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1, 110120

Book Reviews
Biopolitics and the Homonormative Subject
Jasbir K. Puar. Terrorist Assemblages. Homonationalism in Queer Times.
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007) The focus of Puars book is an examination of what she terms the convivial relationship between recent moves towards the recognition of the rights of gay subjects in the US and the tactics, strategies and logistics of our contemporary war machines (p.1). In a timely and provocative discussion of the relationship between race, sexuality and recent US foreign policy, Puar exposes the connections between wide-ranging and apparently disparate events including the torture of prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison by US troops, the escalation of attacks on Sikhs in the US in the aftermath of 11 September 2001, and the decriminalizing of sodomy in the US in 2003. The central argument is that the granting to some gay people of rights associated with US citizenship, such as the right to adopt children, produces both a homonormative, patriotic US national subject and, as a consequence, a perversely queer subject. This queer subject is marked as antithetical to the aims of the US nation state, and to the interests of a tactical alignment between the heteronormative and the homonormative. Puar argues that this strategy of acceptance of some gay people at the cost of the aligning of others with terrorism is a facet of biopolitical strategy central to the US state, and manifested in the logistics and strategies of the US war machine. This account of biopolitics is drawn in part from Foucaults lecture on race and biopower in Society Must be Defended. Here, Foucault describes the biopolitical as interventions made in the name of the wellbeing of the population as a whole, in distinction to disciplinary power, which is addressed to individual bodies. The objects of biopower are processes such as birth and death rates, rates of reproduction and occurrences and duration of illnesses endemic within a population, all of which are rendered political problems to be countered by interventions in such areas as public health, hygiene and housing, as well as sexuality.1 For Foucault, sexuality is the target not only of disciplinary control of individuals characterized by surveillance, but also of strategies that are designed to further the health and vitality of a nation, protecting its reproductive capacities from the threat of debauched, perverted sexuality.2 In this way, normative sexuality serves both to discipline individual subjects and to regulate populations as a whole. Foucault goes on to make an explicit connection between biological accounts of race which emerged in the nineteenth century and the genocidal wars of the twentieth century, in which state sovereignty and biopower converged to unleash deadly forces: If you are functioning in the biopower mode how can you justify the need to kill people, to kill populations, and to kill civilizations? By using the themes of evolutionism, by appealing to a racism.3 This formulation of biopower is one which has been developed notably by Giorgio Agamben, who contends that biopolitics today is animated by the wish to control the biological make-up of populations through the control and elimination of foreign bodies.4 Framing her argument within this particular convergence of biopower, race and sexuality, Puar draws on postcolonial and terrorism studies to show how certain sexual and racial subjects are designated for life and others for death, asking [h]ow do queers reproduce life, and which queers are folded into life? How do they give life? To what extent do they give life? How is life weighted, disciplined into subjecthood, narrated into population and fostered for living? Does this securitization of queers entail deferred death or dying for others, and if so, for whom? (p.36). This set of questions echoes Judith Butlers problematization in Precarious Life (2004) of what counts as a liveable life and a grievable death within the logic of the recent colonial interventions of the US in the name of the security of its own population.5 Butler

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parallax ISSN 1353-4645 print/ISSN 1460-700X online http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/13534640903478841

mounts a careful analysis in order to further her contention that the innite detention of suspects by the US represents a re-emergence or reanimation of sovereign power in the US, in the name of state security. Butler argues that in this instance, the US state has allocated itself a form of sovereign power, under which it has ultimate sanction over who is put to death and who is allowed to live. This emerges in tandem with governmentality, which describes the much more diffuse distribution of power in contemporary US society. Butler is careful to distinguish the functioning of different modalities of power, and to avoid invoking the US state as a unied power, homogenous in its aims and exercising direct and oppressive control over the life of the population.6 This distinction is important as it indicates the differences between an account of sovereign power as an emergence at a particular moment, in the form of a rogue power7 and Puars analysis, which envisages biopower as an arm of state sovereignty, an analysis more in line with the arguments put forward by Hardt and Negri in Empire (2000). Puar, however, does not devote much time to distinguishing between the positions of those authors who she cites, and this can lead to some confusion when getting to grips with her overall argument. Puar utilizes an account of biopower informed by Agamben and Hardt and Negri to produce a convincing analysis in her rst three chapters. In the nal sections of the book, Puar begins to develop a reading that is informed by the affective turn within social and cultural theory, which draws on the work of Gilles Deleuze, Patricia Clough and Brian Massumi among others (p.206). Their work, positing affect as extra to representation, is used as the basis for a proposed reconguring of queer theories in the light of an analysis that takes account of a prediscursive agential queer subject (p.172) rather than a subject that coheres when discursive accounts of meaning production are privileged. Chapter One The sexuality of terrorism draws on Edward Saids Orientalism (1979) to show how government-sponsored terrorism studies, informed by western knowledges of the Arab mind, construct the terrorist as pathological and as standing against modernity. Centrally, Orientalist discourse infers a sexuality that is illicit, excessive, unbridled and perverse, and as such produces a subject in which primitivity and perversion coalesce. Puar goes on to argue that liberal discourse on gay rights, including such media representations as Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, and

