The Transcendental Turn: Kant's Critical Philosophy, Contemporary Theory, and Popular

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THE TRANSCENDENTAL TURN: KANT’S CRITICAL PHILOSOPHY, CONTEMPORARY THEORY, AND POPULAR CULTURE

A Dissertation Submitted to the Committee on Graduate Studies in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Faculty of Arts and Science

TRENT UNIVERSITY

Peterborough, Ontario, Canada

Cultural Studies Ph.D. Graduate Program

May 2014

Abstract

The Transcendental Turn: Kant’s Critical Philosophy, Contemporary Theory, And Popular

Culture

Kevin Michael Mitchell

This dissertation traces the concept of transcendentalism from Kant’s

Critique of Pure Reason (1781) to Michel Foucault’s historical a priori and Pierre

Bourdieu’s field and habitus, with implicit reference to Deleuze’s ‘transcendental

empiricism,’ and the influence this trajectory has had on contemporary theory and

culture. This general conceptual framework is used as the basis for a critical analysis

of a series of examples taken from popular culture to highlight their transcendental

conditions of possibility and the influence this conceptual paradigm has had on

today’s theory. The examples include the NFL ‘concussion crisis,’ South Park’s

problematization of the discourse surrounding it, as well as the literature of Charles

Bukowski, as an exemplification of an immanent writer-written situation. It is

further suggested that, not only is transcendentalism an epistemological framework

for thought, but it also doubles as an ontological principle for the emergence of a

constitutively incomplete and unfinished reality.

Key Words: Kant, Foucault, Bourdieu, Deleuze, Simondon, transcendental, historical a priori, continental philosophy, NFL, football, South Park, Charles Bukowski

Preface

In my first year of the PhD program in Cultural Studies at Trent University I took a seminar with Constantin V. Boundas – a philosopher and influential Deleuze scholar – on the philosophical precedents of cultural studies. This formative seminar addressed the ways in which philosophy is relevant for a well-grounded, historically- minded and self-reflexive understanding of contemporary cultural theory, including post-structuralism, Neo-Marxism and deconstruction. Part of Dr. Boundas’ instruction focused on the Kantian transcendental method, especially as interpreted by French philosopher Gilles Deleuze in his book Kant’s Critical Philosophy: The Doctrine of the

Faculties. Although Deleuze is not himself a Kantian, his book on Kant sets the stage for the later development of what he came to refer to as “transcendental empiricism” – a mode of inquiry that begins and ends with actuality instead of possibility, as it did for

Kant. Instead of merely inquiring into the conditions for possible experience, Deleuze’s version of transcendentalism inquires into the conditions for actual existence. Dr.

Boundas’ seminar theorized the boundary between philosophy and culture as a space of exchange and mutual implication. I follow this line of reasoning and argue that the boundary between culture and philosophy is a site of dialectical interaction and continual integration wherein the two are dependent on each other – philosophy does not happen in a vacuum, and culture is expressed in and through philosophy. In this way I consider it to be the case that a cultural studies without philosophy is blind (as to its own presuppositions), while a philosophy without a socio-cultural analysis is empty.

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This fundamental insight has motivated and inspired the present work. Dr.

Boundas reminded us that Kant's philosophy could be considered to be, before all else, a form of questioning. This questioning is epitomized by its critical inquiry into conditions. Instead of asking what a thing is (as did the Platonists and Scholastics of the past), Kant asked what is necessary for the thing to be the way it is, i.e., what makes it possible? In other words, Kant’s modus operandi is to interrogate the conditions of possibility for experience. In Kant’s own words: “I entitle transcendental all knowledge which is occupied not so much with objects as with the mode of our knowledge of objects insofar as this mode is to be possible a priori.”1 Frederick Beiser characterizes the transcendental as a second-order operation that deals not with the immediate experience of objects, but with the experience of experience, or an interrogation of the conditions whereby experience is at all possible. Through this revision in the form of questioning (asking not what a thing is but what makes it possible), epistemological considerations become primary, and metaphysical speculations are demoted to a secondary status, if not bracketed or barred altogether.2 Further, Kant avoids Hume’s skepticism and the rationalism of Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz, by outlining the universal conditions for any and all experience, rather than falling into the solipsism of

Leibniz (with his windowless monads), and Spinoza’s God-dependent Ideas. By focusing on experience as his starting point, Kant incorporates empiricism into his analysis; and by focusing on the necessity and universality of thought by interrogating

1 Immanuel Kant quoted by Frederick C. Beiser in German Idealism: The Struggle Against Subjectivism 1781-1801 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 169. 2 Opposed to this, it is possible to read the transcendental operation as a metaphysical- ontological feature of reality, which I invite the reader to do in the first chapter of this dissertation.

the a priori structures it requires, he incorporates objectivity, necessity and rationalism. It must also be pointed out that Kant rejects intellectual intuition3 in all its variants outright, and therefore, in his view all knowledge is related to experience in some way.4

This dissertation will argue that this notion of reality – as constitutively unfinished because it is without a foundation – lends itself to a version of politics that remains open to change and novelty. Since reality is unfinished, political circumstances are also unfinished, and therefore are always underway. This means that change is the rule rather than the exception.

3 Intellectual intuition is the idea that it is possible to by-pass the senses and gain direct access to a higher being as in Plato’s hierarchical levels of being where the highest form of knowledge does not rely on the senses at all. In 1766 he published a small text called Träume eines Geistersehers (translated as Dreams of a Spirit Seer) polemically attacking the mysticism of Immanuel Swedenborg because of its rampant idealism and upholding of a non-empirically based intuition. 4 In one way or another his entire career was devoted to refuting Idealism.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Professor Alan O’Connor for the inspiration, encouragement and exceptional support he has graciously offered throughout this process. My committee Dr. David Holdsworth and Dr. Liam Mitchell provided me with productive feedback. Dr. Amelia Angelova for her guidance with chapter one.

The many grad students, with whom I have spent endless hours arguing. And the

Cultural Studies program for its critical and experimental edge.

Table of Contents

Abstract and Keywords / ii Preface / iii Acknowledgements / vi Table of Contents / vii Introduction / ix Overview of Chapters / xxxii

Chapter 1:

The Transcendental Turn and Correlationism 1.1 Introduction / 1 1.2 “Metaphysical Exposition of the Concept of Time” / 19 1.3 The argument for why time is actual without being real / 28 1.4 Conditionality / 34 1.5 Not only epistemologically but actually real / 37 1.6 Appearance is Reality / 43 1.7 Time/Temporality distinction, or, time taken out of time / 55 1.8 Status of a “subject” as both inheritor and generator of time / 58 1.9 Implications of the third interpretation of noumena: Žižek’s “Correlationism and its Discontents” / 59 1.10 What is called finitude? / 62 1.11 What, then, is Correlationism? / 68

Chapter 2:

Mediation and Cultural Transcendentalism: The NFL Concussion and South Park 2.1 Introduction / 75 2.2 The Concussion as a symptom of the need for ‘cultural change’ / 78 2.3 Games, Rules and praxis / 81 2.4 Foucault’s Discursive Formations and the Historical a Priori / 94 2.5 Transcendental Culture / 110 2.6 The Football World as Transcendental-Cultural Artifact / 123 2.7 Cultura violentia / 125 2.8 Exemplarity / 130 2.9 Hegemonic Masculinity: ‘Manning up’ and ‘Care’ / 142 2.10 South Park’s Transcendental Disruption of the Discursive Formation / 152 2.11 Critical Irony / 164 2.12 Gournelos’ Three Tactics / 170 2.13 Self-Consciousness and Auto-Criticism / 176 2.14 “Sarcastaball” / 182

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Chapter 3:

The Transcendental Dimension of the Everyday: Charles Bukowski 3.1 Introduction / 205 3.2 Bukowski as subject/object: the critical juncture of the writing and the written / 213 3.3 Obscenity: the obverse of the ‘seen’ / 217 3.4 Bukowski’s Position (Situated in the “Happening”) / 228 3.5 The immanence of Bukowski’s writing-written situation / 234 3.6 Life as Art; Art as Life / 246

Conclusion / 268 Bibliography / 275

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Introduction

This dissertation works with an expanded version of the original Kantian conception of transcendentalism to include Hegelian-Marxian variants of critical theory with historically-mediated dialectical materialism, a Foucaultian-inspired notion of the “discursive formation,” and Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of the habitus and the “field” of literary production. This version of transcendentalism is materialist and immanent while not being empirical. There is a mediation between the particularity of a given form of existence, and the conditions that allow for it to exist. Put simply, what

I mean by transcendentalism is (an analysis of) the conditions of possibility for any given phenomenon – e.g., an idea, a political situation, an event, an object, and so on.

The work of Charles Bukowski, whose poetic and literary output I investigate in the third chapter, is unique in that he reflexively interrogates the conditions of possibility for itself as mediated by his own existence, as well as the particularity of his situation – living at a particular time and place with a particular lifestyle, etc.

Essentially, then, this project takes transcendentalism as its starting point and treats it as both a method for approaching a series of cultural objects or examples and

a form of being itself. Included in these examples is the so-called concussion crisis in

American football (NFL), South Park's analysis – and problematization of – the discursive structures that subtend this crisis, as well as the life and literary works of

Charles Bukowski. What these analyses are intended to do is provide concrete examples to illustrate a basic point: that transcendentalism is more than a merely formal epistemological principle and that it actually extends toward being a fundamental characteristic of being itself. I argue that transcendentalism is a principle of reality itself in terms of the way it is constituted, and the way the basic terms of givenness (the way objects, things, ideas and so on, appear) are themselves made possible. Therefore, on this view, transcendentalism moves beyond a merely human- centered epistemological standpoint to necessitate its inclusion in and as a constitutive aspect of reality itself. It is not the human that invents and utilizes transcendentalism as a methodological approach to demarcating the limits of reason, as it was for Kant, but a condition of possibility for the very existence of the human as such. Or, put in a slightly different way, the human is a result of a transcendental constitution that is not itself human: and transcendental constitution – like Schelling’s Nature5 – takes place as an auto-poietic process. While transcendentalism is a method of analysis and questioning, it also doubles as a constitutive feature of reality. As a result, any phenomenon may be investigated as to what it is in itself only insofar as its underlying conditions of possibility are articulated, its historical development is taken into

5 See for example: F.W.J. Schelling. Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature Trans. Errol E. Harris and Peter Heath (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); First Outline of a System of the Philosophy of Nature Trans. Keith R. Peterson (New York: State University of New York Press, 2004); Grant, I.H. “F.W.J. Schelling, ‘On the World Soul,’ Translation and Introduction” in Collapse VI: Geo/Philosophy 6 (2010): 58-95.

consideration, and the latter are approached such that they are capable of speaking on their own terms; or, as François Laruelle says, they give the opportunity to be

“determining in the last instance,” and not only according to the framework of the investigator. However, this brings up a fundamental tension in this project. Although not part of this project, the growth in the attention to the circumstances that went into the production of television shows and films (e.g. “director’s cuts”), or paratextual analysis, can be considered a transcendental concern.6

In one sense I argue that the significance of cultural objects – and events – emerge out of the conceptual frameworks available for interpreting and making sense of them (in the tired cliché of the filter). This is the familiar position often referred to as “the social construction of reality,” popularized in the 70s by the 1966 book of the same title by Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann. Proponents of this position argue that we do not have access to reality as it is in itself, but only as it is mediated by the social concepts at the disposal of those doing the interpreting/constructing. As a corollary, it makes no sense to talk about reality at all because all we have access to are interpretations of interpretations. However, built into this argument is the caveat that social beings do not actively and willingly interpret reality by applying social concepts, but that it happens unconsciously and automatically. Either way, what results is a position that holds that what we take to be reality is only a socially “constructed” version of it, whose true nature will forever remain inaccessible and nonsensical.

Reality is relative and depends on the viewpoint of the individual hermeneutically

6 Doherty, Thomas. “The Paratext’s the Thing” in The Chronicle of Higher Education January 6, 2014. https://chronicle.com/article/The-Paratexts-the-Thing/143761/ Accessed January 9, 2014.

interpreting it. As they put it in the Introduction, “What is ‘real’ to a Tibetan monk may not be ‘real’ to an American businessman.”7

While it is indeed the case that a particular version of Kantian transcendental philosophy is compatible with this sociological theory of knowledge, I consider it a gross simplification because it implies that the human (which is nonetheless sociological in character) is at the center of the mediation of reality. While not investigated directly and made explicit, this theory has a tendency to proceed as though a series of free-floating concepts get willfully constructed by social agents who are deemed to have the capacity to initiate the construction of reality. It overlooks the factors that go into the construction of the socio-cultural concepts themselves, which in turn are said to contribute to the construction of reality, as well as the socialized individuals who are simply presupposed.

My approach is to de-center the human from this paradigm and to expand it to include materiality as a fundamental - but enabling - constraint for the emergence of a manifold of potential discursive formations, present only on an incipient and affective level, but which in turn give rise to interpretive frameworks and institutional arrangements. What results is a version of reality not considered to be constructed only by human social interaction, but infused with pre-personal material forces and molecular becomings (à la Simondon and Deleuze). Throughout the project I utilize contemporary variants of Kantian transcendental thought by tracing them to particular aspects of Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, and, to a lesser degree, Gilbert

Simondon and Gilles Deleuze. The intention is to use the transcendental component

7 Peter Berger and Luckmann. The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (New York: Penguin Books, 1991), 15.

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(and, I argue, overall propensity toward transcendental frames of analysis) of these thinkers as a guide to the description of the transcendental emergence, and constitution of, actuality with reference to its precedent conditions, and in conjunction with examples taken from contemporary popular culture.

The main theoretical argument of this dissertation may be formulated as follows. Kantian transcendental philosophy has had an immense influence – and continues to influence – many variants of contemporary theory; contemporary ways of everyday acting, thinking and being in the world, are influenced by contemporary theory. Therefore, contemporary culture is influenced by the transcendental turn inaugurated by the Kant of the Critique of Pure Reason (1781). Both reality and the cultural significance of reality are mediated by a version of transcendental constitution, which is their common formal principle. As a result, the transcendental method is ontologized, or made into a principle of being itself, and not only considered to be part of the way humans approach, and think about, the world in terms of their access to it, and their ways of coming to know it (epistemology). Politically speaking, since reality is emergent and constitutively unfinished (Žižek), it is ontologically left open for alternative arrangements and modes of politically being with each other.

Therefore there is a fundamental tension between, on the one hand, a variant of the social construction of reality – the idea that the way of thinking about the world impact the way the world is experienced, and how that experience is communicated and agreed-upon by members of the social group, and results in the way reality itself appears to the group – and on the other hand, that the way of thinking about the world has nothing to do with human beings because reality itself is indifferent to the human,

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and the human (along with human knowledge) is the result of something that is not human – material forces on a pre-individual level. Transcendentalism – as characteristic of the way reality emerges – does not require a human at its center, but is the condition for the human’s existence. As a result, the socio-conceptual frameworks used to interpret (and “construct”) reality are closer to being inherited than invented willy-nilly, as the social construction of reality paradigm sometimes seems to imply. Socio-conceptual frameworks emerge from the indifferent processes of nature, rather than being at the mercy of a human actor overseeing the construction of these frameworks.

However, it is important to keep in mind that since this is not an anthropocentric celebration of human freedom, social activism, and agency, a certain amount of danger8 inevitably persists as to the way (the highly contested term) reality emerges. There are no guarantees; if there were, we would be living in the static state of The Republic, where the ideal is set down in advance, and the only goal is to actualize it. Or Stalinism. In order to avoid the outright totalitarianism of attempting to deduce socio-political reality from an image, it is important to leave the project open as to its result, since reality is constitutively unfinished and always underway, and therefore the political project itself will be always incomplete. However, it is always possible that

– politically speaking – social reality lapses into fascistic political arrangements (in terms of the ceaseless state of emergency and serious nature of the political atrocities happening daily, as well as the less serious, but nonetheless immediate, multifarious micro-fascistic tendencies of everyday life). In this regard I suggest that we follow Kant

8 For an argument on the necessity of living dangerously see: Friedrich Nietzsche. The Gay Science, Section 283 Trans. Walter Kauffman (New York: Random House, 1974).

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and assume freedom (to resist) as a regulative ideal requiring the attempt to analyze existing phenomena in terms of their transcendental dimension as a task, and act "as if" it is possible to adequately achieve a competent analysis, despite the fact that one’s own perspective is the result of its own conditions of possibility . In this regard it is necessary to bracket the Enlightenment ideal of Reason to make room for faith.

To say that culture is transcendental is to be aware of the underlying tendencies operative in terms of its unconscious drives and forces, which have not vanished, although they may be no longer directly visible or explicitly thought about. A transcendental culture is one where the past does not directly cause the contemporary situation, but one where the past and the present coincide in a dynamic complexity of interrelated arrangements, contradictory tendencies and transitory truths.

The conception of mediation developed here is historically related to the transcendental turn – which I trace back to the first version of Immanuel Kant’s

Critique of Pure Reason of 1781, where he seeks to establish the legitimate limit of human reason and to refute the various forms of idealism (particularly Leibniz’s) which he saw as a threat to progress in the sciences and the overall enlightenment project to establish man’s independence from authority. As part of this task he, among other things, transcendentalizes Aristotle’s categories by placing them in a position of the necessary conditions for possible experience – any and all experience. Whereas for

Aristotle the natural world was directly encountered and registered through the senses and later organized, categorized and taxonomized, for Kant it is necessary to first ask how it is possible at all to know how the natural world is, and once the mechanisms of knowing are established as necessary a priori, they take on the status

of objectivity since, he will argue, they condition any and all experience, and not only the particular experience of one person or another. The transcendental turn is thus marked by a move that makes the object conform to thought, rather than thought conform to the object.

What is at stake for Kant is nothing less than the possibility of metaphysics as a mode of philosophizing and relating to the world. While this move marks the epistemological situation of the enlightenment project – where man is thought of, for the first time, self-sufficiently reliant on his own reason for acquiring knowledge (and thus without the ability to appeal to a transcendent authority – it at the same time marks the crisis of Modernity, which puts man in the position of an axis, holding together disparate levels of being, and enacting a mediation between the pre-modern concepts of the transcendent divine, and the mechanistic-corporeal animal of largely

Cartesian science: the eternal and the finite. Since the death of the philosopher’s god

(which acted as the ultimate assurance for the adequacy of knowledge claims, which, as Descartes demonstrated in his famous thought experiment in the Meditations, the notion of a deceptive god, or “evil genius,” is inconsistent with the benevolence of god), man is left to his own devices, and it is Kant who first devises a method for interrogating these devices: the transcendental method.

It is my suggestion in the pages that follow that the effects of the transcendental rupture – between thought and being – are still with us today, and, although it is not explicitly thought about in Kantian terms, there is an implicit cultural awareness of their presence and influence. For example, the discourse of secularism determines that science and faith are fundamentally at odds with each other. While science is

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considered to have the ability to provide objective knowledge, faith is said to be based on a subjective, and therefore, a relative version of knowledge, and, in line with the contemporary versions of new-age spirituality (where it is possible to pick and choose which version of quasi-theological belief one wishes to “believe” in) it is suggested that there are many “faiths” and thus, many versions of the subjective truth of faith. In both cases what is at stake is the representation of the world (which, of course,

Schopenhauer takes up and makes into the principle of the finite world).

Representationalism is the epistemologico-ontological form that modernity takes in all its guises – political, aesthetic, sociological, cultural, etc.

In representation, reality is considered to be never experienced outside of the determining schematics of a prior representational structure. Representationalism is evident in various aspects of popular culture: from conceptions of personal identity as amalgamations and occupations of representated cultural forms (all versions of identity politics fit into this category where concepts such as “woman” or “race” are said to be represented in this or that way in contemporary

(an-)artistic forms such as the sitcom or the news cast); Hollywood cinema, where even the miraculous special effect is made possible by a prior conceptual representational verisimilitude (the implicit belief that the special effect intervenes into a reality similar to that of the viewer’s). A version of representationalism is also witnessed in so-called “representational” democracy, where the abstract will of the majority is believed to be embodied in the elected representative of the people. Also, as mentioned earlier, all variants of the social construction of reality are representational, wherein language (and signifying structures generally) feature as an arbitrary system

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of meaning construction, and the representational content of the cultural signifier hovers over an abyss of repetition.9

While the projects in this dissertation take up the transcendental theme in different ways, each project 1) diagnoses transcendentalism as an overruling epistemic-ontological condition mediating both reality and contemporary culture, and

2) illustrates the ways that transcendentalism infiltrates contemporary ways of relating to – and conceptualizing – (socio-political) reality. This structure is then elaborated and analyzed through the use of examples as to how it operates to sustain certain ways of being at the expense of others and other possibilities. Although the most obvious example of transcendental constitution is the traditional mass media, and the power it has to set the parameters for how an event is discussed, which in turn contributes to how it is perceived and the types of knowledge and reality claims being made about it, this dissertation puts more emphasis on the more implicit and indirect ways the media operates today (for example, in terms of the many channels of mediated discourse surrounding concussions in the NFL in project 2). It is argued that

“the media” is not a self-subsisting entity, but is part of a larger complex of heterogeneous and transcendental features that together make the represented version of reality what it is and as it is experienced. Instead of a direct evaluation of the mass media, the concept of mediation, utilized to incorporate the Hegelian connotations it carries with it, is considered the determining factor of transcendental constitution.

9 This, of course, is an allusion to the poverty of Judith Butler’s post-structuralist conception of performativity when read from a semiotic perspective.

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While Deleuze’s work does not feature prominently in the pages that follow, the traces of his influence are never far away. His conception of “transcendental empiricism,” as mentioned earlier, has strong connections with the conceptualization of transcendentalism developed throughout the three projects. In transcendental empiricism, the Kantian distinction between thought and being (phenomena and noumena) is collapsed into a unified strata of thought-being, where concepts – instead of remaining on the side of the epistemological conditions for thought – become akin to things in themselves.10 Furthermore, transcendental empiricism seeks to identify the conditions for actual existence, rather than the conditions for the possibility of any and all (representational) experience. In a brief comment in Dialogues, Deleuze alludes to his affinity with Albert North Whitehead as a way of explaining what he means when he predicates empiricism with “transcendental”: in transcendental empiricism

“the aim is not to rediscover the eternal or the universal, but to find the conditions under which something new is produced.”11 While Kant’s version of transcendentalism focused on finding the universal conditions for experience, Deleuze’s version is centered around the question of how it is possible for the new to come into being.

Throughout this dissertation, the implicit guiding thread is the potential for the production of the new, which is formulated in terms of the unfinished nature of reality in the first project, the inherent potential (for otherness) of the material-discursive cultural transcendentalism in the second, and in the immanence of the writing-written

10 Andrew Osborne, “Ray Brassier: A Critique of Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition, Total Assault on Culture, November 5, 2008, http://totalassaultonculture.wordpress.com/2008/11/05/ray-brassier-a-critique-of-deleuzes- difference-and-repetition/ 11 Gilles Deleuze & Claire Parnet. Dialogues Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), vii.

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situation, and of the introduction of this situation into the conditions of the transcendental field, in the third project. In all three projects contingency is given primacy over necessity.

The term “transcendentalism” is used to denote an implicit metaphysical commitment that understands reality to be the result of a process of mediation that goes into constituting all aspects of the experience of reality, and which, at the same time, exists apart from this experience. There are thus three parts of transcendentalism so conceived: 1) reality 2) experienced reality 3) mediation.

Transcendentalism collapses 1) into 2) such that, as a result, reality is that which is experienced, and it is experienced by means of 3), mediation.

One implication of this is that claims about reality are always, in the last instance, claims about experienced reality. That is, since reality becomes manifest in and as experience, and experience is always mediated by the conditions for experience, reality can be said to extend only as far as it is experienceable and actually experienced.

Furthermore, since experience is only (and it can only be) mediated experience, experience is only experience insofar as it is made possible by its conditions, which are themselves not dependent on experience, but make experience what it is and as it is. It follows that reality is necessarily, and always, mediated. As a result there is no such thing as immediate experience, since this would imply a version of experience that is not mediated by conditions. We are thus left with two options: either transcendentalism is wrong, and not all of reality is experienced reality, and there is at least a portion of reality that is not mediated and dependent on experience (this is close to Ray Brassier’s position in Nihil Unbound); or, we accept the terms of

transcendentalism and assume that immediate experience is no experience at all, and therefore, has no link to reality, and all that exists is experienced reality stricto sensu.

In this latter, experience adds nothing to the concept of reality because reality is by definition simply that which is experienced.

One problem that arises out of this is the question of the status of an unmediated – and unexperienced – reality: if the life-world (Lebenswelt) is the network of habits, meanings, signs, rules, etc., forming a way of life, in short, culture, where do these come from, and what are they dependent on as to what makes them possible? As Marx showed, a world is dependent on the historical and material conditions that give rise to it; and although these conditions are not directly related to the content of the world (e.g., inhabitants of the world need not know them thematically and keep them in mind as they interact within the world for them to be influential), they are, nevertheless, the constitutive elements of the world itself. This does not mean that the conditions of possibility for the life-world are more real than the world to which they give rise; on the contrary, the two are linked in a situation of immanent co-constitution and looping of the one influencing the other and vice versa.

As is made clear throughout this dissertation, I argue that the Kantian conception of the transcendental, which limits reality to known reality, puts too much emphasis on experience as the determinant of existence or non-existence. Contrary to this limitation, I argue that 1) reality is constitutively unfinished and therefore, in principle, incapable of being totally experienced, 2) experienced reality is dependent on something of a Foucaultian discursive formation, which is not experienced in itself, but which nevertheless relates to the historical situation in the capacity of what he

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calls the “historical a priori.” As a result, 3) everyday life develops out of an inscriptive writing-written made manifest in the form of a particular habitus which is an amalgamation of Marxian historico-material conditions, meaning formations, and ways of life. These three arguments are found in the three chapters respectively. Through the use of examples – Kant’s “Transcendental Aesthetic” and the related conception of temporality in project 1; the discursive formation surrounding the NFL concussion

‘crisis’ and South Park’s critique of the conditions for this discourse in project 2, and

Charles Bukowski’s immanent poetic unearthing of his own habitus and artistic field in project 3 – the functional role of the transcendental dimension for the production of each particular example is described, and an illustration of the example’s transcendental dimension – as not fixed and static, but contingent and in flux and therefore intrinsically capable of alteration and change – is demonstrated.

The trajectory of the three projects is established in project 1 by the critique of

Kant’s philosophy of temporality as it is outlined in The Critique of Pure Reason where he establishes that time is the pure form of intuition. By making it a pure form of intuition I argue that he enacts a sort of de-temporalization of time by making it conform to a series of a-temporal conditions for experience which are set up in advance, and ultimately act in the service of a purification of the contingency of existence. The role of transcendental apperception is to unify the flux of experience (of the manifold) into the unified co-existence in the establishment of a coherent world.

This project invites the reader to go against Kant’s overt wishes (and preliminary argument) and to actually read the first Critique as an ontological treatise which comments on reality as it is in itself (rather than merely on the epistemic conditions

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for the experience of phenomena), and thereby, to collapse the transcendental conditions for experience into reality as it is in itself. This move, reading Kant against

Kant, results in a reversal of the Kantian framework, thereby rendering visible the contours of this ontology that sets up the conditions for its own existence. Implied in this move, and the critique of Kant’s notion of temporality that goes along with it, is a reconceptualization of reality as constitutively unfinished and therefore also constitutively open to “absolute contingency” as in Quentin Meillassoux’ formulation, a messianic interruptive suspension and transformation of time and being as in Giorgio

Agamben’s conception, or the dialectical production of unfinished reality as in Zizek’s revised position.12 The state of being constitutively unfinished is such that it remains – in principle – impossible to achieve a finished product, where a finished product would be one where any alteration would merely be a degeneration of a perfected state (as in

Plato). Implied by the conception of reality as constitutively unfinished, the way things currently are is only a temporary (temporal) state, and change is immanent to reality itself (rather than something imposed onto it from the outside). This is important because, given the contemporary reconsideration of Kant’s Copernican revolution as outlined in Meillassoux’s After Finitude and labeled “correlationism” (the idea that it is impossible to get out of the conditions of thought and to think reality without these conditions), when reality is considered constitutively unfinished, thought loses its definitive grip on reality, and, instead becomes a moment of the self-reflexive activity of reality itself. In other words, thought becomes a moment of being, an immanent part of being itself, instead of as it is featured in the traditional view of the subject-object

12 Slajov Zizek. Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (New York: Verso, 2012).

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duality, where thought is conceived of as something imposed on, and penetrative of being from a position of exteriority. Reality, then, instead of being an object to be known, is, on this view, a creative force that generates its own conditions and modes of expression and (re)presentation.

Francois Laruelle’s non-philosophy further moves in this direction by making philosophy, as such, an object of critique. According to this position, philosophy is the result of a conceptual blind spot in the form of a prior “decision” made by the philosophical operation in advance, and which acts as its ultimate presupposition.

Thus, “non-philosophical practice entails a suspension of the practicing philosopher’s own spontaneous acceptance of the legitimacy of the characteristic problems, methods, and strategies of philosophy.”13 At the root of Laruelle’s position is a radical pre-conceptual immanence, manifested in what he calls “the One,” which is the ultimate unification of thought and being, such that all thought is considered a manifestation of being’s thinking of itself. Philosophy is the perpetual attempt to theorize, and thereby, gain mastery over the radical immanence of “the One” while, unbeknownst to itself – since it is blind to the prior decision – is of (the same substance as) the One, and therefore, determined by it “in the last instance.” As a result, it is necessary “to think according to the One rather than trying to think the

One.”14 The difference here is between being guided by thought’s object (letting the object determine its own conditions), and that of forcing that which is thought into the position of object, which is then objected to by the conditions of thought. Although, for

13 Ray Brassier. Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 120. 14 Francois Laruelle. “A Summary of Non-Philosophy” in Pli 8: (1999), 138.

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Laruelle, non-philosophy is tasked with accounting for the extra-discursive ground of all discursivity such that “all access to reality is necessarily circumscribed by the circle of transcendental synthesis,” the version of transcendentalism argued for in this dissertation differs in that the ubiquity of transcendental constitution is considered to include the non-discrusive element as part of transcendental constitution of (what is taken to be) the given. That is, instead of the extra-discursive element governing discursivity from beyond, to the contrary, my position is that extra-discursivity is a constituent part of discursivity itself. If we agree with Laruelle that the founding gesture of philosophy15 is a prior decision made in advance, and that this decision can never be justified within the terms of that which it founds, it is not because the decided element is outside of or beyond discourse, but, in a very specific sense, it is discourse.

This is exemplified by Marx’s position that the historical conditions of production influence, and are an immanent part of, the ideological apparatus and what it makes possible to think.

A further difference between Laruelle’s position and the position argued for in this dissertation has to do with the status of the One. While, for Laruelle, the One exists prior to its being posited by a form of thought that – by definition – comes later, it remains to be seen that he successfully avoids lapsing into a totalization of the “One” which he overtly attempts to avoid – a “One” which is otherwise sufficient unto itself, and in no need of the activity of subjectivity to bring it into being.

15 “Philosophy” here marks more than merely the specialized discipline that goes by this name in the universities; instead, the term is used to indicate the entire historico-cultural apparatus of thought about thinking as well as man’s ontological relation to reality.

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Against this, I argue that Zizek’s conception of reality (as constitutively unfinished) is correct because, shedding light on the difference between quantum and

Newtonian laws – and the impossibility of accounting for one by the other – his reworking of the Lacanian story in order to make room for reality (as opposed to merely “The Real”) is a properly political gesture, and part of what the reversal of

Kantianism is all about. It would presuppose that thinking lays the groundwork for action and vice versa. While Laruelle posits a non-philosophical exteriority – and fundamental basis – of philosophy (and which he considers to be the One of the Real par excellance), Zizek’s theorization of reality is in no need of a One, since reality, as constitutively unfinished, is precisely Not-All. Laruelle argues that the content of the decision differs historically; contemporary philosophy has been defined by the decision that being is difference,16 while Derrida’s critique of the metaphysics of presence argued that the tradition was defined by the decision that being is presence, or that thinking is present to itself as exemplified by the Cartesian cogito.

An implication of this is that, while Laruelle’s insight about thought’s transcendental determination by reality “in the last instance” is helpful for clarifying how the content of the results of transcendental constitution could be reflexive of reality itself, since the results are not imposed on reality in advance, but, rather, it is reality that determines thought – and not the other way around as it is for Kant – this solution is still incomplete. The determination of reality by itself “in the last instance” is indeterminate, and therefore, what may be considered the hermeneutic-critical project of knowledge generation is ongoing and without end. The radical immanence

16 Francois Laruelle. Les Philosophies de la difference. Introduction critique (Paris: PUF, 1986).

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argued for in this dissertation also differs from Laruelle’s, since, in my version, mediation is part of the One’s activity as such, even though the One is not. The mediation renting the One apart, and foreclosing its status as One, is a reflexive operation that results in the form of a rupture separating the given from the principle of its given-ness. The fundamental incompleteness of reality acts as the basis (and condition of possibility) for the very attempt to think it. If reality is constitutively unfinished, its unfinished status is embodied in the particular transcendental horizon that is operative as the position of pure potentiality, and the impulse for the counter- actualization of the given. While Laruelle’s attempt to account for the conditions of philosophy can be seen as a gesture enacted by a host of contemporary thinkers –

(Nietzsche’s Zarathustra as the embodied figure of a cosmic will to power pervading – and determining – hierarchies of thought-being; Heidegger’s Dasein as the structural inclusion of the conditions for philosophy into itself; Derrida’s differance as the quasi- transcendental condition of thought’s construction and deconstruction; Foucault’s historical a priori as the archaeological point of contact between history and discursive power’s production of things and states of affairs; Deleuze’s plane of immanene as the topos for the construction and invention of concepts; Bourdieu’s literary field and the privileged “distinction” of bourgeouis disinterestedness) –

Laruelle’s non-philosophical project does more than offer a more radical critique of

Western thought: it marks the attempt to reintroduce the realist insights of the scientific project into the traditionally reluctant historical trajectory of philosophy, which has often viewed itself as merely a clarification of – or as setting the groundwork for – the scientific worldview and its methodological approach.

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Alternatively, the realist character of science has been viewed as having a conservative tendency, since it viewed reality as static, and the only operation suitable for its deployment pure description.17

What these approaches have in common is their attempt to come to terms with the transcendental situation. While this attempt led to the generation, and inventive development of, conceptual tools intended to grasp the coordinates of this situation, it also attempts to highlight the fundamental contingency, and the openness of being to new potentialities and political imaginaries. The purpose of the exposition, through description, of the transcendental is to achieve a better understanding of the history of the present, and the real potentiality for change built into it, including the immanent potential for the achievement of alternative modes of being-with and alternate inflections of the constitution of the contemporary situation. Through this approach comes an understanding of the given as only ever a provisional achievement, and that the illusion of permanence is only based on what Bourdieu calls the illusio – a form of believability, and internalization, of the conditions of the game (as well as the institutional arrangement that subtends it) as veritable and an iteration that allows it to become a resonant moment in the form of life of a group of people. The investigation of the transcendental dimension of what I am calling the “situation” (or the “discursive formation,” “product,” “artifact,” “text,” etc.) allows for the implicit presuppositions of the situation to be made explicit, thereby exposing the elements of the situation that work to safeguard the invisibility of the essential arbitrariness of its present arrangement. Sartre alludes to this when in 1943 he writes that “there is freedom only

17 Gianni Vattimo and Santiago Zabala. Hermeneutic Communism: From Heidegger to Marx (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 26.

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in a situation, and there is a situation only through freedom...There can be a free for- itself only as engaged in a resisting world. Outside of this engagement the notions of freedom, of determination, of necessity lose all meaning.”18 This freedom, which is inclusive of the situation itself, is driven from visibility by the oppressive order, relegating it to a form of “choice,” which is completely determined by the contours of the political interest. This is the hegemony of the transcendental, the various interest in conflict giving rise to forms of actualization and modes of organization that develop out of its contours. To the question of how it is possible to change the situation, it may be responded that it is on the transcendental horizon, which acts as the condition of possibility for all decision – non-philosphical or otherwise – which is the ultimate arbiter of the actuality of the given, and actually conditions it on the fundamental level.

There is a popular belief that the transcendental is opposed to immanence, that at the end of the day the transcendental transcends the actuality of the given. My position is that the transcendental is not ideal in the sense that it is immaterial, but its immateriality, insofar as it exists, is a result of a particular relationship between, and arrangement of, materiality. Sounding a little like the epiphenomenalism of certain variants of contemporary cognitive science – which argue that consciousness is an emergent phenomenon, or a secondary effect, of the underlying materiality of the brain –the “ideal” (to use a thoroughly outdated term), emerges out of the interaction of material stuff (which in the second project I consider to be the “cultural” zone of forces vying for hegemonic articulation) and their emergent potentialities. While

Transcendental constitution is a modality of an underlying, and more fundamentally

18 Jean-Paul Sartre. Being and Nothingness: An Essay in Phenomenological Ontology Trans. Hazel Barnes (New York: Gallimard, 1956), 629.

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basic immanence (Laruelle’s “One”), it is in this sense that immanence could be said to reflect “a real which subsists prior to any constituting process of transcendental realisation”: the conditions for transcendental conditioning are themselves “un- synthesizable,” and hence, indescribable in the terms of the already constituted and conditioned logic to which they give rise.19 What this means is that the materially inflected conditions of the field are immanent to that which they make possible, e.g., the sociological phenomenon that can later be studied via empirical methods of analysis; these same underlying material conditions are not given as they are once and for all, but are themselves constituted by trajectories, vectors, and tendencies of differential forces characteristic of the pre-individual singularities of the cultural transcendental field. This transcendental field, which in one sense is prior to the constitution of the materiality of the Bourdieu-ian field, and in another, co-extensive with it, is the real that Laruelle in his recent work identifies as of “a quantum kind.”20

This is the level of the conditions for the conditioning of the transcendentalism proper to philosophical thinking (as opposed to the non-philosophical thought Laruelle identifies as the ultimate presupposition of philosophy and which Bourdieu considers the material and social conditions for this bourgeouis form of thought), as well as the forms of consciousness that arise in relation to it in popular culture.

It is through the use of examples that this dissertation identifies the influence of transcendentalism as it is inflected in a way of thinking and being, which achieves two things: a localization and diagnosis of this form of transcendentalism as it is made

19 Nihil Unbound, 130. 20 Francois Laruelle. “From the First to the Second Non-Philosophy” Trans. Anthony Paul Smith and Nicola Rubczak in Pli 22 (2011): 177.

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manifest in and through cultural phenomenon, and to follow this form of constitution to its limit, including the terms of the covered-over pre-suppositions of the underlying field of forces achieved on its behalf, and which are only viewable in their status of

‘taken for grantedness,’ and which are thereby systematically removed form visibility by being captured from above in a political maneuver that operates in the service of the preservation of the status quo.

An example of the inclusiveness of the transcendentalism defined and identified throughout this dissertation is Derrida’s notion of iterability: the fact of being able to take a sign from one context, and transplanting it into another, whereby it is transformed takes on an alternative meaning and significance. What the smoothly running signification of communication belies is the underlying groundwork in place that makes it possible, as well as the covering-over of the inherent interruption, noise, and extra-communicable aspects of communication that the communicative regime silences, but which Derrida makes a habit of making visible. What he calls

“dissemination” – the generation of meaning resulting from the de-contexualizaiton and re-contextualization of an utterance – points to the underlying dimension that makes possible the context of the iteration. Since all utterance is uttered in a context, and since it is the context that provides the possibility of meaningful communication

(an utterance without context is meaningless), “there are only contexts without any center or absolute anchoring.”21 Similar to what Derrida refers to as “context” is what I call the transcendental horizon; it is transcendental because the context is the

21 Jacques Derrida. “Signature, Event, Context,” Margins of Philosophy Trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 320. Limited Inc. Trans. Samuel Weber. (Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1988), 62.

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condition of possibility for the intelligibility of text. It is this same pre-judgment horizon of being that Heidegger identifies as the primary relation of man to world. The possibility for meaning to develop out of the situation is as also the context for the originary grounding of meaning, which Derrida points out, is not a solid ground, but one that shifts with the inevitable alteration of the conditions for the situation. As argued at various points in this dissertation (e.g., the definition of “culture” as pre- individual singularity in project 2), the transcendental conditions are not only meaningful utterance, but the very possibility of being in this or that way in the first place.

Overview of Chapters

The first project outlines the transcendental as it first made its appearance in the context of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. After a close reading of the section entitled “The Transcendental Aesthetic,” where he argues that time is a pure form of intuition, some implications of this Kantian move are indicated including its tendency to reify and universalize a particular form of knowledge and the related worldview associated with it. Readers are invited to Kant against the grain, and as an epistemologico-ontologist (instead of merely an epistemologist), whereby it results in a revised position holding that the conditions for experience are part of being in itself instead of only a product of the limits of the finite being of man and his associated limited reasoning capabilities. This reversal renders reality immanent to its conditions, and sets up an expanded sense of the transcendental consistent with its later

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development by Foucault and Bourdieu, as I explain in project two and three respectively. The purpose of this project is to illustrate the implications of Kant’s transcendental move (especially in terms of temporality), as it relates to cultural phenomena and contemporary concerns, and to set up an alternative version of transcendentalism capable of that accounting for reality in itself and as it for us.

The political ramifications of the move to reiterate and preserve being as a static entity (which only changes within the prescribed laws of nature) are found in

Marx, especially in his early works on Hegel (The German Ideology and Grundrisse), where historical time is said to moves in conjunction with the generation of new ratios of perception, which are produced alongside changing modes of production. In this way Marx essentially alters Kant’s conditions of possibility for experience by making them contingent and dependent on their historically embedded context and economic determination. Building on insights gleaned from Quentin Meillassoux’ After Finitude and Zizek’s Less Than Nothing, I offer an alternative version of being/reality that is contingent and unfinished.

The second project uses the example of the phenomenon of concussions in the

NFL as a way of analyzing and situating what Foucault calls the “discursive formation” in the larger discussion, and investigation, of transcendentalism. In the project I begin with the claim that the frequency, and significance of concussions in professional sport has increased in recent years. The supposition is that, while the relative violence

(and danger) in professional sport has not increased in proportion to the recent increase in the frequency of concussions, the rise in rate is due to something else. This factor, I argue, is the raised awareness of the phenomena, and the hyper-vigilance that

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has developed as a result. While it is banal to merely assert that the increase in the frequency of concussions is the result of an increase in reported instances of concussions, it goes further than merely a statistical-reportage phenomenon. I argue that it is actually the discursive formation giving rise to the “concussion” has changed, and that this discursive formation includes their medicalization, regulation, official health and safety policies of the professional leagues, the emotional response and perceptions of viewers, just to name a few. In conjunction with these changes, there is also a self-conscious alteration of the “culture” of the game of football as outlined by

NFL commissioner Roger Goodell, as well as a related contestation of the dominant hegemonic ideal of masculinity negotiated by the players themselves. While hegemonic masculinity plays into the financial interests of the team’s owners and league branding, I argue that there is a tangible shift in perceptions surrounding concussions on the transcendental level.

Using Foucault’s notion of the historical a priori, I follow Beatrice Han’s

Foucault’s Critical Project in making a case for the transcendental constitution of the epistemic situation as uncovered by the archaeological method, and an investigation of the contours of the discursive formation, especially in its influence on the presuppositions governing the present. I pursue the latter by outlining a series of rule levels (explicit, implicit, covert and cultural) as they relate to the game of football from the perspective of their actively embodied engagement, before addressing what I call the “cultural” rules which are the most abstract, and thus form the basis of the transcendental constitution of the given. The particular definition of “culture” used in this context is that of being on the plane of Simondonian pre-individual singularities,

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and Deleuzian/Nietzschean contestation of forces, which act as the pool of pure potentiality for the actualization of the given, and its artifacts, including the game of football with its set of rules and results, including the phenomenon of “concussion” with its own set of rules and newly established mandatory protocol (for identification, classification, as well rules governing how to act/think/feel in relation to the manifestation of symptoms). Since I argue that the particular discursive formation of the phenomenon of concussion is made possible by the particular historical a priori governing their existence, I argue that both the discursive formation and the historical a priori are transcendental in that they both provide the conditions for the given pm different levels. Using Foucault’s insight that the episteme, coupled with the relative dispersal of power, is actually productive of the object it seeks to study, the transcendental is to be seen as co-extensive and immanent to the historico-material conditions thatboth gives rise to and to which it gives rise. The transcendental, as historical a priori, is parallel to the given, and as historical, it is contingent. In a peculiar twist on the Kantian transcendental, Foucault’s transcendental – as historically immament to the given – simultaneously conditions and is conditioned by the given.

Since the Foucaultian transcendental is historical, it is determined by a field of forces in contestation with each other for hegemonic domination, which in turn determine the conditions of discourse, and the appearance of reality. While discourse and power are part of the same actualization of the transcendental field, the control of discourse by the media has great implications for the status and representation of reality and the distribution of resources. In this regard I look at an episode of South

Park (“Sarcastaball”) that deals directly with the NFL concussion phenomenon and

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which problematizes the discursive formation that leads to its constitution, and the hegemonic formation of its actuality. It is shown that, through a series of tactical interventions into the transcendental-hegemonic formation, South Park reflexively renders the discourse self-conscious of its failure to live up to its ideal image, and, through a disruptive cognitive dissonance (in the viewer, who is also a product of this same discursive formation) the episode occasions a critical-reflexive operation, provoking an alteration in the embodied activity of the viewer, and thereby contributing to the undermining and alteration of the discursive formation itself.

The third project treats the literature (poetry, novels, interviews, letters) of

Charles Bukowski to be a resultant artifact of the conditions of the literary field.

Treating Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of the field and habitus as transcendental phenomena, since the former is a hegemonic arrangement of objective positions reflective of historical and material conditions, and the latter is a quasi- phenomenological schematic embodiment of the relative position in an objective- experiential manner, I argue that Charles Bukowski (both as a literary figure and a man) is a privileged figure for the evaluation of the transcendental conditions for the everyday, since his writing is auto-biographical in nature; it is thereby considered that he writes his life as much as he lives his writing. Being immanent to the conditions of his work, the two fold into a single trajectory, and his work unpacks the immanent- transcendental conditions for his work in a very specific and even crude way.

Providing a first-hand “recording” of his experience, his work is special in its disproportionate attention to the details of the conditions for its existence e.g. the meticulous details he provides of his various jobs, and the description of the

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typewriter and alcohol that are part of the literary process, and which are often the subject/content of the finished product as well. While eventually marking a significant position in the literary field itself, Bukowski also traces the lineage of his own becoming, which he achieves by, as he puts it, lining his work in his own “blood”.

The emphasis of this project is on the material and sociological conditions of what Bourdieu calls the “field,” and highlighting the argument for why this is to be considered a transcendental phenomenon. While Bourdieu is often read as (non-) or even anti-Kantian in his criticism of Kant’s bourgeouis criteria of “beautiful” art as defined by “disinterestedness,” Bourdieu’s Kantianism comes through when he makes the reflexive move from the objective condition of the given to the objective conditions for the given. While the former is conducive to statistical mapping of the relative position particular constellations occupy, the latter are part of the more intangible aspects of the sociological attempt to objectify, and thus opens this method up to its critical reflection on itself as a historically constituted discipline with its particular illusio and presupposed criteria of justification and internal forms of regulation.22

Bukowski’s unique brand of descriptively direct and simple poetry and prose illustrates the way the habitus is produced by the field out of which it arises and from which it is sustained, including the limits of the historically real conditions for expression (Bukowski’s early struggle to find a publisher for his work eventually found a home in the underground press), and the ways in which the transcendental field is

22 Pierre Bourdieu. Science of Science and Reflexivity Trans. Richard Nice. (Illinois: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 73.

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pliable only in direct contact with the “enabling constraints”23 of the materially real formations of power and physical-ideal boundaries. As a way of coming to terms with these constraints, I argue that Bukowski’s writing is immanent to them, and thus available as an archive of his particularly harrowed existence. The documentation of his own existence – both as writer-artist and subject of his own particular brand of

(non)-fiction – is close to what Virginia Woolf emphasizes as modernity’s attempt to document its own conditions of possibility by providing, and getting lost in, an excessive of details and seemingly inconsequential lists of gestures, objects and observations.

23 This is a term I borrow from Brian Massumi and Erin Manning from their Sense Lab event “Generating the Impossible” in July, 2011.

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Chapter 1:

The Transcendental Aesthetic and Correlationism

1.1. Introduction

In this chapter Kantian transcendentalism will be analyzed in terms of the

significance it, along with the so-called ‘transcendental turn’ more generally, has for

contemporary theory, which has been diagnosed by Quentin Meillassoux as steeped

in “correlationism.”24 The implications that this turn has for our philosophical

understanding of temporality will also be examined. I will trace its inception to

where it first takes manifest form: the section of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason called

the “Transcendental Aesthetic” whose explicit goal is to critique and delimit the forms

of experience that are prior to, and constitutive of, experience in general. Although

this section is concerned with time and space, special attention will be paid to

temporality understood as the fundamental form of intuition. As part of this analysis,

I will reread Kant against the grain by treating him as an ontologist, whose claims

extend beyond the merely epistemological status we are accustomed to accept, (of

what we can know; of the proper use of reason) and into the realm of being in itself –

as though they are claims about how reality actually is. Although this overtly goes

against Kant’s own intention, this reading is justified by the false pretentions of

Kant’s method itself where he begins from the empirical, abstracts to what he calls

24 Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans. Ray Brassier (New York: Continuum, 2008).

the transcendental, and reinterprets actuality under the guidance of these newly

invented transcendental reifications. Through this move – which attempts to reify the

conditions of knowledge in a timeless a priori realm – Kant opens the door to the

later phenomenological existentialist-ontologies which attempt to grasp this

transcendental constitutive power through taking recourse to a variety of quasi-

metaphysical fictions (Geist, consciousness, Dasein, finitude, language). Despite the

epoch-setting impact of Heidegger’s Being and Time, where temporality is argued to

be being itself, much more attention has been spent in philosophical circles looking at

space, place, topology, mapping/diagramming, and critical geography. Even the

discourse that has come to be known as “post-colonial studies” is concerned with the

demarcating of borders and spatial limitations, which fits into the contemporary

theoretical paradigm that tends to privilege space over time as the place to begin an

interrogation of philosophical experience. The visuality of space, consistent with the

Western philosophical tradition’s emphasis on sight,25 leads to this privileging of

space over time. However, as Foucault provocatively points out:

At the precise moment when a serious-minded politics of spaces was

developing (at the end of the 18th century), the new attainments of theoretical

and experimental physics removed philosophy’s privileged right to speak about

the world, the cosmos, space, be it finite or infinite. This double taking over of

space by a political technology and a scientific practice forced philosophy into a

problematic of time. From Kant on it is time that occupies the philosopher’s

25 C.f. Stuart Clark, The Vanities of the Eye: Vision in Early Modern European Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).

reflection, in Hegel, Bergson and Heidegger for example. A correlative

disqualification of space appears in the human understanding. I recall having

spoken some ten years ago of these problems linked to a politics of spaces and

someone remarked that it was very reactionary to insist so much on space, that

life and progress must be measured in terms of time and becoming. It must be

added that this reproach came from a psychologist: here we see the truth and

the shame of 19th century philosophy.26

Foucault here points out the tension, brought about through the rise of the natural sciences, through which nature becomes idealized by being mathematically mapped, and time takes a backseat to the vagaries of space, distance, motion, and the like. This conflict may be summarized as the tension between experimental- theoretical physics on the one hand, and the philosophy of time from an experiential point of view on the other. What is missing in the natural sciences, it is argued, is the irreducibility of lived experience, and this has historically been made up for by the philosophy that deals not only in the quanta of nature but also with the time of the qualia of subjectivity. What is at stake in this endeavor is nothing less than a radical questioning of what it means for a finite creature to exist in time and, further, how it is that this finite creature may be said to be co-primordial with the being of time as such, to such an extent that time and the finite creature are entangled in a symbiotic relationship, each being constitutive of the other, but neither existing in its own right apart from the other. It is in this sense that, in an admittedly Heideggerian reading of Kant, the finite creature may be said to

26 Michel Foucault, “The Eye of Power,” Semiotext(e) 3.2 (1978): 9.

4 be time. Even as evidenced through the second Critique, for example, it is as the limit that marks the interval, or the junction, of the finite and the infinite – the sensible and the supersensible – that the finite creature is condemned to strive to actualize the ideal of the moral law.27 But, it may be asked, what is it about this interval – the interval between the infinite space and the finite creaturely experience – that simultaneously marks experiential existence, while making it possible to delimit this same limit as the privileged space for the differentiation between sensibility and intelligibility? Further, why is it that the inaugural Kantian moment – the transcendental turn – marks the first time that finitude becomes an issue as such, and not merely a theme in relation to God and the related theological discourses of fallibility, sin, and the fundamental marring of man who is theorized as an imperfect (fallen) realization of infinite perfection?

Contingency rather than necessity is the essence of this modern mode of being since, once it is realized that the link to the eternal is constitutively lacking, and that the death of God is realized in all its implications, the ground gives way to the abyss of the becoming of becoming.28

The method utilized here will be one that follows a movement of thought, one

that remains aware of the implications of the argument, and intends to follow them

through to the end, as best it can. As a work in cultural studies that attempts to

interrogate the roots of cultural theory as such, I will maintain a critical distance

from the philosophical development that has come to be referenced under the

27 Gilles Deleuze, Kant’s Critical Philosophy: The Doctrine of the Faculties, Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 43. 28 Becoming is argued here to be abyssal since becoming itself may be said to become, i.e., it does not become in a set way, whose course may be predicted in advance based on what has come before, but becomes in a way that is radically contingent.

umbrella term “theory,” and therefore, will strive to display a critical – and

productive – irreverence for dominant frameworks and established interpretive

traditions. This will be a hermeneutics of excess, where the excessive refers to that

which marks the marginal, the micro and the minor. This is comparable to what

Deleuze calls a “minor literature”, that is, a literature that is open to its inherent

deterritorialization. As he puts it, “the first characteristic of a minor literature…is that

in it language is affected by a high coefficient of deterritorialization”.29 What this

means is that, within a stable system, whether a “dominant” language such as

German, or a system of thought as in Kantianism, there is a chaotic undercurrent that

is repressed by the dominant, but whose creative potential is left intact, capable of

rearranging the coordinates of the major at any moment. “No homogenous system

remains unaffected by immanent processes of variation. Constants do not exist side

by side with variables; they are drawn from the variables themselves.”30

The dissertation therefore calls for the possibility of a philosophical cultural

studies, one steeped, not in tradition, or in what Žižek calls the “boring specialist

exegesis” of typical academicism, but instead, in a desire for experimentation,

admixture and short circuiting. As Žižek himself puts it, “[t]he best interpretations of

Hegel are always partial; they extrapolate the totality from a particular figure of

thought or of dialectical movement. As a rule, it is not a reading of a thick book by

Hegel himself, but some striking, detailed observation – often wrong or at least one-

sided – made by an interpreter that allows us to grasp thought in its living

29 Gilles Deleuze, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature Trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 16. 30 Verena Conley, “Minoritarian” in The Deleuze Dictionary (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), 167.

movement.”31 The idea is that too much exegetical close-reading risks systematically

overlooking the truly living element of thought’s immanent unfolding. This is the

difference between honoring a kinship to the letter and the spirit of a thinker; while

the former remains steadfast in the stringency of its interpretation, it misses the

forest for the trees, since it forecloses the emphasis that the latter puts on the general

inclination of the thinker. While both remain respectful, the latter (those who remain

true to the spirit of a thinker) wants to honor the original thinker by renewing the

thought, by developing it further and transplanting it into a different soil, i.e., into the

posthumous situation. This is not only a philosophical/ethical question, but is also a

properly cultural/theoretical question: how to best preserve and/or update a

cultural artifact (including a thinker) by bringing it into the contemporary cultural

formation, and bringing it to life by recontextualizing? For Walter Benjamin, this

method – what I here refer to as a philosophical cultural studies – is not only

experimental – but, given what he calls “redemptive history,” comes to manifest itself

in disparate images, or time capsules, which form constellations reminiscent of

alternative historical perspectives, it may even be considered necessary. That is, it is

necessary to take into account the historicization of theory, as well as its location in a

nexus of both material and ideological relations of determination. Theory does not

arise in a vacuum, but is steeped in the existence of the situation from which it arises.

