Cigarettes and Cell Phones

An interesting passage from William Gibson's Zero History:

She hung up before he could say goodbye. Stood there with her arm cocked, phone at ear-level, suddenly aware of the iconic nature of her unconscious pose. Some very considerable part of the gestural language of public places, that had one belonged to cigarettes, now belonged to phones. Human figures, a block down the street, in postures utterly familiar, were no longer smoking.

Until reading this, I had never made an explicit connection between the two. Gibson is on to something given the ubiquity of cell phones, but cigarettes still carry something that cell phones don't (is that due to recent transformations?); that is, they are a marker for sub-cultural group distinction in some situations (think of certain groups who go outside to smoke at concerts) or the way that bumming a smoke  or asking for a light can (in very limited instances) have an inter-subjective appeal.

In any case, Gibson's brief observation is more subtle that recent 'philosophical' takes on the problem, such as Giorgio Agamben's well-known rant from What is an Apparatus?, which reads like a bad joke at a conference that doesn't translate to the printed page (the essay also includes the ridiculous-- and historically unverifiable-- claim that our era possesses the "most docile and cowardly social body that has ever existed in history"):

I live in Italy, a country where the gestures and behaviors of individuals have been reshaped from top to toe by the cellular telephone....I have developed an implacable hatred for this apparatus, which has made the relationship between people all the more abstract. Although I found myself more than once wondering as how to destroy or deactivate those telefonini, as well as how to eliminate or at least to punish and imprison those who do not stop using them [which would then give Agamben-land a higher rate of incarceration than the international leader, the United States], I do not believe that this is the right solution to the problem.

He does not then describe the solution, just has he did not advance our understanding of cell phones as an apparatus. We do, however, have a clearer vision of at least part of Agamben's fantasy life.

Trouble with Agamben (Part 2)

Here's another way to look at the critique of Agamben found in the previous post. The turn to theology, especially the St-Paul cottage industry, runs the the risk of making the ‘recovery’ of the theological tradition itself  a rampart defending what appears to its partisans to be a besieged European intellectual tradition. Consider, for instance, the way in which Agamben’s ‘Occident’ becomes both the greatest threat to, and saving power for, humanity.

Agamben does not help himself out of his occidental standpoint when he argues in The Signature of All Things (a variant appears in, perhaps unsurprisingly, The Time That Remains)—while providing very little evidence—that his “philosophical archaeology” avoids the problems of “writing the history of the excluded and defeated, which would be completely homogeneous with the history of the victors, as the common and tedious paradigm of the history of the subaltern classes would have it.” That he enlists for his political theology Walter Benjamin, whose “On the Concept of History” is an attempt to think through a concept of the history of the oppressed, is even more incongruous.

One other way to approach this: Samir Amin argues in his book Eurocentrism that there are four elements, which need not always be present, to the system of Eurocentricism: 1) the annexation of ancient Greece to modern Europe, 2) the presentation of Christianity, “employing an immutable vision of religion,” as the basis of European unity, 3) the construction of biological racism, and 4) an orientalism that distinguishes social groups by their supposedly invariable cultural traits. At least (1) and (2) are present in Agamben's work, and the monolithic history of the West verges on, or at least does not address (4).

Trouble with Agamben (Part 1)

A recent post by Adam Kotsko takes on Agamben's version of the Heideggerian monolithic Western metaphysics. He writes:

Nowhere is Agamben’s insistence on the monolithic nature of the West more evident than in his continual reference to Judaism, where he portrays the rabbinic tradition as in essential continuity with Western debates. I cannot recall a single time when he cites the Hebrew Bible, for instance, or indeed any Jewish text before the first century. On a certain level, this approach might seem “good,” insofar as it works against the stereotypes of the essential foreignness of the Jew, etc. — yet it completely forecloses the notion that the Jewish community, as a segregated and often persecuted group, might have come up with a substantially different intellectual tradition than the surrounding groups. More than that, the overall pattern of assimilation seems to privilege the non-Jewish Western source: rabbinic messianism gets read through Aristotle, Benjamin gets read through Schmitt, etc.

Thus, even though Agamben is obviously a leader among the Gentiles in drawing on Jewish sources, he does so in such a way as to erase any possibility of genuine Jewish difference — and this is itself only the most serious symptom of his general tendency to make the West a self-enclosed entity that cannot be influenced from the outside.

Here's Peter Gratton's response:

this is not merely some “ethnocentrism is bad” account, but is simply bad history: if I described the history of the weather in this room without reference to the outside climate, all while suggesting that what is important in weather only takes place in this room, you’d be right to say I don’t understand how climate works. Without overstating the problem, I don’t see how this applies to a view of history that is viewed as a simple baton pass-off race from Greece to Rome to the medieval church to Heidegger, all while describing all that is possible in reality and the politics of the world.

All I can add is that the problems of Heidegger's critique of Western metaphysics are amplified by the way in which Agamben attaches his project to that of political theology, which means: theologizing politics, rather than politicizing theology.

