How Object-Oriented is Agamben? Withdrawnness and the Image

     In my last post I set out to determine in what sense Agamben’s inoperativity is object-oriented, concluding that it is and it is not. Clearly, such an answer sidesteps the real question, how object-oriented is Agamben? This post will attempt to show how in two crucial regards Agamben evidences tendencies towards Object Oriented Ontology.
     A major feature of OOO is the assertion that there exist objects “all the way down.” In Prince of Networks, Graham Harman claims that because of the withdrawnness of all objects, whenever one “opens” any given object, we see that it is composed of other objects. And when we open those objects, we see more objects, an so on down into the rabbit hole. In “Nudity,” Agamben makes a nearly identical claim. Discussing Clemente Susini's anatomical wax sculptures, Agamben writes, “But no matter how much we open the wax model and scrutinize it with our gaze, the naked body of the beautiful, disemboweled woman remains obstinately unobtainable” (79). In the context of his essay, these comments do not refer simply to Susini’s sculpture, but to all real objects. Hence, like the sculpture, all real objects remain obstinately unobtainable. In this crucial regard, Agamben is object-oriented.
     Now, we have objects all the way down precisely because each object is radically withdrawn: “the being of any object is always deeper than how that object appears to us” (Harman 180-181). And by being radically withdrawn, the real object undergoes a series of divisions of which the split between a real object and its sensual objectness is primary (the others being between a real object and its real qualities [essence] and a sensual object and its sensual qualities [time]). A consequence of this primary division is vicarious causation; because all real objects are ontologically withdrawn from all other real objects, they can only contact each other through a third, mediating object. This mediator is, according to Harman, the inside of a sensual object. Thus the division between a real object and its sensual object becomes crucial in explaining not only movement and change, but also all interaction between real objects. In some way, then, this split breaks off the infinite downward spiraling of objects by creating a disjunction out of which the object becomes, to a degree, intelligible through its sensual object. The disjunction itself is not that which is intelligible, but rather what is intelligible is the sensual object produced through and out of this split.
     What does this have to do with Agamben? In “Nudity” Agamben sketches out a form of visibility -- nudity -- that takes shape as an inapparent appearance. That is, nudity is an appearance that signifies nothing because it has no content and is, thus, the pure appearance of a human. While the technical term nudity refers to humans in their pure and inapparent appearance, it belongs to the genus of “image.” Drawing upon Meister Eckhart, Agamben claims that in the image the “real thing” (i.e. real object) stands “trembling” and “quivering” in “the medium of its own knowability” (83). For Eckhart and Agamben, the image is, simply and profoundly, the pure knowability of the real object. And like nudity’s pure appearance, the image’s pure knowability is inapparent and nonsignifying because it too lacks content. The question now arises, is the image (and with it nudity) a real object’s sensual object?
     Decidedly not. Rather, the image “is a perfect medium between the object in the mind [sensual, phenomenological object] and the real thing [real object].” Accordingly, the image is “neither a mere logical object nor a real entity” because it occupies the between stretching from real object to sensual object. This medium or between is nudity’s pure appearance (appearance without secret, an inapparent appearance signifying nothing because it lacks content) and, in general, the image’s pure knowability. Thus, both nudity (corresponding to humans) and image (corresponding to all objects, humans included) constitute a medium of absolute knowledge, or, in other words, the pure knowability of objects.