To provide an adequate response to anything worthwhile – whether a gesture, an

insignificant typological font, or an antiquated curiosity – was, for Benjamin, to bring

together difference(s), no matter how seemingly unrelated they appeared to be

31 Slajov Zizek, Less than Nothing, (New York: Verso, 2012), 234.

under the particular perspective that happened to be viewing them at any given time

(usually the dominant perspective, since history has always been – until now,

Jetztzeit32 – the history of the victors).33

Despite the method deployed, there is a sustained argument running through

the course of this dissertation. The argument will begin by establishing Kant’s

argument for why time is to be considered an a priori pure form of intuition and

what the implications of this are. The connection will then be drawn between this

conception of time and the guiding impulse of contemporary theory, especially how

the Kantian a priori, as a pure form of intuition, is a prime example of what Quentin

Meillassoux has coined ‘correlationism’. Consistent with the proposed

reinterpretation of Kant as an ontologist, time will then be discussed with an eye to

establishing how it could be thought of as (a) other than a transcendental condition

for experience and a pure form of sensibility, and alternatively, (b) something that

actualizes itself in, through, and as the immanent singulartity of a mundane event.

Finally, I will draw out some of the political implications of this revisionist rendering

of Kant, and attempted de-transcendentalisation of temporality – and what this

means for contemporary cultural theory.

We have long been living under the philosophical shadow of Kantianism. We

have made the transcendental distinction between the world of experience and the

world as it is in itself into a real – ontological – distinction, a distinction that does not

32 The concept of Jetztzeit, or “now time”, is developed in Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History” where it is treated as indicating a “messianic” temporality characterized by the collapsing of the past and the future into a present that is pregnant with both, and which unfolds on the basis of a radical rupture. 33 Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, Trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2007).

8 remain satisfied with simply being an epistemological distinction, but insists on being a distinction that extends to reality itself, and therefore, has implications for all parts of cultural existence. As a result of the implications of this Kantian shadow, we find ourselves in a situation that, in order to think, thought must bracket the real reality of the object of thought. Through a modesty and patience, we must think only within the bounds of conditions, and this of course, in order to avoid the wild, and ungrounded, speculation that metaphysics is capable of at its worst. If we are to take

Kant at his word, we are to understand that for the human subject, or for consciousness in general, the world is broken up into discrete compartments – the aesthetic is different in kind from the intellective, the sensual differs from the cognitive, and the epistemological and practical are separated by a yawning chasm.

These distinctions are further broken up into faculties, each having their unique place – and function – within the sensual-experiential plane of experiential existence:

Reason, Understanding, Imagination. These differ from the Platonic ontology that holds the world of experience as something of a mirage tout court due to a mistaking of ephemeral finitude (becoming) with reality (ahistorical being), while, for Plato, reality (being) sits behind – and beyond – the perceptual becoming of finitude as the infinite Form, attainable only through the use of an intellectual intuition. For Kant – and for those of us who live under the shadow of transcendental Kantianism – we are left with the possibility that reality in itself differs from reality as it is experienced for us – there are no grounds to dispute this possible discrepancy – but, and this is the difference, we must not pass judgment on it, lest we overstep the bounds of possible experience and lapse into pre-critical dogmatic metaphysics.

Without having recourse to an external position to our perceptual apparatus in

order to view our perceptual apparatus from a distance, reality is condemned to

remain a mysterious x located out of the bounds of experience. Within the limits of

this Kantian universe we are left with a substantial unknown haunting us like the

specter that the Marx of the Communist Manifesto draws our attention to when he

exclaims “Ein Gespenst umgeht Europa – das Gespenst des Kommunismus” (A specter is

haunting Europe…the specter of communism). What is this specter, this hidden

remnant, that promises the sensus communus34 – the same commons that the Critique

provides in the form of the specter of the legitimate use of reason, and that is later

taken up and reworked as the regulative idea of a utopian kingdom of ends, toward

which all our moral activity is oriented? What is it about the substantial but unknown

x that symptomatically replaces the epistemic criteria of clarity and distinctness of the

Cartesian era as set down in Descartes’ Meditations? The inauguration of the era of

criticism banishes any remnant of dogmatic metaphysics, or what Schelling called

positive philosophy,35 to the dustbins of a history - relegated to an obsolete era that

has long been cut off – and compartmentalized – by the sharp edge of critique. The

noumenal (unknown x) dances in the guise of the spectral remnants of pre-critical

classical metaphysics, that naïve realism of yester-era, which Kantian

transcendentalism forever pushes into the archaic past.

34 The “sensus communus” here is a play on the Kantian “kingdom of ends” (a regulative idea of Reason that is said to guide our moral activity), the “common sense” of the faculties working in conjunction with each other when kept in their proper place, and the communism of Marx. This can also be traced back to Plato’s harmonious soul, and Aristotle’s virtue as a mean between two extremes. 35 F.W.J. Schelling, The Grounding of Positive Philosophy, Trans. Bruce Matthews (New York: State University of New York Press, 2008).

The implications of the so-called second Copernican Revolution cannot be overestimated. Now that reality is mediate (there is nothing outside of its mediation by the conditions for experience), and kept at a provisional distance so that it is firmly established as remaining under the purview of the transcendental conditions of experience, the world will forever be broken into discrete portions – the intuitive and the intellectual – and man will be pushed further to the fringes. The foundational distinction between the sensual and the ideational has been operative at least since

Parmenides, who argued that only being could be thought, thereby inexorably uniting thought and being for millennia. However, it is not until the transcendental turn that these distinctions become formalized to the point that the atemporal conditions for experience become indistinguishable from being itself. The point here is as unconventional as it is counter-intuitive: although in the standard reading of Kant there is a distinction made between reality as it is in itself, and as it is for us, I am arguing that this distinction is only symbolic but not constitutive, since the actual mechanism of the Critique – operating as it does on the basis of a presupposition that the noumenal is thinkable but not knowable – depends on the functioning of that which it disavows. That is, through the transcendental turn, and Kant’s overt intentions notwithstanding, being is reduced to being experienced to such a degree

(and with the result) that if something is not experienced, it does not have being, and it is as good as not existing. Kant is well aware that the transcendental method demands that he distinguish appearance for us from being in itself, however, in practice, this does not happen, and the conditions for experience of reality become indistinguishable from reality itself. Read in this way, Plato’s allegorical cave –

11 instead of acting as a corrective for the ignorance brought forth through a fascination with the senses – becomes a constitutive part of being itself, since there is no longer a distinction to be made between the conditioned appearance of reality and reality in itself. In this way, what exists in the form of the noumenal, although initially designated as merely thinkable, and not knowable, becomes mediate (by the conditions for experience) and therefore knowable because in principle experienceable. Knowledge, according to this argument, is the only thing that has being. Let me be clear - the presupposition at play is that knowledge requires experience, whether, perversely, this experience is in the form of the conditions for experience, or experience tout court that results from these conditions. Given that

Kant critiques metaphysics by interrogating the prospects for metaphysics, i.e., the limits of reason, he takes philosophy from being about being (ontology) and makes it about our knowledge of being (epistemology). As such, I take it a step further and read him as doing ontology by reading his epistemological claims as claims about being itself. As will be seen in the discussion of Heidegger below, the transcendental turn is not simply an epistemological turn, but is implicated in the ontology of experience, and points to larger existential question concerning the conditions of man as such. Following from this reading, it is not that, as it was with Plato, there is a cave hosting an array of fictive shadows cast on the wall, while real reality awaits its discovery outside the cave. No. Since Kant’s Copernican revolution, it is argued here that the cave is all there is.

It will take Horkheimer and Adorno to point out that the cave is another name for Auschwitz, and that Kant himself was an impeccable troglodyte, having never left

Königsberg in his entire lifetime. Just as Copernicus exchanged the geocentric for a

heliocentric universe, Kant saw himself as exchanging an Aristotelian/Cartesian

worldview for a worldview of transcendental constitution. But as Quentin

Meillassoux provocatively points out, what is meant by the Copernican revolution is

exactly the opposite of what Kant intended it to mean when he intended it to mean

that “instead of knowledge conforming to the object, the Critical revolution makes

the object conform to our knowledge”.36 For Meillassoux, a more appropriate title

would have been “the Ptolemaic counter-revolution,” since, it in fact holds that “the

subject is central to the process of knowledge”.37 As it turns out, the decentering of

thought, pursued by the enterprise that sought to establish the absolute

mathematization of nature, was ushered in and marked by the Galilean worldview.

This worldview is defined by its success in the mathematical mapping of motion; it

was through this accomplishment, which achieved a version of reason’s dream for

mastery, brought about something that was up to that point unthinkable: a nature

that is absolutely indifferent to thought. However, as it turns out, the secret

ingredient for the attainment of a nature that is indifferent to thought was nothing

less than a transcendental constitution to ensure that the new scientific enterprise

would achieve a re-centering of thought by placing it in the position of the sole

constituter of the world. It is in this context that Meillassoux defines correlationism

as the inexorability of thought and being. “For it was in response to the very fact of

science that philosophy embraced the various modes of correlation – science’s

decentering of thought relative to the world led philosophy to conceive of this

36 Meillassoux, 117-18. 37 Ibid.

decentering in terms of thought’s unprecedented centrality relative to this same

world”.38 Meillassoux’ understanding of philosophy is that of a reactive force which,

threatened by the efforts of a scientific enterprise that is able to treat large swaths of

the world as indifferent to the human concern, desperately seeks to reinstall itself at

the center of the world by making the object of the world conform to the conditions

that it itself establishes. This operation is twofold: 1) it ensures that nature does not

remain indifferent to the human concern by making it conform to human knowledge;

but also, and at the same time, 2) it sustains the mysterious x lying beyond all bounds

of possible experience, thereby preserving the specter of the substantial unknown by

systematically and constitutively devaluing its epistemic value by placing it outside

the bounds of knowledge so that we can think it but we can not know it. “However,

these subjective conditions that make the natural sciences possible are identical with

those that make metaphysics possible…In other words, what we discover in Kant –

and this is wholly in line with the eighteenth century and the Enlightenment – is an

extraordinarily strict, and if you like, undifferentiated concept of the unity of reason

throughout the various spheres of knowledge.”39 Adorno points to the operation of

what may be called – albeit paradoxically – a faith in reason; the saving grace, that

which is able to render the tumultuous world of sense and the differentiations of the

world coherent, is a transcendental version of reason that heroically smooths out

differences and renders flux static, through recourse to a trans-historical and

atemporal modality of legislation. Since it is the synthesizing powers of reason that

38 Ibid. 39 Theodore Adorno, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, Trans. Rodney Livingstone (California: Stanford University Press, 2001), 42-3.

ultimately lends coherence to the manifold, it is up to reason to legislate on the unity

of apperception. That is, although it is the faculty of the understanding that brings

concepts in contact with possible objects of experience, it is reason’s job to legislate

on the proper application of these categories in a way that lends consistency to the

operation, and coherence (i.e., stasis) to an otherwise incoherent and non-static

universe. “This is why reason, at the very moment it abandons legislative power in

the interest of knowledge to the understanding, nevertheless retains a role, or rather

receives in return, from the understanding itself, an original function: the constituting

of ideal foci outside experience towards which the concepts of the understanding

converge (maximum unity); the forming of the higher horizons which reflect and

contain the concepts of the understanding (maximum extension)”.40

Through the transcendental constitution of experience, which, in the last

instance, refers experience to atemporal Ideas of reason, Kant takes time out of the

equation, thereby rendering static what is, in the words of William James, really a

“blooming buzzing confusion.” The problem with the accomplishment of the

transcendental unity of apperception is that it relies on a form of time that is purely

formal and a priori, one which placates the becoming of existence and its attendant

contingency by detaching time and making it pure. “It follows from this, however,

that the question of metaphysics can really only be the question of these conditions

of reason, these indispensible conditions implicit in reason – that is, of thought and

the necessary forms of intuition – and their relation to different kinds of material”.41

These “different kinds of material” that Adorno refers to are precisely the material of

40 Kant’s Critical Philosophy, 19-20. 41 Ibid.

an experience that is conditioned by the transcendental forms of knowledge of which

time is a pure form; it does not refer to the material that exists apart from these

conditions, and which, due to this operation, subsequently becomes the unknown x.

What Adorno argues in his 1959 lectures on the Critique is that, although Kant’s claim

is that metaphysical statements are beyond reason’s limit, and that it is therefore the

task of reason to establish the limits of itself, the limit, as imposed by reason on itself,

subsumes the negativity of the pre-perceptual world by placing it under the

complacency of the Concept, and therefore undermines the possibility of any change

in the status quo, since it comes to be barred in advance by the transcendental

conditions. In this way, the rules of the game are chosen in advance, and, as in chess,

the decision on the rules cannot be disputed, lest the game itself ceases to be the

game. It is my contention, however, that the rules of the game do change, and that it

is precisely the category of history42 (a temporal concept) that renders the rules of

the game obsolete. However, Kant’s ahistorical transcendental method works to

preserve these rules by putting time – and therefore history – out of play.

When Meillassoux points out that the transcendental method had to be

deployed in order to maintain a grasp on the indifferent object (by making it conform

to the conditions of experience), what he is ultimately pointing out is that the

transcendental mode of givenness – the view that holds that the given of experience

is conditioned by ahistorical concepts of the understanding – is simply one fact

alongside other facts in the temporal universe. Calling it the transcendental subject

42 History depends on temporality, since history refers to change through time; and at its bare minimum, change – the difference between two states or positions – requires time. This illustrates the ways in which internal and external intuition are co-referential for Kant (see below).

for short, this subject arose at a particular moment in geological time, and it will

vanish at another – different – moment. One implication of this is that there is always

more than is given for the transcendental subject, and further, that there is, given

what he establishes as necessity of contingency, an always open and real potential for

radical change. Meillassoux makes a distinction between contingency and facticity:

contingency concerns the non-necessity of entities in the world (or the possibility for

a state of affairs to be otherwise), while facticity (which he later develops into the

neologism ‘factiality’) concerns the non-necessity of the world itself. Given the

inability of thought to know the absolute (noumena), it is not impossible that its laws

(if the noumenal can be said to have laws) could be completely different from the

ones we know to be operative in our world; as such, it is not impossible that the

noumenal laws can jump over, and thereby impact, the laws governing our world.

Contrary to the principle of sufficient reason, which claims that for every state of

affairs there is an attendant sufficient reason that is able to account for its being,

Meillassoux upholds what he calls the ‘principle of unreason’ which he defines as “the

real property whereby everything…is capable of actually becoming otherwise

without reason”.43 This is not to be understood as yet another vitriolic attack of

unreason in the name of a Lebensphilosophie, or a call for the installation of an

irrationalism in the name of a critique of progress. Meillassoux is not simply pointing

out that the finitude of human existence bars the human subject from ever

encountering the ultimate truth, and that as a result, human knowledge is relegated

to a limited and incomplete perspective on this ungraspable reason; instead, he

43 Meillassoux, 53.

17 argues that, from an explicitly human perspective there is nothing underlying the finite creature as its failure to grasp. In line with the principle of unreason, he posits an alternative form of temporality that defies the ordinary sense of time as experienceable within the bounds of the Kantian transcendental paradigm of conditioned givennes. This is therefore:

a time that cannot be conceived as having emerged or as being abolished

except in time, which is to say, in itself. No doubt, this is a banal

argument on the face of it: ‘it is impossible to think the disappearance of

time unless this disappearance occurs in time; consequently the latter

must be conceived to be eternal.’ But what people fail to notice is that

this banal argument can only work by presupposing a time that is not

banal – not just a time whose capacity for destroying everything is a

function of laws, but a time which is capable of the lawless destruction of

every physical law. It is perfectly possible to conceive of a time

determined by the governance of fixed laws disappearing into something

other than itself – it would disappear in another time governed by

alternative laws. But only the time that harbors the capacity to destroy

every determinate reality, while obeying no determinate law – the time

capable of destroying, without reason or law, both worlds and things –

can be thought as an absolute. Only unreason can be thought as eternal,

because only unreason can be thought as at once an hypothetical and

absolute. Accordingly, we can say that it is possible to demonstrate the

absolute necessity of everything’s non-necessity. In other words, it is

possible to establish, through indirect demonstration, the absolute

necessity of the contingency of everything.44

Since everything could, in principle, be otherwise, this is not a metaphysical claim if

what we mean by metaphysics is the positing of an absolutely necessary entity. The

implications of this is that the transcendental conditions of experience that Kant

argues are universal, are in fact contingently dependent on the particularity of the

historical situation in which they find themselves, i.e., the situation from which they

arose. Not only is there no sufficient reason for the laws of the world to be the way

they are and not otherwise, there is no sufficient reason for the world itself. Let us

look at how Kant clarifies the status of time as the counter-part of space by trying to

establish it as a pure form of intuition in “The Transcendental Aesthetic” of the

Critique of Pure Reason. After proposing an alternative approach to the

comprehension of time, we will look more closely at how the Kantian transcendental

framework is the Ur-form of what Meillassoux calls correlationism.

44 Ibid., 61-2.

1.2 “Metaphysical exposition of the concept of time”

In this section Kant of the Critique provides a list of aspects of the

transcendental exposition of time. Not only is transcendentalism a method, it is also a

fixture of the world itself. In the first section he begins by establishing the basis for

what distinguishes transcendentalism from empiricism. It is not enough to abstract

time from “any experience”.45 To abstract from the basis of the empirical level would

be to remain on the empirical level, an operation that would fallaciously take the

particular sensation and generalize on its basis. The move to the transcendental level

requires more; it requires a move from the empirical to what makes the empirical

possible in the first place. In order to get from the particular – not to the universal

genus as in Aristotelian genera-species taxonomy, but – to the level of what must of

necessity be in place in order for experience to be as it is, requires a move that

Francois Laruelle calls “the transcendental method” which he argues to be a

symptom of all philosophy. It is characterized by:

[t]he analytical inventory of a manifold of categorial a prioris on the basis

of the empirical reality or experience whose conditions of possibility one

seeks. In Kant, this is the moment of the metaphysical exposition of space

45 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Werner S. Pluhar (Cambridge: Hackett, 1996), 85.

and time as a priori forms of intuition and of the metaphysical deduction

of the categories as pure, a priori forms of judgement.46

That is, Kant’s transcendental method – although attempting to avoid skepticism by

founding experience on necessary conditions that exceed it and which are at the

basis of experience – is wrought with the difficulty it consciously seeks to avoid.

Time, abstracted from the particularity of all empirical content, would – and does,

according to Laruelle – remain on the level of empirical experience (albeit in a more

general form). Although the Kantian move operates on the basis of an operation that

seeks to found experience on necessary grounds, unbeknownst to itself, it

inadvertently falls into the erroneous trap of abstracting from the empirical level and

remaining on the empirical level under the guise of establishing a universal a priori

position. We must therefore read Kant on two levels: what he intends to achieve (an

evaluation of the a priori conditions of experience that are not merely an abstraction

from experience on empirical grounds but are universal and prior to experience) and

what he actually achieves (an abstraction from empirical grounds). In order for the

form of time to be established as operative (as manifest in the experience of

simultaneity and succession and the form of inner intuition) the argument, in good

circular fashion, presupposes what it seeks, i.e., time as operative as a pure form of

intuition is founded on the constitutive and fundamental presupposition of time as

pure form itself. Rather than discovering time as a pure form, it is imposed and

subsequently treated as though it was discovered. Just as simultaneity and

46 Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 123.

succession are treated as aspects of time, but not as time itself, for Kant, time is

something that stands over and above its various instantiations – time is that which

makes the different modalities of time possible, without these modalities actually

being time itself. As Kant put it, for something to happen at the same time

(simultaneity), or at different times (sequentiality) time is required as the condition

for these to be possible. But where is time since it is treated as existing in a

netherworld apart from both the modalities of time (simultaneity and succession),

and the objects – and empirically existing world – that are said to be in time?

Section numbers 2) and 3), taken together, indicate the necessity of time being

something that cannot be annulled47 and as underlying – and rendering possible –

the apodictic quality of judgment which assures its strict universality and certainty.

Different times are unified under the same underlying time, which is the condition

for all intuitive variations – and appearances – of and within time. That is to say,

without the underlying time, as pure form of intuition, different times would not be

possible. Kant thus infers that time has only one dimension.48 What he means by this

is that, when it comes down to it, all variations of experiential time fall under a single

unified and unifying time as pure form of all intuition. It is argued to be pure since it

is purported that it is not dependent on empirical content, but rather, it makes this

empirical content possible in the first place. Untarnished by empirical accident, it is

said to be purified from the flux of existence. Furthermore, any flux is itself

dependent on the underlying pure form of intuition, since without the form of

47 Kant, 86. 48 Ibid.

intuition, no experience is possible, and without experience, flux would not be

registered experientially.

Time, as a pure form of intuition, is therefore not discursive, i.e., it is not a

universal concept. The distinction between discursive and pure form of intuition can

be summed up thus: while the former (discursivity) functions in terms of the

understanding (as a faculty of judgment), the latter (pure form of intuition) is (also)

on the level of that which is judged, since, as intuition comes first (or is revealed on a

more immediate level since it has to do with the arising of the appearance of the

object with its sensible qualities and relation between itself and other objects in

space) it is logically required to be in place in order for judgment to take place. Said

differently, discursivity presupposes intuition because the discursive concept is

dependent on an intuited content, and not the other way around. However,

considered in a different way, the two are inseparable, as Kant reminds us later –

“Without sensibility no object would be given to us; and without understanding no

object would be thought. Thoughts without content are empty; intuitions without

concepts are blind”.49 The two are thus in a symbiotic relationship, each requiring the

other to fully make it what it is. Yet on a hypothetical level (the way the Critique of

Pure Reason unfolds in terms of its reasoned structure) we may say that the pure

form of intuition comes first, insofar as it is the presupposed condition for any and all

experience, and without it, judgment would not be possible since the pure forms of

intuition (space and time) make experience itself possible. Without experience

judgment would be about nothing and would thus not have empirical purchase.

49 Ibid., 107.

“Different times are parts of one and the same time; and the kind of

presentation that can be given only through a single object is intuition”.50 This

requirement, viz. different times are only presented through a single object qua

intuition, is necessary, since time is – in its original presentation – given as

unlimited.51 Without limit, endless (Unendliche) time translates into the limitlessness

of the infinite: without finitude, we have the sublimity of the endlessness

(Unendlichkeit), time as symbolized in the form of an arrow going-on-forever. While

time is limited by its empirical actualization, as pure form of intuition, time is not

limited, and thus is infinite. Things (objects) can only be presented determinately (as

this or that thing) through a limitation that cuts them off from the continuity of the

background and demarcates their consistency within space, and it is also limitation

that provides the capacity for a determinate discursive judgment. Since concepts only

ever provide partial (re-)presentation, this partiality requires something more, as the

presupposed horizon on which this partiality arises and is able to function. Given that

time is a pure form, it is not reliant on anything other than itself to be what it is; thus

the infinite quality of the pure form of time can only be limited by itself; and in this

way the limitlessness of infinity, if it had a limit, this limit must be imposed by

nothing other than the infinite itself. The discursive concept of time is other than

time itself as pure form; as such, if the concept of time was ultimately determining,

time would be based only on a partial presentation (the concept is partial) and would

thus rely on something other than itself for its limit. But this prospect is barred in

advance, since in this case it would be dependent on something other than itself, and

50 Ibid., 86. 51 Ibid.

would not be pure. The purity of time requires the autonomous setting of (its own)

limit. However, if the finite aspect of time were to set the limit, there would be a

contradiction, since the limit would set its own limit. But the limit, for it to be what it

is – i.e., limited – requires that it has already been limited; as such we can venture to

say that for the limit to be limited, it is necessary for the limit to be limited not by the

limit (which is absurd), but by the unlimited (and the unlimited is infinite). The

unlimited is therefore that which provides limit, and makes the limit what it is. It is in

this way that we can read Hegel’s criticism of Kant’s demarcation of the noumenal

and the phenomenal; the demarcation itself presupposes the unlimited as the criteria

for the limit to be installed. In the Encyclopaedia Logic Hegel argues that the limit

Kant puts on reason is artificial since any limit presupposes an already having gone

past it in order to know what it is being limited from; therefore the line drawn

between the phenomenal and the noumenal is suspect and may – in principle – be

suspended. This grows out of an analytic of the infinite-finite dialectic through which

“[t]he finite realizes itself in and through the infinite, infinitude renders itself infinite

in relation to finitude…the finite is not merely other than or opposed to the infinite

but is actually an internal dimension of the infinite”.52 In this way, Hegel essentially

makes the a priori conditions of possibility historical; this makes them both

necessary and contingent: within an historical epoch they are necessary, but, as times

change, different epochs arise with different a priori transcendental conditions.

Now, in terms of the limit being limited by the unlimited, Kant argues that time

is neither self-subsistent (für sich selbst bestehend), nor a “determination or order

52 Mark C. Taylor, Journeys to Selfhood: Hegel and Kierkegaard, (New York: Fordham University Press, 1986), 155.

attaching to things themselves”53 because in the former it would be absolute, and in

the latter it would not be in the position of transcendental condition. To make time

absolute would mean to take it out of its transcendental position as pure form of

intuition and supplant it by placing it in a place all to itself; in other words, it would

render it transcendent and no longer transcendental. Self-subsistence means that, if

subtracted from all of its empirical accidentality, it would nevertheless remain wholly

what it is, not being dependent on anything other than itself. “If time were self-

subsistent, then it would be something that without there being an actual object

would yet be actual”.54 In other words, self-subsistence would make time into a

metaphysical concept, a concept that defies experience by not being involved in and

with experience; it would make time into an absolutely necessary entity, on the level

of the philosopher’s God of the pre-critical era. To self-subsist means to not be reliant

on anything else for its subsistence, and therefore to remain being what it is without

the input or influence of other things. However, as Brassier, quoting Laruelle, argues

above, this level of analysis risks putting time on the same plane as the objects of

experience in such a way that we abstract from the given, and move from the given to

the given (that is, from one given to the next), instead of, as the transcendental

method would demand, moving from the given to the conditions for the given. That is,

on the level of the experienced object, to move from object to object-in-time is to

remain caught up in actual experience, instead of interrogating the conditions for

possible experience, which are properly transcendental since they are not dependent

on experience, but are that which makes experience possible in the first place. The

53 Kant, 87. 54 Ibid.

mistake with this sort of analysis, according to Kant, is that it renders time reliant on

nothing but itself, since time is the condition for any and all experience, and if time

were experienced directly – on the same level as objects – time would rely on nothing

but itself to be what it is, and would therefore be in the position of the noumenal –

which is absolutely inaccessible to experience. But Kant is smarter than this. Kant

needs time to be mobilized as part of the actuality of experience, rather than as

something that self-subsists indifferently to experience as in a pre-Socratic cosmic

principle. This is why Kant says that time cannot be on the same level as objects

(existing alongside other objects), but is, rather, the condition for objects.55

In the second case, if time had to do with things in-themselves directly

there would be no distinction between the object determined as being in time, and

the time that determines it as being in time. In other words, for Kant of the first

Critique, time as a transcendental condition can not be a part of things in themselves

because not only would this diminish the transcendental import of the project (there

would no longer be any transcendental vantage point from which objects are

determined)56 it would reintroduce the problem of dogmatic metaphysics, since

there would no longer be limit (imposed as the presentation of the object as result of

time’s purely formal imposition) and thus the unlimited would once again have free

reign (as in pre-critical dogmatic metaphysics). As a result, we would have

55 Kant, 94. 56 Which is not necessarily a problem. Although in retrospect the transcendental turn ushered in by the Critique of Pure Reason would not have been possible without this move, to say that time is not a characteristic of things in themselves is required by the terms of Kant’s project as a whole, but is not a good enough reason to reject it as such.

knowledge of things--in-themselves (noumena), which goes against the entire project

of the first Critique.

Kant goes on to make the distinction between the inner and outer sense. While

the latter is spatial – the outer sense has to do with geometrical relations between

objects (and the pure form of external intuition is space as the horizon on which

objects are manifested to sensibility) – the former is temporality. The inner sense –

concerned as it is with the sequentiality of experience and temporal duration – is

time. Kant emphasizes that because time does not have any shape – as do spatial

objects and their relations – time does not have to do with outer intuition. However,

it should be kept in mind that spatial presentations are related back to the

experiencing inner sense (or “subject”) as part of the unity of apperception.57 To

demonstrate the difference between outer and inner intuition, a distinction is drawn

between the simultaneity of the parts of the line (it does not make a difference which

part of the line one points to, they are all available to be pointed at simultaneously)

and the sequentiality of the parts of time.58

It is in this way that Kant is able to say that time is more fundamental than

space, since space, as experienced externality, requires time as the pure form of inner

intuition – all spatial representations are referred back to inner experience, and

hence, time. That is, insofar as space unfolds in a temporal register, and since being

experienced is a necessary condition of space to appear at all, it is referred back to

57 See: § 16 “On the Original Synthetic Unity of Apperception” of of Critique of Pure Reason. 58 Kant, 88. We can read this as suggesting that, no matter how large or small the part is considered, it is sequential. Bergson’s duree can be considered a part of time – although it synthesizes a number of moments, and in this way is itself made up of a series of parts – we can nonetheless consider the duration to be a part of time.

the inner sense, and the inner sense is time. It is not that time impinges on space in

such a way that space could be reduced to time, but rather, “time is an a priori

condition of all appearance generally: it is the direct condition of inner

appearances…and precisely thereby also, indirectly, a condition of outer

appearances”.59 Time is “indirectly” the condition of outer appearances insofar as

these appearances are referred back to the (inner) experience of them, which always

unfolds temporally. This referring back to inner intuition simply means that a

condition for an appearance of space – and for the outer form of sensibility more

generally – is time as the form inner intuition. Space is not in itself temporal – but it is

temporal insofar as it is experienced, i.e., the idea of space does not require time, but

the experience of space is always in time since experience is always – and necessarily

– temporal. Since time is empirically real – given along with any object for experience,

time is necessary – accompanying all sensations – and thus, “no object that is not

subject to the condition of time can ever be given to us in experience”.60

1.3 The argument for why time is actual without being real

However, if all intuition, whether external or internal, relates back to the pure

form of internal intuition, and this is time, a priori, does this not mean that time – and

experience more generally – is subjective? This question stands and falls on the

distinction between the statement that “[t]ime is nothing but the form of inner

59 Ibid. 60 Kant, 89.

sense…apart from the subject time is nothing,”61 and the statement that “[t]ime has

objective validity only with regard to appearances, because these are already things

considered as objects of our senses”.62 It would seem then, that time is indeed

subjective, but, however, with one qualification: time can be considered ‘subjective’

only insofar as we understand the term ‘subjective’ to indicate that epistemic claims

are generated by the very conditions for the appearance of what these claims are

‘about.’ In other words, the ‘subjective’ element of time is that it is a transcendental

condition for experience, and cannot be said to be part of the object as it is in itself –

apart from this experience. The charge of subjectivism stems from the fact that

Kantian epistemic claims – about the truth or falsity of propositions regarding states

of affairs in the world – are governed by the conditions that make these states of

affairs possible in the first place, and as such, the subjective nature of such claims are

based on the fact that the epistemic conditions for a claim generate the content of the

claim itself. To make a judgment regarding the status of an object apart from the

conditions of the object’s appearing (for us) is to overstep the bounds of possible

experience, and this risks falling into empty metaphysical speculation.63 This latter is

what Kant considers to be part of the outmoded pre-transcendental paradigm, one

that naively makes assertions about the objects of knowledge without taking into

consideration their condition for appearing (the pure forms of intuition – space and

time – along with the categories and concepts of the understanding). Kant therefore

distinguishes between the empirical and transcendental realm of experience. While

61 Kant, 88-9. 62 Ibid. 63 Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, Trans. Gary Hatfield (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), § 39.

the former is contingent, and dependent on the particularities of the socio-political

place in which the subject finds itself – including gender, race, and psychology – the

latter is universal, since it is abstracted from the contingently empirical aspects of

experience, and moves toward the form of experience in general. Kant therefore says

that we cannot say that objects are, or are not, in time; all we can talk about is the

appearances of objects, and unequivocally state that: “all things as appearances

(objects of sensible intuition) are in time” and that “this principle has all its objective

correctness and a priori universality”.64

To further clarify this claim, Kant makes a distinction between empirical and

absolute reality. Time is empirically real insofar as all objects appear in sensibility as

embedded in a temporal mode. From an empirical perspective, objects appear to us,

their appearance is part of experience, and experience is empirical. Thus, when

considered under the status of empiricism, time is real for Kant; however, when

considered as something apart form experience, as something subsisting in its own

right, “we dispute that time has any claim to absolute reality; i.e., we dispute any

claim whereby time would, quite without taking into account the form of our sensible

intuition, attach to things absolutely…”65 This is what Kant calls the transcendental

ideality of time: when abstracted from the “subjective conditions of sensible intuition,

then time is nothing”.66

Time is nothing apart from its relation to a subjective sensibility. That is, it is

nothing in itself apart from its activation for the subject in terms of appearance for

64 Critique, 89. 65 Ibid. 66 Ibid., 90.

31 the subject. Although it may seem that Kant’s is a thoroughly subjectivist project, incapable of speaking about objects in themselves but only as they appear for a subject, Kant is nevertheless able to make the case that his transcendental philosophy is universal in its scope and implications. How?

The argument rests on the transcendental method itself. Contrary to what came before – what Kant calls dogmatic metaphysics – which made claims about reality itself, and not the conditions for the appearance of reality, the transcendental method asks not what reality is, but how it is possible for reality to appear the way it does. It begins from x, treats this x as given, and then moves to a different level of analysis by moving from the appearance itself to the presuppositions that are required for the appearance to appear as such. The distinction is therefore made between a priori and a posteriori, whereas the latter is based on knowledge claims derived (at least in part) from experience, the former does not depend on experience, but is prior to experience, and has to do with the transcendental conditions that are required to make experience possible in the first place.

Kant claims that the a priori conditions of experience are universal and necessary (KCP 11). The argument is that any experience at all, if it is to qualify as experience, is of the same form; that is, in order for it to be experience proper it requires the same transcendental conditions that go into determining it as experience. Kant thus posits a transcendental subjectivity, which is not particular to this or that subject, but is instead, a subjecthood in general. Transcendental subjectivity regards the conditions for subjectivity in the first place, such that, in order to qualify as a subject in the first place, the subject must have – as its

32 constitutive pole – the pure forms of sensibility (space and time) as well as the concepts (categories) of the understanding, and Reason (along with the regulative ideas of God Freedom and Immortality). But what is the move Kant makes to confirm this, to get from the dogmatic metaphysics of pre-Copernican philosophy toward the transcendental turn that went on to determine philosophy and theory ever since?

As part of the above suggestion, that Kant is to be read as an ontological-realist, and that the claims made about the conditions of knowing should actually be treated as claims about being, the result is a move toward what I term the de- transcendentalization of time. In a similar way that Graham Harman argues for a version of Husserlian transcendental intentional constitution of objects, not only from the position of one privileged position – the human – but for all objects amongst themselves, the de-transcendentalization of time puts time on the same plane of existence as objects, but with this difference: time is not an object among other objects, but is part of what goes into making these objects what they are. There is no such thing as an object outside of – and without – time: contra Plato, there are no eternal objects. This position states that, against Kant, time is something real in the absolute sense, and which therefore can be speculatively theorized as something existing in its own right. There have, of course, been glimpses of this in the recent history of philosophy – Bergson’s durée, Hegel’s circularity of temporality as Spirit’s becoming-temporal, Heidegger’s care structure, as well as the messianic time expounded by Benjamin and others. But as footnote 30 in the section entitled

“Temporality and Within-Timeness as the Origin of the Vulgar Concept of Time” in

Being and Time attests, the history of philosophy has been caught in the same box

since Aristotle’s original notion of time as determined by, and dependent on,

movement in space.67

But what does it mean for time to be considered something “real”? As noted

above, Kant does not dispute that time is something empirically real. It is undeniable

that all objects of experience must conform to the pure form of sensibility – space

and time – and that, as such, insofar as experience is of something “real,” time is no

less real. However, to posit time as something that is real beyond and outside of

experience is to overstep the bounds of what is verifiable a priori and thus to risk

falling back into dogmatic metaphysics which is based on, and dependent upon,

knowledge claims that surpass the bounds of experience.68 Let us pause here and

take a step back to clarify what we mean by this risk and what its implications are.

It must be kept in mind that Kant speaks on two registers, the empirical and the

transcendental, and while the former is contingent because based on experience, the

latter is deemed necessary and universal, since it is not a determination of this or

that experiential content, but is the condition of possibility for experience in general.

Although sensibility is the “capacity, or receptivity, for receiving representations

through the way we are affected by objects,”69 this affectedness by objects is possible

only insofar as the pure form is there and available for the mediation of affectivity to

take place. What this means is that time for Kant is something purely formal and

which thus operates outside of the scope of the reality of actually existing material-

67 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, Trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: State University of New York Press, 1996), 416-17. 68 Prolegomena, 9. 69 Johann Schultz. Exposition of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, trans. James C. Morrison (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1995).

34 temporal relations. The form of something is related to its essence; its essence is that which makes it what it is; thus form defies accidentality by remaining the same through the changing nature of its actualizations. However, unlike the Platonic form that transcends the world of copies, the form in Kant is different, since it is not itself a thing, but rather, a condition for things. Let us clarify this term since it plays such an important role in the transcendentalization of being that Kant evokes and depends on as part of the transcendental method.

1.4 Conditionality

There are two senses of condition. First, to say that something conditions something else is to say that the first thing, x, has an effect on y such that the activity of x alters – in some way – the being of y. As an example of this we can say that the river – as violently flowing water – conditions the bedrock and the banks of the river in that it passively appropriates the conditioning levied by the water. In classical behaviorism there is the notorious example of Pavlov’s dog who eventually drools at the mere sound of the bell after being conditioned to expect food after the stimulus of the ringing bell (due to association of the one, the bell, and the effect, the mobilization of the body’s digestive proclivities). Thus classical conditioning is the habituated response, through association, of one event and another event, the first being in the position of cause, the second being in the position of effect. Without getting into a discussion of the importance of habit in Hume’s empirical

psychologization of knowledge,70 it should be noted that as a precursor to Kant,

Hume’s emphasis on habituation, association, and expectation, which operate in

terms of the mind, played a formative role in Kant’s notion of condition, but with this

difference: whereas for Hume, conditioning is always premised on a determinate

empirical object that is firmly located within the nexus of cause and effect as

mediated within a stream of consciousness, for Kant, conditioning is transcendental,

and thus has only do to with the possibility of the object in general in a purely formal

sense. Form is thus related to condition in the sense that the form goes into

conditioning the conditioned without itself being conditioned. Despite the fact that this

is uncannily close to the Scholastic version of God wherein God resembles, in all of its

various guises, the Aristotelian unmoved mover or first cause, Kant’s conditioning is

transcendental but not transcendent. As Heidegger emphasizes, Kant’s project is the

first to really thematize the finitude of man, since the critical project is one that

overtly de-centers the divine in the name of maturity and enlightenment.71

Condition then, for Kant, instead of referring to the habitual association of one

event and another event as in Hume, refers to what must be in place in order for the

given to be as it is. In less vague terms, the Kantian condition is in the position of

presupposition and asks the question: what does this state of affairs presuppose as

the condition that necessarily must be in place for it to be possible? The Kantian

move, then, operates on the basis of the transition from the contingency of empirical

70 By this I refer the reader to the third section of Treatise of Human Knowledge where he demonstrates the role of habit, experience and probability of the past resembling the future for the acquisition of knowledge. In this way he makes a case for an epistemology based on empirical psychological experience. 71 Martin Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, Trans. Richard Taft (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1997).

association to the necessity of transcendental conditionality, thereby rendering the

empirical (in Platonic fashion) as having a lesser degree of knowing and being since it

is a posteriori and therefore secondary.

Conditions then, are in the position of determining without being determined;

that is, even though they are in place and active, having effects on that which they

condition, they are untarnished by the messiness of the empirical flux of being.

Indeed, one of Nietzsche’s main criticisms of Kant was that he did not move beyond

Plato since they both render form immobile by attempting to pause change,

alteration, and becoming by instituting a proprietary universality of being. As he puts

it, “the time has finally come to replace the Kantian question, ‘Why is the belief in

such judgments necessary?’ – to realize, in other words, that such judgments must be

believed true for the purpose of preserving beings of a certain type” (translation

slightly modified).72 The preservation (institutionalization) of a particular type of life

requires the appeal to a higher-order cognitive functioning that is necessary and

universal, and which orders experience, and the appeal that Kant makes is to a form

of judgment that is prior to experience (a priori) and which gives us more knowledge

than a simple tautological analytic judgment. In other words, Kant attempts to stall

the becoming of being by appealing to timeless conditions that are outside of, and

beyond, becoming, and thus the instituting of a particular type of order clothed in the

legitimacy of universality. Anybody who disagrees is not endowed with Reason, and

since Reason is a necessary condition in the definition of the human being – and since

it is only the human being who enjoys full rights in the moral order – those who

72 Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil Trans. Judith Norman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 13.

37 disagree do not qualify as being part of the moral order (and all the attendendant rights therein). To anticipate the argument to come, the transcendental method – whether intentionally or inadvertently – is constitutively based on a move toward stasis, since it works to render becoming static by making being depend on unalterable conditions that make it what it is.

1.5 Not only epistemologically but actually real

Let us further examine Kant’s claim that these distinctions are not only contingent and particular, but are in fact necessary and universal. We will do this by starting from time as the more fundamental counterpart to space, insofar as spatial relations (space is the pure form of outer intuition) refer back to the time as the pure form of inner intuition.

Time for Kant is not “real” – it is ideal in the sense that it exists only in the form of an immaterial condition of possibility for the real (as it appears for us, not as it is in itself). Its use determines the appearance of the world, and its existence apart from any actual appearance of the world is not of the same kind as the world, since it is at the genetic origination of the possibility of this world (a condition is not the same as that which it conditions). At first glance, since it is here considered a form of intuition that precedes and determines experience, time may be considered to be subjective insofar as it is at the root of experience, and experience is considered the domain of a subject. But this is not satisfactory; Kant exclaims that this is not merely a subjective account of the world, but is an objective and universalist account of the possibility of

experience at all, no matter where, when, or for whom. Contrary to Hume’s skeptical

account of experience which holds that experience is merely a bundle of sensations,

and causation is nothing inherent in the world but merely due to the psychological

imposition of habit, Kant merges empiricism (knowledge based on experience) and

idealism (knowledge based on principles imposed by the mind) through an appeal to

the logical consistency of the manifold of experience. That there is continuity of

experience, that events in the world happen in logical sequence, is attributed to the

ability of the transcendental conditions to manifest themselves in the objectivity of

the appearance of an external world. This logical consistency is guaranteed through

the appeal to the a priori conditions of experience that are before experience, and as

such, are not reliant on the messiness of the empirical world governed by the senses

for their validity. As he puts it, “a priori principles form the basis of objectively valid,

though empirical, judgments – that is, of the possibility of experience so far as it must

connect objects as existing in nature”.73 Time is a condition of experience, and is

therefore a priori in that it renders experience possible – it acts as the background of

both internal and external experience – by being a pure form of intuition. For Kant,

the senses intuit the external world, but this intuition is possible only because time

(and space) are the form of any and all intuition (time is attributed to the form of

internal intuition, space is the form of external intuition). As such, “[a]t the basis of

their empirical intuition lies a pure intuition (of space and time), which is a priori.

This is possible because the latter intuition is nothing but the mere form of

sensibility, which precedes the actual appearance of objects, since in fact it makes

73 Prolegomena, 47.

them possible”.74 Space and time, thought of as general forms of sensibility, are

required (and in fact presupposed) for the appearance of the objects that we can be

said to be familiar with to be revealed, i.e., everything that can be experienced –

including experience itself – conforms to these two general forms of sensibility.

Subjectivity and objectivity are united within the same constituting consciousness

since the conditions of experience are universal and thus the same results are

attained for everybody – the objective world is the shared world that is constituted

through all particular people whose experience conforms to the same universal

conditions. As conditions of any and all experience, they are not the conditions for

one person’s experience in particular, but are the conditions of experience in general:

if there is experience it will be experience in and under these terms – experience in

other than these terms is not possible.

Now, there is a nascent realism to Kant’s overt transcendental epistemic

caution. Despite the overt intention of the Critique to outright bar this, the reality of

the a priori distinctions between the parts of existence – as exemplified by the

categories – are actually fundamental parts of existence itself. If we say that reality

encompasses all that exists – whether actual or potential, - and that which exists is

real, through this tautological sounding claim, we may make the further claim that

what is universal and necessary is real insofar as 1) it gives rise to what is actually

experienced, and 2) what is actually experienced is mediated by universal and

necessary conditions. If experience is mediated by universal and necessary

conditions, and these universal and necessary conditions are real, since what is

74 Ibid., 25.

universal must be real, it follows that the result of this mediation (i.e., experience),

since mediated by the universal and necessary conditions, is also real. Otherwise we

would say that the universal and necessary conditions give rise to subjective and

contingent experience, which would reflect a failure of the conditions and a fallibility

of the human creature, and which would, in turn, necessitate a reliance on external

authority to attain the truth, which contradicts his explicit stance as articulated in

such texts as the What is Enlightenment? essay.75 But this would be absurd since he

explicitly states The reality of experiential existence is therefore necessitated by the

status of the universal and necessary conditions for experience.

So it is, as it were, that the particularities of individual, subjective experience

are really mediated by universal conditions thereby granting the status of

universality to particularity. It is as though there were a range of possible

experiences encompassed by the universal conditions, and within this range are

contained historically contingent differences such as class. Despite differences in

empirical contingencies, being born at such and such a place and time, the fact is that,

if something is to be classified as having experience it, of necessity, conforms to the

universal conditions for experience. So in a roundabout way, and although Kant

explicitly argues that we cannot say anything about how the thing is in itself, he

implicitly asserts – despite himself – that reality is subsumed under the universal

conditions insofar as the conditions are real, and really part of reality. Reality is such

that there is (il y a), there takes place, a reflection on itself, such that it is split into the

75 Immanuel Kant, “What is Enlightenment” in Cambridge Edition of the Collected Works of Immanuel Kant: Practical Philosophy Trans. Mary J. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

part of it that is given and the other part has givenness for it. Classically, and

simplistically, we can see this as the subject-object dualism, where the subject has

givenness for it, and the object is determined as given for the subject.

Against the letter of Kant, we can reconstruct the terms of the argument as follows:

reality is what is experienced, and what is not experienced – reason’s vocation

beyond the limit of possible experience – is not really real because it does not

conform to experience. Reading Kant against the grain, that is to say, ontologically,

what we realize is that the demarcations he makes between the intuitive receptive

side and the active-practical side are actually two parts of existence as such, and not

only parts of the experience thereof. Being, then, is split between passivity and

activity, and it is this split that forms the basis for the dialectic between knowledge

and action, that is, between stasis and force – the one and the many.76

Given the terms of his argument, how is it that he is able to insist on the

distinction between the intuitive-receptive side and the active-practical side as

though they are two separate parts of existence? As noted above, this rests in his

argument about the universality of the transcendental conditions of experience. Why

is it that the practical side is separated from the epistemic side? He classifies these

two sides as receptive and spontaneous respectively: “Through receptivity an object

is given to us; through spontaneity an object is thought in relation to that given

presentation which otherwise is a mere determination of the mind.”77 The difference

here is between the raw data of receptive experience (which he claims is “a mere

76 This is Fichte’s conception of the absolute subject as a unification of theoretical and practical reason. 77 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason Trans. Paul Guyer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 106.

determination of the mind”), and that data subsequently taken up, and made sense of

by the understanding through its subsumption under a concept, that is, by putting it

to the test of universality. To further clarify the duality, Kant expresses the

distinction thus: “The first is our ability to receive presentations (and is our

receptivity for impressions); the second is our ability to cognize an object through

these presentations (and is the spontaneity of concepts).”78 However, is it not the

case that knowledge is derived from experience, and that experience derives from

one’s action in the world, and from that action running up against the friction that the

world provides in opposition to the whims of the actor? Although for Kant, the

transcendental distinctions (the categories and the concepts of the understanding)

are subjective in the sense that they are a priori (before experience) conditions for

the appearance of experience – rather than for things in themselves – given the

implications of the ‘Transcendental Aesthetic,’ I argue that, following the Hegelian

criticism, they actually have ontological currency. That is, following Hegel’s criticism

of the limit that Kant puts on what we can know – and the basic distinction between

the way things appear for us and how they are in themselves – the position I am

arguing for here is that experience is not simply the result of subjective conditions

imposed on the world, but that the status of these distinctions are nothing less than

ontological, in that they actually touch on reality as it is insofar as they are an attempt

to strive to map the finitude of existential reality. Further, and this is Žižek’s claim,79

it is argued here that reality is constitutively unfinished, and that therefore, the

purely formal temporality that Kant posits as making possible any and all experience

78 Ibid., 105-6. 79 Zizek, 743.

– operative as its formal condition – has a purely mythical status, mythical in the

sense that Horkheimer and Adorno use the term to refer to the Enlightenment’s

dream of reason.80 Temporality, treated as a pure form of intuition, is a conception of

time that works to ossify change by transforming flux into stasis, and thereby

operates to preserve the way things are politically, aesthetically, scientifically, and

ideologically.

Thus far the argument is three-fold:

1) Kant is to be read ontologically; his claims about the conditions of

experience are not only epistemic claims but are, implicitly, claims

about being.

2) a) Since the conditions for possible experience are universal and

necessary, it follows that they are real, i.e., the universal conditions of

experience, and their attendant implications, are part of being itself,

and not only our experience of being.

b) The transcendental condition (mediate givenness) is part of reality

itself.

3) Reality is not-All, constitutively “unfinished” and incomplete (Žižek).

1.6 Appearance is reality

The appearance of actually existing things in themselves are reflective of reality

as it is, and they therefore have ontological status since, as Heidegger puts it, being

80 Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment Trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002).

only arises in the thereness of its reflection on itself through a movement of

veiling/unveiling (aletheia). To use a slightly outdated expression, it is for

consciousness qua consciousness (for the human being) that being qua being arises,

or is given for the finite subject. What this means is that, for the Kant of the Critique of

Pure Reason, there is nothing meaningful outside of the bounds of experience, and

that what can be said to be real is real only for consciousness, i.e., it exists only

insofar as it is amenable to consciousness, and, insofar as it is given to consciousness,

it is real. This implies that if something is not given to consciousness, it is not

experienced at all, and its existence is therefore precluded in advance. But since

consciousness is the result of the transcendental conditions for experience, which go

into constituting the object as it appears for consciousness, consciousness is the

consciousness of the real, and the real is mediated by consciousness.

An example of this is the way Ludwig Feuerbach explains the invention of God;

man invents God and the invention (God) eventually begins to oppress the inventor

(man), and man becomes the servant of his created master.81 This is also the

Frankenstein theme, where Frankenstein knows not what he creates, and the

monster inevitably goes on a killing spree, etc. God – or the monster – is no less real

for being a creation; yet in a sense, God, for Feuerbach, is a fiction that then becomes

real through a form of belief that makes it real by creating a worldview to sustain it

and to bring it into actuality by supporting it, which, in turn, goes into determining

how life is experienced. Another example of this logic is what is called the self-

fulfilling prophecy of social psychology. One has an expectation of how they will be

81 Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity Trans. George Eliot (San Antonio: MSAC Philosophy Group, 2008).

45 received by other people; one acts toward these people in a way that would be appropriate if these people were in fact acting toward one in that way; and then these people begin to act in the expected way, based on the behavior of the original expectation.

What these examples have in common is that they all have the form of a tautological argument – they presuppose what they set out to prove. In a similar way, the Kantian transcendental argument goes something like this: the transcendental conditions of experience make experience possible; everything that can meaningfully be said to exist is experienceable, therefore what exists is experienced. But experience is nothing but the result of the conditions of experience that go into making it what it is. It may be thought that, as an implication of this circular reasoning, one gets what one puts into it. But this is not the case because being itself operates in this way; that is, being demands, and requires, the constituting- constituted operation of the transcendental vocation in order for it to be what it is. As such, being is simultaneously the condition and the conditioned, and the correlation between the two. But since reality is constitutively unfinished, it is forever open and ongoing; therefore the conditions and the conditioned are both finite, and never come to meet up and align with each other.

As such, experience is simultaneously based on and creates what exists as experienceable; what is experienceable in principle, is experienceable for consciousness only; but since consciousness is both the necessary and sufficient condition for determining what exists (since experience is always conscious experience), and what exists is what is experienceable, it follows that what is

46 experienceable is consciousness itself. In this Kantian paradigm, conscious experience is experienced existence and existence itself, but with this caveat: it is only insofar as consciousness is the result of the necessary conditions for experience, and that these conditions are considered universal, that experienced existence, and existence itself, are united. This presupposes that being gives itself to experience and it is only insofar as it gives itself that it exists. But what is the status of the noumenal in all this? Although reality is not-all, and constitutively incomplete, it does not follow that reality is not reducible to what is given. Instead, what is not given is no less part of reality; reality includes within itself its own incompletion, and this incompletion is a result of a radical temporality that blows apart Kantian stasis and renders it a secondary attempt to ideologically complete reality to the primary flux of absolute time. Even Heidegger says that being withdraws, and that his criticism of Western metaphysics as an onto-theological metaphysics of presence, is precisely this: the given is a myth and not all of being is experienceable. In the standard reading, the

Kantian gesture is to posit the noumenal as that which forever eludes the grasp of the transcendental subject, and which is therefore rendered completely nominal, a mere regulative idea that has the status of merely an epistemic claim – a claim about knowing and not about being – which helps him avoid charges of dogmatism, which would of course result if he claimed to extend the epistemic claim to an ontological claim within the terms of the critical philosophy. In this light, we don’t know how being is in itself, but only how it appears to us. But this is the move that undermines itself when he goes on to claim that the conditions of experience are universal, and are therefore necessary. That being is appearance is all that is necessary for the

consistency of his program, but with one caveat: the distinction between the

supersensible and a sensible be inexorably built into, and conditions, any and all

knowledge claims such that they do not extend beyond the imposition (the imposed

conditions) of the transcendental subject.

In one reading, what does not appear – that is, what can never appear since it is

by definition beyond experience – has no place in the Kantian framework. But this

misses the point. In a more nuanced reading, the noumenal, since it is by definition

that which does not appear, but at the same time lets appearance be what it is, i.e., it

lets appearance appear. The noumenal, as that which does not appear, situates the

phenomenal – in the counter-position of itself – as that which appears. This latter

claim is crucial: in order for something to appear something has to dis-appear –

appearance is selective, disjunctive, and interruptive. This is what Heidegger means

when he says that being “withdraws”: it cannot give itself fully as itself all at the same

time since it necessarily unfolds, in an analogous way to the adumbrations that

Husserl cites as the aspectuality of the object’s appearance.82 The appearance of that

which appears presupposes the withdrawal of that which does not appear, and which

can not, in principle, appear. The above use of the term consciousness should be

bracketed, or qualified. What appears, as it appears, may be said to be the result of

consciousness, but consciousness, as in the psychoanalytic paradigm, is always

dependent on the unconsciously non-given aspect of itself, i.e., that which withdraws

from givennes (for Kant, this is the transcendental apparatus itself). The given is the

82 Edmund Husserl, Ideas I Trans. W.R. Boyce Gibson (New York: Routledge, 2012).

appearing, but this is only the surface, since what appears is given only insofar as

something is not given.

