Centre for Peripheral Studies

◊ ◊ Originally written for the 2015 special ’Bernard Stiegler’ issue of Boundary 2: International Journal of Literature and Culture at the invitation of its Guest Editor, forthcoming in the next issue of Parrhesia: Journal of Critical Philosophy. ◊ ◊ This critico-theoretical review of Mécréance et Discrédit (Volume One: The Decadence of Industrial Democracies, Volume Two: Uncontrollable Societies of Disaffected Individuals) examines the dual deprivation of hope (praespero) on the one hand and of leisure (otium) on the other,  or what we call—après Stiegler—the privation of‘praesperotium’, in the techno-political present. Stiegler’s subject-matter, the spiritual dimension of individuals and its dissolution via disindividuation, will be explored in light of the Simondonian notion of religious subjectivity, technical objectivity, and the dehiscence of the object’s/subject’s primordial/preindividual ‘unity’.  Aspects of Stiegler’s Mécréance et Discrédit find exemplification in our essay—our critico-theoretical review—via Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Mort à Crédit. ◊ ◊

In this presentation, we would like to speculate on the socio-political and techno-cultural implications of our society's widespread, almost ubiquitous use of 'those damned dirty apps'.  Just as Charlton Heston in Planet of the Apes discovered that humanity is and are no longer the ruling species on earth, we may soon discover, in our increasing use of app-driven mobile technology, that we are no longer in the driver's seat.  We tend to think of apps in some sense as ‘appetizers’: as single-function/single-purpose/single-service applications with custom interfaces designed to be æsthetically appealing, user-friendly, and bio-politically beneficial.  But apps are never what they seem and cannot simply be defined by their formal properties or æsthetic characteristics; apps are always imbricated in mechanisms that allow hidden data-collecting, information-processing and intelligence-exchanging operations.  No matter how ‘benign’ they may be, in the system of capitalist consumption, uploads and downloads, they are part of a larger predatory framework, and are in this respect [culinarily, or consumer-orientedly] ‘weaponized’ from the outset.

This paper examines Walter Benjamin's argument that the matter --the materials --of materialist historiography are the objects that have been forgotten and discarded by modern bourgeois commodity culture. Benjamin's argument that the historian's task is one that has the potential to transform humanity's experience of the world in a revolutionary manner hinges on what he calls the 'messianic' potential of the historical object as such, and it is this 'messianic' or 'redemptive' dimension of materialist historiography that is the focus of the present analysis. Just as Benjamin saw in child's play and children's playthings a potential 'playing out' and 'recollecting' of that which has been dropped, left behind, forgotten and forsaken, he likewise saw the historical endeavour as one which engaged the discarded materials of bourgeois culture and cut through progressivist, universalist history --revealing in so doing a materialist and indeed 'messianic' history. If in the child's fascination for the forgotten object the object reveals its critical and redemptive play-potential, likewise in the analysis of the historical materialist the material of history reveals a critical and redemptive political potential. The consequences of this redemptive relation (these redemptive relations) are drawn out in the essay and culminate in the figure of the revolutionary custodian and the 'New Janitocracy'.

◊ ◊ This paper advances the argument that Foucault’s notion of ‘bodily inscription’ can be found in more rudimentary form in the Nietzschean notion of ‘bodily descent’ — the path qua pathology of ‘going under’ first outlined by Nietzsche in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The argument is set within context of the ongoing debate in Foucault studies about whether a non-discursive dimension of the body can be posited or whether the body is always already and inevitably discursive. Following Judith Butler’s assessment that there is in Foucault’s work the presence of a body outside of signification, the present paper argues that Foucaultian bodily inscription is akin to Nietzschean bodily descent: both are predicated on and depend upon the occluded presence of an inherently ‘indecent’ or ‘undisciplined’ body, one that disrupts the discursive economy of subjectivization (assujettissement). Through the detailed reading of an exemplary tale by Franz Kafka (‘In the Penal Colony’), we attempt to describe the structural axes or disciplinary matrix that descends and is imposed upon ‘undisciplined’ or ‘indecent’ bodies, revealing in so doing the ‘indecent’ body subject to this descent, the body ‘crossed over’ and ‘crossed out’ — ‘double crossed’ — by these axes, by this matrix. We suggest that it is at the crossroads or the crossing of these axes, precisely at the point where the indecent and untidy body is ‘inscribed’ and ‘disciplined’, that Foucault, like Nietzsche, locates a point that points beyond the structure, beyond axial and axiomatic binaries, to a body of inherent possibilities, affective virtualities, and spirited resistance. ◊ ◊ http://rauli.cbs.dk/index.php/foucault-studies/article/view/871 1.1 ◊ ◊