Being Against the World

Rebellion and Constitution

Oscar Guardiola-Rivera

• Publisher: Birkbeck Law Press
• Year: 2008
• eBook ISBN: 9781134046232
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Jurisprudence
• Index: Law

How can we save politics from the politician? How can we save ourselves? This book looks at the example of those who leave the city and break the social contract, rebellious exiles and freedom fighters escaping the wheel of necessity, and learns from them.

Chapter 1
Archaic objects

This book concerns the nature and behaviour of an archaic category of elements called quasi- or obscure objects. These objects are contradictory, in that they seem to enter into and withdraw from all relations, particularly from relations with us. They can be neither described as simple and localisable particles or events, nor as fully substantive and autonomous totalities standing side by side other fully autonomous totalities, which are the way they appear to us.

Rebels are one example of this peculiar nature: they cut off all links and escape from all given relations. But let us not forget that their ‘subjective’ experience is entangled with the ability of objects to move in and out of relations from the very outset. There would be no Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid without their guns and bullets; and there would be no Che Guevara without the beret, the star or the Havana cigar, and perhaps more important, certainly not without the famous photograph. At some point, sooner rather than later, the objects take centre stage. This has implications for political philosophy and legal theory, disciplines that for the most part seem to assume a human-centred universe, which have been hitherto ignored or only partially explored.

According to this book, the most important philosophical implication is that substantialist realism, the view that objects are out there for us, and constructivist subjectivism, the accompanying view that rejects the existence of something in itself corresponding to something for us, cannot account for the form of reality of these objects.

Given the centrality of these objects for science (wave-functions, dark matter) but also for law and politics (guns, berets and stars, but also declarations, prescriptions and constitutions), the fact that criticism cannot account for their reality would entail that the realm of politics gets reduced considerably (mostly, to self-positing rules, adjudication, precaution and prevention). This is no abstract matter, in the pejorative sense of the term, for in fact we live in such a reduced world, and perhaps our inability to bring back the belief in a dream of freedom, an assertion of the reality and importance of anticipating the future, and in reaction to that, the convergence between abject passivity and violent acting out that has become the predominant feature of our daily lives, are but a symptom warning us about the perils of such reductionism.

Against such a reduced view of the world in general and the political world in particular, this book seeks to explore the political significance of obscure objects and rebellious elements. These elements, all or most of them related to radical experiences and attachments, from the pressures of non-locality and global warming to war and revolution, will become evident to the reader soon enough. They circulate and communicate in ways that no talk of globalisation could ever dream of; later on we will use the term ‘contagion’ in order to refer to their manner of circulation. In fact, they will become so ubiquitous that the reader may be forgiven if she concludes that this is not a specific category that refers to some special kind of objects, but rather that there are only obscure elements and quasi-objects, and that the dream of freedom is not as unreal as it seems in the present situation.¹

For now, since one of the claims of this book is to be a relevant guide to the present situation, it would be best to start by clarifying what is meant here by ‘the present’. This will prepare the stage for the re-entry of powerful objects, and will help us to explain in what precise sense they can be called powerful. After doing that, we will return to the question of the nature of relations and to the contradictory role that objects play in the formation of radical attachments. Hopefully, by then, the connection between the two topics will not be lost for the reader.

That connection is central to an idea of freedom that seems to have slipped out of view in recent times, replaced by a much reduced notion of freedom as choice that has become central to our belief in unfettered progress, both scientific—technological and moral/ethical. That notion of freedom as choice between open possibilities predominates not only in law and economics but also, with particular force, in politics, art and the observation of technology. It is perhaps ‘the real’ of our culture. True, people nowadays ask whether technology is out of control, ‘a runaway train without steering and aim’ (Kaiser, 2006: 1), whether our science no longer feels commitment to serve the public good but has become enslaved to powerful interests, and whether or not ‘innovation’, the drive to permanent self-enhancement and constant renewal that motivates such interests, has lost sight of solidarity and neglected the challenge of socially desirable ends. Amidst this questioning has emerged a cry for the development of ‘the right moral attitudes and instruments to manage the risks’ (Kaiser, 2006: 2) posited by science, technology and the drive to constant and unfettered renewal. However, this precautionary position seems powerless when confronted by the question of the drive itself and its connection with a notion of freedom as pure unleashed productivity outside the frame of the present that is, nevertheless, inherent to the present itself.

