A piece I co-authored with Louise Norlie will appear in Unlikely Stories. The piece is about what has become of human beings, our view being that they have become “post-human.” Our viewpoint on the post-human differs from most of what has already been written. Many authors seem to think that the post-human is some kind of cyber-ether-entity, or genetically modified organism … we think neither.
Please drop me a comment to let me know what you think.
I have just finished reading Elaine Scarry’s The Body In Pain. It is a meditation and study on the nature of physical pain and its relationship to materialism. This book gains high praise for its content and style. I would rate her as highly as Foucault for both content and style, whom she obviously draws upon. Scarry positions herself not so much as a radical, but as an activist; not so much an ethicist, but moral philosopher. These may seem to be hair-splitting distinctions, but if they are, then so be it.
Her reading of the Judeo-Christian scriptures and the “gospel” of Marx is illuminating and thought provoking. She certainly is not the first to read the two together. However, her message can be summed up in the following declaration: “In the beginning Value said, ‘Let there be Wealth.’ And there was Wealth.”
The fact is that pain, according to Scarry, “embodies” us. As does work. Whereas the product of labour and / or pain “disembodies” us. And here, precisely, is where Marx intervenes: it is the wage-slave working class who are embodied and the property owning bourgeosie who are disembodied. (Her argument is much more complex, but this is the gist.)
Also included in the work is an analysis of “the structure of torture” and an analysis of “the structure of war.” The two structures, she argues, are actually quite distinct and almost opposite. The main difference between the two is the issue of “consent.” In a (conventional) war two sides agree to participate in a competition to see which side can out-injure the other, so that one side will not be capable of inflicting any more damage, or the cost to continue to inflict damage becomes too high to continue doing so. It is impossible to think that any individual would “consent” to allow somebody to torture him, whereas in war that is exactly the case: the soldier consents to participate in the activity of injury / being injured. In torture, opposite war, the torturer is almost wholly disembodied, while the one being tortured is almost completely embodied; in war, the dis / embodiment split oscillates to differentiate it from torture.
Of particular interest to me is Scarry’s examination and exploration of how physical pain relates to “decreation” (a term that Anne Carson borrowed from Scarry, I believe) and to creation. Creation is essentially an effort to alleviate, reduce, and / or subvert physical pain through the use of artifice. And, in an extremely subtle use of the dialectic, pain is not opposed to creation in general unless it is specifically applied to a human body (as in the practices of war or torture). It could even be generally stated that the sensation of pain is what spurs on our desire for artifice, to put as many layers between our interior and exterior so that the immediacy of experience does not overwhelm us.
Language is the primary artifact that separates us from our immediate conditions, whose artifice is not always apparently visible. Only in certain circumstances does the artificiality of language make itself felt (as when one is learning a new language, or losing one’s language due to intense experience). Through language, we even project human characteristics onto artifacts and are in turn re-created through the use of the artifact (as in the relationship between God and Man …). We attribute artifacts a kind of “human responsibility” when they malfunction, resulting in the injury of a human being. Scarry includes a brief analysis of our legal system and the attempts to discern “liability” when it comes to objects that do not perform their tasks properly and result in the injury of a human being.
All in all – an excellent book. Scarry recommends that we study the nature of creation more in order to understand the relationships between people and created objects better. Perhaps, if we understood more about the mystery of creation, the destruction we seem to wreak on everything would be less necessary.
My mission is to write the unofficial Terrorist Manifesto, and document the effects of terror on the systems it terrorizes. To psychoanalyze the alleged “War on Terror” would be a waste of time, were it not for the fact that psychoanalytic ideas are used by the terrorists’ themselves (in recruiting, indoctrinating, etc.) , and those said to be fighting against it. Thus, psychoanalysis becomes a necessary discourse if we are to elaborate a “theory of terror.” The use of a “theory of terror” is to anticipate the effects of what we are told “terror” is the cause.
I am deeply philosophical. And even more literary. I will often not be making a consistent, coherent, or logical argument, but stating an opinion or offering a proposition, which may or may very well not be informed.
