Let\u2019s say you don\u2019t believe that wholes or totalities exist. You don\u2019t believe that people and objects inhabit underlying structures that assign to them meanings or functions. Whatever it is that is bigger than us, the space within which we move, is neutral terrain, not exactly empty, but unstriated, a field of constantly shifting singularities. It\u2019s going to help to have a name for this space, this wire cage in which the lottery balls blow, though it\u2019s unclear what that name is to be. There is a lot that you can\u2019t call it, many words that, believing as you do, you are going to have to give up. You can\u2019t talk about structure or system or any of their derivatives: There are no ecosystems, and there is no world; there are no political or economic or legal systems, no capitalism, then, no empire, nothing global. It would be safer, conceptually purer, to shut up about the state and society. There can be no talk of rules and laws, because such things either constitute structure or are assigned by it. You\u2019ll also want to toss out any terms that refer to big blocks of time. You can start with the word \u201cmodernity.\u201d<\/p>\n
That people who claim not to believe in totalities routinely talk about all these things suggests only that they are not yet disbelieving with their hearts, like Christian teenagers pretending to be more badass than they really are. Yer average copy of Anti-Oedipus <\/em>is, in this sense, a prop cigarette. But it doesn\u2019t have to be that way. It is the virtue of Giorgio Agamben\u2019s recent book on method, The Signature of All Things<\/em>, <\/em>to remind us what a painstaking post-structuralism can look like. And yes, this is the first thing to know about the book: that it is post-structuralist, in some wholly precise sense of that term, still, in 2008, when it was first published in Italy, and not just because its author quotes Foucault a lot. What matters is that Agamben is still actively trying to purge the concept of \u201cstructure\u201d from his thinking; still trying to jimmy that e <\/em>from his typewriter; still scanning old volumes of philosophy so he can accusingly annotate the passages where schemes sneak in unbidden; still trying to devise something to put in their place.<\/p>\n We can see how this works in the second essay, from which this little book takes its title, and in which Agamben asks us to start thinking again about a basic problem in structural linguistics: How does language pass from words to utterances? Or if you like: How does the mind get from inert words, archived dictionary-like in lists, to living sentences that actually carry meaning? The usual answer to that question would have something to do with rules or laws: There are rules governing how words get combined. Your mind doesn\u2019t only know words and their definitions; it\u2019s absorbed the guidelines for their use. But Agamben doesn\u2019t want to say this, because the word \u201crules\u201d makes language sound like a government agency. Nor are the usual alternatives much better: Any talk about the \u201cstructure of language\u201d is going to bring in resonances of the state or capitalism or the administered world. We could try to identify the mind\u2019s \u201cdevices for building sentences,\u201d but that would turn language into a technology. We could wonder how words get \u201cprocessed,\u201d but that would be either bureaucratic\u2014words as case files or credit-card applications\u2014or again technological\u2014words as refined sugar. Agamben is in the market for a way of thinking about language that does not go through a juridical model of laws and rules \u2026 \u00a0or a political model of the system \u2026 or a technical model of the machine.<\/p>\n His proposal, derived from synopses of Paracelsus and Jakob B\u00f6hme, is that we learn to think of language as magic. Magic is what will substitute for structure, in which case one synonym for post-structuralism is \u201cthe occult.\u201d Agamben wants magical signs; this, roughly, is what he means by \u201csignatures,\u201d signs that aren\u2019t just neutral stand-ins for things, tokens or pointers, but charmed symbols vibrating with their own energies, signs that have \u201cefficacy,\u201d \u201cefficacious likenesses,\u201d not marks that you write down but marks that are written across you. Every spoken sentence changes the world and is in that sense a spell or hex. This is probably the clearest instance of the \u201cregression\u201d that Agamben makes central to his method: \u201cthe opposite of rationalization,\u201d he calls it. If you are serious about your critique of enlightenment, you are going to need an enchanted epistemology.<\/p>\n So \u2026 at least it\u2019s not the same old anti-foundationalism\u2014a post-structuralism, then, with new emphases and possibilities. Indeed, one of the more conspicuous features of Agamben\u2019s reflections on \u201cmethod\u201d is that they actually add up to some pretty strong and decidedly un-skeptical claims about the nature of social reality. How one studies the world is premised on an already robust idea about how the world really is. This is clearest in the book\u2019s first essay, which explains Agamben\u2019s notion of \u201cparadigms\u201d\u2014it would help if you could set to one side whatever you currently think that word means and let Agamben explain it for himself. He is, above all, trying to explain what Foucault had in mind when he said that the panopticon was the nineteenth century\u2019s representative