Sorglose Nacht

Continental Philosophy, several days ago, posted this video, for which I have taken pause several times:

The interviewer asks Cixous, “So particularity and universality are not … opposed to each other?” to which she replies, “oh, no.”

Oh, certainly no. On the one hand: Universality is “universally accessible” and particularity is “particularly located”. Nothing - which is to say no-thing in particular - is universally located or particularly accessible [JLN: “There is no meaning if meaning is not shared.”]. These adjectives are modal functors of Being separated from comparison or reciprocal measure by immediacy, access, immediacy of access. They don’t even occupy the same circuit.

Certainly not. On the other hand: One decides that in fact the difference is not located somewhere at the referent - of course, always, referents or nothing - of universality and particularity, that these circumscriptions do not describe or represent a world that is a circuit of their sameness and difference, but merely suture a gash at the heart of representation.

For instance, Ghandi’s “..way of being typical[ly] Indian was also a way of getting close to all other religions, and all other philosophies in the world…”

The strategies, the movements of any artistic or ideological work, for ontological reasons (and yes, that syntagm can only operate on an ontic register), can only get close to the irreducible difference (here: gender or cultural difference) of shattered and incontrovertibly particular being, because, although there is no being-in-general, political work must be done.

And of course, there is work (the work of representation, closure, the West), and then there is the nudge, the touch, of Being. All at once, universally in particular. Which is to say, operating here at the joint, we are all a little ambivalent.

Hirokazu Koreeda’s Dare mo shiranai, released in the US as Nobody Knows is, as many of its critics have noted, long, and slow. Ella Taylor at LA Weekly writes that it, “unfolds with such leisurely, terrible beauty, it takes a while to realize that what we are witnessing is the children’s long slide into beggary, exacerbated by the slow torture of faint hope.” True true. And it is quite a powerful film.
As I watched, however, what I felt most often was a sort of displaced nostalgia for a certain patience, a certain forbearance. The film takes place in modern Japan, set amongst the video arcades etc. that form the caricature of Japan so familiar from Lost in Translation, et. al. but lost is the frantic pacing that is so often devicive in visualizing the westernization of Japan. What we are left with, instead, is a slow picture of life set against the obvious technologization/occidentalization of Japan in a small city. The story on which the film is based took place in Tokyo; the choice for suburbanization was clearly Koreeda’s. The apartment itself is a western-style stucco job. Why? And what is the occidental?

… “The West” is precisely what designates itself as limit, as demarcation, even when it ceaselessly pushes back the frontiers of its imperium. By the turn of a singular paradox, the West appears as what has as its planetary, galactic, universal vocation limitlessly to extend its own delimitation. It opens the world to the closure that it is. [my italics]

This closure is named in many ways (appropriation, fulfillment, signification, destination, etc.); in particular, it is named “representation.” Representation is what determines itself by its own limit. It is the delimitation for a subject, and by this subject, of what “in itself” would be neither represented or representable.

But the irrepresentable, pure presence or pure absence, is also an effect of representation (just as “The East,” or “The Other World,” are effects of “The West”).

That was written by Jean-Luc Nancy, and this was written by Elvis Costello: “We were waiting for the end of the world / waiting for the end of the world. Dear Lord I sincerely hope you’re coming / ’cause you really started something.”

The alternative here, in the East-West representation schema, is the incessant deferral of closure: Khanti.

Khanti is the sixth of the Ten Pre-requisite for Buddha-hood. “Khanti” literally means “patience”. This patience is not the patience of the weak or that prompted by weakness. It is the perfect control of temper by proper cultivation of mind based on great kind compassion on all living beings … All Buddhas, Pacceka Buddhas and Arahats practiced this Khanti as a pre-requisite for the attainment of their end - the freedom of Nibbana. They have all spoken in a very high praise of it as an essential acquirement for the attainment of each man’s freedom … So the Lord has said “Avera naca sammanti” or patience will overcome all difficulties, and bring eternal happiness.

So, perhaps, when Andy Klein of Los Angeles Citybeat (and others) suggest that “…it’s arguable whether the experience is worth it,” we are at the threshold of a repeating representation. The children in the film, the audience, the West - it takes a decidedly Eastern patience; a patience in the name of pure presentation, a patience in the absence of conceptualization, of “thought” as we know it in the West.

When Prospero…becomes annoyed when his daughter’s attention wanders, she placates him by saying, “Your tale, sir, would cure deafness.” What an extraordinary idea: to tell a story where the words themselves would cure deafness. This is…the logic of “incantation”. As a magician, Prospero has such a power.
So [do] programmers.