Getting Ready for the RPA: On Agamben and Benjamin

I'll admit that I didn't write much for The Notes Taken over the month of October. Instead, most of my time, outside of teaching, that I would spend writing was consumed by preparing job applications and preparing my paper for the upcoming Radical Philosophy Association meeting at the University of Oregon in Eugene. Take a good look at the schedule (PDF), and you will see that our own Sean Moreland is giving a talk on "Visceral Re:Visions: Genre and the Syntax of Violence in Haneke's Funny Games and Laugier's Martyrs" (Friday's 2:00-3:30pm session) our friend Mark Raymond Brown will be presenting on "A Remedy for Violence: The Necessity of Healthcare Reform in the US" which I swear has something to do with Sartre (during Saturday's 10:30am-12:00pm session), and I will be giving a paper on Giorgio Agamben, Walter Benjamin, and the critique of violence (during Saturday's 2:00-3:30pm session). At the moment the paper doesn't have a title (I've changed it several times), but I'm leaning toward "Anomic Violence: Toward a Benjaminian Critique of Agamben."

I read a less organized draft of my paper at the end of October at CSU Stanislaus. While it must have been confusing for the audience, as I jumped from Fredric Jameson to Agamben to Georges Sorel to Benjamin's "Critique of Violence," many of their questions helped me clarify why exactly (1) I was interested in this early essay of Benjamin's, and (2) why I need to cut the long sections on sovereignty and the state of exception out of the paper. 

Let's start with (2): Agamben is best known for returning sovereignty to the forefront of political thought. I know, because the first article I managed to publish applied Agamben's critique of the state of exception to the war on terror and its localization in Guantanamo Bay. I started writing the paper in early 2003 and it finally saw the light of day as "The Absence of Evidence is Not the Evidence of Absence: Biopolitics and the State of Exception" in Philosophy Against Empire, Today, Vol. 4, edited by Tony Smith and Harry van der Linden (Philosophy Documentation Center, 2006). Since then I've found that Agamben's critique brings with it a large amount of philosophical "history of metaphysics" baggage that he inherited from Heidegger, not to mention his extensive use of Schmitt. Back in 2006, the last few pages of the article dealt with the absence of the concept of event or the act as a moment of subjectification in Homo Sacer. But I found I needed to say more about what I found so off-putting.

To get the current paper down to a manageable size, I've cut all the exegetical talk about sovereignty and assumed that my audience will be familiar with it. The exegetical discussions were adding too much weight to the presentation. All you get now is my central problem with Homo Sacer: Agamben accepts from Schmitt that the sovereign has a monopoly on the capacity to decide and the capacity for violence. This is important because Agamben's State of Exception rejects the sovereign monopoly on violence (there are passages in HS that hint at this, but Agamben doesn't pursue the consequences); the whole of the 'gigantomachy concerning a void' that he stages between Schmitt and Benjamin turns on the possibility of anomic violence, or, since violence is a cipher for human action, praxis (and subjectification) with no relation to law.

Which leads to (1): the task is now to show how Benjamin's concept of divine violence is one of the many figures he proposes for anomic praxis. Unlike Agamben, I think this kind of praxis and subjectification leads through Benjamin's work on aesthetics, as well as some of his theological debates with Gershom Scholem (which are really just debates about aesthetics and politics anyway).

Thus I've found my way back to something like the framework of my Schelling book, when I didn't really expect to: investigating how artistic production is presented as an alternative to law (which for Schelling was Kant's and Fichte's categorical imperatives) as a model for free human praxis. With Benjamin, the problem will be very different, given that his work on aesthetics is so closely connected to anarcho-syndicalist  (Sorel again!) and Marxian politics, although for the moment, it sets the course for how I will be approaching his work in the future (although Marx's critique of 'creativity' as found in the "Critique of the Gotha Program" hangs over part of this investigation).

And here we all thought I was joking when on my profile I wrote that I am "working on a book about the convergences and divergences of history, politics, and art in the work of Walter Benjamin, which is a loose sequel to Freedom and Nature in Schelling's Philosophy of Art."

Thoughts on the Schelling Book and After

Today was the day that the typesetting and proofing and indexing of the Schelling book (if you're not already in the know, it's here) was supposed to be finished, and...we made it.

To think, only a year ago, to the day, I was writing Chapter 4, which is about Schelling's philosophy of art during the period that he held to a position he called absolute idealism (1801-1806), and which, as almost everybody knows, he developed with Hegel, before their later break over that one book that Hegel published in 1807...

I've already discussed, in a very schematic fashion, Schelling's absolute idealism and his philosophy of art on the blog (parts one, and two), and the nice part is, much of this discussion doesn't appear in the book, so if you read it, it won't be redundant. In fact those posts are more than likely going to be used for a future paper about Schelling and Hegel.

But a year ago, to the day, I was still grappling with a flaw in previous Schelling secondary-lit. Most people follow this line: Schelling's philosophy of art was important when he held to the subjectivism of transcendental philosophy (through the System of Transcendental Idealism), and when he dismissed that subjectivism, he no longer needed artistic production as the 'keystone' of the system. I argue that he still needs the philosophy of art, in fact, he makes recourse to artistic production to move his changing system along through 1807.

