1994tesis On Horror

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O rder N um ber 9422206
From H eidegger to horror: The defiguration of the m achine in

R om antic literature and cultural theory
Hansen, Mark Boris Nicola, Ph.D.

University of California, Irvine, 1994
Copyright © 1994 by Hansen, Mark Boris Nicola. All rights reserved.
UMI
300 N. Zeeb Rd.
Ann Arbor, MI 48106
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA
IRVINE
From Heidegger to Horror: the Defiguration of the Machine

in Romantic Literature and Cultural Theory
DISSERTATION
submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for

the degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
in Comparative Literature
by
Mark Boris Nicola Hansen
Dissertation Committee:
Professor Juliet Flower MacCannell, Chair
Professor J. Hillis Miller
Professor Andrzej Warminski
Professor Wolfgang Iser
1994
c 1994 by Mark Boris Nicola Hansen
All rights reserved.
The dissertation of Mark B. N. Hansen is approved,
and is acceptable in quality and form
for publication on microfilm:
'A:
</-U £ ~U7fVlAl/'ict-l—
St /^6ua- ,
Committee Chair
University of California, Irvine
1994
ii
To my mother, father, sister and Mimi, who each in their own
way forced me to question.
May it be urged against this method that

it arbitrarily attributes a privileged
value to immediate knowledge? But what
reasons should we have for doubting any
knowledge - would the idea of doubting
it ever occur to us - but for the
difficulties and the contradictions
which reflection discovers, but for the
problems which philosophy poses? And
would not immediate knowledge find in
itself its justification and proof if we
could show that these difficulties,
contradictions and problems are mainly
the result of the symbolic diagrams
which cover it up, diagrams which have
for us become reality itself, and beyond
which only an intense and unusual effort
can succeed in penetrating?
— Henri Bergson
iii
TABLE OF CONTENTS
page
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ....................................... V
CURRICULUM VITAE ....................................... vi
DISSERTATION ABSTRACT ................................. vii
INTRODUCTION ........................................... 1
The Problem of Technology and the Aesthetics
of the Uncanny
PART I: THE MACHINE M E T A P H O R .......................... 79
CHAPTER 1 .............................................. 80
Fire Given over to Chance: Towards a Liberation
of Machinic Automatism
CHAPTER 2 .............................................. 137

The Machine Basis of Heidegger's "The Question
Concerning Technology”
CHAPTER 3 .............................................. 182

The Mechanics of Deconstruction: Derrida on de Man
PART II: MEMORY AND TECHNOLOGY ........................ 226
CHAPTER 4 .............................................. 227

Psyche and Metaphor: Derrida's Freud
CHAPTER 5 .............................................. 249

Freudian Experience and the Question of Technology
CHAPTER 6 .............................................. 284

The Redemption of Shock Experience: Benjamin,
Erlebnis and the Impact of Technology
PART III: THE TECHNOLOGICAL UNCANNY ................... 315
CHAPTER 7 .............................................. 316

"Not thus, after all, would life be given": The
Scientific Context of Frankenstein and the Parody
of Romantic Poetics
CHAPTER 8 .............................................. 367

A Clear Conscience and a New Life: Heinrich von
Kleist's "The Marquise von O— "
iv
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
My thanks, first of all, to my chairperson, Professor

Juliet Flower MacCannell, who has read this dissertation in
many stages of its writing, and whose confidence in my
project helped me over many a hurdle. My thanks, too, to
Professor J. Hillis Miller, who has made innumerable
helpful suggestions. I am also grateful to Professor
Andrzej Warminski and to Professor Wolfgang Iser for their
guidance on this project. Finally, I would like to express
my thanks to all my professors at UC Irvine; it was your
interest that sparked my own.
Financial support for this project was provided by the

University of California, Irvine and by the Fulbright
Commission.
CURRICULUM VITAE
1987 B. A. in Comparative Literature, New York

University
1987 1988 Regent's Fellow, Comparative Literature,

University of California, Irvine
1988 1990 Teaching Assistant, English and Comparative

Literature, University of California, Irvine
1989 M. A. in Comparative Literature
1990 1991 Fulbright Scholarship (Graduate Fellow),

Universitaet Konstanz, Germany
1991 1992 Teaching Assistant, English and Comparative

Literature, University of California, Irvine
1992 1994 Adjunct Assistant Professor, Philosophy,

Villanova University
1994 Ph. D. in Comparative Literature, University of

California, Irvine
Dissertation: "From Heidegger to Horror: the

Defiguration of the Machine in Romantic
Literature and Cultural Theory"
DISSERTATION ABSTRACT
From Heidegger to Horror: the Defiguration of the Machine

in Romantic Literature and Cultural Theory
by
Doctor of Philosophy in Comparative Literature
University of California, Irvine, 1994
Professor Juliet Flower MacCannell, Chair
The dissertation examines the function of technology in
modern European literary and theoretical texts from the
late 18th century to the present. I argue that the
linguistic bias of contemporary literary and cultural
theory is ultimately unable to account for the impact of
technology on human experience. Focusing on the
progressive evolution of the machine metaphor in twentieth-
century theory from Heidegger and Freud to Derrida and
Lacan, I show how, in each case, an initial openness to
technology's materiality is compromised in order to
maintain the classical privilege of representational
thought as constitutive of the real. With the help of
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's notion of the "machinic
assemblage” and Walter Benjamin's theory of "shock-
experience” [Chockerlebnis], I then develop an alternative
account of the subject's encounter with technology. This
vii
account, I argue, emerges from a neglected current in
Romantic literature which explicitly uses the radical
alterity of technology in order to develop a forceful
critique of the linguistic bias of Romantic poetics. What
this critique ultimately uncovers is an entirely new
category of aesthetic experience beyond the sublime, namely
the "technological uncanny," through which the subject is
able to experience the non-representational impact of
technology. This new experiential category ultimately
leads to a radical "becoming-technological" of the subject,
as I show by reading two literary works, Mary Shelley's
Frankenstein, and Heinrich von Kleist's "The Marquise von
O— .11 These texts, I furthermore argue, form an alternate
genealogy of Romanticism critical of the masculinist
tradition that has dominated Romantic poetics from
Wordsworth to Bloom and de Man.
viii
INTRODUCTION
THE PROBLEM OF TECHNOLOGY AND THE AESTHETICS OF THE UNCANNY
In his 1914 study of the Doppelgaenger, Otto Rank, the
young German psychologist and disciple of Freud, puts forth
an incisive hypothesis concerning the new technology of the
cinema. "It may," Rank suggests, "turn out that
cinematography, which in numerous ways reminds us of the
dream-work, can also express certain psychological facts
and relations - which the writer often is unable to
describe with verbal clarity - in such clear and
conspicuous imagery that it facilitates our understanding
of them.111
Rank's words serve as an apt introduction to the topic
that I shall explore in this book: the dialectic linking
the repression of technology with what can perhaps most
appropriately be called, in the wake of Jacques Derrida's
retooling of a Heideggerian topos, the drive to "closure"
in contemporary cultural theory. Twentieth century theory
has found itself torn between two polarized demands; it has
been called upon to establish a firm grounding for the
human sciences - whether its model be that of science or of
language; and, at the same time, it has come increasingly
under the demand - arising from popular culture no less
than inter-institutional forces - that it reflect the
1. Otto Rank, The Double: A Psvchoanalvtic Study. tr. Harry

Tucker, Jr. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 1971), p. 4.
2
historically-changing lifeworld according to some immanent
index. Through a brilliant recourse to rhetorical
strategies of varying types, post-structuralist and
psychoanalytic criticism has succeeded to a large extent in
cutting through this apparently radical double bind. By
aligning the scientific or quasi-scientific ground of the
human sciences - language (in the French sense of a general
system [langage]) - with its forms of instantiation
(parole) which are, broadly speaking, technological (from
the technology of writing to that of electronic memory
banks), critics have been able to unite these two demands:
they are able to retain an a-historical, quasi-
transcendental locus (required for "scientificity") while
still managing to avoid charges of ontological dogmatism
that normally are held to follow from the transcendental
privilege granted to language (and specifically, from its
alleged freedom from all particularity). Nevertheless, the
widespread celebration of post-structuralism currently
possessing the institutionalized human sciences (along with
popular culture) has obscured some basic limitations.
While the critical programs contributing to the development
just mentioned have certainly led to a more adequate
approach to technology, they are nevertheless compelled to
reduce technology to a particular figure that can be
reconciled with the field that they thematize. In every
case with which I am familiar (including several that are
explicitly sympathetic with my own critical project), where
contemporary critical theory does broach the "question of
technology," it tends to restrict the impact of technology
to the space of thought. I shall explore this figure under
the generalized rubric of the "machine metaphor." From its
earliest codified definition to its contemporary function
as the multi-purpose figure for mechanisms of all sorts
(from the animate machines of biology to the technical ones
of engineering and computer science), the machine has
provided a blanket concept for our efforts to think
technology. More often than not, however, our drive toward
conceptual clarity (and theoretical closure) has
compromised our ability to refrain from anthropomorphizing
or otherwise restricting the practical force of technology.
Our adherence to the machine as a figure for
technology, I suggest, contains an essential ambivalence
which characterizes recent attempts to address technology
within what I take to be the currently prevalent model for
the human sciences in general, namely "representational
theory." Theoretical elaborations of the recent past open
the discursive model of the human sciences to the impact of
technology in an unprecedented manner; yet, because they
privilege discourse (thought) over life (and its
irreducible technological content), they are one and all
forced to close the door on technology at a certain point -
to restrain it within a frame that is thoroughly foreign to
it. At a certain, necessarily premature point,
contemporary theory sacrifices what I shall call (drawing
4
of Deleuze and Guattari) the "rhizomatic" impact of
technology in order to safeguard its own theoretical

coherence.
Rank's account of the cinema lays out the two basic
features that characterize in more specific terms precisely
those twentieth-century efforts directed at formulating a
critique of technology: technology's transformational
impact on human experience; and its affinity with the human
perceptual apparatus or psyche. (Broadly speaking, the
former feature provides the leitmotif for the work of the
Frankfurt School in Germany; while the latter underlies
French theory from structuralism on, together with its
American spin-offs.) As we know, these two features have
rarely found any form of peaceful coexistence, a fact which
points as much to "essential" theoretical divergences as it
does to timely polemical struggles.
This historically-significant incompatibility accounts
for what is noteworthy about Rank's hypothesis: its
immunity to the dialectic between these two features, an
immunity stemming from its theoretical or critical
innocence. Standing as it does at the threshold of
technological modernity, Rank's account remains fruitfully
open to possibilities that were quickly eclipsed - or
played off against one another. He is able to praise
cinema for expressive possibilities that are the result not
simply of its formal medium but that in addition have some
anchor in the "objective content" to be expressed. In
short, Rank posits the "apparatus-psyche" analogy that will
go on to dominate film criticism; yet, because he links
this analogy directly with a certain historically-based and
content-specific type of expression, he develops it in a
manner that mitigates its potential for formalistic
terrorism. The limited scope within which Rank posits the
analogy has the effect of obstructing the facile reduction
of cinematically-grasped experience to psychic experience
as such - even if his view of cinematic expression above
all as a sort of "extension" of other expressive media
(e.g. the dreamwork or writing) would tend in general to
support such a reduction.
It would be difficult to discount Rank's role in
inaugurating the interface between media studies and
cultural theory, however unwitting it may have been. On
the one hand, it can be argued that the evolution of film
practice and theory follows Rank's lead, since its
fundamental figure - from Bazin's early account of the
ontology of the filmic image, to the apparatus and feminist
theory of the 70's and 80's, to the Lacanian-Jamesonian
paradigm current today - remains that of the apparatus-
psyche analogy. By strengthening the reduction of cinema
to writing/language, film theory has demonstrated a
noteworthy fidelity to Rank's historically-specific
paradigm - a fidelity rendered all the more striking by the
fact that it can be seen to reflect non-filmic, that is to
say psychoanalytical, assumptions. Oddly enough, film
theory parts company with Rank because it insists on an
analogy between psychological structures of the mind and
formal properties of the filmic medium that is far more
extensive than anything envisioned by Rank. In short, film
theory betrays the restraint that Rank imposed on the
apparatus-psyche analogy; it recasts his historically
specific analogy in far more forceful and abstract terms:
as a purely formal analogy between dreamwork and cinematic
writing. As a result, the link to an historically-
determined objective content is jettisoned in favor of a
generalized formal applicability.
The elaboration of the apparatus-psyche analogy in
this new and improved form has produced much influential
and important scholarship and has, in the process, made
film technology into the paradigm case for our
understanding of technology's impact on experience.
Whether this exemplarity of film technology is due to
intrinsic factors (its material content) or to external
factors (its ubiquity in society), it brings with it
significant consequences that bear directly on the generic
definition of technology. If technology is analyzed on the
model of film technology, as it is (whether explicitly or
otherwise) in contemporary cultural theory, its "ontology"
undergoes a radical reduction. I choose to introduce the
problem of technology in the context of film theory's
limitations so as to underscore the prevalence of this
reduction. It stems from an allegedly essential alliance
of contemporary cultural theory, even in its most radical
forms, with the fundamental motif of phenomenological
analysis: the privilege of thought over technology. As
long as the investigation of technology is carried out on
the basis of the apparatus-psyche analogy, technology's
"radical exteriority" with respect to thought (and
representation) undergoes a dogmatic - and critically
debilitating - reduction. We can now assert a first
principle of an adequate approach to technology: rejection
of the archaic phenomenological privilege (or,
alternatively, respect for technology's exteriority).
Readers may be surprised to discover that, despite often
explicit critical postures regarding phenomenology,
contemporary theory continues to adhere quite faithfully to
this hard-to-shake motif.
The central role of film in the contemporary discourse
on technology does not only stem from theorists most
inclined to accept the psychoanalytic ontology - the
absolute priority of the psyche - ensuing from the
apparatus-psyche analogy. The exemplarity of film and its
enabling reduction of technology can also be seen to
underlie the work of materialist thinkers, although in an
implicit manner. For example, the recent work of Frederic
Jameson - work which promises to bring the apparatus-psyche
analogy to its endpoint - develops the evolution of
technical reproduction as a narrative of technological
emancipation from the psyche. As the exemplary technology
8
of what Jameson, following the German Marxist philosopher
Ernest Mandel, calls the "third machine age," video
constitutes the final embodiment of a new materialism of
machinery. Whereas film surpasses photography by
incorporating the "realities of the 'existential'" ("time
and death") into its own formal process, video pushes the
formalization of experience to its endpoint.2 With video,
the disjunction between registering subject and registered
object - a disjunction that is central to the filmic
editing process - is overcome. Jameson fantasizes that
video can simply dispense with editing altogether, thus
permitting a perfect coincidence of two temporalities - of
production (filming) and of reproduction (viewing)
respectively. For Jameson, such a possibility betokens a
liberation of technology's dependance on an autonomous
subject or ego. Video's machinery, he contends, "uniquely
dominates and depersonalizes subject and object alike,
transforming the former into a quasi-material registering
apparatus for the machine time of the latter and of the
video image or 'total flow.'"3
As my introductory remarks should indicate, I am less
interested in the plausibility of this argument on its own
terms than in the light it sheds on the contemporary status
2. Frederic Jameson, "The Existence of Italy," in

Signatures of the Visible (New York: Routledge, 1992) , p.
192.
3. Jameson, "Video: Surrealism without the Unconscious," in

Postmodernism (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1991), p. 76.
of the "question concerning technology."4 On the one hand,
Jameson's privileging of video as the exemplary or
symptomatic technology of postmodernity opposes the
ontology of more standard film theory5 - as can be seen,
for example, in his emphasis on the machine autonomy of
video which does away with all symbolic mediation. Yet at
a more general level, his position shares with standard
film theory a broader assumption about technology: that it
can be exemplified by reproductive technology. Since it
eclipses the specifics of his argument against film theory,
this common bond has the effect, as I shall argue, of
compromising the apparent radicality of his critique. By
privileging a form of reproductive technology as the
examplar of contemporary technology, both Jameson and
apparatus theory fall into the same reductive trap: in both
cases, technology is violently domesticated into the
category of technical reproduction (or media technology).
Whether intended or not, both accounts give the impression
that the fundamental function of technology is to mediate
(i.e., provide the material support for) representation
4. I appropriate this formulation from Martin Heidegger's

famous article, "The Question Concerning Technology," in
The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. tr.
William Lovitt (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), pp. 3-35.
5. Noting its kinship with the computer and information

technology of the third stage of capitalism, Jameson
qualifies video as the latter's "art form par excellence."
"I have tried to suggest that video is unique — and in
that sense historically privileged or symptomatic —
because it is the only art or medium in which this ultimate
seam between space and time is the very locus of the
form..." (Postmodernism. 76)
10
(even when such mediation is itself immediate) . In this
way, they share in the general reduction or repression of
technology that characterizes (and enables) contemporary
critical theory: they elevate a partial function of
technology to a global status. While representation is -
in actual fact - one function among others, theory's blind
privileging of reproductive technology catapults it into a
more prominent foundational role. Reproductive technology
is taken to delimit the "highest genus" of technology and
thus to encompass the entirety of technology's ontology.
As a result, the "essence" of technology is restricted to
its impact on representation: it gains the attention of
criticism only when (and to the extent that) it fits into
its various frames of representation. Beyond that, it
simply does not matter.
That technology produces a sort of "return of the
repressed" can be demonstrated by observing its destructive
impact with respect to the theoretical claims of
contemporary models of technology. Jameson's failure to
demarcate technology from reproductive technology and to
address the former has the effect of undermining his
radical claims for the emancipation of technology from the
psyche. While he traces the dissolution of the disjunction
between subject and object that would allegedly overcome
the contemporary "problem of representation," he
nevertheless retains the very category of representation as
the tribunal for evaluating the historical content of
11
technology. His analysis of the logic of late capitalism
points to a disjunction of the technology of the third-
machine age (video) with respect to past forms; yet,
because he does not admit technology's impact on historical
experience except as it is framed by representation, he is
unable to overcome his own dependance on the
phenomenological/representational model that he so
vehemently opposes. Simple as it is, the fallacy of his
logic exemplifies the reductive misreading that is
prevalent in contemporary theory: to the extent that the
evaluation of technology's impact is restricted to its
effect on representation, a narrow tribunal is imposed on
something irreducibly material and supra- (or sub-)
representational.
Despite this objection, however, Jameson's
contribution does manage to indicate a path beyond the
apparatus-psyche analogy. More for the problems he raises
than the solutions he provides, his example teaches the
necessity of putting into question the very homology
between technology and representation. Wherever this
homology is blindly or expressly accepted (as it
unwittingly is in his own account), technology finds itself
reduced to a status within the frame of representation, and
its radical potential finds itself compromised from the
start.
It is to Jameson's credit that he stresses the need
for a radical critique of phenomenology, even if his own
12
argument cannot overcome reliance on the latter's basic
categories.6 He is right in insisting that what is needed
to carry us out of the double-bind of representation is an
assault on the phenomenological assumptions underlying much
of contemporary theory. It is precisely such a critique
that will also liberate technology from the enslavement
which it currently suffers - enslavement to the category of
reproduction.
I. The Problem of Representation
While it has become a commonplace to contend that
contemporary theories of representation (and particularly
deconstructive theory) complicate and ultimately succeed in
casting aside their phenomenological heritage, Jameson's
6. Jameson's position can be described as an imperfect

conjunction of a materialist praxis and a (theoretical)
critique of phenomenology. With the fusion of subjective
(represented) time and "real" time promised by video
technology, he suggests, the possibility for the kinds of
narrative and rhetorical destabilization which come with
the delay structurally inherent in representation will
simply fall away. However, despite his confidence that
such a "machine materialism" will render the category of
representation obsolete, such a result does not come about
without the assistance of a supplementary critique of the
assumptions of phenomenology. In other words, theoretical
labor is necessary to stimulate or enact a possibility that
has already been realized by the machine materialism of
video technology. The call for a critique of phenomenology
— - although it compromises the force of video-praxis (and
the spontaneous dissolution of the "representation debate"
it allegedly entails) — is itself an important part of
Jameson's program. Indeed, in light of my concerns, it is
the important part of Jameson's program. Since my critique
of the technological reduction applies with particular
force to Jameson's restriction of machinic materialism to
the model of video, his entire argument must be purged of
its (hidden) phenomenological foundations.
13
example serves the useful function of cautioning against
such a view. On his account, phenomenological
presuppositions possess a resilience and a capacity for
metamorphosis that can only be shattered by a radical
machinic materialism. Discussing the role of the video
camera, Jameson stresses exactly this resilience. It is
only "the involvement of the machine," he argues, "[that]
allows us now perhaps to escape phenomenology and the
rhetoric of consciousness and experience, and to confront
this seemingly subjective temporality in a new and
materialist way.11^ Only the involvement of the machine,
that is to say, allows for the dissociation of
representation ("subjective temporality") from the
(individual) psyche - the dissociation that will permit the
ultimate overthrow of the phenomenological epoctie.
We can get a glimpse at how resilient phenomenology
really is by following Jameson's own argument to the point
at which it unravels. Despite the initial plausibility of
his claim, Jameson's argument is once again compromised by
the frame of reference in which he evaluates the new
"machinic materiality." Even after the demise of the
"rhetoric of consciousness," Jameson continues to depend on
the analogy of representation and consciousness, of
apparatus and psyche. Since machines (e.g., the video
camera) do not consume representations, but merely produce
them for human consumption, the machine-organism interface
7. Jameson, Postmodernism. 75.
14
which Jameson discovers in contemporary technology
continues to depend on the phenomenological frame of
reference it otherwise promises to displace. Only the
apparatus-psyche analogy (here fused into a single agent)
can link representation and machinic materiality in the
manner championed by Jameson. What this means, of course,
is that Jameson's argument ends up perpetuating the
metaphysics of representation (or reproduction) common to
the positions that he attacks. His recourse to traditional
categories demonstrates that even the invocation of
something as seemingly materialist as the machine - an
invocation quite prevalent in contemporary criticism (and
one that extends as far as the de Manian "rhetoric of
consciousness and experience" that Jameson explicitly
criticizes) - can be covertly marshalled to bolster the
privilege of thought. Against Jameson's almost euphoric
celebration of the happy invention of video technology, we
must observe that the recourse to the machine, in and of
itself, is unable to furnish an easy escape from
phenomenology.
What Jameson's argument helps to indicate is something
still more important: namely, the fact that contemporary
theory of representation shares with classical
phenomenology, at a level ontologically (and logically)
prior to their decisive divergence, a massive (and naive)
commitment to the philosophical category of thought. In
both cases, technology becomes relevant only to the extent
15
that it impacts whatever specific field theory happens to
thematize. On the basis of the sheer materiality to which
Jameson draws our attention, machine technology can hardly
be held to unsettle, in any decisive way, the traditional
category of thought (a category whose priority in modern
philosophy remains unquestioned from Husserl onward).
Rather, machinic materialism can be opposed to the
phenomenological domain of thought in general, and to the
rhetoric of consciousness in particular, only if technology
is granted a status independent of thought. The machine
must be taken as a real force and not simply as a metaphor
for something else.
Because of a hidden allegiance to certain motifs of
the phenomenological heritage - precisely the allegiance
that Jameson cautions against - French theory (and to a
great extent too, the American criticism following in its
wake up to and including Jameson's own work) is thus
compromised in its treatment of technology. We can observe
this allegiance and its effects by examining briefly the
more or less united front which French theory assumes
(despite all of its diversity) when approaching the issue
of cybernetic technology. The two central projects that
have provided the basis for much media theory both in
France and in the United States - namely, Jacques Lacan's
"return to Freud" and Jacques Derrida's grammatological
"dissemination" - emphasize a common enabling decision
concerning the work of the German philosopher Martin
16
Heidegger. In more and less explicit terms, both discount
the thesis of Heidegger's famous critique of technology:
that the essence of technology is nothing technological.8
Differences aside, Lacan and Derrida share a common
understanding concerning the locus of technology's impact
on thought and psychic life. For both thinkers, technology
contaminates thought and the psyche from what could, in
Heidegger's idiom, be called an ontic site; it interferes
directly and immediately in the everyday lifeworld. The
"purity" of technology's essence thus appears, on their
reading, to be compromised by the irreducibility of
everyday experience.9 The very locus or agent for thinking
the essence of technology in its metaphysical purity - the
"split subject" (Lacan) or the "text" (Derrida) - is
irreducibly and irremediably captured by what Heidegger
8. Heidegger, in "The Question Concerning Technology," 3.

I return to this essay in detail below, Chapter 2.
9. Lacan's subject is fascinated by the "embodiment" of

the non-imaginary gaze to which it owes its own
constitution. In "looking awry" at the technically-
mediated representations of contemporary popular culture,
the subject can replay, at virtually any place and time,
its primal fantasy of coinciding with its own birth. In
terms of this "ontology," technology's "essence" cannot be
detached from its role as the material (and ontic)
embodiment of the "object cause" of desire (the objet petit
a ) ; its significance stems from its mediation of fantasy —
that is, how it impacts the "presence" of the primal
objects, the gaze and the voice, as they are embodied in
the everyday world. Likewise, Derrida's analysis of
textuality forcefully asserts the originary contamination
of thought by technology: thought owes its very "being" to
the technology of writing. No absolute separation of an
essence of technology from its ontic embodiment (as
language) is possible. I shall return to these issues
below, Chapter 4.
17
would call its "fallenness11 [Verfallenheit] : its
involvement in the ontic world of its everyday concerns.10
What is essential in this common French decision
concerning Heidegger is the way it sets the stage for the
"closure of representation" that has literally oriented
post-structuralist French thought.11 While Derrida and
Lacan ultimately come down on different sides of the
"representation debate,"12 their respective approaches
10. See Being and Time, paragraphs 35-38.
11. The term, of course, is Derrida's; see especially, "The

Theater of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation," in
Writing and Difference, tr. Alan Bass (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1978), pp. 232-250. For example, Derrida
writes: "Because it has always already begun,
representation therefore has no end. But one can conceive
of the closure of that which is without end. Closure is
the circular limit within which the repetition of
difference infinitely repeats itself. That is to say,
closure is its playing space. This movement is the
movement of the world as play." (250) One should recall
that Derrida's "closure" is a transformative gloss on
Heidegger's "end." See the latter's article, "The End of
Philosophy and the Task of Thinking," in Basic Writings,
tr. David Krell (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), pp. 369-
392. See also the provocative article by Eugenio Donato on
this issue in The Textual Sublime, ed. Hugh Silverman (New
York: SUNY Press, 1990), 3-27.
12. Lacan makes it clear that his project, and particularly

the analysis of the gaze, is antithetical to the
philosophical problematic of representation: "What is at
issue here is not the philosophical problem of
representation. ... it is not in this dialectic between
surface and that which is beyond that things are suspended.
For my part, I set out from the fact that there is
something that establishes a fracture, a bi-partition, a
splitting of the being to which the being accommodates
itself, even in the natural world." (The Four Fundamental
Concepts. 106) One must remember too, however, that vision
is absolutely necessary as what enables the specific
experience of anamorphosis as an experience of everyday
popular culture. While, in a formal or structural sense, a
blind man (as Lacan points out) is perfectly capable of
encountering his own constitution, he cannot do so by
18
share an initial move: they both channel their accounts of
technology through the model of representation. As a
consequence, while their work (and the French decision in
general) has the positive effect of mitigating the
dogmatism of Heidegger's fetishization of Being, it
nevertheless has the unfortunate effect of committing
theory to another fundamental Heideggerian thesis: the
thesis that the technological domination of reality
coincides with the radicalization of the problem of
representation.
In his article "The Age of the World Picture,"
Heidegger traces the drive behind technological domination
in modernity to a desire to reduce "Being" to the "being of
what is." This domination culminates in the thinking of
the world, not simply as the object of a representation,
but essentially as representation:
Where the world becomes picture, what is, in its entirety,

is juxtaposed as that for which man is prepared and which,
correspondingly, he therefore intends to bring before
himself and have before himself, and consequently intends
in a decisive sense to set in place before himself. Hence
world picture, when understood essentially, does not mean a
picture of the world but the world conceived and grasped as
picture. What is, in its entirety, is now taken in such a
way that it first is in being and only is in being to the
extent that it is set up by man, who represents and sets
forth [durch den vorstellenden-herstellenden Menschen
gestellt ist].13
For Heidegger, of course, this'enframing of reality carried
watching a Hitchcock film: he cannot "look awry" in the

literal sense.
13. Heidegger, "The Age of the World Picture," in The

Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. 129-130,
emphasis added.
19
out by representational thinking is to be deplored; the
necessity of thinking the essence of technology "outside"
of the technically-mediated world stems directly from it.
In their respective criticism of this motif, both
Lacan and Derrida radicalize the notion of representational
thinking in a productive way. At the same time, however,
they make representation into a spectre far more powerful
than what Heidegger had envisioned. Lacan demonstrates how
the confrontation with the source of being - what
institutes the subject as split - is immanent to the domain
of language as it is embodied in textual and techno-
scientific technologies. Extending this local
contamination of the Heideggerian "call of conscience" into
a generalized critique of the phenomenology of presence,
Derrida radicalizes the necessity for representational
thinking. Instead of the deplorable and forgetful mode of
thinking that it constitutes for Heidegger, representation
becomes primary and originary; the (self-)presencing of the
present is not indebted to a transcendent concealing-
revealing movement of truth (as Heidegger claims), but
rather to the original difference ("differance") within the
movement of presencing. Because of its reliance on the
trace, and thus on language (techne), the self-presencing
of the present can only take place as the structural
deferral of presence, or in other words, as representation.
What Heidegger discovers in the Greek experience of
aletheia - the concealing-revealing movement of truth - is
20
recast as something immanent to the technology of language.
This account of the French decision concerning
Heidegger is by no means meant to exhaust the respective
projects of Derrida and Lacan, both of which I shall return
to in great detail below. For the moment, I would like to
stress only the fundamental limitations of the French
radicalization of Heidegger's notion of representational
thinking with respect to Heidegger's project: it can do no
more than seek to embed its central concepts (e.g.,
differance or anamorphosis) within the domain of
contemporary technology. As I have already indicated, this
entails a fundamental reduction of technology to the model
of representation, since technological objects are
significant only for their instrumental role in thinking
(Derrida) or in desiring (Lacan).
While in one sense the French reading pushes
Heidegger's notion of the "enframing" [das Gestell] to the
farthest extreme imaginable (in the process closing off all
paths to a transcendent source of Being), it also shuts its
ears to another, muffled side of Heidegger's thought - a
"voice" literally silent in Being and Time that only comes
to speak, and then only obliquely, in the final phases of
Heidegger's career. In its zeal to do nothing less than
enframe Heidegger himself, the French reading finds itself
guilty of the very charge it levels against the master: it
too fails to hear the ontic call, the plea of the aging man
who abandons the hubris of philosophical thought. The
Spiegel interview of 1966 (but also the late notion of
Gelassenheit, "releasement") shows a Heidegger trying to
bring himself to the point of accepting the inevitable
consequences of the failure of his philosophical project.
Faced with the prospect of the very "closure of
representation" developed by the French, Heidegger makes a
concession that has been eclipsed by his more grandiose
plea for an ontological retreat - his almost laughable
advice to mankind that it prepare itself for the coming of
a new "god." Despite its virtual silencing, the
significance of this concession cannot be stressed enough,
since it signals nothing less than Heidegger's complete
about-face regarding technology; in his final
pronouncement, he seems to concede that technology cannot
be restricted to the category of representation!
Certainly, this death-bed and "all-too-human"
conversion on the part of Heidegger the philosopher runs
against the grain of his entire project as well as his
immense esteem for the almost other-worldly figure of the
thinker. Above all, it challenges the central role of
technology in his epochal rediscovery of the Greek
experience of the concealing-revealing movement of truth.
Despite such considerations of consistency, however, I
believe that Heidegger's conversion merits attention on
purely hermeneutic grounds that cut to the quick of the
contemporary crisis of representation. The apparent
conversion to which I am drawing attention furnishes an
22
approach to technology that - unlike Heidegger's dominant
path - does not compromise itself from the start, that
explicitly resists the impulse to align technology with
language.
The central feature of this path is its refusal to
accept the "closure of representation" as the inevitable
and radical consequence resulting from the technologization
of the lifeworld. Where the French refinement of Heidegger
strengthens the hold of representation on thought and thus
extends the sway of the enframing, Heidegger's late
concession licenses a reinterrogation of technology that
parts company with the central figure of his project and of
all phenomenology - namely the privilege granted to
thought. Such a reorientation, as we shall see, is crucial
to account for technology insofar as technology's
materiality exceeds the grasp of traditional philosophical
categories.
II. Erlebnis and Erfahrung
In taking the apparatus-psyche analogy as the paradigm
for investigations into technology, film theory unwittingly
overlooks an aspect of technology, already contained in
Rank's prescient hypothesis regarding film, that exceeds
any possible field of thought. In addition to inaugurating
the analogy of cinematic writing with the dream-work, at a
time in which Freud was content to employ literature as
mere source material for character studies, Rank stresses
23
the fact that the film medium itself has a qualitative
impact on the content of its representations. The film
apparatus is more than a mere neutral extension of our
perceptual and psychic powers, a McLuhanesque "extension of
man."14 The formal possibilities for expression that film
opens cannot be restricted to the translation of
preexistent and wholly independent contents into the form
of a new technological medium. On the contrary, Rank
presciently grasps that film's form itself plays a
constitutive role in determining the contemporary
experiential content of a psychological motif (for example,
the Doppelgaenger motif that forms the theme of Rank's
study).
We can detect traces of Rank's incisive analysis in
the following word of caution against the reduction of film
to the status of a mere external factor in expression:
Any apprehension about the real value of a photoplay which

aims so largely at achieving external effects may be
postponed until we have seen in what sense a subject based
upon an ancient folk-tradition, and the content of which is
so eminently psychological, is altered by the demands of
modern techniques of expression. (Rank, 4, emphasis added)
Even if Rank's own assumptions dictate his eventual
reduction of film form to a mere support for the
investigation of "the essential problem of the ego," his
example sets the stage for a revaluation of the film
theoretical model.15 What it points out is the fact that
14. "Extensions of Man" is, of course, the subtitle of

McLuhan's great work Understanding Media (New York: McGraw
Hill, 1964).
24
film technology, through the very process of qualitatively
altering the content of aesthetic expression, also alters
human experience in a fundamentally practical manner — a
manner that has no direct impact in terms of the category
of thought and that cannot be wholly recuperated through
any kind of phenomenological thematization. Film
technology does not just supplement an already constituted
space of representation (the "other scene" of the
unconscious), as the governing film theoretical analogy of
apparatus-psyche suggests. On the contrary, in altering
the subject expressed, it plays a part in the very
production of representation and actually marks the
priority of production over representation. Only in this
sense can we grant to film technology a role as the
exemplary form of contemporary technology.
Any attempt to restrict the evaluation of technology
within a preconstituted space of representation can
therefore only result in a wholesale reduction of its
productive impact. Rank's hypothesis clearly indicates a
basic reality about life: it teaches that technology's
15. Rank continues: "We must arrive at the meaning of these

fundamental problems, necessary to understanding the film
[Heinz Ewers' "The Student of Prague"], by tracing the
related forms of the motif in literary models... and by
comparing these forms with the corresponding folkloric,
ethnographic, and mythical traditions. We should see..
that this [literary] form coincides to a high degree with
the original, and later obscured, meaning of these motifs.
In the last analysis, they can be traced back to the
essential problem of the ego — a problem which the modern
interpreter, who is supported or compelled by the new
technique of representation, has prominently highlighted by
using such a vivid language of imagery."
25
impact on experience precedes the allegedly radical
"closure of representation" ! The impact of technology
takes place prior to the constitution of a field of
representation. Faced with this radical priority and
exteriority, any approach to technology that begins by
imposing the representational frame is limited to a purely
descriptive significance. Since it can in principle only
translate technology into its own preconstituted field, any
such description is thus condemned by structural necessity
to reduce technology to a subordinate role within the space
of its own critical engagement with representation. While
this reduction seems so evident as to be utterly ingenuous,
my readings of its important paradigm cases will
demonstrate just how common, and also how limited, such
descriptions are.16
I propose to employ the notion of the "molecular" as
it is introduced by Deleuze and Guattari to characterize
this reduction.17 The paradigm cases of the technological
16. See my readings below, Chapters 1-5.
17. The term "molecular" comes from the work of Gilles