As an attempt to question this state of things, the present will be described here as modern/colonial in spite of its faith in unfettered progress or perhaps because of it. In this situation, a dimension of coloniality—religion, magic, superstition, empire—haunts the very triumph of the project of Enlightenment.² On the one hand, what is properly ‘modern’ is the widespread belief that through our actions and decisions we become masters of our own destiny; according to this belief, the aim of our existence is to live and die in our own fashion, following our own enlightened designs for progress. However, on the other hand, the experience of modernity—both as mastery and enlightenment—produced and continues to produce a sort of remainder or leftover that does not manage to gather itself back (Mazzoldi and Téllez, 2007: 367), to reassemble itself completely.³

How to think of this leftover that is thoroughly modern, and yet seemingly returns as an archaic experience, ancient and immemorial, as what is brought back from the past or from colonial and imperialist adventures?⁴ Philosopher Bruno Mazzoldi introduced this question in an early dialogue with Jacques Derrida and Freddy Téllez on the subject of images, words and powerful objects (Mazzoldi and Téllez, 2007: 372). In the remainder of this chapter, let us engage with this question of the archaic object and the consequences of that question in relation to the real of the present and reality as such.

Archaic and obscure objects: Tlingit coffins, Peruvian stones and French paintings

The initial subject of the exchange between the Colombian philosophers and Derrida was a 1978 exhibition by French artist Gérard Titus-Carmel titled The Pocket-Size Tlingit Coffin et les 61 premiers dessins qui s’ensuivrent, and the accompanying text put together by the French/Algerian thinker, Gérard Titus-Carmel: ‘The Pocket-Size Tlingit Coffin’ illustré de ‘Cartouches’ par Jacques Derrida.⁵

Titus-Carmel’s work is, as Andrew Weiner and Sonja Hansard-Weiner (1992) point out, ‘utterly fascinating and just a bit disturbing: to be forced to see these “made-up objects”, with such an intensity and so convincingly present is to forget Magritte’s injunction (“Ceci n’est pas une pipe”)’. As they suggest, Titus-Carmel’s work reflects upon one of the problems that is essential for art and metaphysics: that of the relationship between original and copy, nature and artifice, absence and presence. Moreover, he introduces a non-representational twist to the study of this relation. In his Suites (Titus-Carmel tends to work in series) the artist begins with an ‘archaic’ model (Tlingit coffins, Narwa objects, ancient Peruvian stones)⁶ and draws a sketch. From this loosely drawn ‘original’, he then makes a three-dimensional model. This in turn, becomes the subject of a series of carefully rendered drawings (127, in the Tlingit coffin series). Sometimes the three-dimensional model is destroyed, other times it is abandoned. We are left looking from the first drawing to its descendants at two, three, or one hundred and twenty-seven removes. For the spectator it is a question of counting and, if she wishes, tracing each consecutive drawing to its absent parent(s), missing but fascinating.

The drawings are outlines, in the sense of having the force of the stroke. Their aim is not to reproduce or serve as stand-ins for the original, but rather to trace or draw a line on the same model. They suggest a quest for origins, with a twist: the original has been smashed. The ‘archaic’ is gone and yet it remains fascinating. Like native rituals to the anthropologist, fossil records and found objects to archaeologists and sound artists, uncanny experiences to psychoanalysts, and very old ‘made-up’ texts to religious and legal interpreters. The question is: what does this absent presence say to us? To sum up, the dialogue between these philosophers takes on a very old debate: that of the relationship between words and images, absence and presence, form and matter. In more general terms, this is a dialogue on the nature of cause and relation. As we will see, this debate has had profound consequences in ‘Western’ (and non-Western) cultures, from art and religion to law and the sciences. It still rages on.

