Only a small shift

Love this quote:

[I]t is not necessary to destroy everything nor to begin a completely new world. It is sufficient to displace this cup or this bush or this stone just a little, and thus everything. The Haasidim tell a story about the world to come that says everything there will be just as it is here. Just as our room is now, so it will be in the world to come; where our baby sleeps now, there too it will sleep in the other world. And the clothes we wear in this world, those too we will wear there. Everything will be as it is now, just a little different. (Walter Benjamin qtd. in Agamben 52)

Contrast IV: Instruction to Look at Writing Techniques, Art, and Literature

Jullien says that within writing techniques (calligraphy), art, and literature we can see Chinese metaphysics at work. He says:

This mode of thought never conceived or artistic activity as the West initially did, that is, as mimesis ... Rather, artistic activity was seen as a process of actualization, which produced a particular configuration of the dynamism inherent in reality.

So, I believe Jullien is instructing us to look at writing techniques, art, and literature if we want to understand the metaphysics of our contemporary electrate moment.

Although there are, it seems, a limitless number of contemporary artistic examples that we could use to look at to understand electrate metaphysics, I have chosen to look at television shows, specifically, Netflix's House of Cards.

Part of the reason for my choice is that many critics have argued that we are currently witnessing a Renaissance within television. As Jeff Bercovici argues in his article in Forbes, "conventional wisdom has it that the richest, most challenging and rewarding storytelling is taking place not in cinemas or even in novels but on television."

So, to continue with Jullien's contrast, if Chinese art sought to convey the shi that was always already inherent in nature, and Western art traditionally  conceived of art as mimesis, "the reproduction or imitation of a particular kind of 'nature' at some level more 'ideal' or more 'real'" (75), then what is the corresponding logic of contemporary television, specifically, of House of Cards.

I argue that the logic guiding this show, and much of other contemporary art and literature and writing, is similar to what Bolter and Grusin have described as "hypermediation." In this way, the art resonates with our own experiences--we are aware of the mediating apparatuses of our day-to-day experiences--transparent immediacy has become a thing of the past. We, then, identify, through recognition, with the "seams" that are placed on the surface of House of Cards.

For example, Spacey's character, Frank, directly addresses the camera. And, unlike a show like The Office, where this effect might by accounted for by the presence of a documentary crew in the diegetic world of the show, there is no explanation for how Spacey's character manages to break the fourth-wall and speak directly to us.

Furthermore, when Frank and the other characters receive text messages, we see these messages appear on the screen.

It is pleasurable because it is personal. And, if we can identify a logic at work in these aesthetic choices, I would argue that it is a logic of sped up, saturated, present mediation. A similar operation is at work with "postmodern" novels that are, in part, about the act of writing itself. Here, we see the logic applied to the digital image.

Contrast III: An Instruction from Jullien to look at Politics

In Chapter 2, of The Propensity of Things, Jullien looks at how Chinese thought in late Antiquity conceptualized political efficacy.

In other words, here, Jullien has moved from the art of warfare to the art of ruling. He will go on to look at the art of writing, painting, and poetry.

So, as Jake Green has noted, Jullien instructs us to move away from general theories and toward the particular details in order to describe a given metaphysics. In Chapter 2, the particulars Jullien examines have to do with the powers of the sovereign (and therefore have implications for how we think about contemporary political theory--for instance, the state of exception).

So, for the Chinese thinkers of late Antiquity, Jullien says political effectiveness is viewed as stemming directly from the position, the arrangement, the supports surrounding the sovereign.

two aspects to any potential effectiveness stem from hierarchical positioning. First, it does not depend on the personal merit of the individual using it. ... Second, the individual may or may not use it but can never do without it entirely. (40)

and

Thus, the sovereign's position counted above all. (45)

 Chinese acrobatic touring company, The Golden Dragon Acrobats  

Jullien connects the sovereign's power through position to the sovereign's power through surveillance (56). This, Jullien notes, is similar to Bentham's panopticon that Foucault describes in Discipline and Punish.

In both Bentham's and the Chinese system, the functional disymmetry is identical: on the one hand, the enforced transparency of those who are observed, on the other, the opacity of the observer, whether prince or guard. (56)

However, Jullien notes that Bentham's prison pales in comparison to the ways in which the Chinese had already "elaborated as early as late Antiquity ... [a theory of surveillance] on a scale that controlled the whole of humanity" (57).

So, Jullien is instructing us, then, that there are at least 2 productive places within politics for us to better understand how a metaphysics functions: 1) how the ruler obtains/maintains his power and 2) how surveillance operates.

