Walter Pater's Speculative Aesthetics and Microbiopolitics

In defining the aesthetic experience as hazarding oneself within a desubjectifying aesthetic-object relation, Walter Pater’s speculative aesthetic criticism short circuits the Ruskinian liberal subject (predicated on art’s near-sublime ability to convey the greatest number of great ideas) and its condition of possibility (the mastered/mastering human-world correlate) by overwhelming it with a field of bipolar tensions. Pater, having worked Kantian aesthetics backwards from the “subject” to the aesthetic object, confronts the material conditions of possibility for pure aesthetic experience. While the lineage of Victorian Kantians (Coleridge, Carlyle, Ruskin, Arnold) had pursued the transcendental dimension of aesthetic experience as a way to construct an autonomous, self-willed, distanced, and disinterested liberal subject, Pater sought to strip the aesthetic experience of all external relations or ends. Scandalous to 1870’s England and blasé to post-New Criticism literary scholars, Pater’s peculiar rootstock of “art for art’s sake” deserves reappraisal on ontological and ethical grounds. Rather than reading Pater as a historical anomaly, I propose an approach treating his aesthetic criticism as a speculative philosophy capable of providing a model for how contemporary microbiopolitical apparatuses operate upon living beings and how an efficacious subjecthood can be constructed vis-à-vis those very apparatuses.

            Pater’s sketch of the aesthetic experience, which maps the force field stretched between the aesthetic object and the critic’s imaginative reason, not only inverts then-conventional Kantian criticism, but also pushes aesthetics to its ontological and epistemological horizon: the pure aesthetic object. If the aesthetic object and aesthetic critic enter into intimacy through the aesthetic encounter, and if this intimacy short circuits the production of a liberal subject (a harnessing of the material autonomy of art for immaterial, human ends – meaning, ideation, morality), then the danger lies in the aesthetic object’s indifference to the critic’s comportment. The horizon between matter (or content) and form becomes for Pater the primary locus of the aesthetic encounter, the site where the aesthetic object withdraws from access and the site to which the critic is irresistibly drawn. Such a fissure, I argue, becomes a site of mastery – the object over the viewer or the viewer over the object – motivating Pater’s insistence that “it is the constant effort of art to obliterate it” (90). Matter and form must, for Pater, operate through a curious immanence within which “this form, this mode of handling, should become an end in itself, should penetrate every part of the matter.” Resolutely non-Platonic (or non-Kantian?), Paterian form remains grounded in materiality as the trace of the artistic gesture or signature. Form’s penetration of matter is that which subverts Ruskinian subject-formation by suspending the force of external relations manipulating the aesthetic object for other ends.

Nevertheless, the zone of indistinction rendered by form’s penetration of matter also serves as generative force for meaning – and the liberal subject’s formation via art. The form-and-matter zone of indistinction is, therefore, a particularly fraught region for Pater wherein “meaning reaches us through ways not distinctly traceable by the understanding” (91). Meaning serves as a sieve through which living being is captured and passed along into other fields of force – an ideological terrain of Victorian liberalism, for instance. Meaning, arising out of form-and-matter, is an apparatus – a “thing” capturing, orienting, modeling, controlling, intercepting, securing the behaviors, gestures, opinions, discourses of living beings for ends outside themselves. And yet if meaning, as an apparatus capturing and jettisoning some capacity of the viewer into another field (a process Agamben calls sacredization), arises out of form and matter’s indistinction, then form-and-matter also holds the potential to subvert that process. An over-penetration of form into matter could render inoperative meaning’s capturing force. For Pater, art inherently tends to this suspension: “Art, then, is thus always striving to be independent of the mere intelligence, to become a matter of pure perception, to get rid of its responsibilities to its subject” (92). As an aesthetic object withdraws into its constitutive zone of form-and-matter, it simultaneously severs itself from ends outside itself, while still retaining its force of capture. As The Picture of Dorian Grey warns, the pure aesthetic object never ceases to exert capturing, modeling, control, or orienting force over its viewer. Rather, in the aesthetic object Pater discerned the bare condition of an apparatus’s possibility, its unceasing force of capture independent of ends – the aesthetic object as black hole.

            The horizon marking the aesthetic object’s force is useful in thinking through the operations of what Nigel Thrift defines as microbiopolitics: practices and techniques of power operating “in the half-second delay between action and cognition” (71). This microbiopolitical domain teems with apparatuses capturing living beings at an ontological level indifferent to thought. If biopolitics could be thought through a correlationist lens (Foucauldian power-knowledge), microbiopolitics demands a speculative philosophy because it operates entirely independent of thought. Certainly the “operators” of such apparatuses can and should be thought; nevertheless the very operations of microbiopolitics demands approach other than the Foucauldian. Pater’s aesthetic object offers such an approach. By mapping the domain generating an object’s capacity to capture (its condition of possibility as an apparatus), Pater’s criticism concerns itself with the ontological conditions of capture indifferent to thought: the half-second delay between action and cognition.