So I read a book about cochlear implantation, called Rebuilt. Now, this is a very interesting area for those who would say that they are interested in what Derrida has to say. I tend to sometimes allow technology to focus the lens of a text for me, and here is a perfect example. In fact, I was shocked to read this book, and find that the author failed to mention the issue of philosophical speech primacy even once, through repeated references to “cultural theory” documents, naturally including The Cyborg Manifesto.

A cochlear implant is a small, complex electronic device that can help to provide a sense of sound to a person who is profoundly deaf or severely hard of hearing. The implant is surgically placed under the skin behind the ear. It is basically a small computer, with about as much power as an old 386dx, which stimulates the auditory cortex more directly in the absence of working stereocilia, the fibrous sound-receptors on the cochlea. The cochlea itself is a small, snail-shaped organ which receives sound like field grass receives wind, and transmits these motions electrically to the auditory nerve. It is composed of three fluid-filled sacs, the tympanic canal, the vestibular canal and the cochlear duct. The part of the cochlea that transmits the sounds to the nervous system is called the organ of corti. Separating the tympanic canal and the organ of corti is a structure called the basilar membrane. The electrode array of the implant, which pulses sound to the auditory cortex (as defined by it’s software), is placed in the scala tympani along the basilar membrane. Now I will read to you from probably my two favorite books of all time:

Timbre, style and signature are the same obliterating division of the proper. They make every event possible, necessary, and unfindable.
-Jacques Derrida, Tympan, Margins of Philosophy, xix

Each existence appears in more ensembles, masses, tissues or complexes than one perceives at first, and each one is also infinitely more detached from such, and detached from itself.
-Jean-Luc Nancy, Cosmo Baselius, Being Singular Plural, 186

Now, as a language-user, spend the night dreaming of writing a text that makes the deaf hear - that re-opens speech - someone is working on this now: namely, Prospero-tron. The embodied inversion of speech-primacy - writing as the techne to open the circuit of speech. In other words:

Welcome back to wonderful auditory world, Caliban, through the power of writing: “You taught me language, and my profit on’t / Is I know how to curse. The red plague rid you / For learning me your language!” (The Tempest I.ii.366-368)

It is always a fine moment when I pop down Clay Shirky’s newest addition to his Networks, Economics & Culture mailing list, and the newest edition is no exception. Titled Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags, it takes a well-balanced look at two organization systems that have existed for the web, one of which Shirky refers to as “ontological”, the other “organic.”

As it is clearly not Mr. Shirky’s intention to deal in any depth with what the “is” is, I thought a look at this document in terms of a more wide-scope “philosophical ontology” might yield something interesting, at least terminologically-speaking. To begin, let me show you how he delimits the term ontology:

The main thread of ontology in the philosophical sense is the study of entities and their relations … What kinds of things exist or can exist in the world, and what manner of relations can those things have to each other? … The knowledge management and AI communities have a related definition … something like “an explicit specification of a conceptualization.” … The common thread between the two definitions is essence, “Is-ness.” In a particular domain, what kinds of things can we say exist in that domain, and how can we say those things relate to each other?

Using this working-style definition, he proceeds to give some examples of “real-world” ontological classification systems: the periodic table of the elements, the Dewey Decimal System, and finally the DMOZ/Yahoo post-library heirarchy. It is interesting and funny, well worth a read for anyone interested in organization systems in general. After witnessing in pictures the transformation between the rigid heirarchy of the DDS and a graph that represents something like the “ontologically” unstructured reference map of Google, he goes through the del.icio.us system of classification by aggregation of user-”tagged” references, finally suggesting and for the most part convincingly showing that a combinatorial system of user-input works better than a dictatorially controlled “ontology” for a large unstable set of data accessed by a great many non-expert users, such as the web.

Ok. Now, the question I am asking myself is this: Ignoring unproductive definitional quips, and simply accepting Shirky’s last question for ontology, that is, “what kinds of things can we say exist in [this] domain, and how can we say those things relate to each other?,” to what extent is del.icio.us (un-)ontological?

Now, clearly, taking the scope of the question above as the entire scope of what Shirky names “ontology,” del.icio.us is nothing less than entirely ontological. It is a way in which someone, Joshua Shachter, answers the question “what kinds of things exist and how can we say these things relate to each other?” It is, to be sure, a distributed ontology, and our point as follows will be in general that ontology is already “distributed” in the first place.