This articulation of the relational dependence of the given on the non-given is

uncannily similar to the logic of the Hegelian Master-Slave dialectic. Initially, the

slave is absolutely dependent on the master for its well-being – on a bare level, the

slave avoids death by continuing to work for the master. It is only later, when the

slave realizes that the Master is actually dependent on the Slave that the slave

realizes its freedom through this comprehension. In a similar way, the appearance of

phenomena in the Kantian paradigm is dependent on that which does not appear, i.e.,

Nature in Schelling’s terms.83 For Schelling, it is not enough to posit the

transcendental conditions for experience; we must account for what gives rise to the

possibility of these conditions themselves, and this is the primordial abyss of forces

that actively give rise to the possibility of the possibility for experience as it were.

But what is the status of consciousness here? In the Kantian paradigm,

consciousness is merely the name for the unity of apperception; what this indicates is

that we experience more than is – and can be – unified and elevated to the level of

appearance per se: there is a vastness to the manifold (that which is only in principle

experienceable instead of being actually experienced), and this vastness is given

unity by means of the synthesis of apperception which ties it all together, and as a

result, conscious experience is always the result of this synthesis (which presupposes

the transcendental concepts for the synthesis to take place) and is not possible

without it. Conscious appearance (the appearance of the world as mediated by the

83 F.W.J. Schelling, First Outline of a System of the Philosophy of Nature Trans. Keith R. Peterson (New York: State University of New York Press, 2004).

understanding’s use of the concepts) is treated here as the mark of all possible

experience since, as this thinking goes, if it is not for consciousness it is not

experienceable, and since only what is experienceable – actually or possibly – exists,

it follows that what is not consciously experienceable doesn’t exist – and this

includes Schelling’s Nature which is the materialistic precursor for the

transcendental. “For the world is a sum of appearances; hence there must be some

basis of these appearances that is transcendental, i.e., thinkable”.84 Although this

argument begins with what it sets out to prove, namely, that what is is

experienceable, its very weakness is also its strength. The move that reduces being to

experience, does not, however, go the complete distance, i.e., it does not go as far as

Berkeley for whom to be is to be perceived, because it relies on a crucial qualification,

namely, that something could be thinkable without being known.

The difference between thinking and knowing is simple: I can think many

things, a unicorn, 1 + 1 = 2, the concept of love, but in order to know these things

takes an extra qualification, they must operate under the conditions of the synthetic a

priori. They must conform to the conditions of transcendental knowledge as

determined by the faculties, since it is the faculties that constitute experience as what

it is, and knowledge is of either of two kinds: a priori (before experience) and a

posteriori (after experience). Since we cannot access the noumenal in a purely logical

fashion, a priori, we cannot have knowledge of it, or by means of experience directly,

and although we can think its possibility, we can not know it. For Kant, although many

things can be thought, in order to qualify as having being in the full sense, there is

84 Critique, Pluhar, 657.

50 required something further, the status of knowing (as discovered through synthetic a priori intuition), and it is this qualification that renders most of experience lacking in being. So when Kant says that the noumenal is thinkable without being known, what he is in principle stating is that phenomenal appearance obscures something else: an obscene hidden moment of the phenomenal that is constitutively barred from givenness. This opens up the psychoanalytic paradox: that something can in principle not be knowable yet have existence and operate in such a way – and to such a degree

– that it is constitutive of experience and what can be known, although it is fully operational outside of the bounds of possible experience. If we accept the crude definition of the unconscious as ‘that which determines the subject (and its attendant conscious experience) in the last instance, and from the periphery, it fits perfectly well with the Kantian notion of the transcendental conditions of experience which are not conscious in any empirical sense, but nonetheless completely determine the nature of experience. He thus pulls the negative theological card by exclaiming that we cannot dismiss that which surpasses experience as non-existent, only that nothing could be said of it and it cannot be known. In other words, he holds onto the possibility that there could be a thing that surpasses experience, a thing in itself that is, constitutively, forever out of our grasp. This possibility is thinkable, but, given the finite, limited, conditions of our knowing, it cannot be known. Given what has been stated above, does this mean that the noumenal exists without having being, as though existence just is, while being is something to have and to behold?

Existentially, what this says is that existence precedes being such that to be is to be a modality of existence (and not of being): there is more that exists than has being.

In this Kantian framework, consciousness – as the guarantor of givenness – is

universal, and its results are necessary. It therefore follows that for being to be given

at all, consciousness is required as its minimal necessary condition, and if it is only

the human subject that is endowed with consciousness, it follows that being is given

only to the human subject, which Heidegger famously refers to as Da-Sein (“being-

there”). As indicated above, Kantian consciousness is the result of a synthesis of the

manifold; it is the result of intuition’s conveyance of sensation, which is in turn

schematized by the understanding, and made intelligible by means of the

synthesizing of the manifold of apperception (manifested as the “I think” which

accompanies all thinking). In this sense, consciousness is an achievement, not of this

or that subject, but of subjectivity in general. Although Kant emphasizes the trans-

historical stability of the understanding’s categories/concepts, it is here argued that

it is the process of experience, produced by the fitting of an intuition with a concept,

that is at the basis of the active achievement of coherent experience. And given that

the stability of time – and the resultant coherent experience – rests on, and is

dependent upon, an underlying unstable temporality, the achieved linearity of

experience is contingent, and reality is actually unfinished. Kant is often read as a

mere epistemologist – attempting as he does, to found knowledge on something more

than the metaphysical presupposition of a cogito as in Descartes’ solution, or the

skepticism of Hume’s empiricism.85 This standard reading interprets Kant as seeking

85 Although it is Hume who he credits as prompting his discovery of the synthetic a priori and transcendental philosophy: “I openly confess that my remembering David Hume was the very thing which many years ago first interrupted my dogmatic slumber and gave my investigations in the field of speculative philosophy a quite new direction” (Prolegomena, 5).

to delimit the boundary between reason’s proper and improper use by appealing to

the apodictic laws of thought that do not rely on empirical experience for their

discovery. The very idea of “metaphysical cognition” implies that its sources cannot

be empirical.86 Not only is Kant not a mere epistemologist, but, as an extension of his

project, he propounds an ontology of givenness that arises as a result of the

transcendental method that he deploys. This is best seen through his treatment of

noumena.

There are at least two interpretations of the status of noumena in the Critique of

Pure Reason:

1) “Noumena” is a name for that which can only be posited as falling out of,

surpassing, or otherwise not being registered through the forms of experience, and

therefore, is the result of a complete absence of knowability. In this reading, all that

can be said is that noumena may or may not exist, but this question is otherwise

bracketed and passed over in silence.

2) Noumena are implicated in the objects of experience, but we can not go so far as to

say that noumena cause phenomena. In this way, noumena exist out there in-

hemselves, and we are only privy to a limited, mediated experience of them, but the

exact nature of the correlation will be forever unknown due to the limited scope of

conscious reality. In both cases noumena can only be thought and not known.

The implications of these interpretations are as follows. Noumena can only be

said to be (because, given our limited finite position, we cannot be certain that they

do not exist) but we must remain in ignorance about how it is. There is a positing of

86 Prolegomena, 9.

53 bare existence in the first option; while in the second option the possibility of an unknown but somehow constitutive role is left open. In both cases there is a claim being made about the nature of reality, and not only of our knowledge of reality. That

Reason is limited in its ability to grasp the full nature of noumenal reality is seen by

Kant to be a limit of reason itself, and not of reality. In other words, Kant’s project of transcendentalism is an immanent critique of knowledge, of how it can be said that we to come to gain knowledge of that which can be known. However, despite this standard reading of Kant as merely an epistemologist, it is argued here that there is a third, Hegelian-Žižekian, interpretation of the noumenon which is that noumena do not surpass the phenomena, but are a constitutive part of phenomena, that phenomena are not an appearance of reality but are reality in itself, and that, as such, reality is constitutively incomplete. Kant thus fails to comprehend the realist implications of his project by not taking it far enough; it is not that knowing and being coincide, but that existence surpasses both, and as a result, noumena are built into phenomena, and this noumenal-phenomenal hybrid is – and is not merely reflective of – reality in itself. It took Hegelian philosophy to historicize the transcendental conditions by temporalizing them while preserving their necessity and universal status. In other words, Kant’s project surpasses mere epistemology by extending into claims about reality itself. Although Kant is often read as bracketing real-reality (the in-itself) in the quest to save metaphysics from reason’s tendency to lapse into ungrounded flights of fancy, and to thus be satisfied with attaining a foothold into that which is real for us, his project actually does much more than set out the limits and conditions for knowing. Kant propounds the thesis of human

finitude for the first time in the Western tradition, a finitude that may be said to be a

necessary and sufficient condition for the unfolding of being, as that being for whom

being is at issue.87 It is against this backdrop that the question of time arises, which

for Kant, comes before the sensual-intellectual synthetic division, since it is in fact

presupposed by both. It is for this reason that in the last section of this chapter I will

focus my attention on the way time is transcendental – a pure form of intuition – for

Kant, and why this is important for an understanding of what is meant by

“correlationism” and how it figures in contemporary continental philosophical

debates.

1.7 Time/temporality distinction, or, time taken out of time

One implication of time being taken out of the grasp of the subject and placed in a

transcendental nether-place rendering it simply presupposed, is that it becomes

something that is, properly speaking, not a thing at all – that is, it is rendered a priori

and purely logical. It does not exist alongside other objects, but is in a privileged

position vis-à-vis the object. Having nothing to do with the subject’s being-in-the-

world, the Kantian subject88 turns out to be conditioned by time, the result of time’s

87 See: Heidegger, Being and Time. 88 While the Kantian “subject” is absolutely determined by the transcendental conditions of its actualization, the alternative subject, the subject arising out of the historical nexus of materially contingent relations resembles what Bruno Latour calls “actants”, objects that are determined in and through their relationality with other objects, and the relations between objects, but for that reason, can not be said to be without something resembling agency. In our reading of the temporal actualization of the object, the object is a condensed inherence in time, which simultaneously renders time material and material as the temporally subsisting-inhering object-actant.

55 purely formal status, and not as a subject existing on the same level as time. This is to say, time is put in a different dimension than the historical subject, in the position of its always being presupposed, but never accessible/accessed directly, making it something of a constitutive outside. Time is thus taken out of the scene and rendered purely formal. For Kant, time is not something that one can come to terms with and analyze as one can analyze an object. What this move effectively does is to work to undermine the efficacy of the subject by determining it as existing in time (partes- extra-partes) – and therefore at the behest of time – and not as a subject that exists as time, as simultaneously its inheritor and its generator.

In this latter sense of time – time as both the inheritor and generator of the subject – the subject inherits time in a similar way that Heidegger argues that existence is inherited, i.e., in the mode of thrownness – we do not choose to be born, nor the historical situation in which we are born, but it is this facticity that chooses us. However, it is here argued that time itself (that which we inherit) would remain dependent on the underlying base (i.e., on its inheritor) in order to become itself, to be what it is. There is thus a distinction to be made between the inheritor and the inherited: while the inherited in this case is time itself, the inheritor is both the passive inheritor and the active participant of inheritance – i.e., the co-poietic author of the inherited (in this case time) through the very act of inheritance. It is thus that, on an ontological level, the inheritance of time actually produces time, such that it can be said that time becomes itself only when it inheres and is thus made actual – outside of its inheritance, time is an empty concept, an idle thought about time, or “a regulative ideal”. To activate time, however, requires the bringing of time from the

status of empty epistemological concept into its activation, such that it becomes

temporal, not for this or that subject, but for itself. Contrary to the Kantian critical

transcendentalism expounded above, this alternative approach to time views time as

a properly political concept, as a time that is graspable, taken up, and expounded in

such a way that time remains to be invented. That is to say, when rendered within

reach – as a subject that is the activator/inheritor of time – time is the “stuff” of the

event. In a similar way, Kant says that time is nothing apart from the subject.89 In our

terms this means that time is nothing apart from, and outside of, its material

actualization. When Kant makes the distinction between the empirical and the

transcendental version of time, we submit both to critique, and the result is an

admixture of the two, something akin to Deleuze’s ‘transcendental empiricism’ – the

conditions of possibility for the actual, and not the possible.

Kant explicitly states that “time attaches not to objects themselves, but merely

to the subject intuiting them”.90 In this context, Kant is responding to the criticism

that he is making time into something of an unreal chimera, that is, into something

that is not real, but only a fiction. The accusation is that change is actual, change

presupposes time, so therefore, time is actual. Kant does not deny that time is actual,

experience is actual insofar as it is a subjective manifestation of reality and relates

directly back to the inner form of sensibility. Since any experience of external reality

is related back to the inner form of sensibility – and situated as the manifold of

apperception – it is the actuality of inner sensibility that is ultimately primary.

Through a Cartesian-like argument, he appeals to the apodicticity of inner experience

89 Critique, 89. 90 Ibid., 91.

– it is undeniable that experience is happening (since experience presupposes an

experiencer).91

Instead of the Heideggerian groundless subject (Dasein) coming to be what it is

through existential-decision, time itself requires the underlying substratum of the

subject-individual in order to actualize itself and become what it is. In Hegelese, this

is the concepts movement from externally mediated to internally mediated, i.e., for-

itself. But is this not also the Heideggerian move that makes Dasein identical with

time, albeit the care structure of the three ex-stases as outlined in Being and Time

(§VI)?

When Heidegger characterizes Dasein as the “Between” of birth and death, it is

clear that Dasein does not come to step into, and thereby, actualize an already-

existing spot by filling it in, but rather, Dasein is the “Between” itself. “Da-sein does

not first fill up an objectively present path or stretch ‘of life’ through the phases of its

momentary realities, but stretches itself along in such a way that its own being is

constituted beforehand as this stretching along”.92 As we can see, Dasein actualizes

time, such that it can not be said to be “in” time, but to be “as” time. So in both senses

we can say that Dasein needs time as much as time needs Dasein. In our terms – and

analogously – what this means is that, temporality, as constituting-constituted, is co-

primordial with the coming-into-being of both itself and the object; since it is

inherited by an object, it also inheres-in the object and is determined, as to what it is,

in and through this inherited-inheritor relation.

91 Ibid. 92 Being and Time, 343.

1.8 What is the status of a “subject” that is at once the inheritor and the generator of time?

As alluded to above, it is often the case that Kant is read as a subjective idealist,

an extension of which is the contemporary post-modernist nonsensical play of the

signifier that holds that reality is only as it is experienced by me, and that there is no

reality out there outside of my perception of it. This is precluded by Kant’s appeal to

the universalism of the transcendental conditions of experience; they are not binding

only for me alone, but for every single experiencer qua experiencer; in other words, if

there is to be experience, experience will be had under the universal conditions that

Kant outlines in the Critique of Pure Reason. The argument states that, although there

may be individual differences of perception, the fundamental apparatus remains the

same throughout these differences of perception. This is because these conditions are

necessary, they are before experience (a priori), and they are universal since they are

the formal condition for experience. It must be kept in mind here that experience on

this level is not recognizably experience in the contemporary sense of his or her

experience of race, class, or gender. The latter, the experience of race, class, or

gender, is, in Kant’s terms, conditioned, and are thus made possible by the more

fundamental conditions that make particular experiences possible. Although there

are differences on the empirical level, these differences are conditioned by a

universal plane on the transcendental level.

1.9 Implications of the third interpretation of noumena: Žižek’s “Correlationism and its Discontents”

What are the real stakes in the distinction between noumena and phenomena?

Despite the above two proposed ways of interpreting the distinction between

noumena and phenomena, I offered a third, Žižekian, interpretation. As stated, the

appearance of experience is reliant on something that it is not, i.e., the non-appearing

excess of appearance. Pushed to its conclusion we can say that hidden behind

appearance is nothing, a lack of appearance, but this does not mean that appearance

is All, a totality that includes everything within itself, even the nothingness of its lack.

Appearance, as an ontological category – not the empirical appearance of this or that,

but appearance as such – covers over the absolute lack in appearance; or in

Heideggerian terms, that which shows itself manifests itself in terms of a covering

over of itself qua nothingness. For Heidegger the most authentic ontological moment

is the moment when being is revealed as that which simultaneously gives itself while

withdrawing itself from givenness. In this proposed Žižek-inspired (re-

)interpretation, being – or the real – is that which is not-all; reality is constitutively

unfinished because appearance is a mediation of excess and lack (the noumenal and

phenomenal combined). Appearance is more than nothing but less than something

because – ontologically – there is more than meets the eye, and this more is the

lacking real which exists but is not knowable. So when Kant says that our perception

is not of things in themselves but of things as they are for us, he does not go far

enough because he makes the noumenal into a substantial thing that exists in the

fullness of its being. “But even if we could say anything synthetically about things in

themselves through the pure understanding (which is nevertheless impossible), this

still could not be related to appearances at all, which do not represent things in

themselves”.93 Following this line of thought, appearances do not represent things in

themselves because things in themselves are precisely the spectral nothingness that

existentially operate only to provoke the apparition of appearing. This does not

reduce appearance to a pure spiritual remnant, but rather, asserts the Žižekian

unfinished nature of reality itself.

Kant does, however, provide an intimation of this when, in the ‘Doctrine of the

Elements,’ he discusses the four types of Nothing. Although he does not think it

possible that there is nothing hidden behind appearances, he nonetheless hints at it

when, in the categories that respond to the All, the Many and the One, he highlights

the related but opposing side of “the concept of that which cancels everything out,

i.e., none, and thus the object of a concept to which no intuition that can be given

corresponds is = nothing”.94 The object of a concept: this is the corresponding

content that arises when the transcendental use of the concept is implicated in the

articulated understanding of a sensation. A concept without a corresponding object is

one that intimates the nothing, although in a substantial way, i.e., it makes the

nothing into a substantial something. In the second version of nothing he simply

states “Reality is something, negation is nothing, namely, a concept of the absence of

an object such as a shadow or cold (nihil privativum)”.95 Here, negation is nothing:

93 Critique, Trans. Guyer, 375. 94 Ibid., 382. 95 Ibid.

this is a contradictory statement since the copula “is” connects the subject (negation)

with the predicate (nothing) in such a way that these negative terms are granted

substance through the very form of the proposition. Taken together, these two

version of nothing (the object of a concept without intuition and the concept of an

absence) articulate the substantial nothing – as opposed to the insubstantial

emptiness of the pre-ontological void – that Kant must cling to while glimpsing the

problematic notion of the noumena that haunt the substantiality of appearance. As he

says in the first version (while discussing an object of a concept without intuition)

“noumena [are that] which cannot be counted among the possibilities although they

must not on that ground be asserted to be impossible (ens rationis)”;96 he places

them ambiguously between possibility and impossibility. This highlights the voidal

moment in the structure of the Critique coming to the fore at the same time that he

attempts to keep the abyss of noumena at a distance, while astonishingly

acknowledging the inevitability of the role of nothing in the substantiation of an

articulate something (appearance). It is the subtlety of this acknowledgement that

provides us with an entrance into the way in which the unity of apperception, the

central crux of the experiential form/content, is dependent on a false conception of

temporality where, in the Transcendental Aesthetic, it is reduced it to a pure form of

intuition. Time, which operates in the Critique as a purely formal condition, cancels

out, by displacement, the ontologically unfinished nature of reality in such a way that

reality is made to conform to a transcendentally-mediated atemporal temporality – a

form of time that sits at the backdrop of all possible experience as the ultimate

96 Ibid.

presupposed horizon acting as the guarantor of an imposed stasis. Time as a pure

form of intuition dismisses the possibility of a radical contingency of time, a

contingency that opens time up to its utmost possibility of evental rupture, whereby

it can be said to overcome itself by actualizing itself in and as heterogeneous

multiplicity. As early as Hegel’s critique of Kant’s ahistorical formalism, the limitation

of the Noumenal-Phenomenal division is seen to displace the otherness of experience

by reducing it to nonsense, thereby attempting to put it out of play. However, it is the

very nature of finitude – of the non-All nature of reality – that demands a radical

contingency at the heart of being, such that any notion of transcendental conditioning

must take into account the historical conditioning of the conditions and the

multiplicity of evental sites for the actualization of the temporal bias. How can this be

possible within the framework of the Critique? It is Kant’s initial discovery, and

subsequent abandonment, of finitude that we will take as our guide for the analysis

of how Kant de-temporalizes time by cutting off the lack of being/knowledge from

consideration.

1.10 What is called finitude?

On a first indication, the finite is that which is opposed to the infinite, and the

reverse, the infinite is the obverse of the finite. This statement, that finitude is the

opposite of the infinite – that they are mutually exclusive concepts – is incomplete,

since it does not clarify what the terms are, but only states that they are mutually

exclusive. If, however, we go further and say that the infinite is without limit, by

63 implication, this would be to state that the finite is limited. For something to have a limit is for something to have an end; thus, the infinite is endless, while the finite is defined by its end. There are, however, two types of end: a telos and an abrupt break

– while the latter simply states that there is a stopping point in relation to the beginning (the beginning begins while the end ends by putting a stop to what the beginning began), the former indicates a goal for which striving attempts to actualize.

We may provisionally say that both senses are true when it comes to finitude; while the former end (abrupt break) is contained within the definition of the finite in distinction with the infinite, the latter is less easy to admit to without further evidence. The end as telos requires some further argumentation to establish the pretext of an end that is the goal toward which a striving progressively moves. These analyses are, while perhaps helpful for clarifying the concept of finitude, lacking in their relevance for clarifying the stakes of finitude in Kant’s discourse and what the precise link to time may be.

Earlier the claim was made that finitude is linked to ontology in the sense that

Kant’s description of epistemological conditions actually have ontological purchase by being – essentially – claims about being itself. That is, since the knower of epistemology is finite in that it has an end in both senses (the knower who seeks knowledge is limited in the knowledge that has been already attained, if it wasn’t, it would be infinite and not in need of coming to terms with the acquisition of more knowledge and the conditions of knowledge; and it is teleological since the goal is the attainment of ever more knowledge and its clarification), the finitude of the knower, who seeks after knowledge, is actually a part of, and a moment of being. Thus we may

state that the epistemological vocation, namely the seeking after the attainment of

knowledge, is fundamentally premised on a lack (of knowledge), and as lack, there is

a limit to the knowledge the seeker after knowledge has. The knowledge that is

sought is not knowledge of that which does not exist, but of necessity, the seeker

after knowledge seeks knowledge of that which exists, and that which exists is.

Therefore, the seeker after knowledge (the entire epistemological enterprise) is

intimately connected with ontology, about the nature of reality itself.

As constituted through the different faculties transcendentally at work

producing experience, the human is at the end of the resultant activity of these

faculties. As such, “[a] finite, knowing creature can only relate itself to a being which

it itself is not, and which it also has not created, if this being which is already at hand

can be encountered from out of itself”.97 The finite creature is in such a way that there

is given, over and against it, a being for which this finite creature is as the locus of

arising and out of which the given is provided. The given is that which appears over

and against the finite being; it is that being’s double insofar as the given is given for

this finite creature. Furthermore, there must be a pre-ontological ‘knowledge’

already in place that is initially capable of recognizing the being that the finite

creature is not. Heidegger explicitly states that finite creatures require a basic

characteristic, which he calls the “faculty” of “turning toward” which thereby “lets-

[something]-stand-in-opposition” (Ibid.). The basic structure of the finite creature is

thus the “turning toward,” since what it turns toward is something that it is not; this

implies an end since where the finite creature ends, that which it is not, begins. This

97 Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, 50.

65 also hints at the primacy of intuition in Kant’s first Critique; although heavily steeped in the language of Reason, Understanding, apodictic certainty, synthetic a priori, etc., the transcendental aesthetic precedes the transcendental logic both chronologically in the text and logically since the basic structure of what Kant describes – experience

– is the experience of the finite creature which is defined by its turning toward otherness and letting x stand in opposition. And it is also in this way that Kant’s discourse is more than epistemological since the basic characteristic of turning toward and letting stand in opposition require a being which stands in opposition. To reverse it, the being standing in opposition, in Heidegger’s account, requires its having been turned toward and set forth as standing in opposition for it to properly appear in its being, that is, to appear as that which is. This gesture is called “intuition” in Kant, and as pure forms of intuition, time and space are the absolute horizon for anything at all to appear (including appearance itself).

Finitude, then, has to do with end, limit, turning toward, etc. What all these terms have in common is the necessary lackingness of this term: as opposed to infinitude, finitude lacks the endlessness of that which is without end. In this sense finitude is indistinguishable from striving, since to be in lack is to require something that is not present. The basic gesture of turning toward implies that there is a something that is turned toward; since this something cannot be said to pre-exist the turning toward that constitutes it, that which is lacked, and made manifest through the gesture of turning toward, is co-related and co-primordial with the turning toward such that it arises – as appearing – at the same time as the turning toward turns toward.

What is at stake here is the status of experience in terms of its connection to truth as well as the knowledge derived thereof. Against Hume’s skepticism, Kant attempts to ground experience in what he considers necessary categories that determine experience, but which are not themselves dependent on experience for their constitution. The transcendental condition sets the stage, as it were, for the presentation of intuition to be represented, and thus to be made into a mediated image of the original intuition. These two forms, sensibility and understanding, are brought together into a higher unity whose ideal is the Idea of Reason. The unity of apperception, however, is also the unit of experience, that is, an experience that is at once normative and coherent. However, the achievement of this normativity and coherence can not be taken for granted since it is not given readymade but rather, takes time for it to come about. This time-taken is the ultimate presupposed, but never explicitly thematized, operative horizon which Kant treats as though it is outside of time, or at least it is not thought through directly. The unity of apperception is achieved by means of a particular temporal constitution that takes up time and renders it discretely finite and thus livable. This latter, the living experience of the specious present is the phenomenological moment, which is itself dependent on this more primordial achievement of unity based on time as the underlying basis for any and all unity. What this means is that experience is nothing given in advance but is only actual insofar as there is an operation taking place that synthesizes the disparate aspects of the manifold and renders it coherent; and further, it is time that is the necessary condition for this operation – and any operation at all – to take place.

Time, then, is not the result of experience, nor is experience something that arises as

the result of time, but time is that which is more than experience and less than

nothing. Less than nothing does not mean here that it has no efficacy, that it is a zero

since we cannot touch it, weight it, or sense it; rather, less than nothing, borrowed

form the title of Žižek’s book of the same name, recognizes the not-all nature of

reality by being and remaining open to the constitutive lack that resists

appropriation into constituted reality. Reality is incapable of being totalized, and

therefore, any notion of reality as completely contained within the domain of a form

of time that is absolutely determining (a pure form of intuition) is already to

presuppose a totality (All) of experience. Just as reality is not finished, time itself is

not ready-made, complete in itself, and even regular. To the contrary, contingency is

itself contingent, it cannot be reduced to calculable possibility; it is therefore

multiple, always more than its singular manifestation, and open to its displacement

into alternative formation. As opposed to Kant’s purely formal notion of time, it is

here argued that time is the name for the becoming of being, but with this difference:

if being is becoming (unstable, ongoing, non-static), time is the essence of that which

is, and since time is always more than itself and less than nothing, it operates as the

outplace of splace,98 the disruptive force that transcends singular existence by

rendering it universal. Since that which is can only be said to be insofar as it is in

time, the negativity of being is built into it as its openness to what it is not. Sartre

called this the nothingness of human existence, or the emptiness of the for-itself as

opposed to the fullness of the in-itself (being). If the in-itself is full material being, the

for-itself is the negative element of the in-itself, the concept of pure movement and

98 Alain Badiou, Theory of the Subject Trans. Bruno Bosteels (New York: Continuum, 2009).

displacement, and it is here that it is argued that this displacing nothingness is time

itself. But time is not complete in itself; it is, instead, less than nothing, or pre-

negative: time is a hole in nothingness which means that time is not something

stable, but is itself in becoming.

But how is it that nothingness can be said to be in becoming, since this would

seem to imply, at the bare minimum, the becoming of something? Time always

actualizes; it lapses into being (Schelling) and carries its effect in its wake. In contrast

to the Kantian knowledge-based economy, Schelling’s is an activity-based becoming –

“through a productive, realizing power; not through knowledge but through action”.99

Becoming becomes, or time is. What this means is that time is a name for the

transition from virtual potentiality into actuality such that time itself comes to be

actualized as this transition. It is only a finite creature that requires the constitution

of a unity that forms the basis for its continuity in space/time, and as the most

fundamental pure form of intuition, time is at the basis of this continuity.

1.11 What, then, is Correlationism?

It is precisely the central status of finitude that is called into question in

Meillassoux’ groundbreaking text After Finitude.100 Given the rise of theoretical

quantum physics, and the speculative-realist impulse found therein, Meillassoux calls

99 Schelling, xxvi. 100 In a personal communication with Slavoj Žižek at the European Graduate School, he believes that the publication of Meillassoux’ text marks a big event in continental philosophy because of its clarification of the problematic that has haunted it since at least Kant’s transcendental turn.

on philosophy to answer for itself, given its human-centric limitations. What happens

when we ask the question about how reality was before the rise of human

consciousness, and how will it be after? What is the status of any statement that

attempts to answer it? Further, “how can transcendental philosophy (for which all

reality is subjectively constituted) account for statements about natural processes

which occurred prior to the rise of humanity from the beginning of our universe (the

Big Bang) to fossils from the early stages of life on earth?”101 The problem is that

transcendental philosophy, and those that follow in its footsteps (including

postmodernist theories of language, hermeneutics, and all variants of “always-

already” “being-in-the-world”), is incapable of accounting for itself as a contingency

in the grand scheme of things. This is reminiscent of Husserl’s remark that he is not

interested in genetic phenomenology (how consciousness arises in the first place),

but only in how it is, resulting in doctrines of the universality and even eternality of

consciousness. That Kantian philosophy is incapable of providing an adequate

response to this question within the terms of its philosophy, helps to highlight its key

limitation. Although there has been many critics (including Hegel) who have been

critical of the ahistorical nature of transcendental philosophy as propounded by Kant,

Meillassoux goes further by including, not just history (and the related critique that

the transcendental conditions are historically determined) but the thought-being

correlate itself. One cannot think a reality independent of thought, because to think it

is already to make it dependent on thought. For transcendental philosophy, finitude

is the ultimate horizon of our thought in its relation to being. Žižek quotes Heidegger

101 Žižek, 625.

in a letter from around 1920: “I often ask myself – this has for a long time been a

fundamental question for me – what nature would be without man – must it not

resonate through him in order to attain its ownmost potency?”102 Heidegger is here

repeating the onto-theological claim that God comes into his own through reflective

recognition of his creation; Hegel sums this up best when he claims that Spirit and

matter coincide such that matter becomes conscious, and nature becomes aware of

itself, thus vindicating the dark recesses of its past silence. Although this quote

approximates the correlationist concern, it ultimately bypasses the main problem by

following in the footsteps of the Aristotelian teleological tradition which holds that

the eternal form comes to complete material nature by actualizing its potential.

Heidegger’s “being-in-the-world” exemplifies the correlative dependence of nature

on its always already interpreted historico-cultural situatedness.

“Correlationism” stands for the self-referential claim that there is nothing

outside of that which can be thought, since, if it was thought outside of thought, it

would have been thought, and this, of course, is a contradiction. It reduces being to

thought, and thought to its conditions (whether transcendental, historical,

discursive-embodied), presentation is always represented, and there is no access to

extra-discursive reality. It is self-referential, since, the subject – thought – is at once

the subject and the predicate: the outside of thought is in fact mediated by thought,

since to posit thought qua outside-thought is already to think it. This problem – in the

sense that it exposes a certain formulation of the intersection of the epistemological-

ontological – may be posed in terms of the object (that which exists outside of the

102 Ibid.

subject as both being and the object of knowledge) and the object’s representation

(which is for the subject). For the object to be adequately, and verifiably, represented,

there would require an hypothetical comparison between the object as it is outside of

representation, and the representation of the object. This comparison would reveal

whether or not the representation adequately re-presents the object. The problem is,

in the post-Kantian transcendental era, the subject only has access to its

representation, and cannot interrogate the object outside of representation to verify

the adequacy of the representation in terms of the presented object. Having access

only to its representation of the object, the subject is left in its own way, cut off from

the object as it is in itself, that is, as it is outside of its representation for the subject.

As Meillassoux makes clear, the “solitary” subject whose representational adequacy

of the object is barred from being confirmed or denied by a subject who would be

able to step outside of itself in order to acquire an “objective” viewpoint, is

supplanted by the “universal” judgment of the community of judgers who come to a

consensual agreement that a knowledge claim is adequate or not.103 In other words,

the correspondence between the proposition and the object of knowledge is

exchanged for the criteria of a community-based coherence version of knowledge,

that does not depend on whether or not the knowledge claim adequately

corresponded to the object in itself – all that matters is that the normative value of

the propositional claims are upheld. It is in this context that Meillassoux introduces

the term “correlationism” which he defines as “the idea according to which we only

ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never to either

103 Meillassoux, 4.

term considered apart from the other”.104 As a further caveat, Meillassoux extends

the philosopheme to include the impossibility of grasping “a subject that would not

always-already be related to an object” (ibid.).105 By this latter he includes the

hermeneutic-historic subject who finds itself as a product of its historical

circumstances (e.g. Dasein) and the linguistic turn in all its variants (whose

watchword may be summed up thus: it is not I that speaks but language that speaks

through me).

Although Meillassoux’ claim is one that is said to apply to the entire

history of Western Philosophy – at least since Kant’s so-called Copernican Revolution

– I will look at what it means in terms of the basic tenets of Kantianism as outlined in

the Transcendental Aesthetic.

The basic assertion of this section of the text is: we have access only to the

appearance of the object and not the object as it is in itself. The appearance is how it

is for the subject. It is for the subject because the subject is dependent on the a priori

conditions for the appearance, which is to say, the object appears only within the

limits of the subject’s conditions for experience, and these conditions determine the

way in which the object is to appear. These conditions are transcendental in the

sense that they exist independently of, and before,106 the appearance, and actually

make the appearance what it qualitatively is, i.e., how it manifests itself. These

104 Ibid., 5. 105 Ibid. 106 This “before” is logical and not temporal. Temporally, since the experience in question is not particular, i.e., it is not the experience of this or that particular person, it is, rather, the question of the possibility of empirical experience in general. In this way it is called “transcendental” – and a priori – because it is prior to experience, but goes into making experience what it is, and insofar as the latter is the case, it is cotemporaneous with experience (not temporally prior).

conditions are thus constitutive of appearance – experience is dependent on them

(and can not exist without and apart from them) but the conditions are not

dependent on experience.

In order for the object to appear at all it must appear as part of the vastness of

the manifold of appearance. The manifold is not limited to the object alone, but is the

background – or empty space – for the object to arise. The manifold is made possible

by space and time as the pure forms of sensibility, which are presupposed for any

and all appearance to arise. The manifold is made possible by the pure forms of

intuition – space and time. Pure intuition is distinguished from intuition in that the

pure is a priori – prior to and not dependent on experience. Pure in this sense means

transcendental – it is in the position of condition and independent of conditioned.

Space and time, as pure forms of intuition, can not be objects alongside other objects

because these objects would be contradictory, or have contradictory roles: they

would exist as both condition and conditioned – condition for other objects around

them, and conditioned by themselves. The absurdity of this scenario is that one

object should act as condition for another object, while existing on the same plane as

that other object.107 It is absurd because, by definition, without transcendental

conditions, objects would not appear at all, since in this scenario, the conditioned

would not exist apart form its conditions. This is why a distinction between

conditioning and conditioned is required, viz., as both – the transcendental and the

empirical – having separate planes. The distinction is necessary insofar as the

107 As a side note, it should be pointed out that this is very close to what is upheld in Graham Harman’s object oriented philosophy.

transcendental is not empirically contingent, but renders the empirical plane

possible in the first place.

The conditions exist apart from, and are unaffected by, the conditioned. The

conditioned is appearance, and appearance is the appearance for experience, while

experience is made possible by the a priori conditions of experience, namely the pure

forms intuition: space and time – space as the pure form of extensive magnitude, time

as the pure form of inner intuition. Time is the basis of the extended magnitude of

space since, in order to achieve the content of experience as appearance, the (inner)

actuality of the subject is required. But the subject is only the unity of apperception

actualized as the “I” that accompanies all thought. The unity of apperception is

accomplished on the basis of the pure forms of intuition, and since time is the basis

for space – external intuition refers back to internal intuition as the seat of

experience – the unity of apperception requires a domesticated form of time as its

stabilizing force.

Chapter 2:

Mediation and Cultural Transcendentalism: The NFL Concussion and South Park

2.1 Introduction

This chapter uses Foucault’s notion of the historical a priori to account for the prevalence and impact of the discourse surrounding concussions in football, both empirically (including the frequency of its being mentioned in media and elsewhere), and as part of an implicit level of heightened awareness. I argue that the concussion is transcendentally constituted, that is, it is made possible by an underlying cultural arrangement of pre-individual forces. As a result of this transcendental constitution, its status as a component of reality is contingent and constitutively contestable. Following

Žižek’s claim that reality is “incomplete” (and therefore unfinished and always already underway), the transcendentalism Foucault upholds is non-Kantian in that – paradoxically – its conditions are not universal and necessary, but are, instead, historical and contingent. I use concussion as a cultural example to illustrate the material-historical (transcendental) conditions of possibility that go into making it what it is, including the macro, micro, implicit and cultural-transcendental rules that make the football world the bearer of a form of life.

As part of this analysis I wish to further address the ways in which a medicalized object of analysis (in this case the concussion) is a resultant product of a particular socio- cultural matrix of meanings, ideas, and unconscious notions. Furthermore, I will move

76 toward an explanation of how these meanings and ideas may be said to be transcendentally constituted.

To accomplish this I utilize a range of methodological and theoretical pieces, including Harold Garfinkel’s ethnomethodology, Wittgenstein’s language games and

Foucault’s archaeology, to configure a theoretical platform from which to analyze the becoming-object of the phenomena of the concussion. From an empirical perspective, the concussion is viewed as a problem that arises from the violent nature of the game of football, and the characteristics of the phenomena could be listed (immediate cognitive dysfunctions, disorientation, nausea, blurred vision, headache, etc.), and its progressive stages could be predicted (drawing the link from head injury, to chronic concussion, to chronic traumatic encephalopathy CTE). However, the truth of these analyses notwithstanding, they are part of a larger framework (or what Foucault calls épistémè) that transcendentally accounts for their conditions of possibility, but which are nonetheless coextensive with the empirical level. I call these precedents “cultural” since they are responsible for constituting the larger milieu of networked and symbolic meanings.

Underlying even these is a level of impersonal pre-individual108 singularities and forces in contestation with each other, which acts as the ultimate ungrounded ground

(Ungrund) of, and for, the arising of cultural artifacts (of which the concussion is here considered an example). Pre-individuality is the incipient state of becoming before the constitution of a recognizable entity. In this sense one may say that affect is pre-individual because it is prior to emotion.109 I argue that on this level, the level of transcendental cultural constitution, the arrangement of power dynamics (and their attendant political

108 See discussion of Gilbert Simondon below. 109 See Brian Massumi’s Parables for the Virtual.

77 configurations) are indeterminate and therefore – since the actual institutional arrangement of social forces are contingently based on the modes of actualizing the transcendental conditions of possibility (which themselves are in flux) – (social) reality is left open for other (or ‘better’) actualizations.

Since it is on the basis of the transcendental level that political actualities, and the discursive formations that act as their underpinnings, and support, are formed and transformed, the question of how to reactivate politics by reaching into the transcendental conditions of possibility for the constitution of the actual political situation is a substantial one. Along these lines, I address the potentiality for reconfiguring the political (as the site of power) by appealing to a type of comedic humor that critically operates on the basis of the transcendental level of discourse by interrupting the flow of said discourse by staging an active intervention into it. This, I propose (following a stream of German Idealism), makes the transcendental reflexively self-conscious and critical of itself.110 In particular, I look at an episode of South Park (S16E08) that addresses the issue of the “concussion crisis” on the level of its discursive transcendental constitution, and, following Ted Gournelos,111 look at the tactics it utilizes for its intervention. By specifically addressing discourse on the transcendental level, I argue that the show looks to achieve a critical transcendentalist reconfiguration of the political imaginary by opening it up to a reflexive awareness of its own conditions of potentiality.

110 As will be seen later, this quasi-self consciousness is activated through the experience of the viewer as embodied actualization of the discourse. 111 Ted Gournelos. Popular Culture and the Future of Politics: Cultural Studies and the Tao of South Park (Maryland: Lexington Books, 2009).

2.2 The Concussion as a Symptom of the Need for ‘Cultural Change’

In his Foreword to the 2012 Health and Safety Report, Roger Goodell, the commissioner of the National Football League, begins by explaining that “[w]e continue to make significant strides in promoting a culture of safety for NFL players and, through our leadership, for football players and other athletes of all levels” (emphasis added).112 The word “culture” is used many times throughout the report, always in the context of the need for a raising of awareness through a concerted effort in education, dialogue and monitoring.113 The emphasis on “health” and “safety” indicates a renewed114 interest in promoting an ideal image of safety to counter-balance the violent reputation the sport has often carried with it.115 As such, “[t]he NFL has made health and safety an integral part of the culture of football, and a vital component of the game itself”.116 To make good on this promise, the campaign to actively spread this “culture” has been extended into the Pop

Warner youth football organization as well as the NCAA college level. These efforts crucially include the way the game is perceived by the public. Given the self-conscious attempt to change the “culture” of the game – both on the physical level of how it is played, and on the mediated-cognitive level of how it is perceived – it is implied that, as of writing the report, there is no such culture of “health” and “safety” in place. Furthermore, the very

112 Ralph Goodell. NFL Health & Safety Report Fall 2012. http://www.nflevolution.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/FINAL-NFL-Fall- 2012-Health-Safety-Report.pdf Accessed October, 2012. 113 Ibid., 4. 114 At least since the union of the two leagues in the 1960s. 115 “Football is a continuation of war by other means.” (Thomas B. Morgan, Esquire, October 1965) in Michael Oriard. Brand NFL: Making & Selling America’s Favorite Sport (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 1. 116 Ibid., 6.

79 existence of this campaign suggests that it is deemed necessary to “build” a culture through educational initiatives, and the formation of medical research sharing committees.117

Although this document may be dismissed as the empty rhetoric of a public relations campaign118 driven by the need to clean up the NFL’s image119 – it also marks a major shift in the way the sport is imagined and practiced, especially in terms of the role it plays in contemporary North American consciousness. The 2012 Health and Safety Report is part of a larger shift in consciousness, buttressed by the available diagnostic technology, of a heightened awareness of sports-related brain injury and the long-term effects these have on players in their post-football lives. Through this technology a link between concussive symptoms and chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a degenerative brain disease characterized by visible plague build-up (tau), has been established.120 While these findings make a case for the dangers of football on an empirical level by appealing to scientific evidence, this is only the surface. The cynical argument is that it has been in the NFL’s financial best interest to downplay the link between football and head injury, since its exposition would lead to extra financial care for post-NFL players, and the prospect of lowering the level of credibility through preventive rule changes.121 As this reasoning goes,

117 Ibid., 7. 118 Paul M. Barrett. “Will Brain-injury Lawsuits Doom or Save the NFL?” in Bloomberg Businessweek 31/01/13. http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-01-31/will-brain- injury-lawsuits-doom-or-save-the-nfl Accessed October, 2012. 119 Following the launch of several hundred class action lawsuits representing over three thousand former players against the league for damages associated with a previous lack of measures put in place to help avoid unnecessary head injury, the league has taken measures to ensure its public persona shifts to one concerned with health and safety. 120 Gary W. Small, et. al. “PET Scanning of Brain Tau in Retired National Football League Players: Preliminary Findings” in American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry. 21.2, 2013. Pp. 138-144. 121 These preventive rule changes have essentially manifested themselves in fines against defensive players making illegal hits. One such player, who has been fined several times for

80 since the NFL is a multi-billion dollar industry, any damage to its reputation could translate into hundreds of millions of dollars.

The 2012 Health and Safety Report is therefore a product of a public relations campaign fitting for such a prospect. However, it is more than this. The very wording of the

Report (“culture change”) indicates that it is the symptom of a larger set of issues and tendencies which cannot be reduced to the terms of the already-constituted political situation. While the NFL has permanently altered the rules of the game in the hopes of lowering the probability of traumatic brain injury, other more implicit rules have also been altered but which go unseen.

These unseen rules are part of the constituting process of what Raymond Williams calls “a particular way of life”.122 A particular way of life may be summarized as a shared group of meanings, conventions, and general understandings of the world, and one’s place in it. The important thing about Williams’ conception of a particular way of life is that it is always in process, largely unconscious, and socio-historical: a particular way of life is made possible by the contingent historical conditions that make it possible. While a way of life is governed by a set of rules that make it coherent, it is not a finished product any more than the rules are. Analogously, the game of football is overtly constituted as a set of rules (some of which may be altered in the service of making it safer) but underlying these are more subtle conditions that make even the notion of “rule” possible in the first place.

tens of thousands of dollars, is ironically, but legally, changing his name = from Donte Whitner to Donte ‘Hitner’. 122 Raymond Williams. “The Analysis of Culture” in Cultural Theory and Popular Culture nd 2 ed. Ed. John Storey (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1998), 48.

An example of one such rule change is that pertaining to kickoffs.123 Previously used the kicking team kicked from the 30 yard-line, but beginning in the 2012 season, kickoffs are now taken from the 35 yard-line (the extra 5 yards prompts more kick returners to opt to take the “touch back.”124

2.3 Games, Rules and praxis

Like any institutional activity, whether a game, a court session, or an academic class, football relies on a set of rules – both explicit and implicit – which contribute to its preservation through repetition. However, rules are not always explicitly stated in order to operate as part of the foundational architecture of an institution. In fact, the invisible and implicit rules – which do not require a conscious acknowledgement – are more important than the overt rules since they act as the condition of possibility for the latter. Action on their behalf happens spontaneously. It is only when these rules break down, or are disrupted in some way, that the implicit rules governing social interaction come to the fore and are rendered visible and explicit.125

In defining the concept “game” we may say that a necessary condition for a game is the existence of set of rules. The game of American football developed as a collegiate sport in the late 19th century126 out of English-style Rugby and soccer. In the early formative

123 An extreme version of this is the call to get rid of kick offs – and punts – altogether. 124 It is called a safety when the kick returner opts to take a knee in his own end-zone, instead of run the ball out and attempt to gain better field position. A safety automatically results in ball position at the 20 yard line. 125 This is similar to Wittgenstein’s position regarding the rule-governed nature of language. 126 Michael Oriard. Reading Football: How the Popular Press Created an American Spectacle (North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 26. Before 1869 (the

82 years, the rules were under constant revision, especially in the years between 1876 and

1894.127 “Fewer than a dozen young men, all representing elite universities and relatively privileged classes, controlled the game during these crucial early years of its development.”128 In the case of American football, the rules proliferated as they attempted to account for – and frame – the irregularities that the “brutality”129 of the game permitted.

However, in a game such as professional football – where players ‘live’ the game to such an extent that the game becomes ‘who’ or ‘what’ they are as players – the basic rules governing the parameters of the actual game are secondary in importance compared to the implicit rules governing the micro-political aspects of being a player of football within the culture of football. In other words, and paradoxically, a mastery of the actual on-field rules

– and the required skills to make the NFL – are less more important than a mastery of the underlying rules (in the form of norms and customs), whose importance begins at the very beginning of a player’s early engagement with the game. Although the surface rules (the macro-logic found in the rule book, including the basic definitions and how points are scored) are actively enforced and made explicit by a group of officials, these become so naturalized that the game would not risk losing its basic consistency coherence if physical referees were not present for a match. In fact, before the game crystallized into its present- day form, there were no referees at all, with the captains of each team negotiating the legitimacy of plays under dispute. Michael Oriard argues that this gentlemanly version of

first formal meeting between Princeton and Rutgers), an English style Rugby version of the game was played informally for decades. 127 Ibid., 30. 128 Ibid. 129 Concern with the violent nature of the game was a concern from the beginning as evidenced by Walter Camp’s – the attributed founding father – early intervention into outlawing “flying wedges and other mass-momentum plays” (32).

83 officiating could be attributed to the larger differences between British and American history. Whereas England has a long history of legal precedent, America has no such history, and therefore must make up the rules as they go along. This can be extrapolated to represent larger, more fundamental structures including: tradition vs. free enterprise, the

British respect for the crown vs. American “exceptionalism” (where the goal is to find a way around the rules).130 Due to the crystallization of the underlying set of micro rules, which form a web of implicit presuppositions silently operating to ensure the coherence of the actual game action, these rules are presupposed by the macro rules, and act as the latter’s condition of possibility. Thus it is my contention that, given the implicit set of rules operating unconsciously – and which contribute to the creation of the underlying culture of the game, including micro-level activities and interactions, as well as pre-individual singularities – football is more than a set of explicit and implicit rules, and may be said to actually constitute a world. Just as the game could be imagined to function autonomously in the absence of physical referees, this autonomy is reinforced by the overall structure of the world of football, and is part of the conditions of possibility for the actual entities (i.e., players) that come to populate this world, and interact on its basis.

We can thus outline four levels of rules.

1) Macro Rules.

These include the overt rules that making the game what it is in terms of its

basic parameters, as well as the fundamentals of how it is played and what the

objective is.

2) Minor Rules.

130 Ibid., 27.

These are the rules within and underlying the fundamental rules, which govern

proper play and include descriptions of how to reach the basic objectives

including the requisite offensive and defensive formations, rule-infractions and

penalties. Amendments to macro rules fall into this category.

3) Implicit Rules.

Underlying other two types, these rules131 resemble the first two more in name

than in kind. They operate beneath the surface of the game, and are indicative

of the presuppositions that go into forming expectations concerning behavior,

both in oneself and others, as well as the series of attitudinal dispositions,

implicit understandings of what is normal, and acceptable behavior.

4) Cultural Rules.

These are invisible (they literally pre-exist visibility because they are on the

pre-individual level) and transcendentally constitutive. While the pre-individual

level conditions the actual manifestation of the football world, the actual

manifestation can, in turn, influence the tendency of the pre-individual level’s

potential force. Pre-individual and pre-personal, these forces make up the

underlying basis of actualities, which become/are cultural artifacts. They also

provide the conditions for perception, knowledge, as well as the discursive

formations that come to act as their basis. Pre-personal forces are

transcendentally implicated affordances.132

131 The use of the term “rule” to indicate presuppositions, expectations and attitudinal dispositions is part of the larger argument about the nature of rules, namely that are part of a much larger historico-cultural apparatus as their condition of possibility. 132 See Gilbert Simondon’s L’individuation Psychiqhe et Collective for an explanation of how perception arises on the basis of pre-perceptual, affective forces that later crystallize

Despite the contingency of circumstance (every spatio-temporal exemplification differs from all others), the macro-micro rules of the game may remain the same even though, within these rules, there is room for alteration without the risk of changing the game itself. Despite the fact that these macro rules are obvious – anybody who attempts to watch a football game must have some familiarity with them in order for the game to make sense – they are nevertheless formally necessary for the way the game is played. Minor rules are less obvious, but no less implicated in everyday activities and the culturally-disseminated meaning affordances of cultural objects in recognizable ways.

In contrast, implicit rules are invisible, and although they are not obvious from the perspective of the user, they are no less constitutive of the game. This is the type of rule that governs the conventions of the game, not only the way macro and minor rules are interpreted and mobilized as part of the larger strategizing that goes into game management, but also the way players view themselves, their roles, and the others around them and the institution(s) in which they find themselves. Included in these conventions are the normal interactions between players and coaches, the ways in which players interact with other players and as well as opponents, and the way participants (players, coaches and officials), broadcasters (television networks, sports journalists, etc.) and fans think about, and imagine, the game in terms of what it represents, and how it is related to other aspects of life.

Cultural rules are ingrained and operative on a much more intimate level than are the others, but although they are invisible, they nonetheless have a large impact on the way the game is played, talked about, imagined, etc., That is, not only do they have an immense influence on the mundane narrative structures utilized for commenting on the trajectory of

into (the process of) individuation. For Simondon, being is analog: a continuum of phases instead of a compartmentalism of states.

86 the season and the playoff picture, but they operate at the most fundamental levels of the very meanings that are made possible by these implicit presuppositions, and which go into making what may be called the culture of the game.

An example of the levels of rules as they interact in practice, is provided by Dona

Schwartz’s Contesting the Superbowl – a compilation of photography and commentary – produced with a media pass to Superbowl XXVI (1992), which documents the construction of the spectacle of the Superbowl. As a member of the journalistic press core (and a media academic) she was granted access to off-stage and exclusive events instrumental in the production that went into the construction of the event – before, during, and after the actual game. Utilizing the photos at her disposal, Schwartz explains how the image – both physical and discursive – is carefully manicured and maintained on a multiplicity of levels and official capacities including the NFL itself, the Superbowl’s host city, and the corporate media to name a few.

Quoting the officially circulated NFL Media Relations Playbook (which details how players ought to conduct themselves when in the public spotlight) she reads “a great deal of the impression you make in television interviews results from your personal style – your body language. Your dress, your facial expressions, and your posture all convey messages”.133 On the implicit level a player’s posture must be self-consciously assumed in a way that signifies openness and access when dealing with the media. This is an example of the imposition of rules in the absence of actual game play, operating on the implicit level, and made possible by the cultural level. Although these guidelines are overt in the sense that they explicitly state what a player should do in a given scenario, to say that they are macro

133 Dona Schwartz. Contesting the Superbowl (New York: Routledge, 1998), 57.

87 in the above-defined sense, is a bit of a stretch, since they largely refer to the comportment of one’s body in a non-game situation (normally a relatively unconscious aspect of a player’s life). Since it is connected with other more subtle aspects of life, the implications of the regulation of this part of life are immense.

According to Nietzsche the body is the “germ of life from which the whole plant has grown.”134 The body, is not something merely organic, as this quote implies. For Nietzsche, the body is the name for the non-conscious animality of a pre-historical variation. The body is on the level of culture (as I defined it above) since both represent the pre-individual singularities at the level of the pre-personal. All scripted activity incorporated as part of the media’s design is built on, and ultimately presupposes, the activity of the forces manifested in and as a body, which is, in the last instance, indifferent of the vagaries of social practice.

The body, in this view, is a battleground of forces that pre-exist the coded meanings of language, and the signifying practices of custom. It may be stated, albeit in a very convoluted fashion, that for Nietzsche, life has a life of its own, and the body, prior to its signification in the symbolic order, is indistinguishable from this pre-symbolic life. In this sense, macro rules are like layers of sediment built upon others, with a core of pure differential force in the form of pre-individual singularities. The imposition of the script is thus an attempt to re-regulate the – as it were – automatic aspects of a player’s conduct. This is not to say that the pre-scripted conduct is not itself scripted (by implicit rules and underlying cultural dynamics), but it helps to illustrate the ways in which one set of rules implies, and, in a sense, goes on to colonize, another set. What Nietzsche calls the germ of

134 Friedrich Nietzsche. Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future. Trans. Walter Kaufman. (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), § 6, 13.

88 life is akin to the pre-individual level of forces from which intelligibility, organization, and scripted behavior emerges by being captured, categorized and submitted to repetition.

The implicit rules and the overt culture135 of the game are in a symbiotic136 relationship, and are thus operative in a way that differs from – and surpasses – the purview of the macro and minor levels of constitutionality. This is because implicit rules, and the culture of the game, are in some way constitutive of the first two level of rules. Although the macro and micro rules are stable and relatively autonomous, the latter two (implicit and cultural rules) give rise to the first two (macro and micro), and hold them together through the functioning they make possible and implicate.