Deleuze and Felix Guattari. It designates the
infinitesimal or unrepresentable "flow" of desiring
production, the incremental units, so to speak, of
representational "molar" formations. See, for example, the
Anti-Oedipus. where they develop the notion of a "molecular
unconscious": "What is the meaning of this distinction
between two regions: one molecular and the other molar; one
microphysic or micrological, the other statistical and
gregarious? Is this anything more than a metaphor lending
the unconscious a distinction grounded in physics, when we
speak of an opposition between intra-atomic phenomena and
the mass phenomena that operate through statistical
accumulation, obeying the laws of aggregates? But in
reality the unconscious belongs to the realm of physics;
26
reduction on which I shall focus all share a tendency to
focus on global or "molar" units at the expense of the
incremental components of such units. They thus neglect an
entire domain of experience that has only recently begun to
receive critical attention of any kind. Just as the
Freudian model of the mind (to use the example closest to
Deleuze and Guattari's project) grants significance to
quantitative (or sensory) experience only to the extent
that it leaves behind memory traces (i.e., reaches a
certain intensity which forces a transvaluation into a
qualitative factor), so too analyses of technology tend to
focus on the qualitative modifications that it produces on
human experience, at the expense of its incremental impact.
Thus, despite all of the great descriptive projects of
modernity and post-modernity, critical theory has yet to
contend with the fact that the molecular impact of
technology at the level of Erlebnis, or everyday lived
experience, makes its mark literally without a trace.18 On
the body without organs and its intensities are not

metaphors, but matter itself." (tr. Hurley et al.
[Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 1983], p. 283).
18. The term Erlebnis designates actual lived experience

before any attempt to frame or (re-)present it. The root
is of course the German very leben, to live. The term
stands against its counterpart, Erfahrung, also meaning
experience, but in the sense of a unity of experience.
Thus, Erfahrung designates a "translation" of Erlebnis into
the space of thought (representation), and is appropriate
to name the various "basic units" of phenomenology, e.g.,
"perception," "intuition [Anschauung]," "presentation or
representation [Vorstellung, Darstellung]," and even
Dasein. Erlebnis, on the contrary, names the pre-
representational level of experience, what corresponds
perhaps to Kant's sensation [Empfindung] or Husserl's
"hyle." The terminological distinction becomes important
27
the map of twentieth-century criticism, we see theory time
and again taking a partial description as exhaustive of
technology's productive impact. However, as the work of
the Frankfurt School and subsequently of the eccentric
in German thought with Dilthey's great work on poetry and

experience, and plays a significant role in Husserlian
phenomenology. In Being and Time. Heidegger has the
following to say of the historical significance of
Dilthey's investigations of Erlebnis: "The researches of
Wilhelm Dilthey were stimulated by the perennial question
of 'life.' [die staendige Frage nach dem 'Leben'] Starting
from 'life' as a whole, he tried to understand its
'Experiences' [Erlebnisse] in their structural and
developmental inter-connections. His
'geisteswissenshaftliche Psychologie' is one which no
longer seeks to be oriented towards psychical elements and
atoms or to piece the life of the soul together, but aims
rather at 'Gestalten' and 'life as a whole [Ganze des
Lebens]. Its philosophical relevance, however, is not to
be sought here, but rather in the fact that in all this he
was, above all, on his way towards the question of 'life.'
To be sure, we can also see here very plainly how limited
were both his problematic and the set of concepts with
which it had to be put into words. These limitaions,
however, are found not only in Dilthey and Bergson but in
all the 'personalistic' movements to which they have given
direction and in every tendency towards a philosophical
anthropology. The phenomenological Interpretation of
personality is in principle more radical and more
transparent; but the question of the Being of Dasein has a
dimension which this too fails to enter. No matter how
much Husserl and Scheler may differ in their respective
inquiries, in their methods of conducting them, and in
their orientations towards the world as a whole, they are
fully in agreement on the negative side of their
Interpretations of personality. ... For Scheler, the person
is never to be thought of as a Thing or a substance; the
person 'is rather the unity of living through [Er-lebens]
which is immediately experienced in and with our
Experiences [Erlebnisse] — not a Thing merely thought of
behind and outside what is immediately Experienced [ausser
dem unmittelbar Erlebten]." (tr. Macquarrie and Robinson
[New York: Harper & Row, 1964], 72-73 [German, 46-47]).
Against Heidegger's critique, I would stress the necessity
of resurrecting Erlebnis as the notion that can allow us to
confront the molecular impact of technology on life. This
argument develops implicitly in my treatment of Heidegger
and his inheritors and bears fruit in my chapter on Walter
Benjamin (see below, chapter 6).
28
French critics Deleuze and Guattari help to demonstrate, at
the molecular level, technology's impact on life remains
sub-representational, meaning that it cannot be detected,
demarcated, or stored by any representational faculty or
memory, whether psychic or artificial.19 In its molecular
composition, technology makes no impact on the individual
qua thinking subject or psyche, and thus leaves no traces.
No matter how emancipated from its traditional localization
in the individual psychic subject, no thought-space is
capable of grasping this level of experience without
distorting it into a reductive molar constellation or
representation. One consequence of this restriction, which
I shall explore in the following, is that no figure of
memory can adequately circumscribe the radical exteriority
of technology.
The great spokesman for this undetectable domain of
lived experience is Walter Benjamin, whose example I shall
take up in detail below. The evolution of Benjamin's
theory of experience provides a significant model for the
revolution in theory with regard to technology that I
invoke above in reference to Jameson. While his early
concern with linguistic philosophy finds its correlate in a
purely theoretical indictment of the Kantian categories20,
19. For theoretical formulations of these positions, see

Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectic (New York: Routledge,
1977), especially the sections grouped under the title
"Micrologies." For Deleuze-Guattari, see A Thousand
Plateaus (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1987),
chapters 3 and 9.
29
his later engagement with dialectical materialism permits a
far more comprehensive grasp of experience. If the early
critique shows the paucity of the Kantian schematism with
regard to the experiential domain (the most blatant
omission from the table of categories being that of
language), its corrective remains entirely theoretical: it
would simply replace one (limited) "frame of reference"
with another (fuller) one.21 It is only at the point when
Benjamin confronts the purely repetitive experience of the
worker on the assembly line that he is compelled to revise
his theoretical bias.22 Since such mechanical labor has
no proper content, its repetition produces no difference.
It makes no mark on the registering apparatus (the psyche
of the worker) and thus cannot be grasped and stored as a
(memory) trace. "The manipulation of the worker at the
machine," Benjamin concludes, "has no connection with the
preceding operations for the very reason that it is its
exact repetition,"23
Benjamin's work demonstrates the essential tie between
20. See Walter Benjamin, "On the Program of the Coming

Philosophy," tr. Mark Ritter, in Gary Smith (ed.),
Beniamin: Philosophy, Aesthetics. History (Chicago:
University of Chicago, 1989), 1-12.
21. With the exception of the New German Critique circle

and some German critics, the contemporary reception of
Benjamin has privileged his early linguistic model to the
detriment of the later concerns with dialectical
materialism and technology.
22. This topos stems, of course, from Marx.
23. Walter Benjamin, "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire," in

Illuminations. tr. Henry Zohn (New York: Shocken, 1969),
177.
technology and this unpresentable domain of experience,
which he appropriately terms Erlebnis. In order to
introduce this latter into the domain of criticism,
Benjamin introduces the notion of "shock".24 The
experience of shocks [Chockwirkung] provides a new category
necessary to account for life in the contemporary world.
Central to this category is an emphasis on micrological
intensities. Since the increasing technologization of the
lifeworld has led to a virtual explosion in unpresentable
experience of mechanical repetition, epistemological models
(like the Kantian one) based on a qualitative principle
(the link between the trace and a content) must give way to
a quantitative model. Benjamin posits such a model on the
basis of Freud's notion of the "outer cortex" of dead
matter that insulates the psyche from external stimuli.
Benjamin's novel interpretation of Freud's 1921 text Bevond
the Pleasure Principle, exploits its elaborate recurrence
to the mechanical model of Freud's earliest sketch of the
psyche in the 1895 Project for a Scientific Psychology.
Yet even Freud's account of the memory trace as the result
of quantitative bombardment remains too molar in relation
to the infinitesimal impact of technology. The
implications of Benjamin's shock model open a fruitful
alternative to models of technology that owe their
foundation, in some degree, to the Freudian schema. In
24. Benjamin's theory picks up on Bergson's notion of

shock, developed in Matter and Memory.
experiencing the shocks of a technologized world,
contemporary man develops a faculty which lies outside the
space governed by the Freudian division of labor between
conscious neutralization and unconscious preservation. He
becomes increasingly able to "parry" shocks in a way that
simply prevents them from entering his psychic system. It
is just such a dimension of experience that is necessary to
address the increasing automation of human activity under
capitalism. Precisely because automated experience, to a
greater or lesser degree, eludes representation by the
psyche, it remains "unneutralized" and thus able to provide
the lived [erleJbt] raw material for a kind of revaluation
that Benjamin, with reference to Baudelaire's poetic
practice, calls "poetic experience [poetische Erfahrung]."
I give this schematic account of a model that
constitutes the theoretical keystone of my argument in this
book (and to which I devote a central chapter) because it
perfectly exemplifies the shift from theory to aesthetics
that, I believe, is basic to any critical confrontation
with technology. If it is accepted that much of what we
conventionally group under the rubric "experience" remains
unpresentable on any of our current hermeneutic (and post-
hermeneutic) models, such a state of affairs calls for a
wholly different approach to technology. With this
imperative in view, we can redirect the impact of the
twentieth century lineage of de(con)structive critique away
from its exclusive concern with the problematics of
textuality and representation and toward the more
primordial level of experience. What Benjamin's example
points out is the irreducible priority of life (Erlebnis)
over any mediation through the category of thought (under
its many names, including perception, presentation,
representation, and even experience [Erfahrung] itself).
Since it takes place below the threshold of perception and
is thus fundamentally imperceptible, the experiential
impact of man's subjection to technology remains invisible
on all such hermeneutic regimes. Conjoined with the
priority of hermeneutics over Erlebnis prevalent today in
cultural criticism, this limitation has not been recognized
for what it is - a limitation. Rather than bringing about
the self-critique that it would seem to merit, it has
instead led critics to advance and staunchly defend a
dogmatic denial of the significance - and even in some
cases of the very existence - of such a level of
experience. Evaluated in this light, contemporary
criticism seems to be caught in the clutches of nothing
less than a wholesale "resistance to life."
While I feel strongly that the popular indictment of
deconstruction as a reduction of everything to the text
utterly fails to grasp the subtlety and ambivalence of its
critique of metaphysics, practitioners of deconstruction
(including both of its alleged founders) have indeed called
a legitimate objection upon themselves by attempting to
extend the sway of their critique beyond the confines of
33
the text of philosophy/literature to life itself. One
cannot, I think, escape the force of the deconstructive
critique as it pertains to the domain of thought: with its
leitmotif of differance - the non-presence that haunts the
origin of any movement of thinking - deconstruction has set
forth a forceful indictment of the naivety of Western
metaphysics and literary/aesthetic criticism and has
changed our view of representation in a way that is
decisive. Because philosophical or critical thought is
immediately and in its essence a presentation or
representation, its pretension to a moment of pure
presence, a moment in which it would coincide with its
origin, with the matter which it thinks, is completely
without foundation.
When this critique is generalized to the point that it
impacts the force or value of life itself - when, for
example, Derrida claims that differance is "anterior to"
the movement of life itself - it is a completely different
story. Such a generalization, I suggest, compromises the
critical force of the deconstructive assault on the
dogmatism of thought and thus falters on the grounds of its
own standard: it simply substitutes its own determination
concerning the value of life for that of the metaphysical
tradition. In both cases, a genetic model of life is
dogmatically imposed on the productive forces composing
what we call life. Erlebnis is domesticated - from the
beginning - into a descriptive model whose concern is far
more with the legitimation of the construction of the
category of life for the sake of theoretical integrity than
an attempt to account for actual lived experience. From
the beginning, in other words, life is thought on a genetic
model which simply ignores its molecular force. In its
zeal to domesticate life into the frame of representation,
theory privileges the descriptive issue of the derivation
of life over productive activity. In order to derive life
from a movement (self-affection) that is proper to the more
restricted category of thought, theory simply imposes its
own narrow definition of what life is.
In order to counter this debilitating dogmatism,
representational theory must be subjected to a critique
that questions its very foundations. Against the privilege
of representation over production, we must invoke and
follow the example of Marx, whose forceful indictment of
Hegelianism opened a dimension of material lived experience
not subject (i.e., exterior) to representational framing.
Deployed in this context, Marx's work demonstrates how
deconstruction, as well as the Freudian (and Lacanian)
theory of the unconscious - which together form the two
paradigms for the alleged contemporary overcoming of the
metaphysics of presence - both remain strictly confined to
the terrain of consciousness (in its broad philosophical
sense, as delimiting the "mental" or "thought"). Marx's
fundamental contribution here is to demonstrate that life
cannot be reduced to consciousness. Materiality, even the
35
"materiality of thought" (Marx's characterization of
language in the German Ideology), remains exterior to the
horizon of consciousness in a way that is not simply an
effect of the limitations of thought, as Derrida's notion
of the "supplement" and (to a lesser degree) Lacan's
theorization of an "object cause" suggest. On the
contrary, materiality is radically exterior to thought in a
way that is directly real. In its reality, materiality
cannot be reduced to the textual, representational, or
fantasy status that it has for a subject. It remains
"other" in the radical sense that the French philosopher
Emmanuel Levinas lends to the term; for Levinas, Cartesian
man, with his finite mind, lacks the capacity to imagine a
Being with infinite reality.25 Far from culminating in the
radicalization of representation witnessed in Derrida's
work - and which can in this light be seen to be perhaps
the most powerful monument of the humanist reduction to
date - Levinas's thought urges a humility, a recognition of
the fundamental incapacity of thought to capture the real.
Drawing on this notion of humility, one could say that with
Marx the finitude of thought is revalued as a structural
25. See Levinas, Totalite et Infinie (Paris: Kluwer

Academic, 1971), 10: "La violence qui consiste pour un
esprit a accueillir un etre qui lui est inadequat,
contredirait-elle 1'ideal d'autonomie qui guide la
philosophie, maitresse de sa v£rit£ dans 1'evidence? Mais
la relation avec 1'infini — l'id£e de 1'Infini comme
l'appelle Descartes — deborde la pensee dans un tout autre
sens que 1'opinion. Celle-ci s'evarfouit comme du^vent
quand la pensee la touche, ou se revele comme deja
interieure a cette pensee. Dans l'idee de l'inf,ini se
pense ce qui reste toujours exterieur a la pensee."
36
limitation with regard not simply to a being with a
specific content, but to the almost unimaginable entirety
of what we habitually call "reality." Thought, in short,
only captures part of our encounter with the real; to avoid
the violent reduction of the latter, the hegemonic sway of
thought as the tribunal for reality must itself be

suspended.
If Marx's work demonstrates in a definitive manner
that there is a general excess of life over thought,
critics such as Benjamin and Deleuze-Guattari have
exploited this demonstration in a way that opens the
possibility of waging a critical and timely war against the
generalization of the frame of representation. While
deconstruction (together with Lacanian theory) makes a
strong case that life emerges (as a value or force) only
subsequently and supplementarily (nachtraeglich) to its
ungraspable moment of happening, this is so only so long as
the representation-thought-consciousness complex remains
the tribunal for its evaluation. With support from critics
like those I mention, I think that we are now in a position
to oppose the deconstructive claim (that there is absence
at the origin) by asserting that life is necessarily prior
to and independent of representation. Following up on the
implications of this fundamental revaluation, we will be
able to turn away from a critical practice concerned
predominantly with the (phenomenological) issue of
legitimation, liberating ourselves instead for a poly
37
dimensional or 11rhizomatic" and pragmatic approach to the
material actuality of life in a technologized lifeworld.26
III. Technology
Although it would be misleading to view it exclusively
as a direct product of the industrial revolution (and its
subsequent history), this excess of life over thought does,
I believe, find its most important concretization in modern
technology. The virtual explosion of technology in the
twentieth-century has brought about a situation in which
lived experience has become increasingly disjoined from
recuperative mechanisms of all sorts (including traditional
strategies of narrative and models of memory, as well as
the newer technical strategies of the electronic revolution
which, as I shall show, merely refine the capacities of the
former). The result is that, on par, a larger share of
experience than ever before has gone undetected by the
various disciplines of the human sciences. This increasing
alienation of the real has culminated in our contemporary
critical situation - a situation in which some nonpartisan
thinkers (particular twentieth-century German thinkers and
those influenced by them) have indeed been prompted to
develop aspects of a critique of technology that takes
26. Cf. the first "Plateau" in A Thousand Plateaus for a

discussion of the "rhizome." Deleuze and Guattari
constrast it with the linear model of the tree model. The
rhizome can be compared to the root-structure of a plant,
since it spreads laterally without obeying any structuring
principle of hierarchy.
38
flight from Marx's seminal overturning of Hegel.27 The
problem of technology in the sense that I have given it in
my recuperative sketch is thus more significant than ever.
It is precisely a shared conviction concerning this
situation that brings together the work of critics as
diverse as Adorno and Horkheimer, Benjamin, Deleuze and
Guattari, and Jameson. In ways that differ considerably,
all of these critics assert two tenets that run in the face
of the governing model of contemporary criticism: on the
one hand, they maintain the priority of production over
representation; and on the other, they testify to the
pressing need for a model of aesthetic experience that
would successfully counteract the blindnesses of the
representational model. In both cases, this dual critical
position entails a significant revision of the traditional
philosophical or metaphysical account of technology.
Specifically, it puts into question philosophy's implicit
determination of technology on a mechanical model.
The most important aspect of this questioning concerns
what the French historian of science, Georges Canguilhem,
27. The model for this critique was laid out, of course, by
the early work of the Frankfurt School (and by such
important fellow-travellers as Walter Benjamin and Hannah
Arendt). Their model continues to inform the work of
Habermas and company in Germany and has motivated several
important French developments in the field of technology,
notably with Baudrillard's work (which extends Marx's
critique beyond the Marxian model of production) and the
joint project of Deleuze and Guattari, Capitalism and
Schizophrenia. It also provides an impetus to the work of
Frederic Jameson, from his early thematic treatments of the
Frankfurt School to his later work on media culture.
39
diagnoses as a descriptive or theoretical imperative of the
mechanistic theories that he classifies as "Cartesian": a
reduction of technical invention "to the application of a
given system of knowledge."28 Canguilhem illustrates his
diagnosis with a brief account of the genesis of
mechanistic theory in the analogy between body and machine
first promulgated by Aristotle (following Plato) and later
refined by Descartes (and ultimately by Julien de la
Mettrie, author of the Enlightenment text, L'Homme-
machine) . Canguilhem sees an underlying harmony in all of
these models:
Despite their differing explanations of movement, for

Aristotle as for Descartes later, the comparison of the
body with a machine presupposes that man is composed of
automated mechanical parts reliant on an energy source that
produces motor effects over time... (48)
What Canguilhem stresses here is the dependance of the
body-machine analogy - as much in its Aristotelean as in
its Cartesian form - on a theoretical foundation: the role
of a prime mover or God as the source of all movement, or
in other words, of life itself. No matter how emancipated
a mechanistic theory might appear or how independent
mechanical teleology is from life, it is so only in
appearance; as Canguilhem argues, it has simply been
"concentrated ... in its entirety at the point at which
life begins." (54) One could thus say that mechanistic
28. Georges Canguilhem, "Machine and Organism," in

Incorporations. ed. Crary and Kwinter (New York: Zone
Books, 1992), 62. Canguilhem's article is excerpted from
his book La Connaissance de la Vie (Paris: Vrin, 1985).
theories in general claim a false autonomy, since in the
end they are all indebted to an (often concealed) energy
source that is, ultimately, vitalistic or
anthropomorphic.29
In terms of the argument I am trying to develop here,
it is the prevalence of such a mechanistic treatment of
technology (what I go on to treat under the general heading
of "the machine metaphor") that lies behind and produces
theory's failure to account for the impact of technology on
contemporary experience. While the differing contemporary
invocations of the traditional mechanistic philosophical
model raise subtle and complex issues that require detailed
analysis, at a more general level their shared mechanistic
foundation reinforces the basic underlying univocity of
their claims regarding technology. For once the model of
mechanical construction is taken to define the ontology of
technology, the task of legitimating the representational
model eclipses all other concerns. In its attempt to
define the machine, the mechanical model - even in those
cases where it is employed for allegedly non-essential
reasons - cannot avoid recourse to a preexisting (and
ontologically fundamental) structure or model. Ontological
29. Canguilhem concludes his account of Descartes with the

following characterization: "The positive element, then, in
Descartes' attempt to explain life mechanically is that he
eliminates the need to tie mechanism to finality in its
anthropomorphic aspect. However, it seems that in doing
this, one anthropomorphism has been substituted for
another. A technological anthropomorphism has been
substituted for a political anthropomorphism." (54)
with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
41
possibility viewed narrowly (as it is in the "closure of
representation") takes the place of material possibility -
or in other words, the machine, viewed ontologically, takes
on the status of a metaphor, a linguistico-theoretical
entity.
In the wake of the astounding prevalence of such an
ontological-descriptive mode of analysis where it is a
question of technology, it seems inevitable that a basic
reduction would ensue. Since all mechanical models, as
Canguilhem stresses, must ultimately derive technology from
a specific vitalistic source (i.e., a dogmatic decision
concerning the value of life) any account of technology on
that model will predetermine technical invention in terms
of a governing theory and will reduce technology to the
field it opens. To follow up the example I have been
developing in this introduction, Derrida's treatment of
technology as technical reproduction (from writing to
computer storage) reflects his decision concerning life -
his deconstruction of the primacy of life in favor of the
differential movement inaugurating the history of thought
or consciousness. Rather than confronting technology
according to the diversity and ubiquity of its impact on
experience, Derrida reduces it to a status that coheres
with the grammatological-phenomenological opening of the
field of the living as the movement inaugurating thought
(psychic self-affeetion). As a consequence, he restricts
his interest to forms of technology that can be directly or
42
indirectly assimilated to the model of writing he develops
in Of Grammatology.30
Another way to put this is that Derrida refines the
mechanical model so as to subordinate the category of
production to that of representation. The force that
impels life is travestied as a metaphysical desire for the
self-presencing of the present, as if to suggest that
before and above any struggle for self-preservation (a
struggle at the level of the "existentielle" or ontic
category of need, not the symbolic one of desire), we
desire to reach a moment of self-presence in which our
self-representation coincides with our activity. While
Derrida's subtle analyses of literary and philosophical
texts, along with Lacan's symbolic reformulation of Freud's
theory of desire, eloquently testify to the relevance of
such a desire in relation to the production of human
representations, it seems presumptive to generalize this
aspect of drive so as to cover the principle of life in all
of its dimensions - to characterize all of what Deleuze and
Guattari term "desiring production." Such a reduction of
production to the production of representations institutes
a molar teleology into the category of production. In so
doing, it leads to the effacement of the increments of
desiring production that remain, as it were, below the
threshold of presentation.
30. I develop various aspects of this writing-model in

Chapters 1, 3, and 4, below.
43
IV. From Aesthetic Experience to the Sublime
We are now in a position to appreciate the
significance of the critique of representational theory
that I am drawing on here. What unites Benjamin's
Erlebnis, Deleuze-Guattari's autonomous "part-object
machines," and Adorno-Horkheimer's critique of the Kantian
schematism, is precisely a struggle against such a molar
theory of desire. In the light of the central role played
by German criticism (and its off-shoots) as the sole voice
of dissent against the hegemony of the reduction of
technology, it is hardly an accident that Benjamin
represents the main inheritor of Rank's thesis concerning
the productive impact of the film medium. Benjamin's
connection between the montage principle of cinema and
shock experience positions film as the aesthetic pendant to
this theory of experience.31 Benjamin sees film as a means
of "redeeming" the otherwise lost domain of Erlebnis - a
contemporary equivalent to Baudelaire's poetic practice.
Film fulfills this role beyond any memorial (psychic) space
of representation, since it does not seek to represent or
reproduce the unrepresentable through the content of its
images, but rather to provide the "real" analogue of
31. See Miriam Hansen, "Benjamin, Cinema and Experience:

'The Blue Flower in the Land of Technology,' in New German
Critique 40 (Winter 1987), 184. See also what Peter
Buerger has to say regarding montage in his influential
text Theory of the Avant-Garde. tr. Michael Shaw
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1984), 73ff.
44
mechanical repetition in the realm of aesthetic experience.
Far from synthesizing a field of thought, it functions
precisely by disrupting the associational process of the
mind.32
Benjamin's thought thus opposes the dominant trend of
contemporary film theory. Whereas the latter reduces
technology to film technology which it then interprets on
the basis of a preconstituted psychic space, Benjamin takes
film as an example of technology (and as one example among
others) precisely because (and only because) of its
disjunction from the psyche. By comparing film with its
technological predecessor, photography, we can get a sense
of the revolutionary significance of this disjunction.
Photography remains an "auratic" artform, since it does not
challenge the fundamental figurative analogy modeling
technology on a psychic space.33 Its aesthetic
32. See Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical

Reproduction,11 in Illuminations. 238: "Let us compare the
screen on which a film unfolds with the canvas of a
painting. The painting invites the spectator to
contemplation; before it the spectator can abandon himself
to his associations. Before the movie frame he cannot do
so. No sooner has his eye grasped a scene than it is
already changed. ... In fact, when a person views these
constantly changing images, his process of association
[Assoziationsablauf] is immediatedly disrupted
[wird...unterbrochen]. This constitutes the shock effect
[Chockwirkung] of the film..." (translation modified)
33. To my mind, Benjamin's notion of "aura" remains quite

close to the Freudian notion of representative space or the
unconscious theater. In the photography essay, for
example, he defines it as an experience of framing: "the
unique manifestation of a distance, however near it may
be," that allows the perceiver (the psyche) to frame the
perceived into a scene. Unlike Heidegger (and Freud) who
stake their claim with the preservation of this "essential
45
significance derives from its function as a storage
mechanism for experience, its capacity to capture the "tiny
spark of chance, of the here and now, with which reality
has, as it were, seared the character in the picture..."'54
As long as its primary aesthetic function is that of
storage (i.e., representation of something that has either
drifted away in the past or has never been present), the
photographic apparatus remains subordinate to the psychic
or auratic experience that it helps to mediate.35
It is only with the introduction of the filmic
principle of montage that we can begin to delineate the
principle critical tenet in which a revolutionary
technological aesthetics finds hope. Because it disjoins
the aesthetic field from any foundation in a psychic space,
the montage aesthetic exposes the theoretical bias of the
distance," Benjamin sees its collapse as the ultimate

result of technological mediation.
34. Walter Benjamin, "A Short History of Photography," in

Screen 13.1 (Spring 1972), 7.
35. See, for example, Benjamin's description of the

portrait of the young Kafka in his collection: "This
picture in its infinite sadness forms a pendant to the
early photography where the people did not, as yet, look
out at the world in so excluded and godforsaken a manner as
this boy. They had an aura about them, a medium which
mingled with their manner of looking and gave them a
plenitude and security." ("A Short History of Photography,"
18) Although Benjamin opposes other non-auratic
possibilities to the early form of the portrait, the point
I am arguing is that photography, as a material medium, is
in no way irreconcilable with representational aesthetics
in the way that film is. It seems to me that Benjamin's
Kunstwerk essay (1935), despite its heavy reliance on the
earlier photography essay (1929), nevertheless makes a
clear case that montage, and not simply the camera,
represents the true revolutionary potential of technical
reproduction.
46
apparatus-psyche analogy. While the apparatus conceived in
terms of this analogy serves as a McLuhanesque extension of
human perception, in doing so it merely reinforces the
descriptivist reduction: the priority of representation
over production. Essentially incapable of providing a
broader conception of human activity - one that could
embrace the new shock-experience inventoried by Benjamin -
the apparatus model is just one more example of the
privileging of theory over aesthetic experience currently
prevalent in Franco-American criticism. Because it retains
the psyche in the position of mediator for Erlebnis (and
thus for the role of technology in Erlebnis), this model
finds itself compelled to constrain the anarchic,
rhizomatic complexity of aesthetic experience (in the broad
Greek sense of aisthesis) within a theoretically-secured
field of representation.
Film theory can thus be taken as a paradigm case of
the "subjectivism" for which Theodor Adorno rebukes
contemporary thought. In a section from Aesthetic Theory
entitled "Aesthetic experience as a form of objective
Verstehen," Adorno develops a savage indictment of
sublimation theory for modelling the objective art object
on the subject. Adorno's stinging words forcefully
summarize the critique I have been attempting to stage:
"Experience is prior to aesthetic sublimation. ... An
attitude that identifies the self with the work of art... -
the hallmark of subjectivism in aesthetics - is preartistic
47
and downright spurious.1,36 In the context of contemporary
Franco-American literary and cultural theory, this
objection becomes still more fundamental, since in the wake
of structuralism, the very category of the aesthetic has
itself fallen by the wayside. Contemporary criticism's
fascination with the theory of the subject - and with
theory tout court - has led to an almost complete loss of
contact with the tradition of aesthetics. What remains for
Adorno the basic motif of the analysis of art has undergone
a complete revaluation: as seen through (post-)
structuralist eyes, the "truth content of art" retains
nothing of its former grandeur. All that is left is its
wholly negative significance as the "effect" or mere
"ideology" generated by the basic causes of post-modernity
- grammatical or libidinal structures.37
The limitation of the apparatus paradigm runs deeper
still. Not only does the contemporary reduction of
aesthetic experience close off access, in principle, to the
unpresentable infinitesimal quanta constituting Erlebnis38;
36. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory. tr. C. Lenhardt (New York:

Routledge, 1984), 474.
37. See the later work of Paul de Man for the preeminent
example of this reduction. For example, the essays on
Kleist, Shelley, and Baudelaire in Rhetoric of Romanticism,
where he defines "aesthetic ideology" as a blanket
description for the tropological systems mechanically
produced by an act of pure linguistic positing.
38. This limitation is significant for Adorno as well. For

example, in the same section of Aesthetic Theory. he says
the following of "experience": "It is closely related to
vivid perception in general and yet different in that it
distances itself from the immediacy of the latter. In so
it also leaves criticism without resource for grappling
with what Jameson (following Benjamin) holds to be the
quintessential feature of postmodern culture: namely, the
complete absence of any "critical distance."39 The
formalist motif of the "ontological retreat" - a widely-
used strategy developed from the Heideggerian problematic
of the ontological difference - can no longer effectively
meet the call of technology, since in its contemporary form
technology is characterized by its fundamental resistance
to all forms of capture by (the onto-phenomenological
category of) thought.40 The domination of technology has
doing it faces the ever-present danger of relapsing into

simple perception... On the other hand, such relapses
into immediacy are as necessary to aesthetic experience as
they are futile, if not accompanied by anything else. To
hypostatize immediacy is to miss it, and that means missing
the claim to immediate existence raised willy-nilly by all
works of art." (474) There would be much to say in
comparing this ambivalent evaluation of the immediacy of
lived experience with the more positive evaluation given it
by Benjamin. Adorno's analysis contains a critique of
Benjamin meant to guard against the "fascist" potential
inherent in "enthusiasm." Given the elimination of
distance characterizing contemporary techno-culture,
however, it seems to me that the disinterested stance
championed by Adorno no longer holds forth a viable
critical option. Moreover, one could counter Adorno's
suspicion of fascism with another suspicion - of
reductionism, since - given the structural distance
separating immediate lived experience from "aesthetic
experience" - it remains perilously close to the brink of a
total escalation of subjectivism to a point at which it
would encompass, in addition to the "text," the "object-
cause," and the "unpresentable," nothing less that the
objective sphere itself I
39. See "The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism," in

Postmodernism. 48. Incidentally, Jameson's essay dates
from 1984.
40. Originally developed as a refinement of Heidegger's

"ontological difference," the motif of the "retreat"
currently informs approaches as diverse (and anti-
49
achieved the violent sway that Heidegger feared; in its
contemporary radicalized form, this domination neutralizes
Heidegger's entire project and those analytical strategies
stemming from it. The destruction of the aura and the
evolution of what Jameson calls a "new global space"
accomplishes the total suppression of any ontological
(and/or representational) distance. Jameson's materialist
reading forcefully exposes the way in which contemporary
technology, technology of the "third machine-age," is
developed and deployed without any essential continuity
with its past forms. In transforming "everything in our
social life," technology has attained a productive role so
fundamental to the infrastructure underlying Erlebnis that
it can no longer be isolated from its social situatedness.
We can simply take no distance from it. And with no space
untouched by its impact, there no longer remains any
"neutral" ground that would sanction an ontological retreat
- a pure philosophical evaluation of technology.
In light of this situation, I believe that the
contemporary critique of technology must follow Jameson's
decision to retool the old notion of aesthetic experience.
In shifting the locus of criticism away from the safe haven
Heideggerian) as Lyotard's and Zizek's, as well as more

congenial evolutions of Heidegger, such as Lacoue-
Labarthe's and, of course, Derrida's. See Jean-Francois
Lyotard, Heidegger and "the jews" (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1990); Slavoi Zizek, The Sublime Object
of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989); Philippe Lacoue-
Labarthe, Heidegger. Aesthetics. Politics (London:
Blackwell, 1989); and, especially, Derrida's programmatic
essay, "La retrait de metaphore," in Psych£: Inventions de
1'autre (Paris: Editions galilee, 1987), 63-94.
50
of the traditional disinterested subject of philosophy,
Jameson's notion of the "technological sublime" marks an
important first step in such a project. If Jameson's
position differs from representational theory in that it
emphasizes the immanence of technology within the field of
analysis, it likewise debunks that strand of Adorno's
thought which retains the positive valuation of aesthetic
"disinterest" (and the more general animosity toward
technology as such). Jameson's notion of the technological
sublime treads a path between these two poles, opening the
category of experience to an evolution that corresponds
directly, outside the frame of representation, to the
striking evolution of technology in recent decades. It
renders accessible the particular kind of presence that
technology possesses - its Baudrillardian "obscenity";
perhaps for the first time, a conceptual critical apparatus
is developed that permits technology to be considered in
terms of its direct and immediate, pre-representational
impact on human experience.41 In this light, it is hardly
41. Jameson appropriates the term from Baudrillard. See,

for example, Jean Baudrillard, "The Implosion of the Social
in the Media," in Mark Poster, Jean Baudrillard: Selected
Writings (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1988), 210: "There is
an obscenity in the functioning and the omnipresence of
opinion polls as in that of publicity. Not because they
might betray the secret of an opinion, the intimacy of a
will, or because they might violate some unwitten law of
the private being, but because they exhibit this redundancy
of the social, this sort of continual voyeurism of the
group in relation to itself... This is the real obscenity.
Through this feedback, this incessant anticipated
accounting, the social loses its own scene. It no longer
enacts itself; it has no more time to enact itself; it no
longer occupies a particular space, public or political; it
becomes confused with its own control screen.
51
an accident that Jameson's account of the "technological
sublime" recoups Benjamin's shock-theory of film:
So I come finally to my principal point here, that this

latest mutation in space — postmodern hyperspace — has
finally succeeded in transcending the capacities of the
individual human body to locate itself, to organize its
immediate surroundings perceptually, and cognitively to map
its position in a mappable external world. It may now be
suggested that this alarming disjunction point between the
body and its built environment — which is to the initial
bewilderment of the older modernism as the velocities of
spacecraft to those of automobile — can stand as the
symbol and analogon of that even sharper dilemma which is
the incapacity of our minds, at least at present, to map
the great global multinational and decentered
communicational network in which we find ourselves caught
as individual subjects.42
In his appropriation of the traditional aesthetic category
of the sublime, Jameson simply substitutes technology in
the place traditionally held by nature. Whereas, for Burke
and for Kant, it was the vastness and sheer power of nature
that threatened the schematizing powers of the imagination,
today this threat is embodied in our increasing dependance
on machine technology and the resulting alienation. In
this new role, technology, Jameson insists, is a "figure
for something else" - a figure for the changed human
relation to the sphere of production: "that enormous
properly human and anti-natural power of dead human labor
stored up in our machinery - an alienated power ... which
turns back on and against us in unrecognizable forms..."
(35)
Overinformed, it develops ingrowing obesity. For

everything which loses its scene (like the obese body)
becomes for that very reason ob-scene."
42. "The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism," in

Postmodernism. 44, emphasis added.
52
Despite the significance of Jameson's post-modernist
retooling of the source of the sublime, what he more
generally fails to stress sufficiently is the autonomy or
objectivity of technology that, I suggest, is necessarily
entailed by such a retooling. The cognitive breakdown
characterizing the classical and romantic sublime takes on
meaning within the space of the psyche; yet it does so
without altering the constitutional role of the psyche in
any significant manner. Once technology comes to drive the
sublime, however, the very capacity of the psyche to
recuperate from its breakdown - nothing less than the in
forming power of the imagination - finds itself irrevocably
impaired. Far from reinforcing the recuperative power of
the psyche, technology poses an entirely new form of
sublime threat: it threatens the literal disintegration of
the imagination. Correlative to this transformation, the
positive aesthetics of the traditional sublime gives way to
a negative aesthetics: no longer able to transform a
painful experience into something positive, the imagination
must look beyond representation in order to present its
experience. To begin to take stock of this transformation,
we must explore the specific nature of contemporary machine
power, which as Jameson stresses, leaves us literally
without a location in the global space that it nevertheless
produces; for in this way, it marks a decisive turning
point in the experience of alienation first theorized by
Marx. We can no longer circumscribe the alienation we
53
experience from some outside position: no theory -
including Jameson’s own model of "cognitive mapping" - can
successfully grasp the "impossible totality of the
contemporary world system." (38)
As these remarks indicate, I believe that this
experience of cognitive failure differs in an essential way
from that theorized by Burke and Kant - and also more
recently by Lyotard - as the sublime. In my opinion,
Jameson actually compromises the radical promise of his
insight by recurring to this tradition. No matter how
terrifying and painful the breakdown of the imagination,
the experience of the sublime - by definition - centers on
a (subsequent) moment of restoration: as Lyotard describes
it, "[a]rt, by distancing th[e] menace [of the sublime],
procures a pleasure of relief, of delight." "Thanks to
art," he continues, "the soul is returned to the agitated
zone between life and death, and this agitation is its
health and its life."43 On this model, it is only with
such a restoration of man's imaginative powers that the
experience becomes an aesthetic one. Like the
representational theory against which it agitates, the
aesthetic of the sublime actually requires an enabling act
of theorization: artistic production carries out a
theoretical labor by transforming a purely subjective
experience lacking any form into an objective and in-formed
43. Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Inhuman: Reflections on

Time, tr. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Stanford,
CA: Stanford UP, 1991), 100.
54
one.
It is, however, just such a possibility of form-giving
that is threatened by the synchronicity and absolute
proximity of global space. The theorization of the
technological sublime which Jameson proposes thus
contradicts his assumptions regarding the third machine
age.44 Like the dominant theories of representation in
high modernism, and specifically the apparatus-psyche
analogy, which it allegedly eclipses, Jameson's sublime
betrays a critical dependance on the psychic subject not
just as a registering agent for lived sense-data but as an
intra-psychic translator. Regardless of its source, the
sublime ultimately requires a reduction of Erlebnis to a
"figure"; what for Kant as well as for Lyotard is
originally a feeling of terror or of awe becomes an
aesthetic object capable of containing - and domesticating
44. For example, concluding his remarks on the sublime, he

advances the following hypothesis: "...I want to suggest
that our faulty representations of some immense
communicational and computer network are themselves but a
distorted figuration of something even deeper, namely, the
whole world system of a present-day multinational
capitalism. The technology of contemporary society is
therefore mesmerizing and fascinating not so much in its
own right but because it seems to offer some privileged
representational shorthand for grasping a network of power
and control even more difficult for our minds and
imaginations to grasp: the whole new decentered global
network of the third stage of capital itself. ...conspiracy
theory (and its garish narrative manifestations) must be
seen as a degraded attempt — through figuration of
advanced technology — to think the impossible totality of
the contemporary world system. It is in terms of that
enormous and threatening, yet only dimly perceptible, other
reality of economic and social institutions that, in my
opinion, the postmodern sublime can alone be adequately
theorized." (38)
55
- something that, at the level of sheer experience, remains
psychically intolerable.
V. Minor Romanticism: Sublime Parody
Despite the apparent dead-end of the technological
sublime in a retrograde formalism, the contemporary
critique of technology profits from Jameson's decision to
invoke aesthetic experience. He is the first to pose the
problem of technology in terms that are appropriate to its
molecular ontology; in this way, his contribution goes well
beyond the limited solution offered by his own theory of
the technological sublime (and its correlate, cognitive
mapping). If Jameson's example puts us in a position to
see why the heritage of Romantic sublime, with its
inextricable ties to the psychic subject, must be
abandoned, it is not due to any fashionable postmodern
insight. Much to the contrary, its far more important
consequence is to open our eyes to a different path out of
the Kantian indictment of the imagination - that path paved
by several minor Romantic figures on the Continent and in
England. The work of writers such as E.T.A. Hoffmann,
Heinrich von Kleist, and Mary Shelley, tackles the sticky
problem of cognitive failure in a far more mundane, if less
exuberant manner than that taken by the canonic Romantic
poets and theorists. The divergence of this path from the
Romantic moment constructed by literary history (and
reconstructed by de Manian deconstruction), especially in
56
respect to the problem of technology, is so extreme that I
shall argue below for its status as a "counter-tradition"
to Romanticism.
For the moment, however, a preview of what I take to
be the central scene of Shelley's novel Frankenstein will
illustrate the general significance of this divergence.
Viewed in the context of the struggle for identity waged by
Shelley against the more famous male figures in her life
(whose numbers include at least two great Romantic poets),
the scene depicting Victor Frankenstein's retreat from his
daily woes to the sublimity of the Mont Blanc - together
with the ensuing appearance of the monster - betrays a deft
critical handling of the poetics of the sublime, with a
particular vehemence directed against its championing of
the poetic faculty of apostrophe.
Let us follow the mounting self-transcendence of the
novel's protagonist to the point of its - interrupted -
crescendo. The relevant text begins by citing the
prototypical sublime effect - the experience of painful
pleasure. Victor Frankenstein reports his thoughts: "From
the side where I now stood Montanvert was exactly opposite,
at the distance of a league; and above it rose Mont Blanc,
in awful majesty. I remained in a recess of the rock,
gazing on this wonderful and stupendous scene." The
negativity of this feeling then gives way to a mounting
aesthetic revaluation: "My heart, which was before
sorrowful, now swelled with something like joy..." This
57
glimmer of joy soon builds to the point of inspiring a
textbook poetic apostrophe reminiscent of Percy Shelley's
canonic "Ode to the West Wind." Overcome with sublime
glory, Victor Frankenstein exclaims: "Wandering spirits, if
indeed ye wander, and do not rest in your narrow beds,
allow me this faint happiness, or take me, as your
companion, away from the joys of life."45 Anyone even
remotely familiar with Romantic aesthetics would expect the
episode to conclude with a successful poetic transcendence.
Yet Shelley's depiction - despite its echoes of Percy's
poem "On Mutability" - functions instead as a critical
devaluation of poetry; her purpose is not to celebrate the
aesthetic triumph of the sublime, but to parody it as an
irresponsible - and ultimately impotent - evasion of
everyday life.
Shelley stages this critique through recourse to a
dramatological motif: namely, the intrusion of the monster
from off-stage and the ensuing fracturing of the secured
space of the "scene." (Not incidently, this motif forms
the prototype for that particular juxtaposition of the
strange and the banal which has come to define the modern
genre of horror.) The terrifying but quite predictable
appearance of the monster at this point, as if in response
to Frankenstein's apostrophe, abruptly interrupts the
burgeoning mood of sublimity traced by Shelley's text: "As
45. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus.

