If you don't stop
(This is a warning)
Someone's gonna lay in your bed
(This is a warning)
And someone's gonna eat your food
(This is a warning)
And someone's gonna wear your clothes
(This is a warning)
And someone's gonna fit your shoes
(This is a warning)
And someone's gonna get your keys
(This is a warning)
And someone's gonna open your doors
(This is a warning)
Someone's gonna get your check
(This is a warning)
"I was always a reader as a young kid. I was never outside in the streets sellin' this doing that. I used to read books, that's what I did. I actually read books so that I could trick my parents into thinkin' that I was going to school and shit. But once I got to the West Coast, it was just such a thrill to be in California. I had been to L.A. as a kid or young child, but as an adult I had never been to L.A., so my vibe was so great I was putting songs together in fuckin' 5 minutes back then. I can't remember one rap I wrote that Eazy didn't love, and muthafuckas in L.A. from Dre's relatives to Eazy's relatives to Cube's friends didn't love. Muthafuckas were like, "Doc you the shit!" Once they came in like that it was hard for me to come back to Texas because Texas never showed me that kind of love."
The commentary on women shows more resentment than ignorance. The authors have a bone to pick with women, and to shove down their throats. I remember this mentality from middle school: women are worthless, treat them like shit and you're on the right track. This is the idea of a vulnerable little boy, who too often never grows up and lives inside the mind of a middle-aged man. Vulnerable little boys, which are all little boys, feel like they've lost over a decade of their lives not fucking beautiful women. They feel like they're investing with debt when they enter the sexual arena, and it's women's fault for not fucking them thus far. And the less successful they are, the more resentful they get that women aren't taking pity on them, or if they are, that their pity does not lead to sex. And sometimes even if they do get laid, they're annoyed that this doesn't translate into a non-relationship with a slave who does your bidding because she's scared of being called a slut.Apparently, if you're racist towards an African-American, you'll most likely lose your job and get involved in a lawsuit.
HOWEVER, if a nigger is racist towards a whitey, you can't do a damn thing about it, Obama is a perfect example of this hypocritical duality. But if you DO decide to, everyone will just say "Who gives a fuck?". Because no one really cares.
ANY QUESTIONS?
A properly Heideggerian analysis proceeds to the true ‘by means of what is correct’ (QCT 6). This approach finds in everyday common sense a particular attitude towards the question of being – through it we access the manner in which the world is made present to us, and at the same time access history that reveals the singularity of such a comportment toward things. So in considering torture, it is fitting to begin by staking out the terms in which it is presently discussed. What is the correct way to talk about it? For this we look to arguments given ‘for and against’ torture, the first by President Obama and the second by former Vice President Dick Cheney. These speeches were delivered almost simultaneously on May 21, 2009:
Obama: I know some have argued that brutal methods like water-boarding were necessary to keep us safe. I could not disagree more… I reject the assertion that these are the most effective means of interrogation…. they did not advance our war and counter-terrorism efforts – they undermined them, and that is why I ended them once and for all.
Cheney: The interrogations were used on hardened terrorists after other efforts failed. They were legal, essential, justified, successful, and the right thing to do. The intelligence officers who questioned the terrorists can be proud of their work and proud of the results, because they prevented the violent death of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of innocent people.
What is taken for granted in this debate? What are its limits? Notice how both Obama and Cheney speak about torture in terms of its efficiency in ‘advancing our war and counterterrorism efforts,” and in “preventing the violent death of thousands…of innocent people.’ Both sides take for granted that the ultimate horizon for the validity of torture is its success in serving our national security interests. Accordingly, both consider torture a means to an end. That is why the debate around torture has waged within this narrow line of questioning: Do the enhanced interrogation techniques constitute torture according to its juridical definition? Are there circumstances wherein torture is justified? Do such techniques produce good, ‘actionable’ intelligence? Do the benefits of using such techniques outweigh the costs? Are they the best way to advance our counterterrorism interests?
