THE TOOL/MAKER: the BIRD, the CAGE, the RADIO, the SEA, the ROCK, the EYE, the SPACE by JOHNNY A. STEIN Presented to the Facult
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
THE TOOL/MAKER: THE BIRD, THE CAGE, THE RADIO, THE SEA, THE ROCK, THE EYE, THE SPACE by JOHNNY A. STEIN Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Arlington in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT ARLINGTON May 2014 Copyright © by Johnny A. Stein 2014 All Rights Reserved ii Acknowledgements I would like to express my special appreciation and thanks to my advisor Professor Dr. James Warren, you have been a tremendous mentor for me. I would like to thank you for encouraging my research and for allowing me to grow as a scholar. Your advice on both research as well as on my career have been priceless. I would also like to thank my committee members, professor Tim Richardson and professor Stacy Alaimo for serving as my committee members even at hardship. I also want to thank you for letting my defense be an enjoyable moment, and for your brilliant comments and suggestions, thanks to you. I would especially like to thank my teaching colleagues, assistants, and secretaries in the English Department at University of Texas at Arlington. All of you have been there to support me when I researched and collected data for my Ph.D. thesis. A special thanks to my family. Words cannot express how grateful I am to my mother, father-in-law, sister and brother-in-law for all of the sacrifices that you’ve made on my behalf. Your prayer for me was what sustained me thus far. I would also like to thank all of my friends who supported me in writing, and incented me to strive towards my goal. At the end I would like express appreciation to my beloved wife, Tania Stein, who spent sleepless nights with and was always my support in the moments when there was no one to answer my queries. April 14, 2014 iii Abstract THE TOOL/MAKER: THE BIRD, THE CAGE, THE RADIO, THE SEA, THE ROCK, THE EYE, THE SPACE Johnny A. Stein, PhD The University of Texas at Arlington, 2014 Supervising Professor: James Warren As street politics began to operate academically after the civil rights eras, academic turns toward socio-constructive theories dominated critical philosophies of the subsequent eighties and nineties (especially in the West). This paper examines the linguistic turn in light of a New Digital World Millennium that is the continuation of the Rise of Science that emerged in the 17th century. Material voices that were overshadowed by linguistic or terministically-centered philosophies are today more than ever emergent through tool use. The wireless revolution of the late 19th century has today created technological tools at hand that are deeply impressing the human being-in-the-world, rapidly shaking up the place of homo sapiens in the cosmos. Robotic technologies today have the capacity to taste fine wine and food, disseminate information by hive-minds, fuse with our material flesh, and have taken on faculties of speech and learning. Humans iv are the makers of such tools and all of them are made to overcome material constraint. Considering such rapid technological innovation and new material interlocutions, I argue that a return to the beginnings of the Academy is necessary because they had already always acknowledged material voice and mystical (oracular/prophetic/irrational) impressions until the rise of Socratism. A return to the tools left behind by Science is necessary because it is the method by which to access (speak about) such mystical machinations brought forth through material tool use. This paper will revisit ancient methods with a new eye to the constraints of the material world and the tools used to overcome them. v Table of Contents Acknowledgements………………………………………………………………………….iii Abstract…………………………………………………………………………………….…iv Chapter 1. PARS PRO TOTO: An Introduction………………..…………………………1 Transiently Defining Matter as it is Considered on these Grounds………………..9 Totum Pro Parte: The Road from T/here…………………………………………....30 Chapter 2. Reveille………………………………………………………………………....32 The Roots of the Linguistic Turn……………………………………………………..42 The Failures of the Terministically Screened……………………………………….50 Tools to Add and Tools to Take: Retaining the F/roots of the Linguistic Turn…..60 Edification: Crossing the Nature/Culture Divide……………………………………70 Chapter 3. Anxious Docility: The Birth of The Eye……………………………………...83 The Birth of Performativity…………………………………………………………….92 Flash Forward: Out of the Performative Middle Ages and into the New Millennium….…………………………………………………………………………108 Chapter 4. The TOOL/MAKER…………………………………………………………..112 The Cyborg Language King…………………………………………………………115 The Material Subject: Impressions from Natural Tools…………………………..129 Chapter 5. New Constructions…………………………………………………………..137 [re]Negotiating with Natures………………………………………………………...146 [re]Negotiating with Objects…………………………………………………………160 Disturbances in The Force: The Dark Side of Tool Use…………………………167 Where to Go When There is Nowhere Else: Into The Archive………………… 175 Chapter 6. Archives…….