File spoon-archives/lyotard.archive/lyotard_2004/lyotard.0410, message 36


Date: Wed, 13 Oct 2004 02:01:56 -0700 (PDT)
From: Roger Taylor <trodtaylor-AT-yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: Source of line of thinking


Steve, 
 
Sorry for not replying earlier (grueling day with conference planning). I see where you are going, but your first premise contains a hidden assumption--- that distinction between entities implies hierarchy. So-called humans and so-called animals are different on several counts, none of which (I agree with you here) are hard and fast. Marking this difference does not necessarily imply a movement toward supporting relations of supieriority or inferiority (or novelty even). I suppose that this is one way open open up what you wrote below (albeit in a more abstract manner). 
 
In speaking of the pre-human, the animal is foregrounded in Lyotard as something intractable to the development which would transform subjectivity into some total untility (this is one the primary concerns of his late thoughts, in his supplement to the differend, la phrase affect and too already in the differend in his animal examples). 
 
Perhaps I see a way to clarify some of my confusions, which by the way to your credit, were not due to your explanations. My confusions circulate around how we are commonly defining the the term "technology". There are tool-user relations which remain entirely utilitarian. 
 
At the same time, the same relations may (and perhaps must of necessity) be involved in other sorts of relationships ranging from sentimentality to fetishized object relations, extensions of the body into an interface with the inanimate, the animating of the inanimate, the use of an animate by an animate as an utilitarian tool, and so on. These few are by no means exhaustive. And I have an intuition that if we follow these definitions through not only does the human-animal distinction become blurred but even the animate-inanimate distinction. Blurred but not fused, a fuzzy index of difference? I am not sure. I just thought a consideration of some of these thoughts might help to frame our mutual conversation. 
 
On my reading of Lyotard, I think that you can follow his mention of animals in the differend, compare it with the dual concept of the inhuman in the work of the same name and then place on the map of his differend language of logos and phone. Phone is a general potential for affectivity. But it is also the raw matter from which logos draws its manifold structures. Another way to think about this is through the Freud of Beyond the Pleasure Principle: there is a life drive, in line with the reality principle, in conflict with the death drive (less a destructive impulse than a will to discharge excitations through sleep or other non-biological sublimations). One might be able to conclude in a counter-intuitive fashion then that the inhuman really is the what is not human in the human that remains (as for all animate beings) constitutive of them. Which would in turn lead to the claim that ultimately the human-inhuman distinctions are functions of a specific logos always in defiance but
 simultaneously standing on a general phone. 
 
These are some fragmentary thoughts. So pardon me if they are not so well conceptualized. 
 
be seeing you, 
Roger 

"steve.devos-AT-krokodile.co.uk" <steve.devos-AT-krokodile.co.uk> wrote:
eric/all

Yes that is the risk, and I can't see a way out of the contradiction, 
for with the distinction between the human and animal comes the 
inherited belief, faith in humans as something distinct and special. 
How to construct a position which allows the human difference to be 
explored without the delusion of superiority, of specialness. On the 
linguistic/technical note - my personal suspician is that even within 
the local of our small insignificant planet the specialness of the 
twice-born charecter of the human will be found to be mistakern.

When I began exploring the technologial line of thought in Lyotard's 
work, I had original thought that his using the phrase 
"libidinal-technical set-up" was locating the position within something 
that argued the Freudian-descended-libidinal was more important, 
preceded the technical. (hence my not opening the discussion out before) 
but this is not the case. Only recently did I notice that his general 
acceptance of the Leroi-Gourhan/Steigler argument that the technical, 
the tool existing prior and creating the human libidinal - given this it 
isn't hard to realize that an unknowable version of the 
libidinal-technical set-up existed in the pre-human, in our 
forerunners. In which case it's not to imagine that such a setup and 
also exists in the crow or the bonobo chimanzees or the sperm whale... 
Of course it is precisely this that places the utilitarian negation 
founded as it is on pain and suffering into question, for we do not have 
to believe in the superiority of the human from this realisation.



pause

steve



Eric wrote:

>Steve,
>
>I am sympathetic with this approach you are taking. In my view, Lyotard
>is not merely offering us the Kant of the third critique, but a Kant
>without autonomy, where the Copernican revolution is transformed into a
>more Freudian, ecological one, with the results of again displacing the
>center. A Kant of the third critique, perhaps, but a Kant of alterity
>rather than autonomy - a Kant from below....
>
>Without privileging the human, I think it is possible to note the
>distinction, if only in degree, if not in kind. The risk you appear to
>run in reducing human to animal in a plane of equivalence is that, taken
>to the extreme, you replace history with nature in a way that seems to
>deny the temporality embedded in the arc of technology, the long span
>from the Neolithic cave until now. 
>
>I believe the linguistic/technological matrix is one that evolves as a
>quasi-organism (think self gene or meme) and operates in symbiotic
>fashion with the neophyte human organism, bonding through a kind of
>trauma of initiation, that Lyotard, speaking of Kafka and the Penal
>Colony, compares to a tattoo or inscription, a traumatic writing upon
>the flesh. 
>
>This twice-born character of the human, while it might share something
>of the animal, seems to exceed in prodigious scope mere nature. This
>dynamic of history, as Marx saw, makes us exceedingly dialectical
>animals.
>
>eric 
>
>
>
>
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: owner-lyotard-AT-lists.village.Virginia.EDU
>[mailto:owner-lyotard-AT-lists.village.Virginia.EDU] On Behalf Of
>steve.devos-AT-krokodile.co.uk
>Sent: Monday, October 11, 2004 2:47 PM
>To: lyotard-AT-lists.village.Virginia.EDU; Eric
>Subject: Re: Source of line of thinking
>
>Roger/Eric/all
>
><>Let me start by admitting that what follows is difficult and doesn't 
>contain the intertextual references necessecery to prove the argument - 
>but given that it rests on the on the assumptions which has to be 
>accepted before anything else - first anyone that believes that humanism
>
>begins from the false assumption that 'humans are special and unique' - 
>given this difficulty... but enough. Is it clear... i realize probably 
>not but still.... I am going to mix up the two or three issues in what 
>follows - addressing the 'false consciousness issue' and at the same 
>time the 'technoscience/technics issue'. In the process of doing so 
>carry out an experiment and try and expose the dependency of Lyotard on 
>a very specific understanding of the tool/human relationship, which as 
>he uses it in the key essay Logos and Techne - (esp p53) which marks 
>'Technologos" as that which differentiates human cultures from
>non-human...
>
>Humans cannot evade the laws of thermodynamics, there is nothing about 
>progress in Darwin's theory of natural selection, there is nothing about
>
>progress in Gilles theory of technological evolution. It is 
>industrialization, starting from the first neolithic indutsrial 
>revolution, that has enabled humans to achieve their present numbers; 
>but this current level of industrialization is the cause of climate 
>change with the consequent effect that it will make the planet less 
>pleasant for human beings. Perhaps Rees is right in supposing that a 
>massive human dieback estimated at 1Bn upwards is inevitable as the 
>Earth returns to a state of equilbrium, possibly but I am personally 
>brought to the edge of despair by theorisations based on fear...[let me 
>explain...]
>
>The false consciousness error allows me to raise two issues - that is to
>
>bring to the surface the references that Lyotard implicity and 
>explicitly refers to in his conceptualisation of 'development and the 
>inhuman'. References which are deeply dependent on 
>scientific/technoscienctific knowledge but which can be seen to be 
>'false' because of the original implicit humanism. The accusation of 
>'falseness' is supported by subsequent scientific developments which 
>have increasingly begun to suggest that nothing differentiates us from 
>the non-human. [excepting what Lyotard refers to as Technologos (53. the
>
>inhuman)]. The line of thought which Lyotard adopts is constructed 
>around the notion that the technological moment is the human 
>constituting moment, that is to say that the tool-human moment (referred
>
>to in the Asassination of Painting essay) - which is postulated by 
>Leroi-Gourhan , then advanced by Gilles with his theory of technological
>
>evolution, and which is then read and understood through the work of 
>Bernard Stiegler (see Logos, Techni, or Telegraphy). As it happens their
>
>understandable error is to think that the tool-human - the 
>technics-human relationship is unique - but we we now recognize this is 
>the central anthropomorphic error. Leroi-Gourhan for eaxample simply 
>didn't have the evidence to produce a non-anthropomorphic version.
>
>"...You know technology wasn't invented by us humans rather the other 
>way round..." (p12) This direct reference to the above line of thought -
>
>which as said begins with leroi-gourhan, has the unfortunate but 
>historically located error of ignoring the fact that humans are not the 
>only tool using animals on this planet. A position which Stiegler nows 
>accepts - as evidenced by his current much looser definition of the 
>'subject' which results in his accepting the non-human as having 
>complete equivilance of value to the human.
>
>In the place where Lyotard states the above he also says "...A human in 
