Samuel Johnson on blogging

...perhaps?:

The boundless liberty with which every man may write his own thoughts, and the opportunity of conveying new sentiments to the public without danger of suffering either ridicule or censure, which every man may enjoy whose vanity does not incite him too hastily to own his performances, naturally invites those who employ themselves in speculation to try how their notions will be received by a nation which exempts caution from fear, and modesty from shame; and it is no wonder that where reputation may be gained, but needs not be lost, multitudes are willing to try their fortune, and thrust their opinions into the light, sometimes with unsuccessful haste, and sometimes with happy temerity.

-From "Introduction to the Harleian Miscellany: An Essay on the Origin and Importance of Small Tracts and Fugitive Pieces"

Spivak, Derrida, Marx and the question of value

I'll outline here a basic point that Gayatri Spivak makes about Derrida and Marx in "Scattered Speculations on the Question of Value" that does not cease to be relevant even today when thinking about all the concepts we inherit from Derrida--most notably (and was there any other concept he gave us? and was it ever a concept?) differance. We'll see that it is picked up, a decade later, by Bernard Stiegler, for essential reasons. Spivak lays out the point simply, in the strict terms of Marx:

For Derrida... capital is generally interest-bearing commercial capital. Hence surplus-value for him is the super-adequation of capital rather than a "materialist" predication of the subject as super-adequate to itself. This restricted notion can only lead to "idealist" analogies between capital and subject, or commodity and subject.

-in The Spivak Reader, 119

The distinction she makes between "materialism" and "idealism" is outlined in the first paragraph of that essay and should be recalled:

One of the determinations of the question of value is the predication of the subject. The modern "idealist" predication of the subject is consciousness. Labor-power is a "materialist" predication. Consciousness is not thought, but rather the subject's irredicible intendedness towards the object. Correspondingly, labor power is not work (labor) but rather the irredicible possibility that the subject be more than adequate--super-adequate--to itself, labor-power: "it distinguishes itself [unterscheidet sich] from the ordinary crown of commodities in that its use creates value, and a greater value than it costs itself" (Capital 1, 342).

-in The Spivak Reader, 109.

This is a lot to take in, but let's walk through it: Spivak is extremely careful with the words she uses and each signals a turn in thought that lends itself to our tracing it out.

It is obvious from the first sentence of the second quote (the first sentence of the first paragraph of the essay) that how the subject is predicated is, for Spivak, a way that the question of value can take on a particular valence or tone. In other words, a way the question of value can be asked can be in how the subject is predicated, how it is allowed or not allowed to be: the predication itself asks the question of value, so that what value is will resonate with how a subject is predicated.

Spivak then reproduces a distinction Marx makes in The German Ideology between the predication of consciousness and the predication of labor-power. As Marx says, the former predication "descends from heaven to earth," making "consciousness" into what "determines life" while the latter is involved in a movement of "ascending from earth to heaven," making "life" into what "determines ...consciousness" (The German Ideology, Amherst: Prometheus, 1998, 43). This is the sense in which the first is "idealist" and the second "materialist:" not because one or the other is a particular form of rigorous idealism or materialism but because the first has idealist and the second "materialist premises" (Marx, 43)--thus the quotes she puts around the words. What is "idealist" corresponds to a predication of the subject that presupposes the form of consciousness as primary and the labor power in life secondary, and what is "materialist" corresponds to a predication of the subject that presupposes the form of labor-power in the opposite way. What are these presuppositions, exactly? Nothing other than identity, self-presence in the case of idealism and difference or absence of presence in the case of materialism. This is why Spivak says that labor-power is not labor--not a thing or a present that would be identical to itself, like the conscious "I am"--but a "irreducible possibility:" labor-power is not, because it is only a difference between the subject and its object, what it needs. Thus, "super-adequation:" the converse of Spivak's proposition that the subject is super-adequate to herself according to labor-power is that the subject is that the subject is lacking something or is different than what it needs to be in order to be adequate. For Spivak, labor-power is a predication of the subject as a needing and making subject, a subject that can make more than it needs and, in "being" this ability, always "is" lacking something or needing something that would make it adequate to itself or identical. It is always already more than its identity to itself. If Derrida's consideration of capital "can only lead to 'idealist' analogies," as she says, then we see that Derrida's idealism must stem from presupposing here that consciousness as this self-identity is more primary than labor-power and difference as a predication of the subject.

We'll continue these reflections later... here is the transit they will make: capital presupposing identity in Derrida and escaping the real meaning of surplus-value, or the surplus itself. This "restricted" and not "generalizing" notion--Spivak especially chooses her words carefully here, referring to the distinction between a restricted and general economy--stems from an ambiguity in how differance appears only after or before there is super-adequation, and not precisely at the point of super-adequation itself. In other words, differance "is" not super-adequation, and thus Derrida presupposes that it exists in a completed form--in capital, rather than as labor power. This ambiguity is localized by Stiegler in Technics and Time, when he cannot place differance either before or after phusis with any clarity: does phusis arise from differance or afterwards? And is this a correct understanding of differance on the part of Stiegler--is not this indeterminacy precisely the determinacy of both the either and the or, of the perhaps?

Mourning after citation: re-membering

What is the connection in Derrida's oeuvre between mourning and citation? That is, between something like the remembering of the deceased and the quotation of another? How can this event surrounding death be so textual? Or, more generally, how can a more "ethical" concern of Derrida towards the end of his career (even though it appears in some of his earliest work) find itself already implicated in the logic of his earlier "metaphysical/post-metaphysical" writings (even though it is featured even in his last interview) via the particular transit or opening that the shoring up or juxtaposition of these terms constitutes?