This isn’t to argue that Pater’s aesthetic objects are microbiopolitical apparatuses (which would be to stretch the definition too far, as if all art were microbiopolitical because it works on the senses), although the incense-laden procession opening his Marius the Epicurean could gesture towards contemporary pheromone apparatuses. Rather, Pater’s aesthetic criticism, if read as speculative philosophy, not only offers a way to think the ontological conditions of microbiopolitics, but also provides a form-of-life constituted by the reparative or profaning appropriation of apparatuses: Hellenic subjectivity. Explicitly a renunciation of Ruskin’s valorization of the Gothic, Hellenic subjectivity profanes the liberal subject’s constitutive characteristics and puts them to new use. Like the liberal subject, the Hellenic subject is self-willed (“They are ideal artists of themselves” [143]), autonomous (“that Hellenic ideal, in which man is at unity with himself” [145]), and disinterested (“the absence of any sense of want” [144]). However, such a subject arises out of an entirely different relation to the world. Whereas the liberal subject attains its self-will, autonomy, and disinterestedness from a detachment or transcendence from the world (from sensation into mind, for instance), the Hellenic subject emerges from a radical immersion into the world: the “Hellenic ideal, in which man is at unity with himself, his physical nature, with the outward world.” As Johann Winckelmann’s life (Pater’s prototype Hellenic subject) indicates, the Hellenic subject is constituted through an intimacy with the aesthetic object, a being “in touch with it; it penetrates him, and becomes a part of his temperament” (127). It is in connection with the aesthetic object, understood as a pure apparatus, that we should read Pater’s (in)famous definition of success in life. “To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy” of “that strange, perpetual, weaving and unweaving of ourselves” is to profane the apparatuses of “the modern world, with its conflicting claims, its entangled interests, distracted by so many sorrows, with many preoccupations” (148), severing their external ends (claims, interests, sorrows, preoccupations) and repurposing their force of capture for new ends. Pater’s “speculative culture” (154) offers a model for Thrift’s microbiopolitical counter-conduct – an art or cultivation of the self attuned to “the kind of biological-cum-cultural gymnastics that take place in this realm which is increasingly susceptible to new and sometimes threatening knowledges and technologies” (71).

Walter Pater's Theory of the Dispositif: Countering Liberal Pastorship with the Aesthetic Object

In this paper, recently given at the "Phases of Thought" scholar symposium at UCD, I attempted to provide a sketch of an emerging larger (dissertation) project and then a possible segment of that project.

Overall, I am concerned with how in late-Victorian England the conduct of the groups or populations was conducted through localized configurations of liberal pastorship or governmentality – that is, how the conduct of purportedly “free” subjects was (potentially) conducted in certain locations. The lack of attention to the space of pastorship has limited other approaches to nineteenth-century British liberalism, pastorship, conduct, and counter-conduct such as those of Lauren Goodlad, Amanda Anderson, and Elaine Hadley. I argue that “milieu” provides one way of historicizing specific, localized struggles over liberal pastorship. The milieu, Foucault tells us in Security, Territory, Population, consists of a configuration of artificial elements and natural givens – a potential model for reading the composition and operation of pastorship and counter-pastorship, conduct and counter-conduct in spaces as disparate as Walter Pater’s Brasenose College (Oxford), the virtual middle-class home of Mary Haweis’ interior decoration guides, or the socialist utopia of William Morris’ News from Nowhere. The milieu’s artificial elements are those “objects” constructed by a regime of pastorship, while the natural givens are everything present in a location but not constructed by that regime. According to this understanding multiple milieux can operate and contest each other within a single location. The milieu’s conducting artificial elements are what Foucault and later Agamben define as the “dispositif” (apparatus): anything coupling living beings with a larger field by orienting, intercepting, or securing their behaviors, thoughts, or discourses. Although only one node through which conduct is conducted and by which that desired conduct is resisted, the dispositif is useful for understanding localized liberal pastorship because it is a medium for “free” contact, exchange, and circulation between individual bodies and regimes of power. Walter Pater’s The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry offers not only what I argue is a late-Victorian theory of the dispositif, but also a program of counter-conduct: Hellenic subjectivity. 

Pater’s aesthetic criticism 1) locates the aesthetic object’s medium-specific “sensual element” and 2) estimates “the degree to which a given work of art fulfills its responsibilities to its special material.” Rather than focusing on art’s intellectual content as does Ruskin (great art provides the greatest number of great ideas, therein orienting the proper conduct/morality they imply – think reading “The Definition of Greatness in Art” coupled with “Of Queen’s Gardens”), instead Pater’s aesthetic critic focuses on a work’s sensual element in order to understand its operations upon the individual at a sensual and affective level – “How is my nature modified by its presence.” Art, Pater argues, operates through its proper materiality in order to reach the viewer’s “imaginative reason” via the senses. The gap between art’s materiality and imaginative reason’s immateriality is bridged by the sensuous element, the artist’s “mode of handling” proper a given medium. Although rooted in art’s materiality, the sensuous element is irreducible to materiality and is instead a sort of spectrality hovering between the two. According to Pater, an aesthetic object’s sensuous element delights the senses in part to “become the vehicle of whatever poetry or science may lie beyond the intention of the composer.” Pater locates in the sensuous element the medium through which an individual comes into “contact” with a regime of liberal pastorship – again, think Ruskin’s criticism its attendant conduct: the sensuous element is that medium or condition of possibility for art’s greatness, its ability to conduct “free” conduct.

            Yet, this contact with liberal pastorship worries Pater, who wishes to theorize the ideal aesthetic object, which should be an end in itself: “Art, then, is thus always striving to be independent of the mere intelligence, to become a matter of pure perception.” That is: if the aesthetic object via its sensuous element threatens to place the viewer into relation with some regime of liberal pastorship, it becomes more efficacious the more independent of that pastorship it can get.

Of course this tendency is an idealization. As Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Grey tells us, all aesthetic objects partake in a milieu and therefore serve to conduct conduct for better or worse. Nevertheless, we see in Pater’s schematization of the aesthetic object’s operations a model of the dispositif as a one mechanism of pastorship. Insofar as it tends towards autonomy, the aesthetic object serves as the node with which a certain counter-conduct, Hellenic subjectivity, orients itself. The proper comportment demanded by the pure aesthetic object is one of suspension of content/pastoral baggage and attunement with the autopoietic sensuous element – a two step counter conduct (im)famously promoted in The Renaissance’s conclusion, one that renounces the hallmark “disinterestedness” of the classic liberal subject. Supine reflection “suspends” one’s comportment to the “cohesive forces” and “the action of those forces extending beyond us” in order to experience the ecstatic “weaving and unweaving of ourselves.” The Hellenic subject, constituted by its blithe repose and its concentrating breadth/attunement, names the counter-conduct seeking only “to burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy” – opened by the suspending or profaning dispositif, the aesthetic object indifferent to everything but its own sensuous element.