1818 text, ed: James Rieger (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1974), 93.
58
I said this, I suddenly beheld the figure of a man, at some
distance, advancing towards me with superhuman speed...11
An "ontic" intrusion, an everyday concern, forcefully
asserts the priority of the real, recalling Frankenstein
from his transcendental narcosis. Far from producing a
ecstatic epiphany, the sublime here culminates in disaster,
both personal and social. Immediately, "rage and horror"
replace sublime joy, depriving Frankenstein of his voice -
the literal vehicle of apostrophe. Following this
prototypical fall from grace, things will never be the same
for him: his attempts to retreat from the everyday give way
to an increasing obsession with the monster, leading him
directly and inevitably toward death.
This exemplary parody of the sublime stresses the
irreducible drive of everyday reality and the corresponding
practical injunction to us that we deal directly with
displeasure. It urges us to abandon the molar model of the
sublime in favor of a molecular aesthetics - an aesthetics
that treats feeling, negative or positive, directly and in
its immediacy, without the comforting distance of
representation. Such a model of aesthetics finds its best
description - unintentionally to be sure - in Freud's text,
"The Uncanny."
V I . The Uncanny
Freud begins his text with a brief excursus on
aesthetics, which he takes in its broad Greek sense as the
59
theory of feeling. The psycho-analyst, Freud reveals,
"rarely feels impelled" to stray into a domain like
aesthetics; when he does, it is to shed light on "remote
regions" that have been "neglected in standard works." In
this case, Freud immediately tells his readers, it is an
impulse of precisely this nature that drives his own
interest. Aesthetics, Freud maintains, has traditionally
ignored what he considers a significant experiential domain
by passing over and/or transvaluing feelings of a
"negative" nature:
The subject of the "uncanny" is a [neglected] province of

this kind. It undoubtedly belongs to all that is terrible
to all that arouses dread and creeping horror... As
good as nothing is to be found upon this subject in
elaborate treatises on aesthetics, which in general prefer
to concern themselves with what is beautiful, attractive
and sublime, that is with feelings of a positive nature,
with the circumstances and the objects that call them
forth- rather than with the opposite feelings of
unpleasantness and repulsion. ®
If Freud's earlier forays into the domain of literature
served a restricted psychoanalytic function of furnishing
exemplary material for the study of character, this article
marks the beginning of something different. In it Freud
turns to aesthetics - at least initially - not simply as a
source of material, but for structural reasons: the
aesthetic feeling of the uncanny opens a new domain of
experience for human exploration.
We know that Freud's analysis quickly becomes
46. Sigmund Freud, "The Uncanny," tr. Alix Strachey, in On

Creativity and the Unconscious (New York: Harper and Row,
1958), 122-123, emphasis added.
entangled in a repetition of the same; he goes on to found
the uncanny in archaic experience, and to "castrate"
Hoffmann's story "The Sandman."47 Still, I think we can
glimpse a fleeting suspicion on Freud's part that something
else is at stake here. His invocation of aesthetics
suspends for a brief instant the machinations of his
dogmatic model, leaving behind a faint trace of a radical
possibility. For if the uncanny appears to mark a change
in the essence of human experience (in a manner similar to
Rank's account of the cinema), it would seem presumptuous
and downright dogmatic to restrict it to the domain of a
preestablished, ahistorical, backward-oriented theory. As
an index of modern human life, the uncanny testifies
forcefully for the priority of everyday molecular
experience over archaic forces, and thus inverts the
classical Freudian schema (even as it is reproduced in "The
Uncanny" itself).
I find the fictional and factual evidence of an
historical reciprocity between technology and the uncanny
so arresting that I believe we must develop the
implications of Freud's brief hesitation to their fullest
potential. That the aesthetic category of the uncanny
emerges simultaneously with the industrial revolution finds
ample proof in the Gothic tradition and in Marx's recourse
47. See Helene Cixous, Fiction and Its Phantoms: A Reading

of Freud's Das Unheimliche (The "Uncanny"), New Literary
History 7 (1976), 525-48 (tr. from "La Fiction et ses
fantomes," Poetique 10 [1972], 199-216.).
to vampire metaphors.4® What has not received attention,
however, is the potential critical function of this
category with regard to the traditional history of science
(and the often implicit priority within it of thought,
narration, and textualization): not only does the uncanny
indicate an ahistorical subjective affect as Freud's
archaizing reading suggests; it also gives "objective"
expression to the impact of machine automation on human
experience beyond the point at which it can be thematized
by means of traditional phenomenologico-scientific
categories. Thus, I assert that if Freud's contribution to
aesthetics is more than another reduction to the same, it
has a larger function even than that of responding to
critical objections against his crude hermeneutics: it
provides a corrective to the limitation of contemporary
representational theory as it concerns the issue of
technology.
The analysis of this corrective requires a critical
reading of Freud's article. In particular, it is necessary
to challenge Freud's polemic against the thesis of the
psychologist Jentsch, which holds the uncanny to be an
experience of "intellectual uncertainty" resulting from
"doubts whether an apparently animate being is really
alive; or ... whether a lifeless object might not be in
48. For an excellent account of the relation between horror

and the industrial revolution, see Chris Baldick, In
Frankenstein's Shadow (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987) .
Baldick has a chapter devoted to Marx's rhetoric.
62
fact animate."49 Such doubt, Jentsch emphasizes, becomes
prevalent in the wake of certain technological inventions
which prefigure those of our contemporary age: "wax-work
figures, artificial dolls and automatons." In the light of
my thesis correlating representational hermeneutics with
the reduction of technology, it is hardly surprising to
find Freud militating with all his force against any
assertion of the primacy of technology over thought. To
salvage Freud's radical insight in "The Uncanny" we must
repose the question of technology at its point of emergence
in modernity; against molar and representational schemes of
interpretation, which rely in some way or other on a
movement of transcendence (and thus privilege some figure
"in retreat"), we must explore the correlation between
technology and the uncanny with particular regard to its
immanence in everyday ontic life.
My contribution thus takes up the interrogation of
Freudian hermeneutics already advanced in contemporary
cultural theory. While literary critics and psychoanalysts
have long rebuked Freud for his ignorance of structural
aspects of fictional language, I believe that "The Uncanny"
exposes a different, more significant, limitation - one
that applies in a general sense in the case of contemporary
hermeneutics as such. For what Freud's turn to aesthetics
demarcates in the most striking manner is the irreducible
49. Freud quoting Jentsch's article "Zur Psychologie des

Unheimlichen" (Psychiatrische-Neurologische Wochenschrift,
1906, Nos. 22, 23); "The Uncanny," 132.
63
reliance of representational theory on a phenomenological
reduction or epoche which brackets more than just
existence.50 Together, deconstruction, Lacanian
psychoanalysis, and sublime aesthetics share with
traditional Freudian hermeneutics an enabling reduction of
material exteriority as such: simply in order to enter the
field of thought (the Husserlian noema), spatial experience
in the exterior world must undergo a revaluating
translation into the language of an interior psychic
space.51 (The apparatus-psyche analogy discussed above
constitutes perhaps the most forceful version of this
reduction within contemporary technology studies.)
My reading thus departs from the terrain made familiar
in the relatively recent Derrida-Lacan debate surrounding
Poe's story "The Purloined Letter."52 In order to critique
50. For a description of the epoche, see Edmund Husserl,

Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology. tr. W.
R. Boyce Gibson (New York: Collier Books, 1962), Chapter 6.
51. If each of these three theories also carries out a

critique of classical phenomenology, which serves mutatis
mutandis to question the latter's possibility for closure,
the "exteriority" which they indicate remains rooted in the
space of a psyche (text, fantasy construction, or aesthetic
object), as a "negative" truth (what cannot be represented
as such). In this sense, though they each problematize the
noesis-noema correlation of Husserlian phenomenology, the
exterior or material element they circumscribe (hyle) is
itself subordinated to the space of the phenomenological
reduction — simply as what resists the correlation. It is
in no way radically exterior, which means that this shared
critique of phenomenology does not effectively lead us out
of the representational (noematic) space secured by the
phenomenological reduction.
52. For the text of Lacan's "Seminar on the Purloined

Letter" and an excerpt of Derrida's "The Purveyor of Truth"
(printed in full in The Postcard), as well as useful
Freud's reduction of language, both Derrida and Lacan
concentrate on demonstrating the excess of fiction over the
theoretical interpretations churned out by Freud's
hermeneutic programme. This critique shows how Freud's
theory must castrate the disseminatory and/or structural
dimensions of literary narrative, concluding that his
alleged scientific conclusions rest on an illegitimate -
but nonetheless (given the phenomenological assumptions of
representational theory) unavoidable - framing of
literature.53 Despite the significant issues separating
them, both critics find themselves united in a common
critique of the psychoanalytic model of reading elaborated
in Freud's early texts on literary characters.54
Regardless of Freud's contribution to literary history and
literature's contribution to psychoanalytic theory, Freud
is judged a naive reader. His failure to take into account
the fictionality of literary characters, both Lacan and
Derrida argue, compromises the scope of his theoretical
background material, including parts of Bonaparte's book

and some useful secondary works, see The Purloined Po e , ed.
John P. Muller and William J. Richardson (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins UP, 1988).
53. For a critical reading of Derrida's reading of Lacan,

see Barbara Johnson, "The Frame of Reference: Poe, Lacan,
Derrida," reprinted in The Purloined Poe. 213-251. Besides
clarifying many of the differences between the texts of
Derrida and Lacan, Johnson provokingly demonstrates how
Derrida falls victim to many of the "reductions" he accuses
Lacan of committing. In this way, Johnson's reading tends
to collapse the two readings in a manner that I believe
helps to support the thesis I am advancing here.
54. For example, his article "Some Psychopathic Characters

on the Stage" and his Hamlet reading in Interpretation of
Dreams.
claims - blinding him to the structural relations of the
unconscious (Lacan) and/or to the disseminatory
supplementarity of the symbolic substitution allegedly
guaranteed by castration (Derrida). Both criticisms thus
expose Freud in the process of performing a reduction of
the text: only by deriving representation, directly and
without remainder, from a univocal source can he achieve
the scientific clarity that is his foremost concern.
By contrast, the reduction that concerns me stems from
the distance separating immediate lived experience from any
interpretative recuperation whatsoever (whether literary or
theoretical). Since such recuperation can only take place
in a subsequent moment, through the deferring distance of
representation, or as Freud says, nachtraeglich, it remains
structurally distant from Erlehnis. The point is not
simply to bemoan thought's distorting belatedness in yet
another postmodern form, but rather to grasp clearly the
fact that the reduction of technology spans a space larger
than that of the psyche in any its forms: a rhizomatic
space stretching from the psychic domain of language
outward to fundamentally non-linguistic and immediate lived
experience. With regard to technology, the space in which
the reduction operates cannot be restricted (as virtually
all of Freud's interpreters seem to maintain55) to the
55. The notable exceptions here are Deleuze and Guattari

and Lyotard. See The Anti-Oedipus and "Beyond
Representation," in The Lyotard Reader (London and New
York: Blackwell, 1989), 155-168.
66
space conjoining restricted and general linguistic
economies,556 the presentable and the unpresentable,5^ or
the representational field and the impossible traumatic
object.58 Because each of these latter schemas retains the
space of representation as the site (and agent) of analysis
(even if it has been fragmented, split, or shattered), they
one and all define a reduction that, no differently than
Freud's psychoanalytic hermeneutics, remains restricted
with relation to a larger reduction of technology. They
are thus incapable - for structural reasons - of grasping
technology's full impact.
As the aesthetic experience of all that is "unpleasant
and repulsive," the uncanny demarcates itself from these
schemas in two decisive ways. On the one hand, it
presupposes no activity of translation that would revalue a
quantity of (molecular) affect as a (molar) qualitative
feeling. And, correlatively, it takes place - and obtains
significance as an immediate and real expression of
experience - within the space underlying everyday
experience, a non-constituted space more basic than all
subsequent spatial constructions within the frame of
56. See Derrida, "From Restricted to General Economy: A

Hegelianism without Reserve" and "Freud and the Scene of
Writing" in Writing and Difference.
57. See Lyotard, "Representation, Presentation,

Unpresentable, in The Inhuman. and Lyotard, "The Sublime
and the Avant-garde, in The Lvotard Reader. ed. Andrew
Benjamin (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1989), 196-211.
58. See Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts. and Zizek,

The Sublime Object of Ideology.
67
representation. In short: "events" that we judge uncanny
immediately embody the pre-perceptual impact of technology
on our lived experience.
VII. The Mirror-Stage of the Uncanny is not Primitive
Let me clarify this assertion with an example from
Freud's own everyday experience. In one of his significant
footnotes to "The Uncanny," Freud describes the following
experience of "suddenly and unexpectedly meeting [his] own
image":
I was sitting alone in my wagon-lit compartment when a more

than usually violent jerk of the train swung back the door
of the adjoining washing-cabinet, and an elderly gentleman
in a dressing-gown and a travelling cap came in. I assumed
that he had been about to leave the washing-cabinet which
divides the two compartments, and had taken the wrong
direction and come into my compartment by mistake. Jumping
up with the intention of putting him right, I at once
realized to my dismay that the intruder was nothing but my
own reflection in the looking-glass of the open door. (156,
emphasis added)
Freud's analysis of this experience shows him in the
process of performing yet another reduction of literature.
Dissociating his own purportedly perceptual mistake from
the fictional theme of the double (where, as he maintains
in the article, the laws of reality forbidding fantastic
occurrences are suspended), Freud insists that his reaction
was not terror but rather animosity: "I can still recollect
that I thoroughly disliked his appearance." While he
retains the possibility that his reaction might betoken a
"vestigial trace" of an older, animist reaction, he
nevertheless closes the book on the uncanny with the
reassuring conclusion that, unlike the countless heros
populating the Romantic imagination, he simply obeyed the
dictates of the reality principle in failing to recognize
his double as such.
Such a conclusion, however, hardly captures the full
significance of the experience it interprets. And its
correction - more importantly - does not entail a purely
literary critique along the lines suggested by the various
deconstructive readings focussing on Freud's lack of
sensitivity to fictionality. It is not fictionality as
such that Freud's account overlooks but rather an important
dimension of his experience - a dimension ungraspable
through representation (whether fictional or otherwise) and
one moreover that takes on a critical function when
juxtaposed with classical phenomenology. By characterizing
his realization of the intruder's true identity with the
temporal adverb "at once" [bald], Freud effaces the
temporal delay separating the protentional-retentional
phase of his (perceptual) judgement from the pre-perceptual
punctual instant of the "event" itself. The experience of
the punctual living present - an experience lacking all
form (and thus without meaning) - is automatically recast
within the time of (perceptual) judgement. With its
function as organizer of experience, the latter
phenomenological time supervenes upon lived experience,
capturing and domesticating its anarchy within the
phenomenological space of representation.
69
In contrast to these explicit conclusions, the actual
letter of Freud's text seems to question just such a
supervenience, along with the phenomenological priority of
perception/representation it supports. On the one hand,
Freud's reasoning process is shown to be circular and self-
validating: the animosity which his reaction substitutes
for uncanny terror seems on the contrary to stem from a
thoroughly mundane quirk of his mood - a mood that pre
exists and helps to shape his reaction, rather than
emerging as its consequence. As the passage cited above
shows, Freud explicitly admits to a feeling that
contaminates the entire episode: namely, a predilection to
put the intruder right. One must therefore wonder whether
the faint trace of an animist reaction that he discovers in
his own experience (whose claims in favor of the
"objectivity" as well as the archaic nature of the uncanny
can hardly be said to be universal) might not instead - and
more plausibly - be due simply to his own personal
pathology.
Such an influence of personal pathology or subjective
predisposition applies still more broadly to the macro
structure of Freud's entire interpretation, as we can see
in testing his account of a shared human situation against
our own personal experiences. We can use our own uncanny
encounters, I suggest, to counter Freud's neat, totalizing
conclusions. If, in our own experience, we find that a
flash of terror is a far more common reaction than a
Freudian rationalization, don't we thereby accumulate the
evidence to rebuke Freud with charges of reductionism?
Mustn't we conclude that his interpretation fails entirely
to grasp a certain dimension of contemporary experience:
the uncanny experience of shock that shoots through our
bodies prior to any reflective/perceptual judgement? As we
shall see, Freud's bias against technology blinds him to
its increasing transformation of our experience, a
transformation that the uncanny encounter - despite Freud's
attempt to restrict it to a role as representative for an
archaic fear - immediately indexes or embodies, beyond the
frame of representation.
In relation to Freud's double hypothesis concerning
the archaic "origin" of the uncanny (the uncanny, he
asserts, stems either from an animism that is not totally
surmounted or from repressed complexes), what is important
to stress is the enabling role played by his reductive
conclusions. The significance of the uncanny can be
restricted to a representational frame and its function
contained within a preconstituted psychic space only on the
basis of the reduction to which Freud subjects his own
experience. By immediately translating the molecular shock
occasioned by his unexpected self-encounter into the
descriptive domain defined by perception, Freud insures the
effacement of any ontic excess that would not lend support
to his archaizing interpretation. As a result, the
potential of uncanny experience to overflow any
71
phenomenologico-representational framing is compromised

from the start.
Once liberated from the reductive interpretation Freud
imposes, this encounter can serve as a prototype for a
technologically-attuned model of aesthetic experience - one
that would stand in the starkest contrast with all models
of the phenomenological sort. The uncanny self-encounter
comprises a counterpart to the empirical primal scene of
Husserlian intersubjectivity. If the latter depends on a
privileged experience of self-perception, which gives a
basis or foundation for the subsequent phenomenological
constitution of the world, the former marks a category in
which self and world are experienced simultaneously in a
pre-reflective, pre-perceptual moment of punctual lived
presence "older than" than any moment of self-perception
(or self-presence). As against the predominantly
representational or descriptive function of
phenomenological constitution, the aesthetic of the uncanny
addresses the production of the punctual present - life
prior to any presentation, representation, constitution,
etc.
In the Fifth Cartesian Meditation. Husserl describes
the transcendental ego's initial confrontation with the
image of the other in the following terms:
...another man enters our perceptual sphere. Primordially

reduced, that signifies: In the perceptual sphere
pertaining to my primordial Nature, a body is presented,
which, as primordial, is of course only a determining part
of myself: an "immanent transcendency." Since in this
Nature and this world, my animate organism is the only body
72
that is or can be constituted originally as an animate

organism (a functioning organ), the body over there, which
is nevertheless apprehended as an animate organism, must
have derived this sense by an apperceptive transfer from my
animate organism, and done so in a manner that excludes an
actually direct, and hence primordial, showing of the
predicates belonging to an animate organism specifically, a
showing of them in perception proper. 9
This crucial passage from Husserl's final effort at
introducing transcendental phenomenology indicates how
phenomenology is compelled to derive the noematic content
(the "sense" or "meaning") of the other from the
transcendental ego's own self-perception. The
"apperception" - or "analogizing apprehension" - of the
other is clearly founded on (and thus of secondary or
derived status with respect to) an originary presentation
of the self, a moment of pure self-presence.60 What I
would like to consider is the similarity between this
limitation of phenomenology and the bias of Freudian
theory. Despite Freud's significant divergence from
Husserl, it seems undeniable to me that a similar privilege
is at stake in both cases. Isn't it the priority of self-
perception (over external experience) - precisely the
59. Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction

to Phenomenology. tr. Dorian Cairns (The Hague: Martinus
Nijhoff, 1960), 110-111, emphasis added. For a helpful
account of Husserl's Fifth Meditation, see Paul Ricoeur,
Husserl: An Analysis of his Phenomenology. tr. Edward G.
Ballard and Lester E. Embree (Evanston, IL: Northwestern
University Press, 1967), Chapter 5.
60. In relation to this schema, Derrida's critique of

Husserl merely applies the intrusion of analogy
characteristic of the "apperception" of the other to self
perception. Regardless of this critical adjustment, the
priority of perception as the category for noematic
constitution remains untouched.
73
priority that defines phenomenology in all its forms - that
Freud's archaizing interpretation aims to protect?
Regardless of Freud's intentions here, the experience
that he recounts (and uncanny experience as such) emerges
in its deeper incompatibility with the reduction of
exteriority presupposed by phenomenology once we cast aside
the "veil" of Freudian hermeneutics. The uncanny occurs
precisely at the punctual instant in which the real happens
- before any mediation through the perceptual apparatus.
It is the experience of the happening of the reall The
uncanny "freezes" naked lived experience - the "tiny spark
of chance, of the here and now"61 - not as an image but as
pure "affect." It does not mime or reproduce the
happening, but coincides with it as the state of becoming:
in a way that is direct and material, it embodies the
alignment of real forces that converge to produce the
event. In this sense, it explodes the primacy of
perception-representation constitutive of phenomenology
from Husserl to Derrida.62
VIII. Becoming-Technological
Uncanny experience is thus identical with a kind of
61. The phrase is from Benjamin's "A Short History of

Photography, 7.
62. Affect is developed as an important categorical

alternative to "feeling" in Lyotard's reading of Freud,
particularly the Anna 0. case. It also serves a crucial
conceptual function in Deleuze and Guattari's account of
"becoming-animal" in A Thousand Plateaus.
74
Deleuzo-Guattarian "becoming": a becoming-technological.63
Just as in the case of a becoming-animal (for example
Kafka's "Metamorphosis"), what is at stake here is not a
mimesis: one does not become like an animal or like a
technological artifact. Rather, as Deleuze and Guattari
stress, one takes on the relations of speed and affect that
characterize the latter. What is at stake is a real
becoming, and not simply a metaphor:
This is not an analogy, or a product of the imagination,

but a composition of speeds and affects on the plane of
consistency: a plan(e), a program, or rather a diagram, a
problem, a question-machine. Vladimir Slepian formulates
the "problem" in a thoroughly curious text: I'm hungry,
always hungry, a man should not be hungry, so I'll have to
become a dog — but how? This will not involve imitating a
dog, nor an analogy of relations. I must succeed in
endowing the parts of my body with relations of speed and
slowness that will make it become dog, in an original
assemblage proceeding neither by resemblance nor by
analogy. (258)
Freud, of course, remains blind to any such molecular
transformation, and not simply for subjective reasons. It
would be no exaggeration to contend that psychoanalytic
theory - with its structural reliance on the primal
function of representation - is quite simply compelled to
obstruct the very possibility of such a transformation.
Against Freud's tendency to reduce the uncanny, we
must reinterpret it in a manner that brings to light its
fundamental status as a becoming. It is only as a becoming
- and not as a static index of archaic material - that the
63. With the difference that it produces the possibility of

experience in a technological world and thus retains a
certain privilege. See below, Chapter 8.
75
uncanny achieves its full potential as a technologically-
attuned model of aesthetic experience: its potential to
embody the "happening” of the living present. (Not
incidentally, it is precisely such an insight that
motivates Benjamin's celebration of the shock-aesthetic of
film.)
Against Freud, therefore, we must demonstrate how a
becoming-technological structures the very happening of his
uncanny encounter. We will have to restructure his account
in order to do so. Where he sees an originary perception
(whether in the event or the archaic residue it
reproduces), we must delve deeper in order to see how he
might have given himself over to a molecular
transformation. Imagine for a moment that instead of
immediately offering his reflective rationalization in
place of the punctual experience, Freud enters into a
specific connection with the assemblage underlying his
self-encounter - an assemblage that is at least in part
technical (it includes the specific technologies of the
mirror and train travel). Such a connection would be
characterized by its total lack of any transcendence: the
connection binding Freud to the assemblage would
reconfigure his molecular makeup as much as it would that
of the assemblage.
In the instant of the happening of the real, Freud
would take on the "speeds and affects" of the train-mirror
assemblage, allowing himself to be shot through by valences
of a technological connection that are purely immanent to
the particular becoming. (As a result, his psyche -
normally the transcendent agent of psychoanalytic
theorizing - would be reduced to the role of one functional
part among others in a larger assemblage produced by the
mutual becoming ensuing between "Freud" and the technical
assemblage.) As such a becoming-technological, Freud's
experience would not represent. It would neither
constitute a metaphor for some external technological
reality, nor express the limitations imposed on
representation by such reality. On the contrary: as
"affect," "which relate[s] only to the moving body in
itself, to speeds and compositions of speed among
elements,"64 it would immediately embody technology!
In light of my argument here, what is especially
important about such a mutual transformation is its
resistance to any hermeneutic strategy: it requires the
reciprocal becoming of at least two interconnected
entities, neither of which retain their original status.
The connection can only be gauged through an immanent
analysis, for which there is no external point of stability
or transcendental signifier. I cannot become a dog without
un-becoming myself and - as Deleuze-Guattari emphasize - "I
cannot become a dog without the dog itself becoming
something else." Technology no longer plays the reduced
role of a support or mediator of human representation, but
64. A Thousand Plateaus. 400.
77
rather enters directly into the "objective content" of
experience.
As the affective becoming that precedes thought,
therefore, the uncanny encounter is the fundamental
category of a model of aesthetic experience and reflects
the specific status of technology within the lifeworld.
Unlike "feeling," which is "an always displaced, retarded,
resisting emotion," affect is "active discharge" whose
immediacy is appropriate (and necessary) to embody the
technologically mediated self-encounter that has become
prevalent with the modernist "society of spectacle" and the
postmodern "obscene" and that defines the contemporary
subject as a function of an historically-determined
interface binding the human and the technological. Thus,
the function of the uncanny isn't purely formal, as the
various phenomenological schemas discussed would perhaps
maintain: it doesn't just function to punctuate or "to
caesura"65 the temporal synthesis constitutive of the
phenomenological ego or transcendental imagination (or
text). Far more important is its material function: the
way in which it embodies the determinate content of the
presynthesized punctual instant beyond any subjective
65. The notion of the "caesura" is formulated by Hoelderlin

in order to describe the division of force between the two
movements comprising Greek tragedy. See "Remarks on
Antigone" and "Remarks on Oedipus" (planned as the
introductions to his translations of the respective plays).
See also Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, "The Caesura of the
Speculative" in Typographies. ed. Christopher Fynsk (New
York: Columbia UP, 1989).
(hermeneutic) economy. As an instantaneous becoming-
technological, the uncanny directly embodies the
immediately and irreducibly technological "objective
content" of lived experience.
PART I
THE MACHINE METAPHOR
79
CHAPTER 1
FIRE GIVEN OVER TO CHANCE: TOWARDS A LIBERATION OF MACHINIC

AUTOMATISM
We have just seen how the uncanny constitutes an
aesthetic category capable of grasping technology's impact
on human experience. The uncanny, we have claimed, stems
immediately from the technologically-determined production
of the "real": it does not "translate" but instead directly
embodies technology's impact. The uncanny puts us in a
immediate relation with technology that bypasses
representation all together.
As I have noted above, the uncanny arises as an
experiential category at about the time of the industrial
revolution. In this chapter, I shall develop an account of
the peculiar "a-causal causality" linking such an
historical and material revolution with the change in our
way of experiencing the world that it appears to bring
about. As an immediate embodiment of technological impact
on experience, the uncanny is caused by technology, but in
a sense of cause for which there is no calculus (and thus
no account). The "exteriority" of the uncanny with respect
to the traditional identification of representation and
thought that we observed in the Introduction testifies to a
larger exteriority: the exteriority of the real impact of
technology in relation to the explanatory categories we use
to account for it (and, more generally still, of material
reality with respect to thought). I shall develop this
80
81
exteriority in relation to the notion of efficient cause;
with the evolution of what one recent critic terms
"dynamical technology" - a machine power source, such as
the steam engine - technology sheds its mechanist ontology
and becomes a causal force whose real material efficiency
exceeds any possible conceptualization according to the
philosophico-scientific doctrine of causality (the
principle of reason).1
In the experience of the uncanny, we encounter the
"effects" of such a causal force: following the industrial
revolution, an entire molecular realm of lived experience -
a realm that is specifically and directly technological -
finds an aesthetic correlate whose function is to assert
its "existence" below the threshold of perception. What is
more, this new found gate of access to the molecular
domain, with its irreducibly technological content,
breaches the alleged "closure of representation" in a
definitive manner. Once we no longer consider it essential
to the very notion of the event, of presence, etc.,
representation takes its proper place as one form of
productive activity among others within a domain larger
than any constituted space - the domain of the real. The
reign of the "closure of representation" becomes
historicized around the central issue of machine
technology; rather than constituting an activity necessary
1. J. David Bolter, Turing's Man: Western Culture in the

Computer Age (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina
Press, 1984), 30.
82
to generate reality, it is revealed to be one form of
thought's attempted domination of the real. And a
fundamental fact about technology is also revealed:
precisely because it opposes the representational
reduction, the experiential role of the aesthetic category
of the uncanny reveals that technology impacts production
directly, prior to and outside of any representational
mediation.
Given technology's exteriority in relation to all
"figures" of thought, a legitimate account of the "causal"
relation between technology and uncanny experience must
itself avoid the reduction that is entailed when thought is
given primacy over production. It is for this reason that
I call it an "a-causal causality": perverting the
distinction Derrida employs to discuss Bataille's thought,
we can describe our imperative as the task of liberating a
"generalized" causality from a restricted causality, or in
other words, of treating causes as real forces
independently of and prior to their function as explanatory
devices. Reformulated m such terms, the uncanny becomes
the focal point of a critique that extends well beyond the
narrow confines of the representation model as it has been
defined and employed in recent criticism. The uncanny,
that is to say, underlies a general critique of what is
2. See Derrida, "From a 'Restricted' to a 'General'

Economy: Hegelianism without Reserve," in Writing and
Difference, tr. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1982).
83
perhaps the leitmotif of Western metaphysics: the so-called
"principle of reason." Initially given explicit
formulation by Leibniz, this principle states quite simply
that "nothing is [or exists] without a reason." In
addition to indicating the specific significance of the
problem of technology with respect to traditional
epistemology, the uncanny functions as a kind of
symptomatic indicator of the historical evolution of a
revenge of the real against the fundamental idealism of
Western metaphysics which, through the principle of reason,
asserts the priority of representation over production.
Because it testifies to the existence of (causal) molecular
forces that are below the threshold of perception, and thus
impervious to capture via representation, the uncanny
breaches the logic of the principle of reason, the logic
that reduces the efficient cause of any event to something
that can be thought - to a "reason" in the sense of ratio.3
3. The modern formulation of the principle of reason can be

found in Leibniz: "There is nothing without reason [Nihil
est sin ratio]." See for example, "On Freedom and
Possibility," in Leibniz, Philosophical Essays. tr. Roger
Ariew and Andrew Garber (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1989),
where the principle is glossed as follows: "there is no
proposition in which there is no connection between the
subject and the predicate, that is, no proposition that
cannot be proved a priori." (19) Heidegger discusses
Leibniz' contribution and the role of the principle of
reason in metaphysics in Per Satz vom Grund (Pfullingen:
Neske, 1957). See also Heidegger's 1928 lecture course,
Anfancrsaruende der Loaik. Gesamtausgabe 26 (Frankfurt:
Klostermann, 1978); and Derrida's essay, "Les pupilles de
1'Universite. Le principe de raison et l'idee de
l'Universite," in Du droit a la philosophie (Paris:
Editions Galilee, 1990). Descartes seems to share in the
reduction of causality to thought when he invokes the
natural light of reason in Meditation 3: "Now it is
84
The uncanny, in other words, asserts the existence of
something which is "without reason," or in contemporary
terms, without representation, unrepresentable.
I. Tuche and Automaton
Because of the profound historical correlation linking
it with the emergence of machine technology, the uncanny
can be held up as an exemplary form of experience in the
modern world. For reasons essentially bound up with its
technical "essence," uncanny experience resists the sway of
the principle of reason as a tribunal for practical
experience in a manner unprecedented in history up to the
industrial revolution. It thus provides an angle from
which we can reexamine the age-old interdependence between
the philosophical reduction of technology and the principle
of reason. The molecular or technical uncanny introduces a
domain of experience that simply cannot find representation
on the philosophical account. Its ever increasing presence
in our technological world calls for an alternative to the
model that has governed our approach to technology for two
millennia: Aristotle's analysis of chance.
manifest by the natural light that there must be at least

as much <reality> in the efficient and total cause as in
the effect of that cause." (Philosophical Writings. vol.
II, tr. John Cottingham et. al. [Cambridge: Cambridge UP,
1984], 28) Despite Descartes' purpose here — to prove the
necessity of the existence of God (as the efficient cause
["formal reality"] of the idea of an infinite being) — it
remains the case that thought (i.e., the "objective
reality" of ideas) possesses a certain priority over formal
reality or external reality, and that there exists nothing
that is not and cannot in principle be presented as an
idea.
In chapter 6 of Physics II, Aristotle broaches the
question whether chance (tuche) comprises a fifth kind of
causality (alongside the material, formal, efficient and
final causes), or if it can simply be explained on the
basis of his famous doctrine of the four causes. Looking
at Aristotle's text with contemporary concerns at heart, we
can see that his question addresses nothing if not the
relation linking technology and the principle of reason.
Where today we could hardly avoid invoking technology in
speaking of a purely machinic (i.e., non-intentional)
factor, Aristotle speaks of a particular kind of chance -
to automaton, the "automatic" - and restricts himself to
examples from the natural world, examples in which events
apparently take place "contrary to nature" (para physin).
At the most general level, Aristotle's text poses the
question whether technologically-produced events (automatic
outcomes) can in fact be accounted for, i.e., represented,
at all. Not only is the possibility that they may require
the addition of a fifth category of cause detrimental to
the explanatory force of the fourfold doctrine, but it
violates the priority of mind over matter that constitutes
the metaphysical foundation of Aristotleanism. In
rereading Aristotle's account of chance, I shall indicate
two specific points where it bears significantly on the
contemporary issue of technology. On the one hand, I shall
lay bare Aristotle's vital role as the inaugurator of the
philosophical reduction of technology. Taken at its word
86
(and through its reception in the history of philosophy),
Aristotle's doctrine forms the prototype for a
subordinating-translation of technological exteriority into
the domain of (constitutive) thought. By resisting this
illegitimate metalepsis (taking of effect for cause), I
shall then attempt to revalue and to redeploy Aristotle's
account of technologically produced chance (the
"automatic”) beyond the bounds of his "nouocentric" (or
"noeticocentric") conclusions. Reading Aristotle against
the grain of his own dogmatism, we can discover a potential
but repressed foundation for a model of technology more
appropriate not only to our experience of modernity, but to
everyday experience in Aristotle's world as well.
The crux of my rereading of Aristotle involves the
introduction of a distinction - of material reality ("real"
causes in the natural world) from explanatory reality
(causes as artifacts of human thought) - that quite simply
does not exist for the Greeks.^ Immediately after raising
the above mentioned question regarding the status of
chance, Aristotle proceeds to demonstrate its subordination
4. Even on a recent reading of Aristotle's doctrine as a

theory of explanation, causes cannot be viewed exclusively
as epistemological and/or subjective entities (as they are
on a Kantian argument), since for Aristotle there is a
fundamental realist correlation between thought and the
(essentially intelligible) structure of the world.
Aristotle's claim about causality is much stronger than
those made in the wake of Kant: like the "categories" which
they connect in action, causes are at once material and
ideal. They determine the condition of possibility not
only for thought about causal connections, but for those
connections themselves.
to the fourfold doctrine: "luck and the automatic," he
asserts, "are reckoned as causes" (and specifically as
efficient causes, "sources of change"). By domesticating
the particular kind of technical or machinic exteriority of
chance (the "automatic," to automaton) within his doctrine
of the four causes, Aristotle imposes a matrix of finality
(which characterizes nature and thought but not the real in
its entirety) on an efficient cause (or better on an
efficiency) that is, as Heidegger would say, "without why."
Nevertheless, in addressing the automatic as a domain of
chance deserving of its own treatment (separate from
"luck"), Aristotle stresses the non-intentional aspect of
the automatic - precisely that aspect of an event which, in
today's terms, would constitute its materiality. Thus, in
the very process of constraining the automatic to his
fourfold doctrine, Aristotle also seems to suggest that
this part of chance exceeds or at least threatens to exceed
the descriptive space of his (and of any) explanatory
theory.
This apparent contradiction in Aristotle's doctrine,
which surfaces only with the modern separation of matter
from thought, does however have an analogue in Aristotle's
text. For Aristotle begins his account of chance by
stressing the distinction between two types of chance -
luck and the automatic - only to assimilate them in the
end, as one and the same, "posterior to both mind and
nature." (198a) Let us follow this progression in more
88
detail.
Aristotle initially distinguishes "chance" (tuche) as
a topic in need of analysis precisely because it comprises
events that fail to fall within the normal range of causal
explanation - events that fail to betray strict necessity
and/or regularity. Such occurrences, he tells us, are
those we ordinarily ascribe to "luck" (meaning precisely
that which lacks necessity and/or regularity). They can be
divided into two categories: those due to "luck" in a more
narrow sense (tuche) and those due to the "automatic"
(automaton). "But since," Aristotle argues, "there are
other things which come to be besides these ["that which is
of necessity and always" and "that which is for the most
part"], and all men say they are the outcome of luck,
plainly there is such a thing as luck and the automatic..."
(197b)5 Where today we tend to describe all chance events
with the concept of luck, in Aristotle's usage luck (in the
narrow sense) applies to a restricted domain of events:
those effected by an agent "capable of choosing." The
automatic, on the other hand, even though it has - for us
- a narrower application than luck, applies in far more
cases, extending, Aristotle says, "to the animals other
than man and to ... inanimate objects."
Aristotle gives two accounts of the difference, both
of which help to emphasize what is at stake in this crucial
5. A New Aristotle Reader. ed. J.L. Ackrill, tr. W.