recent progressive rulings such as the 2003 Massachusetts Supreme Court ruling upholding same sex marriage as well as the recent overturning of anti-sodomy laws in fact unwittingly contribute towards the othering of the monster terrorist fag from elsewhere (p.46). For Puar, this dual process of incorporation and quarantining involves the articulation of race within nation. Nation, and its associations with modernity and racial and class hierarchies, becomes the dening factor in disaggregating between upright, domesticatable queernesses that mimic and recenter liberal subjecthood, and out of control, untetherable queernesses (p.47). In Chapter Two Abu Ghraib and US sexual exceptionalism, Puar argues, following Agamben, that the homonormative citizen relies on a discourse of homosexual and US exceptionalism. For Agamben, the state of exception is that which authorizes the state to operate as a sovereign power in deance of its own laws, and in the name of the protection of the population. Puar utilizes exception here to refer both to US foreign policy and to the production of exceptional US liberal homosexualities, which are contrasted with repressive Muslim sexuality (pp.3-4). Puar examines the liberal US response to the published pictures of abuses at Abu Ghraib, arguing that the response from gay rights and feminist commentators reproduces an idea of Muslim sexuality as both perverse and repressed, naturalizing the notion that nakedness and sexual passivity are more humiliating for these prisoners than for the liberal western male. Effectively, this places the blame on the victims, that is to say, if Muslim males were not so repressed, the torture would not have taken on a perverse sexual nature. Puar goes on to argue that the emphasis on the sexual nature of the acts portrayed draws attention away from the fact that they are acts of torture, and that torture at Abu Ghraib has also been directed against women. Questioning why photos of women being sexually abused have not attracted so much attention, Puar asks could these photos nally demolish the line of reasoning that the United States is liberating Muslim women, a fantasy so crucial to the tenets of American sexual exceptionalism? (p.98). In Chapter Three Intimate control, innite detention, the 2003 decriminalization of sodomy in the US is read not as a piece of progressive liberal legislation, but as an example of the functioning of US sexual exceptionalism. Puar denes the privileging of intimacy the intimacy of the sexual act carried out in private, at home as emblematic of an intensively disciplined and parallax 111

surveyed homonormativity. This exceptional status excludes for example the black welfare queen, the accused Muslim terrorist who must register with the INS or expatriate himself and his family, the incarcerated black or Latino prisoner (p.126). Utilizing Deleuzes notion of the control society, Puar proposes that the demarcation of the private and the public sphere upon which the sodomy ruling rests ushers in what Deleuze identies as the move from disciplinary control towards a more intensive form of surveillance of the boundaries of what is deemed acceptable and unacceptable, private and public, which operates in affective as well as visual registers. This control society which Puar somewhat confusingly also calls superpanopticism is concerned with how things feel, how sensations matter as much as if not more than how things appear, look, seem, are visible or are cognitively known (p.129). My criticism of this point is that, although Puar describes a theoretical change in emphasis, it is not made clear how this move from the visual and cognitive to affective surveillance is exemplied through the increased surveillance of the boundaries of intimate and public space. The signicance of affect is further elaborated in Chapter Four The turban is not a hat, which is a consideration of the response of the Sikh advocacy groups in the US to a rise in racist attacks on Sikhs in the wake of September 11, 2001. Puar argues that the effort of these groups to educate the American public about the patriotic allegiances of the Sikh community is one that involved a distancing of the Sikh from the Muslim, for whom the turbaned man is often mistaken in these attacks. The hypothesis of mistaken identity (p.167) thus relies on the ability of the viewer to discern visual differences between Sikh and Muslim turbans, and this visual difference in turn indicates the differences between Sikhs and real Muslims, positioned as the rightful object of hate. South Asian queer subjects are then subject to a particular duress to produce themselves either as homonormative patriotic subjects included in American exceptionalism, or to align themselves with and reclaim the perverse sexuality imputed to them by Orientalist discourse. Puar proposes that the object of the turban when read through affect makes the south Asian subject not only an identity category that can be read through visual markers and understood within particular grids of intelligibility, but an assemblage comprising the organic and the non-organic. This Deleuzian notion of the assemblage emphasizes points of connection between bodies which trouble naturalized bodily boundaries. Puar presents this distinct ontology as Book reviews 112

