscious intellection. Though he

stops short of affirming categorically that embodied knowledge can never be

altered,18 Bourdieu forcefully suggests that any such alteration can only

result from a far more holist, indirect, and indeed embodied process than

that of analytic penetration into and discursive clarification of its specific

logic.

While Hayles dismisses the autonomy Bourdieu accords practical sense as

an instance of the type of exaggeration not uncommon in recent French the-

ory, I propose, on the contrary, that we take it as the methodological crux of

a nonreductive account of embodied experience. Far from seeking to narrow

Bourdieu's account of practical sense to address specific cultural tasks, we

need to generalize it into a robust experiential mode capable of accounting

for the de jure primacy of embodiment over cultural construction. Put

another way, Bourdieu's example of bodily pedagogy needs to be circum-

scribed as one specific instance of the far more encompassing process of what

he calls "practical mimesis." Defined as a process of acquisition rooted in

direct and immediate bodily adaptation to sensory conditions, practical

mimesis (or mimeticism) "implies an overall relation of identification and has

nothing in common with an imitation that would presuppose a conscious

effort to reproduce a gesture, an utterance or an object explicitly constituted

as a model" (Bourdieu 1990, 73). Not only must practical mimesis not be

confused with identification (which is based in representation), but it must

also be situated below the threshold and beyond the grasp of conscious cog-

nition. Bourdieu notes that it takes place "below the level of consciousness,

expression and the reflexive distance which [memory and knowledge] pre-

suppose." He continues: "The body believes in what it plays at: it weeps if it

mimes grief. It does not represent what it performs . . . What is 'learned by

body' is not something that one has, like knowledge that can be brandished,

but something that one is" (73; emphasis added ). What is embodied through

mimeticism can only be experienced through mimetic reproduction, never

through translation into language; this necessity, Bourdieu suggests, "is par-

ticularly clear in non-literate societies, where inherited knowledge can only

survive in the incorporated state." There, he continues, "[i]t is never

detached from the body that bears it and can be reconstituted only by means

of a kind of gymnastics designed to evoke it, a mimesis which, as Plato

observed, implies total investment and deep emotional identification" (73;

52 * Embodying Technesis

emphasis added). In short, access to embodiment (to the extent that we have

it) simply does not (and cannot) involve translation or delegation into lan-

guage. Accordingly, any bodily hermeneutic capable of accounting for it will

require us to learn how to use our mimetic bodily "sense" as the primary

medium for living through technology's experiential impact.

Such mimetic skill will become ever more important as contemporary

technologies continue to expand our sensory contact with the material

world. Whether we are able to capitalize on this expansion by adapting our

sensory and experiential capacities to the new media ecology will hinge, I

think, on our ability to experience our own embodiment without a pro-

foundly restrictive dependence on cognition and representation. Thus, even

before we can begin to refine our "mimetic faculty,"19 we must disabuse

ourselves of the culturally ingrained logocentrism that compels us, often

despite our own critical intentions, to translate technological materiality

into discourse.

Chapter 2

Locating the Technological Real

In the introduction to the recent volume Virtual Realities and Their Discon-

tents, cultural critic Robert Markley outlines a program of research

designed to counter the dematerialization so often championed by commen-

tators-both popular and academic on virtual reality. For Markley, argu-

ments that cyberspace entails the "death of print culture" (logocentrism)

are, in addition to being greatly exaggerated, flatly contradicted by their

own dissemination through print. As an antidote to the inflated claims of

contemporary cyber-prophets, Markley stresses the necessity of drawing a

distinction between the actual technologies facilitating virtual experience

and the abstraction "cyberspace." Such a distinction would allow us to

account for the inscription of cultural forces within the domain of the vir-

tual and would thus situate cyberspace in relation to the (logocentric) meta-

physical tradition from which it stems and that it, in many ways, simply

prolongs.

. . it is [the] awareness of the historical and cultural implication of virtual

technologies in the dreamscape of Western thought that sets [the contribu-

tors to this volume] apart from those writers who characterize cyberspace as

a new, if not always brave, world . . . [We] remain sceptical of a cyberspa-

tial metaphysics that assumes, rather than questions, the revolutionary

nature of virtual worlds and electronically mediated experience. In this

respect, [our] analyses emphasize . . . that the division between cyberspace

and virtual technologies reflects and reinscribes the oppositions of

mind/body, spirit/matter, form/substance, and male/female that have struc-

tured Western metaphysics since Plato. (Markley 1996, 2)

Following this concrete culturalist program, Markley and his colleagues

are able to separate the material technological infrastructure of virtual

reality from the fantasy of a dematerialized cyberspatial existence that it

facilitates. Such a separation allows us to interrogate claims made on

behalf of the fantasy abstraction "cyberspace" and specifically to question

its content-the false promise that, as Markley puts it, "the more techno-

logically sophisticated our society becomes the less it has to worry about

54 * Embodying Technesis

the distribution of wealth and resources" (4). By reading this content in

terms of the social, economic, psychological, and political realities

attached to the technological infrastructure-what Markley simply chris-

tens as the "material" realities-we can begin to take stock of the concrete

costs and exclusions inseparable from the allegedly revolutionary new

metaphysics. What we thereby discover is the similarity of the virtual rev-

olution to every other so-called revolution; far from comprising a veritable

break with the past and, specifically, with the Western metaphysical tradi-

tion, the cyber-revolution begins to look much more like a new and

improved phase of that tradition, a phase more thoroughly adept than any

previous one at hiding its constitutive biases and exclusions.

For all its urgency, however, Markley's measured call for sobriety in the

face of runaway techno-utopianism runs a certain risk of reduction: by

focusing exclusively on cultural materiality as the site of technology's

effects, Markley's program limits the analysis of virtual reality technologies

to their specific materializations within concrete cultural contexts. Effec-

tively, Markley's enabling alignment of technology with cultural materiality

restricts technology's impact to the effects it has as an assimilated element of

culture.1 Since it cannot address the potential impact of technological mate-

riality beyond the functions technologies acquire through their inscription

within given cultural contexts, Markley's cultural constructivist program

has the (perhaps unintended) effect of stripping technology of its robust

materiality. Despite its success in exposing significant concrete political and

social inequalities that underlie the development and dissemination of vir-

tual technologies,2 the culturalist approach thus attains its force from a

reduction that involves substituting the quasi materiality introduced

through the cultural contextualization of technology for the materiality

belonging to it by dint of its role as an "agent," so to speak, in the com-

plexification of the cosmos.3 To be assimilated into the cultural construc-

tivist paradigm, technologies must accordingly be defined exclusively

through the cultural markings that are affixed to them; whatever material-

ity they possess is derived exclusively from the cultural forces mobilized in

their development and social application. For this reason, the culturalist

approach can do no more than lay bare and contest the ideological content

of technology's culturally acquired materiality;4 it remains narrowly cir-

cumscribed by the very representationalism that is responsible, according to

my thesis, for our compromised engagement with technology. Markley's

decision to bracket the anthropological consequences of technological

change and to focus exclusively on the ideologically loaded cultural strug-

gles ensuing from it reflects precisely such a limitation.

Locating the Technological Real * 55

... even if we see cyberspace as a form of complex mediation within the tra-

ditions of Western science, metaphysics, and economics, it does not tran-

scend the problems of materiality, embodiment, or capital. In this regard, to

offer a critique of cyberspace is to engage in a multivalent exploration of the

values and assumptions of a dualism which are presented as "natural" con-

ditions of human existence, of an ideology of a revolutionary change in con-

sciousness brought about by new forms of technological intervention, and of

the political problems posed by limited access to new and expensive tech-

nologies. (8-9)

As long as we follow Markley by restricting our analysis of technology to

the influence it brings to bear on our "values and assumptions," we con-

strain our investigation to the macroscopic social phenomena and remain

unable even to broach the topic of technology's microphysical impact-the

ways in which it impacts our embodied experience below the threshold of

representation.

Without denying the importance of a healthy skepticism regarding the

"intrinsic" revolutionary status of virtual reality, we need to grapple with

the claims of a different group of critics (including Michael Heim, Michael

Benedikt, and Marcos Novak) whose work situates virtual reality in the

domain of the anthropological. While Markley and the cultural critics for

whom he speaks furnish a much needed thick description of the cultural

context underlying cyberspace, these more speculative theorists help us

explore its less tangible, holist dimensions. Specifically, they raise the impor-

tant issue of how our increasing reliance on virtual technology has changed

and will continue to change the very sensory modes by which we perceive

and experience the world, independently of and prior to its ideological

impact (see Benedikt 1991). Instead of pitting these two approaches against

one another, it seems to me that we might best realize their (respective) con-

tributions by attempting to forge a synthesis between their emphases, which

are differently inflected but ultimately, I think, not incompatible.

In our effort to contextualize the broad anthropological changes brought

about by technology without reductively identifying them as effects of what

Markley calls cultural materiality, we must impose on ourselves a method-

ological double-distancing from (though not a dismissal of) cultural con-

structionism as it is now practiced. Insofar as technologically generated

experiential changes tend to throw our received, culturally coded modes of

experience into (at least temporary) disarray-as, for example, Frederic

Jameson has shown in his widely influential account of postmodern hyper-

space-we must be able to reach beyond the culturally coded experiential

possibilities available to us at any given time in order to circumscribe the

56 * Embodying Technesis

changes in question. Adaptation, in such cases, requires more than a simple

appeal to the cultural field underlying our lived experience; it requires, in

effect, an expansion of that field, one that exceeds the explanatory resources

of a static cultural criticism. Furthermore, to the extent that technological

shifts take place at the microphysical level, as changes in the conditions for

embodied experience, we cannot adapt to them through representation-by

thematizing them in the explicitly formulated cultural codes underlying our

collective social experience. Since they enter our experience through embod-

iment, such changes simply cannot be adequately reconstructed through a

symptomatology of our irreducible cultural marking.5

With this conclusion, we again encounter the crucial feature of techno-

logical change that I introduced in chapter 1: its qualified autonomy from

cultural practice. To the preceding account, I can now add the following

further qualification: unlike modifications of scientific theories, technnolo-

gies impact us, in some degree, by directly altering our lifeworld without

any active contribution from us and without the direct mediation of any

preexisting cultural constructions. In attempting to demarcate technological

from scientific change, my aim is precisely to preserve from reduction that

dimension of technology's impact that resists explicit cultural thematiza-

tion. Accordingly, we must accept, as an enabling element of my analysis,

what appears to be a bewildering paradox: that technology both is and is

not cultural in the restricted sense. Whereas it is always implicated within

discursive and cultural networks that have an irreducible formative impact

on it, technology also functions as a key agent in the macroevolution, or

complexification, of the material world. Whereas technologies are always

results of culturally determined processes, they are also privileged vehicles

of the natural process of material complexification.

To respect this duality, we will need to sketch a history of technology

that serves to distinguish it from, rather than assimilate it to, the history of

science. Insofar as they function as agents of material evolution, technolo-

gies impact us as material forces without being mediated through preconsti-

tuted cultural codes. Accordingly, the history of technology foregrounds the

practical impact of matter's complexification in a manner that is, admit-

tedly, culturally relative but that does not view this impact exclusively as the

creation of culture; the history of science, by contrast, focuses on the partic-

ular modes of cultural understanding developed to explain-or more

exactly, to produce-the theoretical significance of matter's complexifi-

cation. Whereas the history of science is thoroughly cultural in the sense

that it is always a construction of a spatiotemporally distinct culture, the

history of technology, likewise a specific cultural construction in this same

Locating the Technological Real * 57

sense, also involves a supplemental "exocultural" dimension: our embodied

interaction with the "evolution" of matter itself.

From the Cultural History of Science to

Embodied Technoculture

Two recent and important cultural histories of modern physics both single

out the passage from mechanics to thermodynamics as a particularly

significant moment. For N. Katherine Hayles, whose Chaos Bound articu-

lates science and literature together on the basis of a common cultural back-

ground, and for Phillip Mirowski, whose More Heat than Light traces mod-

ern economics to certain culturally resonant misreadings of energy

conservation, this passage marks a basic shift in the ontology of energy-

from a static, substance model to one that is stochastic and statistically based.

In Mirowski's meticulous and sober recapitulation of nineteenth-century

physics, the primary significance of this passage is its release of immanent

contradictions within the energy concept. By introducing irreversibility into

the process of heat conversion, the second law of thermodynamics threw

into turmoil the then current definition of heat as motion at the molecular

level.

It has not been fully realized that the proliferation of probabilistic concepts

in physics is the first of many manifestations of the self-contradiction of the

global energy concept . . . The energy concept was intended to embody the

rational, lawlike, determinate behavior of nature, in that it was the reification

of the independence of natural law from all temporal or spatial accident, as

well as from the accident of human observation. As the energy concept was

thrust upon a world that appeared to abound in such accidents, and as

"external" cultural considerations sometimes encouraged scientists to elevate

the accidental in nature, ideas of probability and randomness were absorbed

into physics. First the accidents were attributed to the frailty of the human

observer, but later it was allowed that accident might be intrinsic to nature

itself. (Mirowski 1992, 64)

On Mirowski's account, the paradigm shift from classical mechanics to

thermodynamics reverses the original definition of energy, thus yielding a

liberation of energy from any physical embodiment in matter: "Once the

mathematics of the field freed energy from matter, it also implied a reversal

within the original definition. Instead of a physical field being necessarily

a spatial distribution of energy that varied in time, physicists found they

could also read the mathematics in such a way that any well-behaved scalar

58 * Embodying Technesis

function with a vanishing time derivative could be identified with energy"

(68). In other words, the thermodynamic revolution, processed through the

history of late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century science,

yielded a divorce between physical or embodied description and mathemat-

ical modeling.

The story Hayles tells complements Mirowski's account but stresses cul-

ture in a far more general sense as the key to understanding the reception of

the thermodynamic revolution. More than its narrowly scientific conse-

quences, what needs to be explained, in Hayles's view, is the popular basis

for the scientific paradigm shift.

The popularization of thermodynamics during the 1860s and 1870s rein-

forced the antagonistic connection between order and chaos through predic-

tions of a cosmic dissipation that would end with all heat sources everywhere

being exhausted, resulting in the so-called "heat death" of the universe.

Countering this pessimistic scenario was the awareness that in the short run

(that is, in the eons while life still continued on earth), the release of thermal

energy could run trains, fuel steamships, generate electricity. The power of

heat engines was of a different kind as well as a different order from the

mechanical advantage bestowed by pulleys, levers, and winches. Whereas

mechanical energy was orderly, conveyed along visible lines of force, thermal

energy was chaotic, driven by the fiery turbulence of the furnace and deriving

its power from the random motions of molecules whizzing by at unbelievable

speeds. (Hayles 1990, 21-22; emphasis added)6

For Hayles, the meaning of the thermodynamic revolution lies less in its

direct impact on scientific theorization than in its correlation with the

broader cultural context that it both supports and modifies. While eschew-

ing any direct, linear relation of influence from science to cultural produc-

tion, Hayles's account suggests that the cultural significance of thermody-

namics is to be found primarily in the various ways in which it modifies and

is modified by our representational practices. In the preceding passage, for

example, we are presented with the tension between two cultural represen-

tations that ensues following the dissolution of the mechanical worldview:

the horrific fantasy of the heat death of the universe is counterbalanced by

the redemptive myth of progress channeled through the new technologies of

the industrial age.

Together, these two interpretations serve to isolate the particular divorce

of theory from (embodied) experience that, in my opinion, comprises the

most significant legacy of thermodynamics for the cultural theorist. From

Mirowski, we learn that science shifts from a realist or physically instanti-

ated form of description to a highly abstract, stochastic, and statistical form

Locating the Technological Real * 59

of modeling, while Hayles informs us about the more widespread, popular

cultural and ideological significance of this shift. In both cases, we are con-

fronted with the dissolution of the harmony or continuity between our rep-

resentational capabilities and the material structure of the world. Following

its redescription in terms of thermodynamics, energy begins to exceed the

grasp of representationalist description as what Lyotard felicitously calls a

humanist "transformer," a means of cognizing materiality in accord with

human capacities that condition practical experience. If the mathematics

developed to model energy, like the conspiracy and salvation narratives that

stand in for its description, furnish "representations" of energy, these are

distinctly inhuman representations which measure energy as the function of

a mathematical abstraction. By rendering energy abstract and divorcing it

from the phenomenal domain, such representations no longer afford us a

means of experiencing energy in a way directly tied to our embodiment. The

thermodynamic revolution thus marks the eclipse of representational

thought as the privileged faculty for mapping our relation to the material

world; in its wake, theory loses the capacity to represent energy and the

physical world of forces in their immediate relevance to our lived experi-

ence.

Technological Materiality

In broad, schematic terms, the history of modern technology largely paral-

lels that of modern science, with the industrial revolution playing a role

roughly equivalent to the thermodynamic paradigm shift. Once again, the

significance of the moment of rupture (in this case, the industrial revolution

itself) centers on the resulting dissolution of our capacity to grasp the

change at issue through representationally mediated forms of experience. In

the case of technology, however, the situation is more complex, since the

ever accelerating technological changes begun during the industrial revolu-

tion impact us at the level of our prerepresentational embodiment and not

solely in ways that are narrowly theoretical and/or explicitly mediated by

cultural codes. Consequently, the eclipse of representation produced by

technology differs markedly from the similar eclipse generated by science.

Not only is technology's experiential impact socially ubiquitous and thus

oddly invisible (since it modifies the infrastructures underlying everyday

practice), but the modifications technologies do bring about occur with

some degree of autonomy-that is, without the mediation of either scientific

theory or popular cultural fantasy. By impacting our embodied lives in ways

60 * Embodying Technesis

that remain invisible at the level of our culturally inscribed expectations,

technologies effectively force us to experience changes in our material envi-

ronment that are no longer thematizable in representationalist terms, that

can only be lived through at the level of our embodiment.

Technology thus provides a bridge between the material, physical world

described by science and the domain of lived experience. Through their

immediate practical effects, technologies broker forms of noncognitive

experiential contact with the material domain that precede and precondi-

tion representational constructions, including those based in the mathema-

tization of the real made possible by these very technologies. What this

means, in short, is that our interaction with technology opens an experien-

tial domain where what we lose in terms of representational power can, in

a certain sense, be redeemed: by forcing us to live through the unrepre-

sentable experiential impact of materiality, our interactions with technolo-

gies operate a shift in the "economy" of experience, a shift from representa-

tion to embodiment (or in Walter Benjamin's terms, from Erfahrung to

Erlebnis) as the privileged site for exploring our worldliness.

Brought to bear on the historical perspective previously sketched, this

shift in the economy of our experience calls on us to find new ways of regis-

tering the practical dimension of technology's impact. Our interactions with

technologies call for a robust experiential model capable both of deformal-

izing our understanding of technology and of (re)situating it at the level of

concrete, lived experience. We simply cannot continue to model our under-

standing of technology's modern evolution on the history of science but

must insist on the autonomy of technology in two senses. First, we must

view technology as the product of a never entirely theorizable feedback loop

involving such forces as the logic of global capital and the cosmological

imperative of material complexification-forces that are, in some sense,

extracultural, extrascientific, and extrahuman. And second, we must refrain

from reducing technology to the product of a cumulative historical process

akin to science, one that assimilates contingent developments into a neces-

sarily culturally relative narrative of our ever increasing capacity to model

the real.

Given its ties to material complexification, it is hardly coincidental that

the specific autonomy I am claiming for technology has emerged during the

industrial revolution-following the widespread distribution to automated

machines of tasks formally performed by humans. By shifting the source of

energy from humans and nature to the machine itself, industrial technology

has rendered obsolete both the traditional understanding of technology as

applied science and its correlative division into the mechanical and the

Locating the Technological Real * 61

dynamical. The industrial revolution has enacted a practical destabilization

of the human measure that prevailed in classical mechanics. In the sugges-

tive terminology recently employed by Lyotard, we could say that the indus-

trial revolution has instituted a "transformer"-an energy convertor-that

is no longer analogical to human experience.

Karl Marx and Michel Serres unfold the two principle elements of this

autonomization of technology. Marx's analysis of machinery establishes the

emancipation of technology from its earlier dependance on human activity.

And Serres's account, by artfully depicting the passage from the old work

model to a new model of spontaneous energy creation, illustrates how the

industrial revolution frees technology from its narrow role of mediating a

preconstituted and static nature and renders it a forceful material agent of

the real. These two contributions develop a notion of technological auton-

omy rooted in the material conditions of energy production and yet focused

on the experiential consequences of technology's eclipse of the human mea-

sure. Together, they stress the practical dimension of technology's impact,

the fact that technology forces society at large to grapple with a new mate-

rial domain. The respective contributions of Marx and Serres help qualify

the particular claim I advance for technological autonomy. Without existing

outside concrete social networks that exert constraints on its development,

technology nonetheless resists cultural and scientific contextualization to

the extent that it "obeys" a (natural or cosmological) imperative that, as

Lyotard puts it, is simply higher than the human. Technology may never be

noncultural in any meaningful sense (what, indeed, could that ever mean?!);

yet, to the extent that its impact is holist, it evades the resources of any "pos-

itive" cultural criticism.

To grasp the significance of this unprecedented autonomy, we need only

assess the theoretical limitations of a cultural historical approach to tech-

nology that fails to appreciate the central role of the industrial revolution in

the dissolution of the human as measure. In an interpretation of the steam

engine as a fruitful fusion of mechanical technology ("the artificial control

of technical processes") and dynamical technology ("the harnassing of inan-

imate sources of power to drive new mechanisms"), cultural critic J. David

Bolter relies on an outmoded, preindustrial division that simply cannot

grasp the specificity of machine technology (Bolter 1984, 29). Bolter seizes

on the traditional dual model of technology because it underwrites the cen-

tral narrative of his study-an account of the progressive development of

technology as an expression of human ingenuity. To accomplish his goal of

showing that industrial technology actualizes the modern cultural fantasy of

autonomous technology, Bolter has absolutely no reason to break with the

62 * Embodying Technesis

explanatory models of the past; quite to the contrary, he is able to view the

steam engine as a new and improved metaphor for the persistent telos of the

Western technological imagination precisely by demonstrating how it fuses

the dynamical and mechanical models.

Dynamic technology, then, was as old as or older than mechanical technol-

ogy, but it needed much longer to mature. Although accurate pendulum

clocks were being built in the seventeenth century, it was not until the end of

the eighteenth that the inanimate prime mover found its place as a defining

technology. The triumph of this technology was the steam engine. As a clock-

work mechanism capable of producing power, it combined two qualities that

had long before been expressed separately in the clock and the waterwheel.

Although heat produced by coal was as much a natural resource as the flow

of water in a river or the wind across the plains, the steam engine seemed by

its very intricacy more artificial than the windmill or waterwheel, an expres-

sion of man's ingenuity and not a mere harnessing of nature. (30; emphasis

added)

By adopting a narrowly culturalist, representationalist perspective, Bolter

misses the crucial shift in the economy of the human and the nonhuman

that, as I have suggested, comprises the central legacy of the industrial rev-

olution for the cultural critic. While the steam engine certainly is, in a myr-

iad of senses, an altogether magnificent figure for human reason-a key

"expression of man's ingenuity," as Bolter puts it-it also furnishes the

basis for a new lived understanding of the energetics of the material domain

and consequently for a whole new experiential world.

Fathoming this world, Michel Serres suggests, requires a radical break

with the representationalist mechanical models of the past. Describing an

advertising sign made by George Garrard in 1784, Serres furnishes an

account of the industrial revolution directly at odds with the picture painted

by Bolter: "For the study of mechanics, work is a force in motion. What are

the origins, the sources of this force? There are four of them and only four:

horses... ; men... ; wind... ; [and] [w]ater.... [Like Garrard's tableau,

Lagrange's book] recapitulates, by its story and in its system, a perfect

world that will soon disappear, totally overthrown when fire and its power

supplant wind and water, horses and men, as source and origin of force"

(Serres 1982b, 54-55; emphasis added). While Bolter views the industrial

revolution as the culminating cultural synthesis of the two traditional cate-

gories of technology, Serres sees it as the origin point of an entirely new

form of energy and a corresponding experiential world. For Bolter, the

steam engine is perhaps the ultimate metaphor for human reason; for Serres,

by contrast, it is the catalyst for a radically new type of expression that rec-

Locating the Technological Real * 63

ognizes, and indeed takes it orientation from, the alienation of human cog-

nition ensuing in the wake of the industrial revolution.

The principle behind this alienation is, of course, the shift of operational

control from human to machine that forms the basis for the capitalist mode

of production. With the development of what Marx calls the "motor mech-

anism," technology emancipates itself from the essential dependence on

human activity that characterized it from antiquity through the age of clas-

sical mechanics. In this sense, Marx's account inaugurates a specifically

modern definition of "machine"-a definition that (as I shall argue at length

in chap. 3) breaks with its long-standing rhetorical meaning and, even more

importantly, with the correlated Greek notion of techne as an art supple-

menting nature.

All fully developed machinery consists of three essentially different parts, the

motor mechanism, the transmitting mechanism, and finally the tool or work-

ing machine . . . The tool or working machine is that part of the machinery

with which the industrial revolution of the 18th century started . . . The

machine proper is therefore a mechanism that, after being set in motion, per-

forms with its tools the same operations that were formerly done by the

workman with similar tools. From the moment that the tool proper is taken

from man, and fitted into a mechanism, a machine takes the place of a mere

implement. (Marx 1906, 407-8)

With the insertion of the tool into the machine complex, human mediation

falls out of the equation. While tools are moved by human power, machines

are moved directly by natural force. "As soon as tools had been converted

from being manual implements of man into implements of a mechanical

apparatus," Marx argues, "the motive mechanism also acquired an inde-

pendent form, entirely emancipated from the restraints of human strength"

(412). Consequently, with the development of the machine mode of pro-

duction, technology takes on the modern role I have been ascribing to it: it

becomes the agent of material complexification. Bypassing the mediation

formerly furnished by the human, machines tap directly into natural force

and operate, in effect, as autonomous producers of energy. In the process,

machines introduce a fundamental shift in the very conception of energy:

rather than something to be extracted from nature, stockpiled, or held in

reserve, energy becomes something that is spontaneously or automatically

created.

While Marx articulates the new ontology of the machine age, it falls to

Serres to unpack its concrete experiential consequences. In "Turner Trans-

lates Carnot," Serres employs the self-reflexively metaphoric mode typical

of his thinking to assess the fundamental disenfranchisement of the human

64 * Embodying Technesis

in the face of a newly empowered nature. Rooted in the "stochastic meta-

morphosis by fire," the industrial revolution operates what Serres charac-

terizes as a material revolution-a transformation that alters force at its

very origin and generates what is, from the experiential perspective, a new

form of energy.

What is the Industrial Revolution? A revolution operating on matter. It takes

place at the very source of dynamics, at the origins of force. One takes force

as it is or one produces it. Descartes and Newton, crowned by Lagrange,

chose the first alternative: force is there, given by the biotope, the wind, the

sea, and gravity.... With it one produces motion, work, by using tools....

The mediating function of the tools is inscribed in their form, their lines, their

geometry.... Then a sudden change is imposed on the raw elements: fire

replaces air and water in order to transform the earth. Fire will consume

[Lagrange's] Analytical Mechanics and burn down Samuel Whitbread's

warehouse. It will destroy the wooden shed, the wooden ships. Fire finishes

off the horses, strikes them down. The source, the origin, of force is in this

flash of lightning, this ignition. Its energy exceeds form; it transforms. (Serres

1982b, 56)

For Serres, in short, what distinguishes the steam engine from all previous

technologies is not so much its energy principle in itself but rather its con-

crete effects on human experience of the material world: the steam engine

transforms a natural material, coal, into a source of energy unrelated, by

any mechanical calculus, to its natural or static force. By unpacking the

figurative resonances of the industrial revolution, Serres is able to correlate

the ontological material changes analyzed by Marx with experiential

changes at the level of actual practice. He thereby generalizes Marx's con-

cept of alienation into a counterphenomenology of modern experience.

Focusing on the introduction of a new energy principle unbounded by the

form accorded it by nature and by the laws of mechanics that traditionally

were held to describe it, Serres shows how we lose the capacity to experience

the world in the manner privileged by modernity-via the mediation of rep-

resentation. Whereas the energy transmitted by the waterwheel or deployed

in a clockwork mechanism could be represented through the laws of

mechanics, the energy produced by the steam engine is incalculable in tradi-

tional representationalist terms. Rather than fitting into a pregiven form, it

"transforms."

Serres develops the experiential consequences of the ontological revolu-

tion carried out by modern technology precisely by exploding the represen-

tationalist frame of reference. Once we take the creation of force as the

essential characteristic of machine technology, we no longer can oppose the

Locating the Technological Real * 65

machine to an independent reality but must situate it as a process within the

real. As a result, the very ontological division underlying the machine's

value as metaphor collapses. Following the industrial revolution, the

machine cannot be employed to represent other processes to which it is

functionally similar (e.g., the body, human life, or textuality, to name only

those most central to modernity) without undergoing a radical reduction of

its robust materiality. Through the new form it acquires in the industrial

revolution, the machine is transformed from a figure produced by thought

(e.g., a concept of functional organization) into an autonomous agent of the

material complexification of the universe.

This ontological revolution calls on us to develop a postrepresentational-

ist reformulation of the question concerning technology. We must learn to

treat technical machines in the way that Deleuze and Guattari treat desiring-

machines-as machines "in more than a metaphorical sense." They suggest:

"Every machine . . . is related to a continual material flow (hyle) that it cuts

into.... [E]very machine functions as a break in the flow in relation to the

machine to which it is connected, but at the same time is also a flow itself,

or the production of a flow, in relation to the machine connected to it"

(Deleuze and Guattari 1983, 36). With the postrepresentationalist emanci-

pation of technology from its reductive metaphoric function, the machine

sheds its restricted status as an organization of force opposed to the organic

and attains its properly modern role as the privileged agent of material

change. In this role, the machine is inseparable from the "real" that it pro-

duces.

Technology and the "History" of Matter

To model this emancipation of energy, we must trace the "inhuman" his-

tory of matter as it "evolves" in excess of our capacity to give it representa-

tional form. Such a task requires us to rethink the function of technology,

since the modern machine foregrounds the primal formlessness of matter.

Serres concludes: ". . . beneath the forms of matter, stochastic disorder

reigns supreme. To smelt is to rediscover chance as fundamental. The fur-

nace is the engine for going back toward chaos. The foundry is where cre-

ation starts over at zero. History is recast beginning with primitive matter"

(1982b, 61). In the industrial boiler room, something happens that alters

our lived relationship with matter: for the first time, we encounter the tech-

nologically embodied, autonomous evolution of matter as something radi-

cally alien to our "natural" human rhythm(s).

66 * Embodying Technesis

While Serres's singular fusion of science and poetry forcefully expresses

the urgency for a new evaluation of modern technology, Lyotard's recent

work most decisively sketches the inhuman history of matter correlative

with it. In a series of recent essays focusing on the contemporary material-

ization of mind and apparently addressed to the cosmos itself, Lyotard pre-

sents a conception of matter from a cosmological perspective. According to

Lyotard, the evolution of matter results from a process of "cosmological

chance"-physics' analogue to the chance variation that biologists (and

increasingly researchers in the social and cognitive sciences) identify as the

motor of natural selection. To stress its complicity with the new technolo-

gies of the information age and its autonomy with respect to the human,

Lyotard dubs this cosmological perspective the "metaphysics of develop-

ment."

[The metaphysics of development] results from a process of development,

where it is not mankind which is the issue, but differentiation . . . The strik-

ing thing about this metaphysics of development is that it needs no finality.

Development is not attached to an Idea, like that of the emancipation of rea-

son and of human freedoms. It is reproduced by accelerating and extending

itself according to its internal dynamic alone. It assimilates risks, memorizes

their informational value and uses this as a new mediation necessary to its

functioning. It has no necessity itself other than a cosmological chance.

(Lyotard 1991, 6-7)

Radicalizing Herbert Marcuse's critique of technology, Lyotard effectively

inverts the humanist perspective central to its emancipatory program:

because technology is now in the service of cosmological complexification,

or negative entropy-rather than the human domination of other human

beings (and subsequently of nature)-we must fundamentally alter our

political aims with respect to it.7 Rather than doggedly persisting in our

efforts to triumph over the metaphysics of domination, we must struggle to

adapt our experiential capabilities in an effort to keep up with the techno-

logical "expressions" of cosmological chance.

With this thesis, Lyotard begins to articulate a postrepresentationalist,

"exocultural" model of technological evolution. Eschewing traditional

strategies that reductively trace technology to factors internal to human cul-

ture and society, he argues that technologies, while continuing to develop in

response to specific human needs and within specific cultural contexts, both

express and contribute to a process of material complexification unrelated

in any essential way to human cultural pursuit: ". .. what is called research

and development in contemporary society and the results of which con-

stantly disturb our environment are much more the result of... a process of

Locating the Technological Real * 67

'cosmolocal' complexification than the work of human genius attached to

the discovery of truth and the realization of good" (61). From Lyotard's

perspective, then, our contemporary imperative to develop technology is not

fundamentally different from the necessity we fall under as natural creatures

subject to evolutionary chance.

As is clearly shown by the development of the techno-scientific system, tech-

nology and the culture associated with it are under a necessity to pursue their

rise, and this necessity must be referred to the process of complexification (or

neg-entropy) which takes place in the area of the cosmos inhabited by

humanity. The human race is, so to speak, "pulled forward" by this process

without possessing the slightest capacity for mastering it. It has to adapt to

the new conditions. (64)

With this pronouncement, we reach the far side of the famous Heideggerian

maxim that will furnish my point of orientation in part 2 of this study. By

aligning technological development with material complexification, Lyotard

effectively expunges any possibility that technology could somehow be pure

of essence. In its contemporary role as the privileged vehicle for cosmic com-

plexification, technology does not constitute a depraved epochal ontology

that functions to conceal Being. Instead, it has become internal to Being

itself.

Correlatively with this displacement, human beings lose whatever active

role remains for them on the Heideggerian view-both as an efficient cause

of the modern epochal stamping of Being and as the passive "shepherds" of

whatever new showing of Being the future will bring. For Lyotard, human

beings have become mere pawns in a vast techno-evolutionary scheme:

"... technological-scientific development is, on the surface of the earth, the

present-day form of a process of negentropy or complexification that has

been underway since the earth began its existence. I'm granting that human

beings aren't and never have been the motor of the complexification, but an

effect and carrier of this negentropy, its continuer . . . I concede that it isn't

any human desire to know or transform reality that propels this techno-sci-

ence, but a cosmic circumstance" (22). Accordingly, for all of its importance

as a contribution to the post-Heideggerian rethinking of technology,

Lyotard's program is compromised by his unmitigated enthusiasm in

embracing techno-complexification. The unwavering privilege he grants the

cosmic point of view is fundamentally disempowering, if not downright

repugnant, given the urgency of our responsibility, as contemporary cultural

critics and as world citizens, to explore the anthropology of the technologi-

cal age.8 In my opinion, moreover, Lyotard's striking nihilism is less the

reflection of any actual or possible experiential reality than a result of his

68 * Embodying Technesis

effort to ally his thinking rhetorically with the cosmological perspective he

claims to be explicating. (Consider, for example, the way he introduces his

conclusions, his manner of addressing-or perhaps even of speaking for-

the cosmos itself: "I'm granting that..."; "I concede that..."; etc.) By priv-

ileging the long-term, cosmological evolutionary perspective in this rhetori-

cally insistent way, Lyotard tries his best to coax us into aligning our

perspective with it.

If we hope to meet the challenges of the emerging posthuman age with-

out simply abandoning the human, however, we must struggle most zeal-

ously against just such a cosmological alliance. Only by preserving the value

of our short-term human perspective will we retain the ability to invest our

lives with significance-to intervene (to whatever extent possible) in strug-

gles over the future of technology and to engage ourselves in the affirmative

task of exploring new technologically mediated, posthuman forms of

human agency.9 However irrelevant they may be from the perspective of the

cosmos, such struggles and engagements are absolutely central to our con-

temporary cultural moment: it would hardly be an exaggeration to claim

that their outcome will dictate the terms of whatever contract we will be

able to broker with technology. Only our active intervention, as critics like

Hayles have recently argued, will allow us to fashion a future in which the

human can find ways of grappling with the displacement it undergoes in the

face of technology's inhuman evolution.

Given such an imperative, we must accord Lyotard's cosmological per-

spective a heuristic, rather than a prescriptive, role. Insofar as it forms a

strong reminder of modern technology's fundamental autonomy from the

human measure, Lyotard's perspective provides the critical leverage neces-

sary to loosen the stranglehold maintained by the constructivist idiom. Once

we begin to view his grand narrative as something like a cosmological fairy

tale-one not entirely dissimilar from Haraway's more famous and deeply

resonant cyborg myth-we will be able to enlist his support in the project of

articulating an anthropology for the contemporary technological age.

In effect, Lyotard's effort to correlate the alienation generated by con-

temporary technology with the liberation of energy from mechanical and

dynamical constructions of matter helps to make tangible the shift explored

in the cultural histories of science and technology discussed earlier. With his

crucial notion of the transformer, Lyotard successfully foregrounds the

increasing divide separating the physics of matter-energy from the human

dimension. Lyotard's transformer operates a transformation of a "material

point"; it is a way of modeling and converting energy that can either clarify

matter for us or demarcate its radical incongruity with our human percep-

Locating the Technological Real * 69

tual, experiential, and cognitive rhythms. Lyotard notes that for classical

mechanics, which models matter on the substance model, "the only relevant

transformers are the axioms of classic geometry." He notes further that by

thinking of matter through the concept of extension, Descartes submits it to

a transformation that is "analogical to human experience." He argues that

in the case of contemporary technoscience, by contrast, transformations are,

to a large extent, inhuman: "The transformation of elements, such as the

transformation of uranium 238 into neptunium,.., are not only not on our

scale, but require an idea of matter" no longer modeled on substance (37).

In our contemporary world, he continues, "matter is energy," and com-

plexification occurs through the increasingly dematerialized transforma-

tions of energy. As transformations become more diverse and more inhu-

man, explains Lyotard, the capacities of the properly human transformer,

the nervous system, become increasingly marginalized; as a consequence,

energy (matter) increasingly escapes our ken.

Contemporary science. . . shows us that energy, in all its forms, is distributed

in waves, and that, to quote Jean Perrin, "all matter is in the end a particular

and very condensed form of energy." The reality to be accorded such-and-

such a form of energy, and therefore of matter, clearly depends on the trans-

formers we have at our disposal. Even the transformer that our central ner-

vous system is, highly sophisticated in the order of living creatures, can only

transcribe and inscribe according to its own rhythm the excitations which

come to it from the milieu in which it lives. (43; emphasis added)

In foregrounding the incompatibility between nervous systems (explicitly

modeled as inscriptional agents) and the modern complexification of the

material domain, Lyotard describes the very divorce of theoretical knowl-

edge from experience that I have attributed to the industrial and thermody-

namic revolutions. In the process, he adds an important element to the pic-

ture previously sketched-a concrete understanding of how the human use

of technology (e.g., to model mathematically those material processes that

are cognitively unmappable by the human brain) fits within a cosmological

dialectic and indeed how it forms a double-edged sword, simultaneously

aiding us in adjusting to the inhuman material evolution and spurring fur-

ther material complexification. Lyotard acknowledges that while the devel-

opment of technoscience allows us to "increase our material liberty" by

memorizing "in a fashion accessible to us, vibrations naturally beyond our

ken," it also further differentiates or complexifies matter-energy itself, leav-

ing us more marginalized than ever. Accordingly, he admits, despite local

and temporary gains, technoscience's ever expanding contribution to

"negentropy" cannot but increase our alienation: "The complexification of

70 * Embodying Technesis

the transformers, theoretical and practical, has always had as its effect the

destabilization of the fit between the human subject and its environment"

(44; emphasis added).

Ultimately, the cosmological endgame between the human and the tech-

nological compels Lyotard to situate our current moment in the lineage of

earlier destabilizations of the humanist perspective, as a culminating strike

against the privilege of (human) reason itself.

... this current of thinking... deal[s] a blow to what I shall call human nar-

cissism. Freud already listed three famous ones: man is not the center of the

cosmos (Copernicus), is not the first living creature (Darwin), is not the mas-

ter of meaning (Freud himself). Through contemporary techno-science, he

learns that he does not have the monopoly of mind, that is, of

complexification, but that complexification is not inscribed as a destiny in

matter but as possible, and that it takes place, at random, but intelligibly,

well before himself. He learns in particular that his own science is in its turn

a complexification of matter, in which, so to speak, energy itself comes to be

reflected, without humans necessarily getting any benefit from this. And that

thus he must not consider himself as an origin or as a result but as a trans-

former ensuring, through techno-science, arts, economic development, cul-

tures and the new memorization they involve, a supplement of complexity in

the universe. (45; translation modified, emphasis added)

Paradoxically, to grasp the heuristic value of Lyotard's perspective, we need

to understand this passage not as a hyperbolic obituary of the human but as

a fundamentally ambivalent affirmation of its resilience. The human,

Lyotard's genealogy seems to imply, perseveres through its destabilizations.

Thus, if we can only find a way of resisting his overenthusiastic call for a

direct communion with the cosmos, we can selectively draw on his analysis

to situate technology in a more encompassing and properly posthuman con-

text without at the same time being compelled to affirm its radical inhu-

manity.

The Practical Dimension of Technology and

Embodied Experience

Once we take up a pragmatic perspective on Lyotard's admittedly eccentric

views, we can fully appreciate his emphasis on the practical dimension of

contemporary technoscience. By demonstrating how technoscientific devel-

opments impact us extrascientifically, independently of their institutionally

mediated scientific significance, Lyotard lends strong support to the auton-

Locating the Technological Real * 71

omy I have been claiming for technology. On the one hand, he furnishes a

coherent account of technology's particular autonomy from the cultural.

Though always developed within cultural contexts that have a determining

influence on their form, technologies are simultaneously exocultural: they

are crucial vehicles of a nonteleological, natural or cosmological evolution-

ary process that is only secondarily or tangentially (though certainly not

inconsequentially) subject to the more local demands of our cultural

moment. On the other hand, by stressing the key role played by transform-

ers, Lyotard furnishes a concrete account of the constitutive split that

informs human existence following the industrial revolution: with our ever

increasing reliance on inhuman transformers, our very capacity to acquire a

representationally mediated understanding of material complexification

diminishes. Insofar as it depends on abstract mathematics and computer

programs far beyond the grasp of our synthetic, phenomenal cognition, our

contemporary formalized means of representing materiality could not be

further distanced from our phenomenal experience of it.

Far from living out the global embrace gleefully envisioned by Marshall

McLuhan, then, we face a situation in which the prostheses we adopt to

cognize and intervene in the technologically driven material complexifi-

cation of the universe only seem to expand our experiential alienation. Since

they deterritorialize our cognitive mapping of the real into the dematerial-

ized, disembodied domain of mathematical formalization, the prosthetic

transformers on which we increasingly rely reinforce the fundamental inca-

pacity of those transformers proper to us-the embodied mind and the ner-

vous system-to translate technologically generated alterations of the life-

world into forms that fit the human measure.

Because contemporary technology largely exceeds the grasp of our built-

in, or natural, experiential capacities, the very hope of preserving the value

of the human perspective in the face of rapid technological change hinges on

our willingness to accept and adapt ourselves to the shift it produces in the

economy of experience. Thus, far from sharing cultural studies' commit-

ment to contextualization and its reassuring conviction that, as Markley

puts it, we still live in the humanist, logocentric era, we must take on the

more fundamental task of rethinking the very notion of culture in light of

the profound shift in the locus of experience brought about by technology.

Although a full account of this shift must await my discussion of Walter

Benjamin's trenchant distinction between Erlebnis and Erfahrung (chap. 9),

a brief consideration of Lyotard's debt to Henri Bergson-and specifically

to Bergson's ontological monism-will serve to make clear the extent of our

task. By furnishing the conceptual terminology to describe the progressive

72 * Embodying Technesis

shift in the mind-matter economy that has been the legacy of technological

change since the industrial revolution, Bergson helps us grapple with the

imperative we now face: his dissolution of the mind-matter distinction

serves as the strongest possible reminder that we urgently need to find ways

of expanding our access to the ever more prominent embodied dimension of

our lived experience.

Eschewing traditional dualism, Bergson situates matter and mind as the

two poles of a single continuum; mind, he claims, is distinguished from mat-

ter only by "differences of degree, which depends on the capacity to gather

and conserve." He further claims that "[m]ind is matter which remembers

its interactions, its immanence" (Lyotard 1991, 40). Mind, in other words,

is the product of an organism's (or a system's) ability to delay its reaction to

a material point (a stimulus from the material world); such delay gives it the

capacity to assemble what are in effect successive stimuli or material shocks

into a simultaneous unity of duration that yields a "conscious perception"

or "representation" (40). In the case of human perception, the difference

between matter and mind is one of rhythm. The process we follow in delay-

ing our reaction in this way comprises a kind of interface through which we

translate the preperceptual rhythm of material stimuli into units that obey

the rhythms proper to our representational consciousness. If successful, this

translation process yields an increase in our "material liberty," for by delay-

ing our instantaneous reaction to material stimuli, we are able to resist

falling under the determinism that matter would otherwise impose on us.

On Lyotard's account, this translational capacity meets its limit in the

postmodern world. With the material changes imposed by contemporary

technologies, we increasingly find ourselves unable to bridge the gap

between the rhythms of material stimuli and our proper human rhythms.

Consequently, we find ourselves faced with an ever increasing loss of mate-

rial liberty, a loss that can be temporarily forestalled only by our use of

prosthetic forms of mind, even if these forms will progressively alienate us

from our bodies until the moment when they simply replace us. What makes

this tragic story of humanity's demise seem inevitable is not some cosmo-

logical necessity, as Lyotard claims, but simply the poverty of Bergson's

recipe for material liberty. So long as we follow Bergson in predicating the

power to delay on the production of a representation, Lyotard's extreme

antihumanist picture of the future appears all but inevitable. If our power is

reductively bound to our representationalist faculties, not only will our cur-

rent form of existence as embodied creatures become ever increasingly out

of sync with material change, but our fate will indeed come to hinge, as

Lyotard rather gothically suggests it does, on developing prosthetic bodies

Locating the Technological Real * 73

capable of housing mind and guaranteeing its survival following the heat

death of the sun.10

Fortunately, to resist such a pessimistic and fantastically hyperbolic con-

clusion, we need only eschew the deep theoretical bias that lies at the heart

of Bergson's (and Lyotard's) ontology. By decoupling human freedom from

the capacity to translate material stimuli into mental representations, we

open entirely new possibilities. Specifically, we avoid reducing the nervous

system to a static entity by granting it capabilities of adaptation that are not

narrowly cognitive. Ultimately, this will allow us to resituate our adaptation

to technological change within the broad perspective of the evolutionary

history and flexibility of the embodied human being. Consequently, we will

be able to acquire the means of explaining how we can modify ourselves to

process preperceptual material stimuli and, correlatively, how we can expe-

rience technologically generated material complexification without the

mediation of representation.11

Faced with the task of developing what amounts to a logic of embodiment,

the contemporary cultural critic occupies a position largely analogous to

that of artificial life (AL) researchers who, departing markedly from the

artificial intelligence (AI) tradition, seek to develop cognitive agents capable

of performing simple everyday practical tasks, such as walking and avoiding

stationary objects. We too must develop a bottom-up model of cognition,

one that does not begin by presupposing (human) consciousness as its goal

but fundamentally reconceives cognition as the operation not of disembod-

ied logical operations but of massively distributed nervous systems. On such

a model, cognitive responses to material stimuli need not take the form of

representations but can be thought of as computational adjustments occur-

ring in the peripheral nervous system. As a model for such a bottom-up,

postrepresentationalist notion of agency, AL research affords us an alterna-

tive to the radically posthuman robotics paradigm

enthusiastically

embraced by Lyotard. If we can learn from AL research efforts to evolve

"intelligence within the machine through pathways found by the 'creatures'

themselves" (Hayles 1996b, 161; emphasis added), we may come to under-

stand how our nervous systems can adapt to material changes that exceed

their inscriptional capacities and how we can stimulate our nervous systems

to "learn" in an emergent and completely practical way-one that would

forever lack a representational correlate.12 As I shall argue in chapter 9,

Walter Benjamin's notion of sensory retraining through submission to the

shock experience of the cinema engages these possibilities in extremely fruit-

ful ways. Where Lyotard's interest in technological prostheses remains

74 " Embodying Technesis

purely cognitive, Benjamin gives us a recipe for how to use them mimeti-

cally, a recipe for training our senses in a manner that, following Bourdieu's

proscription, has no direct representational or theoretical payoff. In the

space of this difference, I suggest, we encounter the core challenge of the

technological posthuman: if we are to negotiate technologically mediated

material complexification without either falling back into a retrograde and

defensive humanism or taking an all-too-precipitous leap into the inhuman,

we simply cannot put off the opportunity of exploring such unorthodox

possibilities.

Part 2

The Machine Reduction of Technology



Chapter 3

From Metaphor to Embodiment:

Resisting Technesis

Having now exposed the microphysical dimension of technology's impact

on embodied experience, I can turn to the main topic of my study: the cri-

tique of twentieth-century critical discourses for their reduction of technol-

ogy. In this chapter, I reconstruct the genealogy of this theoretical reduction

by tracing its two major twentieth-century trajectories back to their com-

mon source in Greek ontology; in chapters 4-8, I track the legacy of this

reduction through critical readings of a core set of central twentieth-century

critical discourses.

Read as a contribution to contemporary criticism, my genealogical

reconstruction serves to expose the extensive and often unacknowledged

reliance of cultural studies on poststructuralist theory. By itself hardly a

grounds for complaint, this reliance becomes an issue, as I suggested in my

introduction, when contemporary critical discourses positivize their theo-

retical sources, making the deconstructive moment a transitory phase in a

larger narrative or historicization of the cognitive subject's triumph over

any and all material obstacles. In the two forms it takes in contemporary

criticism (what I differentiated in chap. 1 as representationalist and systemic

analyses, respectively), this positivization engages technology as an instance

of a broader notion

of exteriority borrowed, essentially without

modification, from poststructuralism. Since this notion of exteriority-what

Derrida christens relative exteriority-is itself profoundly reductive, my cri-

tique is intended to apply with equal force to poststructuralism and to its

contemporary legatees.

In its first, more prevalent form, the positivization of the deconstructive

moment results from the simple incapacity on the part of contemporary crit-

ics to give up their deeply entrenched commitment to representationalism.

The example of cultural critic Michelle Kendrick discussed in my introduc-

tion forms a case in point. While Kendrick announces an urgency to treat

technology as somehow "beyond the control or agency of the user"

(Kendrick 1996), her assessment of its impact is restrictively filtered through

78 * Embodying Technesis

the effects it has on our capacity to constitute ourselves as subjects, to rep-

resent ourselves to ourselves.1 No matter how aware we might be of the

constitutive fictionality of the self, no matter how rigorously we might fol-

low Hume in privileging habit over representation, we remain dependent on

representational constructions of the self to capture the significance of our

habits and, consequently, to mediate the "technological real" for us. What-

ever exteriority is thereby broached is-and can only be-a relative exteri-

ority, a point of resistance internal to the representational space of thought.

In its second form, the positivizing of the deconstructive moment results

from a decision to privilege formal analogies between literary and techno-

scientific systems. In reading literary texts as emergent phenomena in the

sense developed by cybernetics or, alternately, as structures sharing a com-

mon organizational logic with chaos theory, critics deploy the systems per-

spective in a largely uncritical manner: they simply presuppose an underly-

ing structural homology between literary and technoscientific branches of

knowledge.2 Not only does such a position perpetuate the hypostatization

of thought that, as we have seen, hinders the investigation of technology's

robust experiential impact, but it does so by jettisoning the very dimension

of poststructuralist theory most fundamental to its cultural application-the

disjunction between interiorizing thought and its technological embodi-

ment.3

In a recent discussion of literature and complexity that can stand as an

exemplar for the systems approach, William Paulson contextualizes decon-

struction within the cybernetic theory of communication as self-organiza-

tion from noise. By adopting an information-theoretical perspective, Paul-

son is able to reinterpret rhetorical indeterminacy as the constitutive

condition of the literary itself: "The process of self-organization from noise

provides a suggestive model for the understanding of literary signification, a

model that accounts for meaning by accepting, rather than resisting, the

rhetorical dimension of language" (Paulson 1991, 41). Within such a per-

spective, one need not fear the specter of radical undecidability and the con-

stitutive instability of language, since indeterminacy itself-as noise-repre-

sents the condition of possibility for literary meaning to arise.4 In short, the

information-systems perspective reverses the trajectory of deconstruction:

rather than moving outward, as de Manian deconstruction does, from

grammar to rhetoric, deconstruction within an information-theoretical

frame moves inward, as it were, from rhetoric (noise) to grammar (infor-

mation). By furnishing the background for the "play of the signifier," more-

over, information-theory fundamentally alters the focus of rhetorical analy-

sis: instead of culminating in a purely formal incompatibility of grammar

From Metaphor to Embodiment * 79

and rhetoric, it opens language to the outside. Ultimately, then, the cyber-

netic contextualization of the grammar-rhetoric disjunction displaces de

Man's textualist nihilism entirely; far from leading to a prison house of for-

mal self-referentiality, the cybernetic interpretation is marshaled to support

a dialectical reader-response program, based on the notion of literary com-

petence, in which indeterminacy has the function of stimulating the acquisi-

tion of new interpretative codes (see ibid., 48).

Whether the invocation of a systems perspective leads to a fortification of

properly human processes of cognition or, by contrast, to the kind of radi-

cal break with the human perspective introduced through the comparison of

literature with chaos, the attempt to situate the deconstructive disjunction

within a more embracing context can succeed only by converting it into a

functional differentiation within an inclusive context-a provisional cut

between system and environment. To assert a formal homology (and not

simply a common cultural background) between literary texts and scientific

systems, contemporary cybernetic and chaos-theoretical models have to rely

on a systems-theoretical notion of observation that severely compromises

the status of materiality. By restricting materiality to a role within a given

environment, the enabling act of observation that initially differentiates sys-

tem from environment also functions to bracket out materiality in the

broader sense. Instead of being invoked as the rich and unpredictable back-

ground for all practice, including the production of observational acts them-

selves, materiality is situated outside the circuit that connects system and

environment. As a result, it receives a purely abstract determination as that

which resists translation per se.

Paulson, for example, claims that we can infer the "ultimate underlying

unity" of literature and science ("systems that only disciplinary descriptions

have cut into separate hierarchical levels") by developing "local, emergent

and risk-taking . . . process[es] of transcoding" between cultural text (liter-

ature) and sociohistorical context (science) (50).5 Since it directs (and

thereby restricts) critical attention to a model of society (and, by extension,

of reality) that is constructed around specific processes of transcoding, such

a systems-theoretical perspective brackets out the larger domain of materi-

ality. Far from helping us clarify our embodied connection with the world,

systems theory actually seeks to revolutionize the task of theoretical descrip-

tion, to reconceptualize it as a self-contained reproduction of the real: by

introducing the notion of second-order cybernetics (according to which an

observation that introduces a distinction is itself "unable to observe the dis-

tinction on which it bases its own observation" [Schwanitz 1995, 156]), sys-

tems theory shifts the focus of analysis from a first-order process of observ-

80 * Embodying Technesis

ing objects to a second-order observation of observations. Rather than a

concrete engagement with technology's impact on our embodied experi-

ence, systems-theoretical models leave us with a description of the func-

tional specification of technological society (or whatever plays the role of

most inclusive context) as a progressive proliferation of second-order obser-

vations.6 While systems theory may indeed function to overcome particular

deconstructive aporia, as its proponents claim, it does so only at the cost of

radically isolating system from environment. Consequently, whatever epis-

temological force it can claim is acquired only by cutting description off

from embodied reality-by bracketing out all constraint the real might

impose on it.7

In effect, then, systems analyses of science and technology form exem-

plary instances of the positivizing of poststructuralist theory that I have

attributed to contemporary cultural studies: by thematizing exteriority

exclusively as a temporary blind spot constitutive of a particular system that

cannot be seen from the vantage point of the observation responsible for its

construction, such analyses domesticate exteriority into a mere by-product

of an evolving description of the relation of system and environment. Not

only is exteriority thus defined, in principle, as purely relative-a con-

structed point of resistance within the space of descriptive thought-but it is

also effectively neutralized, since it can in principle always be recuperated at

a higher level of complexity, as the new state of a system following a further

act of observation. Thus, to the extent that it attributes the disjunction

between interiorizing thought and its technological embodiment to an

observer rather than to the world itself, systems analysis misses the chance

to capitalize on what, in my opinion, is truly novel and affirmative about

our otherwise all-too-banal "postmodern condition"-the way technologies

have incorporated the cause of deconstruction directly into the material

infrastructure of the lifeworld itself.8

As long as technology is modeled on the category of relative exteriority,

its material autonomy remains subordinate to its function within the

domain of discursive thought; far from functioning as an agent of material

complexification, technology is deployed as a purely abstract marker of an

alterity that is constitutive of thought. The most significant consequence of

this reduction is the collapse of technology into metaphor. For the twenti-

eth-century critics on whom I focus-those most responsible for technol-

ogy's assimilation into the category of relative exteriority-this collapse of

technology into metaphor takes the form of what I have already identified

in my introduction as the machine reduction of technology. By identifying

technology with the figure of the machine, twentieth-century critical dis-

From Metaphor to Embodiment * 81

courses effectively preserve the priority of thought over technology and, in

the process, more deeply entrench the instrumental enframing of technology

so central to our modernity.9

Due largely to the legacy of poststructuralism, our current efforts to

rethink the contemporary role of technology are overdetermined and, I sug-

gest, undermined by the prevalence of one particular form of this machine

reduction: the reduction of technology to that particular machine known as

the text. To overcome the machine reduction of technology in its current tex-

tualist form, we will thus have to return to the source of the metaphysical

assumptions underlying current conceptualizations of technology-Aristo-

tle's "decision" to subordinate the "automatic" (to automaton) to a category

of chance modeled on human intentionality and natural teleology (tuche). To

get there, however, we must first sketch the modern trajectory that links tech-

nesis to Aristotle's inaugural machine reduction of technology.

The Machine Reduction of Technology and the

Modern Trajectory of the Machine Metaphor

Understanding the machine reduction of technology in its contemporary

form requires us to reconstruct the gradual historical process through which

it acquired its textualist basis. As literary critic Wylie Sypher suggests, this

process can be traced back to the nineteenth century, to the moment when

literature rediscovered its pre-Romantic roots and became once again an

explicitly technical enterprise focused on method rather than expression.

For Sypher, this return to method is inseparable from the development of

technology and expresses the desire on the part of literary authors to reap

the benefits of the technicist attitude; centered on the neutralization of

chance and accident, this new attitude finds its literary apogee in Stephan

Mallarme's effort to automatize the process of writing poetry. Un Coup de

Des, writes Sypher, is "a desperate venture in writing a pure poem by cal-

culating everything, by ruling out the surprises of Chance-the throw of the

dice, which is the aesthetic threat." He continues:

... the Poem (the Book) should be so duly controlled that the casual, the con-

tingent, the irrelevant should be eliminated. The symbolist poem was devoted

to a conquest by method, a program of artistic discipline that banished the

accidental as utterly as a laboratory experiment... The poem, manifesting its

pure Beauty, would appear in all its clarity as the supreme artifact unconta-

minated by the hazard of photography or prose, the disorder of life, the acci-

dents in actuality. (Sypher 1968, 25-26)

82 * Embodying Technesis

Mallarme's ideal remained the goal for later symbolist and modernist critics

and writers, who faced the undeniable failure of his project (Sypher refers to

the "inaccessibility" of his pure Poem) by shifting the emphasis of their tech-

nicism from the work to its reception, from the metaphysics of textuality to

the pragmatics of avant-garde shock tactics. The explicit identification of

text with machine emerges from this shift: Paul Valery, for example,

qualifies the poem as "a kind of machine for producing the poetic state of

mind by means of words" (cited in ibid., 27); and William Carlos Williams

is even more concise, boldly contending that "the poem" simply "is a

machine" (cited in Porush 1985, 11).

Poststructuralist theory further reinforces these same values of the text-

machine-formalism and systematicity against the messiness and open-

ness of life processes. Armed with the methodology of structural linguistics,

poststructuralists make good on Mallarme's impossible program: by divorc-

ing Language (langue) from pragmatics (parole) and concentrating solely on

deconstructing its systematic operation, poststructuralist critics produce the

separation of pure poetry from phenomenal life.10 In this way, they develop

what amounts to a restricted machinic ontology of textuality; for them, lan-

guage assumes the role of a machine that runs independently of the phe-

nomenal and rhetorical categories governing lived experience.

Paul de

Man furnishes the prototype of the poststructuralist

identification of text and machine with his claim that the "machine is like

the grammar of the text when it is isolated from its rhetoric, the merely for-

mal element without which no text can be generated" (de Man 1979, 294).

The poststructuralist text-machine, in turn, finds its philosophical exponent

in the early Derrida, who explicitly describes grammatology as a liberation

of the machine in language: "The originary and pre- or meta-phonetic writ-

ing that I am attempting to conceive here leads to nothing less than an 'over-

taking' of speech by the machine" (Derrida 1974, 79). With their general-

ized identification of text and machine, the poststructuralists realize

Mallarme's goal in the very process of bringing to a close the progressive

project-so central to twentieth-century philosophy and cultural criticism

of introducing technology into the heart of thought. By radicalizing Heideg-

ger's and Freud's invocations of technology, Derrida, de Man, and Lacan

celebrate the text, the letter, and the signifier, respectively, as the site of tech-

nology's penetration into thought. In so doing, they open an entirely new

phase not simply in the technicist history of modern literature but in the

modern cultural history of the machine metaphor itself. With their

identification of text and machine, the poststructuralists bring about a

From Metaphor to Embodiment * 83

significant inversion in the tenor of the machine metaphor: for the first time,

the machine is actually deployed as a metaphor for technology itself.

Prior to this inversion, the machine-despite a diverse set of concrete

deployments-clearly served the single overarching purpose of establishing

the nature of the human. Either by furnishing analogies for its mechanisms

(body and later mind) or by representing what is other than the human (the

universe or God's creation, figured as a clockwork or a feedback mecha-

nism), the machine facilitated consideration of such key philosophical top-

ics as whether human beings have free will and what distinguishes them

from animals.11 One machine in particular provided modern Continental

philosophers with a useful metaphor for conceptualizing or repudiating

what they thought was singular and irreducible about the human-what, in

different accounts, is variously termed soul, mind, free will, spirit, and so

forth. In a justly famous passage from the sixth Meditation, Descartes inau-

gurates the reign of this metaphor by comparing the body to the workings

of a clock.

... a clock constructed with wheels and weights observes all the laws of its

nature just as closely when it is badly made . . . as when it completely fulfils

the wishes of the clockmaker. In the same way, I might consider the body of

a man as a kind of machine equipped with and made up of bones, nerves,

muscles, veins, blood and skin in such a way that, even if there were no mind

in it, it would still perform all the same movements as it now does in those

cases where movement is not under the control of the will or, consequently,

of the mind [but occurs merely as a result of the disposition of the organs].

(Descartes 1988, 58)

Across the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the clock metaphor gradu-

ally evolved into the radical affirmation of a total equivalence of the human

with the machine. It reached its culmination when the eighteenth-century

French materialist Julien de la Mettrie simply extended Descartes's analogy

to include the mind itself: ". . . since all the faculties of the soul depend to

such a degree on the proper organization of the brain and the whole body,

that apparently they are but this organization itself, the soul is clearly an

enlightened machine" (La Mettrie 1912, 128). With this extension, the rad-

ical potential of the classical machine metaphor is achieved: mechanism and

organism form a single continuum; the human being simply is a kind of

machine.

Whether we explain the motive behind this trajectory in cultural-materi-

alist terms, as historian Otto Mayr does in his thick description of the

clock's role in early modern Europe, or in theoretical terms, as French

84 * Embodying Technesis

philosopher of science Georges Canguilhem does in his genealogy of the

machine metaphor,12 what is important is the distinct tenor that is common

to the metaphor: in its various guises, the machine is consistently employed

as a heuristic for conceptualizing what is proper to the human.13

Precisely this basic coding is inverted in the twentieth-century evolution

of the metaphor: by the time it acquires its poststructuralist form, the

machine has begun to furnish a metaphor not for the human but for tech-

nology itself. In carrying out Mallarme's program, the poststructuralists

give a radically new spin to the text-machine equation. In their hands, this

equation does not simply comprise a means for understanding and autono-

mizing Language as system (i.e., langue); it simultaneously affords a means

for fundamentally rethinking technology itself. By consummating the shift

in the tenor of the machine metaphor that has been underway since the nine-

teenth century, the poststructuralist equation of text and machine thus fun-

damentally shifts the target of its reduction: in its new textualist form, the

machine functions as a metaphor for technology, and technology's domesti-

cation within the textually generated space of relative exteriority is effec-

tively insured.

Precisely such a reduction occurs in Derrida's assimilation of cybernetics

to grammatology. On Derrida's account, technology is functionally subor-

dinated to the movement of differance, to which it owes its existence.

... [the notion of program] ... must of course be understood in the cyber-

netic sense, but cybernetics is itself intelligible only in terms of a history of the

possibilities of the trace as the unity of a double movement of protention and

retention.... It is an emergence that makes the gramme appear as such (that

is to say according to the new structure of nonpresence) and undoubtedly

makes possible the emergence of the systems of writing in the narrow sense.

.. [O]ne could speak of a "liberation of memory," of an exteriorization

always already begun but always larger than the trace which, beginning from

the elementary programs of so-called "instinctive" behavior up to the consti-

tution of electronic card-indexes and reading machines, enlarges differance

and the possibility of putting in reserve. (1974, 84)

For Derrida, technology is thus derivative in two senses. Functionally, tech-

nology is limited to the role of material support for the "possibilities of the

trace"; like writing in the restricted sense, it is merely the means by which

differance exteriorizes or expresses itself. And ontologically, technology

remains radically dependent on the quasi-vitalist movement of differance;

again like writing in the restricted sense, it is the product of the primordial

"arche-writing" that conditions its very emergence.

By rethinking the notion of the cybernetic program in terms of his textual

From Metaphor to Embodiment * 85

metaphysics, Derrida performs what amounts to a hostile takeover. Unlike

those critics (e.g., Paulson or Michel Serres) who seek to employ the cyber-

netic theory of communication as a model for thinking about the interrela-

tionship of various autonomous spheres, Derrida seizes on the notion of the

cybernetic program precisely because it allows him to restrict technology to

this doubly derivative status and consequently to support the totalizing

grasp of his ontology of differance. For Derrida, in the context of the history

of the trace, technology functions as a mere machine-"a technics in the ser-

vice of language"-while differance is the genetic or quasi-vitalist principle

that animates the technical machine: ". . . a certain sort of question about

the meaning and origin of writing precedes, or at least merges with, a cer-

tain type of question about the meaning and origin of technics. That is why

the notion of technique can never simply clarify the notion of writing" (8).

By using the machine (the cybernetic program) as a metaphor for tech-

nology's role in the differential movement of the trace, Derrida adds a meta-

physical wrinkle to the inversion of the machine metaphor we have been

tracing. According to Derrida, it is only by recognizing its foundation in dif-

ferance that cybernetics can overcome the opposition of man and machine:

"... the entire field covered by the cybernetic program will be the field of

writing. If the theory of cybernetics is by itself to oust all metaphysical con-

cepts-including the concepts of soul, of life, of value, of choice, of mem-

ory-which until recently served to separate the machine from man, it must

conserve the notion of writing, trace, gramme, or grapheme, until its own

historico-metaphysical character is also exposed" (9; emphasis added). For

Derrida, the foundedness of cybernetics in differance leads to the dissolution

of the machine metaphor in its classical form. By tracing the cybernetic pro-

gram back to arche-writing, Derrida shows that it stems from a nonorigi-

nary principle of origination, a principle that precedes all metaphysical

oppositions-most importantly the very opposition underlying the classical

machine metaphor: "Even before being determined as human.., or nonhu-

man, the gramme-or the grapheme-would thus name the element" (loc.

cit.).

What Derrida does not say is that this grammatological dissolution of

metaphysical opposition generates an enabling opposition of its own, since

it owes its possibility to a subordination of technology to the genetic or

quasi-vitalist principle of differance. The grammatological project works to

realize the cybernetic program only if technology is equated with the exteri-

orization of the trace in writing. As a result, the dissolution of the machine

metaphor in its classic form gives way to a new form that perpetuates, at a

different systemic level, the very reductive binary opposition (vitalism vs.

86 * Embodying Technesis

mechanism) that it is supposed to have overcome. So long as it functions "in

the service of language," technology remains thoroughly mechanical and

can readily be assimilated to the figure of the machine. In the end, the reduc-

tion Derrida imposes on technology reflects the marked privilege he accords

ontology: more precisely, it stems from his decision to consider technology

exclusively as part of an ontogenetic, language-centered program and to use

the generative text-machine as a model for encompassing technology as

such. To show that this approach succeeds only to the extent that it reduc-

tively predetermines the status of technology, we must thus expose the oper-

ational principles of its functioning.

Technesis

With his ontogenetic circumscription of cybernetic technology, Derrida fur-

nishes the theoretical core of a hugely influential approach to technology. By

following Derrida's lead in restricting technology to the model of the text as

machine, latter-day poststructuralist and contemporary cultural critics par-

ticipate in and define the strategy for discursivizing technology that I call

technesis.

Like gynesis, the putting of woman into discourse that Alice Jardine dis-

covers at the heart of French feminism and poststructuralism, technesis des-

ignates an equivocal, ambivalent effort on the part of modernity to embrace

otherness. Just as gynesis promotes a reduction of women in the service of

the theoretical deconstruction of the phallologocentric modernist text, tech-

nesis advances a reduction of concrete technologies in the service of a gen-

erative, deconstructive textual model. As Jardine explains, gynesis names

the process by which modernity (in particular, French poststructuralism)

comes to explore the paradoxes and self-contradictions inherent in discur-

sive practice; seeking the "reincorporation and reconceptualization of that

which has been the master narratives' own 'nonknowledge,' " French theory

explores a new kind of "space," a space "over which narrative has lost con-

trol." It is not at all surprising that this space has "been coded as feminine,

as woman" (Jardine 1985, 25). Like gynesis, technesis employs an abstrac-

tion-technology-as a cipher for the internal otherness that, following

poststructuralist (and now multiculturalist) orthodoxy, forms an intrinsic,

constitutive element of any text (or identity construction). In a similar way

then, gynesis and technesis both require, as their point of departure and con-

dition of possibility, the preparation of their respective object for its assim-

ilation into the text: the robust exteriority of actual, embodied women and

From Metaphor to Embodiment * 87

of concrete ontic technologies must undergo reduction so that they can

function as purely abstract placeholders for the otherness internal to lan-

guage.

By exposing the logic of reduction central to French poststructuralism,

Jardine's critique of gynesis is bold and unequivocal. While the putting of

woman into discourse might serve to broaden textuality in a way that

allows male theory to encompass that which appears to defy narrative cap-

ture, it reduces women to the abstraction "woman," before reducing both

to language. Gynesis, Jardine concludes, transforms "woman and the femi-

nine into verbs at the interior of those narratives that are today experienc-

ing a crisis in legitimation" (25). Indeed, as Jardine points out, gynesis can-

not in fact even be said to concern women in any meaningful sense: ". . . in

the writings of those theorists participating in gynesis, woman may become

intrinsic to entire conceptual systems without being 'about' women-much

less 'about' feminism" (61).

A similar point can be made about technesis. Like gynesis, it reduces

materially embodied technologies to the abstraction "technology," before

reducing both to language. There is, however, an important difference

between the two reductive strategies. Gynesis perpetuates a reductive use of

the concept "woman" for the purpose of expanding our understanding of

the nature of textuality; its primary aim is not that of providing a model for

thinking (or rethinking) about women.14 Technesis, by contrast, is

employed by critics in an effort, whether explicit or covert, to valorize the

text as a model for enframing material technology. Unlike gynesis, technesis

has as its primary function the translation of material technology in its con-

crete, worldly embodiment into a textualist analogue, the abstraction cre-

ated when technology is constrained to fit the textual figure of the machine.

This translation betrays a deep-seated resistance to technology whose force

only increases in proportion to the strength with which it is disavowed. By

taking this resistance seriously, we can appreciate the extent to which the

enabling move in the poststructuralist version of the machine metaphor-

the generalization of the text-machine into a model for thinking about tech-

nology as such-is itself motivated by a desire to preserve the integrity of the

textual ontology on which it is based. The machine metaphor of technology

functions as a defense against the threat posed by the radical material alter-

ity of technology: by safely situating technology as the "other" within

thought, as the machinery of language integral to thought's genesis, techne-

sis neutralizes a more formidable "other" that threatens the wholesale dis-

solution of the much-cherished closure of representation.

Rather than adopting Jardine's strategy of preserving what is fruitful in

88 * Embodying Technesis

the object of her criticism, we must therefore resolutely reject technesis in

favor of the robust embrace of technology I have outlined in the two pre-

ceding chapters. In its hegemonic role as the contemporary form taken by

the machine reduction, technesis purges technology of its materiality in a

way that simply allows for no recuperative reconstruction whatsoever. The

technema resulting from poststructuralist technesis is a woefully rarified

object-for-thought. Stripped of its material basis, it cannot deliver the expe-

rience of otherness it promises, for like the noema containing the other's

consciousness in Husserl's fifth Cartesian Meditation, it turns out to be

nothing other than a projection (no matter how distorted and indetermi-

nate) of its constituting agent, the textualized "ego" (Husserl 1977). To root

out the technetic reduction, we must therefore reject the path of Husserlian

phenomenology-and its enabling commitment to the noiesis-noema corre-

lation-as an adequate mode of describing the real.s5 By reintroducing the

very technological materiality that the phenomenological epoche was

designed to bracket out, we must try, as it were, to force high theory into a

crucial act of self-de(con)struction, one that chips away at the enabling

ontological reduction of technology to text.

To judge by the endurance of technesis following the advent of cultural

studies, the hegemonic sway poststructuralist textualism exercises over

efforts to explore technology has not only persisted into the contemporary

critical epoch but expanded to form a general program for the various sorts

of technocriticism current today. Nowhere is this legacy more significant-

and less acknowledged-than in the emerging field of literature and science.

Without explicitly intending it, contemporary technocultural critics inter-

ested in bridging the divide separating science from the humanities have

embraced technesis as a generalized theoretical interface between literary

texts and technological systems. As long as it serves a purely instrumental

function in an analysis that focuses narrowly on the interpretation of literary

texts, such an embrace remains benign; as soon, however, as it is generalized

into a universal medium capable of establishing ontological isomorphism

between text and technological system, it becomes profoundly reductive.

To illustrate how tenuous the divide actually is between these two possi-

bilities, I shall concentrate for an instant on one particularly well focused

example from the emerging field of literature and science. By exposing the

tendency of such interdisciplinary work-even when it is most limited in

scope-to advance larger claims concerning the ontology of technology, I

shall foreground the unacknowledged, structural legacy linking contempo-

rary technocriticism to technesis.

In his insightful study of "cybernetic fiction," literary critic David Porush

From Metaphor to Embodiment * 89

unpacks the multivalent function of the machine figure in modern literature

and, in the process (and, I think, without explicitly intending to), institutes

an overly narrow ontological determination of technology as, essentially, a

figure for determinism. Contending that the machine constitutes "some-

thing even more powerful than a metaphor," Porush sketches a model of

machine iconicity that, despite an important and empowering break with

the insular and largely defunct formalist tradition, steadfastly refuses to

abandon the narrowly figurative basis of the machine metaphor. Not only

does the machine consistently recur in literature as an image particularly

expressive of technology's widespread impact on contemporary culture, but

it also plays a more specific structural role in the organization and con-

cretization of postmodern literary texts. Following Eco and Iser, Porush

describes the machine as an "icon," a figure that does not "serve to desig-

nate a signified object but instead designate[s] instructions for [its] produc-

tion" (1985, 15, quoting Iser); he thereby emphasizes that it is "a sort of

machine, in so far as we understand machines as the incarnation or illustra-

tion of a systematic set of rules" (loc. cit.). As a "self-referential icon," notes

Porush, the machine designates instructions for the "production of a com-

plex of ideas about mechanism"-more exactly, "for the various determin-

istic and mechanistic descriptions of experience and the world that our cul-

ture has invented" (16).

Whatever Porush's approach can tell us about technology remains

directly correlated to his elucidation of the machinic icon's role in the con-

stitution of a text-machine. Without in any way directly intending it,

Porush's model thus effectively reduces technology to the status of a deter-

ministic system, one that is-importantly-strictly homologous to the rule-

governed mechanism of a literary text.

... in th[e] case of the machine icon, there is an infinite variety of machines

used figuratively by fiction, but only one thing that they signify: determinism.

Swift's All-Knowlege machine signifies the deterministic reduction of knowl-

edge to an accumulation of random phrases. Dickens' description of Grad-

grind signifies the determinism . . . of his pedagogical method. Butler and

Forster describe society itself as a machine. Henry Adams sees the machine as

a metaphor for history's deterministic process. The structuralists use the

machine as a metaphor for the determinism of language's structures of

signification. The cyberneticists use the machine as a metaphor for the deter-

mination of human communication and mechanisms of the brain, and then

proceed to translate their metaphors into hardware. (16)

If the machine icon is indeed, as Porush insists, "even more powerful than a

metaphor," its proper field of operation still remains the domain of lan-

90 * Embodying Technesis

guage. In contrast to metaphor in its classical determination, the machine

icon does not refer to some extratextual state of affairs; it describes the con-

stitution of the figurative and grammatical mechanism of the very text it

generates. Without explicitly making the equation, such an analysis suggests

a textualized model of technology: like poststructuralist technesis, it privi-

leges the mechanism of the text as a sort of prototype technical system.

Porush, moreover, is hardly alone among contemporary technocultural

critics in skirting the delicate line separating a benign application of the

machinic icon to a literary text from a full-blown ontological reduction of

technology. Indeed, where his model merely implies an impoverished ontol-

ogy of technology as its correlate, other explorations of the convergence of

literature and science more directly engage the machinic icon in ways that,

it seems to me, either simply take for granted the general viability of using

texts to describe technologies or else more actively seek to expand litera-

ture's descriptive function beyond the scope of a particular literary text or

figure. In my opinion, what motivates recent literary critics to appropriate

systemic models from information science and chaos theory is not just a

methodological instrumentalism but a strong quasi-ontological conviction

that literary texts actually share common structural properties with the

physical reality that these technological models were originally developed to

describe.16 Whether they explicitly intend to or not, such systemic analyses

thus invest literary texts with the responsibility of mediating the most fun-

damental material changes technology brings about. Not unlike the cyber-

punk conspiracy narratives that Frederic Jameson reads as the "representa-

tional shorthand" for the unfathomable workings of global capitalism

(Jameson 1991, 38, 321), the postmodern literary texts privileged by these

critics are called on to translate such changes into a form more readily

understandable in human experiential terms than the technical, mathemati-

cal idiom germane to science. No matter how radically contemporary and

worldly they may appear, however, the various literary translations mobi-

lized in these readings rely on and perpetuate the thoroughly reductive

notion that technology can be adequately captured in the text.17

Metalepsis

Having established technesis as the dominant strategy of poststructuralist

and contemporary analyses of technology, we can now focus more

specifically on the form of its textual inscription. Through a rhetorical

analysis of this strategy, I shall attempt to show how the machine reduction

From Metaphor to Embodiment * 91

of technology permeates poststructuralist (and contemporary technocriti-

cal) theoretical texts not so much as the result of a conscious intention but

rather as a necessary axiom of the underlying discursive ideology that the

poststructuralists (and their more recent legatees) inherit from structuralist

linguistics.18 By demonstrating how the machine reduction of technology is

effectively instituted by the "logic" of textuality, I shall prepare the ground

for a markedly different, nontextualist technocriticism.