Charlton (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1987, 102).
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited w ithout permission.
distinction. First, he argues that outcomes due to luck
and those that are automatic are "for something" (or, in
other words, have a "final cause") in different ways: the
former are "for something" in a sense that could be
determined by their agent (i.e., according to the category
of thought), while the latter are "for something" in a
sense that cannot be so determined, that remains - in
itself - indeterminate. While it makes sense to speak of
luck in respect to a human agent - who can, for example, go
to a conference to hear a paper and run into an old friend
"by chance" - it makes no sense to do so when the "agent"
in question is an inanimate object. In short: it is
meaningful to relate the "lucky" outcome to the intentions
of a human agent, despite the fact that the outcome is "by
concurrence." Aristotle concludes that "luck and its
outcome belong only to things which can be lucky and in
general engage in rational activity." (197b)
Events caused by the automatic, on the other hand, are
not likewise meaningful. They do not pertain directly to
the intentional horizon of an agent, and - importantly
(although Aristotle doesn't put it this way) - can only be
rendered meaningful through an activity of translation. In
order to attain meaning, automatic events must be
evaluated, not in themselves, but rather within a specific
subjective horizon belonging to some particular intentional
agent. While luck is a "real" cause that simultaneously
plays an explanatory role within the field of thought of
90
its agent (and where the distinction between these two
"domains" is not important), the automatic is a real
"cause" at one remove from such an immediate (and
subjective or cognitive) explanatory role. The automatic
is a real "cause" independently of any intentional agent;
and it only becomes a cause in the explanatory sense
(within a constituted doctrine) through a kind of
translation: by being transposed into a second-order
function of an intentional agent. Always already a real
"cause," the automatic must be made into a cause in
Aristotle's conceptual sense, something which can happen
only in retrospect - only after the event and even then
only for a subject or mind.6
The second difference introduced by Aristotle concerns
the relation between efficient and final cause. In cases
where luck is in operation, the final cause is internal to
the "nature" of the object, stemming unintentionally but
nevertheless from the activity of an otherwise intentional
agent. "The source of an automatic outcome," on the other
6. What is at stake here is the very status of cause:

whether it is something real (outside of our categories for
thinking it) or whether it is a concept that arises only in
thought. The difficulty of explicating Aristotle stems
from the fact that this distinction — which characterizes
modern thought from Descartes' distinction between
"objective" and "formal" reality on — does not exist in
his "material ontology": for him (or at least his dominant
voice), what is is strictly identical to what can be
thought. By pressuring the incompatibility lurking within
Aristotle's account of "luck," we can entertain the
possibility that his desire to reduce the automatic to the
category of thought stems precisely from this dogmatic
imperative, rather than reflecting an accurate analysis of
the automatic.
91
hand, "is external": it stems from outside the "nature" of
the object passively undergoing change. The final cause
corresponding to this external efficient cause emerges only
through analogy with an intentional agent, as Aristotle's
example of a stone falling illustrates:
A stone falls and hits someone, but it does not fall for
the purpose of hitting him; the fall accordingly was 'in-
itself-to-no-purpose' - a chance result [rather, an
automatic result, tou automatou, MH] - because the fall
might have been caused by someone who had the purpose of
hitting the man.7
It is simply outside the nature of the stone to hit a man
"with the purpose of hitting him." In qualifying the final
cause of the automatic as "external," Aristotle
establishes, among other things, that in itself (i.e., in
its relation with its efficient cause), it is unknown to
thought, and can be so known only negatively through
comparison with the sense it takes on when it is carried
over to an intentional agent. Thus, like the first
difference, this one emphasizes the mediation or
translation that the automatic must undergo in order to be
presented in thought.
On the basis of these two differences, Aristotle
stresses the external provenance of the efficient cause
that defines the automatic in its proper sense. Luck (in
the narrow sense) rests at the farthest extreme from
7. Aristotle, Physics I, Books I-IV, tr. Philip H Wicksteed

and Francis Cornford (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1929) .
Charlton's translation is less clear: "The stone did not
fall for the purpose of hitting someone; it fell, then, as
an automatic outcome, in that it might have fallen through
someone's agency and for hitting." (105)
natural necessity while still remaining "natural" (or
governed by the nature of the agent); as Aristotle puts it
"We are furthest from an outcome of luck with things which
come to be due to nature." The efficient cause of a lucky
event, nevertheless, remains internal to the nature of the
agent, either directly or "by concurrence." The automatic
on the other hand, comes into play when things take place
"contrary to nature" (para physin) .
In order to illustrate this difference, Aristotle
compares two examples. In the case of natural
monstrosities produced contrary to nature's logic,
Aristotle contends, we are still dealing with luck, since
the cause of such monstrosities remains internal to nature
Yet because of the perversity that goes with conceiving
such mishaps in intentional terms, we tend to attribute
them to " 'accident[s]' (automaton) in Nature." When it
comes to categorical definitions, however, we must avoid
drawing ontological conclusions from what is merely a
manner of speaking, and so must distinguish from this
example of luck an example of the automatic in its proper
sense. The automatic itself, Aristotle argues, is para
physin ("contrary to nature") in a radical sense, since it
breaks entirely with the model of natural (or internal)
generation. He continues:
But this case [of a monstrosity] is different from that of

the horse [which exemplifies the automatic8 ]; for the
8. "Automaton, on the other hand, may be used to describe

the behaviour of brute beasts and even of many inanimate
93
horse's escape was due to an external cause, but the causes

of Nature's miscarriage are internal to her own processes.
(Wikestead and Cornford tr. , 161)
In its radical - proper - definition, the automatic is para
physin in the sense that it cannot be tied down to a
"purpose" immediately graspable by an agent of thought.
With this radical account of the automatic, Aristotle
unwittingly provides the possibility for an encompassing
account of technology which resists not only his own
restricted account of techne as a mode of production that
imitates (or supplements) nature, but also the entire
tradition to which it gives rise.9 As radically para
physin, the automatic radicalizes the limited exteriority
or autonomy which Aristotle grants to art (techne); in the
end, the automatic forms a "materialist category" that
manages to escape from the stranglehold at the hands of a
intellectualized nature which Aristotlean "onto-mimetology"
places on it.10 If art in the Greek sense of techne
(artificial production) "either imitates the works of
nature or completes that which nature is unable to bring to
completion," the automatic operates entirely outside the
physical realm governed by nature in the sense that
Aristotle lends it here: namely, nature modeled on thought;
things. For instance, we attribute it to automaton if a

horse excapes a danger by coming accidentally to a place of
safety." (Wikestead and Cornford tr., 159)
9. Including the reading of Aristotlean mimesis according

to the logic of the "supplement."
10. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe uses the Derridian notion of

the "supplement" to describe Aristotle's concept of
"mimesis.11
94
nature as a quasi-intentional (or teleological) agent. The
automatic is not simply the category of something that -
unlike techne - is radically artificial (i.e., non
natural) ; rather, it embodies the causal action of nature
as nature in a modern physicalistic sense, i.e., a sense
much larger than that given by Aristotle's notion of physis
as nous. Pushed to its extreme, this latter radicalization
of art's independence from natural necessity undermines the
symmetry between nature and art that governs Aristotle's
metaphysics and his concept of mimesis and calls for the
introduction of the uncanny as the experiential correlate
to the category of the automatic.11 Since technological
production does not fit into any explanatory causal
categories, but rather causes a reaction that is
unrepresentable, we must turn to the new experiential
category of the uncanny in order to embody - without
reduction - what takes place para physin.
Given what look like solid grounds for a distinction
between luck and the automatic on the basis of their
11. Even man's role as efficient cause — i.e., as the

agent that produces movement — has a mimetic core: his
imitation of the prime mover. In Metaphysics, love itself
is mimesis: "That that for the sake of which is found among
the unmovables is shown by making a distinction; for that
for the sake of which if both that for which and that
towards which, and of these the one is unmovable and the
other is not. Thus is produces motion by being loved, and
it moves the other moving things." (1072b) (Aristotle
Reader. 347, emphasis added) Activity or production
stemming from love or desire thus undergoes a fundamental
reduction: it is conceived in terms of a model, and thus
subordinated to a relationship of thought (the category and
space of mimetic representation).
95
respective relation to (human) thought, one cannot help but
be surprised by the conclusion that Aristotle draws.
Immediately following the distinction between the
metaphoric and the proper real definitions of the
automatic, Aristotle retracts the radicality of his
distinction:
What the automatic and luck are, then, and how they differ,
has now been said. As for the ways in which they are
causes, both are sources from which the change originates;
for they are always either things which cause naturally or
things which cause from thought - of which there is an
indeterminate multitude. But since the automatic and luck
are causes of things for which mind or nature might be
responsible, when something comes to be responsible for
these same things by virtue of concurrence, and since
nothing which is by virtue of concurrence is prior to that
which is by itself, it is clear that no cause by virtue of
concurrence is prior to that which is by itself a cause.
Hence the automatic and luck are posterior to both mind and
nature; so however much the automatic may be the cause of
the heavens, mind and nature are necessarily prior causes
both of many other things and of this universe (proteron
noun ... physin aitian einai). (198a, Charlton tr.)
Here we see Aristotle shuffling between the two "domains"
of causality mentioned above: material and explanatory.
One can indeed follow his reasoning in this passage up to a
point: namely, where he asserts that both luck and the
automatic are "efficient causes" in the sense of being the
"source of change." But when he limits the ontology of
such causes to two (narrow) categories - "either things
which cause naturally or things which cause from thought" -
he leaves out the proper definition of the automatic as
what is para physin in a radical sense. He forgets that
automatic causes are "causes of things for which mind or
nature might be responsible" only after a translation into
96
the "horizon" of an intentional agent, or in other words,
only after a reduction of the radical (unknowable)
externality of an automatic (efficient) cause. Again, the
example of the stone seems to establish this difference: by
itself the stone falling is "without why"; it acquires a
determinable final cause only when viewed on the model of
intentional thought, i.e., within someone's head.
Nevertheless, Aristotle feels fully justified in his
reduction of the real to what can be thought. He believes
he is merely drawing a consequence resulting directly from
a fundamental law of reason/nature - the law that states:
"nothing which is by virtue of concurrence is prior to that
which is by itself." Concurrence, however, is always
relative to an agent, and thus is already under the sway of
a dogmatic reduction: of the real to the mental. Something
can come to be a cause by concurrence only if it is
attached to an intentional agent that is directly and in an
essential manner a cause. Aristotle's example of
concurrence illustrates as much: "...in the case of a house
the cause is a builder, but by virtue of concurrence a
fluteplayer..." The concurrent cause (in this case) of the
house is a fluteplayer, which on account of its numerical
or substantial identity with the builder, is part of the
efficient cause; the latter however, is in a more
fundamental sense, the builder qua builder.
Consequently, despite Aristotle's claim that the
automatic, like luck, is also a cause by virtue of
concurrence, it is hard to see how the automatic - prior to
its reduction - lends itself to such a hierarchizing
distinction. If the "final cause" in itself of the
automatic is unknowable, there is no principle on which to
separate essential from concurrent. The possibility to do
so comes only following the reduction-translation of the
automatic to the field of thought. Thus Aristotle's
assertion of priority is circular, and is based on what we
would today call a metalepsisz a taking of an effect for
the cause, of a consequence for the origin. If, as
Aristotle contends, "it is clear that no cause by virtue of
concurrence is prior to that which is by itself a cause,"
the priority of the latter can only produced by the
activity of thinking which transforms the automatic into a
kind of second-order efficient cause permitting such a
differentiation. In short: Aristotle operates a wholesale
reduction of the efficient cause to that set of outcomes
which are capable of having final causes that can be known,
or alternatively, that are "internal" to their efficient
cause (i.e., nature or thought). Efficient causes which
are automatic thus undergo a thorough subordination, along
with a narrowing transformation, that quite simply equates
them with their hollow correlates within the field of
thought.
II. From the Automatic to Technology
With the promise of a liberation of the automatic from
Aristotle's doctrine of causality, it appears that we have
discovered a "source of motion" (efficient cause) which
testifies to the possibility for a non-reductive account of
technology. Viewed in its radicality, the automatic
embodies a type of efficient cause - or more accurately, an
efficiency - whose impact suggests an irreducible priority
of production over representation. Since the automatic is
"external" to the change it brings about, no analysis of
the change can capture its productive efficiency: it defies
the very mode of description posited by Aristotle (and
reproduced by the tradition) - the definition of efficient
cause on the basis of the change it produces, i.e., in
terms of its finality.12 The automatic acts as a source of
motion independently of and prior to any operation of
finality; it resists the linear correlation between cause
and effect that the latter serves to establish.
Yet while Aristotle's analysis of the automatic
promises such a radical emancipation of efficiency from its
descriptive reduction, it is one that philosophy and
cultural theory have utterly failed to realize. The
foremost reason for this failure, as we shall see, the
narrow definition of technology with which philosophy
works. From Leibniz (who resorted to the ultimate
finality, perfection, rather than face the automatic) to
Heidegger (whose liberation of the "without why" instead
12. Aristotle defines the efficient cause as "in general

that which makes something of that which is made, and that
which changes something of that which is changed." (194b)
imposed the stronger "because" of Being), analyses of
causality have maintained, often in hidden or convoluted
forms, the precedence of finality over efficiency.13 There
is, therefore, more at stake in the return to Aristotle
than a mere reversal of his own reduction - one moreover
that can only remain purely theoretical. If the
tradition's adherence to Aristotle's causal doctrine
strengthens the force of his reduction within the discourse
of philosophy as a whole, the role it plays "outside"
philosophy - it defines the status of technology in the
real - lends it force of a wholly different nature. In
addition to its enabling role within philosophy,
Aristotle's reduction helps to institutionalize, as a
governing force in the practical sphere, the traditional
mechanical model of technology - the model that underlies
virtually all of our popular assumptions about technology.
In opposing Aristotle's reduction, we must direct our
critique against this latter model by tracing the evolution
of a "revenge of the real" - a practical and materialist
struggle against descriptive reduction, whose "energy"
stems directly from the repressed "efficiency" of
technology. It is this revenge that I shall trace in the
following chapters.
Philosophy's connection to the mechanistic model stems
from its essential commitment to the priority of finality
over efficiency. To the extent that this commitment goes
13. See note 3 above.
100
hand in hand with the defining principle of mechanics, it
manifests a massive resistance to technology. The
mechanical model, as I shall demonstrate in detail,
functions precisely because and only to the extent that it
channels efficiency into predefined, linear "work." It
stresses the goal-oriented, "mechanical" aspect of
technological production at the expense of a more radical
possibility: the technological production of efficiency.
Indeed, mechanics is defined precisely in terms of its
inferiority to "life": the fact that it depends on an
outside source of power (thought or nature) - an efficiency
that it does not itself produce.
In this light, Aristotle's reduction of the automatic
comprises a prototype not only for a general philosophical
reduction of production (to representation), but also for a
specific technological reduction of efficiency (to
finality). In both cases, it is man's mastery of the real
- or the fate of humanism - that is at stake. As long as
reality is indebted for its very constitution to the
movement of thought, production in its proper sense - as
the direct practical activity of the real - is subordinated
to a restricted (theoretical) determination of production
(the production of presence, of the text, etc., in short,
the production of representation). An efficient cause from
the domain of representation supervenes upon the real. The
phenomenological movement of presencing (or of differance
or of lack) is held to open the movement of life itself;
101
and the domain of the latter is delimited by the domain of
the former. Thus, production as such (production of "life"
as force and in its entirety) is subordinated to the
category of production within the domain of thought. The
pattern is the same in the case of the technological
reduction of efficiency. As long as machines are
ultimately indebted to an external (non-technological)
power-source, technology remains dependant on non-
technological production. Thought, desire or natural force
must drive the machine, which - for this reason - is
limited to the linear completion of a goal-directed task.
Where the example of technology diverges from the more
general philosophical reduction (of which it remains an
example), what is highlighted is the status of technology
as a functionally privileged domain of production. While
there is certainly a legitimate scope of operation for the
descriptive category of representation within philosophical
thought, once this category is carried over to the real -
as it is in exemplary fashion when employed to "ground" the
mechanistic model of technology (and as it is in all of the
theoretical models I shall investigate in Part II, which to
that extent remain mechanistic) - it is undermined (or
"deconstructed") not by its theoretical (or descriptive)
heterogeneity with the real, but far more definitively, by
the immediate excess of the real (of production) over any
possible description (representation). It is my
conviction, therefore, that technology comprises a "domain"
102
of the real that is least susceptible to philosphical
reduction, and that - for this reason - holds a privilege
as the exemplary "site" of a revenge of the real (and of
production) against thought (representation). The immanent
critique of the mechanistic model that I shall develop thus
serves concurrently as an indictment of the philosophical
motif of the "closure of representation."
III. Two Models of the Machine
The word "technology" comes from the Greek
"technologia," meaning the "systematic treatment" (logos)
of an art or craft (techne). This Greek etymology stands
most directly behind the modern meaning of technology as a
type of discourse (OED: "A discourse or treatise on an art
or arts"). In addition to this discursive meaning, which
in its modern sense has a particular relation to the
industrial arts, technology has acquired another meaning as
synonymous with "applied science" in a sense that goes
beyond the narrow discursive foundation implied in the
notion of a theory of scientific application. We can
accurately characterize this meaning as an exclusively
modern one, since the separation it assumes between
(theoretical) discourse and (practical) application is
unthinkable in Greek terms.
In its modern usage, the word "technology" has two
distinct meanings: one pertaining exclusively to discourse
(or theory); the other to practical reality. This post-
103
Greek semantic splitting, I suggest, is not fortuitous, but
reflects the real evolution of what is designated by
"techne" from craft or handwork to machine production. (In
Capital. Marx provides the materialist history of this
evolution.) With the notable exception of weaponry,the
Greek meaning of technology seems to encompass its modern
usage up until the industrial revolution.14 It even
restricts the initial application of the word "machine"
(again with the exception of weaponry) to discursive
phenomena: as in its theatrical meaning of "a contrivance
for the production of stage-effects" or its more general
literary meaning as "a contrivance for the sake of effect;
a supernatural agency or personage introduced into a
poem..." (OED) It is only following the widespread
deployment of machine technology in the industrial
revolution that technology acquires its proper, modern
meaning as applied science. The necessity for this non-
Greek meaning had, however, been prepared by an historical
14. See Lynn White, Jr., Medieval Technology and Social

Change (London and New York: Oxford UP, 1962, especially
his treatment of the stirrup, 1-39; and Deleuze and
Guattari, "Treatise on Nomadology: -The War Machine," in A
Thousand Plateaus. 351-423. Aristotle, incidentally,
reduces weaponry to the mechanical model (and thus to the
space governed by the Greek meaning of technologia) .
"Aristotle draws a clear parallel between the organs of
animal movement and 'organa, ' or parts of war machine, like
the arm of a catapult about to launch a projectile. Thus
catapults, typical automatic machines of the period, seemed
to be articulated like a human limb, as they were poised
and made to release their great stores of pent-up energy."
(Georges Canguilhem, "Machine and Organism," tr. Mark Cohen
and Randall Cherry, in Incorporations [New York: Urzone,
1992].) Canguilhem's article is excerpted from La
Connaissance de la vie (Paris: Vrin, 1985).
104
evolution of technology from the Roman waterwheel to the
steam engine.
I include this digression on the semantic duplicity of
"technology” because it helps to indicate the shortcoming
of the approach taken by historians and philosophers of
science who draw an allegedly exhaustive distinction
between two models of machine technology - the mechanical
and the dynamical. In a recent book entitled Turing's M a n .
J. David Bolter furnishes a definition for these two
historically determined types: "Mechanical technology is
the artificial control of technical processes; dynamic
technology is the harnessing of inanimate sources of power
to drive the new mechanisms." (29) The focus of mechanics
is on the artificial programming of an operation; dynamics
concerns the transmission or redirection of natural energy
for new purposes. The preeminent example of the former is
the clock: a "fixed mechanism" whose "responses must be
predetermined and built into the mechanism of gears and
weights by the original maker." (29) (Lewis Mumford cites
the clock as the paradigm of machine technology: "The
clock... is the key machine of the modern industrial age.
For every phase of its development the clock is both the
outstanding fact and the typical symbol of the machine.15)
The waterwheel (together with its relative, the windmill)
exemplifies the second "dynamic" model, since (like the
15. Mumford, Technics and Civilization (New York: Harcourt,

Brace, Jovanovich, 1934), 14.
105
stirrup before it) it transformed a natural force into a
power source for other mechanisms. Bolter suggests that
the Industrial Revolution comprises a fruitful fusion of
these two models: [quote]. Yet, the fact that Watt's
steam engine lends dynamical technology a (theoretically
and semantically) demarcated independence from mechanical
technology indicates the need for further refinement of
Bolter's theory.
In order to understand why "dynamical" technology only
came into its own with the industrial revolution, we must
turn to Marx's account of the machine in Capital. As Marx
makes clear, it is only with the development of the "motor
mechanism" that technology emancipates itself from an
essential dependance on nature. Functioning as the energy
source itself, the motor mechanism introduces a wholly new
element, a third kind of machine distinct from both
mechanical and dynamical technologies of the past. Marx's
account of machinery thus defines a new modern sense of
"machine," one that coincides with the industrial meaning
of technology introduced above:
All fully developed machinery consists of three essentially

different parts, the motor mechanism, the transmitting
mechanism, and finally the tool or working machine. ... The
tool or working machine is that part of the machinery with
which the industrial revolution of the 18th century
started. ... The machine proper is therefore a mechanism
that, after being set in motion, performs with its tools
the same operations that were formerly done by the workman
with similar tools. From the moment that the tool proper
is taken from man, and fitted into a mechanism, a machine
takes the place of a mere implement.16
16. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy.
106
Corresponding to this emancipation of the tool from man, an
emancipation of the motive mechanism from human strength
and control furnished the machine with an unprecedented
autonomy. Marx continues:
As soon as tools had been converted from being manual

implements of man into implements of a mechanical
apparatus, of a machine, the motive mechanism also acquired
an independent form, entirely emancipated from the
restraints of human strength, Thereupon the individual
machine ... sinks into a mere factor in production by
machinery. One motive mechanism was now able to drive many
machines at once. The motive mechanism grows with the
number of the machines that are turned simultaneously, and
the transmitting mechanism becomes a wide-spread apparatus.
(412)
With the introduction of the steam engine, the machine
acquires a new function: no longer restricted to the
mechanical function of the tool apparatus, nor to the
dynamical function of the transmitting mechanism, the
machine emerges in its full potential as the "source" of
energy. It quite simply takes the place of nature.
The steam engine is the first machine in the
specifically modern sense of the term: the first machine
capable of producing (and not just rechannelling) energy.17
In this modern sense, the modern machine possesses two
characteristics that distinguish it from its etymological
tr. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling (New York: Modern

Library, 1906), 407-408.
17. The OED does not include this modern definition of the
machine, but rather restricts itself to various senses of
the machine's function of applying, transmitting, and
modifying pre-existent force. This semantic restriction
(and the restriction of the machine within mechanics) can
perhaps be justified on etymological grounds: i.e., it
reflects the semantic range of the Greek mechane
("contrivance"); but - as I shall argue - it leads to
confusion regarding the contemporary status of technology.
107
as well as its material heritage. First, unlike the
waterwheel and the windmill, it is no longer directly
dependant on the disposition of nature. As Bolter puts it:
"The engine could be used anywhere at any time; power no
longer depended upon where nature had put a stream or when
the wind was strong." (30) Not only is the machine
emancipated from a constraining reliance on nature's
"presence"; but with its new function of producing energy,
it institutes its own "form" of energy in the place of the
"force in motion" (work) that had earlier been furnished,
pre-formed, by nature.18 (With the modern machine,
technology is in fact emancipated from the storage function
that has often been mistakenly thought to characterize its
modern form.) As a corollary of this functional change,
another distinction defines the modern machine: whereas the
energy transmitted by waterwheel or windmill (no less than
that deployed in the clockwork) could be represented
through the laws of mechanics, the energy produced by the
steam engine was incalculable.
In introducing a wholly new machine function (and thus
expanding the semantic range of "machine"), the steam
engine does not furnish a new metaphor for the old
dynamical and mechanical technological processes, as is so
18. See Michel Serres, "Turner Translates Carnot," in

Hermes: Literature. Science. Philosophy. ed. Josue Harari
and David Bell (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1982): "For
the study of mechanics, work is a force in motion. What
are the origins, the sources of this force? There are four
of them and only four: horses,...; men,...; wind,... [and]
[w]ater." (54)
108
often supposed^-9 ; on the contrary, it explodes the very
hierarchy that had supported the classical function of the
machine as a metaphor (not only for the domain of
technology specifically, but for "mechanical" processes in
general). With its excess over form, the productive
efficiency of the steam engine breaches the descriptive
system of mechanics. Departing radically from its pre
industrial function as a translator (of real force into
descriptive form [mechanics] and/or into formed force
[dynamics]), the industrial machine is immediately and
irreducibly real. In the wake of the steam engine, the
machine can no longer be defined through its action upon a
pre-constituted and independent reality; instead, it
attains its radical status as an immediate part of the
real. Unconstrained by any form and prior to metaphor, the
machine embodies the real production of force.
The priority of production over form finds its prophet
19. As Bolter's reading suggests, when he, for example,

ascribes the function of the steam engine to its status as
the representation of the 19th century's hopes for an
autonomous technology: "Dynamic technology, then, was as
old as or older than mechanical technology, but it needed
much longer to mature. Although accurate pendulum clocks
were being built in the seventeenth century, it was not
until the end of the eighteenth that the inanimate prime
mover found its place as a defining technology. The
triumph of this technology was the steam engine. As a
clockwork mechanism capable of producing power, it combined
two qualities that had long before been expressed
separately in the clock and the waterwheel. Although heat
produced by coal was as much a natural resource as the flow
of water in a river or the wind across the plains, the
steam engine seemed by its very intricacy more artificial
than the windmill or waterwheel, an expression of man's
ingenuity and not a mere harnessing of nature." (30,
emphasis added)
109
in Michel Serres:
What is the Industrial Revolution? A revolution operating

on matter. It takes place at the very source of dynamics,
at the origins of force. One takes force as it is or one
produces it. Descartes and Newton, crowned by Lagrange,
chose the first alternative: force is there, given by the
biotope, the wind, the sea, and gravity. ... With it one
produces motion, work, by using tools The mediating
function of the tools is inscribed in their form, their
lines, their geometry... Then a sudden change is imposed
on the raw elements: fire replaces air and water in order
to transform the earth. Fire will consume [Lagrange's]
Analytical Mechanics and burn down Samuel Whitbread's
wherehouse. It will destroy the wooden shed, the wooden
ships. Fire finishes off the horses, strikes them down.
The source, the origin, of force is in this flash of
lightning, this ignition. Its energy exceeds form; it
transforms. (56)
What distinguishes the steam engine from all previous
technologies, according to Serres, is its energy principle:
it foregoes the ordered energy-translation characterizing
wind and water for the stochastic metamorphosis by fire.
The steam engine transforms a natural material, coal, into
a force unrelated (by any mechanical calculus) to its
"natural" force. It is in this sense that we can speak of
a technological or machinic production of force.
This transformation is not a translation, but a
material revolution. The alternative Serres presents
cannot be reduced to Bolter's dialectic of mechanism and
dynamism. Something more radical is at stake. Once we
take the production of force as the primary function (and
meaning) of machine technology, the machine no longer
opposes an independent real. Not only does its productive
efficiency exceed form, but the division between reality
and representation - the division that underlies the
110
machine's value as a metaphor - collapses. Because of its
essential function as "motor mechanism," the machine is
never simply nor primarily a metaphor; the restricted
mechanical and dynamical models of the past give way to a
wholly new relation between technology and reality — that
of direct embodiment. In the Anti-Oedipus. Deleuze and
Guattari provide an exemplary definition of this new
machine:
In what respect are desiring-machines really machines, in

anything more than a metaphorical sense? A machine may be
defined as a system of interruptions or breaks (coupures).
These breaks should in no way be considered as a separation
from reality... Every machine ... is related to a
continual material flow (hyle) that it cuts into. ... In a
word, every machine functions as a break in the flow in
relation to the machine to which it is connected, but at
the same time is also a flow itself, or the production of a
flow, in relation to the machine connected to it. This is
the law of the production of production.20
The real is, in short, "machined," i.e., materially
embodied in a machine. There is no part of reality that is
not simultaneously "machinic"; the machine sheds its
restricted status as an organization of force opposed to
the organic, and attains its emancipation as the
generalized producer of force, inseparable (in "reality"
and in representation) from the "real" that it produces.
Given this prerogative of the real over the
metaphoric, we can extrapolate the most radical conclusions
from the following analysis of the unrepresentability of
technologically produced force. In his article on Turner,
Serres argues that:
20. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus. 36.
Ill
Matter is no longer left in the prison of diagram. Fire

dissolves it, makes it vibrate, tremble, oscillate, makes
it explode into clouds. ... No one can draw the edge of a
cloud, the borderline of the aleatory where particles waver
and melt, at least to our eyes. There a new time is being
fired in the oven. On these totally new edges, which
geometry and the art of drawing have abandoned, a new world
will soon discover dissolution, atomic and molecular
dissemination. The boiler's fire atomized matter and gives..
it over to chance, which has always been its master. (58,
emphasis added)
Not only does this analysis perform a "molecularization" of
technical production (that parallels, to a degree, Deleuze
and Guattari's molecularization of desire in general), it
also puts it into direct relation with chance (Aristotle's
automatic). We can now grasp the specific relationship
between technology in its modern (proper) sense and the
category of the automatic (as well the motivation behind
the latter's suppression). The automatic is, quite simply,
the category of the metamorphosis by fire. As the
embodiment of the properly machinic production of force,
the automatic comprises an efficient cause that is
immediately real, independent of and prior to any mental
and/or natural system, and that absolutely resists
reduction to any representational space.
This is not to say that the automatic is itself
created in the wake of the thermodynamic revolution. As
the type of chance correlated with the "objective" (or non-
intentional), it has always existed, even if it has failed
to find practical embodiment powerful enough to resist the
humanist reduction introduced above. Chance, as Serres
says, "has always been [matter's] master," even if this
112
mastery has been little recognized. What Serres' analysis
demonstrates so well is the recalcitrance of theory:
despite its transhistoricality, the mastery of chance in
the real does not establish itself until the point at which
the representational reduction no longer works'. A
practical excess of the real over representation is
necessary to force the abdication of the classical
mechanical reduction. Such an excess is supplied by the
industrial revolution: it is the specific correlation of
chance with machine technology proper that brings to an end
the specific priority of representation underlying the
reduction of the automatic to chance (tuche). With machine
technology, the "efficiency" of the automatic can no longer
be effectively constrained by representation: machines
appear to produce energy - to function as efficient causes
- without relation to any human or natural finality.
The return and generalization of chance finds its
supreme accomplishment in the wholly new potential for the
machine to function as an autonomous "subject." Since such
a function furnishes a non-human representational
perspective (as Jameson's recent account of video has
indicated) - at least in theory - it dissolves the
perogative of human representation over the real. For the
natural or mental finality of classical representation
(that we find, for example, in the apparatus-psyche
analogy), it substitutes a "finality" that is purely
machinic (and thus purely immanent) - one that cannot be
113
translated into any representational finality, whether
human or natural. Once the machine becomes a subject,
obeying its own inhuman and unnatural laws, the automatic
efficient cause attains an autonomy of its own; in the
self-sufficient machine of Capital, it achieves a revenge
against thought, man, and nature. With the employment of
machinery by Capital, Marx argues, "the automaton itself is
the subject, and the workmen are merely conscious organs,
co-ordinate with the unconscious organs of the automaton,
and together with them, subordinated to the central moving-
power." (458) Shut out in this radical manner by machine
technology, man can hardly hope to restrict its productive
efficiency by imposing a finality of thought or nature.
The possibility for a technologically produced
efficiency thus explodes the hold of mechanics as a theory
of the real. What emerges where such efficiency cannot be
reduced is nothing less than the return of chance (the
automatic) of which Serres speaks. Along with a new
function in the descriptive register (as the "cause" for
the failure of representation), chance explodes as a
material efficiency in the domain of the real. With this
material revolution, the distance between representation
and reality collapses and the descriptive function of
chance attains its immanence within the real. As a
descriptive category, chance does not form an abstract,
axiomatic correlate of the real (as was the case with
mechanics); on the contrary, it directly embodies an
114
element of the real that had hitherto been invisible. The
resurgence and generalization of the automatic correlates
with a material revolution - a revolution which Serres
describes, with reference to Turner's aesthetic revolution
in painting, as a movement from abstract theory to
pulsating reality: a passage "from the rationalized real,
from the abstract or mathematical real, to the burgeoning
real that radiates from the furnace where edges collapse."
(58)
IV. The Machine Metaphor
In the light of Serres' distinction between mechanical
order and stochastic disorder, Bolter's division of
technology loses its radicality. Rather than defining a
mechanical and a non-mechanical theory respectively,
Bolter's "mechanical" and "dynamical" models both appear to
comprise branches internal to mechanics: on the one hand, a
"statics" (the theory of rest), and on the other, a
"dynamics" (the theory of motion).21 It is against both
models that an automatic model achieves its prominence:
bypassing all abstract calculation, the automatic unleashes
the actual efficiency of the real, the force of disorder
that is, as Serres says,"everywhere." The automatic is no
mere metaphor; it is not a description of something whose
materiality is elsewhere, in the real. It is the
fundamental principle of the real, rediscovered by and in
21. See Serres, 55.
115
the machine:
...beneath the forms of matter, stochastic disorder reigns

supreme. To smelt is to rediscover chance as fundamental.
The furnace is the engine for going back toward chaos. The
foundry is where creation starts over at zero. History is
recast beginning with primitive matter. (Serres, 61)
It is not only history that industrial machinery
recasts, however, since it begins an new epoch in which
chance is at once the basic element of matter in theory (it
defines the fundamental principle of the real) and in
reality (its productive efficiency is immediately embodied
in industrial technology). As Deleuze and Guattari stress,
the real is directly produced by machines, which means that
it loses its (false) status as something non-technological.
With the machine revolution, the real is seen in its true
light: as essentially technological.
Hence it no longer makes sense to conceive technology
on the mechanical model. What was already a violent
reduction of the automatic prior to the industrial
revolution (a reduction that entailed the exclusion of a
certain part of the real), now betokens — given the
contemporary omnipresence of technology — a debilitating
blindness toward the real in its entirety.
Despite the indomitable force of this material
reality, however, a massive reduction of technology
continues to prevail in the Human Sciences. As I shall
demonstrate, philosophers and critics as influential as
Heidegger, Derrida, Freud, Lacan, and ultimately even
Deleuze-Guattari demarcate their "uniqueness" with an
explicit turn toward technology, only to reintroduce the
mechanical reduction when technology proves to be more than
they bargained for. The omnipresence of such self-
subversion in recent theory testifies forcefully to the
practical excess of technology over the very category of
thought that remains fundamental in the various discourses
of the Human Sciences. Since this excess is radical (i.e.,
it respects no limits placed upon it by thought), it
ultimately defies the respective "framings" of the real
imposed by these above-enumerated philosopher-critics. As
a result, they are forced into a life-or-death struggle
against technology - a struggle that can be won only
through repressive measures. It is nothing more than the
structural limitation of theory that compels the reduction
of technology: unable to accommodate the latter's practical
impact without renouncing its hold on the real, theory is
compelled to forge an alliance with its former enemy. From
this situation arises the central irony of contemporary
cultural criticism: cultural theory is unable to liberate
technology from the grip of the mechanical reduction
without itself resurrecting that reduction when its own
claims are threatened.
Of course, this reliance on the mechanical reduction
is nowhere acknowledged as such. (In several cases, it may
even escape private recognition.) We can observe it in
operation, however, in a positively reconfigured form, in
contemporary criticism's opposition to the so-called
117
"machine metaphor." Critics from Lewis Mumford to Derrida
have mounted a sustained assault on the assumptions of the
classical machine metaphor, exemplified in the 18th century
thesis of Julien de la Mettrie's L'homme-machine.22 De la
Mettrie radicalizes the analogy of body and machine
initially formulated (in the modern period) by Descartes.
In a famous passage from Meditation 6, Descartes compares
God's creation of the body to the work of a clockmaker:
...a clock constructed with wheels and weights observes all

the laws of its nature just as closely when it is badly
made ... as when it completely fulfils the wishes of the
clockmaker. In the same way, I might consider the body of
a man as a kind of machine equipped with and made up of
bones, nerves, muscles, veins, blood and skin in such a way
that, even if there were no mind in it, it would still
perform all the same movements as it now does in those
cases where movement is not under the control of the will
or, consequently, of the mind [but occurs merely as a
result of the disposition of the organs].23
Building upon this foundation, de la Mettrie simply extends
the analogy to include the mind as well as the body:
"...since all the faculties of the soul depend to such a
degree on the proper organization of the brain and the
whole body, that apparently they are but this organization
itself, the soul is clearly an enlightened machine."24
With his work, the radical thesis of the classical machine
metaphor is achieved: mechanism and organism form a single
22. Julien Offray de la Mettrie, Man a Machine. bilingual

edition (LaSalle, Illinois: Open Court, 1953).
23. Descartes, Philosophical Writings. 58 (final phrase in

brackets included only in French version). See also
Descartes' "Treatise on Man."
24. La Mettrie, Man a Machine. 128.
118
continuum.
A common thread unites the recent attacks on this
classical form of the machine metaphor. Whether they speak
in the name of the "organism" or of some other source of
life that allegedly sheds its organicism (e.g., "desire" or
"thought" or "differance"), they all maintain the
limitation of the mechanism in relation to "life."25 On
the basis of their respective vitalist assumptions, such
attacks gain strength by constructing a model of the
machine which (despite claims to the contrary) shares the
essential features of the mechanical model. Due to its
structural "logic," contemporary theory finds itself
committed to a model of the machine that has been rendered
obsolete by contemporary technology. This commitment, it
is important to stress, is in no way willful since it is
only through opposition to this very model of the machine
that its various "vitalisms" are able to emerge. The
dialectical relationship between machine model and theory
institutes a blindness as a structural facet of
contemporary criticism: it is unable to critique the
machine model in any radical manner, without renouncing its
own theoretical ground. Isn't it ironic that the
liberation of "life" from mechanics - the liberation
promised by recent theory - should end up by perpetuating
the mechanical model in a transfigured form, as a metaphor
25. The exception, of which I shall speak more below, is