…………………………………………………………………178 The Archive: Origins and Developments (What it is and from Where it Came).181 vi A Shifting Archive: New Technologies, New Collections………………………...190 Topoi: Aristotle’s Ancient Topics……………………………………………………196 27 Metaphorical Topoi with an Evaluation on Metaphor…………………………201 An Evaluation on Rhythm……………………………………………………………219 Chapter 7. Requiem………………………………………………………………………227 References…………………………………………………………………………………240 Biographical Information………………………………………………………………….251 vii Chapter 1 PARS PRO TOTO: An Introduction “When you gaze long into an abyss, an abyss also gazes into you.” Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future (1886). Current thinkers who deal with objects seem to be operating in two directions. In one direction are those who are considered “Object-oriented Ontologists (OOO)” such as Graham Harmon, Levi Bryant (who re-coined Harmon’s identification of the movement, Ian Bogost (the video game designer), and the medievalists Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (who examines objects as paradoxically alien and intimate with humans). I wish to acknowledge their contributions to current thought but I will be mostly interactive with feminist, post-humanist, and new materialist “patterns of thought.” A tenet of most OOO- oriented thought is that the world is machine-like in which everything has its place. Relata exist autonomously for object-oriented ontologies, which is antithetical to my arguments on these grounds. Rather, I aim to support other patterns of emerging thought such as the new materialisms, actor network theorists (ANTs), post-humanists, border theorists, and other theorists such as feminist studies or critical race studies. I draw upon these because for many of them, relata cannot exist independently. Matter and meaning are mutually articulated. Objects and meaning emerge together. In the support of such new post-humanistic, connective directions, then, I will articulate my own contributions. I will be advocating a return to Ancient ideologies and methods1 because it was they who had experienced a great split between the opposing poles of Apollo and Dionysus. The rise of reason stamps out natural drive and intuitive wills. These moves I will outline in the next chapter as well as outline the crisis in philosophical thought as a result of the linguistic 1 By “ancients,” I mean primarily the roots of rhetoric, which began in Ancient Greece with the pre- Socratics. The rise of the city and the rise of democracy and the rise of rhetoric and of knowledge- building are one and the same. I will be telling that story throughout these grounds. 1 turn. After, docility and social constructionisms set a stage whereby notions of resistance, freedom, and change became impossible. I will use such analysis to demonstrate a new way of thinking about things-in-the-world is critically needed. I also will be locating a great shift in thinking that has been brought about by the advent of wireless technology in the late 19th century, the time in which Friedrich Nietzsche was writing. I agree with Nietzsche’s solution to the changes I will be highlighting and offer a very specific sort of Cyborg figure in the final chapters that is metaphysical and naturist, one that is consistent in overcoming; that is why tools are of so much import. I will use Nietzschean methodology as well as conduct a short genealogy of the performative prescription antagonized with the material body in chapter 3. I will lastly indicate that every tool is made to overcome a lack or a loss and no tool exists that that is not forged in such a capacity. As such, tools are made to overcome. They are made to be used. Therefore, chapters four and five will specifically identify the nature of tool use and explain how that use sets a post-humanistic philosophical stage. Unlike object-oriented ontologists and their machine world, I aim to show that the world is utterly and intimately connective. Science and its method should be commensurate with connectivity as that has been the case for thousands of years. To prove that point, I will be consistently and consciously referring to the patterns of thought that began with the Ancients. Since then, new scientific investigations, wireless technologies, and innovations in cutting edge physics are all pointing back to where Eastern mystics and Western patterns of thought have been pointing for thousands of years: all that is-is connected. New wireless innovations allow for a new Cyborg figure that is predicated on Nietzschean terms and allows not only attention to parts operating with wholes but also allows for greater freedom of movement and resistance. I will build this Cyborg figure after the Zarathustrian tradition of individual and collective Wills. The preceding statements are my arguments on these grounds. 2 I’ll begin with the changes that were occurring in the late 19th century when a Scottish physicist, James Clerk Maxwell, formulated a series of mathematical equations that essentially fused electricity, magnetism, and optics (the eye). The results: the electromagnetic field. Maxwell showed three separate parts to be disparate manifestations of the same thing.