            The intersection of dispositif, Hellenic subjectivity, and pastorship offers an opportunity for a series of “strategic” displacements: from object of analysis to field of truth engulfing it, from institution to general order, from function to general economy of power – all ways to consider the class, race, and gender exclusions making Hellenic subjectivity possible. 

Occupy's Poet Laureate: Keats

I am still having difficulty getting back into my exam reading after the quarter (not that Caleb Williams and Althusser aren’t super exciting), so I will procrastinate by blogging about why the Occupy poet laureate should be Keats. Yeah, ode-on-a-grecian-urn Keats as a radical leftist.

            The modern playbook on avant garde and politically subversive poetry comes, in large part, from Wordsworthian Romanticism. Not only was Wordsworth’s second preface to Lyrical Ballads one of the first literary manifestoes, it established the poetics of subversion as rooted in Romantic irony. Such irony stipulates the near impossibility of any truly meta-perspective (i.e. the Burkean sublime) outside one’s embeddedness within a phenomenological and moral environment. Romantic irony marks the site of one’s encounter with the other, who is, within this space, never truly other. Accordingly, Wordsworthian romanticism is all about relations – self/other, human/nonhuman, middle class/peasants, etc. This is precisely why Whitehead’s process theory jives so well with both Wordsworth and Percy Shelly (the hyper-Wordsworth). In sketching the genealogy of his Organic Theory of Nature (all reality is a process of becoming composed of events, realizations, and relations wherein entities bind together through prehension and patterns), Whitehead calls Wordsworth his a nineteenth-century predecessor not only because “he dwells on that mysterious presence of surrounding things, which imposes itself on any separate element that ewe set up as an individual for its own sake,” but primarily because Wordsworth “exhibit[s] entwined prehensive unities, each suffused with modal presences of others” (Science and the Modern World 83-84).

            Whitehead’s deference to Wordsworth indicates not only the prevalence of Wordsworthian poetics, but also the operations of its political subversion. As a political act, Wordsworthian Romanticism proceeds by reconstructing a profuse environment (not only “natural,” but also socio-economic) outside of which the poet seemingly offers a meta-position (that place where the environment is known fully, as if the reader-perceiver were some Burkean sovereign) only to undercut any such position.

“The Old Man Travelling” is a prime example of such a politics of subversion. Wordsworth opens this poem with what appears to be a nicely poetic description of an old man wandering, an opening seemingly ripped from the pages of a sentimental poem by, say, William Cowper. We see the old man and his poverty from a vista removed from the action – the abstraction of this gaze seemingly isolates the political content (poverty and class inequality) so that we the privileged reader (both epistemologically and economically) can abstractly understand that content. Such sentimentalizing (or more precisely, pastoralizing) is ironically sketched in the lines, “He is by nature led/ To peace so perfect, that the young behold/ With envy, what the old man hardly feels.” Here we already get a sense that the joke is on us, who have up to this point assumed the position of “the young” by presupposing our own epistemologically privileged perspective – we know what the old man feels better than he can know because we have attained our nicely distanced gaze.

However, by giving the old man the final word, the poem undercuts this meta-position by forcing the reader into an undue intimacy with the old man. What a sentimental gaze led us to believe (the old man is a poor-in-world primitive) is completely shattered when the old man reveals his “real” feelings: anxiety over his son, who is “dying in an hospital” following a Napoleonic war “sea-fight” This rug-pulling maneuver places the reader face-to-face with the other. But the encounter is uncannily ambiguous: where is the line between self and other when the coordinates of that division have been seemingly obliterated? Locked in such an undue intimacy, the reader becomes aware of his/her embeddedness in an economic and moral environment and hence ethically responsible for the alterity that, as Whitehead stipulates, “imposes itself” on us.

While such an undue intimacy is the initial, experiential task of Wordsworthian political poetics it is a controlled intimacy. If on the one hand Wordsworth seeks to toss the reader into a radical intimacy with the other, he does so by also implicitly assuring his reader that in the last instance this is only in one’s mind. The entire subject-forming, ethical machine of Wordsworthian poetic experience is predicated on the possibility of “world making” – or, the suspension of one’s immediate experience of the real through an abstracting prehension that translates the always incomplete real into a fulfilled phenomenal Real. If Wordsworth pulls the rug of sentimental poetry from under our feet, in the end he does so not to obliterate our phenomenal distance from our surroundings, but rather to upgrade our prehension of those surroundings. The problem with the sentimental gaze isn’t that it is world making; the problem is that is merely too abstract. As Wordsworth famously claims, “We murder to dissect” – an inescapable operation poorly managed by sentimental poetics. Luckily for us, Wordsworth has the solution. Sure we murder with our dissecting gaze, but we can do it with feeling – which makes everything okay. By attuning ourselves to our surroundings, the violence of phenomenal prehension (murdering to dissect) becomes tempered, which then allows for a more authentic relation to our surroundings. By being attuned to the old man’s true feelings, we enter into a more ethically efficacious relationship with him. As a political-ethical procedure, Wordsworthian Romanticism serves to upgrade our consciousness of our relations with the other so that we can then, perhaps, change those relations for the better. As a political action, however, such a political poetics ­– which stretches from Wordsworth to Shelly to the Realist novel to Dada to Modernism to certain David Lynch films – operates to the side of the political “reality” it comments upon. Just as we never actually enter an undue intimacy with the old man (Romantic irony protects us from a full immersion into our environment), Wordsworthian poetics never enter into a lived political struggle.