To further illustrate this we may think of the steps a player must have taken in order to make it to the NFL. From strength and endurance conditioning, diet, imparting trust in one’s peers and coaches, manicuring and maintaining an appropriate reputation, performing under various forms of pressure both in game and out of game, all of these are intangible parts of the underlying fundamental basis of the football world largely invisible – but necessary – for the other two levels to be possible.

One way to think about implicit rules is to consider them in terms of the “‘seen but unnoticed,’ expected, background features of everyday scenes.”137 In Studies in

Ethnomethodology, sociologist Harold Garfinkel sets out the terms of his programmatic

135 This dissertation makes a distinction between two senses of culture. First, there is culture in the everyday sense of shared activities, norms, and behaviors of a given people. This is what I call overt. Second, there is culture on the transcendental level of pre-individual singularities; this is the level of the ultimate presupposed conditions of possibility for the actuality of the first level of culture. It turns out that, when pushed for clear definition of the first, and the impossibility thereof, the two marvelously come closer together than otherwise imagined. More on this below. 136 One way to think of this symbiosis is through the historical a priori and the archive. (See below). 137 Harold Garfinkel, Studies in Ethnomethodology (Los Angeles: Polity Press, 1984), 36.

89 attempt to study the unnoticed background of everyday social practices, with the hope of better understanding the shared – but implicit – understandings in place to bring about a shared set of social meanings. These latter are not norms in the traditional sense (an authoritative moral code that transcends the social world to which it controls) but are, instead, the “taken for granted…background expectancies…of everyday life”138 which are immanent to that life. As expectancies of everyday life, they operate in situ, that is, they do not exist apart from their material manifestation in action, but are actually co-extensive with these practices. It is not successive in that first, there are a set of norms, and then, second, an actor comes along who ponders the possible courses of action by explicitly considering the available norms. Rather, action on their basis simply happens in the sense that William

James’ “bare activity” tautologically, but helpfully implies: happening happens.139 While there is an immanent immediacy of action – actors act without first thinking about how to act – this does not mean that there is nothing outside of the action, as though the action arose from out of a vacuum unaffected and uninformed by anything other than itself.

Garfinkel goes on to argue that, at the very least, there is a set of background expectancies relied upon to allow actors navigate the complexity of social situations. He approvingly cites Alfred Schultz’ classic studies these expectancies are defined as part of the “attitude of daily life.”140 An attitude is not a rigid structure, imposing a stolid form of order on an otherwise fluid set of practices, but is, instead, closer to a mode of approaching the world in the fullness of its lived experience.141 Furthermore, since an attitude is always embedded in

138 Ibid., 37. 139 Brian Massumi, Semblance and Event (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2011). 140 Garfinkel, 37. 141 Although this is a reference to the phenomenology of the later Husserl and especially Merleau-Ponty, experience here is a reference to the mediate relation between actors’

90 and operative as part of a world, it also contributes to the formation of this world by affecting and being affected by it. Through expectations about how the world is one is compelled to act toward it in a way that is governed by these expectations, thus contributing to the making of the world in an image of one’s expectation of it. At the root of this network of expectation is the inference that others share similar expectancies and experiences, with the result that there is a mutual sharing of expectations and meanings held in common but without being explicitly articulable. It is this network of expectation that provides the background informing action and determining meaning. However, what is the relationship between background expectancies and rules, and why are they considered transcendental?

On a basic level, a rule produces regularity by enforcing conformity and uniformity in the face of contingency. The existence of a set of rules produces expectation – the inference that a particular outcome will result given a particular set of circumstances – and the rational confidence that one’s action will result in the future outcome given a particular set of circumstances or a generalized situation. This expectation itself has force, and goes beyond mere idle speculation to be grounded in rational inference based on previous experience within the terms of the situation. Ideally, the imposition of rules raises the probability that behavior will unfold in a certain way, thereby granting a semblance of stability to the predicted outcome of one’s action. In this sense, rule-following goes hand-in- hand with a form of social stability, wherein contingency is replaced with the calculable imposition of the guise of practical necessity. Garfinkel’s mutual expectation – governed as it is by mundane attitudinal corroboration – may be seen as the mechanism whereby a

expectancies, other actor’s expectancies, and the situation. A phenomenological analysis here would be devoid of the fullness and wonderment that the experience of the world provides in the latter’s analyses.

91 predictable order (including a coherent and sequential past-present-future) is achieved. As noted, however, mutual expectation does not arise out of nothing, and is itself grounded within a series of cultural conditions of possibility for expectation to manifest itself in the first place.142

Garfinkel is known for his disruptive interventions into the establish structure of social interactions. By disrupting the flow of social interaction (through a purposive contravening of the underlying network of expectations), he was able to observe the breakdown, and subsequent re-ordering, of social forms, including their underlying presuppositions, network of values and implicit norms. The premise is based on the idea that social structure reestablishes itself after momentary disruption, and that, by observing the way social cohesion is once again achieved after disruption, we are momentarily exposed to the underlying implicit mechanisms at work that make social order possible in the first place. Through their disruption, implicit rules are rendered explicit by becoming vulnerable, and being called upon to recreate social order. As a result of this disruptive intervention, one is able to witness the underlying constitutive presuppositions doing their work to stabilize the situation. There are thus two aspects of this intervention, the actually observed behavioral situation, and the implicit mechanism (mutual expectation) that ensures the continuity of social order.

What we witness here, then, is a scenario where mutual expectation leads to coherence and predictability, but, at the same time, where mutual expectation – since it cannot itself rely on the achieved coherence and predictability – relies on something else, an

142 In The Genealogy of Morals (§2) Nietzsche considers the cultural conditioning of expectation as part of a necessity for civilization to “breed” man as a promising animal, in order to justify the enforcement of responsibility as a mode of social order.

92 extraneous point of departure for both. While Garfinkel argues that expectation arises out of interaction, rather than the other way around (interaction arising out of expectation), I want to problematize this picture by making both conditioned by a transcendental dimension which I call culture. By saying that it is transcendental is by no means to suggest that it transcends the immanent level of social interaction to thereby exist in an outside region beyond the one where interaction actually happens. Instead, what I do suggest is that there are conditions of possibility that act as the basis for the implicit rules (which include attitudes and expectations), but which are not reducible to these rules themselves.

Transcendental does not mean transcendent. Transcendentalism immanent, albeit with the caveat that the transcendental is constitutive of the macro, micro, and the implicit levels, without, however, being detached from them.

Although I distinguish between four levels of rules (macro, minor, implicit and cultural), in practice they are integrated in such a way that the explicit rules of the game cannot operate without the implicit rules, which act as enabling conditions for their application, nor without the transcendental cultural apparatus that grants a sort of coherence to the entire platform, and renders its consistency possible. These three sets of rules must therefore be considered as intertwined, and folded into each other. Insofar as there is continuity in both kind and ontological status between them, they all contribute to the constitution of the singular, quasi-transcendental interface.143 The cultural apparatus thus serves as the place for the becoming intelligible of the other three aspects. Similar to the

143 “Quasi-transcendental” is intended to denote the difference between the role of identifiable terms which have been classically called norms, customs, values, morays – anything that is said to govern behavior from afar. What I call transcendental is not identifiable in this way since it itself conditions and makes possible the latter. Essentially, I am arguing that the classic terms have been attempts to account for, and make sense of, this dimension by making it intelligible and susceptible to language.

Deleuzian virtual dimension, which is co-extensive with the actual, and serves as the field for impersonal intensive forces to imperceptibly and affectively operate, the transcendental cultural apparatus is an incubator for tendencies, which mediates, and in the last instance, determines, the way things actually are.

Although this use of the term “culture” may seem to be at odds with the regular usage,144 which often considers culture as something concrete and consciously held by a shared group of people, often reducing it to a series of artifacts or recognizable traits, culture is also something more than can be reduced to these often problematic assumptions. Culture has something about it that is unsayable in such a way that one may somehow feel that s/he knows that there is more to it than any particular object, yet remain incapable of articulating exactly what it is. This tip-of-the-tongue experience of attempting to define culture, hints at a need for a different order of explanation that defies formulation in conventional grammatical forms. This is why Raymond Williams puts such emphasis on art’s ability to somehow encapsulate the generalized “structure of feeling” of a culture: the intangible character of a culture’s living organization leaves a visible trace in the material manifestation of creative expression.145

However, asking for a definition of culture is something akin to Wittgenstein’s notion that language eventually gives way to silence when pushed beyond the limit of the particular game in which it is involved. Since Wittgenstein’s conception of language146 is based on use, language is always part of a shared group of practices, implicit understandings and conventions that it takes part in. It does not signify or represent these practices, but is,

144 See the definition of the fourth type of rule above. 145 Williams, 53. 146 See below for a more thorough discussion of Wittgenstein’s theory of language, and how it can be conceived to have a transcendental dimension.

94 itself, a practice operating on the same level as these other more overtly physical-behavioral practices. It is my contention that – following this conception of language as non- representational practice – regular language simply lacks the capacity to account for the transcendental dimension of culture, and the imperceptible and unsaid presuppositions which are linked directly to the level of pre-individual singularity. While the concussion is a symptom – physical, psychological, and transcendental – of the active interaction between these three levels of rules, it is only on the basis of the cultural level that the other three may be said to come together, and to loop back into the visible fold of discourse’s material and intelligible manifestation, while keeping the deeper, unrecognizable and unsayable dimension hidden.147

2.4 Foucault’s Discursive Formation and the Historical a Priori

On the macro level of football’s gameplay, there are real physical bodies repetitively hitting and being hit by other bodies – to such an extent that the basic parameters of the game makes concussion a probable result. On the micro level, there are rules, such as the 35 yard kickoff amendment, that change the way the game is played, and (at least according to the official opinion of the NFL) lessen their likelihood. But it is only on the basis of the implicit and cultural level of rules (which includes a mix of the official medical discourse, the media’s framing and contribution to the perceived reality of its object, the related

147 A version of this is found in Schelling’s Ungrund, the ‘ungrounded ground’ of freedom: “prior to Grund, there can only be an abyss (Ungrund); that is, far from being a mere nihil privativum, this ‘nothing’ that precedes Ground stands for the ‘absolute indifference’ qua the abyss of pure Freedom that is not yet the predicate-property of some Subject but rather designates a pure impersonal Willing that wills nothing.” Slavoj Žižek. The Abyss of Freedom (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004), 15.

95 academic studies conducted by the NFL, and the non-intelligible forces that operate on the pre-personal level) that concussions become an articulable and recognized phenomenon integrated into the overarching web of knowledge, understanding, and norms – or what

Foucault calls discourse.148

Discourse in Foucault’s sense, is non-representational, – it does not stand in for an object that exists before and outside discourse – but instead, conditions or constructs representation by making it possible in the first place.149 By operating as part of the nexus of power-knowledge (which it gives rise to as much as it is affected by), discourse constitutes what is given, and as it is given. In this way, “[d]iscourses are considered as historically situated ‘real’ social practices not representing external objects but constituting them”.150

Discourse is thus a term that signifies a generative activity which is not merely linguistic, but also includes practices, norms, thoughts, feelings, and ideas; furthermore, it involves the ways in which these latter are interpreted, understood, and incorporated into a way of life. It is not only that discourse is something that can be found, existing in the world as a tangible entity to be picked up and observed, it is produced through by means of its re-enforcement through re-iterated acts upon and through it. For example, the institution of football, similar to that of a prison, has an overt structure, with readily decipherable information in terms of

148 The Implicit and Cultural level rules are not the same as “discourse” but they become embodied in and as discourse. In the case of football, implicit rules (which includes attitudinal dispositions based on implicit understandings gleaned from mediated sources) and cultural rules (the level of pre-individual singularities and forces) get integrated into discourse, and thereby they become part of an “overarching web of knowledge, understanding and norms”. 149 Reiner Keller, “The Sociology of Knowledge Approach to Discourse” Human Studies: A Journal for Philosophy and the Social Sciences 34.1 (2011), 46. 150 Ibid.

96 the rules and laws governing its life.151 Beneath these overt rules are the invisible workings of everything that goes into making the football world – or the prison – what it is (which are not always explicitly visible to someone not participating directly in the institutional arrangement). These include the power relations between inmates-inmates (players-players), guards-inmates (coaches-players), guards-guards (coaches, general managers, owners), warden-guards (NFL commissioner, medical professionals, trainers), and so on, but also the relation between the prison or player and the larger society including the ideas,152 beliefs, understandings, and ways of speaking about the prison (or the game), imagining it, and acting on behalf of it, i.e., the discursive formation for which it is a symptom. In this example the “truth” about the prison – or of the football world – includes the debates surrounding its place in relation to the other institutions such as legal, medical, educational, etc., (e.g., whether or not the length of sentence is believed to be proportionate to the rate of crime, etc.), and are all part of the discursive formation constitutive of the prison. However, the very way the entity is spoken about, and the related discourse, or the rules that go into structuring what is ‘sayable’ about the prison/football world, are coupled with, and derivative of other more imperceptible micro aspects that are, in one way, heterogeneous to these, but in another way – since they give rise to them – operative on the same plane as them. The imperceptible micro aspects are not different in kind from what they give rise to, but are what Foucault would call the resultant nodal points of power, since they are not outside of the network of power relations, but are inextricably caught within it as both product and producer.

151 An institution may be said to be alive in the sense that Emile Durkheim uses when explaining his organicist metaphors to describe the social organs in their various operational guises, and organization, with, and in terms of each other. 152 Ideas include the “ideology,” although Foucault strays from using this term.

For Foucault, then, knowledge does not represent the world (as it is in itself), but is a product of the productive activity of the discourse surrounding the object of knowledge in such a way that the object of knowledge is produced as a result of this discourse.

Knowledge is productive, and discourse produces knowledge, and both are caught up in relations of knowledge/power. However, it should be kept in mind that discourse is not something consciously and intentionally produced by those in power. It paradoxically grows out of, and produces – through the complexity of a situation having multiple nodal points of power – a very tentative result (which is taken as real by common sense). As a result of the process of networked nodal points of power giving rise to situated entities, the people considered to be beneficiaries of these power manifestations themselves also arise out of – and are produced as part of – power’s constituting effects. Power thus produces the positions of privilege, the oppressive structures of socio-cultural organization, as much as the people who fill these positions, including the counter-hegemonic forces that are made possible by, and arise as a result of, these oppressive structures.

Returning to the earlier discussion of the four levels of rules as outlined above, games may be seen to be both the result of rules – arising from out of the rules as their effect – and as their cause – games give rise to rules which are required to fit into larger institutional frameworks. In one sense games are Gestaltist schemes not reducible to their rules; but a game is nothing without a set of rules. However, games and rules are both dependent on a form of power, which is the ultimate arbiter of the status of rules that go into the formation of a game. “Power is essentially what dictates…law…power prescribes an

‘order’…that operates at the same time as a form of intelligibility…power acts by laying

98 down the rule…”153 The type of rule that power lays down and maintains is not a macro rule which is readily explicit, but an implicit rule – a rule governing the expectations and intentions of a group of people, a mode of existence rather than a hard and fast edict. Even though there is a rule book for the NFL, which explicitly articulates the way the game is played in the manner of an instruction manual, the order that power articulates is organized on an affective, impersonal/pre-personal level. Power, for Foucault, operates on the interstices of actuality and potentiality, acting as an index of force relations and disarticulate tendencies. Foucault makes it clear that he does not mean power in the conventional sense of an amount of force to be seized upon by a pre-existing institution, or levied against an adversary. “‘Power [is not] a group of institutions and mechanisms that ensure the subservience of the citizens of a given state”, nor “a mode of subjugation which, in contrast to violence, has the form of the rule”, nor even “a general system of domination exerted by one group over another, a system whose effects, through successive derivations, pervade the entire social body”.154 These ways of treating power assumes it to be a thing – a discrete entity – that is capable of being fully grasped by another already-constituted entity

(such as human consciousness). When he says that power is generative, he does not mean that power is quantifiably cumulative (power leads to more power and power generates wealth) or that it generates the resources (e.g. military might) for the oppression of one group by another. Generative, in this sense, is to be understood in the transcendental terms of the generation of the conditions for the existence of these entities with interests (such as an oppressive group) in the first place. “[P]ower must be understood in the first instance as

153 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality Vol. 1, Trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon, 1978), 83. 154 Ibid.

99 the multiplicity of force relations immanent in the sphere in which they operate and which constitute their own organization; as the process which, through ceaseless struggles and confrontations, transforms, strengthens, or reverses them; as the support which these force relations find in one another, thus forming a chain or a system, or on the contrary, the disjunctions and contradictions which isolate them from one another; and lastly, as the strategies in which they take effect, whose general design or institutional crystallization is embodied in the state apparatus, in the formulation of the law, in the various social hegemonies”.155 Foucault is aware of, and emphasizes, the immanent agonistic relations of power – a field of forces rather than of objects – that make up an underlying and unsettled grid of articulations and quasi-articulations. With no central point of inhabitation, power is amorphous, lacking a proper place that can be pinpointed and localized. This leads him to state that “[p]ower is everywhere; not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere”.156 This “everywhere” is not a here or there, a place that pre-exists its citation by power, but is itself produced by the “coming from” of power. As a result, power paradoxically comes from what it produces, generating itself as much as the material effects of this generation (such as the institutional structures that Foucault cites as examples).

Since it operates on the level of pre-individual singularities or differential forces in contention with each other, culture can be said to operate on the level of Foucault’s power, which is more on the level of force than as a relation between two pre-existent entities.

Culture, then, is more than a reservoir for meanings, artifacts, or works (including overt rules). Although it contains these as its outer surface, or skin, it is, more fundamentally, the forces that go into making this outer layer possible. As a result, meanings, artifacts, or

155 Ibid., 92-3. 156 Ibid., 93.

100 works are like remnants of the underlying (or ‘overlaying’) transcendental tendencies and becomings, which form on the surface as symptoms, but point to an elsewhere, which is not a place above or beyond, but at the heart of manifestation itself. In terms of social interaction, these are the unsaid presuppositions that Garfinkel attempts to localize through his experiments that worked to interrupt the linear order of social flows. These unsaid presuppositions do not belong to any one person – or institution – in particular, but function as necessary ingredients for the social machination to exist and function as it does in the first place. They are, in this sense, transcendental, not in the strictly Kantian sense wherein the transcendental is inexorably associated with formal a priority, but in a sense that includes the historical dimension of the real – but imperceptible – tendencies that structure the habitable world. Culture includes the Foucaultian micro-power flows (or forces), and nodal points of exigency, but it is not reducible to these, since culture is also the effect of these in the form of meanings, artifacts and works. But power “is maintained through language, or rather through the act of discourse that creates, from the very fact that it is articulated, a rule of law. It speaks, and that is the rule”.157 In this context it may seem that

Foucault puts an emphasis on language as a privileged institution for the flourishing and preservation of power, but includes the caveat that language is not a representational regime of signs and signifieds. Since language is non-representational, it does not stand in for that which it speaks of, but instead, co-constructs itself along with its referent, and, insofar as language is constructive, it brings something into being it does something.

According to Ludwig Wittgenstein language consists of a set of rules. In this way, language is a game, or, language, as a generative practice, is a series of games. If the

157 Ibid., 83.

101 privileged form of the manifestation of power is language, and language is a set of rules implicated in their use and together making up a game, power is indistinguishable from the activity that arises out of it. “Here the term ‘language game’ is meant to bring into prominence the fact that the ‘speaking’ of language is part of an activity, or form of life”.158

For Wittgenstein, meaning is use, that is, words do not have an essential meaning residing within them as their eternal truth, but instead, meaning arises out of a negotiated interaction of words and practices within a situation of usage. Meaning does not reside in a transcendent realm existing apart from the realm of use (as though a contingent use of words struggled to tap into this dimension), but rather, meaning is immanent to the messiness of the situation. As a result, learning the meaning of a word is simply learning how to use the word. The proper Wittgensteinian question asks not what meaning is, but what it does, or better, how it comes to be (and do) what it does. What is presupposed for language’s existence is a situation in which language flourishes through its being used, and through this use, meanings – and things – are rendered existent and become what they are.

This does not imply that language does not contribute to the construction of the situation that it presupposes. Language requires a situation as much as the situation requires language. What Wittgenstein calls a “form of life” resonates with what has been referred to above as the “football world”. A form of life is not something that can be pointed to, described or dissected, but would in fact actually include the act of pointing itself, and the significance that this act has within the nexus of organized rules that contributes to the making of its significance. As a performative apparatus, language “maintains” discourse, as

158 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations Trans. G.E.M. Anscombe (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), §23.

102 much as discourse contains language, but language is not reducible to words, since it contributes to making up a form of life, a mode of existence, or a style of being.

The football world is an instantiation of a form of life. Since a form of life has at its basis a set of implicit rules, not readily articulable but which, nonetheless, can be shown to be implicated in a particular discursive formation, the world of NFL football can be seen to contribute to the cultivation of a shared way of being, complete with a set of rules (macro, micro, implicit and cultural), a particular language that translates these rules into formal conditions, as well as the statistical data derivative from these rules when put into action in the form of gameplay. The world of football includes an entire set of conditions that go into making it what it is including eating rituals (e.g. tailgate parties), festivals (Superbowl), the honoring of ancestors (Hall of Fame), a legal system (both intra-game in the form of yardage penalties, and extra-game in the form of monetary fines and suspensions for infractions such as the use of banned performance enhancing substances or illegal hits), and so on. The world, as form of life, is subtended by discourse, and arises as its effect, but is also made manifest as the result of an underlying anonymous but constitutive power or field of forces. While power is anonymous – in the sense that it does not belong to anyone, and does not give rise to any thing in particular – it is also ubiquitous, generative, imperceptible, multiple; as such, power is indiscernible from the structures generated as its result, and, since there is no linear causality of power, already existing institutions have a hand in power’s reproduction, especially in the form of a temporal repetition. Power produces structures, while these structures, through repetition, reflect back at power to sustain it and lend the possibility of altering its course. This is especially important when thinking about the iterative effects of power, which Judith Butler famously takes up in terms of

103 gender/sexuality as part of the mechanics of queering identity. The structures that result from power require their reproduction through performative re-iteration; if not preserved through repetition, the potential is opened up for their replacement by alternative configurations of power relations. Power does not dissipate or disappear; its structural effects are only reoriented and differently actualized.

Discourse, then, includes the words used to describe things, the relation between words, the relation between these descriptions at different times and places, and the relation between these including the ruptures, discrepancies, disputes, and so on. Discourse is both immaterial, incorporating the relations between (and within) words, the networks of rules forming their proper and improper usage, and the ideas to which these give rise; it is material through what is sometimes (and improperly) taken to be its “effects,” which are the concrete and tangible arrangements of words into things. Similarly, power both gives rise to discourse and emanates from it; it also has material and immaterial elements, which includes the phenomena later included under these descriptions. The historical contours of power and discourse work to institute particular discursive formations based on shared historical understandings, and which implicitly carries within itself a reference to its own historicity and situated particularity. Relating to a particular temporal order, it tends to conform to the interest of the already-established institutional framework, which preserves and distributes its purported legitimacy.

History is also subtended by materiality in two ways: 1) it is a product of the material conditions that went into making it what it is, since, as the result of a certain way of thinking, conceiving and feeling, history’s object (i.e., ‘the past’) is formed; and, 2) it contributes to constructing the material conditions for which it is a result (both in the sense

104 of what it takes itself to be, i.e., a causal representation of what actually happened, and in the more critical sense which claims that the writing of history is itself the product of a material-historical position), since it retroactively interprets what came before in the attempt to grant closure to it by tying up loose ends, and interpreting the present as part of a larger narrative structure. Insofar as history works to actualize a particular temporal register, which accompanies and stratifies a particular political situation, it may be said that there is no proper “now” without history, since history requires the standpoint of the now as the condition for its possibility. Given the particular discursive formation actualized in and through the power that comes to be history, there is no history without a history for some particular interest.159 As always written from the perspective of the present, history is formed as a remnant of this present, and is formed on the basis of a myth of the past (a past that never was present as Deleuze says).160 As a temporal concept – which changes through time – history is a category of contingency. In opposition to the universality of the Platonic

Forms which remain self-same throughout the flux of time (since they are eternal), and the necessity of the Kantian a priori transcendental categories of the understanding which cannot be otherwise, history is in time, and is therefore changeable (instead of permanent), local/particular (instead of universal) and contingent (instead of necessary). Since discourse does not appear as such, it can be said to partake in both necessity and contingency, since,

159 The term interest is to be understood as a compounding concentration of tendencies; interest is the accretion of force constructive of a situation. For example, the concentration of the flow of finance creates a position of wealth, which then comes to form a “position of interest” for the subject (both the subject of the position, and s/he who is subjected to it) who fills that position. 160 “It is with respect to the pure element of the past, understood as the past in general, as an a priori past, that a given former present is reproducible and the present present is able to reflect itself” (DR 81). Deleuze’s virtual past, the past through which all presents acquire their actuality, is not a past that can ever be present, but is the a priori condition of possibility for the present.

105 even though it is historical and therefore contingent, it operates as though its effects are necessary, because it is not even thematized as a candidate for questioning.

Foucault calls this paradoxical status – simultaneously necessary and contingent – the state of being “historical a priori.” Unlike the Kantian use of the term a priori, which literally means “before experience,” and which he uses to indicate the necessary structures that make experience possible, Foucault couples it with the term “historical” to indicate that it is both “before experience” and “historical”. The paradox resides in the fact that for something to be properly “before experience” it requires that it not be historical, since historicity requires the possibility of change (which itself requires time), and implies an ideal experiencer (whether animate, inanimate or divine) who can track the change, and be cognizant of the basic structure of a ‘before’ and ‘after’. In other words, history requires the experience161 of history, so a history that is before experience would be a timeless history, which is a contradiction. Foucault is well aware of the seeming contradictory status of this concept, but uses it anyways to indicate something that normally goes unnoticed about discourse, namely that while it is contingently based on the reality of historical circumstance, it also transcendentally functions to condition that same reality.

In the context of this argument, the historical a priori will be interpreted as a transcendental concept. What I mean by this is that it is a concept that indicates an implicit

161 This is not only to state the platitude that history is always written from a particular perspective (from the experience of the historian, whether that historian claims to be writing objective historiography or not.). “Experience” here is a purely conceptual experience, since it is intended to indicate that history, as a temporal concept, is always manifest and actualized in a material world; i.e., “experience” is being used to indicate the basic form of experience (which includes the basic component of having “been there” and therefore having been affected – in some way – by having “been there”). Thus the trace, as an indication of the bare fact of having been there, in some form, epitomizes this pure form of experience, which is an experience not for this or that experiencer, but of experience in general.

106 structure lying at the basis of socio-cultural and historical reality, and which is, simultaneously, co-extensive with it and therefore part of that same reality itself. The term transcendentalism is used to indicate an implicit metaphysical commitment that understands reality to be the result of a process of mediation that goes into constituting all aspects of the experience of this reality, while, at the same time, existing apart from said experience.

Experience here is a term that indicates the anonymous and impersonal appearing of phenomena, whether that of a subjective formation, an abstract epistemic arrangement, or even a computational algorithm. Experience thus indicates a mode of being at and toward existence, which includes the way being appears to itself in the reflective mode of its own reflexivity, or reflection-reflected doubling.162

While being an extension of the concept of “discourse” examined above, the historical a priori also includes, within it, an implicit questioning of the functioning of discourse, and it is also, in principle, able to account for it. At the same time, the historical a priori points to an operation that has also been in effect since the Kantian transcendental turn. It was Kant who inaugurated the so-called ‘Copernican Revolution’ of knowledge, with its associated reconfiguring of the statuses of god, immorality and freedom as mere

“regulative ideas of reason”.163 What Kant really inaugurated was a revolution in the way historical reality is conceived, and the place of the human being within the cosmos, as one that moves away from a God-centered conception toward a finite understanding.

162 This doubling is also seen in Jean-Paul Sartre’s early work The Transcendence of the Ego where he formulates a theory of consciousness against Husserl’s ego-centric version. 163 C.f. Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude Trans. Ray Brassier (New York: Continuum, 2009) where he discusses the ways in which contemporary theory is defined by what he calls “correlationism”.

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Foucault provides a negative definition of historical a priori as “not a condition of validity for judgments, but a condition of reality for statements…” Bringing our attention away from the purely linguistic aspect of discourse, and the formal grammatical rules associated with the validity of judgments, toward the reality to which statements are directed, he argues that the statement is dependent on prior conditions (of the historical a priori) whose purpose it is to pre-constitute the reality to which statements actually refer.

He takes precaution to make clear that “this a priori does not elude historicity: it does not constitute, above events, and in an unmoving heaven, an atemporal structure; it is defined as the group of rules that characterize a discursive practice: but these rules are not imposed from the outside on the elements that they relate together; they are caught up in the very things that they connect” (emphasis added).164 While the conditions for reality differ from reality itself, these conditions are nevertheless embedded within – and are a constitutive part of – the reality that they condition, and are, indeed, immanent to reality itself. Incapable of

“eluding historicity”, they are historical structures that are immanently embedded in the phenomena to which they give rise. Foucault is careful to emphasize that these conditions do not exist in an ahistorical realm of unchanging ideas, but are, rather, on the same plane as the phenomena themselves – “they are caught up in the very things they construct”.165 These structures, therefore, are contingent; they operate as part of the same material of historical circumstance, i.e., they do not develop autonomously, but are inherent to the circumstantial unfolding itself.

164 Michel Foucault. The Archaeology of Knowledge. Trans. Sheridan Smith (New York: Routledge, 2005), 143-44. 165 Ibid., 144.

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Although it would be easy to consider the manifestation of the historical a priori as a quasi-metaphysical entity that remains self-same throughout its historical manifestation, there is no such entity for Foucault. “Nothing…would be more pleasant, or more inexact, than to conceive of this historical a priori as a formal a priori that is also endowed with a history: a great, unmoving, empty figure that irrupted one day on the surface of time, that exercised over men’s thought a tyranny that none could escape, and which then suddenly disappeared in a totally unexpected, totally unprecedented eclipse: a transcendental syncopation, a play of intermittent forms”.166 In other words, this structure is not the same structure across temporal change; it does not develop or progress as the way Hegelian

Absolute Spirit is sometimes thought to. Since it is part of the very structure to which it gives rise, and from which it also comes to be, each structure may be said to have its own version of the historical a priori. Since these structures are historical, contingent, and therefore changing, what is it that gives them the status of the a priori, that is, how can they be said to be prior to experience?

It must be kept in mind that the temporality utilized by Foucault to theorize the concept of the historical a priori is not the typical one of incorporating the successive moments of past-present-future, where these are conceived as being three successive moments – a dot on a line that continually and indifferently quantitatively moves forward.

Alternatively, for Foucault, the temporality of the historical a priori is a conception of temporality in which the present is constitutively wrapped up in the past and the past is co- extensive with the present, while the future – as that which is tendentially anticipated – rupturally arises as the result of an actualization of the inherent potentiality of the other

166 Ibid.

109 aspects – which is not a potential that pre-exists its actualization – but is co-constituted with the conditions emergent as the past-present. The a priority of this “before” is not, therefore, one that indicates a previous moment in time, but a transcendental indication that may be summarized through the question: what must be in place for this phenomena to be possible in the first place? The “before” is thus a structural priority required to be in place for the structure to take place, but occurs at the same time as the structure.

While avoiding the use of the term experience in its conventional sense, Foucault’s project – short of diagramming a Raymond Williams-esque “structure of feeling” – is an attempt to account for how things (ideas, institutions, discourses) arise from out of particular temporal-material junctures, and the ways in which the multiplicity of these discourses operate in and on each other, such that, as a result, they create discrepancies, ruptures and breaks in an otherwise quasi-continuous historical trajectory. In fact, experience here could be considered a discursive object operating alongside other objects, in and of a particular discursive formation; that is, since it takes its place within a certain historical trajectory, and is developed as part of a certain circumstance, experience, like

“man”, is a recent invention. While Nietzsche is attributed with announcing the death of

God, it is customary to grant Foucault with the title as he who announces the death of Man, the Man that is more than his historical circumstances, and who can, through the travails of work and war, recreate his environment to suite him through the cultivation of a second nature.167 Since Man (both as concept and as entity) is a product of his circumstances, he

167 This is an allusion to Alexander Kojève’s influential 1947 seminars on Hegel in Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit Trans. James H. Nichols, Ed. Allan Bloom (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980).

110 has168 no “experience” proper, and if the word experience is used at all, it is recognized as a product of a particular discursive formation, e.g., the one that says that Man is a bearer of experience.

2.5 Transcendental Culture

Culture, defined above as the threshold, or reservoir, for pre-personal forces, is considered here to be historical a priori, in its function, its result (its giving rise to the positivity of the manifest) and in actu (as in archive).169 In this conception culture is transcendentally constitutive of worlds, while also being (part of) a (or “the”) world itself.

In this sense, to say that a group of people, or a society, share a culture means that there exists an inherent trace – at the pre-personal level of the field of forces – which operates as a common pre-condition for the group of people or society. What may be termed transduction, the crystallization of individualization from the pre-individualist state, is the modality through which culture is made manifest and actualized into archive, which is subsequently ordered and placed into discrete patterns and forms of thought-being, and documented based on paradigms, or epistémés, that eventually become part of the heritage.

It is this process of enculturation – the movement from pre-individual to individualization – that the scientific discourse of the modern period, through with its mathematization of nature, attempted to facilitate, culminating as the objective of all ideological attempts at

168 The verb “to have” is used in this sense to indicate the traditional notion of man as a bearer of property; C.f. Locke’s definition of property as what is owned by mixing labor with the land. 169 The actuality of culture (i.e., its objectification in terms of artifacts and macro rules) is referred to by Foucault as the “archive”.

111 mystification that cover-over or “naturalize”.170 The ordering of language, and therefore thought, translates into the ordering of being, which becomes naturalized by hardening into the unquestionability of common sense. Even though culture is undetermined, acting as the

‘stuff’ to be actualized in this or that way, the hardening of discourse into categorical thought, facilitated by the authoritative specialization of the status of the scientific statement, provides the illusion that there is an eternally lawful order for the way reality appears and is structured. Given the weight it carries in terms of its ability to authoritatively order and guide cultural becomings,171 Foucault takes great interest in science as a way of thinking, and the influence it has in terms of determining what it is possible to think.

Foucault looks at scientific discourse, not from the point of view of what individuals say, nor from the form or structure informing what they are capable of saying, “but from the point of view of the rules that come into play in the very existence of such discourse”

(emphasis added).172 To look at the rule(s) is to look beneath the surface, not for rules that are explicitly stated, but for those that are operative in the state of unsaid presuppositions that govern from the core of the elementary components of the structure. The “culture” to which Foucault refers is one that neither belongs to the region of empirical regularity governing social life in the form of explicit norms, customs and regularities, nor to the more sophisticated level of theoretical analyses (both scientific and philosophic) that are said to

170 Roland Barthes. Mythologies. Trans. Annette Lavers. (London: Paladin, 1972), 116. 171 This is an oblique reference to the Deleuzian notion of becoming-other (becoming- animal, becoming-woman, becoming a potted plant). “[B]ecomings…have neither culmination or subject, but draw one another into zones of proximity or undecidability”; to become is to be in motion, in a (non-)position in-between discernible states. See: Gilles Deleuze. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. (Minnesota and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 507. 172 Michel Foucault. The Order of Things Trans. (New York: Routledge), xiv.

112 govern the world from within the heart of its essence, i.e., those esoteric principles operative from afar and only made intelligible through the knowledge statements of specialists whose insight is supposed to penetrate the hidden – true – workings of things. What Foucault designates the ‘in-between’ region characterizing culture, traverses both of these (macro- micro rules and specialist discourse) since it belongs to an, as it were, subterranean region that may be said to order order, or provide the possibility of order in the first place. This

“primary state” of culture – a culture that operates impersonally on a transcendental level since it offers the possibility of any and all order – “liberates order itself” since it is the condition of possibility for any particular form of order. In this sense order grows out of, or is dependent on, disorder.

But what, however, is the status of a disorder that grants the potentiality for the achievement of order, and acts as the possibility for its form? What is this region, that acts as a space for the alignment of order with disorder, by informing one with the other?

According to Foucault, depending on the “culture or the age in question,” it is “continuous or graduated[,] or discontinuous and piecemeal, linked to space or constituted anew at each instant by the driving force of time, related to a series of variables or defined by separate systems of coherences…”173 Foucault is careful not to characterize this formative region as a disconnected region existing apart from the order that it informs. As continuous with the empirical level that it informs, disorder does not exist apart from its actual manifestation in a particular time and place. Therefore, “in so far as it makes manifest the modes of being of order, it can be posited as the most fundamental of all: anterior to words, perceptions, and

173 Ibid., xxii.

113 gestures”.174 In my terms, the disorder that Foucault hints at informs (providing the form for) order, is analogous to the transcendental underpinnings of culture, which, as described above, is a region of pre-individual singularities and a field of forces in agonistic tension with each other, eventuating into the archive in the form of cultural artifacts.

Culture, then, is in a curious position. While not overtly manifest on the empirical level, it does not transcend the manifest; culture can be said to be the ‘cause’ of the manifest only in a very specific sense, provided we keep in mind that the causality Foucault discusses is of a non-linear variety, i.e., it is not causal in the sense that it acts as a precedent or origin.

It can be said to come ‘before’ the ‘effect’ only in so far as the effect is wrapped up with the

‘cause’ as part the of its very constitution. Thus Aristotle differentiates between four types of causality, and within these, there are causes that follow from the nature of x (formal and material), and those that follow from its activity (efficient). It is the cause that stems from the unmoved mover’s being – as an extension of it – that does not require time (in any conventional sense) for its manifestation: being is said to come from its essence as a manifestation of this essence. It is thus that, for the Greeks, the world didn’t come into being at a certain moment in time, but existed eternally because of the fact of this divine form of causality. Analogously, the simultaneity of causation occurring as part of what I call transcendentalism results from the dynamism of differential forces operative on the transcendental level wherein ruptures between conflicting trajectories and tendencies, and horizontal grids of emergent formations eventually manifest into, and as, discursive formations, and rules of varying degrees (implicit, micro, macro).175 Foucault calls the

174 Ibid., xxiii. 175 Again, I make an oblique reference here to Deleuze’s plane of immanence, where the “virtual” dimension, while co-extensive with the actual, is the realm of unactualized

114 method of analysis fit to study these dynamic tendencies “archaeology,” and it is this latter which, while taking into consideration the non-progressivist movement of the historical a priori, addresses “itself to the general space of knowledge, to its configurations, and to the mode of being of the things that appear in it, defin[ing] systems of simultaneity, as well as the series of mutations necessary and sufficient to circumscribe the threshold of a new positivity”.176 While “a new positivity” may emerge out of a particular transcendental formation, the latter, as a principle of order (instead of order itself), can only be traced by looking through the manifest for the “blank spaces of [the] grid that order manifests itself in…as though already there, waiting in silence for the moment of its expression”.177

There are different levels of Foucault's analysis of the historical a priori. On the empirical level we may ask: from where do these historically contingent - yet actually existing - ideas arise, or derive? To ask where they derive does not necessitate a causal analysis of historical contingency, which goes back and traces the lineage of an idea to locate the various forms the idea took, as though operating in an evolutionary psychological paradigm. Rather, on the empirical level Foucault ensures he does not get caught up in the history of ideas, which merely traces relations between actually existing ideas. The problem with this approach is that it treats the ideas as already existing and in relation, so that "order is imposed on us by immediately perceptible contents".178 These latter are closer to the

Aristotelian paradigm, which glimpses hierarchical essences by the naturally occurring specimens actively operating to actualize their potential and thus realize the natural order of

becoming. For Freud, this is the dynamism of the unconscious whose language is indecipherable to waking consciousness, yet provides the signifier and impetus for intelligibility. 176 Ibid., xxv. 177 Ibid., xxi. 178 Ibid., xix.

115 things. In this way, order - and its attendant laws of thought - are found out there, in and as the laws of nature, since, in this conception, thought features as a derivative (but higher) form of that same nature. Order is thus not something achieved, but immanently given by the organizational tendencies of the cosmos. This is the pre-critical realist paradigm that the

Kantian critical turn has forever and inexorably changed. Foucault inherits this critical project, and differentiates himself from Kant by - among other things - making the necessary conditions of possibility for experience (as well as that experience itself) contingent, and therefore, relative to place and time.

For Foucault, however, order is nonetheless achieved as a result of the underlying conditions for ordering, with the difference that, since these conditions change historically, so too does the achieved order that changes along with it. What Foucault calls 'order ' refers simultaneously to the scientific hierarchical relation between entities (as formalized in accordance with the propriety of categories as exemplified by the genus-species paradigm), the constitution of these entities (in both their differential relation with other entities and their internal nature according to how they are seen and experienced), and the conditions for any and all order itself (what may be called 'the order of order' or ‘meta-order’). However, it must be pointed out that, although the term 'entity' is sufficiently vague so as to preclude conceiving of these as substances, entities arise as a result of discourse. When in The Order of Things, Foucault uses the term 'thing' as a quasi-ontological category, his approach is qualified by the later Archaeology of Knowledge wherein he clarifies that he does not refer to "things" as entities pre-existing their articulation, since they do not exist apart from the discursive formation for which they are a constituting-constitutive part. In the Archaeology he introduces the idea of the 'enunciative function' which is a formulation of - or a way of

116 conceiving - the particular épistémè of modernity, which is said to operate in a way such that the fundamental fluidity of language is coupled with the pervasive fluidity of being.

The 'referential' - that to which the enunciative function ideally refers - "is not made up of

'facts', 'realities' or 'beings', but laws of possibility, rules of existence for the objects that are named, designed or described within it".179 These "laws of possibility" and "rules of existence" are the unsaid substratum that may be said to be operative, not only on a sub- cerebral level, but on an extra-empirical immanently transcendental plane. As mentioned earlier, this transcendental plane is transcendental not in the sense that it is restricted from the onslaught of time, but, on the contrary, it happens alongside of, and as, temporality itself. It is immanent to that which it gives rise, yet it is not reducible to the latter; it is thus an empirico-transcendental doublet, and the historical a priori is a manifestation of this doubling operation.

In her reading of Foucault's Commentary - the unpublished additional part of his dissertation which is actually a response to, and a commentary on, Kant's Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798) - Beatrice Han argues that Foucault positions Kant’s

Anthology as a repetition of the transcendental theme as it initially reared its head in terms of the Critique of Pure Reason (1781). Listing four types of repetition, she focuses on the fourth, which she argues moves "the Critique to a more finished form, of which anthropology itself was the hidden presupposition" such that the repetition at work is to be considered in the "dialectical and dynamic sense of an Aufhebung”, or sublimation, in a progressive movement toward actualization.180 What this means is that, according to

179 Archaeology, 91. 180 Béatrice Han. Foucault’s Critical Project: Between the Transcendental and the Historical. Trans. Edward Pile (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 22.

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Foucault, Kant struggled with his formulation of the overall conception of the transcendental in general, and its relation with the empirical in particular. Furthermore, through the systematic reading Han prescribes - interpreted under the guidance of dialectical repetition - we get a properly problematized conception of the transcendental - one that is both a priori and historical. Although this is barred in advance by the overt terms of Kant's project, Han contends that, through a close reading of the Commentary, a revision to the purist version of transcendental constitution is found in the Critique.

As a result of this juxtaposed reading of the Critique and the Anthropology, I argue that there is a renewed need for, and emphasis on, a conception of mediation as a term that works 'in between' – always beginning in the middle (Deleuze) – and which is in a state of continual emergent process (Whitehead). This is seen in Kant's own problematization of the relationship between transcendentalism and empiricism. While the empirical is the constituted result of the constituting activity of the transcendental, the exact determination of their relation is complicated by the fact of finitude: How can a finite creature, having the impediment of an actually existing body, and, finding itself embodied in a world, be considered capable of gaining access to an absolutely presupposed, but impossibly disclosed, realm of constituting activity, when it itself – as a finite being – is the result of this constitution. Would this not require a surpassing of the bounds of its own finitude in order to access an in-principle inaccessible realm that is, by definition, foreclosed from it in advance? The problem, therefore, consists in the difference between the transcendental and the empirical as two levels that differ, while somehow remaining in unity. This is not, however, the Platonic duality of the supersensible and the sensible, since the transcendental does not transcend the empirical, but conditions it.

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Following Han, the solution is to be found in her reading of the Anthropology, and her emphasis on the prospect of it being the secret to the completion of the originary

Kantian transcendental project. This basic insight may be summarized thus: there is a caesura between the transcendental and the empirical, and that caesura is called man. This is exactly what anthropology is, i.e., the study of “man” – considered as an historically conditioned cultural phenomenon. In terms of the Kantian project, man happens to be the result of, and a manifestation of, the "empirico-transcendental doublet". "As for man, he is their synthesis - that in which God and the world are actually unified - and yet in regard to the world he is merely one of its inhabitants, and in regard to God merely a limited being".181 What is important here are the linkages made between limit, god and world, and their synthesized unification under the rubric of man. Man, as finite being, is thus the mediation of the traditional source of knowledge, belief and being, and the realm of carnality, embodiment and terrestriality. These two (transcendent truth and finite carnality) are nothing in themselves, and everything as they are for the mediate term - the transcendental subject which is simultaneously object and subject. Although Foucault quickly drops these terms in his formulation of the problematic in his later work, they nonetheless seem to linger in his later work, especially when one considers what the

Kantian project marks in terms of the onset of modernity. Transcendental constitution does not come from a transcendent source, but is contained within the bounds of reason as the moment when the representation of the world became synonymous with the world itself. As

Foucault puts it, "[t]he Kantian critique...marks the threshold of our Modernity; it questions

181 Michel Foucault. Commentary, 104., Translated by and Quoted in Han, 26.

119 representation...on the basis of its rightful limits".182 Furthermore, it is man that henceforth acts as the formulated, and formulating, effect of a manifest power, operative on both a transcendental and empirical level.

Foucault translates his analysis of the Kantian problematic of the relation between the transcendental and the empirical in terms of what he calls the fundamental. In the thinking through of the anthropology as accomplished by Han, one finds the Anthropology project is actually complementary to the critical perspective of the first Critique since

"rather than allowing us to think the empirical from the transcendental standpoint...it opens up the opposite direction by showing that empirical limitations can only make sense in reference to the transcendental determination that they unknowingly presuppose. While the transcendental allows the a priori determination of the form that experience must take, the fundamental, on the contrary, takes empirical contents as its point of departure and shows that they are marked by 'irreducible transcendences' (Commentary, 81)...which reveal the impossibility of the empirical being its own foundation".183 The Critique is characterized by a top-down approach, beginning as it does with the pure form of intuition, before proceeding to derive empirical experience from it. In a sense, this purely formal approach presupposes what it sets out to prove, since it establishes the rules of the game in advance, resulting in a sort of filling in the blanks. However, in the Anthropology Kant moves in the opposite direction, beginning with the work of establishing the empirical limitations, and only then moving on to analyze why they are necessarily presupposed and determined by transcendental articulation. "Thus the theme of the fundamental is structurally tied to the retrospection through which empirical finitude always appears as already transcendentally

182 Michel Foucault. Order of Things, 242-43. 183 Han, 27.

120 founded".184 What Foucault calls "the fundamental" refers to the necessity of empirical contents being founded by a priori determinations; as a result, empirical contents - and the study of such - are deluded – and result in delusion – if they are taken to be their own foundation. The fundamental is the fact of the transcendental mediation, traditionally conceived in terms of god, man, and world, where man is seen as the mediation between the two. In modernity, the transcendent god is exchanged for transcendentalism, and the world becomes a mediation of the limits of the transcendental conditions for appearing.

Methodologically speaking, one begins with the empirical and ends in the transcendental; inferring the outlines of the transcendental dimension from the historical perspective, while interrogating the empirical through a back-and-forth movement of dialectical repetition.

As a formative step in Foucault's thinking, the historical a priori is thematized as a model to fulfill the requirements of remaining true to the fundamental, while being able to do an empirically inflected history of the present. In this methodology, the development of a particular empirical phenomenon is traced, not only in its historical lineage - which would remain on the empirical plane - but simultaneously, also in terms of its conditions for arising, which are not merely empirical, but also transcendental.

What I have been calling transcendentalism is the epistemological-ontological situation inherited from the Kantianism turn, which requires the methodological cognizance of the mediated double suture between reality, as mediated by the transcendental dimension, and the mediation itself as a manifestation of the real. Foucault's historical a priori is a trope that attempts to be used to think through this ontological scenario. What the historical a priori accomplishes is it allows us to conceptually put the empirical and the transcendental

184 Ibid., 27.

121 together, and, in a theoretical sleight of hand, pry open the authorial position by critically exposing it to the conditions of its own appearing.

As is well known, Foucault's historical analyses lead him to claim that man is a recent invention. Without getting into the complexities accompanying this apparently simple phrase, I would like to point out two things that it represents. First, in terms of an articulation of the fundamental orientation of the empirical and transcendental, man is seen as the mediating term whose 'experience' is a manifestation of the ontological interplay between these two planes. Secondly, through this interplay between the empirical and the transcendental, the position of the theorist is displaced; instead of a self-constituting subjectivity at the root of discourse, man does not speak discourse but discourse speaks man; by speaking man, discourse constitutes man. Discourse is not mana that falls from above, but emerges as a manifestation of a pre-personal power such that the result of the action of man on man (e.g., the historically embedded ways of thinking and acting on the body) becomes a manifest extension of an underlying plane of pre-individual singularity (an agonistic play of forces). The theorist is not exempt from this underlying play of forces, but is also a product of it. As such, it is the theorist's vocation to bear witness to the impossibility of articulating his or her situation by making this impossibility felt in and through the attempt.

To begin as I am, with the phenomena of ‘the concussion’ as it manifests itself in the

National Football League, is not, therefore, to end on the empirical level, since, as Foucault makes clear in his analysis of the fundamental – as the always and already mediated relation between the empirical and the transcendental on the phenomenal plane – the empirical and the transcendental inexorably go hand in hand, with the result that any analysis of empirical

122 phenomena implicitly refers to their transcendental conditions of possibility. The end-point of analysis is not the empirical phenomena as such, but what this latter refers to, without doing so explicitly. The question then becomes: What hidden dimension is secretly at work, not in the form of a detached transcendence, but as an immanent and constitutive part, actively determining the manifestation without itself being manifest? In conjunction with a reading of the later Kant in the Opus Postumum, "Foucault reminds us that although the world is the 'source' of knowledge (which therefore is denied any pretension to the absolute), it can only be so on the basis of a 'transcendental correlation between passivity and spontaneity,' that is, for the transcendental subject, in that it a priori unites sensibility and understanding".185 In other words, what the Foucaultian project offers is a way of accounting for the development of discourse, not only as something that has traceable effects which may be studied in the empirical methodology of the social sciences, but as something that results from a general ontological formation which incorporates a particular epistemological formation within it. What Foucault calls modernity – the moment of

Kantian transcendentalism – is what I consider to be at the basis of the mediated nature of being, as exemplified by the fact of the internal strife or ‘contestation’ quality of reality. The latter is not something given, something discoverable, or directly reducible to a mathematical formula, it is something represented and whose representation is fought over.

Reality is fundamentally incomplete, and the representation of reality is up for grabs; as the construction of reality, ideological ways of presenting reality effect, affect, and inflect the social body to which they give rise, while also, at the same time, they grow out of these. Let me now examine this claim in more concrete terms.

185 Han, 26.

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2.6 The Football World as Transcendental-Cultural Artifact

The football world is the product of a particular “form of life”; a form of life is the non-quantitative sum of a complex network of rules, both explicit and implicit, that contribute to the formation of a quasi-cohesive whole which functions autonomously (in terms of the activities that take place within it and on its behalf), since it takes on a life of its own and grants an array of proper and improper moves within the game. As should be clear at this point, the game of football does not stop on the field where one team wins and another loses. It extends – both spatially and temporally – beyond the actual game to include everything that goes into making the game possible, including the contingent history of the game of football itself, the trajectory of the players’ histories, the way the equipment acts as both inhibitor and enabler, the stadium’s operation (lights,186 field upkeep, concession sales, etc.), the media/television crew, and so on; but also includes even more subtle features such as the micro-interactions between players, clique groups that develop on a 52-player roster divided into offence/defense/special teams, the internalizing of ideologies surrounding masculinity, safety, and financial/contractual considerations, as well as the media discourse that surrounds it all and wraps it into an illusively totalized image which is sold back to itself.187 The immanent discourse of those directly involved in the construction of the game as spectacle, gradually includes – and is dependent on for expansion – the (social) media

186 This aspect is especially salient since in the most recent Superbowl of February 2013, there was a half hour power outage in the middle of the game, drawing the attention of 108 million viewers to the fact of the Superbowl’s dependence on invisible off-field aspects that make the spectacle possible. 187 An example of this is the Madden series video games mimetically based on the game, which is actually used by coaching staff to demonstrate plays and develop strategy in the locker room to be then used in “real” games.

124 world, and the massive fandom that goes into consuming and producing various angles of interpretation, contestation and support (both financially and intellectually).

An example of this are the many Internet facilitated Fantasy Leagues, which involve a complex rule-based game of “picking teams” and building a roster of otherwise disparate players (who actually play for different teams), and, based on the statistics that these players accumulate (yardage, touchdowns, interceptions) throughout the season, the “owners” of these teams compile points in competition with each other, thereby building a community and constructing an identity.188 This aspect of the game, while not directly related to the players on the field, adds to the conversation (and the market for predictive statistics), even though some NFL insiders consider it an affront to the game since it breaks the officially established teams down into individual players who are then mixed around, and reduced to their weekly statistics.189 However, like all originally amateur improvisations, the NFL officially welcomes Fantasy football, since it of course contributes to overall viewership.

It is important to note that most, if not all, of these aspects may be readily subsumed under the rubric of “cultural” components, although the way I am using the term culture here extends beyond the actual artifacts empirically considered to belong to a particular culture. All of these aspects are themselves assemblages dependent on – and arising on behalf of – the pre-individual singularities reflecting the unfinished nature of reality. While the game extends to include the cultural aspects that go into making it what it is, these, on both a macro and micro level, are further dependent on subtler, or what Nietzsche calls more

188 Farquhar, Lee and Meeds, Robert. “Types of Fantasy Sports Users and their Motivations” Journal of Computer Mediated Communication 12 (2007), pp. 1208-1228. 189 This can be seen as a microcosm of how the “real world” NFL actually operates from a business perspective, based as it is on neo-liberal evaluative calculations determining players’ worth based on age and past productivity. The worth of a player drastically declines as he nears his late 20s.

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“subterranean” aspects. These subterranean aspects, Nietzsche tells us, are properly beyond good and evil, and are essentially characterized by a sort of violence.

2.7 Cultura violentia

Underlying the blatant violence of football, which, according to the most obvious and common sense position,190 leads to concussions, is the violence of culture, which in my terms, is pre-personal and reflective of the underlying field of forces, which are selectively captured by the overlying regime of intelligibility. Closer to the terms of my analysis is

Deleuze in Nietzsche and Philosophy: “Culture…is a violence undergone by thought, a process of formation of thought through the action of selective forces…express[ing] the violence of the forces which seize thought in order to make it something affirmative and active”.191 The violence referred to here is the underlying violence of the pre-personal forces, which are in perpetual contestation with each other, agonistically attempting to manifest their will at the expense of the others. Of course, what is metaphorically called

“will” here does not pre-exist its differential contestation with the other.

This description of culture, as an underlying arena of pre-personal forces in conflict, is a transcendental notion intimately related to its manifestation as the hegemonic discourse of the dominant order. Deleuze makes clear that the violence discussed in the context of

Nietzsche’s notion of culture, is the cosmic violence of pre-personal force, which are later –

190 This is also the level of the highly controversial – and misleading claim – that violent content leads to violent behavior; my position does not consider violence in this trivial sense. 191 Gilles Deleuze. Nietzsche and Philosophy. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 108.