This essay draws on Heidegger’s concept of Gestell (enframing) in order to go past this level of questioning, whereby we attend to torture only on the basis of its effectiveness in meeting our discrete objectives. Instead we ask: How do we characterize a general comportment to the world that restrains our questioning of torture to an inquiry into its efficiency? What is our relationship to truth such that, when in a state of urgency, torture appears the most surefire means by which to access it? What is truth considered as intelligence?
Heidegger begins his Question Concerning Technology by interrogating the ‘correct’ definition of technology, which, like torture, treats it as a means to an end. This is what Heidegger calls “the instrumental” definition of technology, and we find the same definition of torture in both Obama and Cheney’s reflections. For Heidegger, the instrumental, ends and means, belongs to the broader consideration of causality. When viewed in relation to the Greek’s thinking of the four causes, causality becomes in turn a question of how things are brought forth into presence – a question of how things are made present to us[1]. “Technology is therefore no mere means,” he says, “technology is a way of revealing,” (12). Heidegger uses the word Gestell (enframing) to name this mode of revealing at work in technological instrumentality. Gestell is the manner in which technology reveals the world, makes it present to us. In translation, gestell (enframing) requires an exhaustive enumeration of approximate definitions, which required extensive footnotes from the editor. Herausfordern, literally ‘to demand out hither’ or ‘to challenge’ is one such approximation: “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,” (14 QCT). In the same discussion, Heidegger says that gestell is “…a kind of setting-in-order…it sets upon in the sense of challenging…sets upon to yield…expedites in that it unlocks and exposes,” (14-15 QCT). All this language could easily be used to describe the manner of accessing truth at work in the torture under discussion. This truth is approached as something to be extracted from the detainees in the manner that we extract oil from the earth. Gestell may be alternatively described as a way of revealing the world through “enhanced interrogation techniques.”
Gestell does not merely designate a comportment toward the physical world or toward information. It proclaims the manner in which the world is made present, which means that it is operative at the most fundamental level of phenomenal experience. Far from describing a simple relation, Enframing conditions what is present at any given time to relate to in the first place. Man is not the arbiter of revealing or the source of enframing. As a mode of revealing, enframing conditions the way in which humans too, are made present to us:
‘when … 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. …man stands within the essential realm of enframing (QCT 27, 24).
Man, along with the rest of the world, is enframed, demanded-out-hither into presence by the mode of revealing that ‘sets upon to yield.’ Heidegger’s term for what is brought forth in this way is bestand, which roughly translates as standing reserve. Bestand denotes the ontological status of a resource, something at all times available for ordering and for use. Bestand does not have the character of an object that stands over-against man, but of a kind of homogenous baseline of raw material, appropriated, transformed, and circulated at whim. As we have seen, gestell confers this status upon man himself. Having established gestell as the mode of enframing, that it brings the world to presence as standing reserve, we can now approach questions untouched by our conventional discourse on torture[2].
A central point when drawing out the implications of gestell for the CIA torture program is that the detainees were rendered as standing reserve long before they arrived at the detention center. Andrew Mitchell presents this problem succinctly in Torture and Photography:
Prophylactics: What is troubling in these digital photographs from Abu Gharib are the questions they raise concerning a world already transformed into so many piled bodies, a world that can only reveal itself as tortured, and this by the very technology that has traveled out from Iraq and into the wired homes of American to bring us these insistent images of cruelty and abuse. The camera calls attention to the filth that it itself creates.
When revealed as bestand, the detainees are ordered about in the manner that corresponds to their way of being present, which curiously precedes their interrogation process. It is precisely in this sense that Heidegger proclaims “the atom bomb and its explosion are the mere final emission of what has long since taken place, already happened,” (The Thing, 164). Gestell accomplishes the annihilation and debasement of the detainees at an ontological level - long before they become detainees.