moving forward from discursive accounts of identity. She uses as an example Sarah Ahmeds account of how certain subjects develop the propensity for labels such as terrorist to stick to them. For Puar, Ahmeds turn to history is unable to adequately answer the question [h]ow did stickiness come to be? (p.189). In distinction, Puar utilizes the notion of bodies as contagious, not in the sense of individual bodies as carrying contagion, but using contagion as a model for how bodies that acquire particular habits become involved in certain collectivities or social strata or particular racial formations. I would argue that this utilization of contagion is potentially problematic, as the notion of communication as contagion has its own distinct genealogy within the development of crowd psychology. Within this lineage, the contagious transmission of affects within a group has been traditionally understood within an evolutionary framework. This aligns contagious communication with suggestibility, which is imputed to particular subjects along racial and class divides,8 leading to the familiar notion of the increased suggestibility of, for example, a crowd watching a football match, or young Muslims listening to a charismatic clergyman in a Mosque. This is not to propose that notions such as contagion cannot be revived or reworked as challenges to the gure of the autonomous western subject, but that the genealogy of such concepts cannot be ignored. What is at stake in the account of biopower that envisages it as an arm of sovereign power? For Agamben, whose model of biopower is followed by Puar, National Socialism was the apex of biopower and an exemplication of the way in which the politics of life is in fact characterized by thanatopolitics, the politics of death.9 However, it has been argued that, although Foucault uses the genocides carried out in the name of National Socialism and of Stalinism as examples of biopower and state sovereignty working together, he does not necessarily posit that death is at the heart of biopower, or that biopower is always aligned with sovereign power.10 Nikolas Rose uses this as a departure point for a critique of Agamben and others who proffer what he sees as an overly pessimistic account of biopower that does not pay attention to the diffuse and disparate ways in which power operates in a Foucauldian schema, which, for Rose, describes a plethora of strategies, state or otherwise, through which life as a biological force is fostered.11 Although Puar provides compelling and convincing examples of the unwitting effects of homo-

normative discourse, I would argue that her argument relies too heavily on a distinction that renders biopower as malevolent. Biopower is then pitted against affect, contagion and movement, which become the locus of futurity. This is perhaps what enables the rather disturbing description at the end of the book of the exploding suicide bombers body, merging with the bodies of the other victims, as a newly becoming body (p.217). Puars insistent aligning of progressivist US laws in sexuality with sovereign biopolitical control seem unfairly to render an array of lesbian, gay, queer bisexual and transgender campaigns as nothing more than extensions of repressive state power. A more nuanced account of biopower may offer a way out of this tendency to render biopower as a kind of conspiracy or liberal trap.

trans. David Macey (London: Penguin, 2003), pp.242-44. 2 Michel Foucault, Society Must be Defended, p.252. 3 Michel Foucault, Society Must be Defended, p.257. 4 Nikolas Rose, The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power and Subjectivity in the Twenty-rst Century (Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2007), p.57. 5 Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London and New York: Verso, 2004), p.xv. 6 Judith Butler, Precarious Life, p.56. 7 Judith Butler, Precarious Life, p.56. 8 Lisa Blackman, Is Happiness Contagious?, New Formations 63:1 (2007), pp.15-32 (p.20). 9 Nikolas Rose, The Politics of Life Itself, p.57. 10 Michel Foucault, Society Must be Defended, p.260. 11 Nikolas Rose, The Politics of Life Itself, p.58.

Notes Michel Foucault, Society Must be Defended: Lectures at the Colle`ge de France, 1975-76 [1997], ed. Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana,
1

q 2010 Celia Jameson Goldsmiths, University of London

Epistemic Values and Epistemologies of the Eye

Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison. Objectivity.
(Brooklyn, NY: Zone Books, 2007) Objectivity has a history, it turns out, that reveals how scientic objects come to qualify as real under the watchful eyes and practised hands of naturalists, scientists, and engineers. Many of the working objects of the last three hundred years of scientic study, from birds to bones, snowakes to spermata, and ink blots to atoms, are carefully mapped to a series of emerging epistemic virtues by authors Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison. They begin their rich historical account of objectivity through the splash of mercury and milk droplets of British physicist Arthur Worthingtons research into uid dynamics in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Worthington had coaxed out a systematic classication scheme for uid ow by observing the moment of splash impact over and over and recreating it in precise drawings. When Worthington turned to the new technology of photography, to his wonder and surprise, it captured no symmetry, but rather, catalogued highly irregular shapes in the splashes. Under his practised eye and over twenty years of

research, he had carefully and judiciously weeded out any irregularities in his drawings, choosing instead to assemble an idealized governing order for uid ow. Now, seeing the variations the photographs revealed to him he abandoned the ideal for the real; an objective view and record of a complex physical world and its asymmetrical individuality (p.16). Worthingtons experience demonstrates, for Daston and Galison, the moment of change or shift in scientic seeing beginning in the mid-nineteenth century from highly idealized representations of nature to blind sight or objectivity as a way of seeing without inference, interpretation, or intelligence (p.17). In Objectivity, the authors detail the history of objectivity through scientic image-making collected in scientic atlases. Scientic atlases appear across a range of disciplines displaying systematic compilations of working objects that stand as dictionaries of the sciences of the eye (p.22). This very specic aspect of science, image-making, supports their key claim that epistemic virtues, or codes, arose around the sciences as reections of scientic practice. The authors distinguish three epistemic virtues beginning with truth-to-nature in the eighteenth century, to mechanical objectivity by the later nineteenth century, and trained judgment parallax 113