Keats’s poetry, on the other hand, is all about the actual immersion within an aesthetic, political, ethical world. As poems like “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (and its precursors “Lines to J.H. Reynolds, esq.” and “Sleep and Poetry”) are not only about relations (they are object-lessons detailing our capture by the kitsch dispositifs of capitalism), but also participate in relational actions, albeit in a truly subversive manner. The poles of Keatsian object lessons stretch from a meditation on the poet’s desubjectifying experience of apparatic capture (see my previous post on apparatuses) to the poet’s construction of an object that will operate exactly as the object within the poem acts on the poet. As the poet is “teased out of thought” by a profusion of capitalist kitsch – it is incredible how many of Keats’s objects are kitsch: a reproduction Portland Vase, busts of poets in Leigh Hunt’s library, reproductions of paintings, mass-print translations of Homer – he simultaneously reenacts the same operations to capture the reader. Keats’ poems work in a totally different register than Wordsworthian Romanticism. Instead of upgrading our consciousness of relations, Keats seeks to place us on the very gears of capitalist relationality – in the hiatus opened by each object of a capitalist economy and our selves.

But this is not critique. Keats does not say, “Because you now know how dispositifs operate you can be more effective participants in society.” Rather, he actually renders the mechanisms of capitalist capture inoperative. By reproducing an object that functions according to the same operations as an imitation Portland Vase, Keats profanes the very operations of capitalist sacredization (the jettisoning of living being into a separate sphere, here the teasing of thought by consumption), returning to free, poetic use the faculties of living being previously appropriated by capitalism. This is the meaning of the famed lines “Beauty is Truth, truth beauty.” Keats is not evoking some auratic universalism – one that would merely fetishize the procedures of sacredization – but rather stressing that the aesthetic encounter – one’s capture by a dispositif – is the condition of any encounter with any object and that the modality of that encounter is completely contingent. These lines say, simply, "You cannot escape apparatic capture, but you can reconfigure the modality of that capture just like this poem’s profanation of a capitalist dispositif does." Hence Keats’s indefatigable stress on inoperativity: apparatic capture suspends living being in a certain modal relation, but there are also subversive reconfigurations of those relations. That is what Keats’s object poems are all about. They mediate and construct new modal relations with the objects of capitalist consumption, therein doubly suspending the apparatic suspension of living being. If kitsch teases us out of thought, then it is also possible to tease kitsch out of thought. Keats’s poems do this in reality. 

And that is precisely how the political activities of Keats and Wordsworth differ. While Wordsworthian Romanticism seeks to upgrade our consciousness, Keatsian poetics actually changes our imbrication within our environment and is, accordingly, politically subversive in actuality.

The tactics of the Occupy movement share the political operations of Keats’s poetry. At bottom, the Occupy movement is about one’s simple existence in space and how that act renders the operations of hypercapitalism inoperative. By refusing to participate in the mechanisms that appropriate vital functions of living being by capitalism’s dispositifs, an occupier radically suspends the efficacy of capitalism – which is predicating on the abstraction of productive vitality (labor, consumption, thought, language, etc.) from one ontological layer (individual being) to another (field of capitalism). The occupier’s mere existence in space – his/her inoperativity – is the most radical form of revolution possible under the existing conditions of biopolitical hypercapitalism. Quite literally, the inoperativity of protesters across the world consists in the placement of their bodies on the gears of the apparatus such that those apparatuses cease to function. That is why the recent west-coast port shutdowns are radically violent: by placing their bodies within the space capitalism needs to distribute its goods, the protesters actually strike a blow against that system.

Wordsworthian models of political activism are absolutely impotent in this regard. Predicated on consciousness upgrading, Wordsworthian subversion can be heard in the persistent entreaties that the occupiers formulate demands or offer nuanced philosophical explanations of their movement. Such formulations are nothing more than a reinscription of a potentially revolutionary energy within the very operations the movement seeks to overthrow. That is why I personally find the conciliatory rhetoric of certain strains of the movement worse than pointless. By calling for ethical openness for the other, such strains merely recapitulate the assimilationist logic of capitalism. While being open to the other is ethically correct, it is merely a precondition for the actual revolution and not itself revolutionary. Rather, the revolutionary work of the movement happens at the level of inoperativity – the port shut downs and building occupations – wherein the operations of capitalism are suspended. The occupy movement isn’t, in the last instance, an upgrading of our ethical consciousness. The occupy movement is about the revolutionary overthrow of capitalist relational in actuality. Keats provides one model for such revolutionary inoperativity. 

How Object-Oriented is Agamben: Inoperativity

      Now for the first of a possible series: How Object-Oriented is Agamben?