Deleuze and Guattari, who aim to overcome the very
opposition between vitalism and mechanism.
119
for technology and no longer for man?
Caught in this double-bind, theory simply exchanges
one machine metaphor for another. While de la Mettrie's
machine metaphor posits an equivalence of organism and
mechanism, the modern reformulation is satisfied with a
narrower equivalence: technology = mechanism. The machine
metaphor is not in fact overcome, but simply retooled: it
no longer serves to reduce life to mechanistic principles,
but to constrain technology within the classical model of
the machine. In both forms, it nevertheless serves the
same end: the successful achievement (or closure) of a
theoretical account of "life." Throughout the
modernization of the machine metaphor, the subordination of
technology to "life" is maintained.
One must not be fooled by the subtle formulations of
critics like Mumford and Derrida, who represent extreme
positions since they both take as their explicit goal the
liberation of technology from its reduction to the machine
metaphor. In both of these exemplary cases, a governing
(and dogmatic) ontology of life (organicism and textuality,
respectively) brings about a division within technology
that ultimately insures the latter's reduction. In the
degree to which it serves an an integral part of the theory
of life at issue, technology is separated from its mere
machine basis. Technology is made larger than the
traditional field governed by the classical machine,
precisely because it integrates within itself certain human
120
factors. This humanization of technology, it is suggested,
tends to explode the machine metaphor.
In his critique of the machine metaphor, Mumford, for
example, relies on a distinction - between "technical
habits" and the "automatic machine" - whose kernel is
precisely this priority of organism over machine. While
the "automatic machine" is characterized - negatively - as
requiring an "external source of power" and possessing a
"limited kind of activity," the former allegedly provides a
more adequate model for the modern interface between human
activity and technology.26 It is thus precisely to correct
for the restrictions imposed on technology by mechanics
that Mumford undertakes his critique of the machine model:
...the mechanical metaphor is not in itself a satisfactory

device for eliminating purely human concerns, for
mechanisms are themselves subjectively conditioned
fabrications and their own peculiarities, which counterfeit
certain aspects of organisms, are precisely what must be
explained. 7
Mumford is correct, of course, in arguing that there are
aspects of technology which exceed the mechanical metaphor;
his analysis falters only when he decides that these
26. Mumford, Technics and Civilization. 11.
27. Mumford, The Myth of the Machine. The Pentagon of Power

(New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, Inc., 1964), 89.
See also, 88: "...I propose to examine the actual nature of
the machine - any machine - to see if it can be adequately
described and understood by the purely analytical method in
the restricted terms that have been applied to animate
organisms. If it cannot be so described, then the
reference to this model in interpreting organic behavior
conspicuously misses the one significant trait that
actually binds mechanisms and organisms together -
purposeful organization and subjective intention."
121
aspects ape human behavior (life) - when, that is, he
constrains them to the model of organic finality and denies
their more radical potential automony. (The machine
metaphor, he argues, "conspicuously misses the one
significant trait that actually binds mechanisms and
organisms together - purposeful organization and subjective
intention." (88]) The result is that Mumford overlooks the
radical efficiency of the automatic machine (i.e., the
motive mechanism), and ends by modelling technology on an
"organically-supplemented" mechanics.
The pattern is similar in the case of Derrida. Like
Mumford, he too seeks to balance out the restriction of
technology to mechanics. In the critical program
introducing Of Grammatoloqy. Derrida describes his project
as a liberation of the machine: "The originary and pre- or
meta-phonetic writing that I am attempting to conceive here
leads to nothing less than an 'overtaking' of speech by the
machine."^® As the exemplar of technology, cliffFrance
wrests a part of technology away from its mere mechanical
basis. To the extent that differance conditions the
presencing of the present ("life"), technology can be held
to be essential to the ontology of life, and thus to exceed
the descriptive framework of the mere machine.
Once again, Derrida is certainly correct to expand the
"domain" of technology, to pick away at the traditional
28. Derrida, Of Grammatoloqy. tr. Gayatri Spivak

(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1974), 79.
122
notion of the machine. Like Mumford, however, he falters
in failing to permit the potential radical autonomy of
technology. By construing technology as writing (and thus
as differance), Derrida simply substitutes a less
restrictive reduction for that of the classical metaphor;
rather than expanding technology in a form consistent with
its practical efficiency, he reduces technology to
reproductive technology. What is important in technology
is not its real materiality, but its status as essential to
the linguistic or thought-mediated mastery of the real (its
reduced materiality as the "support" for thought):
...[the notion of program] ... must of course be understood

in the cybernetic sense, but cybernetics is itself
intelligible only in terms of a history of the
possibilities of the trace as the unity of a double
movement of protention and retention. ... It is an
emergence that makes the gramme appear as such (that is to
say according to the iew structure of nonpresence) and
undoubtedly makes possible the emergence of the systems of
writing in the narrow sense. ...one could speak of a
"liberation of memory," of an exteriorization always
already begun but always larger than the trace which,
beginning from the elementary programs of so-called
"instinctive" behavior up to the constitution of electronic
card-indexes and reading machines, enlarges differance and
the possibility of putting in reserve. (84)
Confronted with the material basis of technology (its
automatic efficiency), Derrida sees nothing more than a
mere machine — a machine in the service of a "technics in
the service of language." (8)
V. From the Supplement to the Automaton
As I have already suggested, I believe that the
ultimate subordination of technology to a model of life
123
compromises the critical promise of recent attacks on the
traditional machine metaphor. If critics like Mumford and
Derrida have effectively demonstrated the need to overcome
the rigid homology between mechanism and organism, in
seeking to enact their theoretical critique they remain
committed to that denigration of mere technology which
characterizes the metaphysical tradition. What must be
rejected in their critique, consequently, is not the
intention - since, in both cases, a useful step toward the
liberation of technology is in fact taken - but rather, the
decision to liberate technology on the basis of its
affinity with the human. The result of this decision is a
dogmatic binary division of technology into a mere machinic
dimension and a role "within" the properly human (as a
"supplement" to the traditional conception of
"organology"). Technology, in other words, finds itself
split between two ontological determinations - on the one
hand, as a properly technological "object"; on the other,
as no-longer-just-technological element of life - neither
of which capture its radicality. A radical liberation must
oppose this restricted one: a liberation of technology on
the basis, not of its affinity with the human, but rather
of its capacity to function in the place of the human. A
liberation that would avoid splitting technology in this
way must restore its fundamental autonomy: its productive
capacity and its automatic efficiency, whose only "model" -
metamorphosis by fire - is simultaneously and inseparably a
124
real force.
While the relative "liberation of memory" discussed by
Derrida (and by Leroi-Gourhan before him) is "always
already" underway within the "history" of the trace, the
radical liberation of technology from its reduction to
memory, representation, etc., evolves historically and
culminates in the thermodynamic revolution. It is a
material revolution - a revolution in the real - and not
simply a theoretical reversal. If its theoretical
apparatus is already in place with Aristotle's discussion
of the automatic, the liberation of technology becomes
articulated as a desirata and formulated as a project only
in the modern world. As an evolution of the real from the
17th century up through the industrial revolution, this
radical liberation concentrates on a specific aim: the
struggle to construct a truly autonomous automaton.
Mary Shelley's Frankenstein constitutes the
culmination of this effort and the aesthetic correlate of
Marx's "motive mechanism." As an example of automatic
efficiency (production in advance of theoretical
determination or prediction), the creation of the monster
embodies - beyond the recuperative power of any critical
analysis - the radical exteriority of technology: the
reversal of its classical subordination to "life." It
constructs an automaton that is more radical than any
imaginable by theory - one that is "always already" in
advance of any mechanical and/or organic principles. As
125
the culmination of an evolution of the real, this radical
automaton defies all efforts, beginning with Aristotle's,
to integrate it within the horizon of mechanical theory.
It must thus be distinguished from the conception of
the automaton currently prevalent in the philosophy of
technology - a conception that falsely claims to liberate
the radical potential of technology when in fact it does no
more than reproduce Aristotle's "original" reduction of the
automatic. In his account of the historical evolution of
mechanics as an explanation for the "living organism," the
French philosopher of science, Georges Canguilhem, provides
the prototype of such a conception. According to
Canguilhem, it is the possibility of constructing an
automaton (a "totally self-sufficient" machine) that
underlies the viability of the mechanism-organism homology.
In opposition to Marx's analysis of the "motive mechanism"
(as well as to Serres' discussion of stochastic
production), Canguilhem is thus compelled (like Aristotle
before him) to see automatic production as part of
mechanical theory. It is precisely the successful
construction of an automaton (or the assumption that such a
construction is possible) that first allows mechanics to be
used to explain organic life:
This brief overview of some elementary principles of

kinematics helps to give a fuller sense of the problem
without losing sight of a central paradox: Why was it
necessary to turn to the theory of mechanism ... in order
to explain the living organism? The answer can be found,
it seems, in the fact that this mechanical model of living
organisms does not rely on kinematics alone. A machine, as
defined [by kinematics], is not totally self-sufficient: it
126
must receive and then transform energy imparted to it from

an outside source. ... For a long time, kinematic
mechanisms were powered by humans or animals. During this
stage, it was an obvious tautology to compare the movement
of bodies to the movement of a machine, when the machine
itself depended on humans or animals to run it.
Consequently, it has been shown that mechanistic theory has
depended, historically, on the assumption that it is
possible to construct an automaton, meaning a mechanism
that is miraculous in and of itself and does not rely on
human or animal muscle power. (47)
When Canguilhem goes on to reject the possibility of
constructing such an autonomous automaton - and to make a
case for the "inscription of the mechanical into the
organic" (64) - he too (like Mumford and Derrida) enlists
the assistance of a retooled machine metaphor. While he
correctly demonstrates the limitations of the "kinematic"
model, which describes energy translation according to "the
principle that every movement of a machine is geometric and
measurable" (46), he sees the motoric element that must be
added to it as a mere supplement to the mechanical model,
rather than the principle of an entirely different
conception of production. As a consequence, his account
collapses the two antithetical historical stages in the
evolution of the automaton: the preparatory project of
simulating or approximating an animate organism and the
more radical project of creating energy technologically.
The possibility developed by the former - from the
Cartesian parallelism between the "animal spirits" and
hydraulic power29 to Hoffman's automata30 - remains
29. See Descartes, "Treatise on Man," in Descartes:

Selections, ed. Ralph M. Eaton (New York: Scribner's,
1955), 352-53: "Now, in proportion as these spirits enter
127
mechanical, since it relies in principle on an outside
source of energy. With the latter, however, one has to do
with something altogether different; from the almost mythic
18th century experiments in galvanism31 to the development
of a fully operative motive mechanism, the automaton finds
a source in fire (and electricity) that reconnects it with
its repressed anarchic efficiency.
It is only by reducing this radical automaton to its
merely prepatory form that Canguilhem is able to protect
the priority of organology over machine. Once again, a
reduced model of the machine is perpetuated in order to
enable the triumph of a (dogmatic) philosophy of life.
Canguilhem gives rhetorical strength to this reduction
thus the cavities of the brain, they pass thence into the
pores of its substance, and from these pores into the
nerves; where, according as they enter, or even only as
they tend to enter, more or less into some rather than into
others, they have the power to change the form of the
muscles into which their nerves are inserted and by this
means to cause all the limbs to move; just as you may have
seen in grottoes and fountains in the royal gardens that
the force alone with which the water moves, in passing from
the spring, is enough to move various machines, and even to
make them play on instruments, or utter words, according to
the different arrangement of the pipes which conduct it.
And, indeed, the nerves of the machine that I am describing
to you may very well be compared to the pipes of the
machinery of these fountains, its muscles and tendons to
various other engines and devices which serve to move them,
its animal spirits to the water which sets them in motion,
of which the heart is the spring and the cavities of the
brain the outlets."
30. See especially, the mechanical doll (Olympia) of "The

Sandman" and Hoffman's appropriately entitled story,
"Automata."
31. Mary Shelley's 1831 "Introduction" to Frankenstein

inventories some moments in this history. Once could refer
as well to Hegel's Encyclopedia and Schelling's Philosophy
of Nature for more sober accounts of galvanism.
128
through a theoretical sleight-of-hand, which - not
incidentally - centers on Aristotle's doctrine of
causality. Following in the footsteps of the French
philosopher Alfred Espinas, Canguilhem traces Descartes'
man-machine homology back to Aristotle who "draws a clear
parallel between the organs of animal movement and
'organa,' or parts of war machines, like the arm of a
catapult..." (48) "Despite their differing explanations of
movement," Canguilhem continues,
for Aristotle as for Descartes later, the comparison of the

body with a machine presupposes that man is composed of
automated mechanical parts reliant on an energy source that
produces motor effects over time and continue to do so well
after the original (human or animal) energy has dissipated.
(48)
What emerges clearly from this passage (and the "history"
it proposes) is the fact that Canguilhem either does not
see or refuses to admit the possibility of a
technologically produced efficiency; as long as the
automaton remains "inextricably tied" to an original (human
or animal) source of energy, its radicality is obscured.
Yet Canguilhem himself exposes this theoretical
sleight-of-hand (what I have above called metalepsis). In
elucidating the Aristotelian foundation of a text from
Descartes' "Treatise on Man," he complacently conforms his
analysis to the received interpretation of Aristotlean
causality. As a result, the force of his analysis is
compromised: a natural or mental efficient cause,
ultimately traceable to God, insures that no automaton can
ever achieve independence. In words that practically echo
129
those used by Aristotle in his metaleptic reduction of the
automatic (Physics II, 6), Canguilhem constrains
technological production within a reduced machine model:
...to understand [Descartes'] machine-animal, it is

necessary to see it as being preceded, logically and
chronologically, by God, who is an efficient cause, and by
a preexisting living model after which it is to be modeled
or imitated, which is a formal and final cause. ...the
animal-machine theory, which is usually seen as a departure
from the Aristotlean concept of causality, ... [nonetheless
contains] all of Aristotle's types of causality. (53)
As in the case of Aristotle's reduction, the imposition of
an external finality violently effaces the efficiency of
the automatic; a purposiveness relative to the ends of man
takes the place of real machinic production. Technology
once again finds itself reduced to mechanism - this time
through the restricted homology of machine-organ (both of
which depend on an external, human and biological efficient
cause). Canguilhem continues:
Machines do not construct other machines, and it could even

be said that, in a sense, explaining organs or organisms
through mechanical models amounts to explaining the organ
by means of itself. At bottom, then, we are dealing with a
tautology; for it can be shown... that machines can be
considered as organs of the human species. A tool or a
machine is an organ, and organs are tools or machines. And
so it is hard to see how mechanism can be distinguished
from purposiveness. No one doubts that a mechanism is
needed to ensure that a given operation is carried out
successfully; and, conversely, every mechanism must follow
a precisely determined sequence toward performing some
particular task, since a mechanism cannot depend on
randomness or chance. (55, emphasis added)
Given this subordination of the automaton to an abstract
and universal origin (the prime mover or prima causa), it
is no wonder that "mechanism" comes up short in accounting
for chance. In the place of the radical disjunction
130
between mechanism and technology, Canguilhem imposes a
false restricted opposition between two types of mechanism
- those "whose purpose is manifest" and those "whose
purpose remains latent."
Like Aristotle before him, Canguilhem domesticates
the automatic within the restricted category of techne; as
the imitation or supplementation of natural production,
techne remains safely circumscribed within a calculable
field. Thus the priority of the human over the machine -
as the sole entity who can experience "chance" - remains
intact. Because "chance" is allied with the human (and
against the machinic), its efficient cause must exceed the
merely mechanical; as a result, technology can at most aid
man in achieving independent and prior biological or
theoretical ends.
While this conception lends support to McLuhan's
fundamental hypothesis that technology extends "our central
nervous system ... in a global embrace,"32 it also
coincides with the more recent determination of technology
as "supplement." In Of Grammatoloqy. Derrida derives the
function of the supplement explicitly from the Greek notion
of techne:
The supplement adds itself, it is a surplus, a plenitude

enriching another plenitude, the fullest measure of
presence. It cumulates and accumulates presence. It is
thus that art, techne, image, representation, convention,
etc. come as supplements to nature and are rich with this
entire cumulating function. (144-45)
32. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media (New York:

Signet, 1964), 19.
131
To be able to construe technology in this way, one must
already be working within the field "purified" by the
representational epoche discussed above. As the
placeholder of presence, technology (i.e., writing in
general) is restricted to the function of assisting in the
process by which the present presences; it performs a
signifying or indicating function one step removed from the
real. (As Derrida says, "[t]he sign is always the
supplement of the thing itself.") Technology's primary
material efficiency is simply left out of account.
While Derrida's elucidation stresses the function of
the supplement within the field of representation, it has
as an unacknowledged correlate certain assumptions
regarding the real materiality of technology.
Deconstructive theory has attempted to thematize this
materiality as that of language itself - the physical
support of language, i.e., letters and sounds33; it has
become commonplace to invoke Marx's pronouncement in the
German Ideology that "language is the materiality of
consciousness." Yet between this restricted materiality
and the larger materiality of social life there is
literally an abyss. If technology has a material impact at
the molecular level, it is one that can hardly be accounted
for by a restriction of its materiality to the "matter" of
language. Nevertheless, behind this restricted
33. See especially the late work of Paul de Man in Rhetoric

of Romanticism (New York: Columbia UP, 1984).
132
thematization lies the powerful institutionalization
explored in the Introduction: the contemporary hegemony of
media studies as the exclusive model to investigate
technology.
By restricting the impact of technology to the field
of media, the category of language is once again granted
precedence over the real. As a result, an entire material
domain is simply left out of account. Yet, as I have
argued, this material domain nevertheless lies behind the
impact of media technology. The importance of Canguilhem's
analysis is to provide the material foundation of this
reduction: the "supplement" is the correlate within the
field of representation of a real identification of machine
and organ. Canguilhem's "organology," in other words,
develops a more encompassing theory of supplementarity, one
which embraces Derrida's theory just as Einsteinian
relativity theory eclipsed but partially incorporated
Newtonian mechanics. Not only does technology assist the
presencing of nature (which Derrida, again reductively,
construes as equivalent to the "full plenitude of speech");
it also aids man more generally to "maintain a biological
economy" (63), to "live in continuity with life." (64) The
former is a limit case of the latter; what is common to
both is the restricted material function of technology as
an organ for (human) life. As the general foundation for
the interpretation of technology as supplement,
Canguilhem's theory illustrates in an exemplary manner how
133
the contemporary assault on classical mechanics has been
unable to escape a crippling reliance on the basic
principle of the machine metaphor: the determination of
technology on the model of the (mechanical) machine. The
only difference that it introduces is the excess of life
over mechanism: an excess that is dogmatic to the extent
that it relies on a false reduction of the machine.
Against such a restriction, we must oppose an absolute
liberation of technology. As long as technology's
materiality is derived from its function-for-man, its
"exteriority" from thought and nature will remain merely
relative. This is the case as much for Canguilhem's
externalization of the human organism as it is for
Derrida's supplement, its representational correlate.
Given Canguilhem's biological thesis, there simply is no
place external to natural-mental teleology. Likewise, if
the "supplement is exterior," it is only so in a relative
sense: exterior to the self-presencing of the present
within the phenomenological economy. It is "outside of the
positivity to which it is super-added," not outside of
thought.34
A radical theory of technological exteriority (where
exteriority, in a post-Levinasian determination, means
precisely, "outside of thought") develops the second phase
of the evolution of the automaton, which Canguilhem's
theory (now in the role of foundation for the reduction of
34. Of Grammatoloqy. 145.
134
technology to the supplement) conspicuously ignores.35
With the productive automaton - not as a metaphor, but as a
real machine - the age of the machine metaphor reaches its
end. For if the automaton unites the efficient cause with
the real in automatic or "spontaneous" (an alternate
translation of to automaton) production, it is no longer
possible to subject technology to a "putting in reserve."
Heal autonomy means precisely that: independence in the
immediate from a human efficient cause (or resistance to a
genetic-phenomenological determination of autonomy on the
basis of an ultimate source). In short, autonomy in the
real stems from relations inherent to what Deleuze and
Guattari call a "rhizomatic multiplicity" - a non-linear
and immanent field of relations unrelated to any totality
or origin.36 It is not the ontological status of the
automaton in reference to abstract "categorials" that
matters, but rather its specific productive function within
a particular assemblage or multiplicity. Such a
determination releases the automaton from the foundation
35. In Chapters 7 and 8, I shall have occasion to situate

such a development historically; in Mary Shelley and
Heinrich von Kleist, the self-sufficient automaton
functions as the real embodiment of technological
productive efficiency.
36. They define "multiplicity" in a functional manner:

" [Multiplicity] was created precisely in order to escape
the abstract opposition between the multiple and the one,
to escape dialectics, to succeed in conceiving the multiple
in the pure state, to cease treating it as a numerical
fragment of a lost Unity or Totality or as the organic
element of a Unity or Totality yet to come..." (A Thousand
Plateaus. 32)
13 5
imposed by Aristotle when he compares the movement of
animals to that of "automatic puppets": both, he says, "are
set moving when a small motion occurs: the cables are
released and the pegs strike against one another..."37
Situated in the real, by contrast, the puppet sheds this
metaphoric function: no longer a mere supplement, a
simulation of human life, it directly embodies a real
efficiency. The second phase of the evolution of the
automaton finds an exemplary embodiment in the becoming-
assemblage (or becoming-autonomous) of the puppet as
Deleuze and Guattari describe it:
Puppet strings, as a rhizome or multiplicity, are tied not

to the supposed will of an artist or puppeteer but to a
multiplicity of nerve fibers, which form another puppet in
other dimensions connected to the first: [quoting Ernst
Juenger] "Call the strings or rods that move the puppet the
weave. It might be objected that its multiplicity resides
in the person of the actor, who projects it into the text.
Granted; but the actor's nerve fibers in turn form a weave.
And they fall through the gray matter, the grid, into the
undifferentiated...." ... An assemblage is precisely this
increase in the dimensions of a multiplicity that
necessarily changes in nature as its expands its
connections. There are no points or positions in a
rhizome, such as those found in a structure, tree, or root.
There are only lines. (8)
The automaton only emerges in its proper autonomy with its
redefinition as a rhizomatic assemblage. If, ultimately,
the puppet remains too closely aligned with a human power
source to embody the automony of specifically technical
assemblages, at a more general level it permits a fruitful
redefinition of technology as something "more" than
37. From Aristotle's treatise, "Movement of Animals," A New

Aristotle Reader. 235 (701b).
13 6
mechanism. Only such a fundamental liberation of the
automatic can succeed in overcoming the machine metaphor,
in its modern as well as its classical form.
CHAPTER 2
THE MACHINE BASIS OF HEIDEGGER'S "THE QUESTION CONCERNING

TECHNOLOGY"
"... it is only another sign

of the groundlessness of
thinking and understanding
prevalent today, when a house
is presented as a machine-
for-living IWohnmaschine] and
a stool as a machine-for-
sitting [Sitzmaschine].
There are people who see in
such insanity [Jrrsinn] a
great discovery and the
harbinger of a new culture."
— Martin Heidegger1
In the last chapter, I emphasized the necessity for a
liberation of what Aristotle calls the automatic [to
automaton] from its repression in mechanical theory. It is
the category of the automatic that comprises the
possibility for technologically produced efficiency beyond
representation and calculation, and, as a result, its
liberation is fundamental to the successful critique of the
machine metaphor. Without such a liberation, technology
inevitably undergoes reduction to the merely secondary
status of the mechanical machine: unable to furnish its own
efficiency, it remains unautonomous and dependant on an
1. Martin Heidegger, Die Grundbeariffe der Metanhvsik.

Gesamtausgabe 29/30 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1988), 316,
(translation mine). "So ist es nur wieder ein Zeichen der
heute herrschenden Bodenlosigkeit des Denkens und
Verstehens, wenn man uns das Haus als eine Wohnmaschine und
den Stuhl als eine Sitzmaschine anbietet. Es gibt Leute,
die sehen sogar in solchem Irrsinn eine grosse Entdeckung
und die Vorboten einer neuen Kultur."
137
138
external efficient cause.
In this chapter I shall turn my attention to the
twentieth-century genesis of the technological reduction.
As I have already suggested above in the Introduction, it
is the work of the influential German philosopher, Martin
Heidegger, that underlies much contemporary cultural
criticism. To a great extent, contemporary theory,
particularly where it concerns itself with technology and
the media, can be read as a radicalization of the famous
diagnosis that Heidegger provides in his article "The Age
of the World Picture." As I indicated, Heidegger depicts a
technological command over reality that is forceful enough
to produce a metaphysical identification of reality with
representation - forceful enough, that is, to restrict the
"reality" of the world to what can be "conceived and
grasped as a picture."
Post-Heideggerian French theory (as exemplified in the
work of Derrida and Lacan) finds its point of departure in
an explicit inversion of Heidegger's position. Where
Heidegger maintains that the "essence of technology" is
uncontaminated by technology, both Derrida and Lacan assert
an irreducible linguistic basis for all determinations of
"essence" (which answer the question "what is?").
According to them, the contemporary reign of
representational thinking is not simply an historically
specific and hence limited phenomenon, but is in fact a
structural element of thought itself.
139
In the wake of this French "decision" regarding
Heidegger's famous maxim, what is in Heidegger a
historically determinate reduction of technological
materiality has been given a stronger legitimation. In
Derrida's work, technology is equated with writing (and all
of its possible "externalizations"), while in Lacan's,
technological artifacts (exemplarily, embodiments of the
gaze and the voice) serve as the 11locus" for the worldly
enactment of desire (i.e., as the "objet petit a" or
"object cause" of desire). In both cases, a partial
account of technology rooted in Heidegger's notion of the
"enframing" takes priority over a fuller account of
technology's radical exteriority or materiality — an
account developed by Marx and the Frankfurt School. The
apparatus-psyche model prevalent in contemporary film
theory has its genesis in this complex philosophical
lineage; through its debt to those more radical theories I
have mentioned (e.g. Derrida's and Lacan's), it implicitly
accepts the terms of a Heideggerian-style ontological
analysis as the prototype for an account of technology.2
It accepts, that is to say, an account of technology that
is - in itself - structurally reductive.
In order to liberate the radical exteriority of
technology from its philosophical "enframing," I shall thus
have to oppose not just the apparatus-psyche analogy as it
2. I have discussed the "apparatus-psyche" analogy in my

Introduction, above.
140
has been explicitly formulated in recent film theory, but
- more importantly — the reception of Heidegger that has
prevailed more generally in French thought. I believe that
it is possible to discern, between the lines of Heidegger's
text, a model of technology that anticipates the automatic
model I have sketched above. For in addition to advancing
the schematic pronouncements on technology for which he is
so justly famous (e.g., "techrie is nothing technological,"
"science does not think," etc.), Heidegger also identifies
the very principle of modernization that effectuates the
autonomy of industrial technology. This identification, I
suggest, remains important even though Heidegger never
develops its consequences. In rereading him today, our
task must be that of lifting the repression that he has put
upon his own proto-discovery of the automatic model. We
must engage in what Habermas, in another context, has
called a "redemptive reading" - one that opposes
Heidegger's own intentional proclivities as much as the
recent reception of his work.3
In championing the singular significance of
Heidegger's critique of technology, I therefore concur - at
least in part - with recent French (and American) critics.
Yet I do so, I think, for fundamentally different reasons.
To my mind, Heidegger's work is most important for what it
3. Juergen Habermas, "Walter Benjamin: Consciousness-