of the twentieth. It is not a neat, lineal catalogue of succession from one form to the next, but more a sequential folding of one epistemic virtue into the next laid out across seven chapters. The three epistemic virtues trace a history of objectivity as a subset of the history of epistemology itself fused to the emergence of post-Kantian understandings of the subjective and objective. Epistemic virtues involved virtuous practices exercised by scientists to know the world and not the self, but in the end, as the authors assert, a particular kind of self must be moulded and enlisted to carry out this virtuous program in science (pp.39-40). In the rst chapter, the authors construct a careful rationale for choosing scientic imagemaking and atlases to emphasize practice over politics and virtues over paradigms. Images thus become the organizing principle of the book around which the authors illustrate how epistemic virtues can be inscribed in images methodically working through how such images are made, used and defended against critics (p.42). Chapter Two introduces truth-to-nature as the rst epistemic virtue that precedes objectivity. In the eighteenth century, visual surveys of all sorts of scientic phenomena were assembled into compendiums known as atlases. These collections bore essentializing depictions of nature as true forms and ideal renderings of scientic study that sought to remove natures imperfections to establish idealized exemplars catalogued and labelled with the kind of precision notable in, as an example, Linnaean schemata. Linnaeus, the authors tell us, exemplies the virtue in truth-to-nature of this era. Linnaeus published the Hortus Cliffortianus in 1737, a compendium of botanical classication, and it represented the standard value in truth, not objectivity, as the outcome of careful examination by a highly subjective observer who brought all his mental faculties to bear on the subject at hand; the representation and understanding of what truly is nature (p.60). Under truth-to-nature, naturalists such as Linnaeus relied on talented illustrators to render archetypal drawings of nature culminating in what the authors designate as the four-eyed sight required to meet the rigorous standards of scientic atlases. Each atlas was a collective effort of the experienced scientist or naturalist, artist-illustrator, engraver, printer and publisher resulting in beautifully produced compendiums that were prized references on scientic expeditions and at universities. Book reviews 114

The four-eyed sight of truth-to-nature began a slow dissolution from the manufacture of reasoned images to those that represented the blind sight of a growing number of scientists who exercised a new conguration of epistemological conviction that aimed to silence the observer and Let nature speak for itself: objectivity (p.120). Scientists like Worthington who had seen anew through the advent of photography and imaging science had begun to question the long held perspective of truth-tonature with its reasoned images. Mechanical objectivity spurned the idealizations of truth-tonature and embraced a new set of ethics predicated on self-restraint and self-discipline buttressed by machinic instruments and devices to enable image-making devoid, as they saw it, of human intervention. The turn to objectivity was a direct response to the willful intervention of the author-artist and four-eyed sight of truthto-nature replacing it with procedures and methods to minimize subjective interpretation. This introduction of scientic objectivity in the later part of the nineteenth century would quiet the interfering subject by three means: mechanical methods, restrained ethics, and individualized metaphysics (p.124). Through an exercise of self-restraint, mechanical objectivity abandons the ideal type for the regulative ideal realized through self-surveillance and self-discipline over and against any slippage into personal interpretation or subjective dislocation. Self-discipline was a cardinal Victorian virtue as well; the scientic self of mechanical objectivity absorbed the social and moral constraints of Victorian society.1 There is a further development to this repression of will of mechanical objectivity through structural objectivity that was, the authors note in Chapter Five, objectivity without images. Taking objectivity farther through logic, physics, philosophy and mathematics meant spurning image-making for law-like sequences of signs and differential equations to describe and communicate knowledge about the world (p.254). It appealed particularly to newer sciences of the mind in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that sought to explain phenomena through a process of abstraction transforming subjective representations into objective concepts (p.264). While this book emphasizes scientists and scientic image-making alongside atlas-making, it does not discuss the printing industry so crucial to the making and circulation of scientic atlases. This may seem insignicant to the larger

epistemological questions, yet printing had a crucial role in expanding scientic knowledge and by the mid- and late nineteenth century, in dening the scientic self as author. In the era preceding truth-to-nature and in its early instantiation, mechanized printing was critical to the circulation of scientic atlases and treatises that expanded the reach of science beyond academic elites solidifying early modern scientic enterprise in the eighteenth century.2 Daston and Galison acknowledge that as imaging and reproduction techniques became more sophisticated they conveyed scientic ndings in publication with precision and clarity, but do not attach particular emphasis to its role in scientic atlases nor in developing the scientic self (p.196). However, throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries this advancement in capability and capacity through mechanized printing made scientic atlases more accessible and increased their circulation.3 Printing effectively publicized science and was as important to the history of science and epistemology, I suggest, as the sort of specic practices gathered under epistemic virtues. Thus, by the time the notion of objectivity became critical to science, printing and distribution had become critical to scientists. In this same period, the expansion of copyright encouraged the rights of the author as creator to be afforded certain privileges, recognition, and control over their works.4 While Daston and Galison foreground important aspects of scientic image-making that exemplify particular virtues for the ideal scientic self of each period, which I will return to below, the making of scientists of the nineteenth century into authors is also an important feature.5 The author, as Foucault asserted, performs a certain role and conrms a certain mode of being through particular characteristics that link the scientists (authors) name to a function and mode of existence [and] circulation within society.6 The science author gains, by attribution, the author function and authenticity through this privileged moment of individualization which over time is, as the nal chapter of Objectivity points out, often subsumed in the twentieth century under inventor and patent holder.7 Authenticity and objectivity remain important attributes of the scientic self. In Chapter Four, the authors turn Foucaults notion of technologies of the self toward the practices of the mind and body [ . . . ] that mould and maintain a certain kind of self suitable to the harsh demands of each epistemic