institution, or what Agamben himself wants to say when he makes the same claim, for the twentieth century, about the concentration camp. These two, the panopticon and the camp, are paradigms<\/em>\u2014not their respective eras\u2019 most powerful institutions, at least not by any of the usual metrics, and not their most frequently encountered institutions\u2014but the pattern or model for all manner of other agencies, and so the key to the latter\u2019s intelligibility. To examine in detail a Regency-era prison is actually to describe five or six other institutions all at once: hospitals, elementary schools, mental asylums, army barracks, nearly any public street in Britain in 2010. The prison itself serves as a kind of extended sociological analogy, even a kind of \u201callegory\u201d\u2014the word is Agamben\u2019s own. Everything is now like x<\/em>.<\/p>\n You\u2019ll be able to make up your own mind about the \u201cparadigm\u201d\u2014about how useful it is as an explanatory device\u2014if you bring into view its competitor concepts, the notions that it most nearly resembles and so means to replace. These are basically two: the symptom and the function. We could<\/em> try to discover what functions prisons or concentration camps play in the social order at large. This would require that we attempt something like a political economy of the camps, that we try to work out what it is in the modern European state or in organized capitalism that tends to produce camps. If, alternately, we called the camps a \u201csymptom,\u201d we would be positing not so much function as dysfunction; the camp would be the visible mark or felt sign of an underlying sociopolitical disorder, one whose pathways and mechanisms, because not available to the eye, would still have to be analytically reconstructed. Either way, if we talk about functions or symptoms, the task in front of us is to relate camps and prisons back to the underlying order that has at least partially produced them. And this is precisely the job that Agamben is now calling off. What he likes most about the notion of \u201cthe paradigm\u201d is that it bypasses any talk of the totality or system; it spares us from having to reconstruct anything. If you call the camp a \u201cparadigm,\u201d you are saying that nothing \u201cprecedes the phenomenon.\u201d Camps and prisons are \u201cpure occurences\u201d that persist \u201cindependently of reference\u201d to other institutions\u2014\u201cpositivities,\u201d he calls them and doesn\u2019t blush. They are representative institutions, and they conjure up parallel institutions, but only as a string of singularities, the relationships between which are to be left, as a matter of principle, unelucidated. It isn\u2019t even an open question, to be settled empirically, whether prisons and this or that capitalism require one another. The question is methodologically disallowed. There is pride in not asking it. His sense is that the agencies of a given historical period might congeal into a set, might adopt similar designs and follow similar procedures, might come to resemble one another, without, however, being functionally related, and the task of the social historian is only to chart the spontaneous mutation in some free-floating logic of institutions.<\/p>\n Here\u2019s Agamben: \u201cAccording to Aristotle\u2019s definition, the paradigmatic gesture moves not from the particular to the whole and from the whole to the particular but from the singular to the singular.\u201d You can attribute that idea to Aristotle, but it also sounds an awful lot like the \u201cconstellations\u201d of Benjamin and Adorno\u2014assemblages of singular things, not subsumed under a category or master term, but linked all the same, except only just, minimally unified, scattered fragments carefully re-collected, scraps joined with twists of wire, like an early Rauschenberg combine, the unity-of-unity-and-difference with difference dialed high in the mix. Agamben and Adorno share the idea that singularities might be linked together directly and so circumvent the abstractions that typically manhandle them. And saying as much should help us identify what is peculiar about Agamben\u2019s thinking. For Adorno, of course, preserves the moment of the totality or the whole\u2014he continues to speak of \u201ccapitalism\u201d or \u201cthe administered world\u201d\u2014to which the constellation of singularities nonetheless provides an alternative. Hence Adorno\u2019s in some sense entirely conventional reliance on the aesthetic: He thinks we need a better way to cognize objects and thinks, too, that art might provide it; that in the aesthetic encounter we for once apprehend objects in their singularity, without immediately subsuming them under models or formulas. In rare moments, we stop thinking like administrators and lose the names for things. The constellation is an alternative mode of cognition, a utopian counter-term, and in that sense a project<\/em>, rather than, as Agamben has it, a method\u2014a counter-systemic thinking and not a post-structuralism. The bizarre thing about Agamben\u2014although this is a peculiarity he shares with lots and lots of other thinkers\u2014is that he thinks that this utopian counter-term already describes our political and economic reality. It is the mistake endemic to the breed. What in Adorno remains a political task Agamben and sundry others turn into proclamation. Fired by the idea that the world should not be organized into structures and systems, they convince themselves that the world is not so organized, though where they used to take the epistemological shortcut to singularity, they are now more likely to take the ontological one: sameness cannot exist; it is existentially excluded; there is only multiplicity.