Quantum Anthropologies: Life at Large

181 Pages·2011·3.99 MB·English

by  Vicki Kirby

Vicki Kirby
Life at Large
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Vicki Kirby
Quantum Anthropologies
Life at Large
Duke University Press
Durham and London
2011
306.01 KIR
© 2011 Duke University Press ^
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper oo
Designed by C. H. Westmoreland
Typeset in Warnock Pro by Keystone Typesetting, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear on the last
printed page of this book.
Frontispiece: needlework by Claudia Vigeant
Contents
Preface: The Question of Supplemental-ity
—A Quantum Problematic vii
Acknowledgments xiii
1. Anthropology Diffracted: Originary Humanicity 1
2. Just Figures?: Forensic Clairvoyance, Mathematics, and
the Language Question 22
3. Enumerating Language: “The Unreasonable Effectiveness
of Mathematics” 49
4. Natural Conversations: Or, What if Culture Was Really
Nature All Along? 68
5. (Con)founding “the 1 luman”: Incestuous Beginnings 89
6. Culpability and the Double-Cross: Irigaray with
Merleau-Ponty 111
Notes r37
Works Cited 155
Index 163

Preface
The Question of Supplementary
—A Quantum Problematic
As I collect my thoughts about what it is that gives my work its special
signature, a signature where “points in the pattern” of its argumentation
reveal a certain focus, an attention, or even obsession about something
whose relevance may well seem obscure, I recall a scene in Berlin nearly
two years ago. I had presented a paper that in preliminary fashion consid­
ered Derrida’s work on the question of the a-human and genetics, and
although my questioner registered no disquiet with the general direction
of my argument it was clear that he had a problem with my vocabulary.
“Writing,” “textuality,” “language in the general sense”? Given that I was
engaging questions of life, science, biology, and system, why was I still
wedded to Derridean terms? I was aware at the time that I answered the
question poorly, and so I continued to be bothered about what I could have
said that might have explained why I was determined not to “move on,” or
more to the point, why “moving on” demanded that I stubbornly stay put.
The same uneasiness with my working frame of reference, or what was
perceived as its obvious limitations, came up again a few months ago in a
different guise. In this instance it was the relevance of Ferdinand de Saus-
sure’s work for computational or neurological analysis, which was deemed,
quite simply, obsolete: surely we need contemporary theorists to engage
contemporary technological and scientific complexities, and moreover,
theories that specifically address the subject matter under review?
These are the sorts of prejudices, seemingly reasonable and straightfor-
viii Preface
ward, that the arguments in the following chapters hope to trouble. Al­
though the proper name Derrida isn’t always foregrounded and may some­
times even appear absent, my own reading of the legacy of deconstruction
is always at work. By taking Derrida’s notion of an “open system” to its
logical conclusion, the senses of particularism—whether individual sub­
jects, objects, words, methodologies, or even systems—lose their identify­
ing outlines as entities or atomic individuations that communicate, or
relate to each other, with causal effect. Instead they can be read as different
expressions of the same phenomenon. A consequence of this condensa­
tion, this concretion or différance, is that grammatology becomes a “posi­
tive science” for Derrida. But what does this mean, and why, to my mind,
does it represent such an extraordinary challenge that its implications go
unnoticed, confined as they are to disciplinary argument within philoso­
phy and literature? For Derrida reminds us that “the concept of text or of
context which guides me embraces and does not exclude the world, reality,
history.... [T]he text is not the book, it is not confined in a volume itself
confined to the library. It does not suspend reference. . . . Différance is a
reference and vice versa” (1988,137).
Because the reasoning that obstructs the taking up of these implications
is eloquently exemplified in John Protevi’s Political Physics (2001), and
because Protevi’s sympathetic assessment of deconstruction’s strengths,
but also of its inadequacies, is widely held, his argument provides an in­
structive touchstone for situating my own contribution to questions of
matter and indeed, a political physics, and a ready introduction to what
follows in the rest of the book.
In regard to matters of substance and science—pragmatics and physical
reality, those “convergent fields assuming the highest importance in the
material structuring of the current global system of bodies politic: recom­
binant genetics, cognitive science, dynamical systems theories and others”
(2001, 2)—Protevi is convinced that deconstruction can have little to say.
He even cites Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont from the “science wars” to
buttress this perception, for they do ultimately “absolve Derrida of most of
the culpability in overstepping the philosophy/science border they impute
to others: ‘since there is no systematic misuse of (or indeed attention to)
science in Derrida’s work’ ” (2001, 5).
However, it would be unfair to say that Protevi fails to appreciate the