126 through macro-cultural appropriation – translated into the institutional power that Michel

Foucault recognizes operating in a masked disciplinary fashion. The violence of culture in its nascent state is of the status of pure potentiality, since it has not yet been actualized into the form of a cultural artifact (whether discursive or extra-discursive), and it remains unformed, without sense, intelligible or visibility. Nietzsche calls this pure form of potentiality “activity” – it is active in the sense that it seeks to actively create something new. However, he also recognizes that this pure potentiality for the new is not always actualized in this way; when this pure potentiality for the new is derailed (as Nietzsche complains it had happened in his time in the form of the Church, State and their morality and institutions), the violence of culture is used in a repressively non-active, or reactive way, that actually inhibits the creation of the new by reactively attempting to preserve the status quo. “The cultural work of active forces constantly risks being diverted from its course and sometimes it does benefit reactive forces. The Church or the State takes on this violence of culture in order to realize their own ends”.192

This conception of nascent cultural violence is also related to Pierre Bourdiou’s notion of symbolic violence, where he argues that violence actively covers up its own condition of possibility (which is the active violence of culture that strives to be constructive by actualizing a new form of social organization), and thereby disguises itself as non-violent social reality. This latter is conceived, by social actors operating – and constituted – within a field of transcendental constitution, as so many positions to be occupied. As Bourdieu puts it, “the very lifestyle of the holders of power contributes to the power that makes it possible,

192 Ibid., 109.

127 because its true conditions of possibility remain unrecognized…”193 Disguised in and as the normative framework for rational action, reactive violence is able to infiltrate the arbitrary interstices of unquestionable commonsensical position-taking and acting.

Underlying these three conceptions of violence – active/reactive violence, disciplinary power, and symbolic violence – is an implicitly shared notion of culture as the potentiality that extends beyond its particular manifestation, e.g., in terms of institutionalized frameworks of pre-figured possibility. The pre-individual violence of culture, and the violence utilized by repressive institutional apparatuses in the effort to realize a state harnessing reactive forces, happen to be on the same transcendental plane.

Given the ontological immanence of culture as is reflected in – and reflective of – the univocity of being, the transcendental mediation of culture (as pool of pre-individual singularities) is divided in unity. Although it is not totalizable, since it is constitutively unfinished, being – and culture by extension – is split into its actual manifestation and its potentiality for manifestation. This is what Simondon calls the excessive nature of being.

Being precedes the One of the individual because it is more than one, i.e., it is pre- individual. For Simondon the emphasis must be placed on the process of individuation, rather than the result of the process; furthermore, the result of the process is not a state but a phase, and this phasing/de-phasing process is called “transduction”.194

It is not that there is something called culture that awaits its manifestation in a number of different ways, as in the Aristotelian version of substantial potential (dunamis) where every entity has the potential to actualize its pre-determined essence (entelechy);

193 Pierre Bourdieu. The Logic of Practice. Trans. Richard Nice (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 139. 194 Muriel Combes. Gilbert Simondon and the Philosophy of the Transindividual. Trans. Thomas LaMarre (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2013), 6.

128 instead, since being is constitutively unfinished, it cannot be predetermined, and thus, it is left open to be actualized in a way that cannot be predicted in advance. The transcendental field of potentiality does not hold a finite number of possibilities (chosen from a closed pool) to be actualized; although there are tendencies to be actualized, these are emergent, alongside the emergence of the dynamism of the field considered as a non-totalizable whole.

Culture then, even though it partakes in the univocity of being, is split into two macro sides

(potential manifestation and actual manifestation), although these cannot be reductively counted as two, since they themselves are in process, and therefore emergently becoming.

The manifestation of culture is thus not unilinear, static or ever completable – even on the level of manifestation there is contestation and emergent formations. Manifestation does not occur once and for all, but is always in process such that potentiality is co-extensive with actuality, i.e., it is of the same manifest “thing” – and a thing is itself never finished, but becomes alongside the becoming of being. The transcendental split of culture is therefore only heuristic – it is not actually split: potential manifestation and actual manifestation are co-constitutively comingled and inseparable.

This is how Nietzsche could consider the best195 aspect of culture to be “a training that brings the whole unconscious of the thinker into play”.196 Culture thus “expresses” the entirety of the being (of the person or entity), both actuality and potentiality, as a unified whole actively creating in – and as – the world. The “unconscious” is the transcendental

195 It is “best” because it actualizes differently and thereby creates by actualizing alternative potentialities; although there is an implicit vitalist bias in this description (that health, life and creativity is better than death and institutional stasis), I think it is enough to flag it here and simply state that I relate this vitalist impulse to its political underpinnings such that the active forces conducive to life tendentially move to create alternatives to the status quo. This is also the difference between the spirit and the letter. 196 Nietzsche and Philosophy, 108.

129 field that makes possible the being or entity in the first place. Creation then, in this view, requires a remaining open to what one is not, in the task of being equal to the pre-historical heritage of one’s being.

Similarly, the actual game of football (both in terms of a particular actual instantiation, as well as the sport in general) includes the transcendental-cultural aspect that goes into making it possible, as well as making it what it is, and as it is (its manifestation).

Since it contains both macro and micro aspects (or what I have been calling “rules”), the macro aspect of the game develops as part of, and in relation to, an ongoing dialectic between the differential levels of rules, keeping in mind that on the cultural level there is an incessant agonism of pre-individual forces which cannot enter into anything like a dialectical relationship proper. As is made clear above, these rules act as the unsaid layer that makes everyday interaction run smoothly and without interruption. Yet these rules themselves point to something deeper and more primordial, something constitutively unknowable from within the terms of empirical observation, since the latter is limited to what is measurable (or experienceable) in some way; and although constitutively unknowable, they nevertheless remain operative as part of that to which they give rise. If these implicit rules are themselves unsayable, what, then, does this make of culture? That is, if the implicit rules act as the ultimate presupposed horizon for social interaction, how, and to what extent, is culture determining in the last instance?

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2.8 Exemplarity

Since culture is the transcendental plane197 of potentiality, and is therefore ultimately unthematizable, i.e., it cannot be made into an object of investigation, where does this leave it in terms of being a component of the football world, and in some way related to the phenomenon of the concussion? As is made clear above, through the Wittgensteinian example of the self-referential act of pointing (the act of pointing is part of a language game, and is therefore itself enmeshed in a paradox of tautological referentiality), the act of making culture into an object for investigation not only presupposes a set of implicit rules making this gesture possible, but it is actually enacted as a result of this possibility, granted by a certain historical a priori of culture in the first place. As noted above, since culture is not static, it is not a single unitary whole, but rather, a multiplicity of tendencies, quasi- objects,198 and contradictions. Wouldn’t it be necessary, then, to simply state that, since culture is unfinished and in processual becoming, that it is only possible to investigate culture in the abstract, and only indirectly? This would be analogous to the speculative positing of “dark matter”199 which can only be observed in its effects, and as a result, nothing can be said about it directly –it remains a purely hypothetical construct used to explain certain phenomena (rather than leaving gaps in our knowledge of reality).

197 I reluctantly use the Deleuzian term ‘plane’ to indicate the quasi-place/space of that aspect of the situation, and the situated object, that is in active becoming and therefore constitutively unfinished. 198 This term is borrowed from Bruno Latour in We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993). 199 Timothy Walsh. The Dark Matter of Words: Absence, Unknowing and Emptiness in Literature. (Illinois: SIU Press, 1998).

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However, this would only be the case if culture – as historical a priori – were existed elsewhere and was detached from the phenomena to which it gives rise. Since culture is not an unknown variable that transcends its actual manifestation, studying a cultural artifact is not to study culture indirectly, but is actually studying culture tout court.

Since culture is not detached from the phenomena to which it gives rise, and although it may be considered to be amorphous in its form, it nonetheless is a constitutive,200 and co- extensive part of the actual. As a phenomenon that only shows itself obliquely, it therefore must be investigated through examples. While an example does not have the pretention to be the thing itself in its entirety, at the same time, it does not differ from the thing itself either, but it is co-extensive with it. Co-extensivity allows at least two things to differ in degree, but not in kind. In other words, an example exemplifies an aspect of the thing, thereby providing a glimpse of what the thing is capable of being, by displaying its range of actuality. Through the use of examples, culture is by no means pinned down and thematized as a discrete object, and then dissected once and for all as to its truth, but is, instead, considered to provide a glimpse of itself, albeit one that is aspectual and limited.

What Giorgio Agamben calls “paradigm” highlights exemplarity and the use of examples more generally, since, as he describes it, an example “is a singular case that is isolated from its context only insofar as, by exhibiting its own singularity, it makes intelligible a new ensemble, whose homogeneity it itself constitutes”.201 Without leaving the

200 Since this term has come up several times throughout this dissertation, word of explanation is in order. I use this term to denote the phenomena where something peripheral leads to the given of something else. My archetypal example is the role of Lacanian desire in the constitution of self, where, even thought desire is lack – a hole in being – it nonetheless provides the impetus for the subject to strive to fill it, and, insofar as the subject strives, the subject actually constitutes itself through this activity. 201 The Signature of All Things, 18.

132 level of singularity, it simultaneously instantiates itself and the larger generality to which it belongs, while the latter does not exist outside of its immanent exemplification as embodied in the particular example. Thus, “to give an example is a complex act which supposes that the term functioning as a paradigm is deactivated from its normal use…to present the canon

– the rule – of that use…”202 To ask for an example neither asks for the abstract rule governing the classification, nor the actual thing itself determined by the general rule, but both on the level of particularity. “The example constitutes a peculiar form of knowledge that does not proceed by articulating together the universal and the particular, but seems to dwell on the plane of the latter”.203 The use of an example of culture does not therefore speak for, or represent, culture as a whole, but instead is a local variation gleaned from a particular perspective, while nevertheless remaining a constitutive part of actually existing culture. This is similar to the paradox of the Leibnizian monad, which is both universal and particular at the same time; however, it differs from the latter in that, unlike the Leibnizian monad, it does not have the pretention to totality and holism. Since it is in tension with itself

(given the agon of forces), culture is incomplete in itself; as both source and result, it gives rise to examples, which exemplify its ambiguous incompletion, while sustaining its ceaseless becoming.

The example being utilized is the rise of concussion, as both a health and safety concern, and an impetus toward a change in perceptions regarding the dominant discourse of hegemonic masculinity as exemplified in the game of football. As illustrated above, the commissioner of the NFL – Roger Goodell – seeks to “create” a different “culture”. What could he mean by this? Surely he could not have in mind the transcendental plane of pre-

202 Ibid. 203 Ibid., 19.

133 personal forces that go into constituting culture as such. In a sense, however, this is exactly what he means by culture, since it is the transcendental aspect of culture that is open to change, and that provides the potentiality for altering the possible. Since culture encompasses the aforementioned sets of performative rules (macro, micro, implicit and cultural/transcendental), the commissioner seeks to change the way things are actually done by seeking to change the underlying presuppositions that make possible the way things are done. Given the double sidedness of culture (on the one hand, in terms of its actual manifestation in the form of artifacts and discursive formations/objects, and on the other, in terms of the transcendental realm of pre-individual singularities), culture encompasses both the actual and the possible way things are done. I will now turn to two examples of the culture surrounding concussions prevailing in the NFL, before looking at the ways in which the dominant hegemonic discourse is actively interrupted, and even subverted, on the transcendental level through the use of the comedic tactics utilized by the television show

South Park.

Example #1:

On December 12, 2010, Green Bay Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers suffered his second concussion of the season. In contravention with the prevailing “warrior masculinity script”204 – which states that one must ‘man up’ in the face of adversity – which has accompanied the physicality of the game, teammate Greg Jennings urged Rodgers to voluntarily take himself out of the game in order to avoid further injury. Since the script demands an heroic sacrifice of the player’s off-field physical well-being for the greater good of the prospect of on-field victory, it is assumed that going against this script would severely

204 Eric Anderson and Edward M. Kian. “Examining Media Contestation of Masculinity and Head Trauma in the National Football League,” Men and Masculinities 15.2: 153.

134 lessen the chance of winning, while raising the chance of incurring the informal penalty of peer ridicule, ostracism, and – eventually, if the perception continues in this way – a smaller contract in future years. Caught up in this script are the ideals of toughness and ruthlessness in the face of defeat, exemplified by the heroic individual who does not back down in the face of adversity. Coupled with the mechanism of a peer-pressure induced group-think urging players to cover-up any and all signs of weakness, if pain happens to be present, it is in the player’s best interest to hide it, or if it is obvious, to simply play through it, since, as this thinking goes, there won’t be another game for a week.205 Through this implicitly- scripted on-field heroism, a player is promised a degree of clout through the cultivation of a reputation as a player who neatly fits the script.206 This translates into a form of cultural capital and a degree of respect (by other players, management, fans), and therefore, a greater chance of securing a position (and the possibility of a lucrative contract) in future years.

However, in open contravention with this script, Jennings made no secret of his concern for his fellow player. He was quoted by Mark Viera in The New York Times as saying “I was very concerned about him [Rodgers]. I kind of whispered in his ear, walked behind him during the time he was sitting on the bench and kind of told him: ‘This is just a game. Your life is more important than this game.’ I told him that I love him to death, and you’ve got to

205 Gay Culverhouse. Throwaway Players: The Concussion Crisis from Peewee Football to the NFL (California: Behler Publications, 2011). It should be noted that there are a number of books framing the phenomenon of concussion in terms of a “concussion crisis”. See: Christopher Nowinski. Head Games: Football’s Concussion Crisis from the NFL to Youth Leagues (Massachusetts: Drummond Publishing Group, 2007); Linda Carroll and David Rosner. The Concussion Crisis: Anatomy of a Silent Epidemic (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2011). 206 The script is conducive to a multiplicity of appellations and references to pop cultural figures. A recent example of this proliferation of naming is the use of names and themes from Transformers, where Calvin Johnson was given the nickname “Megatron”, and Marshawn Lynch referred to his own intense style of play as “Beast Mode.” This is also an instance of the influence of video game culture overlapping with sporting culture.

135 make the choice, but this game is not that important”.207 In what is seen as a shift in the hegemonic masculine narrative governing pro football, Rodgers heeded Jennings’ advice and took himself out of the game.208 Jennings stretched the implicit rules governing in-game behavior (the drive to win at all cost) to the breaking point by urging the most valuable player (whose participation is deemed a necessary component for victory) to exit the game, thereby putting the health of the player above the prospect of winning the game.209

Example # 2:

On November 11, 2012, almost two years after the precedent setting Jennings-Rodgers conversation, and well into commissioner Goodell’s campaign to “change culture”210 by putting measures in place to lessen the risk of head injury, San Francisco 49ers quarterback

Alex Smith was concussed during a scramble for a first down. Heeding the newly transformed cultural rules, Smith willingly reported possible concussion-like symptoms and took himself out of the game of his own accord. His backup, Colin Kaepernick, took over for him in the game and never looked back. He went on to impress everybody with his ability to execute the ‘read option’ offense, utilizing his 6’4” frame to run, something that his predecessor, Alex Smith, had been criticized for lacking, although Smith was playing the best football of his career and leading the league in completion percentage at the time of his concussion. To the bafflement of most observers, and in contravention with the implicit

207 Anderson, et. al., ibid. 208 Incidentally, the Packers went on to win the Superbowl that season. 209 It is interesting to note that Jennings was a veteran player who had secured a large contract by already establishing his toughness. For a rookie to do what Jennings did would be even more unthinkable. 210 The discourse has caught on, with articles being written about the phenomenon in terms of a “cultural problem” in other North American sports leagues. For example: Gregg Patton. “NHL: Prevalence of Concussions a Cultural Problem” The National 10/03/13. http://www.thenational.ae/thenationalconversation/sport-comment/nhl-prevalence-of- concussions-a-cultural-problem Accessed November 3, 2013.

136 rules governing the protocol surrounding concussions, and even though his stats were among the best in the league, the San Francisco 49ers coach, John Harbaugh, decided to make a permanent change at quarterback such that, essentially, Smith could be said to have lost his job because of (the self-reportage of) a concussion. As he is quoted saying shortly after: “you state your case with your play. I feel like I’ve done that. I feel like the only thing

I did to lose my job was get a concussion”.211 Even though he was performing well at the time of his injury, by taking himself out of the game he gave rise to doubts regarding his ability to actualize the warrior script. In the hypercompetitive world of American football, it is either sink or swim, and there is an extremely small window for bad press. As Chris

Nowinski, co-director of the Boston University Center for the Study of Traumatic

Encephalopathy puts it, “There’s no question that the pressure to ignore concussions is still there and that there’s a risk for any player reporting an injury. In a perfect world, every player would get his job back. But this isn’t realistic. The coach is looking out for his job and teams want to put the best team on the field. The pressure to win is highest at the NFL.

There’s millions and millions of dollars involved”.212 Citing the immense financial stakes,

Nowinski points out the brutal truth – winning in the NFL translates into getting paid, and making money is the modus operandi of the NFL.213

211 Cindy Boren. “Alex Smith: ‘The only thing I did…was get a concussion.’” The Washington Post 11/30/12. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/early- lead/wp/2012/11/30/alex-smith-the-only-thing-i-did-was-get-a-concussion. Retrieved 12/11/12. 212 Daniel Brown and Mark Emmons. “Alex Smith & Concussions: What They’re Saying” Mercury News, 12/08/12. http://www.mercurynews.com/other-sports/ci_22154207/alex- smith-concussions-what-theyre-saying. Retrieved 12/11/12. 213 As the logic has it, winning teams are more likely to keep the roster they have, thereby assuring jobs for younger players and contract extensions for older players. There is also an implicit perception of raised player stock if a player has played for a team that happened to

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These two examples highlight the atmosphere for the contestation of hegemonic articulations of the discursive formation surrounding football’s manifestation of masculinity, the perceived inherent “toughness” of the game, and the normal requirements for players to play through pain and potential injury. As Gay Culverhouse points out through her use of first-hand examples, gleaned from her experience as daughter of the owner of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, it is well documented that, since the beginning of the professionalization of football in 1892, players have felt the need to compensate for real or perceived weakness on and off the field.214 She suggests that the use of performance enhancing drugs (and steroids in particular) are often perceived by players to be a requirement for entering into the highly competitive environment of college sports (e.g.,

NCAA), even at the known cost of adverse long-term effects. However, in the make-or- break years of players in their prime, there is a slight window of opportunity, and it is necessary to excel now or never.

A 1993 study by the Canadian Study for Drug-Free Sport in 1993 found that 83,000

Canadians from the ages of 11-18 have used steroids.215 It is conceivable that the argument could be made that, from the point of view of competition, the widespread use of these substances, if made legal, would lead down a slippery slope such that their use would almost become a prerequisite for competition. The moral implications of performance enhancing substances notwithstanding, the question to ask at this point is where this interest in highly competitive sport can be said to come from in the first place?

make it to the post-season, and especially for the much-lauded Superbowl (symbolically indicated by the coveted Super Bowl ring). 214 Culverhouse. 215 James Deacon. “Biceps in a Bottle: Teenagers Turn to Steroids to Build Muscles” Maclean’s, May 2, 1994.

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Anderson and Kian make the point that, built into the archetypal script governing the performance of masculinity is a ritualistic demand to prove one’s proximity to the ideal by actively seeking to embody the fantastic image of the heroic figure. It is as though this script

– hegemonic masculinity – transcendentally closes off a reactualization of alternative gender forms by blocking the reuptake of other possible trajectories of becoming. This translates into a stifling competitive environment, where a ritualistic proving ground articulates the need to be seen – by one’s peers and the community at large – as an adequate approximation of the ideal. This is witnessed by the fact that it is not only a matter of peer pressure, or a private desire to gain a competitive edge by the player. Illegal performance enhancing drugs are often pushed on high school students by coaches and parents.216 Although it is sometimes argued that parents’ desire for their kids to play on the best team is governed by their own self-interest, governed by the prospect that their kid will attain the best scholarships that will eventually fund their retirement,217 I argue that it is important to take into consideration the violence imposed on both males and females by oppressive gender norms, and the requirement to ritualistically seek to actualize the ideal. The archetypal ideal works on the transcendental level to support a hegemonic version of masculinity that demands embodiment in a way that performatively iterates its actualization through approximate embodiment. This leads to extreme measures taken to gain even a slight advantage. It is the overt violence of this situation that belies the underlying cultural violence that operates on the level of hegemonic myths informing these more directly experienced forms.

216 Matt Chaney. “Steroid Use Unpreventable in High School Football” Steroid Times 14/05/10. http://www.steroidtimes.com/steroid-use-unpreventable-in-high-school- football/2010 217 Ibid.

139

Looking at the competitive football situation from a strictly analytic point of view, as sample size rises, the shape of the data approximates a normal distribution; while there are a proportionately small number of cases in the extremes, these are exceptions to the bell curve. In the highly competitive football world however, where only a few special players actually ‘make it’ to the professional level, the abnormal outliers come to actually set the bar for the competition. As a result, the entire pool of potential players are forced to compensate (by using performance enhancing drugs) in order to compete with the high standard of play set by the very best. As the bar goes up, so to does the need to compensate.

The standard is then pushed ever higher when the best players begin to use the performance enhancers. As one high school football player put it, “[y]ou see linemen at colleges that are over 300 pounds and linebackers that are 280...Not all of us have those attributes…So everyone tries to get as jacked as they can”.218

All of these steps, from getting drafted to getting a contract and playing professionally, have their own micro and implicit rules associated with them, which includes a large media presence, where especially the higher rated draft prospects are expected to cultivate a public persona, as well as a professional relationship with potential teams in closed-door interviews. Culverhouse argues that the entire process is exploitative, where the use and abuse of players, especially by billionaire team owners and upper-echelon management, tend to treat players as an expendable resource to be used up and discarded, in exchange for the newest batch of young players. When the goal is to succeed by any means possible, it becomes a level playing field only if all participants access the same performance enhancing technology and put their bodies (and heads) at risk to the same

218 Ibid.

140 reckless degree. In a world where ‘advancements’ in technology, and scientific engineering, are usually greeted with applause, the science behind performance enhancement is an exception. Whether the use of performance enhancement is viewed as a political, health, or ethical issue, the cultural artifact exemplified by the football world, with its various symptoms including the concussion, structurally fosters a demand for performance enhancement to such an extent that there will always be a place for it as part of this system, even in the face of the strict drug-testing policies and fines in the NFL.

Feeding into the demand for performance enhancement is the cult of celebrity surrounding star players, including the pressures associated with the need to negotiate between a public and private persona in mass and social media. By reiterating the ideal image and rehearsing its proximity, media makes it tangible in a way that exacerbates the demands young players face in maintaining an image to be invested in. This is intensified by the now ubiquitous presence of social media – especially Twitter – where players often catch themselves (or are caught) revealing their private thoughts to the public.219

These pressures were made salient and put on display through an incident concerning first round draft incumbent Manti T’ao – a Notre Dame linebacker at the time – who used social media (Twitter and Facebook) to invent a fake girlfriend and subsequently perform her

“death”.220 Whatever his motives for perpetrating this hoax – whether he did it for the publicity in an attempt to promote his name in an environment where any media attention is

219 In 2009 the NFL revealed its official policy on social media. Before each season players are briefed by media “specialists” who seek to educate them in the potential uses and abuses of social media. 220 Timothy Burke and Jack Dickey. “Manti T’eo’s Dead Girlfriend, The Most Heartbreaking and Inspirational Story of the College Football Season, Is a Hoax” Deadspin 16/01/13. http://deadspin.com/manti-teos-dead-girlfriend-the-most-heartbreaking-an- 5976517

141 good media attention – the result raised questions about his credibility and ability to handle the pressures of professional football. The navigation through these networks for young players is a daunting task. Making matters worst is the fact that, from the point of view of the fans (and the general public, especially in the hometown of the NFL franchise teams) there is a certain reverence surrounding the NFL player; surpassing the cult of celebrity, the

NFL player is an actualization produced and reinforced by the dominant discourse, and he is thus expected to maintain this level of excellence. However, the difficulty of the rise is coupled only with the ease of falling, i.e., it is much easier to fall out of this status than to attain it.221

The case I am making is that, in order for this dominant discourse to arise and be maintained as constitutive of the hegemonic order, what is required is an entire set of implicit articulations and micro-rules that translate into the never-back-down warrior-esque mentality demanded by this role, which accepts nothing less than the will to inter-subjective sacrifice and mutual danger. Furthermore, to be in contravention to this hegemonic order is to risk both material and symbolic repercussion; i.e., if it is argued that the financial bottom line is the raison d’etre for the owner’s investment in the team, and this bottom line is intimately tied to on-field winning, having the star players on the field at all times – regardless of injury – is in the owner’s best interest. The rationale is that, even if the injured player is not performing near 100 percent, his presence on the field makes the opposing

221 A recent example of a player not living up to the expectations is Matt Schaub. After throwing interceptions in consecutive games, fans notably burnt a replica jersey outside the stadium; and he began to fear for his – and his family’s – safety when he was confronted at his home by fans, and people began driving by his house taking pictures. When he got injured in the next game, to his dismay, many fans actually cheered. Mike Florio. “Report: Fans Confront Matt Schaub at His Home,” November 8, 2013. http://profootballtalk.nbcsports.com/2013/10/08/fans-confront-matt-schaub-at-his-home/ Accessed on November 19, 2013.

142 defense account for him, translating into opportunities for other players, which wouldn’t be there without the presence of the star. However, these macro-level rules, which operate on behalf of, and for the owner – and which may be summed up by the imperative to win at all costs – is buttressed by a set of micro-level rules such as: whether or not they are capable of performing at full capacity, big-name players coerce the opponent into accounting for that player’s on-field presence by adapting their offensive and defensive team’s formations accordingly, and this translates into better opportunities to win”; or the (categorical) imperative to “keep your best players on the field no matter what.” Although not part of the conventional rule set – as found in the official rule-book, or the (real or imagined) archive of canonical football strategy – these rules are nonetheless operative, and their being in operation has an impact on the ways in which the actual game manifests itself.

2.9 Hegemonic Masculinity: ‘Manning up” and ‘Care’

However, functioning beneath the surface of even these less obvious macro and micro rules are the implicit rules which, although partly imperceptible, also happen to coincide with the owner’s best interest. In an intricate economy of rules and fantasies, the financial bottom line coincides with winning, and winning happens to coincide with the best interest of all involved (fans, players and owners). Contained in these implicit rules is the basic scriptural presupposition for acting in a way that demonstrates full composure in threatening situations, the and the implicit demand to play through injury. Let me call the various components of the implicit script governing ideal conduct the ‘virtues of hegemonic

143 masculinity’ which, it must be kept in mind, are made possible by means of the set of implicit rules. One such virtue may be designated the act of ‘manning up’.

Playing on the archetypal heroic male narrative inherited from the Homeric mythical tradition, where the ideal hero (e.g. Odysseus) goes on to slay a series of monstrous adversaries without showing the least sign of trepidation, to ‘man up’ is to prove one’s masculinity by approximating the ideal. In this genre’s narrative, which doubles as the narrative of Western civilization, the hero is he222 who perseveres and overcomes all odds in a battle where he is featured as the underdog; through an act displaying unprecedented courage, he is willing to sacrifice himself for the greater good – whether that be ridding

Greek civilization of threatening barbarous Cyclopes or winning a football game. Acting as a model of courage and duty, the symbolic form of the hero is mobilized as an ideal to be attained and actualized through the cultivation of an Aristotelian virtuous character.

‘Manning up’ thus requires the ability to subtract secondary distractions (e.g., fear, pain) in the face of the adversity standing in the way of the attainment of a goal (e.g., scoring, or defending, a potential touchdown). There is also a certain amount of burden of proof at play within the ideal of ‘manning up’: it is on the prospective man who mans up to prove himself as worthy of respect from his peers, as well as the attainment of the recognition of being a ‘man’, if a man is defined as he who strives toward actualizing the heroic ideal. ‘Manning up’ is therefore an objective manifestation of the implicit set of rules that govern the attainment of the heroic ideal, as well as functioning as part of the proto- cultural baggage that accompanies the football world, and goes into being a constitutive component of its form of life.

222 In line with the tradition of Western civilization, the archetypal hero has been male.

144

Looking at the first example above, when Jennings urged Rodgers to leave the game, he openly, and overtly, threw Anderson and Kian’s dominant hegemonic masculine ideal into a state of conflict. By demonstrating an ethic of care for Rodgers (who is a quarterback, and the single most important player on the team since he runs the offense), Jennings’ behavior not only undermined the body of implicit rules governing the conduct of players in relation to each other – made possible as a result of the transcendental cultural dimension – but he inadvertently actualizes an alternative rule-set governed by care, resulting in a dis- identification with existing forms of role identification. In a way, however, by disidentifying with the dominant discourse, Jennings demonstrates the possibility of usurping this ideal through a performative iteration that injects a degree of difference into it. As Foucault makes clear, the historical a priori is not atemporal, but is instead, characterized by a series of ruptures, discontinuities, and even contradictions, it is therefore open to be changed in such a way that it actualizes differently.

Today the medicalized discursive formation of head trauma re-produces the hero narrative in an altered form by setting it up in a way that allows it to be interrogated as never before imagined. New forms of brain imaging techniques (fMRI) delve into the anatomy of the hero’s brain, mapping the consequential traces of its heroic activity, a new form of objectification that sets the hero narrative on the operating table to be viewed from within through a register of causal necessity. This is all part of the transcendental contestation of cultural dynamics governing the actuality of player conduct, wherein the historical becoming of discourse is displayed and determined as potentially displaced and displaceable; through the example of Jennings’ move toward actualizing the ideal differently (made possible because his clout and social capital accumulated by proving

145 himself capable of approximating the heroic ideal through his many years of play), we are privy to the hegemonic contestation and unfolding of the discursive formation governing on-field heroics and masculinity. Just as discourse develops into a discursive formation, the cultural-transcendental dimension (which gives rise to artifacts and fields of conduct) conditioning the manifestation of the macro and micro rules governing the football world, is also determined by the contingent interplay of forces. Given the contingency of becoming, and the incomplete status of reality, the transcendental is internally conflicted and in agonistic tension with itself, and, as a result, the actualization of the given is not determined in advance.

If we compare ‘manning up’ and ‘care’ with each other, and consider them as two alternative actualizations of the cultural transcendental dimension, it is clear that they are incompatible. While ‘manning up’ is part of a long tradition of rules governing proper football conduct (both on and off the field), ‘care’ is in direct conflict with the status quo.

Demonstrating care on the football field risks being seen as inadequately masculine or anti- heroic; in a reversal of the Kantian categorical imperative which states that one ought to treat other people as ends in themselves, in the football world is it imperative to treat the other’s body as a means toward the end (of winning). Treating the other’s body as an end in itself forecloses the possibility of sacrificing it for the attainment of the goal of winning.

When Jennings confesses that “I love him,” it becomes apparent that the love he confesses is more than simply the love between comrades who willingly sacrifice themselves for the preservation of the other – as seen in countless war dramas – since, in the latter case, the ultimate end (the defeat of the enemy) continues to be the overruling consideration.

Jennings’ love is different, since for him, the larger end (of winning the football game) was

146 being sacrificed on behalf of the well-being of Rodgers since, as he put it, “this game is not that important”.223

But as in other aspects of the dominant hegemonic order, the ‘manning up’ narrative does not die so easily. It pushes back, even in the face of a self-consciously professed will to

“change the culture” by attempting to move it toward a Jennings-esque culture of care as officially stated in the Health and Safety Report. Looking at the second example, by voluntarily taking himself out of the game, quarterback Alex Smith directly undermined the

‘manning up’ narrative, and for this he paid the price. He lost the starting role, and eventually his “job” (even though it should be noted that he was soon after traded to the

Kansas City Chiefs where he has the starting job). Smith had so internalized the non-heroic virtue of ‘care’ that he unflinchingly took himself out of the game, even in the absence of pressure from the training staff. However, it appears that, to a certain extent, this move backfired. By forfeiting the starting role to backup Colin Kaepernick, a dangerous precedent was set for young players watching: the risk of losing their job far outweighs the prospect of saving one’s head from further damage.224 Thus the dominant hegemonic order has a way of reestablishing itself. For Alex Smith, once he was officially let go, and it was announced that the coach made the controversial decision to give the starting role to Colin Kaepernick

(at that point a second year untested understudy of Smith) for the remainder of the season,

Smith was good enough and established enough to quickly find a job elsewhere. As a result

223 They went on to lose the game, but, as mentioned above, they ultimately – and ironically – went on to win the Super Bowl. 224 As it turns out, it is the official medical staff – on location at each game – whose responsibility it is to diagnose hits and players to be evaluated; it is often the case that post- concussion determination, the players’ helmet is confiscated, indicating the control is out of their hands once a concussion is suspected. However, Smith took himself out and requested evaluation himself, leading to the question of whether or not players attempt to find ways of avoiding concussion-suspicion.

147 of reporting his concussive symptoms Smith was left standing on the sidelines for the remainder of the season while Kaepernick got a chance to prove himself by leading the team to the Superbowl game. It was as though Smith had enough (too much) faith that the alternative culture of care had become a reality, that he believed he would promptly resume his season upon being cleared by the official NFL concussion protocol.225 But this was not the case. Since the coach liked Kaepernick’s play when he stepped in for the concussed

Smith, he decided to, as he put it, go with the “hot hand”. This ‘hot handed’ thinking resembles the business-oriented ruthlessness in boardrooms across America. It demonstrates a lack of human-human relationship, or loyalty to members of the ‘team’ who have put in the time to benefit the whole. In a neo-liberal world dictated by the logic of the market, where everything is reduced to its exchange value, coupled with the goal of winning at all cost, players are anonymous pieces in a puzzle. Smith thus fell down a slippery slope, swimming against the current of a neo-liberal calculus, itself buttressed by a hero archetype working to maintain the hegemonic masculine ideal.

Despite the officially stated intention of changing the culture, the Smith example illustrates that the hegemonic masculine ideal is deeply intertwined with, and reinforced by, the cold calculus of neo-liberal economics. From a business standpoint, owners want their players to sacrifice their bodies for the good of the organization. If they are willing to do this of their own accord, out of a personal sense of glory, for example – as dictated by the

225 The protocol has become standardized and made official for the 2012-13 season, including the use of an iPad app. The protocol works on the basis of preseason cognitive tests that establish a baseline score, and then these results are compared to the suspected post-concussion player’s cognitive performance. See: Mike Sando. “Inside Slant: The Real Concussion Protocol” in NFL Nation Blog 11/28/12. http://espn.go.com/blog/nflnation/post/_/id/67469/inside-slant-the-real-concussion-protocol Accessed on November 29, 2012.

148 heroic script – all the better, since it keeps the question of labor practices out of the picture, as well as making it appear that the player’s sacrifice is purely voluntary. This of course flies in the face of the official words spoken by the commissioner to “change the culture” and to make it safer from a health and safety point of view.

If culture is a transcendental historical a priori structure, and, insofar as it is historical, and characterized by a field of inter-operative tendencies actively at odds with each other and manifesting themselves in various ways, culture may be said to be violent only in the qualified sense of not overt violence (as on the macro/micro levels), but implicit and constitutively violence. It is not the case that cultural artifacts come ready-made, as products untarnished by their production, but the artifact – whether an inscription on a cave wall, or the football world, which includes the phenomenon of concussion – is marked by the traces of its birth pangs, which it continues to carry as a constituent part of what it is.

The origin of the artifact therefore does not bask in the tranquility in an ahistorical essence (outside of time and becoming), but is characterized by the formative struggle that went into making it possible, and that continues to sustain it. Like all artifacts, we are not born once and for all, but continue to struggle to be born at every instant.226 As Foucault puts it, commenting on his method, “[w]hat is found at the historical beginning of things is not the inviolable identity of their origin; it is the dissension of other things. It is disparity”.227 This “dissension of things” – far from contributing to the installation of a complete picture of history – indicates the disparate tendencies that are inter-operatively at odds with each other; in this sense, a thing is a manifestation of this struggle, and as

226 Steen Brock. “Self-liberation, Reason and Will” in Kierkegaard und Schelling: Freiheit, Angst und Wirklichkeit Ed. Hermann Deuser (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2003), 226. 227 Michel Foucault. “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” in The Foucault Reader Trans. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 79.

149 manifested, it also, and inevitably, partakes in this struggle. In other words, a thing (thought here as a manifestation of disparate forces in conflict with each other) bubbles to the surface as an effect, but once made manifest as a thing, it struggles with other things (with their own pre-history) in an analogous way to the previous, pre-individual level. “These elements may join in a body where they achieve a sudden expression, but as often, their encounter is an engagement in which they efface each other, where the body becomes the pretext of their insurmountable conflict”.228 The body is an incorporation of pre-personal force, which contains and organizes it in a way that transforms this initially active force into a stagnant power (as a body) which in turn redirects it in a way that helps to sustain itself – the embodiment of force – by operatively transforming external threats into a form that is conducive to its preservation. What may be called the spiritualization of force, the acting on itself of a body as a way of preserving itself as the way it is, looks at the world from the perspective of a detached observer who observes the semblance of a world, i.e., the world as if it was detached from its historical becoming. The sickly body is the symptom of an excess of the reactive forces of self-preservation, and the world – and the possibilities, or lack thereof within it – appears accordingly.

It is the viewing of the world in this way – as complete in itself, outside of time, and differentiated into distinguishable units which exist partes extra partes – made possible by a particular way of transforming force into power,229 that results in the potential for the installation of a truth which “stands the test of time” by remaining intact in the face of

228 Ibid., 83. 229 For the difference between force and power see Brian Massumi. A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992). “Force is not to be confused with power. Power is the domestication of force. Force in its wild state arrives from outside to break constraints and open new vistas. Power builds walls” (6).

150 conflict. In this view, what I am calling the artifact230 (which the concussion is an example), results from a scenario in which “force contends against itself, and not only in the intoxication of its abundance, which allows it to divide itself, but at the moment when it weakens. Force reacts against its growing lassitude and gains strength; it imposes limits…”.231 This scenario is made possible by the transcendental culturo-historical a priori

– the condition of possibility for the arising, installation, preservation, and fall of certain ways of life which are living discursive formations containing their own particular artifacts, which in turn arise as a result of the discursive formation’s mode of meaning-making and significance generating practices. Through these practices, force is made visible through various embodiments of power/knowledge formations.232 The actual bodies performing feats of athleticism on the overt level of the football field – and the associated macro/micro rules that govern this activity – are therefore said to be enmeshed in violence in a conventional sense, but this violence is also based on a different sort of violence characterized by pre-personal tendential forces in conflict with each other. These pre- personal tendencies are said to be “violent” in the sense that they are incompatible with each other, or contradictory. The battlefield of culture happens beneath the surface, and may or may not manifest itself in conventionally violent ways (as it has throughout history). Laws,

230 I use this term to indicate a consolidation of forces into the formation of a body, since, on a very basic level, a body is a container of an inside in relation to an outside. Similarly the artifact is distinguished from what it is not and exists in and as a series of material-historical vectors of becoming and meanings, but is treated as though divorced from these as a thing. I extend this term to include worlds, as in the “football world” which, although constituted on the basis of a Wittgensteinian form of life, also includes it’s other side of its being treated as an object alongside other objects. 231 Ibid., 84. 232 The concussion – as the site of contestation involved in medical, legal, physical, , social, economic, and other discourses – is an example of one form of the embodiment of disparate force into power/knowledge frameworks.

151 rules, and limits are set to ensure a surficial peace – which often happens to be the policing of one class by another – but these limits are also enforced by means of a violence, not only in the sense of overt and excessive physical brutality, but also in the more primordial sense that the interest of one group (of forces, which eventually manifests itself in a group of people) is imposed on another group by means of the “law” as set forth in a set of rules. But

“the nature of these rules allows violence to be inflicted on violence and the resurgence of new forces that are sufficiently strong to dominate those in power”;233 such that, as a result,

“[h]umanity does not gradually progress from combat to combat until it arrives at universal reciprocity, whether the rule of law finally replaces warfare; humanity installs each of its violences in a system of rules and thus proceeds from domination to domination”.234 In other words, violence is the starting point for history; although Foucault uses the term violence to indicate the violence of “humanity” against itself, violence operates as part of the transcendental conditions that make an articulation of “humanity” possible in the first place. The latter are the cultural rules that are “before” the manifestation of this or that particular form of life, but are incapable of being recognized or articulated within the terms of the form of life itself, i.e., these “[r]ules are empty in themselves, violent and unfinalized; they are impersonal and can be bent to any purpose”.235

To say that the concussion is a manifestation of a violent culture is not simply to say that, on the empirical macro level, concussions result from abrupt physical contact between bodies, and that, since this practice is socially acceptable, this reflects a culture that permits violence. Instead, the violence of the cultural constitution of artifacts is operative on the pre-

233 “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” 85. 234 Ibid. 235 Ibid., 86.

152 personal level of transcendental cultural creation/manifestation that acts as the condition of possibility for the actualization of this overt level of violence. However, it must be kept in mind that the violence of the transcendental aspect of culture also gives rise to the actualization of care. Although the term “violence” is wrought with moralistic overtones, it is helpful to use it as a way of mediating the differing levels of transcendental cultural rules, as well as the impersonal inclination of these rules, operative as they are on the level of the structural formation that gives rise to the grid of power relations, which can be archaeologically mapped along historical lines of manifest actualizations (for example, the historical rise of the concussion’s particular discursive formation).

2.10 South Park’s Transcendental Disruption of the Discursive Formation

In Episode 8 of the 16th season of the animated television series South Park, creators

Matt Stone and Trey Parker address the theme – and the discourse surrounding – safety in contemporary sporting culture, in particular, the issue of head injury – or concussions – in the National Football League. In lieu of the NFL’s recent attempt to address the issue of concussions head on,236 South Park provides a critique of the issue, which exposes the nuances of the competing discourses surrounding, and contributing to, the construction of the phenomenon, including its framing in various forms of media. Through an admixture of allusive, responsive, and disruptive tactics,237 the episode deconstructs the terms of the popular debate as it is framed and discussed in the mass media, as well as how the various

236 This includes a contract with General Electric to develop new technology to diagnose concussions as they happen. 237 See below for a direct treatment of what these terms denote in Ted Gournelos’ treatment in his Popular Culture and the Future of Politics.

153 interventions attempting to make the game safer may be seen as ridiculously heavy-handed, especially in the context of a game predicated on tackling people to the ground. Some of these interventions have even been perceived as a threat to the legitimacy of the game and its legacy as a rough sport.238

Through an intricately layered – and extremely complex – episode design, that plays with, and highlights, a variety of themes including the perceived detrimental impact of professional football to the long-term health of the players, popular conceptions of gender – especially hegemonic masculinity’s construction of a quasi-gladiatorial status of the players

(in both their own and fans’ eyes) – and the role of (excessive) sarcasm in popular cultural debate, the episode works to expose and critique the discursive formation governing the terms of the debate in a way that highlights the tension at work within it, thereby making explicit the oft hidden absurdity of the actually occupied positions of the debate. When the positions are pushed to their logical limits239 – which they often are in the polarized arena of

American politics – they are easily seen as unrefined, or even childish.

238 This has been an ongoing issue since its inception in the early 19th century; Roosevelt is famously credited for “saving” the game by instituting a number of changes to make the game safer following a number of on-field deaths. Interestingly, President Obama, as recently as January 2013 said that he would have to think “long and hard” about letting his son play football. He goes on to say that he worries more about college level players than professional NFL players because the latter “can make decisions on their own, and most of them are well compensated for the violence they do to their bodies”. Hinting at changes that may turn out to make the game “less interesting”, Obama follows Roosevelt in addressing safety in football (The New Republic, Feb. 11). Both presidents were/are fans of the game, and both see the need to change what they perceive as preventable violence. However, from the other point of view, violence is a constitutive part of football – there is no way of avoiding high velocity collisions when the defensive objective of the game is to physically subdue another play by blocking, hitting and/or tackling him to the ground. 239 This method – pushing argumentation to its logical limits – is often deployed by Slajov Žižek in what may be viewed as an attempt to radicalize a position held by his interlocutor, thereby shedding new light on the topic by having the courage to push through the various moderate positions, deemed acceptable, and therefore available.

154

Created by two University of Colorado students as a short animated film in 1992, which was circulated on the net as one of the first instances of “viral” activity,240 the show began in its official capacity as a marque member of Comedy Central. It has established itself as an example of a new media paradigm, which – despite its major network status – emphasizes peer-to-peer file sharing,241 which makes up a large part of its actual distribution.242 Given the show’s minimalist production value (starting out as a sort of animated puppet show with the use of cardboard cut-outs, and subsequently upgraded to basic flash animation), critical theorist Ted Gournelos argues that, since the show can produce an episode in less than a week,243 it is capable of producing extremely timely episodes that tap into contemporary issues in real time, especially since it is capable of addressing issues before they crystallize into hardened positions, and while they are therefore still up for negotiation in terms of their meaning and overall cultural significance.

Given their use of crude humor, and no holds barred ethos, the show is able to address issues, not only in terms of the actual debate, or even positions made possible by the terms of the debate, but they are actually in a position to problematize the conditions of possibility that go into the production of the debate itself. This translates into a new form of media production that is capable of going beyond the reflection of what has already been said.

Through the use of what Gournelos calls the allusive-responsive-disruptive tactical

240 Ted Gournelos. Popular Culture and the Future of Politics: Cultural Studies and the Tao of South Park (Maryland: Lexington Books, 2009), 11. 241 Its creators, Matt Stone and Trey Parker, are known to have openly encouraged this, at the behest of their network Comedy Central, and its parent company Viacom. 242 Gournelos, 13. 243 This is compared to The Simpsons, which takes six months to produce a single episode with an extensive team of writers (Gournelos, 16).

155 approach, the show taps into the grounds of what it is possible to say (and therefore think and imagine) in the first place.

As an example of relative artistic freedom244 made possible by the minimalism of the medium – and the fluidity of both form and content – the show is noted for its crass jokes and even offensive humor, especially when it is used to disrupt unquestioned assumptions about gender identities, racial politics, and child-parent paradigms. This is especially acute when the use of parody is deployed to mimic reactionary political positions by using overtly offensive language and tropes that could even be considered “hate speech”.245 However, I argue that, throughout the years, the show has gone through a process of modification, wherein it took the virtues of its no holds barred attitude and transformed it into a radical critical pedagogy that works to make visible the invisible assumptions, and pre-critical attitudes, that go into constructing the basis of the socio- cultural imaginary. By preserving its impious edge – where seemingly nothing is off limits – and by using it in the service of intellectual debate by making timely interventions into actually existing positions, it is inevitable that the result has been deemed offensive by one

244 Bill Donohue’s Catholic League being one noteworthy example, and perhaps the most outspoken. The producers have a history of fighting Viacom and Comedy Central over copyright laws, arguing that this is a form of censorship. Censorship, as well as its intricate relationship with tolerance discourse as it is produced and sustained through the liberal democratic state, is often an issue that the show deals with. 245 To illustrate the self-aware style of the show, it should be pointed out that there are several episodes that deal directly or indirectly with the nature of this accusation as in S11E1“With Apologies to Jessie Jackson”, where the long history of language and race are brought into contact with such topics of white privilege, victimization, as well as the (neo- )liberal multiculturalist and democratic pluralist assumptions regarding the ability representation of the other’s experience. In S6E14 “The Death Camp of Tolerance” tolerance discourse itself is called into question, which is a comedic extension of Wendy Brown’s arguments in Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire (New York: Princeton University Press, 2006).

156 group or another.246 Taking its original “punk rock” crassness,247 and coupling it with a discerning political analysis, South Park is able to comment on, and thematically articulate, fundamental ethical and political debates that are often reduced to aseptic intellectual exercises in moral philosophy classes (such as abortion, euthanasia, gender and sexuality, religion’s relationship to the state, human rights, censorship, etc.), and in a gesture of radical pedagogy, avoid dogmatic party lines by provocatively leaving the issue open for further analysis by viewers themselves. By treating the portrayal of these issues, as well as the reality to which these issues apply, as ontologically unfixed and therefore in need of active contestation and negotiation for the attainment of an impression of stability, the show is able to foreground the emergent micro-political dimension of belief, thereby highlighting the transcendental instability of belief itself as it relates to political and ethical conceptions of the real. Reality here is understood as unfinished; that is, as Žižek puts it “reality is not fully ontologically constructed, the world is not fully out there.”248 The famous example of this incompleteness is the analogy he draws between video game producers and God’s creation of the world. To even a casual gamer (and in the most realist of games) it is readily apparent that the world of the video game is incomplete in terms of details or the possible space for game play. He claims that this is comparable to the way nature is composed of both a macro and a micro aspect: while on the quasi-experiential level – where Newtonian physics consistently applies – reality is rational and complete, on the quantum level reality is irrational and incomplete. Since on the quantum level things don’t neatly fit in place, Žižek

246 Gournelos, 14. 247 Trey Parker: “We were both sort of punk rockers. We wanted to do a punk rock tv show.” Interview with Charlie Rose (September 26, 2005). http://www.spscriptorium.com/SPinfo/050926CharlieRose.htm 248 Slajov Žižek, EGS seminar, August 2012.

157 surmises that God – not expecting science to ever gain the capacity to penetrate the depths of the quantum level of reality – got lazy, and simply left this level of reality in a state of incompletion. In this way, since reality is non-All (there is no absolute totality), being is constitutively left open and, to paraphrase Sartre, man is condemned to be free.

It is due to this incomplete status of reality that a negotiated approach to representing it is required, since in actu any representation would fail to capture that to which it attempts because, since it is incomplete, its completion will come only in a non-existent future which cannot be anticipated in advance.

Although the pretense of representationalism is to provide an accurate glimpse of reality, this pretense is necessarily false, since that which it represents is changing in time and constitutively incomplete. The implicit promise of representation is to depict reality accurately and in a more or less complete way. However, since reality is incomplete, representation is condemned to inaccuracy and incompleteness, and as such, competing versions of represented reality are necessarily in dispute. The fragmented nature of reality requires a dissensual version of politics, one based on an agonistic tension between incomplete and malleable subject positions that are themselves in flux. This is similar to what Gournelos calls a “disruptive ontology”,249 a term “reflecting fragmented being itself as a political state, and the concentration or direction of that fragmented being as a similarly political (and potentially radically progressive) move”.250 This is the idea that the freedom necessary for political change is found as an inherent aspect of being itself, since being is fragmentary and always already under (de-)construction. It is “reflective of” fragmented being, since the latter is not static, and in Hegelian fashion, reflects reflection itself by

249 Gournelos, 223. 250 Gournelos, email correspondence. February 5, 2013.

158 making it an object for itself. Representation necessarily becomes a participant in this struggle, which as Nietzsche claims, is an agonistic one, as discussed earlier in terms of the conflict at forces at the pre-individual level. Nietzsche demonstrates the inevitable failure of the attempt of representation to overcome the agonistic character of being when he draws the reader’s attention to what lies behind the Homeric world, which historically gets depicted through an orderly poeticism passed down orally through the ages, and which beckons to be considered a representative origin of Western civilization. As Nietzsche asks himself:

But what lies behind the Homeric world, as the womb of everything Hellenic? For in

that world the extraordinary artistic precision, calm, and purity of the lines raise us

above the mere contents: through an artistic deception the colors seem lighter,

milder, warmer; and in this colorful warm light the men appear better and more

sympathetic. But what do we behold when, no longer led and protected by the hand

of Homer, we stride back into the pre-Homeric world? Only night and terror and an

imagination accustomed to the horrible. What kind of earthly existence do these

revolting, terrible theogonic myths reflect? A life ruled only by the children of

Night: strife, lust, deceit, old age, and death...251

Representation allows for the clean erasure of that which falls outside of its terms, leading to the false impression that the representational content is all there is. The product of

251 Friedrich Nietzsche. “Homer’s Contest” in The Portable Nietzsche. Trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking Press, 1968). Letter to Erwin Rohde, 16 July 1872. Selected Letters of Friedrich Nietzsche Trans. Christopher Middleton (Hackett Publishing: Indiana, 1969).

159 representation comes ready-made, giving rise to the misconception of reality as static, since the production of the product is not part of the representational content. The “children of the

Night” to which Nietzsche artfully alludes are the forces that fall outside the light of representation – both the forgotten elements foreclosed from being part of representation, and the conditions of possibility for representation itself, the fact that there is representation taking place providing an image of reality and not reality itself. The agonism that goes into the construction of reality, but which is not part of the presentation of reality, is akin to what

Agamben, citing Nietzsche’s friend Franz Overbeck, refers to as prehistory. “The fundamental character of prehistory is that it is the history of the moment of arising, and not, as its name might lead one to believe, that it is the most ancient. Indeed, it may even be the most recent…”.252 Prehistory is not a point of origin, the historical moment of something’s coming into existence, since it is of a qualitatively different type of 'history' – one that it heterogeneous to the history we are familiar. It is of a past that never was – and is incapable of ever being made – present. There is thus a history of representation, or a representational history, and a prehistory of representation – which is representation’s blind spot. “[H]istory begins only where the monuments become intelligible and where trustworthy written testimonies are available. Behind and on this side of it, there lies prehistory”.253 Under a false pretense, representationalism works to awe, and dumbfound, its recipient by claiming that the results of representation is all that there is to it, i.e., that there is no extra- representational content. It thus works to excise itself from visibility by making a totality out of its representational content. This covers-over and loses the dissensual nature of the

252 Franz Overbeck qtd by Giorgio Agamben in The Signature of All Things: On Method Trans. Luca D’Isanto and Kevin Attell (New York: Zone Books, 2009), 85. 253 Ibid.

160 underlying cultural forces that go into making representation - and its results - possible in the first place. It is at this level, on the level of the covered-over and, as it were, hidden aspect of representation, that South Park actively disrupts the discursive formation on the basis of its transcendental presuppositions, and works to problematize and make visible, its unsaid and otherwise invisible political presuppositions and implications. This is operative on the transcendental level since, as noted earlier, the transcendental is coextensive with the actual, and it is of the underlying unarticulated, but presupposed, conditions for the actual’s existence. It is thus at the transcendental level that representationalism hides its tracks, since the very presupposition that representation is accurate, and therefore in no need of being questioned, has already been unthinkingly accepted. While making visible the otherwise invisible operation of representation itself, the show provokes the viewer to question their perceptions of reality and the way things are structured politically, economically, culturally, and otherwise.

One possible criticism of the show is that it is often difficult to discern Parker and

Stone’s political stance on the issues that they so critically highlight, leading to the assumption that they are politically neutral and therefore irresponsible for declining to take an articulated stance – and be consistent across, and even within, episodes – on the issues that they so controversially formulate. In this way the show has even been charged with having conservative or libertarian leanings.254 Given the radical nature of the show, in terms of its problematization of presuppositions, it is difficult, if not impossible, to fit the show into the terms of a traditionally conceptualized coherent political paradigm or project.

254 Popular Culture, 42.

161

Further, the reluctance to fit into a recognizable political platform leaves one susceptible to the impression of subscribing to an extreme version of ethical relativism.255

While it is true that the show does not fit into a traditional political platform, the attempt to evaluate the show in these terms misses the point. It overlooks the fact that, philosophically, South Park operates on the basis of a fundamentally unstable ontological framework.256 What this means is that, since discourse is inherently unstable and shifting, the result - the formation of political positions - are also unstable and shifting. This is not to say that coherent political action is impossible, and that political subjects should just indifferently embrace ethical relativism. Rather, political action is possible only insofar as the instability of a project is acknowledged in advance. Since it is argued here that reality is constitutively incomplete, a political project – itself based on a particular stance on reality in terms of a fundamental belief structure dictating what is real and therefore what is possible

– will inevitably also be incomplete, and emerge alongside, and within, the emergent nature of constitutively unfinished reality. Although there are positions of consolidated power - and consolidated people who come to occupy these positions257 - the attempt will always be to foster the impression that reality is stable, and that there are only a few political choices to be made. Just like representation wants to hide its pre-historical becoming, consolidated political positions seek to hide the fact that they are a representation of reality, and only account for a small portion of the potentiality to become politically. Given this unstable

255 What I mean by this is the ethical position that there are no absolute values, and therefore, every ethical position is just as good as any, with the result that there are no grounds to criticize – or even evaluate – other positions. 256 Gournelos argues that the three tactical operations that he introduces in the book work on the condition that being is inherently unstable. 257 The false impression of stability and consolidated subject positions, are constructed by an immense ideological and physical system of control and networks of securitization.

