schaffer_not_sayin_shes_a_heidegger

media type="custom" key="23925688" "the call undoubtedly does not come from someone else who is with me in the world. The call comes //from// me and yet //from beyond me and over me…//" (B&T, 275, quoted on tTB, 23)


 * TO SUPPOSE THAT ANY PUN, NO MATTER HOW FLIPPANT, MIGHT BE MEANINGLESS ****, IS TO IGNORE THE WHOLE POINT OF PUNNING ** : the revelation of new meaning in the strange isomorphisms and homophonies of languages that seem, at first blush, to conform to understanding and reason. While etymology can point out that words sound alike, replace, complete one another for determined or at least determinable reasons, punning posits new origin stories, create new family structures for words and names based on resemblance and substitution. To read a pun is to read something beyond or next to meaning, to read as Freud reads a dream, reading not for the meaning but the underlying structure. Or maybe more apposite here is Tom Watson sitting by an unconnected telephone, listening to sparks and pops in the distance.

"One of the most common sounds was a snap, followed by a grating sound that lasted two or three seconds before it faded into silence, and another was like the chirping of a bird. My theory at this time was that the currents causing these sounds came from explosions on the sun or that they were signals from another planet. They were mystic enough to suggest the latter explanation but I never detected any regularity in them that might indicate they were intelligent signals." (Watson, 81)

As Avital Ronell reads it: "The first freak, Watson opened an altogether original channel of receptivity, admitting anharmonically telegraphed messages whose principal interest lay in the pure interference that noise conducts. Indeed, Watson may have ben, as he here asserts, the first convinced person actually //to listen to noise//. And he preserves the savage acoustics at noise level, as **asignificatory signals, planetary talk, supersonic crackles**, rather than rushing in a supply of semantic cover. This possibly imparts a more radical accomplishment than the invention in whose conception he shared." (tTB, 259)

Punning--or giving yourself over to the pun, letting the pun speak you, listening for sense in the static of meaningless metaplasm--might offer a route beyond an instrumental interpretation of language.

"This is not an advertisement for learning to read German. It posts an announcement for learning to listen to Babel, to think the possibility of a rumors reading, a double reading, reading the future of one's conception from the fragile assertions of a so-called primary text. Bell read in a willed resistance to a past that kept the telephone hidden, though in some way figured. Helmholtz's hieroglyphics turned into a fortune-telling book; Bell took a take that resembles one's attempt to photograph ghosts. They do not show up in the development, they rest out of print." (tTB, 289)

In recognizing that any effort to master a language will always result in new means of being mastered by it, in pushing against any conception of speaking that "pursues and entraps [language] as a calculable coherence of forces," (tQCT, 21)...

And I recognize, of course, that using "language" in the place "nature" does a funny thing here...

I have digressed without even starting to make progress. The pun that put me onto all this is in the url of this page. It's ill-formed, barely syntactical, and doesn't bear repeating. It slipped from my fingers unstoppably; a sort of manual embolalia, the lyrics and name combined together to create a pun that could hold shape long enough to be given textual form, and I hit "Add Link" and the page was created.

Half-knowingly, I cemented the link between "Heidegger" and "gold digger" into hypertext. And why not? After all, Heidegger presents himself in the act of aimless philosophical digging (in my reading) in the first half of //tQCT//. Why should he look to ancient Greek meanings for words, why should an outdated notion of causality shed insight into the essence of technology? The text gives me macaronic vertigo, as though I were standing at the lip of a wide hole or quarry excavated by Heidegger, as he translates language into other language and then back to me. The translators work to explain Heidegger's translations of other thinkers' translations. His inquiry has gone deeper than I generally feel the need for inquiries to go. I have no respect for the classics. Heidegger is a digger.

Why dig? And I don't think the answer lies in what he digs up (//poiēsis//, fourfold causality, etc); that would only be its //telos//. More accurate, of course, would be to say that this is simply Heidegger's scholastic M.O., and honestly the general operating procedures of philosophy. This is why I am no philosopher. Digging reads as a weird professional quirk to me, the way that economists want to reduce every interaction to exchange, or the way that anthropologists read off of papers at conferences. But what could motivate this? Why even inquire after something so old-fashioned as essence?

Perhaps Heidegger digs (and here is my best guess) to find a vantage point, or perhaps a vantage-//langue// from which to look at modern technology from a pre-modern place. He digs to triangulate between another mode of speaking about technlogy, or technics, his own words for it, and modern technology.

Maybe--and here's why I started in this direction--digging shares a familial resemblance to punning. There are dissimilarities: punning requires more play, more wildness, while digging tends to demand long hours in the library, and lessons in such tiring languages as Greek and German. But both look to find other modes of meaning, both routes try to escape the bonds of language.