This observation calls our attention to a number of disturbing facts about the torture controversy that were never rendered controversial within the narrow confines of our conventional debate. Perhaps the most pressing is the fact that some of the most heinous and dehumanizing treatment occurred during the ‘softening up’ process, prior to any formal interrogation. The state that the interrogator found his detainee literalizes in a profound way the manner in which gestell renders everything always-already-debased:
…on a couple of occasions, I entered interview rooms to find a detainee chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair, food, or water. Most times they had urinated or defacated on themselves, and had been left there for 18, 24 hours or more. – Email from FBI agent 11 (Seton Hall Law School Report)
The infamous pictures of the Abu Gharib abuses come from this part of the interrogation process – namely, the part without any interrogation. They were preliminary to any pointed effort at gleaning the truth or obtaining intelligence. Rather, they were designed to create the conditions under which to extract the sought after information. Utterly dehumanized, the detainee shivering naked on the floor is the coarse literalization of bestand, “the mere final emission of what has long since taken place.” A passage from Nietzsche’s Word: God is Dead explicates how this ‘fixing of conditions’ belongs to the essential movement of Enframing:
…the will’s surrounding itself with an encircling sphere of that which it can reliably grasp at, each time, as something behind itself, in order on the basis of it to contend for its own security. That encircling sphere bounds off the constant reserve of what presences (ousia, in the everyday meaning of the term for the greeks) that is immediately at the disposal of the will. This that is steadily constant, however, is transformed into the fixedly constant, i.e., becomes that which stands at something’s disposal, only in being brought to a stand through a setting in place. 83-84
The detainees were “brought to a stand by a setting in place,” that is – made present to the interrogators as something “fixedly constant,” “standing at [their disposal].” Again – this movement is accomplished preliminary to the posing of an actual question. The detainee lying fetal in his own waste is the condition for the US being able to ‘contend for its own security’…”necessary to prevent the violent death of thousands” (Cheney).
Another place we can trace enframing is in the character of the ‘truth’ that the interrogation process was supposedly designed to obtain. A passage from the CIA Inspector General Report, issued in 2004, orients us to the kind of ‘truth’ under consideration:
The agency’s detention and interrogation of terrorists has provided intelligence that has enabled the identification and apprehension of other terrorists and warned of terrorist plots planned for the US and around the world. The CTC Detention and Interrogation Program has resulted in the issuance of thousands of individual intelligence reports and analytic products supporting the counterterrorism efforts of the US Policymakers and military commanders. 100
This report provides an essential reworking of the instrumental definition of torture. We saw how for both Obama and Cheney, torture is considered as a means, good or ill, for advancing US counterterrorism interests. But in the ‘wherefore’ in this report is altogether different; torture is instead evaluated for its capability to produce “intelligence” and “analytic products” that may in turn serve those working to advance our counterterrorism interests. The immediate end to which torture is a means is, explicitly, the “issuance of analytic products.” This is an important distinction that conventional discourse overlooks. It shows how the ‘truth’ extracted for the detainees holds the same value of the detainees themselves: that of a resource, available at whim, mobilized toward a specific purpose. That is why the entire interrogation process bears only a nominal relationship to the truth, and also why the great majority of the detainees were innocent men picked up on bounty, far from the “high value suspects” that Cheney consistently evokes. They were merely the material condition for the CIA’s data mining (The quality of the intelligence/data is of little consequence – recall Iraq and the WMD controversy. I am yet to make full sense of how, despite the fact that the invasion was arbitrary and inevitable, the Bush administration went to such lengths to provide false evidence). It should come as no surprise in a today where vast amounts of human resources are mobilized in the service of information, where inconceivable lives of arduous toil are deployed to produce its smooth surface.
[1] I have omitted a number of Heidegger’s conceptual maneuvers (the fourfold, occasioning, poesis) in order to expedite the analysis to the question of enframing and how it applies to the data on torture.
[2] I have also omitted a discussion on Gestell as the consummation of Western metaphysics. This would involve a (long) detour into the revelation of truth as something esoteric and hidden, to be accessed by a kind of process. I chose to focus instead the ‘softening up’ process that the CIA treats as a condition of possibility for interrogation itself.
In his Theological Political Treatise, Spinoza enumerates explicit protocols for the interpretation of Holy Scripture. These directives appear in the middle of the manuscript, and call forth many of the essential philosophical positions that he formulates throughout the rest of the text. In this paper, I will address them in a different order than appears in the book, and they may be summarized as follows: 1. Scripture must be read in its original Hebrew 2. One must attend to the historical context from which Scripture emerges 3. One must not be hasty in resolving apparent contradictions and inconsistencies in the text. These three protocols signify a single commitment to reunite Scripture to the diversity of its origins. The harsh response to the publication of the TTP shows that this commitment yields philosophical consequences that strike at the foundations of established religious doctrine.