As an involuntary, structural necessity, technesis constitutes an unrecog-

nized theoretical commitment no less for the poststructuralists than for their

more recent legatees. Not unlike the process of naturalization analyzed by

Barthes (1972) in his study of myth, technesis works by proffering a discur-

sivized model of technology as a ground-zero, default model. It is therefore

a construction, but one that is not so much chosen by the critic as imposed

by the critical method or, more exactly, by the ideology of textualism.

Accordingly, the materiality of technology surfaces in texts in a manner

more symptomatic than thematic: it is textually "inscribed," if inscribed is

the right term, through metalepsis, a rhetorical figure describing the

metonymical substitution of one (figurative) word for another or several

others. Most often involving extreme compression and an ensuing obfusca-

tion of the literal sense of the statement, metalepsis also, in certain cases,

designates an inversion or conflation of cause and effect.19 Consider, for

example, the Oxford English Dictionary's citation (s.v. metalepsis) from

Blair's Rhetoric of 1812: "When the Trope is founded on the relation

between an antecedent and a consequent, or what goes before, and immedi-

ately follows, it is called a Metalepsis." What is at stake, if not just such a

causal inversion, when technology is inscribed as a textual function? As the

rhetorical operation that collapses (linguistic) text and (nonlinguistic) con-

text, metalepsis produces "materiality" within the space of language.

Accordingly, it forms the precondition for the reign of technesis.

In this role, metalepsis functions in a manner formally akin to what

Harold Bloom describes, in his work on the anxiety of influence, as the ratio

of apophrodes, the "Return of the Dead." In this final stage of confronta-

tion with the work of a precursor, the strong poet is able to incorporate the

precursor's vision as if it were his or her own. In The Anxiety of Influence,

Bloom describes apophrades as "the triumph of having so stationed the pre-

cursor, in one's own work, that particular passages in his work seem to be

not presages of one's own advent, but rather to be indebted to one's own

achievement" (Bloom 1973, 141; emphasis added). In his commentary on

Bloom, Louis Renza points out that what apophrades actually describes is

the operation of metalepsis, and he cites Bloom's reference to the Freudian

92 * Embodying Technesis

fantasy of the primal scene by way of example; in this instance, Renza notes,

the "trope" of apophrades is able to generate "the illusion of having

fathered one's own fathers," of projecting the vision of the precursor "as if

it has not yet occurred" (Renza 1995, 191, citing Bloom 1975, 20). Accord-

ingly, in Bloom's neo-Freudian account of metalepsis, we witness an impor-

tant modification-a modernization, as it were-of its more general sense of

tropological compression;20 here the compression of time and chronology

(and, one might add, positivist literary history) is so extreme that the com-

monsense distinctions underlying our notions of causality and influence

begin to coalesce, if not to fade away entirely.

By shifting its focus from the text itself to the intertextual agon between

ephebe and precursor, Bloom's modernization of metalepsis adds to the

trope a psychological dimension that is not present in its traditional form.

For all its promise, however, Bloom's intervention does little to supplant

the traditional task of literary interpretation or to question its narrow

focus on "the relationship between two or more texts" (1975, 65). If it

retools metalepsis as a privileged trope with which to describe psychologi-

cally motivated intertextual relationships, Bloom's analysis continues to

bracket the relation of text to context. While such a reduction remains

largely benign in an interpretative model explicitly intended to describe the

logic of textual relations, it becomes significant when metalepsis functions

instead to domesticate what lies beyond the text. Technesis represses not

simply the text of a precursor poet but the extratextual domain of techno-

logical materiality as such.21 Accordingly, what "returns" is not the dead

breaking out of their purely symbolic subservience to the living but tech-

nological materiality emancipated from the tenuous and never wholly

effective rhetorical erasure under which metalepsis places it. In its post-

Bloomian form, metalepsis thus functions to disguise the threat of techno-

logical materiality by domesticating it into something that appears to be

(or-in the past perfect tense appropriate to such a virtual historical oper-

ation-to have been) produced by the text itself. Modifying Bloom's ear-

lier cited description (with italics to mark the substitutions), we might say

that metalepsis designates "the triumph of having so stationed technology,

in one's own work, that particular aspects of technology seem to be not

preconditions of one's description, but rather to be caused by one's own

production."

What is foregrounded by such a hypothetical modification is the radically

different cause motivating the "return" of the repressed in the two cases:

while the dead precursor poet can return only because of guilt and only

through the mediation of the (Bloomian) literary critic adept in discerning

From Metaphor to Embodiment * 93

its traces, technological materiality returns under its "own" volition, as it

were, independently of mediation as such. Unlike the language of a precur-

sor literary text, technology is simply not subject to being changed by revi-

sionary rhetorical misprision, which means, in effect, that the metalepsis

constitutive of technesis cannot maintain itself in the face of the real.

Beneath-or better, outside of-the space of its textualization, technology

remains what it is regardless of the modifications to which it is submitted in

the process of its textualization.22 In sharp contrast to Bloom's ratio of

apophrades, no metalepsis involving technology can ever really be success-

ful, since rhetoric by itself remains powerless to alter the actual materiality

of technology.23

In twentieth-century theoretical texts from Freud and Heidegger to

Lacan, Derrida, and Deleuze and Guattari, metalepsis functions precisely to

produce an obfuscation of this extratextual status of technology, a denial of

the irreducibility of the technological real. As long as technology is made to

derive from language, the poststructuralist and constructivist idioms can

confidently maintain their enabling conflation of technology's robust mate-

riality with the relative materiality that it possesses within the theater of rep-

resentation. Viewed exclusively as the "support" for ecriture, the petit objet

a, the assemblage, and so forth, technology does indeed appear derivative,

the product of a genetic or quasi-vitalist program of differance, subject con-

stitution, or desiring-production.

Far from being a merely recent phenomenon, moreover, as our discussion

thus far might suggest, metalepsis in fact forms nothing less than the basic

principle of the Western philosophical tradition's encounter with the real

from antiquity onward. By subordinating robust materiality to language,

metalepsis performs a foundational role in the inauguration of philosophi-

cal discourse concerning technology: as a metaphor of metaphor, it func-

tions analogously to the figure of catachresis, with the difference being that

it is based not on an inaugural act of (improper) naming but on a derivative

sleight of hand, an illegitimate and violent domestication of materiality into

the striated space of discursive reason.24

To glimpse the rhetorical reduction at stake in technesis, let us focus

briefly on the role metalepsis plays in the paradigm case of technesis in

twentieth-century theoretical discourse. As I shall show in detail in chapter

4, Martin Heidegger's mature meditation on modern technology in "The

Question concerning Technology" owes its force and its cogency to a fun-

damental metaleptic reversal. While Heidegger unequivocally asserts the

ontological secondarity of technology on the basis of the ontological differ-

ence between Being and beings, he cannot acknowledge the precondition of

94 * Embodying Technesis

such assertion-its dependence, by way of a dogmatic appeal to the onto-

logical priority of language, on an essentially violent reduction of the ontic

impact of technology. Nonetheless, Heidegger can purchase the right to

assert the (ontological) secondarity of (ontic) technology only by first deter-

mining it as something subordinate to language. This effectively means that

the ontological difference is itself constituted as the effect of a prior reduc-

tion designed to domesticate ontic technology into the frame of reference

provided by Heidegger's onto-hermeneutic understanding of Being. Despite

Heidegger's claims for its "originarity," the ontological difference actually

functions to mask a prior metalepsis; its purpose is not to account for tech-

nology's origin but to obfuscate the enabling reduction of technology by

seamlessly assimilating materiality into the onto-hermeneutic horizon of

discourse. By demystifying Heidegger's foundational metalepsis, we can see

that the derivative status he assigns technology is less the result of a rigor-

ous analysis of its actual materiality than the mere by-product of a dogmatic

philosophical commitment.

Insofar as they fetishize this prototype textualization of technology, post-

structuralist theory and much contemporary technocultural criticism,

whether knowingly or unknowingly, follow Heidegger's lead: they too con-

ceal the fact that technology has always already undergone a prior reduction.

Moreover, because the force of the textualist metaphysics depends on a rad-

ical blindness to this reduction, the text cannot furnish the site for an archae-

ology of the technological real. From the textualist standpoint, technology

just is what it appears to be: the material support for the genetic or quasi-

vitalist ontology of textuality. Metalepsis simply effaces all (textual) traces of

anything beyond the theater of representation. Thus, the always already real-

ized reduction constitutive of technesis remains invisible in a model like

Hayles's constrained constructivism, which hypostatizes the semiotic indica-

tion of the material flux within the text; unlike the "elusive negativity" fore-

grounded by Hayles, technesis functions on an all-or-nothing basis: entrance

into a (textualist) system governed by metalepsis can only be purchased at

the cost of a total blindness to its constitutive reduction.

Accordingly, our effort to counter the forceful legacy of technesis will

require us flatly to reject the covert textualism of contemporary technocul-

tural criticism. Because the metaleptically constituted text cannot point us

to its material outside, we will have to restore such an outside beyond the

form imposed by the text, as something that had to be effaced during the

process of textual constitution. Such a task will call on us to rethink the role

of rhetoric in the analysis of contemporary technoculture. Instead of con-

tinuing to employ rhetoric semiotically-to point to the extratextual tech-

From Metaphor to Embodiment * 95

nological outside-we must open the text to a practical deconstruction ema-

nating directly from the technological real; at the same time, we will have to

(re)focus our rhetorical skills on the task of discerning traces of those con-

stitutive metalepses that enable the simulation of textual autonomy in the

face of the technological real. Refigured as an instrumental task within a

posttextualist model of embodied experience, the effort of probing these

rhetorical sites of metaleptic suture will help us reconstruct the robust mate-

riality that was sacrificed, in each specific case, to preserve the theoretical

cogency and explanatory grasp of the hegemonic textualist ontology.

Greek Ontology and the Machine Reduction

Breaking with the metaleptic strategy of contemporary theory involves

much more than a reconceptualization of its modern ontology. Though con-

crete industrial and electronic technologies may have been historically nec-

essary to effectuate it, the automatic deconstruction of the machine reduc-

tion explodes a metaphysical determination of technology that has been

handed down to us from the Greeks. To root out this reduction, we will

have to revisit and revise the Greek assimilation of technology under the

category of techne.

The exemplary textual site of this assimilation occurs at the point in the

Physics where Aristotle argues that art (techne) imitates nature: "he teckhne

mimeitai ten physin" (194a; Aristotle 1929, 121, 123). As Philippe Lacoue-

Labarthe has pointed out, Aristotle specifies two forms of this mimesis: "On

the one hand," says Aristotle, "techne carries to its end [accomplishes, per-

fects, epitelei] what physis is incapable of effecting [apergasasthai]; on the

other hand, it imitates" (cited in Lacoue-Labarthe 1989, 255). While the lat-

ter designates mimesis as it has traditionally been defined, the former coin-

cides with the motif of the supplement central to Derrida's early work; in

effect, the supplement Derrida describes in Of Grammatology could well be

read as a gloss on Aristotle's passage: "The supplement adds itself, it is a

surplus, a plenitude enriching another plenitude, the fullest measure of pres-

ence. It cumulates and accumulates presence. It is thus that art, techne,

image, representation, convention, etc. come as supplements to nature and

are rich with this entire cumulating function" (Derrida 1974, 144-45). In

this form, the supplement-no matter how novel an interpretation it is

given-retains a basic fidelity to Aristotelian techne.

By sketching out the ties linking technesis and techne, Lacoue-Labarthe's

interpretation of the Physics clarifies the heritage of contemporary technesis

96 * Embodying Technesis

in Aristotle's determination of technology. Accordingly, the crux of Lacoue-

Labarthe's reading concerns his subtle demarcation of two different mimetic

functions that correspond to the two forms of techne introduced by Aristotle.

There are thus two forms of mimesis. First, a restricted form, which is the

reproduction, the copy, the reduplication of what is given (already worked,

effected, presented by nature) . . . Then there is a general mimesis, which

reproduces nothing given (which thus re-produces nothing at all), but which

supplements a certain deficiency in nature, its incapacity to do everything,

organize everything, make everything its work-produce everything. It is a

productive mimesis, that is, an imitation of physis as a productive force, or a

poiesis. It accomplishes, carries out, finishes natural production as such.

(Lacoue-Labarthe 1989, 255-56)

Lacoue-Labarthe's distinction suggests that Western philosophy has devel-

oped on the basis of a fundamental (and reductive) allegiance between tech-

nology and art; techne as know-how, no less than techne as art, finds its

place securely within the (Greek) category of production-poiesis-defined

in Plato's Symposium as the bringing forth of "what passes over and goes

forward into presencing from that which is not presencing" (205b).25 From

the Greeks to today's technocultural critics, technology thus remains under

the sway of the presentational function of mimesis-what Lacoue-Labarthe

calls "onto-mimetology."

In aligning techne and mimesis in this way, Lacoue-Labarthe in effect

marshals the Derridian motif of the closure of representation to account for

technology's function in the production of truth. Ultimately, onto-mimetol-

ogy ascribes all truth claims (and truth itself in the Greek/Heideggerian

sense of aletheia) to an untheorizable discursive operation that generates the

possibility for representation itself, what Lacoue-Labarthe glosses as the

"production of a theater" (a space of representation) that enables the

(restricted) operation of mimesis.

... because [fundamental mimetology] represents the function (or even the

fact) of supplementation in general-the function, or the fact, of substitu-

tion-it is necessary to think that the theater exemplifies general mimesis.

Theatrical mimesis, in other words, provides the model for general mimesis.

Art, since it substitutes for nature, since it replaces it and carries out the poi-

etic process that constitutes its essence, always produces a theater, a repre-

sentation. That is to say, another presentation-or the presentation of some-

thing other, which was not yet there, given, or present. (Lacoue-Labarthe

1989, 257)

For my purposes, what is important about this intervention is less its pow-

erful critique of presence than its broader fidelity to the onto-theological

From Metaphor to Embodiment * 97

horizon opened by Aristotle. The distinction Lacoue-Labarthe draws

between general and restricted mimesis remains securely within the space

cleared by the metalepsis Aristotle inaugurates with his subordination of

technology to techne. Accordingly, the reversal Lacoue-Labarthe attributes

to the moderns-the privileging of art over nature-only serves further to

efface the dependence of this very mode of thinking about technology on its

prior and enabling reduction. Once it is determined as the supplement of

physis, techne stops being an object of interpretation; investigation turns

away from the question whether techne is an adequate category for thinking

about technology and toward the role art plays in the production of nature.

In effect, then, Lacoue-Labarthe's onto-mimetology, expanding the sway of

the Derridian supplement, generalizes Aristotle's metaleptic reduction of

technology into the constitutive condition of possibility for thought itself.

Aristotle and the Automatic

To undo the assimilation of technology under the Greek category of techne,

we will need to reconstruct Aristotle's notion of the automatic (to automa-

ton). By pressuring the contradiction at the heart of Aristotle's determina-

tion of technology-the contradiction between technology as supplement

(techne) and as the radically nonnatural (para physin)-I shall redeem the

technological real from the forcible abjection it must undergo in order for

Aristotle's causal doctrine to retain its integrity and maximize its explana-

tory grasp. Following my analysis, Aristotle will be unmasked as nothing

less than the progenitor of technesis in Western metaphysics; like Heidegger,

Derrida, and Lacoue-Labarthe after him, Aristotle finds himself compelled,

by the structural logic of his thought, to suppress the radical exteriority of

technology at the moment when it threatens the integrity of his nouocentric

(mind-centered) metaphysics.

In the example on which I shall focus, Physics 2.6, Aristotle distinguishes

two forms of chance in a manner that appears, at least initially, to recognize

the autonomy of the real. While tuche, or "luck," remains relative to human

and/or natural intentionality, to automaton (the automatic) designates a

category of causality that remains irreducible to techne, in its general and

restricted (mimetic) forms. In the final reckoning, however, when Aristotle

seeks to reconcile his investigation of chance with his famous doctrine of

causality, he betrays the initial promise of his introduction of the automatic.

By assimilating the automatic to tuche (chance modeled on human/natural

intentionality), Aristotle inaugurates a philosophical choice that has proven

98 * Embodying Technesis

decisive for subsequent efforts to explore technology's experiential impact.

Since it forms nothing less than the prototype for the metaleptic reduction,

this decision will form the initial and ultimate theoretical target, as it were,

of my effort to rethink technology beyond technesis.

Aristotle's analysis of chance (tuche) reaches its crucial moment when he

asks whether luck and the automatic (tuche and automaton) can be

explained on the basis of his famous fourfold doctrine of causality or if

they-in defiance of his nouocentric ontology-require a modification of

that doctrine. Almost as soon as the question is raised, an answer is fur-

nished: "luck and the automatic," Aristotle unequivocally states, "are reck-

oned as causes" (196a, Aristotle 1987, 100) specifically, as efficient causes,

"sources from which . . . change originates" (198a; 105). Whatever chal-

lenge the analysis of chance poses to the fourfold doctrine of causality is one

that can easily be met. As a result, chance is important less as a philosophi-

cally significant object in its own right than as a test of the scope of Aristo-

tle's causal doctrine; it draws its significance from the resistance it offers

causal explanation, since it designates events that fail to fall within the nor-

mal range of causal action, events that fail to demonstrate strict necessity

and/or regularity. Chance occurrences, Aristotle tells us, are those we ordi-

narily ascribe to "luck" (meaning precisely that which lacks necessity and/or

regularity). They can be divided into two categories: those due to "luck" in

a more narrow sense (tuche) and those due to the "automatic" (automaton).

In Aristotle's usage, luck (tuche) applies to a restricted domain of events,

those effected by an agent "capable of choosing." The automatic applies in

far more cases, extending, Aristotle says, "to the animals other than man

and to. . . inanimate objects" (1976; 104).

Aristotle gives two accounts of the difference, both of which help to

reveal what is at stake in this crucial distinction and to prepare for his reduc-

tion of the automatic to luck in the narrow sense. In the first account, Aris-

totle argues that outcomes due to luck and those that are automatic are "for

something" (i.e., have a final cause) in different ways: the former are for

something in a sense that could be determined by their agent (i.e., according

to the category of thought), while the latter are for something in a sense that

cannot be so determined, that remains-in itself-indeterminate. While it

makes sense to speak of luck in respect to a human agent-who can, for

example, go to a business meeting and run into an old friend by chance-it

makes no sense to do so when the agent in question is an inanimate object.

Aristotle concludes that "luck and its outcome belong only to things which

can be lucky and in general engage in rational activity" (197b; 104, empha-

sis added).

From Metaphor to Embodiment * 99

Events caused by the automatic are not likewise (i.e., intrinsically) mean-

ingful. They do not pertain directly to the intentional horizon of an agent,

and importantly (although Aristotle does not put it this way), they can only

be rendered meaningful through (metaleptic) translation. To attain mean-

ing, automatic events must be evaluated not in themselves but rather within

a specific subjective horizon belonging to some particular intentional agent.

While luck names a real force that simultaneously plays an explanatory role

within the field of thought of its agent, the automatic is a real force inde-

pendently of its relation to an intentional agent and only becomes a cause in

the proper, explanatory sense by being transposed into a second-order func-

tion of an intentional agent.

Aristotle's second account of the difference between luck and the auto-

matic concerns the relation between efficient and final cause. In cases where

luck is in operation, the final cause is internal to the nature of the object,

stemming unintentionally but nevertheless from the activity of an otherwise

intentional agent. "The source of an automatic outcome," however, "is

external" (197b; 105): it stems from outside the nature of the object pas-

sively undergoing change. The final cause corresponding to this external

efficient cause emerges only through analogy with an intentional agent, as

Aristotle's example of a stone falling illustrates: "A stone falls and hits

someone, but it does not fall for the purpose of hitting him; the fall accord-

ingly was 'in-itself-to-no-purpose'-a chance result [rather, an automatic

result, tou automatou]."26 It is simply outside the nature of the stone to hit

a man "with the purpose of hitting him." In qualifying the final cause of the

automatic as external, Aristotle establishes, among other things, that in

itself (i.e., in its relation with its efficient cause), the automatic is opaque to

thought and can be known only negatively through comparison with the

sense it takes on when it is carried over to an intentional agent. Thus, like

the first difference, this one emphasizes the mediation or translation that the

automatic must undergo to be presented in thought.

On the basis of these two differences, Aristotle stresses the external

provenance of the efficiency that defines the automatic in its proper sense.

Luck (in the narrow sense) rests at the farthest extreme from natural neces-

sity while still remaining natural (i.e., governed by the nature of the agent);

as Aristotle puts it, "[w]e are furthest from an outcome of luck with things

which come to be due to nature" (1976, 105). The efficient cause of a lucky

event, nevertheless, remains internal to the nature of the agent, either

directly or "by concurrence." The automatic, however, comes into play

when things take place "contrary to nature" (para physin).

To illustrate this difference, Aristotle compares two examples. In the case

100 * Embodying Technesis

of what we might call freaks of nature, natural monstrosities produced con-

trary to nature's logic, Aristotle contends, we are still dealing with luck,

since the cause of such monstrosities remains internal to nature. Yet because

of the perversity that goes with conceiving such mishaps in intentional

terms, we tend to attribute them to "'accident[s]' [automaton] in Nature."

When it comes to categorical definitions, however, we must avoid drawing

ontological conclusions from what is merely a manner of speaking, and so

we must distinguish from this example of luck an example of the automatic

in its proper sense. The automatic itself, Aristotle argues, is para physin

(contrary to nature) in a radical sense, since it breaks entirely with the model

of natural (or internal) generation. He continues:

Automaton, on the other hand, may be used to describe the behaviour of

brute beasts and even of many inanimate things. For instance, we attribute it

to automaton if a horse escapes a danger by coming accidentally to a place of

safety.... But this case [of a natural monstrosity] is different from that of the

horse; for the horse's escape was due to an external cause, but the causes of

Nature's miscarriage are internal to her own processes. (Aristotle 1929, 159,

161; emphasis added)

The automatic is para physin in the sense that it cannot be tied down to a

purpose immediately graspable by and attributable to an agent of thought

or to nature. Its efficiency derives from something purely contingent and

external to the subject it qualifies and thus comprises a sort of lacuna in the

explanatory matrix of Aristotle's causal doctrine.

Given what look like solid grounds for a stable and interesting categori-

cal distinction between luck and the automatic on the basis of their respec-

tive relations to (human) thought, the conclusion Aristotle goes on to draw

cannot but come as a surprise.

... both [the automatic and luck] are sources from which the change origi-

nates; for they are always either things which cause naturally or things which

cause from thought-of which there is an indeterminate multitude. But since

the automatic and luck are causes of things for which mind or nature might

be responsible, when something comes to be responsible for these same

things by virtue of concurrence, and since nothing which is by virtue of con-

currence is prior to that which is by itself, it is clear that no cause by virtue of

concurrence is prior to that which is by itself a cause. Hence the automatic

and luck are posterior to both mind and nature; so however much the auto-

matic may be the cause of the heavens, mind and nature are necessarily prior

causes both of many other things and of this universe [proteron noun . .

physin aitian einai]. (Aristotle 1987, 198a; emphasis added)

From Metaphor to Embodiment * 101

By restricting efficient causes to two categories-"either things which cause

naturally or things which cause from thought"-Aristotle leaves out the

proper definition of the automatic as what is para physin, unnatural in a

radical sense. He forgets that automatic causes are "causes of things for

which mind or nature might be responsible" only following their translation

into the horizon of an intentional agent, or in other words, only after a

reduction of the radical exteriority of the automatic. Again, the example of

the stone seems to establish this difference: by itself the stone falling is

"without why"; it acquires a determinable final cause only when viewed on

the model of intentional thought, that is, as an event within an individual

mind or within that great mind Aristotle calls "nature."

Not surprisingly, given my claim for Aristotle's privileged status as the

progenitor of technesis, this assimilation of the automatic into the doctrine

of causality takes form as a metalepsis in the text of the Physics. By claim-

ing that the automatic, like luck, is an (efficient) cause by virtue of concur-

rence, Aristotle is merely drawing a conclusion on the basis of what, for

him, is simply a fundamental law of nature-the law stating that "nothing

which is by virtue of concurrence is prior to that which is by itself." In itself

or prior to its reduction, however, the automatic does not lend itself to such

a hierarchizing distinction; since the final cause of the automatic is unknow-

able, unthinkable, and unpresentable, there is no principle in the case of the

automatic on which to separate essential from concurrent. The possibility to

do so comes only following the translation of the automatic into the horizon

of thought, where something can be a cause by concurrence only if it is sub-

ordinated to an intentional agent that is a cause in itself.27 Consequently,

Aristotle's assertion of the priority of "mind and nature" over luck and the

automatic is both circular and metaleptic. His subordination of cause by

concurrence acquires validity only on the basis of a prior commitment to

nouocentrism-a categorical and dogmatic privileging of the mental over

the material. Once it is assimilated into the field of thought, to automaton

loses its radical exteriority: following Aristotle's inaugural metalepsis, the

automatic appears to be the result of a prior cause, rather than a force oper-

ating beyond the scope of thought.

Chapter 4

Questioning the Machine Basis of Techne:

Heidegger on Technology

In chapter 3, I showed that Aristotle's decision to repress the automatic

played an operative role in the inauguration of the machine reduction of

technology. To trace the endurance of this reduction in the Western philo-

sophical tradition, I shall now focus on the figure responsible for reinvent-

ing the philosophical machine metaphor in a distinctly twentieth-century

form, the German philosopher Martin Heidegger.

Heidegger's influence on contemporary technocultural theory is, in a

word, immense. His diagnosis in essays like "The Question Concerning

Technology" and "The Age of the World Picture" has established technol-

ogy as an important object for disciplines as diverse as political science,

media studies, gender studies, and art history, not to mention philosophy

and literary criticism. Certainly, no serious contemporary study of technol-

ogy in practically any discipline would dream of forgoing a sustained

engagement with Heidegger's work, and yet, despite the enormity of this

influence, his model tends less to inspire genuine critical attention than to be

taken as an unquestioned-and unquestionable-starting point for explor-

ing technology.1 Mediated by French poststructuralism, this uncritical

(non)reception of Heidegger is, I think, largely responsible for the reign

technesis enjoys in contemporary technocultural criticism. The failure on

the part of contemporary critics to criticize Heidegger's presuppositions-

especially his ontologizing of technology-not only has had the effect of

rubber-stamping his bleak depiction of an absolute technological command

over reality but has facilitated a wholesale and still more reductive posi-

tivizing of it. Given Heidegger's sustained call for a resistance against tech-

nology, there is certainly a bitter irony to the fact that technology's restric-

tion of the real to what can be "conceived and grasped as a picture"

(Heidegger 1977c) has come to form an unquestioned methodological basis

for much recent work in cultural theory of media and technology; from Bau-

drillard's embrace of the hyperreal to the robust celebration of representa-

Questioning the Machine Basis of Techne * 103

tion common to most contemporary forms of cultural studies, Heidegger's

bleakest prospect has been more than fulfilled.

As I suggested in my introduction, this misguided positivizing of Heideg-

ger finds its theoretical basis in the refunctionalization to which French

poststructuralism has submitted his thought. As exemplified in the work of

both Derrida and Lacan, poststructuralism operates an explicit inversion of

Heidegger's position, an inversion that functions to radicalize Heidegger's

view by expanding the command of technology and tightening the strangle-

hold exercised by representational thinking. Where Heidegger maintains

that the essence of technology (techne) is uncontaminated by technology,

both Derrida and Lacan assert a constitutive complicity of logos (and hence

of all determinations of essence) with an irreducible technicity. According to

their otherwise quite divergent analyses, the contemporary reign of repre-

sentational thinking is not simply a historically specific and hence limited

phenomenon but a structural element of thought itself.

In the wake of this poststructuralist decision regarding Heidegger's

famous maxim that the essence of technology is nothing technological, the

historically determinate reduction of technological materiality that we find

in Heidegger is given a vastly stronger legitimation. Thus in Derrida, tech-

nology is equated with writing (and all of its possible externalizations),

while in Lacan, technological artifacts (exemplarily, embodiments of the

gaze and the voice) serve as the locus for the worldly enactment of desire. In

both cases, a restricted account of technology rooted in a radicalized and yet

ultimately faithful version of Heideggerian enframing takes priority over a

robust account of technology's radical material exteriority.

Breaking with French poststructuralism, I shall challenge this radicaliza-

tion of Heidegger's position, together with the positivization it has more

recently yielded, not so much by disputing its cogency as by questioning the

adequacy of its source. In particular, I shall question whether Heidegger's

account of the temptations posed by ontic technologies provides us with a

rich enough basis for grasping technology's robust impact on our experi-

ence. In the story I shall tell, whatever cogency and force Heidegger is able

to acquire for his ontologizing of technology comes from a massive and vio-

lent reduction of ontic technologies. My account will thus expose the prior-

ity of the ontological for what, I suggest, it is: a defense against the ontic

threat of the technological real. By laying bare the occulted priority of the

ontic, I shall thus urge a different path out of Heidegger than the one cho-

sen by poststructuralism, a path that takes seriously the notion of techno-

logical autonomy that he repeatedly found himself compelled to repress and

that simply cannot be grasped through any radicalization of representation,

104 * Embodying Technesis

no matter how extreme. On this point, my interpretation resonates with

recent interpretations of Heidegger's politics and specifically with the per-

suasive suggestion that an overriding desire to maintain faith in a philo-

sophical salvation blinded him to the everyday, "fallen" menace of technol-

ogy, which he might otherwise have seen quite clearly.2

In this chapter, I shall critically reconstruct Heidegger's account of tech-

nology to contextualize my central claim: that the key distinction Heidegger

develops in "The Question concerning Technology" between a generic and

a specifically modern form of production-between Hervorbringen (literally

"bringing-forth," Heidegger's translation for poiesis) and Herausfordern

(challenging-forth)-presupposes and obtains coherence only on the basis

of a reduction of technology first developed in his early period. Without this

reduction, undertaken most explicitly in Heidegger's account of the

machine as subordinate to the world-disclosing power of Dasein (the mode

of situated being or "being-there" constitutive of human existence) in his

lecture course from 1928, the distinction of Herausfordern from Hervor-

bringen would threaten the primacy of poiesis and, with it, the very priority

of ontology on which his analysis is based. As I see it, Heidegger's reduction

of technology thus functions to insure the domestication of modern tech-

nology within the frame of poiesis. In the process of exploring this reduc-

tion, I shall argue that Heidegger's account of technology is ultimately

determined by the analysis of language he initially develops in Being and

Time and that his reduction forms the paradigm for technesis as the privi-

leged twentieth-century form of the machine reduction of technology.

"Angst" vor der Technik?

In Being and Time, Heidegger addresses technology in two fundamental

ways, both of which serve to establish its secondarity with respect to

Dasein's ontological commitment to its ownmost Being. On the one hand,

Heidegger develops an account of technology as that which is experienced

practically in the mode of Zuhandenheit (readiness-to-hand); in accord with

his account, ontic technologies are a part of what makes up the world of

Dasein's everyday, practical concern and are experienced as components of

a total activity and not in themselves. They owe their existence to the world-

disclosing force of Dasein. On the other hand, Heidegger addresses technol-

ogy more obliquely through his analysis of Dasein's fallenness. In the host

of examples Heidegger marshals to illustrate the three modes of fallenness

(idle talk, curiosity, and ambiguity [Gerede, Neugier, Zweideutigkeit])-

Questioning the Machine Basis of Techne * 105

examples that centrally involve technologized modes of public communica-

tion-technology is prohibited from playing any positive role whatsoever.

Rather than assisting Dasein in its quest to achieve an authentic under-

standing of its source of Being, technology here comprises precisely what

must be overcome on the way toward such an understanding. In Heideg-

ger's account, it would seem, technology can only interfere with the quest

for authenticity in a manner that-like any other breakdown in Dasein's

average everyday, practical activity (Zuhandenheit)-can easily be cor-

rected simply by being thematized.

Heidegger's account does not consider the potential recalcitrance of ontic

technologies-the possibility that they might resist such thematization or

that Dasein might never be in a position to make its dependence on them

explicit. To understand why this possibility poses a threat to Heidegger's

phenomenological program, let us distinguish Being and Time's famous

account of the hammer as the prototype of the tool from those technologies

that Dasein encounters as obstacles on its quest for authenticity. Such a dis-

tinction serves to emphasize the specificity of electronic and media tech-

nologies that, as various postmodern critics have pointed out, differ from

machine and preindustrial technologies insofar as they impact us from

within; because they are implicated in our very Being-in-the-world as a cen-

tral aspect of what enables experience as such, they cannot be thematized in

the same way as earlier technologies, that is, by being made explicit via the

theoretical mode of knowing Heidegger calls Vorhandenheit.3 Accordingly,

such technologies simply cannot be accounted for on the theory of reference

Heidegger develops in Being and Time: unlike the examples of practical

objects he furnishes (e.g., the automobile's turning signal), the vast majority

of postmodern technologies cannot be constituted either as signs or as indi-

cations and thus cannot be given any objectal status by Dasein. Effectively,

this means that postmodern technologies (to the extent that they become an

issue for Dasein) must occupy a position formally analogous to the role of

death in Being and Time: in both cases, Dasein confronts the lack of an

object where an object should be. Within the terms of Heidegger's analysis,

postmodern technologies should provoke Angst, the feeling of ontological

doubt faced in experiences (such as Dasein's confrontation with its own

death) that cannot be correlated with a particular referent and that, conse-

quently, disturb Dasein sufficiently to tear it away from its everyday

involvement with the thing-world and spur it on to attain its authenticity.

It is not surprising that Heidegger furnishes no such account of technol-

ogy in Being and Time. Not only would an account of technology as

"nonobjectal" contradict his instrumental determination of technology as

106 * Embodying Technesis

ready-to-hand (zuhandene), but more importantly, it would accord a recal-

citrance to technology that Heidegger is hardly prepared to allow. Unlike

Being-toward-death, which provokes Angst from a source internal to

Dasein, nonobjectal technology introduces a source of anxiety that would

be radically external to Dasein's powers-that could, in short, potentially

obstruct Dasein from ever beginning its quest for authenticity. This threat, I

suggest, furnishes the root motivation for Heidegger's reduction of ontic

technology: to purchase coherence for his account of Dasein's conversion,

Heidegger must exclude all possibility of sustained external technical inter-

ference.

We can see this reduction at work in the analysis of how Dasein moves

from its everyday absorption in idle talk (Gerede) to a position where it is

able to hear itself authentically. Restricted by his inflexible categorical

opposition of authenticity and inauthenticity, Heidegger has no means to

recognize the possibility that Dasein might indeed depend, intrinsically and

insurmountably, on ontic technologies; not insignificantly, it is important to

point out that any such dependence will only have increased with the evolu-

tion and increasing sophistication of consumer society in the twentieth cen-

tury. In paragraph 55 of Being and Time, Heidegger depicts Dasein's strug-

gle for authenticity as an unmediated response to the call of conscience; to

respond properly, Heidegger contends, Dasein must overcome its factical or

phenomenal absorption in the idle talk of the public self (das Man). Yet,

because this absorption is rooted not in the formal structure of Dasein but

in its ontic, fallen desire, Dasein must overcome what is in effect an external

threat-an everyday, habitual (i.e, nonthematized) reliance on mundane

technologies that might in fact be quite difficult or altogether impossible to

give up.4 Before it can even begin its philosophical quest for ontological

authenticity, Dasein must thus surmount a prior ontic commitment-its

absorption in the domain of the technical.

In the face of the external, ontic origin of the threat of the technical, Hei-

degger asserts the categorical priority of the ontological over the ontic. Sim-

ply by presupposing this priority (the very priority that technology puts into

question), Heidegger is able to shift the focus of the existential analytic of

Dasein from the constraints imposed by its external absorption to its

unhampered power for internal modification. "Losing itself in the public-

ness and the idle talk of the 'they,'" Heidegger says, "Dasein fails to hear

[Uberhort] its own Self in listening to the they-self." He continues:

If Dasein is to be able to get brought back from this lostness of failing to hear

itself, and if this is to be done through itself, then it must first be able to find

Questioning the Machine Basis of Techne * 107

itself-to find itself as something which has failed to hear itself, and which

fails to hear in that it listens away to the "they." This listening-away must get

broken off; in other words, the possibility of another kind of hearing which

will interrupt it, must be given by Dasein itself. The possibility of its thus get-

ting broken off lies in its being appealed to without mediation. Dasein fails

to hear itself, and listens away to the "they"; and this listening-away gets

broken by the call if that call, in accordance with its character as such,

arouses another kind of hearing, which, in relationship to the hearing that is

lost, has a character in every way opposite. If in this lost hearing, one has

been fascinated with the "hubbub" [vom Larm] of the manifold ambiguity

[Zweideutigkeit] which idle talk possesses in its everyday "newness" [des

alltaglich "neuen" Geredes], then the call must do its calling without any

hubbub and unambiguously, leaving no foothold for curiosity. (1962,

315-16/1986, 271; emphasis added)5

Given Heidegger's own catastrophic fall into the ontic-a fall mediated, as

Avital Ronell has shown, by his own fear and repression of the technologi-

cal-there is every reason to question the efficacy of such an exclusively the-

oretical solution.6 What we quickly discover in doing so is that Heidegger's

analysis of language (Rede) is absolutely powerless to insure the "breaking-

away" of Dasein from its everyday objects of desire. Though his formal-

ontological genealogy of language establishes the ontological priority of

authentic discourse (Rede) over mere speech (Sprache) and idle talk

(Gerede), ontology can provide no guarantee against the external danger

inherent in the everyday priority of these latter-the danger of a practical,

ontic co-optation of the "call of conscience" by the technological. While

Heidegger's dogmatic assertion of Dasein's power to overcome its fallenness

might effectively repress the priority of the ontic within the domain of his

theory, it can do no such thing at the level of the practical, where, I suggest,

ontic technology returns with a vengeance.

Heidegger's Ambivalence

To grasp the significance of ontic technology's return beyond its much

debated role in Heidegger's own fall into ontic politics, we must turn to the

later Heidegger's far more nuanced account of technology and specifically

to the central claim he makes in "The Question concerning Technology"

that the essence of technology "is in a lofty sense [in einem hohen Sinne]

ambiguous" (1977b, 33). The possibility of reconstructing and developing

the repressed ontic priority of technology hinges on our ability to demystify

108 * Embodying Technesis

this claim, to recognize the fundamental limitation inherent in the very ter-

minology Heidegger employs to present the two poles of the ambiguity.

On the one hand, Enframing [das Gestell] challenges forth into the frenzied-

ness of ordering [das Rasende des Bestellens] that blocks every view into the

coming-to-pass of revealing and so radically [von Grund auf] endangers the

relation to the essence of truth [den Bezug zum Wesen der Wahrheit]. On the

other hand, Enframing comes to pass [ereignet sich] for its part in the grant-

ing that lets man endure.., that he may be the one who is needed and used

for the safekeeping of the coming to presence of truth [zur Wahrnis des

Wesens der Wahrheit]. (33/37)7

Against Heidegger's inclination to take this description as exhaustive of the

ontology of technology, we must stress its fundamental limitations. Since

both poles remain firmly within the space of an ontological hermeneutics in

which language is the site of truth, Heidegger's "lofty ambiguity," like the

ontological difference itself, presupposes a prior reduction of the ontic

domain, an act of translation in which a merely theoretical incompatibility

between two modes of thematizing technology takes the place of a real

conflict between technological materiality and thought. Since it strips tech-

nology of its exteriority and its material resistance to thought, this transla-

tion installs technesis as the enabling figure of Heidegger's account of tech-

nology.

Not surprisingly, this very same epoche of technological materiality

informs the poststructuralist reception of Heidegger and, through it, con-

temporary cultural studies of technology. By retaining the structure of Hei-

degger's account of technology, contemporary technocultural critics effec-

tively render themselves incapable of eschewing his reduction. Like

Heidegger's poststructuralist heirs, these critics are barred by their own

methodology from redeeming his prescient, if bleak, insight into technol-

ogy's radical and inhuman autonomy-the very insight whose foreclosure

comprises the enabling condition for constituting technology as "in a lofty

sense ambiguous."

Though Heidegger could never quite bring himself to face this prospect

without reduction, there are moments in his later career when he actually

comes close. In his 1966 interview with the German news magazine Der

Spiegel, for example, Heidegger contends that technology impinges directly

on the very possibility of thought itself not from within (as it does in the

figure of the supplement) but from without:8 "The modes of thinking

handed down by the metaphysical tradition, which concludes in the figure

of Nietzsche, no longer offer the possibility of reflectively experiencing

Questioning the Machine Basis of Techne * 109

[denkend zu erfahren] the fundamental principle [Grundzug] of the emerg-

ing technical age."9 Far from merely contaminating thought via its depen-

dance on language, Heidegger here suggests that technology imperils the

descriptive sway of discursive reason by producing a reality that exceeds the

onto-hermeneutical grasp of language. Unlike his poststructuralist disciples,

who fervently embrace the critical constraints imposed by the reign of rep-

resentational thought, Heidegger momentarily envisions (if only to dismiss)

the possibility of a more fundamental shift in the economy of our experi-

ence.

Because of the sustained, enabling privilege he grants language, however,

Heidegger was unable to cash in this insight. Like his disciples, he could not

see in technology anything other than a threat to the purity of language.

"Cybernetics," he contends in another late essay, "reconstructs language so

that it can function as an exchange of news [bildet die Sprache um zu einem

Austausch von Nachrichten]. The arts become stored and storing instru-

ments," (Heidegger 1977a, 376; translation modified). As a consequence,

the possibility of connecting thought with its primordial ground in the

ontology of truth is compromised: "'Theory' ['Theorie'] now means: sup-

position of the categories, which are restricted to a cybernetic function, but

denied any ontological significance [aber jeder ontologische Sinn abge-

sprochen wird]" (377). On such a view, technology's impact, which can

only be negative, stems exclusively from the way it effaces the deep onto-

logical significance of Vorhandenheit, or "presence-at-hand," the ontic cat-

egory Heidegger develops in Being and Time to describe the theoretical

being of a worldly object. What cybernetic technologies do is present the

being of language as mere words cut off from their connection with a

Bedeutungsganzheit, or "context of involvements." In this sense, what Hei-

degger says of the typewriter is all the more true of the computer: it "renders

language operational [die Sprache in Betrieb nimmt] and thus holds mastery

over [meistert] the essence of man" (Heidegger 1957, 28).10

Despite its very different tonality, this restriction of technology's impact

to its effect on language draws on and extends his early formative account

of Dasein's effort to gain knowledge of (or make explicit) its practical

engagement with technology. In Being and Time, Heidegger subordinates

Vorhandenheit to Zuhandenheit, the mode in which Dasein exists in its

average everydayness. One only becomes aware of the existence of a techni-

cal object (e.g., a hammer) when the object fails to function properly (e.g.,

when it is too heavy or breaks down). On Heidegger's account, while the

practical activity characteristic of the mode of Zuhandenheit is prior to and

110 * Embodying Technesis

comprises a necessary background for the mode of theoretical knowing, one

can only encounter one's dependence on ontic technology-and thus only

assess the impact of technology on experience-by thematizing it in the

mode of Vorhandenheit. By instituting such a theoretical necessity, Heideg-

ger imposes a fundamental limitation on what counts as technology: only

those technologies that are or can be thematized in explicit terms can, on his

account, be understood to have a direct impact on our practical lives.

Left out of this scheme are two kinds of technologically mediated practi-

cal experiences that do not achieve the level of explicit thematization: (1)

experiences in which there is no breakdown and hence no motivating reason

to cross from the practical to the theoretical domain and (2) experiences in

which technology's impact (because it is molecular and diffuse) is in princi-

ple not recuperable through thematization. To assess these two kinds of

experiences, we must break with the cognitive focus of Heidegger's analysis

and articulate a bodily hermeneutics-a robust mode of understanding able

to encompass the unthematized, corporeal dimensions of our embodied

lives.11 Without in any way endorsing Heidegger's paranoia about technol-

ogy, we must radicalize his muted concern at the fundamental incapacity of

Western metaphysics to facilitate what Heidegger, in his monumental

Nietszche (1961), calls a "thinking experience" (denkende Erfahrung) of

modern technology. By acknowledging the eclipse of language as the domi-

nant experiential faculty, we can bring the deep ambivalence of Heidegger's

project to the fore and take stock of the cost, as it were, of his stubborn

commitment to the motif of the ontological difference: simply stated, Hei-

degger's logocentrism prevents him from capitalizing on-let alone recog-

nizing the importance of-the fundamental shift in the economy of experi-

ence toward which his late work gestures.

While Heidegger attributed the ontological difference to (his reconstruc-

tion of) pre-Socratic Greek thought, it appears, when seen in historical hind-

sight, to owe much more to an ontic, and thus (in his terms) inauthentic,

fear of technology. Accordingly, Heidegger's explicit characterization of

technology as "in a lofty sense ambiguous" should be viewed as a protective

measure designed to ward off the threat of a more fundamental

modification of our mode of being, one that would destroy the gains of his

life's work. Yet because technology's actual ontic effects are entirely unaf-

fected by the theoretical reduction, the threat of technological autonomy-

precisely the dreaded object of Heidegger's fear-remains very much alive;

in the contemporary world, this threatened autonomy takes the form of an

insistent revenge of the real operated through our profound addiction to

commodified technologies.

Questioning the Machine Basis of Techne * 111

Acknowledging this material revenge allows us to deflate Heidegger's

claim for the archaic priority of ontology. Like Aristotle's reading of the

automatic, such a claim imposes a reduction of technology that both enables

the command of philosophical description over the real yet is thoroughly

reductive-and also thoroughly impotent-in light of the robust materiality

of the technological real. This effectively means, then, that the most famous

motif of Heidegger's thought might turn out to owe more to a strategic deci-

sion than to any philosophical necessity. Just as Aristotle strategically

employs a theoretical hierarchy to domesticate the excess of the automatic,

Heidegger strategically fetishizes language as the locus of Being to bracket

out the ontic priority of technology. Far from the primordial and enabling

motif he claims it to be, the ontological difference is thus itself conditioned

by something "older" than and prior to it: the dogmatic reduction of tech-

nology to the purely instrumental status of the machine.12

The Machine

Heidegger's deeply paradoxical claim concerning the devastation wrought

by technology in the twentieth century follows directly from this reduction

of technology to instrumental status.

[Technology's] threat to man does not come in the first instance from the

potentially lethal machines and apparatus [todlich wirkenden Maschinen

und Apparaturen] of technology. The actual threat [Die eigentliche Bedro-

hung] has already affected man in his essence. The rule of the Enframing [Die

Herrschaft des Gestells] threatens man with the possibility that it could be

denied to him to enter into a more original revealing [Entbergen] and hence

to experience the call [Zuspruch] of a more primal truth. (1977b, 28/1954,

32)

Despite its undeniable perversity, we must acknowledge that this claim

obeys a logic that is absolutely central to the humanist tradition of Western

thought. By celebrating the priority of the human over the technological, of

the essential over the derivative, Heidegger paradoxically reinforces the

humanism that he otherwise so insistently rejects: as long as technology is

defined as merely machinic-as wholly dependant on Dasein for its being-

it remains purely instrumental and (always potentially) subject to human

control.

The significance of this paradox cannot be emphasized enough, for it

demonstrates the enduring sway exercised by Heidegger's early reduction of

technology to the figure of the machine. Far from marking a break with fun-

112 * Embodying Technesis

damental ontology, the later Heidegger's famous division of technology is in

fact thoroughly dependent on his early, seldom discussed instrumental

definition of the machine.13 In a lecture course of 1929-30, The Fundamen-

tal Principles of Phenomenology, Heidegger explicitly likens machine tech-

nologies to tools: "The machine is a tool [Zeug] and as such is 'serviceable

for' [dienlich zu] . . ." (Heidegger 1981, 315). The type of being accorded

machines-Dienlichkeit, or "serviceability"-squares perfectly with the

account of Zuhandenheit from Being and Time; like the hammer, with

which we engage first and for the most part in a practical mode, the machine

is a use object and becomes the explicit theme of theoretical discourse only

when it breaks down. In accord with this homology, we can thus conclude

that Heidegger's early determination of the machine respects the founda-

tional privilege of Dasein; like all tools, the machine requires a "manufac-

turing by men" (Erzeugnis von Menschen) and, more importantly, is depen-

dant for its very existence on the activity of a questioning Being: ". . . the

manufacture of tools," Heidegger says unequivocally, "is only possible on

the basis of what we call Weltbildung" (313).

In assimilating the machine to the tool, Heidegger effectively expands the

sway of the restriction Being and Time placed on our assessment of tech-

nology's impact; like the prototypical tool (the hammer), the machine can

only be made thematically available to us as Vorhandenheit. Through this

assimilation, Heidegger effectively pigeonholes the machine as an instru-

mentalist mode of revealing that owes its existence to the constitutive con-

cern of Dasein or the world-disclosing power of language. Moreover, the

reduction of machine to tool lies behind Heidegger's later splitting of tech-

nology into essential (linguistic) and nonessential (nonlinguistic) dimen-

sions; by generating a category for what he later comes to call the "merely

technical" (das Technische), this assimilation of machine to tool effectively

serves as the foil against which the essential status of technology as techne

can emerge (1977b).

Indeed, this assimilation itself ultimately underwrites the central motif of

Heidegger's questioning after technology: the much debated purity of

techne, the essence of technology. Heidegger models his machine reduction

of technology on the assimilation of machine to tool; like any tool, the

machine is constituted by the passage from Zuhandenheit to Vorhanden-

heit. With this restriction of technology to the figure of the machine, he ties

technology's efficacy to the world-disclosing activity of Dasein or language,

thereby purchasing, as it were, the right to domesticate the radical material

exteriority of technology. The priority Heidegger places on ontology thus

Questioning the Machine Basis of Techne * 113

allows him to enact a sweeping two-part, theoretical metalepsis: only after

violently reducing the ontic priority of technology is he able to establish that

language furnishes the ground for whatever relationship we have with tech-

nology; yet once he imposes this reduction, ontic technology is accorded a

status only through the thus secured ontological standpoint, effectively

insuring that it can only have the derivative status he grants it. As an instru-

mental machine, technology is made to depend for its very existence on the

"world-forming" (weltbildend) power of an agent of thought (1981). And

since thought hereby attains the status of efficient cause, Heidegger's doubly

reductive move effectively installs representation in the place of production

and description in the place of the real.

Aristotle and to automaton

The very same metaleptic strategy informs Heidegger's rereading of Aristo-

tle's doctrine of causality in "The Question concerning Technology."

According to Heidegger, this doctrine has dominated man's thinking about

causality since Aristotle; in its wake, the essential meaning of cause as "that

to which something else is indebted" [das, was ein anderes verschuldet] has

been covered over by a merely instrumental definition (Heidegger 1977b,

7/1954, 12). To correct this instrumentalist reduction, we must ask after the

meaning of the term cause itself, with an eye to discovering what Heidegger

calls the "unifiedly determined" causal character of the four causes, that

which allows them to "belong together" (7/12). Heidegger finds this deeper

meaning in the hermeneutic function he substitutes for Aristotle's efficient

cause.

Finally there is a fourth participant in the responsibility for the finished

sacrificial vessel's lying before us ready for use, i.e., the silversmith-but not

at all because he, in working, brings about the finished sacrificial chalice as if

it were the effect of a making; the silversmith is not a causa efficiens. The

Aristotelian doctrine neither knows the cause that is named by this term nor

uses a Greek word that would correspond to it. The silversmith considers

carefully and gathers together the three aforementioned ways of being

responsible and indebted. To consider carefully [iberlegen] is in Greek leg-

ein, logos. Legein is rooted in apophainesthai, to bring forward into appear-

ance. The silversmith is co-responsible as that from whence the sacrificial ves-

sel's bringing forth and resting-in-self take and retain their first departure.

The three previously mentioned ways of being responsible [formal, material,

114 * Embodying Technesis

final causes] owe thanks to the pondering of the silversmith for the "that"

and the "how" of this coming into appearance and into play for the produc-

tion of the sacrificial vessel. (8/13)

In the context of my argument, this allegedly fundamental philosophical

intervention underwrites what is in effect a mere reversal. Because it leaves

intact the broader foundation of Aristotle's doctrine-the purely instrumen-

tal determination of (ontic) technology-Heidegger's ontologizing of

efficient causality does nothing to surmount Aristotle's restricted view of it

as a supplement to physis. In both cases, something that has causal force

outside of any secured hermeneutic space is metaleptically translated into a

mere derivative effect of a constitutive act of thought.

The parallel with Aristotle helps to contextualize what is at stake in Hei-

degger's (failed) effort to capture ontic technology within an onto-

hermeneutic frame of reference. Just as so-called automatic events refuse the

subordination Aristotle submits them to, industrial and electronic technolo-

gies exceed the space of the epoche Heidegger imposes on them. Yet since

the materiality at stake in these latter is active or productive at the level of

the real, they operate a revenge of the real that literally explodes the prior-

ity Heidegger lends ontology. This revenge takes place as a kind of

autonomous deconstruction

that puts into practice something like

Emmanuel Levinas's (still essentially theoretical) critique of fundamental

ontology for "subordinat[ing] the relation with someone who is a being (the

ethical relation) to a relation with the Being of being which, because it is

impersonal, permits the capture, the domination of being (in a theoretical

relation [une relation de savoir])" (Levinas 1971, 36). Effectuated in this

way Levinas's critique calls on us to recognize the practical or ethical imma-

nence of contemporary technology within the real. Indeed, the resulting

revenge of the real operates a mundane equivalent of what arms-race spe-

cialists call "technology creep"-"the uncontrollable surging ahead of

invention [or simply of technical mediation] past all attempts to predict it or

legislate it" (Brand 1987, 19). Such a revenge perfectly instantiates the cat-

egory of "technological drift" that political philosopher Langdon Winner

coins to describe such unintended consequences of technological innova-

tion. More precisely, the revenge of the technological real instantiates Win-

ner's twofold notion of technological drift as a designation for the "preg-

nant possibilities" accompanying new technologies in the early phases of

their dissemination as well as the particular autonomy of technology, the

"life of its own" that any given technology possesses "as it finds its way into

the complex sphere of social practice" (Winner 1977, 92-93).

Questioning the Machine Basis of Techne * 115

Production and Poiesis

In "The Question concerning Technology," we find another, more sophisti-

cated version of this same metaleptic reduction, one that foregrounds Hei-

degger's paradigmatic identification of technology (techne) with poiesis:

"Technology is a way of revealing.... Techne belongs to bringing-forth, to

poiesis; it is something poietic" (Heidegger 1977b, 13/1954, 16). By explic-

itly identifying production with the Greek notion of poiesis, Heidegger

effectively covers over the reduction of ontic technology that renders plausi-

ble his ontological approach to technology: once installed as the category

for thinking technology, poiesis limits the domain of what counts as tech-

nology to what can be constituted through onto-hermeneutics, whether an

onto-hermeneutics of Dasein (early Heidegger) or of language itself (late

Heidegger). In this sense, the identification of production with poiesis is not

fundamental, as Heidegger claims, but rather, like the more general priority

of ontology, thoroughly dependent on a prior reduction of ontic technology.

The immediate motive for Heidegger's identification of technological

production with poiesis stems, as one recent commentator suggests, from

his understanding of Greek metaphysics: "The Greek founders of meta-

physics defined the being of entities in a proto-technological way. For them,

'to be' meant 'to be produced.' Hence, according to Heidegger, the history

of metaphysics became the history of the unfolding of productionist meta-

physics" (Zimmerman 1990, xv). Insofar as he concurs with Plato in

defining poiesis as the bringing-forth of "what passes over and goes forward

into presencing from that which is not presencing" (Symposium 205b; Hei-

degger's translation [1977b, 10/1954, 13]), Heidegger contributes to the

deep hold that Greek poietic ontology exercises over Western metaphysics.

Indeed, precisely this Heideggerian appropriation of the term productionist

as a translation for poiesis informs the modern repression of productive

materiality: in its wake, production is simply narrowed to fit within the poi-

etic model. Faced with this reduction, we must insist on a fundamental dif-

ference between Greek and modern technology. Whereas poiesis could

coherently be applied to the forms of production known to the Greeks

("handcraft manufacture," "artistic and poetical bringing into appearance

and concrete imagery," and physis [1977b, 10/1954, 13]), it simply cannot

be extended to cover the category of modern production. By claiming that

"[t]he possibility of all productive manufacturing lies in revealing," Heideg-

ger violently restricts the scope of production to a model utterly incapable

of accounting for (a large share of) the impact of modern and postmodern

technology (1977b, 12/1954, 15). Moreover, Heidegger's attempt to suture

116 * Embodying Technesis

the gap separating ancient and modern ontology by determining production

as poiesis appears to compromise his crucial claim regarding the fundamen-

tal singularity of modern technology.

As is so often the case with Heidegger, this apparent contradiction points

to a deeper unity that invokes the seemingly all-powerful figure of the onto-

logical difference: ancient and modern technologies are ontically distinct

even though they share a common (ontological) essence. Consider, for

example, the important passage where Heidegger connects the enframing

[das Gestell], his term for modern technology's hold on Being, with poiesis.

The word stellen [to set upon] in the name Ge-stell [enframing] not only

means challenging. At the same time it should preserve the suggestion of

another Stellen from which it stems, namely, that producing and presenting

[Her- und Dar-stellen] which, in the sense of poiesis, lets what presences

come forth into unconcealment. This producing that brings forth-e.g., the

erecting of a statue in the temple precinct-and the challenging ordering now

under consideration are indeed fundamentally different [grundverschieden],

and yet they remain related in their essence [im Wesen verwandt]. Both are

ways of revealing, of aletheia. (1977b, 21/1954, 24)

Despite an allegedly fundamental difference, challenging-forth and bring-

ing-forth-into-concealment are, Heidegger seems to be saying, at a deeper

(i.e., ontological) level, effectively the same.

What is the sense of this equivocation? How can modern technology be

simultaneously non-poietic and yet ultimately a mode of poiesis? How, fur-

thermore, can we reconcile this claim with Heidegger's earlier articulated

commitment to the view that modern technology "does not unfold into a

bringing-forth in the sense of poiesis" (14/18)? Is this just carelessness on

Heidegger's part, or can we read in it the traces of a deeper, structural

conflict-of a prior commitment to a model of technology wholly incapable

of accounting for the alleged singularity of modern technology?

To address these questions, we must explore the notion of Herausfordern

(challenging-forth) that Heidegger introduces to characterize the mandate

behind modern technology, the "stockpiling" (Lagern) or placing "on call"

(zur Stelle) of energy as the "standing-reserve" (Bestand). Herausfordern

characterizes what I shall call the storage model of technology, a model

whose essential feature is the bending of natural force to unnatural (i.e.,

non-poietic) ends.

The revealing that rules in modern technology is a challenging [Heraus-

fordern], which puts to nature the unreasonable demand that it supply

energy that can be extracted and stored as such. But does this not hold true

for the old windmill as well? No. . . . [T]he windmill does not unlock

Questioning the Machine Basis of Techne * 117

[erschliesst] energy from the air currents [Energien der Luftstromung] in

order to store it [umrn sie zu speichern]. In contrast, a tract of land is chal-

lenged into the putting out of coal and ore. The earth now reveals itself as a

coal mining district, the soil as a mineral deposit. The field that the peasant

formerly cultivated and set in order [bestellte] appears differently than it did

when to set in order still meant to take care of and to maintain. The work of

the peasant does not challenge the soil of the field. In the sowing of the grain

it places the seed in the keeping of the forces of growth [Wachstumkrdiften]

and watches over its increase. But meanwhile even the cultivation of the field

has come under the grip of another kind of setting-in-order, which sets upon

[stellt] nature. It sets upon it in the sense of challenging it. Agriculture is now

the mechanized food industry. Air is now set upon to yield nitrogen, the earth

to yield ore, ore to yield uranium . . . ; uranium is set upon to yield atomic

energy... (14-15/18-19)

In the very act of instituting a fundamental distinction between the two

technological modes of storage and translation, this passage inscribes an

essential duplicity into the key notion of Heidegger's theory of technology:

Herausfordern is made to designate both a mode of production unique to

modernity and a mode of revealing like any other. In so doing, Heidegger

perpetuates and in fact greatly expands the sway of his early subordination

of technology (as Zuhandenheit) to the world-disclosing power of Dasein:

he sacrifices his claim regarding the difference of modern technology in

order to champion an allegedly more basic ontological unity of production

as such. With this "choice," Heidegger effectively exposes the instrumental-

ist basis of his interest in technology: for him, technology is nothing more

than a stepping-stone toward a discussion of humanity's peculiar ontologi-

cal predicament in the modern age, a predicament that-Heidegger takes

great pains to stress-is in no way essentially technological.

As we might expect, however, Heidegger is able to downplay the para-

dox that ensues from the duplicity of Herausfordern. By playing his onto-

logical trump card once again, he introduces a covertly operating distinction

between two basic registers of poiesis: (1) poiesis as a description of pro-

duction-the production of presencing-as such and (2) poiesis as a nar-

rower category of production in harmony with the presencing of physis.

This key distinction allows Heidegger to maintain the ontic singularity of

modern technology without abandoning

his primordial ontological

identification of production and poiesis. Viewed against the narrow register

of poiesis, Herausfordern presents a radically new mode of production; cir-

cumscribed by the broader register of poiesis, by contrast, it shows itself to

possess a fundamental kinship with Hervorbringen, since both are, essen-

tially, modes of revealing.

118 * Embodying Technesis

By introducing this distinction, Heidegger effectively embraces technesis

as the enabling strategy for his mature meditation on technology: whether it

accords with physis or not, technology (as an ontological modality of

physis) always essentially involves a production of presencing. Yet far from

solving the paradox underlying "The Question Concerning Technology"-

the paradox of Herausfordern's duplicity-Heidegger's recourse to the priv-

ilege of ontology effectively suspends it. By reinstalling the ontological dif-

ference, Heidegger is able to focalize his account of modern technology

exclusively on its role in the presencing constitutive of truth. From this per-

spective, not surprisingly, technology can only be given a negative determi-

nation, as a degradation of a former, more authentic relationship to Being:

Herausfordern only attains its status as a form of poiesis in the broader

sense (as a mode of revealing) by constituting a degradation of poiesis in the

narrower sense (as a mode of presentation compatible with physis). With

this move, Heidegger subtly shifts his focus: far from exploring the being of

modern technology, he concentrates exclusively on the ways in which it cov-

ers over whatever possibility we might have of developing an authentic rela-

tionship with the essence of technology qua the modern stamping of Being,

or in other words, with truth in its modern showing.14 As long as it com-

prises a mode of poiesis or the revealing of Being, modern technology, in

other words, can be distinguished solely through its negativity-the way it

obscures the meaning of Being.

Technology and Language

Heidegger's effort to enframe modern technology as an obstacle preventing

us from authentically experiencing Being sends him back to the account of

language he originally developed in Being and Time. As a degradation of

poiesis, Herausfordern plays a role formally identical to the one played by

Aussage (assertion), the inauthentic degradation of Auslegung (interpreta-

tion), within his onto-hermeneutic theory of reference. By transforming

Herausfordern into a degraded form of an authentically onto-hermeneutical

relation to Being, Heidegger restricts the scope of its effects to the horizon

of thought in a way that insures the efficacy, in principle, of his poietic

strategies (see for example, his discussion of the "saving power" of language

[1977b, 28, 32-35/1954, 31, 35-38]) for overcoming the threat posed by

modern technology. Following this reductive transformation, whatever

strategy we take to grapple with technology involves an essential internal

modification of our (ontological) self-understanding that is unrelated to any

Questioning the Machine Basis of Techne * 119

potential change in our mundane, practical comportment toward technol-

ogy. Just as Dasein only reaches a more primordial understanding of its

Being-in-the-world by surmounting its superficial absorption in Aussage, so

too must human beings in the technological epoch see beyond their chal-

lenging-forth of nature (Herausfordern) in order to experience the revealing

of Being. By attesting to the enduring sway of a hermeneutic (or logocentric)

notion of truth, this homology foregrounds the central function that the

(correlative) machine reduction of technology continues to play following

the period of fundamental ontology.

Indeed, this homology allows us to discern the extensive debt Heidegger's

mature reflection on technology owes to fundamental ontology. The rela-

tionship of Auslegung and Aussage furnishes a model of ontological unity

for Heidegger's later assimilation of Herausfordern to Hervorbringen.s5 In

paragraph 34 of Being and Time, Heidegger explains how the two struc-

tures of the understanding are in fact rooted in a single ontological ground,

what he calls Rede (discourse), and how, furthermore, they can be viewed as

two modifications-one authentic, the other inauthentic-of this structure.

As the most fundamental articulation of Dasein's circumspective under-

standing, Rede, Heidegger contends, "underlies [liegt . . . zugrunde] both

interpretation and assertion" (1977b, 204/1954, 161).

By determining Herausfordern as, effectively, a degradation of Hervor-

bringen in the same sense that Aussage is a degradation of Auslegung, Hei-

degger is able to map out the radical difference of modern technology (it is

non-poietic in the restricted sense) without abandoning the privilege of

ontology. While Herausfordern perverts the revealing of nature by stockpil-

ing nature's resources just for the sake of stockpiling, at a deeper level it

continues to serve the poietic function of disclosing the world, if only in a

fallen mode (one that parallels Aussage) in which the truth of Being is cov-

ered over. When Heidegger goes on to distinguish poetic from technological

modes of revealing by applying the test of authenticity, we encounter a par-

ticularly striking example of this debt to fundamental ontology.

The hydroelectric plant. . . sets the Rhine to supplying its hydraulic pressure,

which then sets the turbines turning. This turning sets those machines in

motion whose thrust sets going the electric current for which the long-dis-

tance power station and its network of cables are set up to dispatch electric-

ity. In the context of the interlocking processes pertaining to the orderly dis-

position of electrical energy, even the Rhine itself appears as something at

our command. The hydroelectric plant is not built into the Rhine River as

was the old wooden bridge that joined bank with bank for hundreds of years.

What the river is now, namely, a water power supplier, derives from out of

120 * Embodying Technesis

the essence of the power station. In order that we may even remotely consider

the monstrousness [das Ungeheuere] that reigns here, let us ponder for a

moment the contrast that speaks out of the two titles, "The Rhine" as

dammed up into the power works [verbaut in das Kraftwerk], and "The

Rhine" as uttered out [gesagt aus] of the art work, in Holderlin's hymn of

that name. (13/16)

What makes the power station monstrous is not its explicit destruction of

nature but the way it corrupts the mode of revealing characteristic of poetry

(poiesis). In the place of a nature that is discursively disclosed, modern tech-

nology substitutes a purely instrumental model of nature, the significance of

which is found not, oddly enough, in its ontic effects but rather in its

poverty as an ontological mode of revealing Being.

If modern technology is, as Heidegger claims, "something completely dif-

ferent and therefore new," something that orders nature according to an

instrumental, external telos, this difference-and whatever danger of auton-

omy it might pose-is quickly subsumed by its more profound kinship with

Hervorbringen (5/8). As a producer of standing-reserve, ontic technology is

reduced to the status of pure instrumentality; it becomes a type of unau-

tonomous inner-worldly entity that, like any other such entity, discovers its

possibility-and also its limits-thanks entirely to the ontological mode of

revealing Heidegger calls Herausfordern: "Revealed, [the airplane] stands

on the taxi strip only as standing-reserve, inasmuch as it is ordered to ensure

the possibility of transportation . . . Seen in terms of the standing-reserve,

the machine is completely unautonomous [schlechthin unselbststaendig],

for it has its standing [ihren Stand] only from the ordering of the orderable"

(17/20-21). In a manner no less reductive than that employed in the 1928

instrumental definition, the machine is here made to depend for its very exis-

tence on the operation of an ontological clearing, what Heidegger calls "the

ordering of the orderable." Restricted in this way, ontic machines are pro-

hibited from having any significant (i.e., ontological) impact whatsoever.

If this restriction allows Heidegger to foreground the ontological

significance of modern technology, it also sets the stage for a redemptive

story that exactly parallels Being and Time's account of Dasein's quest for

authenticity-and that must fail for the same reasons. By modeling his the-

ory of modern technology on his earlier model of language, Heidegger

builds into it the possibility for a return to an authentic relationship with

Being. Just as Dasein had merely to answer the call of conscience, human

beings in the technological epoch, while no longer possessing control over

unconcealment itself, need only listen to the call of the poet, a call that

testifies to the "saving power" within the essence of technology (1977b, 34).

Questioning the Machine Basis of Techne * 121

Once again, however, what guarantees this possibility is nothing other

than the privilege Heidegger lends ontology, the very issue that technology

puts into question. Like Dasein, "modern man" is a questioning Being and

is thus able to grasp the implicit "as-structure" underlying the technological

revealing of Being.16 Moreover, like Dasein, human beings in the techno-

logical epoch possess a certain autonomy with respect to the fallen mode of

their everyday existence, a particular facility for ontological self-transfor-

mation: ". . . precisely because man is challenged more originally than are

the energies of nature, i.e., into the process of ordering, he is never trans-

formed into mere standing-reserve. Since man drives technology forward, he

takes part in ordering as a way of revealing" (18/22). For Heidegger, such a

privilege insures nothing less than the categorical triumph of the human

over any merely external interference with the call of Being. By harmonizing

ontic technology with his account of language, Heidegger submits it to the

reduction I call technesis and thereby purchases the right to discount the

very real possibility that ontic technology might interrupt the call of Being

in a far more disruptive and recalcitrant way. No differently than in Being

and Time, Heidegger dogmatically turns a blind eye to the admittedly dis-

turbing possibility that our absorption in technology might simply drown

out or contaminate Being's call in a way that effectively compromises any

hope for (ontological) redemption.

Chapter 5

The Mechanics of Deconstruction:

Derrida on de Man, or Poststructuralism

in an Age of Cultural Studies

Having presented the paradigm case of the twentieth-century machine

reduction of technology, I shall now begin to unpack the philosophical

underpinnings of the contemporary technocultural turn by focusing on one

exemplary appropriation of Heidegger. In "Acts," the third of his Memoires

for Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida proposes a generalization of deconstruc-

tion to bring it into continuity with the technologized lifeworld. By con-

fronting de Man with Heidegger, Derrida emphasizes deconstruction's

"constitutive complicity" with Heidegger's meditation on technology-its

need to "question the dissociation between thought and technology" (Der-

rida 1986, 107). This critical imperative informs Derrida's qualified appro-

priation of de Man's division of memory into two basic forms-what de

Man, following Hegel, calls Erinnerung (remembrance) and Geddichtnis

(the faculty of memory proper). Playing de Man against Heidegger, Derrida

is able to articulate a "disjunctive juncture" that occurs between these two

forms of memory and that, he feels, can underwrite a productive general-

ization of deconstruction-an extension of differance to objects other than

philosophical and literary texts, to what he calls the "totality of our relation

to the world" (Derrida 1990, 107).

More so than any other of his numerous texts, "Acts" spells out the cen-

tral role that Heidegger plays in Derrida's effort to open deconstruction to

technology. By recasting Heidegger's famous dissociation of technology

from techne onto de Man's opposition of Erinnerung and Geddichtnis, Der-

rida would seem to be engaged in an effort to broaden the question of tech-

nology beyond its narrow Heideggerian framework. Yet to the extent that it

simply translates the issue of technology into the (narrower) problematic of

memory, this critical gesture, as we shall see, only furthers the domestica-

tion of technology's material exteriority into the horizon of thought. Far

from breaking with Heidegger's foundationalism, Derrida effectively

The Mechanics of Deconstruction * 123

repeats the very same metalepsis that was responsible for generating the

ontological difference; like his mentor, Derrida purchases the right to sub-

ordinate technology to thought through a previously enacted and occulted

reduction of technology's robust materiality: recast as artificial memory, or

Geddichtnis, technology is rendered essentially linguistic and remains

securely rooted in the legacy of Aristotle's techne.

Though it certainly does begin to rethink Heidegger's purity in the light

of our contemporary media age, Derrida's strategy in "Acts" thus fails to

take a sufficient distance from Heidegger's manner of thinking about tech-

nology. As long as Derrida retains the figure of thought (no matter how

transformed by deconstruction) as the tribunal for evaluating technology,

he cannot truly break with the poietic foundation of the Heideggerian pro-

ject. His argument, accordingly, is important for my purposes less for its

own conclusions than for its broader aim of opening deconstruction to cul-

tural critique and for the extensive, if largely unrecognized, influence it has

exercised (and continues to exercise) on contemporary cultural studies of

media and technology. By updating Heidegger's machine reduction, Derrid-

ian technesis furnishes the prototype for the reduction currently enjoying

hegemonic sway within contemporary cultural criticism: the reduction of

technology to representational technology. Whether acknowledged or not,

the Derridean motif of the closure of representation serves as the philo-

sophical basis for current forms of cultural studies that privilege representa-

tion as the raw material for analysis. Since it localizes the experiential

impact of the material domain within the closure of representation, Der-

rida's radicalization of Heidegger furnishes something like a general theo-

retical grounding for the culturalist epoche itself.1

By exposing the dependence of Derrida's representationalist ontology on

the prior reduction of technology, the argument I develop in this chapter

will resituate the motif of incompatibility-which deconstruction predicates

exclusively of a given text-outside the restricted space governed by the clo-

sure of representation. As a figure for the space between representation and

radical materiality, incompatibility will acquire an altogether new function:

rather than circumscribing the "totality of our relation to the world," as

Derrida puts it, incompatibility will point beyond itself, to that which rep-

resentation cannot capture. Accordingly, my critique of Derrida will urge a

basic reorientation of cultural studies, a shift out of the restricted horizon of

representation and into the robust domain of embodiment.

Toward this end, I shall pursue two interrelated critical engagements. On

the one hand, I will call into question the methodological commitment, on

the part of contemporary cultural critics as much as Derrida himself, to the

124 * Embodying Technesis

closure of representation as the exhaustive horizon for assessing the impact

of contemporary technology. On the other hand, I will counter Derrida's

program for the cultural application of deconstruction by submitting his

reading of de Man to criticism. By demonstrating how Derrida's violent

appropriation of de Man's analysis of textual memory (Geddichtnis) installs

an enabling and yet debilitating double bind at the heart of contemporary

postdeconstructive cultural studies, I shall indict the very move that opens

deconstructive analysis to the cultural domain for effacing what is (poten-

tially) its most significant contribution to the cultural study of technology:

its recognition of the radical exteriority of the material real.

The Priority of Poiesis

In his commentaries on Heidegger, from the early essays in Margins to later

work, such as Geschlecht II, Of Spirit, and Given Time, Derrida criticizes

the alleged purity of techne without questioning the broader Heideggerian

privilege of a poetic witnessing of the "truth" of Being.2 While Derrida's cri-

tique persuasively establishes that the possibility of thinking the essence of

technology is first and foremost a linguistic possibility (and thus that Hei-

degger's desired purity is an impossibility), he nonetheless retains a deep sol-

idarity with the more general Heideggerian fetishizing of language. For Der-

rida no less than for Heidegger, the "truth" of Being (and, in Derrida's case,

the "truth" that Being is not "one") can only be witnessed in language.

Appreciating this particular solidarity is crucial if we are to grasp Der-

rida's deep fidelity to the Heideggerian project as such. While Derrida con-

vincingly shows that all language bears within itself a constitutive technical

contamination (the possibility of iteration) and that a certain "essential"

nonidentity precedes the determination of essence (and founds language

itself), Derrida cannot do away with the alethic framework of Heideggerian

hermeneutics, its division into manifest and latent domains (predication and

apophansis). As a consequence, I suggest, Derrida simply cannot eschew the

subordination of technology to truth that is, as we discovered, such a promi-

nent feature of Heidegger's thought. By privileging the trace as the with-

drawal of truth, Derrida retains the very same priority of ontology for

which Levinas rebukes Heidegger.3 Despite rejecting Heidegger's insistence

on the singularity of Being, Derrida's understanding of differance as the

nonoriginary foundation of discourse lends it an entirely analogous, onto-

genetic function: like Being, it furnishes a nonphenomenal, poetic site that

forms the condition of possibility for the emergence of thought as such.

The Mechanics of Deconstruction * 125

This analogy underwrites a general commitment on the part of Derrida

(and, by implication, those cultural critics who inherit his legacy) to the

basic principle of Heidegger's questioning of technology: the machine

reduction of technology. Since Derrida's conception of the text shares with

Heidegger's privileging of poiesis a common source in Aristotelian ontol-

ogy, the textualism central to poststructuralism and postdeconstructionist

cultural studies can be understood as a variation on Heidegger's (and Aris-

totle's) paradigm reduction of technology. This homology, moreover, holds

up despite the local modifications to which Derrida submits Heidegger's

text. Like other influential French intellectuals from the second half of the

twentieth century, Derrida has made a fundamental contribution toward

rethinking the opposition between nature and culture and has thus compli-

cated the Aristotelian categories in a way unimaginable to Heidegger. Since

nomos (institution, law, culture) becomes thinkable only with the possibil-

ity of writing, Derrida is quite correct to suggest that one cannot speak of

physis as the opposite of culture: "The very idea of institution-hence of the

arbitrariness of the sign-is unthinkable before the possibility of writing

and outside of its horizon. Quite simply, that is, outside of the horizon itself,

outside the world as space of inscription, as the opening to the emission and

to the spatial distribution of signs, to the regulated play of their differences,

even if they are 'phonic"'" (Derrida 1974, 44). Yet while such a move suc-

cessfully reverses Heidegger's (and Aristotle's) hierarchical schema by

demonstrating the dependence of nature on culture, it does not actually

overthrow the nouocentrism of Greek metaphysics. In fact, far from coun-

tering the collapse of exteriority at stake in Aristotle's own assimilation of

techne to physis, Derrida's assimilation of physis to techne effectively raises

it to a new level: by taking the being of what is and making it thoroughly

dependent on the metaphysics of the text (and thus on the operation of

techne), Derrida simply effaces the very category of radical exteriority and,

along with it, all traces of materiality outside the space governed by textu-

ality.

Whereas Derrida's encounter with Heidegger comprises the proximate

source of grammatology, his (earlier) encounter with Husserl represents the

deep source of his unwavering fidelity to Aristotelian ontology. Derrida's

conception of the text and the textualization of the world is ultimately noth-

ing but a grammatological transformation of the Husserlian noema (the

thought content that is inseparable from a noetic act of thinking).4 Schemat-

ically put, Derrida substitutes differance for the transcendental ego; in place

of the noetic-noematic correspondence, he installs the relation between

thought and writing. It is, of course, on the basis of this arche-deconstruc-

126 * Embodying Technesis

tion that Derrida can think of the world as text and delineate the "death of

the book" in Of Grammatology; on the one hand, it renders obsolete tradi-

tional boundaries separating private thinking from exteriority, and on the

other, it introduces writing as exteriority (and exteriority as writing) into

the most intimate interiority: "The system of writing in general is not exte-

rior to the system of language in general, unless it is granted that the divi-

sion between exterior and interior passes through the interior of the interior

or the exterior of the exterior, to the point where the immanence of lan-

guage is essentially exposed to the intervention of forces that are apparently

alien to its system" (Derrida 1974, 43; emphasis added). If we attend to the

equivocation in the final sentence of this passage, we see that the interven-

tion of "apparently alien" forces into the immanence of language signals not

the intervention of any material outside but only the upsurge of the relative

exteriority of writing within the interiority of language. In no way has the

"system of language in general" been broached.

On this point, Derrida speaks more frankly earlier on in Of Grammatol-

ogy when he defines exteriority as "the exteriority of meaning" (13; empha-

sis added). Here Derrida again marks his debt to Husserl by announcing his

intention to work within the general field of Husserlian phenomenology, a

field constituted through the reduction of experience to the experience of

meaning. More than any other aspect of grammatology, this phenomeno-

logical commitment explains Derrida's restriction of technology to the

domain of memory; only by fetishizing the philosopheme of memory can

Derrida replace the disjunction between interiority and radical material

exteriority with a division between a relative interiority (thought as writing)

and a relative exteriority (the technology of writing).

