Sorglose Nacht

As children, we have all suspected it: perhaps we are all, moving strangely beneath the sky, victims of a trap, a joke whose secret we will one day know. This reaction is certainly infantile and we turn away from it, living in a world imposed on us as though it were “perfectly natural,” quite different from the one that used to exasperate us.

- Bataille, L’Art, exercise de la cruauté

The image above was created by Martin Klimas, who describes the process in the following way:

The shooting environment must be controlled and kept consistent. The lighting is clear and direct, head on. My background is neutral, but bright enough so that the shattering object completely stands out. I drop the figurine from the same height in complete darkness while the lens of the camera is open. When the figurine hits the ground, the sound triggers the lights to go off for a fraction of a second. I do this procedure many times or until I find the one frame that is just right. I keep just one such picture for every figurine.

- Interview with Rosecrans Baldwin, The Morning News.

So here we are again; at the double-paralysis, the uncanny encounter with technology.

¶ One

Klimas, self-decribed as “in [one] sense a sculptor, but [with] only a 5000th of a second to build my sculpture,” is in fact the curator of the camera’s monuments.

One could not capture these images; the precision required is too great. One needs an array of prostheses: audio-sensors, custom camera circuitry and photodiodes, an onboard computer … At this rate of speed, our hands are dumb, paralyzed.

The photograph is too fast for us: It is the time equivalent of the incessant scientific photographs of DNA or the Milky Way.

¶ Two

One initially inclines to read these photographs as monuments to the destruction of porcelain, cassette tapes, cellular phones, flowers. As one looks, however, this inclination itself self-destructs - the images memorialize something that we all know we must have missed.

Now (but from a “now” that is clearly too precise) the uncanny surfaces: More and more, one cannot help but see instead monuments rendered to the unfazed, precise and complicated computer-controlled camera that captures moment after moment of the fall.

Everything is wrong, one realizes. These images are perverse, fetishistic…

But the trap is not reducible to the bait. It supposes not only the hand that places it but the end pursued. What happens to someone who takes the bait? What are, for the individual who gives into fascination, the consequences of his weakness?

- Bataille, Ibid.

God is a shout in the street! - Stephen Dedalus

Jacques-Alain Miller is right here: “[Google] is the cataract: the ostentatious white of the page blackens suddenly, the void is overturned by an onslaught, succinctness becomes logorrhea.” And wrong here:

What is sure is that it is stupid. If the responses proliferate on the screen, it is because they are mistaken. The initial signal is made of words, and a word does not have a single meaning. Thus, meaning escapes Google, which encodes, but doesn’t decode. It is the word in its stupid materiality that it memorizes. Thus, it is always up to you to find in the haystack of results, the needle that is meaningful to you.

Whatever Google’s brain is, it is always passing just short of thought’s grasp: not dumb or stupid or brutal, just some other intelligence … no syntagm rendered for “thought” applies.

Meaning is inverted. Words, which sag in all their stupid overdetermination, operate here on an entirely different plane of immanence (to use that good Deleuzo-Guattarian parlance) - they are crystalline, brilliant, indisputable in their materiality, their absolute weight in bytes.

Thought is a sieve for Google; they are wildly, totally other. Whatever decision Google makes it does so from the “negative part of [the] negation” (Badiou) of thought. It does so, one might say, in total excess of thought, and from an order that escapes desire or meaning.

“God doesn’t reply; Google, always, and immediately.” But it replies with a sort of charade - the kind of frenetic and only vaguely descriptive gesticulations of foreigners asking for directions - PageRank is a kind of waving and pointing, while Google chatters on, largely for its own benefit, in its mother tongue: volume. We can read the gesture: Make sense of this. Make sense of my ludicrous volume.

Any encounter takes place entirely in this difference, in the rift between between an order and a desire trying to communicate. Difference differing: “Thus, the necessity for it to pose as an axiom its fundamental kindness.”