Spinoza insists repeatedly in the TTP that Scripture be studied in its original language of Hebrew. He argues that the true meaning of Scripture can only be approached by a strict adherence to the economy of words contained already in its pages: to “investigate from established linguistic usage, or from a process of reasoning that looks to no other basis than Scripture” (89). By restricting his lexicon to ‘established linguistic usage’, Spinoza commits to understanding every word within its specific context and with respect to its specific connotations.
Adherence to Hebrew exposes within the text many contradictions and inconsistencies that had been rationalized and smoothed over in translation. In many cases, these rationalizations radically changed the tone and character of the specific passages, producing in turn their own paradoxes and insoluble conflicts. Spinoza pointedly warns against such hasty attempts to rationalize scripture from outside its Hebraic context: “I term a pronouncement obscure or clear according to the degree of difficulty with which the meaning can be elicited from the context, and not according to the degree of difficulty with which its truth can be perceived by reason” (88). Here Spinoza breaks with the metaphysical tradition of interpretation, which seeks a true meaning lurking beneath the surface of the text. This approach supports the idea that there is an esoteric content to Scripture that awaits a future revelation through a kind of exegetical rationalization, a translation from myth and obscurity into logic and reason. For Spinoza, the text is a surface without depth. To seek an esoteric meaning beyond what is already present in the text is to add meaning and subtract from the original message. Spinoza rejects the style of interpretation that seeks to synthesize and cohere divergent biblical texts. His own protocols seek instead to recover areas of dissonance and contradiction where translators had surmised harmony and unity.
Spinoza’s break with the metaphysical approach also marks a significant shift in the temporal dynamics of religious observance. The metaphysical tradition held that the esoteric content of Scripture remained hidden until some future time when its true meaning could be illuminated by the divine light of reason. This futural orientation is what Spinoza refers to in the preface to the TTP, where he criticizes the piety that rests on hopes and fears; as hope and fear inevitably turn away from the present to what is to come. It is hope and fear, Spinoza says, that provide the ground for superstition and the usurpation of religion by illegitimate authorities. By insisting that the meaning of Scripture is immanent to the text itself, Spinoza refuses to defer its revelation indefinitely into the future. This gesture goes against a distinctly Christian/Platonic temporal structure that situates humankind behind a veil of tears, amidst ephemeral appearances, which, like Scripture itself, must be penetrated beyond. The Christian doctrine of salvation rests on this orientation to the future, which is one of the many reasons for the harsh response to the publication of the TTP.
Another reason for the negative reactions is that Spinoza’s position undermines the authority of the intermediary figures that interpret scripture for the masses. If the true meaning of Scripture can be found within its pages, then it does not rest on the approval, translation, or interpretation of any establishment that claims access to its esoteric content. If it were the case, Spinoza argues, that the meaning of Scripture were esoteric and hidden, “it would follow that the common people, for the most part knowing nothing of logical reasoning or without leisure for it, would have to rely solely on the authority and testimony of philosophers for their understanding of Scripture, and would therefore have to assume that philosophers are infallible in their interpretations” (101) - and not only philosophers, but the many political authorities that claim interpretive authority over holy Scripture. Spinoza’s protocols undermine such authorities: “There is nothing…in our method,” says Spinoza, “that requires the common people to abide by the testimony of biblical commentators” (101).
Spinoza’s fidelity to the original Hebrew implicitly undermines the authority of the many Latin translations of Scripture, and in bypassing these translations Spinoza makes another serious philosophical gesture. This is because Hebrew is a language that resists many forms of philosophical dualism that lie at the foundation of Christian dogma. The Divine Logos, the domination of Spirit over matter, the primacy of Heaven over earth – these cannot be found within the Hebraic forms that appear in original Scripture. Rather, these distinctly Christian dualisms inhabit the many Latin translations and commentaries. In his return to Hebrew, Spinoza gestures towards a collapse or a sublation of these binary oppositions.