During the period of absolute idealism, Schelling argues that philosophy constructs a system from the perspective of reason itself, and in the lectures later published as The Philosophy of Art he argues that artistic production in the form of mythology provides the historical content of the transition from the infinite to the finite. That is, philosophy deals with the infinite as the perspective of reason, and art (via the imagination/Einbildungskraft) 'forms into unity' the historical content of art through mythology, art presents the absolute in finite form. Far from dismissing art, Schelling needs it to give content to the absolute. (now I know that some might say that nature-philosophy does that as well, and it's true, although Schelling claims that art is a superior truth; we have to just leave it at that for the moment).  But I argue that the historical content that art is to provide is itself formally different than what the so-called perspective of reason (absolute idealism) tells us about the world, and the two can't be, or weren't, reconciled. This sends us off to Chapter 5, which you are all going to have to wait for.

Now, I had been rehearsing this post for a few weeks, because I was going to tell you that, for the first time in years, I didn't have a project with a deadline at hand for the first time since I spent the summer reading the three volumes of Foucault's History of Sexuality (that was the summer between my BA and the start of my MA...in 2001).

But it's no longer true. I've volunteered to review Rancière's Dissensus, and last week the RPA accepted my conference abstract on a critique of Laclau and Agamben, both so far apart and yet so similar in not quite grasping, for very different reasons, the uses of violence. 

However, with just that gloss, I know what you're thinking: between the time you write the abstract and the time that it's accepted, you've been reading a lot of Fanon and Lukacs, and now you're quite certain that the paper has transformed into something entirely different and you're right. Laclau's got to go, and you've got to get serious about Agamben's tendency to turn historical violence into metaphysical violence. Hell, you might even get a chance to throw in a critique of Zizek, because they have a common fault: too much early Benjamin, not enough later Benjamin.

Yeah, that's it, that's exactly what I'm working on. Imagine if conference abstracts started reading like the paragraph above...

Self-Promotion or Self-Critique?

Milton Fisk reviews a volume (in which I am a contributor) in "Radical Thought in the Time of Corporate Globalization," in Capitalism, Nature, Socialism, Vol. 18 n. 4 (Winter 2007), pp. 148-150.

His overall judgment on Philosophy Against Empire, Radical Philosophy Today, Vol. 4, edited by Tony Smith and Harry van der Linden (Philosophy Documentation Center, 2006):

Editors Tony Smith and Harry van der Linden have put together an excellent volume on a wide range of important social and political problems. A notable exception is the absence of an essay devoted to the impact of corporate globalization on the environment, which reflects the absence of a major focus on the environment within this group of radical philosophers.

On my contribution, Fisk writes:

In “Biopolitics and the State of Exception,” Devin Zane Shaw criticizes the state from the perspective of immigration. Following Giorgio Agamben, Shaw sees migrants as exposing a crisis that affects sovereignty, democracy, and human rights. Sovereignty leads to treating migrants as outcasts, as bare individuals with no democratic or human rights. Due to the nature of sovereignty, failure awaits reformists who accept the sovereign state. Moreover, human rights, being for Shaw only the creatures of sovereignty, lack liberatory potential. The implication is that the plight of migrants can be resolved by doing away with the state.

That's a decent synopsis. Although I must admit that I have since been rethinking whether that implication should be that the state form should be abolished, especially if that means that multinational corporations will take over its functions. If I had to write the piece now, I don't think I would rely as heavily on Foucault and Agamben. I now think he overstates his case because the 'state of exception' appears to be a metaphysical destiny, which has those same fatalist overtones that Heidegger's later work possesses. This would require rereading Agamben, but I am currently busy with philosophy from the 1920s to 1940s (at this moment, Benjamin and Sartre, an odd couple if there ever was one), which is over a century after the stuff I was reading for the primary sources of my dissertation (Schelling's work from 1795-1810).

In retrospect, I think that one of the major problems with Agamben's (and, in a different way, Foucault's) analysis is that while it talks biopolitics quite well, it has trouble linking this with a critique of capitalism. I do, however, still think that politically marginalized populations tell us important things about globalization, which is why I discussed the figure of the immigrant and his or her relationship to sovereign power. What my article stressed is that anybody's encounter with the state as police force depends on the caprice of this force, and that formal rights don't guarantee anything in this encounter.

What I had not worked on so much, as I wrote that essay (from 2003 to 2005), was a theory of ideology. I think a theory of ideology would have allowed me to render less abstract, and less global, statements about things such as the mobilization of human rights in the war on terror. Now I would try and pinpoint the history of human rights as they are mobilized for intervention and when they are not, to show how these interventions correspond to some other interest (like geo-political dominance, economic benefit, etc.). It seems to me that this would lead to a distinction between formal, individual rights and collective economic justice (including environmental justice, since Fisk mentioned that the Radical Philosophy volume did not display interest in this topic) and that the left should advocate the latter.