It is important to point out that the Tlingit referred to in the exhibition’s title are an American Native people who speculate that the fundamental insight about the world is its ambiguous duality between superficial presence and hidden or absent depth. Their objects—like the coffin ‘found’ and ‘made-up’ by Titus-Carmel—are meant to stabilise relations between what is absent and what is present. Gérard Titus-Carmel came back to this question of fundamental duality, in relation to non-representational ancient Peruvian stones and objects, in his 1984 Suite Chancay series. ‘Presented as a series of permutations based upon motifs from a lost Peruvian civilization, we find not a bit of statue, a fragment of axe, but an invitation to pass beyond’ (Weiner and Hansard-Weiner, 1992: 4), like Orpheus’s passage through the surface or Cocteau’s watery mirror, themselves reflected in the liquid mirror scene of The Matrix. These objects—the statue, the axe, the mirror—are charms, fetishes, and their magical allure invites us to seek more basic realities once ‘reality’ has been reduced to only the void in which all things began. This involves an assertion of hope and boundary-crossing, of rebellion and passage (Mazzoldi and Téllez, 2007: 374).

Similarly, Mazzoldi argues in the dialogue that magic (by which he means the connective power associated to charms and powerful objects such as fetishes in ‘pre-modern’ societies, but also to the ‘made and found’ artworks based on archaic objects that were the subject of the dialogue) is a leftover from the experience of Enlightenment that needs to be explored in its own right:

I’m going to say that this body of the revenant, what remains, what cannot be gathered back, and this thought of the remains, it could also be defined as a thought of superstition.

(Mazzoldi and Téllez, 2007: 372)

He then goes on to explain that although magic has been displaced by other beliefs and practices in modernity such as law, normative religion and techno-science, and has thus become secondary in relation to them, it may still play a central role in the understanding of radical attachments, affects and actions—from the experience of the spectator of the arts to envy, theft, violence and rebellion.

He calls for a thought of the remainder, a careful consideration of the role played by objects in radical attachments, as a means to clarify the nature of such relations and perhaps also relationality as such. As Mazzoldi suggests, the aim of this focused attention upon objects themselves, rather than just objects for us (as in traditional phenomenology) would be to develop a way of thinking what remains in a different manner: neither as mere residue, the result of our operations of division and calculation which does not count and has no effects, nor in terms of a presence that remains permanent in spite of apparent modification. In more general terms, the issue at stake in this shift from phenomena to objects is that of causality and relation and the possibility of conceiving cause and relation in accordance to a different model than that of the unchanging substance and the accidental change. Therein would lie the potential for a critique of certain inadequate models of substance, but also the possibility to retrieve a repressed notion of change, revolt and resistance from within the model of substance. He elaborates thus:

I noticed in the text that is illustrated by ‘Cartouches’ certain references to the charm, to the throw of luck, to something that awakens envy. The zelōtypos is the one who is jealous, like the spectator of Titus-Carmel’s paintings, of all paintings maybe. You [Derrida] speak of the spectator precisely as someone who is jealous. ‘Jealous onto madness’ (…) But, now, the one that makes you jealous unto madness, the thing that makes you invidus—because invidus has both an active and a passive sense—that’s the sorcerer. There is no way to get around this fact. Finally, the little coffin, what is it if not a magical device? So it’s true, what I suspected from the first moment and also from the last is true: you [Derrida] are a magic maker. But this kind of magic never leaves reason; it is not madness. It’s a way to operate, a way to get the body and the mind to function. I would like you to talk about that, precisely.

(Ibid.)