Raising or Rescuing Critique," in Gary Smith, ed., On
Walter Beniamin: Critical Essays and Recollections
(Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1988), 90-128.
141
"thinks" but does not - or cannot - say. To put it
bluntly, I believe that Heidegger, at some point or other,
gains an insight into the "ontic priority" of technology,
but that he is compelled - by a logic that cannot even be
said to be a conscious logic - to repress this insight.
Heidegger's overriding desire to maintain faith in a
philosophical salvation blinds him to the everyday,
"fallen" menace of technology that he would otherwise see
quite clearly.
I. Fear of Technology
Perhaps we can get closer to the stakes of this
repression if we articulate it in terms of Being and Time's
existential theory of reference. Not entirely unlike
modern art, ontic technology in the sense I am discussing
it here (as "prior" to ontology) eludes the existential
"categorials" of Being and Time. Since it is not (and
cannot be) the explicit object of human concern, man's
relationship with it is not (and cannot be) mediated by
reference. For this reason, ontic technology should
provoke a reaction from Dasein similar to that elicited by
the confrontation with its own death: that is, it should
provoke Angst, the general feeling of malaise which cannot
be tied down to any particular object and which, readers of
Being and Time will recall, shakes Dasein up sufficiently
to tear it away from its everyday involvement with the
thing-world and spur it on to attain its authenticity.
142
Yet, in the host of examples with which Heidegger
illustrates the three modes of fallenness ("idle talk,"
"curiosity," and "ambiguity") - examples that include
technologized modes of public communication - technology is
foreclosed, in no unclear terms, from playing any role
whatsoever in Dasein's quest to achieve an authentic
understanding of its source of Being. Technology, that is
to say, can only interfere with the "death metaphysics"
underlying fundamental ontology by introducing a source of
anxiety that is absolutely exterior to Dasein's thematizing
(or representing) activity. In an entirely different
manner from death, whose deferral constitutes the "origin"
of thinking for Heidegger (and of representation for
Derrida), ontic technology is - in principle -
unrepresentable.
Heidegger's analysis of "idle talk" (Gerede) provides
an exemplary instance of his method of confronting this
absolute exteriority. He fears it as an obstacle to the
"call of conscience" and takes flight so as to avoid it.
In paragraph 55 of Being and Time. Heidegger depicts
Dasein's struggle for authenticity as an unmediated
response to the call of Being. Not only does such a
response require Dasein to hear the call as it is
enunciated from out of Rede (the onto-hermeneutic space of
truth) - which is an ontological possibility secured to
Dasein by its very constitution; it also requires Dasein to
overcome its factical or phenomenal absorption in the "idle
143
talk" of the public self (das Man, the "they"), an
absorption rooted not in the formal structure of Dasein,
but in its ontic, fallen desire. "Losing itself in the
publicness and the idle talk of the 'they,'" Dasein,
Heidegger says,
fails to hear [ueberhort] its own Self in listening to the

they-self. If Dasein is to be able to get brought back
from this lostness of failing to hear itself, and if this
is to be done through itself, then it must first be able to
find itself — to find itself as something which has failed
to hear itself, and which fails to hear in that it listens
away to the "they." This listening-away must get broken
off; in other words, the possibility of another kind of
hearing which will interrupt it, must be given by Dasein
itself. The possibility of its thus getting broken off
lies in its being appealed to without mediation. Dasein
fails to hear itself, and listens away to the "they"; and
this listening-away gets broken toy the call if that call,
in accordance with its character as such, arouses another
kind of hearing, which, in relationship to the hearing that
is lost, has a character in every way opposite. If in this
lost hearing, one has been fascinated with the "hubbub"
[vom Laerm] of the manifold ambiguity [Zweideutigkeit]
which idle talk possesses in its everyday "newness" [des
altaeglich "neuen" Geredes], then the call must do its
calling without any hubbub and unambiguously, leaving no
foothold for curiosity. (315-16/271)
For all of its subtlety, Heidegger's analysis of language
[Rede] is absolutely powerless to insure the actual
"breaking-away" of Dasein from its everyday objects of
desire. While Heidegger's genealogy of language
convincingly asserts - from a formal-ontological standpoint
- the priority of authentic discourse [i?ede] over mere
speech [Sprache] and "idle talk" [Gerede], there is no
guarantee against the latter's everyday priority, and thus
against the practical, ontic co-optation of the ontological
"call of conscience" by inherently technological structures
(the public self, etc.) that cannot even be "objects" or
144
"referents" in terms of Heidegger's linguistics. This
situation has led one recent commentator to refer to
Dasein's proximate everyday state as that of "addiction."4
What this means is that Heidegger's application of
ontological categories to the problem of technology harbors
an internal conflict - a conflict between competing claims
for priority (between the ontic claim of technology and the
ontological claim of philosophy) - that it is wholly
incapable of resolving and is thus forced to repress. A
central task for a redemptive reading of Heidegger involves
the elucidation of this repressed conflict; as the material
basis underlying the linguistic or ontological ambiguity
that Heidegger discovers in the essence of technology, the
ontic priority of technology emerges directly from out of
the real. It thus provides a "ground" for a practical
revision of the major thesis of the ontological epoche - a
ground for an automatic or spontaneous "revenge of the
real" that can be discerned obliquely in Heidegger's text
and that undermines its most significant claims.
It is this internal conflict within Heidegger's work
that gives it the special status it holds for my more
global critique of the contemporary critical scene. As a
critic of the apparatus-psyche analysis, I look upon
Heidegger's conflict not simply as a flaw, but as a
critical blindness to the material domain whose discovery
4. See Avital Ronnell, Crack Wars (Lincoln, NE: University

of Nebraska Press, 1992).
145
allows us to carry on Heidegger's project in ways unthought
(and unthinkable) for him. Far from regretting it as a
philosophical weakness, I therefore take solace in the fact
that Heidegger's analysis of technology betrays, at certain
points, its own shaky foundation. For in doing so, it not
only covertly demonstrates the limitations of the
ontological frame of reference, but also illuminates a path
beyond that frame - a path that Heidegger himself, for
obvious reasons, was unable to follow, but one that
nevertheless remains open to us.
In order to elucidate this path, we must demystify
Heidegger's claim that technology is "in a lofty sense ...
ambiguous." Although Heidegger views his description as
exhaustive of the "ontology" of technology, we must come to
see the two poles of the ambiguity he points to as limited
in scope, since both remain firmly within the space of an
ontological hermeneutics for which language is the site of
truth. We must come to the realization that the lofty
ambiguity Heidegger sees in technology (the ambiguity
between its "essence" and its mere material impact) is in
fact derivative and that it attains coherence only within a
previously secured ontological frame of reference. We must
realize that this ambiguity presupposes a prior reduction
of the ontic domain, and is thus, as it were, nothing other
than a "translation" of a material conflict at the level of
the real into a "heterogeneity" within a hierarchical
descriptive horizon. To put it more bluntly, we must come
146
to see how Heidegger defuses a conflict in the real by
recontextualizing it within a space where it is no longer a
conflict, but simply an "incompatibility” between two human
modes of thematizing technology (man's authentic
"correspondence" to Being's call and his inauthentic
absorption in the ontic). In the end, nothing less is at
stake in Heidegger's framing the problem of technology
exclusively in terms of representation than a wholesale
domestication of the real into the space of thought.
II. Heidegger's Ambivalence
We find this ontological contextualization at work in
a crucial passage from "The Question Concerning Technology"
- a passage in which Heidegger depicts the impact of
technology as a double-edged sword:
The essence of technology is in a lofty sense [in einem

hohen Sinne] ambiguous. ... On the one hand, Enframing
[das Gestell] challenges forth into the frenziedness of
ordering [das Easende des Bestellens] that blocks every
view into the coming-to-pass of revealing and so radically
[von Grund auf] endangers the relation to the essence of
truth [den Bezug zum Wesen der Wahrheit]. On the other
hand, Enframing comes to pass [ereignet sich] for its part
in the granting that lets man endure ... that he may be the
one who is needed and used for the safekeeping of the
coming to presence of truth [zur Wahrnis des Wesens der
Wahrheit]. (33/37)
In characterizing technology's "ambiguity" in this way,
Heidegger has already subordinated the ontic, material
force of technology to its more profound ontological
significance. Moreover, Heidegger's frame of reference
here has apparently been effective in hiding this
subordination from the critical tradition. His decision to
investigate technology on the basis of its essence has been
understood, for the most part, in the light of his hope
that mankind will discover a new relation to Being outside
of the enframing of thought by representation. Yet we must
point out the blatant dogmatism in this move of
Heidegger's: the isolation of the essence of technology
preserves the hope Heidegger points to only because it
eliminates the radical materiality of technology. To the
ontic impact of technology - the generalization of the hold
of representation on thought - Heidegger opposes more of
the same: i.e., a deeper, ontological relationship between
techne and thought. Nowhere does he confront technology's
sheer materiality - its absolute exteriority with respect
to the cognitive category of thought. In his very
characterization of technology as "ambiguous in a lofty
sense," Heidegger actually decides - or rather closes off
- a more immediate, materially-based ambiguity. His
analysis does not simply privilege technology's function as
an externalization of thought (the language or storage
model) over its function as the radical "other" of thought
(the "automatic" model), but actually carries out a
wholesale, if implicit denial of the significance of the
latter.
It is this decision to eliminate technological
materiality, more than any other motif in Heidegger, that
furnishes the prototype for contemporary approaches to
technology. Despite a virulent critique of the alleged
148
"purity" Heidegger grants to techne, both Lacan and Derrida
maintain a more general fidelity to his methodology: they
follow him in broaching the problem of technology through
the frame of representation. Like Heidegger, therefore,
they both situate the "ambiguity" of technology within (or
at least solely in reference to) the space of an onto-
hermeneutics which takes language as the site of truth.
There is, however, something that distinguishes
Heidegger from his important disciples, something that
speaks to the current impasse in technology theory. With
respect to Heidegger's self-professed focus on
representation, the radicalization of the enframing
undertaken by French post-structuralism foretells the
ultimate - and inexorable - fate of Heidegger's
interrogation of technology; it brings to completion what
is only prepared in his work. Yet, however correct and
productive it is in this regard, this radicalization
brackets something that was still obliquely present in
Heidegger's text. It brackets what lies behind the
explicit ambiguity that Heidegger thematizes in his major
statement on technology: a consideration of and retreat
from the radical (and for Heidegger, bleak) prospect that
technology might in fact possess a disconcerting autonomy
from human command.
Heidegger depicts this possibility most forcefully at
the very end of his career. In his interview with the
German news magazine Der Spiegel ["The Mirror"], he
149
suggests that technology directly impinges on the very
possibility of thought itself, not from within (as it does
in the figure of the "supplement") but from without: "The
modes of thinking handed down by the metaphysical
tradition, which concludes in the figure of Nietzsche, no
longer offer the possibility of reflectively experiencing
[denkend zu erfahren] the fundamental principle [Grundzug]
of the emerging technical age."5 Far from merely
contaminating thought through its dependance on language,
technology (in this determination) threatens to overthrow
the descriptive hold of thought on reality - i.e., to
produce a reality that exceeds the very category of
thought.
Heidegger, of course, is not himself able to bring
this radical conception of technology to fruition. Readers
familiar with the Spiegel interview know that even there -
in the place where Heidegger gives way to the most extreme
pessimism - he nevertheless refuses to abandon the
traditional philosophical privilege of thought. This
recalcitrance on the part of the aging thinker is hardly
accidental, however, since it merely reformulates a certain
privilege that he had always attributed to man qua speaking
5. Heidegger, "Nur noch ein Gott kann uns refcten." Spiegel-

Gespraech mit Martin Heidegger am 23 September, 1966. Der
Spiegel, No. 26, May 31, 1966, 212, my translation. An
English translation of this interview has been published
with the title "Only a God can save us: Der Spiegel1s
interview with Martin Heidegger," tr. Maria P. Alter and
John D. Caputo, Philosophy Today, XX (Winter, 1976), 267-
284.
animal - what Derrida, in his recent study of Heidegger
entitled Of Spirit, calls the “privilege of the question.”
When Heidegger speaks of the radicalized danger of
technology (one potential "interpretation" [Deutung] of its
"ambiguity" [Zweideutigkeit]), he always retains the
framework of language as the locus of truth. In conceiving
technology as the end of philosophy, he makes no reference
to its radical exteriority - to the revenge of the real
that is underway independently of any evolution of the
revealing of Being. On the contrary, Heidegger speaks of
it as a threat to the traditional role of thought - a
threat to the possibility, embedded within thought, of
connecting contemporary (historical) man with the "source
of his being." As I have already noted, Heidegger quite
literally limits technology's danger to the threat it poses
to the "purity" of language. "Cybernetics," he says in one
late article, "reconstructs language so that it can
function as an exchange of news [bildet die Sprache um zu
einem Austausch von Nachrichten]. The arts [Die Kunste]
become stored and storing instruments Igesteuert-steuernden
Instrumenten]."6 As a consequence, the possibility of
connecting thought with its primordial ground in the
ontology of truth is compromised: "'Theory' ['Theorie'l now
6. "The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking," in

Basic Writings, ed. David Krell, 376, tr. modified. German
text "Das Ende der Philosophie und die Aufgabe des Denkens"
in Zur Sache des Denkens (Tuebingen: Max Niemeyer, 1969),
64. Subsequent passages will cite both English and then
(separated by a slash) German pagination.
151
means: supposition of the categories, which are restricted
to a cybernetic function, but denied any ontological
significance [aber jeder ontologische Sinn abgesprochen
wird]." (377/65) What Heidegger says of the typewriter (in
"Hebei - der Hausfreund") is all the more true of the
mainframe computer: it "renders language operational [die
Sprache in Betrieb nimmt] and thus holds mastery over
[meistert] the essence of man."7
In my opinion, Heidegger sells himself short when he
closes the door so precipitously on his discovery of the
ontic priority of technology. Nevertheless, he does not do
so simply on a whim, but is compelled by a structural
necessity of his thought; he is simply obeying what he
considers a higher philosophical order - the priority of
ontology. While he believes it to be the fruit of his
early immersion in Greek thought, this priority, seen in
historical retrospect, seems to owe as much, if not more,
to an ontic, i.e., "inauthentic," fear of technology.
Heidegger's explicit characterization of technology as
"ambiguous" can thus be seen as a protective measure: as I
have already said, it disguises a more significant and
unsettling material conflict (of thought with the real) and
thus preserves the privilege of language that forms the
fundamental principle of Heidegger's thought. In doing so,
moreover, it also preserves the illusion that man retains a
7. Hebei — der Hausfreund (Pfullingen: Neske, 1957), 28,

my translation.
152
basic command over technology.
Once we have unmasked the partiality of this
ambiguity, we are able to perceive the seemingly mechanical
movement of a "revenge of the technical," a movement taking
place in complete independence from human thought. With
this material revenge, technology achieves in actuality the
potential autonomy that, in the theoretical realm, is the
excluded object of Heidegger's "fear."
Grafting our critique onto this spontaneous and
material movement in the real, we are able to take a
cynical view of Heidegger's claims for the archaic priority
of ontology. As we observed in the case of Aristotle's
reading of chance, such claims advance a reduction of
technology that is enabling for the command of
philosophical description over the real, yet thoroughly
reductive in light of a "material ontology" of the real.
In Heidegger's case, moreover, this motive might comprise a
more immediate necessity for the entire critical lineage
inaugurated by his formulation of the "ontological
difference." The most famous motif of Heidegger's thought
might, in other words, turn out to owe more to a strategic
and pragmatic decision than to any fundamental ontological
priority.
Like Aristotle's conception of nous [thought], the
ontological difference (the priority of Being over being)
harbors within it an enabling reduction of that "share" of
the real that seems to exceed it. Just as Aristotle
153
employs a categorical hierarchy (the primacy of thought) to
compromise the excess of the automatic, Heidegger
fetishizes language as the "locus" of truth in order to
bracket out the ontic priority of technology. As a
consequence, the allegedly archaic ontological difference
can be seen to be conditioned (or at least assisted) by
something "older" than it - although not "older" in the
ontological (or "pre-ontological") sense of Derrida's

• ^ ft
differance.° The ontological difference, in short, has as
its correlate an enabling decision regarding the ontic
domain - a dogmatic reduction of technology to the purely
instrumental status of the machine.
III. The Machine
It is precisely this reduction that explains the
paradoxical and rather perverse claim Heidegger makes
concerning the devastation wrought by technology in the
twentieth-century:
[Technology's] threat to man does not come in the first

instance from the potentially lethal machines and apparatus
[toedlich vrirkenden Maschinen und Apparaturen] of
technology. The actual threat [Die eigentliche Bedrohung]
has already affected man in his essence. The rule of the
Enframing [Die Herrschaft des Gestells] threatens man with
the possibility that it could be denied to him to enter
into a more original revealing [Entbergen] and hence to
experience the call [Zuspruch] of a more primal truth.9
8. Cf. "Differance," in Margins of Philosophy (Chicago:

University of Chicago, 1987).
9. "The Question Concerning Technology," in The Question

Concerning Technology and Other Essays. op. cit., 28
(German text in Vortraege und Aufsaetze [Pfullingen: Neske,
1954], 32). In subsequent citations, page numbers of the
154
Heidegger discounts the destructive impact of technology
because it lacks a direct relation (or what he calls
"correspondence" [Entsprechung]) with language. What is
merely machinic, he seems to suggest, cannot hit us where

it hurts.
Readers who have experienced the devastation of two
global wars and countless regional struggles (including
current ones) will certainly find it difficult to
sympathize with this opinion. Nevertheless, it does seem
to possess a "logic" - and one very central to Western
thought in general. Within a humanistic context (where
human activity holds a privileged status in the real),
Heidegger's interpretation attains a certain coherence: as
long as military-industrial technology is defined as a mere
machine - something that is wholly dependant on a thinking
being (Dasein) for its (necessarily) derivative status - it
is of secondary importance and should be subject to human
control.
The significance of this interpretation cannot be
sufficiently stressed, for it shows the endurance of
Heidegger's early reduction of technology to the figure of
the machine. Far from the ground-breaking motif that it
has most often been taken for, the later Heidegger's famous
division of technology is in fact thoroughly dependent on
his early - virtually unknown - instrumental definition of
the machine. In a lecture course of 1929-30, entitled "The
English shall precede page numbers of the German in

parentheses.
Fundamental Principles of Phenomenology," Heidegger
provides the following account of machine technology: "The
machine is a tool [Zeug] and as such is 'serviceable
for...' [dienlich zu...]."10 As Heidegger himself
acknowledges, this definition squares with the account of
"readiness-to-hand" [Zuhandenheit] from paragraph 15 of
Being and Time: like the hammer, with which we engage
"first and for the most part" in a practical mode, the
machine is a use object, and becomes the explicit theme of
theoretical discourse only when it breaks down.
Heidegger's introduction of the machine respects the
foundational privilege of Dasein that determines the entire
itinerary of Heidegger's so-called fundamental ontology.
Like all tools, the machine requires a "manufacturing by
men" [Erzeugnis von Menschen]; and still more importantly,
it is dependant for its very existence - i.e., for the
(ontological) category that "defines" it - on the activity
of a questioning Being (Dasein): "...the manufacture of
tools," Heidegger says unequivocally, "is only possible on
the basis of what we call Weltbildung."11
It is this reductive determination of the machine
which lends an appearance of coherence - and even of
necessity - to Heidegger's earlier discussed translation of
10. Gesamtausgabe 29/30, 315, my translation. The German

original reads: "Die Maschine ist ein Zeug und als solches
dienlich zu..."
11. Ibid., 313, my translation. The German original reads:

"[Solches] Erzeugen von Zeug ist nur moeglich, wo das
zugrunde liegt, was wir Weltbildung nennen."
156
the real conflict posed by technology into an ambiguity
that is purely descriptive and cognitive: into a narrow
ambiguity between two possible interpretations [zwei
Deutungen]. Despite its appearance as a mere derivation
from the more explicit theory of Being and Time, this early
reduction of technology to the narrow figure of the machine
ultimately performs a more basic function in Heidegger's
approach to technology. Since it persists well beyond the
period of fundamental ontology, it actually comes to
predetermine Heidegger's later splitting of technology into
an essential (i.e., linguistic) part and a non-essential
(non-linguistic) part. More specifically, it would appear
that Heidegger's early reductive definition of the machine
furnishes him with a useful model for what he later comes
to call the "merely technical" [das Technische]; it thus
serves as a foil against which the essential (ontological)
status of technology as techne (a mode of unconcealment, of
aletheia) is able to emerge.
What this means is that the central motif of
Heidegger's later thought - the purity of techne and its
essential unity with the truth of Being - acquires whatever
plausibility it has from the failure of a dogmatically-
instituted mechanical model to circumscribe technology in
any adequate or exhaustive manner. What is at issue here
is nothing less than the translation of a material conflict
into the hermeneutic domain, or in more general terms, the
dogmatic priority Heidegger lends to ontology (and to the
question) - the priority, in the words of the French
phenoxnenologist Emmanuel Levinas, of man's relation to
Being over his relation to other beings. This priority
allows Heidegger to perform a violent, but highly effective
metaleptic cover-up: after reducing the ontic priority of
technology in order to claim that language furnishes the
exhaustive horizon for our relation with the "essence" of
technology (i.e., with Being in its contemporary form), he
then asserts that ontic technology has a derivative status
in light of the thus-secured ontological standpoint.
Viewed from this angle, technology appears to depend - for
its very existence - on the "world-forming" [weltbildend]
power of an agent of thought. And since thought hereby
attains the status of "efficient cause," effacing the
material efficiency of technology in the process, it
effectively installs representation in the place of
production, description in the place of the real (and thus
warrants the rhetorical characterization of metalepsis).
The ontic priority of technology in the domain of the real
is exchanged for a derivative ontological status, and in
the process, its resistance to thought (a resistance which
betokens its radical materiality) is simply left out of the
picture.
IV. Aristotle and "to automaton"
The very same metaleptic cover-up informs Heidegger's
allegedly originary rereading of Aristotle's doctrine of
158
causality in "The Question Concerning Technology."
According to Heidegger, this fourfold doctrine has
dominated man's thinking about causality (and also
implicitly, under the guise of the "principle of reason,"
about Being) since Aristotle; in its wake, the essential
meaning of cause (Greek aition) as "that to which something
else is indebted" [das, was ein anderes verschuldet] has
been covered over by a merely instrumental definition.
(7/12) To correct for this instrumental reduction
(precisely what transpires, says Heidegger, when we focus
on technology's ontic impact), we must ask after the
meaning of "cause" itself, with an eye to discovering the
"unifiedly determined" causal "character" of the four
causes which allows them to "belong together." (7/12)
Heidegger finds this deeper meaning in the hermeneutic
function which he substitutes for Aristotle's efficient
cause:
Finally there is a fourth participant in the responsibility

for the finished sacrificial vessel's lying before us ready
for use, i.e., the silversmith — but not at all because
he, in working, brings about the finished sacrificial
chalice as if it were the effect of a making; the
silversmith is not a causa efficiens. The Aristotelian
doctrine neither knows the cause that is named by this term
nor uses a Greek word that would correspond to it. The
silversmith considers carefully and gathers together the
three aforementioned ways of being responsible and
indebted. To consider carefully [ueberlegen] is in Greek
legein, logos. Legein is rooted in apophainesthai, to
bring forward into appearance. The silversmith is co-
responsible as that from whence the sacrificial vessel's
bringing forth and resting-in-self take and retain their
first departure. The three previously mentioned ways of
being responsible [formal, material, final causes] owe
thanks to the pondering of the silversmith for the "that"
and the "how" of this coming into appearance and into play
for the production of the sacrificial vessel. (8/13)
159
Yet for all of Heidegger's bravado, this revision of
Aristotle's doctrine merely replaces one instrumental
reduction with another. To forestall the prevailing
determination of Being on the basis of instrumental
causality (the principle of reason), Heidegger simply
inverts the relation between Being (i.e., Dasein) and
instrumentality. Rather than relying on a pregiven and
dogmatic conception of causality to provide an account of
its Being, Dasein's activity (questioning, thinking, etc.:
in short, activity which has Being as its aim and its
source) is itself made responsible for bringing the
instrumental modes of causality to light.
In terms of the history of philosophy, this reversal
is momentous, but for us it nonetheless remains a "mere"
reversal. Despite its local inversion of certain terms
within the Aristotelian doctrine of causality, Heidegger's
account leaves intact the broader foundation of Aristotle's
doctrine - the identification of (ontic) technology and
instrumentality. It ultimately reproduces Aristotle's own
paradigm reduction of technology to a restricted model
(i.e., as a supplement to physis). In both cases,
something that is a "cause" outside of any secured
hermeneutic space (i.e., a space governed by the ontology
of "causality") is revaluated metaleptically as a mere
derivative effect of a fundamental (i.e., constituting)
movement of thought.
The fact, however, that Heidegger's reduction concerns
160
industrial technology - or technology as an (at least
potentially) active, anarchic and rhizomatic source of
efficiency - differentiates it in actuality (and not simply
categorically) from Aristotle's own reduction of the
primarily descriptive category of the automatic. While the
revenge of the real remains implicit in Aristotle's world
(since technology in antiquity was for the most part
reducible to the mechanical model), it becomes explicit and
irrevocable in Heidegger's, and does so in a way that can
not be ignored. In the modern world, that is to say, the
revenge of the real comprises an everyday equivalent to
what Arms Race specialists call "technology creep" - "the
uncontrollable surging ahead of invention [or, more
appropriately here: simply of technical mediation, MH] past
all attempts to predict it or legislate it."12
Technology's ubiquitous impact provides the automatic with
an actual foothold in the molecular real - a foothold
antedating any act of reflection and one whose rhizomatic
efficiency defies any capture by thought and/or in
representation.
Despite this basic difference in the material basis
underlying their respective projects, Heidegger's reference
to Aristotle makes it possible to define more concretely
the positive potential that I am claiming to discover in
the very failure of his onto-phenomenological project.
12. See Stewart Brand, The Media Lab: Inventing the Future
at MIT (New York: Viking Penguin, 1987), p. 19.
161
With the historically determined ubiquity of technology
immanent to Heidegger's thought, the radical autonomy that
he (along with Aristotle) forecloses becomes embodied from
a standpoint in the real - a standpoint which literally
explodes the priority Heidegger lends to ontology. The
revenge of the real takes place as a kind of "autonomous
deconstruction," a practico-technico-automatic enactment of
Levinas' still essentially theoretical objection against
fundamental ontology. "To affirm the priority of Being

/i /
(1'etre) over being (1'etant)," Levinas says in Totality
and Infinity.
is already to decide the essence of philosophy, to

subordinate the relation with someone who is a being (the
ethical relation) to a relation with the Being of being
which, because it is impersonal, permits the capture, the
domination of being (in a theoretical relation [une
relation de savoir])... Heideggerian ontology
subordinates] all relation with being to the relation with
Being...13
Our evaluation of the force of this reversal must address
the state of contemporary technology, by accounting for its
deployment from a position immanent to the real. In the
form Levinas gives it, this objection remains parasitic on
Heidegger's conception of thinking, and more generally, on
a conception of thinking per se; it merely substitutes a
13. Levinas, 36, my translation. T?he French original

reads: "Affirmer la priorite de l'etre par rapport a
1'etant, c'est dejci se prononcer sur 1'essence de la
philosophie, subordonner la relation avec quelqu'un qui est
un etant (la relation £thique) a une relation avec l'etre
de 1'etant qui, impersonnel, permet la saisie, la
domination de 1'etant (a une relation de savoir...
L'ontologie heideggerienne subordonn[e] a la relation avec
l'etre, toute relation avec 1'etant..."
162
failure of finite thought for Heidegger's triumphant
evaluation of this unique human attribute. In its proper
technological embodiment, however, the automatic is not
simply "beyond" the capacity of finite thought (as is
Levinas' description of the primordial "face" of the other
or Descartes' idea of God or even the experience of the
sublime); rather - for "reasons" that are immediately real
- the automatic is irreconcilable with the very category of
thought. Unlike the primordial relation with the "other,"
it does not depend on any act of thinking, but takes place
by itself, en autoi.
V. Production and Poiesis
In "The Question Concerning Technology," Heidegger's
most famous and most explicit account of technology, we
find the sophisticated version of the metaleptic reduction
that has been our focus thus far. As I have already
indicated, the restricted or hermeneutico-linguistic
"ambiguity" Heidegger discovers in technology emerges only
on the basis of a prior reduction - of ontic technology to
the derivative and descriptive-ontological status of the
machine as Dasein thematizes it, which is to say, through
the ncategorialu of Zuhandenheit ("readiness-to-hand").
When Heidegger explicitly identifies production with the
Greek notion of poiesis, this metaleptic reduction is
already in effect. What I am suggesting, therefore, is
that Heidegger's reading of production on the basis of
163
poiesis (like his earlier assertion of the priority of
ontology) is not in fact fundamental and primordial, as the
bravado of his "return to the Pre-Socratics" would
indicate, but rather abridged and derivative. Like the
priority of ontology, it only works once the radical
productive efficiency of technology has been dogmatically
reduced.
Much has been written recently on the subject of
Heidegger's antipathy toward modernity - in art as much as
in life. Indeed, with the outbreak of the so-called
"Heidegger affair" (the scandal evoked by our belated
coming-to-terms with Heidegger's nazi involvement),
Heidegger has been indicted for his backward-oriented
cultural prejudices, including a profound dislike of the
modern technologies of radio and television and a
particularly vehement hatred of modern (i.e., abstract)
art. One recent book, appropriately entitled Heidegger's
Confrontation with Modernity. has even been devoted to his
so-called "productionist metaphysics" - a phrase meant to
convey the foundation of his thought in the Greek notion of
poiesis, as the author's definition makes clear:
The Greek founders of metaphysics defined the being of

entities in a proto-technological way. For them, 'to be'
meant 'to be produced.' Hence, according to Heidegger, the
history of metaphysics became the history of the unfolding
of productionist metaphysics. 4
The history of metaphysics, that is to say, bears witness
14. Michael E. Zimmerman, Heidegger's Confrontation with

Modernity: Technology. Politics. Art (Bloomington, IN:
Indiana University Press, 1990), xv.
164
to the perseverance of the poietic ontology of the Greeks.
Heidegger thus concurs, as this author observes, with Plato
who defines poiesis as the bringing-forth of "what passes
over into presencing from that which is not presencing.11
(Symposium, 205b)
In my opinion, this appropriation of the term
"productionist" as a translation for poiesis forms the
keystone of the modern repression of productive materiality
(of production as material force). With it, poiesis is
rendered coterminous with production, which really means
that production is narrowed to fit within the poietic
model. While one might legitimately claim that poiesis
furnishes an adequate description of the forms of
production known to the Greeks ("handcraft manufacture,"
"artistic and poetical bringing into appearance and
concrete imagery," and physis), to claim that it governs
all causal relations - that, in short, "[t]he possibility
of all productive manufacturing lies in revealing" - is
something quite different. Such a determination would
appear wholly incapable of accounting for changing modes of
production, and for industrial technology in particular.
Moreover, as we shall soon see, this determination seems to
contradict the very principle that underlies Heidegger's
entire meditation on techrie as the modern stamping of
truth: the singularity of modern technology. There are
then both intrinsic and extrinsic grounds for opposing the
conflation of production with poiesis.
165
When critics attack the Volks-orientation of
Heidegger's productionist metaphysics without questioning
the grounding conflation of production with poiesis, they
in fact shy away from all consideration of more radical
possibilities. Their local complaints disguise a deeper
fidelity to Heidegger: no matter how critical their stance,
they can do no more, ultimately, than perpetuate the
reduction programmed by Heidegger's own paradigmatic
identification of techne and poiesis: "Technology is a way
of revealing. ... Techne belongs to bringing-forth, to
poiesis; it is something poietic."15
This perpetuation of Heidegger's reduction by
contemporary critics has the effect of whitewashing the
textual evidence of a certain hesitation on Heidegger's
part. While it appears undeniable that Heidegger in the
end licenses the poietic reduction of production, his path
toward this final position is hardly a smooth one. By
analyzing the textual development of Heidegger's argument,
one can find traces of an attempt to move beyond the
restrictions of the narrow poietic model; such traces
suggest a certain self-critique on Heidegger's part: his
recognition of the ontological poverty of a language-
centered conception of technology. Given the presence of
such a self-critique, the fact that Heidegger subsequently
reinvokes the poietic model testifies less, I suggest, to
his conscious intention than it does to a structural
15. "The Question Concerning Technology," 13/16.
166
commitment. Once again, the "hidden" presence of the
dogmatic privilege of the question (from the Being and Time
period) ultimately compromises his meditation on
technology.
Traces of Heidegger's hesitation in conflating
production and poiesis can be found in the important
passage where Heidegger connects the Enframing [das
Gestell] with poiesis:
The word stellen [to set upon] in the name Ge-stell

[Enframing] not only means challenging. At the same time
it should preserve the suggestion of another Stellen from
which it stems, namely, that producing and presenting [Her-
und Dar-stellen] which, in the sense of poiesis, lets what
presences come forth into unconcealment. This producing
that brings forth - e.g., the erecting of a statue in the
temple precinct - and the challenging ordering now under
consideration are indeed fundamentally different
[grundverschieden], and yet they remain related in their
essence [im Wesen verwandt]. Both are ways of revealing,
of aletheia. (21/24)
This passage articulates the paradox Heidegger sees in the
historical evolution of technology - a paradox reflected in
the simultaneous identity and difference with which he
characterizes the relation of pre-modern and modern
production (Her-vor-bringen ["bringing-forth," Heidegger's
translation of poiesis] and Herausfordern ["challenging-
forth"] respectively). Whatever the deeper significance
of this simultaneous "fundamental difference" and
"essential relation" between the two, it is clear that such
a paradoxical bond can emerge only within the poietic
horizon - only on the assumption that both "modes of
production" "bring forth what presences into
unconcealment." Such a determination, however, seems to
167
contradict (or at least to modify fundamentally)
Heidegger's earlier and more radical claim for the
singularity of modern technology: that it "does not unfold
into a bringing-forth in the sense of poiesis." (14/18)
What is the sense of this equivocation? How can
modern technology be simultaneously non-poietic and yet
ultimately a mode of poiesis? Is this just carelessness on
Heidegger's part, carelessness that can simply be dismissed
(as it has been by recent criticism) as inessential? Or
can we read in it the traces of a deeper, structural
conflict - perhaps a prior commitment on Heidegger's part
that intervenes to compromise his radical vision?
These questions call for a closer reading of
Heidegger's conception of Herausfordern ["challenging-
forth"]. Heidegger introduces the term to characterize his
conception of modern technology - or rather, the mandate
behind modern technology: namely, the "stockpiling"
[Lagern] or placing "on call" [zur Stelle] of energy as the
"standing-reserve" [Bestand]. Herausfordern characterizes
what I shall call the storage model of technology - a model
whose essential feature is the bending of natural force to
"unnatural" (i.e., non-poietic) ends. Heidegger introduces
this function with reference to specific modern
technologies:
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
168
blowing. But the windmill does not unlock [erschliesst]

energy from the air currents [Energien der Luftstroemung]
in order to store it [urn sie zu speichern]. In contrast, a
tract of land is challenged into the putting out of coal
and ore. The earth now reveals itself as a coal mining
district, the soil as a mineral deposit. The field that
the peasant formerly cultivated and set in order
[bestellte] appears differently than it did when to set in
order still meant to take care of and to maintain. The
work of the peasant does not challenge the soil of the
field. In the sowing of the grain it places the seed in
the keeping of the forces of growth [Wachstumkraeften] and
watches over its increase. But meanwhile even the
cultivation of the field has come under the grip of another
kind of setting-in-order, which sets upon [stellt] nature.
It sets upon it in the sense of challenging it.
Agriculture is now the mechanized food industry. Air is
now set upon to yield nitrogen, the earth to yield ore, ore
to yield uranium...; uranium is set upon to yield atomic
energy... (14-15/18-19)
With this passage, the central issue of Heidegger's claim
for modern technology is raised: does the storage of energy
differ in any essential way from the translation of energy
from one form to another? Does it part company with what
we have earlier discussed as the "dynamical" part of
mechanical theory?
For Heidegger, it seems that the answer must be yes,
since his very introduction of new terminology suggests a
categorical distinction. Herausfordern is introduced to
characterize a mode of technological production
unprecedented in history. As the above passage suggests,
it breaches the essential bond uniting poiesis and the
natural showing of nature. Nevertheless, this
determination of poiesis is fundamentally incongruous with
Heidegger's subsequent definition of Herausfordern as a
form of poiesis, a mode of production that is related to
poiesis (via stellen) "in its essence."
169
Since both claims are essential to Heidegger's
analysis of modern technology, we cannot simply cut through
this apparent aporia. We must take an entirely different
path - a path which calls on us to discern the presence and
operation of two entirely separate registers of poiesis.
On the one hand, poiesis has a general function of
facilitating production (the production of presencing) as
such. In this sense, it is the category of modern
production no less than it is of pre-modern production.
Yet on the other hand, Heidegger also construes poiesis in
a narrower sense - as a restricted category of production
whose basic principle is its harmony with the presencing of
physis.
It is this incongruity, I suggest, that allows
Heidegger to maintain the singularity of modern technology
without abandoning his primordial conflation of production
and poiesis. With respect to the narrow definition of
poeisis, Herausfordern presents a radically new mode of
production; yet, circumscribed by the larger notion of
poiesis, it is revealed to possess an essential kinship
with Her-vor-bringen, since both are modes of revealing, of
aletheia.
Yet before we come to the conclusion that Heidegger
has thus skillfully evaded the reduction we have detailed
above, we must inquire further regarding the nature of this
essential kinship. Heidegger's insistence on founding
Herausfordern (and all other modes of production) on
170
poiesis becomes in actuality a restriction: Herausfordern
can only attain its status as a form of poiesis in the
broad sense by being determined as a degradation or founded
mode of poiesis in the narrow sense. The mandate behind
modern technology - the principle of stockpiling - is a way
of ordering that supplements a more original ordering: that
of nature. In other words, the Gestell can provoke nature
(by placing demands that are contrary to nature) only on
the ground of a prior presencing of nature as nature. This
dogmatism leads Heidegger to deny the autonomy of the very
"machine" which exemplified and motivated Marx's conception
of the "motive mechanism"; for Heidegger, the steam engine
is nothing more than a stockpiling of the sun's warmth.
From beginning to end, the cycle of energy exchange is
governed by the classical laws of the work model: it is
conceived as a calculable transformation of a pre-existent
source of energy. "The sun's warmth," says Heidegger, "is
challenged forth for heat, which in turn is ordered to
deliver steam whose pressure turns the wheels that keep a
factory running." (15/19)
VI. Technology and Language
We can now see that the machine metaphor is operative
in all of Heidegger's work: the subordination of
Herausfordern to poiesis is pre-programmed by the
persistence across the so-called Kehre of the hermeneutic
notion of truth (and with it the reductive figure of the
171
machine). And the dogmatism to which it testifies is not
simply willful on Heidegger's part (i.e., occasioned by his
personal antipathy toward modernity) but is instead
structural - implicit within his philosophical foundation
- and thus inexorable.
Heidegger's early reduction of technology to the
narrow figure of the machine, which, I have argued,
persists into and compromises his later analysis of
technology, can now be placed in more specific relation
(via the privilege he grants to language) with the later
conflation of production with poiesis. In both cases, the
dogmatic reduction of technology has its source in the "as-
structure" of understanding that underlies the important
analysis of language in paragraphs 32-34 of Being and Time.
These important paragraphs are devoted to the concepts
of Auslegung ["interpretation"], Aussage ["assertion"], and
Sprache ["language"] respectively. These three concepts in
turn pertain to what Heidegger calls Verstehen
["understanding"] - one of the three (together with
Befindlichkeit ["mood"] and Rede ["discourse"]) primordial
existentialia of Dasein. Understanding, as Heidegger
himself points out, provides an exhibition of what had
earlier (in his Introduction) merely been posited
dogmatically: namely, the privilege of Dasein as the being
that questions after its own Being.16 Understanding is the
16. See 188 (German 147): "What was posited dogmatically at

an earlier stage [in paragraph 4] now gets exhibited
[erhaelt jetzt seine Aufweisung] in terms of the
172
way that Dasein is, (to speak like Heidegger) proximately
and for the most part, in its "there." "To say that in
existing, Dasein is its 'there'," argues Heidegger,
is equivalent to saying that the world is "there"; its

Being-there is Being-in. And the latter is likewise
"there," as that for the sake of which Dasein is. In the
"for-the-sake-of-which" [Worum-willen'] existing Being-in-
the-world is disclosed as such [als solche erschlossen],
and this disclosedness we have called "understanding."
(182/143)
As the primordial form of Dasein as "Being-in-the-world,"
understanding does not denote a reflective making-conscious
or -explicit (as it does in ordinary language), but rather
an essentially practical involvement which precedes such
reflective knowledge.
Auslegung ["interpretation”] is the formation
[Bildungr] of understanding according to its own
possibility; "[i]n it," says Heidegger, "the understanding
appropriates understandingly that which is understood by
it." (188/148) Interpretation thus comprises the first
(and primordial) level of a making-explicit of Dasein's
"Being-in-the-world." Heidegger conceives it as a
modification that is implicit in Dasein's initial practical
involvement with the "ready-to-hand":
To say that "circumspection [Umsicht] discovers" means that

the "world which has already been understood comes to be
interpreted [ausgelegt wird]. The ready-to-hand [Das
Zuhandene] comes explicitly [ausdruecklich] into the sight
which understands [verstehende Sicht]. ...that which is
circumspectively ready-to-hand is taken apart
[auseinandergelegt] in its "in-order-to" [Um-zu] and is
attended to [besorgt] in accordance with what becomes
visible [sichtig] following this disassembly. That which
Constitution of the Being [Konstitution des Seins] in which

