Walter Benjamin

When I hear the word apparatus in a text I suddenly get interested. “The apparatus!” It sounds imposing. It is actually. In the Kafka story we read a few weeks ago, that word is in the first line. And we saw what that apparatus ultimately was meant to do and actually made happen: it inscribes language deep into the tissue, but interesting, not into the tissue of who is being inscribed upon, rather than who is watching, or reading; it also represses, dominates, kills, the body. We also saw this word in Althuser. He called them the Ideological State Apparatuses and Repressive State Apparatuses. These, just like in Kafka, serve the function of a sort of molding, manipulating, and keeping in place, in running order. The ultimate function of these is restricting the body, limiting its possible bodily actions; it is a restriction and harboring of its natural destructive force. When the ideas (the ISA in Althuser), unnoticed mental rules, that are imposed (educate), that are meant to impose, do not actually have an effect on a given subject (body), then the repressive arm (the RSA) is sent in to physically handle the disorder. Walter Benjamin also uses this word in “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility.” He uses the word in reference to the camera. The camera is that for witch the actor is performing. The camera is a technological artifact. It is one of the materials that will impulse and facilitate the technological reproducibility. It will reproduce artificiality; a manipulation of the performance as opposed to the stage actor in a play. It is interesting then, the sort of appropriation that technology can assume. That apparatus has consumed the human, the body. The human dances not to entertain other humans but the camera; the camera (and the microphone) is that which requires the human to move. The camera therefore alters him; makes him use his body and feel in ways he wouldn’t otherwise. But then there is other end of that apparatus. It also captures who is viewing. The television! That is the other apparatus. (In Benjamin’s days this was probably less so.) Or is it the same one? I think both devises are part of the same apparatus. It is as Benjamin suggests, it demands a payment in “human material”. The apparatus here, just as in Kafka or Althuser appear to demand this, payment in “human material.”

J.L. Austin

Just the title of J.L. Austin’s work, one of this week’s readings, is already saying something of the project which will be undertaken in the text to follow. The title is “How to Do Things with Words.” With this title I start thinking of a type of map; that is to say, that there is a map or a chart of words and what they will materially produce. In essence, what I am trying to say is that there is a physical, a material aspect, or result, of using a word; in a valid atmosphere of course; and Austin is going to divulge this information because this is not in general know. If we can ‘do’ things with words, there is a certain materiality to them; they are tangible. If there is something material than there is a bond, a direct link that presupposes no change or a possible dissociation. There is a right and wrong way of doing the ‘things’ with words. The wrong way is cast out of any proper value because it does not follow the rules, the right way, or the ‘truth’; the referent.

The theory he develops is, at least the way I see it, and perhaps a bit condition by what I understood in Derrida’s critique (I will not discuss this here), more or less how I just explained my view of the title. The big word in this article, excerpt of his book, is “performative”. He describes performative utterances, and their validity, as being conditioned by material conditions outside of the words. ‘I write’ is valid right now because I am performing the act of writing. I n this case I have had a successful performative act. If am speaking to a friend and say, “Yeah, I write,” I have had an unsuccessful performative act, according to Austin that utterance cannot be described as ‘saying anything’; it is a misfired performative act. There are certain infelicities affecting the assertion to my friend. If a judge declares me ‘guilty’ inside of a court room there is no question of whether that is true or false: there is only one outcome, that that was a successful performative utterance because everything material to it happened in the way it was supposed to. If the same judge judges me on the street, and says ‘You’re guilty’, there has been, again, an unsuccessful performative act. But there is also the possibility that a friend of mine says ‘You’re guilty’, and like a judge, slams a gavel. This is a parasitic event on language. This is outside of ordinary language. Austin doesn’t really want to talk much about that.

Derrida & Searle

I probably did not understand all the concepts in Jacques Derrida’s articles we read this week; the main one being ‘Signature Event Context’.  I did understand although that there is a very tough intellectual battle going on that John R. Searle starts with Derrida by basically saying in his whole essay, basically what he said specifically to one of Derrida’s arguments: “the answer is a polite but firm, ‘No, it isn’t true.’”. Searle, although it seems, has effectively argued in favor of Austin; this is because he thinks to have very much discovered the true intentions of Austin and the true intentions of Derrida, and Derrida for him is wrong because he misunderstood, could not figure out the true intentions, meaning, of Austin. I will try and look at some of these concepts.

It seems Jacques Derrida is working with, or coming from the perspective of language and signification only on that plane more than Austin is pretending to do. I wouldn’t venture to say that the arguments are flawed from the get go because they are working on concepts that have nothing to with each other. But it can seem that they are indeed working two different realms of language. I will quote a line by Derrida: “He [Austin] then attempts to justify, with nonlinguistic reasons, the preference he has shown in the analysis of performatives… in the final instance, is the reference made therein to what Austin calls the source.” (19). The source is also known as the origin, the author, the referent, or the context (at least that is how I think Derrida uses them). In deed Austin is working, as I proposed in my post for Austin, with a material that directly conditions the validity or meaning of words (remember he said that a performative was not simply to say something but also to do something, be validated by a situation). This here is the fundamental divergence that Derrida takes from Austin’s proposition. He talks about meaning as supplementary. It is precisely Derrida’s project to create a distance from a source, from a referent because that, he says, limits the possibilities of language. Searle, in his response, limits his arguments to basically saying to Derrida that his close reading of Austin was not a correct interpretation. When Searle apposes Austin’s notion of repeatability of writing, he focuses on the material aspect of the reproducibility of a book. This, now in my reading of Derrida, is not what Derrida had in mind when he talked about writing as iterable.

