Immanent Domain

Derrida's Cat

"My cat, the cat that looks at me in my bedroom or bathroom, this cat that is perhaps not “my cat” or “my pussycat,” does not appear here to represent, like an ambassador, the immense symbolic responsibility with which our culture has always charged the feline race …

If I say ‘it is a real cat’ that sees me naked, this is in order to mark its unsubstitutable singularity. When it responds in its name (whatever ‘respond’ means, and that will be our question), it doesn’t do so as the exemplar of a species called ‘cat,’ even less so of an ‘animal’ genus or kingdom.

It is true that I identify it as a male or female cat. But even before that identification, it comes to me as this irreplaceable living being that one day enters my space, into this place where it can encounter me, see me, even see me naked. Nothing can ever rob me of the certainty that what we have here is an existence that refuses to be conceptualized.

And a mortal existence, for from the moment that it has a name, its name survives it. It signs its potential disappearance. Mine also, and that disappearance, from this moment to that, fort/da [here/there, present/absent], is announced each time that, with or without nakedness, one of us leaves the room.” (9)

Jaques Derrida. The Animal That Therefore I Am. Edited by Marie-Louise Mallet. Translated by David Wills.  New York: Fordham UP, 2008.

This passage is from a section of the book where Derrida is engaging “Genesis,” specifically Adam’s naming of the animals and the shame Adam and Eve feel because of their nakedness, and where Derrida is interrogating Heidegger’s account of “being-with” or alongside other creatures.

I had misplaced the book and been looking for it for a couple of days. I was sitting and scanning a bookshelf for it yet again when my dog Islay suddenly ran up, sat down beside me, looked me in the eye, and ran off. When I looked up again, the book was the first thing I saw, far from where I'd previously been searching.

Ethics vs. Morality; Experimentation vs. Salvation

“Deleuze draws a clear distinction between ethics and morality. Morality is a set of constraining rules that judge actions and intentions in relation to transcendent values of good and evil. Morality is a way of judging life, whereas ethics is a way of assessing what we do in terms of ways of existing in the world.

Ethics involves a creative commitment to maximizing connections, and of maximizing the powers that will expand the possibilities of life. In this way, ethics for Deleuze is inextricably linked with the notion of becoming.

Morality implies that we judge ourselves and others on the basis of what we are and should be, whereas ethics implies that we do not yet know what we might become.

For Deleuze, there are no transcendent values against which we should measure life. It is rather ‘Life’ itself that constitutes its own immanent ethics. An ethical approach is, in this way, essentially pragmatic, and it is no surprise that Deleuze admires the American pragmatist model that substitutes experimentation for salvation." (85)

--John Marks, “Ethics.” The Deleuze Dictionary. Edited by Adrian Parr. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2005.

Deleuze elaborates these concepts in his book Spinoza: Practical Philosophy.

Cropportunity

"You know, the Chinese word for 'crisis' is the same one as ..."

Philosophy As Buggery

“My way ... was, I really think, to conceive of the history of philosophy as a kind of buggery or, what comes to the same thing, immaculate conception. I imagined myself getting onto the back of an author, and giving him a child, which would be his and which would at the same time be a monster. It is very important that it should be his child, because the author actually had to say everything that I made him say. But it also had to be a monster because it was necessary to go through all kinds of decenterings, slips, break-ins, secret emissions, which I really enjoyed.”

—Gilles Deleuze

Hostalgia

Nostalgia followed by a shooter of self-contempt. "I succumbed to hostalgia and downloaded 'Billie Jean,' but felt dirty about myself afterwards."

The Practical & Political Mystery of Separation

More gorgeous prose from Giorgio Agamben. This is on our (conceptual) internal division between animal and human. It's from his fourth chapter of The Open, which starts with Aristotle and ends with this three pages later.

The division of life into vegetal and relational, organic and animal, animal and human … passes first of all as a mobile border within living man, and without this intimate caesura the very decision of what is human and what is not would probably not be possible.

It is possible to oppose man to other living things, and at the same time to organize the complex—and not always edifying—economy of relations between men and animals, only because something like an animal life has been separated within man, only because his distance and proximity to the animal have been measured and recognized first of all in the closest and most intimate of places.

But if this is true, if the caesura between the human and the animal passes first of all within man, then it is the very question of man—and of “humanism”—that must be posed in a new way.

In our culture, man has always been thought of as the articulation and conjunction of a body and soul, of a living thing and a logos, of a natural (or animal) element and a supernatural or social or divine element.

