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Machinic Deconstruction: Literature / Politics / Technics Samenvatting in Het Nederlands ______ Machinic Deconstruction : literature/ politics/ technics Ieven, B.K. Citation Ieven, B. K. (2007, November 22). Machinic Deconstruction : literature/ politics/ technics. Leiden University Press (LUP), Leiden. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/1887/12448 Version: Not Applicable (or Unknown) Licence agreement concerning inclusion of doctoral thesis in the License: Institutional Repository of the University of Leiden Downloaded from: https://hdl.handle.net/1887/12448 Note: To cite this publication please use the final published version (if applicable). Machinic Deconstruction: Literature / Politics / Technics Cover design: Maedium, Utrecht Lay out: Bram Ieven ISBN 978 90 8728 029 1 NUR 630 © Leiden University Press, 2007 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book. Machinic Deconstruction Literature / Politics / Technics PROEFSCHRIFT ter verkrijging van de graad van Doctor aan de Universiteit Leiden, op gezag van de Rector Magnificus prof. mr. P.F. van der Heijden, volgens besluit van het College voor Promoties te verdedigen op donderdag 22 november 2007 klokke 15:00 uur door Bram Koen Ieven geboren te Lommel, België in 1979 Promotiecommissie Promotor: Prof. Dr. E. J. van Alphen Referent: Prof. Dr. P. Bowman (Roehampton University, Verenigd Koninkrijk) Overige Leden: Dr. J.J.M. Houppermans Prof. Dr. F.W.A. Korsten (Universiteit Leiden / Erasmus Universiteit Rotterdam) Prof. Dr. V. Liska (Universiteit Antwerpen, België) Dr. A.E. Schulte-Nordholt Acknowledgements _________________________ Most of the research in this dissertation is published here for the first time. A part of the third chapter has been published in an earlier version as an article entitled “The Just / The Legitimate: Rawls and Derrida on Justice” in John Parry (ed.) Evil, Law, and the State (Rodopi: Amsterdam / New York 2006). Thank You _________________________ Contrary to what is often said, one is never alone when writing a dissertation. People stay present in the reminiscences of discussions, they come in with the memories of the good times we had, and they stay present in the ideas I picked-up in conversations and that were subsequently developed into paragraphs and chapters. These people are colleagues, friends, parents, family and, most of all, my wife. All of them stood behind me, gave me their support, and indicated a myriad of possibilities when I thought I was stuck. Thank you. The research schools and institutes that I have been involved in did all of this as well. Most of all I would like to thank Pallas, the research institute at Leiden University that financed my research. The institute gave me the time to write, but it also took the time to listen, gave me invaluable practical support. In short, Pallas gave me the means not only to start this research but to bring it to a good end. Thank you. Finally, teaching is a remarkable affair: very often I walked out of a classroom with more ideas than I went in with. To the students I have been lucky enough to teach over the last three years: thank you. Table of Contents _________________________ Introduction From Machinic to Technics (And Back Again) [5] 1. The Instance of Emergence [5] 2. From Economy to Machine [8] 3. The Language Machine [17] Chapter One Machines / Dispersion / Technics [29] 1. Introduction: Machines of Dispersion [29] 2. Phonocentric Metaphysics [34] 3. The Supplementary Technique and the Machine [40] 4. Angel’s Multiplicity [51] 5. A Double Move in Technics [59] 6. Différance of Technics / Technics of Différance [69] 7. The Turning of Technics / Heidegger’s Technè [77] 8. Conclusion [86] 1 Chapter Two Machinic Functions: Deconstructions and/of the Metaphysical Machine [89] 1. Introduction [89] 2. The Metaphysical Machine, Reading History [92] 3. Destruction / Deconstruction, Wither the Metaphysical Machine (1) [96] 4. End / Closure, Wither the Metaphysical Machine (2) [109] 5. Speeding Time in the Machine [115] 6. Linear Machinic Technologies / Circumventing Technopolitics [124] 7. Conclusion: Artefactualities in the Deconstructive Machine [130] Chapter Three The Modern Political Machine [135] 1. Introduction [135] 2. Constitution: Disadjustment, Machinic Point, and Executive Function [139] 3. Territorialization and Centralization in the Modern State Machine [146] 4. State Thinking and Skepticism [153] 5. Law and Legitimacy in the Modern Political Machine [157] 6. Demystification and Machination: The Modern State Machine [165] 7. Constitutive Violence and Performative Fiction [174] 8. Conclusion: The Executive Functioning of the Modern Political Machine [186] 2 Chapter Four Subject / Exappropriation / Technics: On the Terminal Exappropriation of Language and Technics [189] 1. Introduction [189] 2. Exappropriation: Interlacing of Technics and Language [192] 3. The Eyes of Language as Technics [201] 4. The Expropriation of Language: Assia Djebar’s Algerian War [203] 5. Conclusion: Exappropriation by the State Machine versus Hospitality [224] Reference material [231] Samenvatting in het Nederlands [247] 3 4 Introduction From Machinic to Technics (and back again) _________________________ 1. The Instance of Emergence This book deals with technics . By the term technics I want to express a pre- cise, albeit somewhat abstract idea that will bear on how one thinks about technology, technique, and machines. The concept of technics not only has implications for how one conceptualizes technology. It opens the possibility of positioning elements of technology within politics and literature. Tech- nics can be seen as the outcome of a renegotiation of ontological differ- ence: it is an attempt at tracing back technological elements to their multi- ple, differential ontological core. First of all, in order to understand the con- cept of technics it must be distinguished from technology. As a concept bearing on politics, literature, and ontology (including metaphysics), tech- nics does not simply refer to a technology or to a technological artifact. Unlike an artifact, technics is not and can never become a thing . A thing in- dicates a material unity which, while not necessarily an object that is con- ceptually present, 1 is embedded within a repetitive pattern of everyday use. 1 For a philosophical investigation of the thing (in its relation to nature and technics, and in distinction to ‘objects’), see Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought (Harper & Row: New York 1971), 166-167: ‘The jug is a thing. What is the jug? We say: a vessel, something of the kind that holds something else within it. […] As a vessel the jug is something self- sustained, something that stands on its own. This standing on its own 5 In contrast, technics is a relational concept that cannot be pinpointed as an object, thing, or artifact. Instead of indicating a unity, technics is a veritable ‘in-between,’ it is at work in between things, constituting interrelations be- tween things, or artifacts. However, insofar as technics is what establishes interrelations between things, it is also, in the same move and at various moments in their construction, the emergence of an unquenchable multi- plication and dispersal in which no-thing can hold together. In this sense, technics becomes multiplicity itself. It is for these reasons that technics can- not be conceptualized by focusing on technical things or artifacts. In his introduction to a seminar on Heraclitus, which he taught with Martin Heidegger, Eugene Fink gives the following circumscription of a thing in its relation to technics ( Technik ): On the one hand we take the concept of thing in a wider sense, and then we mean all that is. On the other hand, we also use it in a narrower sense. If we mean things in the narrower sense, then we can distinguish between such things as are from nature […] and such that are products of human technics […]. 2 Fink does not just distinguish between two different kinds of things here. Instead, he makes a distinction between technically created things and natural things. In the first chapter of this study, I will attempt to bypass the difference between technics and nature by deconstructing the concept of thing. To this end, I introduce a novel concept of technics that cannot be enclosed within the existing conceptual categories of object or artifact, characterizes the jug as something that is self-supporting, or independ- ent. As the self-supporting independence of something independent, the jug differs from an object. An independent, self-supporting thing may become an object if we place it before us, whether in immediate percep- tion or by bringing it to mind in a collective re-presentation. However, the thingly character of the thing does not consist in being a represented ob- ject, nor can it be defined in any way in terms of the objectness, the over- againstness, of the object.’ 2 Eugene Fink and Martin Heidegger, Heraclitus Seminar (Northwestern University Press: Evanston 1993), 4. 6 technology or technique. This involves theorizing technics not so much as an object (or as a quality belonging to an object), but rather as interrela- tions between a myriad of heterogeneous elements, as a multiplicity of in- terweaving forces that slowly consolidate into more structural – or, as will become clear below, machinic - functions. Above all, I am deploying this idea of technics as a means to counter the assumption that technics can be reduced to the way it can be readily discerned in literature, politics, or in sys- tems of writing and representative (political) institutions in general. 3 Al- though technics forms part of a system of writing, and takes part in political institutionalization, what I hope to explain in this study is that in order to effectively account for the ‘techno-logics’ at work in a system of writing, or in a mode of institutional-political representation, it must be encapsulated in a broader framework – that is, in a theory of technics .
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