Leo Strauss was first brought to my attention by Carl Mitcham back in 2004, by way of Harvey Mansfield’s insidious A Student’s Guide to Political Philosophy. Since this time, one of two things has happened: One, a lot of people had Strauss brought to their attention, or two, I noticed a lot more people paying attention to Strauss. At least, paying attention to some people in the Bush administration who have been labeled Straussians, or labeled themselves as such. (Incidentally, it seems that even the most Straussian of the cabinet/PNAC Straussians may want to re-identify, in their interesting public stance on the “War on Terror”, as Mansfieldian, which is at least terra firma.)

Apparently, 2007 is the year where another group of Strauss apologists (this is starting to become somewhat of an American philosophical tradition, isn’t it?) take Strauss back, so to speak. Which has, I have to admit, sort of caught me off guard. Books have been released this year on Strauss and Arendt and, perhaps even more bizarrely, on Strauss and Levinas.

It’s not usually in my interests, nor is it in the interest of the way that I see the blog as a way of abetting philosophical discourse, to be topical. But I am nonetheless a citizen of this information glut, and from time to time, something like this is going to catch my eye.

I’d like to frame my piece on the late-blooming “was Strauss really not as politically-charged as the world seems to interpret him as?” discussion in terms of a piece of Derrida, this time interviewed for the Journal of Nietzsche Studies (vol. 7) in 1994. Here it is:

Thinking’s task today is to tackle, to measure itself against, everything making up this programme of contamination. This programme forms the history of metaphysics, it informs the whole history of political determination, of politics as it was constituted in Ancient Greece, disseminated throughout the West and finally exported to the East and South. If the political isn’t thought in this radical sense, political responsibility will disappear. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that this thought has become necessary only today; rather, today more than ever, one must think this machine in order to prepare for a political decision, if there is such a thing, within this contamination.

Methodologically, Strauss’ strategy (and here is the seed of his charged “noble lies”/”deadly truths” agenda) for interpreting the classics, and Plato in particular, is couched in the notion of philosophical texts offering both an exoteric teaching and an esoteric/”true”/privileged teaching, which was concealed from the general reader. Let’s look at the text:

Philosophers or scientists who hold this view about the relations of philosophy or science and society are driven to employ a peculiar manner of writing which would enable them to reveal what they regard as the truth to the few, without endangering the unqualified commitment of the many to the opinions on which society rests. They will distinguish between the true teaching as the esoteric teaching and the socially useful teaching as the exoteric teaching; whereas the exoteric teaching is meant to be easily accessible to every reader, the esoteric teaching discloses itself only to the very careful and well-trained readers after long and careful study.

So here’s the aporia that we can lens using the Derrida interview quoted above:

1. “On each occasion one will have to make complex gestures to explain that one is acting, despite contamination, in this particular way, because one believes that it is better to do this rather than that, that a particular act chosen is in such and such a situation more likely to do such and such than another possible act. These gestures are anything but pragmatic, they are strategic evaluations which attempt to measure up to the formalization of the machine.”
2. “There’s no way out…one has indeed to assume the risk of being misunderstood, continuing to think in modest terms what is after all exceedingly ambitious, in order to prepare for these responsibilities - if they exist.”

Which is to say that the way in which Strauss is styled or framed by his partisan (or non-partisan) successors, now or to come, is both entirely his fault, and was entirely unavoidable. That is, Strauss either chose an Heideggerian gesture of silence, or else paid a Nietzschean price for esotericism. And here is the point: these two strategies operate in the same register; or, in the same contaminated machine of global politics.

What Strauss fundamentally failed to do (and that which he could not fail to do) was to appropriately, “think this machine in order to prepare for a political decision, if there is such a thing, within this contamination.” Any topical political silence in which he indulged - be it in the shameful Heideggerian order or the esoteric Nietzschean order - was nothing more than a failure on his part to anticipate the “absolutely unprecedented responsibilities of ‘thought’ and ‘action’…” (Derrida, Of Spirit) inherent within his textual gesture.

This gesture of silence, this self-insistence on esoteric meaning is what allows Strauss to be continually refigured next to Levinas, Arendt, and Nietzsche, as well as Wolfowitz and the American neo-conservatives. This aristocratic gesture, narcissistic bait, inevitably failed appeal to deceleration in a obviously accelerating world…

But of course, what we are calling the Heideggerian and Nietzschean orders here doubtlessly contaminate each other … … …