>short is..." Which carries the implication that a human has a value 
>greater than for example a bonobi chimpanzee, a sperm whale or indeed 
>george the cat. This is not the case - on a plane of difference all 
>points are equivilant - this hardline philosophy of difference approach 
>can be rejected on the basis of being willing to refuse the notion of 
>equivilance. But there is also the scientific and historical point which
>
>defines the 'false consciousness' which is implicit within Lyotard's 
>statements - name that western societies are by tendency radically 
>anthropocentric. That is to say that there is an untenable seperation 
>constructed between humanity and the natural world, most specifically 
>between humans and other animals and non-humans. It has been 
>convincingly argued that the indo-european descended monotheistic 
>account, at best understands that; god grants man dominion over animals 
>and that this implies some duty of care - but this still remains a 
>representation of the false consciousness at the heart of western 
>anthropocentrism, namely that humananity is in some sense better. The 
>reference point being that Lyotard repeats this specific problem by 
>maintaining that the human is different and worse can be understood to 
>believe they are in some way of greater value, either way he does not 
>deny this common misunderstanding. Consider the mistakern comparision 
>between human and cat in the introduction to the inhuman (3) - which can
>
>be considered as repeating the strange anthropocentric misunderstanding 
>that the animal is instinctual and the human has to learn to be human. 
>This is to say that by making the comparison of human child and cat he 
>is marking a false difference between human and cat as representative of
>
>other animals. The irony of this false difference is that it is 
>precisely at this point that one recognizes Lyotard's humanism, that is 
>to say can his logic survive once the animal is understood as 
>equivilant. So the implication of the following, which surely implies 
>human uniqueness, is that this is wrong because of the original context:
>
>"What shall we call human in humans, the initial misery of their 
>childhood or their capacity to acquire a second nature which thanks to 
>language makes them fit to share a communal life adult consciousness and
>
>reason...? That the second depends on and presuppose the first is agreed
>
>by everyone..."
>
>That the symbolic recursiveness has been proven to exist in the 
>non-human life forms, is to refuse the assumption that the symbolic 
>recursion as demonstrated by "logic and mathematics" and aesthetics are 
>universal knowledges - for even within the human socials they are not, 
>for they are western (indo-european) knowledges which are being imposed 
>on the human world.
>
>References throughout The Inhuman: Introduction, chapters, ,2,3,4,5.
>
>The eqivilance between the various animals on the planet, human, bonobo,
>
>sperm whale, cat, crow and wasp for example is slowly and painfully 
>being accepted - notably as already stated by Steigler.
>
>This may not be that much clearer... sigh. What do you think Eric is 
>that clearer?
>
>best
>steve
>
>
>
>Roger Taylor wrote:
>
> 
>
>>Steve, 
>>
>>This time the attachment should come through. Also, I'm not sure what
>> 
>>
>you mean by "Lyotard's false consciousness with respect to humanity".
>Please explain this. I am a bit confused on that point. Otherwise
>forward the attached flyer to anyone you think might be interested.
>Maybe hop a plane and come raise some hell in Atlanta. My doors are
>always open. 
> 
>
>>Roger 
>>
>>"steve.devos-AT-krokodile.co.uk" wrote:
>>roger,
>>
>>In theoretical terms I tend to agree with the below - which makes me 
>>wonder precisely why the analysts who call themselves Jungians, are 
>>always in my limited experience - how ridiculous this seems as I write 
>>this - so much more humane. With the caveat of the common social 
>>imaginary, which should be taken into account and couldn't this be 
>>considered the common identity you are refusing. Either way a clearer 
>>explanation as to how you can accept Lyotard's false consciousness of 
>>'humanity' as a species, given the implications of the below would be 
>>interesting, because isn't the underlying implication of the below the 
>>rejection of the notion of 'species' - Or is it that a subject is 
>>forever only a human being in your theoretical structure ?
>>
>>Technics later - tomorrow perhaps, have worked enough this weekend...
>>
>>steve
>>
>> 
>>
>> 
>>
>>>Ok, Klein and Jung. The problem with Jung that I have is that he
>>> 
>>>
>assumes a uniform self-same consciousness and unconsiciousness running
>between humans. I don't and won't buy that. Why? It should be obvious. I
>will not subcribe to a before the fact identity between subjects. On the
>other hand, there is something binding between us that Lyotard in his
>writings on Kant and the Sensus Communis betrays. We all feel but with
>the stopgap that each instance of feeling is entirely singular. This
>does not mean that cultural patterns cannot develop. Of course they do.
>But that is a second order of commonality. (I'll have to come back to
>this later). And just a short note on Klein: I was analyzed by a
>Kleinian for two months and found it to be one of the most confining
>environments I have ever experienced. 
> 
>
>>>
>>>
>>> 
>>>
>>> 
>>>
>> 
>>---------------------------------
>>Do you Yahoo!?
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