Wednesday, November 02, 2005
(4:44 AM) | Matt Christie:
The Open: Profound Boredom (updated)
So we're skipping a crucial chapter, or two, and leaping into boredom. Not, of course, that there is any strict sequence here. Like those of Blanchot, one may pick up Agamben's books and begin reading almost anywhere. Stil, it should probably be noted at least in passing that the chapters separating Ben's post and mine, namely, "Poverty in World" and "The Open," are perhaps the most central and important to Agamben's larger thesis (such as it may be called) in delimiting the zone of 'bare life,' that which is neither animal nor man (again, following the peculiar logic of Blanchot's 'neuter') (see also here and here (alas, Google Print has not been granted access to Demeure, although guess what is there! if you are interested)). Following also after his work on "the end of the poem," Agamben is again concerned here with theorizing, as precisely as may be possible, that 'ceasura' or zone of silence (in poetry, but also perhaps in daily speaking, there where silence is, for lack of a better expression, made to speak), there "between" the two lines (or in this case between the two poles of the "anthropological machine").That is perhaps enough linking. These two chapters mark the beginning of Agamben's sustained and substantial reading of Heidegger, whereas before he was just sort of endlessly situating his argument, albeit in typically lucid and eclectic (John Holbo would undoubtedly say "kitsch-like") fashion. Or so one could argue, in any case, but I wouldn't buy it myself. Perhaps that is a bit too simple (and glorifying of the present speaker). I think we see how Agamben is being quite deliberate and consistent in these wonderfully economical chapters, each one reaching, eventually, but without straining too much, onto a plane of non-resolution as if by pure necessity. Each time he suggests that what is at stake – and precisely in his reluctance to attempt ever saying too much in one breath – nevertheless remains consistent. I would suggest that what this narrative movement accomplishes is then more than a mere situating (in fact it defies strict chronology or linearity, and does so in the spirit of the true 'hypertext'); it is rather something of a performance of the stakes, but also one that avoids a certain pretension to the final word. As a matter of style and argument, this is something I like very much about Agamben, in addition to his writing being simultaneously rich and accessible, and hardly ever – well it goes without saying really – boring.
But that is all maybe, as John Lennon once said of Nixon on the 1998-released album Anthology (and in a brilliant parody of Dylan's voice), "It's pretty vague, Mister Man."
First a rather straight-forward question, then, concerning the second most colorful of Agamben's animal examples: the honey bee. Again deferring to Heidegger on Uexküll, Agamben states, "The mode of being proper to the animal, which defines its relation with the disinhibitor, is captivation (Benommenheit)." He goes on to faithfully describe both the etymology and play of Heidegger's language, in a manner worth quoting at least once if only to give a sense of the somewhat atypical closeness of the reading:
Here Heidegger, with a repeated etymological figure, puts into play the relationship among the terms benommen (captivated, stunned, but also taken away, blocked), eingenommen (taken in, absorbed), and Benehmen (behavior), which all refer back to the verb nehmen, to take (from the Indo-European root *nem, which means to distribute, to allot, to assign). Insofar as it is essentially captivated and wholly absorbed in its own disinhibitor, the animal cannot truly act (handeln) or comport itself (sich verhalten) in relation to it: it can only behave (sich benehmen). (52)
Ben seems to have detected a residual anthropomorphism in this construction, or in the animal so conceived by our gaze (unless I am mistaken), and he may be right. While I'm not certain of much of anything here, it does seem as though both Heidegger and Agamben are at pains to describe the animal in negative terms (hence the being "poor in world," and the "ontological status of the disinhibitor" (54) for Uexküll's "carrier of significance" (51)). Eventually, as Agamben makes clear, this negativity or fundamental absence or inability to be grasped, extends for Heidegger to humanitas as well (51). But the exemplary manner in which the honey bee is "captivated" is really something. Let's read that again:
Heidegger refers to the experiment (previously described by Uexküll) in which a bee is placed in front of a cup full of honey in a laboratory. If, once it has begun to suck, the bee's abdomen is cut away, it will continue happily to suck while the honey visibly streams out of its open abdomen. (52)
What does any of this have to do with boredom? Well, the bee is, as Heidegger insists, "simply taken by the food...it is precisely being taken by its food that prevents the animal from taking up a position over and against this food." Heidegger describes this captivation as a certain kind of openness. In this "instinctive behaving...the 'very possibility of apprehending something as something is withheld...not merely here and now, but withheld in the sense that it is 'not given at all''" (53). Agamben glosses that this "cannot properly be defined as a true relationship, as a having to do with" (54). It is neither purely negative nor straighforwardly open. Furthermore:
The ontological status of the animal environment can be defined: it is offen (open) but not offenbar (disconcealed; lit., openable). For the animal, beings are open but not accessible; that is to say, they are open in an inaccessibility and an opacity – that is, in some way, in a nonrelation. This openness without disconcealment distinguishes the animal's poverty in world from the world-forming [again, Heidegger's term] which characterizes man. (55)
But thankfully there is more (or rather less) to man than this world-forming. And this radical less may have much to do with boredom (we are undoubtedly getting there). Would you believe that Heidegger theorizes boredom for nearly one hundred eighty pages? I haven't read a word of it, but other people may have started. Thankfully so has Agamben.
The chapter is again fairly straightforward. Agamben traces three relatively distinct stages in which Heidegger theorizes boredom, all on the way to "profound." Conveniently enough, these three are essentially reduced to two moments of boredom, for the sake of further convenience apparently, both called "profound."