If the trace, arche-phenomenon of "memory," which must be thought before

the opposition of nature and culture, animality and humanity, etc., belongs

to the very movement of signification, then signification is a priori written,

whether inscribed or not, in one form or another, in a "sensible" and "spa-

tial" element that is called "exterior." Arche-writing, at first the possibility of

the spoken word, then of the "graphie" in the narrow sense, the birthplace of

"usurpation," denounced from Plato to Saussure, this trace is the opening of

the first exteriority in general, the enigmatic relationship of the living to its

other and of an inside to an outside.... (70)

With this allegiance to memory, it would seem that we have come full circle

back to the Heideggerian equation of Being with the meaning of Being and

also, therefore, to the Aristotelian privilege of nature and thought over the

automatic. For, we must ask, does this restriction of exteriority (including

the exteriority of matter itself) not already decide the problem of technology

The Mechanics of Deconstruction * 127

in advance and according to a dogmatic philosophical program? And if so,

does it not thereby compromise from the start the radicality of Derrida's

grammatological circumscription of cybernetics-both by instituting in gen-

eral a nouocentric origin and by preserving all of those metaphysical con-

cepts (soul, life, value, choice, and especially memory) that, as Derrida puts

it, serve "to separate the machine from man" (9)?

Indeed, only such a prior dogmatic reduction of technology can, I sug-

gest, explain Derrida's practice of identifying text with machine. Within the

pseudo-exteriority opened by the movement of the arche-trace, technology

can be given no other determination than that of text-machine.

Within the closure . . . it is necessary to surround the critical concepts with a

careful and thorough discourse-to mark the conditions, the medium, and

the limits of their effectiveness and to designate rigorously their intimate rela-

tionship to the machine whose deconstruction they permit . . . (14; empha-

sis added)

Within a certain historical epoch, there is a profound unity among infinitist

theology, logocentrism, and a certain technicism. The originary and pre- or

meta-phonetic writing that I am attempting to conceive of here leads to noth-

ing less that an "overtaking" of speech by the machine. (79; emphasis added)

... it is very difficult to avoid the mechanist, technicist, and teleological lan-

guage at the very moment when it is precisely a question of retrieving the ori-

gin and the possibility of movement, of the machine, of the techne, of orien-

tation in general. (84-85; emphasis added)

Far from a mere consequence of the nature of technology, this literally ubiq-

uitous identification of text with machine itself constrains technology to fit

it into the horizon of memorial thought. By domesticating technology into a

supplement to thought, Derrida repeats the enabling move of Heidegger's

analysis: the reduction of technology's material effects into a question for a

cognizing human agent, or Dasein.

With his radicalization of phenomenology and the problematic of repre-

sentation, Derrida nonetheless appears to bring metaphysics to a decisive

point of rupture: mandated to eclipse nothing less than the privilege of

thought itself, the cybernetic program puts into question all hitherto

unquestioned (and unquestionable) metaphysical concepts, including the

very institution of the trace. Yet as Derrida's own practice shows, this point

of rupture is one that he cannot cross, if only because, for him, thought

remains, and cannot but remain, the (occulted and/or fantasized) origin

the origin of that first exteriority from which substance itself follows, as

both thought and extension.

128 * Embodying Technesis

The "Disjunctive Juncture": Generalizing de Man

To demonstrate in concrete terms how the fundamental limitations of Der-

rida's methodology compromise his effort to liberate technology from its

Heideggerian reduction, I shall turn to his reading of de Man. Just as (Der-

ridean) deconstruction can only reveal spaces of relative exteriority within a

parasited text, it can only model technology on a textual function-in other

words, on the text as machine. The functional analogy linking text with

machine begins to function ontologically-and hence reductively-from the

moment when deconstruction generalizes its claims to technology as such,

rather than restricting them to technology in its textual form.

My focus on a particular text (one itself concerned with a particular text)

will allow us to address the ontological violence of deconstruction's

embrace of technology within the confines of its reading practice. By gener-

alizing the de Manian distinction between Erinnerung and Geddichtnis

beyond the scope of Hegel's system, Derrida seeks to broaden the role of the

text-to articulate nothing less than a textual account of the constitution of

the world. On such an account, materiality is rendered essentially textual: it

is incorporated into thought as relative exteriority. Thus, far from truly

opening onto the outside, such an incorporation domesticates worldly exte-

riority into a textualist frame of reference. Moreover, since it is the result of

an important structural commitment of deconstruction, such a domestica-

tion simply cannot be avoided: guided by its need to parasite a prestructured

and structurally unified text, deconstruction can only think what gives itself

as text.

Despite the limitations it highlights, such an evaluation is entirely consis-

tent with the various descriptions Derrida has given of deconstructive read-

ing. In Positions, for example, Derrida cites, as justification for his reticence

to address Marx's thought, deconstruction's need for a "host text."

In what I have begun to propose, I attempt to take into account certain recent

acquisitions or determined incompletions in the order of philosophy, semiol-

ogy, linguistics, psychoanalysis, etc . . . Now, we cannot consider Marx's,

Engels' or Lenin's texts as completely finished elaborations that are simply to

be "applied" to the current situation. In saying this, I am not advocating any-

thing contrary to "Marxism." . . . These texts are not to be read according to

a hermeneutical or exegetical method which would seek out a finished

signified beneath a textual surface. Reading is transformational . . . But this

transformation cannot be executed however one wishes. It requires protocols

of reading. Why not say it bluntly: I have not yet found any that satisfy me.

(Derrida 1981, 63)5

The Mechanics of Deconstruction * 129

In "Acts," this same requirement for reading protocols compels Derrida to

adopt the very machine reduction of technology that I criticized in Heideg-

ger. To provide a field for his critical inversion of Heideggerian purity, Der-

rida must provisionally embrace the structure of Heidegger's text and, with

it, the governing onto-phenomenological reduction explored earlier. Focus-

ing on the basis of this problematic commitment, "Acts," we can question

Derrida's hyperbolic claims concerning the affirmative "re-marking" of the

concept of matter (and, by extension, of techne)-the re-marking that is

supposed to liberate matter from its metaphysical (textual) closure. If the

marking of the concept "in the deconstructing text" does indeed function as

a "positively displacing, transgressive deconstruction"-a second re-mark-

ing "outside the oppositions in which it has been caught"-it can do

absolutely nothing to broach the onto-phenomenological reduction, the

bracketing of the radical exteriority of matter, that gives its possibility in the

first place (Derrida 1981, 65-66).6 Within the deconstructed-deconstructing

space of thought, the concept of matter undergoes a drastic narrowing: it

plays the purely abstract role of that which resists idealization.

While we earlier had occasion to observe Derrida's invocation of the

machine as a way of modeling the structure of the text, here we confront

something far more radical: the wholesale reduction of machine to text. To

contaminate Heidegger's purity, Derrida is compelled to localize the opera-

tion of technology exclusively within the domain of the text. Technology is

thus restricted to the "machinic," the "programmatic," and, ultimately, the

"grammatical" aspect of thinking (the mechanism of language). The result

is a curious inversion of Heidegger's position, one that contaminates the

essence of technology only to compromise further the possibility of main-

taining the radical material exteriority of technology. While Heidegger

reduces technology to the machine to determine it as the nonessential out-

side of thought, Derrida identifies machine and text in a way that obscures

the very possibility of distinguishing between technology and thought. The

contamination of thought by technology simply forecloses all consideration

of technology beyond its impact on thought, outside of the category of the

grammatical. Reduced to a machinic function within the operation of the

deconstructed-deconstructing text, technology is thus effectively dematerial-

ized.

Ultimately, then, what Derrida presents as a radical departure from Hei-

degger turns out to be no more than a local inversion that leaves untouched

the broadly Heideggerian framing of technology. Derrida's generalization of

de Man functions less to break with Heidegger than to harmonize the nar-

rowly literary practice of deconstructive reading with the onto-phenomeno-

130 * Embodying Technesis

logical approach to worldly materiality. In the end, Derrida's textual reduc-

tion of technology comprises not so much a critique of Heidegger's ontology

as a fine-tuning of the latter's machine reduction.

From Hegel to Heidegger

To assess the constraints Derrida's methodology places on his concrete

reading practice and assumptions about culture, let us explore his effort to

pose the question concerning technology through a specific deconstructive

reading-de Man's reading of Hegel's account of memory. By grafting de

Man's reading onto Heidegger's questioning of technology, Derrida

launches a bivalent critique directed simultaneously against Heidegger and

against de Man. On the one hand, Derrida uses de Man's account to intro-

duce the complicity between thought and its material support (writing, tech-

nology, techne, etc.) that serves to undermine Heidegger's alleged purity; on

the other hand, he deploys Heidegger's onto-phenomenological framing of

technology-reinterpreted in textualist terms-to suggest the necessity for a

fundamental refunctionalization of de Man's distinction between interior

and artificial memory (Erinnerung and Geddichtnis, respectively). Through

this double critique, the allegedly pure essence of techne is shown to be con-

taminated, since its presentation-in the technically embodied form of

Geddichtnis-is not simply exterior to it. Furthermore, the intrinsic connec-

tion of language with technology is broadened beyond the narrowly textual

sphere and made to assume the ontological function of world constitution.

Derrida's reading thus marks a certain ambivalence regarding deconstruc-

tion's debts-its complex and simultaneous complicity with and break from

both the Heideggerian questioning of technology and de Manian reading

technique.

Paul de Man's text "resembles," says Derrida, "a double decision," a

decision to "rethink" or think beyond (and against) Heidegger what Hei-

degger himself tried to think, namely, "the totality of our relation to the

world." He continues:

... it in principle gives itself the means not to drive out into the exterior and

inferior dark regions of thought, the immense question of artificial memory

and of the modern modalities of archivation which today affects, according

to a rhythm and with dimensions that have no common measure with those

of the past, the totality of our relation to the world (on this side of or beyond

its anthropological determination): habitat, all languages, writing, "culture,"

art (beyond picture galleries, film libraries, video libraries, record libraries),

The Mechanics of Deconstruction * 131

literature (beyond libraries), all information or informatization (beyond

"memory" data banks), techno-sciences, philosophy (beyond university insti-

tutions) and everything within the transformation which affects all relations

to the future. This prodigious mutation not only heightens the stature, the

quantitative economy of so-called artificial memory, but also its qualitative

structure-and in doing so it obliges us to rethink what relates this artificial

memory to man's so-called psychical and interior memory, to truth, to the

simulacrum and simulation of truth, etc. (1986, 107; emphasis added)

For Derrida, the significance of de Man's reading practice stems from its

method and not from its specific, textually anchored claims: de Man out-

lines a general strategy for thinking about the world as it is given, a strategy

that "in principle" furnishes the possibility of not separating memory as a

faculty of thought from its form in the world, as archivation, writing, tech-

nical mediation. Derrida's generalization thus involves two discrete stages:

(1) a movement outward from the Hegelian text to the text of the world or

textuality as such and (2) a jump from the explicitly textual structures of the

world (e.g., technical archives, etc.) to structures that allegedly break with

the metaphysics of textuality, that "have no common measure with those of

the past."

Despite the appearance it gives of moving beyond the textualist ontology,

however, Derrida's appropriation of de Man retains an extensive commit-

ment to phenomenological reduction. Paradoxical as it sounds, Derrida is

able to develop a coherent account of the passage from the first to the sec-

ond stage only by reimposing the very phenomenological bias de Man

works so hard to undermine: to open itself to world-structures that "have

no common measure with those of the past," deconstruction must rely on

the priority of thinking, precisely that phenomenological commitment most

strenuously under attack in de Manian deconstruction. For Derrida, in

short, only the act of a thinking subject can bridge the gap that distinguishes

contemporary technology from the traditional metaphysical text. His gener-

alization thus functions by substituting an account of the technical

modification of the contemporary text (in its role as surrogate subject) for a

robust analysis of technology itself.7

Viewed in this way, Derrida's attempted generalization of deconstruction

should be understood as imposing a violent reduction on de Man. Rather

than addressing the radical critique of phenomenal thought at work in de

Man's reading of Hegel, Derrida employs de Man's account of memory

solely as a means of revising Heidegger's conception of the purity of techne.

We thus discover a certain phenomenological imperialism underlying Der-

rida's appropriation of de Man. From Derrida's standpoint, even a reading

132 * Embodying Technesis

like de Man's-a reading that thinks through or, more precisely, presents

the impossibility of thinking through the radical disjunction between Erin-

nerung and Geddichtnis-is beholden (to some minimal extent) to the onto-

logical force of thought. Indeed, it is precisely for this reason that Derrida

can submit de Man's reading to a protocol that is irreducibly Heideggerian:

"There is no deconstruction which does not begin by tackling this problem-

atic or by preparing itself to tackle this problematic, and which does not

begin by again calling into question the dissociation between thought and

technology, especially when it has a hierarchical vocation, however secret,

subtle, sublime or denied it may be" (107). By instituting such an impera-

tive, Derrida effectively restricts the scope of de Man's argument to the phe-

nomenological frame of his own program for the cultural deployment of

deconstruction: viewed as a (subordinate) part of the neophenomenological

model of the thinking subject, de Man's radical deconstruction of textual

memory can only function as a local critical modification of the Heidegger-

ian approach.

What underwrites this imperializing appropriation is Derrida's "discov-

ery" of a "certain continuity" between the two disjoined forms of memory.

Perhaps we can measure the stakes of de Manian interpretation. It delineates

a gesture quite different from that of Heidegger by recalling that the relation

of Geddchtnis to technique, artifice, writing, the sign, etc., could not be one

of exteriority or heterogeneity. This amounts to saying that the exteriority or

the division, the dis-junction, is the relation, the essential juncture between

thinking memory and the so-called techno-scientific, indeed literary outside.

... I would say that this gesture is quite different from Heidegger's and that

it gives rise to quite different intonations. .. On the side of deconstruction,

if this can be said, and in its de Manian form, a certain continuity (within the

disjunctive structure) between thinking memory and techno-scientific mem-

ory does not exclude, but, on the contrary, permits a thinking of the essence

of technology, a thinking which it is not within the logic of deconstruction to

renounce. This is why deconstruction, at the very moment when it puts in

question the hierarchical division between thought and technology, is neither

technicist nor technological. (109-10; final emphasis added)

The continuity Derrida distills from de Man's reading allows him to deter-

mine technology on the model of the supplement. Within the space sutured

by the "essential juncture" of thinking memory and the "techno-

scientific/literary outside," technology simply supplements thought with a

material basis without which it could not function. That is why deconstruc-

tion permits, and indeed requires, a (nontechnicist) "thinking of the essence

of technology." By refunctionalizing the "disjunction" between Geddichtnis

The Mechanics of Deconstruction * 133

and Erinnerung in a way that compromises its radicality, Derrida is able to

read it as a local critique of Heidegger, rather than a radical critique of the

onto-phenomenological subject and of the priority of thinking as such.

In the form Derrida here gives it, deconstruction is therefore placed in the

paradoxical position of being more Heideggerian than Heidegger's own

onto-phenomenology: following the "closure of representation," technol-

ogy is made wholly coequivalent with the supplement and thus loses its truly

radical force as a material obstacle to the onto-phenomenological move-

ment of thought, a threat to thinking itself. In this way, Derrida's general-

ization of deconstruction brings to a culmination the linguistic reduction of

technology (technesis) that remained a source of so much ambivalence for

Heidegger. In the end, Derrida's critique establishes the necessity of invok-

ing deconstruction as a means-indeed the sole means-of accomplishing

Heidegger's goal of thinking the essence of technology. Only deconstruc-

tion, Derrida proclaims, has the power to think technology's (impure)

essence.

Accordingly, the "disjunctive juncture" that Derrida attributes to de

Man comprises the fundamental principle of the generalization of decon-

struction necessary for opening deconstruction to the field of culture. By

evaluating de Man's reading only insofar as it "tackles" or "prepares to

tackle" Heidegger's dissociation, Derrida presents it as an exemplary

instance of the operative role deconstruction plays in opening thought to the

world. On this model of disjunctive juncture, deconstruction acquires its

role in cultural critique from its suturing function: the cultural application

Derrida proposes functions by suturing a concrete deconstructive figure (the

heterogeneity of Erinnerung and Geddichtnis) with a phenomenologically

determined horizon or field of application. By modeling the relationship of

thinking to technology on the disjunctive juncture between thought and its

material support, Derrida effectively naturalizes the subordination of tech-

nology to thought in a way that collapses the two discrete stages in his gen-

eralization of de Man's Hegel reading. The ensuing reduction of technology

becomes the precondition that enables the movement from the first stage

(the expansion of the de Manian disjunction from Hegel's text to textuality

as such) to the second stage (the jump from textual structures to technolo-

gies that "have no common measure" with textualized forms of technolog-

ical archivation). Effectively then, Derrida's account of technology in the

cultural field relies on a metalepsis formally analogous to the one that struc-

tures Heidegger's text: technology undergoes an initial textual reduction

that is subsequently effaced through the imposition of a textualist ontology

of differance. Ultimately at stake in Derrida's advocacy for a "certain

134 * Embodying Technesis

continuity" between Erinnerung and Gedichtnis is nothing less than the

possibility of constraining technology to the form of textual supplement-

the very locus of deconstruction's resonance among contemporary techno-

cultural critics.

Allegory as Radical Disjunction: De Man's Resistance

to Heidegger

In appropriating de Man as the source of the disjunctive juncture of tech-

nology with thought, Derrida assumes the ready assimilation of de Man's

account of Gedichtnis into the phenomenological field. Given de Man's

constant opposition of the linguistic and the phenomenal, however, there is

much reason to question such an assumption.8 To do so, let us consider Der-

rida's treatment of de Man-and de Man's reading of Hegel-in more

detail.

In "Sign and Symbol in Hegel's Aesthetics" (1982), de Man ostensibly

seeks to clarify both the determination of beauty as "the sensory appearance

of the idea" and the general symbolic theory of art that it articulates. His

ultimate goal, however, is a critical indictment of all symbolic aesthetics for

failing to recognize the cognitive breakdown implicit in Hegel's theory. Ulti-

mately, this task amounts to demonstrating how the Hegelian system

itself-the dialectical forward progress of thought-requires a material (and

aesthetic) supplement, what de Man (following Hegel) calls "allegory." To

assess the plausibility of Derrida's appropriation, we must then ask whether

his onto-phenomenological account can encompass allegory in the sense de

Man (and Hegel) lend it.

By way of contextualizing this question, let me briefly sketch de Man's

reading of Hegel, beginning with his analysis of the complicity of sign and

subject that Hegel develops in the Encyclopedia. The distinction of sign and

symbol, de Man contends, exactly parallels the distinction between thinking

subject and sensing subject: "Just as the sign refuses to be in the service of

sensory perceptions [as the symbol is] but uses them instead for its own pur-

poses, thought, unlike perception, appropriates the world and literally 'sub-

jects' it to its own powers" (1982, 767). Yet because it derives from the gen-

erality of language, this freedom of the sign and of thought at once threatens

to annihilate the respective moment of origin of both sign and thought. Cit-

ing Hegel's own (in)famous pronouncement that "we cannot say anything

in language that is not general," de Man draws the following conclusion:

"Thus the sign, random and singular at its first position, turns into symbol

The Mechanics of Deconstruction * 135

just as the I, so singular in its independence from anything that is not itself,

becomes in the general thought of logic, the most inclusive, plural, general,

and impersonal of subjects" (768).

In a reading that almost exactly reproduces the "sense-certainty" section

of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, de Man goes on to develop the paradox

of the subject-the fact that the "I" is at once what is most particular to

"me" and what is common to all forms of human being. When sense-cer-

tainty, pointing to itself, says "I am this," it cannot say what it wants to say,

since the very act of calling itself "this" requires that it act as a grammatical

"I"-in other words, as the very antithesis of a particular "this." This initial

paradox of the subject, de Man concludes, poses an "inescapable obstacle"

to the Hegelian system.

Thus, at the very onset of the entire system, in the preliminary consideration

of the science of logic, an inescapable obstacle threatens the entire construc-

tion that follows. The philosophical I is . . . self-effacing in the much more

radical sense that the position of the I, which is the condition for thought,

implies its eradication, not, as in Fichte, as the symmetrical position of its

negation but as the undoing, the erasure of any relationship, logical or oth-

erwise, that could be conceived between what the I is and what it says it is.

The very enterprise of thought seems to be paralyzed from the start. It can

only get under way if the knowledge that renders it impossible, the knowl-

edge that the linguistic position of the I is only possible if the I forgets what

it is (namely, I), if this knowledge is itself forgotten. (769)

As de Man goes on to note, Hegel's own passage constitutes a performative

example of this necessity and in the process points forward to the role of the

aesthetic (and specifically to Hegel's own introduction of allegory): it "for-

gets its own statement . . . by describing the predicament it states, which is

a logical difficulty devoid of any phenomenal.., dimension, as if it were an

event in time, a narrative" (769).

Having outlined the paradox of the subject, de Man introduces the neces-

sity for an aesthetic defense against the self-erasure of thinking in Hegel.

Insofar as it furnishes the illusion of a reconciliation between saying and

meaning, the aesthetic of the symbol covers over the fundamental obstacle

that language poses to Hegel's dialectical system. De Man argues that it is

therefore "an ideological, and not a theoretical construct, a defense against

the logical necessity inherent in a theoretical disclosure" (771). Readers

familiar with the later de Man will recognize in this appeal to ideology the

prelude to an introduction of the "material." Having demonstrated the

impossibility of a dialectics of interiorization (Erinnerung), the "command-

ing metaphor" of Hegel's entire program, de Man asks "whether the

136 * Embodying Technesis

external manifestation of the idea . . . indeed occurs in the mode of recol-

lection [Erinnerung]," or if-on the contrary-the mind "leaves a material

trace upon the world" in which the sensory manifestation of the idea can

take place (771).

To demonstrate that the latter is the case, and to bind the problematic of

language more closely to that of thought, de Man turns to Hegel's discus-

sion of memory in the Encyclopedia. The function of Hegel's account of

memory almost exactly parallels that of his treatment of the subject. In

order for the mind to advance on its dialectical path, it must forget what it

has earlier interiorized. The progression from perception to thought is itself

operated by a movement from the kind of memory (i.e., recollection, or

Erinnerung) characteristic of phenomenal experience to a kind of memory

(Gedichtnis) that can only be identified with the mechanical order of gram-

mar. Gedichtnis stands opposed to Erinnerung: while the latter operates the

interiorization of meaning, the former, as the faculty of memorization, or

learning by heart, requires, according to de Man, that meaning be forgotten

and words be "read as if they were a mere list of names" (772). In de Man's

view, this incompatibility of Erinnerung and Gedichtnis, like the earlier dis-

cussed incompatibilities of saying and meaning and of sign and symbol,

leads to a cognitive impasse that once again occasions an aesthetic defense:

"Memory [Gedichtnis] effaces remembrance (or recollection) just as the I

effaces itself. The faculty that enables thought to exist also makes its preser-

vation impossible. The art, the techne, of writing which cannot be separated

from thought and from memorization can only be preserved in the figural

mode of the symbol, the very mode it has to do away with if it is to occur at

all" (773).

With this third demonstration of the Hegelian impasse, however, de Man

is able to articulate the negative truth of the aesthetic. "The idea," he con-

cludes, "makes its sensory appearance, in Hegel, as the material inscription

of names" (772). In the process of being committed to writing (i.e., to

Gedichtnis), the idea becomes a thing of the past, something that can never

be recaptured by interiorizing thought, or Erinnerung. The movement from

remembrance to memory, from thought to writing, installs a radical dis-

junction between thought (the phenomenal) and its content (the idea mate-

rially inscribed in words). Gedichtnis, for de Man, remains radically sepa-

rated from thinking; this is why he says that memory (material inscription)

cannot be preserved in thought.

Given such a radical disjunction, the question then surfaces as to how the

impossible progression from perception to thought (impossible, that is,

from the phenomenal standpoint of consciousness) is nevertheless possible.

The Mechanics of Deconstruction * 137

The answer de Man gives is, of course, through allegory, that linguistic

function absolutely heterogeneous to phenomenal thinking: ". . . allegory

narrates 'the separation or disarticulation of subject from predicate [die

Trennung von Subjekt und Prdidikat].' For discourse to be meaningful, this

separation has to take place, yet it is incompatible with the necessary gener-

ality of all meaning. Allegory functions, categorically and logically, like the

defective cornerstone of the entire system" (775). The linguistic category of

allegory permits the movement from Erinnerung to Gedichtnis, the mater-

ial inscription of the (thence forgotten) idea. Consequently, allegory permits

the elaboration of the symbolic theory of art.

As I have noted, Derrida's generalization of deconstruction centers on the

status of his "juncturing" of de Man's "disjunction"-in other words, on its

compatibility with "allegory." To play de Man against Heidegger, Derrida

is compelled to bracket Erinnerung and to inscribe its incompatibility with

Gedichtnis within the space of Gedichtnis itself; he argues that de Man's

example serves to establish "that the relation of Gedichtnis to technique,

artifice, writing, the sign, etc., could not be one of pure exteriority or het-

erogeneity" (1986, 109). Despite its superficial resemblance to de Man's

own statement that Gedichtnis "cannot be separated" from writing, Der-

rida's interpretation ignores de Man's introduction of the "material"-a

category that, I suggest, holds the relation of radical exteriority with respect

to phenomenological thought or consciousness (i.e., Erinnerung). When

Derrida junctures the disjunction of thought and technology, he submits this

exteriority to a relativizing reduction by introducing something that is not

present in de Man: the synthesizing thought-act (noetic or technetic act) of

a (textualized) consciousness. Only such a supplemental act can juncture or

suture the exteriority of the "material" and "thinking memory": "the exte-

riority of the division, the dis-junction," claims Derrida, "is the relation, the

essential juncture between thinking memory and the so-called techno-sci-

entific, indeed literary outside" (109; emphasis added). With this supple-

mental technetic act, the disjunction is captured in the form of a technema

(or text), and-as in the Hegelian march of the Spirit-the exteriority of the

material simply loses its exteriority: it is eaten up by textualizing spirit on its

forward march toward the total techno-textualization of the world.

Whereas Derrida pursues a grammato-phenomenological (and ultimately

very Hegelian) dissolution of the obstacles posed by the disjunction between

memory and technology, de Man focuses on the problematic of presenta-

tion-how it is that Hegel's text can say the impossible. Not only does this

difference explain the distinct textual practices of these two "fathers" of

deconstruction, but it points to a fundamental disparity between their

138 * Embodying Technesis

respective conceptions of thought. For de Man, thought is rigorously asso-

ciated with phenomenal consciousness (Erinnerung), which means that the

allegorical presentation of thought, its "material inscription," must remain

fundamentally heterogeneous and inaccessible to it; deconstruction, more-

over, is just the name for this radical heterogeneity, and the task of the (de

Manian) deconstructive critic is to mark the negative moment in particular

texts where thought and its inscription (or presentation) become disjoined.

For Derrida, by contrast, textual structures characterize not only texts in the

material sense but also consciousness itself; consequently, on his account,

there can be no radical divide between the phenomenal structure of memory

and the material-linguistic structure of the text. The aspect of the de Man-

ian disjunction that is important for Derrida is thus the separation of textual

memory, or Gedichtnis (which, for him, is simply another way of saying

Erinnerung), and its technical "outside." Since neither can be radically exte-

rior to thought, this disjunction is itself a relation of thought and technol-

ogy. The hope of thinking the "totality of our relation to the world" there-

fore remains alive for Derrida, because-despite the lack of "common

measure" with the unfolding of the world in the past-the technologized

structures of memory in the world simply are identical with the structures of

Gedichtnis.

This identity allows us to grasp in the clearest possible manner the reduc-

tive phenomenological background of Derrida's proposed generalization of

deconstruction. In order for us to think of the outside as a supplement, we

must presuppose that the world is as it is accessible for us, that the real is the

representable, that technology can be encompassed by techne. This remains

the case, moreover, despite the complication presented to each of these

claims by the Derridian motif of relative exteriority. One need not deny that

technoscientific archivation extends the textualization of the world in order

to resist the stronger conclusion that such a determination encompasses the

totality of the outside of the world. By assuming that it does, Derrida's pro-

ject furnishes an endorsement of Heidegger's machine metaphor that only

serves to strengthen its final determination in the figure of the Gestell: tech-

nology reduced to a (mere) means of storage.

To resist this tacit endorsement and the wholesale reduction that it

fortifies, we must grasp its ultimate consequence: the implicit yet profoundly

reductive idealization of the world that results from Derrida's assimilation

of Heidegger's dissociation of thinking memory and technology into the

figure of the supplement. No matter how fundamentally it purges con-

sciousness of its traditional attributes, Gedichtnis continues to perform the

function of consciousness insofar as it serves to mediate our relation to the

The Mechanics of Deconstruction * 139

world through thinking. Moreover, despite Derrida's claim that it lacks any

intrinsic "common measure" with the totality of past technological media-

tion of memory, the so-called technoscientific outside can only be accessed

through this neophenomenological faculty of Gedichtnis, whose structure

is derived explicitly from the traditional metaphysical text. To put it in Der-

ridean terms, there can be no deconstructive reading of Heidegger without

the possibility of framing the world as text. Only within such a textual

unity, no matter how heterogeneous its content appears, can the world take

shape as contaminating differance. Accordingly, at those moments when

Derrida contends that the world is differance or, alternatively, that dif-

ferance is in the world, we can be sure that the text-world homology will

have always already been activated. Moreover, if the world is presentable

only as a trace structure, bearing within itself the potential for meaning,

deconstruction does not have it within its logic, as Derrida might say, to

avoid Heidegger's trademark epoche, his reduction of the world to "some-

thing" reconcilable with the phenomenological category of meaning. Like

Heidegger, Derrida must in the end determine the world (narrowly) as

"something" that gives itself to thinking.

Memory and Cultural Studies

My critical account of Derrida's appropriation of de Man has served to

show that his proposed generalization of deconstruction comes only at the

cost of a reductive allegiance to the phenomenological model of thought. To

preserve the possibility of thinking about the technological outside, Derrida

is compelled to model this outside on the textual structures of thought itself

and to impose an act of a textualized consciousness as the constitutive prin-

ciple for the disjunctive juncture constituting the principle of his generaliza-

tion. Given both the homology Derrida asserts between text and world and

the synthetic function he accords textualization, all distinction between

Gedichtnis and Erinnerung disappears, leaving thinking memory with the

quasi-sacred status of postmodern subject-effect.

This sacralization of thinking memory constitutes a metaphysics of the

contemporary age that, as I have repeatedly suggested, underpins contempo-

rary media and cultural studies. In their fetishization of representation, con-

temporary discourses of cultural constructionism betray a deeply rooted,

though perhaps largely unconscious, allegiance to Derrida's generalization of

deconstruction. This allegiance is particularly clear in the case of cultural

studies of technology. Not only does the task of such cultural study remain

140 * Embodying Technesis

that of thinking technology, but it also presupposes some form of phenome-

nologizing memory whose function is precisely to open the space in which

technology can be thought. Technocultural critics who follow the represen-

tationalist program cannot avoid sanctioning a version of the same machine

metaphor that is at work in Heidegger (and Aristotle)-the reduction of tech-

nology to a function within thought. This commitment insures that technol-

ogy will have always already been reduced to the form of representation-

text-in which it gives itself to thinking memory.

Derrida's impulse to generalize deconstruction is to be commended, but

since deconstruction's relevance in an age of cultural studies depends on a

movement beyond the restricted literary text and beyond textualism as such,

that impulse must also be checked. To be successful in reconceptualizing the

cultural studies of technology, we must move, with de Man, beyond the

bounds of Derridian grammato-phenomenology. Adapting de Man's indict-

ment of the aesthetic, we might say that Derrida's juncture constitutes a

defense against the radical exteriority or materiality not simply of allegori-

cal memory but of technology or technological worldliness itself. As I shall

argue when I return to it in chapter 9, the radical disjunction de Man posits

between Erinnerung and Geddichtnis allows us to overcome this defensive

reaction formation. In so doing, it comprises a crucial step in the evolution

of a poststructurally smart, nonreductive account of technology's impact on

human experience.

Interlude 1

Psyche and Metaphor: Derrida's Freud

In chapter 5, I exposed the complicity of Derrida's proposed generalization

of deconstruction with the phenomenological category of memory (or

memorial thought). On the basis of an appropriative misreading of de Man,

Derrida was able to develop a powerful and influential-though unfortu-

nately also reductive-model for thinking technology. In the form given it

by Derrida, this model serves as the basis for the technetic approach that has

retained hegemony following what I would call the "technocultural turn" in

the theory and criticism of media, science, and technology. In particular, it

is Derrida's localization of technology within thought that prepares the

metaphysical ground for the identification of language and technology so

central to contemporary constructivist critical idioms. As long as contem-

porary technocultural criticism retains this reductive genealogy of technol-

ogy, it cannot evade an extensive commitment to the very sacralization of

thinking memory we discovered in Derrida's reading of de Man.

To address further complications introduced by this commitment, we

must now expand our consideration of memory to another disciplinary site

equally central for assessing the genealogy of contemporary cultural criti-

cism. I make no exaggeration in claiming that Freud's rich theoretical work,

and particularly his evolving model of memory, furnishes a touchstone of

sorts for many a current effort to evaluate technology's impact on the sub-

ject. In its various forms, Freud's model of the psyche has been appropriated

by critical practitioners of all sorts, including the film-apparatus theorists of

the 1970s, feminist film and cultural critics, post-Lacanian ideology critics,

postcolonial critics, and post-Althusserian Marxists like Jameson. In my

opinion, the appeal of the Freudian psyche as a model for subjective agency

stems from its capacity to unite two central concerns of contemporary crit-

ics: (1) a strong sense of the anthropological basis of the subject and (2) a

sophisticated understanding of the internal divisions inseparable from the

process of subject constitution. Accordingly, Freud's conception allows for

a highly complicated understanding of technology's impact on the psyche,

which nonetheless does not eschew its worldliness. For neo-Freudian critics,

142 * Embodying Technesis

the machine merges two crucial functions: it constitutes both a descriptive

model and a materialization of the psyche. As the externalization of psychic

space, the machine plays an integral role in the constitution of the subject,

lending it worldly support for its ontogenetic dialectic.

For all the momentous cultural and theoretical significance of the

unconscious as a radical deterritorialization of cognition, however, con-

temporary theory's allegiance to psychoanalysis largely reproduces those

limitations we discovered in our analysis of its commitment to phenome-

nology: once again, materiality or exteriority is subordinated to the onto-

genetic (or presentational) role of what can still be termed the thinking

subject. Despite this common motif, however, the shift from Heideggerian

to Freudian ground does mark a progressive step within my genealogical

reconstruction of the twentieth-century history of cultural studies of tech-

nology. In Freud (and in neo-Freudian modes of criticism), we encounter

an effort to work through (rather than surmount) the eclipse of the unified

subject of philosophy. Whereas Heidegger can only bemoan thinking

under the grip of technology as inauthentic, and whereas Derrida can only

invert this valuation, Freud seeks to diagnose the modification of the sub-

ject that results from its encounter with technological modernization.

More specifically, Freud considers the impact of the technologized life-

world insofar as it penetrates into, and subsequently exteriorizes, the psy-

che. In this sense Freud furnishes a much needed antidote to the philo-

sophical discourse of modernity: he fruitfully counterbalances the

grandiose and abstract gestures of Heidegger and his followers with a

healthy tinge of concreteness.

The Mind-Machine Analogy

Given Derrida's central role in refunctionalizing deconstruction for cultural

critique, it will come as little surprise to find in him an ad hoc spokesman

for the theoretical appeal that Freud exercises among so many contempo-

rary cultural critics. In his early essay "Freud and the Scene of Writing,"

Derrida traces the evolution of the various Freudian models of the psyche

from the 1895 Project for a Scientific Psychology to the "mystic writing

pad" of the 1920s (Derrida 1978, 196-231). Focusing on Freud's recourse

to machinic metaphors for the mind, Derrida argues that the evolution in

the Freudian model witnesses an increasing convergence between the psyche

and its technological analoga. For Freud, this convergence reaches its apex

Psyche and Metaphor * 143

in the mystic writing pad-"a slab of dark brown resin or wax" over which

"is laid a thin transparent sheet" (Freud 1963, 209). The mystic pad embod-

ies the dual function of memory: like consciousness, the top sheet can be

cleared of its inscriptions, and thus it represents the infinite capacity for per-

ception; like the unconscious, the underlying slab retains traces after they

have been cleared from the top sheet. By combining these functions, the

mystic writing pad furnishes a metaphor for the psyche that finally meets the

dual requirement (of capacity and retention) motivating Freud's theory

from its earliest systematic form.

Still, from Freud's perspective, the mystic writing pad remains a

metaphor, since the convergence it presents-of psyche and machine-must

at some point come to an end. Freud acknowledges that it is limited by an

internal deficiency-namely, the difference separating a dead metaphor

from a living system.

We need not be disturbed by the fact that in the Mystic Pad no use is made

of the permanent traces of the notes that have been received; it is enough that

they are present. There must come a point at which the analogy between an

auxiliary apparatus of this kind and the organ which is its prototype will

cease to apply. It is true, too, that once the writing has been erased, the Mys-

tic Pad cannot "reproduce" it from within; it would be a mystic pad indeed

if, like our memory, it could accomplish that. (211; emphasis added)

The originality of Derrida's reading lies precisely in his rejection of this

Freudian restriction. For Derrida, the mind-machine analogy is not simply

one analogy among others but-like the heliotropic metaphor from Der-

rida's "White Mythology"-the analogy that founds the psychic system as

such. Machines like the mystic pad can represent the psyche precisely

because they embody it. Consequently, Derrida alleges, the psyche itself is

nothing but the operation of the machine we call "representation": with its

necessary reliance on the deferral of presence, the psyche instantiates the

very essence of the machine-an essence embodied in the historically con-

crete technology of the mystic writing pad. As Derrida explains, the "two-

handed operation" of the mystic pad (one hand writes on the surface while

another periodically raises the top sheet) is itself, in its essence, the move-

ment that produces psychic life.

Traces thus produce the space of their inscription only by acceding to the

period of their erasure. From the beginning, in the "present" of their first

impression, they are constituted by the double force of repetition and era-

sure, legibility and illegibility. A two-handed machine, a multiplicity of agen-

cies or origins-is this not the original relation to the other and the original

144 * Embodying Technesis

temporality of writing, its "primary" complication: an originary spacing,

deferring, and erasure of the simple origin, and polemics on the very thresh-

old of what we persist in calling perception? (1978, 226)

An actual worldly machine capable of modeling the process of psychic pro-

duction, the writing pad furnishes a metaphor not just for the intrapsychical

functioning of the mind but for the ontogenesis of the psyche itself. It com-

prises nothing less than the ontic embodiment of differance.

The Reduction of Technology

Derrida's liberation of the machine from its Freudian devaluation has far-

reaching consequences for the traditional question concerning technology.

Once it is no longer possible to isolate the machine from thinking memory as

the dead metaphor of a living system, technology cannot simply be opposed

to psyche. Rather, it comes to function as an essential part of the very move-

ment that generates psychic life. It comes to be introduced, as Derrida puts it,

"within the psyche." This introduction requires two stages. The machine and

representation must first be rendered homologous, and the function of tech-

nology must be made coequivalent with that of psychic representation. Only

then can the machine find a role within the psyche. The hinge articulating the

two is the concept of death. When he argues that both machine and represen-

tation are, from an ontological standpoint, dead, Derrida installs the very

same machine reduction of technology we discovered in our earlier investiga-

tion of Heidegger. In Derrida's argument, however, the essence of technology

is not the poietic showing of Being but representation itself.

That the machine does not run by itself means something else: a mechanism

without its own energy. The machine is dead. It is death. Not because we risk

death in playing with machines, but because the origin of machines is the

relation to death.... But what was to run by itself was the psyche and not its

imitation or mechanical representation. For the latter does not live. Repre-

sentation is death. Which may be immediately transformed into the follow-

ing proposition: death is (only) representation. (1978, 227)

As the embodiment or materialization of representation and everything

bound up with it (difference, delay, etc.), the machine functions to interrupt

the pure spontaneity of memory and thus to generate psychic life. Derrida

thus argues that the localization of technology within the psyche is simply the

consequence of Freud's untapped insight into the complicity of life and death.

All that Freud had thought about the unity of life and death, however, should

have led him to ask other questions here .... Freud does not explicitly exam-

Psyche and Metaphor * 145

ine the status of the "materialized" supplement which is necessary to the

alleged spontaneity of memory, even if that spontaneity were differentiated

in itself, thwarted by a censorship or repression which, moreover, could not

act on a perfectly spontaneous memory. Far from the machine being a pure

absence of spontaneity, its resemblance to a psychical apparatus, its existence

and its necessity bear witness to the finitude of the mnemic spontaneity which

is thus supplemented. The machine-and, consequently, representation-is

death and finitude within the psyche. (227-28)

From Derrida's perspective, the psyche cannot be fundamental, for it owes

its constitution and operation to death-death as difference, as the technical

supplement that produces the periodicity responsible for opening the space

of the psychic. Since the complication of psyche and machine is more pro-

found than Freud admits, their resemblance cannot be restricted to a merely

external analogy. The machine resembles the psyche not simply from the

outside but in the sense that it is death and finitude within the psyche.

Given Derrida's articulation of machine, representation, and death, we

can now understand why he addresses Freud's contribution to the question

concerning technology solely through the textuality of the psyche. This

focus, as Derrida explicitly claims, reflects the "metaphoric investment" of

Freud's text-Freud's commitment to a double claim that "[p]sychical con-

tent will be represented by a text whose essence is irreducibly graphic" and

that "the structure of the psychical apparatus will be represented by a writ-

ing machine" (199). Nonetheless, if Derrida's deconstruction of this

"metaphoric investment" re-poses the question concerning technology in

fundamentally new terms, it does so only at the cost of a crippling adherence

to the machine reduction. Rather than asking if technology is a kind of text,

Derrida simply assumes that it is, in order to pursue a far more dogmatic

line of interrogation.

We shall not have to ask if a writing apparatus-for example, the one

described in the "Note on the Mystic Writing Pad"-is a good metaphor for

representing the working of the psyche, but rather what apparatus we must

create in order to represent psychical writing; and we shall have to ask what

the imitation, projected and liberated in a machine, of something like psychi-

cal writing might mean. And not if the psyche [and its technical supplement]

is indeed a kind of text, but: what is a text, and what must the psyche be if it

can be represented by a text? (199)

For Derrida, the psyche is a textual effect, not in the trivial sense that it is

only language, but rather because it is founded on writing-on the opera-

tion of differance, the marking of intervals by the "two-handed machine."

For this reason, the machine can function, like the heliotropic metaphor of

146 * Embodying Technesis

"White Mythology," as a founding metaphor: it is at once both a represen-

tative of the psyche and the technical supplement that opens its domain.

Thus Derrida concludes, "For if there is neither machine nor text without

psychical origin, there is no domain of the psychic without text" (199). We

might add that there is also no such domain without machine.

With this conclusion, we can begin to fathom the constraint imposed on

contemporary cultural criticism through its extensive allegiance, via Der-

rida, to a radicalized version of Freud's mind-machine analogy. The gener-

alized identification of machine and psychic writing beyond the restricted

domain of analogy effectively compels the reduction of technology to tech-

nical forms of memory. Accordingly, the liberation of the machine devel-

oped by Derrida and perpetuated in contemporary criticism entails an initial

and massive sacrifice of technological materiality that institutes the govern-

ing metalepsis of Derrida's textualization of Freud: by imposing such a

sacrifice, Derrida can subordinate the autonomy and worldliness of techni-

cal machines to their function within psychic life.

Not unlike his reading of de Man, this metalepsis operates a conflation of

representation and the real into two relatively differentiated categories of

thought, two different metaphorical registers that he reductively character-

izes as the "rhetorical" and the "solid" metaphors, respectively. Just as it

did in the appropriation of de Man, Derrida's reduction of the material

exteriority of the real into a rhetorical category is intended to carry out a

generalization of deconstruction beyond the narrow confines of the meta-

physical text. At stake once again is a movement from a narrowly textual

understanding of the machine to a more fundamental (ontogenetic) interac-

tion between thinking and worldly technology. Derrida writes:

Nor does Freud examine the possibility of this machine, which, in the world,

has at least begun to resemble memory, and increasingly resembles it more

closely. Its resemblance to memory is closer than that of the innocent Mystic

Pad: the latter is no doubt infinitely more complex than slate or paper, less

archaic than a palimpsest; but, compared to other machines for storing

archives, it is a child's toy. This resemblance-i.e., necessarily a certain

Being-in-the-world of the psyche-did not happen to memory from without,

any more than death surprises life. It founds memory. (228)

By transposing the mind-machine relation from the restricted rhetorical

domain to the material domain and by replacing the reflective category of

analogy with the productive function of resemblance, Derrida in effect

determines technology as a form of memory, or more exactly, as its enabling

supplement.

Not surprisingly, this transposition serves to conceal the extensive met-

aleptic reduction of the real that lies behind Derrida's effort to generalize

Psyche and Metaphor * 147

Freud's model for cultural application. By founding the rhetorical metaphor

(and the order of analogy) on the so-called solid metaphor (and the order of

resemblance), Derrida effectively collapses the heterogeneity between the

two categories. In the process, moreover, he obfuscates all traces of the

material exteriority that is a constitutive element of the solid metaphor. Like

Heidegger, he substitutes a distinction relative to the register of representa-

tion for an opposition between radically distinct registers (the representa-

tional and the real). Accordingly, the transposition of one metaphoric regis-

ter into the other, which comprises the operative principle of Derrida's

generalization, requires a prior reduction of the technological real-the ini-

tial act of inscribing it as the solid metaphor. Derrida writes:

Metaphor as a rhetorical or didactic device is possible here only through the

solid metaphor, the "unnatural," historical production of a supplementary

machine, added to the psychical organization in order to supplement its

finitude. The very idea of finitude is derived from the movement of this sup-

plementarity. The historico-technical production of this metaphor which sur-

vives individual (that is, generic) psychical organization, is of an entirely dif-

ferent order than the production of an intrapsychical metaphor, assuming

that the latter exists (to speak about it is not enough for that), and whatever

bond the two metaphors may maintain between themselves. (228)

By construing the operation of actual machines exclusively through the

rhetorical category of the solid metaphor, Derrida betrays a deep allegiance

to the machine reduction of technology. As the material supplement to

thought, the concept of technology exemplified by the solid metaphor has

already undergone the metaleptic reversal constitutive of technesis.

Rather than generalizing deconstruction beyond textuality, then, Derrida's

interpretation simply expands the jurisdiction of the textual reduction of tech-

nology. Through his proposed generalization, technology remains, in its

essence, a means of archivation, of information storage; only now, in the post-

Freudian era, it finds itself spread over global dimensions.1 Stripped of all hints

of autonomy, of a proper materiality, technology-as the materialization of

the world's resemblance to memory-is made to fit within a teleological his-

tory of the psyche and its ontogenetic production of thought and memory.

Integrated into the textually given play of the world, technology comprises

nothing more than a support for the Being-in-the-world of the psyche.2

Beyond the Machine Reduction

Despite the reduction it ends up imposing, Derrida's effort to open thought

to the material outside effectively plants the seeds for the undoing of the

148 * Embodying Technesis

ontogenetic approach. Once broached, technological materiality resists cap-

ture within the field of metaphor, even when the latter is thought through

ontologically, as it is in Derrida's conception of solid metaphor. This fact

highlights the significant difference between Derrida's neo-Freudian concep-

tion of metaphor and the more famous account he furnishes in "White

Mythology"-a difference that is concretely bound up with the advent of

technological modernity. While Derrida derives metaphoric supplementar-

ity from the heliotropic metaphor in "White Mythology," his reading of

Freud seeks to correlate differance with worldliness through machinic

embodiment. As a ground for the nonoriginary origin of metaphor, the

machine possesses a far more concrete and insistent material specificity than

does the sun. While the sun is originally nonnatural by dint of its necessary

discursive mediation, the machine is nonnatural in another, radically differ-

ent sense: it is the result of a mode of production that breaks with the order

of nature, that is, in Aristotle's sense, para physin (see chap. 3). With his

introduction of the machine, Derrida has in effect opened theory to a force

beyond its grasp.

For the generalization Derrida proposes to be successful, therefore, it

must break with textuality in a more radical way than he permits;

specifically, it must eschew the Greek model of techne and the ontological

understanding of metaphor that Derrida derives from it. In this sense,

"Freud and the Scene of Writing" stands at the crossroads of two tendencies

in Derrida's work-his commitment to an ontogenetic account of history

and his increasing awareness of a material dimension of worldliness. Insofar

as it shows these tendencies to be fundamentally incompatible, moreover,

Derrida's reading of Freud marks the immanent movement of deconstruc-

tion toward its own dissolution. In the end, therefore, Derrida finds himself

compelled to do precisely what he criticizes Freud for doing: like Freud, he

must limit the resemblance between mind and machine, though in the oppo-

site direction. Where Freud discounts the machine for its inability to gener-

ate life, Derrida encounters a machine that, so to speak, has too much life.

Accordingly, his restriction of technology to the mere support for the Being-

in-the-world of the psyche should be understood as a defensive gesture

designed to preserve the principle underlying the homology of differance

with the Freudian psyche: the resemblance between mind and machine.

Against such a gesture, we must ask whether post-Heideggerian, post-

Freudian questioning concerning technology must address the real opera-

tion of machines-not their role in the ontogenetic construction of thought.

Part 3

Tracking the Technological Real



Chapter 6

Technology and External Experience:

Reconsidering Freud's Project for a

Scientific Psychology

By demonstrating the dead end of the ontogenetic textualist approach, my

preceding criticism of Derrida's "Freud and the Scene of Writing" was

designed to indicate the urgency for a radically different reading of Freud,

one that would be capable of overcoming his own narrow focus on the

mind-machine analogy. In this chapter, I shall rehabilitate the role of exter-

nal experience beyond the narrow frame Freud accords it in his theory of the

death drive; in so doing, I shall re-pose the question concerning technology

in a manner that does not subordinate it to the project of representing the

psyche through an "auxiliary memory aid." Once liberated from its ontoge-

netic subordination, the topic of external experience will furnish the basis

for a critical revision of Freud's understanding of technology-one that

breaks out of the psychic frame of reference in order to embrace the embod-

ied, corporeal dimension of technology's experiential impact.

By exposing the analytical necessity that compelled Freud to introduce

the death drive, I shall critically interrogate the source of the ontogenetic

reduction: the legislative power with which Freud invests theoretical specu-

lation. In concrete terms, I shall question Freud's implicit claim that the

death drive introduces radical exteriority into the psyche, and in the process,

I shall unpack the ontogenetic reduction that, I suggest, Freud imposed on

external experience in order to make room for the death drive.

Within the frame of Freud's evolution, of course, the death drive answers

a certain empirical challenge: it explains the persistent and troubling phe-

nomenon of traumatic repetition. To account for instances of repetition that

lacked any clearly identifiable psychic purpose, Freud found himself com-

pelled to confront the limitations of his hitherto dominant homeostatic view

of the psyche and to articulate the bivalent theory of energetics for which he

has been alternatively celebrated and taken to task.1 Since it counterbal-

ances the forces of life, the death drive serves to undermine the notion that

152 * Embodying Technesis

living organisms are governed exclusively by internal forces tending toward

progressive or qualitative change. The death drive, in short, subjects the

individual organism to a collective, biological force that appears to be

located outside them.

By placing the psyche in close proximity to less complicated organisms,

the death drive would thus appear to undermine the ontogenetic privilege

Freud attributes to the psyche in his early metapsychological papers. Far

from being the result of some primarily internal psychic dialectic, the

"phenomena of organic development must," Freud contends, "be attrib-

uted to external disturbing and diverting influences" (Freud 1961, 32). He

continues:

In the last resort, what has left its mark on the development of organisms

must be the history of the earth we live in and of its relation to the sun. Every

modification which is thus imposed upon the course of the organism's life is

accepted by the conservative organic instincts and stored up for further rep-

etition. Those instincts are therefore bound to give a deceptive appearance of

being forces tending towards change and progress, whilst in fact they are

merely seeking to reach an ancient goal by paths alike old and new. (32)

In the case of the human organism, such external modification takes place

through the process of repetition. By translating instinctual energy from the

primary process into the secondary process, repetition aims to ward off the

possibility of a traumatic impact of instinctual energy. It thus serves on the

side of life, as it were, since, as Freud argues, it both increases the complex-

ity of the organism and makes it possible for "the dominance of the pleasure

principle . . . to proceed unhindered" (29). Traumatic dreams can accord-

ingly be understood as the attempt by primary processes to bind, via a com-

pulsive repetition, the excess of freely mobile energy responsible for neuro-

sis: ". . . by developing the anxiety whose omission was the cause of the

traumatic neurosis," writes Freud, they endeavor "to master the stimulus

retrospectively" (26).

If it is empirically undeniable that the death drive introduces a certain

dimension of exteriority into Freud's account of the psyche, further consid-

eration reveals a massive subordination of this exteriority to the overarch-

ing project of representing the psyche. When he grants repetition agency

over the organism's allegedly external modification, Freud imposes the

ontogenetic understanding of the psyche as the governing frame of his inter-

pretation in a way that compromises any more robust consideration of

external experience. Specifically, his understanding of the organism's exter-

nal modification through the mechanism of traumatic repetition subordi-

Technology and External Experience * 153

nates the direct, physical impact of external stimuli to its necessarily subse-

quent impact on the psychic system. Whether caused by mechanical shocks

(the so-called war neuroses) or by lingering traces of infantile and early

childhood experience, trauma, for Freud, remains an unequivocally psychic

phenomenon: the experience of a stimulus that the psychic organism was

not prepared to handle. To the extent that it reflects certain reductive

aspects of Freud's model of the psyche,2 this subordination unequivocally

demonstrates that the origin of traumatic stimuli holds relatively little

importance for Freud, since it is designed solely to support a theory of psy-

chic economy.

Despite its apparent opening to external experience, then, the death drive

cannot underwrite a challenge to the ontogenetic reduction of exteriority

underlying Freud's theory. Consequently, if we are to succeed in rehabilitat-

ing external experience from its Freudian reduction, we must interrogate the

death drive in a context that allows us to circumscribe Freud's ontogenetic

standpoint. Following the lead of communications theorist Anthony

Wilden, we must criticize Freud's homeostatic model for its constitutive nar-

rowness. According to Wilden, what compelled Freud to develop the biva-

lent theory of energetics was nothing other than the poverty of his theoreti-

cal perspective. Lacking a concept of the psychic system's interaction with

its environment, Freud had no other recourse than to postulate a further

internal drive to account for phenomena that explicitly violated the psyche's

economy. Viewed in the light of systems theory, Freud's error stems from

his wholesale assimilation of environment into system, an assimilation that

occurs in two stages. The first involves the actual positing of the death drive

to account for something that stems from the relation of the psychic system

to its environment; the second seeks to account for this act of positing itself.

Since Freud has no concept of environment, this latter account can only

derive from the psychic system itself and thus implicates Freud in a radical

double bind. Wilden writes:

. . the psychoanalytical theory of repetition seems to be no more than the

tautologous product of theory's CONSTITUTIVE lack of context.... Being

innately paradoxical because of the inadequacy of its theoretical structure to

account for the vast field to which it is applied, the theory will do well to

identify all oscillations and repetitions as innate and universal characteristics

of its "object," rather than recognize them as its own products. (Wilden

1980, 134)

Freud's error perfectly exemplifies what Wilden glosses as the "projection of

a model derived from technology. .. into the social dimension" (129)-an

154 * Embodying Technesis

extremely compressed, yet still recognizable, version of what I have been

calling the machine reduction of technology. Indeed Freud seems to impose

what is in effect a double reduction, since, in addition to modeling exterior-

ity on a formal model of the psyche as technological system, he generates

this latter model on the basis of a reduction of technology to the figure of the

machine. By pointing to the fundamental reduction involved here-the

reduction of the social environment to the status of an epiphenomenon of

the (individual) psyche-Wilden's critique lays bare the profoundly reduc-

tive metalepsis at work in Freud's theory. Precisely because Freud lacks a

concept of the environment, his account can only work with exteriority in a

rarefied form-with a form of relative exteriority that is intrinsic to and gen-

erated by the system itself but that is nonetheless posited (and can only be

so posited) as emanating from the (phantom) environment.

To rehabilitate the role of external experience against this powerful

reduction, we must therefore consider Freud's account from an environ-

mental perspective rather than in terms of the individual psyche. By shifting

focus in this way, I shall bring a fresh perspective to a crucial element of

Freud's account of external experience in Beyond the Pleasure Principle-

the so-called dead cortical layer. Viewed as a system function that evolves

through interaction with an increasingly technologized environment, the

dead cortical layer comprises a historically specific form of experiential

agency. In addition to the task Freud assigns it-protecting the psyche by

filtering stimuli-it acquires the function of absorbing external stimuli cor-

poreally. By suspending the psychic neutralization of external stimuli that

Walter Benjamin so insightfully diagnoses as the theoretical principle

informing Freud's model of the organism in Beyond, this view of the dead

cortical layer opens what amounts to a new mode of experiencing the exter-

nal world (Benjamin 1968).

In my effort to contextualize this revisionary reading of the cortical layer

within the Freudian theoretical corpus, I will follow a trajectory that is the

precise inverse of Derrida's. Rather than tracing the evolution of the mind-

machine analogy forward from the hydraulic model of the 1895 Project for

a Scientific Psychology to the mystic writing pad, I will begin with Freud's

fully elaborated trauma model from Beyond the Pleasure Principle, where

the reduction of exteriority is in full force, and move backward to the topo-

logical derivation of external experience developed in the 1895 Project.

Reading retrospectively in this way, I shall isolate an important dimension

of Freud's initial conception of consciousness that has been subsequently

overlooked: the "problem of quality" or the "temporal period" of external

experience (Freud 1954). By aligning this early notion of the period of stim-

Technology and External Experience * 155

ulation with Bergson's conception of the duree, I shall pursue the far more

materialist line of thinking concerning consciousness that Freud all but

abandoned in his later metapsychological work. Like the duree, the tempo-

ral period articulates a point of contact between matter (which always pos-

sesses a distinct temporal period) and mind (which translates such a period

into quality) and thus calls for a model of psychic functioning very different

from the (Freudian and Derridian) temporal account of the psyche as writ-

ing machine.3

The Trauma Model: Consciousness, Memory, and

External Experience

In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud repeatedly attributes the speculative

hypothesis of the death drive to his assessment of certain nineteenth-century

and early twentieth-century advancements in mechanical technology. By

defining traumatic neurosis as "a condition which occurs after severe

mechanical concussions, railway disasters and other accidents involving a

risk to life" (1961, 6), Freud makes clear the complicity of this new psychic

phenomenon with machines like the locomotive and technologies of mass

destruction.4 While this connection makes a genuine contribution to the

exploration of modern technology's experiential impact and has been inter-

estingly interpreted by some of Freud's more acute commentators (most

notably, Ronell [1989]), it cannot escape Wilden's objection (since it incor-

porates technology as a systemic element) and thus cannot serve as the basis

for a robust account of external experience. In my assessment of Freud's

treatment of trauma in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (henceforth Beyond),

I shall seek to demonstrate the limitations that are imposed on external

stimuli by the theoretical demands of Freud's metapsychological model of

the psyche. In particular, I shall demonstrate how the two modes in which

Freud treats external experience-sampling and trauma-acquire their

respective functions only on the basis of a wholesale subordination of sen-

sation to Freud's overriding theoretical interest in preserving the integrity of

the psychic economy. The results of this demonstration will in turn guide

my reconstruction of Freud's theory of periodicity and its role in his earlier

(1895) mechanical model of the mind.

Both sampling and trauma function by imposing a form on stimuli that

are themselves undifferentiated, pure quantity. Though introduced as the

perceptual dimension of Freud's account of external experience, sampling

effectively restricts perception (and its constitutive sensory matter [hyle]) to

156 * Embodying Technesis

the narrow role of testing the real, with the sole purpose of alerting the psy-

che to potentially traumatic stimuli. And trauma, the psychic effect of exter-

nal experience, functions by representing technology's experiential impact

as the feeling accompanying the breakdown of the psychic system, its failure

to master or bind an influx of external stimuli.5 In this sense, sampling and

trauma together institute what we might call, following Deleuze and Guat-

tari, a molar reduction of the imperceptible.6 As the privileged modes for

experiencing technologically generated stimuli, sampling and trauma both

function by installing a system of reference and a threshold of perception

that determine what can count as external experience. On such a model, I

suggest, technology is stripped of its robust materiality and reduced to the

narrow role of supporting or materializing a traumatic cause.

Through sampling, the system of consciousness (system-Cs) is able to

receive and test a small portion of the stimuli constantly bombarding it from

the outside. Samples pass through the system-Cs as "mobile cathectic

energy" (Freud 1961); they overcome no resistances and thus, like all phe-

nomena of consciousness, leave behind no permanent traces, expiring

instead in the very process of becoming conscious. By limiting perception to

what is experienced consciously and by imposing the hylomorphic form of

the sample on the undetermined flux, sampling carries out a reduction of the

molecular, subrepresentational level of experience-what, in the tradition

of Kant and the early Husserl, would be called sensation, or hyle.' In this

respect, sampling imposes the ontogenetic reduction germane to Freud's

metapsychology: rather than opening the psyche to exteriority, the sampling

of external stimuli serves to isolate the psychic system and protect it against

the harsh outside world. "The main purpose of the reception of stimuli,"

says Freud, "is to discover the direction and nature of the external stimuli;

and for that it is enough to take small specimens of the external world, to

sample it in small quantities" (1961, 21). On this model, perception is

reductively determined as a mechanism for psychic defense: the information

it yields helps the psyche determine how great a store of cathected energy it

will need to master incoming stimuli and thus preserve its equilibrium

against the threat of trauma.

In the case of trauma, Freud argues, the psychic reduction of external

experience becomes all the more forceful, since feeling simply replaces direct

contact with exteriority.

We describe as "traumatic" any excitations from outside which are powerful

enough to break through the protective shield. It seems to me that the con-

cept of trauma necessarily implies a connection of this kind with a breach in

an otherwise efficacious barrier against stimuli. Such an event as an external

Technology and External Experience * 157

trauma is bound to provoke a disturbance on a large scale in the functioning

of the organism's energy and to set in motion every possible defensive mea-

sure. At the same time, the pleasure principle is for the moment put out of

action. There is no longer any possibility of preventing the mental apparatus

from being flooded with large amounts of stimulus, and another problem

arises instead-the problem of mastering the amounts of stimulus which

have broken in and of binding them, in the psychical sense, so that they can

then be disposed of. (23-24)

Whether such breaches in the protective shield are neutralized in conscious-

ness or lead to unconscious trauma, their significance extends only to their

impact on the psyche. By assimilating the excessive external excitations into

the form of endogenous disturbances (an assimilation rhetorically marked

by the shift signaled in the phrase "and another problem arises instead

.."), Freud places them under the jurisdiction, as it were, of the death

drive. More precisely, Freud isolates external excitations from their empiri-

cal context and revaluates them in terms of the psychic economy in order,

subsequently, to attribute the disturbances they occasion to a basic psychic

drive.8 As both Wilden and Deleuze and Guattari contend, the causal force

Freud attributes to the death drive permits him to retain his ontogenetic

focus at the moment that context, environment, and exteriority threaten its

collapse.9

Ultimately, then, Freud's institution of the death drive insures the reduc-

tion of technology's experiential impact, which can only begin following a

breach in the protective cortical layer and only on the inside of the psyche.

As a consequence, the trauma model depends on an enabling metaleptic

reversal akin to Derrida's assimilation of psyche to text: rather than asking

how psychic representation results from external experience, Freud gener-

ates the category of exteriority in accord with the requirements of a dog-

matically instituted representational model of the psyche. In this same vein,

we can discern in Freud's updating of the "old, naive theory of shock" a

reduction analogous to the one we have already discovered in Derrida. Just

as Derrida asks what the psyche must be if it is to be determined on the

model of the text, Freud asks what external experience must be if it is to be

determined on the model of the psyche: "The [shock theory] regards the

essence of the shock as being the direct damage to the molecular structure

or even to the histological structure of the elements of the nervous system;

whereas what we seek to understand are the effects produced on the organ

of the mind by the breach in the shield against stimuli and by the problems

that follow in its train" (25; emphasis added). Not only does such a per-

spectival shift discount the direct experiential impact of technology, but it

158 * Embodying Technesis

calls for a fundamental reconstitution of external experience as the "mater-

ial" correlate of the energetic economy of the psyche.

Freud's Quality Model: The Emancipation

of Sensation?

Despite the predominance of this reconstitution, Freud's oeuvre does in fact

contain (the rudiments of) an alternative model of external experience that

furnishes a more promising basis for developing a robust account of tech-

nology's experiential impact. To reconstruct this model, we must seek to

understand the hydraulic account of the psyche that Freud introduces in his

1895 Project for a Scientific Psychology (hereafter Project) without reading

it retrospectively through the later metapsychological works. In particular,

we must counter the reduction the later Freud and Derrida impose on the

concept of the period of stimuli: its wholesale assimilation to the periodicity

of the psychic system. Toward this end, we must rehabilitate Freud's 1895

account of the autonomous perceptual function of consciousness from the

sweeping reduction it undergoes in Beyond. With his introduction of a third

experiential register, the system o (perception), alongside consciousness (the

system 4) and the unconscious (the system N), Freud strives to determine

perception molecularly, on a level where "use, functioning, production, and

formation are one and the same process" (Deleuze and Guattari 1983, 181).

By placing the psyche into direct contact with exteriority, w forestalls the

reduction of function to ontology that informs the metalepsis of Beyond.10

Unlike Beyond, then, the 1895 Project is fraught with tension in a par-

ticularly explicit manner. By tracing the development of the hydraulic model

as it is presented in the text, we will be able to reconstruct the deep theoret-

ical contradiction informing Freud's approach prior to the metaleptic reduc-

tion that subordinates exteriority to the demands of the psyche. More

specifically, we will uncover the conflict between Freud's ontogenetic stand-

point and his naturalizing aim of developing a quantitative account of psy-

chical processes that would square psychology with the requirements of nat-

ural science.

Freud begins his sketch with a division between stimuli originating in the

external world and stimuli coming from within. This division leads him to

differentiate between two psychic aims: while the "primary neuronic sys-

tem" strives to discharge whatever energy it takes in from the outside world

following the "principle of inertia," the "secondary function" concerns

itself with stimuli originating "from the somatic element itself" (Freud

Technology and External Experience * 159

1954, 357). In the former case, the neuronic system simply employs the

quantity of energy it acquires from outside in order to get rid of it. Things

are not so simple in the latter case, however, for, argues Freud, "the organ-

ism cannot withdraw itself from [endogenous stimuli] as it does from exter-

nal stimuli," since the former "give rise to the major needs" of the body

(357). According to Freud, insofar as these needs call for actions, the neu-

ronic system must "abandon its original trend towards inertia" and "learn

to tolerate a store of quantity (Qn) sufficient to meet the demands for

specific action" (358).

This functional necessity compels Freud to introduce the basic structur-

ing principle of the hydraulic model of the mind-namely, resistance: "The

secondary function, which requires quantity (Qn) to be stored up, is made

possible by supposing that there are resistances which oppose discharge."

Freud initially applies these resistances, or "contact-barriers," to explain the

possibility of representing memory, which he defines as "a susceptibility to

permanent alteration by a single process" (359). By interrupting the free

flow of quantity through "neurones," the contact-barriers leave the latter in

a modified condition following each excitation and thus represent memory.

On this naturalizing account, memory arises to meet the psyche's need for

stored energy sufficient to neutralize the threat of endogenous stimuli.

At this point, Freud encounters the first in a series of "difficulties" that

exert a decisive influence on the trajectory of his analysis. The possibility of

permanent neuronic alteration appears to conflict with the empirical fact

that "in general, fresh excitations meet with the same conditions of recep-

tion as did the earlier ones." To overcome this difficulty, Freud simply dis-

tinguishes two classes of neurones: "permeable neurones (offering no resis-

tance and retaining nothing) which serve the function of perception, and

impermeable neurones (offering resistance and retaining quantity [Qn])

which are the vehicles of memory and presumably of psychical processes in

general." From this distinction in neurone class, Freud draws a significant

systemic distinction: "Henceforth, accordingly, I shall call the former sys-

tem of neurones and the latter N" (360).

Freud goes to some length to emphasize that these two systems are not

distinct in essence but have been prepared by experience for their separate

functions: the two systems "retain their characteristics because the -neu-

rones are connected only with the periphery and the w-neurones only with

the interior of the body. A distinction in their essence is thus replaced by a

distinction in the milieu to which they happen to be located" (365). This

functional distinction informs Freud's resolution of the exclusivity of mem-

ory and consciousness, since consciousness occurs as a limit point of

160 * Embodying Technesis

facilitation, when a contact-barrier is so traveled that it loses its resistance

and becomes permeable (i.e., open to the lower quantities that characterize

the -system). By explaining how the psyche can possess both a limitless

receptivity and a retentive capacity, this functional distinction allows Freud

to meet the requirement imposed by his conception of the psyche as writing

machine. Those excitations that meet resistances (in the v-system) will be

retained, while those excitations meeting no resistance (in the -system) will

simply vanish on expiration.

Insofar as he marshals the -w distinction primarily to explain the psy-

che's capacity for both receptivity and retention, Freud appears to institute

an ontogenetic bias formally identical to the one governing Beyond. Despite

their functional independence, -functions remain exclusively in the service

of the v-system: limitless receptivity is required not to facilitate perceptual

experience but rather to insure ever new content for the progressive consti-

tution of the v-system. As in the case of the trauma model, everything here

is in the service of the psychic system proper. Freud explains: ". . . one pecu-

liarity of neuronic systems-their capacity to retain and at the same time to

remain receptive-seems to be explained by the hypothesis of there being

two neuronic systems, and W . .. All psychical acquisition would on this

basis consist in the organization of the v-system through partial and locally

determined suspensions of the resistance in the contact-barriers which dis-

tinguishes w from " (363; emphasis added). The functional separation of #

and w thus masks a fundamental reduction. From the moment that the

v-system is equated with the "psychical processes in general," the -system is

needed only to explain how facilitations are possible-how, that is, quantities

select the particular routes through neurones that will produce memory.

In contrast to Beyond, however, Freud's analysis in the Project does not

conclude with this point but begins (haltingly) to eschew this reduction in

the face of demands made by empirical phenomena (i.e., by the environ-

ment). When he expands the functional distinction of and W to reflect what

he calls the "magnitude of quantity," Freud confronts a certain weakness in

his theory-its inability to account for experiences involving minimal exci-

tation. This weakness stems from two elements of Freud's model: (1) the

genealogy of consciousness from the v-system and (2) the restriction of

-functions to their contribution to the economy of the psyche. By subordi-

nating consciousness to the v-system, Freud imposes a perceptual threshold

whose function is to limit which external stimuli find representation within

the psyche. He explains that whereas permeable -neurones are receptive to

any quantity (no matter how negligible), w-neurones can only be reached by

quantities above a certain threshold (commensurate with the resistance of

Technology and External Experience * 161

the contact-barrier): ". . . quantities pass through the -neurones against

which the resistance offered by the contact-barriers is negligible, but . . . the

v-neurones are only reached by quantities which are of the same order of

magnitude as that resistance" (365). On this account, only those excitations

whose magnitude of quantity is sufficient to penetrate the contact-barriers

of the v-system will find representation in the psyche. With this restriction,

we once again encounter the reductive trauma model of experience.

Rather than marshaling the threshold notion to bolster his ontogenetic

account of the psyche as he does in Beyond, however, the 1895 Freud finds

it necessary to expand his account of the -system precisely to address this

theoretical weakness. This expansion centers on the opposition of quantity

and quality, an opposition Freud employs to distinguish two functions of

the -system: screening of exogenous quantities and reception through the

sense organs. By underwriting Freud's introduction of a third system of neu-

rones (co), this latter -function will introduce what amounts to a second

form of consciousness.

Screening functions in the Project just as it does in Beyond: it protects the

organism against excessive external stimuli. Exogenous quantities, insofar

as they possess a greater magnitude than endogenous ones, must be trans-

formed before they can be introduced into and ultimately into W. Freud

attributes this transformation to what he calls the "nerve-ending appara-

tus": "... the -neurones do not terminate in an unattached manner at the

periphery, but end in cell-structures; and it is these and not the -neurones

which receive the exogenous stimulus. A 'nerve-ending apparatus' of this

kind.., might well serve the purpose of not allowing exogenous quantities

(Q) to impinge upon in undiminished magnitude but of damping them

down" (367). The nerve-ending apparatus serves the same function as the

protective shield (the dead cortical layer) in Beyond: it allows the -system

to sample stimuli from the external world in quantities that are not harmful

to it. Once again, however, this screening function is immediately evaluated

in terms of how it benefits the v-system: Freud argues that its function is

exclusively to protect against the pain caused by "the irruption of large

quantities (Q) into w" (368).

Only when he seeks to explain the phenomenon of consciousness proper

does Freud actually address the content of external experience. While it

"knows nothing of... quantities and neurones," consciousness, Freud con-

tends, "gives us what we call 'qualities'-sensations which show a great

variety of 'differences' and whose differences depend on relations to the

external world" (369; emphasis added). With this notion of "quality,"

Freud introduces a type of experience capable of registering external stimuli

162 * Embodying Technesis

without imposing the psychic reduction characteristic of the v-system. In

fact, Freud here introduces what amounts to a second form of conscious-

ness, something akin to what contemporary neuroscientists call "conscious-

ness in general," which is not derivative from nor subordinate to the W-sys-

tem (Damasio 1995). To prevent misunderstanding of this important point,

we need to distinguish three properly independent modes of experience

which Freud groups under the blanket term consciousness: (1) a representa-

tional mode, or consciousness proper (consciousness as a function of the N-

system); (2) a perceptual mode, or consciousness in general; and (3) a sub-

perceptual mode, or sensation. Only the first corresponds to consciousness

in the sense of mental experience with a representationalist content.11 The

second and third modes involve more robustly embodied levels of experi-

ence that, I suggest, do not necessarily (and in many cases cannot) have

mental representations as correlates and do not involve consciousness at all

in its familiar sense. The experience of qualities constitutes "consciousness"

in the sense of the second and/or third modes; I shall henceforth call it qual-

itative consciousness.

On Freud's account, qualitative consciousness can be distinguished from

representational consciousness primarily through its distinct genealogy.

Qualities are not a function of quantity, or more specifically, of quantity

flowing freely or against resistance in the 4- and v-systems; as Freud

unequivocally puts it, "there is nothing quantitative about them" (369).

Qualitative differences do not depend on differences in quantity (as do the

differences in facilitation that underlie memory and representational con-

sciousness).12 They are, rather, the internal modification of external quan-

tity (and science, according to Freud, teaches that there is nothing but quan-

tity in the external world). Consequently, qualities cannot be accounted for

in terms of the systemic correlation of and W. They stem neither from the

-system (since, on Freud's psychic model, consciousness can only result

from excitations reaching the "higher levels of the neuronic system") nor

from the v-system (since at least one v-function, recollection, is entirely

devoid of quality). To explain the origin of qualities, therefore, Freud "must

summon up enough courage" to introduce a third system of neurones (co, or

Wahrnehmung [perception]). Since, he argues, they are "excited along with

the others during perception but not during reproduction," these "percep-

tual neurones" appear to share the protective function characteristic of the

nerve-ending apparatus, though with one important difference. While the

latter holds off quantity by screening it into manageable quotients, co does

so by transforming it into quality. Indeed, argues Freud, the perceptual sys-

tem primarily "consists in contrivances for changing external quantity into

Technology and External Experience * 163

quality." (370). Moreover, according to Freud, perception occurs only

when quantity has been assimilated into quality: "It may be that the char-

acteristic of quality (that is, conscious sensation) only appears where quan-

tities have so far as possible been excluded" (371).

Far from solving the problem of external experience, however, the intro-

duction of qualitative consciousness introduces what Freud, in an instance

of his well-known tendency to dramatic hyperbole, calls an "immense

difficulty." To achieve the complete permeability and limitless receptivity

that characterizes them, perceptual neurones (N-neurones) require a magni-

tude of quantity necessary to break down contact-barriers; yet, by

definition, they constitute that class of neurones possessing the least degree

of quantity. The difficulty, in a word, is this: barred from employing his

quantity theory of the genesis of the psyche, Freud has no way of explaining

how external excitations result in the kind of (perceptual) consciousness

that results from the stimulation of perceptual neurones. Freud solves this

difficulty in characteristic fashion-by introducing yet a further speculative

claim.

I can see only one way of escape: to revise our basic hypothesis on the pas-

sage of quantity (Qn). Hitherto I have regarded it only as a transference of

quantity (Qn) from one neurone to another. It must have another attribute,

however-of a temporal character; for the mechanics of the physicists have

assigned this temporal attribute even to the motions of masses in the external

world. I shall describe this attribute briefly as "period." Thus I shall assume

that the resistance of the contact-barriers applies only to the transference of

quantity (Q), but that the period of neuronic motion is transmitted without

inhibition in every direction, as though it were a process of induction. (371)

With this added attribute, Freud can explain the complete permeability and

limitless receptivity of the perceptual neurones in a way that does not rely

on quantity-in a way, in short, that is independent of the genesis of the

psychic system.

Because it links perceptual consciousness and the external world, this

independence is absolutely crucial for any effort to liberate external experi-

ence from the reduction Freud imposes on it. We can grasp its importance

by clarifying the key differences separating Freud's conception of the

"period" from Derrida's (reductive) construal of it as the "general periodic-

ity" of the psyche. In his effort to synthesize Freud's model of the mind with

Heidegger's analysis of temporality, Derrida contends that the permeability

of the perceptual neurones proceeds "from pure time, from pure temporal-

ization in its conjunction with spacing: from periodicity" (Derrida 1978,

205). According to Derrida periodicity introduces "pure difference" as the

164 * Embodying Technesis

condition of possibility for the emergence of the psyche and everything

related to it (perception included): "The concept of a period in general pre-

cedes and conditions the opposition between quantity and quality, and

everything governed by this opposition" (205). By conflating the difference

marked by quality with the differences among quantities that underlie mem-

ory, Derrida blatantly ignores the careful effort Freud takes to avoid align-

ing the period with the quantitative difference generative of memory (i.e.,

with a quantitative difference internal to the psychic system) and thereby to

preserve the independence constitutive of perceptual consciousness.13

In his zeal to ontologize Freud's model of the mind, Derrida thus brack-

ets precisely what is most fruitful in Freud's speculation: the external

anchoring and irreducible locality of the period. According to Freud, there

is no "period in general" but only the period of specific stimuli emanating

from the external world. By ontologizing Freud, Derrida effectively over-

looks the substantial naturalism of the 1895 model and downplays Freud's

strong desire to make his theory consistent with "the general laws of

motion." Insofar as they "assimilate the period of an excitation," argues

Freud, perceptual neurones are a function of such general laws (1954, 371;

emphasis added). By perception, then, Freud means the integration into the

organism of external forces, all of which possess their own characteristic

period (or "qualitative characteristic"). According to Freud, while such inte-

gration involves a certain reduction-of what is continuous in the external

world into a discontinuous segment-and yields what Freud calls an "anal-

ogy," not an absolute coincidence,14 the specific period of the actual exter-

nal stimulus nevertheless retains a constitutive role: "The characteristic of

quality in the stimuli . . . is represented by a particular period of neuronic

motion which is certainly not the same as that of the stimulus but has some

relation to it, determined according to a reduction formula that is unknown

to us" (375).

Duration, the "Quality" Model, and Technology

Freud's conception of the period would therefore seem more akin to

Bergsonian "duration" (duree) than to Heideggerian temporality. Like

duration, the temporal period brokers an encounter of matter and mind that

eschews traditional dualism as well as the radicalized form of subjectivity

stemming from the ecstatic temporalizing of Dasein (and, one could add, of

differance). While a thorough analysis of Bergson's theory of perception is

beyond the scope of my argument here, a brief comparison of Freud and

Technology and External Experience * 165

Bergson will help us expand Freud's narrow and too hastily abandoned

analysis of quality. Modeled on duration, the notion of quality provides the

conceptual basis for an understanding of external experience beyond the

scope of the psychic reduction.