Dasein as understanding is its 'there.'"
173
has been circumspectively taken apart as such with regard

to its "in-order-to" — that which is explicitly understood
— has the structure of something as something [etwas als
etwas].17
Heidegger emphasizes that any experience of the ready-to-
hand, no matter how elementary, is already founded in
understanding: "Any mere pre-predicative seeing of the
ready-to-hand," he says, "is, in itself, something which
already understands and interprets." (189/149)
Consequently, any interpretation is grounded in "fore
having" [Vorhabe], fore-sight" [Vorsicht], and "fore
conception" [Vorgriff]. This three-fold structure of
interpretation - as Dasein's explicit mode of understanding
- is, of course, the basis for the famous "hermeneutic
circle." Defined as the being that questions, Dasein is
constituted in such a way that it - by nature - brings its
understanding to explicit articulation in interpretation.
By contrast with Auslegung (which defines the
essential mode of Dasein's understanding), Heidegger
introduces a different modification; namely, Aussage or
"assertion." In this derivative mode of interpretation,
something that was proximally ready-to-hand as equipment in
interpretative-understanding is transformed into something
that is vorhandene or "present-at-hand":
If [an] entity becomes the "object" of an assertion, then

as soon as we begin this assertion, there is already a
change-over in the fore-having. Something ready-to-hand
with which we have to do or perform something, turns into
something "about which" the assertion that points it out is
made. Our fore-sight is aimed at something present-at-hand
17. 189/148-49, translation modified.
174
in what is ready-to-hand. ... When an assertion has given a

definite character to something present-at-hand, it says
something about it as a "what"; and this "what" is drawn
from that which is present-at-hand as such. The as-
structure of interpretation has undergone a modification.
In its function of appropriating what is understood, the
"as" no longer reaches out into a totality of involvements.
... The "as" gets pushed back into the uniform plane of
that which is merely present-at-hand. It dwindles to the
structure of just letting one see what is present-at-hand,
and letting one see it in a definite way. (200-201/158)
This reading of Aussage as a derivative mode of Auslegung
lies behind the project of a "destruction" of Western
ontology, which limits Being to what can be grasped in the
explicit form of the assertion. Far from constituting the
primordial foundation of metaphysics, logic is rooted in
ontology or "logos" as the Pre-Socratic thinkers understood
it (and as Heidegger reformulates it). The logical copula
realizes a theoretical judgement between two entities that
are always already related in the mode of Zuhandenheit.
Consequently, the "ontological origin" of Aussage is
Auslegungt the "something as something" - or the
"existential-hermeneutical 'as7'1 - lies behind (as the
ground of) the explicit or "apophantical 'as'" of the
assertion.
In paragraph 34, Heidegger turns his attention to Rede
["discourse"], which he defines as the "articulation of
intelligibility" [die Artikulation der Verstaendlichkeit].
Rede comprises the form according to which Dasein's
circumspective understanding is - in itself - articulated
or structured [gegliedert] prior to Auslegung and Aussage.
Rede, Heidegger says, "underlies [liegt...zugrunde] both
175
interpretation and assertion." (204/161) What this means
is that Dasein's Being-in-the-world is an involvement
essentially oriented toward the possibility of making-sense
of the world. As Heidegger explains, Dasein hears "motor
cycles and wagons" - and not simply "pure noise"; and it
dwells alongside the "ready-to-hand-within-the-world" - not
alongside mere "sensations." (207/164) Discourse, in
short, is the form of the world in which Dasein exists; the
"totality-of-involvements" [Bewandtnisganzheit] that Dasein
"understands" (in the primordial sense) is a
Bedeutungsganze - a "totality-of-significations."
In light of this primordial articulation of Being, the
hermeneutical-as and the apophantical-as are to be
distinguished as "authentic" and "inauthentic"
modifications of understanding respectively. In the one
case, Dasein understands its involvement in the world as
its ownmost Seinkoennen or potential for Being, while in
the other, it loses sight of itself in its understanding of
the world, (cf. 186/146) Readers of Being and Time will
recognize in this one of the central motifs of its second
major division: namely, Dasein's struggle to hear the "call
of conscience" which will wrest it from its everyday
"fallenness" and spur it on to its authentic potential.
Yet, regardless of whether Dasein achieves its
authenticity, the world remains nothing more than a
Bedeutungsganze, a constructed "world for Dasein."
Now it is precisely this hermeneutic bias, which
176
equates the real with the meaningful (i.e., with what can
be given meaning, though not with meaning itself), that
comes to underlie Heidegger's paradoxical characterization
of modern technology. In Being and Time, it is through
meaning that beings other than Dasein are discovered;
meaning, in other words, is an "Existential" of Dasein
which characterizes, in an exhaustive manner, the mode of
Being of inner-worldly beings - a mode of Being that is for
Dasein. Heidegger says as much in paragraph 32:
When entities within-the-world are discovered along with

the Being of Dasein - that is, when they have come to be
understood - we say that they have meaning [Sinn]. But
that which is understood, taken strictly is not the meaning
but the entity, or alternatively, Being. Meaning is that
wherein the intelligibility [Verstaendlichkeit] of
something maintains itself. That which can be Articulated
in a disclosure by which we understand, we call "meaning."
(192-93/151)
While the real is not here equated with meaning itself, it
is restricted to what can be "articulated in
intelligibility" - restricted, in other words, to the
horizon of truth given primordially by Rede. (We can see
too how the privilege of the question stems directly from
the primordial articulation of Rede.18)
18. The threefold structure of the question developed in

paragraph 2 marks it as an exemplary form of world-
disclosure: "Any questioning, as a questioning after
something [als Fragen nach], has that which is asked about
[sein Gefragtes]. All questioning after is in some way a
questioning of something [Anfragen b ei...]. So in addition
to what is asked about, a questioning has that which is
interrogated [ein Befragtes]. In investigative, i.e.,
specifically theoretical questioning, what is asked after
is determined and conceptualized [zu Begriff gebracht]. In
what is asked about, moreover, there also lies that which
is to be found out in the questioning [das Erfragte]; in
this, questioning achieves its aim." (24/5, tr. modified)
It is precisely this identification of the real with
the meaningful that modern technology threatens. To the
extent that it helps ward off this threat, Heidegger's
division of poiesis into a general and a restricted
function seems to stem from his continued allegiance
(whether intentional or structural) to the hermeneutic
foundation of reality. If "challenging-forth" perverts the
revealing of nature, seen more profoundly, it nevertheless
serves the more general function of disclosing the world
for Dasein. We can grasp this allegiance through the
implicit analogy of Herausfordern with Aussage:
Herausfordern eclipses Her-vor-bringen in the same way that
assertion dominates the Western notion of truth, covering
over and denying its essential foundation in Rede. In both
cases, a derivative and perverting mode of revealing, of
aletheia, usurps the place of its foundation.
It is for this reason that Heidegger is able to
distinguish disinterested from interested technological
modes of revealing according to the authenticity-
Compare this with the following passage from paragraph 32:

"That which the discourse is about [das Worueber der Rede]
does not necessarily or even for the most part serve as the
theme for an assertion in which one gives something a
definite character. ... What the discourse is about is
something structural [Strukturmoment] that it necessarily
possesses; for discourse helps to constitute the
disclosedness of Being-in-the-world, and its own structure
is modelled [vorgebildet ist] upon this basic state of
Dasein. What is talked about [das Beredete] in talk is
always 'talked to' [angeredet] in a definite regard and
within certain limits. In any talk or discourse, there is
something said-in-the-talk as such [ein Geredetes als
solches] - something said as such [das ... Gesagte als
solches].u (204-205/161-62, tr. modified)
178
inauthenticity divide. The most noteworthy example
concerns a hydroelectric plant on the Rhine:
The hydroelectric plant... sets the Rhine to supplying its

hydraulic pressure, which then sets the turbines turning.
This turning sets those machines in motion whose thrust
sets going the electric current for which the long-distance
power station and its network of cables are set up to
dispatch electricity. In the context of the interlocking
processes pertaining to the orderly disposition of
electrical energy, even the Rhine itself appears as
something at our command. The hydroelectric plant is not
built into the Rhine River as was the old wooden bridge
that joined bank with bank for hundreds of years. What the
river is now, namely, a water power supplier, derives from
out of the essence of the power station. In order that we
may even remotely consider the monstrousness [das
Ungeheuere] that reigns here, let us ponder for a moment
the contrast that speaks out of the two titles, "The Rhine"
as dammed up into the power works [verbaut in das
Kraftwerk], and "The Rhine" as uttered out [gesagt aus] of
the art work, in Hoelderlin's hymn of that name.*9
What makes the power station "monstrous" is its explicit
corruption of nature, not as brute materiality, but as
authentic poiesis. For the discursively disclosed nature
of the Greeks - a "nature" that is constructed on the basis
of Rede - modern technology substitutes an instrumental
model of nature, one that grasps nature not as a source of
Being, but as a pure reserve of energy. It is in this
sense that modern technology is grundverschieden
["fundamentally different"] from pre-modern technology:
instead of disclosing nature according to its pre
structured discursive foundation, it orders nature
according to an external telos - a machinic instrumentality
instituted by the "essence of the power station."
Yet, as I have argued, Heidegger ultimately discovers
19. "The Question Concerning Technology," 16/19.
a more profound "essential kinship" between Herausfordern
and Her-vor-bringen in that both are modes of revealing, of
aletheia. When he construes the machinic ordering of
nature according to the storage model, Heidegger wards off
this potential monstrosity of modern technology - its
radical autonomy. By restricting machinic instrumentality
to the production of the "standing-reserve" [Bestand],
Heidegger annuls the material efficiency of technology and,
at the same time - precisely by thus assigning it a human
or logocentric efficient cause - insures its indirect
genesis from .Rede (or, in other words, its hidden poietic
foundation). The instrumentality of the machine (e.g. the
airplane) becomes nothing more nor less than the meaning of
an inner-worldly being: it is a status granted the machine
by - and exclusively for - Dasein. The machine's ordering
of nature serves as nothing more than a way of disclosing
the world:
Revealed, [the airplane] stands on the taxi strip only as

standing-reserve, inasmuch as it is ordered to ensure the
possibility of transportation. ... Seen in terms of the
standing-reserve, the machine is completely unautonomous
[schlechthin unselbststaendig], for it has its standing
[ihren Stand] only from the ordering of the orderable.
(17/20-21)
If, compared with paragraph 15 of Being and Time (and GA
29/30), the machine has acquired a larger role in
disclosing the world, it nevertheless remains subordinate
to human Dasein in precisely the same way that it was in
the early period. As an exhaustive determination of the
ontological status of technology, not in itself but for
Dasein, "standing reserve" is nothing more than an updated
version of Zuhandenheit. Heidegger's continued
subordination of technology to a human efficient cause can
be easily read from his account of man's role in the
"challenging setting-upon"; even if human Dasein does not
"have control over unconcealment itself" (as it did,
perhaps, in Being and Time) . man's role remains a
privileged one: "...precisely because man is challenged
more originally than are the energies of nature, i.e., into
the process of ordering, he is never transformed into mere
standing-reserve. Since man drives technology forward, he
takes part in ordering as a way of revealing." (18/22)
It is upon this humanist privilege that Heidegger
founds the possibility for salvation; since man alone - as
the questioning Being - is able to grasp the implicit "as-
structure" in the technological revealing of Being, he has
the power to hear the authentic call of the poet, a call
that testifies to a "saving power" within the essence of
technology. Just as in Being and Time, man can "respond"
to the "call of unconcealment" in one of two ways - either
inauthentically or authentically. He can mishear the call
and mistake technology for truth; or else, hearing it, he
can expose the technological command over the real for what
it "truly" is - the mere effect of an essential, and
essentially discursive, epochal stamping of Being. In
either case, man's response is mapped out entirely within
the onto-hermeneutic space of "truth" and the possibility
of discovering the "essence" of technology in a "place"
closer to home - in the materiality of everyday lived
experience - remains fundamentally foreclosed to him.
CHAPTER 3
THE MECHANICS OF DECONSTRUCTION: DERRIDA ON DE MAN
Now that we have explored the paradigm case of the
machine reduction of technology, we shall turn our
attention to one exemplary interpretation of Heidegger that
sets the stage for the contemporary critique of technology.
In a text entitled "Acts," the third of his Memoires for
Paul de M a n . Derrida suggests that deconstruction maintains
a constitutive complicity with the text of Heidegger.
Deconstruction, Derrida contends, cannot avoid a
confrontation with Heidegger's meditation on technology; it
cannot avoid "calling into question the dissociation
between thought and technology."1 In "Acts," it is this
principle of minimal identity that guides Derrida's
reexamination of de Man's deconstructive practice and
specifically his reading, in "Sign and Symbol in Hegel's
Aesthetik," of Hegel's distinction between two forms of
memory - Gedaechtnis and Erinnerung. In a more general
sense, the occulted presence of Heidegger in de Man's
reading also comprises the basis for the productive
generalization of deconstruction - a generalization that,
beginning with Of Grammatology. has progressively become
more and more central in Derrida's work. The practical
basis of this generalization is Derrida's attempt to extend
1. Jacques Derrida, Memoires for Paul de Man (New York:

Columbia, 1986), 107.
182
183
the analysis of "differance" to objects other than
traditional philosophical texts, what he calls the
"totality of our relation to the world."2 Upon it hangs
the much discussed question whether deconstruction indeed
has a practical or so-called "affirmative" dimension.3
"Acts" is a particularly illustrative text in this
regard, for more than any other it spells out - with
specific regard to the technological lifeworld - what
exactly is at stake in Derrida's appropriation of
Heidegger. By recasting Heidegger's division of technology
(into essence and accident, i.e., what is essential to
thought and what isn't) in terms of de Man's opposition of
Erinnerung and Gedaechtnis (translated as "remembrance" and
"memory," interior as opposed to artificial memory),
Derrida very subtly domesticates the question of technology
- and specifically of the "exteriority" of technology -
within the horizon of memory, or in other words, of
thought. What the reading of de Man accomplishes,
therefore, is a translation of the problem of technology
into a (narrower) problem of memory. The immediate
philosophical payoff of this translation should be evident:
recast as artificial memory or Gedaechtnis, technology is
shown to be essentially linguistic, its rapport with the
Greek techne (now liberated from its Heideggerian "purity")
2. Jacques Derrida, Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question

(New York: Columbia UP, 1990), 107.
3. See, for example, the work of G a v a t r i qpivak and Rar-hara—

Johnson.
184
remaining secure.
While this strategy permits a rethinking of
Heideggers purity in the light of our contemporary media
age, I suggest that it fails to distance itself
sufficiently from Heidegger's manner of thinking
technology. As long as Derrida retains thought as the
tribunal for evaluating technology, he cannot truly break
with the poietic foundation of Heideggerian thought
uncovered in our reading of Heidegger. Because Derrida
seeks, by means of an immanent critique, to destabilize
Heidegger's claim that "the essence of technology is
nothing technological," he must initially accept the
general frame of Heidegger's characterization of technology
as a threatened automation of thinking. In short, I
suggest that Derrida, for all the bravado of his critique
of Heidegger, in fact remains ultimately faithful, not
simply to the general program of a poietic phenomenology,
but specifically to Heidegger's mode of approaching
technology. His deconstruction of Heideggerian purity
therefore disguises a more fundamental adherence to
Heidegger's onto-hermeneutics. What this means, I suggest,
is that Derrida's assimilation of technical exteriority
into the horizon of memory - the burden of his reading of
de Man - remains thoroughly Heideggerian; it performs an
initial and dogmatic reduction of technology's potential
exteriority with relation to thought, which is - as I
suggest above in my chapter on Heidegger - perhaps more
185
forceful even than its model. Derrida, in short, purchases
his right to a restricted deconstruction of Heidegger's
text at the cost of a longterm allegiance to and
fortification of the ontological reduction.
Now the deciphering of this complex scenario would not
demand separate treatment, if Derrida's ultimately
Heideggerian maneuver did not in fact generate the
philosophical argument underlying the general reduction
that holds sway (most often unconsciously) in contemporary
media studies: the reduction of technology to reproductive
technology. The most significant - and significantly
restrictive - conseguence of this reduction is its
bracketing of technological exteriority: of the material
dimension of technology which, as my above argument has
established, exceeds the grasp of thought (and thus of
phenomenology). My argument in this chapter will unfold
along two lines. On the one hand, I shall use the
opportunity of critically evaluating Derrida's
rapprochement of Heidegger and de Man to elucidate the
broad structural foundation of the contemporary media
studies model, and specifically to call into question the
fundamental limitations generated by its adherence to a
global (or molar) hypostatization of memory as the
exhaustive horizon for assessing the impact of contemporary
technology. On the other hand, I shall explore the
implications of Derrida's violent appropriation of the de
Manian analysis of textual memory. This appropriation, I
shall contend, installs an enabling yet debilitating
double-bind at the heart of contemporary cultural studies:
the very move that opens the cultural domain to
deconstructive analysis simultaneously effaces the radical
exteriority or materiality which promises to be the
latter's most significant contribution to cultural studies.
In appropriating the de Manian distinction between
Erinnerung and Gedaechtnis to demarcate the space for the
technical deployment of differance, Derrida is compelled to
join or "juncture" what remains for de Man an absolute and
unthinkable "heterogeneity." With this move, Derrida
compromises the promise of the category of "linguistic
materiality" which emerges in the final productions of the
late de Man; far from extending such materiality beyond its
narrow de Manian determination as the other to thought
within the "domain" of language, Derrida's reading actually
re-assimilates this linguistic materiality within the
horizonal activity of a phenomenological or textual
subject.
I. The Question of Difference: Differance as Questioning
In the above chapters, I have more than once had
occasion to invoke Derrida's critique of Heidegger. Let me
now try to bring together these scattered remarks into the
following provisional thesis: in his work explicitly
focusing on Heidegger as well as his more general project,
Derrida criticizes the alleged purity of techne, while
187
preserving and reproducing the broader Heideggerian
privilege of a poetic witnessing of the "truth" of Being.
While Derrida's critique demonstrates in a decisive way
that the possibility of thinking the essence of technology
is first and foremost a linguistic possibility (and thus
that Heidegger's desired purity is an impossibility), he
thereby shows his solidarity with the Heideggerian fixation
on language: for him no less than for Heidegger, the
"truth" of Being (reread as a "truth" about language, about
the ontological copula), can only be witnessed poetically -
can only be witnessed, that is, in language (although no
longer through the superhuman insight of the great poet but
rather in the labor of deconstructive reading).
When it is properly evaluated, the significance of
this easily overlooked solidarity overshadows the flashy
critical gestures for which Derrida is otherwise, and quite
deservingly, famous. For while he shows that all poetic
language (including the language of that exemplar of
Heideggerian purity, Hoelderlin) bears within itself a
constitutive technical contamination - the possibility of
iteration - and that a certain "essential" non-identity
precedes the determination of essence (and founds language
itself), he is not able, nor does he attempt, to do away
with Heidegger's "alethic" hermeneutics. Derrida's
brilliant critical gestures remain secondary given his
commitment to the poetic as the space of a non-phenomenal
encounter with something approximating a Heideggerian
188
source of Being. Consequently, while Derrida subversively
resituates the poetic within the ontic sphere, the poetic
still serves the Heideggerian function of operating a
retreat of Being from that sphere (and in particular from
its technological substratum). As long as the juncture
between thought and language requires a retreat from the
technological lifeworld as a condition for its
demonstration, it retains a crippling vestige of
Heidegger's purity. Rephrasing this point in the light of
my provisional thesis, we could say that the translation of
the question of technology into a problem of memory (along
with the governing restriction of technology to language
that enables it) remains a Heideggerian project through and
through.
These extensive ties culminate in a commitment on
Derrida's part - and, more importantly, on the part of the
media studies model - to the two basic (and intertwined)
principles of Heidegger's critique of technology: the
privilege of the question and the machine reduction of
technology. I think these commitments can best be spelled
out through direct reference to Heidegger's text.
Regarding the first, we must observe that Derrida's
critique comprises a continuation of, and not a departure
from, Heidegger's methodology. Like Heidegger, he is
committed to a poetic account of human freedom, one which
privileges man's status as a questioning Being. Despite
his reservations, therefore, Derrida in the end must concur
189
with the following methodological pronouncement that
Heidegger develops at the beginning of "The Question
Concerning Technology": that hope for a "free relationship"
with technology rests in man's potential to achieve an
authentic understanding of technology's foundation in Rede.
"Questioning," Heidegger says,
builds a way. ... The way is a way of thinking. All ways

of thinking ... lead through language in an unusual way
[auf eine ungewoehnliche Weise durch die Sprache]. ...in
[questioning concerning technology] we should like to
prepare a free relationship [freie Beziehung] to it. The
relationship will be free if it opens our Dasein to the
essence of technology. When we can respond [Entsprechen
wir] to this essence, we shall be able to experience
[erfahren] the technological within its own bounds.4
While this "privilege of the question" becomes one of the
(four) guiding "threads" of Derrida's critical examination
of Heidegger, it is one that Derrida himself cannot escape.
In Of Spirit. Derrida mounts a sustained critique of
Heidegger's purity whose purpose is to demonstrate the
essential technicity of language and its contamination of
questioning.5 According to Derrida, it is the primacy of
the question which licenses Heidegger to proclaim that the
essence of technology is nothing technological. Because
questioning is that activity of Dasein through which it
discovers its pre-linguistic understanding [V'erstehen] of
Being, it is allegedly "pure" of any contamination by
technical concerns (including technical, i.e., explicit
4. Heidegger, "The Question Concerning Technology," 3-4/9,

tr. modified.
5. Derrida, Of Spirit. Chapter 3.
language, Aussage). By following the dissemination of the
word "Geist" in Heidegger's texts, which he reads as the
"name" of the "unquestioned possibility of the question,"
Derrida uncovers a contamination of the privilege of the
question through a certain politico-spiritual ideology - an
ontic and dogmatic predetermination that comes to guide the
allegedly pure ontological investigation. The force of
Derrida's criticism is thus directed less against the
formal structure of Heideggerian ontology as such than
against the practical (what Heidegger calls the
"phenomenological") means by which it is to be carried out.
Regardless of its status within Heidegger's formal
linguistics, the act of questioning is always marked by a
constitutive contamination, "a contact originarily
impurifying thought or speech by technology." (10) Such a
contact is never abstract and purely formal but is always
bound to the iteration of a particular semanteme (as
Derrida's tracking of the word "Geist" convincingly
demonstrates).
Still, even such a sublime strategic reading does not
entirely dispense with the privilege of the question, since
it retains willy nilly the possibility of thinking the
essence of technology, of thinking the category of essence,
and hence of questioning:
A second thread conducts, especially in the great question

of technology, to this typical and exemplary statement: the
essence of technology is nothing technological. This
matrix statement remains, at least in one of its aspects,
traditionally philosophical. It maintains the possibility
of questioning thought, which is always thought of the
191
essence, sheltered from any original and essential

contamination by technology. It is a question therefore of
analyzing this desire for rigorous non-contamination and,
from that, perhaps, of envisaging the necessity, one could
say the fatality of a contamination, and the word is
important to me, of a contact on the part of technology
that originally impurities (d'v.n contact impurifiant
originairement) thought or speech. Contamination,
therefore, of the thought of the essence by technology, and
so, of the thinkable essence of technology by technology -
and even of a question of technology by technology, the
privilege of the question having some relation, already,
always, with this irreducibility of technology. It is easy
to imagine that the consequences of this necessity cannot
be limited.
Regardless of the subtle refinements Derrida here
introduces into the Heideggerian schema, his strategic
criticism owes an enormous debt to the priority of ontology
that is the central feature of Heidegger's notion of the
"ontological difference." It is only within the onto-
hermeneutic horizon that the contamination of which Derrida
speaks can take place; differance, the renegade "concept"
naming the originary contamination of the question,
"presences" only as absence, and only in the text (e.g.,
the text of philosophy) that, as "White Mythology"
explains, is opened by the "retreat of metaphor," by the
occultation of a nmetaphore en plus."7 If, for Derrida,
the essence of technology can presence only within the
space opened by technical language, the grammato-
phenomenological account of presencing on which he relies
nevertheless requires a movement of withdrawal (the non
6. Derrida, Of Spirit. 10, tr. modified.
7. See Derrida, "White Mythology," in Margins of Philosophy

(Chicago: University of Chicago, 1982).
192
identity at the origin), that is, in its formal dimension,
equivalent with Heidegger's ontological retreat. Derrida's
debt to Heideggerian ontology, moreover, compromises the
implication, coming at the very end of the above passage,
that his critique somehow frees the materiality of
technology from its "thinkable essence" and thus from its
subordination to the privilege of the question. Whatever
the materiality of technology admitted into questioning, it
remains restricted to what can be translated into the
horizon constituted by a questioning Being, even if that
horizon is reconfigured as the differential text and that
Being is externalized as language itself.
In order to grasp the second above-named commitment on
Derrida's part - to the machine reduction of technology -
we must observe the underlying continuity between
Heidegger's Aristotelian ontology and Derrida's conception
of the text. Once again, a passage from "The Question
Concerning Technology" establishes the basic methodological
principle that unites Derrida to Heidegger: the exhaustive
parallel between techne and physis. In what is certainly
one of the more curious passages of his text, Heidegger
chooses to illustrate the purity of the essence of
technology with an example drawn directly from nature. To
show that we must not mistake ontic technology for techne,
Heidegger turns to an analogy from nature. "Technology,"
he remarks, "is not equivalent to the essence of
technology. When we are seeking the essence of "tree," we
193
have to become aware that That which pervades every tree,
as tree, is not itself a tree that can be encountered among
all the other trees."8 It is precisely this exhaustive
parallel of techne and physis, circumscribed by Heidegger's
hermeneutic conception of production (poiesis), that gives
rise to the machine reduction of technology discussed
above: as long as technology is determined as essentially a
mode of revealing, ontic technology can be given no other
status than that of pure instrumentality.
Now, it would certainly be an error to suppose that
Derrida presupposes this same parallel in the same manner.
Like other influential French intellectuals of the modern
period (including the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss
and the classicists Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre
Vernant), Derrida has made a fundamental contribution (with
Of Grammatology) to the contemporary project of overcoming
the binary opposition of nature and culture, and has thus
complicated the Aristotelian categories in a way
unimaginable to Heidegger. Since nomos ("institution,"
"law," in short, culture), which Derrida tellingly reads as
"the arbitrariness of the sign," becomes thinkable only
with the possibility of writing, one cannot speak of physis
as the opposite of culture. "The very idea of institution
- hence of the arbitrariness of the sign," Derrida argues:
is unthinkable before the possibility of writing and

outside of its horizon. Quite simply, that is, outside of
the horizon itself, outside the world as space of
8. Heidegger, "The Question Concerning Technology," 4/9.
194
inscription, as the opening to the emission and to the

spatial distribution of signs, to the regulated play of
their differences, even if they are "phonic."9
Nevertheless, at a still more basic level, Derrida's
conception of the text comprises an extension of - and not
an essential departure from - the Aristotelian homology
between nature and thought (physis and nous), a homology
which (as I have shown in Chapter 1) also encompasses
techne. The reason, I suggest, stems from Derrida's
Husserlian roots: his mature conception of the text (and of
the textuality of the world) is nothing more than a
grammatological transformation of the Husserlian noema (the
thought content that is inseparable from a noetic act of
thinking).10 Derrida simply replaces the transcendental
ego with the differential trace structure of writing; in
the place of the noetic-noematic correspondence (between
the subject's act of thinking and his thought), we discover
the relation between thought and writing. It is, of
course, on the basis of this arche deconstruction that
Derrida can categorize the world as text and delineate the
"death of the book"; on the one hand it renders obsolete
traditional boundaries separating private thinking from
exteriority, while on the other it introduces writing as
exteriority (and exteriority as writing) into the most
9. Derrida, Of Grammatology. 44.
10. This emerges most clearly in the section on Husserl

from the "Excursus" to Of Grammatoloqy. There Derrida
consolidates his earlier reading of Husserl in Speech and
Phenomenon (Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 1972).
195
intimate interiority:
The system of writing in general is not exterior to the

system of language in general, unless it is granted that
the division between exterior and interior passes through
the interior of the interior or the exterior of the
exterior, to the point where the immanence of language is
essentially exposed to the intervention of forces that are
apparently alien to its system. (43, emphasis added)
Derrida's equivocation in the final sentence is not without
significance, for the intervention of "apparently alien"
forces into the immanence of language does not in fact
signal the intervention of any material outside, but only
the upsurge of the relative exteriority of writing within
the interiority of language. In no way has the "system of
language in general" been broached.
From this angle, Derrida speaks more to the point
earlier in Of Grammatoloqy when he defines exteriority as
"the exteriority of meaning." (13, emphasis added) Here we
see clear traces of his Husserlian-Heideggerian provenance.
Ultimately, I suggest, it is this phenomenological
commitment that entails Derrida's restriction of technology
to the domain of memory - to the thoroughly descriptive
division into a relative interiority (thought as writing)
and a relative exteriority (the technology of writing)
within a memorial horizon preconstituted by the movement of
the trace but also one that (since the archi-trace is non
identical) is always already at play. Indeed, it is
Derrida himself who announces his allegiance with the
philosopheme of memory:
If the trace, arche-phenomenon of "memory," which must be

thought before the opposition of nature and culture,
196
animality and humanity, etc., belongs to the very movement

of signification, then signification is a priori written,
whether inscribed or not, in one form or another, in a
"sensible" and "spatial" element that is called "exterior."
Arche-writing, at first the possibility of the spoken word,
then of the "graphie" in the narrow sense, the birthplace
of "usurpation," denounced from Plato to Saussure, this
trace is the opening of the first exteriority in general,
the enigmatic relationship of the living to its other and
of an inside to an outside..." (70)
With this pronouncement, are we not back at the point where
Heidegger equates Being with the meaning of Being, and also
therefore, at the point where Aristotle privileges nature
and thought over the automatic? Doesn't this restriction
of "exteriority" (which includes the exteriority of matter
itself) already decide the problem of technology in advance
and according to a dogmatic humanist program? Doesn't it
compromise Derrida's "cybernetic program" from the start —
both by instituting in general a "nouocentric" origin and
by preserving all of those metaphysical concepts ("soul,"
"life," "value," "choice," and especially "memory") that,
as Derrida puts it, serve "to separate the machine from
man"?
If this were not the case, I submit, it would be
difficult to make sense of Derrida's practice of
identifying text with machine. Within the "exteriority"
opened by the movement of the archi-trace (and even as the
movement itself), technology is given a determination - as
text (or as differance) - that Derrida more than once names
machine. For example:
Within the closure ... it is necessary to surround the

critical concepts with a careful and thorough discourse —
to mark the conditions, the medium, and the limits of their
197
effectiveness and to designate rigorously their intimate

relationship to the machine whose deconstruction they
permit... (14, emphasis added)
Or:
Within a certain historical epoch, there is a profound

unity among infinitist theology, logocentrism, and a
certain technicism. The originary and pre- or meta-
phonetic writing that I am attempting to conceive of here
leads to nothing less that an "overtaking" of speech by the
machine. (79, emphasis added)
Or again:
...it is very difficult to avoid the mechanist, technicist,

and teleological language at the very moment when it is
precisely a question of retrieving the origin and the
possibility of movement, of the machine, of the techne, of
orientation in general. (84-5, emphasis added)
It is this identification of text with machine that places
technology (and the problem of technology) within the
horizon of thought/memory. With this radicalization of
phenomenology (and the problem of representation), Derrida
brings metaphysics to a point of rupture: mandated to
eclipse nothing less than the privilege of thought itself,
the cybernetic program puts into question all hitherto
irrefragable metaphysical concepts (including the very
institution of the trace). Yet, as Derrida's own practice
and his theorization of this questioning as the "closure of
metaphysics" demonstrates, this point of rupture is one
that cannot be crossed, if only because thought (and
memory) remain(s), and cannot but remain, the origin -
origin of that first exteriority from which all substance
(including that of thought and that of world) follows.
198
II. The "Disjunctive Juncture": Generalizing de Man
By critically evaluating Derrida's reading of de Man
in light of his apparent commitment to a nouocentric
metaphysics, I shall attempt to answer the following
question: Can (and how can) a methodology that is committed
to the grammato-phenomenological reduction explored above
(and to a determination of technology as text-machine)
avoid perpetuating the machine-reduction of technology in a
form virtually identical with that of Heidegger, its great
forebear and opponent? Or, more precisely: Does the
"deconstruction" of Heidegger's purity, which overcomes the
dogmatic opposition between nature and culture licensing
Heidegger's denigration of the machine, but which does so
only by constraining the machine (and technology) within
thought (conceived textually), in the end accomplish
anything other than a repetition of the Heideggerian
reduction?
Our concern with a particular text (and a text itself
concerned with a particular text) will allow us to pose
this question with specific regard to the role of the text
in the practice(s) of reading that characterize(s)
deconstruction. If Derrida finds himself compelled
ultimately to repeat the Heideggerian machine reduction, as
I shall argue, it is because of his reliance on the "text"
as the "frame of reference" or the noematic field
permitting the analysis of technological exteriority. By
generalizing the de Manian distinction of Erinnerung and
199
Gedaechtnis beyond the Hegelian system, Derrida broadens
the role of the text: he articulates a textual account of
the constitution of the world. On this account, the
structures of worldly exteriority are essentially textual
in a way that allows the correlation of "exteriority” with
thought. What such an elaboration entails, however, is the
domestication of worldly exteriority into the frame of
reference of the text. This reduction is the flip-side of
an important structural commitment of deconstruction -
namely, its need to parasite a pre-structured and
structurally unified text (what Derrida terms the
"metaphysical text"). Deconstruction, that is, can only
think what gives itself as text. It is precisely this
commitment to a metaphysics of the text that ultimately
explains Derrida's fundamental fidelity to Heidegger: in
both cases, the radical exteriority of technology finds
itself reduced to fit a nouocentric frame.
I should point out here that my assessment of
Derrida's commitments furnishes no novel insight, and is in
fact entirely consistent with his own descriptions of
deconstructive reading. In Positions, to give a striking
example, Derrida cites deconstruction's need for a "host
text" as justification for his reticence to address Marx's
thought:
In what I have begun to propose, I attempt to take into

account certain recent acquisitions or determined
incompletions in the order of philosophy, semiology,
linguistics, psychoanalysis, etc.... Now, we cannot
consider Marx's, Engels' or Lenin's texts as completely
finished elaborations that are simply to be "applied" to
200
the current situation. In saying this, I am not advocating

anything contrary to "Marxism," I am convinced of it.
These texts are not to be read according to a hermeneutical
or exegetical method which would seek out a finished
signified beneath a textual surface. Reading is
transformational. ... But this transformation cannot be
executed however one wishes. It requires protocols of
reading. Why not say it bluntly: I have not yet found any
that satisfy me. 1
With specific reference to the reading of Heidegger
undertaken in "Acts", the ultimate consequence of this
requirement is the adoption of Heidegger's reduction of
technology that I have developed above. In order to
provide a "field" for his critical inversion of Heidegger's
purity, Derrida must provisionally embrace the structure of
Heidegger's text, or in other words, the governing onto-
phenomenological reduction explored above. If, in the
negative or critical phase of his deconstruction, Derrida's
introduction of differance contaminates the purity of
thought [Denken], in its "affirmative" phase it can do not
more than install another nouocentric agent - the text - in
its place. "Acts" furnishes reason, therefore, to doubt
Derrida's claims for an affirmative "re-marking" of the
concept of matter (and by extension, of techne); while he
sees the marking of the concept "in the deconstructing
text" as a "positively displacing, transgressive
deconstruction," a second re-marking "outside the
11. Derrida, Positions (Chicago: University of Chicago,