Here Mazzoldi speaks of the magical device as part of the body—mind system, as ‘a way to get the body and the mind to function’. The fundamental duality embodied in Tlingit objects like the coffin and Titus-Carmel’s images reappears in this reference to the mind—body problem: how are these two different substances to function? How are they to connect? Is it mutual fascination with the same object? Are they there ‘in order to’ do something required by the object, ‘for the sake of’ the object, rather than the other way around? The hidden reference in this sort of talk is Heidegger’s insight that all beings fall under the heading of ‘equipment’ (Heidegger, 1967: 105). This means to say that body and mind, for instance, are there in order to do something else but also for the sake of something else. This is to be understood not in the sense that they are inert utensils to be used, but rather, in the sense that they are plugged into one another and embedded into even remoter references. In any instant, these substances are affixed to one another in total embrace. This totality—the body—mind function—is primary and hidden from view in relation to the specific presence or presentable form of the mind and that of the body. And since this system is itself embedded into other, remoter references, ultimately it forms a primary totality that Heidegger (1967: 120) calls ‘world’.⁷ Function, the structure of the ‘in order to’ and ‘for the sake of’ refers to this totalising force Heidegger calls world. What emerges into view out of this world is not equipment or system, but a ‘simplified’ mode of the system: the mind as mind, the body as body.

The crucial point here is to understand that the body as body is not the same as the body itself, and the mind as mind is not the mind itself. Rather, the ‘as’ refers in these cases to a real appearance prior to any distinction between truth, semblance and falsity, or to be more precise and use the language of phenomenology, the appearance or sensual-character of reality. Put otherwise, the ‘as’ refers to allure and fascination (which we will later call ‘reciprocal projection’ or enactment), that is to say, to an aesthetic dimension that is primary or more archaic than the representational language of truth, commonality and falsity. Entities (mind, body and so on) encounter each other as appearances (appearances taken as something that is precisely the logic of magic) and never directly. Thus, in order to connect at all they need to lure each other, to invite sensual embrace. That is precisely the role of charms, images, sounds and partially apparent or quasi-objects.

How to understand appearance? The event that cuts across systemic totality (world) and allows specific entities to appear and encounter one another is one of simulation: the mind is a simulation or an idea of the body that encounters the latter and identifies its specificity only as such. In turn, the body, in its specificity, is a simulacrum of the mind—body system. In more general terms, things simulate themselves. Heidegger calls this ‘the as-structure’.

It is perhaps better to understand simulation as a self-reflexive or auto-transcendent process: each entity projects itself onto a fixed point out of itself—an objectivity, let us say an image of itself—while its real self (function, totality) withdraws out of view, and encounters or identifies itself and each other only in relation to this fixed point, object or simulated image. Simulation is a process of exteriorisation; in more strict terms, it is a process of auto-exteriorisation.

The externalised image or simulated object is not merely a representation, a ‘deficient’ copy of the real object. We have learned this already while referring to the work of Titus-Carmel. It is not an abstract stand-in for the real object, but rather, its intermediary, a vehicle allowing it to connect with others. A simulation does not communicate with others by achieving or producing some commonality of meaning. Rather, communication between simulacra is first and foremost purely sensual, imaginative, an interplay of reciprocal projections. Simulated objects are like retroviruses, injecting back their code into everything they encounter. The proper term for this form of attachment is contagion, a phenomenon that is observable in biological processes (ingestion, viral infection), socio-political processes (imitation, identification, over-identification) and even inorganic processes (cellular automata).⁸ Forms of contagion such as identification, ‘irrational’ as they may seem at first, found the stability of relations between specific terms. Contagion makes related termini similar, uniform and equal without the need for a previous community of meaning. Therefore there seems to be no reason to postulate a realm of ‘meaning’—comprising dematerialised beliefs and fully meaningful commands—existing beyond and above the realm of sensuality, in order to explain collective attachments. Contagious mediation thr...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: art, politics and infinite critique
• 1 Archaic objects
• 2 Uncanny encounters
• 3 An introduction to fetishism (with a plea for materialism)
• 4 The most sublime of fetishists
• 5 Let us make love (and listen to Death From Above): notes on psychoanalysis
• 6 The love that seeks no other: further notes …
• 7 Horror in philosophy
• 8 Rip it up and start again
• 9 Sex, laws and rock ’n’ roll: on music as an organising principle
• 10 Guevara’s choice: on revolution as a radical organising principle
• Bibliography