162 ontological framework, and the processual nature of reality, it follows that there is more to politics than meets the false choices constructed by mass media and the dominant discourse.

South Park is an intervention into this falsified image of the political landscape. By actively disrupting it, it works to illustrate the superficiality of the choices presented as real, and provokes a critical response in the viewer in light of the realization that reality itself is incomplete.

Since South Park episodes often end with an implicit imperative to see through the superficiality of the false political choices offered as absolute, and to “be reasonable,” it could be argued that Stone and Parker take something of a Socratic approach.258 What I mean by this is that, if nothing else, Socrates stands for the critical pedagogical teacher, who claims to know nothing, and teaches one to question that which one believes one knows. It should thus be pointed out that the show is not only critical on the level of political parties and popular debate, it goes further: through its various interventions into the transcendental, it asks what it is that makes politics possible – and even worthwhile – in the first place. That is, it inquires into the value of political inquiry itself. It is at this level that the properly transcendental dimension comes to light, and it is seen to function in and through a disruption of the already established nature of this dimension. When in The Meno Socrates is made to ask whether “virtue [is] something that can be taught? Or does it come with practice?”259 what is implied is that it is only through thinking (in this case about virtue) that virtue is able to manifest itself, and in this way, that thinking itself may be considered a

258 It should be noted here that I am referring to the Socrates who wrote nothing down, and who happened to be Plato’s teacher. This Socrates has nothing to do with Plato’s doctrine of the Forms or his later political philosophy. Which is to say, I am making reference to the Socratic dialectical method than to Platonic philosophy, which is an antithesis to the ontology argued for here. 259 Plato. Meno Trans. Robert Sharples (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

163 primary virtue. With the realization that thinking itself is a virtue, it becomes clear that the show puts its emphasis on the necessity of thought as an ingredient of – and perhaps, a condition of possibility for – meaningful action; or even that thought itself is a form of action or activism. Similarly, when Žižek provocatively exclaims, “Don’t act. Just think”260 he implicitly claims that thinking things through – even if it does not always lead to meaningful political action – is sometimes better than mindless action. This reversal of

Marx’ thesis 11 from his Theses on Feuerbach – where he famously remarks that philosophers have only interpreted the world, and that one must change it – translates it back into its original form, such that today the main task is again to interpret the world since it is now so complex. This, of course, is not to go against Marxism, but in a very Marxian way, it brings thought back to its revolutionary vocation as appropriate to the 21st century and the ubiquity of social media such as Twitter which structurally reduces expression to a hundred and forty characters.

Critical interpretation is therefore a form of political action, and the South Park creators may therefore be said to be engaged in a form of critical sociology (or pedagogy), such that, through the creation of episodes provoking a reflexive thought, these episodes come to act as embodied forms of reflexive action. Thought and action cannot be detached.

For Pierre Bourdieu reflexivity “entails…the systematic exploration of the ‘unthought categories of thought which delimit the thinkable and predetermine the thought’”.261 It is the

“unthought categories of thought” which are the transcendental conditions for thought, and

260 Slavoj Zizek. “Don’t act. Just Think.” (video) Big Think (2012). http://seekingalpha.com/article/1229121-blackberry-shorts-have-little-to-gain-much-to- lose?source=email_rt_article_title 261 Pierre Bourdieu and L. Waquant. An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).

164 which make thought what it is and as it is. The ‘unthought,’ but determining, conditions for thought, which act as the backdrop for the relations between thought and what comes to be the reality to which thought thinks, are the ultimate subject of South Park’s critique. Instead of demanding the acceptance of pre-constituted political positions, and forcing a decision on their behalf, the creators of South Park provoke the viewer to think through the issues for themselves by reflexively situating themselves in the socio-cultural nexus in which they are embedded. Beginning each episode by foregrounding the absurdity of the pre-constituted positions relating to the episode’s issue, they elicit an amount of cognitive dissonance within the viewer’s set of beliefs between how things are portrayed and how they think things are, thereby making it uncomfortable for the viewer (since it is made salient that their beliefs are in obvious contradiction), to eventually provoke a reconsideration of, and response to, their non-critical position. This scheme operates on the basis that there are a series of implicit rules and “unthought categories of thought” governing everyday life, and that these rules are associated with the structures of belief about reality, as well as that people rely on these ready-made beliefs and attendant political leanings, which stand-in for

– and thereby preclude – an actively engaged questioning and thinking-through of an issue in all its variegated complexity.

2.11 Critical Irony

Another way this approach works to highlight and destabilize the transcendental dimension is seen in its utilization of irony as the basic mechanism for its comedic approach to problematizing the governing discursive formation of contemporary issues. Socratic irony

165 works by bringing to visibility (and thought) the otherwise invisible absurdity characterizing the (politically motivated) ‘common-sense’ understanding(s) of reality, while at the same time acknowledging its own position as part of the very cultural structures that it critiques.

By immanently deconstructing itself in the attempt to observe itself in and through alternative contexts that contest the ingrained – and unacknowledged – position it highlights, it brings the undigested issue to the fore, thereby illustrating its complexity.

According to Linda Hutcheon, “irony ‘happens’ for you…when two meanings, one said and the other unsaid, come together, usually with a certain critical edge'. These two meanings come to form a dynamic tension, not exactly a logical contradiction, but at least a contrariety, where the cognitive dissonance that they occasion elicits a response – i.e., laughter, or a sense of immediate complicity where the one who understands (or “gets it”) comes to feel as though they have a glimpse of an underlying truth of the situation not otherwise available in the non-ironic register".262 Irony happens to those who are in the position (and well equipped enough) to “get it”, i.e., those who are so constituted to form a

“discursive community” which pre-exists, and makes possible, the arising of irony in the first place.263 In this sense there is an autonomous aspect to irony, since to force irony, to consciously make it happen, runs the risk of precluding its appearance in advance since this forcing would work to lessen its “critical edge”. This illustrates the autonomously emergent nature of both discourse and reality, since both unfold without being an agent at the origin of the situation, and arise out of the transcendental-material conditions of the situation,

262 Linda Hutcheon. “Irony, Nostalgia and the Postmodern” University of Toronto Library (online), 1998. http://www.library.utoronto.ca/utel/criticism/hutchinp.html (Accessed 25/03/13). 262 Linda Hutcheon. Irony’s Edge: The Theory and Politics of Irony (New York: Routledge, 1994), 4. 263

166 rather than being in an external position that has an effect on the situation. Furthermore, since there is an ingroup-outgroup dynamic at play - irony is only available to those who have the cultural capital required to "get it" by having access to the requisite understanding of the dynamic tension between the said and the unsaid - it presupposes a situation that both harbors this tension, and makes it available through recourse to its own conditions of becoming. While irony depends on its embeddedness in and as situation, its ability to disrupt this same situation, by pointing to its unacknowledged but inherent potential to become otherwise, it acts as a nascent opening of the situation to its other. By reflexively including itself among the terms it relies on for its actualization, irony could be said to be disposed toward a form of auto-criticism. That is, by taking itself to be included as part of its critical object, it differentiates itself into the myriad transcendentally conflictive terms that it relies on as the basis for its own possibility, and is thereby able to point toward the achievement of alternative modalities beyond (yet immanently situated within) these terms in the form of the potentiality of response. Irony is therefore ‘always already’ embedded in a situation, while at the same time working to achieve a distance from this same situation, and it is through this tentatively achieved distance, through the work of auto-criticism, that it is possible for an attempt to be made to rework the situation in the form of a future-oriented response.

Just as Socrates claimed that the only thing he knew was that he did not know, South

Park, rather than providing answers in the form of moral lessons to be gleaned from each episode, works to provoke a response in the viewer by conscientiously – and uncomfortably

– leaving the issue open for further consideration. Since the show approaches contemporary issues by appealing to pre-existing but unacknowledged, beliefs, knowledge structures, and

167 hegemonic/ideological processes at the level of their constitutive presupposition, the show’s modus operandi of critique may be argued to operate in a similar way as the above-defined notion of irony, where it functions on the transcendental level (i.e., the level of discourse’s

‘pre-history’ understood in terms of the fragmented pre-personal elements that go into making its actual empirical manifestation possible) while remaining self-consciously immanent to the culture in which it operates. It thereby works to fold this pre-personal transcendental dimension of culture back onto itself, thereby making itself an object for itself. The discrepancy between the uncritically held current version of itself, and the absurd way it appears when exposed to critique, provokes the laughter and the comedic element of the show by foregrounding the dissonance occasioned by this discrepancy.264 Reductio ad absurdum, the same method deployed by Aristotle in the first part of The Metaphysics to illustrate the inconsistent premises of pre-Socratic philosophers’ argumentation, works to expose contradiction in belief, and thereby urges the believer to fix their belief structure by getting rid of the contradiction by making the structure more consistent. I argue that South

Park utilizes this method of argumentation on a transcendental cultural level in the form of a comedic-performative enaction of examples that instantiate the contradictory nature of these belief structures.

In her purposely non-academically written and unconventional chapter on satire and irony in Deconstructing South Park: Critical Examinations of Animated Transgression,

Stephanie Hammer playfully and performatively engages with academic literary theory

264 It is not as simple as there being one dominant and one subordinate version, but, instead, there is a composition of a multiplicity of conflicting views and quasi-views, such that the dominant exists as an assemblage in contradiction and contention with itself; but the simplest way to schematically draw out the terms of the discussion is by appealing to this binary model of superordinate and subordinate.

168

(especially Northrop Frye's Anatomy and Criticism, Alvin Kernan's The Plot of Satire, and

Michael Seidel's Satiric Inheritance).265 In her chapter she achieves a direct commentary on the intersections of South Park and canonical literary theory by putting the canonical viewpoints in the mouths of the South Park's characters themselves. In doing so she achieves a critical ventriloquism that provides a direct immediacy to the content of heady academic theory by translating it into the form of the South Park universe with all its vulgarity, cynicism and humor. The gesture of bringing academic writing and South Park together proceeds in such a way that both discourses come into conflict with each other and as a result, she implicitly argues, they come to deconstruct each other.266 The classic figures of the satirical form are brought to bear on the typologies of the show itself, which results in an admixture of voices, discourses and terms of literariness that become unseated from their usual grounding in what South Park character Cartman might refer to (but in much more vulgar terms) as the sterility of the academic form and its inability to directly account for the subversive potential that the show embodies. While academia is largely concerned to provide a discrete argument and finding direct evidence to back it up, South Park works in the opposite direction by taking up a multiplicity of conflicting narratives and putting them in direct contact with each other, thereby foregrounding the absurdity that results from such a disruptive – and agonistic – display of incommensurability. The truly disturbing aspect of

265 Stephanie Hammer. “‘The Brown Noise’: A Roundtable Discussion on Satire and South Park, Chaired by Eric Cartman,” in Deconstructing South Park, Edited by Brian Cogan (Plymouth: Lexington Books, 2012). 266 A series of edited books have been published looking at the academic interest of South Park, for example: South Park and Philosophy: You know, I learned Something Today, Edited by Robert Arp (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007); South Park And Philosophy: Bigger, Longer and More Penetrating, Edited by Richard Hanley (Chicago: Open Court, 2007); Toni Johnson-Woods. Blame Canada!: South Park and Contemporary Culture (New York: Continuum, 2007); The Deep End of South Park, Edited by James R. Keller and Stratyner (London: McFarland and Company, 2009).

169 this gesture is that these conflicting – and often absurd – discursive forms are often actually held positions by members of the contemporary social world – held by the viewers themselves. This is why Hammer’s paper could be read as an articulation of the limits of academic prose in terms of its ability to enact meaningful change in the political existence of members of the larger society, and the necessity for an actively performative gesture, one that directly intervenes into the Lebenswelt of everyday life. She pushes the boundaries of this academic limitation by transforming her prose into the South Park narratival universe, thereby revealing the transcendental meeting point between a reactive attempt to understand the world, and the critical-creative gesture that actively transforms it.

Just as it has been argued that the discourse of NFL football is caught up in unconscious transcendental structures of pre-historic myth, Hammer ties various aspects of the South Park narrative into their western literary precedents. For example, she points out that the "Alazon - the imposter = a jerky guy"267 is an archetypal figure from ancient Greek theatre that has an uncanny resemblance with the ways in which Cartman is portrayed by

Parker and Stone. By connecting a contemporary version of satire with its ancient Greek heritage, she highlights the show’s potential to disrupt the taken-for-granted flow of everyday life, and to present the occasion for critical reflection on the status quo. It is also pointed out that satire has always (at least since Greek theatre) played the double role of distraction from everyday concerns and critical social commentary. Through distraction from everyday concerns, a space is opened up for the critical distance necessary for the critical social commentary to be meaningfully received in all its discursive incommensurability and subversive potential. This incommensurability occasions the

267 Ibid., 23.

170 reconsideration of one’s own position, the socio-economic power relations involved in the constitution of one’s position, and the role played by complacency to sustain this state of affairs.

Since, as Kernan argues, the genre of ironic theatre is without a plot,268 it lets everything remain the same, so that as a result of this relative stasis of character development, a saturated critical attention may be placed on the way things actually are (i.e., the audience’s own social structure), and not only how they came to be as part of their plot- driven portrayal. According to Kernan, the plot takes attention away from the contemporary circumstances of the audience by placing their attention firmly in an anticipatory framework in a closed imaginary world. This is also related to what I call auto-criticism below, since it is the inter- and intra-textual elements of the text that happen to bring out a productive tension in themselves. According to this view, it is only when nothing happens that a critical awareness of one's own discourse is revealed in all its contingent becoming and malleability. It is also in this way that the text opens itself up to its conditions of possibility, and discourse itself (both portrayed on the stage and in the audience's actual existence) is revealed as constitutively unfinished and therefore open to change.

2.12 Gournelos’ Three Tactics

The method of critical irony deployed by South Park to expose the contradictory nature of the dominant discourse, is characterized by Gournelos as consisting in three interrelated tactics which he labels The Allusive, The Responsive, and The Disruptive.

268 Ibid., 24.

171

1) The Allusive is similar to bricolage, which proceeds to enact “the (re)assemblage of signifiers within a power structure [and] acts as a challenge to dominant (static) structures”.269 Gournelos attributes the allusive strategy to Michel de Certeau’s use of Levi-

Strauss term, and should be read in conjunction with what he refers to as the act of

“poaching,” i.e., the selective use of particular parts of a text for the achievement of tactical advantage. The allusive strategy is at work whenever there is inter-textuality, cross- referentiality with other – usually historical – aspects of (pop) cultural, or other citational strategies used to inform an understanding of the present usage by re-contextualizing its precedents. It follows that this method requires a basic level of familiarity with the aspects of culture being alluded to in order to be most effective. By poaching one aspect of culture from its context, this poached content is deterritorialized, and thereby takes on a novel meaning in relation to the past from which it has been poached. An example of this is the use of mash-ups which Laurence Lessig defines as a form of literacy (or writing), that works to make – and express – something new, which was not already contained in the original, with the result that the finished product of the mash-up is not reducible to the sum of its

(poached and mashed-up) parts.

2) The Responsive tactic builds on the Allusive. Like the latter, it requires a base- level reference point for which to respond and be put into action. However, while the

Allusive is general and abstract, the Responsive is grounded in the particularity of that to which it responds. That is, the responsive directly responds to particular contemporary events, and in so far as they are current, they are often unfolding at very same time that the responsive tactic is being enacted. Its strength comes from the particularity and timeliness of

269 Ibid., 20.

172 the issue or event it responds to, since the latter is often not yet fully constituted in terms of its popular meaning. Given their “topical grounding” and specificity, responsive tactics offer “a direct expression of conflict…in which broad social norms and policies are engaged precisely as they are performed in tangible events and media productions”.270 In one sense, then, Responsive tactics put the abstract theory of the Allusive into the actuality of practice, since the reference is directly tangible and put into full view. In another sense, however,

Allusive and Responsive tactics have both theoretical and practical aspects, since the gesture of allusion is performative as much as it is theoretical, while the practical intricacies of the response must be, to a certain extent, thought-out in advance for it to be effectively disruptive. These two tactics thus work hand-in-hand: while the Allusive tactic alludes to, and thereby provides the material on which the Responsive responds, the Responsive acts on the alluded content in a constructive way to draw out, and foreground, the immanent conflict at play within the alluded-to event itself, with the result that this event is often disrupted and displaced in terms of its political significance and meaning.

3) The Disruptive tactic attempts to exacerbate tensions in the dominant discourse by breaking up the constitutive logic ruling the hegemonic formation, with the goal of problematizing and reconfiguring it. Seeking to “disrupt the dominant in order to render it as one possibility among many,” the disruptive tactic “accentuate[s] internal logical inconsistencies or contradictions to force them into fracture”.271 Operating similarly to what

Jacques Derrida called “deconstruction,” this tactic works within the text to exploit constitutive weaknesses so as to unravel the mechanics of the text’s dominant and often oppressive structure. This tactic is the most invasive since it works to disrupt discourse (or

270 Ibid., 25. 271 Ibid., 29.

173

‘the text’) from within, yet it is still connected with the above two forms, since it alludes to the discourse that it disrupts, and its disruption is a form of response. However, unlike the other two, the Disruptive works on something already established and formed.

What these strategies have in common in South Park’s use of them is that they all operate on an already constituted discourse, which is first made explicit through the reflective operation of the episode’s cartoonish re-enactment, and then – through an admixture of the tactics – acted upon to disrupt the flow of the already-constituted, and established, larger discursive formation to which each episode’s issue belongs. This latter is part of the historical a priori of the situation, which includes the conditions of possibility of the show itself. Thus South Park is self-reflexive regarding its own position, often making fun of itself, and bringing its own limitations to the fore. This approach can be compared to

Foucault’s method of archaeology and genealogy, since both of these also operate on the basis of a given historical formation. The historical situation – which Foucault’s methodological apparatus problematizes – does not arise as a result of Foucault’s analysis, but is treated as, in some way, pre-existing the analysis, and therefore, acting as a kind of condition of possibility for the type of analysis which Foucault deploys. Since power is

‘always already’ there, it does not come into being at a particular moment, but has existed all along, whether it was recognized as such or not. But this does not mean that power has always existed in the same way. Like Foucault, South Park is aware of the contingency of the present, and it thus acknowledges that what Foucault calls power shifts along with the contingent emergence of temporal moments, whether conceptualized as part of a grand historical narratives or not. For Foucault – and Gournelos – history is in some way dependent on its being written, told, recorded, documented, analyzed, studied, legislated,

174 etc., it is nothing in itself, but exists as a product of a particular – and historical – discursive formation. The political issues and circumstances South Park problematizes are part of the particularity of their transcendental conditions, which include the Simondonian pre- individual, and Agambenian pre-historical becomings. South Park is possible on the basis that the transcendental constitution of history is never finished once and for all, but is always already open, and its meaning is up for grabs. Thus pre-history (which representationalism defies) is another name for the historical a priori since like the former, it is neither in time, nor not in time, but exists as part of a temporal register best referred to as intra-historical. South Park deploys methods of representationalism in order to discount and debase them, thereby pointing to the constitutive failure of representation to finally capture Žižek’s unfinished status of being.

In line with Foucault’s methodological project, it is argued here that the dominant discourse is inherently conflictive, agonistic, and unstable. Similar to how Gramsci characterizes hegemony as an arena for – and the product of – actively conflicting contradictory interests, Gournelos argues that common sense understandings, and popular beliefs, are actively negotiated and disputed in a way that precludes (because they are in a transcendental mediation) immediate discernibility. He characterizes politics as “an ongoing struggle mediated by (but not reducible to) accepted discourse”.272 This “emergent” image of politics characterizes it not depicted as a struggle between fully constituted groups with discrete interests and fully articulable demands, but as a tension between fragmentary, incomplete – and even contradictory – tendencies that have yet to consolidate into

272 Ibid., 35.

175 traditionally recognizable positions.273 Under these terms, history is not considered a progressive movement toward ever better ways of organizing the social, but as a contingent series of ruptures with no fixed Archimedean point. This leads Gournelos to assert that

“what is at stake [with these aforementioned tactics] is the active rupturing of the present, a new way of approaching and enacting political engagement that reflects emergent modes of understanding and approaching the world rather than tools to be used within dominant frames”.274 Gournelos does not see the tactics as mere tools to be used within already constituted frames of reference, but more radically, he sees these tactics as co-emergent with the very situations in which they are enacted. They are not fixed, but are just as unstable as the ontological situation to which they are reflectively and critically put to use, and for which they have been invented. They are general frameworks for thought-action – not hard and fast rules to be followed and applied mechanically. As such, they are as incomplete as the reality to which they respond, and therefore their exact use may remain open.

The “active rupturing of the present,” while being compatible with Foucault’s attempt to provide a “history of the present,” also operates – along with much of Foucault’s early work under the heading of archaeology – on the transcendental level, both as being part of it, and acting as a disruption to it. Above I argued that the transcendental is co- extensive with the material and historical conditions to which it belongs. Using Foucault’s notion of the historical a priori, it was suggested that the transcendental is the realm of pre-

273 A tendency differs from an intention in that, while the latter is caught up in a narrative of subjective decision and causal agency, a tendency is simply a mathematically mapped trend based on probability, which does not require an underlying entity to be the “cause” of the tendency. While a tendency requires its historical movement to be part of the equation that makes inferences as to its future course, a trajectory simply looks at its movement without making it a part of a larger picture. 274 Ibid.

176 personal forces and oscillations that concretize into narrative forms and implicit rules.

While simultaneously being part of and constitutive of the particular knowledge/power formation it finds itself caught up within, the transcendental provides the conditions for – as well as being conditioned by – the actual explicit rules. As a consequence of this overarching transcendentalism, comedy in general, along with the particular type of comedy deployed by South Park is inherently critical, and operates at the limits of the discourse in the form of the three tactical methods mentioned above. Similarly, I argue that South Park’s critical irony operates on the transcendental level as an ultimately disruptive force that inadvertently spurs the emergence of alternative arrangements of the actual on the level of explicit rules and behavior. It does this in three ways: 1) bringing to self-consciousness, 2) highlighting discrepancy, and 3) provoking new response.

2.13 Self-Consciousness and Auto-Criticism

This is illustrated through Hegel’s analysis of the move from Consciousness to Self- consciousness in the Phenomenology of Spirit. Consciousness, having developed as a result, and on the basis of, the earlier stages of Sense-certainty, and the levels of Perception – going from basic temporal and spatial differentiations and determinations (as exemplified by the indexical ‘this’ and ‘that’), toward that of the recognition of shape, the object, and the backdrop of experience in general –lacks awareness of itself as such. For this reason it requires the recognition of another consciousness so that it will be able to see itself reflected in the other, and, insofar as the other is a reflection of itself, in itself. The explicit violence manifested in this section of the Phenomenology is not by accident. As in the use of the

177 word culture above (conditioned by a form of violence as force), Hegel understood conflict as at the basis of life as such. It is through conflict that the ‘new’ dialectically emerges onto the scene. It is in this way that we must view the moment that Consciousness becomes Self- consciousness, and why it is important for a description of how comedic humor in general – and the critical irony deployed by South Park in particular – is necessarily predicated on disruption.

In the Master-Slave dialectic, two Consciousnesses come face-to-face for the first time. Viewing each other as a necessary requirement for the attainment of recognition, a fight to the death ensues, resulting in the victor stopping just short of killing the other. The victor eventually realizes that it must preserve the other insofar as its own recognition depends on the existence of the other so it decides to preserve its life, and as a result, the balance of power shifts until both become aware of themselves in relation to the other:

Consciousness becomes Self-consciousness. “Self-consciousness…is movement; but since…it distinguishes from itself…only itself as itself, the difference, as an otherness, is immediately superseded for it; the difference is not, and it [self-consciousness] is only the motionless tautology of: ‘I am I’; but since for it the difference does not have the form of being, it is not self-consciousness…but there is also for consciousness the unity of itself with this difference as a second distinct moment”.275 Struggling to gain possession of itself as itself, Self-consciousness goes through the growing pains of its own recognition. The difference between itself and itself in the reflective movement is initially overlooked, and all that is left is the Fichtean empty I=I, where empty absolute identity –and stasis – is the only result. However, Hegel (in a gesture that will found contemporary theories of difference)

275 Hegel, 105.

178 emphasizes that it is precisely the difference that is being overlooked: in order for the tautologous proposition of ‘I am I’ to arise in the first place, it is necessary that there be a base level (however small) of difference between them. The comparison itself – the question of whether or not these two things are the same – becomes an object (“there is also for consciousness the unity of itself with this difference”). This second distinct moment is the doubling-back of one part of consciousness (treated as the passive object) by another

(treated as the active subject). The tautology that Hegel formulates as ‘I am I’ turns into a chiasmic “I” broken into the part of itself that is reflected upon, and the part of the ‘I’ that is doing the reflecting. Once provoked by critical irony, the transcendental folds back onto itself as unity-in-difference; acknowledging itself as part of the same unity, it recognizes itself as simultaneously exemplified by identity and difference at the same time. The movement of self-consciousness is therefore the development of the recognition of difference as the chiasmic object that is both self and other. Critical irony plays the role of this degree-zero of difference, prompting the transcendental’s recognition of itself as internally conflicted and constitutively unfinished. The movement of self-consciousness is never finished because the chiasmic object – difference itself – is precisely the difference between the doubling reflective movement of the transcendental’s own identity. Irony happens as a result of this ontological doubling, and South Park’s transcendental criticism acts as a medium for making it explicit.

Through this recognition of itself as split into two aspects, the transcendental realizes that there is a discrepancy (or the discrepancy is ‘realized’ in the sense that it comes to fruition) between the actuality and potentiality of manifestation. That is, critical irony, by appealing to, and operating on the level of the transcendental constitution of actuality,

179 provides an image for the discrepancy between how things actually are and how they could be, provoking the dominant imaginary to fall into doubt, about itself and its unactualized potential.

At this point it may be asked how the transcendental could have an ideal image of itself, since it was earlier considered to be pre-personal, and therefore without any semblance of coherence, given that it was characterized as the condition of possibility for coherence in the first place. However, since the transcendental is not detached from the actual discursive formation, and the empirical conception of reality to which it gives rise, it is not a purely formal category, but rather, a materially real actualization. The discrepancy here is not between an ideality and itself, but between the actual discourse – the way things are spoken about and imagined on the explicit and implicit level of rules outlined above – and the way it could be (made explicit through the discrepancy initiated by critical irony’s intervention). Discourse, considered as part of a particular historical situation that actualizes into a discursive formation, is a relating and unifying force, and, insofar as it tends toward unification, takes an interest in its achievement of unity. It can thus be said that when provoked by critical irony, and doubled over by difference, discourse is compelled to re- orientate itself by being interrupted by the situation insofar as it provokes dissonance.

There are thus two levels of the transcendental’s realization that it is internally conflicted, and therefore constitutively unfinished. Firstly, there is the formally ontological aspect wherein there is a realization of a unity between itself and difference, as exemplified in Hegel’s second moment where the reflective difference between itself and itself becomes an object for itself; and, secondly, there is the moment where critical irony’s disruption (as concretized in Gournelos’ three tactics) makes salient the fact that discourse is actually

180 incoherent and therefore in need of reevaluation, and eventually reconstitution. Insofar as the transcendental encompasses what is interpreted – at a particular historical stage and through a particular discursive formation – the subject (or “consciousness” or whatever other effect is drawn out), which is a particular manifestation of the transcendental, is itself subjected to the discrepancy in the form of cognitive dissonance. And this is precisely the point: although indifferent to its own difference (between itself and itself as reflecting- reflected and between the ideal and the actual) the transcendental gives rise to the conditions for the comparison, and to the discrepancy found therein. The transcendental, when rent askew, is pushed forward by the impossible prospect of its completion; as a result, the constitutively unfinished status of this completion requires a continual processuality and becoming.

That there is difference at all – both between itself and itself in the purely logical form, and between its ideal image and its actual manifestation – brings up the possibility of a discernible unifying tendency. That is, the unifying tendency, made manifest through the fact of there being an ideal image at all, and the discrepancy between the latter and the way it actually is, results in what Hegel calls the restlessness of the negative, which is the desire to fulfill itself in the face of constant thwarting. Derrida conceptualizes this in terms of the impossible, but logocentrically attempted, closure of the book: the closure of the book is always already underwritten by the text.276 What this means is that, historically, the western metaphysical tradition has equated speech with the presence of thought and being, and treated writing as a derivative effacement of the purity of the former. Writing (grammé) has been treated as secondary to speech because it takes up space, requires materiality for its

276 Jacques Derrida. Of Grammatology, Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997).

181 traces to be inscribed (rather than the pneumatism of speech), and is temporally detached from the presence of its origin. However, as Derrida argues, this is only the dream of reason; there was never a speech that preceded writing; and in fact, the reverse is the case: an arche-writing may be seen to precede speech in the form of cultural activity that left material traces in its wake. This constitutive debasement of speech by writing leaves the philosophic enterprise open to its other, and as such, the ideal metaphysical closure – whether of the book or the ideal image of the transcendental – is merely a manifestation of a finite power structure that attempts to impose the legitimacy of its law on its subjects (in the process of subjectivation). Since the law is written, it too is open, and the exposure of power to its hypocritical underside (the constitutive discrepancy between what it claims to be and what it actually is) is inscribed in its essence. And insofar as the latter is the case, it (the existing power structure) borrows from the transcendental for its sustenance, but also for its potential change.

The discrepancy (between the ideal and the actual) leads to the response of bringing the two into alignment. This requires action and new forms of speaking about (imagining) old entities (including socio-political forms of organization). Action is thus required, but given the way in which reality is mediated by the transcendental, it is critical irony that initiates response by acting as the catalyst for responding to the situation in a new way. This does not come from above but rather, from the way discourse itself is formulated and altered through its internal disputation. Since the latter is material as much as ideological, the acting out of alternative scripts (and rule-sets) encourages an alteration in the discursive formation– including different and inventive ways of actualizing the transcendental cultural pre-personal matrix of forces. As a mode of actualizing potentiality, the violence of the

182 cultural level is mirrored by the violence actively involved in Gournelos’ “active rupturing of the present”.

2.14 “Sarcastaball”

Gournelos argues that the active rupturing of the present results from a comedic intervention, which utilizes the tools of ironic displacement and the tactics of the allusive, responsive, and disruptive. These comedic interventions into actually existing discourse(s), although overtly operative on the mundane level of the actual effects of discourse, simultaneously, but covertly, operate on the transcendental level, since the latter is the condition of possibility for the mundane level of media discussion (such as the debate about effects of video games on children). The actually existing issue discussed here, NFL concussions and critical treatment by South Park, are part of a discursive formation that simultaneously unfolds in the present (when the episode aired for the first time on

September 26, 2012), and cites its own pre-historico-transcendental dimension which acts as its condition of actuality, such that the actual intervention itself (the episode) operates on both levels.

The episode foregrounds the issue of head injury in football by beginning the with an on-field award ceremony celebrating the accomplishments of retired players who have been out of the game for a number of years. In terms of the timeliness of the debate, since the episode aired while the football season was in full stride – and players were being pulled from games on a weekly basis with the attribution of of “concussion” (both by the media and on the official list of injured players provided all teams every week) – the questionable

183 safety of the game was already a salient issue in the minds of the viewers, not only avid viewers of football, but also in the mind of the general public, as the issue that was frequently made a top priority by the media to such an extent that the game of football may be said to have become associated277 with the word “concussion”. According to Google

Trends, the search term “concussion” peaked in November 2012, around the same time that the episode aired), indicating that indeed, concussions were on people’s minds.

In the episode, the effects of brain injury are displayed in an overwhelming and exaggerated way, the players walk around the field as if in a daze, clearly not cognitively present for the presentation of the award. The indication of non-presence works to allude to the fact that they have been forced out of the game by both time (age) and the effects of the game of football itself. However, it is no accident that the episode includes an evaluation that the foreclosure from the game of football extends to the game of life, including the competence to participate in various language games and correctly interpret the social syntax and different levels of rules operative therein. South Park makes it funny by enacting these deficiencies in an absurd way by radically decontextualizing the scene, thereby having the behavior of the disorientated players act out – and embodying – the absurdity of the discourse itself.

An example of this display of absurdity occurs at the very beginning of the episode.

Following a tackle, a disoriented player gets up, reaches into his pocket for his car keys, and simulates driving (placing his hands in the air as if to grasp a steering wheel). The scene’s

277 I use this term in a similar way that William James uses it in terms of his description of the flow of consciousness in “The Stream of Thought” in The Principles of Psychology. (1890). This can also be compared to the use David Hume makes of it to indicate the way knowledge arises based on the experience of frequent conjunction of phenomena in A Treatise of Human Nature (1739).

184 humor is exacerbated through the use of voice-over play-by-play commentary, simulating the crisp, but slightly overly excited, commentator’s voice reciting specialized knowledge about the game. The commentary also describes the physical play on the field, and then, in a jarring understatement, and without flinching, the voice proceeds to note that the player is

“driving” himself off the field, but it “doesn't make a lot of sense because since his concussion in '06 he doesn't even had a license.” This acts to interrupt the flow of the game by juxtaposing the absurdity of the on-field behavior with the normal expectations the viewer has of the normally mediated football experience with its average cues and comforts.

Introducing the theme of concussions through a playfulness that elicits a form of laughter that derives from the stupidity of the exaggerated disorientation of the players, it is juxtaposed with the ‘business as usual’ demeanor of the play-by-play commentator in the voiceover, opening up a sarcastic mode for the main vehicle of critique.

By foregrounding the disorientating effect of head injury in direct association with the game of football – and mixing this with the use of abject absurdity278 – South Park elicits a form of laughter deriving from the unexpected exaggeration of the effects of concussion on in-game behavior that leads to an outright breach of the implicit rules governing acceptable behavior for how players act on the field, as well as the more global concerns with rewriting the hegemonic masculinity script. While this could be seen as a symptom of a malicious insensitivity toward the seriousness of the topic (or outright

278 The narrative of the episode circulates around a play on the idea of caring concern for other players by reaching ‘deep inside yourself’ to find one’s creamy goo centre, which is an allusion to Butters’ discovery of his pubescent body and associated wet dreams. It turns out that, not knowing what it was, we find out that he has been saving his semen in vials and believing that it would give his fellow sarcastaball players an edge of niceness. The episode ends with the exasperated sports talk host sarcastically summing up the absurdity of the suggested rewritten script to hegemonic masculinity: “Football has to be made safer, so why don’t we have players in bras drinking semen.”

185

‘ableism’), it works to effect a deterritorialization of the image of the concussed victim by placing him in a situation where the rules of the situation break down and thereby make themselves known.

A similar approach is used in the theatre of the absurd where the break down of meaning is situationally explored and celebrated. In the latter, the liminal space279 of sense/nonsense is exposed as the place for a potential (re-)generation of meaning in an otherwise meaningless world. What the theatre of the absurd attempts to achieve is a sort of phenomenological reduction, not to the givenness of the world as it appears in its logical elements (as the “reduction” is deployed by Husserl), but rather, to the way it appears in its non-logical absurdity. The premise of the reduction is to let being (or phenomena) reveal itself as it is, without being concerned with the existential import of the thing; since it is argued here that being is constitutively unfinished, the absurdity of the theatre of the absurd reflects the ontological absurdity of an unfinished being on the level of human existence.

This approach works by occasioning a degree of cognitive dissonance that arises on the basis of the now salient discrepancy between the ideal (expected) and the real (actual) version of reality. The “Sarcastaball” episode dramatizes what Sara Jane Bailes calls ‘an aesthetics of failure’ whereby the opening sequence of the episode situates the extreme competence of players in the most athletic years of their life with the uncanny incompetence of retired NFL players who are depicted as incapable of achieving even the most mundane of tasks. This extreme juxtaposition forces the viewer to question the legitimacy of the mediated football spectacle, and to think through the obnoxious difference that haunts the

279 Gina Masucci MacKenzie, “Theatre’s New Threshold,” review of Reassessing The Theatre of the Absurd: Camus, Beckett, Ionesco, Genet and Pinter, by Michael Y. Bennett (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).

186 game as its excessive remainder. The depiction of failure in theatre, raised to an aesthetic form, allows the audience to witness the “thing before us…coming undone”280 which, in this case, is the confidence that the football world exemplifies the pinnacle of physical competence. While NFL football may be thought to represent the highest level of physical ability in (North) American culture, “Sarcastaball” interrupts this narrative by foregrounding the downside of this machismo by concretely re-situating its image in the socio-historical/material conditions of/for its existence, thereby articulating the failure of this (the American) dream (of playing football in the NFL) for achieving ‘the good life’.

The transcendental dream of a virulent masculinity, untarnished by any signs of weakness, ends in the despair, physical exhaustion and mental illness of the defeated players depicted as stumbling around the field.

Although the viewer of South Park does not participate in the same spatio-temporal space as the performers on the field, through the use of allusion, the episode is able to represent a familiar mediated presentation of ‘being there’ – i.e., watching the game broadcasted on a major US network (NBC, ABC or FOX). It is in terms of the latter that the disruption is most pronounced. While normally an exemplar of seamless and polished brilliance – utilizing the best equipment available (including “Skycam” a camera system of cables remotely controlled hovering above the players achieving a bird’s eye view of the action on the field), this viewing experience is simultaneously cited (called up in terms of its phenomenological comportment) and interrupted by the on-field incident of the player attempting to “drive” himself off the field. Following the unexpected occurrence, the commentators are made to speak in a tone of subtle surprise, while maintaining a ‘business

280 Sara Jane Bailes. Performance Theatre and the Poetics of Failure: Forced Entertainment, Goat Island, Elevator Repair Service (London: Routledge, 2011).

187 as usual’ professionalism. However, as the media broadcast breaks down, the viewer is left to fill in the blanks, with the obvious implication that playing in the NFL may actually lead to harmful effects on players’ well being, and that it is no big deal, since it is an expected and accepted part of the game. The failure of the broadcast, mimicking the failure of the players to live up to their image as heroic figures both on and off the field, develops into a progressively more absurd rendering of the dominant discourse surrounding concussions, and the NFL’s desperate attempt to respond to the need for a cultural change in the perception of the game as unsafe.

While the commentator says the player is “slow to get up,” Randy, incapable of containing his enthusiasm for the viciousness of the hit, actually uses it as a pedagogical moment to teach his son (and his son’s friends), how to properly deal a damaging blow to another person, albeit on the football field. This highlights the masculine ideal that Randy operates on the basis of, and which he re-affirms through his iteration of highly-charged masculinist behavior. While he is jumping up and down and yelling “Boom!” at the momentum of the hit, he exhibits stereotypical masculine behavior by holding a bottle of beer at the couch in front of the television. There are no females present at this scene, where

Randy takes up the role of the father figure imparting the ideal to the next generation.

As this goes on the broadcast of the game takes a pause and Commissioner Roger

Goodell joins the booth where he is asked to comment on the “hoopla” surrounding concussions. Goodell immediately gets into a seemingly scripted line about the lack of evidence for the correlation between football and head trauma thereby highlighting the entire spectrum of the problem as one concerning the issue of framing the concussion as something requiring further study. The framing of the issue as one of merely

188 epistemological concern immediately puts it in the discourse surrounding science and the deferral that an appeal to specialist knowledge affords. While it is not an outright dismissal of the issue, it allows for an undecided status of the concussion be instituted by obscuring the issue by having it rely on the establishment of evidence by those who can tell the truth, i.e., Heidegger’s “the they” (the anonymous voice of the crowd of amorphous people in the know). This of course is a microcosm of the issue, framed as it is as one concerning the status of neuroscience and the brain scans capable of giving an immediate picture of the cranium, as though the image itself did not need interpretation. The latter is caught up in a network of interests and discourses determining the validity or invalidity of a given approach to the study of the brain in this highly specialized (and locked-in, or established) discipline. Goodell reiterates that there are “interesting statistics” coming out, and that he

(and the NFL) are “deeply concerned,” but we (all of us) are waiting to see if there is any direct correlation between football and concussions (all the while loosening his tie, a television trope signifying discomfort in the face of the attempt to justify a state of affairs in the name of accountability). This deferral obfuscates the question, along with the issue, in a way that moves the attention away from the game of football toward that of the scientists themselves.

Under the surface of this highly charged masculine environment of Randy teaching the boys how to be violent in football is a theme of counter-masculinity in the form of homo-phobic rhetoric. Butters, unaware of the subtext of his statement, says that he “sucks” at sports and that he was told to work at a Thai massage parlor because he is so good at

“sucking.” The vulgarity of the statement aside, it opens up a new dimension of the situation by re-uniting it with the fear of the opposite of the hegemonic masculinist ideal. Butters

189 becomes the site for the disputation, and contestation, of the image of the heroic football player who is to appear completely void of feminine traits.

In one-way the episode can be read as Randy versus the school. While Randy is portrayed as the pinnacle of machismo, the school represents a reactive attempt to unify all behavior by protecting children from any potential harm, even if that harm is that which comes from the nature of the cultural world itself. The school is made to take the most violent parts of football away so that harm could be avoided, something that Žižek attributes to the postmodern over-concern with health, and the associated removal of the “bad” things including coffee without caffeine or beer without alcohol. The school system is thus seen as a threat to the American ideals of risk-taking and danger in the name of a higher principle

(such as the glory found in victory, especially when made possible through sacrifice). This is what stirs Randy to attend the PTA meeting the next day, where he sarcastically suggests that they should make the players wear bras, tin-foil hats and use a balloon instead of a ball.

To his dismay, these become instituted into the rules, and he eventually becomes the coach of the new Sarcastaball League. Eventually Commissioner Goodell states that the

Sarcastaball rules have been incorporated into the NFL, and Randy is appointed the new head coach of the Denver Broncos. All this happens as though in the blink of an eye; where the game of football is portrayed as falling down a slippery slope lubricated by Randy’s sarcasm ending in the absurdity of a game involving men in bras and tin-foil hats politely passing a balloon around a football field. Playing directly on the opposite of the masculine ideal, the feminization of the game, when it is threatened by new safety procedures, is used as a means to convey the absurdity of moving away from the masculine violence that is supposed to be inherent in the game as one of its constituent traits. This is “a sport where

190 safety is all that matters” playing up the dialectic between safety and the ruthlessness of competition when untethered to normal social laws of conduct (such as the exceptional status of the legality of fist-fighting in hockey, touted as merely part of the game by the likes of Don Cherry on CBCs Hockey Night in Canada).

Consistent with the earlier move to set Butters up as the representative for the alternative option to hegemonic masculinity through an intensification of the discrepancy between his polite (and therefore effeminate) position, and the brutality of the violence on the football field, he is portrayed as excelling at the game of Sarcastaball (which requires politeness and an excessive concern for the wellbeing of the other players). I have set this discrepancy up as the difference between ‘Manning-up’ and ‘Care’ as two inconsistent traits vying for expression in the examples of Jennings-Rodgers and Smith-Kaepernick. One of the points being made is that it is impossible - and irrational - to be forced to decide one or the other. There should be a relative reasonableness to the evaluation of the game, which shouldn’t be so violent that players get their heads knocked off on every play, but not should it be made so safe that the game ceases to be competitive. Interrogating the limits of both discourses, the episode demarcates a line of flight that takes the debate into a terrain of undecidability, but which is not over-determined by the biases and tired analyses contained in and as part of the already existing discourse(s). This points out the incipient coagulation of discourse in an either/or sentiment, but also the non-necessity for any binary logic associated with the complexities of social life. Part of the even-handed approach offered in this episode is that the solution must match the complex messiness of the problem, and that, in other words, no absolute solution is possible, only a series of situated evaluations of the outcome of different interventions.

191

Through a sarcastic remark, Randy raises the concern that - through the excessive concern with safety - the children are learning a deceptive conception of the world where

“hugging and safety is what the world is all about.” While it is often argued that putting children in sports at a young age is a way of teaching them life-lessons, as though sports were an avenue for character formation and growth, Randy’s concern is that it can have the opposite effect. Letting things run their course, without too much intervention from the top- tier planners (parents in this case) may be a better route since it allows children to negotiate the conditions of their existence through their own autonomy. As this thinking goes, painting a picture of the world with rose-colored glasses only sets the kid up for disappointment, despair and not preparing them for the ruthless violence to come.

Consistent with the theme of masculine identity and the questionable intervention of an excessive concern with safety at the expense of the authenticity of the game, Butters is discovering his adult manhood for the first time (portrayed in the episode as his first encounter with mature sexuality in the form of nocturnal emission). This coming-of-age discovery of human sexuality plays into the themes of hetero-normative masculinity, and the pressures of maintaining a healthy virulence through displays of testosterone-driven expression associated with the feats of athleticism associated with professional football.

Ironically, it is Butters who is (it may be assumed) the first of his peers to reach puberty, while being the one that displays the least amount of traditionally inflected masculinist behavior, thereby shedding light on the contingent history and constructed nature of the masculine ideal itself. Not knowing how to comprehend his nocturnal emissions, he believes it to be a sign of his internal goodness and begins to save it in vials. Playing up the use of performance-enhancing drugs, and enacting a symbolic reversal of the testosterone-boosting

192 drugs used to enhance performance, the episode addresses sexuality as the highly-charged but under-represented master-concept of the dialectical concern with safety (preserving the cognitive abilities of the players) and aggression (preserving the integrity of the game).

Given the objective of sarcastaball, being as polite, courteous and caring as possible),

Butters’ ejaculate is treated in the episode as being infused with the caring edge required to excel in an environment of care. Eventually the vials are marketed as a sports drink, where famous players (such as Tom Brady) are portrayed drinking this mysterious drink with a grimacing facial expression.

This additional theme pushes the discourse of the concussion into its transcendental conditions of possibility, thereby exhibiting the complexity of the discursive formation growing out of the terms of the debate. The episode demonstrates the heterogeneous character of discourse, and the hegemonic struggle for the dominant articulation of the competing fragments of possible framings and inflections. Since being is ontologically unfinished, it remains open to alternative inflections and modes of actualization. This fundamental openness is politically put on display by the episode by putting disparate potential framings in contested relation with each other including: the concerns to face-save the NFL by means of Goodell’s spinning of the stats and deferral of the correlation (an appeal to science in the service of capital); the over-zealous fandom of the position performing the masculinist ideal of heroism and violent competition; the coming-of- age/becoming-male narrative of Butters first discovery of sexuality; the reversal of the rules of football as ones’s excessively concerned with safety, and the related marketing of

Butters’ semen as a performance-enhancing football drink; the influence of sarcasm (and cynicism) in political life and the inability to speak reasonably in an environment

193 excessively concerned with political-speak jargon and (neo-)liberal frameworks of policy management; the actual concern for the players’ well-being and the possible long-term injuries embattled players face post-retirement to name but a few of the themes that come into contact with each other, and which are normally left out of the overt aspects of the discussion concerning concussions as it is popularly conceived. These are part of the transcendental dimension, which the episode brings out of their invisibility, and thereby puts them in circulation as part of the main concern of addressing the concussion crisis, which, it is implied, is a crisis only because of the ways in which popular debate is quickly closed- down by the influence of the dominant media closing off the inherent potentiality of the political situation and the emergent discursive situation operating on a micro-affective level.

At this level the episode works to display these normally unnoticed themes, which are directly related to the articulation of what it means for a concussion to happen in the context of the football world.

Randy eventually goes to parliament (with his beer in hand) to make a sarcastic announcement that, although the economy is “in the toilet,” the number one priority of the country should be making football safer. He is again greeted with an enthusiastic response from the members of parliament who seem to agree that making football safer should be made the priority. Implicit in this critique is the inability of public debate to latch onto the issues that affect them the most, including the economy, because these happen beneath the surface of sports and entertainment. However, while football may be seen as a diversion from real political issues, football is also a huge component in this larger political spectrum of issues, whereby football (and sport culture more generally) is inexorably linked to these other concerns by means of the transcendental dimension of the hegemonic contestation for

194 the inflection of reality taking place in the form of competing discourses and modes of actualizing the inherent potential of an incomplete ontological situation. While perhaps not the main concern on the agenda (as it is sarcastically portrayed to be by Randy’s address to the government), football is also inexorably linked with all other political issues on the agenda in a more direct way, since they all have footings in the same transcendental dimension.

All three of Gournelos’ tactics are utilized by the show to disrupt the discursive formation of concussions on the level of its transcendental constitution. The episode uses the Allusive tactic by citing the experience of watching football, using its own conventions as signs to be read in such a way that puts the viewer in the position of viewing a televised sporting event. The show’s reproduction of the familiar conventions of watching a game, acts as a platform for the allusion to the contemporary issue of the concussion as it plays a role in the situated discursive formation of contemporary professional sport. By alluding to these familiarities, the episode is able to re-examine them through a radical decontextualization. This latter occasions the Responsive tactic to foreground the contradictory discourse surrounding the concussion. In one sense American culture valorizes the heroics that go into playing the game with passion, the sacrifice of the individual for the team, as well as the high level of athleticism necessary to compete at the professional level. However, there are also concerns regarding the long-term safety of players who engage in the game at the level of intensity necessary to sustain a career, and these contradictory attitudes were circulating in tandem at the time the episode aired, thereby foregrounding this tension in a timely way.

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With these two tactics establishing the basis for critique, the episode uses the disruptive tactic to immanently problematize the discourse by actively engaging with, and playing with the associated gender norms that go into sustaining the hegemonic status of the heroic script as exemplified in requirement of ‘manning up’. By calling into question hegemonic masculinity by valorizing an ethic of care, the prevailing hegemonic order is disrupted and the disconnect between the actual and ideal aspect of the transcendental is put on display. The disruptive use of sarcasm allows the transcendental dimension to be repeated with a difference (obvious to the audience, but lost on the show’s protagonist), thereby setting up a cognitive dissonance in the viewer’s belief-set as it relates to the contemporary issue of concussions, as well as the larger issue of the epistemic relationship between the media and reality.

Sarcasm functions here as a catalyst for critique, as well as a vehicle that drives the thematic content, by framing it through the continual displacement it affords. The episode is aptly called “Sarcastaball” because Randy, the overzealous father of Kyle, who often finds himself caught up in his father’s misplaced enthusiasm, falls into an uncontrollable bout of chronic sarcasm upon realizing that, in the name of safety, Kyle’s school principle has decided to change the rules (of grade school football) by taking kickoffs out of the game because they are deemed to be the most violent part. Before he learns about the proposed rule change, Randy is portrayed as an avid football fan who takes great pleasure in the violent aspects of the sport. Sitting with Kyle and his friends, he jumps off the couch yelling, “Boom! Did you see that hit? That was a great hit boys, remember that at practice tomorrow.” This highlights the hegemonic masculine ideal, with the archetypal father figure teaching his male son to incorporate the warrior mentality through the role modeling he

196 provides as mediated by the football spectacle on television. At the same time his own distorted frame renders ridiculous the advice he is providing, and the vicarious nature of the experience he is propounding.

The episode is grounded in Randy’s appeal to sarcasm as a way of deferring acceptance of the rule changes, and deflecting a full incorporation of the purported need for new safety regulations into his role of father. His sarcasm makes itself felt at a PTA meeting where the discussion turns to the need to ensure the safety of children playing football.

Randy stands up in protest and says that he has an idea for how to make the game safer, suggesting that the players wear bras, tinfoil hats and use a balloon instead of a ball. While one player catches the ball, he runs while the other players hug. It will be a sport where

“safety is the only thing that matters” and will be called “Sarcastaball”. The other parents at the meeting applaud at what they consider to be a serious – and very good – suggestion, and ask him to be the coach. In a sarcastic tone of voice Randy replies “Yes, I would love to be the coach of the sarcastaball team.” The news media portray Randy as a concerned parent attempting to change the sport by making it safer for the children. He is quoted as saying

“the children are learning valuable life lessons because hugging and safety is what the world is all about.” Given his sarcasm, he means the opposite of what he says; yet nobody (in the general public) understands the sarcasm as sarcasm, and mistakenly takes him at his literal word. Safety and violence are juxtaposed here, and thereby provide the dialectical implication that the world may not be as “safe” as some may like.

This lack of awareness of sarcasm is similar to what Hutcheon argues as the basis of irony, i.e., that one either ‘gets it’ (being part of the group is a necessary condition) or one does not ‘get it’. However, in contradistinction to sarcasm (which is actively utilized by the

197 user to make an implicit but semi-self-conscious verbal assault on its recipient), irony reflects back on its situation as condition for its own possibility, thereby citing its prehistory as a moment of its present actualization. That is, while irony may be said to have more to do with the conditions of the situation itself (and the expectations located therein) sarcasm is actively utilized by a user to comment in some way on an object. This distinction notwithstanding, both irony and sarcasm, as I am using them here, work to unsettle the trajectory of the discursive formation, and – through drawing attention to the situation, or an object ‘in’ it – influences the taking up of a critical stance that ideally leads to the critical questioning of presuppositions.

However, the sarcasm that Randy wields seems to achieve just the opposite. Since his sarcasm is lost to his audience, he ends up merely repeating the prejudices of his audience, and thereby reinforcing their expectations about concussions, sport and the need to dramatically alter the rules of the game in the name of safety. Insofar as the audience’s views are reinforced, a sort of mob mentality ensues, and the opposite of Randy’s intended message goes viral, leading NFL commissioner Roger Goodell to hold a press conference announcing that the NFL has adopted the sarcastaball rules, and that Randy has been elected as the new head coach of the Denver Broncos. Through a simple reiteration of the popular idiom, people are portrayed as enthusiastically clapping in support, having their expectations reinforced. By sarcastically repeating what ends up becoming a mantra – that things must be made safer at all costs – the result is that people come out in support of the initiative in record numbers; this influx of support is portrayed in terms of being a media spectacle – something that takes off, goes viral, and forms a structured response demanding participation and an eventual reworking of reality in its terms.

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The episode thus acts to put on display, and to demonstrate, the process of consolidation of a discursive formation, whereby the image of safety (portrayed as threatened by the rise of the concussion) becomes the Archimedean point, or rallying cry guiding the entire interpretation of reality on a grand scale. Through a sustained campaign of reiteration, the object of discourse becomes naturalized, and as a result, it comes to reflect the way it is spoken of and portrayed in its ‘average everydayness’.281 Later in the episode

Randy is depicted getting an MRI. It turns out that Randy is diagnosed with a degenerative condition whose symptom is uncontrollable sarcasm. With his wife Sharon at his side,

Randy has the following conversation with the cognitive brain specialist:

Doctor: It appears that there is permanent damage.

Sharon: How do we fix this?

Doctor: There just isn’t enough research in how sarcasm affects the brain.

Randy: That’s it! I should just go home and forget about what this sport has done to me. Let thousands of people play sarcastaball and get hurt too.

Doctor: Oh really? You think there’s a correlation between sarcasm and sarcastaball? Oh really, that’s fascinating. Please go on.

Randy: No. Sarcastaball has nothing to do with it. I just really enjoy being sarcastic so I must be finding an excuse.

Doctor: You know, I have a 50 year old Alzheimer patient out in the waiting room that can’t even remember his family, but let’s forget about him and focus on how sarcastaball might affect people’s brains.

281 I borrow this phrase from Heidegger to indicate the way things are, not in their exceptional circumstance (e.g., when there is a revolution), but when things just are as they are.

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Randy: My son is out there playing that game. It’s heartwarming you have such high regard for his safety.

Doctor: Okay, I have a better idea. Let’s get all the funding for cancer research and genetic diseases; let’s take all that money and make commercials that say ‘Hey America, sarcasm might not be such a good think for the brain’.

Randy: Thank you doctor. Thank you so much.