value of Derrida’s contribution or that his reading has no accepted validity
Preface ix
(there are many Derridas!), for his endorsement of the philosopher is exu­
berant. Derrida is a “fantastic reader of the history of philosophy, a master
at showing the breakdown of philosophy’s pretensions to self-grounding.
. . . [H]is reading techniques, his scrupulous attention to detail, are a
welcome addition to any philosopher’s toolkit: these cannot be forgotten
and retain their usefulness in many, but not all, contexts” (2001, 6). In sum,
Derrida’s interventions are persuasively “fantastic” and pragmatically rele­
vant if they remain confined to a very restricted understanding of language,
ideation, and culture that Derrida himself was, at least most of the time, at
pains to reject.
What is at stake in this assumption that deconstruction can only prove
useful if its implications are contained? What happens if we acknowledge
and elaborate Derrida’s insights, granting an even greater operationalism
to what is sometimes preliminary in his thought? For example, the conse­
quences of Derrida’s own arguments about the problematic of grounding
must be read as precious nonsense if, having digested them, Protevi can
blithely describe materiality (Nature) as “something” to be added to con­
ceptuality (Culture). What is the point, really, in championing the difficult
convolutions of deconstructive thought as well as feminist and other polit­
ical interventions that question the disjunction of the human from the
nonhuman, or mind (culture) from body (nature), if this same disjunction
remains the true and inescapable ground of our arguments? And even if we
were to concede that this disjunction was a reality, how then can these
separate systems relate or communicate their radical and unrepresentable
(incommunicable) difference? I would like to think that deconstruction
cannot be enlisted to persuade us that such questions can be put aside.
When Derrida reminds his audience that deconstruction’s implications
could not be confined to philosophy any more than they could be re­
stricted between the covers of a book, perhaps the most provocative conse­
quence of such clarifications is that the reader/writer of this “general text”
is necessarily dispersed—it is not located, at least not in any classical sense,
in a human agent. Within this “open system” whose only constant is muta-
tion/writing, the same questions that are confronted in the physical sci­
ences about determination, agency, causality, space-time involvement, and
“spooky” entanglement, are all operative. Importantly, dispersing literacy
(textuality) as the weaving of life itself means not only that “old” texts
remain contemporary and productively alive because never closed off in a
x Preface
past that is simply behind us, but also that the “texts” of seemingly pri­
meval organisms, or even a supposedly inanimate and lifeless entity such
as a photon, become subjects of cognitive and agential entanglement and
observational intention.
My own intervention throughout these chapters is to recast the question
of the anthropological—the human—in a more profound and destabilizing
way than its disciplinary frame of reference will allow. And I have done this
by reading Derrida’s “no outside of text” and the sense of systemic involve­
ment to which it attests, as “no outside of Nature.” Such a reading will not
affirm Protevi’s understanding of deconstruction as a methodology whose
ultimate goal is to muddle conceptual integrity and to underline the com­
plexity of the human condition’s representational solipsism (Culture). As
Protevi represents deconstruction’s goals, “The general text, as we will see,
while inextricably binding force and signification in ‘making sense,’ is not
an engagement with matter itself; such an engagement is impossible for
deconstruction, for which ‘matter’ remains a concept, a philosopheme to
be read in the text of metaphysics, or functions as a marker of a radical
alterity outside the oppositions that make up the text of metaphysics”
(2001, 19).
While there is much in Protevi’s overall argument to be commended,
and I am not disputing his scholarship, it is important to underline that his
assumption that Derrida’s “no outside metaphysics” must exclude matter,
that matter is incapable of representing itself, entirely misses the extraordi­
nary puzzle of how a system’s apparent interiority can incorporate what
appears to be separate and different, or indeed, nonlocal. Whereas “text”
and “metaphysics” are sites of excavation, discovery, and reinvention for
Derrida, Protevi uncritically embraces their received meanings, as did my
interlocutors above.
Derrida’s work on supplementarity can certainly be read as a convoluted
argument about the impossibility of escaping metaphysics (ideation/the
concept), but it can also be interpreted as an acknowledgment of the self­
involvements of a meta-physis whose internal torsions have quantum im­
plications. My interest is in a more robust exploration of the latter rather
than a corrective that will return us to a reworked, if conventional under­
standing of metaphysics/conception as something that is utterly different
from matter/substance: the enclosed domain that guarantees human ex-
ceptionalism. The naiveté that refuses the question of matter, here also, the