In the larger picture, reading Freud through Bergson will help us to mod-

ify the notion of qualitative experience to reflect the experiential conditions

of our technological age; aligned with Benjamin's category of Erlebnis ("liv-

ing through"), qualitative consciousness specifies the mechanism for our

embodied mode of experiencing the technologized environment of post-

modernity (see chapter 9). By replacing Freud's account of quality as a pro-

tective mechanism with an understanding of it as a robust and richly

embodied mode of apprehending the external world, I shall expand its func-

tion to encompass two types of encounter between organism and world that

have become prevalent in contemporary postmodern technoculture:

encounters involving subperceptual or molecular stimuli that do not register

psychically in any direct way and encounters involving stimuli that are

incompatible with the capacities and rhythms of qualitative consciousness,

that cannot simply be screened out, and that therefore impose violent,

though often unregistered (i.e., nontraumatic) modifications on our nonpsy-

chic qualitative experience.

Working under the assumption that there is a complete continuum

between matter and mind, Bergson defines perception as a fundamentally

pragmatic gesture: the act of aligning the rhythm of internal duration with

the rhythm of the duration belonging to external matter. In this sense, he

argues, perception constitutes a "choice."

Perception, therefore, consists in detaching, from the totality of objects, the

possible action of my body upon them. Perception appears, then, as only a

choice. It creates nothing; its office, on the contrary, is to eliminate from the

totality of images all those on which I can have no hold, and then, from each

of those which I retain, all that does not concern the needs of the image

which I call my body. Such, at least, much simplified, is the way we explain

or describe schematically what we have called pure perception. (Bergson

1991, 229)

As the result of this process of alignment, perception is equated with an

action of the body on the "totality of images." Since perception, for Berg-

son, always involves a mix of mind and matter, the alignment of internal

and external duration can embody any of the possible configurations of

matter and memory on the continuum between pure perception and pure

memory. Depending on which pole is more prominent, perception will

either tend to obey necessity (the law of matter) or to express freedom (the

166 * Embodying Technesis

law of spirit). In either case, argues Bergson, the important point is that

"sensible qualities" are not internally or psychically generated representa-

tions but rather the materialization of choices enacted by memory on the

real.

Now, at the same time that our actual and so to speak instantaneous percep-

tion effects this division of matter into independent objects, our memory

solidifies into sensible qualities the continuous flow of things.... To reply, to

an action received, by an immediate reaction which adopts the rhythm of the

first and continues it in the same duration, to be in the present and in a pre-

sent which is always beginning again-this is the fundamental law of matter:

herein consists necessity. If there are actions that are really free, or at least

partly indeterminate, they can only belong to beings able to fix, at long inter-

vals, that becoming to which their own becoming clings, able to solidify it

into distinct moments, and so to condense matter.... (210; emphasis added)

Depending on where it lies along the continuum of matter and mind, an act

of perception thus comprises either an adaptation of internal to external

duration or an assimilation of external to internal duration.

Modeled on Bergsonian duration, Freud's conception of quality takes on

a far more materialist flavor. As the products of the alignment of internal

and external duration, perceptual qualities attest to the relative command of

the organism over its material world. Like the "sensible qualities" Bergson

speaks of, perceptual qualities comprise an organism's material incorpora-

tion of the external world. Bergson explains: "as they are found in our mem-

ory-shot perception, [sensible qualities] are, in fact, the successive moments

obtained by a solidification of the real" (211). Read in this way, Freud's

qualitative consciousness becomes capable of more than mere protection

and, at the same time, loses its lingering representationalist function. Instead

of comprising a mysterious psychic analogy for external stimuli, perceptual

qualities would be the physiological products of the organism's effort to

solidify or fix that stimuli-in other words, the means by which an organ-

ism robustly experiences the external world.15 Bergson's monism gives us

the conceptual tools necessary to assess the material impact of technological

change according to a simple economic formula that eschews Freud's onto-

genetic reduction: as our material world complexifies, we become less and

less able to solidify the real by fixing the becoming of matter.

Nonetheless, if we are to grasp the continual increase in passivity that is

the correlate of technological change, we must eschew the voluntarist strain

of Bergsonist pragmatism. In particular, we must focus our attention on

those experiences where no solidification of the real is possible, where the

material world simply imposes its rhythms on us. If we cannot delay our

Technology and External Experience * 167

response (by generating a representation) in an ever increasing number of

situations, how, we must ask, can we avoid becoming the mere pawns of

technological materiality?

One answer to this question-Lyotard's-involves our use of technology

to expand our material liberty. Lyotard argues that by availing ourselves of

the "complex of transformers" produced by technoscience, we can gain the

means to extend the range of external rhythms that we can solidify or take

in as sensible qualities. New technologies thus comprise what Lyotard calls

a "supplementary cortex." Lyotard explains that as a stand-in for our per-

ceptual faculty, the technological cortex enables an extension of the range of

our collective perception and thus fundamentally alters the nature of expe-

rience: "These [new] technologies show in their own way that there is no

break between matter and mind, at least in its reactive functions, which we

call performance-functions. They have a cortex, or a cortex-element, which

has the property of being collective, precisely because it is physical and not

biological" (Lyotard 1991, 43). By submitting matter to a deindividualized

spirit, the new technologies expand the range of perception. In the process,

however, they also fundamentally alienate the individual organism from its

role as locus of perception, stripping from it the biological privilege it has

always held. Ultimately, then, if the new technologies increase our material

freedom, they do so in ways that lie beyond the bounds of individual, lived

experience.

An example cited by Lyotard-Bergson's example of the technoscientific

grasp of the color red-helps to establish this point. Lyotard argues that if

science increases our command over the sensory experience of redness by

breaking red light down to a "vibration of the electro-magnetic field at a fre-

quency... of 400 trillion vibrations per second," this "liberation" is hardly

one for us as embodied creatures of experience, since the human eye, were

it to synchronize itself to that rhythm (even if such a thing were possible),

would register only "pure shocks" (42). While this example might seem far

removed from the domain of actual experience, the new media and elec-

tronic technologies that structure our experiential domains function in a

formally identical way. By accelerating the rhythm of the lifeworld in ways

that increasingly escape the cognitive and perceptual grasp of the individual

organism, new technologies introduce something radically incommensurate

with our traditional, biologically based experiential faculties. Once again,

however, rather than following Lyotard in abandoning the human, we need

to focus on finding ways of integrating such opaque elements into our indi-

vidual experiential lives, of gaining some modicum of control over them.

In the context of such a quest, the specific advantage of Freud's concep-

168 * Embodying Technesis

tion of quality should immediately become apparent: as the basis for a

model of perceptual "consciousness" (consciousness in general) that is inde-

pendent from psychic (or representational) consciousness, quality brokers a

form of experience that, unlike Bergson's notion of the solidification of the

real, does not depend on the mediation of representation, on a translation of

external experience into an analogous internal form. As the faculty the indi-

vidual organism uses to absorb excessive or alien external rhythms, periods,

or durations, perceptual consciousness thus permits the experience of these

latter independently of the psychic model and (psychic) representation as

such. It forms the basis for a corporeal mode of experience-a mode of

experience founded on the direct interactional contact of the individual

organism with the material world.16 Moreover, precisely because it requires

a distinction among three forms of consciousness, Freud's 1895 model

allows us to avoid concluding, with Bergson and Lyotard, that the deter-

minism of our passive (unmediated) encounters with matter necessarily

entails a decrease in our liberty. Notwithstanding its internal inconsistency,

Freud's complex concept of consciousness has the merit of explaining how

our embodied experience, despite being largely outside of our (direct, con-

scious) control, can nonetheless be an issue for us. By making it an explicit

concern (though not the intentional object) of our representational con-

sciousness, we can take actions that will ultimately, if only indirectly,

improve our bodily lives. We can, for example, retrain our bodies to deal

better with certain types of excessive stimuli or to tolerate repetitive labor;

and we can do so, importantly, without first (or ever) acquiring cognitive

and/or representationalist mastery over these experiences. Expanded in the

ways I suggest, Freud's model thus addresses our insistent current need-a

need directly correlated with technological advancement-to secure a

means of accounting for the unmarked dimension of our experience of tech-

nological materiality in a way that need not end in pessimistic resignation or

nihilistic disenchantment.

To give my suggestion its strongest possible form and to prepare for our

return to Freud in chapter 9, let us briefly reconsider the notion of the dead

cortical layer in the context of my reconstruction of the topic of quality.

Whereas Freud's 1895 notion of qualitative perception remains exclusively

oriented toward the needs of his model of the psyche,17 in Beyond he

emphasizes what he calls the "protective" function of the dead cortical

layer, a function that (he haltingly admits) is "almost more important...

than reception of stimuli."

... we have more to say of the living vesicle with its receptive cortical layer.

This little fragment of living substance is suspended in the middle of an exter-

Technology and External Experience * 169

nal world charged with the most powerful energies; and it would be killed by

the stimulation emanating from these if it were not provided with a protec-

tive shield against stimuli. It acquires the shield in this way: its outermost sur-

face ceases to have the structure proper to living matter, becomes to some

degree inorganic and thenceforward functions as a special envelope or mem-

brane resistant to stimuli. In consequence, the energies of the external world

are able to pass into the next underlying layers, which have remained living,

with only a fragment of their original intensity; and these layers can devote

themselves, behind the protective shield, to the reception of the amounts of

stimulus which have been allowed through it. By its death, the outer layer has

saved all the deeper ones from a similar fate . . . (21)

As a protective envelope enclosing the psyche, the dead cortical layer func-

tions by deflecting exogenous stimuli, by refusing them entrance into the

psychic system. Or so it appears from the standpoint of the psyche.

From a nonpsychic standpoint, by contrast, the cortical layer physically

absorbs those exogenous stimuli that would lead to psychic trauma. In this

way, the dead cortical layer functions as an organic and corporeal agency

through which we can experience the technologically induced shift in the

economy of mind and matter. Read through the 1895 model of qualitative

consciousness, the cortical layer carries out a thorough deterritorialization

of Freud's nouocentric stance, one that brings this theoretical model into the

domain of practice. As a material and physical agency, it dissociates experi-

ence from the narrower metapsychological model of the psyche as writing

machine.

By demonstrating the necessity for a corporeal level of experience,

Freud's stress on protection from stimuli would thus seem to make good on

an injunction voiced in 1895 by Joseph Breuer, Freud's early mentor and

collaborator, that the "perceptual apparatus, including the sensory spheres

of the cortex, . . . be [kept] distinct from the organ which stores up and

reproduces sense impressions in the form of memory-images" (Freud 1954,

363n).18 Not only does the protective function require that perception be

detached from consciousness, but it effectively demands that the (hence-

forth) merely local (intrapsychic) divide between consciousness and mem-

ory-trace be replaced with a broader exclusivity-the exclusivity of corpo-

real and psychic experiential modes.

Chapter 7

Technology beyond Thought, or How Real Is

the Lacanian Real?

By reconstructing Freud's inchoate notion of perceptual consciousness in

chapter 6, I have sought to retool the dead cortical layer into a "faculty"

correlated to the experiential impact of modern and contemporary tech-

nologies. As a corporeal agency of experience, the cortical layer would seem

capable of registering technology's molecular impact on our bodies-the

impact it makes without leaving traces. Why, then, do I now delay develop-

ing this function of the cortical layer to focus on Lacan's, and subsequently

on Deleuze and Guattari's, respective engagements with modern technol-

ogy? What can possibly be gained from an exposition of the arcane "logics"

of the object petit a and of desiring-production?

Put bluntly, Lacan and the team of Deleuze and Guattari are coresponsi-

ble for an "ontological revolution" in contemporary theory that makes pos-

sible a determination of technology as something more than the mere sup-

port for thought. With the Lacanian conception of the real, and even more

so with its critical appropriation by Deleuze and Guattari, something radi-

cally external to the domain of phenomenological thought becomes-for

the first time-irreducible and unbracketable. In short, the variant though

broadly complementary efforts of both Lacan and Deleuze and Guattari to

link technology with the real combine to form a crucial hinge in my effort to

sketch an alternative approach to technology that avoids the machine reduc-

tion. In this chapter, I shall examine the terms of Lacan's break with the

phenomenological tradition, focusing mostly on its limitations, though not

without some recognition of the positive contribution it made historically as

a catalyst for alternate, nonrepresentationalist models of the subject's con-

stitutive relation to the technological real. In the following chapter, I shall

explore Deleuze and Guattari's joint effort in Capitalism and Schizophrenia

to capitalize on the break first broached by Lacan.

The sustained attention Lacan paid to technology throughout his career

plays a crucial enabling role in his important break with phenomenology.

The final fruit of this attention-Lacan's instantiation in Seminar XI of

Technology beyond Thought * 171

objet a as "gaze" and "voice" in the modern world-articulates a connec-

tion between desire and ontic technology that localizes technology as the

hinge linking the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real. Through this instan-

tiation, Lacan grants technology a role both in the imaginary dialectic con-

stitutive of the split subject and in the inaccessible real. By coordinating the

function of the objet a in the imaginary (the suture of fantasy) with its func-

tion in the real (what in relation to the imaginary subject can only be con-

ceived as "pure lack" or "void"), Lacan recognizes what the phenomenolo-

gist could not: that, alongside its role in fantasy or consciousness,

technology-or, more precisely, the technologically embodied objet a-has

a certain autonomy in the real. Notwithstanding the limitations of Lacan's

own treatment of this autonomy, the connection he draws between technol-

ogy and the real constitutes the hinge that will, in the hands of others, begin

the long process of overturning the machine reduction.

In reconstructing the development of Lacan's thought concerning tech-

nology, I shall seek to separate this fruitful connection of technology and the

real from the reduction it undergoes in his theory. What we will find is that

Lacan's notion of the real is itself the problem, insofar as it remains inca-

pable of breaking with the psychocentrism we have discovered in Freud and

Derrida. Because he consistently conceives of the real from the standpoint of

the symbolic, Lacan effectively renders it a psychic construction. As long as

it remains junctured to the symbolic-"defined by the impossibilities

encountered by the symbolic," as Francois Roustang puts it-the real can-

not furnish the material basis for a robust conception of technological

autonomy.1 To think through the autonomy Lacan wants in principle to

grant technology, we shall thus need to revise the very basis of the real,

emancipating it from its symbolic foundation.

We can get a sense for the stakes of Lacan's reduction by focusing on one

of his more central metaphors for the real: his comparison of psychic energy

with the energy stored up by a hydroelectric dam. Insofar as it installs mean-

ing as the ultimate horizon of analysis, this comparison reproduces the

enabling move central to the analyses of Heidegger and Derrida: "To say

that the energy was in some way already there in a virtual state in the cur-

rent of the river is properly speaking to say something that has no meaning,

for the energy begins to be of interest to us in this instance only beginning

with the moment in which it is accumulated, and it is accumulated only

beginning with the moment when machines are put to work in a certain

way."2 Following the terms of this analogy, we can only conclude that the

Lacanian real is, in some sense, constructed: it comes into being (as some-

thing "of interest to us") only with the imposition of structure, just as the

172 * Embodying Technesis

energy of the river becomes accessible only with the interruption of the

dam.3 Commenting on Lacan's use of mathematical formalization to

describe the real, Slavoj Zizek reinforces this conclusion. In the absence of

the dialectic of desire, he suggests, the real would be nothing but an irra-

tional, prelogical chaos; it would lose its status as matheme, "a purely logi-

cal formation to which nothing corresponds in 'reality"' (Ziek 1994, 51 n.

11). Because it must be activated by the falling out of the signifier, or objet

a, the real is restricted ontologically to a conceptual correspondence with

the individual fantasy structures characteristic of neurosis.4

Ultimately, I suggest, Lacan's focus on the constructed dimensions of the

real compromises his effort to furnish a more radical opening onto materi-

ality, a more robust conception of exteriority, than what the phenomeno-

logical tradition affords. Despite his fundamental and flamboyant break

with Freud's thoroughly Cartesian topology, Lacan can also be accused of

collapsing the outside "onto" the psyche. In fact, his intervention comprises

nothing less than the flip side of Freud's, for where Freud hypostatizes the

psyche and the instinctual drives, subsuming everything within the mind,

Lacan so extends the psyche that inside comes to coincide with outside. No

matter how much light this extension might shed on the paradoxical local-

ization of psychic desire in the objet a as what Lacan calls an extimate ker-

nel (extimate here designating the nonphenomenological, constitutive exte-

riority of the objet a), the exteriority thus secured remains merely relative

since it depends for its very existence on the dialectic of desire.

Viewed in the most positive light, this reduction can be attributed to the

disciplinary demands of psychoanalysis and specifically to the concrete

imperative it places on the critic to focus on the unsymbolizable object cause

of desire. Whereas Lyotard, for example, can attribute the eclipse of human

agency directly to the material cosmic complexification of the cosmos,

Lacan has no choice but to ground it in language. As Lacan explains, such a

focus is precisely what defines the field of psychoanalysis: "Now the subject

of the unconscious is a spoken being, and that is the being of man; if psy-

choanalysis is to be a science, that is not a presentable object . . . The object

of psychoanalysis is not man; it is what he lacks-not an absolute lack, but

the lack of an object" (Lacan 1989a, 113). Despite its origin in the real, the

ultimate significance of objet a remains (and can only remain) its privileged

place in the symbolic, its status as the radically unsymbolizable object rep-

resenting the subject to the "Other."5

Any account of technology that respects this self-imposed disciplinary

demand cannot but remain in the thrall of subjectivism. In Lacan's case, this

reduction surfaces most insistently in the subordination of technology to

Technology beyond Thought * 173

objet a that forms the crux of Seminar XI. For Lacan, mass-media tech-

nologies are significant only insofar as they embody the gaze and voice (the

modern forms of objet a) and are consequently of interest solely to the

extent that they support the dialectical emergence of the subject. In other

words, Lacan reduces technology to a support for the subject. To this fun-

damental limitation, we need to add three others: (1) Because objet a is

unknowable, its embodiment in technology can yield nothing concrete;

Lacan's approach to technology is plagued by abstraction. (2) Because objet

a is a traumatic object and, for this reason, acquires its role as the object

cause of desire, technology is relevant only to the extent that it supports a

traumatic event; Lacan perpetuates the molar trauma model central to

Freud's mature thought. (3) Because objet a functions as object cause of

desire, technology is assimilated into an account of the emergence of desire,

to which it becomes subordinate; Lacan thus retains the ontogenetic bias of

the later Freud and Derrida.

To situate these limitations concretely within Lacan's theoretical corpus,

I shall reconstruct the path leading to the fourfold reduction of technology

in his work.6 Following a brief exposition of the link between objet a and

technology, I shall correlate Lacan's analysis of causality in Seminar XI with

his account of the machine in Seminar II, in order to expose the operation

of a machine reduction of technology simultaneously imposed and obscured

by Lacan's early decision to align the machine with the symbolic. Finally,

following communications theorist Anthony Wilden, I shall summarize the

impact of this reduction from the systems-theoretical perspective and sug-

gest the dead end of contemporary projects that seek to extend Lacan's

model as the basis for an account of technology.

Technology and the Objet a

Given his early interest in Heidegger, it is not surprising that Lacan's most

sustained engagement with technology can be found in his critique of the

objectifying impulse of modern science. For Lacan, modern science com-

prises a collective mechanism of denial by which we moderns avoid con-

fronting the hidden truth of the unconscious.7 Lacan claims that insofar as

it remains exclusively concerned with knowledge-the product of our

technoscientific colonization of the world-science is unable to address the

topic of truth: "Truth . . . remains alien to the scientific order: science may

be honored by its alliances with truth; it may take as an object truth's phe-

nomenon and value; but it cannot, in any way, interpret truth for its own

174 * Embodying Technesis

end" (Lacan, 1966, cited in Leupin 1991, 5). Underlying this claim, of

course, is Lacan's appreciation for the constitutive incompleteness of truth,

the fact that truth surfaces only within the dialectic of desire constitutive of

the subject. In it, we can see the early affinity of Lacan's critique of science

with that of Heidegger. For both, science masks the disclosure of truth: it

substitutes a purely objective command over reality for the world-disclos-

ing, existential project of a questioning being.8

From the psychoanalytic standpoint, the subject of science (as a privi-

leged instance of the modern ego) is constituted through the effort to suture

a lack in Being. From Descartes to Godel, Lacan argues, modern logic "is

indisputably the strictly determined consequence of an attempt to suture the

subject of science, and Godel's last theorem shows that this attempt fails,

meaning that the subject in question remains the correlate of science, but an

antinomial correlate since science turns out to be defined by the deadlocked

endeavor to suture the subject" (Lacan 1989b, 10). As the result of its para-

noid stance, the subject of science comes into

being through an

identification with the field of positivity, an identification that achieves on a

collective scale what ego identification does on the individual scale.

This fundamental parallel opens an important social dimension in

Lacan's thought, which, by 1953, yields a fully articulated view of psycho-

analytic practice as a means to combat the "social psychosis" generated by

science.

. . a way out is offered to the subject for the resolution of that impasse [of

the belle tme who does not recognize his very own raison d'6tre in the disor-

der that he denounces in the world] when his discourse is delusional. Com-

munication can be validly established for him in the common task of science

and in the posts that it commands in our universal civilization; this commu-

nication will be effective within the enormous objectification constituted by

that science, and it will enable him to forget his subjectivity. (Lacan 1977b,

70)

While it furnishes a form of communication analogous in function to the

modern ego, science underwrites an evasion of truth that has far more dev-

astating social consequences.

The roots of this extensive parallel between the ego and science can be

traced to Lacan's analysis of space in the fifth thesis of "Aggressivity in Psy-

choanalysis" (1948), where he first broaches the social consequences of psy-

choanalysis. By claiming that aggressivity increases with the spatial con-

striction of the modern urban environment, Lacan effectively retools the

Hegelian master/slave dialectic so central to his early work in order to assail

Technology beyond Thought * 175

the stance of modern science. Here Lacan posits for the first time the topic

that is my central concern-the link of technology with desire.

Correlatively [to the promotion of the ego and the ever more advanced real-

ization of man as individual] . . . , we are engaged in a technical enterprise at

the species scale: the problem is knowing whether the Master/Slave conflict

will find its resolution in the service of the machine, for which a psychotech-

nique that is already proving rich in ever more precise applications will be

used to provide space-capsule pilots and space-station supervisors. (1977a,

27; emphasis added)

Technology ("the machine") is here conflated with an intensification and

externalization of the dialectic of desire constitutive of the ego. In an antic-

ipation of the reduction that will surface so insistently in his later work,

technology here comprises what Lacan, in a striking term, calls "psy-

chotechnique," technology in the service of the psyche.

This very same parallel between technoscience and the ego leads Lacan, a

decade and a half later in Seminar XI, to connect the objet a with technol-

ogy. In the mass-mediated forms taken by the voice and the gaze in the con-

temporary world, Lacan sees an extension of the enormous objectification

and a correlative alienation of the subject.

I have already indicated the interest to be found in situating, at the level of

the subjective status determined as that of the object a, what, for the past

three hundred years, man has defined in science. Perhaps the features that

appear in our time so strikingly in the form of what are more or less correctly

called the mass media, perhaps our very relation to the science that ever

increasingly invades our field, perhaps all this is illuminated by the reference

to those two objects, whose place I have indicated for you in a fundamental

tetrad, namely, the voice-partly planetarized, even stratospherized, by our

machinery-and the gaze, whose ever-encroaching character is no less sug-

gestive, for, by so many spectacles, so many phantasies, it is not so much our

vision that is solicited, as our gaze that is aroused. (Lacan 1977c, 274)

From this passage we get a clear sense for Lacan's unequivocal determina-

tion of technology as the site for an exteriorization of the extimate objet a.

Without discounting the importance of Lacan's claim regarding the

increasing centrality of technology as a support for the dialectic of desire,

we must resist the temptation to reproduce his disciplinary blindness by lim-

iting our account of technology to this aspect. We must, that is, do every-

thing we can to avoid pigeonholing technology as a (mere) support for the

subject, since we can learn nothing concrete about technology in that way.

As long as we follow Lacan's determination of technology as a mere

176 * Embodying Technesis

mechanism for the splitting of the subject, the most we can claim about the

technological exteriorization of the object cause is that it renders all the

more inscrutable the lack that is, for Lacan, constitutive of desire.9 In sum,

despite his important shift from a predominately critical account of tech-

nology as a destructive externalization of the ego to a more positive account

of its contribution to subject constitution, Lacan continues to subordinate

technology to the abstract dialectic of desire. Both voice and spectacle lure

their respective drives solely on account of the lack-the nonspecularizable

kernel-which they embody; for all of their apparent concreteness, that is,

both technological embodiments of objet a lure the drive in the same wholly

abstract manner in every case-by generating a void between the subject

and the real.

The Object Cause

Lacan's reduction of technology forms nothing less than the precondition

for the equation of machine with symbolic order on which his theory of the

object cause is based. Yet insofar as he presents this reduction as a simple

consequence of his decision to focus exclusively on the object of psycho-

analysis, Lacan is able to present this assimilation of technology to the sym-

bolic order as if it were the result of a critique of causality, rather than the

very condition of possibility for such a critique. On Lacan's account, tech-

nology acquires whatever status it has as a function of the gap that opens

the space of psychic causality.

Cause is to be distinguished from that which is determinate in a chain, in

other words the law. By way of example, think of what is pictured in the law

of action and reaction. There is here, one might say, a single principle. One

does not go without the other . . . There is no gap here . . . Whenever we

speak of cause, on the other hand, there is always something anti-conceptual,

something indefinite. . . . In short, there is cause only in something that

doesn't work. (Lacan 1977c, 22)

The Freudian unconscious, Lacan contends, is located precisely in this gap

between cause and effect. As that which is covered over in fantasy, this gap

is constitutive of the subject qua subject of desire. And since psychic causal-

ity is what produces the law in a way that inaugurates causality as such, it

remains prior to any causal effects of technology and thus insures their orig-

inally symbolic nature.

Lacan attributes the production of this misfiring constitutive of uncon-

Technology beyond Thought * 177

scious causality to the law of the signifier. What misfires is precisely the

process of signification; a signifier falls out from the symbolic chain and

becomes the objet a. As Joan Copjec observes, Lacan's task is "the

clarification of the way consequence is, in fact, derived from language."

Copjec continues: "He [Lacan] will thus define the subject not as an effect

contained within language, but as an effect of that which it cuts off, that

which language makes disappear" (Copjec 1992, 236). The break in the

symbolic chain-what Lacan calls "cause"-actually produces the subject

as its effect.

This understanding of causality requires a major, though once again (as

in the case of Heidegger) ultimately not transformative, revision of Aristo-

tle's fourfold doctrine. To answer the question "Where do we meet the

real?" Lacan puts forth what looks like a striking reversal of tuche and

automaton.

. .what we have in the discovery of psycho-analysis is an encounter, an

essential encounter-an appointment to which we are always called with a

real that eludes us . . . We have translated [tuche] as the encounter with the

real. The real is beyond the automaton, the return, the coming-back, the

insistence of the signs, by which we see ourselves governed by the pleasure

principle. The real is that which always lies behind the automaton. ...

(1977c, 53-54)

By identifying automaton with the signifying chain and tuche with the

falling out of the signifier, Lacan appears to invert Aristotle's schema.10

Against Aristotle, he situates chance exclusively in tuche, relegating automa-

ton to a form of repetition that designates no more than a pseudochance, an

as-if-by-chance.11

Through this inversion, however, Lacan effectively strips away the non-

human dimension so central to Aristotle's automaton. By restricting it to the

automatism of language or the signifying chain, Lacan strips automaton of

its capacity to embody the kind of chance that characterizes events in the

inanimate domain.12 Consequently, despite his revisions, Lacan ultimately

follows Aristotle in subordinating automaton to tuche and ultimately repro-

duces the reduction Aristotle inaugurates in his analysis of chance: the

reduction of exteriority to thought and, specifically, of technical exteriority

to techne.

If anything, Lacan's subordination of automaton to tuche is even more

sweeping than Aristotle's, since the assimilation of automaton to repetition

insures its dependence on a notion of psychic causality. The priority of psy-

chic causality itself lends further proof of the constructed status of the

178 * Embodying Technesis

Lacanian real; in the wake of such a priority, the real coemerges with the

symbolic and the imaginary in a process of which it is simultaneously the

cause. According to 2izek, precisely this process embodies the operation of

psychic causality.13

The Cause qua the Real intervenes where symbolic determination stumbles,

misfires-that is, where a signifier falls out . . . [T]he Real is the absent Cause

which perturbs the causality of the symbolic law. On that account, . . . the

Cause exercises its influence only as redoubled, through a certain discrepancy

or time-lag. . . . Consequently, a certain radical ambiguity pertains to the

Cause: the Cause is real, the presupposed reef which resists symbolization

and disturbs the course of the automaton, yet the Cause is simultaneously the

retroactive product of its own effects. (2iek 1994, 30-31)

According to 2izek, for the real to "effectuate its causal power," it must

undergo what corresponds, in its own register, to the subject's encounter

with it, what Lacan designates as tuche. The real as traumatic kernel or

object cause only comes into existence following its symbolization. 2izek

continues: ". . . the trauma has no existence of its own prior to symboliza-

tion; it remains an anamorphic entity that gains its consistency only in ret-

rospect... from the structural necessity of the inconsistency of the symbolic

field" (31). What enables this reduction of the real to trauma is the assimi-

lation of automaton to the signifying chain. Both reductions involve a fun-

damental collapse of radical exteriority as the sacrifice necessary to insure

the unhindered reign of psychic causality (tuche).14

Desire and the Machine

Having observed the connection Lacan advances between the technologi-

cally embodied objet a and the identification of automaton with the sym-

bolic, we must now underscore their constitutive complicity. The coherence

of Lacan's assimilation of technology as support for the objet a stems

directly from his early reduction of the machine to a mere physical embodi-

ment of the symbolic order. Not unlike the case of Heidegger, an early

reduction of technology determines Lacan's mature stand on technology,

once again in a manner that is obfuscated by metalepsis.

In Seminar II: The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psy-

choanalysis, Lacan rereads Freud's notion of the death drive in light of his

early discovery of the unconscious and the bioenergetic model of the psyche.

For Lacan, the death drive is the pivotal concept that enabled Freud to

Technology beyond Thought * 179

return to his early and seminal discovery of the irreducible gap between the

unconscious and the ego, a discovery that, Lacan suggests, quickly fell into

neglect in the early trajectory of the psychoanalytic institution. Two interre-

lated aims animate the seminar: first, Lacan seeks to extend his early critique

of ego analysis by destroying the philosophical notion of consciousness; sec-

ond, he develops a theory of the machine as the crux of an alternative, his-

torically specific materialist definition of consciousness.15s

Lacan orients his development of these two arguments around Freud's

relationship to Hegel. In "Freud, Hegel, and the Machine," Lacan draws a

central contrast between two models of desire: on the one hand, a Hegelian

view of desire as intersubjective, modeled on the master-slave dialectic, and

linked to a conception of consciousness that assumes knowledge; on the

other, a Freudian view of desire as unconscious, instituted by the machine-

as-consciousness, and thus linked with a model of consciousness that has

already built-in opacities to knowledge.16 The question Lacan pursues con-

cerns the relation between these two models: what is there that is new in the

passage from Hegel to Freud? Lacan's answer sheds light on the role of tech-

nology in his theory of desire: "Between Hegel and Freud, there's the advent

of the world of the machine" (Lacan 1991, 74). Together with the correla-

tive concept of energy, the machine makes visible for the first time the sym-

bolic basis of human being and the existence of unconscious desire not gov-

erned by the ego.

In Seminar II, Lacan pursues this thesis historically, beginning with

Descartes. Descartes marks the first stage in the modern history of the

machine basis of the symbolic. Lacan argues that by thinking the body as

machine, Descartes anticipates and prepares the modern view of the physi-

cian's task with respect to the body as tantamount to the dismantling of a

machine. Descartes' conception of the body realizes the symbolic possibili-

ties as they were embodied in contemporaneous machinery. Lacan writes:

... it took quite a bit for [Descartes] to begin to think of the body as a

machine. What in particular it took was for there to be one which not only

worked by itself, but which could embody in a quite striking way something

essentially human" (73). With the invention of the clock, that is, our sym-

bolic functioning finds an "objective" materialization outside of ourselves.

In a distinct swerve from both Freud and Derrida, Lacan approaches the

machine as a historically specific embodiment of the possibilities of sym-

bolic activity.

[The machine] isn't purely and simply the opposite of the living, the simu-

lacrum of the living. That it was constructed so as to embody something

180 * Embodying Technesis

which is called time and is the mystery of mysteries should put us on the right

track. What is in play in the machine? ... It isn't a simple artifact, as could

be said of chairs, tables, and of other more or less symbolic objects, among

which we live without realizing that they make for our own portrait.

Machines are something else. They go much further in the direction of what

we are in reality . . . (74)

Lacan argues that more than any other worldly entity, the machine fur-

nishes a view of our truth: it "embodies the most radical symbolic activity

of man" (74).

Just as the clock conditions the machine metaphor in its classical form,

the steam engine stands behind the Freudian conception of homeostasis.

Lacan explains:

Energy... is a notion which can only emerge once there are machines....

There are no examples of energy calculations in the use of slaves . . . It took

machines for us to realize they had to be fed. And more-they had to be

looked after. But why? Because they tend to wear out. Slaves do as well, but

one doesn't think about it, one thinks that it is natural for them to get old and

croak. And later on, it dawned on people . . . that living things look after

themselves all on their own, in other words, they represent homeostats. (75)

By generating a symbolic order in which energy calculations are at issue,

machines condition the fundamental question that Lacan ascribes to Freud:

"what, in terms of energy, is the psyche?" (75).

The symbolic dimension embodied in the homeostat is also what makes

possible Freud's discovery of a beyond beyond the machine-a "symbolic

beyond." The appearance of dreams and compulsive repetition strain

Freud's historically inherited and thus naturalized energy model almost to

the breaking point. In the dream, writes Lacan, Freud "discovers the opera-

tion of the symbol as such"; he "realizes that the brain is a dream machine"

(76). As a "function of the symbol," continues Lacan, repetition puts the

human being beyond "all the biological mechanisms of equilibration" (90).

Freud's elaboration of the death instinct, Lacan concludes, is an effort to

"try to recover what [the symbolic beyond] means in terms of energy" (76;

emphasis added). In sum, the machine embodies the possibility of conceiv-

ing man as a symbolic being: the machine makes understandable, for the

first time, the notion that the unconscious is structured like a language (that

it is the discourse of the other) and, moreover, that the subject is the effect

of a preexisting symbolic circuit.

To see how Lacan himself deploys the symbolic dimension of the

machine, let us focus on the example he provides to illustrate his materialist

Technology beyond Thought * 181

definition of consciousness. By imagining a world from which all living

beings have disappeared but where cameras continue to register images,

Lacan demonstrates the autonomy of the "phenomenon of consciousness as

such"17-its independence from the ego.

. we have manufactured instruments which . . . we can imagine to be

sufficiently complicated to develop films themselves, put them away into lit-

tle boxes, and store them in the fridge. Despite all living beings having disap-

peared, the camera can nonetheless record the image of the mountain in the

lake, or that of the Cafe de Flore crumbling away in total solitude.... We

can take things further. If the machine were more complicated, a photo-elec-

tric cell focused on the image in the lake could cause an explosion . . . and

another machine could record the echo or collect the energy of this explo-

sion. So then! this is what I want you to consider as being essentially a phe-

nomenon of consciousness, which won't have been perceived by any ego,

which won't have been reflected upon in any ego-like experience-any kind

of ego and of consciousness of ego being absent at the time. (46-47)

In this striking anticipation of the later account of the technological embod-

iment of the objet a, the camera is accorded a role solely as support for the

"I," as a worldly embodiment of the symbolic dimension of the subject.

With this thought experiment, Lacan gives us an example of the heuristic

role of the machine in dividing the Freudian from the Hegelian world: just

as the clock revealed slaves' need for nourishment, the camera allows us to

conceive of consciousness as a machine operating beyond the subject's will

to knowledge.

In this hypothetical story, we confront the central homology that Lacan

posits between the machine (-in-the-) psyche and worldly machines: both

comprise embodiments of the symbolic.18 No less than the machine, argues

Lacan, the human being qua split subject is built out of the symbolic.

... it is in as much as he is committed to a play of symbols, to a symbolic

world, that man is a decentered subject . . . . [I]t is with this same play, this

same world, that the machine is built. The most complicated machines are

made only with words [ne sont faites qu'avec des paroles]. Speech is first and

foremost that object of exchange whereby we are recognized. . . That is how

the circulation of speech begins, and it swells to the point of constituting the

world of the symbol which makes algebraic calculations possible. The

machine is the structure detached from the activity of the subject. The sym-

bolic world is the world of the machine. (47)

By determining the technological machine as the beyond of psychic equilib-

rium, as the gap between the "I" and the "me" (the ego), Lacan employs

technology instrumentally: it furnishes a means of grasping the specificity of

182 * Embodying Technesis

the modern psyche. With this determination, he effectively commits himself

to a version of the machine reduction of technology: by contending that

"machines are made only with words" (or more precisely, "are not made

except with words" [ne sont faites qu'avec des paroles]),19 Lacan institutes

technesis as the privileged vehicle for investigating technology's impact.

Technology is relevant on his account only insofar as it embodies the sym-

bolic-only insofar as it comprises the machine in/of language.

Nonetheless, Lacan's assimilation of machine and symbolic order does

not simply repeat the machine reduction in its onto-phenomenological or

onto-grammatological form. Whereas Heidegger and Derrida employ tech-

nesis to efface the threat technological exteriority poses to philosophical

thought (or consciousness), Lacan successfully liberates technology from its

narrow function as the support for conscious activity. In so doing, he takes

an important step toward recognizing technology's radical exteriority.

Rather than simply enlarging the self-alienation of thought from its (writ-

ten) expression in the figure of relative exteriority, technology on Lacan's

account comes to instantiate a symbolic order of language as it operates

independently of human cognition. Though still tied to language and to the

figure of the machine (as itself a figure for language), technology acquires a

certain autonomy from the narrowly human (hermeneutic) use of lan-

guage.20

In the end, however, whatever gains are realized by this deterritorializa-

tion of technology are largely compromised by the broader reductive strat-

egy underlying Lacan's argument: the governing homology he draws

between worldly machinery and the machine-as-consciousness. Precisely

this homology licenses the construal of technology as the worldly support

for objet a. Lacan's account thus rests on a metalepsis formally identical

with Heidegger's: the governing homology of his argument only acquires its

force from a prior decision to construe the machine as symbolic program.

By restricting technology to a strictly cybernetic (symbolic and linguistic)

function, Lacan is able to determine the object cause of desire as the punc-

tuation of the homeostatic system comprising the symbolic and thus as the

very origin or "essence" of technology itself.

"Society Is the True Reality and the Individual

the Abstraction"

Anthony Wilden's communications perspective can help us contextualize

Lacan's reduction of technology. Looked at from Wilden's perspective, the

Technology beyond Thought * 183

theoretical imperative to constrain technology within a narrow, linguistic or

nouocentric framework can be attributed to theory's "CONSTITUTIVE

lack of context" (Wilden 1980, 134). In every case we have explored thus

far, an intrusion from the environment produces a destabilization of the

(closed) theoretical system that, given its limited resources, can only be

bracketed or otherwise excluded. At a subsequent stage, the destabilization

is then accounted for as a product of the system in a way that simply effaces

the enabling reduction of environment.

By exposing the mechanism of such effacement, Wilden's critique fur-

nishes a general model for exposing the logic of metalepsis that forms the

rhetorical embodiment of the machine reduction of technology. More than

an intentional strategy on the part of an author and more than a mere struc-

tural necessity inherent in language, metalepsis is the textual expression or

symptom of the system's (i.e., linguistic theory's) built-in inability to recog-

nize its environment.

As I argued in chapter 6, Freudian repetition comprises a particularly

clear example of this process. Within the closed-system, homeostatic model

he borrows from nineteenth-century science, Freud altogether lacks the

resources necessary to understand the beyond of the pleasure principle. To

preserve the integrity of the (closed) psychic system, he is thus compelled to

posit a new drive-one that can account for the beyond but without any

recourse to the environment. The brilliance of his speculations notwith-

standing, Freud's move here typifies psychoanalytical theory and other

closed-system forms of theory. All such forms, Wilden explains, are equally

unable to account for the role of the environment.

The tighter the theoretical closure, and the smaller the number of levels of

logical typing the theory is prepared to entertain, the sooner the theory will

discover that it is paradoxically double-bound by being, in effect, OUTSIDE

itself. . . . [N]o current psychoanalytical theory has at its disposal . . . a

sufficient contextual understanding which would enable it to deal either the-

oretically or practically with the question of the transcendence of INDIVID-

UAL psychological double binds in the real and material domain of the col-

lective. (134)

Applying this objection to Lacan's postulation of an abstract dialectic of

desire, we get a clear sense for how Lacan's fetishization of language merely

transposes the double bind of Freudian homeostasis into a new (equally

closed) domain. Wilden observes: "The bioenergetic metaphors will, how-

ever, tend necessarily to be retained in sublimated forms in any 'linguistic'

or 'digital' perspective. In such a perspective, a concept like 'desire' will have

to be employed to explain 'motive'" (137). He also observes: ". . . to replace

184 * Embodying Technesis

"instinct" by pulsion or 'drive' or derive (Lacan) is no more than a play on

words within the bioenergetic model. This is only a 'detour' which is a nec-

essary result of the emphasis on language rather than on communication"

(450).21 Like Freud's adherence to the homeostatic model of nineteenth-cen-

tury science, Lacan's hypostatization of language imposes a closed-system

perspective on an open-ended, goal-seeking (or purposive) entity. As a con-

sequence of these related reductions, the field of investigation is restricted to

the individual who is in isolation rather than in dynamic interrelation with

the environment.22 Like Freud before him, Lacan thus introduces a theoret-

ical reduction that, by detaching analysis from context, simulates a series of

double binds that retroactively (or metaleptically) appear to legitimate (but

that in fact themselves necessitate) the reduction of technology to language.

Correlated with Wilden's reading of Lacan, my critique of the operative

Lacanian homology between worldly and psychic machines takes on added

significance. From the systems perspective, the enabling reduction Lacan

imposes on technology reflects his effort to understand the latter as a

metaphor for social (or symbolic) phenomena. Commenting on nineteenth-

century analogies of life and/or society with the "organized machine,"

Wilden draws the following conclusion: "The significant understanding that

'society is the true reality and the individual the abstraction,' which is com-

mon to Saint-Simon, Comte, and Marx, is consequently obscured by the

projection of models derived from technology-mediated by 'science'-into

the social dimension. 'Machine' . . . means 'machine,' 'organism,' and

'social physiology' at one and the same time" (129). Since they are inher-

ently homeostatic, context free, and closed-system, technological metaphors

(or better still, technological systems as the basis for metaphor) are inca-

pable of accounting for the social dimension in all its complexity. Conse-

quently, what is needed is an entirely different understanding of technology,

one that situates it as an irreducible part of the environment, of the real and

material collective.

Such an understanding requires a break with

Lacan's exclusive

identification of the collective with the (digital) symbolic. As Wilden sug-

gests, Lacan's failure to distinguish language from communication limits the

analytical scope of his work.

To model human behavior, or the phantasy, or social structure, on the

phonemic relation of opposition is an interesting metaphor of the digital ide-

ology of our culture. . . . [T]he actual fact of irreducible DIFFERENCE

becomes the "fact" of irreducible OPPOSITION posited by Lacan, through

which is justified the application of the either/or epistemology of the bioen-

ergetic perspective to the both-and realities of the open system . . . [There-

Technology beyond Thought * 185

fore] we cannot agree [with Lacan] that the psychoanalyzable symptom is

"sustained by a structure which is identical to the structure of language."

That structure is not a linguistic structure, but a systemic and communica-

tional one. (458)

In the end, then, not only is Lacan's reductive homology of concrete with

psychic machine the result of his adherence to the closed system of Freudian

bioenergetics, but so too is the very privileging of language in human activ-

ity-undoubtedly the central contribution of Lacan's rich theoretical and

clinical corpus.23

Chapter 8

Ontological Revolution at What Cost?

Ambivalence in Deleuze and Guattari's

Capitalism and Schizophrenia

In the eclectic, post-Lacanian collaboration of Gilles Deleuze and Felix

Guattari, theory appears finally to have found a way of embracing technol-

ogy in a noninstrumentalist fashion. While Lacan performs the crucial task

of conceiving the real in a manner that opens the possibility of situating

technology beyond the domain of the phenomenological horizon, his map-

ping of object a onto the mass media subordinates concrete technologies to

a purely abstract dialectic of desire. In their own variant elaboration of the

real as the material stratum, or mechanosphere, Deleuze and Guattari (here-

after, in this chapter, D+G) seek to concretize the function of technology by

tethering it to specific effectuations of the real. The role D+G play in the crit-

ical genealogy I am tracing is both constructive and critical. While I embrace

their effort to develop a general machinic ontology capable of displacing the

binary opposition (vitalism vs. mechanism) underlying the machine

metaphor, I reject the primacy they lend desire. Such a primacy, I contend,

drives them to discount technical autonomy in all forms and, ultimately, to

perpetuate technesis through a global subordination of technology to a

mathematically and technically embodied semiotics of the social.

With their novel interpretation of desire, D+G furnish the basis for a fun-

damental and wide-ranging ontological revolution in our approach to tech-

nology's experiential impact. In the infamous Anti-Oedipus, D+G develop a

machinic ontology that counters the oedipal imperialism of psychoanalysis

by highlighting the social and technical preconditions for oedipalization.

Through an eclectic and polemical analysis extending from psychoanalysis

to the history of society, D+G forcefully contend that desire is inextricably

intertwined with technology-that it is, as they put it, "machined" (D+G

1983, 2). Preindividual and multiple, and thoroughly permeated by social

and technical determinants, desire is "strictly immanent to a plane which it

does not preexist, to a plane that must be constructed, in which particles are

Ontological Revolution at What Cost? * 187

emitted, fluxes are conjoined" (Deleuze 1987, 108; cited in Bogue 1990,

89). For this reason, one cannot divorce desire from its concrete material-

ization, as Lacan does when he situates desire's aim, or object cause, outside

the social field and restricts desire's worldly embodiment to the status of

mere support. Nor can one reduce the machine to a (mere) metaphor, since

desire functions machinically in the real. "Desire is machined" and the

"machine desiring," according to D+G: desire and machines cannot be sep-

arated (separation being the precondition of their being placed into a figura-

tive relationship). As D+G repeatedly affirm, there are only desiring-

machines. "Everything is a machine" (D+G 1983, 2).

With their rhizomatic machinism of desire, D+G introduce a radical

alternative to the representationalist paradigm underlying the reduction of

technology to its global impact on thought (Heidegger and Derrida) and to

a purely abstract role in the ontogenetic constitution of the subject (Freud

and Lacan). By taking literally Marx's thesis that machine technology com-

prises the final stage in the metamorphosis of living labor into fixed capital,

D+G appear to welcome the internalization of the machine within the mod-

ern subject.1 Where previous theorists balk at the notion that technology

infiltrates subjectivity, D+G seem eager to entertain the radical idea that all

desire is somehow machine made.

In A Thousand Plateaus, D+G deploy the notion of machinic internaliza-

tion as the foundation for a model of molecular agency that would appear

to be capable (on initial glance at least) of addressing technology's impact

on human experience in a nonreductive fashion. As the transformational

movement of presubjective desire, becomings forge machinic connections

between molecular singularities that entirely bypass the molar threshold of

perception/representation in order to connect terms in "pure relations of

speed and slowness, pure affects" (D+G 1987, 281). By forging rhythmic

connections between those assemblages of singularities we call human

beings and the material real, becomings hold out the promise for a robust

account of technology's experiential impact. Eschewing the monopoly of

representation, D+G trace the practical connections immediately generated

by the human incorporation of technology's inhuman rhythms.

While D+G appear to grant technology a qualified autonomy from the

tyranny of language, they cannot avoid reduction altogether. In subordinat-

ing technology to the social, they impose a reduction at a more inclusive

analytic level, one that has the effect of rendering technology entirely depen-

dent on desire for its very existence. If D+G thus restore a certain material-

ity to technology, particularly when contrasted to the figures explored ear-

lier, they nonetheless retain the rudiments of a formally identical machine

188 * Embodying Technesis

reduction. The materiality they do grant technology remains the mere

epiphenomenon of the social origin of desiring-production: like the quasi

materiality championed by today's cultural constructivists, it simply cannot

adequately index the radical material exteriority fundamental to modern

machine and cybernetic technology. Whether it is treated as the principle for

state science's hylomorphic reduction of matter or as the basis for a new

inhuman model of nomadic thought, technology is effectively distanced

from the material stratum, its function limited to the subsidiary task of pro-

viding a principle of (semiotic) organization that must itself be effectuated

by the more primary movement of social desire. Marshaled to highlight the

emancipatory potential of an alternate social semiotic, D+G's division of

technology draws attention away from the more radical materiality that my

study attributes to it.

This subordination of technology to social desire ultimately compromises

the radical potential of the machinic revolution D+G initiate in the Anti-

Oedipus. To guarantee the triumph of desiring-production (becoming) over

all forms of domination, D+G are compelled to sacrifice the ultimate payoff

of their ontological revolution: its displacement of the traditional humanist

privilege. Rather than extending agency (Being) to nonhuman entities, D+G

categorically foreclose the possibility of attributing desire (or, following

Deleuze's Spinozist terminology, "ontological power") to technical

machines (Deleuze 1990a). By thus limiting the sway of technology, D+G

are able simply to bracket the problem of power as it is raised, for example,

by Foucault; in place of a concrete account of actual forms of domination,

they substitute an abstract account of identity constitution. Their account,

in other words, too readily obscures a crucial distinction within power:

between powers of bodies (desire modeled on Spinoza's conatus) and pow-

ers exercised over them.2 By stressing the assemblage's priority as a concrete

expression of an abstract machine that is effectuated by desire, D+G subor-

dinate power (in the second, proper sense) to desire; in so doing, they are

able to preserve an emancipatory potential that is not internal to power (i.e.,

that does not take the form of resistance) but instead involves a broader

shift to an alternative kind of assemblage (a different social expression of

desire).3

This same subordination of power to desire informs D+G's split account

of technology. In instances where it functions by exerting power over our

bodies (domination), technology remains firmly embedded within the statist

assemblage; it embodies the principle of hylomorphism through which the

state domesticates matter as formed content. As long as technology remains

subordinate to the power of the state, whatever power it exercises can

Ontological Revolution at What Cost? * 189

always in principle be overcome through a deterritorialization of the state

assemblage. In those cases where technology facilitates emancipatory deter-

ritorialization, it simply does not function as an instrument of domination,

as a source of power.4 Within the nomad assemblage, technology is

employed as a vehicle for nomadic desire to express itself. In either case,

technology remains a mere tool in the service of a social machine: it alter-

natively allows either a restrictive state to impose its form on matter or a

guerilla social movement to bring social organization into closer proximity

to the material stratum.

In according the social the role of exhaustively circumscribing the space

for all movement, D+G effectively restrict their options for revolutionary

practice to wholesale social upheaval: deterritorialization of the statist

assemblage (society) can only take place through the erection of a counter-

state, an alternative societal form based on a logic that breaks with the hylo-

morphism central to the state's hegemony.5 In accord with this restriction,

the quest for an alternative social logic comes to hinge on an exploitation of

the a-signifying semiotics of abstract mathematical and technical systems.

As we can discern from D+G's updating of nomadology for use in the late

capitalist mechanosphere (cf. Plateau 13), the rootedness of contemporary

deterritorialization in advanced systems introduces an extensive degree of

human alienation.6 For all its apparent promise to track the itinerary of the

contemporary mechanosphere, nomad deterritorialization of thought ulti-

mately divorces thought from experience, installing in the divide between

them a gap whose concrete effects it is powerless to address. While the

replacement of human-centered signifying semiologies with an a-signifying

semiotics modeled on technological systems yields a model of inhuman or

machinic thought capable in some sense of capturing the logic of late capi-

talism, it turns a blind eye to the technological alienation experienced by

contemporary agents. Despite its flexibility, machinic thought effectively

brackets the concrete effects of technological domination. Accordingly,

D+G's model of becoming

can only describe the technological

complexification of the cosmos from an inhuman standpoint, one that, as

Mark Poster suggests, simply does not (and cannot) have any experiential

correlate: "It is as if the earth itself were to describe the changes on its sur-

face in the course of human history, a vantage point quite remote from the

ego of the individual or from the disciplined consciousness of a social scien-

tist" (Poster 1990, 136).

By narrowing technology's material impact to what can be mapped in

inhuman thought-to a technological system-D+G effectively reimpose

the tyranny of the theoretical that is so central to the representationalist

190 * Embodying Technesis

model explored earlier. To address technology's experiential effects, we

need to resist this strategy both by drawing a sharp ontological divide

between actual lived experience and what can be mapped virtually and,

more concretely, by rescuing or redeeming the actual from our culture's

extensive ideological investment in technologies of virtuality that appear to

marginalize it. Viewed from the standpoint of embodied phenomenal life,

what is important, as post-Althusserian Marxist critics have long pointed

out, is the way we experience the real, not its theoretical description (Eagle-

ton 1979, chap. 1; Jameson 1981, 29ff.). Against D+G's effort to appropri-

ate technology as the very principle for modeling contemporary thought, we

need to attend to the concrete ways in which technologies interfere with and

perhaps confound our efforts to understand their own constitutive materi-

ality.

Though valuable as a theoretical description that might very well clarify

possibilities for practice, D+G's inhuman, a-signifying semiotics must con-

sequently be supplemented with a concrete account of our corporeal adap-

tation to technology-an account of how technology's robust, pluridimen-

sional impact is actually lived through. Whether it is acknowledged or not,

some such account comprises the enabling condition for the various models

of affirmative subject construction championed by contemporary propo-

nents of cultural studies. By establishing the priority of embodiment over

discourse, what I shall call (drawing on Bourdieu's account of "mimeti-

cism" in primitive cultures [1990]) the mimetic dimension of our adaptation

to technology urges us to attend to the ways in which technology's power

over our bodies (domination) actually gets experienced. Not only does this

mimetic dimension furnish the background-and the precondition-for all

(subsequent) discursive processes of identity construction, but it also under-

lies our largely untapped capacity for experiencing technology in a postrep-

resentational, posthermeneutic mode-as a concrete, material force struc-

turing the lifeworld(s) of our embodied practice.

Beyond the Machine Metaphor

D+G's presentation of their machinic ontology begins with a concentrated

attack on metaphor and specifically on the Freudian notion of fantasy and

the Lacanian imaginary: "What a mistake to have ever said the id. Every-

where it is machines-real ones, not figurative ones: machines driving other

machines, machines being driven by other machines, with all the necessary

couplings and connections" (1983, 1). On the basis of this vociferous attack

Ontological Revolution at What Cost? * 191

on psychoanalytic metaphoricity, D+G propose an entirely new principle of

organization: for the representational unity of the scenic, they substitute a

purely functional form. Before and behind the ego, there are id machines

that operate directly on the surface of matter, cutting into the flow (hyle),

establishing machinic connections, without the least regard for psychic

aims, ego integrity, and other sacred cows.

With the machine, in short, we encounter an entirely new ontology of

desire. Rather than describing or representing how desire acts on the real,

the machine designates desire's production in the real, or better still, as the

real itself. Desire produces the real by machining, by effectuating the "par-

ticles" and "fluxes" that constitute matter itself. Desire thus overthrows the

linguistic closure of the Lacanian symbolic. As Guattari confidently

announces in his programmatic critique of Lacan, "one can no longer...

continue to say of history, as the site of the unconscious, that it is 'structured

like a language' "; instead, one must say that it liberates the "subject of the

unconscious" from its ties to the ego and places it in direct contact with the

"real" of the modern technological age, a real in which "the machine has

now come to the heart of desire" and "human work.., is merely a residual

sub-whole of the work of the machine" (Guattari 1984, 118, 113).7

In the Anti-Oedipus, Guattari's conception of the machine assumes yet

greater significance, since it is employed to underwrite a sweeping model

of causality radically divergent from the traditional Aristotelian model

central to the machine reduction of technology as I have thus far explored

it. By locating causal force at the molecular level, D+G liberate it from its

subordination to a final cause. Because it operates by inclusive disjunction,

by the logic of both/and, molecular efficiency infinitely exceeds any partic-

ular finality. This perspective reveals the reductive basis of the Aristotelian

reign of finality; as the principle informing the machine reduction, finality

attains its force by imposing a narrow molar configuration that valorizes

one possible arrangement of molecular force (efficiency) to the exclusion

of all others.

D+G's anti-Aristotelian model of causality derives from Deleuze's inter-

pretation of Spinoza and specifically from his rehabilitation of the concept

of immanent causality. As effectuators of matter, desiring-machines operate

in relation to what D+G call the "body without organs," the absolutely

undifferentiated mass produced when desiring-machines function at a zero

degree of intensity. D+G maintain that desiring-machines and the body

without organs differ only in function, not in essence: "The organs-partial

objects and the body without organs are at bottom one and the same thing.

... Partial objects are the direct powers of the body without organs, and the

192 * Embodying Technesis

body without organs, the raw material of the partial objects" (1983,

326-27). Because they are simply two states of the same stuff, neither the

body without organs nor desiring-machines can lay claim to causal priority

in the production of social machines. Rather, like Spinoza's immanent sub-

stance (God), which actualizes itself through modes (of the attributes

thought and extension), the body without organs expresses itself through

desiring-machines, which serve as its immanent attributes. D+G explain:

"The body without organs is the immanent substance, in the most Spinozist

sense of the word; and the partial objects are like its ultimate attributes,

which belong to it precisely insofar as they are really distinct and cannot on

this account exclude or oppose one another" (327). Because it operates as

an inclusive disjunction, the immanent cause functions machinically and

forges a functional unity that is merely one possible expression of the

infinite virtuality of the body without organs, or "molecular chain of desire"

(327). Within such a monist ontology, causation is simply the expressive

unfolding of the immobile motor (substance, body without organs) and its

corresponding complication into working parts (expressed attributes, par-

tial objects).

More than any other element of D+G's rich project, this concept of

immanent causality has the most to contribute to my critical genealogy:

with its central notion of efficiency beyond finality, immanent causality fur-

nishes an ontology that can clarify and overcome the machine reduction of

technology. From the perspective of the body without organs, the machine

metaphor stems from the illegitimate subordination of molecular efficiency

to (a particular) molar configuration; D+G maintain that as long as the

machine is taken in its "structural unity" and the living in its "individual

and specific unity," machine and desire "remain in an extrinsic relationship,

either because desire appears as an effect determined by a system of mechan-

ical causes [mechanism], or because the machine is itself a system of means

in terms of the aims of desire [vitalism]." "The link between the two," D+G

argue, "remains secondary and indirect." (284). Viewed from the perspec-

tive of D+G's machinic ontology, the machine metaphor (in both its mech-

anist and vitalist forms) is the result of a category mistake: a reductive molar

principle is imposed on a molecular, machinic flux.

From the perspective of the molecular, by contrast, one can discern the

ontological equivalence or indifference of vitalism and mechanism. D+G

explain:

... the real difference is not between the living and the machine, vitalism and

mechanism, but between two states of the machine that are two states of the

Ontological Revolution at What Cost? * 193

living as well. The machine taken in its structural unity, the living taken in its

specific and even personal unity, are mass phenomena or molar aggregates;

for this reason each points to the extrinsic existence of the other . . . But in

the other more profound or intrinsic direction of multiplicities there is inter-

penetration, direct communication between the molecular phenomena and

the singularities of the living, that is to say, between the small machines scat-

tered in every [molar] machine, and the small formations dispersed in every

organism: a domain of nondifference between the microphysical and the bio-

logical . . . (285-86)

In place of the figurative opposition of living and machine, D+G install a

functional principle of difference. Not unlike Bergson's differentiation of

mind and matter, the molar and the molecular differ not in kind but only in

degree: molecular desiring-machines are simply the material constituents of

molar machines, which are, in turn, their institutional or social expressions.

While it serves the crucial critical function of undermining the very

ground for the machine metaphor, D+G's concept of immanent causality

nonetheless cannot avoid reduction altogether. Despite their critique of

Aristotelian finality, D+G remain unwilling to accord technical machines

the same status they lend desire. By defining the technical machine as molar

and subordinating it to another molar machine (the social assemblage),

D+G perpetuate a more local form of the machine reduction of technology:

they wholly foreclose the operation of technical automatism, the noncalcu-

lable productive efficiency that emerges with industrial technology. Because

it functions to preserve the privilege of desire against the threat of a limited

technological automatism, the subordination of the technical machine

entails a rejection of what I have earlier (borrowing from military and polit-

ical analysts) called "technology creep" or "technological drift," the liabil-

ity for technology to deploy itself and thus to impact experience along path-

ways that cannot be predicted from or limited to the synchronic standpoint

of governing social forces. To give an entirely banal example, D+G's theory

effectively denies-or, at the very least, entirely overlooks-what Edward

Tenner has recently called "revenge effects" of technology, material techno-

logical effects that can in no way be attributed to a governing social semi-

otic (Tenner 1996). Aside from the potential role they could play in some

revolutionary expression of social desire, unintended effects like the escala-

tion of system failures ensuing from improvements in computer perfor-

mance would form instances of opacity within the global social model put

forth by D+G. On this model, such unintended effects could (at best) be

characterized as insignificant residues of capitalism's purely abstract neces-

sity to complexify itself; at worst, they would simply remain invisible. Be

194 * Embodying Technesis

that as it may, the important point is this: given D+G's self-professed aim to

overcome the very demarcation separating the animate from the inanimate,

their refusal to extend efficiency (desire) to technical machines would seem

to betoken a profound act of denial. In the process, it forcefully attests to the

strength of our culture's collective resistance to technology.8

The reduction of technical automatism permeates the very structure of

the Anti-Oedipus. With the categorical priority of social over technical

machine and the ensuing incapacity of technical machines to produce

antiproduction in a manner that evades society's reproductive interests, the

causal efficiency of technical machines is restrictively channeled to serve the

interests of society. In sharp contrast to desiring-machines, which "produce

antiproduction all by themselves," technical machines can produce antipro-

duction (or deterritorialize) "only within the extrinsic conditions of the

reproduction of the process," that is, only within the self-legitimating and

reproductive space of a particular social machine. Unlike desiring-machines,

in other words, technologies lack the potential to interrupt the effective

functioning of the social machine. Moreover, technical machines lack any

semblance of autonomy. D+G argue that technical machines "are not an

economic category, and always refer back to a socius or social machine that

is quite distinct from these machines, and that conditions this reproduc-

tion." They thus conclude: "A technical machine is therefore not a cause but

merely an index of a general form of social production" (1983, 32; empha-

sis added). Subjected to society's quasi-transcendental command, technol-

ogy is stripped of its potential for rhizomatic multiplicity: inventions are

barred from coupling machinically outside of socially sanctioned routes.

State and Nomad Science: From Hylomorphism

to Abstraction?

From the Anti-Oedipus to A Thousand Plateaus, D+G's basic concepts

undergo a striking and productive generalization. The human-centered ter-

minology of the Anti-Oedipus, with its stress on desire, gives way in A

Thousand Plateaus to a dazzling network of concepts applicable no less to

geological formations and DNA than to desiring-production proper. Cor-

relative to this conceptual development, D+G's ontology itself undergoes a

generalization: refunctionalized as the oscillation between deterritorializa-

tion and reterritorialization, what used to be called desire undergoes a dras-

tic dehumanization and assumes the role of motive force for all movement.

As Eugene Holland writes, deterritorialization and reterritorialization lose

Ontological Revolution at What Cost? * 195

"[t]heir last traces of humanism and even anthropocentrism." "The terms,"

continues Holland, "are now extended far beyond the sphere of human his-

tory and psychodynamics to characterize everything from geological sedi-

mentation.., to the constitution of protein chains within the genetic code"

(Holland 1991, 59).

With its apparently global dissociation of deterritorialization from

desire, we might expect A Thousand Plateaus to address technology in a

more robust manner than does the Anti-Oedipus. If anything, however, the

later work subordinates the technical machine to the social assemblage in

even more forceful terms.

... the principle behind all technology is to demonstrate that a technical ele-

ment remains abstract, entirely undetermined, as long as one does not relate

it to an assemblage it presupposes. It is the machine that is primary in rela-

tion to the technical element: not the technical machine, itself a collection of

elements, but the social or collective machine, the machinic assemblage that

determines what is a technical element at a given moment, what is its usage,

extension, comprehension, etc. (D+G 1987, 397-98; last emphasis added)

By defining technology's subordination as its constitutive principle, D+G

advance what is clearly a (sociological) version of the very same machine

reduction of technology we have been tracking: itself an abstract unity or

intellectual system, technology only acquires its being through effectuation

by the social machine.

Precisely this immanence of technology within social networks motivates

the split to which D+G submit technology. Since technology can claim no

exteriority to the social as such, the most it can claim is a kind of relative

exteriority: an embodiment in an alternate social assemblage (nomadology).

Even following such alternative embodiment, however, technology does not

acquire a role in material complexification but remains a construction of

society. Technology embodies the central semiotic process through which a

given social assemblage imposes its form on matter: it is through technolo-

gies that the material flux is, so to speak, bound. Far from liberating mater-

ial exteriority from the tyranny of (discursive) thought, technology ulti-

mately expands the power of thought to reduplicate matter.9

With this stress on the technological embodiment of thought, D+G place

themselves squarely within the tradition they in so many other ways counter

(and help us to counter). Following the identification of material flux with

its materialization in technological systems, a relative technological materi-

ality stands in for a robust one. Stripped of its material agency, technology

is narrowed to play the role of "material" support for a now radically deter-

ritorialized form of thought. Not only do D+G thus employ what is clearly

196 * Embodying Technesis

a (postmodernist, posthumanist) version of technesis, but they also attempt

to obfuscate this reduction through metalepsis. Their assimilation of tech-

nology to a social semiotic covers over a previously enacted reduction of

technological materiality. By concentrating their analysis of technology on

the opposition between state and nomad science, D+G effectively naturalize

the social, semiotic framework of their investigation; not only do they pre-

sent it as the only possible analytic framework for such an investigation, but

they thereby efface all traces of technological autonomy. Postmodern

nomadology, in short, functions to divert attention from D+G's basic reduc-

tion of technology. Within the field it opens, the relation of technical mate-

riality and the social is inverted: stripped of its radical exteriority, technol-

ogy appears as a material force only through the function it is accorded by

the social machine.

If we turn directly to of D+G's presentation of nomad science and its rela-

tionship with the material flux, we discover traces of such a metalepsis in the

very place where we would least expect them. Since nomadology can only

replace one social regime of technology (hylomorphism) with another, less

reductive one (tracking the material flow), it remains powerless to overturn

the enabling (because always already enacted) social subordination of tech-

nology. Considering the fundamental constraints that the socialization of

technology imposes on technological materiality, we can hardly credit

D+G's claim that nomad science liberates the singularities of matter. No

matter how effectively it might deterritorialize statist thought, nomadology

cannot itself avoid the material reduction that is inseparable from the very

process of social (re)territorialization: as a form of organization (no matter

how minimal), it simply cannot coincide with the material flux.10

Far from an unintended consequence of this program, this limitation

stems from the very model of double articulation that D+G develop to

express their ontology of immanent causality. By conceptualizing all differ-

entiation between the social as such (the diagram) and its outside through a

distinction generated within the field of the social, D+G effectively repro-

duce the very same conceptual error that we observed in both Freud and

Lacan: to preserve the integrity of their system (immanent causality), they

are compelled to attribute environmental processes to the immanent (onto-

logical) unfolding of the social and thus to collapse the very notion of radi-

cal material exteriority. As Wilden's critique reminds us, this necessity

expresses not a theoretical strength but a theoretical lack-a lack of those

resources necessary to situate a system in the context of its material basis.

Introducing a critical perspective on D+G's ontological model allows us

to understand both why nomadology cannot undo the reduction of technol-

Ontological Revolution at What Cost? * 197

ogy on which it is based and also how the exclusive focus on it as a (sup-

posedly radical) alternative to statist hylomorphism functions to disguise

this reduction. In the first place, as the enabling condition for the ontology

of double articulation, the reduction of technological materiality cannot,

logically speaking, be grasped through that ontology: it simply lacks all pos-

itive existence within the (material) space governed by double articulation.

When D+G subsequently conceptualize nomad and state science as two

variant products of a common social semiotic, they introduce a systemic

mechanism for generating the purely relative notion of exteriority that they

valorize. Within the field of their system, such a relative notion stands in for

and effectively effaces the robust materiality of technology.

This substitution finds its condition of possibility in the nonessential dif-

ference that D+G posit between state and nomad science. In a move that

concretizes their categorical deconstruction of the vitalism-mechanism

divide, D+G oppose the disjunctive divide between state and nomad science

as yet another form of reduction. In so doing, they further disguise the

restricted field of their ontology of double articulation. From their perspec-

tive, state science is the beneficiary of the binary logic opposing it to alter-

native social configurations; exclusive emphasis on the opposition of state

and nomad science disguises a more basic structural homology between

them and lends the state an appearance of almost unshakable stability.

Within such a schema, the simple act of recognizing the purely functional

status of the difference between the two itself takes on revolutionary over-

tones, for it lays bare the fragility of the state's hold. Insofar as state and

nomad science both belong "ontologically, to a single field of interaction,"

they comprise variant products of a single semiotic of social organization, a

single diagram (1987, 367). Far from forming a recalcitrant opposition,

their differentiation is malleable and constantly shifting. With their con-

junctive perspective, D+G thus expose the formal mechanism of social

change, but only at the cost of a certain reduction: whatever exteriority they

claim for nomadology is itself, as I have said already, the product of its dif-

ferentiation from hylomorphism and is thus purely relative to the semiotic

system governing it.11

By affirming such a relative, system-generated, purely constructed con-

ception of exteriority as the crux of nomadism's force, D+G valorize a

purely abstract approach designed to open the formal possibility for change

and, in the process, to discount any engagement with concrete materiality.

From the nomad standpoint, state technology can be indicted as a semiotic

organization of the material stratum in which form and matter remain

externally opposed, in which, argue D+G, "all matter is assigned to content,

198 * Embodying Technesis

while all form passes into expression" (369). With its more inclusive con-

text, nomadology exposes hylomorphic technology for what it is: an

artificial reduction of the material stratum modeled on the binary opposi-

tion of substance and form central to Saussurian linguistics. Moreover, since

it comprises a variant semiotic organization that undoes the binary system

of hylomorphism, nomad science is itself able to avoid that particular reduc-

tion. What D+G fail to make explicit, however, is the fact that deterritorial-

ization of the statist assemblage can liberate matter only against a restricted

model of the real, only, that is, on the assumption that the differentiation of

hylomorphism and nomadology exhausts the space of the real. Effectively

then, the claims D+G make on behalf of nomadology acquire their force

from the reduction that enables their entire project: the assimilation of the

social (and of materiality itself) to an all-encompassing semiotic model.

Given the centrality of this enabling reduction, it is hardly insignificant

that D+G's ontology of double articulation depends on an extensive-and,

I would suggest, highly problematic-analogy with (Danish linguist) Louis

Hjelmslev's critical revision of Saussurian linguistics. Just as Hjelmslev

broadens the range of linguistics by substituting a fourfold distinction (form

and substance, expression and content) for the signifier-signified binary,

D+G deconstruct hylomorphic ontology by complicating the binarism of

form and matter.12 Beyond all questions concerning Hjelmslev's revision of

Saussure,13 the cogency of this critical appropriation hinges on the validity

of modeling materiality on one of its specific domains-of modeling matter

as such on the vocalic continuum.

Precisely such a move underlies D+G's claims for nomadology's prox-

imity to matter. Specifically, D+G enlist Hjelmslev's core notion of an

undifferentiated vocalic material continuum in order to lend substance,

as it were, to their claims on behalf of nomad science. Just as the Hjelm-

slevian linguist works with language at a zero degree of differentiation,

the nomad scientist allegedly possesses the capacity for taking up matter

in an absolutely undifferentiated state-prior to its division into hyle and

morphe.

... nomad science is more immediately in tune with the connection between

content and expression in themselves, each of these two terms encompassing

both form and matter. Thus matter, in nomad science, is never prepared and

therefore homogenized matter, but is essentially laden with singularities

(which constitute a form of content). And neither is expression formal; it is

inseparable from pertinent traits (which constitute a matter of expression).

(369)

Ontological Revolution at What Cost? * 199

Nomad science, D+G would like to claim, works on matter that has not

been prepared, on matter as undifferentiated flux.

To evaluate this claim, we must pose several basic questions concerning

nomadology. Does this alleged advantage render nomadology immune from

reduction? Does working on undifferentiated matter constitute a direct

expression of matter itself? Or does the act of appropriating Hjelmslev's

vocalic continuum in fact introduce a (minimal) principle of organization

that contravenes D+G's radical claims? We must come to recognize, I think,

that nomad science, no matter how much "more immediately in tune" with

matter it is, remains and can only remain a configuration of form and sub-

stance, one perhaps significantly less reductive than statist hylomorphism,

but one that still cannot avoid imposing order on the undifferentiated flux.

If we look at the big picture, we thus see clearly that D+G's generalization

of Hjelmslev's model effectively undermines their radical claims; far from

providing an ontology flexible enough to describe the material stratum

itself, it establishes nomadology as nothing more than a variant social-semi-

otic organization imposed on the undifferentiated material flux.

D+G's reliance on Hjelmslev ultimately expresses the central role that

technesis plays in their reduction of technological materiality to thought. If

it is to be taken seriously, the analogy with Hjelmslev's linguistics requires

that the evolution of nomadology parallel the process of language develop-

ment. For this to be the case, nomadology, like language in Hjelmslev's

account, must owe its particularity-as one specific articulation of an undif-

ferentiated material flux-to sociocultural factors. Consequently, nomadol-

ogy has to be a social construct before it can embody the material flux. The

analogy thereby imposes a fundamental reduction on materiality, for it

implies a parallel between the materiality constitutive of the vocalic appara-

tus and materiality as such; in both cases, content and expression are sup-

posed to emerge from a single undifferentiated matter as the production of

actualities from a vast set of virtualities. Yet when generalized beyond a

specific domain (e.g., the vocalic continuum corresponding to the shape and

capacities of certain types of biological or natural human equipment) and

made to stand for materiality as such, this model cannot but render materi-

ality thoroughly abstract and formalizable.

Taken at its word, then, the analogy with Hjelmslevian linguistics, like

the more general social ontology underlying nomadology, actually compro-

mises D+G's program for radical deterritorialization.14 If I understand

Hjelmslev correctly, his model is able to complicate the binary structure of

Saussurian linguistics only because every language emerges from and can be

200 * Embodying Technesis

traced back to a common undifferentiated material substrate. Hjelmslev's

model shows that all languages are, in this particular sense, alike; all are

actualizations of a virtual materiality, a materiality laden with potential,

and all are, on account of their organization into content and expression,

necessarily at some remove from the undifferentiated material flux. Gener-

alized into the flexible semiotic ontology underlying the promise of

nomadology, this same model determines nomadology as one actualization

of an inexhaustible material virtuality; following the parallel with Hjelm-

slev, this actualization (like every other potential actualization) necessarily

imposes a minimal organization on the undifferentiated material flux and

this remains at a certain minimal distance from it.

Consequently, when D+G champion the proximity of nomad science to

matter, they simply cannot claim that nomadology directly embodies the

undifferentiated flux. The most they can claim, as I have suggested earlier, is

that nomadology is less reductive than state science. They can argue that as

a form of (minimal) organization of the flux, nomad science places "vari-

ables themselves in a state of continuous variation" (1987, 367). Such, I

take it, is the (implicit) point of D+G's recourse to phenomenological termi-

nology in their description of nomad metallurgy. They maintain that as the

"intuition-in-action" of the machinic phylum, metallurgy comprises the

"phenomenology of matter," the expression of the nomos of materiality:

"Metallurgy is the consciousness or thought of the matter-flow, and metal is

the correlate of this consciousness" (411). Though not necessarily restricted

to furnishing the material support for an act of techno-thinking as it was

with previously discussed theorists, technology nonetheless remains the cor-

relate of a particular social activity. Within nomadology, technology

remains an operation to be performed on the real-a mere vehicle for trans-

lating the real into a form (e.g., writing)-and not an operation of the real

itself. Accordingly, the material autonomy D+G attribute to metallurgy

remains a merely relative autonomy, one generated only through a socially

rooted correlation of an act with a context. The configuration of an assem-

blage by the metallurgist (not technology itself) comprises what D+G call

the "veritable invention" (1987, 406). The assemblage remains primary in

relation to the material phylum.

Despite the flexibility of their model of double articulation, D+G thus

confront the very same problem that plagued the theorists explored earlier

in this book: to preserve the integrity and coherence of their ontology of

social actualization, they are compelled to overlook those autonomous ele-

ments of technology-from local revenge effects and technology creep to

technology's infrastructural role in material complexification-that fall out-

Ontological Revolution at What Cost? * 201

side its scope. Subordinated to the social assemblage, technology can only

be determined as one element in some particular configuration of form and

substance on a continuum that runs from the most rigid hylomorphism to

the most fluid, though still differentiated, interpenetration. Not only does

this requirement prevent technology from embodying the real as agent of

material complexification, but it also limits the scope of its effects: as one

component of the configuration imposed by a given assemblage on the real,

technology's impact is rigidly controlled and determined by the social semi-

otic that is responsible for its construction and for which it furnishes noth-

ing more than a material support.

Technology Twice Subordinated: The Diagram

D+G call the organizing principle of any all-encompassing social semiotic a

"diagram" and define it as the abstract program underlying and informing

any configuration of content and expression (i.e., any particular social

form). The priority they accord the diagram explains why material technol-

ogy emerges only with the anthropomorphic stratum; like language, which

forms its correlate, technology is made possible by a certain configuration of

content and expression that characterizes human social life (as distinct from

the physicochemical and organic strata).15s To the extent that it functions

primarily, if not exclusively, to materialize a diagram, technology appears to

be firmly circumscribed within a reductive (humanist) frame of reference

that narrowly determines it as strictly isomorphic with language.

It is telling that D+G submit (their own version of) Foucauldian panopti-

cism as the primary illustration of the diagram and, by implication, as an

adequate model for understanding material technology. Assimilated into the

ontology of double articulation, the two correlative developments condi-

tioning the modern penal system in Foucault's famous analysis in Discipline

and Punish-the material development of the prison and the invention of

the legal category of delinquency-pertain to separate domains of content

and expression respectively. D+G maintain that the prison is a form of con-

tent, "the 'prison-form,'" in relation with other content-forms of the same

type, while delinquency is the form of expression "in reciprocal presupposi-

tion with" it. Delinquency does not serve as the signifier for the prison-form;

nor does the prison-form simply refer back to the word prison. Rather, D+G

argue, delinquency articulates an entire network of "statements arising in

the social field," while the prison-form embraces "a complex state of things

as a formation of power (architecture, regimentation, etc.)." They claim,

202 * Embodying Technesis

moreover, that the prison has "a relative expression all its own," that there

are "all kinds of statements specific to [the prison] that do not necessarily

coincide with the statements of delinquency." And they also claim that

delinquency has "an autonomous content all its own," that it "expresses not

only a new way of evaluating crimes but a new way of committing them"

(1987, 66-67).