      Per Tim Morton’s comments on Agamben in a recent course lecture on Object Oriented Ontology (Agamben seeks to out-meta Heidegger, to find The Ground beneath Heidegger’s ground), my readings in OOO, and Agamben’s own recently published essay collection, Nudities, I feel it is time to put the radical Italian philosopher to the test.
     First, in regards to Tim’s assertion that Agamben seeks to out-ground Heidegger: he does, repeatedly and exhaustively. Take for example the final pages of The Open, where Agamben explicitly attempts to work beyond the aporia of Heidegger’ conception of the open and human Dasein. Yet, I wonder, is Agamben, in general, actually out-grounding in a meta-critique? While this question may not fit well with The Open, it does with the essay “Hunger of an Ox: Considerations of the Sabbath, the Feast, and Inoperativity.” Much like his concept of profanation, Agamben’s inoperativity is a process that renders all hegemonic (specifically “sacred” -- a term that for Agamben, means all life, activity, objects, and use within hyper-capitalism, which functions through sacralization, the jettisoning of objects from the realm of free use into a separate, isolated, alienated sphere) objects and activities free from “productive” ends. Inoperativity is, therefore, not abstinence or idleness, but rather “a particular modality of acting and living” that opens itself up through the suspension of the sacred (105). At first glance, inoperativity looks like a meta-process: one steps outside of hegemonic forces (hyper-capitalism) in order to enact a more authentic (or at the least, different) manner of living. This appears “meta” by such a stepping outside -- in the suspension of sacredness. However, to be properly “meta,” this suspension must double its glance back towards that which it enacts itself upon: our inoperativity would then distance itself from the forces imbricating living being in order to perceive them lucidly (“What is the Contemporary?” calls for such an activity: “Contemporariness is, then, a singular relationship with one’s time, which adheres to it and, at the same time, keeps a distance from it” [41]. Clearly, Agmaben's thought runs in two direction: a meta-grounding rightly criticized by Morton, and a radical lateral removal from all previous ground. This second direction is, to a degree, a minor chord in Agamben's work, although the political implications might attest to its ultimate significance).
     This, however, is not the case with inoperativity as sketched in Nudities. Inoperativity is simply a radically lateral removal and intervention in the processes of sacralization that seeks in no way to interpret or interrogate those processes. It simply is the modality of living and acting in a post-sacred society. If it has an aim it is merely “to open [human activities] to a new -- or more ancient -- use in the spirit of the Sabbath” (112) -- the hiatus of time in which all activities are stripped of their productive force. Suspension here is not an excepting process; inoperativity does not come about through a constituting exception of sacralization (this would be the meta-suspension -- a distancing that remains constitutively connect to that which it excepts). Instead, inoperativity is a radical suspension in which all aspects of sacralization are obliterated and those beings and activities that were previously imbricated in forces of sacralization are open to their free and proper play.
     Of course, Agamben repeatedly ties inoperativity to the human -- a decidedly un-OOO maneuver. And while this focus may in large part result from spatial constraints (“Hunger” is only eight pages long), it nevertheless represents a potential blind spot in Agamben’s recent work: the re-ascendant primacy of the human (granted a “humanness” not defined by the anthropological machine). Nevertheless, might inoperativity be extended to all objects? Take my earlier post on apparatuses. Near the conclusion, I claimed that the apparatus refers to a certain potentiality for capture inhering in any given object that is activated only when placed in the correct circumstances. For example, a book is simply a paper weight until it is picked up and read, therein serving its apparatic function of capturing the living being of its reader, who not only expropriates his/her mental faculties to the text, but his/her living being: he/she renders themselves relatively immobile and docile. Of course, the book prior to reading is still an apparatus (it captures the papers it rests on top of), but this is not the “proper” or intentional apparatic function of the book. Now, the book's undergoing inoperativity would be involve the cessation of its apparatic potential -- to capture both the mental and living being of humans and the mobility of a loose pile of paper. The book may still be read and sit atop papers, but it would do so in a manner that does not capture objects within a larger field of forces -- the reading-human within hypercapitalism, the papers within the strictures of an “organized” desk. This inoperativity of the book is performed by foreclosing the possibility of placing it within the contingent circumstances of capture. What was once a vessel ferrying one object into a larger object (the reading human into hypercapitalism) becomes merely an object. The book can therefore be read, but in so being read the book does not shuttle the reader into contact with hypercapitalism. The reader simply reads -- he/she enters into contiguous (vicarious) contact with the book through the sensual object “text,” a mediator hovering between the book and the reader that is both of the book and of the reader -- something like the “gesture.”
     Insofar he does not extend inoperativity to all objects, Agamben is not object-oriented; nevertheless, inoperativity does provide the means for an object-oriented analysis of apparatuses and the political consequences of contact and causation.

Reading Gesture Part II: To the Lighthouse and Discursive Planes

     My last post’s example of the gesture in Dickens’s Oliver Twist raises another question about gestic reading: what, beyond content, is the consistency of the gesture? What “form,” in other words, is read in a gestic reading? This is clearly the point at which Oliver’s hypnagogia falls short in pointing towards a truly gestic reading: Oliver’s dream world is, simply, a matter of the novel’s content, not its form. While finding instances of the gesture’s messianic world are illuminating, they do not lead, in actuality, towards a hermeneutic of the gesture. Instead, the gesture can be, I hope, found in the non-diegetic passages between discourse levels within the prose of certain authors.
     Take Virginia Woolf and a random passage from To the Lighthouse: “No, she thought, putting together some of the pictures he had cut out – a refrigerator, a mowing machine, a gentleman in evening dress – children never forget. For this reason, it was so important what one said, and what one did, and it was a relief when they went to bed. For now she need not think about anybody. She could be herself, by herself” (62). And so on . . .
     Now, conventional wisdom holds that Woolf’s style falls under the category of "internal monologue." I will not contest this convention. Instead I want to point to, as best I can with the limited typographical techniques available on Blogger, the enmeshment of discourse planes that constitutes Woolf’s gesture. The first word, “No,” clearly indicates a thought Mrs. Ramsay has, an actuality Woolf makes painfully clear (“she thought”). However, this first word introduces a discourse plane, one upon which Mrs. Ramsay’s more-or-less conscious thoughts will unfold. At first glance it is this plane of discourse upon which the list of paper cutouts belongs, as if Mrs. Ramsay were thinking “refrigerator, mowing machine, etc.” Another initial reading could be that the list belongs to the discursive plane of the narrator (who is first inserted into the text with “she thought”), such that the list is an objective, external list of the paper cutouts. Yet the text’s dashes foreclose both readings. Instead, the discursive plane of the list belongs to something between an “objective” exteriority and a “subjective” interiority; that is, the list belongs to a plane between Mrs. Ramsay and the world around her.
     And things get even more complicated from here. The phrase following the second dash (“and children never forget”) seemingly belongs to the plane of Mrs. Ramsay’s more-or-less conscious monologue. Yet, the manner of this phrase – its detached “universalism,” its all children do X – shifts the discourse into another plane whose “genre” can be called “middle-class domestic wisdom.” The phrase itself could have easily been cut from a domestic manual’s pages, much as James’s cutouts were cut from a catalog. And the passage continues along upon this ambiguous plane until the series comma (“, and . . .”) – the genre register is, until that comma, clearer with its instructive “one” pronouns. Yet this plane could very easily be attributed to Mrs. Ramsay’s conscious thought – and now I want to have my cake and eat it too. For the discursive plane introduced with “children never forget” belongs to both Mrs. Ramsay and the genre of domestic manuals. Here we see something like an apparatic capturing emerging from the text: Mrs. Ramsay’s thought’s capture by the apparatus of the domestic manual. Yet the only way this capture becomes visible in the text is through the intersection of two discursive planes registered by marks read non-diegetically (those dashes and pronouns). And this is, I think, Woolf’s point entirely: that we can, through her style, see Mrs. Ramsay’s capture by the various Victorian, domesticating apparatuses prevalent at the fin de siècle. What Woolf’s style reveals to the reader gestically is not Mrs. Ramsay as captured, but the actual processes of Mrs. Ramsay’s capture – of Mrs. Ramsay’s capture as such. Such a gestic style is not limited to Woolf and other Modernists (especially both Joyce, who makes explicate use of genre play, and Faulkner), but writers as seemingly disparate as Samuel Richardson (Clarissa) and Thomas Pynchon (Gravity’s Rainbow, Against the Day, and in particular, Inherent Vice).
     I must reiterate, the world of the apparatus and the world of messianic are, startlingly, closely related in that they occupy the “space” beside living beings. It is as if the messianic world and the bare life that apparatuses produce are two poles of the same “world,” a world a certain reading can bring into language.