It may be enough to say that we live in a surveillance state. It's been well documented that we are tracked, monitored--by the government, by corporations, our emails, our text messages, our telephone calls, our shopping habits, our movements in cities, in malls.

What I find most interesting, then, for thinking through an electrate metaphysics is how, today, the ruler obtains his power.

If, for the Chinese in late Antiquity, the ruler's power came from his position, and for the Greeks, we the ruler's power came from his personal qualities or his abilities, then today, I would suggest that we think of how the ruler's power comes from our emotional reactions.

Two examples might help to illustrate what I mean here: terror alerts during the second Bush administration and the Obama Hope image (with credit, here, to how Dr. Laurie Gries' work has affected my own thinking about this image).

Contrast II: Pathos, Circulation, Dispersion, Chaos

Jullien describes the Western world's reliance on causality--"for it is by going back into the causes of things that we apprehend reality and its underlying principles: this formula has shaped our investigations and determined the progress of our thought" (219)

He goes on to say that it "does not seem possible, for us in the Western tradition, to question the absolute validity of this understanding of causality, for its legitimacy is treated as self-evident and serves as the logical basis for the tradition" (220).

On the other hand, the Chinese have not traditionally relied on an understanding of causality to explain how the world is. Rather, they rely on "the implication of tendencies ... the sequence of changes taking place stems entirely from the power relations inherent in the initial situation" (221).

Although this binary is useful for thinking through historical differences, again, I feel that it doesn't quite hold for our contemporary moment. Yes, the reign of logos has not entirely ended, but, increasingly, there are those who point toward a multiplicity of voices, of causes, of agencies.

Contrast 1: Proximity and War

We're working on composing/inventing an electorate metaphysics, and, in the CATt, we're using Francois Jullien's The Propensity of Things in the position of "C"--it is our contrast.

The contrast helps us to better understand what are the existing paradigms (the problems), and within the contrast we look for concrete examples and evidence in order to help us better understand how we can chart a departure and a divergence.

So, for this first blog post (& email), I will examine Jullien's examples of Chinese warfare and Greek warfare in order to think through how these might relate to our contemporary understanding of warfare and its relation to the logic of images. If Jullien is suggesting and instructing us that warfare (in addition to art) is one realm to find evidence of how things are within a given cultural paradigm, then the differences between the Chinese and Greek forms of warfare might help us describe what happens to warfare in electracy.

Jullien says that the Greeks "reached a concept of warfare in which the head-on clash of the two phalanxes, deliberately engineered by both sides, constituted the determining element, that is, hand-to-hand fighting in broad daylight" (35). For the Greeks, "the spear was both instrument and symbol of this heroic confrontation" (36).

The spear, held in the hand, then, symbolizes the Greek form of combat.

On the other hand, "projectile weapons ... were generally despised...because they killed from a distance and without regard to the personal merits of the fighting men" (36). 

The Greeks value proximity in combat.

The Chinese, however, perfected the projectile weapon, the crossbow, which could skillfully kill from afar (36).

Distance and proximity. A setup and its efficacy contrasted with means and ends.

Today, warfare is electronically mediated through the screen and the joystick. As former CIA director Leon Panetta said in May of 2009, drone warfare has become "the only game in town."

U.S. drone pilots attack targets in countries such as Pakistan and Afghanistan with "unmanned aerial vehicles." These pilots work in the New Mexico desert, outside of Alomogordo, and, ostensibly, they are far removed from the battlefield. Distance.

On one hand, "virtual warfare" may seem to follow the logic of the crossbow.

But, in another sense, the drone pilots feel that they closer than ever before (or at least closer than pilots of manned aerial vehicles of war) to the people they attack.

Derek Gregory in his 2011 article "From a View to Kill," says the technology "viscerally immerses physically remote operators in combat" (203) and that this intimacy is achieved, in part, through the pilots' close visual proximity to the events on the screen--they are some 18 inches away from what it looks like on the ground (200).

Warfare through digital imaging and UAVs, then, is both the crossbow and hand-to-hand combat. But the hand-to-hand intimacy has been reduced to the visual. The risk of bodily harm to the UAV pilots has been removed (although the drones still require some troops on the ground for take off and landing).

Maybe drone warfare is not, finally, a useful example for thinking through the metaphysics of electracy. But, as Jullien instructs us, the "obvious trait finally escapes our grasp," and, I would argue that images that have the power to affect us emotionally and psychically (and that are part of/produced by/the result of apparatuses that can have lethal material consequences) are a feature of our current moment that often escapes our grasp.