virtue, that is, the scientic self (p.199). Such practices of mind and body varied across the epistemic virtues inuenced not only through scientic practice, but the normative social rules of a given era; the self of truth-to-nature was a genius of observation while the self of mechanical objectivity was a study in selfdiscipline. The self is mutable and different selves appear at different times in history even, at times, becoming the scientic object under examination.8 The emergence of scientic subjectivity in the mid-nineteenth century was crucial to the establishment of objectivity in which the negating of subjectivity by the subject became objectivity (p.204). These two congurations reached a new complementarity at the turn of the twentieth century when scientists sought to balance the self-restraint of mechanical and structural objectivity of the nineteenth century and its carefully created images and measured reproductions of working objects with trained judgment. Trained judgment, as Chapter Six outlines, was an effort by scientists to apply an interpretive eye instead of truth-to-natures four-eyed sight or mechanical objectivitys blind sight; a new sight that relied on training and experience to read images and provide expert assessment. Trained judgment in the twentieth century is the making of a disciplined, calibrated eye through scientic practice and repetition. For Daston and Galison, trained judgment is their nal scientic self in a triad of epistemic virtues: from the sage wisdom of truth-to-nature, to the methodical, selfdenying worker of mechanical objectivity, to the expert of trained judgment as the end post welding their epistemological history of the image to the ethical epistemology of the authorscientist (p.357). In Chapter Seven, the authors conclude by encapsulating their history of objectivity in a periodization chart that neatly organizes four features, that is, persona, image, practice and ontology, around each epistemic virtue (p.371). This can be viewed in the context of the right depiction in image-making for each of the three epistemic virtues considered as representational accounts of delity to nature. Contemporary digital image galleries that constitute todays atlases fuse the artifactual to the natural and are often images of manipulated objects presented in an aesthetic form suited to digital presentation. The authors suggest that in this era of nano-objects and atomic-scale manipulation, hybrid forms and nanofactured goods prevail under the manipulation and image-making of parallax 115

the scientic-engineering self in which images become tools part of the apparatus of contemporary scientic imaging (p.414). Scientic image-making is now less about representation and more fully presentation of ideas and forms often as patentable knowledge where attribution and authenticity are realized through proprietary invention.9 It is easy to think of the commodity aspect in relation to the production of scientic atlases particularly as market-based economies matured through the nineteenth century and became the economic model of many countries in the twentieth century. However, this issue of parallax considers the life of the gift and I suggest Objectivity can be thought of as a documentary project that demonstrates science is full of gifts. Nature has gifted its complexity to scientic quests for knowable truths, objective knowledge and cautious judgment and in the process it has been observed, drawn, photographed, x-rayed, measured, classied, quantied, extracted, modied, and so on to provide theories about nature and ontologies of things in themselves. Nature is the gift that keeps on giving amid the human calculation of benet versus the cost of knowing through virtuous enterprise. Scientic atlases were and are often collective efforts in production and utility; a social exercise requiring collaboration to enroll practitioners as well as phenomena in the making and in the use of the atlas by colleagues, students, and sometimes a literate, interested public (p.27). They straddle the economy of commodity exchange, presumably sold for a set value, while at the same time engender reciprocal, gift-like relations between the creators and beneciaries, scientist and student. The academy in particular, where scientic atlases were and are so often sponsored and created, operate as gift economies in the production and dissemination of knowledge.10 Thus, the notion of the gift may be invoked in the moment a reader, scientic colleague or student uses an atlas and refers to the work of the author, seeing something new and exposing the previously unseen in an image. Paralleling the account of art as a gift, the atlas becomes an agent of transformation and regeneration; the reader or viewer passes on what they have gleaned or learned and been transformed in the process.11 Daston and Galisons work on objectivity is full of a multitude of forms and things; it is replete with atlases and instruments and working objects as varied as microbes, brains, owers and nanospheres, yet, these nonhuman things sometimes Book reviews 116

appear as sidekicks in their human-centred tale of objectivity. Such things, as is clear from the authors phenomenal collection, assemble allies within what become networks of scientic collectives; networks of objects, scientist-colleagues, authors and artists, publishers and students of science. The working objects through which the scientic self and sight are wound together link practice to the practitioner permitting the nuances of each epistemic virtue to emerge. Objectivity, it seems, is a working object itself and a work in progress.