Franz Kafka

The Penal Colony

Much of the theory (and one short story) that we have been reading in the past weeks in one way or another has the body at the center, or better yet at an invisible, or displaced center, of its theoretical propositions. (This week’s reading of a Kafka story, The Penal Colony, is not an exception.) Body can be viewed in a few different forms, i.e. social body, body of works, individual body, etc., although it is usually exemplified in the individual body of the subject. The body as being inseparable from language, I would propose the body as the general grounds of human inquiry and discussion. This may be perhaps because the body is where we feel, it is what decays on its own through time, it is what will bring us to our end (death), and therefore it is the most important surface on which to make a semantic inscription and with which to make organizational strategies before each one meets that end. The latter concept, ‘organizational strategy’, now suggests a political aspect. This organizational aspect, as Louis Althuser has shown (calling it infrastructure), is inseparable or cannot survive or exist without semantic inscription, or the assigning of meaning; in Althuser this area belongs to an upper lever called the superstructure, this is where politics, an intangible, resides. The body is therefore ground zero for any type of social formation or organization. This for some probably would be difficult to accept if a position outside of the material is not taken; meaning if one does not take a stance outside of just the actual individual’s body starting with his or her skin. The body as the center, ground zero, goes beyond actual inscriptions on the skin, perhaps the widespread modern use of the ‘tattoo’ might suggest otherwise, but that is not what I intend to discuss here.

In Kafka’s story The Penal Colony the body is, as I have already implied, the center, the nucleus holding the language together in its organized form. In this case although, I don’t believe the body is part of the main question, it is rather part of the answer to that question. The question is: where is justice made? (It is a vague question I know.) This of course leads to a discourse on justice; asking what justice is. In the text although, there seems to be a working definition of what justice is. Justice in the text is simply punishing the guilty and in regards to this the text works with the notion that everyone is guilty; the officer and old commandant certainly seem to think so; explicitly at least. The traveler, although, doesn’t think that way. He thinks an accused needs a due process before justice is made. In the end both actually think the same. I will explain. The whole point of the apparatus is to kill. There is absolutely no point in a machine with such intricacies of writing on the body if the condemned is still going to die. That would be useful if the condemned were to stay living. In the end the Traveler stays living and there is a reason for that. The old has given way to the new. The whole process of the spectacle is no longer necessary; it has achieved the logical outcome of making justice by writing on the body. This outcome is to have those inscriptions present in every living body. That is to say, one is still guilty, but messages like “Honour your superiors” or “Be just!” are, as the Officer says, experienced in the body. The Traveler is the immediate example of a controlled, disciplined, civil body. He leaves the penal colony, but even outside he is imprisoned, he is still in the penal colony because the inscriptions in his body control him, control his body; because he, like everyone else, is guilty. The due process he believes in is applying by force onto the body of the condemned, i.e. fines (you have to work to pay the fine, right?), confinement, maybe death penalty, etc., bodily inscriptions which he or she did not accept or relieved themselves of them; so it actually is a reapplying of the inscriptions. Either way, justice has been made on his body. The ‘peculiar apparatus’ is the puppeteer.

Jacques Lacan

“Thus the subject, too, if he can appear to be the slave of language, is all the more so of a discourse in the universal movement in which his place is already inscribed at birth, if only by virtue of his proper name.”

The term ‘liberty’ comes to mind as I read this. This implies that if language, or better yet of the ‘discourse in the universal movement,’ is our (humans) master, as we are a subject by virtue of our ‘proper name’ giving us our place in the community, then the concept of liberty is ever more empty. We tend to think, or at least this is the general conception of liberty in our day, that liberty is being able to do or think as I please. This is the most common way of conceptualizing ‘liberty’. When I think of this I always think of the example of me, or a subject, being in front of 30 different television sets, with different brands and sizes and other specifications, and thinking that that, my being able to choose from 30 different television sets, is an expression of my liberty. The problem here is that the option of not buying, just out right living without a television set, never crossed my mind. In this example there are obviously many other forces at work limiting the full scope of my understanding of liberty. The freedom of being able to do perhaps is easier to pinpoint: this can be seen as the removal of restrictions upon the body, matter, itself; not being confined unjustly, being able to move as I please. The other one, the cognitive element is much more difficult to grasp. Lacan goes on to say that language is what distinguishes human society from natural society. So language is what makes us human and it enslaves us. This tells me that liberty doesn’t exist. We may think we have the freedom of ‘thought’, but in that case what doesn’t cross our minds is that when we think a certain way, we are subjected to that discourse and that there was manipulation in getting us to join that discourse. Pinpointing how we are not at liberty to think what we want to think is something that must be rejected if one is within the parameters of the general concept of liberty that I mentioned above. Lacan (and Freud) talks about the unconscious mind. One of Lacan’s theses’ is that the unconscious mind is made up of language. Therefore, in my observation, we are slaves to our unconsciousness. I am inclined to think that a psychotic person, maybe really be free when language doesn’t make us human or our unconscious, language, is unlocked.