Grass!

      It is official: my tour of landscaping duty with the “Enterprise” has ended. For ten of the last eleven summers, I cut grass into an endless variety of lengths, lines, and patterns for an even odder assortment of golfers, flatlanders, and rednecks. This season’s close comes with great relief. Of the ten summers I have spent exposed to poison ivy and sumac, swarming hornets and wasps, flying sticks and rocks, spewing gas and diesel fumes, blistering exhaust and sun burns, only three were spent working for MDP Enterprises, a landscaping company in humble Springfield, Vermont named after its illustrious and ever humble snake oil salesman proprietor (yes, what my boss lacks in imagination, he more than makes up for in ego). So, to observe this special occasion: a post on grass, my evergreen constant of the past eleven years.
     My last post discussed, perhaps too abstractly, a concept I find crucial to navigating our contemporary condition: the apparatus. Concurrent with this effort, Levi Bryant over at Larval Subjects posted some simply amazing comments on the mediality of . . . grass! Because his argument meshes so well with my clumsy attempt at defining the apparatus as the medium between objects that establishes and articulates a power relation, I offer it to you at length:

It is not simply that media extend man, but rather humans often extend media. Take the example of lawn grass. Does grass extend the human? Certainly we see children playing in the grass, laying in the grass, having picnics in the grass, etc. However, isn’t it equally true that grass uses humans to extend itself? From a Darwinian perspective– and especially from the perspective of sexual selection in the Origin of Species –isn’t it true that grass has seduced humans so as to get itself reproduced? Isn’t the softness of grass, its rich verdant color, its pleasant earthy smell, the satisfaction it provides when being mowed, etc., a sexual strategy to get itself reproduced? Is it at least not partially true that contemporary Western civilization is an effect of grass’s drive to get itself reproduced? Has not grass carefully cultivated local manifestations among humans (primarily male humans) that take pleasure in neat lines on their lawn, the sound of a lawn mower, the luster of a thick lawn, and so on? Have we not been engineered by grass? Moreover, we could even say that in its race to domesticate man, grass generates an antagonistic war against not only weeds, but rather different varieties of grass, all using humans as queer sexual organs to get itself reproduced and to get achieve the hegemony of its particular species or variant.

First off, with “media” Bryant is at once evoking Marshall McLuhan’s definition of media as anything that extends man and expanding it to including anything that extends any object. Hence grass’s use of humans as media (or queer sexual objects) to extend themselves (an argument that Michael Pollan makes in Botany of Desire). Now, I see grass’s use of humans as media objects as an apparatic relationship wherein the grass captures human living being, getting us to do all kinds of weird things (like getting me to wake up at five every morning for ten summers).
     But how exactly does grass capture us in order to extend itself? Bryant cites several aspects grass has developed that seemingly lead to its force of capture over humans: softness, color, smell, mowing satisfaction (how many lawns has Bryant mowed?!). Now, these aspects are, properly, accidents, not the substance of grass (to revert to Scholastic terminology). That is, the pleasing (to us) texture, smell, and color of particular varieties of grass are modifications of the general “substance” of grass (of grass-ness). And it is these accidents (or evolutionary affectations within the performative of queer reproduction) that induce humans to supplicate themselves before the lush thrones of Bermuda, Kentucky blue, and fescue grasses.
     Are these accidents, then, the manner of the grass-apparatus, which is (from a certain standpoint) external to grass as such? Take color. The pleasing aspect of grass’s color is visible primarily to the human eye, not to the eye of the grub burrowing at the grass’s roots or the deer grazing on its leaves. The pleasurable color of grass is so only externally – when caught within the apparatic relationship established between humans and grass. Likewise with smell and texture. These accidents serve as the manner with which grass comports itself towards human in order to lock both into a power relation that will extend grass’s own living being. Thus, the grass-apparatus does not consist of grass, but the peculiar accidents located within a specific power relationship between grass and humans.
     But what does grass capture thusly? Well, just about anything. Grass’s apparatic extension implicates the plant in nearly all aspects and power relations of hypercapitalist society. Take my snake oil salesman boss. He has become defined through his company’s name, MDP Enterprises, within the public sphere of Windsor County Vermont. M is known, literally, as the “M” of the “Enterprise.” Yet M has come to be known publically in this manner because of his simultaneous capture within the grass-apparatus. The Enterprise that has created M’s discursive existence comes from his response to being captured by grass’s color and texture: cutting it into pleasing lines.
     Now this power relation between M and the grass apparatus extends into large power relations. M can control other humans through his manipulation of his own capture in the grass-apparatus. As a successful snake oil salesman, M has convinced countless out-of-staters that their rarely-visited vacation homes need their lawns mowed weekly at seventy-five bucks a pop (some homes are ski homes, so why the owners think they need their grass cut weekly defies any logic). But, the really fascinating thing here is that grass has once more manipulated M (and M’s manipulation of all sorts of other relations within a hypercapitalist culture: petro, consumer, labor, and advertising cultures) into extending its living being into places it otherwise would not exist (those rarely visited lawns). And again, what centers all of these mutually penetrating power relationships is the apparatic manner of grass – its pleasing color, smell, and texture.