Despite their relative autonomy, both of these multiplicities are selected

by and effectuate the same diagram: panopticism. "The panoptic mecha-

nism," says Foucault, "is not simply a hinge, a point of exchange between a

mechanism of power and a function; it is a way of making power relations

functions in a function, and of making a function through these power rela-

tions" (Foucault 1979, 206-7). Panopticism cannot be limited to the model

of the penal system but rather, according to Deleuze, determines a general-

ized diagram of power that "acts as a non-unifying immanent cause that is

coextensive with the whole social field" and that "affects visible matter in

general (a workshop, barracks, school or hospital as much as a prison) but

also in general passes through every articulable function" (Deleuze 1988b,

39, 34; emphasis added).

Within such a schema, material technology can only develop inside of a

more primary social field that is itself selected and organized by a given

abstract machine (or diagram). Through its social subordination, explains

Deleuze, technology is thus made to serve narrowly human ends.

The concrete machines are the two-form assemblages or mechanisms,

whereas the abstract machine is the informal diagram. In other words, the

machines are social before being technical. Or rather, there is a human tech-

nology which exists before a material technology. No doubt the latter devel-

ops its effects within the whole social field; but in order for it to be even pos-

sible, the tools or material machines have to be chosen first of all by a

diagram and taken up by assemblages. (39; emphasis added)

By introducing a still more primordial enabling condition for the emergence

of material technology, the diagram seems only to compound technology's

social subordination. More precisely, it imposes a double reduction on tech-

nology, for in addition to relying on a specific social assemblage for its effec-

tuation, any given technology must also be selected by a particular diagram.

Beyond its operative role in this double social subordination, the diagram

imposes a crippling level of abstraction on technology. By assimilating tech-

nology within an all-embracing social model of expression, D+G's norma-

tive and totalizing abstraction of the diagram forms a functional equivalent

of Foucault's abstraction of the body. As N. Katherine Hayles has shown,

Ontological Revolution at What Cost? * 203

Foucault's overreliance on discourse in Discipline and Punish generates a

tyranny of the abstract normative concept of body at the expense of the irre-

ducibly concrete experience of embodiment (Hayles 1992). Such a one-sided

approach, typical of contemporary cultural-constructivist models, leads

directly to a reductive determination of technology as a mere support for the

process by which subjects are disciplined or otherwise constituted. What is

lost in this process of abstraction is the robust view of embodiment as inter-

mediary between technology and discourse. On such a view, technological

changes initially impact us largely at the prediscursive (and, as I have argued

in chap. 1, precultural) level of embodiment and are only subsequently-

and, I insist, only partially-captured through the thematizations made pos-

sible once they are distilled into linguistic form. Like Foucault's abstraction

of the body, D+G's model forecloses the possibility for experiencing tech-

nology through embodiment and thus restricts its impact to those effects

that appear within the socially constructed space effectuated by the semiotic

logic of the diagram.

By refusing to situate technology nonreductively within the real, D+G

ultimately fail to consummate the very machinic revolution they inaugurate

in the Anti-Oedipus. Consequently, they repeat, if on a less massive scale,

the same reduction for which they rebuke Lacan: where Lacan renders the

(technological) real a construction produced through the dialectic of desire,

D+G relativize it into a product of social construction. Following this inter-

vention, we continue to be enjoined from experiencing technology's robust

material impact. Enframed within the ontology of double articulation, tech-

nology is accorded only a limited operational impact; it comprises one ele-

ment among others in a given social assemblage. Even in its role as material

support for the semiotic process of mapping the matter-flow, technology

can do no more than furnish what amounts to an inhuman technematic cor-

relate of the real-one whose pure abstractness precludes all possible expe-

riential contact.

Becoming-Other and the Neutralization of

Tech no- Deterritorialization

Through the preceding critical reading of D+G's account of technology in

the Anti-Oedipus and in A Thousand Plateaus, I have exposed the two polar

tendencies informing their project. I have observed how their machinic

ontology deconstructs the machine metaphor in a way that allows us to

204 * Embodying Technesis

raise the question concerning technology outside the space governed by the

(mechanical and/or textual) figure of the machine. And I have traced the

paradoxical persistence of a quite peculiar humanist reduction of technol-

ogy-linked to D+G's privileging of the social machine-that mitigates the

promise of their ontological revolution.

Far from a (mere) methodological error, the coexistence of these conflict-

ing tendencies expresses a significant ambivalence: it marks a tension

between D+G's theoretical commitment to molecular revolution and their

unwavering faith in the power of (human) practice to overcome all obsta-

cles. Their ambivalence exemplifies the theoretical paradox common to

most current forms of technocultural constructivism (especially those that

are politically motivated): the deeply rooted incompatibility between prag-

matic and ontological commitments. By tracing D+G's technological epoche

to the political aim of their project, I shall now attempt to show how their

commitment to active becoming as a model for transformational practice

prevents them from developing the radical consequences of their own onto-

logical revolution. Since it exceeds the grasp of the social machine, auto-

matic technology would, if unconstrained, obstruct the apparently unlim-

ited transformational potential of becoming as it is developed in Plateau 10;

were it to condition development and change in the diagram through its

direct agency within the real, technology would impact us beyond the grasp

of the diagram, or in other words, outside the social as such. For D+G's

model of practice to have any hope for success, then, automatic technology

must be absorbed into the operation of a social machine of desire and thus,

in effect, wholly effaced.

As I suggested at the beginning of this chapter, the notion of becoming

holds much promise, at least on first glance, as the basis for a model of

agency capable of addressing technology's impact on human experience in a

nonreductive manner. Becomings operate at the molecular level, liberated

from the constraints imposed by the threshold of perception/representation.

Rather than multiplying analogies, becomings establish structural fusions.

D+G explain: "... becoming is not to imitate or identify with something or

someone. Nor is it to proportion formal relations. . . . [B]ecoming is to

extract particles between which one establishes the relations of movement

and rest, speed and slowness that are closest to what one is becoming, and

through which one becomes. This is the sense in which becoming is the

process of desire" (1987, 272-73). Insofar as they enact the transformation

of singularities entering into contact without the mediation of form, becom-

ings would thus appear capable of accounting for the preperceptual rhyth-

mic dimension of contemporary technology. D+G explain that rather than

Ontological Revolution at What Cost? * 205

deriving relations based on the perception of movement (as phenomenology

does), becomings embody movement itself.

Perception will no longer reside in the relation between a subject and an

object, but rather in the movement serving as the limit of that relation, in the

period associated with the subject and object. Perception will confront its

own limit; it will be in the midst of things, throughout its own proximity, as

the presence of one haecceity in another, the prehension of one by the other

or the passage from one to the other: Look only at the movements. (282;

emphasis added)

Becomings forge connections based on rhythm, the perception of which is

the common period associated with the particles thus connected. By placing

particles directly into contact, becomings recognize a mutual transforma-

tion of human and machine that is unimaginable on both the traditional and

the grammatologically retooled phenomenological model. Becomings, in

short, open a new practical mode of (human) relation to the real.

If we articulate this formal, ontological account of becoming with the

more pragmatic claims D+G make for it, however, we encounter a strong

tension at the heart of the becoming model-a tension between two diver-

gent, ultimately incompatible, accounts of becoming. On the one hand,

D+G employ becoming as the general function of their ontology, as the prin-

ciple that explains the fluid interrelation of all intensities at the molecular

level;16 on the other hand, however, they marshal becoming to serve as the

operator of personal or individual acts of self-transformation, as the basis of

their model of practice. These two distinct deployments of becoming differ

fundamentally in at least two significant ways: while the former is thor-

oughly detached from any essential reference to the human and requires an

enunciatory standpoint that is nonlocalized (a view from nowhere), the lat-

ter cannot be separated from human activity or disembodied from the con-

crete subjective position of a particular practical agent. In its more general,

descriptive function, becoming characterizes relations between particles as

such and in all strata, anthropomorphic, organic, and physicochemical

alike; it describes machinic couplings of all sorts, whether these occur

between animate or inanimate entities or both, human beings or nonhu-

mans or both. In its more localized, practical deployment, by contrast,

becoming characterizes movements that involve human beings centrally as

the agents of transformation. Here D+G's model of becoming echoes their

determination of technology: in both cases, they lend a distinct privilege to

the human. In contrast to Bergson, for example, who accords human beings

a limited ability to increase their material liberty by introducing delay into

their relations with matter, D+G grant them a far more powerful capacity to

206 * Embodying Technesis

select their own becomings-to choose to extract precisely those particles

that will conjoin in successful movements of becoming. Despite its alleged

molecularity and its brute functionality, the pragmatic role D+G lend

becoming does not seem able to avoid a content-laden, representationalist,

and perhaps even intentional reference to an irreducibly molar and

specifically human predicament.17

Whereas D+G's model of becoming acquires its force through a covert

and deeply problematic conflation of these two divergent accounts of

becoming, it also disguises a sharp tension between their major philosophi-

cal sources-Bergson and Spinoza. While D+G's general ontology of move-

ment derives from Bergson's descriptive monism, their development of

becoming as a form of active transformation reflects a strong commitment

to Deleuze's rehabilitation of Spinoza's model of practice and specifically his

concept of the "common notion" (Deleuze 1990a). This Spinozist concept

furnishes D+G with a model of becoming as real, and not simply analogical,

transformation: as "adequate ideas" expressing the relation between two

things, common notions broker practical metamorphoses between rhythmi-

cally distinct singularities (1990a).

Since it requires a valorization of the power of thought, D+G's rehabili-

tation of the Spinozist common notion is, I suggest, incompatible with the

generalized (Bergsonist) ontology of becoming and out of sync with the

postmodern mechanosphere it describes. By modeling molecular transfor-

mation on Spinozist practice, D+G effectively limit the range of possible

becomings to those that can be brokered by thought, those that can fall

under the governance of a "common notion." Recurring to Lyotard's ter-

minology (1991), we could thus say that D+G's account of practice is mod-

eled on an outmoded commitment to the human as transformer, whether

the transformations at issue occur through direct experiential apprehension

or via the intermediary of technological models that translate the inhuman

for human apprehension. Such commitment loses sight of the reality of our

contemporary contact with the cosmos; as Lyotard (1991) repeatedly

emphasizes, the vast majority of transformations occurring in the contem-

porary mechanosphere are transformations that permit no such humaniza-

tion. At the limit then, D+G's model of practice remains fundamentally

irreconcilable with the ontological revolution that they so forcefully theo-

rize.

To conceptualize D+G's restrictive commitment to an outmoded form of

humanist pragmatism, let us briefly explore the novel interpretation of Spin-

oza that Deleuze undertakes in his 1968 study Expressionism in Philosophy:

Spinoza.18 In a reading of Spinoza's expressionist ontology, Deleuze empha-

Ontological Revolution at What Cost? * 207

sizes Spinoza's monism and specifically his postulation of a rigid ontological

parallelism between the attributes of thought and extension. According to

this parallelism, the intellectual and the corporeal are expressions of a sin-

gular, univocal and infinitely powerful being. Ontological parallelism is

simply the logical development of the assertion of univocity of being; uni-

vocity entails the absolute uniformity of the whole, such that the modes

through which the different attributes are expressed are actually the same.

Deleuze explains: "Parallelism characterizes modes, and modes alone. But it

is grounded in substance and the attributes of substance. God produces

things in all attributes at once: he produces them in the same order in each,

and so there is a correspondence between modes of different attributes"

(Deleuze 1990a, 110). In the case of human understanding, for which only

two attributes (thought and extension) are available, there is an "isonomy"

(an "equality of principle" [108]) between the two series of entities (ideas

and things) without there being any causal relation. What this acausal ison-

omy effectively requires is the full comprehensibility of matter: within the

ontological field it governs, any modification in the mode of extension must

be paralleled by a corresponding modification in the mode of thought.

Only such a complete isomorphism of thought and extension can guar-

antee the success of Spinozist practice, a model of practice whose aim is the

maximization of our power of thought as the active agent in our efforts to

improve the conditions of our material (extended) lives. It alone can explain

why the production of "adequate ideas"-ideas that reveal something about

the structure and connections of being through a direct expression of their

efficient and formal causes-necessarily leads to a practical betterment of

living conditions.19 With his isomorphic monist ontology, Spinoza makes

the power of bodies to act dependent on a correspondent, if not actually

prior, mental labor, a labor whose aim is to transform so-called passive

affections into active ones.

The agency behind such conversion is, of course, conatus (striving), the

"physical instantiation of the ontological principle of power" (Hardt 1993,

93). Conatus is a synthesis of activity and sensibility, of spontaneity and

affectivity, demarcating the range within which finite human beings are able

to exert power. By delimiting human power in this way, Spinoza recognizes

the difference between human beings and God and makes an important con-

cession to empirical reality. God (Substance) is completely filled with active

affections, since there is no cause external to it; human beings, by contrast,

are filled mostly with passive affections, since our power is vastly surpassed

by the power of God (or Nature), that is, by external forces more powerful

than those proper to us. This initial predominately passive position human

208 * Embodying Technesis

beings occupy furnishes the mandate for practice and helps to clarify the

need for a separation of two fundamental types of conversion: (1) the con-

version of passive into active affections and (2) that of sad into joyful pas-

sive affections. Since human experience is, practically speaking, composed

predominately of encounters between incompatible beings that yield sad

passive affections, the emphasis of Spinozist practice must fall on the latter

conversion, as Deleuze explains: "The ethical question falls then, in

Spinoza, into two parts: How can we come to produce active affections? But

first of all: How can we come to experience a maximum of joyful passions?"

(1990a, 246).

Sad passive affections result from an encounter of bodies whose internal

structures are not compatible with each other. Such affections can be con-

verted into joyful passions through an analysis of bodies that allows us to

recognize common relationships existing between our body and another

body. Since it focuses on the powers of the body, Spinozist practice com-

prises what Deleuze calls an "ethology"-the study of "bodies, animals, or

humans by the affects they are capable of" (Deleuze 1992, 627). For Spin-

oza, a body's structure is not its power to act (spontaneity) but its power to

be affected: "What a body can do," Deleuze notes, "is the nature and the

limits of its power to be affected" (1990a, 218). A body's power to be

affected is thus the precondition for its power to act. Consequently, ethol-

ogy demands a maximum conversion of passive into active affections as a

preparation for a body's practical emancipation. Deleuze argues that to

mobilize the specific resemblances that exist between two bodies, we must

focus on the structure of bodies, rather than on their "sensible forms or

functions": "By inquiring how these relations vary from one body to

another, we have a way of directly determining the resemblances between

two bodies, however disparate they may be" (278). In so doing, we bypass

the molar level (where incompatibilities between bodies might appear insur-

mountable) to discover deeper molecular correspondences.

Michael Hardt explains how this recognition of structural resemblances

allows us "to begin a practical project": "By recognizing similar composi-

tions or relationships among bodies, we have the criteria necessary for a first

ethical selection of joy: We are able to favor compatible encounters (joyful

passions) and avoid incompatible encounters (sad passions)" (1993, 96).

When we act on our analysis by making such a selection, we produce a

"common notion," what Deleuze defines as "an idea of a similarity of com-

position in existing modes" (1990a, 275). Common notions are ideas that

express the compatibility or commonality of our body with other bodies we

Ontological Revolution at What Cost? * 209

encounter. By substituting an internal cause for an external one, common

notions allow us to convert passions into actions.

For all of D+G's insistence that becoming involves transformation at the

presubjective, molecular level, it seems clear from Hardt's interpretation

if not, in fact, from Deleuze's study itself-that some act of cognitive selec-

tion is required to initiate the process of conversion central to any affirma-

tive practical modification. Here again, then, we encounter the problematic

divorce of human from inhuman perspective that arises as the consequence

of D+G's effort to graft a pragmatist model of practice onto a posthumanist

ontological description. As long as it remains disembodied from any partic-

ular (human) standpoint, the common notion (and the coextensivity of

thought and materiality it presupposes) furnishes a general ontological prin-

ciple capable of explaining the structural interconnection of all things. As

the active principle of D+G's model of practice, however, the common

notion has to be an idea produced by an embodied subject; it simply cannot

do without an essential reference to the human and to cognition in the nar-

row sense. Deleuze explains that in the final instance, the mind is always

what converts a joyful passion, arising from an encounter with an external

body, into an action.

Joyful passions are ideas of the affections produced by a body that agrees

with our own; our mind by itself forms the idea of what is common to that

body and our own; from this flows an idea of the affection, a feeling, which

is no longer passive, but active. Such feeling is no longer a passion, because it

follows from an adequate idea in us; it is itself an adequate idea. It is distinct

from the passive feeling from which we began, but distinct only in its cause:

its cause is no longer an inadequate idea of an object that agrees with us, but

the necessarily adequate idea of what is common to that object and ourselves.

(1990a, 283-84)

The conversion of a sad passive feeling into a joyful one can best be under-

stood as an act of reconceptualization-a cognitive reascription of the cause

of a feeling from something obscure and incomplete to an adequate idea.20

If this conversion results in practical effects, these remain directly tied to the

increase in the subject's mental power-to employ Jameson's felicitous

term, in the subject's capacity "cognitively to map" his or her relation with

the real (1991). Indeed, as Spinoza's definition makes clear, the increase in

practical freedom is the immediate and analytic result of the mind's produc-

tion of an adequate idea: "A feeling which is a passion ceases to be a passion

as soon as we form a clear and distinct [adequate] idea of it" (Spinoza,

Ethics [VP3], quoted in Deleuze 1990a, 284; emphasis added).

210 * Embodying Technesis

Because it performs the all-important role of bridging the gap of differ-

ence separating our body from other bodies, thought attains a distinct priv-

ilege in Spinozist practice. Not surprisingly, a similar privileging of thought

structures the actual practice by which becomings are constructed. If

becomings have the potential to enact deterritorializations of content, it is a

potential they acquire only through the mediation of expression. The

process of becoming always begins in a state in which our body is filled pre-

dominately with sad passive affections; we find ourselves, for example, con-

strained by the molar identity imposed on us by gender dualism or by the

synthetic unity demanded by the legal machine. We always begin to deterri-

torialize through expression, which means that becoming, like Spinozist

practice, must be guided by thought, or more precisely, by a semiotic rela-

tionship that is, within D+G's neo-Hjelmslevian ontology, constitutive of

thought.21 Even when it occurs as a rhythmic connection seemingly unre-

lated to thought, becoming cannot dispense with a moment of recognition

a moment that serves as the cause of the subsequent, though analytically

necessary, increase in practical freedom.

If the Spinozist heritage of D+G's becoming model leaves it with a cogni-

tivist bias, it also limits its applicability to what, in D+G's terms, we might

designate the anthropomorphic era. As long as it is modeled on the produc-

tion of a common notion, becoming remains incapable of clarifying rela-

tions between human agents and those dimensions of the material stratum

that do not afford any possibility for commonality, that are, in Lyotard's

sense of the term, inhuman. No relation of active becoming can be estab-

lished between the central nervous system and (following Lyotard's exam-

ple) the radically inhuman rhythm of an electromagnetic field or, perhaps

more to the point, the rhythm (following Jameson) of the global electronic

communicational network or even (following Walter Benjamin) of a Fordist

assembly line. Becoming, as D+G develop it, cannot encompass transforma-

tional connections where the human term cannot but remain passive, where

the human agent must let itself be invaded by the inhuman rhythm of mate-

rial exteriority-where, in sum, the cause of the suffered modification is not

the lack of a suturing idea but a material reality that is radically external to

thought. With this limit on the scope of affirmative becoming, we encounter

the theoretical imperative that underlies my critical study: the imperative to

lend our embodied experience a distinct autonomy by divorcing our pro-

cessing of the alien material rhythms from any moment of (cognitive) recog-

nition that would precondition or actually cause the movement of becom-

ing.

Insofar as it pinpoints the crucial difference between Spinoza's seven-

Ontological Revolution at What Cost? * 211

teenth-century world and D+G's late-twentieth-century mechanosphere,

this conclusion highlights the ultimate incompatibility of Spinoza's theolog-

ical ontology with modern materialism (Bergsonian ontology). Within

Spinoza's system, God or Substance can serve as the ultimate principle of

ontological actualization as such, since it encompasses all that is, has been,

and will be; God actively possesses all ideas and thus acts as their efficient

cause, giving them reality. The same cannot be said, however, of the

machinic phylum, the ground (and ground principle) of D+G's monism; by

contrast with God/Substance, it can play the role of (universal) efficient

cause only after it has been assembled according to a social semiotic that

expresses not the desire of matter or Substance but the desire of social sub-

jects. Consequently, as a contemporary principle of ontological explana-

tion, the assembled or effectuated machinic phylum cannot but comprise an

always already reduced materiality: a materiality so constructed as to make

everything fully comprehensible, to guarantee the isomorphism (or expres-

sive parallelism) of content and expression.

This incompatibility between D+G's Spinozist model of practice and

their Bergsonist materialist ontology ultimately expresses itself as a tension

between the two (equally problematic) approaches to technology presented

earlier. Either the privilege of (human) thought germane to the Spinozist

model of becoming is upheld, with the consequence that all dimensions of

materiality not amenable to transformation via a common notion are

effaced, or else this privilege is rejected, with the consequence that becom-

ing loses its directedness and emancipatory force in order to inform the

movement of the universe as a whole. In the end, D+G leave us either with

a coherent, but reductive, model of practice or with a purely abstract

description of material change stripped of any human dimension.

Interlude 2

Breaking with the System:

Technology beyond Semiotics

By tracing Deleuze and Guattari's reduction of technology to their Spinozist

model of practice in chapter 8, I have exposed the fundamental limitation of

the becoming model and of all forms of technocultural criticism that invest

the construction of the body with a capacity for evading the epoche of mate-

riality. None, I have argued, can address technology's materiality without a

crippling reliance on the mediation of thought (on some form of "common

notion"). In the case of Deleuze and Guattari (hereafter, in this interlude,

D+G), this limitation takes shape as a certain theoretical allegiance: rather

than acknowledging technology's ever increasing challenge to the power of

thought as an internal limitation to the scope of their theory,1 they prefer to

model its emancipatory potential exclusively as the (relatively exterior)

material embodiment of a systemic description of thought in its "posthu-

man" form.

Insofar as it valorizes a systemic form of reason to describe our encounter

with the technological real, D+G's model exemplifies the broad systems-the-

oretical paradigm that is currently being promoted, in various forms, to fill

the "theory void" left in the wake of the social and political turn against

poststructuralism in the later 1980s and early 1990s.2 For the same reason,

D+G's model perfectly illustrates the theoretical priorities-and theoretical

compromises-of systems theory for modeling the technological real. From

Humberto Maturana and

Francisco Varela's biological model of

autopoiesis and Heinz von Foerster's second-order cybernetics to Niklas

Luhmann's theory of social systems and contemporary information-theoret-

ical models, systems theory acquires its explanatory force by rendering the

(material) environment a function of the system.3 Since they must rely on

technically sophisticated systemic-semiotic models to describe the logic of

the contemporary mechanosphere, recent culturalist adaptations of systems

theory can only expand this privilege of system over environment. In a rad-

ical break with the biological heritage of systems theory, such adaptations

install a posthuman conception of system that effectively confronts them

Breaking with the System * 213

with the very same impasse that D+G face: their enabling recourse to formal

languages operates an expansion of reason into forms no longer inter-

pretable in ordinary language, forms that can only be exteriorized in tech-

nological systems and mathematical logics.4 Like D+G's model of deterrito-

rialized thought, such approaches (as I suggested in chap. 3) deploy a

powerful form of technesis rooted in the equation of technology with its sys-

temic description.

While it may increase our theoretical command over the constantly com-

plexifying real, the equation of technology and system that enables contem-

porary culturalist adaptations of systems theory can only further widen the

gap between thought and experience. To reclaim the domain of embodied

experience against the threat of theoretical tyranny, we must therefore

eschew semiotics entirely as the mediator of our contact with the techno-

logical real. Not surprisingly, this imperative calls for a fairly extensive redi-

rection of our critical energies, one that moves beyond even the most

promising recent efforts to problematize the semiotic paradigm central to

those contemporary adaptations of the systems-theoretical perspective that

seek to model technology. Thus, while technocultural critics like Gregory

Ulmer, Friedrich Kittler, and Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht-to name only those

most immediately relevant to my project-(variously) concentrate on the

task of expanding the scope of semiotics beyond its hermeneutic enframing,

what is really needed is a robust posthermeneutic realism concerning culture

and technology, one that categorically rejects the recourse to semiotics as

such. To intervene effectively in a world where images increasingly impact

us, beyond our traditional associational capacities, in a manner that can

only be categorized as material, we will need to develop new mimetic modes

of agency (mimetic in the sense Bourdieu lends the term) that draw directly

on our experience as embodied creatures.

The Constraints of Purity

Having first encountered the constraint of semiotics in D+G's model of

becoming, we might best begin this task by returning to their account of

subjectivity. Why, we need to ask, do they find themselves compelled to

maintain the "purity" of desire? And what are the consequences of this

structural necessity for their attempt to generate an account of (revolution-

ary) agency?

As I showed in chapter 8, D+G's model of becoming-other, like that of

nomadology, draws much of its force from their social subsumption of

214 * Embodying Technesis

technology's potential impact on desire: since technology constrains the free

expression of desire only insofar as it forms a (subordinate) part of a given

social assemblage, its constraint can always in principle be overcome through

a deterritorialization that yields a less constraining assemblage. It should be

clear, however, that this position depends on a dogmatic reduction of tech-

nology: because of their commitment to a politics of desire, D+G are effec-

tively compelled to presuppose that the constraint exercised by technology

does not infiltrate desire itself but remains a function of its social organization.

The social subsumption of technology's impact on desire finds its theo-

retical principle in the semiotic reading of capitalism that D+G's project

inherits from Guattari's pre-Anti-Oedipus work. In his essays on molecular

revolution, Guattari emphasizes the correlation between social decoding

and the liberation of desire. For Guattari, emancipation and liberation, like

repression and alienation, are possibilities produced by variant semiotic

organizations of the molecular force of desire underlying capitalist coding.

Expanding Marx's analysis of contradiction, Guattari sees in modern capi-

talism a certain chance for desire to reach its utopian aim.

... production on this vast scale has led to an ever greater molecularization

of the human elements involved in the machinic forces of industry, the econ-

omy, education, the media and so on . . . [O]rgans and functions take part

in a machinic "assembly" which puts together semiotic links and a great

interweaving of material and social fluxes . . . Having broken up the tradi-

tional human territorialities, the forces of production are now in a position

to liberate the "molecular" energy of desire. (Guattari 1984, 223; emphasis

added)

Within this network, technology comprises one element among others.

Guattari argues that if it participates in the massive decoding characteristic

of capitalism, it only does so as a function of an organizing semiotic princi-

ple capable of installing an entirely different social assemblage: "because

industrial societies operate from semiotic machines which are, more and

more, decoding all realities, all previous territorialities, because the

machines of technology and of economic systems are more and more deter-

ritorialized, they are capable of liberating ever greater fluxes of desire" (228;

emphasis added). In an anticipation of the functional priority expression

holds over content in A Thousand Plateaus, here deterritorializing semiotic

machines must guide deterritorialized technologies toward the production

of alternate social codings.

The necessity for such a guiding semiotic becomes even more pronounced

in the Anti-Oedipus, where deterritorialized technologies no longer directly

Breaking with the System * 215

liberate fluxes of desire but are enframed within an overarching capitalistic

axiomatic that assigns them their function as producers of "machinic sur-

plus value."

... the specific flows of code that have taken a technical or scientific form are

subjected to a properly social axiomatic that is much severer than all the sci-

entific axiomatics... : the axiomatic of the world capitalist market. In brief,

the flows of code that are "liberated" in science and technics by the capital-

ist regime engender a machinic surplus value that does not directly depend on

science and technics themselves, but on capital-a surplus value that is added

to human surplus value and that comes to correct the relative diminution of

the latter, both of them constituting the whole of the surplus value of flux

that characterizes the system. (D+G 1983, 234; emphasis added)

Far from underwriting a general molecularization of society, technology is

here refunctionalized into a subordinate instrument of the societal logic of

self-reproduction, and its capacity for evading social coding-its "machinic

surplus value"-is transformed into a function of the social axiomatic itself

(what, in A Thousand Plateaus, is called the "diagram" or "abstract

machine").

Not surprisingly, it is this refunctionalization that generates the general

systemic reduction D+G impose on technology in the two volumes of Capi-

talism and Schizophrenia. Specifically, it allows them to invoke the social

system as an antidote to the alienation introduced by technology, as a means

of suturing the ever increasing rift between human (social) experience and

the material (technological) conditions of life that, following Marx, forms

the legacy of machine technology.

In its simplest, so-called manual forms, the technical machine already implies

an acting, a transmitting, or even a driving element that is nonhuman, and

that extends man's strength and allows for a certain disengagement from it.

The social machine, in contrast, has men for its parts, even if we view them

with their machines, and integrate them, internalize them in an institutional

model at every stage of action, transmission, and motricity. Hence the social

machine fashions a memory without which there would be no synergy of

man and his (technical) machines. (D+G 1983, 141; emphasis added)

By suturing the human element and technological innovation, social mem-

ory effectively refunctionalizes technology into an instrument of social logic,

be it that of the statist society or of a counterstatist nomad assemblage.

Social memory forms the enabling condition for technology to have any

(human) significance whatsoever: it is what allows technology to attain a

relationship, a "synergy," with human beings.

216 * Embodying Technesis

When, in A Thousand Plateaus, D+G go on to present "enslavement"

and "subjection" as the two principle categories for analyzing the "univer-

sal history" of society,s they effectively institute a formally similar socially

constituted synergy between the human and the technical as the prerequisite

for understanding the capacities of the individual at any given historical

moment, especially insofar as they are bound up with technology.

There is enslavement when human beings themselves are constituent pieces

of a machine that they compose among themselves and with other things

(animals, tools), under the control and direction of a higher unity. But there

is subjection when the higher unity constitutes the human being as a subject

linked to a now exterior object, which can be an animal, a tool, or even a

machine. The human being is no longer a component of the machine but a

worker, a user. He or she is subjected to the machine and no longer enslaved

by the machine. (D+G 1987, 456-57)

As a specific form of social organization, capitalism, according to D+G,

involves a conjunction of both modes of subjectification: it arises through "a

worldwide enterprise of subjectification by constituting an axiomatic of

decoded flows" and combines a form of social subjection that is the result of

the axiomatic's "models of realization," with a new machinic enslavement

corresponding to the "axiomatic itself" (457, 458).

On this model, technology is narrowly construed as a support for the

process of subjectification in both its forms. D+G argue that technical

machines furnish the means by which the capitalist semiotic subjects human

beings: "One is not enslaved by the technical machine but rather subjected

to it. . . . [C]apital acts as the point of subjectification that constitutes all

human beings as subjects; but some, the 'capitalists,' are subjects of enunci-

ation that form the private subjectivity of capital, while the others, the 'pro-

letarians,' are subjects of the statement, subjected to the technical machines

in which constant capital is effectuated" (457). Here technical machines

function exclusively as instruments in the process of subjection, a process

that is itself programmed by the general semiotic of capitalism. D+G argue

that machinic enslavement employs technology in the same instrumental

way: "one is enslaved by TV as a human machine insofar as the television

viewers are no longer consumers or users, nor even subjects who supposedly

'make' it, but intrinsic component pieces, 'input' and 'output,' feedback or

recurrences that are no longer connected to the machine in such a way as to

produce or use it" (458).6 Once again, technical machines produce subjects

as the structural effects of the constituting social networks (or semiotic

webs) on which they depend.

Breaking with the System * 217

If the priority D+G accord subjectification allows them to retain the

(abstract) possibility for the molecular revolution of desire (since subjection

and enslavement are merely the effects of an always potentially alterable

social assemblage and do not actually contaminate desire), it prevents them

from actualizing the "revolutionary movement" that they claim is intrinsic

to the capitalist semiotic.7 Retaining subjectification as the exhaustive cate-

gory for conceptualizing agency insures the ultimate containment of all

deterritorialized flows of desire: despite their revolutionary potential, that

is, such flows can amount to something only if they yield alternate forms of

subjectification.8 Just as their lack of a robust notion of environment (mate-

riality) compels D+G to posit an alternate social organization (nomadology)

as the sole form of resistance to statist hylomorphism (as I demonstrated in

chapter 8), so too their totalization of the social requires them to retain the

semiotic network of capitalist axiomatics as the exclusive and exhaustive

field for any account of revolutionary becoming.9 Their model of techno-

logical becoming is thus constitutively incomplete. If they are able to intro-

duce deterritorialized flows of desire that exceed the resources of the capi-

talist semiotic, the resulting undecidability-the moment of formal

indeterminacy on which they place their hope for revolutionary change-

can only introduce the openness structurally necessary for change, not

change itself. D+G write:

The undecidable is the germ and locus par excellence of revolutionary deci-

sions. Some people invoke the high technology of the world system of

enslavement; but even, and especially, this machinic enslavement abounds in

undecidable propositions and movements that, far from belonging to a

domain of knowledge reserved for sworn specialists, provides so many

weapons for the becoming of everybody/everything, becoming-radio, becom-

ing-electronic, becoming-molecular . . . Every struggle is a function of all of

these undecidable propositions and constructs revolutionary connections in

opposition to the conjunctions of the axiomatic. (473)

What needs to be added to this recipe is precisely an account of how these

possibilities lead to new modes of experience that would not themselves

merely reproduce enslavement or repressive subjectification at a higher

level.10 Yet precisely such an account is excluded in principle by the categori-

cal privilege D+G grant the social as the exhaustive source of all forms of sub-

jectification. Accordingly, the potential becomings-other intrinsic to the capi-

talist axiomatic-the "molecularization" of society on which they stake so

much-can only take place as the production of new modes of subjectification

that are, in their turn, functions of the same organizing social semiotic.

218 * Embodying Technesis

What motivates this reduction is D+G's desire to keep desire pure. As

expressions of pure desire, becomings are movements of desubjectification

that cannot have any positive significance in themselves. Lacking an anchor

in some kind of nonsubjectified, properly presubjective agency (embodi-

ment), such movements are doomed either to (re)impose the molar restric-

tion of subjectification or to remain punctual instances of purely formal,

empty resistance. As long as they insist on desire's purity, in other words,

D+G have no category other than subjectification through which to concep-

tualize technology's impact on agency. Accordingly, I must concur with crit-

ics who accuse D+G of promoting a highly problematic view of desire as

pure-as a unified and abstract, even metaphysical, substance.11 Rather

than allowing technology to contaminate desire in a way that would funda-

mentally alter what it means to be an embodied agent (as, e.g., Donna Har-

away and Sandy Stone do), D+G are compelled to situate technology exclu-

sively at the level of the social assemblage where its impact is limited to its

effect on how desire is organized.12 As long as it remains the mere effect of

a particular social (semiotic) organization of desire, constraint simply can-

not infiltrate desire itself; yet as long as desire retains its purity, it cannot but

remain purely formal, incapable of materializing the type of social change

D+G propose.13 We can now clearly grasp the particular double bind D+G

face: either desire remains pure, in which case it loses all agential force, or

else it is opened to technological contamination, in which case its capacity

in principle to evade constraint is compromised.

Reading Marx against D+G allows us to cut through this double bind

and explore more promising, if more constrained, notions of agency.

Because it acknowledges the specificity of modern (machine) technology,

Marx's notion of technological alienation locates technology beyond the

grasp of social memory. From such a perspective, what predominately binds

us to our machines is not a synergy generated through a process of social

construction but an embodiment of technology's molecular impact. As a

directly material process, technical infiltration of agency places constraints

on subjectivity that exceed the resources of D+G's systematic account of

capitalism's logic. As Marx demonstrated most forcefully in the Grundrisse,

human agency in the machine age no longer arises through conscious self-

determination but is dictated by the operations of machines.

The worker's activity . . . is determined and regulated on all sides by the

movement of the machinery, not the other way round. The knowledge [Wis-

senshaft] that compels the inanimate parts of the machine into action as an

automaton in accordance with their construction does not exist in the con-

sciousness of the worker, but rather acts upon him through the machine as

Breaking with the System * 219

an alien force, as the force of the machine itself. (Marx 1971, 133; transla-

tion modified and emphasis added)

This transferral of agency to the machine introduces a specifically techno-

logical form of alienation: a submission to the rhythm of technology. Since

it can only be lived as a breakdown in human mastery, we must view it (with

Marx) as the technological embodiment of the exteriority of power or dom-

ination. Independently of any potential contribution to social revolution,

technology would thus seem to comprise a recalcitrant, internal impediment

to desire's free expression in the sense D+G envision-an irreducible conta-

mination of the very Being of desire.

Though D+G present their recipe for ontological revolution as an exten-

sion of the reversal described by Marx, they stop short of embracing the

notion of technological alienation.14 The reason, once again, is that they

can only guarantee the possibility for emancipation by keeping desire free

from any form of technological domination. To understand their departure

from Marx and its implications for our rethinking of agency, we must

accordingly distinguish two very different senses of machinic incorpora-

tion. Machines may be internalized in the sense of furnishing the principle

for psychic organization and ontological production, or they may be inter-

nalized in the very different sense of impacting the determination of the

nature or essence of desire itself. When D+G correlate the submission to

technology described by Marx with the incorporation of the machine into

subjectivity, they stress the first of these senses. As Jean-Jacques Lecercle

puts it, "Man's dependence on machines has been internalized, machines

are inside man's mind: his desire is machine produced; in a sense the orga-

nization of man's desire is that of a machine" (Lecercle 1985, 174).

Though Lecercle interprets this internalization as the basis for D+G's equa-

tion of machines with desiring-machines, again we must be careful to dis-

tinguish two ways of understanding such a link-one concerned with the

organization of desire, the other with its essence. Once we open the space

of this difference, we can see how closely D+G's question mirrors Heideg-

ger's: in both cases, what is in question is whether the essence of something

(desire or techne) can really be nontechnological. By privileging the social

as the exhaustive horizon for analysis, D+G (not altogether unlike Heideg-

ger) back themselves into a corner where they have no choice but to main-

tain the purity and emptiness of desire prior to its social effectuation. To

prevent technology from interfering with the social liberation of desire,

they must efface all lingering traces that link the internalization of technol-

ogy to the contamination of desire.

220 * Embodying Technesis

If we are to have any hope of addressing technology's robust experiential

impact, we will accordingly need to broaden our understanding of agency

beyond the category of subjectification. Here, fortunately, we can follow the

lead of Eugene Holland, who sees, in certain contemporary technological

solicitations of our bodies, a new machinic enslavement that appears to

break entirely with the process of subjectification and the semiotic model

that it serves.

. . the new post-signifying regime of subjectification appears to be already

on the wane, its mode of subjection to classical market capitalism being

replaced by an even newer mode of "machinic enslavement" to the axioms of

advanced monopoly capitalism which bypasses subjectivity altogether. Mar-

ket research these days-commercial and political alike-no longer bothers

to interview sample subjects for their personal responses to test ads; instead

it hooks up machines to measure galvanic skin response, pupil dilation, and

heart rate. Conscious, subjective responses become increasingly irrelevant as

the axioms of high-speed capital plug more and more directly into the body

... , creating ever-new artificial organs to respond to the objects it has pro-

duced to satisfy them . . . (Holland 1991, 63; emphasis added)

In the context of a traditional humanist model of experience, such autono-

mization of machinic enslavement, as both D+G and Holland suggest, calls

for a reserve of reterritorialization, a quotient of subjectification, to be

employed for defensive purposes.15s As a harbinger of a new experiential

model for the technological age, by contrast, it simply intensifies the broad

injunction everywhere posed to us by contemporary technologies: the

injunction to develop new experiential modes capable of registering pre-

cisely the kind of presubjective molecular stimuli that Holland introduces.

By enacting a machinic enslavement no longer coordinated with a process of

subjection and a governing semiotic, technologies that engage us directly at

the level of embodiment (like those that allow for direct physiological mea-

surement) introduce a form of technological infiltration that functions,

despite its immanence within the social machine of capital, as a radical

intrusion from the outside, an intrusion beyond the remedy of any semioti-

cally based molecular revolution of the social.

Technical Infiltration

No contemporary critic has done more than Friedrich Kittler to turn theory

on to technology. In his Grammophon, Film, Typewriter and in various

recent articles, Kittler has refunctionalized Foucault's notion of the histori-

Breaking with the System * 221

cal apriori in order to reckon the experiential consequences of the techno-

logical shifts of the past century. For Kittler, technologies-specifically,

media technologies-furnish the background for our contemporary forms

of knowledge production; by mediating our experience of space and time,

they comprise materially embodied and historically concrete versions of the

Kantian forms of intuition.

While a broad consideration of Kittler's work is beyond my scope here, I

would like to single out several motifs of his work that can help us move

beyond the impasse generated by D+G's insistence on the purity of desire.

With his analysis of media and computer technologies as the historical apri-

ori of our age, Kittler successfully carries out one of the two tasks we face in

refunctionalizing D+G's theory of becoming: he recognizes the technologi-

cal contamination of agency. Unlike D+G, who subordinate technology's

impact to a process of subjectification prescribed by a social logic, Kittler

situates it prior to any such process, as the very background of our sensory

existence. Nonetheless, insofar as his theory remains more concerned with

fathoming the logic of the media that have toppled the reign of alphabetism

than with addressing their experiential consequences, he remains as inca-

pable as D+G of eschewing the systemic, semiotic approach. Consequently,

despite his important contribution, Kittler ends up perpetuating the short-

coming of D+G's systemic interpretation of technology: rather than cashing

out the technical contamination of experiential agency, he concentrates on

the abstract inhuman dimensions of the shift from writing to technical

media and, following the practice of contemporary science (and particularly

computer science), reifies the mathematical expression of media systems.16

Notwithstanding his effort to open agency to technological infiltration, Kit-

tler thus faces much the same impasse as D+G: his systemic focus leaves him

unequipped to account for experience outside the particular modes of sub-

jectification made possible by such systems.

In "Signal-Rausch-Abstand" (Signal-noise-interval), Kittler focalizes his

media-technical approach through the scientific history of cybernetics to

undo the hegemony of literary language in the modern period. By reading

the materiality of language as noise in the cybernetic sense, Kittler demon-

strates the reductive presupposition underlying the institutions of poetics

and hermeneutics: both rely on a graphic-phonetic model whose own con-

dition of possibility lies in a reductive bracketing of noise.17 With the

appearance of modern communication technologies like the gramophone

and film, noise asserts itself with a vengeance: it functions as the material

background in whose absence communication would be impossible. From

the initial emergence of this modern model of information following the

222 * Embodying Technesis

introduction of electromagnetic waves, there has occurred a steady dehu-

manization of information both in its physical existence and in its nota-

tional expression. As our theoretical and technical understanding has grown

to the point where signal and noise are best defined in purely numerical

terms-in Kittler's words, "as the function of two variables, an irreducibly

noise-free signal input and a separate source of noise" (Kittler 1993, 168)-

the physical domain of information has quite literally exploded, eclipsing

the human scale that characterized preelectric culture. The logarithmic

expression of the signal-noise interval makes palpable the vast gap between

human perceptual (experiential) capacities and the objective range of such

elements of the real as acoustic noise and movement. Following what we

might call the logarithmic turn, spoken language loses its privileged interi-

ority, its former position as what Jean-Joseph Goux calls the "general equiv-

alent" (Goux 1990, 42);18 no longer a means for spontaneous self-affection,

it becomes objectively measurable, "just as measurable," argues Kittler, "as

... radio and television systems" (1993, 169). And since this objectification

largely eclipses the minimum and maximum thresholds of perception, it

yields an expansion of language's domain well beyond the bounds of what

is humanly experientiable. To grapple with language in this expanded form,

as something other than the mere vehicle for understanding, we must seek

new ways of encountering it that are capable of addressing its insistent and

now palpable materiality.

When Kittler subsequently turns his attention to the broader conse-

quences of the objectification of language, he abandons his empirical per-

spective in order to evaluate the systemic foundation of the informational

model of language and to question its theoretical implications for literary

study. Following a thumbnail sketch of the mathematization of chaos from

the statistical model (Brown, Boltzman) to its positivization (Wiener's Lin-

ear Prediction Code), Kittler (re)turns to Lacan, concluding that the real

"refers ... to nothing other than white noise" (178). Likening the Lacanian

symbolic to "a probabilistic law, one that is built on the noise of the real,"

Kittler proposes an information-theoretical understanding of the uncon-

scious, one that "liquidates . . . the imaginary" and institutes a "strategic

subject" in its place.19 On such an understanding, Kittler argues, "the strate-

gic chances of a subject could for the first time be reckoned game-theoreti-

cally" (179). The subject, in other words, has become a probabilistic effect

of the biggest system of them all-the real-which in its contemporary sys-

temic form need no longer make provision for the properly human realm of

the imaginary.

In Kittler's account, as in D+G's, the ultimate consequence of our

Breaking with the System * 223

encounter with technology is the dehumanization of thought into mathe-

matical systems (game theory) and the ensuing deterritorialization of agency

from (human) embodiment to a purely formal, probabilistic materialization

as a structural function of advanced systems. Yet where D+G stress the

redemptive revolutionary undecidability and thus seek (no matter how

futilely) to preserve a basis for human intervention, Kittler's media-techni-

cal deterritorialization of thought exuberantly projects us into a posthuman

era where subject-positions are mere passive effects of a totalized real from

which humans have quite simply been excluded:

In less than two centuries, mathematical information technology [Nachrich-

tentchnik] has transformed the signal-noise-interval into a thoroughly

manipulable variable. Together with the operational boundaries of the sys-

tems of everyday language [Alltagssprache], those of poetry and hermeneu-

tics have been overcome. Taking their place are media whose addressee (con-

sumer advertising notwithstanding) is no longer necessarily man [Mensch].

. [Poetic and hermeneutic] interpretation sanitizes an inner space [Innen-

raum] of all noise, which nonetheless does not cease to function in the

beyond of events [im Jenseits der Ereignisse], in delirium and in war. From

the moment that noise is addressed through interception of enemy signals

and no longer through the interpretation of articulated discourses or tones,

the yoke of subjectivity is taken off our shoulders. After all, automatic

weapons systems are themselves subjects. (181; emphasis added)

In this realm of experience beyond human sense capacity, systems extend

themselves without any human input whatsoever, while agency is wrested

from human embodiment and refashioned as the punctual, structural effects

that give systems their direction.20

This posthuman, systemic functionalization of agency takes on an even

more pronounced form in Kittler's more recent posthistorical conception of

writing for the computer age. In "There Is No Software," his postmortem of

the logocentric age, Kittler correlates "the last historical act of writing" with

the development of the integrated microprocessor by Intel engineers and, in

so doing, further sunders the technological materialization of thought from

any basis in human experience. For Kittler, computer language is, in its

essence, a hardware function: "This postmodern Tower of Babel reaches

from simple operation codes whose linguistic expression is still a hardware

configuration, passing through an assembler whose extension is this very

opcode, up to high-level programming languages whose extension is that

very assembler" (Kittler 1992, 82). By hyperbolizing the dependence of soft-

ware on hardware, Kittler forecasts the ultimate disappearance of software

as such: "In principle, [the] descent from software to hardware, from higher

224 * Embodying Technesis

to lower levels of observation, could be continued over more and more

orders of magnitude. All code operations, despite such metaphoric faculties

as call or return, come down to absolutely local string manipulations, that

is, I am afraid, to signifiers of voltage differences" (84). Because program-

ming languages are ultimately rooted in hardware, Kittler argues, their

"explosion has eroded the monopoly of ordinary language" (82); a concep-

tion of writing that could realize the "priority of hardware in general," he

maintains, would literally materialize the real by "enter[ing] that body of

real numbers originally known as chaos" (87, 90)21 and thus collapse the

gap between command and execution characteristic of human symbolic lan-

guage.22 Viewed in terms of its (systemic) essence, computer writing inverts

the function of software: where software seeks, like alphabetic writing, to

facilitate understanding (or, as in the case at hand, the programmability of

machines) by minimizing noise, hardware seeks to increase efficiency by

maximizing noise and thus, argues Kittler, "obeys many of the requisites for

... highly connected, nonprogrammable systems" (90).23

The potential cost of such a hardware realism is great: by hyperbolizing

the systemic-semiotic dimension of technology, we risk losing the human

perspective as such. If it is true that we in the cybernetic age "simply do not

know what our writing does" as Kittler suggests (83), it is a "truth" that

should motivate us to rediscover and expand our embodied relation with

writing.24 Rather than ceding our agency to a wholly deterministic form of

machine writing in which command always automatically yields perfor-

mance (since, as Kittler reminds us, machine signifiers are nothing but volt-

age differences), we should strive to broaden the domain of the experiential

beyond knowledge production.25 We must, in short, open our embodiment

to the robust tactile and sensory dimensions of experience "beyond" the cul-

turally relative threshold(s) built into our sense organs through the process

of their technically supported, historical articulation and formation. Only

such a radical deterritorialization of experience will allow us to overcome

our tradition's narrow determination of the senses as organs designed to

register sense stimuli directly and exclusively as knowledge.26

Beyond Semiotics

For all of his effort to resist the reduction of technology so central to the

"cultural monopoly of alphabetism," Kittler (1987) cannot effectively purge

his methodology of the semiotic ontology he inherits from his poststruc-

turalist forebears. In a recent interview, in fact, he goes so far as to qualify

cultural studies as the study of culturally relevant sign systems.27 Following

Breaking with the System * 225

such a determination, Kittler stresses facility in programming languages as

our way of keeping up, at least temporarily, with the dehumanization cur-

rently at work in computer evolution. Like the dialectic Lyotard sketches

between complexification and the always provisional supplementation of

our cognitive faculties, the adaptation Kittler proposes traces a path

toward-and would seem to embrace-a negative (or inhuman) posthu-

man, one in which the human element increasingly disappears as technology

(hardware) works its way toward complete, inhuman autonomy.

To temper this frightening, nihilistic picture of the future, we need to

shift our emphasis to the other side of the materiality so central to Kittler's

media-technical revolution. Following Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and the telos

of the "materialities-of-communication" project for which he serves as ad

hoc spokesman, we need to seek ways of resituating such materiality within

the field of human experience. Whereas Kittler emphasizes those dimensions

of electric and computer technology that radically undermine logocentrism,

Gumbrecht's project addresses technological materiality as a form of con-

crete exteriority-of "antilogocentrism" that is nevertheless firmly situ-

ated within the logocentric (or, as I would prefer to put it, the experiential)

domain.28

In Gumbrecht's account, the materialities-of-communication position

essentially derives from a certain assimilation of Derrida, one that lays stress

on "the physical side, the 'exteriority' of language" (Gumbrecht 1994,

394).29 By reading exteriority as a material opacity that interferes with the

epistemological force of our concepts at the same time as it makes them pos-

sible, Gumbrecht seeks to foreground the irreducible role of materiality in

the production of meaning. Accordingly, he defines materialities of commu-

nication as "the totality of phenomena contributing to the constitution of

meaning without being meaning themselves" (398).

This invocation of materiality inaugurates a broad posthermeneutic

mode of literary and cultural criticism: by introducing chance and contin-

gency into the heart of meaning, it serves to mark an internal limit to the tra-

ditional hermeneutic project (Wellbery 1992). From our perspective, the

most important facet of this posthermeneutic program is Gumbrecht's pro-

posal for refunctionalizing subjectivity as a form of practical engagement

with technological materiality. In his account, the materialities-of-commu-

nication program envisions "a theory that integrates.., three tendencies-

toward less anthropocentric (less spiritual), less antitechnological, and less

transcendental forms of human self-reference" (1994, 392). By recasting

subjectivity as human self-reference, Gumbrecht inaugurates a "change in

the perspective with which we observe communication"-a focal shift from

the individual subject in isolation to the agent-environment relationship

226 * Embodying Technesis

(398). And by opening self-reference to the material, and specifically tech-

nological, outside, Gumbrecht broadens the scope of systems theory as it

has been developed from Maturana to Luhmann.30 In Gumbrecht's

account, the possibilities for agency that arise from such a relationship are

not dictated exclusively by the logic of a system, as they are in D+G's model

of subjectification or in Luhmann's model of social autopoiesis, but are, on

the contrary, produced through the concrete interaction of an embodied

individual with a materially robust environment.

Insofar as it injects exteriority into the system-environment relationship,

Gumbrecht's displacement of subjectivity into concrete forms of human self-

reference allows him to distance his methodology from the inhuman, quasi-

objective perspective of Kittler, on the one hand, and from the overly ideal-

izing perspective of Luhmann, on the other. Whereas Kittler correlates the

objective materiality of (computer) hardware with an eradication of the very

capacity for an observer to introduce differences that make a difference,

Gumbrecht accords materiality a far more tempered role as what locally and

concretely interrupts the subsumptive path of systems theory.31 Without

abandoning the possibility of drawing distinctions between system and envi-

ronment, Gumbrecht seeks to develop a model of agency as something other

than a purely punctual strategic point in a constantly complexifying sys-

tem-in other words, as something with an irreducible material basis.

Though Gumbrecht thereby preserves some of the explanatory power of sys-

tems theory, he nevertheless rebukes systems theory (and Luhmann's version

in particular) for its enabling reduction of materiality: according to Gum-

brecht, systems theory can only purchase its theoretical clarity by separating

"reality from cognition and . . . eliminat[ing] . . . the concept of matter" in

order to "keep these distinctions, forms, and meanings at a safe distance

from the effects of exteriority" (Gumbrecht 1996, 585). By resisting this

impulse to bracket materiality, Gumbrecht inaugurates a contamination of

the system-environment divide that (implicitly) calls on us to address tech-

nology's infiltration of agency. Without abandoning the resources of the sys-

tems perspective, Gumbrecht gives priority to moments where it breaks

down, where materiality intervenes in the process of observation in ways that

cannot be subsumed through a further act of observation. In so doing, he

points the way for an examination of how the technological real infiltrates

agency prior to and independently of any systemic effect of subjectification.

By following Gumbrecht's middle path through the Kittler-Luhmann

divide, we can rework what is most promising in systems theory-its focus

on the subject-environment relation-into the basis for a new model of our

being in the contemporary technological world.32 With his emphasis on the

Breaking with the System * 227

concrete and local function of exteriority, Gumbrecht injects an irreducible,

unsubsumable, and constitutive materiality into human self-reference.

Because it functions to interrupt the dialectical expansion of systems theory,

this material basis allows us to expand the scope of systems theory beyond

the purely theoretical deployment I developed in my chapters on Freud and

Lacan. Rather than merely contextualizing the constitutive double-bound-

ness of a theory, the materially contaminated systems perspective highlights

the practical urgency for a basic shift in critical perspective-from the

restricted theoretical domain of system semiotics to the robust experiential

domain of presubjective embodiment. Since it remains unrecuperable by

means of a theoretical shift in observer perspective, the material basis of

human self reference anchors it to the world in a manner that is, quite sim-

ply, beyond the scope of subjectification. Gumbrecht's refunctionalization

of Luhmann's notion of self-reference thus illustrates in concrete terms how

the material interruption of the systems perspective undoes the construc-

tivist project as such: by promoting "exteriority to constitutive status," it

"displaces the very notion of constitution itself, which, due to the irre-

ducibility of this exteriority, can no longer be conceived as subjective

engenderment or production" (Wellbery 1992, 17).33

To respect this anticonstructivist imperative, our efforts to explore the

material anchoring of human self-reference in the technological real will

have to eschew all dependence on (semiotic) models of subjectivation. If

material exteriority is to attain its proper constitutive status, we will have to

develop alternative models of agency that do not conflate the constraint

imposed by the material anchoring of our self-reference with the constraint

of particular subject-positions. Despite Gumbrecht's claims to the contrary,

the constitutive materiality of self-reference simply cannot be understood in

terms of the subject-effects produced by the various systems it makes possi-

ble;34 indeed, the constitutive status of materiality effectively accords a role

to embodied experience that can only be grasped if we divorce agency from

subjectification. Drawing on Walter Benjamin's still prescient articulation of

technology, memory, and lived bodily experience (Erlebnis), I shall now

sketch a model of embodied agency that grants materiality its constitutive

status. By encouraging us to eschew the systemic-semiotic perspective and

the privilege it accords system over environment-or, as Gumbrecht puts it,

to eschew "the habit of 'reading' and 'interpreting' the world as a book of

signifiers"-Benjamin's example constitutes our best hope for fathoming

the extensive "materialization of the spirit" that is the true legacy of mod-

ern technology.35



Part 4

Corporeal Mimesis



Chapter 9

On Some Motifs in Benjamin: (Re)Embodying

Technology as Erlebnis, or the Postlinguistic

Afterlife of Mimesis

Now that we have grasped the dead end of the systemic-semiotic perspec-

tive, it remains for me to lay out the model of corporeal mimesis that I pro-

pose in its place. To do so, I shall return to the still resonant work of Ger-

many's most important twentieth-century literary and cultural critic, Walter

Benjamin. By thinking through and beyond Benjamin on the topic of expe-

rience and technology, contemporary technocultural critics can, I suggest,

begin to disabuse themselves of their ingrained textualist biases in ways that

facilitate a fundamental reconceptualization of technology's experiential

impact beyond technesis. Pried loose from its own irreducibly political

moment and coordinated with the technologies of our postmodern age, Ben-

jamin's rehabilitation of lived experience (Erlebnis) acquires a basic anthro-

pological function: as a hinge articulating embodiment with technologies

that facilitate collective experience, Erlebnis forms the medium for our

interface with the ever more fragmented and autonomous material world.

More than any other twentieth-century critic, Benjamin must be credited

with problematizing the tyranny of discursive-representationalist reason

and insisting on the irreducibility of an embodied experiential domain. In

his work on the nexus linking technology to the structure of experience-

and particularly in his 1939 essay "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire"-Ben-

jamin refuses to subordinate Erlebnis (literally, "living through") to memo-

rial-reflective experience proper (Erfahrung). In appropriating Benjamin's

category of Erlebnis as the basis for a theory of experience in the postmod-

ern age, I shall emphasize an aspect of his thought that diverges from his

sustained (and well-excavated) concern with historical redemption-what

one recent critic refers to as his interest in diagnosing our "more equivocal

contact with contemporary reality" (Cohen 1993, 205). Rather than con-

tinuing to focus on Benjamin's peculiar, admittedly fascinating historical

232 * Embodying Technesis

moment, I want to ask what Benjamin can offer us in our effort to reconcile

experience with the infrastructure of the emergent posthuman world.1

By articulating the increased centrality of Erlebnis in the modern age

with a historical account of what he calls "the mimetic faculty," Benjamin

develops an aspect of embodiment absolutely fundamental to my claims

concerning technology's molecular impact. In contrast to Bourdieu, whose

structural account of mimeticism remains abstract, Benjamin employs

mimesis first and foremost as a historical category-a category capable of

describing the relationship between embodied human beings and the ever

changing material domain. This historical conception of mimesis broadens

and sharpens Hayles's dialectical account of the correlation between tech-

nological change and shifts in embodiment; specifically, Benjamin positions

modern technology as the agent behind the fundamental shift in the domi-

nant mode of experience characteristic of modernity-the shift from

Erfahrung to Erlebnis.

To appropriate Erlebnis as the basis for a robust account of technologi-

cal change, we must supplement Benjamin's history of mimesis by introduc-

ing a third stage in its evolution-one in which image replaces text as the

basic medium of experience. Such supplementation in turn requires us to

emphasize those aspects of his doctrine of mimesis that depart from his

totalizing and hermetic linguistic ontology. By distinguishing a properly lin-

guistic form of our contact with the material world from a primitive, prelin-

guistic and embodied one, Benjamin historicizes the linguistic (textualist)

model of the cosmos as specific to a particular (if particularly long and

important) phase in human existence. Viewed in the broader context thus

secured, language appears as one vehicle among others for our contact with

the cosmos and one whose sway is by no means necessarily infinite. The

structural open-endedness of his mimetic history leaves room for the intro-

duction of a distinct postlinguistic form of mimesis that would restore a cru-

cial dimension of sensuosity-a practical, embodied basis to our contact

with the material world.2

This possibility speaks directly to our contemporary cultural moment. By

providing a model for conceptualizing embodied experience without mea-

suring it through an account of metaphoric change or otherwise reducing it

to discourse, Benjamin's mimetic theory of experience can guide our efforts

to think through two central aspects of the imagistic turn currently under-

way in our culture. In the first place, it furnishes a compelling account of the

key experiential consequence of this shift-the decline in language's tradi-

tional hermeneutic and ontological function that results from the increasing

autonomy of the material world as producer of our contemporary imagi-

On Some Motifs in Benjamin * 233

nary. In this way, Benjamin's theory fills out the experiential side of the pic-

ture painted by those media and technology critics who stress the autonomy

of technological modes of reproduction with respect to the long-reigning

tyranny of the literary; in particular, Benjamin helps us construct the expe-

riential correlate to what Wlad Godzich, summarizing the work of critics

like Baudrillard and Virilio, incisively describes as our culture's incipient

return to a curious posthistorical form of preliteracy.

We are living in the midst of a prelogical affirmation of the world, in the

sense that it takes place before the fact of logos, and it threatens us with an

alienation that modern thinkers could barely conceive. For what happens is

that immediate (nonmediated) reality becomes the very expression of the

imaginary and substitutes itself for it. The imaginary becomes free of the

logos since the world speaks itself in its own terms. Such a world is defined

without us. It is the world without us, a world altogether other, with coordi-

nates that do not come from us.... We are now inhabited by images that we

have not drawn from ourselves, images of external impression that we do not

master and that retain all their agential capability without being mediated by

us. (Godzich 1994, 368-69)

Despite the vast acceleration of image circulation in the historical interval

separating Benjamin's moment from ours, his effort to grapple with the

material impact of similar autonomous images remains exemplary: it com-

prises an indispensable model that can guide us in our efforts to forge con-

nections with our alienating, postimaginary material world.

With its (at least virtual) call for a shift from semiosis to mimesis as the

dominant mode governing our contact with the world, Benjamin's theory

helps us to fathom a second aspect of the imagistic turn. By distinguishing

between instrumental and representationalist uses of language, Benjamin

clarifies how it is that we can, at the same time, speak nonreductively about

what is literally unspeakable and avoid reducing technology to an abstrac-

tion indistinguishable from everything else that resists representation. Once

we grasp the mimetic basis of our experience of the autonomous, worldly

imaginary, the risk of reducing embodiment to language simply falls away;

the passage to a mimetic model of experience introduces a more inclusive

notion of environment, one in which language loses its categorical privilege

and takes up a more humble role as one modality among others of our con-

tact with the material domain. Affirming the mimetic basis of our experi-

ence thus involves both gain and loss: while we acquire the capacity to val-

orize explicitly an experiential domain that can only be bracketed out on

any logocentric approach, we must abandon our commitment to a concep-

tual and/or semiotic mastery of our experience-its complete translation

234 * Embodying Technesis

into language-whether this takes the form of traditional philosophical

foundationalism or of the quasi-foundational discursive constructivism cen-

tral to so much of contemporary cultural studies. With John Dewey (fol-

lowing philosopher Richard Shusterman's recent reconstruction), we must

embrace the nondiscursive (or better, mimetic) basis of our experience, not

as the foundation of our conscious knowledge, but as a never fully explica-

ble background whose importance is primarily aesthetic, in the broad sense

of conditioning our immediate "felt quality of living" (Shusterman 1994,

136). Such a task, Shusterman makes clear, does not amount to a turn away

from language as such but involves a far less grandiose break with the

tyranny that discursivity has exercised in twentieth-century literary and cul-

tural criticism and in Western philosophy more generally.3 While language

loses its ontological status as a "general equivalent" that sets the boundaries

of the interpretable as such (Goux 1990), it acquires a more concrete and

humble practical role as one (perhaps locally privileged) means among oth-

ers for our never exhaustive understanding of our lived, somatic, and hence

properly unrepresentable experience.

Second Nature and Mimesis

Not surprisingly, the two central aspects that distinguish Benjamin's

account of technology from Deleuze and Guattari's also explain his value as

a guide for the contemporary technocultural critic. With his view of tech-

nology as a material force of natural history and his exploration of agency

in the technological world on mimetic grounds, Benjamin furnishes what

Deleuze and Guattari could not: (1) an account of the real that recognizes

the presocial role of technology as agent of material complexification and

(2) a correlative account of becoming (what Benjamin calls "innervation")

that foregrounds corporeal or physiological adaptation to the alien rhythms

of the contemporary mechanosphere.

By embracing Lukacs's notion of "second nature" well beyond its histor-

ical, praxis-directed, Hegelian focus, Benjamin articulates a conception of

technology that anticipates the function it has acquired (following the

analyses of contemporary critics like Lyotard) in the process of material

complexification. As Susan Buck-Morss argues, while technology trans-

forms nature through social and historical activity, the resulting second

nature cannot be reduced, as it is by Lukacs, to an "alienated and reified

subjectivity, a world created by humans who did not recognize it as their

own" (Buck-Morss 1989, 70). Rather, explains Buck-Morss, material

On Some Motifs in Benjamin * 235

nature for Benjamin "was 'other' than the subject, and this remained true no

matter how much human labor had been invested in it" (70). For Benjamin

then, as for Lyotard, a specifically technological form of what (for want of

a better term) I shall call alienation must be distinguished from the alien-

ation emphasized by our century's most significant Hegelian readers of

Marx (Lukacs, Adorno, and, more recently, Slavoj Zizek).4 What fuels such

alienation is, as I have just argued in the preceding interlude, precisely what

Deleuze and Guattari refuse to accept: the technical contamination of

molecular agency or desire itself. Rather than an instrumentalist or socially

programmed axiomatic reducible to capitalism, technology embodies the

very contact between humankind and the world on which societal forms are

themselves constructed. It thus conditions the movement of desire itself.

Accordingly, Benjamin stands at the farthest extreme from Heidegger and

the entire tradition of technesis; for Benjamin, technology names the mod-

ern form of physis itself, not simply its ontic degradation: "technology is not

the mastery of nature but of the relation between nature and man . . . In

technology a physis is being organized through which mankind's contact

with the cosmos takes a new and different form from that which it had in

nations and families" (Benjamin 1996, 487). Expanding technology's direct

link to physis, Buck-Morss acutely discerns a bipartite model of natural his-

tory at work in Benjamin's understanding of technology: for Benjamin, she

contends, "[t]here have been.., two epochs of nature." She explains, "The

first evolved slowly over millions of years; the second, our own, began with

the industrial revolution, and changes its face daily" (1989, 70).

Benjamin's historical account of mimetic practice forms an experiential

correlate to his strongly technological conception of natural history.5 In a

swerve from the Aristotelian tradition as he understood it, Benjamin situates

mimesis not as an imitation (or supplement) of nature but as an irreducible,

material element of nature itself. "Nature creates similarities," Benjamin

contends, citing mimicry as an example. He argues that the human capacity

for producing similarities is, however, higher than nature's, since it is rooted

in practice and specifically in the practice of becoming-other: "[The human]

gift of seeing resemblances is nothing other than a rudiment of the powerful

compulsion in former times to become and behave like something else

[aihnlich zu werden und sich zu verhalten]" (Benjamin 1986b, 331). The

sensuous correspondences that formerly governed nature find their true

importance in human beings, whose gift for mimesis they are said by Ben-

jamin to "stimulate and awaken." Consequently, according to Benjamin,

the mimetic faculty is a deeply historical human product, one that "has

changed with historical development" (331).

236 * Embodying Technesis

Both essays on the mimetic faculty concentrate on the transitional

moment in the history of mimesis-a moment of rupture when the experi-

ence of sensuous correspondences passed over into the experience of non-

sensuous ones. This rupture brings the mimetic capacity of language to the

fore and, with it, a certain diminution in our practical command as materi-

ally embodied and situated beings. Benjamin explains: ".. . our existence no

longer includes what once made it possible to speak of this kind of similar-

ity [the nonsensuous]: above all, the ability to produce it. Nevertheless we,

too, possess a canon [Kanon] according to which the meaning of nonsensu-

ous similarity can be at least partly clarified. And this canon is language"

(334). According to Benjamin, since language has been informed, "from

time immemorial," by the mimetic faculty, the rupture responsible for its

modern reign might best be understood as a transformation, one that brings

out the latent potential-and priority-of language as mimetic medium:

"language," Benjamin concludes, "may be seen as the highest level of

mimetic behavior and the most complete archive of nonsensuous similarity:

a medium into which the earlier powers of mimetic production and com-

prehension have passed without residue" (336; emphasis added).

Correlative to his increasing interest in technological modernity during

the 1930s, the focus of Benjamin's search for correspondences shifted from

language to images and ultimately to image technology itself. Together with

the major essays of the decade, Benjamin's monumental, unfinished study of

modernity, the so-called Arcades Project, marks a distinct movement away

from his youthful theologically grounded notion of natural correspondence

and toward a synthetic notion of correspondence materialized initially as

the phantasmagoria of technological culture and later through reproductive

technologies functioning as the exteriorized (and collective) embodiments of

memory. The postlinguistic, postarchival stage with which I suggest we sup-

plement Benjamin's history of mimesis functions precisely to bring his

mimetic account of experience into line with his mature work on techno-

logical modernity. Within this expanded historical frame, the eclipse of lan-

guage as the reigning vehicle of mimesis effectively serves as a prerequisite

for the displacement of semiotics heralding the advent of what Gumbrecht

(following Bergson) calls the "materialization of the spirit" (1996, 590).

Just as technological modernization produces a shift in the mode of experi-

ence, from Erfahrung (typified for Benjamin by the great memorial project

of Proust) to Erlebnis (anticipated by the corporeal poetics of Baudelaire), it

also brokers a shift in the medium of experience, from nonsensuous linguis-

tic correspondences to embodied and practical mimetic activity-what one

recent critic aptly calls "contact sensuosity" (Taussig 1993).

On Some Motifs in Benjamin * 237

Supplemented to address the contemporary prelogical, imaginary world,

Benjamin's account of mimesis would thus appear to provide the basis for a

model of becoming that satisfies the current critical imperative for some

positive form of agency, while simultaneously eschewing the machine reduc-

tion of technology in any form, including technesis. Whereas theorists from

Aristotle to Heidegger, Lacan, Derrida, and even Deleuze and Guattari can

only localize technology (however it is construed) as a supplement to nature

(or society), Benjamin not only welcomes technology's modern role as agent

of material complexification but also embraces the technological contami-

nation of human agency that is its experiential correlate. Applied to our

contemporary cultural predicament, Benjamin's account helps us to grasp

how technology permeates presubjectified agency as an immediately sensu-

ous force independently of and prior to the subjectifications that are gener-

ated as structural effects of the semiotic system(s) constitutive of late capi-

talism.

Erlebnis and Erfahrung

Though critics have overwhelmingly tended to view Benjamin as a funda-

mentally nostalgic thinker, his account of the shift from Erfahrung to Erleb-

nis reveals him (also) to be a sober-minded material realist. Far from the

tragic and irreparable loss it is so often taken to be, the dissolution of

memorial, auratic experience holds a profoundly ambivalent status for Ben-

jamin. If the narrowing of the domain of reflective experience (Erfahrung)

in technological modernity is inevitable, as Benjamin often suggests it is, the

increased prominence he accords Erlebnis would appear to constitute some

form of compensation. Insofar as it absorbs infelicitous or alien stimuli that

can only be integrated into experience as something lived through rather

than reflected on, Erlebnis comprises the experiential modality most appro-

priate for a world in which the experience of shock has become the norm. It

renders possible a more robust and pluridimensional form of experience,

one that eschews the privilege of mediated interiority in favor of sensory and

corporeal immediacy.

Given this promise of Erlebnis, it is surprising to find it all but universally

dismissed in the critical literature as a degraded mode that must be

redeemed, whether historically or messianically, through some resurrection

of Erfahrung.6 A case in point is furnished by Rainer Rochlitz, who simply

effaces all traces of Benjamin's ambivalence in order better to promote a

blanket dismissal of Erlebnis as, effectively, a fall from grace.

238 * Embodying Technesis

[Benjamin] is not unaware that his model of intact experience belongs to an

age that has passed. Between this model and the contemporary era, no medi-

ation is possible. Only a messianic perspective-a confirmation of the gap

existing between the present and a reconciled future-allows us to imagine a

restoration of integral experience. Without ritual and its ceremonies, experi-

ence can present itself only in the degraded form of "lived experience"

(Erlebnis) which art alone, through a heroic effort, can transform into a true

experience (Erfahrung), now confined to literature. (Rochlitz 1996, 210)

In the face of such a blanket dismissal, our effort to reconstruct Benjamin's

account of Erlebnis calls on us to protect its wholly secular and future-ori-

ented perspective from the omnivorous grasp of his earlier formulated meta-

physico-theological conception of experience. Far from merely extending

and refining an already complete theory of experience, as it is so often taken

to do, "On Some Motifs" represents a fundamental turning point in Ben-

jamin's experience. Read against the grain of Benjamin's famous Artwork

essay ("Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction") and the majority of

the secondary literature on it, "On Some Motifs" exposes a startlingly prag-

matic Benjamin-one who sees the necessity of accepting the decline of

Erfahrung as the precondition for a new and more appropriate conception

of experience (Erlebnis) to emerge mimetically from our sensuous contact

with the modern material mechanosphere.

The fundamental philosophical refunctionalization to which Benjamin

submits the concept of Erlebnis testifies to the specificity of its function in

"On Some Motifs." In appropriating Erlebnis as the crux of his inchoate

mimetic theory of experience, Benjamin wrests it from the nineteenth-cen-

tury hermeneutic tradition out of which it stems; whereas Wilhelm Dilthey

employs Erlebnis to expose the narrowness of the neo-Kantian and posi-

tivist concept of sensation, Benjamin deploys it against the cognitive

monopoly characteristic of Romantic and post-Romantic thought. Never-

theless, a profound continuity with certain key elements of the hermeneutic

tradition lies behind his critical refunctionalization of the term. In particu-

lar, Benjamin follows Dilthey in drawing on the richness of Erlebnis as a

nonconceptual account of experience. Consequently, when he invokes it in

"On Some Motifs," Benjamin explicitly means to draw on its potential as a

vehicle for broadening the bounds of experience.

Writing on Dilthey in Truth and Method, Gadamer highlights the robust

notion of the given developed by Lebensphilosophie: "What Dilthey tries to

grasp with the concept of 'experience' [Erlebnis] is the special nature of the

given in the human sciences. . . . Dilthey circumscribes the ideal of con-

structing knowledge from atoms of sensation and offers instead a more

On Some Motifs in Benjamin * 239

sharply defined version of the concept of the given. The unity of experience

(and not the psychic elements into which it can be analyzed) represents the

true unity of what is given" (Gadamer 1989, 65-66). Gadamer explains that

as a name for this robust concept of the given, Erlebnis resists conceptual

determination: "Experience [Erlebnis] has a definite immediacy which

eludes every opinion about its meaning. . . . What we call an Erlebnis in

[the] emphatic sense thus means something unforgettable and irreplaceable,

something whose meaning cannot be exhausted by conceptual determina-

tion" (67). Erlebnis, Dilthey clarifies, marks the irreducibility of life to lan-

guage, of experience to meaning: it "is a qualitative being, i.e., a reality that

cannot be defined through one's inward being, but also reaches down into

what is not possessed in a differentiated state."7

While he draws on this tradition to resist the cognitive monopoly char-

acteristic of modernity, Benjamin nonetheless manages to turn Erlebnis

back on itself in the process of refunctionalizing it for the twentieth-cen-

tury.8 By exploiting the division between corporeal experience and the expe-

rience of consciousness, Benjamin reinterprets Erlebnis against its Romantic

and post-Romantic determination as what Gadamer calls a "protest against

modern industrial society" (63). Rather than a means of escape from the

realities of a mechanistic society, for Benjamin Erlebnis designates the new

mode of experience that is itself correlative with the growth of industrial-

ism. The paradigm for such shock experience-experience that fails to leave

any cognitive traces-is, of course, the worker on the assembly line. Like the

gambler and the flaneur, the worker lives a life of empty, nondifferential

repetition. Benjamin explains: "The jolt in the movement of a machine is

like the so-called coup in a game of chance. The manipulation of the worker

at the machine has no connection with the preceding operation for the very

reason that it is its exact repetition . . . [E]ach operation at the machine is

just as screened off from the preceding operation as a coup in a game of

chance is from the one that preceded it" (Benjamin 1968, 177). By correlat-

ing it with technology's vastly expanded role in structuring the modern life-

world, Benjamin fundamentally modifies the tenor of Erlebnis. Far from

naming what is most enduring in cognitive, memorial experience (as it does

for Dilthey), Erlebnis is made to designate what is most fleeting and transi-

tory-those shocks that impact us immediately and corporeally without

entering the psyche, leaving traces, or producing representations. If such

shocks nevertheless stay with us indefinitely, it is not because they are cog-

nitively or psychically unforgettable but rather because they impact us at the

deepest level of our embodied experience, prior to the mediation of mem-

ory.

240 * Embodying Technesis

Memoire Volontaire, Memoire Involontaire

In "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire," Benjamin (1968) links the shift in the

economy of experience from Erfahrung to Erlebnis to the modern decline in

the role played by interiorizing, or "involuntary," memory (Erinnerung, or,

in Benjamin's translation, Eingedenken, "being-mindful-of") and the cor-

relative expansion of technical, or "voluntary," memory (Geddichtnis).

Through a critical reconstruction of the historical evolution of Erlebnis

from Dilthey via Bergson and Proust to Freud, Benjamin exposes its mater-

ial connection with the technological exteriorization of memory: just as

Erlebnis betokens a displacement of reflective thought as the privileged

locus of experience, technological reproducibility marks the eclipse of inte-

rior, associational memory as the privileged mode of storing experience.

To liberate voluntary, technically exteriorized memory for its modern

role, Benjamin carries out a sustained critique of interiority that should lay

to rest doubts concerning his alleged nostalgia, at least as concerns this

aspect of his theory of experience. The main target of this critique is the

ahistoricism and abstraction of Lebensphilosophie, its deluded effort to dis-

cover the "true" experience hidden beneath the surface of life. Not surpris-

ingly, the first stage of Benjamin's argument takes aim at the abstraction of

Dilthey's notion of the given and his focus on poetry: Dilthey's "point of

departure," Benjamin argues, "was not man's life in society. What [it]

invoked was poetry, preferably nature, and, most recently, the age of

myths" (Benjamin 1968, 156). Insofar as he resituates Lebensphilosophie

on a firm empirical ground, Bergson marks a second stage in Benjamin's

reconstruction. Benjamin writes that Bergson's Matter and Memory "is ori-

ented toward biology." He continues: ". . . it regards the structure of mem-

ory as decisive for the philosophical pattern of experience. Experience is

indeed a matter of tradition, in collective existence as well as private life. It

is less the product of facts firmly anchored in memory than of a convergence

in memory of accumulated and frequently unconscious data" (157). With

Bergson, the analysis of lived experience discovers an entirely new topic

social memory. For this reason, Bergson's work promises to restore solidar-

ity between individual experience and collective life. Divested of its private

character, memory is transformed into a locus where diverse fragments of

external experience come together; it brings the individual into immediate

or material contact with the external world, independently of any private

memorial synthesis. With his collective and materialist conception of mem-

ory, Bergson takes a first step against the determination of the given in

Lebensphilosophie as a given for a (private, individual) consciousness.

On Some Motifs in Benjamin * 241

While Bergson's work posits a continuum of mind and matter that is

essential to Benjamin's corporeal refunctionalization of Erlebnis, it nonethe-

less inherits one major flaw from Dilthey-abstractness. Benjamin argues

that because Bergson "rejects any historical determination of memory," his

theory must be historicized (in a third critical stage). Such a task, Benjamin

contends, falls to the "poet": "Proust's work A la Recherche du temps

perdu may be regarded as an attempt to produce experience synthetically, as

Bergson imagines it, under today's conditions, for there is less and less hope

that it will come into being naturally" (157). In the process of "put[ting]

Bergson's theory of experience to the test," Proust carries out what Ben-

jamin calls an "immanent critique": he rejects the pragmatic voluntarism

implicit in Bergson's conception of action. Benjamin argues that in the

"inhospitable, blinding age of big-scale industrialism," the solidification of

matter from out of the continuous flow of things is no longer solely the pre-

rogative of human agents but ever more frequently a result of the workings

of sheer chance-of external, predominately technological forces.