As illustrated in this exchange, the use of sarcasm obfuscates the position of the speaker to such a degree that it becomes difficult to discern whether the words should be taken at face value or not. Within this exchange there is a subtle criticism of the excessive amount of money used in a public campaign in the US to ‘raise awareness’ about the risk of head injury in sport, sponsored by the NFL and Goodell’s campaign to initiate “cultural change”. It is not wrong to spend the money this way, but it is hypocritical. Further, it does not take highly sophisticated brain imaging technology to find a “correlation” between football and brain injury. Repetitively getting hit in the head – and occasionally knocked unconscious – will inevitably take its toll on the function of the brain, and this is known without specialized equipment. However, as players are wont to point out, they are aware of the risks involved when they sign up. Since the high profile case of Junior Seau – whose family is filing a wrongful death suit against the NFL following his suicide, the NFL stepped up its campaign for rule change, even considering the one that the South Park episode begins by mentioning regarding kick offs. Not all players are happy about these changes, especially defensive players whose job is to hit other players. On this issue veteran safety Troy Polamalu spoke out, suggesting that he would like more say in the way that the game is being reorganized. As he put it, “[t]here are rule changes every year. I do wish,

200 however, that the NFL would have a voice from the players’ side, whether it’s our players’ union president, team captains, or our executive committee on the players’ side. Because we’re the guys that realize the risk, we’re the guys on the field”.282 Polamalu’s concern is that players are shut out from the negotiations, while the top brass make decisions based on their self-interest (e.g., positioning for law suits), while leaving players out of a discussion that is professed to be about players’ safety in the first place.

One conceivable interpretation of the NFL concussion situation is the following.

Driven by self-interest in terms of securing the financial bottom line by safeguarding the company from the requirement to compensate an overwhelming excessive amount of injury- related pension payments to retired players, the NFL has systematically downplayed the link between the two, thereby attempting to diminish its culpability. However, as technology developed and the link became much more obvious, coupled with the growing number of players suing the NFL for over misleading labor practices and refusing to provide adequate post-career funds for health care, the NFL had to backtrack. To continue along this line of reasoning, part of the NFL’s strategy for dealing with this onslaught of legal issues is to change its public persona by making it seen to be much more concerned with safety (instead of valorizing violence). As a result of the public campaign, which includes millions of dollars spend on the type of advertisement alluded to in the exchange between Randy and his doctor, the phenomenon of concussion has taken on a new prominence in the perceptual and intellectual space of the populace. As Chomsky and Herman point out in Manufacturing

Consent, the corporate interest achieves its goal of securing favorable marketing conditions

282 “Troy Polamalu Talks Rule Changes” ESPN.com News Services, March 29, 2013. http://espn.go.com/nfl/story/_/id/9111820/troy-polamalu-pittsburgh-steelers-says-players- say-rule-changes Accessed March 29, 2013.

201 through a gross expenditure on media environments that offer an appropriate consumer audience; and as a result, in order for news media to qualify for this advertisement revenue, they must ensure that their programming is in line with this interest by creating an environment conducive to it. As a result, the corporate interest ends up having a large impact on the way the media reports on – spins, frames, conceptualizes – reality. In this climate it could be argued that the NFL – as a major corporation with ties with the largest broadcasting corporations in the US (NBC, ABC, FOX) – is in an position to have an large impact on the way the media spins the issues surrounding head injury, and therefore, on the discursive formation itself, which it is a constitutive part of, since it is simultaneously producer and product.

It is this formative process that functions on a transcendental level, constructing and controlling the flows of information; it in-forms reality by providing the terms in and through which it is experienced and capable of expressing itself. In terms of the pre- individual singularities of the transcendental cultural level, the networks of in-formative power forge link-nodes: just as the inhuman speculative financial market flows in a virtual dimension that is irreducible to the material level of phenomenological experience while still being translated into actual/material resonances (e.g., housing foreclosures), the football world also has its inhuman, financially speculative aspects. The political economy of football, big business dealing both in human and non-human commodities alike, is part of the transcendental cultural realm of becoming. In these terms, commissioner Goodell’s campaign to change the culture of the football world by making safety a priority would require dipping into the transcendental-cultural precursors of the football world to

202 affectively capture alternative vectors of becoming.283 Changing the way the football world

– as both an institutional framework and a way of life – is perceived (and perceivable given its transcendental conditions of possibility) on a grand scale would involve an alteration of the discursive formation itself – something that cannot be achieved by a single individual, since it would involve changes to the entire apparatus of power constitutive of this world.

However, as a node in the network of financial power that (immediately) translates into media power, insofar as the media plays a formative role in the construction and sustenance of the discursive formation, the NFL is in a privileged position to institute change in its self- interest by having an impact on the discourse, as it operates on the transcendental level.

Making the cultural artifact of the football world different is not an impossibility for an institution as powerful as the NFL, but this also would requires an alteration to the dominant hegemonic masculinity as it operates to influence and co-construct a particular discursive formation.

In the grandiloquence that only a contemporary cynic could muster, Peter Sloterdijk states that “there can be no healthy relation of modern-day enlightenment to its own history without sarcasm”.284 According to Sloterdijk, sarcasm provides the vehicle for approaching the history of the discourse of the enlightenment in a critical enough way for it to grasp the transcendental dimension of its own constitution. Through the use of (sarcastic) repetition, similar to the way Beatrice Han considers Kant’s Anthropology to be a dialectical repetition of the theme of the first Critique (as noted above), discourse is activated through a

283 I use this term in the way Brian Massumi uses it in Parables for the Virtual (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2002) to indicate the pre-perceptual underpinnings for perception. 284 Peter Sloterdijk. Critique of Cynical Reason. Trans. Michael Aldred (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 6.

203 performative gesture that displaces its central authority by avoiding shedding light on its incompleteness. Insofar as the South Park episode repeats the repetition (of the discourse surrounding concussions which includes the concern with safety and the initiation of rule- changes), it is able to bring the critical gaze (of the viewer) to the level of its transcendental dimension, thereby casting doubt on the ways in which the concussion (as a phenomenon) is utilized in its various guises as, for example, a legal (bargaining) tool (utilized in the attempt to achieve a different work environment by and for NFL players), as well as its imbrication within a political decision-making process. At the same time, however, South Park positions the concussion in terms of its status as just another rule in the game, where its influence is manifest in terms of the way other proximate rules are enforced, the ways in which players treat (and view) each other, and their relation with the NFL as a corporate entity, as well as the way the larger institutional framework of the football world in general is viewed and appropriated through its consumption and interpretation by fans and general spectators. This includes the altered viewing conditions of the gameplay as mediated by a newly acquired attitude of uneasy concern.285 By priming the football world (including the audience) to be vigilantly aware of the existential presence of concussions, the experience of viewing the game is influenced by the inflexion of expectation (of violent hits, injury, concussion), and this in turn affects the ways in which the game is thought of, watched and imagined.

“Sarcastaball” demonstrates, and attempts to account for, the consolidation of the discursive formation that goes into constituting the contemporary rise (in terms of instances/rates counted and overall discussion in the media and elsewhere) in football-

285 I would characterize this attitude as one of ambivalence because, since the mediated hyper vigilance surrounding concussions, there has developed a certain ‘tip of the tongue syndrome’ involved in watching an NFL game where the subtle acknowledgement that head injury could occur at any moment is never far away.

204 related concussions, as well as providing a critical rendering of the discourse by problematizing the gender roles, juridical implications, and institutional practices that go into sustaining and maintaining the phenomenon of football on a variety of levels, including the transcendental level that accounts for the presuppositions (and quasi-unconscious assumptions) that act as necessary conditions for its arising. Just as there are philosophical precedents to the issue of the mind/brain dualism, the phenomenon of the concussion incorporates two aspects (a materialist reduction to the brain and a socio-cultural production of discourse) while suspending judgment as to which is the more important in a consideration regarding the meaning of concussions in their socio-cultural – and medical – significance. To say that the concussion is the result of a discursive formation is not to deny that there are real material effects on the brain, and that these effects could be studied empirically. By making the claim that concussions are transcendentally constituted is to remain aware of the historical contingencies of knowledge, the praxis of science, and their intertwinement in an épistémè, as well as the ways in which this knowledge is thought to affect and reflect reality as it is in itself. By orientating the crux of the debate at the point of intersection between naturalism, media and scripts of gendering (whether hegemonic or otherwise), South Park operates on the basis of the guiding premise that reality is never not hegemonically disputed and in contestation. It is therefore always already open to alternative forms of actualization, novelty, and change on the level of its transcendental constitution.

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Chapter 3:

The Transcendental Dimension of the Everyday: Charles Bukowski

3.1 Introduction

This chapter addresses the transcendental dimension of the everyday286 as exemplified by the work of poet and novelist Charles Bukowski. By “the transcendental dimension of the everyday,” I mean the field (socio-cultural, economic, political, literary) that acts as the ultimate foundation and presupposition for the taken for granted status of a particular form of life to be possible. This means that the transcendental is invisible, but ultimately constitutive, of the experience of reality in terms of the way things appear for people living in and through a particular habitus.

I will argue that the transcendental dimension of the everyday is exemplified, highlighted and articulated throughout Bukowski’s work (poetry, novels and letters),287 and that it is through the particular style of art that Bukowski’s work affords and produces – including its unique appeal to ‘reality’ through an non-ironic realism – that makes both him and his work a special place to investigate the phenomenon of everyday transcendentalism.

286 While this may appear to be a reference to Heidegger’s treatment of the ‘average everydayness’ of Dasein in Being and Time, although similar in emphasis, it differs, since I am not attempt to find the structures of any and all Dasein, but, the particular conditions of possibility for Bukowski himself. We may or may not be able to draw an analogy to ourselves while finding the conditions for the everyday for him. 287 Bukowski’s work and life merge in such a way that it is often insisted that all of his work is unabashedly autobiographical, his novels being a retelling of, and reflection upon, different parts of his life as documented by the jobs he toiled at and the women he had relationships with.

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Methodologically, I will take as assumption that the poet is not detachable from his work – especially given the autobiographical nature of Bukowski’s writing, which could be read as an archive of his attempt to address the state of his life by writing it out. The approach will see the artist and the work merge into a unified force within a field of differential relations.

These latter may be formulated in the language of the social sciences, for example, through the conception of “class” as an over-ruling determination of a particular relation between members of socio-economic strata.

I draw on the work of Pierre Bourdieu as a figure who is cautious not to over- theorize the field by resorting to abstract terms that lack explanatory power. Bourdieu’s strength in this regard is that he is able to identify differential positions within a field of power relations by translating them into the methodological framework of sociology, thereby gaining a foothold in what he admits is an extremely complex phenomenon. He accomplishes this through his unique application of multiple correspondence analysis

(MCA) as a way of mapping out the various positions and trajectories within the field in the position of providing an explanation of their conditions of possibility. For my part I consider this field to be transcendental because it provides the conditions of possibility for the very existence of the inhabitants – including ways of seeing, thinking, believing, imagining – to be the way they are.288 While recognizing the importance of Bourdieu’s

MCA statistical approach, there is another aspect of his work, which I will focus on and utilize for the purpose of this dissertation. This is his more abstract and disparately scattered comments on the “unthought” conditions for thought. In this sense I put him in the Kantian

288 In my expanded sense of transcendentalism, I include the actual existence of the entity (object, event, work of art, person) in all its materiality to come into being as part of its constitutive transcendental structure.

207 framework that treats thought as determined by something that is not thinkable in the same way or on the same level. The emphasis is not placed on the cognitive-centric notion of

“thought” as the main component of analysis. For my purposes here, thought is expanded – against the philosophic tradition that Bourdieu often rails against, but very much in line with the process thought of Whitehead and the ‘transcendental empiricism’ of Deleuze, which includes action as a form of thought. For Brian Massumi (and for Deleuze), philosophy is not contemplation, as it has been considered to be for millennia, but instead, is about engaging in practices, fastening ways of being, and inventing modes of intervention into the environment. Philosophy, then, according to this conception, is not different from action, but is, instead, a special form of action, one that remains aware of its status as co-constituted along with the world in which it is engaged. Similarly, the thought that is conditioned by the unthought, that Bourdieu identifies, should not be confused with the thought that traditional

Western metaphysics considers to be differentiated from practical action. Furthermore, the unthought conditions for thought are also decidedly non-cognitivist and non- psychoanalytic.289 While it is undeniable that there is a cognitive aspect to life – Bourdieu does not reduce subjective experience to its materialist conditions – he considers the cognition of subjective experience to be the result of a particular manifestation of the underlying field, which I consider to be transcendental since it acts as the condition of possibility for this experience, while not being exactly the same thing as to which it gives

289 Although, in a sense, it could be argued that the transcendental dimension has a relationship to the theorization of the unconscious that comes from the lineage of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Freud. For an argument about how F.W.J. Schelling fits into this history see: S.J. McGrath. The Dark Ground of Spirit: Schelling and the Unconscious (New York: Routledge, 2012).

208 rise; however, it is not different in kind from that to which it gives rise, since the transcendental is immanent to that which it gives rise.

In Marxist terms, this would be the difference between the structure and the super- structure; however, the one is not reducible to the other, and as for Bourdieu, the two interact and influence each other – they are co-constitutive (the ideological sphere has as much influence on the underlying material base as vice versa). It is this aspect of Bourdieu’s thought that I will bring to bear on an analysis of Charles Bukowski as a product of his field

(not only literary but socio-cultural, economic, political, and so on) as well as a producer of it (by bringing out a certain form of poetry that some may argue – in accordance with the institutional conventions of the history of power governing poetic license – is not very poetic).

The transcendental dimension, then, while immanent to that which it constitutes, informs the conditions of reality, while, at the same time, it remains a constituent part of it. As such, what I am calling transcendentalism is an extension of the Kantian insight – that there is a condition of possibility for something’s existence, including that of the socio-cultural world of meaning-making processes as well as material and ideological relations. The condition of possibility, unlike that which is conditioned, is operative from the background; while not directly visible, its influence is found in the entity to which it gives rise, while also – at the same time – being a constitutive part of this very same entity (the productive force does not transcend the product). More abstractly, I use the term reflexivity to signify the folding-over of being upon itself in the tradition of German Idealism, where being is thought to be in a constant dialectical transformation and struggle with itself in such a way

209 that being works itself over and therefore is constitutively unfinished.290 Bourdieu’s suggestion that a critical sociology be a reflexive one, capable of accounting for its own presuppositions is a call to transcendental philosophy but with the difference that the transcendental is extended to include what Michel Foucault calls the “discursive formation” as well as the socio-cultural, economic, political, etc., aspects of the field, wherein philosophy is not purely contemplative, but thoroughly practical. That is, a self-consciously critical sociology is aware of itself as situated in a field of relations and power struggles that gave rise to the possibility of the sociologist as a product of this field. For Bourdieu, again, the only way one is able to come to terms with the field one finds oneself embedded in is through an attempt at remaining cognizant of the "the unthought conditions of thought" (An

Invitation 40), which are Kantian insofar as they are constitutive. Unlike Kant, however, for whom the transcendental is an ahistorical and purely epistemological dimension, Bourdieu extends these conditions to account for the sociological, economical, and historical aspects that go into making a theory of knowledge possible in the first place. Bourdieu extends the

Kantian gesture beyond the confines of a transcendental subject who is ideally detached from its genetic manifestation (the conditions that make it possible), and offers an account of the socio-historical reasons for the invention of this ideal subject in the first place. In so doing, he reminds us that the subject-object dualism, which he sees as being at the origin of contemporary science as its unaccounted-for condition, is incapable of being justified within the discourse of science itself. In other words, what may be called regimes of knowledge generation are incapable of accounting for themselves in their own terms, and it therefore requires a reflexive approach to the study of these regimes, in order to make explicit the

290 This is Slavoj Zizek’s position elaborated in Less than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (New York: Verso, 2012).

210 implicit presuppositions which act as their conditions of possibility. He makes his case for the necessity of the reflexive practice by formulating the problem thus: “every word that can be uttered about scientific practice can be turned back on the person who utters it,” that is, on the conditions for its utterance.291 Although this issue makes reference to the philosophical problem of how a contingent historical being could utter ahistorical (or at least transhistorical) truths, it nevertheless also appeals at the micro level of the sociologist’s position as one of coming to terms with science as a way of exposing science’s hidden portions, and the various conventions associated with it, including the knowledge produced and reproduced on its behalf. The essential thing to keep in mind here is that science – the most cherished authority in Western civilization – is itself caught up in a transcendental field of constitution such that, in terms of its ability to reach beyond itself to penetrate immediate reality, it finds only itself, i.e., only what it puts there. In order to more fully appreciate its accomplishments, and its failings, science too must be reflexive, and the ability to be reflexive goes hand in hand with critical analysis on the transcendental level of constitution.

According to the transcendentalism inherent in our post-Kantian situation, phenomena are perceivable – and known – from a (relatively) subjective position only; they are not known in themselves apart from the perspective of the subject and its gaze. It is only relatively subjective because, as it was for Kant, there is a shared transcendental apparatus among members of a given Lebenswelt, which has come to be institutionalized by, among other things, the political interests with a stake in a given conception of (the normative)

‘way things are.’

291 Pierre Bourdieu. Science of Science and Reflexivity Trans. Richard Nice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 4.

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If true that in our contemporary knowledge paradigm things are simultaneously taken for granted and not believed to be fully amenable to the gaze, then a critical reflexivity would necessarily attempt to operate on the transcendental level to make it explicit by exposing it in its influence. The goal of this analysis would thus be “to bring to light what is

‘the hidden’ par excellence, what escapes the gaze of science because it is hidden in the very gaze of the scientist, the transcendental unconscious, one has to historicize the subject of historicization, to objectivate the subject of the objectivation, that is, the historical transcendental, the objectivation of which is the precondition for the access of science to self-awareness, in other words, to knowledge of its historical presuppositions”.292 Similar to

Foucault’s historical a priori, Bourdieu’s summoning of the “historical transcendental” is temporally situated, while remaining properly transcendental, that is, constituted and constituting – in such a way that, given its transcendental status, it is appropriate – and even necessary – to ask the question: “how is it possible?”

What this means is that, considered from the level of sociological analysis, there is a reflexive folding of the socio-cultural material conditions for the existence of a particular being onto that particular being itself. The product (of the field) is produced as a result of this folding, and, through a detour through the logic of the future anterior, it is constituted at the same moment of its arising: while coming before it, the condition(s) of possibility for the thing are also contemporary and emerge simultaneously with it. In this sense, then, one’s birth ‘will have been’ insofar as – in the midst of living – one’s life is not complete, we do not know what the meaning of its birth will be. This is why I consider the art and life of

Bukowski to be in an inexorably overlapping relationship with each other, and why I chose

292 Ibid., 86.

212 him as an icon of the transcendental social field. For example, when considered in basic materialist terms, for Bukowski the poet, there is a multiplicity of factors that went into making him what and who he is.293 It is the city and the particular types of poverty surrounding him; the relationships (friendships and nemeses) caught up within this same tumult; the economic and labor relations, in both their personal and impersonal aspects, which contribute to providing an identity for the person (both in terms of the tax forms and census categories one must fill out and thereby ‘identify’ oneself as), as well as the force and building blocks for the person to structure their identity in terms of (“I am my job”). For

Bukowski, however, the same factors are operative in and as his art. It is as though the mediated version of Bukowski is an artful rendition of the same factors that went into constituting him as a person, that is, as a person who writes about these same factors.

Furthermore, it is the field, and the various factors that contribute to letting Bukowski become a poetic figure of anti-poetry, that allows him – by lending credence to his position

– to be recognized within the categories of literariness.

While the field is objective, it consists in the objective conditions – materially and ideological – that are necessary for the outcome of the achieved result, the subject is also an object because it is both a result, and an active participant, and therefore component, of the field. Bukowski is both a product of his situation and a normative force within it (after being established, young poets come to impress him with their own poetry, thereby using him as a measure of their own success, and the terms upon which success is achievable within the

293 The ‘what’ and the ‘who’ of Bukowski is a particularly important distinction in the context of this dissertation. ‘What’ Bukowski is has to do more with his status as an icon of a particular style of writing – an exemplification of a form of art. The ‘who’ of Bukowski has more to do with the biographical side, of Bukowski the man. Again, it is important to keep in mind that this is not a binary opposition, the ‘what’ and the ‘who’ are treated here as though they could be one and the same.

213 field). As Bourdieu points out, the modality of the social sciences, operative as it is in an ingrained subject-object dualism, must problematize this presupposition in order to properly penetrate the transcendental dimension of its constitution. However, “the objective- subjective duality can [only] be overcome via ‘a science of dialectical relations between objective structures…and the subjective dispositions within which these structures are actualized and which tend to reproduce them’” (Bourdieu, 1977:3).294

3.2 Bukowski is subject/object: the critical juncture of the writing and the written

Regarding the quasi-foundational subject-object dualism that Bourdieu attributes to the transcendental structure of contemporary science, and which he takes to be at the very root of the form of knowledge generation and the epistemological currency which we find ourselves in - and which acts as its ‘unthought’ presupposition - he argues that, similar to

Merleau-Ponty in The Phenomenology of Perception, we, as researchers, must find a way to take into consideration the underlying structures, and fields of power relations, that are simply presupposed - but overlooked - for the type of knowledge generation that takes place in both the physical and social sciences. “Objective structures of knowledge production,” which are unpacked via reflexive methodology, have to be taken into account as one step on the way to avoiding the trappings of subject-object dualism. For Bourdieu, a subject position – and the phenomenological experience that goes along with it - is a manifestation of the underlying relations of power. In this sense, perhaps, Bourdieu could be said to be an epiphenomenalist in the way that the interiority of experience (and the associated language

294 Mustafa Ozbilgin. “Understanding Bourdieu’s Contribution to Organization and Management Studies,” (Book Review) Academy of Management Review 30.4 (2005), 858.

214 of the phenomenological subject) is a by-product of an underlying material substratum of conditions that make it what and how it is. However, he would like to preserve the integrity of experience as an important aspect of the social world - he just problematizes it in order to study it as a product of a certain form of sensibility. And this is what the reflexive method aspires to achieve: to non-reductively anticipate the structures that go into making a certain form of experience - whether scientific or poetic - possible. And in this sense Bourdieu is working within the Kantian tradition of transcendental constitution. While Kant attempted to account for the a priori and necessary (ahistorical) conditions that make experience possible, and Foucault - through his notion of the historical a priori - attempted to problematize the naivety of the Kantian framework without lapsing into a Hegelian historicism, Bourdieu makes the Foucaultian project concrete by focusing on the use of a methodology that generates facts of the social world that are indicative of their moment of tension within the field of relations. Bourdieu uses sociology as a method to approach the transcendental constitution of knowledge and subject positions in its most tangible manifestation, while Foucault talks about discourse, knowledge and power in an abstract way that attempts to avoid reducing these considerations to the actually existing framework for speaking about them – thereby avoiding falling into the language of the specialist that he sought to problematize. Bourdieu attempts to map the field in terms of its genesis while also attempting to preserve the full complexity of its elusiveness.

Charles Bukowski is a manifestation of this elusiveness. While asserting and embodying a criticism of the autonomy of poetry when considered a pure form of art detached form its historical context, through his poetry, he brought a critical awareness to bear on the poetic and literary field, without, however, even self-consciously making the

215 attempt. The ideal image of the poet as a vessel for truth - and poetry as a manifestation of a pure and autonomous activity untarnished by the grind of the everyday - is thrown into doubt in and through Bukowski's a-poetic writing of poetry. The idea of an autonomous art, one that does not rely on its historic and economic conditions of possibility, is an ideal that is only possible by means of a reification - and systematic forgetting - of the conditions that make it possible. As Bourdieu says “[O]ne of the very paradoxical properties of very autonomous fields, such as science or poetry, is that they tend to have no other link with the social world than the social conditions that ensure their autonomy with respect to that world, that is to say, the very privileged conditions that are required in order to produce or appreciate very advanced mathematics or poetry, or, more precisely, the historical conditions that had to be combined to produce a social condition such that the people who benefit from them can do things of this kind.”295

The very conditions of poetry are the disavowed and therefore invisible relations of poetry to the outside world, yet, as Bourdieu points out, these conditions are no less a part of poetry. Poetry, thought of as an autonomous field, untarnished by the material relations of production that make it possible, is a function of the material conditions that it disavows but which are nevertheless the constitutive under side that makes the illusion of its purity possible. By bringing this other side into the realm of poetry itself, Bukowski makes visible the otherwise invisible relations of power that make the autonomous purity of poetry possible. Through his poetry and novels, Bukowski invites the reader to become aware of the - otherwise covered over - everyday struggles of the poet, not in a way that romanticizes

295 Science of Science and Reflexivity, 15.

216 through the trope of the 'starving artist',296 but in a way that goes beyond the poetic as heroic figure, by telling the details a life story in all its mundaneness. By writing largely in the auto-biographical form, he is able to bring a poetic sensibility to bear on the non-poetic aspect of the everyday. By treating his own life as the subject of the poetic endeavor, he lives his art in a way that renders it incapable of being costumed in metaphor or adorned with literary flourish. Instead of a work of art, Bukowski produces a work of life, and in so doing, he subverts the conventions of the art world, which he considers too 'boring' to read.

It is not that he is a critic of the art world, he simply does not recognize it, both out of necessity - he had no formal education in poetry - and preference. While a fan of Cezanne and Dostoevsky, he did not attempt to emulate their styles,297 but instead, admired their comportment in the struggle to remain alive in the face of absurdity and abjection.

Bukowski is not a theorist because he did not attempt to come to terms with his life on a meta-level; by focusing on the insignificant, he inadvertently makes it significant by bringing it to signify the poetic gesture in its non-poetic form.

He uses poetry, or writing in general, as an outlet, a form of escape from his daily grind and his commerce with other people. Notorious for his love of alcohol, and the solitude he sought after – and which he utilized for the production of his hundreds of poems and many novels – he embraced the life of the ob-scene. When people slept, recovering

296 “That was all a man needed: hope. It was a lack of hope that discouraged a man. I remembered my New Orleans days, living on two five-cent candy bars a day for weeks at a time in order to have leisure to write. But starvation, unfortunately, didn’t improve art. It only hindered it. A man’s soul was rooted in his stomach. A man could write much better after eating a porterhouse steak an drinking a pint of whiskey than he could write after eating a nickel candy bar. The myth of the starving artist was a hoax” (Factotum). 297 The Hunchback of East Hollywood, 43.

217 from their 9-5 job, he wrote and drank, all the while listening to symphony music on his radio, and reflecting on – by recounting – the concrete occurrences of his day.

3.3 Obscenity: The Obverse of the ‘Seen’

Bukowski’s obscenity derived, not only in the literal sense of the nature of the material he dealt with – destitute hotel rooms, bars, prostitutes, alcohol and fighting – but in the etymological sense of “the obverse side of the scene”.298 It is in more than one way that

Bukowski was positioned on “the obverse side of the scene”: for example, the literary magazines he attempted to get published in, which he was always rejected from (Factotum), before he became a “popular figure in the alternative publishing scene in the late 1960s”.299

The newspapers he attempted to utilize were also marginal and/or “underground” in terms of their position within the larger literary field. As Abel Debritto observes, “Underground newspapers were indeed a product of the times; basically, they were all created to protest against the current socio-political affairs: ‘Whether revolutionary, radical, or alternative, the underground press questioned, altered, sought to radically change the status quo.’”300

298 Rajiv Kaushik. “The Obscene and the Corpse: Reflections on the Art of Jean-Michel Basquiat” in Janus Head: Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature, Continental Philosophy, Phenomenological Psychology and the Arts 12.2 (2011). 299 Abel Debritto. “A ‘Dirty Old Man’ on Stage: Charles Bukowski and the Underground Press in the 1960s” in English Studies 92.3 (2011), 309-322. For a much more thorough investigation of Bukowski’s publishing career with reference to his underground beginning see: Abel Debritto. Charles Bukowski, King of the Underground: From Obscurity to Literary Icon (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2013). 300 Ibid., 310.

218

Although Bukowski was not self-consciously a political agent, he inadvertently was part of this scene. It was more by chance than anything else that he attempted to get published alongside the politicized beatnik movement in the same literary publications; but he operated in his own way, as though he was oblivious to the political situation in his midst. While he was not completely oblivious to what was happening around him – such as the hippies and associated literary movements – he had little patience for the type of group- oriented activity, and especially the cultish feel, that some of these groups had.

Obscenity does not stop there, however; it continues in a much more enigmatic way.

As Rajiv Kaushik puts it, “What is obscene…is the un-presented content that belongs on the other side of a present vision, and moves out into a region of displacement and destabilization.”301 Considered “the repressed” in psychoanalytic theory, or “noise” in the early information theory of Shannon, in phenomenological psychology it is the side (of the phenomena considered as object) that defies visibility, and therefore intelligibility. The region defying visibility and intelligibility is also the seedy underbelly of the city, the place where “all the action is” as Bukowski states in an interview, preferring the view of skid-row to that of the “green trees” of the German countryside. It is not only metaphorically that this is the obverse side of the scene characterized by “displacement and destabilization”: this is the area that is ghettoized, politically ignored, and forgotten. The residents, or the participants as Bukowski might have it, live day to day, taking what they can get – and not knowing when they will get their next meal, or fix. However, Bukowski portrays the instability of life in these areas as one where life really “happens” – it is not deadened by the illusion of the stability afforded one with a consistent job, house, cars (the image of the

301 Kaushik, 85.

219 suburban dweller) but it is as though it embraces the instability, and in some ways, welcomes it. It’s not that he attempts to prove himself by starving in cheap hotels and drinking with prostitutes; he simply feels that this is where life unfolds, on the fringes of society where people do not have the distinction afforded by the cultural capital accrued to those who attempt to build a solid foundation far away from this slippery and obscene world. While not viewing himself as a martyr – or a monk living an ascetic lifestyle and finding joy in the small things – he valorizes the ob-scene as one where the sincerity of one’s conditions are able to break through the superficiality of the governing forms of sensibility. In the poem “millionaires” we get a glimpse of this attitude toward the repressed side of the social formation:

you

no faces

at all

laughing at nothing---

let me tell you

I have drunk in skidrow rooms with

imbecile winos

whose cause was better

whose eyes still held some light

whose voices retained some sensibility,

and when the morning came

220

we were sick but not ill,

poor but not deluded,

and we stretched in our beds and rose

in the late afternoons

like millionaires.302

Bukowski prefers the non-deluded insight into their condition – knowing full well that they are on the lower rung of the social ladder – than the deluded condition of the millionaire, forgetting he will die, and living in a detached state from the world. Without a human face (“no faces…at all…laughing at nothing…”), the financially rich millionaire has lost what is of real worth – the ability to connect with other people in an honest way, to go about living together in the face of the absurdity of the flux of becoming. It is in this way that Bukowski taps into the transcendental dimension of social being. “The obscene, in this sense, articulates the anamorphic: the morphoses of a quotidian and so-called normative regard is subtended, subverted or returned back (ana-) to something ab-normal, in order that this previously hidden scene (often othered because of its taboo content we repress) may exhibit itself.”303 By exhibiting the previously hidden (because taboo) side of the social field, Bukowski brings it to articulation, and thereby disavows the image of the poet’s privileged position as one hovering godlike over the real material relations of being, a version of poetry that believes itself capable of accessing the truth of the world, a version of truth that does not require the “sick” and the “poor” in order to be what it is. But this is a

302 Charles Bukowski. “millionaires” Mockingbird Wish Me Luck (New York: Harper Collins, 2002), 54. 303 Kaushik, 85.

221 contrived truth based on power and the privileged view resulting from it. As Manuel

Delanda points out, with reference to Deleuze’s Neo-Realist ontology, “there are no totalities, such as ‘society as a whole,’ but a nested set of singular (unique, historically contingent) beings nested within one another…[b]etween one entity and the larger one the relationship is one of parts to whole (not one of membership in a general category)…a whole emerges (and needs to be continuously maintained) by the interactions between the parts.”304 Truth, then, insofar as it is “true” (and not merely the product of the ideological function) is contained and located in the small and the insignificant (from the point of view of the political oppressor), that is, it is also – and especially – located in the “sick” and

“poor” who are “not deluded” and “whose voices retain some sensibility.” According to

Deleuzean ontology, society is nothing more than a “set of singular (unique, historically contingent) beings nested within one another” and as such, only the singularity of a face is capable of containing the destiny of the whole – a whole which is only insofar as it is the product of the multitude of minor parts (nested in one another) of the assemblage’s constitution, without thereby standing for the totality of the parts. As such, it is in error, in the interstices of the system that truth resonates, and may be qualified as true to the constitutively ob-scene aspects of life.

The vitalism in Deleuze’s thought – the idea that there is a process of interaction at the basis of the constitution of structure, or system, and that the latter does not exist apart from this ongoing historical process – is amenable to the notion that the socio-political situation contributes to constituting a “body.” As the history of Western philosophy has

304 Manuel Delanda. “Deluzian Interrogations: A Conversation with Manuel Delanda, John Protevi and Torkild Thanem” in Tamara: Journal for Critical Organization Inquiry 3.4 (2004).

222 always privileged form over anything else, the anamorphic, which Kaushik articulates, brings this tradition’s history into conversation with that which it has always sought to repress. The anamorphic by definition defies form; being without form, it lies concealed at the root of the hidden motive toward the achievement of form: the drive for regularity, control, domination. In terms of the social body, the anamorphic is of the body without organs (BwO) – a pure form of immanence. “The BwO is not a scene, a place, or even a support upon which something comes to pass…The BwO causes intensities to pass; it produces and distributes them in a spatium that is itself intensive, lacking extension. It is not space, nor is it in space; it is matter that occupies space to a given degree – to the degree corresponding to the intensities produced (emphasis added).”305 Since matter is energy, the

BwO, as non-space spatium is the intensive comportment toward becoming, the becoming of becoming where form has not yet been formed: the energetics of the ob-scene (inhabiting the intensive pre-individual singularities) provides the conditions of possibility for the impulse toward the formalism of the scene. As the condition of possibility for change, it is also the condition of possibility for form, structure and system. For both Deleuze and

Bukowski it is change that comes first: before the serenity of a static existence there is the ob-scenity of becoming, which is also at the basis for the possibility of counter- actualization, i.e., changing the way things are by reappropriating (appropriating differently) the situation’s transcendental conditions.

Against the ‘disinterested’ conception of aesthetics of Kant, who treats aesthetic experience as a detached contemplation of beauty defined as the “free play of the faculties,”

Bourdieu’s argues that art is a product of its material conditions, including its

305 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus Trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 153.

223 institutionalization, and the power struggles between artists and different forms of capital.

The individual artist – in this case Bukowski – is just as much a product of the field as the art he creates, and as such, should be evaluated under the same criteria. “Although it appears to itself like a gift of nature the eye of the nineteenth-century art-lover is the product of history…the pure gaze capable of apprehending the work of art as it demands to be apprehended (in itself and for itself, as form and not as function) is inseparable from the appearance of producers motivated by a pure artistic intention, itself indissociable from the emergence of an autonomous artistic field capable of posing and imposing its own goals in the face of external demands and it is also inseparable from the corresponding appearance of a population of ‘amateurs’ or ‘connoisseurs’ capable of applying to the works thus produced the ‘pure’ gaze which they call for.”306 The idea of a ‘pure gaze’ as well as the artist as genius, are both products of a particular arrangement of material-historical conditions that make it possible. For example, there must be a social class who is defined by leisure

(bourgeois), who has the time to contemplate, and thereby inhabit a vision of the world that features it as appearing in the form of a detached object for domination. It is a historically constituted subject-position that originated at a certain moment in history and at the juncture of a particular relation of production. As George Lukács points out, bourgeois philosophy has always been one with a reification of the world, and in paraphrase of Kant’s proclaimed

“Copernican Revolution,” he summarizes thus: “Modern philosophy sets itself the following problem: it refuses to accept the world as something that has arisen…independently of the

306 Pierre Bourdieu. The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field. Trans. Susan Emanuel (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996).

224 knowing subject, and prefers to conceive of it instead as its own product.”307 Pure art presupposes a pure gaze, which in turn requires a particular type of social existence defined by leisure and a class “distinction.”.

Bukowski does not believe in the purity of art. “An intellectual is a man who says a simple thing in a difficult way; an artist is a man who says a difficult thing in a simple way”

(Notes of a Dirty Old Man).308 For Bukowski, the content of the intellectual and the artist is the same; although they both deal with complexity in their own way (the intellectual complexifies simplicity; the artist simplifies complexity), it is as though – if undertaken in a genuine way – they both attempt to reveal the same substrata of the ob-scene, the obscure invisible plane that is systematically covered over by the logic of the dominant discourse that treats the product of the field (including the possibilities available to the members inheriting a situation) as having a fixed essence. However, [w]hat the analysis of essence forgets are the social conditions of the production (or the invention) and of the reproduction

(or the inculcation) of dispositions and classificatory schemas which are activated in artistic perception – the social conditions of that kind of historical transcendental which is the condition of the aesthetic experience which naively describes it.”309 Making a transcendental argument for the constitution of the artwork and artworld – as one which is contingently based on its socio-historical conditions – Bourdieu points out that it is the

“historical transcendental” that acts as the basis for both the production and reception of

307 George Lukács. “The Antinomies of Bourgeois Thought” in History and Class Consciousness. Unknown Trans. Lukacs Internet Archive. http://www.marxists.org/archive/lukacs/works/history/lukacs1.htm 308 Notes of a Dirty Old Man is the name of Bukowski’s weekly column for the antiestablishment Newspaper Open City beginning in 1967. A selection of these columns were published on January 24, 1969 by Essex House, “a North Hollywood press specializing in pornographic books” (Debritto, 2013, 154). 309 Rules of Art, 288.

225 objects under the guise of an artistic vision. Bukowski breaks these distinctions down, and through his work, the “classificatory schemas,” which are in place and subtended by the institutional framework, are subverted by his propensity to foreground the subterranean locales and ways of life of the city. In this way his work disarticulates the idealized version of the artwork that Bourdieu argues acts to contribute to its own reproduction by symbolizing and sustaining the circulation of a certain form of currency that he calls cultural capital. According to this view, the discourse of the purity of the poet is the product of a

“universalization of the particular case, and in the same way, the constitution of a particular experience, situated and dated, of the work of art as a transhistoric norm of all artistic perception. Concomitantly they pass over in silence the question of the historical and social conditions of possibility of this experience; they exclude, in effect, the analysis of the conditions under which works considered as worthy of the aesthetic gaze were produced and constituted as such; and equally, they ignore the question of the conditions under which the aesthetic disposition they call for is produced (phylogenesis) and continually reproduced in the course of time (ontogenesis).”310 Falling outside of the bounds of the art world,

Bukowski hovers on the fringes of its ob-scene – not part of the scene itself, he presents that which is re-presented at the expense of authenticity, by the works that are officially recognized as deserving admiration. Although he does not choose to be the gadfly of the art world, given the coordinates of the field – and the position he occupies within it – the choice is made for him insofar as he upholds it as his own. “We can always say that individuals make choices, so long as we do not forget that they do not choose the principles of these

310 Ibid., 286. (Emphasis added and translation modified).

226 choices.”311 The principles that choices are based on is their transcendental dimension, the historical and cultural horizon that constitutes them as particular options within the actual context of the world made possible by the transcendental field.

The ambivalent position of choice in Bukowski’s work is telling; while not naïve enough to believe that there is a liberalism of free choice, Bukowski ridicules the notion that one chooses oneself through the choice of one’s lifestyle. He is often portrayed (in his novels) as going with the flow, letting in whoever arrives at his door and often entertaining them throughout the night. In line with Sartre’s existentialism, one must choose something, but the choices on offer are offensively lackluster in their triviality. In jest, Bukowski lists a variety of the choices available to people, who in Sartre’s language, are “condemned” to choose. The size of the list belies the insignificance of the decision while “waiting to die”:

Nothing was ever in tune. People just blindly grabbed at whatever there was:

communism, health foods, zen, surfing, ballet, hypnotism, group encounters, orgies,

biking, herbs, Catholicism, weight-lifting, travel, withdrawal, vegetarianism, India,

painting, writing, sculpting, composing, conducting, backpacking, yoga, copulating,

gambling, drinking, hanging around, frozen yogurt, Beethoven, Back, Buddha,

Christ, TM, H, carrot juice, suicide, handmade suits, jet travel, New York City, and

then it all evaporated and fell apart. People had to find things to do while waiting to

die. I guess it was nice to have a choice.312

311 Loic Wacquant. “Towards a Reflexive Sociology: A Workshop with Pierre Bourdieu” in Sociological Theory 7 (1989), 45. 312 Charles Bukowski. Women. (New York: Harper Collins, 1978), 194.

227

In a logical reversal of agential priority, it is the choice that chooses (for) the one who

“makes” the choice. Not only does it make the choice for them (by offering a limited set of options, and over-signifying what those options are capable of), but the chooser is also chosen by the choice – the one who chooses makes a decision on who (or what) they are insofar as one is what one chooses (in accordance with the series of actions deriving from the choices). The insignificance of the choices notwithstanding, the list admonishes the transcendental spectrum of choice for the illusion of its finite results; instead of creating new meanings for the items listed, Bukowski takes issue with them because, in practice, they function as though they have a homologous meaning and practical understanding.

Conflating the style of choice with the style of life, Bukowski is well-aware of the discourse surrounding the life-style industry, where one not only purchases a product, but one also purchases a style of living, and in so doing, the ability to be seen as part of a certain scene.

The cultural capital that comes with choosing vegetarianism over drinking, for example, initiates one in a world involving yoga, Buddha, India and carrot juice, while opening up the door to a social status of upward mobility. However, these are only surface choices, non- reflexive of the “unthought categories of thought” that are ultimately determining of their meaning and what they are capable of.

Bukowski’s life was defined by its reluctance to decide on the choices offered up as viable options. He was drafted into the military, and although willingly attending the physical and psychological exams that determine the candidate’s suitability for military service, he happened to be deemed unsuitable for military service by the psychologist. It’s not that he attempted to purposely blow the test to avoid service, his failure of the tests

(attributed to a pre-existing heart condition) happened as though around him, out of his

228 control. When the FBI arrived on his doorstep to arrest him, the absurdity of the request couldn’t have been a better rendition of Kafka’s The Trial. Having moved to Philadelphia

(from Los Angeles), he did not inform the draft board when he moved, and only provided them with his then workplace address (the post office). After a few days of interrogation he was finally informed that he was imprisoned for draft dodging until his case was cleared by the proper bureaucratic channels. His life was so amenable to the conditions that were constantly changing around him that, even in prison, he was able to achieve a quality of life that he found enjoyable. “I got hot in a crapgame in the exercise yard and stayed hot 3, 4, 5 days and began to feel better, I was making more money than I ever made on the outside.”313

3.4 Bukowski’s Position (Situated in the “Happening”)

Bourdieu argues that the individual artist is the result of an interplay between the habitus and the post, in terms of the development of a literary subject, who then becomes – on the basis of the field as a whole – the creator of a work of art.314 In the conception of art that is seen as the result of the work of genius, the creator gives rise to the work of art as though in a vacuum. The genius is not dependent on his or her socio-historical circumstances, it is as though the muse visits from an atemporal realm to deposit an atemporal product into the temporal one. In other words, in the traditional conception of art

313 Charles Bukowski. “ww 2” Mockingbird Wish me Luck, (New York: HarperCollins, 2009), 96. 314 Pierre Bourdieu. Sociology in Question. Trans. Richard Nice (London: Sage Publications, 1993), 143.

229

– in which l’art pour l’art is a symptom – the artist creates ex nihilo. Bourdieu problematizes this conception by asking “[b]ut who created the ‘creators’?”315

The response he provides is that it is the field – as a whole – that created the creators of what comes to be considered works of art, and it is toward this field that the attention of the reflexive sociologist, who intends to come to terms with the transcendental dimension of the artist and artworld alike, must turn. When discussing “the field as a whole” it must be kept in mind that the “whole” is not a self-sufficient and finished closed system but of the type found in Deleuze’s Neo-Realist ontology outlined above: a whole that does not exist outside of the nested (in-one-another) of its parts. Just as there is no Society that pre-exists the parts that go into it (like an Absolute Substance), so too does the “whole” of the field remain open and dependent upon the various aspects that go into making it what it is, i.e., an aggregative composite that is no less real for being an assemblage. In fact, the field is not a static entity but a force field of contradictory interests fighting for position. In this way the field may be considered a hegemonic battleground of forces coming into contact, and organizing themselves as a result of the relative force (and power struggles) that are encapsulated on it, as it, and that result from it. For my purposes here I will suggest that

Bourdieu’s field be considered transcendental, that is, as the condition of possibility for the positions, meanings, relationships, modes of perception, etc., that arise as its result, but that do not proceed from it as cause and effect, but actually emerge simultaneously alongside it.

The results of the field do not transcend it, but are immanent to it, such that the field is a constituent part of its result, and vice versa. For the convenience of analysis it is often preferable to discuss and analyze the field and the results – the products of the field in terms

315 Ibid., 139.

230 of entities, objects, occupations, institutions – as though they were two separate moments. It takes the reflexive operation to become and remain aware of the superficiality of the propensity of analysis to cut things up and break them down in the interest of promoting understanding of the phenomena being studied.

The term habitus – often appearing in Bourdieu’s work without explicit definition – will be used in such a way that highlights and emphasizes its transcendental connotations.

The habitus is located at the intersection of a position in the field, a particular subject- position occupying the position within the field, and a quasi-agent taking up and actualizing by inhabiting a position in it, by living through it. Although there are no two habitus’ exactly alike,316 since they are grounded in a generalized historical situation, there is inevitable overlap between them (otherwise communication would be possible and would be disparate), i.e., they share an “epistemological unconscious.”317 The habitus encompasses both the field (which is the historical and material conditions of its emergence) and the experiential factors of the occupant (psychological considerations; schemas of interpretation; forms of affect; the available resources for the construction of selfhood; and so on); and the objective conditions that function in terms of the post that the occupant occupies and confronts themselves and their peers (which are related posts) from. As

Bourdieu defines it, the habitus “is a system of dispositions acquired by implicit or explicit learning which functions as a system of generative schemes, generates strategies which can be objectively consistent with the objective interests of their authors without having been

316 Ibid., 46. 317 Pierre Bourdieu and Loic Wacquant. An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology. Trans. Loic Wacquant (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 40.

231 expressly designed to that end.”318 The habitus is a fluid structure placed upon the individual (as their own), inherited from the system of learning and being-with in the social context of existence; partly known and unknown, the habitus is a transcendental form of

(re-)cognition of the world, one’s place within it, and the possibilities contained in it. While not explicitly formulated in Kantian terms, these terms are not far away from the Kantian framework. The notion of “generative schemes” is a case in point.

A scheme is a mode of – and for – interpretation. It acts as a principle – it has a propensity to organize information in a framework conducive to intelligibility. A diagram is a scheme since it moves from concrete to abstract in the form of coordinates, lines and figures implemented to aid in the understanding of a complex phenomenon by breaking it into its fundamental parts. For a scheme to be “generative” is for it to inform action in some way. As a guide for future activity, a schema provides a pattern for action.

Kant’s schematism for the understanding deals with the problem of how intuitions are subsumed under concepts in the act of judgment. For Kant, a schema is the product of the imagination, since it is a mediation between the intuition of an object (sensibility) and an a priori concept of the understanding. Schema are there (they are not figments of the imagination), in that they inform experience by directing the proper concept to be coupled with the appropriate object of intuition. The schema is thus “a universal procedure of the imagination for providing a concept with its image.”319 What this means is that, through the appeal to the schematism of the understanding (as mediated by the imagination), Kant is attempting to account for the transcendental way that our concepts relate to experience.

Since there is an ideal aspect to experience (our concepts of the world are not the world

318 Ibid., 76. 319 Immanuel Kant. Critique of Pure Reason B180.

232 itself), how is it that we can be sure that the proper (intelligible) concept is applied to the empirical experience of the world of sensible (material) things? Kant’s response is that there is an a priori framework in place guaranteeing the consistency of objects of intuition and their intelligibility as mediated by the concepts of the understanding because – and this is the crux of the transcendental move – these objects only exist as they are experienced, i.e., since we cannot get outside of our finite limitations and approach the objects as they are in themselves, the concern for judging what the object is in itself is cut off from consideration, and it is only as the object appears to us that it is capable of being discussed in terms of its intelligibility.

A schema then, as a mode of intelligibility that contributes to world making: not only is a world a series of objects – and their relations – within a world; these objects are constituted as such by the schematism of the understanding; the objects contributing to the founding of the world are subtended and mediated by the modes of interpretation – the interpretative framework – that contributes to their being understood and acted upon. Action is based on expectation, and expectation (of what will happen if one acts in a particular way in a particular situation) arises as a result of the interpretive framework, or schema, of interpretive understanding. This hermeneutic circle of understanding is open to experience –

‘on the fly’ – yet, at the same time, enclosed within the limits of possibility governed by the transcendental schematism of the historical, social and cultural epoch in question. One’s world is indissociable from the terms of the schematism that discloses the world and renders it a shareable object of experience mediated by language, custom, rules, etc. A habitus thus relates to the field in much the same way paint is mixed in an easel – the mixing of paint leads to a color that is not reducible to the individual component colors that went into the

233 mixing required for the attainment of its existence, yet it is not unrelated to these component colors. In other words, the habitus – having both personal and impersonal components – emerges out of the field, while at the same time, it does not transcend the habitus to which it gives rise, because it exists co-constitutively along with it. This means that the habitus is transcendental: it does not operate on the purely empirical level (although it has an empirical component and can thus be studied by empirical methodology), nor does it arise purely on the basis of the schematism of the understanding, since the two are in intertwined contact, and emerge in connection with each other, influencing each other as they are influenced by the other. However, both of these – the empirical and the schematic component of the habitus – are related to the larger framework that the field provides in terms of its influence on the already attained empirical actuality and its associated interpretive framework, while still being mediated by pre-individual forces and the larger power structure of the situation. The field gives rise to “posts” – or positions within the field

– while, at the same time, the field could be said to be nothing other than these position- takings. The field does not exist in a realm of pure Forms unrelated to (or unaffected by) the positions that emerge in the context of the field; rather, the positions are the semi-tangible effect of the invisible tensions of forces and interests that go into making the field what it is in terms of the conditions of possibility for positions to be taken. Positions are not decided upon by a sovereign capable of transcending the field; rather, positions are immanent to the logic that operates on the ground level and in actu, within the context of the mediating factor of the habitus (which has both empirical and schematic components).

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3.5 The immanence of Bukowski’s writing-written situation

Bukowski occupies a “post” – a position within the field – and, from this post, he relates both to his fellow literary participants (members of the same field), and to the larger public of his social existence, i.e., his poetry (the time he finds to write it as well as its content) is indissociable from the occupations he works, e.g., the post office (the social conditions for its existence). The birth pangs of the poem are an element of the finished product, since they stick with the poem, as part of its essence, and inform both its content and style. The post, however, is both a mediated and mediating factor – it is mediated by related posts such that it could be said that it is a product of this mediation, and it is mediated by factors the literary field itself is in confrontation with (e.g., for Bukowski, the reception of the alternative press and its becoming-mainstream). However, how could it be said that the field is, at one and the same time, a transcendental structure that gives rise to the possible position-takings within it; a component of the material conditions of the world

(considered both empirically and transcendental); and the seat of the habitus (which encompasses the empirical and schematic aspects of the experiential content which can nevertheless be studied objectively)?

To answer this question one must interrogate the nature of habitus itself. The habitus does not exist without an incorporation, that is, without being embodied and lived through.

This differs from Husserlian phenomenology in that the latter, while seeking the objective structures for actual experience, finds these structures in a way that theorizes them as disconnected from the social conditions that have given rise to them. Husserl followed Kant by looking for a priori structures that are universal in grasp, and therefore ahistorical and

235 de-contextual – these factors were predicated on the fact that they are necessary for any and all experience no matter the time or place. While Husserl’s early work320 focused on the mathematical and logical ideals, and the basic structures and principles of how the formal characteristics of cognition relate to – and inform – the experience of the material world. In this early phenomenological approach, even materiality was reduced to a philosophical concept (hyle), and thereby treated in idealist fashion where materiality was strictly conceived in terms of its being subtended by the ideal conditions for its appearing.

For Bourdieu, in contrast, the habitus, while being a structure that informs experience for the individual, is historical, contextual and embodied. This means that, for

Bourdieu, the habitus is materialist through and through and it is grounded in the materiality of the body; however, it must be kept in mind that the body is not simply a scientific cadaver, but an index of scientific discourse and the interpretive framework of the habitus itself. The habitus is a reflexive category that reflexively makes itself what it is. For example, on one level, the body is a thing among things in the world, and can be studied under the scientific gaze in regards to its chemical composition, its mechanical-causal potential, and so on; on another level, however, it is a product of the ideas surrounding what a body is, including its types (working class versus bourgeoisie bodies; young versus old bodies, etc.); and further, it is also a reflexive-interpretive operation that acts on the body itself and thereby governs it from within by folding the social conception of what it is – its positionality within a field – back on it, such that, as a result, the experiential content of the body is – along with its conditions of possibility for thinking, believing, identification and

320 I am thinking here of the Logical Investigations and Ideas I. I think it is safe to say that there was a turn in Husserl, especially in his later work that appears in the as a result of his confrontation with the publication of Heidegger’s Being and Time.

236 the achievement of personhood – mediated by the modes of interpretation prevalent at a given time and place.

The habitus…is that which one has acquired, but which has become durably

incorporated in the body in the form of permanent dispositions. So the term reminds

us that it refers to something historical, linked to individual history, and that it

belongs to a genetic mode of thought, as opposed to essentialist modes of

thought…Moreover, by habitus the Scholastics also meant something like a

property, a capital. And indeed, the habitus is a capital, but one which, because it is

embodied, appears as innate.321

The embodied element of the habitus is most important. This is because it is not an idealistic philosophical concept that can be applied to phenomena in a detached way, whereby it would be diagnosing the world from above. Husserl avoided genetic phenomenology, and simply assumed that consciousness existed as such – it didn’t matter how or why it arose (or in what time period or political context) because for him it was a decidedly ahistorical phenomenon (once it was here it was not going to change). And it is in this way that Husserl repeated Kant’s mistake: although self-consciously taking up the transcendentalist paradigm – and qualifying it with the watchword “back to the things themselves!” – Husserl took temporality out of the equation by reducing it to a purely formal aspect of “internal” time consciousness (a linear conception that reduces the past and the future to the present through the twin notions of protention and retention). Bourdieu’s genetic mode of analysis, on the other hand, accounts for the historical becoming of experience, since the habitus, as the site of contact between the field and individuated

321 Sociology in Question, 86.

237 experience, is embodied, and therefore contingently manifesting. As the above quotation makes clear, while the habitus may be considered something that one takes possession of and has (it wouldn’t be completely improper to say “my habitus”) as a form of capital, the having of habitus is simultaneously what one is. Since I do not transcend the terms of the interpretive schema (which includes the conceptualization of who ‘I’ am and where I fit in) and the material conditions of the field that exists whether I am aware of them or not, (that is, whether I understand the full effect the field has in terms of its ability to condition my existence), my habitus “belongs” to me insofar as I can be said to “belong” to myself. Of course, part of one’s habitus is the value ascribed to it, from which it develops its position in relation to – one takes possession of capital as much as capital takes possession of oneself.

Charles Bukowski has a habitus and this habitus is related throughout his writing; while his novels highlight the context for his poetry in a realist style, without metaphor or literary flourish, his poetry acts as a series of snapshots of the different aspects of his life.