Spinoza is most explicit on this point in relation to the separation between God and Nature. He says regarding this distinction: “what they mean by the two powers, and what by God and Nature, they have no idea, except that they imagine God’s power to be like the rule of some royal potentate, and Nature’s power to be a kind of force and energy” (71). This cosmology that divides God and Nature depicts God as an omnipotent sovereign and Nature as an inanimate flux. Spinoza counters this view: “since nothing can be or be conceived without God, it is clear that everything in Nature involves and expresses the conception of God in proportion to its essence and perfection; and therefore we acquire a greater and more perfect knowledge of God as we gain more knowledge of natural phenomena” (50). For Spinoza, God is not a sovereign with the power to intervene in Nature. God is entirely immanent and coextensive with his creation; in no way is He “numerically distinct” from it.
There is either society or there is sociology – Gabriel Tarde
I came to the works of Gabriel Tarde by way of a book entitled Reassembling the Social by French sociologist Bruno Latour. In it, Latour explores the philosophical underpinnings of a new school of sociology based on Tarde’s work along with philosopher Gilles Deleuze, among others. Actor Network Theory is based on the radical premise that there is no such thing as ‘society’ as an empirical unit or agent. It argues that social phenomena are far too numerous, complex, and multidimensional to ever constitute the discrete totality of the ‘social whole’ or ‘social organism’. Latour locates this radical break with what he terms the ‘sociologists of the social’ in the disagreement between Emile Durkheim and Gabriel Tarde, his lesser known rival and predecessor. This paper is intended as a brief investigation into their debate and its philosophical ramifications.
There are several points in Durkheim’s Division of Labor that betray his conception of society as a totality. The first and most prominent is his use of the ‘organism’ as a metaphor for society. As he says in his introduction: “…the law of the division of labour applies to organisms as well as to societies…the division of labour in society appears no more than a special form of this general development,” (DOL 3). This view implies that the division of labor responds to a sort of biological necessity, that it has a specific function. It indicates that Durkheim believes in a social end or purpose in relation to which the division of labor can be considered as a means. This is made all the more evident when he poses the question: “… is it our duty to seek to become a rounded, complete creature, a whole sufficient unto itself or, on the contrary to be only part of the whole, the organ of an organism?” (DOL 3). Either we strive for a complete society or we strive for society to complete a part of a larger organism: what is taken for granted in this choice? In both cases Durkheim frames social life as aspiring to a wholeness and completeness, either for itself or something larger than it. That the question is posed as one of duty further betrays his notion, for duty is here, as in John Stuart Mill, the ethical dimension of being part of a whole. Consider the two following excerpts:
“In short, in one of its aspects the categorical imperative of the moral consciousness is coming to assume the following form: equip yourself to fulfill usefully a specific function,” (4)
And later, as he introduces his method: “…we shall first investigate the function of the division of labour, that is, the social need to which it corresponds.” (6)
In the first passage Durkheim implicates the problem of ‘fulfilling a specific function’ with the emerging division of labor in society. Yet as his first gesture toward this problem he manages to perfectly reproduce it: he interrogates functionality by analyzing its function[1].
We may also locate Durkheim’s idea of the social totality where he speaks of ‘society’ as having a kind of agency: “thus punishment constitutes essentially a reaction of passionate feeling, graduated in intensity, which society exerts through the mediation of an organized body over those of its members who have violated certain rules of conduct,” (52). In this sentence, ‘society’ and ‘its members’ are portrayed as separate agents, acting upon each other from positions so ontologically separate so as to require the ‘mediation’ of organized bodies. For Durkheim, society is enough of a complete whole that he can speak of it as distinct from its constituent elements, conceived necessarily as mere ‘parts’ serving a specific function. It is on the basis of this notion that Durkheim may then declare some societies to be abnormal or incomplete in their composition, and permits him to draw sharp lines between different societies conceived as mutually exclusive ‘types’.