We must learn instead to think of man as what results from the incongruity of these two elements, and investigate not the metaphysical mystery of conjunction, but rather the practical and political mystery of separation.

What is man, if he is always the place—and, at the same time, the result—of ceaseless divisions and caesurae?  It is more urgent to work on these divisions, to ask in what way—within man—has man been separated from non-man, and the animal from the human, than it is to take positions on the great issues … And perhaps, even the luminous sphere of our relationship with the divine depends, in some way, on that darker one which separates us from the animal.

Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man & Animal, 15-16 emphasis added.

I wish he would avoid using the male universal, but still. How could someone who took seminars with Heidegger come out writing so beautifully?

One of the things I appreciate and respect about Agamben is that there aren't any quick fixes, no insights for us to congratulate ourselves about and move on. Instead, there's a meditation on where we stand in a historical process, where what we think (indeed what can be thought, the historical horizons and inheritances within which we think) is part of that historical process.

Caesura:

• (in Greek and Latin verse) a break between words within a metrical foot.
• (in modern verse) a pause near the middle of a line.
• any interruption or break.

Foucault in Five Sentences

Came across this nice summary of Michel Foucault's approach to political philosophy:

The extent of Agamben’s departure from Foucault’s ascending model of analysis—which builds its tentative general picture by systematic reference to the analysis of how particular institutional practices operate rather than the ontological question of what they are—is instructive.

Foucault’s criticisms of political philosophy proceed from his contestation of their explanatory utility. In The History of Sexuality, he emphasizes, for instance, that the postulates of Marxist theory may be used to arrive at mutually contradictory explanations of the same phenomena and thus are unable to adequately explain anything.

He observes in his lectures on political philosophy that ideas from the modern tradition of contract theory, such as “legitimate power” and its conceptual partners “consent” and “the subject,” block from view some important features of modern political life, especially the ways in which disciplinary practices operate.

The fault, in his view, is that traditional political philosophy wants to find out what power is rather than how it functions.

Emphasis added. Quote is from Alison Ross, "Introduction." South Atlantic Quarterly 107:1 (Winter 2008): 4.

What Do I Mean to a Snake?

Last year my dog Islay saved, if not my life, at least my leg from being bitten by a rattlesnake. I told my therapist the story and she got very excited about my “snake medicine.” She lent me a book about totem animals that recounted various meanings snakes have held for different cultures at different times.

The book made me wary. It indulged in the cultural cherry picking that is common with many strains of New Age Spirituality. Oral Navaho tales were presented cheek-by-jowl with Greek myth and chronicles from Han China. The only common thread I could find was the way the tales might reflect or comment upon the preoccupations of an introspective Westerner in the present.

My impatience with the book helped me realize something more fundamental: I was less interested in the significance the snake might have for me than in what significance I might have for the snake.

Getting at what significance I might have to a snake is by no means easy, any more than understanding Han China. The belief we can understand other cultures and other animals without work, that we can be certain they speak directly to our concerns, rests on a kind of narcissism. Such a belief relies on the idea that we, as especially open-minded observers, can perceive an inner similarity with another creature or culture. On closer examination, deep down they turn out to be just like us. Pet psychics, who claim to discover that your dog’s behavior is explained by something she witnessed as a puppy, are the fullest expression of this narcissism. A dog is not a little human in fur, and its developmental windows, sensory apparatus, and learning goals are different than those of humans. A dog has its own dignity, and for me, recognizing it depends on acknowledging these differences.

Animals, especially mammals, are like us in many ways. We have similar brains and limbic systems. The key word being “similar.” In my experience, the most successful communications I have had with animal others have happened when I was able to stretch my thinking beyond my usual, primate framework.

The same week that my dog saved me from the snake, a bat got into our house. As we tried to shepherd it out, my partner Liz suggested we shine a bright light at it. To something as visually-oriented as a primate, this made a good deal of sense. If I imagined what I would think if I were bat, a light would help. But instead, in what was a breakthrough for me, I was able to imagine what a bat would think if it were a bat. Instead of holding up a light, I advanced on it holding up a large piece of plywood. Having something it could “see” more clearly with echolocation than with vision (though bats are anything but blind), the bat flew away from me and out of the open door.

Communicating effectively with the bat meant recognizing both similarity (the bat’s desire to escape these large, flailing creatures) and difference (that it would react more strongly to a flat, echo-reflecting board than to either our waving arms or a light). But for me, the important conceptual leap was the recognition of difference.