Contemporary ontology is always an engagement with Heidegger. What is at stake in this particular case is the feasibility of Heidegger’s “authentic” and “inauthentic” Dasein. The “inauthentic” Dasein is the mode of being in which Dasein finds itself engaged (immersed) in the so-called “idle talk” (das Gerede) of the “they” (das Man) while in the “authentic” mode (eigentlich^*) Dasein hearkens to the call of and is individualized by its own uncanniness (cf. ¶40, 235/191). In an unsympathetic - or careless, or incomplete - reading of Heidegger, it is easy to allow oneself to read this as a sort of übermensch ontology - again in the popular and not properly Nietzschean sense - which would itself allow room for something like a fascist ontology (a danger one always skirts with Heidegger). Meanwhile, and in a seemingly contrary way, Heidegger had already explicity suggested the following: Being-in-the-world, that is, Being-in-the-world-with- others-in-the-world is the “basic state of Dasein by which every mode of its Being gets co-determined.” (¶26, 153/117)

Or, that the determination of Being is already co-determined. Given this, it becomes increasingly difficult to understand why access to Being, that which is most properly at play in existence, would be in the provice of an authentic understanding, that is, in a severing of Dasein from what has already been established as its co-constitutive condition of determination (it’s “I”) by its others in the first place. In other words, since “ontical experience takes place right at the ‘they,’ and nowhere else.” And as the ontological is nothing but the logic of the ontic inside the ontic, we can only frame the determinitive origin of the practice of ontology right at the “they” - better: “Moreover, there is no ‘elsewhere’: that is the ‘meaning of Being,’ …” (Jean Luc-Nancy, The Decision of Existence)

Or, again, ontology (the logic of existence) has already never been the province of some God-like categorizer, but has always indeed taken place right at the absolutely inescapable distribution of existence. I won’t, but I think you can basically find this thread in not only Heidegger and Nancy, but also Aristotle’s Metaphysics, and, as Heidegger himself displays, in the pre-Socratics as well. In another form, Richard Rorty and the American pragmatists say something just like this, albeit in a less strong sense.

As such, we might say that with something like del.icio.us, we can finally think the practice of categorization as properly ontological.

^* It has been suggested that “ownness” would be a more fair translation, inasmuch as the existential analytic specifically excludes something like a purity of origin or provenance, which the English “authentic” implies. So “authentic Dasein” is perhaps more properly thought as “Dasein in its ownness”. For what it’s worth.

Critical Inquiry vol. 31 no. 3 is currently on-line, and features an interesting, here in the sense of peculiar, “special section” edited by Dragan Kujundzic, a member of the Advisory Board for the International Center for Writing and Translation at the University of California at Irvine. The section, entitled “J”, offers a selection from Jacques Derrida and one from J. Hillis Miller. (Miller holds a place on the Executive Board of the ICWT, and Derrida did until his death. They were friends.) The Miller text [excerpt here] seems to be about the literary kiss, and the Derrida text [excerpt here] contends to begin with the following oneirism:

"How does J. Hillis Miller himself feel himself ?": this is a reverie that I would like to share with you today. What is it to feel oneself [se sentir]? To feel oneself, to sense oneself in the sense in which one lets oneself be affected also by a feeling or a sensation? One cannot imagine this affect without the figure of some contact with oneself, without an auto-affection of touching and, more precisely, without the kind of intimate tactile sensitivity that is enigmatically called taste .

Without having read the article, and as such knowing basically nothing about the text aside from the question in the above excerpt of an excerpt, I immediately thought of Part III of Hegel’s Encyclopedia, ¶403-410, The Feeling Soul. As this is almost certainly not the path that the article took, let me just point out something about sub-part a, The feeling soul in its immediacy.

Though the sensitive individuality is undoubtedly a monadic individual, it is, because immediate, not yet as its self, not a true subject reflected into itself, and is therefore passive. Hence the individuality of its true self is a different subject from it … a subject which may even exist as another individual. [my italics]

Basically, Hegel here is thinking of a situation which is commonly exemplified by the mother-child situation, but in a sort of three-ring coup de grâce, he turns the problem over to hypnotism in ¶406.

Writing about this almost surreal moment in Hegel, Jean-Luc Nancy notes that, “In this state, the disesased subject is ’selfless’: which is as much as to say that there is no subject, that this state is not its own. It is … vacant … devoid of presence and actuality.” That is, a subject essentially constructed by its self-presence, in fact the occasion for presence in general, is suddenly devoid of its constituting factor and is left to exist “formally” as simply the da- of existence.

Nancy also makes the following observation: “If in this way it is presence, it is as a pure presence, which for itself has no present and neither presents nor represents anything to itself, but is merely offered to the other’s representation.” (Identity and Trembling)

Indeed, how might (another) Derrida (in another universe) perhaps flex his mantic musculature, recognizing as he certainly does the knowledge that resists knowledge, recognizing the self-constituting other knowledge, and actually write how "J. Hillis Miller himself feel[s] himself ?" Might I suggest hypnosis?