The first is likened by Heidegger to the experience of waiting for a train, not wishing to read but aimlessly skimming the texts as it were of one's environment regardless. Our quest for diversions remains essentially "empty" and unfulfilled. This first step nevertheless reveals "the constitutive structure" or Dasein of this train-waiting individual. In Heidegger-speak, Dasein is "factically 'thrown' and 'lost' in the world of its concern" (65). According to Agamben this "being delivered over to beings that refuse themselves" is strongly similar to (though only "apparently" so, you know, as in perhaps not as severe as) the captivation of the animal. Whereas we are "delivered over to something that refuses itself," (we cannot seem to find anything that absorbs our interest or captures our imagination), the animal "is exposed in something unrevealed:"
In being left empty by profound boredom, something vibrates like an echo of that "essential disruption" that arises in the animal from its being exposed and taken in an "other" that is, however, never revealed to it as such. (65, my italics)
In short, Agamben says, we are both, animal and man, "open to a closedness." (In an amusing sidenote here, Agamben speculates that this "being delivered over to something that refuses itself...[perhaps] defines the specific emotional tonality" or "characteristic Stimmung...of Heidegger's thought" – a rather general statement that probably applies to everyone who ever wrote after Heidegger if ever there was one.)
But, man is metaphysically(?) somewhat special. Again perhaps relying a bit too heavily on the example of the tick, only man has the capicity to "suspend and deactivate its relationship with the ring of its specific disinhibitors:
The animal environment is constituted in such a way that sometihng like a pure possibility [potenzia?]can never become manifest within it. Profound boredom then appears as the metaphysical operator in which the passage from poverty in world to world, from animal environment to human world, is realized...(68)
This page is crucial, and thick. But I won't belabor the point any further than to say, for lack of anything better just now, that I'd like to be better convinced, and particularly that Agamben is consistent when he posits, "the open and the free-of-being do not name something radically other with respect to the neither-open-nor-closed of the animal environment." Because it seems to me that Agamben is still supposing a great deal about the animal. I'm having a hard time relating a dog with a tennis ball to the bee with honey streaming out its belly, just for instance.
So in conclusion, if the animal is properly "captivated" in relation to its disinhibitor, then it is also "only through the interruption and nihilation of the living being's relationship with its disinhibitor" that "the world has become open for man" (70). This sounds violent, but it's the violence of a radical passivity. Just what kind of openness is this? Well, Agamben ties it to Heidegger's profound 'nothing':
To be sure, just as the living being does not know being, neither does it know the nothing; but being appears in the "clear night of the nothing" only because man, in the experience of profound boredom, has risked himself in the suspension of his relationship with the environment as a living being...Dasein is simply an animal that has learned to become bored; it has awakened from its own captivation to its own captivation. This awakening of the living being to its own being-captivated, this anxious and resolute opening to a not-open, is the human. (70)
That's a very beautiful passage. But I fear by yesterday already nobody was any longer reading. Maybe I can explain it more bluntly some other way, after sleeping on it a bit.
Agamben concludes this chapter by returning to his friend the tick:
[W]ithout either ceasing to an animal or becoming human...Perhaps the tick in the Rostock laboratory guards a mystery of a "simply living being," which neither Uexküll nor Heidegger was prepared to confront. (70)
It's not exactly the unmistakable sound of a revolutionary, or even politically useful thought. But maybe we shouldn't be quite so quick to judge. In order to be politically responsible, truly, one might require first an accurate diagnosis. The point is after all never simply to change the world (without fist understanding it). Agamben's fascination with the boring, unnaturally prolonged life of the locked-up tick may nevertheless be a step in that direction. I think he thinks we're all that way, in the deepest sense of geist, perhaps: inoperosità. And while this condition is to be combatted at all costs, we will not succeed in stopping it (and the worst excesses of the anthopological machine) until we have first theorized them correctly. Whether he is correct, that "posthistorical humanity seems to take on its own physiology as its last, impolitical mandate," remains for the moment to be seen (77).
Update 11/03: I think I failed to remark on something rather central: Heidegger, in the passage from Fundamental Concepts with which Agamben is most concerned, explicitly distinguishes between two "structural" (or, in Agamben's reading, "essential") "moments" of profound boredom. The first, most akin to the animal's captivation, is defined as "being-left-empty, or "being delivered over to beings that refuse themselves" (in which "Dasein...in its being, its very being is at stake"). The second – and it is here that boredom takes a "step...beyond" animal captivation – is defined as "being-held-in-suspense (Hingehaltenheit)" in which:
beings' refusal of themselves in their totality, which took place in the first moment, in some ways makes what Dasein could not have done or experienced – that is to say, its possibilities – manifest by means of a withholding. These possibilities now stand before Dasein in their absolute indifference, both present and perfectly inaccessible at the same time. (Agamben, 66)
It is I think pretty clearly significant that Agamben goes on to quote, rather extensively, from Heidegger on "possibilization." It is my contention that he does so to respond to Derrida; to claim Heidegger, in a sense, back from Derrida in fact This "being-held-in-suspense" clearly fascinates Agamben, and following Heidegger he relates it to the concept of Brache or "fallow ground" (think of a blog that has been abandoned; it is a space that is "held in suspense," and, more than this:
This deactivation of the concrete possibilites makes manifest for the first time what generally makes pure possibility possible (das Ermöglichende) – or, as Heidegger says, "the originary possibilization" (66)
Without wishing to be too grandiose about it, I do think the distinction (between these two "structural" or "essential" moments) requires a fair amount of patient meditation in order to fully grasp. And I am not quite ready to say I do.
Agamben seems to think that "the very origin of potentiality" "appears" in this "deactivation...of possibility." And via this origin he wishes to distinquish once and for all between animal captivation and profound boredom (of which only humans, it seems – although the very concept of what is human is of course at stake – are capable).
Do we consider it at all telling or significant that he then turns to Was ist Metphysik to conclude this chapter? A chapter that for all its nimbleness remains, at least for me, rather for the moment inaccessible.