Often written from the first person perspective, he uses the medium of writing to make explicit the conditions of and for his life.322

Bukowski, like the Flaubert Bourdieu studies in The Rules of Art, contributes to the constitution of the field he is a part of, and which grows around him. It would be erroneous to overlook the foundations put down for the critique of art that the Surrealists and Beats enabled before him, but I contend that the seriousness of their respective projects does not survive in Bukowski’s work. While Jack Kerouac wrote about the road while actually being

322 While both of these conditions are operative on the transcendental level, I use “conditions of” to indicate the actualized result of the transcendental conditions (which could, in principle be studied empirically); I use “conditions for” in the strictly transcendental sense of what must be in place in order for the actualized result to be possible.

238

“on the road,” and fancied himself the originator of a “Beat generation” – “That wild eager picture of me on the cover of On the Road where I look so Beat goes back much further than 1948 when John Clellon Holmes…and I were sitting around trying to think up the meaning of the Lost Generation and the subsequent Existentialism and I said ‘You know, this is really a beat generation’”323 – Bukowski did not claim to have an influence in the literary scene, or elsewhere. Although in an interview, and in jest, he claimed that his three favorite poets were “Charles Bukowski, Charles Bukowski and Charles Bukowski” his writing was as much a therapeutic tool – a means of coping with the travails of the social structure and the existence to which it gives rise – as it was conceived in strictly artistic terms.

These considerations – that of the historical legacy of American poetry and their precedent for Bukowski’s eventual reception in, and influence over, the literary field – are components of what I call the transcendentalism, or the condition of possibility for the emergence of the figure of Bukowski himself. Whether he himself conceived of his writing in terms of an individualist enterprise focused inwardly with no audience other than himself,324 the effect was the same, and he made a public intervention into a field in which he occupied a strictly demarcated position, which he, as it turns out, elaborated – by reflecting on it – throughout his career.

323 Jack Kerouac. “The Origin of the Beat Generation”. Playboy. 1959. http://home.earthlink.net/~copaceticcomicsco/Kerouac.html 324 It is evident that this is not how he conceived of his writing which he himself documents in his novel Factotum where he portrays himself (named “Henry Chinaski” throughout his thinly veiled auto-biographical writings) as desperately seeking publication but facing rejection on a regular basis until he finally gets an acceptance and, after reading it several times in disbelief, fastens it to his mirror so that it can be reflective of who he wants to become.

239

Born in 1920 between the world wars, his father, an American soldier in WWI, met his mother (a German) while overseas on duty in Germany. He documents the earliest years of his life in his late novel Ham on Rye (1982), beginning with his earliest memory: “The first thing I remember is being under something. It was a table, I saw a table leg, I saw the legs of the people, and a portion of the tablecloth hanging down. It was dark under there, I liked being under there.” relating that his earliest childhood memory of being under a table…”325 This proto-phenomenological description orients the reader to an aware of the uncanny situation Bukowski found himself in, from this memory onwards seemingly throughout the rest of his life. This description could be used as a template for other, more mature events, since the uncanny unfamiliarity lingered throughout his career. Even his parents were alien to him: “Two people: one larger with curly hair, a big nose, a big mouth, much eyebrow; the larger person always seeming to be angry, often screaming; the smaller person quiet, round of face, paler, with large eyes. I was afraid of both of them.”326

Although on the Reserve Officer Training Corps in high school (on the strict orders of his father, since the other option was football and regular gym class, which Charles would have much preferred but his father denied him) and earning a metal (which he subsequently dropped into a sewer) in the Manuel of Arms competition (“I yearned to be drunk on beer. I wanted to be anywhere but here”327), he was to be deemed unfit for military service when it came time to fight the Germans, whom his father fought in WWI. His mother was German, and he lived there in his earliest years before they made the trip to the

US and settled in Los Angeles. Aubrey Malone argues that among his parents’ biggest

325 Charles Bukowski. Ham on Rye. (New York: Harper Collins, 2009), 2. 326 Ibid. 327 Ibid., 99.

240 concern was to give the impression to their peers that they were doing well – even though they weren’t. They took the management of their image so seriously that, upon losing his job, his father would leave the house every morning and return around dinnertime to give the impression to the neighbors that he was going to his job, even though most men in their working class neighborhood had also lost their jobs.328 According to Malone, the desire to appear as a good hard working American family was put on their son’s shoulders to such an extent that it was demanded of him that he be able to acquire a good job and live out his father’s dream of being an engineer. “‘Henry is dead on his ass,’ said my father. ‘Sometimes

I can’t believe he’s my son’…‘What’s going to become of you? How the hell are you going to make it? You don’t have any get up and go!’”329

His parents’ desire for the cultivation of a favorable appearance in the eyes of the neighbors is in stark contrast to the simplicity of Bukowski’s poetry, which does not attempt to adorn itself with rhetorical flourishes, or hide the blemishes of its apparent anti- intellectualism, but simply goes with the flow, and relishes in what he seems to consider a brand of naturalism that remains unconcerned with its form – a messiness and crassness of form reflecting the messiness and crassness of (his) life. It is as though he wasn’t even aware of the objective context of his life as context; he simply lived it in the way Merleau-

Ponty speaks of lived experience: unlike “scientific consciousness…[which] borrows all its models from the structures of living experience; [living experience] simply does not

‘thematize’ them, or make explicit the horizons of perceptual consciousness surrounding it

328 Aubrey Malone. The Hunchback of East Hollywood. (London: Headpress, 2003). 329 Ham on Rye, 101.

241 to whose concrete relationships it tries to give objective expression.”330 Scientific consciousness, which operates on the basis of a distinction between the subjective gaze and the object of analysis, presupposes a prior form of consciousness not determined by the subject-object distinction, but instead, exists as an all-encompassing embodiment, where subject and object, form and content, are fused into one. As he lives through phenomena

(which is the backdrop of perceptual experience), Bukowski does not treat it as something objectively concrete, but simply moves along with it, looking through things instead of at them.

This is partly due to his reluctance to identify himself with any thing – an occupation, a movement, a position. This came through in an interview with Fernanda

Pivano, an Italian journalist, when asked about his relationship to feminism. “I don’t really get it. I’ve written quite a number of love stories that are just total love stories, simply that. I guess they don’t read those. And then, now and then, I’ll be attacked. This girl in Germany was screaming at me? Calling me all sorts of things in the hotel…They show up now and then, and they really seem to hate me.” The incomprehensibility of his image – and the inability to accept it – has defined his life, including the way he portrayed his transition from high school to the life that followed in terms of the available choices he outlines in

Ham on Rye: “This was the way things usually worked. You were a governor or a garbageman, you were a tight-rope walker or a bank robber, you were a dentist or a fruit picker, you were this or you were that.”331 The choices pre-exist their choosing, and

Bukowski’s wariness at the lack of truly fulfilling options troubles him. As discussed above,

330 Maurice Merleau-Ponty. The Phenomenology of Perception. Trans. Colin Smith (New York: Routledge, 2002), 68. 331 Ibid., 116.

242 it is as though once he graduated from high school – the social institution that is supposed to prepare one for the finite possibilities of what they will choose to be – he realizes that the choices are structured as dead-ends (their ends are built into them), and they therefore are not open to the ability to choose the nature of the choices themselves. Bukowski therefore prepares himself for what he believes to be the inevitable destiny of one who does not choose any of the available options. “I made practice runs down to skid row to get ready for my future.”332 However, as Sartre argues, although it seems that the world is pre-constituted and therefore exhaustive, i.e., that there are only a finite number of discrete choices to be made, existentially, the world is as fluid (and therefore open in terms of its becoming) as the one who chooses it. “We choose the world, not in its contexture as in-itself but in its meaning, by choosing ourselves…It is the very way in which I entrust myself to the inanimate, in which I abandon myself to my body…which causes the appearance of both my body and the inanimate world with their respective value…because it is positional, what it releases to me is the transcendent image of what I am.”333 Sartre highlights the productive aspect of choice by outlining the phenomenological-ontological situation as one that is determined by the ways in which one approaches it, that is, by the transcendental horizon one brings to bear on it. This does not mean that one can change the way the world is completely (as it is in-itself), but one determines its value, and therefore, the way it appears for-itself, and by extension, for the one who chooses. Although the Bourdieu-ian field may be said to be determining in the last instance, as the objective coordinates of the transcendental dimension, the habitus has a certain degree of fluidity to it, and the

332 Ibid., 153. 333 Jean Paul Sartre. Being and Nothingness Trans. Hazel E. Barnes (London: Taylor & Francis, 1956), 463.

243 conceptual framework and schematism that operates within it colors the ways in which one approaches one’s world. By abandoning oneself to one’s body, as Sartre says, one gives oneself to the world as much as one gives the world to oneself, and as a result of this dialectical process of direct involvement, there is a transcendent image of oneself, an objectification that results from the objective conditions of the field. This image is often uncanny because it is not always how one sees oneself, but how other people sees one. This is why Bukowski’s publisher, Joe Wolberg, who also attended the interview with Pivano, was able to explain to Bukowski (who was baffled by the discrepancy between how he viewed himself and how he was viewed by others) that his “transcendent image” takes on a life of its own. “I think you’re right that most of them just simply haven’t read your work because what they’re reacting to…an audience that you have of people who misinterpret your work, who are, in some way, gross slugs who identify with some kind of weird image they have of you. And so, what these feminists are really protesting or reacting to is a certain kind of person or audience that identifies with you. But you see, anarchists have identified with him, fascists have identified with him.”334 What Sartre calls the

“transcendent image” is transcendent because it is beyond the existential core of the one who chooses, since it is a product of the reification processes of the social field; it haunts one in the same way as that of the prejudicial profiling of individuals by the socio-legal apparatuses of geo-political mechanisms of control, defining the individual’s relation to the state.335

However, against the oppressive conceptual demarcations of the conventional order,

Bukowski utilized a poetic gaze. While this gaze was not the pure gaze of the detached

334 Laughing with the Gods, 31. 335 Giorgio Agamben. “No to Bio-Political Tattooing” Le Monde (10 January, 2004).

244 aesthetician, since it was marked by the labor-filled day he endured at one of his many menial jobs, he nonetheless used it to plumb the abyss of (his) existence, thereby moving into the direction of explicating the implicit presuppositions and transcendental horizon of the everyday. This process, the process of making explicit, is brought to bear on the implicit being of the everyday by utilizing the resources of what Merleau-Ponty calls the thematizing gaze. As Merleau-Ponty explains it, “[t]he process of making explicit, which had laid bare the ‘lived-through’ world which is prior to the objective one, is put into operation upon the ‘lived-through’ world itself, thus revealing, prior to the phenomenal field, the transcendental field.”336 What this means is that, for Merleau-Ponty, prior to the objectifying cognition – which treats the world as an object to be analyzed in terms of laws and causal relations – there is the lived experience of pre-theoretical embodiment, and it is the goal of the phenomenological philosopher to adopt a “reflective attitude” in order to

“reflect on this reflection, understand the natural situation which it is conscious of succeeding and which is therefore part of its definition; not merely practice philosophy, but realize the transformation which it brings with it in the spectacle of the world and in our existence.”337 As with Bourdieu, reflexivity is at the heart of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological method, a method that makes itself aware of the pre-theoretical attitude at the basis of theorizing by replacing it with a “reflective attitude,” capable of thematizing the prior content of the lived experience. “That is why phenomenology, alone of all philosophies, talks about a transcendental field.”338 Both Merleau-Ponty and Bourdieu recognize the importance of the field at the basis of the formation of norms, values, and

336 Ibid., 71. 337 Ibid., 72. 338 Ibid., 71.

245 institutional arrangements, and which goes into the generation of experience. It is transcendental – explicitly for Merleau-Ponty and implicitly for Bourdieu – because the field is at the level of the pre-theoretical matrix of tacit belief – and simple taken-for- grantedness – of being-in-a-world, which goes into making up the unacknowledged pre- perceptual flow at the root of the constitution of sense and the coordinates of one’s embodied habitus.

Bukowski could be said to have walked the line between the objectifying gaze and the analysis of subjective experience because he resisted the pre-constituted formal categories available for interpretation. Since he wasn’t able to adequately interpret his experience – and the objective coordinates of his being – through the use of pre-existing concepts, he was forced to be inventive when discussing his position. Subjectively, the same was true: his subjective experience required a simplified prose capable of conveying it in the rawness of its contours. Since he vehemently rejected the institutionalized language of academia, in a letter to Al Perdy once saying that “universities are trivialities,” it was necessary for him to embody his language in a way that did justice to its pragmatic significance. As Adenzato and Garbarini argue, “interaction with an object [is] a constituent part of the perceptual representation of the object itself.”339 Bukowski is in the peculiar position where the object of analysis is himself, and, although he does not self-consciously analyze himself as a social scientist would, the poetic mode that he utilizes to confront himself and his world positions him as both the object of interaction, and the quasi- subjective initiation of the interaction. That is to say, Bukowski’s writing, being a reflection

339 Mauro Adenzato & Francesca Garbarini. “The As If in Cognitive Science, Neuroscience and Anthropology: A Journey among Robots, Blacksmiths and Neurons” in Theory & Psychology 16 (2006): 749.

246 on his own life and experiences, renders his life an object of reflection, while the process of his writing – drinking wine at a typewriter in the middle of the night – is the active ingredient that works to coagulate the experiences into a shareable literary form. But since the object of his work is himself, there is a breach of the distinction between subject and object, and, in a way, his writing becomes an extension of his life and his life becomes informed by his writing. Although it is most often said that Bukowski represents himself by writing about his own life,340 the reverse could also be argued: by featuring himself in his novels (under the pseudonym of “Henry Chinaski”), he writes his life into existence.

3.6 Life as Art; Art as Life341

The immanence of Bukowski’s position, incorporating its own transcendental conditions into the form of his writing itself, mediates his position in such a way that it transforms it into what François Laruelle calls the immanence of the One which features a

“Stranger-subject”: “Because it is determined by an ineluctable immanence with which it remains identical, the non-philosophical subject cannot be posed against the particular objects reflected in philosophy by being derived according to its conditions.”342 To make this claim Laruelle first distinguishes between “given” and “given-ness”: the former (given) is the result of the latter (given-ness). According to Laruelle, all philosophy is Kantian in nature, that is, it differentiates (whether explicitly or implicitly) between the transcendental

340 Bukowski claims that his writing is “ninety-five percent truth and five percent fiction” (Laughing with the Gods, 26). 341 This is a reference to Paul Clements’ book on Bukowski and the Beat movement. 342 Gabriel Alkon & Boris Gunjevic. “According to the Identity of the Real: The Non- Philosophical Thought of Immanence” in Synthesis Philosophica 51. (2011): 218.

247 conditions of the given and the given itself, and, beginning with the latter, makes the attempt to get to the process of given-ness itself, while conceptualizing itself as the meta- discourse capable of accounting for the adequation or non-adequation of thought and reality.

Alternatively, Laruelle’s non-philosophical attempt to outline the objective contours of philosophy begins and ends with given-ness, since, for Laruelle, thought and reality are both immanent to the One – the One is the identity of both reality and thought. What this means is that thought is – in the last instance – determined by reality, or, since reality and thought are identical, reality thinks itself.343 The error of philosophy is a result of its arrogance: in one way or another philosophy posits a version of the self-constituting autonomous subject who is considered to have control over itself and that which it comes to know (Laruelle even includes Derrida and Deleuze in this history of philosophy because they are said to claim a degree of mastery over the underlying difference that they consider to determine the given).

This does not deny the transcendental structure of knowledge, it actually confirms it because, for Laruelle, reality transcendentally gives itself to a non-philosophical “Stranger- subject” who is “an unseen face turned towards a faceless future; this face can be ‘seen’ by the subject who, instead of trying to perceive or face it, posits itself as ultimately identical to it.”344 The “Stranger-Subject” is as an imbecile who has all the givenness of the world but does not know or even anticipate it; thus, the Stranger-Subject does not dominate the given by positing its own dominance over it, but simply accepts it as it is given. I suggest, then, that Bukowski may be viewed as a proponent of non-philosophy, and as a manifestation of

Laruelle’s Stranger-subject. This is demonstrated through the way he deploys his writerly

343 This is similar to Deleuze’s notion of “expression” (which he develops from Spinoza and Nietzsche), where thought and being are considered to be an expression of the same univocity. 344 Ibid.

248 position as one that comes to embody the radical immanence, and identity, of thought and being, since his thought (as manifested in and through his works) does not differ from his reality in at least two senses: his thought (writing) actualizes his reality, and his thought

(writing) is a part of his reality (he writes about himself writing).

This radical immanence (of the writing-written situation) is illustrated in Bukowski’s poem from 1969 entitled “Drawing of a band concert on a matchbook”. The poem begins with a distinction between life itself and life on paper: life on paper is so much more pleasurable: there are no bombs or flies or landlords or starving cats345

Next he peers out the window, notices it is raining, and muses that “there will be nothing in the park today except bums and madmen”. The narrative then jumps to sitting in the park followed by the words “I am actually down there in the matchbox and I am here too”. Here there is an equation between life itself and life on paper, since he includes himself in both places at once. I suggest that we read this as an indication of the way he works – he is both the writer and the written, and they meet in an immanence of “mediated immediacy”. This concept (“mediated immediacy”) was developed by Walter Benjamin in his essay “On

Language as Such and on the Language of Man”. In this essay Benjamin argues that “[t]he existence of language…is coextensive not only with all the areas of human mental expression in which language is always in one sense or another inherent, but with absolutely

345 Charles Bukowski. And the Days Run Away like Wild Horses Over the Hills (New York: Harper Collins, 1969), 123.

249 everything.”346 The identification of language and thing goes beyond the classification of language as a thing among things in the world. Language, for Benjamin, is not only literary, but there is a language of things, inherent to them. It is in this sense (a specific type of) language could be considered as an immediate mediator that grants things their form by allowing them to speak, and through speaking the language most proper to them, to mediate immediacy – an unconcealment of things as such on their own terms. In this decidedly non- representational view of language, the latter directly “participates” in the life of things in such a way that the two are intertwined.

Language is not an act of mediation through representation, but ‘a matter of mediation through immediacies’. The form assumed by this paradoxically mediated immediacy is participation. The name ‘participates’ directly in the thing, while the word participates indirectly in the thing through the name. The name is an immediate mediation, and the word a mediate immediacy. Neither word nor name represents anything, but together they move matter, as if by magic.347

In the above poem, Bukowski is in both places at once: “I am here too.” The language of the poem does not differ from the actuality of his existence, since they are co- extensive and participate in each other’s becoming. Bukowski says: “writing is ninety percent of me. The other ten percent is waiting around to write.”348 This transcendental matrix of language-name-thing writes Bukowski into existence, since he is immanent to the field of socio-historical contingencies which may be said to “participate” in his writing, and

346 Walter Benjamin. “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man” Trans. Edmund Jephcott (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996), 62. 347 Christopher Bracken. “The Language of Things: Walter Benjamin’s Primitive Thought” in Semiotica 138.1/4 (2002): 324. 348 Laughing with the Gods, 36.

250 that determine it in the last instance. It is the immanence of the writer and the written, the process and the result, that illustrates the transcendental status of his writing, and the way it is able to reflexively get at the field of forces co-extensive with the overt content of the written.

The exorbitant pressure put on him by his parents in his early life, coupled with the anxiety surrounding his appearance (compromised as it was by the riddling of his entire body by severe boils which required painful – and humiliating – hospital treatments), prompted him to accept the role of the outsider.349 He initially found refuge in the library, reading everything from the great American poets to the Russian novelists. He quickly changed his place of refuge to the seedy bar – the archetypical location of Bukowski’s poetry – where people would overlook his overt physical flaws, and where they would treat the demands of life as fulfilled by simply watching the world go by. He was thus able to treat his time at the pub as an end in itself – without goals, future aspirations, or investments. “You see, by hiding in this bar, I didn’t have an eight-hour job; I didn’t have to drive my car to work; I didn’t have to punch a time-clock; I didn’t have to get involved with society. It was a good hiding place.”350 However, as it will turn out, this time spent in less than reputable locales acted as a place from which he was able to “study” people by being – almost unbeknownst to himself – something of a participating observer of his own life, gathering an understanding of the social milieu that unfolded before his eyes, which would later come to be reflected in his work. Without attempting to introspectively get inside his

“self” to share its private thoughts and feelings, he provides a glimpses of his own

349 Ironically, he was the first (and last) nominated “outsider of the year” by The Outsider, an underground literary magazine in the 60s. 350 Ibid., 74.

251 experience of being situated in the midst of what he called something “happening”. What

Bukowski refers to as “something happening” is the state of the streets before gentrification efforts are put in place to “clean” them up. In this view, the act of “cleaning up” the streets ends up robbing it of the rawness of its simplicity. Looking back and commenting on the

East Hollywood area, where he lived for a good portion of his earlier years, he laments that

“There’s nobody there anymore…I get the feeling that the world is more and more drying up…my idea of life is: where the black pimps are, where the whores are, where the music is playing, where the jukeboxes are playing in the bar, where the lights are on, that’s where life is. That may seem to be a terrible type of life for most people. But you listen to that music and you walk into that bar sometimes, and try to find a bar stool, you sit down and the bartender comes up and serves you a drink, you’re glad to get it because you’re in a lively joint where something is happening.”351

Urban gentrification has been a contested issue at least since Marx, who argued that it was through the close proximity of living conditions in city life that the conflicts of class consciousness would be put on full display, thereby initiating revolutionary action in terms of provoking an attempt at their resolution.352 This insight, while perhaps much too optimistic in the revolutionary potential of city dwelling, hits on a correct insight, namely that gentrification is all about class. As soon as an area is gentrified the people living there

(who are usually not property owners) are displaced; their previous buildings demolished, or drastically renovated, the rent is then raised, and there is suddenly no vacancy. Businesses appealing to a certain high standard of living move in, and as a result, an entirely different

351 Charles Bukowski. “The Charles Bukowski Tapes,” No. 5. Directed by Barbet Schroeder. France : Les Films du Losange, 1987. 352 Loretta Lees. “A Reappraisal of Gentrification: Towards a ‘Geography of Gentrification’” in Progress in Human Geography 24.3: (2000), 392.

252 way of life is incorporated, at the expense of those who lived there before, who have now been financially displaced. This neo-liberal-colonialist process is easily argued for in a convincing way by the media playing on irrational fears, and, in name of cleansing the city of crime, popular support is acquired. As Lees argues, “Gentrification…is a cyclical process driven largely…by investment flows.”353 There are ebbs and floods of investments, driven by the market, determining how much money is put into the gentrification process, including when and where it is invested. As money does not consistently flow, the actual result of the process – whether it is affordable or not – is also inconsistent and unpredictable. In this regard, what Loretta Lees argues in a later paper on the “speeds” of neo-liberal urbanism, speaks to the relatively inopportune patterns that result from a form of social planning dictated by market ebbs and flows. “Gentrification is embedded in…an emergent regime of ‘fast’ urban policy formation. Fast policies are designed to travel fast, they are post-ideological (and this is important because it means they can be co-opted by those in any part of the political spectrum), pragmatic, and will propagate themselves spatially. Gentrification is sold to us as something that is creative, it is about urban

‘renaissance’, the rebirth of the central city. Creative neoliberalism is a feel-good term that is hard to argue against.”354

As someone who has lived in East Hollywood before the efforts of gentrification ran their course, Bukowski returns to see the ruins of economic prosperity, that is, the boarding up of his previous hangouts, which have been subsequently deemed unfit for business. The effort to drive away the seedy counter-culture that inhabited this area, instead of bringing it

353 Ibid. 354 Loretta Lees. “The Geography of Gentrification: Thinking Through Comparative Urbanism” in Progress in Human Geography 36.2: (2012), 160.

253 to life, shut down the life that was already there: the life that lived on the edge of disaster and thereby welcomed the becoming of being in all its consequences. The criminalization of a vast part of the population (most incarcerated on non-violent charges) is indissociable from the process of gentrification, which is still going on today. In Crips and Bloods: Made in America, filmmaker Stacy Peralta makes a case for the systematic discrimination and criminalization of African American people in California (and the US generally), the rise and fall of the civil rights movement (and subsequent incarceration of Black Panther members), and the detrimental effects of the introduction of crack cocaine into the ghettoized segregated neighborhoods of South Central Los Angeles as being the driving force behind the prison-industrial complex.355 While the gun-toting culture of rival gangs are used as scapegoats for a structure that systematically discriminates along race and class lines, it is argued that the gentrification efforts are an extension of the segregationist policies that the civil rights movement supposedly defeated and put to rest.

While Bukowski was not a member of a gang, he grew up and lived the majority of his life in East Hollywood. He lived through the early years of the civil rights movement, and the effects of this social milieu are never far away from his documentation of the seedy underbelly of the mythical image of Hollywood. In “The Reason Behind Reason” he makes a transcendentalist argument when, according to David Stephen Calonne, he suggests that there is “an inscrutable riddle occluded behind the reasons we invent to interpret our experience. Whatever meanings there might be are so unreasonable that they are best passed over in silence. It is the individual, questioning poet who is lost, while the crowd ‘all hung

355 Crips and Bloods: Made in America. Directed by Stacy Peralta. New York: Balance Vector Productions & Verso Entertainment, 2008.

254 together in a strange understanding.’”356 This claim bears an uncanny resemblance with

Bourdieu’s “unthought categories of thought” since the “inscrutable riddle” also functions in a zone of constitutive conditions for understanding, yet it is not itself understood, or even understandable in principle. Therefore it must be (similar to Wittgenstein’s famous remark about the ethical element of his thought) passed over in silence. According to Wittgenstein in the Proto-Tractatus (the notes he sent to his publisher immediately before publication), there is, embedded within the “world-language system” – the overt part of the Tractatus that develops his positivistic picture-theory of language – an ineffable element that cannot be reduced to the terms of the elaborated system. He therefore cautions, “My work consists of two parts, the one presented here plus all that I have not written. And it is precisely this second part that is the important point. For the ethical gets its limit drawn from the inside, as it were, by my book;…I’ve managed in my book to put everything firmly into place by being silent about it…”357 It is this “ethical” moment that haunts Wittgenstein’s early work which is, normally thought of as merely a development of Bertrand Russell’s logical positivism. The ethical, in these terms, is epistemological in that it is the basis for the structures of thought governing the ethico-political imaginary, and dictate the terms of the debate, and the viability of positions within the political landscape. The ethical is also ontological in that the necessity of its silence is governed by the unfinished reality of being itself. This is the unwritten aspect of Wittgenstein’s thought which is left unwritten because it is as unfinished as being. It is necessary, then, for a critique of this transcendental realm of conditions of possibility for the demarcations and limitations asserted as natural on the level

356 David Stephen Calonne. “Introduction” in Absense of the Hero (San Francisco: City Lights, 2010), XI-XII. 357 Ludwig Wittgenstein. Proto-Tractatus. “Ludwig Wittgenstein” in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wittgenstein/ Retrieved on 05/27/13.

255 of empirical actuality. Bukowski’s position as poet is one form that this critique has taken, since he does not write in a way that reflect or recognize the drive toward the naturalization of the ideology of the political establishment, but instead, he uses his poetry as a vehicle to expose the absurdity of this situation, while highlighting aspects of life that are systematically overlooked by the mediated version of the political situation. As he put it,

“Poetry comes from where you’ve lived and from what makes you create it. Most people have already entered the death process by the age of 5, and with each passing year there is less of them in the sense of being original beings with a chance to break through and out and away from the obvious and the mutilating.”358 It is “the obvious and the mutilating” that is most effable for Wittgenstein, the coordinates he is able to delineate with mathematical precision using the logical positivistic methods of Russell under the guidance of the principle that that which cannot be spoken about does not exist. However, it is this portion of reality, that which is not easily amenable to the language of positivistic formulae, that is the most important part of reality, since it acts as the conditioning of that reality, and determines what it is possible to consider to be “real” in the first place. The reductivity of the logical positivists, based on a strict verificationist method of scientificality, holds that anything that cannot be verified through direct experience is meaningless, and what is meaningless does not exist. This anti-metaphysical procedure inadvertently naturalizes the mode of experience agreed upon by the (scientific) community – and when extended to social life as in the work of August Comte – is unable to account for the presuppositions that are at the basis for a particular type of experience, i.e., that which is recognized as legitimate by the positivists themselves. This decidely anti-transcendentalist position cannot

358 Charles Bukowski. “Playing and Being the Poet” in Absense of the Hero (San Francisco: City Lights, 2010), XXII.

256 account for the historical becoming of knowledge, and is therefore caught up in an ahistorical analysis of the way the world appears from a particular gaze.

As Bukowski indicates above, his poetic methodology derives from a form of obejctive experientiality: “Poetry comes from where you’ve lived and from what makes you create it.” Poetry for Bukowski, may be said to autochthonously derive and develop from the ground upon which experience happens almost as an outgrowth. Poetry – like philosophy – is thus immanently grounded in the conditions that give rise to it and make it what it is. However, it does not mimetically reflect the conditions of the actual, but it reaches into the transcendental conditions of possibility for the actual, thereby bringing them to bear – and therefore be accounted for – upon the structures to which they give rise.

Translating the ineffable conditions of possibility into the effable language of the actual may be considered to be poetry’s vocation. In order to accomplish this task, traditional versions of poetry sought to invent a new – “poetic” – language that, as it was thought, would better reflect the “unthought categories of thought” in a way respects the immediacy of their becoming. However, for Bukowski, what this does is obscure the social origins of the conditions, and leads to a poetry whose vocation it was to speak of angels and utopias in a way that does not speak to the actual conditions that it has reflexively grew out of. Thus

Bourdieu asks about the creators of the creators, and obviates the myth of creation ex nihilo and the Kant-inspired disinterested viewing of art for art’s sake by bringing it into contact with its contingent beginnings inhering in the “field of artistic production as a whole (which stands in a relation of relative autonomy, greater or lesser depending on the period and the society, with respect to the groups from which the consumers of its products are recruited,

257 i.e., the various fractions of the ruling class).”359 Poetry, under Bukowski’s tutelage, thus has a critical edge; this consists in the relative freedom it has from literary form – although convention still plays a part in what is acceptably considered “poetic” or not – and its consequential ability of truth telling in the face of a writing environment of political sensitivity, and the demands of media publishers to contrive stories by leaning toward the context through acceptable angles in the determination of what is newsworthy. As journalist

Mark Pedelty put it, if The Times isn’t there, it isn’t news.”360 Caught up in this version of poetry is the notion that the subaltern is able to speak: that is, the stories that aren’t told, and therefore silent, are, in a sense, spoken through the telling of the truth about the way of life of an invisible minority of drug addicts, prostitutes and drunks (hardly the theme or content of traditional poetry).

Baudelaire was also a poet who opened poetry up to the less conventionally beautiful aspect of life. Following the release of his Flowers of Evil in 1857, he was charged with “outrages to public morality” by the French government.361 However, Edward Kaplan argues that, similar to Bukowski, despite “Baudelaire’s dubious reputation as a sadist, a blasphemer, an addict or a poet of depravity...his literary and critical works are motivated in large part by a passionate ethical commitment.”362 While it’s difficult to find a resolution to the overt thematic content of Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil, and the “passionate ethical commitment” of its motivation, there are definite parallels to be drawn between Baudelaire and Bukowski, especially in terms of Baudelaire’s opening up of poetry to the more crass

359 Society in Question, 142. 360 Mark Pedelty. War Stories: The Culture of Foreign Correspondents (New York: Routledge, 1995), 73. 361 Edward K. Kaplan. “Baudelairean Ethics” in The Cambridge Companion to Baudelaire. Ed. Rosemary Lloyd (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 88. 362 Ibid., 87.

258 elements of life. It may be added that both poets did not have qualms about speaking frankly about the less than beautiful aspects of life, although, especially in Baudelaire’s case, beauty was something that was to be found in the most unexpected of places. Just as the protagonist of Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground has a spiritually uplifting conversation with a prostitute, Baudelaire finds beauty lurking in places that are untouched by the didacticism of classical art. Both ironically push the notion of the flower to its limit, Baudelaire insisting on the beauty of what he terms “evil” (mal), Bukowski, when he says that “I think degradation, pimps, prostitution are the flowers of the earth.”363

This non-traditional poetic exposition of these aspects of life marks a break from the stifling moralist backdrop of the poetic tradition, and thereby opens poetry up to its non- poetic element. In a similar way that Francois Laruelle talks about the constitutive non- philosophical blind spot of philosophy that makes it possible,364 the poetry of Baudelaire and Bukowski could be seen as opening up the repressed – but no less constitutive – aspect of poetry, and making it into the main content of the poem itself. It is especially the form of the traditional poetic convention that Bukowski especially views as the most reprehensible.

However, as he formulates it, “when content distorts form we’ve got creation, and trouble –

Like say, John Cage, living.”365 Approvingly citing the experimental composing of John

Cage, Bukowski finds creation in the distortion of form, and it is through this distortion that the exposition of the transcendental horizon is capable of being opened up and made explicit. In this sense it may also be said that both Bukowski’s degraded “flowers of the

363 “The Charles Bukowski Tapes” No. 5. 364 François Laruelle. “A Summary of Non-Philosophy” in Pli: The Warwick Journal of Philosophy Vol. 8 (1999). 365 Charles Bukowski. The Bukowski-Purdy Letters: A Decade of Dialogue Ed. Seamus Cooney (Santa Barbara: The Paget Press, 1983), 29.

259 earth” and Baudelaire’s “evil,” are overtly avoided by the poetic tradition. By pushing the themes that Bukowski and Baudelaire poeticize out of the realm of poetry, the didadic poetic tradition was able to preserve itself. It is through this avoidance (or outright disavowal of non-poetic themes) that a fortification of the structure of didacticism was accomplished, which is consistent with a preservation of the moral and political status quo by naturalizing the way things are and suppressing the thought of what they could be. In this way conventional poetry could be seen as operating in the guise of the

“disinterestedness” of the Kantian notion of the beautiful – the enforced detachment associated with reading and appreciating poetry – and the myth of the ‘uncreated creator’ that Bourdieu critiques – and it does so in the service of upholding an ideal of pure contemplation, rather than practical action.

This poeticization of being – detaching it from practical action and the material conditions that gives rise to it – goes a long way in terms of keeping the transcendental conditions for the actual state of affairs invisible, ineffable, and not even questionable, to such an extent that even the historical and social sciences are left pursuing questions that are blind to their own presuppositions. That is, since this epistemological situation is determined by a split between the actual and the conditions for the actual, there is a split between the conditioned and the conditioned such that it is always possible for the transcendental conditions to ‘erupt’ in an ‘event’ that collapses them into the conditioned, therefore leading to the possibility of meaningful change. “The event is in fact an effect of the philosophical understanding of reality as split into two levels, one of which is supposed

260 to give the other through a process of conditioning or differential relation.”366 The interruption of the predictive flow of the actual by a heterogenous interruption of the conditions of possibility for the actual, presupposes an ontological situation in which being is differentiated from itself and incomplete. Just as Laruelle argues for philosophy, along with its constitutive ‘decision,’ to transcendentalize being (and to be aware of this transcendental constitution as it is operative at the basis of philosophy), the poetry

Bukowski calls boring is that poetry that operates on the basis of this split, and makes no attempt to account for it.

The ideal of a poetry untarnished by life – a purely idealistic fantasy that moves the reader toward atemporal forms and puts the poet in the position of the creative genius – is still with us today, even in our so-called postmodern condition and generalized skepticism.

This is best seen in the return to the Classics of Hölderlein and the didactic idealism of

Rilke. In terms of the latter, we may thus ask whether the “overcharged [poetic] image, once our eyes have become accustomed to the obscurity of the symbolist mise en scène, really gives a good, a truthful and a beautiful presentation of the world we live in; or whether, with time, the illusion will grow transparent and the vision appear as the beautifully staged fictions of a false situation.”367 The poetic beauty that the symbolic image attests to, by claiming to embrace a harmonizing vision of the actual, belongs to a gesture that falsifies through adornment and embellishment, as well as a cutting off from everyday life. The rawness of Bukowski’s poetry, written as it is in ordinary language, drains poetry of its romantic aspirations by making it remain on the level of the crass and simple, since, as he

366 Gabriel Alkon & Boris Gunjevic. “According to the Identity of the Real: The Non- Philosophical Thought of Immanence” in Synthesis Philosophica 51. (2011): 213. 367 Anthony Thorlby. “Rilke and the Ideal World of Poetry” in Yale French Studies 9. (1952): 137.

261 makes clear in his novels, there is nothing else. The difference between Bukowski and the didactic poetry of Hölderlein and Rilke is that the latter seek the “pattern of a transcendent world” while Bukowski outlines the contours of the transcendental conditions of his own writing. If Heidegger, repeating Hölderlein, is able to say that “poetically man dwells,”368 it is the nature of this ‘dwelling’ that Bukowski takes up as an issue he is forced to live with, and thereby come to terms with. Although at times he feels cursed, for example, when he is forced to take a semester off of school due to the severe nature of his grotesque boils, or the frequent beatings he would receive from his father as outlined in his autobiographical novel

Ham on Rye, he uses the affective tonality associated with this experience as a driving force for the development of his ability to see through the conventions governing the lives of people around him, including his own. By focusing on the ‘dwelling’ in the literal sense of the series of cheap hotel rooms he is barely able to afford (as documented in Factotum),

Bukowski degrades the lofty status of the poetic that Hölderlein affords it through his making of it into a privileged activity, capable of revealing the presence of the gods and the transcendent aspect of nature. Emblematic of this is the general reluctance – and even constitutive inability – to directly thematize the transcendental, since it is the transcendental that makes possible the positing of the transcendent (the ideal realm of symbolic forms) in the first place. As Bukowski pithily explains his preference: “I’d rather hear about a live

American bum than a dead Greek god.”369

David Calonne argues that the dark side of Bukowski’s poetry derives from the lineage of Romanticism marked by the likes of “Holderlein, Kleist, Nietzsche, Trakl, Kafka,

368 Martin Heidegger. “…Poetically Man Dwells…” in Poetry, Language, Thought Trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1971). 369 Charles Bukowski. Sunlight Here I Am: Interviews and Encounters 1963-1993 (Michigan: Sun Dog Press, 2003), x.

262

Hesse, Rilke.”370 While more than merely a matter of categorization, the lineage Calonne identifies is part of a larger traditional image of the tortured poet-artist, who endures life’s hardship just long enough to pass over an artistic expression of this suffering. Calonne suggests that all of these poets are characterized by the dämonisch, where even Socrates was said to be visited by his daemon371: “all moved along the edge of sanity, suffering dark nights of the soul.”372 The narrative is simple, the poet goes under and wrestles with the dark night of the soul, only to return to the logos of Western civilization, and the ability to translate the uncanny mythos into a form of knowledge that encapsulates the ineffable by translating it into a ‘sayable’ form. While Bukowski does not imagine himself a traveller to

Styxx and back, there is a possible resurrection theme that Calonne picks up on. At the age of thirty-five he was hospitalized for a ruptured stomach, and informed he would have to drastically change his lifestyle, that is, he was told that he must stop drinking. From this moment on, he began writing poetry, and it poured out. “I was almost dead anyhow and it was kind of like sending a message...Sunlight, here I am.”373 This theme does not by any means inform his poetry; however, it could be said that by dwelling in a place where people live day-by-day on the edge of existence – and are thus closer to death – he embodies the field of his writing as much as he writes it. By writing his existence into being, he also, at the same time, bears witness to the constitutively erased aspect of the national image, thereby bringing the obscurity of the other story to the illumination of the logos.

370 Ibid., xiv. 371 Ivan Leudar & Philip Thomas. Voices of Reason, Voices of Insanity: Studies of Verbal Hallucinations (New York: Routledge, 2000), 24. 372 Ibid. 373 Sunlight Here I Am, viii.

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The epistemological situation is thus: we are all Kantians; that is, there is – whether it is directly thematized or not – a transcendental horizon governing the conditions of possibility for actuality, and which is determinant in the last instance.374 Whether or not there is an attempt made to gain access to reality directly, through, for example, quantum theory (what Badiou and Meillassoux insist upon as the axiomatization of Being, according to Ray Brassier and others), the attempt is still condemned to be determined in the last instance by the transcendental conditions of possibility for the attempt (which includes not only the categories and concepts of Kant, but the historical-material and cultural conditions of Marx, as well as the less-than-obvious “discursive formations” of Foucault and the field- habitus of Bourdieu). As such, it is only by reflexively delving into, and exposing, this transcendental horizon, that purposeful critique and meaningful practical action could arise.

The attempt of Bukowski, while not self-consciously pursued, is to bring these conditions of possibility for the actual to the surface and out into the open; he does this through the unblinking explication of the immediate conditions to which he is exposed in his average everydayness. By opening poetry up to this field – its own field – he gets through the barriers that the traditional poetic ideal upheld and preserved from the gaze of critique, and, as a result, his poetry lets the transcendental horizon speak for itself by granting it voice. As inexplicable as this horizon is, Bukowski grapples with it, and in so doing, he inadvertently leaves a paper trail of hundreds of poems, each of which highlight a different aspect of his existence and – by extension – the existence of the conditions and the conditioned.

374 This Marxist phrase is taken up by Laruelle to indicate that what he calls the non- philosophical One is the basis for the Real determining non-philosophical thought. This realist ontology is made possible by the fact that the transcendental operation is hijacked by a situation of pure immanence that does not think the One but thinks according to the One.

264

The political interest in this activity is that, as Adorno touches on in Minima

Morality, it is in and through the most invisible and subtle gestures that the truth of the political situation is made most manifest. That is, the aspect of the situation which is most often overlooked is of most interest, it carries the most weight and acts as a sign of the age.

This is partly because it is not overcoded by the system of language that operates in a way to colonize the meaning of gesture in a way that makes it conform to the terms of the naturalized political meaning-laden environment. Bukowski works in the tradition of emancipatory critique, even if he does not explicitly acknowledge, or even know it. His work exposes the transcendental horizon to itself, and through this disruption, reflexively disrupts the purity of its seemingly austere foundation. Imbued by humor and biting irony,

Bukowski’s poetry is often directly disruptive of the hegemonic way of speaking and thinking about the actual, and the related political situation. Operating partly within the mode of the stand-up comedian (espeically during his live poetry readings), he speaks of things that are on the verge of being thought by people in their conventional everyday activities, but which nevertheless fall below their conscious articulation. Thus Bukowski attempts to articulate the ineffable that Wittgenstein said must be passed over in silence.

Wittgenstein still had an rigid and representational conception of language when he wrote the Tractatus. In this context, for Wittgenstein, poetry was non-propositional and as such, it did not make claims about the state of affairs of the world – poetry was akin to nonsense because it did not claim to convey sense in terms of representational content. The later

Philosophical Investigations is different because it theorizes language as being embedded in the situation of its use: it becomes a question of what language does rather than what it is.

Similarly, Bukowski’s poetic intervention into practical life expands poetry toward the

265 horizon of potentiality that makes it possible, including the situation in which it finds itself embedded. In so doing, he documents – almost in snapshot fashion – the economic existence in Los Angeles in the 60s, where a certain type of existence (including the race, class and level of education) goes from job to job with ease, but does not hold one down, and gets exploited in the process. The poetry speaks to this in a way that exposes it, brings it to the surface, and highlights the absurdity of this situation, much in the same way that the later Wittgenstein realized that in the game of giving and asking for reasons, eventually reason gives out, and things just simply happen. In “On Certainty” he cites “framework judgments” as the underlying – but non-foundational375 – basic certainties laying in a heterogenous region, while acting as the implicit capacity for making judgments. The conditions for the judgment are built into the judgment itself; and the act of judging is governed by the norms governing the situation. In other words, judgment – even in its specialized sense – is a product of a prior decision made in terms of what it is to judge. The system governing the conventions of judging – as a system not unlike the system governing the poetic utterance as non-propositional – extend beyond the epistemological realm of knowledge, and into the transcendental region of belief-making and re-making, since this transcendental system informs, i.e., makes possible the actuality of activity in a way that reaches below the level of conscious articulation, but which, nevertheless, is a constituent part of its articulated result. “All testing, all confirmation and disconfirmation of a hypothesis takes place already within a system. And this system is not a more or less arbitrary and doubtful point of departure for all our arguments: no, it belongs to the essence of what we call an argument. The system is not so much the point of departure, as the

375 “The difficulty is to realize the groundlessness of our believing.” Ludwig Wittgenstein. On Certainty. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1969),150.

266 element in which arguments have their life.”376 The life of the argument, as well as the life of the poem, dwells in the transcendental ungrounded ground of its becoming and active unfolding.

The status of belief here is meta-belief – it is not simply Bukowski’s private belief about the world, but a belief that hovers as a general condition. Belief is related to the schematism discussed above, since both are part of the immanent necessity of a field that satisfies the demands contained within it, the demands, in Wittgenstein’s case, of properly giving and asking for reasons. Belief resides on the level of the “epistemological unconscious” that Bourdieu cites as the seat for the conditions of knowledge generation and agreed-upon understanding of the implicit rules of the social world. However, while

Wittgenstein is concerned with outlining the limits of a conceptualization of the epistemic conditions for experience based on the proposition-oriented framework of a version of logical positivism, Bourdieu is already, in a sense, beyond that. As a sociologist of science, he attempts to get to the unacknowledged practical presupposition that facilitate the consolidation of the discipline. While belief may be said to function in his account as the invisible determinant of the way practical activity is arranged and organized, it is reevaluated outside of its merely epistemological connotations, conventionally formulated in terms of Plato’s tripartite theory of knowledge as justified true belief.377 Belief is part of the habitus, and insofar as the habitus is a transcendental schematism of understanding,

376 Ibid., 147. 377 See Chauncy Maher’s The Pittsburgh School of Philosophy: Sellars, McDowell, Brandom (New York: Routledge, 2012), for a description of the way the classical conception of knowledge is reworked by a Hegel-inspired inferential account of the communication of knowledge.

267 belief is an extension of one’s engagement with the world, as well as a constitutive component of the production of this same world.

Bukowski does not think about things in terms of their factual nature, or their metaphysical value. “I don’t have grand thoughts, I don’t have large thoughts of a philosophical nature. I’m a very simple man and when I write poems, they’re about simple things.”378 While Bukowski claims not to be a “thinking man,” the “thinking” demonstrated in his poetry and novels could be considered to be in the form of meta-descriptions of experience – the demonstration of the unacknowledged presuppositions of experience as facilitated by the “thick description” of the experience.379 While not participating in the game of science or philosophy, where a particular form of truth is at stake, this type of description is not devoid of knowledge or belief, but actually demonstrates it by enacting it.

Insofar as Bukowski’s existence is caught up in the contours of his writing, he could be considered to be a cut from the same fabric, and his writings as manifestations of his practical engagement – and demonstrations – of his framework for belief, as activated and actualized through his life.380 This does not make the descriptions less true, but only that they do a different sort of work in their explication and exposition of Bukowski’s habitus.

378 Laughing with the Gods, 45. 379 Clifford Geertz. The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973). 380 Four of his full-length novels, Ham on Rye (1982), Factotum (1975), Post Office (1971) and Women (1978), [Hollywood (1989) and Pulp (1994) are set in his the later years] all auto-biographical, can be positioned to chronologically account for the span of his life from childhood to the later years when he became established (Ibid., 72).

268

Conclusion

This dissertation has established that the concept of the transcendental does not stop with a critique of pure reason, but extends to the constitution of cultural phenomenon, and as reality is experienced from within a cultural context. Furthermore, transcendentalism also refers to the constitutive form of the production of reality itself, a processual production, which does not depend on the human for its activation, and which sits at the basis of the constitution of the human in the first place, determining it as that which is dependent on a transcendental situation for its being what it is. In this view, reality is in a state of actively constituting itself anew, and like Schelling’s Nature, it is in a continual mode of production.

The production of reality, while appearing to result in products, is in a continual process of constitution and counter-constitution.381 It is never finished, and therefore, as Žižek argues, reality is incomplete and constitutively unfinished. That is to say, reality itself does not have a telos of completion, a state of perfection that it could one day achieve, because it is not

381 This is reminiscent of Kant’s theory of the dynamism of nature; in Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science (1786) he famously argues that natural phenomena are determined by “moving forces of attraction and repulsion originally inherent in them” (72).

269 totalizable and is essentially unfinished. This means that reality is the way it is because it is unfinished and incomplete. A corollary of this view is that political reality is also incomplete, and therefore, perpetually under way. No political state of affairs are definitive; any political involvement requires constant participation in the flux of its becoming.

Politics, therefore, is defined as an active involvement in an infinite task of striving to complete a version of reality that is just. This task is made possible – and even necessary – by the ontological status of reality as constitutively unfinished and open. In a paradoxical turn of phrase, it is nonetheless accurate to say that reality is complete in its incompletion, because part of reality is the fact of its potential for freedom arising from the contingency inherent in its unfinished nature. What has been referred to here as “transcendentalism” is a simple vouching for, and acknowledgement of, the fact of this task – a task incumbent on anyone to act as though they are free to actively and artistically contribute to the completion of reality. As part of the immanent nature of the transcendental situation, everything is part of the same movement of constitution – there is no human opposed to nature, but the very process of nature involves the human alongside – and intermingled with – everything else.

While the human is an effect, it can also be a cause, no less than a tree or a rock may be both cause and effect.

However, the language of the latter is applicable only as a propaedeutic. This way of speaking is symbolic and metaphorical, it has nothing to do with transcendental constitution because there is no absolute necessity for the ways in which reality comes to be constituted.

Patterns of constitution are just that, loose approximations that are repetitively ingrained by a political machination that has a vested interest in preserving and institutionalizing the way things are, and prolonging this particular state of affairs by making it seem as though the

270 way things are is an intractable component of reality as it is in itself. But insofar as reality is ontologically constitutively unfinished, any version of reality is a temporal lapse into being of a more fundamental and primary becoming that does not have a single unified state because it is not static but active. In this way politics becomes a way of naturalizing an otherwise contingent state of affairs by imbuing them with the guise of necessity, universality and objectivity (something that I argue Kant was guilty of in the first Critique).

Roland Barthes argued a similar point in Mythologies when he made the case that myth is a form of ideology, which naturalizes of a contingent state of affairs. So while reality is fundamentally open-ended, politically motivated interests work to cover up this open- endedness and treat it as though it were closed and that reality is complete in itself.

Furthermore, this operation leads to the impression that the existing state of affairs, including the unequal distribution of wealth, is inevitable. I argue that is not the case, and that an evaluation of the transcendental conditions for the contemporary situation illustrates why it is so. Beginning from the premise that, underlying actually existing cultural formations (rules, objects, ideas, and so on), is a level of pre-individual singularity it follows that actually existing reality (both as it is in itself and as it is culturally articulated) is a contingent manifestation of the underlying process of individuation. Therefore, the way things are, and the way they appear to be, are inherently and constitutively open to revision.

Žižek’s incompletion thesis states that since reality is inherently and fundamentally incomplete, it is impossible to ever “finish” reality; all political realities are failures because of the discrepancy between politics and ontology: while politics is such that it must act as though it is the last word, the crown jewel of reality, it is fundamentally flawed because incapable of articulating the ontological fact of its necessary failure. Politics must act “as if”

271 it had the answer, and we must act as though our actions are capable of actualizing a manifestation of pre-individual singularity that is livable, even though the underlying process operative on this level becomes manifest in no necessary way, and we may or may not have the ability to influence it in the direction of our liking. This is why events such as

“Generating the Impossible”382 are valuable because they attempt to materially participate with the activity of nature in such a way that a micro-politico-aesthetic intervention may be capable of swaying the contours of becoming in ways conducive to community and non- hierarchical modes of being.

Throughout this dissertation the inherently contingent manifestation and generation of reality was highlighted to exemplify the haphazard ways in which cultural phenomena are conceptualized, organized and taken to be real. The phenomena of the concussion is treated in chapter two by looking at the discursive formation that goes into the ways in which it is viewed as a crisis requiring a generalized “cultural change” in the football world and beyond. At a time when violence is a normalized component of cultural forms of entertainment, the concussion is treated as a problem that must be resolved both by explicitly changing the rules of the game and to change the opinion about the health and safety in professional football. My analysis abstracted from this issue to bring to light the transcendental conditions for the particular articulation of the concussion’s (as an cultural object) arising, which includes a consideration of the pre-individual singular level of forces operative on what I call the underlying “cultural” level; the contested discursive formation possibilities that the “cultural” this level gives rise to by making possible; the

382 “Generating the Impossible” is the name of Erin Manning and Brian Massumi’s Senselab event that took place in the summer of 2011 in Northern Quebec. http://senselab.ca/events/technologies-of-lived-abstraction/generating-the-impossible-2011/

272

(Wittgensteinian) language games that grow out of actualized discursive formations; and the levels of rules which are in turn made manifest as a result of the latter. On top of this are more transhistorical – but no less materially grounded – considerations of (Cassirer) mythical formations such as archetypal heroic myths which have led to hegemonic versions of masculinity, as well as the NFLs concern with its opposite, a competing, and inconsistent, narrative of care. As is argued, this latter became a competing narrative only after pressure was put on the NFL by former players in the form of class action lawsuits accusing the NFL of negligence and undue risk due to the NFL downplaying the link between football and traumatic head injury. This in turn has led to a counter-actualization of the discursive formation surrounding concussions, but only after the issue became publicized – and a topic of regular communication – to a certain level of saturation, which in turn has had an impact on the larger discursive formation surrounding and constitutive of the football world in general, including a subtle shift in conceptions of masculinity and professional sports as an extension of the labour force.

South Park’s problematization of the competing discourses surrounding the constitution of the concussion highlights the heterogeneous and contingent representation of the concussion crisis on several levels, including the cult of hegemonic masculinity and the associated warrior mentality, the incompetence of medical discourse to account for the nuances of something as complex as the human brain, and the political stakes involved provoking the NFL to (re-)construct an image of itself as caring and responsible. It was therefore important to highlight the official language used by NFL commissioner Ralph

Goodell (“cultural change”) to emphasize the growing awareness of the need for imagined and actual change. It also highlights the somewhat naïve belief in the ability to self-

273 consciously instigate a socio-cultural change on a cultural level through an official mandate and institutionalization (e.g. by fining defensive players thousands of dollars for “illegal” hits).

To further investigate the ontological open-ended nature of reality it was helpful to look at Charles Bukowski’s unique situation of simultaneously embodying artist and the subject-matter-of-art, and to reconsider Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of the literary field of production as a transcendental concept. In this analysis, the field is considered the ultimate constitutor of subject positions, even though it nevertheless remains in a state of vulnerability in terms of the habitus to which it gives rise, and which also has the capacity to reverse the direction of influence and impact the field itself. This chapter is about the everyday transcendental field as exemplified by Charles Bukowski’s (sometimes contradictory) vocation of writing himself into existence (through various literary techniques, mechanisms and realist pretensions), while also documenting the very conditions of possibility for this existence. This chapter also provided an argument for the

Kantian heritage of transcendental philosophy, and its influence on contemporary theory, including the sociological analyses of the often empirically-minded Pierre Bourdieu. What this tells us is that the influence of the transcendental turn is very much alive, and still operative in terms of the ways in which we think about the world, formulate methodological approaches for its study, and imagine our relationship with and access to reality.

While there are several lines of argumentation occurring simultaneously throughout the dissertation, the argument is that the transcendental turn is still influential in contemporary theory and everyday life in general. As a result, it is necessary to approach the study of cultural phenomenon from a transcendental point of view. Transcendentalism is not

274 a human-centric construction but a feature of reality itself, and because of the nature of transcendentalism, and especially the fact that reality is constitutively unfinished, political projects are feasible which desire the actualization of heretofore unimagined possibilities – possibilities which are nonetheless real, albeit unknown. It is the unknown, non-actualized realities that inspired and sustained this project. As Deleuze argues in his book on Kant, it is only through the generative aspects of the transcendental dimension of Kantianism that the new is capable of coming into being. True novelty does not come from truth, but from the non-Utopian, but ontological, category of the Not-Yet that Ernst Bloch works out as a philosophy of the future that does not rely on the present for its capacity to be imagined as already existing in some way. In fact, it may be said that the Not-Yet is the definitive category of the unfinished portion of being, which includes itself as an infinite task to be taken up by a transcendentally aware subject of change.

275

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