Apparatus: The Technological Capture of Living Being

      At the close of my Leave No Trace post I introduced the technical term “apparatus” as LNT’s corporate face, defining the term according to Agamben’s lead: an apparatus is a anything “that has in some way the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control, or secure the gestures, behaviors, opinions, or discourses of living beings” (“What is an Apparatus?” 14). Now, this definition is exceedingly convenient in hinting at the objects hypercapitalism produces (from cell phones to automobiles to televisions to blogs to LNT). And certainly, Agamben is on to something very significant with his definition, especially when considering the scope of his inquiry. In attempting to define our contemporary condition, Agamben asserts, “It would probably not be wrong to define the extreme phase of capitalist development in which we live as a massive accumulation and proliferation of apparatuses” (15). Further, the inquiry into such a proliferating plane of apparatuses (the implication being the absolute capture of all aspects of being) is of crucial importance because “today there is not even a single instant in which the life of individuals is not modeled, contaminated, or controlled by some apparatus.” Such is the “experience” of our contemporary condition: the infinite proliferation of these “things” which capture all aspects of our existence and in so doing separate ourselves from our very being (the apparatus’s division “separates the living being from itself and from its immediate relationship with its environment” [16]). And what makes our current apparatuses peculiar, Agamben claims, is their ability merely to desubjectify their captives, in contrast to other, non-hypercapitalist apparatuses, which function according to a desubjectification-subjectification articulation (the classic example being confession, an apparatus which demands the abnegation of the “self” [desubjectification] in order to offer that individual a rebirth without sin [subjectification]).
     However convenient Agamben’s definition of apparatus may be I feel that it makes only a good starting point for our understanding of the crucial role these formations play today. I would, therefore, like to modify Agamben’s definition, in part reverting to one source of his term (Foucault) as well as amending it with Walter Benjamin’s concept of technology.
     Foucault understands apparatus (for him, dispositif) primarily according to three aspects. First, the apparatus arises as a response to an urgency. Second, because its raison d’etre is derived from a historical (actual) urgency, the apparatus always consists of a concrete strategic function located in a power relation (think: Bush’s “Patriot Act”). Third, because of its concrete, functional relationship with power structures, the apparatus emerges at the intersection between power and knowledge relationships and accordingly forms “the network established between” a “heterogeneous set consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral, and philanthropic propositions – in sort the said as much as the unsaid” (Power/Knowledge 194). Thus, Foucault defines the apparatus as “a set of strategies of the relations of forces supporting, and supported by, certain types of knowledge.”
     Now, for Foucault, the apparatus does not come down to a singular technology of power (a single law of the Patriot Act . . . which are truly terrifying in their “being in force without signification,” the very status of the law within a state of exception), but rather that larger set existing between discourses, technologies, laws, etc – a tack differing from Agamben’s singularization of the term. What I above all want to stress with Foucault’s definition is the apparatus’s status between elements of power – a special status that, I argue, gives the apparatus, no matter the scale, its force of capture.
     Thinking of the apparatus as between structures of powers allows for the examination of living being’s capture at all levels and all scales. To think apparatus thusly is to think of them according to Benjamin’s concept the technological relation (which Benjamin cites as the particular relation modern man has with nature): “technology is the mastery not of nature but mastery of the relation between nature and humanity” ("One-Way Street" 487). Technology is the mastered relation with the thing, not the mastery of the thing itself. And that is precisely how the apparatus captures. An apparatus never captures the living being as such; instead it captures living beings, technologically, through a form of bare life the apparatus constructs with its concomitant mechanism of desubjectification. This is precisely why each apparatus involves desubjectification: by separating living being from its nature, the apparatus constructs a “medium” (a figure of bare life) through which it can master living being.
     The apparatus is, accordingly, this articulation through a medium, the very passage of living being through a one-sided play of power in which living being is striped and separated from its nature. Because the apparatus is something “between” objects locked in a power relation, the term cannot be reduced simply to one of the objects within that relation. Instead, the apparatus will never be this or that particular object (this or that cell phone, television, police act, homeland security law), but a specific manner external to that specific object. This manner generates the apparatic force of any object we deem an “apparatus.” This manner is force of capture, the potentiality of an object’s controlling another object. Crucially, this manner is potential; it is able to not be. An object taken as such is never an apparatus inherently; the apparatic manner particular to an object can, in cases, not be. Yet, with the right conditions (when objects are imbricate within larger networks of power relations), the manner forcibly constructs an articulating power relation between objects, wherein one object can capture the other object. Only after the actualization of such a relation can (and do) we call an object an apparatus.
   However, the apparatus as such is the potentiality of the apparatic articulation – the manner that articulates a power relation between objects.

Leave No Trace: The "Wilderness" Isn't Wilderness Anymore

Any outdoors enthusiast knows by heart the mantra and commandment of all wilderness activity: “Leave no trace.” Straightforward stuff: go into the wild and neither leave nor take anything. A seemingly simple directive of outdoors behavior, except Leave No Trace has a curious half-discursive, half-physical composition. On the one hand LNT, is, in the form we all were typically indoctrinated by, simply a set of discursive precepts for behavior in the “outdoors;” and on the other hand LNT is a 501-c-3, nonprofit incorporation (literally Leave No Trace Inc). Here, then, we find ourselves confronted with a curious, complex hybrid of an ideology; nevertheless, out of this intentional confrontation I wish to outline a specific biocultural entity for which I currently lack a technical term – something like a “paradigm-apparatus,” although such a term is, clearly, quite clunky.