An article from the Political Science Quarterly, dated 1897, succinctly orients Gabriel Tarde’s work against the dominant conception of the ‘social organism’: “At that time the infatuation of sociologists for the Spencerian conceptions, however misapprehended, was at its height. The metaphor of the ‘social organism’ was the motto of the day. After his debut, the unknown magistrate from Sarlat [Tarde] took a firm stand against the dominant doctrine… Tarde necessarily assumes the non-identity of social and biological, and regards their typical and differential elements as irreducible” (504 PSQ). This article establishes Tarde’s posture against the dominant idea of the ‘social organism,’ which brings with it the injunction to interpret all social phenomena as being ‘organs’ within a more or less homeostatic system. For Tarde. ‘differential’ elements in society are ‘irreducible’ to an organic function, and cannot be represented as part of a coherent unity. Tarde here uses the word “identity” in refuting this idea of social unities (aka ‘the social’ or ‘society):
To exist is to differ ; difference, in one sense, is the substantial side of things, what they have most in common and what makes them most different. One has to start from this difference and to abstain from trying to explain it, especially by starting with identity, as so many persons wrongly do… To begin with some primordial identity implies at the origin a prodigiously unlikely singularity, or else the obscure mystery of one simple being then dividing for no special reason. M&S pg. 73
In this passage, Tarde calls society “a prodigiously unlikely singularity” – and criticizes those, like Durkheim, who treat it as an axiom. For Tarde, one must begin with the social in all its inconsistency, difference, and multiplicity. He cautions sociologists to ‘abstain from trying to explain it’ by rationalizing incongruous elements into functions of the social whole, or of any whole whatsoever. Gilles Deleuze, the theorist largely responsible for Tarde’s resurgence, explained the matter concisely: “Durkheim’s preferred objects of study were the great collective representations, which are generally binary, resonant, and overcoded… Tarde was interested instead in the world of detail, or of the infinitesimal: the little imitations, oppositions, and inventions constituting an entire realm of subrepresentative matter,” (Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 217). Tarde’s attention to ‘subrepresentative’ detail derives from his rejection of the great representations of social life in the form of social unities. Again we find the same warning: the sociologist must inhabit the diversity and irreducibility of social phenomena; they must remain there and ‘abstain from trying to explain it’ by an order exterior to it:
"It is always the same mistake that is put forward : to believe that in order to see the regular, orderly, logical pattern of social facts, you have to extract yourself from their details, basically irregular, and to go upward until you embrace vast landscapes panoramically ; that the principal source of any social co-ordination resides in a few very general facts out of which it falls by degree until it reaches the particulars… I believe exactly the opposite.'' p. 114 L/S [viii]
Here Tarde cautions against an ‘upward movement’ that recalls Plato’s ascent from the cave of illusion. What he commits to instead is a going-under that speaks more of Zarathustra’s descent or of Frued’s downward journey into the unconscious. It is in this focus on the actual and material, in this turn away from the heavens, that Tarde’s debate with Durkheim assumes its Nietzschian character (it is no accident that Gilles Delueze and Bruno Latour, the thinkers most responsible for Tarde’s recent resurgence, are devout readers of Nietzsche). Tarde’s affinity to Nietzsche is represented here in these passage from Nietzsche’s Will to Power.
Basic Error: to place the goal in the herd and not in single individuals! The herd is a means, no more! But now one is attempting to understand the herd as an individual and to ascribe to it a higher rank than to the individual - profound misunderstanding! ! ! Will To Power # 766
For Nietzshe as with Tarde, the ‘basic error’ is ‘understanding the herd as an individual’ which is the same as conceiving of society as an organism or a unity. And to ‘place the goal’ in this false unity, to furthermore ‘ascribe to it a higher rank’ is for Nietzsche a dangerous proposition. What he means when he says that “the herd is the means” is that, despite not being the reality of social life, the representation of social relations in the form of social unity (ie. Durkheimian sociology) is a means by which to achieve an end that is always already political.
[1] Nietzsche: Modern socialism wants to create the secular counterpart to Jesuitism: everyone a perfect instrument. But the purpose, the wherefore? Has not yet been ascertained. Will to Power # 757
http://oaklandliving.wordpress.com/