"We are trying to establish an expedient talking path between the legacy of an acknowledged history and its secret account; for within he discourse of acknowledgement some repressed elects seek a form of expression, as if an original mouthpiece had been covered by the film of a technosphere that had forgotten its source." (tTB, 281)

There is more to say here, but instead, let's go on to the quotes!

Essences of technology: //Wesen// is "something that is not simply equivalent to technology, although it is that without which technology would not be." (UtS, 63) "A place that must be staked out is one that cannot stand on its own. It must be defended, even if this defense entails the mounting of further attacks." (UtS, 71-2) "Technology is no tool and it no longer has anything to do with tools, but it provides an uncanny deracinating grid whose locality is a liberalization of the //Unheimlich//, two ocular shapes spying on one another, the earth seeing itself from the moon, ripped out of its socket, axially dislodged, bleeding, redindering the centering effect of an A-bomb completely aconceptual." (tTB, 39-40) "This line of questioning turns Heidegger into a megatool…" (tTB, 44) "Where do we find ourselves brought to, if now we think one step further regarding what Enframing itself actually is? It is nothing technological, nothing on the order of a machine. It is the way in which the real reveals itself as standing reserve. Again we ask: Does this revealing happen somewhere beyond all human doing? No. But neither does it happen exclusively //in// man, or decisively //through// man." (tQCT, 24) "Yet when destining reigns in the mode of Enframing, it is the supreme danger. This danger attests itself to us in two ways. As soon as what is concealed no longer concerns man even as object, but does so, rather, exclusively as standing-reserve, and man in the midst of objectlessness is nothing but the orderer of the standing-reserve, then he comes to the very brink of a precipitous fall; that is, he comes to the point where he himself will have to be taken as standing-reserve. Meanwhile man, precisely as the one so threatened, exalts himself to the posture of lord of the earth. In this way the impression comes to prevail that everything man encounters exists only insofar as it is his construct. This illusion gives rise to in turn to one final delusion: **It seems as though man everywhere and always encounters only himself.**" (tQCT, 26-7)

Modern technology vs traditional: "If the goings-on of technics are part of a larger movement of //Entbergung//, understood as the ineluctable, irreducible path of unsecuring, then the unsettling effects of technics cannot be considered to be an exclusive aspect of its peculiarly modern form. Rather, the danger associated with //modern// technics is--as Heidegger explicitly asserts--a consequence of the goings-on of technics as such and in general as a movement of unsecuring. The danger is there from the startling start, and technics must be conceived both as a response to this danger and also as its perpetuation. As unsecuring, technics starts out from a place that is determined by that which it seeks to exclude. Insecurity is its enabling limit, although it is a limit that must be effaced in order for the place to be secured." (UtS, 66-7) "The example of traditional technics is drawn from the sphere of preindustrial agriculture, that is, from a form of cultivation through which technics cooperates to bring forth 'openings' initiated more or less spontaneously but which require external intervention in order to come forth fully." (UtS, 68) "Nature is //placed// //on order//." (UtS, 68) "If the institutionalization of the subject/object relation--the matrix of representational thinking--is a result of the emplacement that goes on in and as modern technology, then those very same goings-on undermine the objectivity upon which the matrix depends. By determining reality as standing stock, representational thinking treats objects as calculable data, as information to be taken into account or accounted for." (UtS, 73) "The revealing that rules in modern technology is a challenging [//Herausfordern//], which puts to nature the unreasonable demand that it supply energy that can be extracted and stored as such. But does this not hold true for the old windmill as well? No. Its sails do indeed turn in the wind; they are left entirely to the wind's blowing. But the windmill does not unlock energy from the air currents in order to store it." (tQCT, 14) "What the river is now, namely, a water power supplier, derives from out of the essence of the power station." (tQCT, 16)

Calls: "Heidegger evokes the call that he took around that time, an engulfing call that, one suspected, had intoxicated him, deranged his spirits, throwing him into a predicament of horing/hearing briefly set out in the //Speigel// interview made public after his death. In a sense, Heidegger's historical embarrassment belongs to a rhetorical mutation that consists in taking a call. The call [of the SS] is technologized, but we must resist the blind urge to accelerate the argument. What is one taking when one takes a call? What is one giving when one returns the call, that is to say, answers it?" (tTB, 28-9) "the call undoubtedly does not come from someone else who is with me in the world. The call comes //from// me and yet //from beyond me and over me…//" (BT, 275, quoted in tTB, 23)

"A problematics of image-obliteration engages the telephone, and even the rhetoric surrounding it. The telephone sinks away as a sensory object, much as the mother's figure disappears." (//tTB//, 21-2)

oh one last thought: schizophrenia and ordering, scrambled seahorses; the traditional story is that the pyramidal neurons of the normal hippocampus are lined up like little soldiers, a standing reserve of learn-able cells; those of the schizophrenic hippocampus go ever which way, are wild, the unordered world, neurons in themselves...