Proust... does not evade the question [of the contemporary conditions for

experience].... He even introduces a new factor, one that involves an imma-

nent critique of Bergson. Bergson emphasized the antagonism between the

vita activa and the specific vita contemplativa which arises from memory. But

he leads us to believe that turning to the contemplative actualization of the

stream of life is a matter of free choice. From the start Proust indicates his

divergent view terminologically. To him, the memoire pure of Bergson's the-

ory becomes a memoire involuntaire. (157-58; emphasis added)

By recasting Bergson's voluntarist memory as something that can only be

triggered by chance (as the taste of the madeleine famously triggers Marcel's

memory of Combray in Proust's novel), Proust confronts what Bergson

could not-the change in the lifeworld ensuing from large-scale industrial-

ism. In a world ever increasingly dominated by the inhuman rhythm of

things, the faculty of interiorizing memory (Erinnerung) has lost its privi-

lege. Memory now stands at the mercy of chance and finds its home not in

the depths of psychic interiority but in the brute materiality of physical

things: the past, Proust claims, is "somewhere beyond the reach of the intel-

lect, and unmistakably present in some material object."9

To account for the alienation thus produced, Proust introduces the fun-

damental shift in the economy of memory that has taken place with indus-

trialization: as Bergson's memoire pure has become involuntary and ever

more marginal as a means of producing experience, what Proust calls "vol-

untary memory" comes to the fore. Benjamin claims that voluntary memory

differs from memoire pure on two counts: it is strictly in the service of the

242 * Embodying Technesis

intellect, and the information it gives about the past retains no trace of it

(158). If involuntary memoire pure involves the recollection of experience

that has been safely preserved, voluntary memory links us with the past in a

way that does not depend on the faculty of interiorizing thought-that

bypasses psychic mediation as such. Consequently, Benjamin concludes,

voluntary memory cannot lead to "experience [Erfahrung] in the strict sense

of the word" (159).

In the process of expanding the scope and function of voluntary memory

beyond the terms of Proust's bourgeois aestheticism, Benjamin recurs to the

radical disjunction between memory and materiality explored in my reading

of de Man in chapter 5. While Benjamin's two forms of memory coincide

conceptually with Hegel's, they expand the purport of the disjunction de

Man installs between them. Involuntary memory (Erinnerung or Einge-

denken) mirrors the symbolic, since the trace of the past that it preserves is

not arbitrary (unwillkiirlich) but natural; voluntary memory (Gedichtnis),

however, has only a fleeting and arbitrary (willkiirlich) connection with the

past and thus falls on the side of the sign.10 Insofar as it suspends the syn-

thetic function of (textual) memory, the disjunction between these two

forms opens a nonsubjective, material mode of memory (akin to Lacan's

notion of materialist consciousness) that forms the theoretical core for Ben-

jamin's alignment of memory with technological reproducibility.11

While de Man helped to lay out the theoretical stakes of the disjunction,

it thus falls to Benjamin to work out its experiential dimension. In stark con-

trast to de Man's rigid formalism, the rationale Benjamin provides to

account for the disjunction is irreducibly and concretely historical: whereas

de Man focuses exclusively on the abstract antihermeneutic consequences

stemming from the logical incompatibility of Erinnerung and Gedichtnis,

Benjamin attends above all to the impact of the disjunction (together with

its antihermeneutic consequences) on the concrete material conditions of

lived experience. When voluntary memory eclipses involuntary memory, it

betokens not the definitive self-contradiction of theory as such but rather

the fundamental alteration of our lived relation to the world.

By historicizing memory in this way, Benjamin manages to deploy the

disjunction outside of de Man's narrow textualist framework without at the

same time falling into Derrida's trap of rehabilitating the thinking subject.12

Rather than introducing a supplementary juncture that subsumes techno-

logical exteriority (back) into thinking memory, Benjamin assesses the expe-

riential significance of the material shift in the economy of memory. Here

we encounter the Bergsonist foundation of his conception of memory: echo-

ing the functionalist distinction between pure matter and pure memory,

Benjamin treats involuntary and voluntary memory as two modes through

On Some Motifs in Benjamin * 243

which internal duration either aligns itself or is aligned with external dura-

tion. For Benjamin, therefore, the disjunction demarcates two antithetical

types of experience: one centered around a reflective, psychic subject whose

powers have been markedly diminished with the advent of modernity

(Erfahrung); another around a corporeal agency sensitive to the inhuman

rhythms of the mechanosphere (Erlebnis). Since voluntary memory takes its

standard directly from the rhythm of external duration, of the commodity

world itself, its predominance in the modern world yields a fundamental

deterritorialization of the traditional humanist, cognitive subject. In accord

with this deterritorialization, we cannot confine our critical task to lamen-

tation but must follow the sober-minded Benjamin in attempting to recon-

ceptualize experience as the correlate of the new material reality.

Benjamin's Freud

My proposal to supplement Benjamin's history of mimesis finds its most

sustained textual support in what, with Harold Bloom, we might call his

"strong misreading" of Freud (1973). While Beyond the Pleasure Principle

had already historicized the cortical layer as an adaptation to modern tech-

nology, Benjamin's (Bergsonist) rewriting of Beyond in "On Some Motifs"

liberates the cortical layer from its narrow psychic function, reconceiving it

as a new experiential faculty correlative to Erlebnis.13

Benjamin initially turns to Freud to radicalize the disjunction of volun-

tary and involuntary memory beyond the framework of Proust's account, to

develop a "more substantial definition of what appears in Proust's memoire

de l'intelligence" (1968, 160). By pressuring Freud's distinction between

conscious memory and the unconscious, Benjamin discovers theoretical sup-

port for a dissociation of voluntary memory from the domain of the psyche.

With his strong misreading, Benjamin thus sets in motion the archaeological

process I sketched in my account of Freud-the excavation of a model of

corporeal agency, of physical and somatic experience, rooted in the protec-

tive function of the dead cortical layer. Moreover, by correlating such

agency with voluntary, technologically exteriorized memory, Benjamin

inaugurates a practical use of technological reproducibility; rather than sim-

ply mapping or capturing theoretically the inhuman rhythms of the

mechanosphere that escape our ken (as Lyotard proposes), technological

reproducibility is enlisted as an aid in the corporeal retraining that our sen-

sory modalities must undergo if we are to adapt ourselves to our ever more

materialized lifeworld. Not only does Benjamin thereby help us to (re)con-

ceive agency in terms appropriate to our increasingly inhuman world, but he

244 * Embodying Technesis

also gives us a practical recipe for adaptation that allows us to preserve our

human perspective just at that moment when we might most fear our total

marginalization in the face of autonomous cosmological complexification.

Benjamin orients his rewriting of Freud around what he calls Freud's

"fundamental thought": that "consciousness comes into being in place of

the memory-trace." By generalizing the "fruitfulness" of this relation to

"situations far removed from those which Freud had in mind when he

wrote," Benjamin is able to correlate Proust's distinction with Freud's:

"only what has not been experienced explicitly and consciously [was nicht

ausdriicklich und mit Bewusstsein ist 'erlebt' worden], what has not hap-

pened to the subject as experience [was dem Subjekt nicht als 'Erlebnis'

widerfahren ist], can become a component of the memoire involuntaire"

(160-61). This same relation of the unconscious to involuntary memory

also serves to highlight the singularity of consciousness and to expose its

kinship with voluntary memory. Just as it establishes the functionalist

homology of involuntary memory and the unconscious, Benjamin's com-

parison of Freud and Proust implies a homology between their respective

conceptual pairings: like consciousness, voluntary memory functions to pro-

tect the psyche from shock stimuli.

For all of its centrality to Benjamin's theory, the scope of this important

homology is limited by an important point of divergence that will mark

every aspect of Benjamin's subsequent discussion of Freud: while voluntary

memory is, by definition, located outside the individual psychic system, con-

sciousness on Freud's account is securely contained within such a system.

To resolve this divergence, Benjamin revises Freud's account of the dead

cortical layer in an altogether striking way.

The acceptance of shocks is facilitated by training in coping with stimuli....

As a rule, . . . this training devolves upon the wakeful consciousness, located

in a part of the cortex which is "so blown out by the effect of the stimulus"

that it offers the most favorable situation for the reception of stimuli. That

the shock is thus cushioned [abgefangen], parried by consciousness [vom

Bewusstsein parriert], would lend the incident that occasions it the character

of having been lived in the fullest sense [den Charakter des Erlebnisses im

prdignanten Sinn]. If it were incorporated directly in the registry of conscious

memory [unmittelbar der Registratur der bewussten Erinnerung ihn einver-

leibend], it would sterilize this incident for poetic experience. (162)

In this extremely enigmatic passage, Benjamin appears to reproduce the very

same tripartite distinction toward which Freud inchoately gestured in his

1895 Project for a Scientific Psychology. He differentiates two types of con-

sciousness: one (Bewusstsein) that "cushions" or "parries" shock stimuli

On Some Motifs in Benjamin * 245

and another (bewussten Erinnerung) that "incorporates" (vereinleiben) and

thereby "sterilizes" such shock. With this key distinction, Benjamin would

seem to correlate the introduction of a third experiential agency (perceptual

consciousness) with the unprecedented demands of technological moder-

nity: unlike (representational) consciousness and the unconscious, this form

of agency is specifically intended to register the corporeal dimension of tech-

nology's experiential impact.

As a means of redeeming the unrealized potential of Freud's theory, Ben-

jamin's seemingly ad hoc distinction liberates a corporeal agency of experi-

ence against the imperialism of the psychoanalytic model of experience.14

From the outset, Benjamin aligns consciousness proper-the "registry of

conscious memory"-with unconscious memory and dreamwork. Since

both consciousness and the unconscious aim to neutralize or sterilize stim-

uli, both belong to a single psychic system: both are modes of "recollection"

(Erinnerung), whose function is, in the words of Paul Valery, to give us "the

time for organizing the reception of stimuli which we initially lacked."15 On

Benjamin's account, the Freudian agencies that enable psychic activity

(Erinnerung) and constitute experience in the strict sense (Erfahrung)

appear to bring about a rarefication of experience: they neutralize immedi-

ate lived experiences (Erlebnisse) by assimilating them into the (linguistic)

medium of the psyche, into the space of interior memory (Erinnerung).16

With its call for a certain constitutive passivity, Benjamin's refashioning

of Freud's cortical layer into a presubjective form of agency corresponds to

the shift in the economy of experience from Erfahrung to Erlebnis. By vastly

expanding the anthropological basis of the dead cortical layer as Freud had

conceived it, mimetic corporeal agency emerges as our means of adapting to

the technologized mechanosphere of modernity and postmodernity.17 Long

before we acquire the ability to engage in any affirmative becoming a la

Deleuze and Guattari, we must train our corporeal, mimetic faculty to reg-

ister the subrepresentational, molecular rhythms of the lifeworld; only in

that way will we successfully open the basic contact with the domain of

embodiment that forms the prerequisite for any effort to ameliorate or, as

Benjamin would put it, to redeem our robust lived experience.18

From Semiosis to Mimesis: Becoming in the

Technological Age

Benjamin's own willingness to embrace the experiential consequences of

modernization, even in their negative aspects, overdetermines his selection

246 * Embodying Technesis

of Baudelaire as exemplary modern agent. A poet whose mission it was to

live through his own shock experience to the fullest extent and without

recourse to psychic accommodation, Baudelaire literally forced himself to

experience the inhuman rhythm of the modern industrial mechanosphere.

By sacrificing his own internal subjective rhythm, Baudelaire inaugurated

the corporeal form of mimetic agency that, I claim, forms such a central

component of Benjamin's mature theory of experience.

In his first Baudelaire essay, "The Paris of the Second Empire in Baude-

laire," Benjamin cites the experience of the flaneur as an example of passive

adaptation to the materiality of exchange capitalism. Submitting himself to

a process of becoming beyond his control, the flaneur takes on the social

position of the commodity: "The flaneur is someone abandoned in the

crowd. In this he shares the situation of the commodity. He is not aware of

this special situation, but this does not diminish its effect on him and it per-

meates him blissfully like a narcotic that can compensate him for many

humiliations. The intoxication to which the flaneur surrenders is the intox-

ication of the commodity around which surges the stream of customers"

(Benjamin 1973, 55; emphasis added). Benjamin noted that the poet

(Baudelaire) undergoes a similar becoming, emptying himself out to attain

the chameleonlike possibility of embodying the commodity's infinite

reflectiveness: "'The poet enjoys the incomparable privilege of being himself

and someone else as he sees fit. Like a roving soul in search of a body, he

enters another person whenever he wishes. For him alone, all is open; if cer-

tain places seem closed to him, it is because in his view they are not worth

inspecting.' The commodity itself is the speaker here" (55, citing Baude-

laire). Both flaneur and poet forge a compromise with the commodity that

differs significantly from the experience of the "poor wretch" who, passing

"a shop-window containing beautiful and expensive things" (55), confronts

that prototypical experience of postauratic, technological modernity-the

failure of the object to return his gaze. Both flaneur and poet live the break-

down in the aura directly, if in divergent ways. Mistakenly interpreting the

protean reflective capacity of the commodity as empathy, the flaneur gives

himself over to nihilistic abandon; the less mystified poet assumes the com-

modity's cynical attitude, scrutinizing reality just as the commodity does,

with biting disdain.

This affiliation of poet and flaneur underlies the constitutive passivity

Benjamin ascribes to poetic practice. Role-playing, Benjamin suggests,

involves a certain antiheroism, cannily appropriate to the fragmentation of

identity characteristic not only of technological modernity but of our post-

modernity as well: "Unlike Gautier, Baudelaire found nothing to like about

On Some Motifs in Benjamin * 247

his time, and unlike Leconte de Lisle he was unable to deceive himself about

it.... Because he did not have any convictions, he assumed ever new forms

himself. Flaneur, apache, dandy and ragpicker were so many roles to him.

For the modern hero is no hero; he acts heroes. Heroic modernism turns out

to be a tragedy [Trauerspiel] in which the hero's part is available" (97).

With this striking refunctionalization of Keatsian negative capability, Ben-

jamin formulates the crux of the mimetic theory of becoming that he artic-

ulates more fully in "On Some Motifs." Understood as passively experi-

enced necessity dictated by the rhythms of the lifeworld, such role-playing

underscores the shift in the mode of experience at stake in technological

modernization-the shift from semiotics to mimetics. In Buck-Morss's suc-

cinct formulation, the "mastery" of our irreducibly technological relation to

nature demands "being receptive to the expressive power of matter, a

mimetic, not an instrumental skill" (1989, 70). Only a fundamental invest-

ment in our mimetic faculty will equip us for the kind of passive adaptation

Baudelaire's role-playing exemplifies; such an investment, Benjamin sug-

gests, makes Baudelaire's experience relevant for humanity's modern (and,

we might add, postmodern) predicament.

Not surprisingly, the training of our mimetic faculty is precisely what is

at stake in the tactile model of filmic reception Benjamin elaborates in "On

Some Motifs." If the mimetic faculty essays place a strong emphasis on lan-

guage's reign as the repository for nonsensuous similarities, Benjamin's tac-

tile model of experience suggests a postlinguistic afterlife of mimesis.19 In

what amounts to a (partial) return to primitive mimesis, this model dis-

places the distinctly theological and scriptural correspondence with nature

in favor of a technologically embodied sensuous contact with (a now dis-

tinctly second) nature.20 Flattening the distance intrinsic to any semiotic,

contemporary mimesis places the embodied agent in immediate sensory

contact with the rhythmic flux of the mechanosphere. In the aftermath of

this shift, what is important, as anthropologist Michael Taussig insists in an

inspired reading of Benjamin's One-Way Street, is "not what the neon says,

but the fiery pool reflecting it in the asphalt; not language, but image; and

not just the image but its tactility and the new magic thereof with the trans-

formation of roadway parking-lot bitumen into legendary lakes of fire-

ringed prophecy." Taussig continues: "It is not a question, therefore, of

whether or not we can follow de Certeau and combat strategies with every-

day tactics that fill with personal matter the empty signifiers of postmoder-

nity, because the everyday is a question not of universal semiotics but of

capitalist mimetics" (Taussig 1992, 147). The task of affirming such a

mimetics requires a break from Benjamin's own conjunction of mimesis

248 * Embodying Technesis

with the scriptural aspect of language: "the mimetic element in language

can, like a flame, manifest itself only through a kind of bearer. This bearer

is the semiotic element. Thus the coherence of words or sentences is the

bearer through which, like a flash, similarity appears" (Benjamin 1986b,

335). We must bypass the mediation performed by the "semiotic element"

of a word or an image in order to engage physically with it. We must treat

words and images not as "bearers" for the experience of mimesis but as

sources inaugurating mimetic processes of embodiment. By displacing this

semiotic bearer in favor of another bearer-our own embodied reception of

the image as shock-we open a new world, what we might call a tactile

unconscious, in which our embodied being-in-the-world itself becomes the

material support, the medium, for the "contact sensuousity" restored by

modern mimetic machines and, in particular, by the "mimetic powers

striven for in the advertising image" (Taussig 1993, 23).

The importance of Baudelaire's poetic practice as an exemplar of mod-

ern, molecular agency stems from his unwavering embrace of such mimetic

attunement; through it, argues Benjamin, he becomes the lyric poet whose

work has "as its basis an experience [Erfahrung] for which shock experience

[Chockerlebnis] has become the norm." What differentiates Baudelaire

from the poor wretch in the street is not some essential quality, as Heideg-

ger might have wished, but a certain bodily capacity-his higher degree of

tolerance for shock. Benjamin attributes this capacity to Baudelaire's intense

"spiritual and physical" engagement, his mind-body integration: because of

his bodily attunement, he is simply more able than the rest of us to live the

shocks of modern life without recourse to psychological processing.21

"Baudelaire," Benjamin explains, "made it his business to parry the shocks,

no matter where they might come from, with his spiritual and physical self"

(Benjamin 1968, 163; emphasis added). Because he parries shocks corpore-

ally, rather than registering them in consciousness or letting them occasion

a psychic defense against trauma, Baudelaire manages to transform their

corporeal impact into the raw material for his poetry.

Indeed, in his role as mimetic shock absorber, Baudelaire furnishes a

striking illustration not only of the economic principle of experience that

Benjamin appropriates from Freud but of the redemptive possibilities it

affords.

The greater the share of the shock factor in particular impressions, the more

constantly consciousness [or more exactly, the dead cortical layer] has to be

alert as a protection against stimuli [Reizschutz]; the more efficiently it does

so, the less do these impressions enter experience [Erfahrung], tending to

remain in the sphere of lived experience proper [more precisely, "to fulfill the

On Some Motifs in Benjamin * 249

concept of Erlebnis" (erfuellen sie den Begriff des Erlebnisses)]. Perhaps the

special achievement of shock defense may be seen in its function of assigning

to an incident a precise temporal point [Zeitstelle] in consciousness at the

cost of the integrity of its contents. (Benjamin 1968, 163; translation

modified)

By appropriating Freud's model of shock processing as the basis for his the-

ory of modern experience, Benjamin is able to open a divide in the concep-

tual field of Erlebnis. While the protective function mostly occasions a neu-

tralization of the force impressions derive from their content-a

neutralization that makes them into already processed, irrevocably past

lived experiences-it can also function to free their quantitative force from

its hitherto necessary correlation with representational/ideational content,

in the process transforming it into an energy source for practical "innerva-

tion." Benjamin discerns just such a possibility in Baudelaire's embrace of

fright. By leaving himself constantly exposed to stimuli that produce fright,

Baudelaire short-circuits the reflective neutralization of shock; rather than

blocking out the shock stimuli of the external world, he confronts it like a

challenger in a duel. Without neutralization, Benjamin suggests, one experi-

ences "nothing but a sudden start, usually the sensation of fright which,

according to Freud, confirms the failure of the shock defense." He contin-

ues: "Baudelaire has portrayed this condition in a harsh image. He speaks of

a duel in which the artist, just before being beaten, screams in fright. This

duel is the creative process itself" (163). Rather than translating an incident

into an empty, purely formal past moment (a Zeitstelle) of consciousness,

the failure of the shock defense in Baudelaire triggers a frenzy of creative

activity that transforms the poet's body into a medium. Through his corpo-

real engagement, Baudelaire inaugurates a new sense of Erlebnis as the

channeling of the energy of shock into mimetic, physiologically rooted cre-

ative activity.22

Technology and Voluntary Memory

Using Bergson's terminology, we might say that Baudelaire engages in a

combat with the external world that does not begin by imposing the rhythm

of human duration on the rhythm of things. In his creative struggle, Baude-

laire sacrifices the informing power of his psychic duration in order to let

himself be infiltrated by worldly duration.

... Baudelaire battled the crowd-with the impotent rage of someone fight-

ing the rain or the wind. This is the nature of something lived through

250 * Embodying Technesis

[Erlebnis] to which Baudelaire has given the weight of an experience

[Erfahrung]. He indicated the price for which the sensation of the modern

age [die Sensation der Moderne] may be had: the disintegration of the aura in

the experience of shock. He paid dearly for consenting to this disintegra-

tion-but it is the law of his poetry . . . (Benjamin 1968, 193-94)

Itself a reaction to the vast expansion in the corporeal dimension of experi-

ence, Baudelaire's sacrifice anticipates the sweeping incorporation of tech-

nology into the fabric of the lifeworld that our century has witnessed. By

employing his body as a mimetic shock absorber, he inaugurates a mode of

experience that only attains normative status much later, in the age of full-

blown technical reproducibility. His experience of a crowd that, machine-

like, refused to return his gaze prefigures the still more inanimate camera

"eye" that we face daily in the age of technological reproducibility.23

Through his sacrifice, Baudelaire thus reveals the historical correlation

between corporeal mimesis and the ever increasing materialization of vol-

untary memory in technologies of reproduction: insofar as shock replaces

reflection as the dominant mode of experience, the physiological aspects of

aesthetic reception come to the fore. By operating a progressive exterioriza-

tion of voluntary memory from the human body to the machine, technolog-

ical reproducibility makes this physiological dimension into the object of

collective experience. Understood as a homeopathic antidote to the inhu-

manity technology progressively introduces, this exteriorization offers rec-

ompense for the waning of Erfahrung.24 The mimetic correspondences gen-

erated through technical reproducibility not only provide the raw material

for our sensory retraining but also lend a collective dimension to that

process; by increasing our physiological receptivity to the expressive power

of matter, they open a new space of collective action and, with it, hope that

we might gain some control against "the monopoly" that "mediums and the

media" hold over "[h]ow we all in our different ways and different walks of

life are used today by. . . mimetic excess" (Taussig 1993, 255).

Like the situation from which it arises, this hope is unprecedented in the

history of human experience. The technologically mediated reinvention of

experience does not simply restore what was shattered by modernization, as

critics so often suggest. On the contrary, it produces an entirely new form of

experience for the technological age and calls for a correlative rearticulation

of the task of theory. Accordingly, if we are to capitalize on the noncogni-

tive, mimetic dimension of experience central to modernity and (still more

so) to postmodernity, we must embrace technological reproducibility

beyond the scope of traditional representationalism. On such a model, film

constitutes the site not for a reflective experience of the impact of industrial

On Some Motifs in Benjamin * 251

production but for a tactile experience that functions as an aesthetic ana-

logue to the corporeal impact of the assembly line and the urban crowd, a

homeopathic, "virtual" experiential space where we can adapt ourselves to

the unprecedented demands of our technologized lifeworld. By soliciting

our embodied adaptation to the alien rhythms of montage, film opens a new

nature to our experience, what Benjamin calls an "optical unconscious":

"... it is a different nature that speaks to the camera than to the naked

eye-different above all because an unconsciously permeated space substi-

tutes for one that is infused with human consciousness [an die Stelle eines

vom Menschen mit Bewusstsein durchwirkten Raums ein unbewusst

durchwirkter tritt]" (1968, 236-37; translation modified). The seductive

analogy with Freud notwithstanding, what Benjamin has in mind here is

anything but an augmentation of the (Freudian) unconscious; on his model,

film brokers an expansion of consciousness, a broadening of the empirical

(mimetic) faculty that puts us into sensory contact with our world. An ear-

lier text (on which the Artwork essay draws quite heavily) makes just this

point: "Film actually gives rise to a new region of consciousness. It is, in a

word, the only prism through which man's immediate environment-the

space in which he lives, conducts his business and takes his leisure-read-

ily, meaningfully, and passionately presents itself to him [sich... auseinan-

derlegen]."25 The new world opened by film is not an inner, unconscious

world, but the very same material world under very different sensory con-

ditions. By "exploding [our] prison-world with the dynamite of one-tenth

seconds," as the Artwork essay puts it, film introduces us into a world for-

merly untouched by our activity (Benjamin 1968, 236; translation

modified). Rather than merely opening yet another new space for further

conscious (or unconscious) colonization, it creates an entirely new form of

consciousness, a new perceptual faculty that taps into hitherto unexplored

mimetic dimensions of experience.

By expanding the scope of voluntary memory well beyond the point of

detaching it from the individual psyche, technological reproduction gener-

ates a vast fund of mimetically charged, collective images that furnish the

raw material for our efforts to retrain our sensory capacities: "The tech-

niques based on the use of the camera and of subsequent analogous mechan-

ical devices extend the range of the memoire volontaire; . . . these devices

... make it possible for an event at any time to be permanently recorded in

terms of sound and sight" (Benjamin 1968, 186). This deterritorialization of

memory introduces a fundamental shift in its function; following its meta-

morphosis into reproducibility, memory no longer serves to translate lived

experience into the privacy of psychic interiority but mobilizes for collective

252 * Embodying Technesis

consumption, in the material, exteriorized form of images, the very

rhythm of the mechanosphere itself. Through this collective exterioriza-

tion of memory, technologies of reproduction generate an extensive tech-

nical contamination of agency, an infiltration of desiring-production

unthinkable by Deleuze and Guattari, that truly merits the designation

becoming-technological.

Benjamin traces memory's metamorphosis into reproduction to the "cri-

sis in perception itself" brought on by technological modernization (1968,

187). Unlike previous perceptual crises, such as the introduction of perspec-

tive in the Renaissance, this crisis stems not from a shift in representational

form but from the eclipse of representation itself. Accordingly, the retrain-

ing it calls for cannot pursue the goal of cognitive adaptation a la Jameson

but must provide a schooling in passive corporeal becoming, a crash course

in how to use our protective cortex in a habitual, nonintentional, and

nonpsychic mode. Because it bypasses our normal psychological means of

processing external stimuli, such retraining involves our mimetic faculty in

the radical corporeal sense I have introduced: the retraining Benjamin has in

mind comprises a mimetically instilled formation of embodied habitual

response. Grasping this point is crucial if we are to understand the basic

refunctionalization film undergoes in "On Some Motifs"; no longer a privi-

leged site for the experience of dialectical images, film instead comes to

mark the culminating point in Benjamin's progressive account of the tech-

nological exteriorization of memory.26

A touch of the [photographer's] finger now sufficed to fix an event [Ereignis]

for an unlimited period of time. The camera gave the moment a posthumous

shock, as it were. Haptic experiences [Erfahrungen] of this kind were joined

by optic ones, such as are supplied by the advertising pages of a newspaper

or the traffic of a big city. Moving through such traffic submits the individual

to a series of shocks and collisions [bedingt fur den einzelnen eine Folge von

Chocks und von Kollisionen]. At dangerous intersections, nervous impulses

[Innervationen] flow through him in rapid succession, like shocks [Stosse]

from a battery. Thus technology has subjected the human sensorium to a

complex kind of training [einem Training]. There came a day when a new

and urgent need for stimuli [Reizbediirfnis] was met by the film. In a film,

perception in the form of shocks [die chockformige Wahrnehmung] was

established as a formal principle. That which determines the rhythm of pro-

duction on a conveyor belt is the basis of the rhythm of reception in the film.

(175; translation modified)

Refunctionalized as the privileged vehicle of a purely tactile, physiological

experience, technological reproducibility allows us collectively to share

On Some Motifs in Benjamin * 253

Baudelaire's experience of facing the urban crowd: by depriving us of the

ability to reflect, by confronting us with the shock of mimetic excess, our

reproductive technologies force us to live through external stimuli without

neutralizing them.

Innervation: Physiological or Cognitive?

While the majority of those (few) critics who actually do appreciate Ben-

jamin's unequivocal affirmation of film's tactile dimension view it as an

unfortunate break with his earlier, more activist understanding of film,27 to

my mind it marks a fundamental-and empowering-turn in his effort to

yoke technology to human practice. By abandoning the intrinsic link

between technology and artistic revolution central to the political agenda of

the Artwork essay, Benjamin's account in "On Some Motifs" re-poses the

question concerning humanity's relation to technology along different,

vastly more humble lines.28 Rather than continuing to ask how film can

underwrite a revolutionary politicization of aesthetics, he gives voice to a

more basic, and arguably more central, concern of his anthropological

materialism: how is humanity to establish and maintain (nondestructive)

contact with the ever complexifying, technologically driven cosmos?

In a move that garners critical distance from the Artwork essay, the

model of technology Benjamin develops in "On Some Motifs" recurs to an

earlier cosmological conception of technology he lays out in "To the Plane-

tarium," the final section of One Way Street (1928). There Benjamin reads

World War I as the harbinger of a "new barbarism"-a return of sorts to

the communal, ecstatic contact with the cosmos experienced by the

ancients.29 In stark antithesis to Heidegger's later understanding of World

War II as the triumph of instrumental, technical reason, Benjamin actually

welcomes World War I as a wake-up call to humanity, a reminder of its pro-

foundly, even essentially, technological predicament.30 Through the sheer

horror of its unprecedented destruction, the war forces humanity to recog-

nize its "dangerous error"-the error of dismissing the collective experience

of the cosmos as "unimportant and avoidable" and of "consign[ing] it to

the individual as the poetic rapture of starry nights" (Benjamin 1996, 486).

In a striking anticipation of Lyotard's momentous coupling of technology

and cosmological complexification, Benjamin construes the war as a deed of

Nature itself; like Lyotard, he employs the passive voice to suggest an

agency on the part of the technologically infused cosmos.

254 * Embodying Technesis

[The collective experience of the cosmos] is not [unimportant and avoidable];

its hour strikes again and again, and then neither nations nor generations can

escape it, as was made terribly clear by the last war, which was an attempt at

new and unprecedented commingling with the cosmic powers. Human mul-

titudes, gases, electrical forces were hurled [wurden . . . geworfen] into the

open country, high-frequency currents coursed through the landscape, new

constellations rose in the sky, aerial space and ocean depths thundered with

propellers, and everywhere sacrificial shafts were dug in Mother earth. This

immense wooing of the cosmos was enacted for the first time on a planetary

scale-that is, in the spirit of technology. (486-87)

While Benjamin proceeds to interpret this unprecedented destruction

through the narrow lens of his revolutionary political program, ascribing it

to the perverting force of capitalism,31 his analysis nonetheless announces,

in no uncertain terms, the urgent issue of his mature theory of technology:

mankind's need to establish a felicitous (nondestructive) form of collective

communion with the cosmos.32

Benjamin initially takes up this issue in his surrealism essay of 1929,

where he develops the notion of a "collective innervation" of mankind's

body through technology. Here Benjamin again invokes the new physis that

was being organized for mankind by technology and emphasizes the sensu-

ous nature of our collective contact with it: "Only when in technology body

and image-space [Bildraum] so interpenetrate [so tief durchdringen] that all

revolutionary tension becomes bodily collective innervation, and all bodily

innervations of the collective become revolutionary discharge, will reality

have surpassed itself [sich selbst iibertroffen] to the extent demanded by the

Communist Manifesto" (Benjamin 1986b, 192; translation modified). The

operative vehicles of such innervation are precisely those reproductive tech-

nologies that Benjamin would come to focus on in the 1930s: photography,

radio, gramophone, and especially film-the very technologies that, as

Miriam Hansen puts it, "participate in the historical proliferation of the

shock experience and thus escalate the spiral of sensory alienation, phantas-

magoria, and violence" (Hansen 1993, 38). Whatever hope Benjamin saw

for establishing a (nondestructive) sensuous-mimetic contact with the cos-

mos as second nature had to come from the experiential possibilities that

such reproductive technologies facilitated.

Precisely this curious notion of homeopathic redemption lies behind the

privilege Benjamin grants film as the principle agent of the adaptation at

issue in his anthropological materialism. Entirely independently of its func-

tion as a representational medium (and also as a space for the cognitive pro-

On Some Motifs in Benjamin * 255

cessing of dialectical images), film comprises a training ground for a physi-

ological becoming-technological on the cosmological scale: "Film serves to

drill [dient . . . zu iiben] man in those new apperceptions and reactions

caused by interaction with an apparatus [mit einer Apparatur] whose role in

his life increases almost daily. To make the tremendous [ungeheuer] techni-

cal apparatus of our time into an object of human innervation-that is the

historical task in whose service film has its true meaning" (Benjamin

1972-89, I:445).33 In seeking to unpack this highly provocative claim-and

the peculiar mimetic mobilization of film it lays out-we will have to take

seriously its profound antihermeneutic consequences. What is ultimately at

stake in Benjamin's claim for the tactile dimension of film is the basic

nature, as it were, of film's appeal to us. Benjamin's work compels us to ask

whether film is a reflective art form that, like art of the past, engages us cog-

nitively or if, rather, it marks a watershed moment in aesthetic history: the

advent of a predominately corporeal form of art.

Given the profound appeal of his political commitments, it is hardly sur-

prising that Benjamin's critics have consistently emphasized the cognitive

dimension of his theory, both within his larger critical project as a whole

and within the more general context of film theory. Nonetheless, in adapt-

ing Benjamin's work to analyze contemporary technoculture, we must ask

whether and at what cost such an emphasis can be maintained: Has the con-

temporary information revolution so changed the material status of the

image that we are forced to alter the way we look at Benjamin?34

As one of the key catalysts responsible for (re)opening critical interest in

Benjamin's conception of innervation, Miriam Hansen's recent work on the

topic can serve as a test case to carry out such an interrogation. In her sug-

gestive interpretation of Benjamin's previously cited claim for the tactility of

film, Hansen stresses the political stakes of the link Benjamin establishes

between innervation and film in order to impose a criterion for abjudicating

between the cognitive and the physiological (1993, 38ff.). On her reading,

Benjamin's affirmation of the tactile dimension of film flirts with a danger-

ous instability: by insisting on the physiological dimension of our mimetic

contact with technology, Hansen argues, Benjamin would seem to license

effects that cannot be contained by nor channeled through cognition. To

neutralize this risk-or, rather, to insulate Benjamin from it-Hansen

asserts the priority within Benjamin's oeuvre of a cognitive, emancipatory

form of innervation over a purely physiological, merely reactive one. In sup-

port, she cites Benjamin's invocation of Mickey Mouse in the Artwork

essay; under Benjamin's critical eye, Mickey Mouse is transformed into a

256 * Embodying Technesis

cognitively dissonant "figure" for a "historical imbrication of nature and

technology" that points to the "utopian potential of technology for reorga-

nizing the relations between human beings and nature."35

The priority Hansen claims for the cognitive function of innervation itself

depends on a closely related understanding of shock as a fundamentally

inert force, one that depends on some external element for its determina-

tion. Hansen explains that technology can be alternatively destructive and

empowering, depending on how it converts shock into innervation: "...

Benjamin indeed envisioned the process of innervation, like the notion of

shock, in rather neurological, electrodynamic terms. In that sense, the para-

lyzing and destructive effects of technology are only the flip side of tensions,

currents, and forces which, under different relations of production and

reception, could have a mobilizing and empowering effect" (38-39).

Despite this seemingly explicit acknowledgment of its root physiological

reality, Hansen proceeds immediately to subordinate innervation to the

social. By expanding this reciprocity into a full-fledged distinction between

two forms of innervation-a "defensive adaptation to technology"and a

"mimetic, cognitive one" (38)-Hansen effectively asserts the categorical

priority of social construction over technology and its contamination of

(presubjectified) agency. Not unlike Deleuze and Guattari, her ultimate aim

is to enlist technological innervation in the service of social emancipation:

by rendering innervation a function of "relations of production and recep-

tion," Hansen subordinates it in a way that guarantees-at least poten-

tially-its redeployment toward affirmative social ends.

To grasp what is at stake in this reading and in the more general decision

to privilege the cognitive, we need to open a larger issue that I suggest is nec-

essarily raised by Benjamin's introduction of the tactile dimension of film:

the possibility that the physiological basis of innervation might actually

resist all efforts to bind it to the content of a dialectical image. The claims

Benjamin makes for film require us to pose questions that Miriam Hansen

does not find it necessary to ask. Can we really account for innervation as

the effect of a figure that acquires its redemptive function by placing nature

and technology into jarring, indeed cognitively dissonant, juxtaposition? Or

is the alignment of innervation with image content-the hallmark of Ben-

jamin's surrealist phase-ultimately irreconcilable with his mature under-

standing of shock, with his apparent valorization, in "On Some Motifs," of

a physiological model of shock over a dialectical, cognitive one?

These questions broach the profound ambivalence that inhabits Ben-

jamin's understanding of shock. Benjamin, it would seem, has two largely

antithetical theories of shock that come to the fore, alternately, as a function

On Some Motifs in Benjamin * 257

of critical context. In the context of arguments focusing on the task of his-

torico-political redemption, he employs shock to name the cognitive experi-

ence of dissonance that dialectical images provoke; in the context of argu-

ments focusing on the shift in the economy of experience, by contrast, he

uses shock to designate the corporeal impact of a vastly accelerated life-

world on the physiology and neurology of individuals. Despite the clear-

and, I suggest, decisive-distinction between them, these two notions of

shock happen to remain mutually consistent as long as Benjamin's approach

to technological reproducibility stays focused on-and contained within

the image. When he shifts his sights to the aesthetic properties of the

medium itself, however, his use of shock loses its dialectical basis and its

cognitive content. Once he turns from a photographic to a filmic aesthetic,

Benjamin begins to employ shock exclusively to designate a purely physio-

logical, sensuous, and (in the broad sense) aesthetic response to mechanical

stimuli, a response that can no longer make common cause with his earlier

dialectical and image-centered conception.

In moving from a cognitive to a purely physiological model of shock,

Benjamin effectively submits his basic understanding of technological repro-

ducibility to a fundamental revision; leaving behind all traces of his earlier,

surrealist-inspired program of dialectical awakening, he chooses to focus

instead on technology's mediating role in the more basic task of forging a

root sensuous contact between the alienated human individual and the con-

stantly complexifying cosmos. In accord with the shift in his understanding

of shock, the model of film presented in "On Some Motifs" loses the

ambivalence that had characterized it in "The Work of Art"; in the later

essay, film assumes its consummate role as the catalyst for a type of inner-

vation aimed at restoring our basic mimetic contact with the external world.

Such innervation results not from the cognitive processing of dialectical dis-

sonance but rather from the purely physiological absorption of mechanical

shocks.36 As Susan Buck-Morss has recently suggested, it involves a reori-

entation of perception from the perceived object to the perceptual process

itself, a turning back of perception on itself: "In this situation of 'crisis in

perception,' it is no longer a question of educating the crude ear to hear

music, but of giving it back hearing. It is no longer a question of training the

eye to see beauty, but of restoring 'perceptibility'" (Buck-Morss 1992, 18).

As the aesthetic analogue to the shock rhythm of the lifeworld, film is what

makes such a reorientation possible.

Appreciating this shift in focus is, I think, absolutely crucial for our con-

temporary efforts to profit from Benjamin's example. Given the vast

increase in humankind's technological alienation in the sixty years that have

258 * Embodying Technesis

elapsed since his death, the task of securing contact with the cosmos has

become all the more urgent. With the ever increasing importance of tech-

nologies as what orient us in the practical lifeworld, our extensive depen-

dence on them has never been more central or more deserving of sustained

critical attention. Indeed, since this dependence forms the very basis for our

agency in the technologically mediated lifeworld, developing some under-

standing of and command over it forms the prerequisite for any subsequent

practical project and must accordingly be considered the central concern of

contemporary technocultural criticism.

With this in mind, we can now clearly grasp the reduction that Hansen's

reading imposes; bluntly put, it reflects a deeply rooted-and, I suggest,

fundamentally defensive-critical desire to retain control over the physio-

logical force unleashed by technological shock stimuli, even at the cost of

bracketing out some-indeed a large part-of technology's impact. In ask-

ing how to "distinguish ... a film practice that 'breaks through the numb-

ing shield of consciousness' [from] one that 'merely provides a "drill" for

the strength of its defenses'" (1993, 38, citing Buck-Morss), Hansen fol-

lows Buck-Morss in homogenizing shock, rendering it a neutral, purely

quantitative effect that can be qualified in better and worse ways.37 This

critical allegiance allows her to foreground the content of film as the key

determinant of how shock will be deployed and, more specifically, to con-

strue as the embodiment of a utopian possibility for collective innervation

the particular "historical, cultural and political place" that Benjamin

assigns Mickey Mouse (Hansen 1993, 39). By opening a third realm where

humankind's body and technology can meet, beyond the subjective and the

objective, Mickey Mouse performs what Hansen describes as a collective

version of the "profane illumination" championed by the surrealists: "..

Mickey Mouse prefigures the utopian interpenetration of body and image

space which Benjamin delineates at the end of his essay on surrealism.

What the surrealists have understood on an individual basis, Mickey

accomplishes in the arena of mass reception: by generating in the sphere of

the image, through techniques of 'profane illumination,' the reality of a

'collective physis' (Kollektivleib)" (46). In line with the general tenor of the

Artwork essay, the figure of Mickey Mouse owes its force as a dialectical

image to a certain flexibility-Mickey's capacity for bodily metamorpho-

sis-that facilitates the presentation of alternate, hidden possibilities for

the social construction of humankind's relation with technology.38 Just as

the Artwork essay ascribes an intrinsic emancipatory potential to techno-

logical reproducibility, a potential to denaturalize particular ideological

configurations by opening an "optical unconscious," the Mickey Mouse

On Some Motifs in Benjamin * 259

fragments show us how we can live our self-alienation in the face of tech-

nology in a productive way, one that need not coincide with the fascist

hardening of the body so prevalent as a theme of cultural criticism and art

in the interwar period. Hansen argues that by engaging technology as the

internal principle of their own construction, as what she tellingly calls a

"hidden figure," the Mickey Mouse films "hyperbolize the historical imbri-

cation of nature and technology through humor and parody," allowing us

to experience collective innervation in the form of an "aesthetic self-subla-

tion" that loosens technology's bonds to actual society and frees it for

emancipatory uses (42).39

By mapping the two types of film practice onto the distinction between a

collective profane illumination centered on the figure of Mickey Mouse and

a fascist hardening of the body, Hansen makes a strong case that shock

experience requires cognitive redemption if it is to yield anything affirma-

tive. Her account suggests, in no uncertain terms, that our best (and only?)

hope of avoiding (techno)fascism consists in embracing a surrealist-inspired

politicization of the aesthetic: an aesthetic mobilization of shock experience

toward an emancipatory end. The analogy with surrealism suggests, more-

over, an allegiance of "mimetic, cognitive" film practice with a restoration

of Erfahrung.40 Just as the surrealists sought to mobilize shock in order to

open a third domain capable of restoring the unity of experience in a new

form, a domain of "inconceivable analogies and connections between

events" (Benjamin 1986b, 183),41 in Hansen's account film marshals shock

toward a similar opening-a revolutionary moment of dialectical awaken-

ing in which Erfahrung would be restored, again in a new form, as the col-

lective innervation linking humans with the cosmos.42

A Plea for the Autonomy of the Physiological

However strong its appeal, such an aesthetico-political program is sub-

stantially undercut by the concrete realities of our contemporary situation

and specifically, as postmodern critics have persuasively demonstrated, by

the dissolution of any monological form of culture together with the mar-

ket's neutralization of the aesthetic avant-garde (see, e.g., Huyssen 1986).

In the wake of these concrete realities, whatever hopes we may indeed

have of establishing and maintaining mimetic contact with an ever increas-

ingly technological second nature would seem to require us to follow

something like Benjamin's own obscure and halting trajectory from a the-

ory of profane illumination to one of physiological mimesis. If we hope to

260 * Embodying Technesis

adapt Benjamin's project to our world, we must refuse to compromise the

fundamental heterogeneity he maintains between the root physiological

reality of innervation and the (secondary) cognitive grounding he gives it

in the Artwork and Surrealism essays. Only in this way, I suggest, will we

be able to avoid subordinating the physiological basis of shock to a (nar-

row) social circumscription of it, a circumscription that ultimately repro-

duces the very same (sociological) version of the machine reduction we

discovered in Deleuze and Guattari.

To fathom and adapt to our culture's ever expanding commitment to the

image, we need in particular to embrace four key elements of Benjamin's

position in "On Some Motifs" that demarcate it from his earlier work: (1)

his insistence on the tactile dimension of film, (2) his effort to disarticulate

the physiological dimension of shock from any discursive and/or dialectical

content, (3) his shift of focus from image content to medium as the locus of

the image's mimetic impact; and (4) his affirmation of Erlebnis as an

autonomous and potentially empowering mode of experience. Articulated

together, these motifs furnish the theoretical rudiments of a model of cor-

poreal mimesis capable of locating technology's impact at the level of our

embodied experience and of undoing the long-standing tendency, on the

part of Benjamin's readers and of technocultural critics more generally, to

collapse such embodied impact into the discursive. By rooting the notion of

mimetic innervation in the irreducibly physiological experience of tactile

shock stimulated by film, "On Some Motifs" posits a posthermeneutic ana-

lytical model that not only refuses to contain the physiological dimension of

shock within the dialectical space of the image [Bildraum]-to reduce it to

the content of a dialectical image-but also positively insists on grappling

with the conversion of the imagistic into the affective. In "On Some

Motifs," in short, Benjamin proposes a fundamental refunctionalization of

his theory of the image that can help us adapt it to the digital age.43

In suggesting that Benjamin's tactile model of film involves a certain turn

away from the image, Norbert Bolz grasps the fundamental tenet of this

refunctionalization.

. . . film's methods of technical reproduction simply no longer produce

images in the strict sense. In film, the sequence of what has already happened

determines the assimilation of the following frames, and through the shock

effect created by the succession of images [Bildfolgen] the predominance of

tactility over filmic opticality comes to light. With the shocks from its

onslaught of images [Bilderstosse], film corresponds to a pressing demand of

modernity: to blast open all developmental continuity and to tear apart

homogeneous becoming.... The modern machine world prepares the human

On Some Motifs in Benjamin * 261

sensorium for film. As the five senses are trained, opticality loses its priority

to tactility. In the cinema, man learns to parry discontinuities in a mode of

deconcentration. Reception has come to mean the routinizing of shocks.

(Bolz 1990, 87)

Reading Benjamin as an interface between the Guttenberg galaxy and the

new media age, Bolz here suggests an inversion in the trajectory of the

image: rather than the ultimate point of convergence that sparks, by means

of cognitive shock, a profane illumination, the filmic image comprises the

initial point in a process of embodied reception-of reception as embodi-

ment-that culminates in a nonrepresentational experience of embodied

physiological sensation.

Within the history of technology, the crucial moment informing this

reversal in the image's trajectory is the shift from photography to cinema,

from the static to the (mechanically) moving image. If Benjamin's work on

photography chips away at the linguistic subordination of the image char-

acteristic of the Guttenberg galaxy, it nevertheless retains the general prior-

ity of opticality and the image's specifically literary function of "letting man

read what was never written."44 With his turn to film, by contrast, Ben-

jamin's understanding of the image crosses the threshold into the informa-

tion age. As Bolz puts it, Benjamin's media technical understanding refunc-

tionalizes language, transforming it from a bearer of experience

[Erfahrungstriger] into an instrument of communication [Verkehrsmittel]"

(71). Expanding Bolz, we can ascribe the singularity of filmic tactility to its

radical postsemiotic openness: while the photographic-linguistic model

fetishizes the image's internal articulation as a form capable of capturing

our contact with the cosmos, film's extraction of the shock impact of images

institutes an open-ended circuit of communication that, in moving from

image to affect, effectively produces this contact as physiological innerva-

tion.

Through its emphasis on the tactile dimension of film, a media-technical

interpretation thus brings out what is truly singular and remarkable about

Benjamin's position in "On Some Motifs": his refusal to subordinate the

lived experience (Erlebnis) of technology to any semiotic of experience,

including the visual semiotic of the dialectical (photographic) image. By

reorienting the trajectory of the image toward a culminating production of

physiological shock, the media-technical interpretation furnishes a sketch of

how corporeal mimesis functions: as the bearer of the mimetic magic of

images, technological shocks become embodied through a process of

mimetic absorption that yields a purely physiological innervation with no

262 * Embodying Technesis

directly corresponding cognitive or representational content. True in this

respect to its psychoanalytic heritage,45 such innervation fulfills the task of

Benjamin's theory of technology as he first proposed it in One Way Street:

it enacts a sensuous (if no longer ecstatic) contact with the cosmos that func-

tions homeopathically, as it were, as our best means of insuring against a

repetition of world destruction on the order of our century's great and hor-

rible world wars.

Without calling for the abolition of (bourgeois) culture as such-pre-

cisely the goal of the "new barbarism" of "Experience and Poverty"-cor-

poreal mimeticism promotes a form of embodiment centered in the "tiny,

fragile human body."46 As a mode of adaptation that embraces the frag-

menting and alienating impact of technology, corporeal mimeticism remains

profoundly antithetical to the fascist hardening of the body; rather than

defensively rejecting the "tripartite splitting of experience" into agency,

object, and observer that underlies fascist subjectification (Buck-Morss

1992, 30ff.), it responds to this splitting by adjusting our experiential capac-

ities to address the material realities of our technological lifeworld. And

though it eschews the project of formulating a viable "cognitive discourse"

on experience, corporeal mimesis does not simply amount to "a behaviorist

adaptation to the present";47 rather, it calls for a fundamental revaluation

of our priorities as cultural critics and as embodied practical agents. If we

hope to fathom the technological-becoming that we are always in the

process of undergoing, we will simply have to face the reality of our desire

for embodied contact with the cosmos. Precisely such contact forms the

object of the mimetic sensuousity imparted by our now miniaturized and

thoroughly commodified technologies and the desire motivating it is what

gives late capitalism-and ultimately culture itself-its power over us.

Whatever hope we might have of negotiating change in our cultural com-

mitments, even those as basic as our collective addiction to violence and the

confusion of death and play characteristic of contemporary popular enter-

tainment, can only come through a deepening of our mimetic command

over this properly unrepresentable and noncognitive experiential dimen-

sion. Ultimately, then, if we are to follow the Benjamin of "On Some

Motifs," we must subordinate all "self-reflective, anamnestic, and figura-

tive" efforts to "politicize the aesthetics of technology" (Hansen 1993, 41,

54) to the more basic task of establishing contact with our ever increasingly

autonomous, automatized, and (in Godzich's sense) "imaginary" world. In

calling on us to tailor our critical ambitions to the contemporary realities of

cosmological complexification, Benjamin's example helps us recognize pre-

cisely this bottom line: that to increase our command over the very medium

On Some Motifs in Benjamin * 263

of capitalism's extensive mimetic power-its ministration to our basic desire

for cosmological contact-we have to abandon the long-standing cognitive

privilege that, in the process of (allegedly) protecting us from capitulation to

a new barbarism of technological inhumanity, has blinded us to the reality

of our dependence on technologies.

By answering the question concerning technology with a sensuous mimetic

account of presubjective embodied agency, Benjamin opens a path that can

help technocultural critics dispel their residual (and, as I have argued,

largely unthematized) commitment to representationalism. His example can

help us develop more concrete, locally attuned deployments of reproductive

technologies as mimetic vehicles to make our lived experience in the post-

modern age more bearable, if not, in some significant sense, more empow-

ered. In a word, Benjamin points us beyond the impasse of technesis. By

refusing to collapse the technological real into representation and by linking

it to embodiment, he shows us that we can make sense of technology's dif-

fuse, amorphous corporeal impact without filtering it through language,

without linking it to changes in our discursive practices. And he urges us to

focus on our own embodiment as the material site-the bearer-of technol-

ogy's otherwise wholly inhuman impact. Accordingly, Benjamin's example

can help us construct the analytical tools we will need to resist the seduc-

tions of disembodiment projected by contemporary reproductive and virtual

technologies, and in so doing, it can guide us in investigating the experien-

tial changes that are currently revolutionizing our culture. If we can succeed

in emulating Benjamin's sober responsibility to the technological real, we

will begin the crucial task of (re)claiming a distinctly human perspective in

the face of material and technological forces that for so many today portend

the inevitable dawn of a new, radically posthuman epoch.



Notes

Introduction

1. For an interesting discussion of this legacy, see David Simpson's critique of

Rorty's "conversational" style, in Simpson's The Academic Postmodern and the

Rule of Literature (1995), 41-52.

2. For a strong assertion of the necessity for a general "symmetry" of the

human and the natural worlds, see Latour 1993b; Haraway 1991b, 1992.

3. See the remarks on the "imperceptible" in Deleuze and Guattari 1987, and

see Massumi 1995.

4. By representationalist approach I mean any approach that legitimizes repre-

sentation as its frame of reference, whether for ends either affirmative or critical,

positivist or deconstructive.

5. I borrow the term posthermeneutical from David Wellbery, who uses it to

describe the project of Friedrich Kittler in his introduction to the English translation

of Kittler's Discourse Networks, 1800/1900 (1990). See Gumbrecht and Pfeiffer's

Materialities of Communication (1994) for a collection of essays exploring the pos-

thermeneutical in various of its concrete materializations.

6. In enumerating these four variants of technology's invocation by contempo-

rary cultural critics, I am not attempting to furnish an exhaustive account of con-

temporary cultural studies of science, nor am I discounting possible overlaps

between the approaches.

7. Cf., for example, Andrew Ross's account of his intentions in the introduction

to his Strange Weather: Culture, Science, and Technology in the Age of Limits

(1991): "... my chief interest lies in describing how various scientific cultures-sub-

legitimate, alternative, marginal, or oppositional-both embody and contest these

claims in their cultural activities and beliefs. Consequently, two related critiques

operate here. The first is addressed to the ways in which technocratic elites-intel-

lectual and political-have molded and regulated public opinion about the role of

science and technology in shaping our future. The second is addressed to the differ-

ent versions of and various challenges to these elite languages in popular and alter-

native cultures" (9). Judging from Ross's various foci in the chapters that follow-

New Age thought, computer hacking, cyberpunk, environmental decay, futurology,

global warming, and so forth-the second critique predominates.

8. See the various investigations in Penley and Ross 1991, especially Constance

266 * Notes to Pages 6-13

Penley's account of K/S (Kirk/Spock) "slash writing" as a technologically embedded

transformational practice whose aim is to "criticize the sexual status quo."

9. This approach is generally shared by the members of the Edinburgh school of

the history of science and also by related sociologists of science, such as Andrew

Pickering, Michel Callon, and, most importantly, Bruno Latour. My description

here is a paraphrase of Latour's argument in Science in Action (1987). Looked at in

a broad perspective, this approach would also include Donna Haraway.

10. The central text here is Virtual Realities and Their Discontents (Markley

1996), a collection of essays by N. Katherine Hayles, Richard Grusin, Robert

Markley, David Brande, David Porush, and Michelle Kendrick.

11. See Gumbrecht's synthetic conclusion "A Farewell to Interpretation" in

Gumbrecht and Pfeiffer 1994. See also Wellbery 1992.

12. The opening of theory to technology is, I submit, largely responsible for the

broadening of the cultural sphere to include "objects" and practices as diverse as

popular music, mail-order culture, national parks, the cyborg, everyday life, AIDS,

New Age holism, and so on.

13. I borrow the term relative exteriority from Derrida, who uses it to describe

the status of writing as the technical support for thought. In chap. 5, I criticize this

move and link it with contemporary cultural studies. I return to the subordination

of the technical to the social in chap. 8, where I criticize Deleuze and Guattari for

subordinating the technical machine to the social machine, or "machinic assem-

blage." Despite Deleuze and Guattari's conspicuous absence among the main

sources of contemporary cultural studies, their model of becoming, for its

strengths and weaknesses alike, could well comprise a paradigm for the turn to

cultural practices.

14. As it is invoked by certain cultural critics (especially Hayles, but also Har-

away), the posthuman designates not so much a transcendence of the human (as it

does for roboticists like Hans Moravec) but the possibility for forms of identity that

would depart in liberating ways from the classical liberal subject of traditional

humanism. In this sense, the posthuman designates a phase in the evolution of the

human and should be distinguished from, on the one hand, poststructuralist antihu-

manism (which is merely the inversion of the classical liberal subject) and, on the

other hand, contemporary forms of the inhuman (Lyotard) or radical posthumanism

(Moravec, Kroker, Virilio).

15. In this sense, they do not effectively move beyond Derrida's own effort to

"generalize" deconstruction, an effort I consider critically in chap. 5.

16. Derrida develops the term invagination in his commentaries on Blanchot.

See, for example, "Living On" in Deconstruction and Criticism (Derrida 1983); the

four Blanchot essays are collected in Derrida's Parages (1986).

17. A similar point is raised in reference to recent efforts to deploy deconstruc-

tion for the analysis of virtual-reality and electronic subjectivity. See Richard Grusin,

"What is an Electronic Author? Theory and the Technological Fallacy" (Markley

1996).

Notes to Pages 13-20 * 267

18. This distancing takes form either as a radical disjunction within phenomeno-

logical thought (de Man) or as its contaminating destabilization (especially Derrida,

but also Foucault and Lacan).

19. It should not be understood as a mere dialectical inversion of our contempo-

rary obsession with subjectivity and the literary as David Simpson alleges: "Cyborgs,

computers, virtual-reality machines, and rewritten DNA models all seem at least to

propose a technological postmodern that has on the surface little to do with the tra-

ditions of literary criticism. This 'hard' postmodern seems to offer a world free of

feeling, introspection, and bewildering hermeneutic speculations about subject-

object relations and responsibilities. And yet it might be suggested that the very

appeal of these models, models declaring or assuming the death of the subject, is that

they are dialectical formations, limit statements of the desire to be, finally and after

all the promises, free of subjectivity" (1995, 96-97). Simpson's suggestion here is

very close to Jameson's position on technology.

20. This displacement operated by Jameson's treatment of technology as a "rep-

resentational shorthand" for the postmodern system itself has the effect of replacing

a type of material force that is not entirely subject to human control (the develop-

ment of technology) with a type of material force that is, primarily, the result of

human activity (the social or cultural system of late capitalism). Here Jameson

betrays an affinity with Deleuze and Guattari: like them, he subordinates the techni-

cal to the social and thus domesticates the automatism of technology, its rhizomatic

proliferation outside of social networks. Consider, for example, Jameson's denunci-

ation of "mechanical causality" as licensing technological determinism in The Polit-

ical Unconscious (1981): "... . what is scandalous [in mechanistic effectivity] is not

this way of thinking about a given formal change, but rather the objective event

itself, the very nature of cultural change in a world in which separation of use value

from exchange value generates discontinuities of precisely this 'scandalous' and

extrinsic type, rifts and actions at a distance which cannot ultimately be grasped

'from the inside' or phenomenologically, but which must be reconstructed as symp-

toms whose cause is of another order of phenomenon from its effects. Mechanical

causality is thus less a concept which might be evaluated on its own terms, than one

of the various laws and subsystems of our peculiarly reified social and cultural life"

(25-26). Here, as in his 1991 essay, Jameson's aim is to reconcile mechanical or

extrinsic "causality" with representation, to show how it appears in the narrative of

our experience.

21. In this respect, my critique sheds light on Jameson's insightful but underde-

veloped analysis of the resilience of phenomenological modes of criticism. Noting

phenomenology's capacity for metamorphosis, Jameson sees the development of

technology as what finally signals phenomenology's death toll. In his discussion of

video, Jameson argues that it is only "the involvement of the machine [that] allows

us now perhaps to escape phenomenology and the rhetoric of consciousness and

experience, and to confront this seemingly subjective temporality in a new and mate-

rialist way" (1991, 75).

268 * Notes to Pages 26-40

Chapter 1

1. Surely the mere mention of the superconducting supercollider or the bubble

chamber-or even the pig's bladder, that seminal early-modern technical artifact

made famous by Leviathan and the Air Purnp-should be enough to establish the

deep-rootedness of technological development in scientific theorizing.

2. To illustrate the proliferation of quasi-objects, Latour mentions "frozen

embryos, expert systems, digital machines, sensor-equipped robots, hybrid corn,

data banks, psychotropic drugs, whales outfitted with radar sounding devices, gene

synthesizers, [and] audience analyzers" (1993b, 49-50). This dazzling proliferation

suggests a general convergence of cultural analysis with the study of quasi-objects

and allows us to broaden Latour's claims beyond the narrow domain of science

studies.

3. This is the case for the traditional philosopher of science (who seeks to falsify

theoretical constructions through empirical experimentation) as well as the post-

modern cultural critic of science (who insists on the necessary discursive and con-

ceptual mediation-the "theory-ladenness" in the terminology of the philosophy of

science-of all scientific theory).

4. This position is shared by several contemporary "schools" in the social stud-

ies of science, including the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK) and actor-net-

work theory. The former includes the Edinburgh and Bath schools. The Edinburgh

critics (including Barry Barnes, David Bloor, and Steven Shapin) have laid out the

macrosocial approach to SSK, while the Bath critics (notably Harry Collins) have

developed a microsocial approach. The most prominent proponents of the actor-net-

work theory are Latour and his colleague Michel Callon. See Pickering 1992 for a

useful introduction into the positions within and around SSK.

5. See chap. 2 for a detailed discussion of Lyotard's claim.

6. For a reading that eschews the epistemological bias so common to Kantian

criticism and to the legacy of Kant in twentieth-century social and cultural thought,

see Deleuze's (1984) account of the economy of the faculties in Kant.

7. Latour develops this model of inscription in his work (1988b and 1993a) on

Einstein and Pasteur; it underlies his constructivist assimilation of the transcendence

of Nature in We Have Never Been Modern (1993b).

8. Hayles's position here hearkens back to the central role played by

falsification in the philosophy of science. See Popper 1959 and Kuhn 1962.

9. Greimas develops his account of the semiotic square in "The Interaction of

Semiotic Constraints," in Greimas 1987. The semiotic square became popular

among cultural critics following Jameson's rehabilitation of it in The Political

Unconscious (1981). For a more sustained account of the value of the semiotic

square for science studies, see Schleifer, Davis, and Mergler 1992. For a critical

account, see Lenoir 1994.

10. For this purpose, Hayles's constrained constructivism again possesses a dis-

tinct advantage over Latour. Not only does her model preserve the dualism neces-

sary to retain the autonomy of the material flux, but it does so in a way that avoids

Notes to Pages 46-50 * 269

the Kantian impasse of rendering it transcendent and otherworldly, or in Latour's

terminology, of treating it as a pure form (the thing-in-itself). By embedding repre-

sentation within the larger frame of the unmediated flux, Hayles situates material

exteriority squarely in the empirical domain. In this way, she makes it potentially

available for-or more exactly, part of-experience (and of "experience" in a sense

far broader than the cognitively guided objective experience conditioned by the

Kantian transcendental analytic).

11. In literary studies, shifting-out designates the displacement of a character to

another space, time, or character. It allows "the reader of the story to be at the same

time away (in the story's frame of reference) and here (in an armchair)" (Latour

1992, 249). Applied to technology, the process of shifting-out involves a change of

medium-a shifting out from words to a matter other than language. Latour sug-

gests that by forcing the reader to "choose between frames of reference" (249), tech-

nical shifting-out obscures the interrelatedness of technology with society and dis-

course. We are thus compelled to focus on the technical artifact and to ignore the

process of delegation by which it has been constructed.

12. Precisely such a narrow focalization underlies Latour's striking description,

in We Have Never Been Modern, of the purpose of technology: "... . technologies are

remarkable not because they are. . . efficient. . . but because they multiply the non-

humans enrolled in the manufacturing of collectives and because they make the com-

munity that we form with these beings a more intimate one" (1993b, 108). In his

effort to stress the role technologies play as functional subordinates to quasi-objects,

Latour simply overlooks the marked impact that technologies have had (and con-

tinue to have) as the material determinants of the increased efficiency largely respon-

sible for the postmodern condition (see Lyotard 1979).

13. It also leaves her model open to the objection philosopher Wilfred Sellars

raises against the "myth of the given," that is, against the appeal to the ineffable, or

the space of causes, as the foundation for claims within the space of reasons; see Sel-

lars 1997. For discussion and extension of Sellars's critique, see Rorty 1979,

182-92; Shusterman 1992, 286n; and Rorty's introduction and Robert Brandom's

study guide in Sellars 1997.

14. In seeking to develop such a causal link between technological change and

discursive systems, Hayles follows the lead of philosophers and cognitive linguists

like Mark Johnson and George Lakoff who focalize the analysis of embodiment (and

hence of technology) through discourse (see Johnson 1989; Lakoff 1983).

15. Specifically, she reproduces the structure of Foucault's The Archeology of

Knowledge, where a discursive system or regime underlies knowledge claims in a

quasi-transcendental fashion.

16. On this point, see Richard Shusterman's thumbnail "genealogy" (1997b) of

(the repression of) embodiment in Western philosophy from Plato to Nietzsche.

Shusterman stresses the poverty of the Western tradition's philosophical and termi-

nological resources for addressing the nondiscursive domain of embodiment.

17. While Bourdieu's argument specifically addresses societies and "totalitarian

institutions" that seek to produce new citizens through the inculcation of specific

270 * Notes to Pages 51-58

cultural goals, its logic would apply even more forcefully in cases without explicit

and prestructured cultural content, cases involving unsolicited bodily responses of

the sort that accompany fundamental shifts in the technological infrastructure of the

lifeworld.

18. Some critics have taken him to be advancing just such a commitment. See, for

example, Butler 1997, chap. 4.

19. I borrow the term mimetic faculty from Walter Benjamin. In chap. 9, I seek

to update Benjamin's underappreciated yet highly promising notion for the analysis

of contemporary technoculture.

Chapter 2

1. In this alignment, we see a version of a motif that I shall go on to develop at

great length in my discussion of Derrida in chap. 5: the reduction of radical material

exteriority to a relative exteriority within thought or, in this case, culture.

2. These inequalities include, for example, the fact that computers are (still)

tools of the privileged and that programming languages have been largely shaped by

young white males.

3. Here I use the term agent cautiously, for, as I suggested earlier, I do not view

technology as simply and straightforwardly noncultural; rather, I seek to preserve

some sense of technology's autonomy in the face of the explicit claims of contempo-

rary cultural-constructivist approaches. My position is that technologies can impact

us in ways that are not readily assimilable or understandable in terms of our cultural

codes and that, even following adjustment, remain unrepresentable and unthematiz-

able and thus, in a certain sense, outside of the content of explicitly known or expe-

rienced culture.

4. Here we see a version of another motif that I shall develop later-namely, the

central role of metalepsis in the strategy of technesis. In my argument, metalepsis, a

rhetorical figure involving the substitution of effect for cause, functions as a textual

marker of the reduction that ensues when the radical material exteriority of technol-

ogy is covered over by a relative exteriority internal to the textualized system of

thought at issue. See chap. 3.

5. Again, I am not suggesting that this experience is in any way noncultural.

Embodiment involves cultural coding, both in the positivist and in the deep sense,

since it is a species- and culture-specific experience. Embodiment is cultural, how-

ever, in a far different sense from what is meant by cultural constructivism, since it

remains forever opaque to the representational consciousness of the experiencer and

thus cannot be invoked as cultural content for the purposes of explanation.

6. In a later chapter, Hayles expands this argument by suturing Kelvin's notion

of thermodynamic dissipation to the demands of the Victorian moral and social uni-

verse: "Implicit in Kelvin's rhetoric are connotations that link these scientific predic-

tions with the complex connections among repressive morality, capital formation,

and industrialization in Victorian society . . . The 'universal tendency toward dissi-

Notes to Pages 66-73 * 271

pation' places entropic heat loss in the same semantic category as deplorable per-

sonal habits. The reversal of this tendency requires a 'restoration'" (1990, 39).

7. Lyotard's position here makes common cause with that of Donna Haraway

in the "Cyborg Manifesto" and elsewhere. For Haraway, the new "informatics of

domination" enacts a certain suspension of human-imposed forms of domination

precisely because of its "inhumanity," its autonomy from and indifference to human

concerns. By throwing the vast majority of humankind into the same pool (that of

feminized, unskilled laborers), the informatics of domination facilitates a solidarity

that transcends class, race, and gender distinctions.

8. On this point, one could usefully juxtapose to Lyotard the work of recent

anthropologists who furnish a richer and far more nuanced account of technological

autonomy. From the anthropological perspective, technology designates the creation

of artifacts and depends, in every concrete case, on a whole articulated system of

production. Accordingly, technology does not emerge as the mere materialization of

thought, even when the latter is projected onto the cosmos itself; it results, rather,

from the activity of situated people trying to solve local problems. Since there is no

overarching technological imperative that links together the various technological

productions of a given system (as both Lyotard and Heidegger allege), there will

always be unintended, emergent consequences that testify to a qualified autonomy of

technology from specific human intention. The anthropological model, in short, can

recognize technology's autonomy without evoking the kinds of metaphysical

abstraction that mar philosophical forms of questioning about technology. See, for

example, Harris 1979, 1983; Lemonier 1992.

9. In her recent book How We Became Posthuman (1999), Hayles traces the

emergence of the "posthuman" from the postwar development of cybernetics; by

contesting the hegemonic-and deeply reductive-equation of information with dis-

embodiment, Hayles seeks to open the posthuman to debate and, in particular, to

employ it as an opportunity to renegotiate subjectivity on grounds more equitable

and democratic than those underlying the liberal humanist subject.

10. Odd as its sounds, Lyotard makes just this argument in The Inhuman

(1991). He argues that, faced with the prospect of solar death, humankind has two

possibilities: either we can ignore it and simply remain in the life of mind that is, cur-

rently, ours, or we can "try to anticipate the disaster and fend it off with means

belonging to that category [of matter]-means that are those of the laws of the trans-

formation of energy." Lyotard continues: "You decide to accept the challenge of the

extremely likely annihilation of a solar order and an order of your own thought.

And then the only job left you is quite clear-it's been underway for some time-the

job of simulating conditions of life and thought to make thinking remain materially

possible after the change in the condition of matter that's the disaster. This and this

alone is what's at stake today in technical and scientific research in every field"

(11-12).

11. The emerging field of evolutionary psychology has begun the task of insert-

ing our mental development into the evolutionary perspective. By introducing a

deeper notion of cultural conditioning than that commonly articulated by cultural

272 * Notes to Pages 73-80

constructivists, such research furnishes a viable framework for introducing the pos-

sibility of a human adaptational response to large-scale technological changes. See

Cosmides and Tooby 1992.

12. In a recent discussion of the relevance of AL research to human evolution,

Hayles stresses, in a manner that speaks directly to our task, the evolutionary prior-

ity of a distributed interface over consciousness: "How did humans evolve? In

[roboticist Rodney Brooks's] view, through the same kind of mechanisms that he

uses in his robots, namely distributed systems that interact robustly with the envi-

ronment and that consequently 'see' the world in very different ways. Consciousness

is a relatively late development, analogous to the control system that kicks in to

adjudicate conflicts between the different distributed systems. It is, as Brooks likes to

say, a 'cheap trick,' that is, an emergent property that increases the functionality of

the system but that is not part of the system's essential architecture. Consciousness

does not need to be, and in fact is not, representational. Like the robot's control sys-

tem, consciousness does not need an accurate picture of the world; it only needs a

reliable interface" (1996b, 161). This picture of the nervous system as a distributed

system of interfaces helps us to envision its capacity to adapt to profound changes in

the environment.

Chapter 3

1. For the paradigm discussion of the problematic of self-representation, see

Kant's discussion of the "paradox of inner sense" in The Critique of Pure Reason

(1965, 74-91). Briefly stated, the paradox results from inner sense's (i.e., self-repre-

sentation's) necessary reliance on outer sense (or external representation) for the

"manifold" (or content) of its representations.

2. For examples, see the essays collected in Chaos and Order: Complex Dynam-

ics in Literature and Science (Hayles 1991a). For an explanation of the difference

between nonlinear dynamics and chaos and also for further examples, see Hayles

1990 and Porush 1993.

3. See my discussion in chap. 5 of Derrida's reading of de Man on memory.

4. See Hayles 1990, chap. 2, for a discussion of the information-noise economy

in the context of entropy's generalization into a theory of communication.

5. Paulson acknowledges Jameson's The Political Unconscious as the source of

this approach to the mediation of text and context in terms of the problem of inter-

disciplinarity. See Paulson 1991, 50; Jameson 1981, 35-40.

6. Niklas Luhmann's major work, Social Systems, has recently appeared in Eng-

lish (1995). See also Luhmann 1992 and 1994, as well as the special double edition

of Cultural Critique (1995) devoted to systems theory.

7. Gumbrecht (1996) develops a critique of systems theory along these lines. I

return to this issue in interlude 2.

8. This becomes somewhat more complicated in the case of those theorists who

adopt Luhmann's concept of observational perspective in order to describe or "the-

Notes to Pages 81-84 * 273

matiz[e] ... hitherto nonthematized phenomena," or more exactly, the materiality

of communication (by which is meant the material support, sound, rhythm, meter,

etc., underlying communicative acts). See Gumbrecht and Pfeiffer 1994 and my brief

discussion in interlude 2, below.

9. Across it various definitions, the word machine connotes both systematicity

and determinism; traditionally opposed to the organic, it designates processes or

structures that are limited to carrying out, with more or less flexibility, a preset pro-

gram. This limitation is reflected by dictionary definitions like the following from the

American Heritage Dictionary (which, on account of its conciseness, serves my pur-

poses better than the definition from the Oxford English Dictionary): "machine 1. a.

A device consisting of fixed and moving parts that modifies mechanical energy and

transmits it in a more useful form. b. A simple device, such as a lever, a pulley, or an

inclined plane, that alters the magnitude or direction, or both, of an applied force; a

simple machine; 2. A system or device for doing work, as an automobile or a jack-

hammer, together with its power source and auxiliary equipment; 3. A system or

device, such as a computer, that performs or assists in the performance of a human

task; 4. An intricate natural system or organism, such as the human body; 5. A per-

son who acts in a rigid, mechanical, or unconscious manner. 6. An organized group

of people whose members are or appear to be under the control of one or more lead-

ers; 7. a. A device used to produce a stage effect, especially a mechanical means of

lowering an actor onto the stage. b. A literary device used to produce an effect, espe-

cially the introduction of a supernatural being to resolve a plot."

10. For a provocative critique of structuralism and poststructuralism for their

fatal appropriation of a faulty linguistic model (Saussurian linguistics), see Pavel

1989.

11. See Otto Mayr's (1986) study of automatic machinery and political systems

in early modern Europe for an interesting cultural contextualization of the machine

metaphor. In the process of exploring the various functions assumed by the clock

metaphor during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Mayr sharply distin-

guishes between the functions of the clock on the Continent and in Great Britain,

noting that it tended to be used as a metaphor for determinism in France and Ger-

many and, by contrast, as a metaphor (embodied in feedback mechanisms) for

humanity's free, though interdependent, relationship with the material world in

Great Britain. On the basis of such a comparison and the wealth of empirical evi-

dence marshaled to support it, Mayr convincingly establishes that cultural influence

is a key to the evolution of technology, that "technology is a cause as well as a con-

sequence of the values and norms of the society in which it flourishes-technology is

both a social force and a social product" (xviii).

12. For Canguilhem, the classical machine metaphor involves more than simply

a theoretical reduction of organism to the principles of mechanics; it has as its pre-

condition the possibility of constructing an automaton, a "totally self-sufficient"

machine: "Why was it necessary to turn to the theory of mechanism. . . in order to

explain the living organism? The answer can be found . . . in the fact that this

mechanical model of living organisms does not rely on kinematics alone. A machine,

274 * Notes to Pages 84-91

as defined [by kinematics], is not totally self-sufficient: it must receive and then trans-

form energy imparted to it from an outside source.... [As long as] kinematic mech-

anisms were powered by humans or animals.., it was an obvious tautology to com-

pare the movement of bodies to the movement of a machine, when the machine itself

depended on humans or animals to run it. Consequently, . . . the mechanistic theory

has depended, historically, on the assumption that it is possible to construct an

automaton, meaning a mechanism that is miraculous in and of itself and does not

rely on human or animal muscle power" (Canguilhem 1992, 47).

13. In citing the early modern history of the Continental clock metaphor, I am

attempting not to furnish a comprehensive material-cultural analysis but simply to

illustrate by example the basic humanist coding of the machine shared across its

variant cultural forms. The humanist coding of the machine is a staple of pre-twen-

tieth-century literature, from Swift's Lagadan machine to Samuel Butler's meditation

on the human use of machines in Erewhon. See Porush 1985 for a brief history of

this coding.

14. This is clear more in the case of the male poststructuralist use of gynesis

traced by Jardine than in the case of the French feminists of the 1970s (namely, Iri-

garay, Cixous, and Kristeva).

15. The significant exception here is of course Merleau-Ponty, whose work on

bodily intentionality moves away from representationalism in ways that anticipate

my notion of corporeal mimeticism.

16. For examples involving information science, see Paulson 1988 and 1991,

and Serres 1982a; for chaos theory, Porush 1993 and Clarke 1991. For a collection

of essays addressing this issue, see Hayles 1991a.

17. Perhaps even more basically, one would have to explore the relationship

between these scientific descriptive models and technology. What role does technol-

ogy play in the descriptive models of communications theory or nonlinear dynamics?

And does it serve in the generation of nondeterministic structures in such a way that

it could be described adequately within the terms of such structures? Because the

field of science studies tends to eschew the investigation of technology as a task sep-

arate from the investigation of systematicity, it seems to recur to the troublesome

conflation of technology with science discussed earlier. Before it can serve as a model

for (re)thinking technology, the isomorphism central to science studies must itself be

explained and made relevant to technology. How, for example, can the systemic

description of the literary text permit a nonreductive capture or inscription of tech-

nology?

18. For a more detailed account of this fatal legacy, see Pavel 1989.

19. In A Handbook to Literature (1996), Harmon and Holman define metalep-

sis as "a complex figure, also called TRANSUMPTION, dismissed by classical and

Renaissance critics (Quintilian, Puttenham) as affected and farfetched but during the

1970s and 1980s given newly sympathetic attention by some sensitive critics (Angus

Fletcher, Harold Bloom, John Hollander)." They add: "Definitions vary and even

diverge, but the point of metalepsis seems to be the adding of one trope or figure to

another, along with such extreme compression that the literal sense of the statement

Notes to Page 92 * 275

is eclipsed or reduced to anomaly or nonsense" (314). Here is the full text of the

definition in the Oxford English Dictionary (1989), from which I draw: "a rhetori-

cal figure mentioned by Quintilian, consisting in the metonymical substitution of one

word for another which is itself figurative. (In many English examples the use

appears to be vague or incorrect.)"

20. Harmon and Holman furnish two examples of metalepsis in this sense, both

centering on the contribution of Helen and Clytemnestra to the causes of the Trojan

War. Citing the "very powerful metaleptic figure in Marlowe's Doctor Faustus,

'Was this the face that launched a thousand ships / And burnt the topless towers of

Illium?,'" the authors note the compounding of "a dozen figures, including question,

metonymy, metaphor, hyperbole, and paradox (fortified by an elementary reference

to water and fire, a deletion of all fully human elements, and emphatic alliteration

and megaphonic IAMBS with very short short syllables and very long long ones)"

(1996, 314). They write that in Yeats's "Leda and the Swan," the same topic is

"enlarged to embrace the event that led up to the birth of Helen and Clytemnestra"

(315). Yeats's metalepsis thus "transmutes" even more than Marlowe's: "A shudder

in the loins engenders there / The broken wall, the burning roof and tower / And

Agamemnon dead" (315). Here the entire causal and chronological process of

"orgasm, conception, gestation, and birth" leading ultimately to Agamemnon's

murder forty years later is compressed into the posited identification of Agamem-

non's death with this originating procreative act (315).