<\/p>\n If there is a big point here, then we\u2019ve just hit it: You can be counter-systemic, or you can be post-structuralist, but you cannot coherently be both, because once you\u2019ve declared that there is no structure, you cannot then say you want to overturn it. Adorno thinks that a transformed world\u2014let\u2019s call it communism, though he wouldn\u2019t have, as others were hogging the word\u2014would be one in which people and objects can exist as free but linked singularities; and he thinks that we can proleptically work out the epistemology of that world-that-is-not-yet-ours, such that we can sometimes experience objects and others as though already redeemed. Agamben thinks that this utopian epistemology\u2014the knowing of linked singularities\u2014accurately describes the world we already inhabit, which is the society of camps and prisons.<\/p>\n I don\u2019t mean to suggest that Agamben has anything nice to say about prisons and concentration camps. This is manifestly not the case. He typically presents himself as a thinker of The Catastrophe\u2014the destruction of experience, the permanent state of exception, the generalization of Dachau, the merging of the concentration camp with everyday life, Buchenwald without end. There is, if anything, an apocalypticism in his writing, modeled again on the late Adorno and a Benjamin-about-to-die. And yet a certain utopian misdescription of the concentration camp is built into his arguments all the same, simply because he has taken the redemptive moment from negative dialectics\u2014Adorno\u2019s inevitably temporary reminders of how objects would appear to us once liberated from the abstractions of the exchange relation and bureaucratic reason\u2014and locked it in place as a uniform method. The strain of this argument is often evident, as here\u2014Agamben is trying again to sum up what he means by \u201cparadigm\u201d:<\/p>\n We can \u2026 say \u2026 that a paradigm entails a movement that goes from singularity to singularity and, without ever leaving singularity, transforms every singular case into an exemplar <\/em>of a general rule that can never be stated a priori.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n This is a version of what we\u2019ve already seen: Singularities are directly joined, flush up against each other. A certain generality can be achieved, but a miraculous generality that doesn\u2019t come at the expense of singularity, a generality without abstraction. What Agamben is saying here really isn\u2019t all that complicated. All he means is that when you write about a prison or a concentration camp, you are writing about our general condition, but you need never exit the detail and fine grain of your description in order to make this point separately and in its generality. You can just motor on with your individualized account, immersed in the singularity of that particular institution, confident that it will stand in for other similar institutions. The problem, in this light, is the term \u201ca priori,\u201d which Agamben has grabbed from Kant. The rule of prisons, like the rule of camps, cannot be stated a priori<\/em>. To which one would like to reply: Of course not. Of course these \u201crules\u201d can\u2019t be formulated a priori, because Agamben and Foucault are offering us a method for historical<\/em> study; they are talking about historical periods, trying to identify shifts in historical experience, and historical experience is by definition not a priori. That is one of things one knows a priori about the term \u201ca priori.\u201d The claim, in other words, isn\u2019t wrong. Quite the contrary: it is troublingly evident, because definitional. It\u2019s the sort of truth you can\u2019t insist on without making other people wonder whether you\u2019ve really grasped the underlying issues. We can be certain, at least, that we are not <\/em>dealing with a distinctive virtue of Agamben\u2019s method; there is no philosophy whatsoever that could deliver to us a priori knowledge of Sachsenhausen or the Alleghany County Jail. What is true of \u201cthe paradigm\u201d\u2014what Agamben makes his boast\u2014is true of every other historical methodology, without exception. One suspects, then, that this sentence cannot mean what it plainly says, that Agamben wants to use the term a priori<\/em> to suggest a rather different claim: not that the general historical rule can’t be stated a priori, but that it can never be stated in its generality, as an abstraction. But Agamben can\u2019t put it that<\/em> way, because in that form the claim is just false. Anything that can be said about the panopticon paradigmatically could also be said generally, as an observation about a system or set of institutions, without our even having to mention the panopticon. So that’s one way to make it seem as though you have excised from your thought the structures or totalities that have not vanished from the world: You argue the obvious in order to insinuate the wrong.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Let\u2019s say you don\u2019t believe that wholes or totalities exist. You don\u2019t believe that people and objects inhabit underlying structures that assign to them meanings or functions. Whatever it is that is bigger than us, the space within which we … Continue reading