It isn't by mistake that we are able to investigate these matters within a text that, in its name, is fascinated with death and life or death in life, and, in its opening (at least), is obsessed with quotations marks. "Living On" ("Survivre," in French, with the emphasis on the disjunction possible between "sur" and "vivre") links the dismemberment of the body (a condition of death or dying, an act that forces the passing from life to death or the dying in life) to the innermost workings and unworkings of quotations, as they disturb (among other things) speech act theory's popular "use-mention" distinction. This theory would make a quoted phrase--"In other words on living?"--into an act of mentioning, as opposed to a using of the phrase: when you quote, you don't use language but rather mention an instance of its use, they say. "In other words on living?" is (they continue) a sort of quotation or citation, purporting to explain the phrase "who's talking about living?" ("Living On" begins: "But who's talking about living? In other words on living?") while it elaborates it in another use that is not a use but a mentioning. However, Derrida contends that this mentioning never stops just with the whole of the phrase: it passes down to the instance of every word in the phrase. This disturbs the distinction between use and mentioning, because each instance of a mentioning would be indistinguishable from a use: each word, insofar as it refers (either uses or mentions), would be able to be a mentioning as well as a use. I'll clear this up later perhaps, but the point is that the language that can be used also always can be a mentioning. In other words, everything becomes quotable, and in doing so dismembers or disjoins in its rendering mentionable any use of language, word by word:

If it [the phrase "in other words on living?"] is a sort of quotation, a sort of "mention," as the theoreticians of "speech acts" feel justified in saying, we must understand the entire performance [or "mention"] "in other words on living?" as having quotation marks around it. But once quotation marks demand to appear, they don't know where to stop. Especially here, where they are not content merely to surround the performance "in other words on living?": they divide it, rework its body and its insides, until it is distended, diverted, out of joint, then reset member by member, word by word, realigned in the most diverse configurations... For example, several pairs of quotation marks may enclose one or two words: "living on," "on" living, "on" "living," on "living," producing each time a different semantic and syntactic effect; I still have not exhausted the list...

-from "Living On," in Deconstruction and Criticism, 62-3 (translation modified)

Now, dismemberment and disjoining, as the taking apart of a text through the assertion of citationality or infinite "mentionability" within what seems to be its coherent, closed, use, also resets these members that have been disjoined, "member by member" as Derrida says. What is this act of resetting through citation, through making citation not only surround but penetrate to the interior of every use of language? In other words, what is this act of resetting words at the point of there being infinite citationality or performativity in the use of words? "Member by member" it works what is unworked totally as a re-membering. Re-membering indeed describes this whole structure of taking apart and resetting, resetting indeed right at the point at which the disjunction or disjointedness between words is extended infinitely, so that any use of language is also its performance. In other words it is mourning, the remembrance of the dead, the putting back together of the person who has been taken apart in death, the preserving (one can even say materially, if one grants some materiality to thoughts of remembrance in one's head) of the other within one and yet only precisely at the point at which she or he can only exist through citation, through the performance of themselves, no longer in any fully constituted bodily presence. Mourning is citing, infinitely, so that each citation still has to refer to the deceased--who precisely is no longer there in the act of (or because of the act of) citing. Dis- or re-(these two prefixes are now synonymous, because the lack of the referent or the other that needs to be replaced is itself installed by the very interability in the "re")membering as this particular citational structure (citation infinitely extended, every bit and everywhere performative, so that in fact this mentioning, this performing of the referent/other without the referent/other, is its only use) is mourning.

Hopefully this connection is a bit illumined: it is hard to be faithful to Derrida and you see the necessity of his "obscurity" in his texts when you have to try and reconstitute them (especially amidst other work!)--namely, because you can't use the word "is" (in the speech-act sense of "use"), and because this very prohibition also manifests itself and is operated by how all the terms transform themselves. One can perhaps see two consequences of all this, though, which perhaps are one at their root (and yet of course everywhere and never fully able to be captured with a single word). 1) Derrida's opposition to and yet respect for the necessity of (perhaps more than Heidegger, who seeks to destroy this in Seinsgeschichtliche denken yet always grapples with how he can't) Hegelian Erinnerung, internalizing and self-appropriating acts of memory or memorialization in the negative movement of the Aufhebung. The consequence is that there is no appropriation or gathering up of the other into identity/sameness, no resolution in further work of the negative to the contradiction or difference between the same and the other. In other words, 2) it is wrong to say that mourning is the use of language (to recollect or memorialize the other, to bring him or her back into the sphere in which they can live with us but not as us, to reappropriate them and yet respect them in their death, in their otherness) at that point at which it is its performance, its mentioning. That is, the use of language to respect the other (or the referent) at the point at which this language is performance of the use of language to respect the other is not the  the performance of this language only. Language does not refer only to itself in being always a mentioning. If there is only mentioning, it is not the mentioning of one use, of one respect for the other. It is always indistinguishable, as a citation, from every other citation. To put it quite simply: every act of mourning is always not just my act of mourning. This does not mean it is communal: it means that it is never mine, my own. Why? Because every act is always only a performance: it is on par with anyone else's remembering of the other. In the "textual" terms we are also employing, every use of a word would be a mentioning, but then every mentioning would be indistinguishable in its use: the use would be only one--mentioning--but one only in the sense that there is no one use (there is only mentioning). No appropriation, no Erinnerung, and yet the necessity for appropriation as the only way to memorialize and mourn: this is the double bind. Every mourning then, must fail in its appropriation, must not appropriate enough or must appropriate too much of the other. But--and here is the "ethics" of this "textual" logic--mourning must fail to begin again, to begin in failing to begin, to begin more, to fail more: to fail to repeat the mourning is at once a crime and what always takes place, both an ethical failure and the only ethical injunction. One must always mourn more.