Notes
1

Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, The Image of Objectivity, Representations 40 (1992), pp.81-128 (p.118). 2 Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformation in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1979). 3 Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change. See also Stillman Drake, Early Science and the Printed Book: The Spread of Science Beyond the Universities, in Essays on Galileo and the History and Philosophy of Science (Toronto, New York and London: University of Toronto Press, 1999) pp.118-30. 4 Brad Sherman and Lionel Bently, The Making of Modern Intellectual Property Law (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999) pp.161-65. 5 Mark Rose, Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). 6 Michel Foucault, What Is an Author?, in Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structural Criticism, ed. Josue V. Harari (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979), pp.141-60. 7 Michel Foucault, What Is an Author?, p.148. 8 Jan Goldstein, Mutations of the Self in Old Regime and Postrevolutionary France, in Biographies of Scientic Objects, ed. Lorraine Daston (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2000), pp.86-116 (p.90). 9 Foucault also makes this point in What Is an Author?, p.149. See also Scott Lash, Critique of Information (London, Thousand Oaks, and New Delhi: Sage, 2002), pp.193-94. Lash outlines the impact of intellectual property on science and technology following closely Donna Haraways many explorations in this area. See for example, Donna Haraway, Modest Witness@Second Millenium. FemaleMan Meets OncoMouse: Feminism and Technoscience (London and New York: Routledge, 1997).

10 David Baird, Scientic Instrument Making, Epistemology and the Conict Between Gift and Commodity Economies, Philosophy and Technology 2, 3-4 (1997), pp.25-45. Baird makes a related argument regarding scientic instrument making as a gift economy thriving in a small, collaborative techno-scientic collective. 11 Lewis Hyde cited in Mark Osteen, Introduction, in The Question of the Gift: Essays Across Disciplines, ed. Mark Osteen (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), pp.28-29. Osteen also suggests

that Foucaults author-function may operate as a gift in the same way when an appreciative reader increases the value of a text by exposing what wasnt previously apparent in it (p.29).

q 2010 Sandra Robinson Queens University, Kingston, Canada

Individualization and the Play of Memories

Bernard Stiegler. Acting Out. Trans. David Barison, Daniel Ross and Patrick Crogan.
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008) What is Husserlian phenomenology today? Heidegger answered in his 1963 essay, My Way to Phenomenology, that the age of phenomenological philosophy seems to be over.1 One may suspect that this is Heideggers bias, since the master to whom once he dedicated his Sein und Zeit, refused to continue the friendship since 1933.2 But following Heideggers death, the naturalizing phenomenology movement led by the cognitive scientists in the 1980s, also put an end to Husserlian phenomenology.3 Today there are still journals dedicated to phenomenology, but the name Husserl either remains a target of attack by postmodern thinkers or the source of historical studies of a movement once called phenomenology. Bernard Stiegler is probably one of todays most innovative philosophers whose work reinvents Husserls theory of memories to demonstrate an urgency of the re-appropriation of technology. Stiegler explores in Husserl the interaction of the primary retention (impression), secondary retention (recollection), tertiary retention (image) and protention (anticipation). Stiegler, however, adds with Freudian psychoanalysis another dimension a thought that Husserl tried to avoid, that is, a psychologized phenomenology, if not psychologism. This contradiction and intimacy (phenomenology vs. psychology), which haunted Husserl until his death, is also the boundary which once stopped his successors from entering. In Stieglers invention this boundary becomes a necessity, which reects our existence qua reality of the technological world. In Acting Out, a small volume of a collection of two lectures by Stiegler, he

presents to us two Husserls: rst, there is the philosopher of phenomenological epokhe; and second, there is the philosopher of memory. But Husserl nevertheless only appears as a mask in this book, a mask shared by two actors who act out. One is Stiegler himself who demonstrates a successful individuation;4 the other is Richard Durn who presents a failure qua the urgency of a battle against a technological hegemony. The rst lecture is the confession of Stieglers personal experience of becoming a philosopher, a secret that belongs to the most intimate memory of a philosopher. It is a legend of a young man named Bernard Stiegler who did not even nish secondary school, of a one-time member of the French Communist Party, and of a bank robber who was sentenced to ve years in prison, and nally of a world-known philosopher. How did this happen? When one confesses, how can the audience know that the confessor is faithful to his words? Stiegler was aware of this problem of recollection, as he uses the term apre`s-coup, a French translation of Freuds Nachtraglichkeit. The word has a double meaning. It can be understood as a recursive temporality in which the present also conditions the past, especially when Freud refers to trauma; it also refers to primal fantasies, the imagination that never happened nor is happening.5 To recall how to philosophize in the language of philosophy is precisely the apre`s-coup, the recollection of a traumatic memory from the present, which also demands a manifestation of a style of narration. But Stiegler is a philosopher of time, of memory, or more precisly, of hypomnesis.6 A philosopher of time has to be faithful to time (otherwise he becomes a sci- writer), in terms of both secondary retention his memory of the prison and his tertiary retention the story told and published under his name. What does it mean to philosophize? Modern philosophers philosophize in the system of philosophical knowledge inside the department of philosophy, setting up connections of thoughts and arguments in academic papers, parallax 117