     Yet “knowability” is a misnomer. “Knowledge” here is not in any sense correlationist or in any way connected with a cogito. Rather knowability refers to non-knowledge. Because the image is pure knowability, the capacity for any object to be known and made to inapparently appear, it is not properly “knowledge” insofar as it, in having no content, does not signify anything. For Eckhart, the image, as a medium between sensual object and real object, exists in a “between.” As quoted by Agamben, Eckhart asserts, “The forms that exist in matter tremble incessantly, like an ebullient strait between two seas.” The image, then, resides in a “zone of nonknowledge” (the “ebullient strait” between the seas of the real object and the sensual object) that, as Agamben claims in Nudities’ final essay, we “keep ourselves in [a] harmonious relationship with” through a “recipe” (“The Last Chapter in the History of the World” 114). Now, Agamben holds that as of yet, we have “no recipe for articulating a zone of nonknowledge,” not, however, because such a recipe is impossible, but because Western thought has focused solely on developing archives of knowledge (113). A recipe of nonknowledge is, therefore, completely possible, and, more importantly, crucial, as the zone of nonknowledge, in being constituted by imagistic pure knowability, defines the rank and file of the known (113). The problem with this zone is that, if peeled open, it will reveal nothing definite, because, after all, it is composed of inapparent appearances -- images. These images are, Agamben concludes, “gestures” (114).
     A quick recap: Harman gives us a four-fold division of real objects, the primary division being that between a real object and its sensual object. Thus, on the one hand we have objects all the way down because each real object is infinitely withdrawn, a point similarly made by Agamben. On the other hand, a real object connects with another real object only through a mediating third -- a sensual object, something that Agamben hints at with the image. However, Agamben’s image is located at a curious crossroads for each object: it belongs to neither the real object nor the sensual object, but instead it the medium between “the object in the mind and the real thing.” This medium could mean one of two things. First, it could mean that the image is the eidos of a real object, which Harman defines as the tension between a sensual object and a real object’s qualities. Second, the image could be something else entirely. Being the medium between real and sensual object, the image performs a role somewhat different from the eidos: the generation of all knowledge. The image is pure knowability and is accordingly an inapparent appearance lacking all signification. Thus the image is, on the one hand, not a real object insofar as it is partially a sensual object by being an appearance, and on the other hand it is not a sensual object insofar as it is partially a withdrawing real object in its inapparentness. Thus, the image finds itself located in a zone of nonknowledge located between the real and the sensual object. This zone is a between out of which an inapparent appearance becomes not only possible, but visible as a “gesture.” Thus the image is the gesture of a zone of nonknowledge, for which we need a “recipe.”
     What the heck is a recipe in this case? In cooking, a recipe is a form of “knowledge” in the broadest sense -- a comportment towards the real objectness of food. Accordingly, a recipe is a performance of the ingredients; or, in other words, it is, partially, a medium between real objects (the food) and a sensual object (the food in our mind). The recipe is, more properly, the vehicle through which the gesture or image stretching between the food and the food in our mind inapparently appears. Not the image or gesture itself, the recipe is that through which the medium is performed.
     Therefore, to return to my ongoing efforts to develop a “hermeneutic” of the gesture, I can no longer call this project a hermeneutic. Instead, what will be developed will be a recipe book.
     And for vicarious causation: the image or gesture does and does not mediate between real objects insofar as it is the potential mediator between real and sensual objects. Thus it is the pre-condition (“pre” not in a chronological sense) for vicarious causation without which a real object could never contact a sensual object, let alone a real object (through, of course, the sensual object). No image, no vicarious causation. For this reason, the image cannot be what Harman defines as eidos -- the tension between sensual object and real qualities that, like a real object, withdraws itself from all direct access.