21. This distinction reflects the shift in the semantics of technology and the

machine following the industrial revolution. The word technology comes from the

Greek technologia, meaning the "systematic treatment" (logos) of an art or craft

(techne). This Greek etymology stands most directly behind the modern meaning of

technology as a type of discourse (Oxford English Dictionary [1989]: "A discourse

or treatise on an art or arts"). In addition to this discursive meaning, technology has

acquired another meaning linked to the development of industry. Thus, in its mod-

ern usage, technology has two distinct meanings: one pertaining exclusively to dis-

course (or theory) and another to practical, material, and specifically industrial

modes of production. The post-Greek semantic splitting reflects the real evolution,

from craft or handwork to machine production, of what used to be accurately des-

ignated by techne. Nonetheless, the Greek meaning of techne seems to encompass its

modern usage up until the industrial revolution. This is even more evident in the case

of the term machine. Like the term technology, it seems to have been restricted to

discursive phenomena, without reduction, until a relatively late phase. For example,

alongside its general meaning as a "structure of any kind," machine has a theatrical

meaning of "a contrivance for the production of stage-effects" and a more general

literary meaning as "a contrivance for the sake of effect; a supernatural agency or

personage introduced into a poem" (Oxford English Dictionary). The possibility of

sublimating technology is, I suggest, rooted in an understanding of it, and of the

machine, as rhetorically based in the sense of these definitions. Once we introduce

the modern senses of the machine and technology, we must take stock of the limita-

tions placed on the Longinian rhetorical sublime-a version of the sublime that

276 * Notes to Pages 93-102

remains the source not only of the Romantic sublime proper but of Bloom's influen-

tial theory of poetic influence.

22. Not surprisingly, this distinction coincides with the differentiation of tech-

nology from science that I promoted in chap. 2.

23. This same resistance of technology to rhetorical revision renders it impervi-

ous to the psychological logic of the sublime that Bloom employs to describe the

metaleptic process of poetic Bildung. Parting company with those contemporary the-

orists who appropriate the rhetoric of the sublime to describe our relationship with

technology, we must respect technology's recalcitrance as a material element inelim-

inable through the cognitive or psychological reversal constitutive of the sublime.

Such a strategy finds its strongest proponent in Frederic Jameson, who, adapting Leo

Marx's term, dubs the temporary cognitive impasse occasioned by postmodern

hyperspace and global simultaneity the moment of the "technological sublime"

(Jameson 1991). See also Lyotard's "The Sublime and the Avant-Garde," in Lyotard

1991, and Zizek 1989. For a recent study devoted to the role of the technological

sublime in contemporary fiction, see Tabbi 1995. See Weiskel 1977 for a discussion

of the tripartite logic of the sublime and a comparison of the Wordsworthian, Kant-

ian, and Freudian forms of the sublime. For a critique of the Romantic ideology of

the sublime in relation to the industrial revolution, see Hansen 1997.

24. The locus classicus for the poststructuralist handling of the figure of cat-

achresis is, of course, Derrida's "White Mythology," in Derrida 1982. See also

Warminski 1987, liv-lxi.

25. This translation follows Heidegger's gloss in "The Question Concerning

Technology" (Heidegger 1977b, 10).

26. Aristotle Physics II, vi, 197b. I quote the 1929 translation of Wikesteed and

Cornford (161). Charlton's 1987 translation is less clear, though more precise (since

it translates tou automatou correctly): "The stone did not fall for the purpose of hit-

ting someone; it fell, then, as an automatic outcome, in that it might have fallen

through someone's agency and for hitting" (105).

27. Since concurrence is always relative to an agent, it is already under the sway

of a dogmatic reduction-of the real to the mental. Aristotle's example of concur-

rence illustrates as much: (197a; Aristotle 1987, 103) ". . . in the case of a house the

cause is a builder, but by virtue of concurrence a fluteplayer." The concurrent cause

(in this case) of the house is a fluteplayer, which on account of its numerical or sub-

stantial identity with the builder, is part of the efficient cause; the latter however, is

in a more fundamental sense, the builder qua builder.

Chapter 4

1. The striking exception here is Avital Ronell. In The Telephone Book: Tech-

nology-Schizophrenia-Electric Speech (1989), Ronell mobilizes the figure of the

switchboard operator to recast Derrida's critique of phonocentrism in explicitly

techno-psychoanalytic terms. Extending Derrida's analysis of the "gift of being" (the

Notes to Pages 104-7 * 277

gift of our fall into being-there, Dasein) as well as Jean-Luc Nancy's efforts to recu-

perate the Heideggerian motif of finitude (Dewida 1995; Nancy 1988), Ronell

qualifies the promise of Heidegger by confronting it with Freud, Lacan, and (in a

more ambivalent way) Marshall McLuhan. Such a confrontation allows Ronell to

expose the costs of Heidegger's politics of Being and of the general prosthetic culture

that it exemplifies: where Heidegger's ontological commitments hold the (abstract

and by all accounts magnanimous) promise for an unprecedented freedom on the

other side of nihilism-freedom from nothing less than the metaphysical tradition

and the category of substance-Ronell attends to the repression of the mother that,

on her account, forms the enabling condition of Heidegger's ontological difference

and comes to define the danger and indeed the very telos of modern technology. (See

Ronell 1989 and 1994, 219-54.) She is thereby able to furnish a sophisticated

answer to the unsettling question, Why did Heidegger answer the Nazi call? But she

is not able to do so without a significant cost. In taking the telephone as "a syneche-

doche for technology" and in identifying technology with the mourning of the lost

mother (an argument brilliantly nuanced through a recuperative reading of Alexan-

der Graham Bell), Ronell (1989) perpetuates the logic of the tradition she critiques:

in the very process of convincingly mobilizing technology as a support for the "inva-

sion" of the (m)other, she cannot but rely on a determination of technology as an

instrument in the service of an ontogenetic process of subject formation, rather than

a vehicle of cosmological complexification, the effects of which are in no way as cen-

tered on the human and on the political as she suggests. This difference aside, I must

credit Ronell for helping me find my way through Heidegger.

2. In The Barometer of Modern Reason (1993), Vincent Descombes denounces

this error as what he calls "philosophism," the belief that metaphysical claims can

have a direct impact on empirical reality (8). My suggestion here accords with argu-

ments made by many commentators on the so-called Heidegger affair. See especially

the extended discussion of Heidegger's "blindness" to the fallen temptation of the

telephonic in Ronell 1989; see also Lacoue-Labarthe 1990.

3. Philosopher of technology Albert Borgman has analyzed this division

between modern and postmodern technology in relation to Heidegger's writings on

technology (see Borgman 1992). For a useful discussion of Borgman's reading of

Heidegger, see Dreyfus and Spinoza 1997.

4. See Ronell 1992 for a related discussion of addiction as a gloss on Dasein's

average everydayness.

5. Heidegger 1962. The page numbers of the English translation are followed

by a slash and the date and page numbers of the German text.

6. "But if Heidegger can embark upon the adventure of national socialism in

the first place, it is only to the extent that there is something which he resists in tech-

nology, hoping it can be surmounted like the grief or pain one feels in the human

realm over a loss . . . Heidegger wants to mourn technology, but it proves to be

unmournable as yet, that is, undead . . . [W]hen Heidegger fails to consider that

technology cannot be surmounted, surpassed, or even perhaps sublated, he walks

into a trap" (Ronell 1994, 228).

278 * Notes to Pages 108-19

7. "The Question concerning Technology," in Heidegger 1977b, 33 (German

text in Heidegger 1954, 37). In subsequent citations, I provide page numbers of Hei-

degger's English translation followed by a slash and page numbers of the German

text.

8. As Ronell points out, this dialogue situation is itself already overdetermined

by technological conditioning in ways that merit thought. See Ronell 1989; see also

Dienst 1994, chap. 6.

9. Heidegger 1966, 212; my translation. An English translation of this inter-

view has been published (Heidegger 1976).

10. For an affirmative redeployment of Heidegger's understanding of the type-

writer, see Kittler 1986, 290-334; Bolz 1990, 106-7. In his commentary on Heideg-

ger's view of the typewriter, Derrida (1987a) counters this deployment by assimilat-

ing the typewriter to language.

11. This path, of course, is the one taken by Maurice Merleau-Ponty with his

move to introduce the role of the body in perception and to counter the representa-

tionalist model of thought with a bodily one.

12. Derrida is thus right, in a sense, to see the ontological difference as deriva-

tive. Nonetheless, by introducing differance as what is "older" than the ontological

difference, he retains the priority of ontology. See Derrida's "Differance," in Derrida

1982. My argument, by contrast, emphasizes the dependence of all ontologies on

certain constitutive ontic reductions.

13. The reason for this obscurity would appear to be quite straightforward: Hei-

degger's lecture courses, including the one I shall discuss, have only recently been

published.

14. Here we are presented with an instance of the conflation of aesthetics with

truth that is the legacy of Romanticism. For a critical assessment of this legacy, see

Schaeffer 1992.

15. Following the homology I am proposing, Auslegung furnishes the model for

Hervorbringen, in the sense that both denote a movement by which the world of

objects (including technologies) becomes an organized totality-what Heidegger, in

Being and Time, calls a totality-of-involvements (Bedeutungsganzheit). As a

modification of Dasein's initial practical involvement with the Zubandene (ready-to-

hand), Auslegung comprises a first, primordial articulation of Dasein's Being-in-the-

world: "in interpretation [Auslegung], [t]he ready-to-hand [Das Zubandene] comes

explicitly [ausdriicklich] into the sight that understands [verstehende Sicht]...

[T]hat which is circumspectively ready-to-hand is taken apart [auseinandergelegt] in

its 'in-order-to' [Um-zu] and is attended to [besorgt] in accordance with what

becomes visible [sichtig] following this disassembly. That which has been circum-

spectively taken apart as such with regard to its 'in-order-to'-that which is explic-

itly understood-has the structure of something as something [etwas als etwas]"

(Heidegger 1977b, 189/148-49; translation modified). Insofar as it discloses nature

in a manner that allows human beings to dwell in it, Hervorbringen functions alto-

gether similarly. Aussage, by contrast, parallels Herausfordern, in the sense that

both comprise derivative, fallen modes of disclosure that cover over the very onto-

Notes to Pages 121-31 * 279

logical ground to which they owe their possibility. In assertion, something that was

proximally ready-to-hand as equipment in interpretative understanding is trans-

formed into something that is merely vorhandene: "If [an] entity becomes the

'object' of an assertion, then as soon as we begin this assertion, there is already a

change-over in the fore-having. Something ready-to-hand with which we have to do

or perform something, turns into something 'about which' the assertion that points

it out is made.... The as-structure of interpretation has undergone a modification.

In its function of appropriating what is understood, the 'as' no longer reaches out

into a totality of involvements.... The 'as' gets pushed back into the uniform plane

of that which is merely present-at-hand. It dwindles to the structure of just letting

one see what is present-at-hand, and letting one see it in a definite way"

(200-201/158). Likewise, Herausfordern orders the orderable, not in order to place

it in a world of human concern, but to isolate it as the standing-reserve.

16. For the as-structure of interpretation, see Being and Time, paragraphs

32-36.

Chapter 5

1. This holds as much for negative approaches to representation that seek to sit-

uate materiality in textual or representational gaps (e.g., English cultural material-

ism or Althusserian/Machereyian Marxism) as it does for positivist approaches that

view texts as cultural documents or archives (e.g., new historicism in its canonical

forms or the early Foucault).

2. Heidegger has been a persistent focus for Derrida from Of Grammatology

and such early essays as "The Ends of Man," "Ousia and Gramme," and "Dif-

ference" (all in Derrida 1982) to more recent work, including Of Spirit (1990),

Given Time (1992), The Gift of Death (1995), and the Geschlecht essays (1987a).

3. In "Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanual Lev-

ina" (in Derrida 1978, 79-153), Derrida discusses and criticizes Levinas's reading of

Heidegger.

4. This emerges most clearly in the section on Husserl from the excursus to Of

Grammatology (1974). There Derrida consolidates his earlier reading of Husserl in

Speech and Phenomenon (1972).

5. This restriction is perpetuated in Derrida's 1994 study of Marx, where mat-

ter continues to be determined as a concept liberated within the deconstructed-

deconstructing text-or more precisely, as the "spectre" of Marx itself.

6. Here is the quoted passage in full: "The concept of matter must be marked

twice (the others too): in the deconstructed field-this is the phase of overturning-

and in the deconstructing text, outside the oppositions in which it has been caught

(matter/spirit, matter/ideality, matter/form, etc.). By means of the play of this inter-

val between the two marks, one can operate both an overturning deconstruction and

a positively displacing, transgressive, deconstruction" (Derrida 1981, 65-66).

7. With the introduction of such a historical factor, we broach a topic whose

280 * Notes to Pages 134-53

full treatment is beyond my scope here: the disparity between Derridian and de Man-

ian notions of textuality. Suffice it to say that my argument confirms the distinction

suggested by Irene Harvey (1991): de Man's reading practice remains solidly

anchored to the text in its traditional form, while Derrida's derives from a looser

conception of the textual structures of understanding. The terms of Harvey's dis-

tinction, moreover, affirm my view that Derrida's notion of textuality derives

directly from his early reading of Husserl; textuality expresses nothing less than the

differential structure of phenomenological understanding, the structural gap sepa-

rating the moment of presence from its "processing" in thought. On account of this

phenomenological commitment, Derrida need not restrict the text to explicitly lin-

guistic artifacts (as de Man must); texts can function more generally to characterize

any perceptual act at all.

8. See for example, de Man's interview with Stephano Rosso (de Man 1986,

115-21).

Interlude 1

1. In Derrida's analysis of E-mail in Archive Fever (1996), this determination of

technology as archivation not only remains in force but becomes more forceful.

2. Here again we find evidence of Derrida's deep fidelity to Heidegger. Despite

the irreducible reference to ontic technology entailed in his proposed generalization,

Derrida's reading of Freud owes an extensive debt to Heidegger. The notion of

resemblance, constrained within the confines of a textual ontology or onto-textual-

ity, realizes the metaphysical closure of the modern era-what Heidegger designates

as "the Enframing" (das Gestell)-to a far greater extent than does Heidegger's own

concept of representational thinking. Ironically, in the very act of turning Heideg-

ger's purity on its head, Derrida actually strengthens the privilege of ontology. He

opens thought to worldly technology but does so solely to furnish an ontic basis or

anchoring for thought's (still) essentially ontological function. Consequently, the

historical specificity of the mind's machinic embodiment becomes superfluous, since

theory can only look for one thing in technology: ever new dwelling spaces for mem-

ory. Once again, we find that the disciple paradoxically outdoes the master, that

Derrida's analysis is, in a sense, more Heideggerian than Heidegger's own.

Chapter 6

1. By, respectively, Lacan (1991) and Laplanche (1976, especially chap. 4).

2. It resembles two aspects in particular: (1) Freud's privileging of internal stim-

uli and (2) Freud's assimilation of external stimuli (at least of the kind that could

occasion trauma) to a function identical to that of internal stimuli. Since the organ-

ism can successfully close itself off to external stimuli but has no protection whatso-

ever against excitations from within, Freud contends that internal stimuli "have a

Notes to Pages 155-57 * 281

preponderance in economic importance and often occasion economic disturbances

comparable with traumatic neuroses" (1961, 28). Moreover, unlike "normal" exter-

nal stimuli that apparently can easily be warded off by the organism, the external

stimuli leading to trauma function essentially as if they were endogenous.

3. Consider the following passage from the end of "Note on the 'Mystic Writ-

ing-Pad"'" (1963): "On the Mystic Pad the writing vanishes every time the close

contact is broken between the paper which receives the stimulus and the wax slab

which preserves the impression. This agrees with a notion which I have long had

about the method in which the perceptual apparatus of our mind functions, but

which I have hitherto kept to myself. My theory was that cathectic innervations are

sent out and withdrawn in rapid periodic impulses from within into the completely

pervious system Pcpt.-Cs. So long as that system is cathected in this manner, it

receives perceptions (which are accompanied by consciousness) and passes the exci-

tation on to the unconscious mnemic systems; but as soon as the cathexis is with-

drawn, consciousness is extinguished and the functioning of the system comes to a

standstill" (212). This line of argument is fortified by Derrida's reading, as I have

argued in interlude 1.

4. Of course, the wholly unprecedented experience of mechanical force by sol-

diers in World War I precipitated Freud's clinical discovery of traumatic neuroses. In

his footnotes, Freud refers his readers to his introduction to the collective volume

Psycho-Analysis and the War Neuroses (1921) and to his 1905 discussion of "the

effect of swinging and railway-travel" in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality

(1949). On this point, see also Ronell 1989, 84ff.

5. Here the Freudian approach makes common cause with the contemporary

analysis of technology through the sublime. In both cases, the internal, psychic

impact of technology is substituted for its external impact. The feeling accompany-

ing imaginative failure stands in for the actual positive experience of technology. See

chap. 3, n. 23.

6. Such a molar reduction stems from the fact that subrepresentational forces at

the molecular level only become experientiable as such (as represented) when they

are given form: ". . . when forces appear as forces of the earth or of chaos, they are

not grasped directly as forces but as reflected in relations between matter and form.

Thus it is more a question of thresholds of perception, or thresholds of discernibility

belonging to certain assemblages . . . [A]ll history is really the history of perception,

and what we make history with is the matter of a becoming" (Deleuze and Guattari

1987, 346-47). This becoming is itself imperceptible, that is, "below and above the

threshold of perception" (ibid., 281).

7. In the Critique of Pure Reason (1965), Kant distinguishes a level of pure sen-

sation prior to its perceptual presentation (Vorstellung). Likewise, in his early, more

Kantian work, Husserl distinguishes a level of pure sensation, hyle, which cannot be

contained in the noetic-noematic correlation. See Logical Investigations VI (Husserl

1970).

8. For Deleuze and Guattari, this moment of reversal marks the point at which

the death drive is transformed into a molar figure: "There occurs a detachment and

282 * Notes to Pages 157-68

elevation of the death instinct, which ceases to be coded in the interplay of savage

actions and reactions where fatalism was still something en-acted, in order to

become the somber agent of overcoding, the detached object that hovers over each

subject, as though the social machine had come unstuck from its desiring-machines"

(1983, 213).

9. In opposition to Freud's bivalent theory of energetics, Deleuze and Guattari

situate the death drive at the level of the molecular, as one possible path for desiring-

production to take. From their perspective, Freud's theory mistakes a functional dis-

tinction at the level of the real for a categorical one at the level of the psychic assem-

blage: ". . . it is absurd to speak of a death desire that would presumably be in

qualitative opposition to the life desires. Death is not desired, there is only death that

desires, by virtue of the body without organs or the immobile motor, and there is

also life that desires, by virtue of the working organs. There we do not have two

desires but two parts, two kinds of desiring-machine parts, in the dispersion of the

machine itself" (1983, 329).

10. The necessity for the introduction of the system co stems not from the limita-

tions of a theoretical field but from the demands reality makes on theory. In this

sense, it follows a trajectory that undoes or lays bare the metaleptic reduction.

Deleuze and Guattari give an account of this distinction in terms of the molar-mole-

cular divide: ". . . it is this synthesis of [molecular] desire [the synthesis of use, func-

tioning, production, and formation] that, under certain determinate conditions,

explains the molar aggregates (les ensembles molaires) with their specific use in the

biological, social, or linguistic field. This is because the large molar machines pre-

suppose pre-established connections that are not explained by their function, since

the latter results from them. Only desiring-machines produce connections according

to which they function, and function by improvising and forming the connections"

(1983, 181).

11. For a useful discussion of the tripartite distinction between cognition, con-

sciousness, and representation, see Varela et al. 1991, chap. 1. As Varela et al. note,

computationalism has long been involved in the possibility of cognition (representa-

tional or otherwise) without consciousness.

12. Derrida (1978, 200-205) reads the notion of quality entirely differently.

13. For a similar, less Heideggerian, though no less daring, reading of the tem-

poral period, see Brennan 1992, chap. 3. Brennan seeks to rid Freud's theorizing

about psychical energy of the constraining notion "that this energy is contained

within the boundaries of the subject" (85).

14. See Freud 1954, 372. We might be better off speaking here of embodiment

and immanence, rather than analogy.

15. A similar breakdown of the external-internal divide is advocated by Brennan

(1992), though her focus is Freud's theory of energetics, rather than the more

restricted topic of perception. Her effort to develop a transindividual understanding

of psychic energy is, like my argument, directed against Freud's privileging of psy-

chic interiority.

16. Here I draw on Bourdieu's (1990) and Benjamin's (1986a) anti-Aristotelian

Notes to Pages 168-72 * 283

and antirepresentationalist notion of mimesis as a material process of embodying

elements of the external physical world.

17. Freud's 1895 discussion of quality leads immediately to a discussion of what

role qualitative experience plays in psychic life, as if, despite the entire development

that compelled Freud to introduce a separate system to explain perception, that were

the only important issue: "Everything points to the sense-organs, whose qualities

must be represented by different periods of neuronic motion. The sense-organs oper-

ate not only as screens against quantity (Q)-like every nerve-ending apparatus-

but as sieves; for they only let through stimuli from certain processes that have a par-

ticular period. They probably transfer these differences to by communicating to the

neuronic motion periods with differences that are in some way analogous [to those

of the processes in the external world]" (Freud 1954, 372; emphasis added). With

this assimilation of perception to a distinctly psychic duty, Freud reinstalls the appa-

ratus of representationalism that he would seem (at least on my reconstruction) so

well equipped to eschew.

18. The citation is from Breuer's Studies on Hysteria (1895). Freud repeatedly

marks his debt to Breuer whenever he brings up the exclusivity of consciousness and

memory-trace.

Chapter 7

1. In his revisionary critique of Lacan, French psychoanalyst and former Lacan

disciple Frangois Roustang indicts the Lacanian concept of the real: ". . . it would be

extremely difficult to give the notion of the Real any consistency at all. In one sense,

it has no conceptual content apart from the Symbolic, since the Real is defined by the

impossibilities encountered by the Symbolic. As an obstacle to symbolization, it

could have become the Symbolic's 'other,' a reality to which the Symbolic did not

have access. The definition of the Real as the impossible made constant reference to

the reality of the Symbolic, yet remained empty. The Real is indistinguishable from

the Symbolic, whether it is aligned with numbers . . , or becomes a gap, a flaw or a

hole.... [I]n the end it could be said that the Real simply does not exist" (1990,

101-2).

2. Lacan, Seminar IV, 28-11-56, cited in Brennan 1993, 48; emphasis added.

3. In her discussion of this analogy, Brennan faults Lacan for his lack of inter-

est in the "accumulation of energy." She says: "Even if one is not curious about the

source of the energy contained, the mechanism of its accumulation has to be an issue

for psychoanalysis, especially given that the mechanism, 'the dam' seems to be faulty

in psychosis . . . [I]f the psychotic's experience is real, then to rule out the study of

un-contained psychical energy is to limit the understanding of psychosis. It is also to

limit the understanding of how neurosis.. . is distinguished from psychosis" (1993,

48 n. 28). Brennan's argument resonates with the critique of Lacan advanced by

Deleuze and Guattari (1983), who are also interested in the psychotic.

4. As Zizek puts it, "one should always bear in mind apropos of objet petit a

284 * Notes to Pages 172-76

. . that, as is often the case with Lacan's categories, we are dealing with a CON-

CEPT that comprises itself and its own opposite and/or dissimulation" (1994, 178;

emphasis added).

5. Brennan notes: "Lacan's pre-eminent interest was in how it is that the subject

managed to conflate its objet petit a with the big A, the Autre or Other. For he

argued that the subject did conflate them, and in this conflation, implicated the sym-

bolic in the imaginary" (1993, 66).

6. Despite the specificity of my focus in this chapter, my understanding of Lacan

has been greatly aided by many of the general studies of his work, including Bowie

1991, Borch-Jacobsen 1991, Bracher and Ragland-Sullivan 1991, Brennan 1993,

Gallop 1985, Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy 1990, MacCannell 1986, Ragland-

Sullivan 1986, and Weber 1991.

7. For discussions of Lacan's view of science, see, in Alexandre Leupin's Lacan

and the Human Sciences (1991), Leupin's introduction (1-25), Jean-Claude Milner's

"Lacan and the Ideal of Science" (27-42), and Francois Regnault's "Lacan and

Experience" (43-58); Miller 1989, 30-50; Milner, "Lacan et la science moderne,"

and appended responses by Paul Jenry and Jorge Forbes, in Avtonomova et al. 1991,

333-71; Bruce Fink, "Science and Psychoanalysis," in Feldstein, Fink, and Jaanus

1995; remarks in Brennan 1993, 32ff. For a critical account of Lacan's "science of

the real," see Roustang 1990, chap. 2; responding to Roustang, Dor (1996) defends

Lacan's recourse to mathematical paradigms as representationalist, rather than for-

malist, in nature. The most important texts of Lacan concerning science are Seminar

XI (1977c, especially chaps. 19 and 20), "Science and Truth" (1989b), and "Posi-

tion of the Unconscious" (in Feldstein, Fink, and Jaanus 1995).

8. There has been much effort devoted to the relationship between Lacan and

Heidegger. Most of the work focuses on the mediating figure of Kojeve and his

influential Heideggerian reading of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. See Richard-

son 1983a, 1983b; Casey and Woody 1983; the roundtable "Lacan avec Heideg-

ger," including contributions by Richardson, Nancy, Gerard Granel, and Ellizabeth

Roudinesco, in Avtonomova et al. 1991, 189-236; Borch-Jacobsen's "Les alibis du

sujet (Lacan, Kojeve, et alii)," with responses by Macherey and Serge Viderman, in

ibid., 293-331; Wilden's notes to his translation of Lacan's so-called Rome Dis-

course ("The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis") as well

as his essay "Lacan and the Discourse of the Other," in Wilden 1968; Weber 1991;

and Borch-Jacobsen 1991.

9. Another way to put this is to say that Lacan is interested in technology only

from the standpoint of the drive. How else could he maintain the following equation

between television and the public? "For there's no difference between television and

the public before whom I've spoken for a long time now, a public known as my sem-

inar. A single gaze in both cases: a gaze to which in neither case do I address myself,

but in the name of which I speak" (1989c, 7). Such a focus can say nothing about

the concrete impact of televisual technology, beyond viewing it as the site of the

visual address from the "Other." Lacan argues that this is also the case for the audi-

tory address: "That's a question. . . that might well be understood as being about

Notes to Pages 177-78 * 285

your wanting to be able to answer it, yourself, eventually. That is: if you were asked

it, by a voice rather than by an individual, a voice inconceivable except as arising

from the TV, a voice that doesn't ex-sist, because it doesn't say anything, the voice

nonetheless, in the name of which I make this answer ex-sist, an answer that is inter-

pretation" (31). In short, television, on Lacan's view, is nothing other than a techni-

cal instantiation of the voice and gaze of the "Other."

10. As the chance encounter, tuche comprises the origin point for the drive: "The

real may be represented by the accident, the noise, the small element of reality, which

is evidence that we are not dreaming. But, on the other hand, this reality is not so

small, for what wakes us is the other reality hidden behind the lack of that which

takes the place of representation-this, says Freud, is the Trieb" (Copjec 1992, 60).

11. Copjec notes: "What is repeated, in fact, is always something that occurs-

the expression tells us quite a lot about its relation to the tuche-as if by chance. This

is something that we analysts never allow ourselves to be taken in by, on principle"

(1992, 54). See also Fink, "The Real Cause of Repetition" and "The Nature of

Unconscious Thought, or Why No One Ever Reads the Postface to Lacan's 'Seminar

on The Purloined Letter?"'" in Feldstein, Fink, and Jaanus 1995 and 1996, respec-

tively.

12. Given Lacan's understanding of automaton, it is not surprising that Copjec,

in her effort to expound Lacan's distinction of cause from law, would conflate

automaton with tuche. After correctly noting that automaton designates a category

of chance or coincidence in which change occurs not due to any internal principle

but "as a result of the collision of separate events each with its own independent

[and external] cause," Copjec goes on to cite-as an example of the automatic-

Aristotle's example of the man who goes to the market to buy something and meets

a debtor who repays his loan. Copjec argues that within Aristotle's theory, this

example demonstrates a "certain failure of final cause as explanatory principle,"

since the man did not go to the market to recover his money (1994, 233). However,

recalling my discussion of Aristotle in chap. 3, we will recognize this as an example

of causality by concurrence and, moreover, as an example not of automaton but of

tuche, since it involves an agent capable of intentionality. The failure of final cause

that Lacan goes on to develop in Seminar XI is the failure exemplified by tuche and

not automaton, itself the name Lacan gives the signifying network that is fractured

by this failure. This conflation perfectly illustrates the blindness of Lacan's approach

to what Aristotle terms the para physin, the radically nonnatural and nonhuman.

13. In so arguing, Zizek picks up on Lacan's (for my purposes, very revealing)

connection of tuche to trauma: "The function of the tuche, of the real as encounter-

the encounter in so far as it may be missed, in so far as it is essentially the missed

encounter-first presented itself in the history of psycho-analysis in a form that was

in itself already enough to arouse our attention, that of the trauma" (Ziek 1994, 55).

14. This bracketing of the autonomy of the real goes hand in hand with the

empty abstractness of the objet a and has been a topic of much debate. For Copjec,

it is precisely what insures the subject's freedom, the ability of psychic causality to

function beyond the law: "This indeterminate something (referred to by Lacan as

286 * Notes to Pages 179-84

object a) that causes the subject has historical specificity (it is the product of a

specific discursive regime), but no historical content" (1994, 238-39). An opposing

view is given by Peter Dews: "Lacan abandons Freud's conception of a clash and

interference between the two principles of mental functioning . . . in favour of the

view that 'the presence of the unconscious, by virtue of the fact that it is situated in

the place of the Other, is to be sought in every discourse, in its enunciation.' The

unconscious is not another discourse, but simply another way of reading the same

discourse. The consequence of this argument, however, is that the incompatibility

between desire and speech cannot be given any social content: it follows simply from

the nature of language as such" (1987, 108; emphasis added). Whether it is taken

positively or negatively, this abstractness limits the empirical value of Lacan's the-

ory. On his account, technology can only be characterized in terms of a contentless

historical specificity; it can only be accounted for as an aggregate entity that impacts

subjectivity in an onto-metaphysical (and never in an ontic-concrete) manner.

15. For detailed commentary on the central notions of Seminar II, see Feldstein,

Fink, and Jaanus 1996).

16. I owe these formulations to Professor Juliet MacCannell.

17. By "consciousness as such," Lacan means the bare phenomenon of the imag-

inary: "What is the image in the mirror? The rays which return on to the mirror

make us locate in an imaginary space the object which moreover is somewhere in

reality. The real object isn't the object that you see in the mirror. So here there's a

phenomenon of consciousness as such" (Lacan 1991, 46)

18. Given my claims concerning the strength and sheer ubiquity of the machine

reduction in twentieth-century questioning concerning technology (see interlude 1),

it is hardly inconsequential that this homology mirrors Derrida's distinction between

the solid and the rhetorical metaphor.

19. I thank Professor Juliet MacCannell for indicating this distinction.

20. This symbolic autonomy of language is central to the ongoing shift from nat-

ural language to machine code that has been an issue of immense cultural impor-

tance since the postwar advent of cybernetics. See Hayles 1992, 1993, 1999; Kittler

1992, 1993.

21. Lacan's fetishization of language is the target of Wilden's critique in "Lin-

guistics and Semiotics: The Unconscious Structured Like a Language," in Wilden

1980.

22. A similar criticism of Freudian bioenergetics informs the work of the post-

Lacanian theorist most concerned with technology. In her effort to justify a model of

psychical energy that breaks with the "one-person" paradigm, Brennan highlights

Freud's productive misappropriation of the thermodynamical notion of inertia.

While Brennan shares Wilden's appreciation of the reduction imposed through the

application of closed-system technological models, she simultaneously cites Freud's

misguided notion of inertia as the key to the functioning of quantity in the Project

and, consequently, to the entire production of psychical reality via the splitting of

idea and affect and the repression of hallucination: ".. . Freud's confusion lies in his

equation of inertia with lack of motion, rather than unchangingness . . . [W]hat we

Notes to Pages 185-88 * 287

have in Freud is a theory of the construction of psychical inertia as a state of rigid-

ity, a theory that bears on the construction of the sense of time and space .. . [W]hile

Freud's physics are in principle inaccurate, his idiosyncratic notion of inertia may

have made a far greater contribution to physics than he could have anticipated, if it

is read. . . as an account of how a specific type of inertia is constructed through the

constitution of a fixed still point. . . . It is the attempt to deal with quantity that

induces the repression of hallucination, founds psychical reality and the uncon-

scious, and brings the first fixed point, the first moment of constructed (anti-natural)

inertia, into being" (1992, 109-10). By understanding how identity arises as a result

of a process in which the subject constructs an inert point, Brennan draws attention

to the primary transsubjectivity of psychical energy. Subject constitution requires the

binding of energy around a central point; as such, it effaces the energetic continuum

(more or less equivalent to Deleuze and Guattari's "machinic connection") linking

organism to environment. Brennan's argument thus converges on the point stressed

by Wilden, with one adjustment in emphasis. Where Wilden indicts the bioenergetic

model itself for effacing the primacy of the collective dimension, Brennan (following

Deleuze and Guattari) faults the restriction of bioenergetics to a subjective basis:

"... without exception," she says, "all the attempts at theorizing psychical energy

are constrained by the notion that this energy is contained within the boundaries of

the subject" (85).

23. Hayles's critique of Lacan's model of signification lends support to this

claim. By pitting the presence-absence couple of Lacan's model against the pattern-

randomness couple of cybernetic systems, Hayles is able to historicize Lacan in a

way that does not simply dismiss his contribution but seeks to combine what is pos-

itive about it-its connection to the human-with the potentially inhuman cyber-

netic model of signification that is fast becoming dominant in our contemporary cul-

ture. See Hayles 1993.

Chapter 8

1. For a discussion of this internalization, see Lecercle 1985, 174. A similar

espousal of Marx's thesis stands behind the work of Donna Haraway and other

cyborg theorists.

2. This distinction is made by Patton: "For [D+G, as for Foucault], power is

defined in terms of a relation to certain active primary forces or processes: it is a

power over something else. . . . On the other hand, with regard to the nature of

assemblages in general, Deleuze and Guattari contrast power with desire. ..

'[D]esire' understood as active forces or processes is equivalent to power in its pri-

mary sense, that is the ability to do or to become certain things" (1994, 160). For

Deleuze's own characterization of his theoretical differences with Foucault, see

Deleuze 1997.

3. See D+G's comments on Foucault in A Thousand Plateaus (1987): "1) to us

the assemblages seem fundamentally to be assemblages not of power but of desire

288 * Notes to Pages 189-91

(desire is always assembled), and power seems to be a stratified dimension of the

assemblage; 2) the diagram and abstract machine have lines of flight that are pri-

mary, which are not phenomena of resistance or counterattack in an assemblage, but

cutting edges of creation and deterritorialization" (531 n. 39, cited in Patton 1994,

159). It is on the basis of this distinction that Patton invokes the potential of D+G's

model of desire to "provide positive figures for that which is opposed to power"

(1984, 66)

4. In his analysis of D+G's notion of desire as an effort to develop a positive

model of power, Patton mistakenly attributes such a function to technology, sug-

gesting that technological innovations are one form of war machine: "The war

machine exists in the most diverse forms, anything from an industrial or technolog-

ical innovation, a mode of thought, to a commercial circuit or a religious move-

ment" (1984, 76; see also 66 and 1994, 164). Such a reading runs counter to the nar-

row role D+G explicitly accord technological innovation in both the Anti-Oedipus

and A Thousand Plateaus.

5. By stressing D+G's opposition to the liberal tradition, Patton interprets this

restriction as a reflection of the primacy they lend difference: ". . . resistance to sov-

ereignty or State-forms, in the broad sense which Deleuze and Guattari give to these

notions, will always involve the assertion of difference: the maintenance of an irre-

ducible difference is to refuse the first step in the process of capture, namely the

reduction to a uniform field of sameness or identity, whether as workers, women,

consumers or citizens. Who or what is the source of such a refusal? For Deleuze and

Guattari, resistance to domination cannot be grounded in an essentially free human

nature. Rather, it must be understood in terms of a relation between different kinds

of assemblage" (1994, 163). One must ask, however, whence exactly the potential

to evade statist capture comes if not from desire's ability not to be marked in any

recalcitrant way by the state's mechanisms of capture? Moreover, it hardly follows

from the fact that desire (for D+G) cannot exist outside of a social assemblage that

it is marked or constrained in some essential way.

6. Patton goes so far as to suggest that D+G introduce nomadology specifically

to contextualize their discussion of the present: "The invocation of the nomadic war-

riors of the past is clearly intended to assist the reappearance of the same forces in

the present, although not in the same guise" (1984, 77).

7. As Ronald Bogue notes in his study of D+G, the concept of the machine, first

developed by Guattari in his essay "Machine and Structure" (1969), draws on

Deleuze's model of structure from The Logic of Sense in order to reject the struc-

turalist paradigm of Lacan's model of desire. In particular, Guattari's distinction

between machine and structure rewrites Deleuze's distinction between interrelated

heterogeneous series (field of meaning and field of events) and the aleatory point that

traverses those series and effectuates their interrelation. The problem with the

Lacanian model of desire, as also with structuralist accounts of meaning in general,

is precisely their failure to include as an element internal to structure the aleatory

point that generates it in the first place. For the Guattari of "Machine and Struc-

ture," therefore, the machine, as the aleatory point effectuating structure, replaces

Notes to Pages 194-98 * 289

the reductive concept of the "subject," which Lacan interprets as the effect of a

break in the symbolic chain ("the signifier represents the subject for another

signifier" [Guattari 1984, 118]).

8. With this claim, I am not saying that machinic desire, as D+G conceive it, is

entirely reducible to human desire. Rather, I am attempting to argue that D+G

model machinic desire on human desire and that such a modeling introduces certain

blind spots into their social ontology. Still, I am not unsympathetic with critics who

suggest that D+G ultimately fetishize desire as a dogmatic principle. Indeed, I

develop such a criticism in interlude 2. See Poster 1990, 137; Butler 1987, 214; Best

and Kellner 1991, 106.

9. In this sense, nomad technology functions similarly to film, as Deleuze devel-

ops it in his works on the cinema. Just as film generates a "spiritual automaton"-a

reduplication of matter in the form of "time-images" (see Deleuze 1991a, 156ff.)-

technology, according to A Thousand Plateaus, reduplicates at the level of material-

ized thought (i.e., in the notational systems of mathematics and computers) the

movement of flow.

10. In an interesting comparative reading of dynamic and thermodynamic tropes

in Freud and D+G, Martin Rosenberg makes a similar point, suggesting that D+G's

opposition of the games Go and chess as the respective principles of divergent theo-

ries of war functions to disguise an enabling appeal to physis. Go, Rosenberg claims,

is privileged over chess "in order to valorize nomos over physis," that is, to preserve

the independence of the human institution of society from the order of nature. As

Rosenberg insightfully shows, however, D+G's argument here is premised on an

appeal to physis: ". . . in using the game of Go as a source of tropes, Deleuze and

Guattari must make recourse to physis... by valorizing contingency and aggrega-

tion as an essential condition of nomadic and rhizomatic thought and action"

(Rosenberg 1993, paragraph 39). Rosenberg implies that this appeal functions as a

form of metalepsis, since it effaces the natural foundation of the technological

metaphors underlying the claims for nomadology: ". . . Deleuze and Guattari's

recourse to the thermodynamics of open systems far-from-equilibrium, systems

grounded in contingency and multiplicity . . . enables them to articulate their pro-

gram against the laws of dynamics as applied to human affairs, while hiding their

own affiliations with the claim for physis" (paragraph 42).

11. We must thus be careful not to overestimate the exteriority of nomadology.

While all assemblages are defined by their lines of flight, the nomad war machine

does not materialize an absolute line of flight but rather effectuates a line of flight

solely in order to create an alternative assemblage, itself defined in the same way.

Whatever exteriority is thereby mobilized is entirely a function of a given assem-

blage. For a different view of the relation between nomadology and lines of flight,

see Patton 1984, 65-66.

12. D+G borrow the entire content-expression distinction from Hjelmslev, who

deploys it to overcome the binary opposition of form and substance underlying

Saussurian linguistics. In the place of Saussure's distinction between form and sub-

stance, signifier and signified, Hjelmslev proposes a distinction between content and

290 * Notes to Pages 198-99

expression. Content pertains to the domain of meaning (what Saussure calls "lin-

guistic value"); expression pertains to signification (Saussure's "sound-pattern").

Content therefore takes the place of the signified; expression takes the place of the

signifier. To develop a truly universal theory of language, Hjelmslev seeks to free the

Saussurean sign of its binarism. He replaces the two-term signifier-signified (expres-

sion-content) distinction with a distinction among four terms: form of expression,

form of content, substance of expression, and substance of content. In both domains

(form and substance), there is a solidarity between expression and content, so that

no content can emerge without expression and vice versa: "Expression and content

are solidary-they necessarily presuppose each other. An expression is expression

only by virtue of being an expression of a content, and a content is content only by

virtue of being a content of an expression. Therefore-except by an artificial isola-

tion-there can be no content without an expression, or expressionless content; nei-

ther can there be an expression without content, or content-less expression" (Hjelm-

slev 1969, 48-49). Moreover, because the designation of the two domains of

expression and content, respectively, is ultimately arbitrary, and because in both

domains, content and expression emerge against the background of "matter" (or

"purport"), there is a fundamental isomorphism between form and substance.

Hjelmslev explains: "Since the state of affairs for the expression is evidently quite

analogous to that of the content, it will be appropriate for us to be able to underline

this parallelism by using the same terminology for the expression as for the content.

We should then be able to speak here of an expression-purport [or expression-mat-

ter].... The examples we have given, the vocalic continuum and the median profile

of the roof of the mouth, are then the phonetic zones of purport, which are formed

differently in different languages, depending on the specific functions of each lan-

guage, and which are thereby ordered to their expression-form as expression-sub-

stance" (55-56). The point here is that even though expression and content have dif-

ferent forms, substances, and purport ranges, the relation between these three terms

is analogous in their respective cases. As Ducrot and Todorov put it, despite the fact

that, glossematically (i.e., taking phonemes as basic units of expression and taking

semes as basic units of content), expression and content can be distinguished for-

mally and are thus not "conformal," they are nevertheless isomorphic; they follow

the "same type of combinatorial relations" (1979, 22).

13. For a critical discussion of Hjelmslev's relation to Saussure, see Pavel 1989,

54-61.

14. For an opposite view of D+G's relation to Hjelmslevian glossematics, see

Grisham 1991, 49-51. Following D+G, Grisham contends that glossematics is not

abstract enough: "since it interprets language as a set of abstracted constants in the

service of reference, it cannot interpret its own selection" (50). What D+G's gener-

alization institutes, according to Grisham, is a "true abstract machine"-"one that

is capable of interpreting [its own internal] variables" (50). Throughout this reading,

however, the enabling homology of D+G's model-precisely what is most question-

able in their generalization-is simply presupposed as unproblematically valid. For

a similar treatment of Guattari's relation to Hjelmslev, see Genosko 1998.

Notes to Pages 201-212 * 291

15. D+G give a detailed genealogy of these three strata in Plateau 3, "The Geol-

ogy of Morals."

16. For an account of D+G's metaphysics of the virtual and, specifically, of its

relation to Bergson's philosophy, see Boundas 1996. For an account of Deleuze's

reading of Bergson in relation to his work on the cinema, see Douglass 1992a,

1992b; Rodowick 1997, 18-37.

17. Becoming-woman designates an effort to escape the restrictive dual-gender

binary system; becoming-animal, an effort to escape the unified subject of political

and psychoanalytical models; and so on. Alice Jardine makes essentially the same

point from the opposite angle when she suggests that becoming-woman dangerously

collapses into an amorphous molecular figuration whatever molar status women

might have: "To the extent that women must 'become woman' first. . . might that

not mean that she must be the first to disappear? . . . [T]here would remain only her

simulacrum: a female figure caught in a whirling sea of molecular figurations. A

silent, mutable, head-less, desire-less, spatial surface necessary only for His meta-

morphosis" (1985, 217). Here Jardine seems to suggest that some molar position is

required as the prerequisite for any meaningful political action.

18. Deleuze's study of Spinoza has received relatively little critical attention. In

addition to the extremely helpful chapter in Hardt 1993, see Armstrong 1997;

Gatens 1996; Macherey 1996; Norris 1991, 55-66.

19. According to Michael Hardt, Spinoza thus helps Deleuze to furnish an

answer to the Nietzschean question, "why do we seek truth?": "We want truth, or

rather adequacy, in order to increase our power to think. The strategy of the ade-

quate idea makes the question of truth a project of power" (Hardt 1993, 90).

20. In their final collaboration, What Is Philosophy? (1994), D+G redefine the

task of philosophy along these lines. Like Nietzsche before them, D+G are interested

in the practical function of philosophical conceptualization-how it can make our

lives better.

21. Following the seventh theorem of deterritorialization, expression takes the

lead in the practice of deterritorialization: "the deterritorializing element has the rel-

ative role of expression, and the deterritorialized element the relative role of con-

tent" (D+G 1987, 307).

Interlude 2

1. This systemic interpretation of technology as descriptive figure underlies all

efforts to read D+G through chaos theory, nonlinear dynamics, and the fractal. See

D+G 1987, 486-88; Guattari 1984, 102, 125; Deleuze 1995, 29, 33ff.; Massumi

1992, 21ff., 33ff.; DeLanda 1991, 19ff., 29ff., 233 n. 2, 236-37 n. 9.

2. See Rasch and Wolfe 1995. In explaining the potential contribution of the

systems-theoretical paradigm to (largely) American debates on culture, they empha-

size its interdisciplinarity and consequent resistance to the "linguacentrism" of cul-

tural criticism: "With one foot in the European phenomenological tradition and the

292 * Notes to Pages 212-16

other in U.S. cybernetics and information theory, [systems theory] potentially pro-

vides an interdisciplinary site broader and richer than what we in the humanities

have been content with in the past-not least of all because much of the most sug-

gestive and important work in the area of systems theory is being done in the nat-

ural, mathematical, and social sciences, beyond the familiar orbits.., of the human-

ities and its reliance upon the textual paradigm" (11; emphasis added). For an

account of how Niklas Luhmann's systems theory resolves the aporia of deconstruc-

tion, see Schwanitz 1995; and for a systems-theoretical reading of Lacan, see Elmer

1995. On the relation of D+G's project with systems theory, see Guattari's machinic

refunctionalization of Maturana and Varela's notion of autopoiesis (Guattari 1993).

Wolfe argues that the shift to second-order cybernetics-"the abandonment of the

total 'pattern which connects' on behalf of the contingency of observation and the

sort of systemic heterogeneity it makes recognizable"-forges a link to "broader cur-

rents of postmodern theory such as that practiced by Deleuze and Guattari" (1995,

51); he goes on to quote Guattari.

3. The key texts here are Maturana and Varela's Autopoiesis and Cognition:

The Realization of the Living (1980), von Foerster's Observing Systems (1984), and

Luhmann's Social Systems (1995). See Hayles 1996a for a discussion of the history

of cybernetics and its evolving cultural function from the postwar Macy conferences

onward. Proposing a narrative supplementation to systems theory that would

expose "inevitable and inescapable" (and hence inhuman) system closures as in fact

contingent and contextual, Hayles suggests that "divorce of perception from exter-

nal reality" promoted by systems theory is at the same time the source of its theo-

retical strength and its "Achilles' heel" (1995, 75). She furthermore discerns an

exclusion of the human perspective at the heart of systems theory: "Autopoiesis, in

the case of conscious organisms, must contain the observer, yet the observer, with

his anthropomorphic projections and causal inferences, is precisely what has to be

excluded for autopoiesis to come into view as such" (77). This contradiction stems

from Maturana's refunctionalization of cybernetic homeostasis as biological

autopoiesis; this refunctionalization severs the tie between the closed system (or

more precisely, the system's organization) and the environment: Hayles writes that

Maturana "redefined homeostasis so that the circle of causality no longer went from

the system to the environment but rather was contained internally within the

autopoietic processes" (88).

4. The term systems theory in the broad sense in which I am using it here also

includes descriptive systems germane to mathematically based and computer sci-

ences, as well as efforts, like those of D+G, Manuel De Landa, or Friedrich Kittler,

to appropriate such systematic logics as the basis for semiotic models of the social or

of communication. For concrete examples illustrating the promise of systems theory

for social and political theory, see the special 1995 double issue of Cultural Critique

devoted to it, especially the article by Wolfe (30:33-70) and that by Rasch

(30:193-222).

5. D+G write that the imperial archaic states "constitute a machine of enslave-

ment by overcoding already-coded flows"; that the diverse states (empires, city-

Notes to Pages 216-17 * 293

states, feudal systems, and monarchies) "proceed instead by subjectification and sub-

jection, and constitute qualified or topical conjunctions of decoded flows"; and,

finally, that the modern nation-states "take decoding even further" and "combine

social subjection and the new machinic enslavement" (1987, 459).

6. For a development of this form of automatism in relation to the "televisual

system" (as a central institution of contemporary capitalism), see Dienst 1994, espe-

cially chap. 8.

7. Interestingly enough, despite what D+G (1987) say concerning the limitless

expansion of the "immanent boundaries" of the capitalist system, critics interpret

them as announcing the death of the state. Surin, for example, argues that D+G's

account of capitalism leads necessarily to a "postbourgeois" civil society, since, as

they show, capitalism cannot master the exteriority that is its condition except by

treating it as something immanent to itself. Surin argues that this ultimately

unleashes something far more radical than the traditional Marxist withering of the

state, namely, "the expression of that which cannot be codified-the revolutionary

forces, the intensities that elude the codes of the State apparatus and its surrogates"

(1991, 111). Such a reading significantly underestimates the power that D+G accord

capitalism's reterritorializing mechanisms; it also misrecognizes the fundamental

role played by coding (and the semiotic model) even in the production of a nomad

assemblage and in the mobilization of a line of flight.

8. Another way to put this is that nomadism cannot be equated with deterrito-

rialization, as some critics suggest (see, e.g., Patton 1988, 127; Holland 1988, 414).

To yield an alternate assemblage, nomadism must include some amount of reterrito-

rialization and hence some form of social coding.

9. Consequently, it is not possible to play off becoming as an alternative to the

state's "processes of capture" as Patton suggests (1994, 168). As long as becoming

(at least as a form of positivity) remains rooted in the semiotic model generated by

the capitalist axiomatic, it simply cannot wholly evade such capture. The same point

can be made about Holland's effort to free "schizoanalysis" from the grasp of capi-

talist reterritorialization. "Deleuze and Guattari's schizoanalysis," he claims,

"examines the other side of the coin [from Foucault]: the forces at work in discourse

and society that challenge the imposed closure of codes and strive to free desire from

capture in codified representation" (1988, 414). As long as any movement of deter-

ritorialization requires some form of reterritorialization if it is to be more than an

empty punctual moment of resistance, the semiotic basis of D+G's model cannot be

dispensed with; coding and subjectification remain the sole means through which

becoming can have a social impact. Given this necessity, we can readily discern the

profound romanticism of Holland's suggestion that decoding undoes the "bour-

geois" subject position by destroying the social codes of which it is the effect.

10. My objection here parallels that raised by Plant (1993). In her effort to map

D+G's program onto actual moments of "nomad resistance," Plant discovers a dis-

junction between D+G's abstract analysis and the needs of actual practice. Ulti-

mately, this disjunction testifies to the necessity for reterritorialization and hence to

the limitless grasp of the capitalist system. Plant argues that D+G's model "intro-

294 * Notes to Pages 218-22

duces a scenario of perpetual contest, in which codification is always the sad corol-

lary to its subversion and counterrevolution follows revolution as surely as night fol-

lows day." She continues: "And while these might be processes which exercise a fas-

cination of their own, the political and cultural movements cast in the role of the

lines of flight interrupting capitalist society were not intending to become part of its

rich tapestry, but to contest and challenge its very existence" (99). Plant's call for a

grounded basis for political analysis resonates with the claim made by other critics

(see, e.g., Patton 1994) and by D+G themselves that the state-form and nomadology

are purely abstract possibilities.

11. See chap. 8, n. 8.

12. For an alternative position regarding D+G's relation to Haraway, see Stivale

1991, 78-79.

13. In his understanding of desire as ontological power (power to act), Patton

draws a similar conclusion: "Being/desire is the active principle of nature itself, the

'inner will' in all events and processes . . . Understood in this matter, desire is a real

abstraction" (1994, 160-61). Even though he sees this abstractness as proof of the

priority of the assemblage, Patton correctly concludes that desire must be prior to

the assemblage as the power that effectuates it: "The field of which these two

abstract machines are both expressions must therefore be nature or life itself, an

abstract power prior to any determinate modality of action" (164).

14. On D+G's relation to Marx, see Patton 1988. Patton suggests that D+G's

entire project is rooted in a generalization of the "contradictory tendency Marx

describes in relation to the rate of profit." Patton explains: "capitalism is a system

that constantly approaches its own limits while at the same time deferring them,

overcoming them by their reproduction on a larger scale." Consequently, argues Pat-

ton, capitalism forms a totalized horizon or "axiomatic system" for all social activ-

ity whose pattern is deterritorialization (or breaking down of codes) and reterritori-

alization: "The process is endless, since the limits are immanent to the system itself,

determined by the same conditions that govern the expanded reproduction of capi-

tal . . . [T]he fundamental axiom of [capitalism] is that everything be subject to the

laws of market exchange" (126).

15. D+G 1987, 160: "... you have to keep small supplies of significance and

subjectification, if only to turn them against their own system... ; and you have to

keep small rations of subjectivity in sufficient quantity to enable you to respond to

the dominant reality." See also Holland 1991, 63.

16. For a critical reading of the transcendental stance of mathematics, see Rot-

man 1988.

17. Kittler's essay originally appeared as a contribution to Gumbrecht and Pfeif-

fer's Materialitiit der Kommunication, one of the two volumes from which essays in

the English volume Materialities of Communication (1994) were drawn. Despite this

accident of publication, Kittler's project differs in certain fundamental ways from

the methodological program articulated by Gumbrecht in his afterword to the Eng-

lish volume.

18. In "Gramophone, Film, Typewriter" (1987), Kittler speaks of writing as "the

Notes to Pages 222-24 * 295

general medium" in a historical constellation in which "the term medium did not

exist," since there was no other to oppose to it (105).

19. For a critique of Kittler's mapping of Lacan's imaginary, symbolic, and real

onto film, typewriter, and gramophone, respectively, see Sebastian 1990.

20. For a related account of the shift of executive functions from human to

machine, one that employs chaos theory (the theory of self-organization), see De

Landa 1991. Not insignificantly, De Landa's focus is also on war machines: ".. . it

is precisely the distinction between advisory and executive capabilities that is being

blurred in other military applications of Artificial Intelligence . . . To the extent that

the 'insights' derived from watching automata fight simulated armageddons actually

find their way into strategic doctrine and contingency plans, these 'robot events'

have already begun to blur the distinction between a purely advisory and an execu-

tive role for intelligent machines" (1-2).

21. Here, Kittler's conception of the real relies on a (Platonic) notion of the

mathematization of the world that has been criticized both by mathematicians (Rot-

man 1988) and by cultural critics of science and technology (Markley 1996). Rot-

man criticizes the idealization of the material universe that is the enabling condition

for Platonic mathematics. Markley wields this criticism against technical descrip-

tions of virtual reality and the metaphysics of its patron saint, Leibniz.

22. On the difference between natural and computer language, see Hayles 1992.

Hayles stresses the vast difference between the automatic or determinist performa-

tivity characteristic of machine code (where command is logically equivalent to per-

formance) and the symbolic performativity of natural, human language.

23. Kittler makes a similar claim regarding the material basis of writing on the

internet: "electronic elements lead a double life, once in tangible form as silicon and

again as a logical abstraction, as a computer description of itself with all the relevant

data, not only as a diagram on the wall, but also as a simulation" (1995). A similar

claim regarding the "fate" of writing in the hardware-internet age is advanced by

Avital Ronell, who argues that "to elaborate the fate of writing within the techno-

logical field" requires us to develop "a history of atopicality or of that which resists

presentation: those things that are nonsubstantial, tending to obliterate the originar-

iness of site." Ronell continues: "Electronic culture makes us ask (again) whether it

is now obsolete or timely to write" (1994, xiii).

24. This is precisely the task Hayles sets for herself in her 1997 article on Pow-

ers's Galatea 2.2 and Stephenson's Snow Crash. See also Hayles 1993.

25. On this possibility, see Hayles's remarks on embodiment in computer and

virtual-reality experience (1992, 167ff.).

26. See Shusterman 1997a for an account of the devaluation of sense experience

in the Western philosophical tradition.

27. In a 1995 interview, Kittler differentiated "culture" from "society" through

recourse to this semiotic ontology. By way of suggesting the importance of facility in

programming languages for our capacity to speak about culture, Kittler came clean

on his presuppositions: "I think, however, we understand 'culture' [as opposed to

296 * Notes to Pages 225-27

"society"] in terms of a system of signs. Cultural studies refers to and examines the

more important sign systems."

28. On this point, Gumbrecht's project coincides with the position Markley

sketches in his introduction to Virtual Realities and Their Discontents (1996).

29. Against Gumbrecht, I would credit de Man (and not Derrida) with develop-

ing the material side of deconstruction-the motif of exteriority. This, of course, is

the argument I presented in chap. 5.

30. In refunctionalizing Maturana and Varela's theory of autopoiesis to serve as

the basis for a posthumanist ethics, Cary Wolfe introduces what appears to be a sim-

ilar perspective. Specifically, he criticizes Maturana and Varela's recourse to "unre-

constructed humanism" and their dissolution of the material effects of concrete

observational perspectives: "Maturana and Varela's ethical assertion of the necessity

of love. . . is predicated upon the assumption that the question of 'with whom we

want to remain in co-existence' has always already been solved. In the process, Mat-

urana and Varela drain the assertion of contingency of its materialist, pragmatic

force, whose entire point-as we know from feminist philosophy of science as well

as Marxist theory-is to say that all points of view are not equally valid precisely

because they have material effects whose benefits and drawbacks are distributed

asymmetrically in the social field" (1995, 62). The significance of this critique

notwithstanding, we must ask whether such material effects can stand in for the

materiality of the technological real. Hayles's position on this issue is less equivocal:

"... difficulties arise because of Maturana's passionate desire to have something

conserved in the midst of continuous and often dramatic change. Leaving aside the

hand-waving explanations of structure and organization, that something is basically

the integrity of a self-contained, self-perpetuating system that is operationally closed

to its environment. In Maturana's metaphysics, the system closes on itself and leaves

historical contingency on the outside" (1995, 93).

31. Kittler writes: "The [German] high court's reasoning [in defining software as

necessarily a material thing], according to which no computer program could ever

run without the corresponding electrical charges in silicon circuitry, can illustrate the

fact that the virtual undecidability between software and hardware by no means fol-

lows, as systems theorists would probably like to believe, from a simple variation of

observation points" (1992, 86).

32. For other efforts to adapt systems theory to the demands of contemporary

cultural studies, see Wolfe 1998 and the contributions to the 1995 double issue of

Cultural Critique.

33. While Wellbery is associated with the materialities-of-communication pro-

ject, his concept of exteriority differs somewhat from Gumbrecht's concept of mate-

riality. See Wellbery 1992. In his effort to differentiate himself from Wellbery, Gum-

brecht draws a divide between Derrida's and Foucault's respective notions of

exteriority and argues for the superiority of Derrida's: "What Foucault wants to

underscore is the independence of the discourses from any subjective interiority. Dis-

courses-this is Foucault's central methodological principle-should never be seen

as expressions of such interiority. But Foucault does not thematize exteriorities in

Notes to Pages 227-34 * 297

Derrida's sense; indeed their repeated dissolution into the loftiness of discursive

structures has recently emerged as one of the rare shortcomings of the innovative

practice of history he invented" (1994, 394). I would direct this same critique

against Derrida as well.

34. See the distinction Gumbrecht draws between the materialities-of-communi-

cation perspective on technology and subjectivity and a more traditional historio-

graphic perspective: he notes that whereas the latter describe "technical innovations

as motivated by collective needs and as 'invented' by subjective genius," the former

"bring into view.., situations where couplings between human bodies, psychic sys-

tems, and new communications technologies . . . produce specific subject effects"

(1994, 400; emphasis added). See also the contributions collected in part 1 of Gum-

brecht and Pfeiffer 1994.

35. Gumbrecht writes: "Multiple effects of the most important technologies

developed and institutionalized during the past two centuries may converge in a

'materialization of the spirit.' These technologies seem to undo the opposite-i.e.,

spiritualizing-effect attendant, since the fourteenth century, on the habit of 'read-

ing' and 'interpreting' the world as a book of signifiers in which 'deep' meanings had

to be detected" (1996, 590).

Chapter 9

1. Accordingly, my intention is not to present a full picture of Benjamin's star-

tlingly complex and sophisticated career or even to focus primarily on an exegesis of

a particular dimension of Benjamin's thought. For that, I urge you to consult the

many admirable studies of Benjamin's work as a whole, including Eagleton 1981,

Rochlitz 1996, Scholem 1981, Witte 1991, and Wolin 1994, and also more focused

studies, including Buck-Morss 1989, Cadava 1997, Cohen 1993, Jennings 1987,

and Nigele 1991.

2. In my opinion, then, Benjamin's critics are too hasty in their assimilation of

the mimetic-faculty essays to the earlier theory of language he develops in such

essays as "On the Language as Such and on the Language of Man" (1916) and "The

Task of the Translator" (1921). Though it is not without a certain degree of textual

support, such assimilation has the stifling effect of effacing all of the ambivalence

and tension animating Benjamin's shift to the concept of mimesis-ambivalence and

tension that must, ultimately, be situated in the context of Benjamin's evolving

thought and that concerns the divide between his earlier hermetic linguistic theory of

the cosmos and his emergent materialist convictions. For examples of this assimila-

tion, see Cadava 1997, 26-28; Cohen 1993, 39ff.; Wolin 1994, 244ff.

3. See Shusterman's account of the role language plays in clarifying and focus-

ing conscious attention in ways that can improve "qualitative" (i.e., unconscious)

nondiscursive experience: "Such an improved habit, even if it functions uncon-

sciously, can also enhance our conscious thought, since better breathing can mean

better awareness and more steady concentration. We must recall, however, that

298 * Notes to Pages 235-42

conscious attention was required to improve this unconscious functioning; and so,

by the way, is language-as a means for designating body parts, movements, and

feelings on which we are instructed to concentrate" (1994, 138; emphasis added).

4. To reflect the stress Benjamin places on the material impact of technology,

Buck-Morss suggests the term new nature in place of the Marxist term productive

forces: "Benjamin meant by [productive forces] not just industrial technology but

the entire world of matter (including human beings) as it has been transformed by

that technology" (1989, 70). Adorno's meditations on technology, by contrast, are

marked by a profound resistance to the breakdown of the nature-technology divide.

His notion of mimesis requires a concept of the primordial, the uncontaminated-in

short, a concept of nature that can be dialectically opposed to the instrumental ratio-

nality of modern capitalist society.

5. Benjamin addresses the mimetic faculty in two essays from 1933, "On the

Mimetic Faculty" and "Die Lehre von Ahnlichkeit" (The doctrine of the similar). An

English translation of the former is contained in Benjamin 1986b; the German of

both texts can be found in Benjamin 1972-89, II, 210-13 and 204-10, respectively.

6. Very few-if any-of Benjamin's critics have focused any positive attention

on the motif of Erlebnis. Accounts that do more than simply dismiss it include Buck-

Morss 1992 and Naigele 1996. For a general discussion of the various senses of expe-

rience in Benjamin, see Lowy 1983, 632ff.

7. Dilthey, Gessammelte Werke, Musarios ed., VII, 230, cited in Gadamer

1989, 67 n. 126.

8. For a further account of this inversion, see Niigele 1996, 122-24.

9. Proust, Combray, cited in Benjamin 1968, 158.

10. The terminological distinctions I have followed are complicated on at least

two counts: first, Theodor Reik, on whom Benjamin draws, inverts the standard ter-

minological uses, employing Gediichtnis for interiorizing memory and Erinnerung

for artificial memory; second, Benjamin himself uses the term Eingedenken ("being

mindful of," "bearing in mind," as in being mindful of the dead) rather than Erin-

nerung to capture how Proustian involuntary memory is "closer to forgetting than

to what is usually called memory" (1968, 202). See McCole 1993, 266ff., for an

evaluation of Eingedenken as a translation for Proust's memoire pure; see also

Wohlfarth 1978, 164ff.

11. Bolz (1990, 72) draws a link between Lacan's notion of materialist con-

sciousness (from Seminar II) and Benjamin's theory of technological reproducibility.

12. In a mesmerizing meditation on the interrelation of Benjamin's understand-

ing of history with photography, Eduardo Cadava makes a strong case for a Der-

ridean interpretation of Benjamin as a critic keenly attuned to the technical dimen-

sion of thought. In the process, Cadava foregrounds the very link of thought with

memory (memoire involuntaire) against which I have argued so strongly: "[The

phrase 'Theses on the Photography of History'] calls forth what Benjamin under-

stands to be the technical dimension of thought. Indicating the convergence of a

thinking of history and a thinking of photography, it suggests an irreducible link

between thought as memory and the technical dimension of memorization, the

Notes to Pages 243-45 * 299

techniques of material inscription" (Cadava 1997, xviii). Insofar as photography

(and technology more generally) is deployed as the precondition for the emergence

of a thinking of history, such an allegiance cannot be avoided, as Cadava concludes

("That photographic technology belongs to the physiognomy of historical thought

means that there can be no thinking of history that is not at the same time a think-

ing of photography" [xviii]). If, however, it is taken as the basis for a theory of tech-

nology (rather than a theory of history) in Benjamin, it cannot but appear reductive,

for the figuration of technology as the relative exteriority of thought obscures just

that material dimension that Benjamin introduces in his distinction of cinema from

photography. For an account of the importance of this distinction in Benjamin's

theory of technology, see Bolz 1990, 95ff. I address Bolz's argument later in this

chapter.

13. My commitment to Benjamin as a keen critic of Freud pits me against two

camps of critics: those who reject Benjamin's appeal to Freud as a weak and mis-

guided move and those who fail to appreciate Benjamin's significant departure from

Freud. Rodney Livingstone, Perry Anderson, and Francis Mulhern illustrate the first

position; in their presentation of the Adorno-Benjamin debate in Aesthetics and Pol-

itics (Bloch et al. 1977), they single out Benjamin's recourse to Freud in "On Some

Motifs" as indicative of a general falling-off from the earlier Baudelaire essay: "..

Freud was centrally introduced [in "On Some Motifs"] through extensive adoption

of his notion of 'shock' from Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Unfortunately, this was

to select one of the least successful of Freud's later metapsychological works, and

Benjamin's use of it resulted only in a thinner and weaker variant of the original

manuscript" (105). In his account of Benjamin's "materialist theory of experience,"

Richard Wolin exemplifies the second position. After correctly identifying the

importance of Benjamin's reference to Freud, Wolin entirely fails to distinguish

reception from protection. Ultimately, this leads him to claim-reductively, by my

reading-that the protective function of the cortical layer (to parry shocks) broadens

the role of conscious registration: ". . . in modern life, . . . the matter-of-fact preser-

vation of memory traces has given way to their disintegration in consciousness-in

order for them to be assimilated by consciousness and thus stored.... Only by virtue

of this mutilating process of censorship and preformation can experience register in

consciousness and thus in the strict sense be said to have been 'lived"'" (1994,

228-29). Other critics who discuss Benjamin's Freud reading include Buck-Morss

(1992), Eagleton (1981), and Nigele (1991, 1996).

14. Because he retools the cortex as an opening to the outside or, equivalently, as

a radical exteriorization of the psyche, Benjamin's revision differs fundamentally

from superficially similar refunctionalizations that, for all their radicality, do not dis-

turb the priority Freud grants the psychic system. Psychoanalyst Nicolas Abraham's

"transphenomenal" or "anasemic" account of the psyche furnishes a case in point.

By rooting his theory of the anasemic construction of the psyche in the relation

between two psychic structures-the shell (ecorce) and the kernel (noyau)-Abra-

ham dissociates the cortex from consciousness in a manner that appears to parallel

Benjamin's own inchoate interpretation of it as a third corporeal agency.

300 * Notes to Pages 245-47

Specifically, Abraham's concept of the shell appears to recognize the important dis-

tinction between the protective and receptive functions of the cortex. Abraham pre-

sents "the image of the Ego fighting on two fronts: turned toward the outside, mod-

erating appeals and assaults, turned toward the inside, channeling excessive and

incongruous impulses." He argues that "Freud conceived of this agency as a protec-

tive layer, an ectoderm, a cerebral cortex, a shell." In actual fact, however, Abraham

foregrounds the dependence of the shell (cortex) on the kernel and thus privileges the

endogenous function of the system: "the shell," he observes, is "itself... marked by

what it shelters; that which it encloses is disclosed within it" (1979, 17). Since Abra-

ham introduces the cortex-level experience of the external world only insofar as it

enters into the nucleic-peripheral levels of the psyche, he reproduces Freud's bias: he,

too, treats the cortex essentially as a filtering or screening mechanism.

15. Paul Valery, Analecta, cited in Benjamin 1968, 161-62.

16. In connecting the protective function to modernity's destruction of auratic

experience, Terry Eagleton points toward an overcoming of Freudian psychism:

"Living an event with full awareness, parrying the shocks of stimuli rather than

allowing them to penetrate, is therefore inimical to the aura . . . Freud's theory of

memory traces allows Benjamin to press the scandal of the Trauerspiel, in which

'experience' is subordinated to the ecriture of emblem, to even greater lengths-for

now writing has rudely invaded the inmost sanctum of experience itself, whose pro-

ductive mechanism lies exposed as nothing more than a set of inscriptions" (1981,

35).

17. In his work on body techniques, Richard Shusterman suggests a kind of logic

to the contemporary value placed on the body: as an antidote to the ephemerality

and fragmentation of media images of (false) unity, the body furnishes a strong site

for the investment of contemporary selfhood. The merit of Shusterman's work-as

contrasted with the majority of work by contemporary cultural critics who focus on

the body (e.g., Anne Balsamo's work on body building and cosmetic surgery)-is its

refusal to collapse the bodily back into the representational. Indeed, when he speaks

of "muscle memory," Shusterman strikes a very Benjaminian tone: "The muscle

memory of bodily habit provides an organic enduring presence that outlasts the frag-

mentary moments of media bytes and cannot be erased as easily as a data file"

(1997b, 43).

18. Through his creative expansion of Freud, Benjamin is able to exteriorize

agency in a manner far more radical than what is envisioned by contemporary crit-

ics of postmodernity. While the likes of Jameson, Baudrillard, and David Harvey

gesture toward the corporeal dimension of experience correlative to the "space-time

compression" of postmodernity (Harvey 1990), none is willing-as is Benjamin-to

accept the fundamental shift in the economy of experience it involves: the ensuing

eclipse of representation as the tribunal for experience. A case in point is furnished

by Jameson, who provocatively suggests that postmodern hyperspace "has finally

succeeded in transcending the capacities of the individual human body to locate

itself" but who then invokes, by way of solution, what amounts to the restoration of

some form of cognitive command over the real-what he famously calls "cognitive

mapping" (1991, 38).

19. While several critics have noted the debt of "On Some Motifs" to the earlier

Notes to Pages 247-49 * 301

essays on the mimetic faculty, they have done so predominately to underscore the

metaphysical subtext of the later essay. Thus, for example, Richard Wolin cites the

mimetic-faculty essay as the "germ cell" behind the correspondences developed

under the tutelage of memoire involuntaire in "On Some Motifs" (Wolin 1994).

Such a reading ignores the centrality accorded voluntary memory in that essay, a

centrality that requires the very supplementation of the history of the mimetic fac-

ulty that I propose.

20. Several of Benjamin's critics have made gestures toward recognizing a basic

break between linguistic and postsignifying mimesis, though none (with the possible

exception of Taussig and, at certain moments, Bolz) has developed it in terms of a

distinction between an intellectualist mimetic redemption and a corporeal mimetic

becoming. Buck-Morss furnishes a case in point: "Benjamin suggests that what

appears in the 'signworld (Merkwelt) of modern man' to be the 'decay of this capac-

ity' of mimesis, may be, rather, a new stage in 'its transformation.' He holds open the

possibility of a future development of mimetic expression, the potentialities for

which are far from exhausted. Nor are they limited to verbal language-as the new

technologies of camera and film clearly demonstrate" (1989, 267).

21. This point raises a potential confusion that we must guard against: despite

what my language sometimes suggests, the representation-embodiment distinction

must absolutely not be conflated with that of mind and body. My notion of corpo-

real mimesis as a faculty distinct from psychic consciousness does not imagine the

body to be separable from the mind; rather, following Varela, Thompson, and

Rosch's (1991) notion of the embodied mind, it is meant to designate our irreducible

embodiment-an experiential dimension that cannot be separated from the mental,

even if it is strongly nonpsychic (in the specifically Freudian sense of the term).

22. The corporeal dimension of Baudelaire's poetic production can be discerned

most clearly, Benjamin suggests, in his own self-portrait. As if to confirm the mimetic

relation involved, Benjamin describes the physiognomic and corporeal impact of

shock with the metaphor of contagion: "Since he is himself exposed to fright, it is

not unusual for Baudelaire to occasion fright. Valles tells us about his eccentric gri-

maces; . . . Pontmartin establishes Baudelaire's alarming appearance; Claudel

stresses the cutting quality he could give to his speech; Gautier speaks of the italiciz-

ing Baudelaire indulged in when reciting poetry; Nadar describes his jerky gait"

(1968, 163). The causal trigger linking Baudelaire's shock experience to his phys-

iognomy is, like the automatic reaction of the pedestrian or machine-worker, irre-

ducibly physiological. Correlative with the corporeality of his self-portrait, Baude-

laire understands creative activity not as a process of reflectively drawing forth

images from a mental storehouse but, on the contrary, as a physical struggle for

images-a struggle he has brought to life with the figure of the fencer (in his poem

"Le Soleil"). In Baudelaire's self-depiction as fencer, Benjamin discerns a hidden

connection between shock experience and the poetic process: the creative duel shares

a common background with shock experience. Just as the fencer battles the crowd,

parrying its blows, so, too, the poet combats language: Baudelaire struggles with

what Benjamin calls "the phantom crowd of the words, the fragments, the begin-

nings of lines from which the poet, in the deserted streets, wrests the poetic booty"

(165). For Baudelaire, poetic elements (words, poetic lines, images, etc.) possess

302 * Notes to Pages 250-53

more than semiotic significance; they are so shot through with experience (Erlebnis)

that they acquire mimetic content-the "booty" that can only be wrested from them

by the dueling poet. Only by cutting through their semiotic connections-the seam-

less interconnection so central to the symbolist ideology of metaphorical expan-

sion-can the poet encounter their mimetic content as the experience of shock.

23. On this point, see Weber 1996, 100ff.

24. In understanding technological reproducibility as a form of recompense for

the alienation technology brings, I am anticipated by certain of Benjamin's critics. In

her own coupling of mimesis and mechanical reproduction, for example, Buck-

Morss argues that technological reproduction compensates for the effects of techno-

logical production: ". . . technological reproduction gives back to humanity that

capacity for experience which technological production threatens to take away." In

contrast to my emphasis on the tactile dimension of this compensating role played

by film (especially in "On Some Motifs"), Buck-Morss stresses its cognitive dimen-

sion, arguing that whereas the industrialization of production accelerates time and

fragments space, film "shows a healing potential by slowing down time and, through

montage, constructing 'synthetic realities' as new spatio-temporal orders wherein

the 'fragmented images' are brought together 'according to a new law."'" On Buck-

Morss's model, film thus furnishes a "new capacity to study.., reflectively" the shift

to a corporeal form of mimetic experience; Buck-Morss argues that film not only

teaches us how to use the mimetic faculty effectively as a "defense against the trauma

of industrialization" but, more importantly, provides a "means of reconstructing the

capacity for experience that had been shattered by the process" (1989, 268).

25. "Erwiderung an Oscar A. H. Schmitz," in Benjamin 1972-89, II.2, 752. I

owe this reference to Miriam Hansen (1993).

26. It does so, moreover, through its difference from previous forms of techno-

logical reproducibility, specifically from photography.

27. Cf., for example, Rochlitz's evaluation of "On Some Motifs": "Benjamin

attributes the return to barbarism to modern technology and, among other things, to

those techniques of reproduction such as photography and film that he had earlier

celebrated as factors favoring the secularization of the aura and as the means allow-

ing for the satisfaction of the legitimate aspirations of the masses . . . In 'The Work

of Art,' [the] acceleration due to the development of reproduction techniques

appears as a salutary exercise allowing modern humanity to adapt to a dangerous

environment. Benjamin's new evaluation of technology leads him to underscore only

the aspect that is destructive, deadly, to experience in general" (1996, 212). Rochlitz

goes on to read Benjamin's references to ritual in "On Some Motifs" as advocating

a return to the aura. Such a reading misconstrues what Benjamin literally says,

namely, that Baudelaire's contact with a now archaic ritual domain is what allows

him to discern so clearly the shift in the economy of experience (see Benjamin 1968,

181-82). It is also extremely hard to reconcile with the conclusion of Benjamin's

essay: that Baudelaire embraced the "disintegration of the aura in the experience of

shock" (194). Wolin (1994, 225) makes a similar claim in his reading of the essay.

The prevalence of this position among recent critics attests to the enormous influence

of Adorno's criticism of Benjamin (see Bloch et al. 1977, 100-141).

28. Wolin gives an account of this shift: ".. . in 'The Storyteller' (as well as his

Notes to Pages 253-56 * 303

1939 work, 'On Some Motifs in Baudelaire') Benjamin rejects the position of 'The

Work of Art' essay insofar as he comes to realize that the application of technologi-

cal advances to the sphere of art will not necessarily in and of itself result in the

transformation of art along progressive and emancipatory lines" (1994, 225).

29. Several critics view this "new barbarism"-the explicit topic of Benjamin's

"Experience and Poverty" (1933)-as the crux of Benjamin's efforts to grapple with

technology in the 1930s. See Hansen 1993, 40ff.; Bolz 1990, 100ff.; Lindner 1978.

30. Unlike Heidegger, Benjamin views technology as antithetical to the modern

scientific attitude. The communal embrace of the cosmos, itself possible only

through technology, represents a break with modern astronomy's "exclusive empha-

sis on an optical connection to the universe" and more generally with the detached

stance of modern science/instrumental reason (Benjamin 1996, 486). On this point,

see Bolz 1990, 100. For comparisons of Benjamin with Heidegger, see A. Benjamin

1994; Caygill 1994; Weber 1996.

31. Benjamin writes, "because the lust for profit of the ruling class sought satis-

faction through it, technology betrayed man and turned the bridal bed into a blood-

bath" (1996, 487).

32. In his commentary on this passage, Bolz describes this task in similar terms:

"what alone can save us from the frenzy of annihilation [Vernichtungstaumel]

would be a successful cosmic communication through the technical organization of

humanity's collective body [in der technischen Organisation des Menschheitsleibes]"

(1990, 100).

33. This is a passage from the first version of Benjamin's Artwork essay, in which

Benjamin more clearly develops the theme of innervation (Benjamin 1972-89, 1.2,

431-69). The German text on which the standard English translation is based is the

second version of the essay (Benjamin 1972-89, 1.2, 471-508). A corrected form of

this second version appears in Benjamin 1972-89, VII.1, 350-84. See Hansen 1993,

29-30, and the editorial apparatus in Benjamin 1972-89, VII.2, for a discussion of

the various versions of the Artwork essay.

34. Nichols 1988 begins the process of reconsidering Benjamin's contribution

within a digital environment.