while forgetting that philosophy is not only about theories, but also practices, or in Bernard Stieglers term, acts. Philosophy as a practice or spiritual practice is Pierre Hadots exploration of ancient philosophy. Ancient philosophers attempted to attain the tranquillity of the mind and the harmony of the self and the universe through philosophical practice.7 A philosopher always starts philosophizing from the basic motif know thyself. Five years of incarceration gave Stiegler a particular milieu in which the external milieu was suspended, while the internal milieu was reduced to the secondary retention of the world before his incarceration. Stiegler acts by reading and writing. He read Mallarme every morning as soon as he awoke to avoid those uncontrollable protentions that would occur as the waking reveries of the morning.8 He read Plato, but developed his own concept of by default, which against Platos phantasm of pure liberty, opposed to all alienation and all default, to all default posed as alienation.9 It is through reading and writing that Stiegler philosophized as well as survived in prison. He recalls, if this had not happened I would have become insane or totally asocial.10 The suspension of the world also allowed Stiegler to discover the phenomenological epokhe long before he encountered the work of Husserl.11 It means to suspend the natural attitude of seeing the world as it is, and to attain an apodictic understanding through reduction. This reduction not only works on the objects of observation, but also on the subject, by suspending his world, which is in this case the experience in prison. He tried to love this freedom. The occasional visits from friends (which he calls micro-interruptions12) remind him not only of the world of which he is suspended from, but also of the freedom and peace granted by the prison that was shattered from time to time by these visits. But the freedom in the prison is after all not die Freiheit (freedom), but a fragile eigentliche Existenz (authentic existence), a Heideggerian approach to the transcendental reduction in which the They (das Man) are excluded in the reduction.13 But Stiegler is sceptical of this authenticity, renouncing it at the end of the book by saying six years after having announced the danger of das Man he wore the swastika.14 How does one, excited by discovering the phenomenological epokhe in practice, nally reject the authentic self, which is such a logical Book reviews 118

consequence? This break between Stiegler and Heidegger is fundamental in that he ceased to call himself a Heideggerian. Heidegger nds the default of being-with (Mitsein), but he could not think from the default, he took the default as a fault. A fault has to be corrected, but a default has to be transformed in favour of becoming. A default may have to be understood in a double sense: rstly, default as a beginning in the sense that an origin is unthinkable; and secondly, default as a method to afrm the necessity of the already-there as the possibility of all discourse. The default is the pre-individual milieu of Gilbert Simondon, who Stiegler encountered later. To philosophize is to singularize with the default of the milieu, to identify the signicance of the world by transforming with the world. This is precisely Simondons idea of psychic and collective individuation, the asymptotic relation between the I and the We. The phenomenological epokhe is not the end, but the end of the beginning. The authenticity of the self is not outside the default, but always within the default, the default is always a necessity, a necessity of philia (love). Compared with Stiegler, Richard Durn is the one who failed to singularize himself. Durn, the local activist from the city of Nanterre in France, who stormed the citys town hall, shooting and killing eight people before he committed suicide. According to Stiegler, this act suffered from the problem of primordial narcissism. When one does not love oneself, one is not able to love the world, there is no we but they, or what Nietzsche calls the herd. The destruction of the primordial narcissism is the pharmacological effect of modern technology. This is another break from Heidegger; the modern technology is not a fault but a default as Platonic pharmakon, which is at the same time good and bad. The calendarity and cardinality are systems, which basically facilitate the becoming of the we by opening up the commonality of philia, love and desire.15 But the problem we face today is the control of calendarity and cardinality by capitalism. In his investigation of the TV industry, Stiegler showed from a research on the relation between the public and their media an interesting phenomenon. In this study, the publics response to TV was I dont believe it anymore. I watch it but I hate it. This reaction is the loss of libido, where one is not able to signify from watching TV, that is to say, there is no desire, but only drives, or, in Stieglers term, an ill-being. How did this happen? Stiegler demonstrates a new order of the