Leave No Trace Paradigm: How We Think About Others Knowing About Us Out “There”
        What makes LNT so curious is, perhaps, not so much its being both discursive and corporate (in its fullest etymological sense, as a body [corpus] and as a business: something “actual”), but how and for what reason it intersects the discursive and the corporate. LNT is, at its face, a campaign to mobilize a specific manner of behavior within a specific locality. Within the American wilderness (an oddly “out-there” beyond-civilization place), LNT directs us to move through said wilderness without affecting the environment you are an outsider of such that you remain alterior to the environment (a hermetically closed off system of beings who are, by being so closed, non-human . . . according to such a logic). Taking LNT at its face, we appear to be in the realm of ontology (the study of being and its modes of existence considered as such). Yet, why “leave no trace?” Why shift discourse into a seemingly alien field from that which the ideology is purportedly concerned with? That is, why take an ideology that is concerned with ontology and express it with a term ripped from epistemology such that the entire campaign’s “text” ( the slogan and proper noun “leave no trace”) becomes about visibility, about the control over one’s visibility-yet-to-come in a specific medium (those “traces” left behind for others to see), and, ultimately, about the manipulation of the erasure of one’s self within both locality and time (the trace isn’t a trace until it has entered into history, until your presence has “left”)?
      The historical contingencies LNT was created to meet help explain, in part, such a bizarre discursive shift. In the 1970’s our National Parks found themselves inundated with visitors, thus prompting the United States Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management, and Nation Park Service to draft pedagogies for instructing “non-motorized visitors” how to behave in wilderness areas (for more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leave_No_Trace).
     Crucial here: the parks were flooded with people. To make sense of this particular urgency as pertaining to LNT’s paradigmatic structure, we must examine the “scale” of self-other articulations when considering how an object is known to other objects. A 1:N scale expresses the articulation between an object to an alien object (for LNT, human-animal): in a formula of intelligibility, the “sign” left by an object would not be intelligible to another object that is comporting itself towards knowing the first object; or, more simply: the “sign” of Object A is not visible to Object B as intelligible (it is not information, which is, according to Levi Bryant, “the difference that makes a difference”). A 1:1 scale would correspond to a human-human (or chipmunk-chipmunk, bear-bear, whatever-to-whatever) articulation: the “sign” left by Object A would be intelligible to Object B as a signifying sign, as information (and that sign would with time become, properly, a “trace”). The historical contingency (flood of human visitors) to which LNT responds consists not only of this later scale, but also of a specific declension of that scale: an anthropocentric instance.
      Just look at what LNT seeks to “erase” (how one is to behave so that an other-like-you cannot know of your past presence) from one’s trekking through the “wilderness:” camp and travel on durable surfaces (don’t leave new footprints), leave what you find, including edible plants (to “allow others a sense of discovery” – of non-human life), minimize use of fire (“True Leave No Trace fires show no evidence of having ever been constructed”), and, my favorite, dispose of waste properly (hide your shit). While these behaviors (mobility, shelter, food, food’s apotheosis, and warmth) can have detrimental impacts on wildlife, what LNT’s principles stress are traces that are intelligible to humans. And I am not saying that the signs we leave are not visible and, in some fashion, intelligible to wilderness animals (they certainly are); the point here is that such signs in their intelligibility to animals would not be, properly, “traces.” Those signs which LNT outlines (those “traces” we must not leave in behind) and those signs which to animals are intelligible are not necessarily the same. Again, the signs I wish to highlight are only those that LNT has singled out as “traces,” not those that are intelligible to animals yet have been marginalized by LNT’s scope. Seriously, do bears give a damn about your abject waste?
     The historical contingency LNT responds to (a population increase promulgating a 1:1 scale of intelligibility) and LNT’s response to that contingency reveals something like a “state of exception” grafted onto the “society of the spectacle:” a plane of pure visibility upon which all residue of living presence is made potentially intelligible to such an extreme that even in the “wilderness” (that realm once characterized as being absolutely removed from us) we experience anxiety over being-seen-and-known. (Sorry for the sloppiness of these terms, but I wish to hint at a crucial aspect of the contemporary condition rendered visible through LNT: that we all live in a “Camp” [state of exception] that is in large part characterized by the primacy of images and visibility [society of the spectacle])


Leave No Trace Apparatus: How Our Bodies Are Captured in the Wild
     And what we are anxious about being exposed (or, more precisely, what LNT encodes as being fit for anxiety) gets to the heart of LNT’s curious intersection of the discursive and the corporate: the biological necessities of shelter and food. Keeping in mind LNT’s bivalent status as discursive and corporate, LNT is, properly, a biocultural nexus (bio: private bodily needs; cultural: prescriptions for making bodily acts fit for publicity). That is, LNT can be halved according to a biological/private and cultural/public bifurcation wherein “bio”= biological self-care (how you dispose of your crap) and “cultural” = how those biological acts of self-care are taught to be carried out. Literally, the very gesture of a living being’s taking a shit is prescribed by a cultural discourse – LNT itself, a didactic apparatus using language to teach “proper” biological actions (Leave No Trace, Inc “was incorporated to develop and expand Leave No Trace training and educational resources”). LNT is, accordingly an apparatus: a “thing that has in some way the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control, or secure the gestures, behaviors, opinions, or discourses of living beings” (Agamben, “What is an Apparatus?” 15).



Paradigm-Apparatus
     Now, hopefully, a working definition of what LNT actually is can emerge. LNT’s discursive existence (as a slogan and proper noun) meshes violently with its corporate manifestation (as an incorporation seeking the control over biological acts) to form something like a “paradigm-apparatus” – an entity whose function is to respond to a historical contingency (population increase) through discursive (slogan encoding proper anxiety over one’s visibility) and biological (self-care) means. Not only is LNT located at the intersection of bio/cultural (as an apparatus), it is also located at the intersection of the paradigmatic and the apparatic. LNT both models thought (how one thinks about one’s being visible and intelligible to others-like-you) and captures gestures (how one effects biological self-care) such that these activities interpenetrate each other, rendering LNT a paradigm with apparatic power and an apparatus with paradigmatic force. With LNT the paradigmatic ensures the apparatus’s infinite deployment (the expansion of its force-of-capture to all levels of being) while the apparatus simultaneously constitutes the paradigm’s naturalness (the appearance of a model of thought as a simple matter of common course).