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).

Bartleby's Formula Against Exposure

      My previous post’s closing remarks offered a quick, sideways glance at Bartleby: “With shame at her exposed subjectivity, her exposed secreting, Lady Alroy can only pile on the shrouds of a conventional domestic “mystery” and, when those have been rent, merely, in the spirit of her blithe comrade Bartleby, confess, “I have told the truth.”
     This brief transatlantic exchange between indifferences underscores, possibly, the validity of a particular paradigm of intelligibility – of how one can think about one’s being visible and knowable to others. If Lady Alroy appears as a visage of a subject’s having-been-constituted through the secret, and Bartleby, in some fashion, is her comrade in impotent arms, then something in Bartleby’s formula, “I would prefer not to,” might offer an antidote to living being’s capture by intelligibility. Or, more simply: “I would prefer not to” expresses and localizes a “secreting” technique resistant to a specific, modern, and therefore visible, intelligibility.
     When confronted by his employer’s petitions to perform his contractual duties (to copy legal documents with other clerks simultaneously), Bartleby tosses up his formula, to which the employer cannot do, or say, anything. Surely, from a certain vulgar perspective, Bartleby gets his wish; he gets what he, in the end, actually prefers to do: remain hidden behind his screen. What Bartleby prefers not to do in order that he may “do” what he wishes to do (remain invisible) is to enter into a specific form of visibility. In accepting his employer’s petition to work by leaving the concealment of his screen and copying a legal document for the set purpose of examination, Bartleby would open himself up to a visibility not in the general medium of sight (his person being seen by others in the office as soon as he leaves his screen), but instead in the medium of a clerk’s handwriting. That is, Bartleby’s living presence will become visible (and to that discerning critic, his employer, intelligible) through the betrayal of his handwriting alone.
     Yet Bartleby attempts to control this opening into visibility and an inevitable intelligibility through complete indifference. Rather than simply not expose himself within handwriting (which he has already done, prodigiously, numerous times before), Bartleby blanches at a seemingly all-penetrating gaze belonging to his judge and master: his employer. And his blanching, his attempt to conceal himself before the gaze of his employer, takes the form of a curious formula that covers over a secret with indifference, such that what is made a secret (both Bartleby’s motivation to remain invisible and unknown and his most intimate being, his whatever being) hides behind a discourse completely indifferent to signification.
     After all, the syntagma “I would prefer not to” means, for Bartleby and his employer, nothing at all – although it has attained literary, cultural, and theoretical meanings as walled behind double quotation marks (“‘. . . ’”). In uttering his phrase, Bartleby does not, in actuality, tell his boss anything because the phrase itself has given up recourse to signification. Neither mere voiced-sound nor overwrought, metaphoric language, “I would prefer not to” attains a special linguistic status, similar to Levi-Strauss’s “floating signifier” (a signifier of “zero symbolic value, that is to say, a sign marking the necessity of a symbolic content supplementary to that with which the signified is already loaded, but which can take on any value required” [qtd in Derrida’s “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourses of the Human Sciences”). But rather than function as a near-empty linguistic mark that, in facing a non-linguistic void or lack, ensures and actualizes the infinite repetition of finite signs (to make discourses “play” themselves out in intelligibility), Bartleby’s formula serves a shockingly opposite function. Confronting a real threat of his living being’s presence-in-language (how his clerk’s handwriting will be make his intimate being intelligible to his employer), Bartleby’s formula collapses any possibility for an actualized infinite playing out of finite signs, thereby foreclosing both language and exposure. While Strauss’s floating signifier serves as an engine actualizing discourse, Bartleby’s formula serves the exact opposite function: to ensure the potentiality of language. Bartleby’s utterance, in its indifference, is potential (it is able to not be) – a stark contrast to impotential language actualized through the floating signifier (which is not able to not be). Bartleby’s formula is accordingly more “primary” than Strauss’s floating signifier, if we understand “primary” as not chronologically before an event, but as being structurally “prior.” Bartleby’s reticence before his employer’s petition for exposure serves as the locus of a complete rehearsal of language’s potentiality – its being as such in the world without exhausting itself in actualization and impotentiality. By giving over to language any pretense of denominative force, the formula suspends itself in its own authority (power of words and narration) at the edge of language’s complete ineffability not in order that finite signs can play out infinitely, but that the very communicativity of language – its potentiality – can brilliantly emerge in the crystalline gesture of Bartleby’s utterance. Something is, for all its seeming opaqueness, communicated in Bartleby’s formula: communicativity, the potentiality of communication inherent in every particular communication.

(Note: Bartleby perhaps enacts here a constitutive gesture of a language of pure communicativity: “All living beings are in the open: they manifest themselves and shine in their appearance. But only human beings want to take possession of this opening, to seize hold of their own appearance and of their own being-manifest. Language is this appropriation, which transforms nature into face” [Agamben, “The Face” 91].)

Unquestionably, Bartleby’s formula works its magic; it quite successfully cuts off the threat of visibility and its concomitant intelligibility. And it must be remembered that Bartleby directs his formula at a petition for openness – a petition for Bartleby to expose himself to a particular intelligibility in a particular medium (to copy and thereby to show his trace in written forms [not language itself, but a gestic manipulation of language: clerk’s handwriting]). Bartleby, like Lady Alroy after him, seeks, through his formula, to erase his being from the intelligibility of those who are comported towards seeing and knowing him. That is, by allowing himself to be exposed only through his curious formula, Bartleby seeks to resist a penetrating gaze. However, Bartleby’s allowance is of a special, doubled form; he seeks to control his opening into visibility both in virtuality (language as such, language in its potentiality) and in actuality (gestic language, clerk’s handwriting). The formula, because of its indifference towards signification, takes on both forms of allowance simultaneously such that the formula and its utterance constitute the site of Bartleby’s violent struggle to control his own opening into visibility through a radical indifference.
     Confronted with an all-penetrating gaze, Bartleby seems to utilize his formula as a means of hiding himself behind a screen that will actually, in the very gesture of hiding, fully expose him. But nothing like that happens. In its indifference, Bartleby’s formula collapses a seemingly infinite series of withdrawing/exposing into complete invisibility and casts the scrivener into absolute unintelligibility. And it is perhaps for this reason that it can be said that Bartleby is knowable for the narrator and the reader only through his formula.