As someone who regularly studies other cultures, I can say that without doubt, recognizing and understanding differences takes more time than finding similarities. You can’t simply assume that because you are open-minded, you get a special pass to rapid understanding. In my experience, this is also true of animals. You come to understand them, not because you are a special sort of person, but because you are willing to do a special kind of thing, to spend a special kind of time with them that includes recognizing their differences.

Challenge of the Man-Bat

"I was able to imagine what a bat would think if it were a bat." That's a line from another post, and something I thought I'd come up with my own sweet self. But philosopher Thomas Nagel got there first, in an article I had previously read:

"It will not help to try to imagine that one has webbing on one’s arms … and that one spends the day hanging upside down by one’s feet in an attic. In so far as I can imagine this … it tells me only what it would be like for me to behave as a bat behaves. But that is not the question. I want to know what it is like for a bat to be a bat."
(“What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” Philosophical Review 83.4 (October, 1974): 439.

Nagel goes on to point out that we humans cannot accurately imagine what is like to be a bat because we lack the proper sensory apparatus and mental structure. Here I completely agree with him. Indeed when if I hear someone at the dog park tell me about a pet psychic receiving or “flashing on”  a scene from their dog’s memory, some traumatic event from their puppyhood, I am always tempted to ask: “what color was the scene?” If the psychic were sharp, he or she might say it was black and white. The only problem is that dogs are not entirely colorblind. They can perceive subtle shades of violets and blues. They just aren’t very interested in them. Unlike us, they did not evolve hunting for brightly colored fruits.

So if you really want to test someone who claims to be a pet psychic, ask them what colors they see when they connect with a dog. But at the Ashland dog park, what goes around comes around, so I tend to hold my tongue. It seems far more likely to me that a dog would have experienced a traumatic smell as a puppy, or a traumatic blur of motion, both being essential to its brain structure and, prior to domestication, its very survival.

While I may not be able to accurately imagine what is like to be a bat any more than I can, ultimately, imagine what it is like to be another person, I can imagine something different from my own experience, and that imagining can increase my chances of communicating successfully.

What I actually imagined when confronted with a bat in the house was from an episode of Batman: the Animated Series.  It was an episode featuring Robert Langstrom, a scientist who, with the help of a serum, becomes a man-bat hybrid. As a child reading comic books, Manbat fascinated me. I think it was because although his name implied a kind of reverse symmetry with Batman, he was actually different in kind. For Bruce Wayne, Batman is a metaphor, albeit one that often threatens to consume him. For Robert Langstrom, Manbat is a physical transformation, a hybrid that falls outside our normal categories for thinking of either a man or a bat.

The way the animated show imagined echolocation was to give it a visual analog: echoes showed up as splotchy images that flashed and faded after the initial echo. Not entirely unlike a blip on a radar screen, but with more resolution and three-dimensionality. Given that my species evolved swinging from branches, vision—especially depth-perception—was important to our survival. So we tend to prefer our information visually. The animated show’s attempt to render Manbat’s point-of-hearing as a point-of-view took advantage of this preference.

It was this visual image I remembered when I was trying to get the bat out of our house. I thought something along the lines of “what would make a really large, bright blip—a wall of input—to this bat?”  I chose a board and the board worked. My attempt to communicate was successful.

Here we get to what, for me, is the crux of the matter: my successful communication had nothing to do with the bat perceiving my intent.  It was not at all important that the bat understand why I wanted him to leave, or even that I was a being who wanted him to leave. What was important was that the bat left.

This is a more challenging, and in many ways less comforting, way for me to experience a connection with another being than believing that we somehow understand each other’s intent. Social animal that I am, I like to believe that other beings and I are on the same page when we interact.

Actually, I think there are ways—at least as fellow mammals—that the bat and I can be on the same page. But it has to do, not with shared sensation and cognition, but with fellow feeling. Not with sensory perception or intuited intents, but with limbic systems. But that must wait for another post.

Keep Track of the Damned

Hey Kids!

Keep track of the damned with your very own Infernal Bookmark, complete with every circle of Dante's Hell. Download the acrobat file by clicking the link below.

[If you're reading this on Facebook, it's been kicked over from Warren's blog. Go to this URL to get to the entry & the acrobat file: http://www.immanentdomain.org/2009/06/keep-track-of-the-damned.html]

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