35. Focusing on references to Mickey Mouse in Benjamin's work (and especially

in the various versions of the Artwork essay), Hansen develops a utopian dimension

of innervation: ". . . Mickey Mouse does not fully merge with the 'destructive char-

acter,' but retains some of the fairy-tale appeal that Benjamin had noted in 1931

('the motif of one who set out to learn fear'). To people 'tired' of experience, 'fed up'

with 'Kultur' and 'the human being,' the existence of Mickey Mouse is 'a dream that

compensates for the sadness and discouragement of the day' and shows them that

'simple and quite magnificent existence which waking they lack the energy to real-

ize.' . . . Benjamin reads [the bodily metamorphoses of Mickey Mouse] as figures of

innervation, anticipating an emancipatory incorporation of technology.... [T]he

Mickey Mouse films engage technology not as an external force, in a literal or for-

mal rendering of 'mechanization,' but as a 'hidden figure': they hyperbolize the his-

torical imbrication of nature and technology through humor and parody . . . This

aesthetic self-sublation of technology not only condenses the supplementary, home-

opathic relation between the technical media and other technologies; it also

304 * Notes to Pages 257-59

prefigures the utopian potential of technology for reorganizing the relations between

human beings and nature" (1993, 41-42).

36. This physiological function of film was already present in the Artwork essay,

where it was explicitly connected to the technology of the cinematic medium: "By

means of its technical structure [technische Strukture], the film has taken the physi-

cal shock effect out of the wrappers [Emballage] in which Dadaism has, as it were,

kept it inside the moral shock effect" (Benjamin 1968, 238; in the German version,

the entire passage is in italics [1972-89, 1.2, 503]).

37. To legitimate the subordination of the neurological to the social, Hansen

explicitly follows Susan Buck-Morss's recent effort to utilize Benjamin's Freud read-

ing in order to distinguish a proper sense of innervation-"a mimetic reception of

the external world.., that is empowering"-from a purely defensive mimetic capac-

ity, a form of mimesis as "defensive reflex" (Buck-Morss 1992, 17). Yet in doing so,

Hansen also perpetuates the collapse of the two distinct senses of shock that Buck-

Morss's reading operates: to insure the emancipatory potential of innervation, both

Hansen and Buck-Morss put physiological shock into the (exclusive) service of

image-generated, cognitive shock. Since it develops an opposition between good and

bad mimetic modalities that hinges on the deployment of shock, the distinction

Buck-Morss foregrounds relies on a thoroughly homogenous notion of shock: as a

neutral, purely quantitative effect that can be qualified in better and worse ways,

shock possesses no autonomy whatsoever from the social construction of experi-

ence. By enlisting Freud's theory of shock experience as the exemplar of a negative

deployment of shock for purely defensive purposes, moreover, Buck-Morss miscon-

strues the role Freud plays for Benjamin. From her perspective, Benjamin appropri-

ates Freud's theory of shock defense solely in order to describe the (entirely negative)

shift in aesthetic experience witnessed by our modernity: as she understands it, the

Freudian cortical layer forms an organic counterpart to a larger cultural shift from

aesthetics to "anaesthetics," from a robust sensory contact with the world to a gen-

eral numbness and withdrawal from it. Buck-Morss thereby narrows the value of

Freud's insight and of Benjamin's fruitful misreading of it. Rather than forming the

basis for an entirely new mode of experience, the dead cortical layer simply com-

pounds the waning of experience so often lamented by (the nostalgic) Benjamin;

more precisely, it serves as the negative counterpoint to what Buck-Morss conceives

of as Benjamin's positive conception of an empowering mimetic adaptation ("inner-

vation" proper).

38. See, on this point, Hansen's comparison of Mickey Mouse with Haraway's

mythic figure of the cyborg (Hansen 1993, 50-51).

39. This understanding of technology as a "hidden figure" leads Hansen to posit

a representationalist account of the redemptive or curative potential of reproductive

technologies: "the aesthetic self-sublation of technology," as she puts it, "condenses

the supplementary, homeopathic relation between the technical media and other

technologies" (1993, 42). Hansen understands this redemptive function of repro-

ductive technologies as a restoration of our cognitive handle on technology, as a sal-

vation of the "discourse of experience" in the sense of Erfahrung: "The expropria-

tion of the human senses that culminates in Imperialist warfare and fascism can be

countered only on the terrain of technology itself, by means of perceptual technolo-

Notes to Pages 259-61 * 305

gies that allow for a figurative, mimetic engagement with technology at large, as a

productive force and social reality. In other words, the technical media would have

to set into play their metonymic relationship with other technologies, so as to func-

tion as a supplement or pharmakon to the latter, to provide a discourse of experience

that would allow for a collective adaptation of and to technology" (38; emphasis

added).

40. Correlative to her reduction of the physiological dimension of shock, Buck-

Morss likewise retains a distinct investment in the cognitive dimension of experience

and the restoration of its proper sense as Erfahrung. To interpret the redemptive,

empowering dimension of mimesis as something categorically distinct from its

merely adaptive dimension, Buck-Morss must accord to the former a qualitative and

representational cognitive dimension (a content) that is lacking in the latter: Buck-

Morss argues that if mere adaptation "destroys the human organism's power to

respond politically," it does so because it substitutes a blocking out of reality for "a

cognitive mode of being 'in touch' with it" (1992, 18). As we discovered earlier,

however, Benjamin's strong misreading expunges precisely such a binarism from

Freud's text: his Bergsonist refunctionalization of the cortical layer as an emergent

experiential faculty shows us that we do not need a cognitive-representational medi-

ation to establish and maintain contact with material reality-that, in other words,

perception without psychic content (in the Freudian sense) opens an entirely new

and empowering arena for experience. By thus uncovering a qualitative dimension to

sensory perception that is neither cognitively mediated nor representational and that

is not merely defensive, Benjamin's refunctionalization of Freud establishes the

mimetic capability facilitating our adaptation to the "conditions of modern shock"

that, as Buck-Morss herself suggests, have made "response to stimuli without think-

ing . . . necessary for survival" (16).

41. For a reading of surrealist practice as a restoration of Erfahrung, see Cohen

1993, 186-95.

42. Samuel Weber reads this restorative drive as the crux of the fascist use of film

to offer the masses an integral form of self-expression. See Weber 1996, 102ff. By

transforming aura into an intrinsic function of presentation as such, Weber, as it

were, builds into Benjamin's theory a protection against fascism's fantasy of

unification. ".. . the 'decline' or 'fall'-der Verfall-of the aura would not be some-

thing that simply befalls it, as it were, from without. The aura would from the start

be marked by an irreducible element of taking-leave, of departure, of separation.

Were this to be the case, however, then the narrative, sequential, 'historical' aspect

of the aura, expressed in a movement of decline and fall, might well turn out to be

part and parcel of its mode of being. So understood, aura would name the unde-

pictable de-piction of distancing and separation" (86-87). By attributing the shift in

the artwork's relation to its environment exclusively to the work itself (and to the

system of presentation it instantiates), such an interpretation trivializes the opening

to environment and to technological materiality that comprises such an important

aspect of Benjamin's theory of experience.

43. For an interesting updating of Benjamin's Artwork essay along somewhat

different lines, see Nichols 1988.

44. Bolz 1990, 87. In a similar vein, Haverkamp aligns the dialectical image with

306 * Notes to Page 262

the text: "Dialectical images become readable at a critical moment; legibility is their

dialectical qualification at that moment. For only insofar and inasmuch as the image

is read ('gelesenes Bild'), the dialectic renders what is read as an 'image' in the strong

sense ('echtes Bild'). 'Legibility' is what cuts it off from mere imagerie and mere

imagination and turns it, dialectically, from what it contains, fossil-like, into the

schema of what this fossil, flash-like, reveals. What it shows . . . is textual evidence

of a complicated sort. The dialectical image is a text and depends in all its 'dialecti-

cal' as well as 'schematic' qualifications on the readability of texts, even if those texts

eventually come as pictures" (1992, 74; emphasis added). For a different reading of

the dialectical image that stresses the role of fascination, see Abbas 1989. Cadava

expands the textual function of the image to the domain of the photographic as such

when he interprets the photographic image as the very condition of possibility for

the appearance of the event: "Rather than reproducing, faithfully and perfectly, the

photographed as such, the photographic image conjures up its death. . . . Read

against the grain of a certain faith in the mimetic capacity of photography, the pho-

tographic event reproduces, according to its own faithful and rigorous deathbring-

ing manner, the posthumous character of our lived experience" (1997, 7-8).

45. As Hansen notes (following Laplanche and Pontalis), the term innervation is

a psychoanalytic one designating a "'physiological process: the transmission, gener-

ally in an efferent direction, of energy along a nerve-pathway,' possibly produced by

the 'conversion of psychical into nervous energy"'" (1993, 57 n. 24, citing Laplanche

and Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis [1973]). Reformulated by Benjamin,

the term innervation describes the conversion of an image content or an image series

into a physiological effect. As Hansen puts it, Benjamin "must have found [the term

innervation] useful for conceptualizing historical transformation as a process of con-

verting images into somatic and collective reality" (loc. cit.).

46. These are the terms with which Benjamin describes man's encounter with

technology in World War I (See "Erfahrung und Armut," in Benjamin 1972-89,

II.1:215-18).

47. The citation is from Hansen 1993. Working with the opposition between a

content-laden, cognitive form of innervation and a purely physiological one, Hansen

can only understand such a shift in the economy of experience as capitulation to

sheer behaviorism. Reading Benjamin's work of the 1930s (including "On Some

Motifs") as an attempt "to keep both irrevocable disintegration and the need for a

refiguration of experience in view," Hansen allies the abandonment of Erfahrung

with a capitulation to fascism: ".. . fascism had brought home the vulnerability of a

collective lacking a discourse on technological modernization, lacking a public hori-

zon that would enable human beings to recognize and negotiate the effects of his-

torical fragmentation, rupture and loss, of collective yet privatized self-alienation.

Without the self-reflective, anamnestic, and figurative dimension of experience, Ben-

jamin knew, collective innervation would mean nothing but a behaviorist adaptation

to the present" (41).

Bibliography

Abbas, Ackbar. 1989. "On Fascination: Walter Benjamin's Images." New German

Critique 48 (fall): 43-62.

Abraham, Nicolas. 1979. "The Shell and the Kernel." Trans. N. Rand. Diacritics 19,

no. 1 (spring): 16-28.

Adorno, Theodor. 1984. Aesthetic Theory. Trans. C. Lenhardt. Ed. G. Adorno and

R. Tiedemann. London and New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Aristotle. 1929. Physics. Trans. P. Wicksteed and F. Cornford. Cambridge: Harvard

University Press.

. 1987. Physics. Trans. W. Charlton. In A New Aristotle Reader, ed. J. L.

Ackrill. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Armstrong, Aurelia. 1997. "Some Reflections on Deleuze's Spinoza: Composition

and Agency." In Pearson.

Avtonomova, N., et al. 1991. Lacan avec les Philosophes. Paris: Editions Albin

Michel.

Barthes, Roland. 1972. Mythologies. Trans. A. Lavers. New York: Hill and Wang.

. 1979. "From Work to Text." In Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-

structuralist Criticism, ed. Josue Harari. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Baudrillard, Jean. 1990. Fatal Strategies. Trans. P. Bertchman and W. G. J. Nieslu-

chowski. Ed. J. Fleming. New York: Semiotext[e].

Benedikt, Michael. 1991. Cyberspace: First Steps. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Benjamin, Andrew. 1994. "Time and Task: Benjamin and Heidegger Showing the

Present." In Benjamin and Osborne.

Benjamin, Andrew, and Peter Osborne, eds. 1994. Walter Benjamin's Philosophy:

Destruction and Experience. New York and London: Routledge.

Benjamin, Walter. 1968. Illuminations. Trans. H. Zohn. Ed. H. Arendt. New York:

Schocken Books.

. 1972-89. Gesammelte Schriften. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag.

. 1973. Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism.

Trans. H. Zohn. London: New Left Books.

. 1985. "Centralpark." Trans. L. Spencer with M. Harrington. New German

Critique 34 (winter): 32-58.

. 1986a. "On the Mimetic Faculty." In Reflections.

. 1986b. Reflections. Trans. E. Jephcott. Ed. P. Demetz. New York: Schocken

Books.

308 * Bibliography

. 1996. Selected Writings: Volume 1, 1913-1926. Ed. M. Bullock and M. Jen-

nings. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, Belknap Press.

Bergson, Henri. 1991. Matter and Memory. Trans. N. M. Paul and W. S. Palmer.

New York: Zone Books.

Best, Steven, and Douglas Kellner. 1991. Postmodern Theory: Critical Interroga-

tions. New York: Guilford Press.

Bloch, Ernst, et al. 1977. Aesthetics and Politics. London and New York: Verso

Books.

Bloom, Harold. 1973. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. London,

Oxford, and New York: Oxford University Press.

. 1975. A Map of Misreading. Oxford and New York: Oxford University

Press.

Bogue, Ronald. 1990. Deleuze and Guattari. London and New York: Routledge.

Bolter, J. David. 1984. Turning's Man: Western Culture in the Computer Age.

Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Bolz, Norbert. 1990. Theorie der Neuen Medien. Munich: Raben Verlag.

Borch-Jacobsen, Mikkel. 1991. Lacan: The Absolute Master. Trans. D. Brick. Stan-

ford: Stanford University Press.

Borgman, Albert. 1992. Crossing the Postmodern Divide. Chicago: University of

Chicago Press.

Boundas, Constantin V. 1994. "Deleuze: Serialization and Subject-Formation." In

Boundas and Olkowski.

. 1996. "Deleuze-Bergson: An Ontology of the Virtual." In Patton.

Boundas, Constantin V., and Dorothea Olkowski, eds. 1994. Gilles Deleuze and the

Theater of Philosophy. London and New York: Routledge.

Bourdieu, Pierre. 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Trans. R. Nice. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press.

. 1990. The Logic of Practice. Trans. R. Nice. Stanford: Stanford University

Press.

Bowie, Malcolm. 1991. Lacan. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Bracher, Mark, and Ellie Ragland-Sullivan, eds. 1991. Lacan and the Subject of

Language. New York: Routledge.

Brand, Stuart. 1987. The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT. New York:

Viking.

Brennan, Teresa. 1992. The Interpretation of the Flesh: Freud and Femininity. Lon-

don and New York: Routledge.

. 1993. History after Lacan. London and New York: Routledge.

Buck-Morss, Susan. 1977. The Origin of Negative Dialectics. New York: Free Press.

. 1989. The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project.

Cambridge: MIT Press.

. 1992. "Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin's Artwork Essay

Reconsidered." October 62 (fall): 3-41.

Butler, Judith. 1987. Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century

France. New York: Columbia University Press.

Bibliography * 309

. 1997. Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative. New York and Lon-

don: Routledge.

Butler, Samuel. 1968. Erewhon. New York: Lancer Books.

Cadava, Eduardo. 1997. Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History.

Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Canguilhem, Georges. 1992. "Machine and Organism." In Crary and Kwinter.

Canning, Peter. 1994. "The Crack of Time and the Ideal Game." In Boundas and

Olkowski.

Casey, Edward S., and J. Melvin Woody. 1983. "Hegel, Heidegger, Lacan: The

Dialectic of Desire." In Kerrigan and Smith.

Caygill, Howard. 1994. "Benjamin, Heidegger, and the Destruction of Tradition."

In Benjamin and Osborne.

Clarke, Bruce. 1991. "Resistance in Theory and the Physics of the Text." New

Orleans Review 18, no. 1 (spring): 86-93.

Cohen, Margaret. 1993. Profane Illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of

Surreal Revolution. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Connerton, Paul. 1989. How Societies Remember. Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-

sity Press.

Copjec, Joan. 1992. "Cutting Up." In Between Feminism and Psychoanalysis, ed.

T. Brennan. London and New York: Routledge.

. 1994. "The Sartorial Superego." In Lacan and the Historians. Cambridge:

MIT Press.

Cosmides, Leda, and John Tooby. 1992. "The Psychological Foundations of Cul-

ture." In The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of

Culture, ed. Jerome Barkow et al. New York and Oxford: Oxford University

Press.

Crary, Jonathan, and Sanford Kwinter, eds. 1992. Incorporations. New York: Zone

Books.

Cultural Critique. 1995. Vols. 30-31 (spring and fall). Special double issue on the

politics of systems and environments.

Damasio, Antonio. 1995. Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain.

New York: Avon Hearst.

DeLanda, Manuel. 1991. War in the Age of Intelligent Machines. New York: Zone

Books.

. 1992. "Nonorganic Life." In Crary and Kwinter.

Deleuze, Gilles. 1983. Nietzsche and Philosophy. Trans. H. Tomlinson. New York:

Columbia University Press.

. 1984. Kant's Practical Philosophy: The Doctrine of the Faculties. Trans.

H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

. 1986. Cinema 1: The Movement Image. Trans. H. Tomlinson and B. Hab-

berjam. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

. 1987. Dialogues with Claire Parnet. Trans. H. Tomlinson and B. Habber-

jam. London: Athlone Press.

310 * Bibliography

. 1988a. Bergsonism. Trans. H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam. New York:

Zone Books.

. 1988b. Foucault. Trans. S. Hand. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota

Press.

. 1990a. Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza. Trans. M. Joughin. New

York: Zone Books.

. 1990b. The Logic of Sense. Trans. M. Lester with C. Stivale. New York:

Columbia University Press.

. 1991a. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Trans. H. Tomlinson and R. Galeta.

Minneapolis: University of Minnesota.

. 1991b. Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Hume's Theory of

Human Nature. Trans. C. V. Boundas. New York: Columbia University Press.

. 1992. "Ethology: Spinoza and Us." In Crary and Kwinter.

. 1995. Negotiations 1972-1990. Trans. M. Joughin. New York: Columbia

University Press.

. 1997. "Desire and Pleasure." Trans. D. W. Smith. In Foucault and His

Interlocutors, ed. A. I. Davidson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. 1983. The Anti-Oedipus. Trans. R. Hurley,

M. Seem, and H. R. Lane. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus. Trans. B. Massumi. Minneapolis: University of

Minnesota Press.

. 1994. What Is Philosophy? Trans. G. Burchill and H. Tomlinson. New

York: Columbia University Press.

de Man, Paul. 1979. Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau,

Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust. New Haven: Yale University Press.

. 1982. "Sign and Symbol in Hegel's Aesthetics." Critical Inquiry 8, no. 4

(summer): 761-75.

. 1986. "The Resistance to Theory." In The Resistance to Theory. Min-

neapolis: University of Minnesota.

Derrida, Jacques. 1972. Speech and Phenomenon. Trans. D. Allison. Evanston, IL:

Northwestern University Press.

. 1974. Of Grammatology. Trans. G. C. Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins

University Press.

. 1978. Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of

Chicago Press.

. 1981. Positions. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

. 1982. Margins of Philosophy. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of

Chicago Press.

. 1983. "Living On." In Deconstruction and Criticism. Baltimore: Johns

Hopkins University.

. 1986. Memoires for Paul de Man. Trans. C. Lindsay, J. Culler, and

E. Cadava. New York: Columbia University Press.

. 1987a. "La Main de Heidegger (Geschlecht II)." In Psyche: Inventions de

l'Autre. Paris: Galilee.

Bibliography * 311

. 1987b. The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond. Trans. A. Bass.

Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

. 1990. Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question. Trans. G. Bennington and

R. Bowlby. New York: Columbia University Press

. 1992. Given Time. I, Counterfeit Money. Trans. P. Kamuf. Chicago: Uni-

versity of Chicago Press.

. 1994. Specters of Marx: The State of Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the

New International. Trans. P. Kamuf. London and New York: Routledge.

. 1995. The Gift of Death. Trans. D. Wills. Chicago: University of Chicago

Press.

. 1996. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Trans. E. Prenowitz. Chicago:

University of Chicago Press.

Descartes, Rene. 1988. Descartes: Selected Philosophical Writings. Trans. J. Cot-

tingham, R. Stoothoff, and D. Murdoch. Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press.

Descombes, Vincent. 1993. The Barometer of Modern Reason. Trans. S. Schwartz.

Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.

Dews, Peter. 1987. Logics of Disintegration: Post-Structuralist Thought and the

Claims of Critical Theory. London and New York: Verso Books.

Dienst, Richard. 1994. Still Life in Real Time: Theory after Television. Durham,

NC: Duke University Press.

Dilthey, Wilhelm. 1970. Das Erlebnis und die Dichtung. Gottingen: Vandenhoeck

and Ruprecht.

Donato, Eugenio. 1990. "Nietzsche/Heidegger/Derrida." In The Textual Sublime,

ed. G. E. Aylesworth and H. J. Silverman. Buffalo: State University of New York

Press.

Dor, Joel. 1996. "The Epistemological Status of Lacan's Mathematical Paradigms."

In Disseminating Lacan, ed. D. Pettigrew and F. Raffoul. Albany: State Univer-

sity of New York Press.

Douglass, Paul. 1992a. "Deleuze and the Endurance of Bergson." Thought 67, no.

264 (March): 47-61.

. 1992b. "Deleuze's Bergson: Bergson Redux." In The Crisis in Modernism:

Bergson and the Vitalist Controversy, ed. F. Burwick and P. Douglass. Cam-

bridge: Cambridge University Press.

Dreyfus, Hubert, and Charles Spinoza. 1997. "Highway Bridges and Feasts: Hei-

degger and Borgmann on How to Affirm Technology." Man and World 1:1-20.

Ducrot, Oswald, and Tzvetan Todorov. 1979. Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Sci-

ences of Language. Trans. C. Porter. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Eagleton, Terry. 1974. Criticism and Ideology: A Study in Marxist Literary Theory.

London: New Left Books.

. 1981. Walter Benjamin, or Towards a Revolutionary Criticism. London

and New York: Verso Books.

. 1988. "Capitalism, Modernism, and Postmodernism." In Modern Criticism

and Theory, ed. David Lodge. London: Longman Group.

312 * Bibliography

Elmer, Jonathan. 1995. "Blinded Me with Science: Motifs of Observation and Tem-

porality in Lacan and Luhmann." Cultural Critique 30 (spring): 101-36.

Feenberg, Andrew. 1991. Critical Theory of Technology. New York: Oxford Uni-

versity Press.

Feldstein, Richard, Bruce Fink, and Maire Jaanus, eds. 1995. Reading Seminar XI:

Lacan's Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Albany: State University

of New York Press.

Feldstein, Richard, Bruce Fink, and Maire Jaanus, eds. 1996. Reading Seminars I

and II: Lacan's Return to Freud. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Foucault, Michel. 1979. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans.

A. Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books.

Frank, Manfred. 1983. "The World as Will and Representation: Deleuze's and

Guattari's Critique of Capitalism as Schizoanalysis and Schizo-Discourse." Telos

57 (fall): 166-76.

Freud, Sigmund. 1921. Psychoanalysis and the War Neuroses. London and New

York.

. 1949. Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. Trans. J. Strachey. London

and New York.

. 1954. "Project for a Scientific Psychology." In The Origins of Psychoanaly-

sis. Trans. E. Mosbacher and J. Strachey. New York: Basic Books.

. 1961. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Trans. J. Strachey. New York: Norton

Books.

. 1963. "Note upon the 'Mystic Writing-Pad."'" Trans. J. Strachey. Ed.

P. Rieff. In General Psychological Theory. New York: Collier Books.

Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 1989. Truth and Method. 2d ed. Trans. G. Barden and

J. Cumming. New York: Continuum.

Gallop, Jane. 1985. Reading Lacan. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Gatens, Moira. 1996. "Through a Spinozist Lens: Ethology, Difference, Power." In

Patton.

Genosko, Gary. 1998. "Guattari's Schizoanalytic Semiotics: Mixing Hjelmslev and

Peirce." In Deleuze and Guattari: New Mappings in Politics, Philosophy and

Culture, ed. E. Kaufman and K. J. Heller. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota

Press.

Godzich, Wlad. 1994. "Language, Images, and the Postmodern Predicament." In

Gumbrecht and Pfeiffer.

Goux, Jean-Joseph. 1990. Symbolic Economies: After Marx and Freud. Trans. J. C.

Gage. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Greenblatt, Stephen. 1989. "Towards a Poetics of Culture." In The New Histori-

cism, ed. H. Aram Veeser. London and New York: Routledge.

Greimas, Algirdas Julien. 1987. On Meaning: Selected Writing in Semiotic Theory.

Trans. P. Perron and F. Collins. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Grisham, Therese. 1991. "Linguistics as an Indiscipline: Deleuze and Guattari's

Pragmatics." Substance 66 (summer): 36-54.

Bibliography * 313

Grossberg, Lawrence, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler. 1992. Cultural Studies.

New York and London: Routledge.

Guattari, Felix. 1984. Molecular Revolution: Psychiatry and Politics. Trans.

R. Sheed. New York: Penguin.

. 1993. "Machinic Heterogenesis." In Rethinking Technologies, ed. Verena

Andermatt Conley. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich. 1994. "A Farewell to Interpretation." In Gumbrecht and

Pfeiffer.

. 1996. "Form without Matter vs. Form as Event." Modern Language Notes

111, no. 3 (April): 578-92.

Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich, and K. Ludwig Pfeiffer, eds. 1994. Materialities of Com-

munication. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Habermas, Jiurgen. 1988. "Walter Benjamin: Consciousness-Raising or Rescuing

Critique." In On Walter Benjamin: Critical Essays and Recollections, ed.

G. Smith. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Hansen, Mark. 1997. "'Not thus, after all, would life be given': Technesis, Tech-

nology, and the Parody of Romantic Poetics in Frankenstein." Studies in Roman-

ticism 36, no. 4 (winter): 575-609.

Hansen, Miriam. 1987. "Benjamin, Cinema, and Experience: 'The Blue Flower in

the Land of Technology."'" New German Critique 40 (winter): 179-224

. 1993. "Of Mice and Ducks: Benjamin and Adorno on Disney." South

Atlantic Quarterly 92, no. 1 (winter): 27-61.

Haraway, Donna. 1991a. "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-

Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century." In Simians, Cyborgs, and Women:

The Reinvention of Nature. London and New York: Routledge.

. 1991b. "Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the

Privilege of Partial Perspective." In Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinven-

tion of Nature. London and New York: Routledge.

. 1992. "The Promises of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics for Inappropri-

ate/d Others." In Grossberg, Nelson, and Treichler.

Hardt, Michael. 1993. Gilles Deleuze: An Apprenticeship in Philosophy. Min-

neapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Harmon, William, and C. Hugh Holman. 1996. A Handbook to Literature. 7th ed.

Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

Harris, Marvin. 1979. Cultural Materialism: The Struggle for a Science of Culture.

New York: Random House.

. 1983. Cultural Anthropology. New York: Harper and Row.

Harvey, David. 1990. The Condition of Postmodernity. London and New York:

Basil Blackwell.

Harvey, Irene. 1991. "The Difference between de Man and Derrida." In The Textual

Sublime, ed. G. E. Aylesworth and H. J. Silverman. Buffalo: State University of

New York Press.

Haverkamp, Anselm. 1992. "Notes on the 'Dialectical Image' (How Deconstructive

Is It?)." Diacritics 22, nos. 3-4 (fall and winter): 70-80.

314 * Bibliography

Hayles, N. Katherine. 1984. The Cosmic Web: Scientific Field Model and Literary

Strategies in the Twentieth Century. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press.

. 1990. Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Sci-

ence. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

. 1991b. "Constrained Constructivism: Locating Scientific Inquiry in the The-

ater of Representation." New Orleans Review 18, no. 1 (spring): 76-85.

. 1992. "The Materiality of Informatics." Configurations 1:147-70.

. 1993. "Virtual Bodies and Flickering Signifiers." October 66 (fall): 69-91.

. 1995. "Making the Cut: The Interplay of Narrative and System, or What

Systems Theory Can't See." Cultural Critique 30 (spring): 71-100.

. 1996a. "Boundary Disputes: Homeostasis, Reflexivity, and the Foundations

of Cybernetics." In Markley.

. 1996b. "Narratives of Artificial Life." In Robertson et al.

. 1999. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetic Litera-

ture, and Informatics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

, ed. 1991a. Chaos and Order: Complex Dynamics in Literature and Science.

Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.

Hayles, N. Katherine, and Niklas Luhmann. 1995. "Theory of a Different Order: A

Conversation with Katherine Hayles and Niklas Luhmann." Cultural Critique 31

(fall): 7-36.

Heidegger, Martin. 1954. Vortrdige und Aufsitze. Pfullingen: Neske.

. 1957. Hebel-der Hausfreund. Pfullingen: Neske.

. 1962. Being and Time. Trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson. New York:

Harper and Row.

. 1966. "'Nur noch ein Gott kann uns retten': Spiegel-Gespraech mit Martin

Heidegger am 23 September, 1966." Der Spiegel 30, no. 23 (May 31): 193-219.

. 1969. "Das Ende der Philosophie und die Aufgabe des Denkens." In Zur

Sache des Denkens. Tiibingen: Max Niemeyer.

. 1976. "Only a God Can Save Us: Der Spiegel's Interview with Martin Hei-

degger." Philosophy Today 20 (winter): 267-84.

. 1977a. Basic Writings: From Being and Time (1927) to The Task of Think-

ing (1964). Ed. D. F. Krell. New York: Harper and Row.

. 1977b. "The Question Concerning Technology." In The Question Con-

cerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. W. Lovitt. New York: Harper and

Row.

. 1977c. "The Age of the World Picture. In The Question Concerning Tech-

nology.

. 1981. Gesamtausgabe 29/30. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann.

. 1986. Sein und Zeit. Tiibingen: Max Niemeyer.

Hjelmslev, Louis. 1969. Prolegomena to a Theory of Language. Trans. F. J.

Whitfield. Madison, Milwaukee, and London: University of Wisconsin Press.

Holland, Eugene. 1988. "Schizoanalysis: The Postmodern Contextualization of Psy-

choanalysis." In Nelson and Grossberg.

Bibliography * 315

. 1991. "Deterritorializing 'Deterritorialization': From the Anti-Oedipus to A

Thousand Plateaus." Substance 66 (summer): 55-65.

Husserl, Edmund. 1962. Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology.

Trans. W. R. B. Gibson. New York: Collier Books.

. 1970. Logical Investigations. Trans. J. N. Findlay. London: Routledge and

Kegan Paul.

. 1977. Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Philosophy. Trans.

D. Cairns. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.

Huyssen, Andreas. 1986. After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Post-

modernism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Ihde, Don. 1979. Technics and Praxis: A Philosophy of Technology. Dordrecht:

D. Reidel Publishing Company.

. 1991. Instrumental Realism: The Interface between Philosophy of Science

and Philosophy of Technology. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana Univer-

sity Press.

Jameson, Frederic. 1981. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Sym-

bolic Act. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press.

. 1991. "The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism." In Postmodernism, or, the

Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Jardine, Alice. 1985. Gynesis: Configurations of Woman and Modernity. Ithaca and

London: Cornell University Press.

Jennings, Michael. 1987. Dialectical Images: Walter Benjamin's Theory of Literary

Criticism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Johnson, Mark. 1989. The Body in the Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Kant, Immanuel. 1965. The Critique of Pure Reason. Trans. N. Kemp Smith. New

York: St. Martin's Press.

Kendrick, Michelle. 1996. "Cyberspace and the Technological Real." In Markley.

Kerrigan, William, and Joseph H. Smith, eds. 1983. Interpreting Lacan. London and

New Haven: Yale University Press.

Kittler, Friedrich. 1986. Grammophon, Film, Typewriter. Berlin: Brinkmann und

Bose.

. 1987. "Gramophone, Film, Typewriter." October 41 (summer): 100-18.

. 1992. "There Is No Software." Stanford Literature Review 9, no. 1 (spring):

81-90.

. 1993. "Signal-Rausch-Abstand." In Draculas Vermdichtnis: Technische

Schriften. Leipzig: Reclam Verlag.

. With Matthew B. Griffin and S. M. Herman. 1995. "Technologies of Writ-

ing/Rewriting Technology: An Interview with Friedrich A. Kittler about Cultural

Studies in Germany, Literature in the Age of Technology, and the Blind Spot in

Media Theory." <wwwl.cc.emory.edu/ALTJNL/Articles/kittler/kitl.htm>.

Kojeve, Alexandre. 1969. Introduction to the Reading of Hegel. Trans. J. H.

Nichols, Jr. New York: Basic Books.

Kuhn, Thomas. 1962. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University

of Chicago Press.

316 * Bibliography

Lacan, Jacques. 1966. Ecrits. Paris: Editions du Seuil.

. 1977a. "Aggressivity in Psychoanalysis." In Ecrits: A Selection, trans. A.

Sheridan. London and New York: Norton Books.

. 1977b. "The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanaly-

sis." In Ecrits: A Selection, trans. A. Sheridan. London and New York: Norton

Books.

. 1977c. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Trans. A. Sheri-

dan. London and New York: Norton Books.

. 1989a. "Responses to Students of Philosophy concerning the Object of Psy-

choanalysis, February 19, 1966." October 57: 107-14.

. 1989b. "Science and Truth." Newsletter of the Freudian Field 3, nos. 1-2

(spring and fall): 4-29.

. 1989c. "Television." October 57: 3-46.

. 1991. The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis,

1954-1955. London and New York: Norton Books.

Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe. 1989. Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics. Ed.

Christopher Fynsk. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press.

. 1990. Heidegger, Art, Politics: The Fiction of the Political. Trans. Chris

Turner. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, and Jean-Luc Nancy. 1990. Le Titre de la Lettre: Une

Lecture de Lacan. Paris: Galilee.

Lakoff, George. 1983. Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things. Chicago: University of

Chicago Press.

La Mettrie, Julien de. 1912. Man a Machine. Trans. G. C. Bussey. Chicago: Open

Court.

Laplanche, Jean. 1976. Life and Death in Psychoanalysis. Trans. J. Mehlman. Balti-

more: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Latour, Bruno. 1987. Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers

through Society. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

. 1988a. The Pasteurization of France. Trans. A. Sheridan and J. Law. Cam-

bridge: Harvard University Press.

. 1988b. "A Relativist Account of Einstein's Relativity." Social Studies of Sci-

ence 18:3-44.

. 1992. "Where Are the Missing Masses? The Sociology of a Few Mundane

Artifacts." In Shaping Technology/Building Society: Studies in Sociotechnical

Change, ed. Wiebe Bijker and John Law. Cambridge and London: MIT Press.

. 1993a. "Pasteur on Lactic Acid Yeast: A Partial Semiotic Analysis."

Configurations 1:129-45.

. 1993b. We Have Never Been Modern. Trans. C. Porter. Cambridge: Har-

vard University Press.

. 1996. Aramis, or the Love of Technology. Trans. C. Porter. Cambridge:

Harvard University Press.

Latour, Bruno, and Steve Woolgar. 1986. Laboratory Life: The Construction of Sci-

entific Facts. 2d ed. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Bibliography * 317

Lecercle, Jean-Jacques. 1985. Philosophy through the Looking-Glass: Language,

Nonsense, Desire. La Salle, IL: Open Court.

Lemonnier, Pierre. 1992. Elements for an Anthropology of Technology. Ann Arbor:

University of Michigan.

Lenoir, Timothy. 1994. "Was the Last Turn the Right Turn? The Semiotic Turn and

A. J. Greimas." Configurations 1:119-36.

Leupin, Alexandre, ed. 1991. Lacan and the Human Sciences. Lincoln and London:

University of Nebraska Press.

Levinas, Emmanuel. 1971. Totalite et Infinie. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.

Lindner, Burkhardt. 1978. "Technische Reproduzierbarkeit und Kulturindustrie:

'Positives Barbarentum im Kontext."'" In "Links hatte noch alles sich zu entrdit-

seln . . .": Walter Benjamin im Kontext. Frankfurt am Main: Syndikat Verlag.

Lowy, Michael. 1983. "Walter Benjamin critique du progres: A la recherche de l'ex-

perience perdue." In Walter Benjamin et Paris, ed Heinz Wismann. Paris: Les

Editions du Cerf.

Luhmann, Niklas. 1992. "The Form of Writing." Stanford Literature Review 9, no.

1 (spring): 25-42.

. 1994. "How Can the Mind Participate in Communication?" In Gumbrecht

and Pfeiffer.

. 1995. Social Systems. Trans. J. Bednarz, Jr. with D. Baecker. Stanford: Stan-

ford University Press.

Lukacs, Georg. 1971. History and Class Consciousness. Trans. R. Livingstone.

Cambridge: MIT Press.

Lyotard, Jean-Francois. 1971. Discours, Figur. Paris: Editions Klincksieck.

. 1979. The Postmodern Condition. Trans. B. Massumi. Minneapolis: Uni-

versity of Minnesota Press.

. 1991. The Inhuman: Reflections on Time. Trans. G. Bennington and

R. Bowlby. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

MacCannell, Juliet. 1986. Figuring Lacan: Criticism and the Cultural Unconscious.

London: Croom Helm.

Macherey, Pierre. 1996. "The Encounter with Spinoza." In Patton.

Markley, Robert, ed. 1996. Virtual Realities and Their Discontents. Baltimore:

Johns Hopkins University Press.

Marx, Karl. 1906. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Trans. S. Moore and

E. Aveling. New York: Modern Library.

. 1953. Grundrisse der Kritik der Politischen Okonomie. Berlin: Dietz

Verlag.

. 1971. The Grundrisse. Ed. and trans. D. McLellan. New York: Harper and

Row

Massumi, Brian. 1992. A User's Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations

from Deleuze and Guattari. Cambridge: MIT Press.

. 1995. "The Autonomy of Affect." Cultural Critique 31 (fall): 83-109.

Mayr, Otto. 1986. Authority, Liberty, and Automatic Machinery in Early Modern

Europe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

318 * Bibliography

McCole, John. 1993. Walter Benjamin and the Antinomies of Tradition. Ithaca:

Cornell University Press.

Miller, Jacques-Alain. 1989. "To Interpret the Cause: From Freud to Lacan."

Newsletter of the Freudian Field 3, nos. 1-2 (spring and fall): 30-50.

Milner, Jean-Claude. 1991. "Lacan and the Ideal of Science." In Leupin.

Mirowski, Phillip. 1992. More Heat than Light: Economics as Social Physics,

Physics as Nature's Economics. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge Univer-

sity Press.

Nigele, Rainer. 1991. Theater, Theory, Speculation: Walter Benjamin and the

Scenes of Modernity. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

. 1996. "The Poetic Ground Laid Bare (Benjamin Reading Baudelaire)." In

Walter Benjamin: Theoretical Questions, ed. David Ferris. Stanford: Stanford

University Press.

Nancy, J-L. 1988. L'Experience de la Liberte. Paris: Galilee.

Nelson, Cary, and Lawrence Grossberg. 1988. Marxism and the Interpretation of

Culture. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press.

Nichols, Bill. 1988. "The Work of Culture in the Age of Cybernetic Systems." Screen

29, no. 1 (winter): 22-46.

Norris, Christopher. 1991. Spinoza and the Origins of Modern Critical Theory.

Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Patton, Paul. 1984. "Conceptual Politics and the War-Machine in Mille Plateaux."

Substance 44-45 (spring and summer): 61-80.

. 1988. "Marxism and Beyond: Strategies of Reterritorialization." In Nelson

and Grossberg.

. 1994. "Metamorpho-Logic: Bodies and Powers in A Thousand Plateaus."

Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 25, no. 2 (May): 157-69.

, ed. 1996. Deleuze: A Critical Reader. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Paulson, William. 1988. The Noise of Culture: Literary Texts in a World of Infor-

mation. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

. 1991. "Literature, Complexity, Interdisciplinarity." In Hayles 1991a.

Pavel, Thomas. 1989. The Feud of Language: A History of Structuralist Thought.

Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell.

Pearson, Keith Ansell, ed. 1997. Deleuze and Philosophy: The Difference Engineer.

London and New York: Routledge.

Penley, Constance. 1991. "Brownian Motion: Women, Tactics, and Technology."

In Penley and Ross 1991, 135-62.

Penley, Constance, and Andrew Ross. 1991. Technoculture. Minneapolis: Univer-

sity of Minnesota Press.

Peterfreund, Stuart. 1994. "Blake and the Ideology of the Natural." Eighteenth-Cen-

tury Life 18 (February): 92-119.

Pickering, Andrew, ed. 1992. Science as Practice and Culture. Chicago: University of

Chicago Press.

Plant, Sadie. 1993. "Nomads and Revolutionaries." Journal of the British Society

for Phenomenology 24, no. 1 (January): 88-101.

Bibliography * 319

Popper, Sir Karl. 1959. The Logic of Scientific Discovery. New York: Basic Books.

Porush, David. 1985. The Soft Machine. London and New York: Metheun.

. 1993. "Making Chaos: Two Views of a New Science." In The Literature of

Science: Perspectives on Popular Science Writing, ed. M. W. McRae. Athens and

London: University of Georgia Press.

Poster, Mark. 1990. The Mode of Information: Poststructuralism and Social

Change. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Ragland-Sullivan, Ellie. 1986. Jacques Lacan and the Philosophy of Psychoanalysis.

Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Rasch, William. 1995. "Immanent Systems, Transcendental Temptations, and the

Limits of Ethics." Cultural Critique 30 (spring): 193-222.

Rasch, William, and Cary Wolfe. 1995. "Introduction: The Politics of Systems and

Environments." Cultural Critique 30 (spring): 5-14.

Regnault, Francois. 1991. "Lacan and Experience." In Leupin.

Renza, Louis. 1995. "Influence." In Critical Terms for Literary Study, ed. Frank

Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin. 2d. ed. Chicago: University of Chicago

Press.

Richardson, William J. 1983a. "Lacan and the Subject of Psychoanalysis." In Kerri-

gan and Smith.

. 1983b. "Psychoanalysis and the Being Question." In Kerrigan and Smith.

Robertson, George, et al. 1996. FutureNatural: Nature, Science, Culture. London

and New York: Routledge.

Rochlitz, Rainer. 1996. The Disenchantment of Art: The Philosophy of Walter Ben-

jamin. Trans. J. M. Todd. London and New York: Guilford Press.

Rodowick, D. N. 1997. Gilles Deleuze's Time Machine. Durham, NC, and London:

Duke University Press.

Ronell, Avital. 1989. The Telephone Book: Technology-Schizophrenia-Electric

Speech. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press.

. 1992. Crack Wars. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press.

. 1994. Finitude's Score: Essays for the End of the Millennium. Lincoln: Uni-

versity of Nebraska Press.

Rorty, Richard. 1979. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton: Princeton

University Press.

Rosenberg, Martin. 1993. "Dynamic and Thermodynamic Tropes of the Subject in

Freud and in Deleuze and Guattari." Postmodern Culture 4, no. 1 (September).

Ross, Andrew. 1991. Strange Weather: Culture, Science, and Technology in the Age

of Limits. London and New York: Verso Books.

Rotman, Brian. 1988. "Toward a Semiotics of Mathematics." Semiotica 72, nos.

1-2:1-35.

Roustang, Francois. 1990. The Lacanian Delusion. Trans. G. Sims. Oxford: Oxford

University Press.

Schaeffer, Jean-Marie. 1992. L'Art de l'Age Moderne. Paris: Gallimard.

Schleiffer, Ronald, Robert Con Davis, and Nancy Mergler. 1992. Culture and Cog-

320 * Bibliography

nition: The Boundaries of Literary and Scientific Inquiry. Ithaca: Cornell Univer-

sity Press.

Scholem, Gershom. 1981. Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship. Trans.

H. Zohn. New York: Schocken Books.

Schwanitz, Dietrich. 1995. "Systems Theory according to Niklas Luhmann-Its

Environment and Conceptual Strategies." Cultural Critique 30 (spring): 137-70.

Sebastian, Thomas. 1990. "Technology Romanticized: Friedrich Kittler's Discourse

Networks 1800/1900." MLN 105, no. 3 (April): 583-95.

Sellars, Wilfred. 1997. Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind. Cambridge: Har-

vard University Press.

Serres, Michel. 1982a. The Parasite. Trans. L. Schehr. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins

University Press.

. 1982b. "Turner Translates Carnot." In Hermes: Literature, Science, Philos-

ophy, ed. J. V. Harari and D. F. Bell. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Shapin, Steven, and Simon Schaffer. 1985. Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes,

Boyle, and the Experimental Life. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Shusterman, Richard. 1992. Pragmatist Aesthetics: Living Beauty, Rethinking Art.

Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell.

. 1994. "Dewey on Experience: Foundation or Reconstruction?" Philosophi-

cal Forum 26, no. 2 (winter): 127-48.

. 1997a. "The End of Aesthetic Experience." Journal of Aesthetics and Art

Criticism 55, no. 1 (winter): 29-41.

. 1997b. "Somaesthetics and the Body/Media Issue." Body and Society 3

(September): 33-49.

Simpson, David. 1995. The Academic Postmodern and the Rule of Literature: A

Report on Half-Knowledge. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Soper, Kate. 1996. "Nature/'nature'." In Robertson et al.

Stivale, Charles. 1991. "Mille/Punks/Cyber/Plateaus: Science Fiction and Deleuzo-

Guattarian 'Becomings."'" Substance 66 (summer): 66-83.

Stone, Allucquere Rosanne (Sandy). 1991. "Will the Real Body Please Stand Up?:

Boundary Stories About Virtual Cultures." In Benedikt 1991, 81-118.

. 1996. The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical

Age. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Surin, Kenneth. 1991. "The Undecideable and the Fugitive: Mille Plateaux and the

State Form." Substance 66 (summer): 102-13.

Sypher, Wylie. 1968. Literature and Technology: The Alien Vision. New York: Ran-

dom House.

Tabbi, Joseph. 1995. The Postmodern Sublime. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Taussig, Michael. 1992. "Tactility and Distraction." In The Nervous System. Lon-

don and New York: Routledge.

. 1993. Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses. London and

New York: Routledge.

Tenner, Edward. 1996. Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of

Unintended Consequences. New York: Knopf.

Bibliography *321

Ulmer, Gregory. 1985. Applied Grammatology: Post(e)-Pedagogy from Jacques

Derrida to Joseph Beuys. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

. 1989. Teletheory: Grammatology in the Age of Video. London and New

York: Routledge.

Varela, Francisco, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch. 1991. The Embodied Mind:

Cognitive Science and Human Experience. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Warminski, Andrzej. 1987. Readings in Interpretation: Holderlin, Hegel, Heidegger.

Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Weber, Samuel. 1991. Return to Freud: Jacques Lacan's Dislocation of Psycho-

analysis. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.

. 1996. Mass Mediauras: Form, Technics, Media. Stanford: Stanford Univer-

sity Press.

Weiskel, Thomas. 1977. The Romantic Sublime. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univer-

sity Press.

Wellbery, David. 1992. "The Exteriority of Writing." Stanford Literature Review 9,

no. 1 (spring): 11-23.

Wilden, Anthony. 1968. Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis. Baltimore: Johns

Hopkins University Press.

. 1980. System and Structure: Essays in Communication and Exchange. 2d

ed. London: Tavistock.

Winner, Langdon. 1977. Autonomous Technology: Technics-out-of-Control as a

Theme in Political Thought. Cambridge: MIT Press.

. 1986. The Whale and the Reactor. Chicago and London: University of

Chicago Press.

Witte, Bernd. 1991. Walter Benjamin: An Intellectual Biography. Trans. J. Rolle-

ston. Detroit: Wayne State University Press.

Wohlfarth, Irving. 1978. "On the Messianic Structure of Walter Benjamin's Last

Reflections." Glyph 3. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Wolfe, Cary. 1995. "In Search of Post-Humanist Theory: The Second-Order Cyber-

netics of Maturana and Varela." Cultural Critique 30 (spring): 33-70.

. 1998. Critical Environments: Postmodern Theory and the Pragmatics of the

"Outside." Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Wolin, Richard. 1994. Walter Benjamin: An Aesthetic of Redemption. 2d ed. Berke-

ley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

Zimmerman, Michael E. 1990. Heidegger's Confrontation with Modernity: Tech-

nology, Politics, Art. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Zizek, Slavoj. 1989. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London and New York: Verso

Books.

. 1994. Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Woman and Causality. Lon-

don and New York: Verso Books.



Index

Abraham, Nicolas, transphenomenal or

anasemic account of the psyche,

299n. 14

Adequate idea, 206, 207

Adorno, Theodor, 235

Alienation, 64, 215, 233

experiential, 71

technological, in Marx, 218, 219

technological versus Hegelian, 235

Allegory, 135, 137

Alterity, 5, 8, 20, 80

Althusser, Louis, on the real, 17

Anthropological accounts of technolog-

ical autonomy, 271n. 8

Anthropology of the technological age,

67-68

Aristotle, 81, 95-101, 111, 177, 237

on the automatic, 97-101

on chance, 98

on concurrence, 276n. 27

determination of technology, 96

doctrine of causality, 98-101, 113

legacy in modern philosophy, 123

on luck versus the automatic, 97-

101

on mimesis, 95-101

onto-theological horizon opened by,

97

Physics, 95ff.

Physics 2.6, 97

privilege of nature and thought over

the automatic, 126

reduction of technology in, 125

subordination of the automatic, 102

subordination of technology to

techne, 97

two forms of techne, 96

Artificial life versus artificial intelli-

gence, 73

A-signifying semiotics in Deleuze and

Guattari, 189, 190

Asimov, Isaac, 1, 2

Aura, 246

Automatic technology, 204

Automaton, 97-101, 111, 126, 177-78

Autonomous deconstruction, 114

Autonomy

of cosmological chance, 66

of embodied experience, 45, 51, 210

of embodiment, 49

of the material flux, 40

of metallurgy, 200

of the practical sense, 50

of the real, 97

of technical machines, 146, 194

of technological change, 56, 59

of technologically embodied object a,

171

of technological reproduction, 233

of technology, 36, 38, 43, 60-61, 68,

70-71, 80, 103, 108, 110, 114,

120, 147, 171, 182, 186, 225

effaced in Deleuze and Guattari,

196

of the text, 95

Autopoiesis, 212, 226

Barthes, Roland, on naturalization in

myth, 91

Baudelaire, Charles, 236, 246-47, 249,

324 * Index

Becoming, 187-89, 204-11, 213, 218,

245

limitation as model of technological

experience in Deleuze and Guat-

tari, 212

Becoming-other, 217

Becoming-technological, 252, 255

Benedikt, Michael, on cyberspace, 55

Benjamin, Walter, 26, 210, 227,

231-63

account of Freud, 243-45

versus Adorno on technology, 298n.

4

Arcades Project, 236

Artwork Essay ("Art in the Age of

Mechanical Reproduction"),

238, 251, 253, 255, 257-58,

260

on the aura, 246

on the corporeal dimension of Baude-

laire's poetic practice, 301n. 22

on the dead cortical layer, 243,

245

on Dilthey, 238-39

on the eclipse of representation as the

tribunal for experience, 300n. 18

on the economy of experience in the

modern age, 60, 240

on embodiment, 60

on Erinnerung and Gediichtnis,

240-42, 245,298n. 10

on Erlebnis and Erfahrung, 60, 71,

165, 231-32, 236-38, 240, 243,

245, 250

"Experience and Poverty," 262

on film as means to restore man's

mimetic contact with world, 257

on the flaneur, 246, 247

on Freud's understanding of memory,

244

versus Heidegger, on modern science

and technology, 303n. 30

on innervation, 234, 249, 253-59

on innervation as conversion of

image content into physiological

effect, 306n. 45

as keen critic of Freud, 299n. 13

on Lebensphilosophie, 238-39

on man's sensuous contact with cos-

mos, 238

on Mickey Mouse, 258

on the mimetic faculty, 232, 235, 236

mimetic theory of becoming, 247

on the mimetic use of technology, 74,

237

notion of correspondences, 236

One Way Street, 247, 253, 262

on the optical unconscious, 251, 258

"The Paris of the Second Empire in

Baudelaire," 246

on perceptual consciousness, 245

on the physiological dimension of

man's mimetic contact with tech-

nology, 255

on the physiological force of techno-

logical shock stimuli, 258

on physiological mimesis, 259

on "profane illumination," 258

on the psychic neutralization of

Index * 325

on perception, 165

on quality, 165

on "sensible qualities," 166

on the solidification of the real, 168

on the technoscientific modeling of

the color red, 167

Bloom, Harold, 243

The Anxiety of Influence, 91

on Freudian fantasy of primal scene,

91-92

on metalepsis, 91

on the psychological logic of the sub-

lime, 276n. 23

on ratio of apophrodes, 91, 93

Body without organs, 191, 192

Bogue, Ronald, on Guattari's concept

of the machine, 288n. 7

Bolter, J. David, on mechanical versus

dynamical technology, 61-62

Bolz, Norbert, 260-61

on Lacan and Benjamin, 298n. 11

on tactile dimension of film, 261

Borgman, Albert, on modern and post-

modern technologies, 277n. 3

Bourdieu, Pierre, 2, 27, 41, 213, 232

on embodied experience, 50-51

on the "habitus," 50

on logic of practice, 269n. 17

on mimeticism, 190

on practical mimesis, 51

Brennan, Teresa

critique of Lacan's understanding of

psychic energy, 283n. 3

on Freudian bioenergetics, 286n. 22

on the temporal period of stimuli,

282n. 13

on the transindividual status of psy-

chic energy, 282n. 14

Breuer, Joseph, 169

Buck-Morss, Susan, 234-35, 257, 262

on Benjamin's stress on the material

impact of technology, 298n. 4

on cultural shift from aesthetics to

"anaesthetics," 304n. 27

investment in cognitive dimension of

experience, 305n. 40

on linguistic versus postsignifying

mimesis, 301n. 20

on mimetic faculty, 247

on technological reproducibility as

recompense for alienation, 302n.

24

Butler, Samuel, 25

Cadava, Eduardo

on history and photography in Ben-

jamin, 298n. 12

on the textual function of the image,

306n. 44

Canguilhem, Georges

on the conditions of possibility for

the machine metaphor, 273n. 12

on genealogy of machine metaphor,

84

Causality in Deleuze and Guattari, 191

Chaos theory, 78-79, 90, 222

Clock, Lacan on Descartes' model of,

179-80

Clock metaphor, 62, 83, 274n. 13

Closure of representation, 8, 9, 17, 87,

326 * Index

Culturalist epoche, 123

Cultural studies, 5, 71, 77, 102, 122,

224

of technology, 26, 108

Cybernetics, 78, 85

in Derrida, 127

second-order, 79

Cyberpunk fiction, 90

Cyberspace, 7, 16, 53, 55

Damasio, Antonio, 162

Dasein, 104-7, 109, 111-12, 115, 117,

119-21, 164

Death drive, 151-53, 157, 178

as molar figure in Deleuze and Guat-

tari, 28 1n. 8

as molecular desiring-production in

Deleuze and Guattari, 282n. 9

Deconstruction, 9-15, 21

de Manian, 78

difference between Derrida and

de Man, 279n. 17

immanent, of the philosophical

reduction of technology, 29

of the machine reduction of technol-

ogy, 95

of the science-technology correlation,

26

of the subject, 33

De Landa, Manuel, on the shift of exec-

utive function from human to

machine, 295n. 20

Deleuze, Gilles

on ethology, 208

Expressionism in Philosophy: Spin-

oza, 206

on film as spiritual automaton, 289n.

9

on Spinoza's notion of immanent

causality, 191, 192

Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari, 4,

5, 170, 186-223, 226, 237, 245,

252, 256, 260

account of technology, 234

on adequate idea, 206, 207

Anti-Oedipus, 186, 188, 191, 194,

195, 203, 214-15

on a-signifying semiotics, 189, 190

on becoming, 187-89, 204-11

on becoming-imperceptible, 281n. 6

commitment to molecular revolution,

204

critique of Aristotelian causal doc-

trine, 191

critique of Aristotelian finality, 193

on death drive, 157

on death drive as molar figure, 281n.

8

on desiring machines, 65

on desiring versus technical

machines, 194

on deterritorialization and reterritori-

alization, 194

on deterritorialization of the state

assemblage, 189

on the diagram, 201, 202, 215

dissociation of deterritorialization

from desire, 195

on double articulation, 196, 197,

198, 201, 203

Index * 327

on the molecular death drive, 282n. 9

on molecular desiring machines, 193

on molecular perception, 158

on nomadic assemblage, 189

on nomad metallurgy, 200

on nomad science, 196

on nomad versus state science, 197

on ontological parallelism, 207, 211

on ontological revolution, 219

on the practical function of philo-

sophical conceptualization,

291n. 20

primacy of desire in, 186, 213, 218

on the proximity of nomad science to

matter itself, 200

purity of desire in, 221

rejection of technical contamination,

235

role of metalepsis in, 93

on Spinoza's common notion, 206,

208-11

subordination of power to desire,

188

subordination of techical machine to

social assemblage, 195, 266n. 13

on technology as vehicle for nomadic

desire, 189

A Thousand Plateaus, 187,

194-211, 214-20

on the univocity of being in Spinoza,

207

De Man, Paul, 79, 122, 124, 128,

130-40, 146

account of allegory in Hegel, 135,

137

on association of thought with phe-

nomenal consciousness, 138

Derrida's appropriation of, 129,

139

on Erinnerung (remembrance) and

Geddchtnis (exterior memory),

122, 128,132-39

on grammar as machine, 82

on Hegel's account of memory, 122,

128, 130, 136

on the "material," 137

on the paradox of the subject in

Hegel, 135

radical disjunction between memory

and materiality, 242

role in reconceptualizing cultural

studies of technology, 140

on sign and subject in Hegel's Ency-

clopedia, 134

"Sign and Symbol in Hegel's Aesthet-

ics," 134

Derrida, Jacques, 4, 5, 7-9, 19, 27, 97,

103, 122-33, 137-48, 182, 187,

225, 237, 242

"Acts," 122, 129

on arche-writing, 84-85

on Aristotle's assimilation of techne

into physis, 125

assimilation of cybernetics to gram-

matology, 84-85

commitment to phenomenological

reduction, 131

on the concept of matter, 279n. 6

critique of Heidegger's purity,

328 * Index

Derrida, Jacques (continued)

Of Grammatology, 95, 126ff.

on grammatology as liberation of

machine in language, 82

on grammatology as transformation

of Husserlian noema, 125

on Heidegger, 124

analysis of temporality, 163

machine reduction, 130

reduction of technology's material

effects, 127

on Husserl, 126

inversion of Heidegger's purity, 129

liberation of machine from Freudian

devaluation, 144

linguistic reduction of technology,

133

Memoires for Paul de Man, 122

misreading of de Man, 41

ontogenetic bias, 173

onto-phenomenological reduction in,

129

on the period of stimuli, 158

Positions, 128

priority of ontology in, 124

on protocols for deconstructing Hei-

degger's text, 139

psychocentrism of, 171

on the purity of techne, 124

reduction of machine to text, 129

on reduction of technology, 86

on relative exteriority, 77, 266n. 13

representationalist ontology of, 123

and the resistance to radical exterior-

ity, 140

reticence to address Marx's text, 128

on "rhetorical" versus "solid"

metaphor, 146, 147, 148

role of metalepsis in, 93

Of Spirit, 124

on the supplement, 95

on technology as a supplement to

thought, 127

on technology as derivative, 84

technology as textual supplement,

134

textual reduction of technology in,

130

"White Mythology," 143, 145, 148

Descartes, Rene, 174, 179

sixth Meditation, 83

Descombes, on "philosophism," 277n.

2

Desire, 186-87, 214-15, 218

as dogmatic principle in Deleuze and

Guattari, 289n. 8

as modeled on Spinoza's conatus in

Deleuze and Guattari, 188

overthrows the Lacanian symbolic,

191

Desiring machines, 65, 191, 192, 219

versus technical machines in Deleuze

and Guattari, 194

Desiring-production, 170, 188

Deterritorialization, 199, 214, 224

of the state assemblage in Deleuze

and Guattari, 189

Dewey, John, 234

Diagram, 215

Index * 329

epistemological or artifactual, 27

machinic, 148

phenomenological or corporeal,

27-29

priority over discourse, 190

related to language, 233

relation to culture, 270n. 5

and technological change, 41, 50

of technology's molecular impact,

218

Environment, 79, 153-54, 160, 165,

183-84, 212, 217, 226, 233

Epoche

phenomenological, 20, 88

of technological materiality, 108

Erewhon, 25

Erfahrung, 60, 231-32, 236, 237, 238,

242-43, 245, 248, 250, 259

Erinnerung, 60, 130, 132-40, 240-42,

245

Erlebnis, 227, 231-32, 236-38, 243,

245, 249-50, 260-61

Benjamin's corporeal refunctionaliza-

tion, 241

in Gadamer, 239

Ethology, 208

Evolutionary psychology, 271n. 11

Exteriority, 7, 125, 127, 142, 156, 188,

225-27

in Freud's account of the psyche, 152

material, 21, 147

of the material real, 124

of matter, 129

of nomadology, 289n. 11

radical, 20, 126, 137, 140, 178, 196

of the real, 146

relative, 8, 9, 20-21, 77-78, 80, 84,

126, 128, 138, 154, 172, 195,

197

robust, 172

of psyche, 154

of technology, 97, 103, 108, 112,

122, 177, 182

as writing, 126

Feminism, 10, 12

Film, 221, 247, 250-55, 257, 259-60

Flaneur, 246-47

Foerster, Heinz von, 212

Foucault, Michel, 4, 5

on the body, 49

Discipline and Punish, 201, 203

on the historical apriori, 220-21

on power, 188, 202

French feminism, 86

Freud, 4-5, 8, 19, 141-48, 151-69,

179-80, 184, 187, 196, 227, 240,

248, 251

Beyond the Pleasure Principle,

154-61, 168, 243

on the dead cortical layer, 154, 161,

168-70

on the death drive, 151, 152, 153

hydraulic model of the mind, 158,

159

invocation of technology, 82

on memory, 244

model of shock, 249

molar reduction of the imperceptible,

156

330 * Index

Godzich, Wlad, 14, 233

on imaginary world, 262

Goux, Jean-Joseph, on the general

equivalent, 222, 234

Grammatology, 125-26

Gramophone, 221

Greenblatt, Stephen, 5, 10-15

Grisham, Therese, on Deleuze and

Guattari's appropriation of

Hjelmslev, 290n. 14

Guattari, Felix

critique of Lacan, 191

on the molecularization of society,

214, 215, 217

Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich, 213, 225-27

and the materialities-of-communica-

tion project, 225

on human self-reference, 225, 227

on technologically-produced subject

effects, 297n. 34

Gynesis, 86, 87

Habitus, 50

Hansen, Mark, on the ideology of the

technological sublime, 276n. 23

Hansen, Miriam, 262

on Benjamin's reading of Mickey

Mouse, 255, 259

on the cognitive function of innerva-

tion, 256

collapses two senses of shock in Ben-

jamin, 304n. 37

on fascism and innervation, 306n. 47

on innervation in Benjamin, 255, 258

on the redemptive potential of repro-

ducive technologies, 305n. 39

on shock in Benjamin, 256, 259

on the subordination of the neurolog-

ical to the social in Benjamin,

304n. 37

on technologies of reproduction in

Benjamin, 254

on the utopian dimension of innerva-

tion, 303n. 35

Haraway, Donna, 5, 10-15

on the cyborg, 68

on informatics of domination, 271n.

7

Hardt, Michael, 207, 208, 209

Hardware realism Kittler, 224

Harvey, Irene, on the difference

between Derrida and de Man,

279n. 17

Haverkamp, Anselm, on the dialectical

image and the text, 306n. 44

Hayles, N. Katherine, 6, 14

account of technological change, 232

on artificial life research, 272n. 12

on the autonomy of the practical

sense, 51

on autopoiesis, 292n. 3

on the body versus embodiment, 47

Chaos Bound, 57ff.

"Constrained Constructivism," 38ff.

on constrained constructivism, 38, 94

versus Latour, 268n. 10

critique of Lacan's model of

signification, 287n. 23

on the cultural significance of ther-

modynamics, 58

Index * 331

on the separation between discourse

and embodiment, 47

on technology as mediator of embod-

iment and discourse, 41

on thermodynamic dissipation, 270n.

6

on the unmediated flux, 19, 36, 39

Hegel, 134, 137, 179

Phenomenology of the Spirit, 135

Heidegger, Martin, 4, 5, 8, 19, 97,

102-21, 142, 147, 164, 171,

173-74, 177-78, 182, 187, 219,

237, 248, 253

account of technology, 104

"The Age of the World Picture," 102

on the ambiguity of technology, 107,

108

on Aristotle's doctrine of causality,

113, 114

assimilates Herausfordern to Hervor-

bringen, 119

on Auslegung, 118-19

on Aussage, 118-19

Aussage versus Auslegung, 118

Being and Time, 104, 105, 106, 109,

112, 118, 119, 120, 121

on Being-toward death, 106

versus Benjamin on technology, 235

on the call of conscience, 106, 107,

120

catastrophic fall into the ontic, 107

division of technology, 112

on the enframing, 103, 108, 111, 116

on the essence of technology (techne),

67, 103

fear of technology, 110

The Fundamental Principles of Phe-

nomenology, 112

on Gerede (idle talk), 104, 106

on Herausfordern (challenging-forth),

116, 117, 118, 120

on Hervorbringen (bringing-forth),

117, 120

versus herausfordern (challenging-

forth), 104

"Interview with Der Spiegel," 108

invocation of technology, 82

on modern technology, 93

Nietzsche, 110

on the ontological difference, 93

on the ontological secondarity of

technology, 94

on the parallel between Auslegung

and Hervorbringen, 278n. 15

politics, 104

on the priority of ontology, 103, 104,

111

on the purity of techne, 112, 123

"The Question Concerning Technol-

ogy," 93, 102, 104, 107, 113,

115, 118

reduction of technology in, 104,

110

role in technocultural turn, 122

role of metalepsis in, 93

on the saving power of language,

118, 120

on the standing reserve, 116, 120

on technology and authenticity,

332 * Index

Hylomorphism, 201

applied to technology, 198

of state science in Deleuze and

Guattari, 188, 189, 196-97,

217

Imaginary, 171, 178, 222, 233

Imagistic turn, 233

Immanent causality, 191-93, 196

Incorporating practices, 48-50

Industrial revolution, 61, 64

Information, 221-22

Information science, 90

Information theory, 78

Inhuman, 65-66, 68-71, 74

Innervation, 234, 249, 253-59

psychoanalytic definition, 306n. 45

Inscribing practices, 49

Inscription, 26-29, 32, 34-35, 39-40,

53-54

Involuntary memory, 240-44

Iser, Wolfgang, 89

Jameson, Frederic, 11, 14-15, 19, 55,

190, 209-10, 252

on cyberpunk conspiracy narratives,

90

on postmodern hyperspace, 300n. 18

on technology as "representational

shorthand," 267n. 20

on video as materialist temporality,

267n. 21

Jardine, Alice

critique of becoming-woman in

Deleuze and Guattari, 291n. 17

critique of gynesis, 86-87

Johnson, Mark, 6, 27, 41

Kant, Immanuel, 33-34, 37, 156

Copernican revolution, 38

on the paradox of inner sense, 272n.

1

on pure senation, 281n. 7

Keatsian negative capability, 247

Kendrick, Michelle, on technological

real, 15-18, 77

Kittler, Friedrich, 6, 14, 213, 220-24,

226

concept of subject-position as passive

effect, 223

on the difference between culture and

society, 295n. 27

on Foucault's historical apriori,

220-21

Grammophon, Film, Typewriter, 220

on hardware realism, 224

on Lacanian imaginary, 222

on Lacanian real, 222

on the legal status of software, 296n.

31

on the material basis of writing on

the internet, 295n. 23

negative posthuman, 225

reliance on Platonic notion of math-

ematization, 295n. 21

"Signal-Rausch-Abstand," 221ff.

"There is No Software," 223ff.

Lacan, Jacques, 4, 5, 103, 170-87, 196,

203,222, 227, 237

adherence to Freudian bioenergetics,

184-85

"Aggressivity in Psychoanalysis,"

Index * 333

on the machine, 173

on the machine basis of the symbolic,

179

materialist definition of conscious-

ness, 179, 180-81, 242

narrow scope of interest in televisual

technology, 284n. 9

on the object cause of desire, 172-73,

182

on psychic causality, 176, 177

on psychic energy, 171

on the real, 17, 19

reduction of technology to language,

184

on the reversal of tuche and automa-

ton, 177

role of metalepsis in, 93

Seminar II, 178-79

Seminar XI, 170, 173, 175

on the technological embodiment of

the object a, 181

on the technological exteriorization

of object cause, 175

theory of the machine, 179

on the trauma model, 173

Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe

on general versus restricted mimesis,

96-97

on mimesis in Aristotle, 95-96

on "onto-mimetology," 96-97

La Mettrie, Julien de, on man as

machine, 83

Language (langue), 84

versus pragmatics (parole), 82

Latour, Bruno, 30

Aramis, or the Love of Technology,

42

on the Boyle-Hobbes debate, 37

conflates embodiment and discourse,

46

on constructivist ontology, 35

criticism of assymetry, 43, 44, 45

deconstruction of divide separating

the human and the nonhuman,

45

on the "delegated nonhuman charac-

ter" of technology, 45

on division of signs and things, 42

on the "dynamic of an artifact," 46

on the figure of anthropomorphism,

44

on the genesis of technology, 43

on hybrid ontology, 45

on hybrids, 31, 37

inscriptional model, 35, 40

on inscription and translation, 42

on Kantian terrain of modernity, 37

Laboratory Life, 34

on the middle kingdom, 33

on the modern constitution, 31, 37

model of translation, 1, 27, 34, 39

on the ontological differences between

technology and science, 36

on the ontology of the automatic

door closer, 44

on the parliament of things, 32

privilege of inscriptional processes,

47

on the purpose of technology, 269n.

334 * Index

Literature and science, 88

Logocentrism, 12, 53, 225

Luhmann, Niklas, 212, 226

Lukacs, Georg, 234-35

Lyotard, Jean-Francois, 11, 18, 168,

210, 225

on Bergson's account of perception,

71-72

on classical mechanics, 69

on complexification, 253

of transformers, 69-70

on Copernicus, 70

on cosmic complexification, 36,

172

on cosmological chance, 66

on the cosmological endgame of tech-

nology, 70

on Darwin, 70

on the destabilization of the humanist

perspective, 70

embrace of techno-complexification,

67

on energy transformer, 59, 61, 68,

89, 167, 206

on Freud, 70

on industrial revolution, 61, 71

on the inhuman, 243

history of matter, 66

transformations of technology, 69

on Marcuse, 66

on ontology, 73

on privilege of cosmological perspec-

tive, 68

on purity of technology, 67

on "sensible qualities," 167

on the solar death of the sun, 271n.

10

on "supplementary cortex," 167

on technological alienation, 235

on technological evolution, 66-67

on technological prostheses, 74

Machine, 63-65, 82, 85, 111, 120,

127, 129, 143, 145-46, 148, 154,

171, 173, 175, 179-81, 184, 187,

193, 195, 203, 216

as desiring-production in Deleuze

and Guattari, 191

as a figure for technology, 86

as icon, 89-90

semantic range of, 273n. 9

Machine code, 14

Machine metaphor, 21, 83-85, 87, 89,

102, 138, 140, 180, 192-93, 203

in Deleuze and Guattari, 187-88

in Freud, 142

Machine reduction of technology, 8,

21, 81, 88, 90-91, 95, 102, 119,

122-23, 125, 129-30, 144-46,

154, 170-71, 173, 182-83,

191-93, 195, 237, 260

Machinic enslavement in Deleuze and

Guattari, 220

Machinic incorporation in Deleuze and

Guattari, 219

Machinic surplus value, 215

Mallarme, Stephan

effort to autonomize poetry, 81

as poetic ideal, 82

poetic program of, 84

Index * 335

of technology, 4-9, 19, 20, 52, 54,

88, 91-93, 103, 108, 114, 146,

148, 168, 187, 197, 225

Mathematization of the real, 60

Matheme in Lacan, 172

Maturana, Humberto, 212, 226

Mayr, Otto

on the clock in early modern Europe,

83

on the divergent functions of clock in

Britain and on the Continent,

273n. 11

McLuhan, Marshall, 71

Mechanosphere, 186, 189, 211, 238,

243, 247, 252

Memory, 122, 123, 126, 128, 130,

240-43

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 41

on bodily intentionality, 274n. 15

on role of body in perception, 278n.

11

Metalepsis, 21, 90ff., 99, 101, 112,

123, 133, 146-47, 154, 157-58,

178, 182-83, 196, 270n. 4, 289n.

10

canonical examples of, 275n. 20

definition, 274n. 19

origin in Aristotle, 98

Mickey Mouse, 255, 258-59

Mimesis

as basis for model of becoming, 237

as element of nature in Benjamin,

235

physiological, 259

postlinguistic afterlife of, 247

Mimetic bodily cause, 52

Mimetic contact, 259

Mimetic dimension of adaptation to

technology, 190

Mimetic excess, 250, 253

Mimetic faculty, 52, 232, 235-36, 245

Mimeticism, 51, 190, 232

Mimetic modes of agency, 213

Mind-machine analogy

in Derrida, 143, 146

in Freud, 151, 154

Mirowski, Philip

More Heat than Light, 57ff.

on nineteenth-century misreadings of

energy conservation, 57

on statistical modeling, 58-59

on thermodynamics, 57

Molecular agency, 187

Molecular efficiency, 191-92

Molecular impact of technology, 165,

170, 232

Molecularization of society, 214, 215,

217

Molecular revolution of desire, 204,

217

MUDs (multiuser domains), 16

Mystic writing pad, 143, 144, 145,

146, 154

Noise, 221-24

Nomadic thought, 188

Nomadology, 189, 195-200, 213, 217

difference from deterritorialization,

293n. 8

Nomad science, 198-99

336 * Index

Patton, Paul (continued)

and desire as ontological power,

294n. 13

and nomadology, 288n. 6

and power, 287n. 2

and the primacy of difference, 288n.

5

and technology as nomad machine,

288n. 4

and their relation to Marx, 294n. 14

Paulson, William, 85

on rhetorical indeterminacy, 78

on self-organization from noise, 78

Penley, Constance, on K/S slash writing,

265n. 8

Period of stimuli in Freud, 158

Perverse performativity of technology,

43, 46

Plant, Sadie, critique of Deleuze and

Guattari's abstract analysis, 293n.

10

Plato, 115

Poiesis, 96, 115-16, 118, 120, 123,

125

Porush, David, 14, 90

on cybernetic fiction, 88

on machine iconicity, 89

Positivity of difference, 13, 15, 17, 77

Poster, Mark, 189

Posthermeneutic realism, 213

Posthuman, 9, 30, 70, 73, 223, 263

in Hayles and Haraway, 266n. 14

and human agency, 68

technological, 74

Post-poststructuralism, 13, 14

Post-representationalism, 30, 65-66,

73

Poststructuralism, 5, 7, 9-12, 15,

17-18, 34, 77, 81-82, 84, 86-88,

102-3

reception of Heidegger in, 108

Power subordinated to desire in

Deleuze and Guattari, 188

Practical mimesis, or mimeticism, 51

Practical sense, 50-51

Productionist metaphysics, 115

Proust, Marcel, 236, 240-41, 243-44

contact sensuosity, 236

Psyche, 143-45, 147-48, 151-52, 156,

158, 172

Freud on genesis of, 163

as writing machine, 155, 160, 169

Psychic causality, 176-78

Quasi objects, 31-38, 42-43, 45-47,

268n. 1

Question concerning technology, 65,

122, 130, 144-45, 151, 263

Real, 171, 172, 177, 186, 191, 198,

200, 203, 213, 222

as agent of material complexification,

201

as constructed, 178

Renza, Louis, on Harold Bloom, 91-92

Representationalism, 4, 15, 17, 30, 54,

64, 77, 188, 250, 263

Representational thinking, 59, 103, 109

Representation fetishized in contempo-

rary criticism, 139

Resistance to technology, 15, 87, 102

Index * 337

Semiotic square in Greimas and con-

temporary criticism, 268n. 9

Sensuosity, 232, 238

Serres, Michel, 14, 32, 85

fusion of science and poetry, 66

on the autonomy of technology, 61

on the experiential consequences of

machine age, 63

on the industrial revolution, 62, 64

on the primal formlessness of matter,

65

"Turner Translates Carnot," 63

Shapin, Steven, and Simon Schaffer,

31

Shock, 157, 167, 237, 244, 252-53,

256-60

Shock experience, 73, 239, 248, 254

Shusterman, Richard, 27, 234

on body techniques, 300n. 17

on the repression of embodiment in

Western philosophy, 269n. 16

role of language in focusing con-

scious attention, 297n. 3

Simpson, David

critique of Rorty's conversational

style, 265n. 1

on link of technology to subjectivity,

267n. 19

Soper, Kate, 38

Spinoza, Benedict de, 188, 191-92,

206-11

Steam engine, 61-62, 64, 180

Stone, Alluquere Rosanne (Sandy), 3,

16

Storage model of technology, 116

Subjectification in Deleuze and Guat-

tari, 216-18,220-21,226-27

Sublime

related to technology, 275n. 21

romantic, 19

technological, 19

and Freud, 281n. 5

Supplement, 97, 127, 132, 138,

145-47, 237

Surin, Kenneth, on death of the state in

Deleuze and Guattari, 293n. 7

Symbolic, 171-72, 176, 178, 181-82,

184

machine basis of, 179

Sypher, Wylie, 81

Systems theory, 79, 153, 173, 182-85,

212, 227

account of observation, 79

contribution to American cultural

debates, 291n. 2

on isolation of system from environ-

ment, 80

second-order observation, 80

Tactile unconscious in Benjamin, 248

Taussig, Michael

on contact sensuosity, 236, 248

on mimetic excess, 250

on One Way Street, 247

Techne, 63, 95-97, 103, 112, 115, 122,

123, 125, 127, 129-30, 136, 148,

177, 219

Technema, 20, 88, 137

Technesis, 4, 20-21, 26-29, 33, 37, 81,

86-88, 90-95, 97-98, 101-2, 108,

338 * Index

Technological reproducibility, 240,

242-43, 250-52, 257-58

Technology

beyond technesis, 231

cybernetic, 86

dynamical, 61, 64

inhuman evolution of, 68

machine, 64

mechanical, 61-62, 64

versus dynamical, 68

microphysical impact of, 55

related to descriptive models of sci-

ence, 274n. 17

versus science, 59

semantic range of, 275n. 21

as supplement to nature, 237

as vehicle for cosmic

complexification, 67

as vehicle for nomadic desire in

Deleuze and Guattari, 189

Technology creep, 114, 193, 200

Temporal period in Freud, 154-55

Tenner, Edward, 193-94

Text-machine, 82, 84, 86-87, 89,

127-28

Textualism, 88, 94, 125, 131, 133

Text-world homology in Derrida, 139

Theater of representation, 93

Thermodynamics, 59

revolution in, 58

second law of, 57

Thing-in-itself, 38. See also noumenon

Tool, 112

Trace, 124, 126-27

Transformer, 59, 61, 68-71, 206

Trauma, 155-57, 169

Traumatic cause, 156

Traumatic dreams, 152

Traumatic neurosis, 155

Traumatic repetition, 151, 152

Tuche, 97-101, 177-78

Ulmer, Gregory, 213

Unmediated flux, 19, 36, 39

Valery, Paul, on poem as machine, 82

Varela, Francisco, 6, 16, 27, 41, 212

on the embodied mind, 301n. 21

Virilio, Paul, 233

Virtual reality, 7, 15, 53-54

Voluntary memory, 240-42,

250-51

War neuroses, 153

Weber, Samuel, on aura as intrinsic

function of presentation, 305n. 42

Wellbery, David, 225

on exteriority, 227, 296n. 33

on the posthermeneutical in Kittler,

265n. 5

Wilden, Anthony, 155, 173, 182-85,

196

on the death drive, 157

on Freudian homeostasis, 183

on Freud's homeostatic model of the

psyche, 153, 154

on Lacan's bioenergetic model,

184-85

on Lacan's failure to distinguish lan-

guage from communication,

184

on Lacan's reduction of technology