play of the Husserlian primary, secondary and tertiary attentions. Stiegler identied that in Husserls 1905 lectures on the Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness he is not able to fully explore the relation between these three memories, since to Husserl the temporal object, for example, a melody, is nothing but a homogeneous ow of consciousness.16 In his later work, On the Origin of Geometry, Husserl took a different approach to ideality, which is concretized in writing, drawing or, generally, making. It grants a new status to technics in phenomenology since the eidetic of objective knowledge is now not in the speculation of the mind (e.g. the phenomenological reduction) but in making, while at the same time these two do not coherently connect with each other. Stiegler radicalizes the play of retentions by saying that the tertiary memory actually conditions the primary and secondary memory, hence protention. These memories are always in a circuit. Stieglers critique of Husserl coincides with the critique of Paul Ricur that Husserls inner time-consciousness did not explore the dynamics of the circuit, as well as the critique from Michel Henry that the given is taken for granted in Husserl, which can be said in general: the object is always indifferent to the subject.17 Stieglers move is to bring Freudian psychoanalysis into the circuit. This is an innovative move, at the same time as being a de-phenomenolization or psychoanalyzation of Husserls philosophy. Stiegler suggests that the hypersychronization of TV programs constitutes a homogenous secondary retention.18 For example, watching the same commercial broadcast of the World Cup nals this synchronization of time synchronizes not only a common time (consciousness of time), but also the time of consciousness (Zeitbewusstsein).19 The secondary retention conditions the primary retention as selection criteria, they then together condition the protention, which is also imagination. The synchronization leads to the loss of diachrony, which is differance or singularity. Because of this hypersynchronization, one is not able to signify anymore, which is thus similar to what Richard Durn wrote in his diary that everything seems insignicant to him, and he himself cannot signify20 in the words of a psychoanalytical language: the loss of libido, of philia. Stiegler attempts to demonstrate that technology actually conditions our consciousness, hence the psychical power to singularize, and once this hypersynchronization is at work, it destroys the diachrony as well as the primordial narcissism and

leads to the disaster of asignication. If this logic is true, there are still some important questions that remain unexplored. First at issue is what kind of technology shall we have at the age of globalization when the calendarity not only conditions a common time, but also a common retention and protention? Is the analysis only applicable to temporal objects or further? Does the move from TV to video sharing websites, or further to social networking websites in general make any difference? Second, if this logic is true, it is not the libido that conditions consciousness, but the reversed order. Then what kind of consciousness will be able to activate the libido if it is already lost? Third, if technology is the source of hypersynchronization, where are the places for other technics like customs, idioms intrinsic to specic ethnicity or class? Are they not able to make difference in the process of individuation? These are questions that perhaps cannot be covered in a book of this length. However, Stiegler raises questions that point to the problem of the self, the necessity of taking care of oneself. Taking care is not simply a personal practice, but is also a strategy against the hegemony of the industrial control of memory, that is, the evil. Stiegler suggests that the future does not lay in the negation of the evil, but the transformation of the evil, since the evil (the technology) is also pharmacological. The afrmation of the contingency of modern technology is another break from Heidegger, who proposed a retreat to poetic thinking or Gelassenheit, or living in a hut in the Black Forest, while for Stiegler it is a battle, or as he puts it at the end of his text, [w]hat is evil is the we, disquieted about the future of the we, that renounces critique and invention or, in other words, combat.

Notes
1 Martin Heidegger, On Time and Being [1969], trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York and London: Harper & Row, 1972), p.82. 2 See the interview with Martin Heidegger by Maria Alter and John D. Caputo conducted on 23 September 1966 and published in Der Spiegel on 31 May 1976 under the title Nur noch ein Gott kann uns retten. 3 See Naturalizing Phenomenology: Issues in Contemporary Phenomenology and Cognitive Science, ed. Jean Petitot et al. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999). 4 Individuation and individualization are two different concepts. For Simondon and Stiegler,

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individualization is the product or end result, while individuation is always a process or becoming in which the subject tends to achieve the in-divisibility of the self which could never be realized. 5 For the concept of apre`s-coup, see Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis [1967], trans. Donald NicholsonSmith (London: Karnac Books, 1988. pp.111-14. 6 For the concept of hyponemesis and its relation to technology, see Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time 1: The Fault of Epimetheus [1994], trans. Richard Beardsworth and George Collins (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998). 7 See Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault [1981], ed. and intr. Arnold I. Davidson, trans. Michael Chase (Malden: Blackwell, 1995). 8 Bernard Stiegler, Acting Out, p.20. 9 Bernard Stiegler, Acting Out, p.24. 10 Bernard Stiegler, Acting Out, p.19. 11 Bernard Stiegler, Acting Out, p.22. 12 Bernard Stiegler, Acting Out, p.19. 13 See Martin Heidegger, Das Problem der Bezeugung einer eigentlichen existenziellen Moglichkeit, 54, in Sein und Zeit (Tubingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 2006), pp.267-70. 14 Bernard Stiegler, Acting Out, p.80.

15 16

Bernard Stiegler, Acting Out, p.49. For a detailed critique on Husserls phenomenology of Time-Consiousness, please see Stieglers chapter Temporal Object and Retentional Finitude in his Technics and Time 2: Disorientation [1996], trans. Stephen Barker (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), pp.188-243. 17 Michel Henry, Material Phenomenology [1990], trans. Scott Davidson (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008). 18 Following Stiegler, synchronization also implies diachronization, which is to say differance, but hypersynchronization means synchronization without diachrony. 19 According to Husserl, these are two different concepts; the former is the subject of psychology, and the latter is the subject of phenomenology. See Edmund Husserl, The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness, ed. Martin Heidgegger, trans. James S. Churchill (Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1964). 20 Bernard Stiegler, Acting Out, p.56.

q 2010 Yuk Hui Goldsmiths, University of London

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