1981), 63. Derrida has recently published a study of Marx
that might appear to alter his earlier position;
nevertheless, matter continues to be a "concept" liberated
within the deconstructed-deconstructing text and hence
dependent on a grammato-phenomenological movement of
thinking; cf. his recent lectures on Marx.
201
oppositions in which it has been caught,"12 this remarking
in fact merely brackets the radical exteriority of matter
(that itself evades the oppositions to which Derrida
alludes) and relativizes it to a deconstructed-
deconstructing space of thought, within which its role will
be narrowed to what "resists" idealization (i.e., the
materiality of language, etc.). The crucial point is that
any more radical questioning of Heidegger's approach is
foreclosed from the start.
While we have earlier had occasion to observe
Derrida's invocation of the machine to explain the
structure of the text, here we confront something far more
radical: the wholesale reduction of machine to text. In
order to contaminate Heidegger's purity - and to advance
his substantive criticism of Heidegger (vis. that the
essence of technology is technological) - Derrida is
compelled to localize the operation of technology
exclusively in the domain of the text. Technology is
restricted to the "machinic," "programmatic," or
ultimately, "grammatical" aspect of thinking - i.e., the
mechanism of language - and, since thought itself cannot be
separated from this aspect, it is restricted in this way
12. Positions. 65-66. Here is the text in full: "The

concept of matter must be marked twice (the others too): in
the deconstructed field - the is the phase of overturning -
and in the deconstructing text, outside the oppositions in
which it has been caught (matter/spirit, matter/ideality,
matter/form, etc.). By means of the play of this interval
between the two marks, one can operate both an overturning
deconstruction and a positively displacing, transgressive,
deconstruction."
without being opposed to something non-mechanical. The
result is a curious inversion of Heidegger's position,
that, I suggest, actually compromises the possibility of
maintaining the material or radical exteriority of
technology. If Heidegger reduces technology to the machine
so as to determine it as the non-essential outside of
thought, Derrida's identification of machine and text
insures the contamination of technology and thought in a
way that allows for no consideration of technology outside
of its impact on thought, or in other words, outside of the
category of the grammatical, of the machinic element of the
text. In this way, Derrida's inversion of Heidegger's
purity actually fortifies the reduction of technology that
has been underway since Aristotle, and that finds its
culminating modern moments in Husserl (with the
phenomenological epoche) and in Heidegger (with the
ontological difference). Reduced to a machinic function
within the operation of the (deconstructed-deconstructing)
text, technology is more than ever cut off from its
material base.
What Derrida depicts as a radical departure from
Heidegger reveals itself to be no more than a local
inversion that leaves untouched Heidegger's general framing
of technology, and in particular, his restriction of the
impact of technology to the horizon of thought. In this
sense, Derrida's "textual reduction" of technology simply
reproduces Heidegger's above discussed "machine reduction."
203
For this reason, Derrida's generalization of de Man's
analysis of memory does not in fact function to disturb the
Heideggerian approach to technology in any fundamental
manner (as Derrida's statements often lead us to believe).
Rather, its aim is to harmonize the restricted, i.e.,
narrowly literary, practice of deconstructive reading with
the onto-phenomenological approach to the world. The
possibility of generalizing deconstruction, of making it
useful for cultural studies, thus hangs on a certain
allegiance to the Heideggerian account of world
constitution. Even if Derrida successfully overcomes the
Heideggerian demand for purity, some form of onto-
phenomenology, of an opening of the world to and in
thought, continues to hold sway in his own (implicit)
account of what counts as technology.
III. From Hegel to Heidegger
In Memoires, as I have repeatedly observed, Derrida
attempts to articulate the relationship between a specific,
narrowly textual, deconstructive reading and the more
general question of technology. By grafting de Man's
reading of Hegel's account of memory in the Encyclopedia
onto Heidegger's account of technology, Derrida operates a
double critique. On the one hand, de Man's account points
to a complicity between thought and its material support
(writing, technology, techne, etc.) that compromises
Heidegger's alleged purity. And on the other hand,
204
Heidegger's onto-phenomenological framing of technology -
now reinterpreted textually - calls for a fundamental
realignment of de Man's distinction between interior memory
(Erinnerung) and artificial memory (Gedaechtnis), a
realignment that ultimately domesticates their absolute
heterogeneity. Through this double critique, the allegedly
pure essence of techne is seen to be contaminated since its
presentation - in the technical dimensions of Gedaechtnis -
is not simply exterior to it, while the connection of
language with technology is broadened beyond its narrowly
textual sphere. It is for this reason that de Man's
deconstructive reading of a specific text (paragraph 20 of
Hegel's Encyclopedia) can tell us something fundamental -
something "general" - about deconstruction as such; it does
so precisely because it cannot avoid addressing the
Heideggerian problematic of technology. In quite explicit
terms then, Derrida's reading marks both deconstruction's
complicity with and its break from the Heideggerian
approach to technology; yet more covertly, it also marks a
similar complicity and break with the technique of de
Manian reading. We must bear in mind this double critique
in evaluating Derrida's analysis.
Paul de Man's text "resembles," says Derrida, "a
double decision"; on the one hand, a decision to "rethink"
or think beyond (and against) Heidegger what Heidegger
himself tried to think, namely "the totality of our
relation to the world," to a technological world:
205
... it in principle gives itself the means not to drive out

into the exterior and inferior dark regions of thought, the
immense question of artificial memory and of the modern
modalities of archivation which today affects, according to
a rhythm and with dimensions that have no common measure
with those of the past, the totality of our relation to the
world (on this side of or beyond its anthropological
determination): habitat, all languages, writing, "culture,"
art (beyond picture galleries, film libraries, video
libraries, record libraries), literature (beyond
libraries), all information or informatization (beyond
'memory' data banks), techno-sciences, philosophy (beyond
university institutions) and everything within the
transformation which affects all relations to the future.
This prodigious mutation not only heightens the stature,
the quantitative economy of so-called artificial memory,
but also its qualitative structure — and in doing so it
obliges us to rethink what relates this artificial memory
to man's so-called psychical and interior memory, to truth,
to the simulacrum and simulation of truth, etc. (107)
For Derrida, the significance of de Man's reading practice
is its "method" and not its specific, text-directed claims.
De Man outlines a general strategy for thinking the world
as it is given: it "in principle" gives the possibility of
not separating memory as a faculty of thought, memory as
thought, from its form in the world, as archivation,
writing, technical mediation. The burden of Derrida's
reading will thus be to operate a two-fold
"deterritorialization" of de Man's reading: on the one
hand, a movement outward from the Hegelian text to the text
of the world; and on the other, a jump from the explicitly
textual structures of the world (e.g., technical archives,
etc.) to structures that appear to break with the
traditional metaphysics of the text. Derrida himself
stresses the imperative for such a double
deterritorialization, albeit only within his own limited
thematization of technology as surrogate memory, when he
206
notes that the dimensions of archivation in the world today
"have no common measure with those of the past."
The imperative to generalize de Man's reading - to
extract its "method" - reveals a latent phenomenological
impulse that is decisive for Derrida's own characterization
of the contemporary task of thinking deconstruction. In
order for deconstruction to open itself to those world-
structures that "have no common measure with those of the
past," the priority of (phenomenological) thinking -
precisely what de Manian deconstruction aims to undermine -
must in some sense be upheld. Only the act of a thinking
subject (one that has been exteriorized through technical
supplementarity) can bridge the gap that distinguishes
contemporary technology from the traditional metaphysical
text. With the current evolution of the technical
lifeworld, that is to say, the textuality of the subject
undergoes a corresponding modification, a modification that
brings into clear focus the disparity between the Derridian
and the de Manian notions of textuality. As Irene Harvey
has argued, de Man's reading practice remains solidly
anchored to the text in its traditional guise, while
Derrida's derives from a looser conception of the textual
structures of understanding.13 Derrida's notion of
textuality, that is, derives directly from his early
reading of Husserl; what it signifies is nothing less than
13. Irene Harvey, "The Difference Between de Man and

Derrida," in The Textual Sublime, ed. Aylesworth and
Silverman (Buffalo: SUNY Press, 1991).
207
the differential structure of phenomenological
understanding, the structural gap separating the moment of
presence from its "processing" in thought. It is for this
reason that the text, for Derrida, need not be restricted
to explicitly linguistic artifacts (as I suggest it must be
for de Man), but can be said to characterize any act of
thinking whatsoever.
Bearing this difference in mind, we can get a better
understanding of Derrida's motivation in reading de Man
with Heidegger: de Man's account of memory will furnish the
'means to bring thought into accord with contemporary
technology. It is in this sense that we must understand
Derrida's emphatic insistence that de Man's distinction
cannot help but root itself in the Heideggerian approach to
technology. Deconstruction, as a means of thinking the
"totality of our relation to the world," must concern
itself in the first instance with thinking through
Heidegger; it is the encounter with Heidegger's problematic
of technology, Derrida contends, that makes deconstruction
what it is:
There is no deconstruction which does not begin by tackling

this problematic or by preparing itself to tackle this
problematic, and which does not begin by again calling into
guestiorf the dissociation between thought and technology,
especially when it has a hierarchical vocation, however
secret, subtle, sublime or denied it may be. (107)
At stake here is the principle concern of all
phenomenologies: the possibility of thinking thought, of
thinking that which gives the possibility for thought. The
allegedly imperative encounter of deconstruction (including
208
de Manian deconstruction) with Heidegger thus reflects
Derrida's own phenomenological bias. Even in the case of a
reading like de Man's - a reading which thinks, or more
precisely, which presents the impossibility of thinking
thought (the radical disjunction between Erinnerung and
Gedaechtnis) - it is only Heideggerian onto-phenomenology
that initially opens the movement of thinking.
The contribution de Man makes to a cultural deployment
of deconstruction (identified by Derrida with
deconstruction as such) is that of a critical modification
of the Heideggerian approach - and not a more radical
undermining of onto-phenomenology. Deconstruction, Derrida
asserts, must derive from Heidegger, yet also against
Heidegger, according to a critical path that finds its
guidance from the second part of de Man's "double-
decision" :
...on the other hand, in fact, the attention accorded to

this link between Gedaechtnis and hypomnesic writing no
doubt leads to our no longer being able to subscribe (for
my part, I have never done so) to Heidegger's sentence and
to all that it supposes: Die Wissenschaft denkt nicht,
science does not think. ... Let us say very quickly,
perhaps too quickly, that despite the precautions he takes,
and that have the form of denial, Heidegger marks within
this phrase the rigorous necessity of an essential
exteriority and of an implicit hierarchy between, on the
one hand, thought as memory (Denken, Gedaechtnis, Gedanc)
and, on the other hand, science, but also technology,
writing and even literature. ... The Heideggerian argument
which operates everywhere to justify this division and
hierarchy, when it is reduced to its essential schema, has
the following form and can be transposed everywhere: "The
essence of technology is nothing technological." (107-108)
To question with Heidegger the dissociation between thought
and technology, it is necessary to break, as the example of
209
de Man's reading of Hegel does, with "the hierarchical
vocation" of Heidegger's text. This necessity is at once
the limitation of Heidegger's approach to technology and
the curious law governing his legacy.
"Deconstruction" therefore finds itself in the
paradoxical position of being more Heideggerian than
Heidegger. Following its "deconstruction," thought
encounters contemporary technology as the very medium of
its Being-in-the-world. It is therefore precisely the
break with Heidegger's purity that permits the thinking of
technology. The world opens to onto-phenomenological
thought only to the extent that thought recognizes its
intrinsic connection with the technical structures of the
world. In such a phenomenology, no ontological distance
from technology is possible and the essence of technology
cannot be pure, i.e., uncontaminated by technology. In
short, only "deconstruction" can "think" the essence of
technology, and thus accomplish Heidegger's goal. Only
deconstruction can delimit the essence of technology from a
position that is relatively "outside" its effects.
The essence of technology must thus be thought
according to the logic of supplementarity; technology forms
an inseparable supplement to thought, a supplement that
itself permits the operation of thought and that,
consequently, can never be dismissed as the merely
technical. It is for this reason that Derrida is compelled
to interpret de Man's account of memory as fundamentally
210
anti-Heideggerian. According to Derrida, de Man's account
of memory permits the superimposition of an "essential
juncture" where Heidegger posits an absolute heterogeneity:
Perhaps we can measure the stakes of de Manian

interpretation. It delineates a gesture quite different
from that of Heidegger by recalling that the relation of
Gedaechtnis to technique, artifice, writing, the sign,
etc., could not be one of exteriority or heterogeneity.
This amounts to saying that the exteriority or the
division, the dis-junction, is the relation, the essential
juncture between thinking memory and the so-called techno-
scientific, indeed literary outside.... I would say that
this gesture is quite different from Heidegger's and that
it gives rise to quite different intonations. ... On the
side of deconstruction, if this can be said, and in its de
Manian form, a certain continuity (within the disjunctive
structure) between thinking memory and techno-scientific
memory does not exclude, but on the contrary, permits a
thinking of the essence of technology, a thinking which it
is not within the logic of deconstruction to renounce.
This is why deconstruction, at the very moment when it puts
in question the hierarchical division between thought and
technology is neither technicist nor technological. (109-
110, emphasis added)
The "disjunctive juncture" Derrida elaborates here is
nothing less than the fundamental principle underlying the
generalization of deconstruction that is his burden in
"Acts." By evaluating de Man's reading (only) in so far as
it "tackles" or "prepares to tackle" Heidegger's
dissociation, Derrida is able to present it as one example
where deconstructive reading plays an operative role in
opening thought to the world. On this model of
"disjunctive juncture," deconstruction's role in cultural
critique results from a kind of suturing of a specific
deconstructive figure (the heterogeneity of interiorizing
remembrance and mechanical memory) with a
phenomenologically determined field of application.
211
IV. Allegory as Radical Disjunction: de Man's Resistance to

Heidegger
In appealing to de Man as the source informing his
superimposition of juncture on Heidegger's disjunction
between technique and thought, Derrida does not actually
demonstrate the plausibility of his treatment of de Man; he
simply takes it for granted that de Man's account of memory
is readily convertible into the phenomenological field of
Gedaechtnis. Given de Man's constant opposition of the
linguistic and the phenomenal, however, there is reason to
suspect such an accommodating interpretation.1^ In order
to evaluate Derrida's generalization of deconstruction
then, we must consider his treatment of de Man - and thus
de Man's reading of Hegel - in more detail.
In "Sign and Symbol in Hegel's Aesthetics,11 de Man
ostensibly aims to clarify both the determination of beauty
as "the sensory appearance of the idea" and the general
symbolic theory of art that it articulates.15 His ultimate
goal, however, is a critical indictment of all symbolic
aesthetics for their failure to recognize the cognitive
breakdown implicit in Hegel's theory. Ultimately, this
task amounts to that of demonstrating how the Hegelian
system - the dialectical forward-progress of thought -
14. See for example, de Man's interview with Stephano

Rosso, in The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: Univerity
of Minnesota Press, 1987), 115-121.
15. Paul de Man, "Sign and Symbol in Hegel's Aesthetics,"

Critical Inquiry 8 (Summer 1982): 761-775.
212
itself requires a material (and aesthetic) supplement, what
de Man (following Hegel) calls "allegory." The evaluation
of Derrida's assimilating reading could thus be said to
focus on the question whether his onto-phenomenological
account can encompass "allegory" in the sense de Man (and
Hegel) lend it.
Before I consider this question, I shall briefly
sketch de Man's sinuous line through Hegel. Initially, his
task leads to a technical and rather inconclusive
discussion of the central distinction Hegel draws in his
theory of language (in the Encyclopedia) between sign and
symbol. Noting that "there is nothing unusual" about
Hegel's characterization of the sign as arbitrary, de Man
moves on to discuss the complicity of the sign with the
subject; since the sign is absolutely independent with
regard to the natural properties of the entity toward which
it points, it "illustrates the capacity of the intellect to
'use' the perceived world for its own purposes" (767) - its
freedom to replace the latter's properties with those of
its own choosing. Behind the arbitrariness of the sign,
therefore, lies the activity of the subject: the sign
presupposes an "I" which "says" it.
This connection of sign and subject then leads de Man
to compare the role of the sign in Hegel's theory of
language with the role of thought in Hegel's system. The
distinction of sign and symbol, he contends, exactly
parallels the distinction between thinking subject and
213
sensing subject. "Just as the sign refuses to be in the
service of sensory perceptions [as the symbol is] but uses
them instead for its own purposes, thought, unlike
perception, appropriates the world and literally 'subjects'
it to its own powers." (767) Yet, because it derives from
the generality of language, this freedom of the sign and of
thought at once threatens to annihilate the respective
moment of origin of both sign and thought. Citing Hegel's
own famous and ubiquitous pronouncement that "we cannot say
anything in language that is not general," de Man draws the
following conclusion: "Thus the sign, random and singular
at its first position, turns into symbol just as the I, so
singular in its independence from anything that is not
itself, becomes in the general thought of logic, the most
inclusive, plural, general, and impersonal of subjects."
(768)
In a reading that almost exactly parallels Hegel's own
in the "sense-certainty" section of the Phenomenology of
Spirit (and the corresponding section on "pure Being" in
both versions of the Logic), de Man goes on to develop the
paradox of the subject - the fact that the "I" is at once
what is most particular to me and what is common to all
humans (i.e., being an "I"). When sense-certainty (or pure
Being), pointing to itself, says "I am this," it cannot say
what it wants to say, since the very act of calling itself
"this" (or "I") requires that it act as a grammatical "I,"
or in other words, as the very antithesis of a particular
214
"this" (or "I"). This initial paradox of the subject, de
Man concludes, poses an "inescapable obstacle" to the
Hegelian system:
Thus, at the very onset of the entire system, in the

preliminary consideration of the science of logic, an
inescapable obstacle threatens the entire construction that
follows. The philosophical I is not only self-effacing, as
Aristotle demanded, in the sense of being humble and
inconspicuous, it is also self-effacing in the much more
radical sense that the position of the I, which is the
condition for thought, implies its eradication, not, as in
Fichte, as the symmetrical position of its negation but as
the undoing, the erasure of any relationship, logical or
otherwise, that could be conceived between what the I is
and what it says it is. The very enterprise of thought
seems to be paralyzed from the start. It can only get
under way if the knowledge that renders it impossible, the
knowledge that the linguistic position of the I is only
possible if the I forgets what it is (namely, I) , if this
knowledge is itself forgotten. (769)
As de Man goes on to note, Hegel's own passage constitutes
a performative example of this necessity and in the process
points forward to the role of the aesthetic and
specifically to Hegel's own introduction of allegory: it
"forgets its own statement ...by describing the predicament
it states, which is a logical difficulty devoid of any
phenomenal ... dimension, as if it were an event in time, a
narrative..." (769)
Having outlined the paradox of the subject, de Man
suggests that a defense must be mounted against the self
erasure of thinking in order for the phenomenological logic
of Hegel's system to bear fruit. The resistance to the
self-erasure of the mind "takes a multitude of forms"
including the aesthetic, and particularly the aesthetic of
the symbol. Aesthetic resistance is characterized by a
215
conflation of sign and symbol whose pay-off is a
cognitively illegitimate suturing of the subject with its
(own) point of beginning (that it has had to forget to have
gotten where it is). "...it is not difficult," de Man
argues,
to see that the problem (posed by the self-erasure of the

I] can be recast in terms of the distinctiveness between
sign and symbol. As we saw, the I, in its freedom from
sensory determination, is originally similar to the sign.
Since, however, it states itself as what it is not, it
represents a determined relationship to the world that is
in fact arbitrary, that is to say, it states itself as
symbol. To the extent that the I points to itself, it is a
sign, but to the extent that it speaks of anything but
itself, it is a symbol. The relationship between sign and
symbol, however, is one of mutual obliteration; hence the
temptation to confuse and to forget the distinction between
them. (770, emphasis added)
In providing the illusion of a reconciliation between
saying and meaning, the aesthetic of the symbol, in other
words, covers over the fundamental obstacle that language
poses to Hegel's dialectical system. It is therefore "an
ideological, and not a theoretical construct, a defense
against the logical necessity inherent in a theoretical
disclosure." (771)
Readers familiar with (the later) de Man will
recognize in this appeal to ideology the prelude to an
introduction of the "material" - what could, recalling de
Man's debt to Benjamin's theory of allegory, be called the
de Manian site of redemption. Having demonstrated the
impossibility of a dialectics of interiorization
[Erinnerung], the "commanding metaphor" of Hegel's entire
program, de Man asks "whether the external manifestation of
216
the idea... indeed occurs in the mode of recollection"
[Erinnerung], or if - on the contrary - the mind "leaves a
material trace upon the world" in which the sensory
manifestation of the idea can take place. (771)
To demonstrate that the latter is the case, and to
bind the problematic of language more closely to that of
thought, de Man turns to Hegel's discussion of memory in
the Encyclopedia. The dialectical function of Hegel's
account of memory almost exactly parallels that of his
treatment of the subject. In order for the mind to advance
on its dialectical path, it must forget what it has earlier
interiorized. The progression from perception to thought
is itself operated by a movement from the kind of memory
(i.e., recollection, Erinnerung) characteristic of
phenomenal (or sensory) experience to a kind of memory
(Gedaechtnis) that can only be identified with the
mechanical order of grammar. Gedaechtnis, that is to say,
stands opposed to Erinnerung: while the latter operates the
interiorization of meaning, the former, as the faculty of
memorization or "learning by heart," requires that meaning
be forgotten and words be "read as if they were a mere list
of names." (772) This incompatibility of Erinnerung and
Gedaechtnis, like the earlier discussed incompatibility of
saying and meaning and of sign and symbol, leads to a
cognitive impasse that once again occasions an aesthetic
defense:
Memory [Gedaechtnis] effaces remembrance (or recollection)

just as the I effaces itself. The faculty that enables
217
thought to exist also makes its preservation impossible.

The art, the techne, of writing which cannot be separated
from thought and from memorization can only be preserved in
the figural mode of the symbol, the very mode it has to do
away with if it is to occur at all. (773)
With this third demonstration of the Hegelian impasse,
however, de Man is able to articulate the negative truth of
the aesthetic. "The idea," he concludes, "makes its
sensory appearance, in Hegel, as the material inscription
of names." (772) In being thus committed to writing (to
Gedaechtnis), the idea becomes a thing of the past,
something that can never be recaptured by interiorizing
thought or Erinnerung. In short, the movement from
remembrance to memory, from thought to writing, installs a
radical disjunction between thought (the phenomenal) and
its content (the idea materially inscribed in words).
Gedaechtnis, for de Man, remains radically separated from
thinking; that is why he says that memory (material
inscription) cannot be preserved in thought.
Given such a radical disjunction, the question then
surfaces as to how the impossible progression from
perception to thought (impossible, that is, from the
phenomenal standpoint of consciousness) is nevertheless
possible. The answer de Man gives is, of course, through
allegory, i.e., that linguistic function absolutely
heterogeneous to phenomenal thinking: "...allegory
narrates," contends de Man,
'the separation or disarticulation of subject from

predicate [die Trennung von Subjekt und Praedikat].' For
discourse to be meaningful, this separation has to take
place, yet it is incompatible with the necessary generality
218
of all meaning. Allegory functions, categorically and

logically, like the defective cornerstone of the entire
system. (775)
It is the linguistic category of allegory, in short, that
permits the movement from Erinnerung to Gedaechtnis, the
material inscription of the (thence forgotten) idea. And
thus, it is allegory that permits the elaboration of the
symbolic theory of art.
As I announced above, the crux of Derrida's
generalization of deconstruction centers on the status of
his "juncturing" of de Man's "disjunction," or in other
words, on its compatibility with "allegory." In order to
play de Man off against Heidegger, Derrida is compelled to
bracket Erinnerung and to inscribe its incompatibility with
Gedaechtnis within the space of Gedaechtnis itself. The
example of de Man's reading, that is to say, serves to
establish "that the relation of Gedaechtnis to technique,
artifice, writing, the sign, etc., could not be one of pure
exteriority or heterogeneity." (109) While this reading
appears to accord with de Man's own statement that
Gedaechtnis "cannot be separated" from writing, it ignores
de Man's introduction of the "material" which, I suggest,
holds the relation of radical exteriority with respect to
phenomenological thought or consciousness (i.e.,
Erinnerung). When Derrida junctures the disjunction of
thought and technology, he submits this exteriority to a
relativizing reduction. He introduces something that is
not present in de Man: the synthesizing thought-act (noetic
219
act) of a (textualized) consciousness. Only such a
supplemental act can juncture or suture the exteriority of
the material and "thinking memory": "the exteriority of the
division, the dis-junction," claims Derrida, "is the
relation, the essential juncture between thinking memory
and the so-called techno-scientific, indeed literary
outside..." (109, emphasis added) With this supplemental
noetic act, the disjunction is captured in the form of a
noema (or text), and - as in the Hegelian march of the
Spirit - the exteriority of the material simply loses its
exteriority: it is eaten up by textualizing spirit on its
forward-march toward the total textualization of the world.
While Derrida seeks a grammato-phenomenological
dissolution of the obstacles posed by the disjunction
between memory and technology, de Man focuses on the
problematic of presentation, i.e., how Hegel's text can say
the impossible. Not only does this difference explain the
distinct textual practices of the two "fathers" of
deconstruction, but it points to a fundamental disparity
between their respective conceptions of thought. For de
Man, thought is rigorously associated with phenomenal
consciousness (Erinnerung), which means that the
allegorical presentation of thought, its "material
inscription," must remain fundamentally heterogeneous and
inaccessible to thought. Deconstruction, for de Man, is
just the name for this radical heterogeneity, and the task
of the deconstructive critic is to mark the negative moment
220
in particular texts where thought and its inscription (or
presentation) become disjoined. For Derrida, on the other
hand, textual structures characterize texts in the material
sense but they also characterize consciousness itself.16
Consequently, there can be no radical divide between the
phenomenal structure of memory and the material-linguistic
structure of the text. The aspect of the de Manian
disjunction that is important for Derrida is thus the
separation of textual memory or Gedaechtnis (which, for
him, is simply another way of saying Erinnerung) and its
technical "outside.” Since neither can be radically
exterior to thought, this disjunction is itself a relation
of thought and technology. The hope of thinking the
"totality of our relation to the world" therefore remains
alive for Derrida, because - despite the lack of "common
measure" with the unfolding of the world in the past - the
technologized structures of memory in the world are simply
identical with the structures of Gedaechtnis.
It is here that the phenomenological underpinnings of
Derrida's proposed generalization of the deconstructive
project can most clearly be delimited. For thinking the
outside as a "supplement," the textual remainder of a claim
to textual closure, entails the presupposition that the
world is as it is accessible for us, that the real is the
representable. An approach that thinks technology through
16. See the article by Irene Harvey cited above for a

discussion of this difference.
221
the holistic category of the "totality of our relation to
the world" can claim to present the world only on the basis
of a homology of world and text. While no one would deny
that techno-scientific archivation extends the
textualization of the world, it is by no means certain that
such a determination encompasses the totality of the
outside. The assumption that it does functions to endorse
Heidegger's machine metaphor, whose final determination is
the Gestell: the determination of technology as
(exclusively) a means of storage.
Against this tacit endorsement and the wholesale
reduction that it fortifies, we must question Derrida's
strategy. Doesn't the displacement of Heidegger's
dissociation of thinking memory and technology within the
logic of the supplement constitute an implicit idealization
of the world? No matter how fundamentally it strips
consciousness of its traditional attributes, as long as it
serves the function of thinking our relation to the world,
Gedaechtnis is a form of consciousness. And the so-called
techno-scientific outside - despite Derrida's claim that it
lacks any intrinsic "common measure" with the totality of
past technological mediation of memory - can only be
accessed through the faculty of Gedaechtnis, whose
structural textuality is modeled on that of the traditional
metaphysical text. There can, in short, be no
deconstructive reading of Heidegger without the possibility
of framing the world as text. Only within such a textual
222
unity, no matter how "heterogeneous" its content appears,
can the world take shape as contaminating differance. When
Derrida says of the world that is differance, he has
already made the homology active. If the world is
presentable only as a trace-structure, bearing within
itself the potential for meaning, deconstruction is
compelled to repeat the Heideggerian move of reducing the
world to "something" reconcilable with the phenomenological
category of meaning. Deconstructive reading, therefore,
takes place within the exact same phenomenological
boundaries as does Heidegger's hierarchical dissociation,
even if it undoes its ontological underpinnings.
Derrida's forceful "summary" of the deconstructive
break with Heidegger says as much:
In terms of the thousands of ways imaginable, one can

certainly not circumvent the necessity of all the
Heideggerian trajectories, one cannot be any 'nearer' to
this thinking, but one cannot also not be any farther from
it, nor can one be any more heterogeneous (this does not
mean opposed) to it than by risking an affirmation of this
type: the essence of this is this, the essence of
technology is (still) technological, there is no gap or
abyss between thinking thought or thinking memory
(Gedaechtnis) and science, technology, writing (Mnemonics);
or rather, this maintenance, in a Heideggerian manner of a
heterogeneity between the essence of technology and
technology (which is, by the way, one of the most
traditional of gestures), between thinking memory and
science, thinking memory and technicist writing, is
precisely a protection against an other abyssal risk, that
of parasitic contamination, of an an-oppositional
differance, etc. (139-140)
If Heidegger's purity is a resistance to differance with
the purpose of controlling or excluding it, isn't the
deconstructive framing of the world in the (metaphysical)
text a reduction of the world's absolute otherness to the
223
categories of phenomenology? One wonders how different
from Heidegger's purity differance really is.
V. Memory and cultural Studies
Derrida's move to generalize deconstruction comes only
at the cost of what I consider a retrograde allegiance to
the phenomenological model of thought. In order to
preserve the possibility of thinking the technological
"outside," Derrida is compelled to model this outside on
the textual structures of thought itself. The "disjunctive
juncture" constituting the principle of his generalization
is thus produced by an act of a now textualized
consciousness. With the homology of text and world and the
synthetic function of textualization, the separation of
(and the very distinction between) Gedaechtnis and
Erinnerung disappears and "thinking memory" acquires the
quasi-sacred status of "postmodern subject"; it is, quite
simply, the faculty that permits the experience of worldly
exteriority, and thus of modern technology.
This sacralization of thinking memory constitutes a
metaphysics of the contemporary age that, as I have argued
in the Introduction, pervades contemporary media and
technology studies. No great imaginative feat is required
to see how the two master strokes of contemporary cultural
studies - the reduction of technology to media technology
and the analogy of apparatus and psyche - derive from the
Derridian paradigm of cultural or "affirmative"
224
deconstruction. In both cases, not only is it still a goal
to think technology, but it is a phenomenologizing memory
that opens the space in which technology can be thought.
Like Derrida, therefore, the contemporary paradigm of media
studies is compelled to sanction the Heideggerian machine
metaphor: the reduction of technology to a function within
thought. The above-developed failure of the contemporary
media studies paradigm to furnish a robust account of
contemporary technology itself stems from the limitations
of its metaphysical source. Ultimately, it is this latter
that must be reworked in order to bring about a productive
revolution in media studies.
In this light, Derrida's reading is important, not
simply in its function as the source for the contemporary
reduction of technology, but because of its domestication
of de Man's own account of memory. As I shall argue when I
return to it below, the radical disjunction de Man posits
between Erinnerung and Gedaechtnis - precisely because it
eclipses the synthetic function of the (textual) memory -
constitutes the first step in the evolution of an
alternative (non-memorial) account of the human experience
of technology in the modern epoch. In juncturing writing
and memory - the "material" and the "phenomenal" - Derrida
effaces the very possibility for radical exteriority, and
thus compromises the promise of de Man's work for cultural
studies. Aping de Man's indictment of the aesthetic, we
might say that Derrida's juncture constitutes a "defense"
225
against the radical exteriority or materiality not simply
of allegorical memory (as in de Man) but of technology or
technological worldliness itself. For, as I have argued,
in calling for non-cognitive modes of experience, the task
this latter poses for modern man threatens the hegemony of
memorial thought.
While Derrida's impulse to generalize deconstruction
is to be commended, since deconstruction's relevance in an
age of cultural studies depends on a movement beyond the
restricted literary text, we must move, with (and beyond)
de Man, beyond the bounds of Derridian grammato-
phenomenology. Technology, that is to say, must be located
where de Man locates the "material inscription" of thought,
i.e., outside the texto- phenomenological horizon of
thought. Only in this manner will we begin on our path to
redeem the forgotten pessimistic strain of Heidegger's
thought (the non-poietic basis of technology) that, as I
argue above, is central for a robust account of
technology's impact on human experience.
PART II
MEMORY AND TECHNOLOGY
226
CHAPTER 4
PSYCHE AND METAPHOR: DERRIDA'S FREUD
In the last chapter, we discerned an essential bond
between Derrida's proposed generalization of deconstruction
and the phenomenological category of memory or memorial
thought. While this bond could only be established on the
basis of an appropriative misreading of de Man (a
misreading that merits criticism), it nevertheless
elaborates a powerful and influential model for thinking
technology and serves as the basis for the approach to
technology prevalent in contemporary theory - what I have
above designated the apparatus-psyche analogy (the
contemporary form of the machine metaphor). In particular,
it is by means of Derrida's introduction of technology into
thought, his localization of technology within thought,
that the metaphysical ground for the contemporary
identification of apparatus and psyche is prepared. The
latter becomes possible - and attains force as a means of
thinking technology - only with the climactic consummation
(and ensuing dissolution) of the mind-machine analogy. It
is only on the basis of a thorough integration of machine
into mind that technology can be given the status of
"apparatus" - the status, that is, of a machinic
exteriorization of the psyche. We must thus conclude that
contemporary theory (insofar as it relies on the apparatus-
psyche analogy) finds itself committed to the very
227
228
sacralization we discovered in Derrida's reading of de Man
- the sacralization of thinking memory.
Before I turn my attention directly to the modern
evolution of an alternative (non-memorial) account of
technology - an account that redeems radical materiality
from its grammato-phenomenological "juncture" - I shall
consider the affiliation of contemporary theory with the
Freudian model of memory. For it is Freud's account of the
psyche (and Lacan's elaboration of it) that constitutes the
most prominent common source for contemporary approaches to
technology.1 Moreover, as we shall see, it is only through
a radicalization of the Freudian account (following certain
indications provided by Freud himself) that an alternative
approach to technology can be delineated.
I. The Mind-Machine Analogy
Not surprisingly, it again falls to Derrida to serve
as an ad hoc, and perhaps not fully acknowledged, spokesman
for theory's affiliation with Freud. In his early article,
"Freud and the Scene of Writing," Derrida traces the
evolution of the various Freudian models of the psyche from
the 1895 Project to the "mystic writing pad" of the 20's2 ;
focusing on Freud's recourse to machinic metaphors for the
1. Such approaches are numerous, but include as their

notable examples: feminist apparatus theory (Mulvey, de
Lauretis, etc.); recent Lacanian theory (Zizek, Copjec,
etc.); and Jamesonian Marxism.
2. Derrida, "Freud and the Scene of Writing," in Writing

and Difference. 196-231.
229
mind, Derrida argues that the evolution in the Freudian
model witnesses an increasing convergence between the
psyche and its technological analogon. For Freud, this
convergence reaches its apex in the mystic writing pad; the
latter - "a slab of dark brown resin or wax" over which "is
laid a thin transparent sheet" - embodies the dual-function
of the memory, at least up to a point: like consciousness,
the top sheet can be cleared of its inscriptions, and thus
represents the infinite capacity for perception; and like
the unconscious, the underlying slab retains traces after
they have been cleared from the top sheet. In this sense,
the mystic writing pad furnishes a metaphor for the psyche
that finally meets the dual requirement motivating Freud's
theory from its earliest systematic form.
Nevertheless, for Freud, this convergence must come to
an end; it is limited by an internal deficiency - namely,
the difference separating a "dead" metaphor from a living
system. Toward the end of his article, Freud announces the
necessary end-point in the analogy of mind and machine:
We need not be disturbed by the fact that in the Mystic Pad

no use is made of the permanent traces of the notes that
have been received; it is enough that they are present.
There must come a point at which the analogy between an
auxiliary apparatus of this kind and the organ which is its
prototype will cease to apply. It is true, too, that once
the writing has been erased, the Mystic Pad cannot
"reproduce" it from within; it would be a mystic pad indeed
[a Wunderblock in German] if, like our memory, it could
accomplish that.
Now, the significance of Derrida's reading lies precisely
3. Freud, "Note Upon the 'Mystic Writing-Pad'," in General

Psychological Theory (New York: Collier, 1963), 211.
in its rejection of this Freudian restriction; for Derrida,
that is, the mind-machine analogy is not simply one analogy
among others, but is - like the heliotropic metaphor (the
sun) from "White Mythology" - the "analogy" that founds the
psychic system as such. Machines like the mystic pad can
represent the psyche precisely because they embody it; the
psyche itself is nothing but the operation of the machine
we call representation, the machine par excellence. As
Derrida explains, the "two-handed operation" of the mystic
pad (one hand writing on the surface; another periodically
raising the top sheet) is itself, in its essence, the
movement that produces psychic life:
Traces thus produce the space of their inscription only by

acceding to the period of their erasure. From the
beginning, in the "present" of their first impression, they
are constituted by the double force of repetition and
erasure, legibility and illegibility. A two-handed
machine, a multiplicity of agencies or origins - is this
not the original relation to the other and the original
temporality of writing, its "primary" complication: an
originary spacing, deferring, and erasure of the simple
origin, and polemics on the very threshold of what we
persist in calling perception? (226)
It is this apparently radical inversion of Freud's alliance
with vitalism that I shall examine in this chapter; for the
moment, however, I should like to draw attention to the
implicit allegiance on the part of the contemporary
apparatus-psyche model with this Derridian legacy of Freud.
In order to legitimate its enabling analogy, contemporary
theory (whether it acknowledges it or not) must presuppose
the ontological interpenetration of mind and machine that
Derrida elaborates in undermining Freud's (very
231
Heideggerian) devaluation of technology. Contemporary
theory's unifying affiliation with Freud thus constitutes,
in actual fact, an affiliation with a certain
radicalization of Freud; it entails a commitment to a
radicalized form of Freudianism that undermines the
division between "dead" matter and living (psychic) system.
If contemporary theory can thus be said to inaugurate
a new approach to technology, this is true only in the
sense that it re-poses the (Heideggerian) question of
technology. The conclusion of Derrida's reading of Freud
can thus be read equally well as a summary of the
contribution made by apparatus-psyche theory:
Here the question of technology (a new name must perhaps be

found in order to remove it from its traditional
problematic) may not be derived from an assumed opposition
between the psychical and the nonpsychical, life and death.
Writing, here, is techne as the relation between life and
death, between present and representation, between the two
apparatuses [the external memory aid and the organ]. It
opens up the question of technology: of the apparatus in
general and of the analogy between the psychical apparatus
and the nonpsychical apparatus. In this sense, writing is
the stage of history and the play of the world. (228)
What this means is that contemporary theory, in its effort
to account for technology's impact on human experience,
finds itself compelled to abandon materialist analysis in
favor of ontological investigation - investigation of
technology's role in the genesis of (psychic) life. From
the start, then, technology is submitted to the same
enabling reduction that we observed in our earlier
chapters: it is restricted to a function within thinking
memory, to a (derivative) status as the mere "medium" of
232
thought.
We can now grasp the full significance of Derrida's
Freud-reading: since it furnishes the most explicit account
of the foundation for the apparatus-psyche model, it
comprises the exemplary focal point for the critique (and
eventual correction) of the latter's hidden ontological
bias. Moreover, it is the critique of Derridian
Freudianism that will yield an immanent line-of-flight
leading us beyond a strictly ontological analysis of
technology (and thus, by implication, beyond the limited
apparatus-psyche model); by mobilizing and intensifying a
conflict within Derrida's own conception of metaphor - one
that is wholly effaced in recent theory - we shall discover
an alternate approach that will bring us back to Freud's
text, back, that is, to Freud's understanding of
technology.
II. The Reduction of Technology
As I have already observed, Derrida's liberation of
the machine from its Freudian devaluation has certain
consequences for the traditional question of technology.
Once it is no longer possible to isolate the machine from
thinking memory as the "dead" metaphor of a living system,
technology cannot simply be opposed to psyche. Rather, it
comes to function as an essential part of the very movement
that generates psychic life. It comes to be introduced, as
Derrida puts it, "within the psyche." This introduction
233
requires two stages. The machine and representation must
first be rendered homologous, such that the function of
technology is essentially that of psychic representation.
Only then can the machine find a role within the psyche.
The hinge articulating the two is death; both machine and
representation are dead:
That the machine does not run by itself means something

else: a mechanism without its own energy. The machine is
dead. It is death. Not because we risk death in playing
with machines, but because the origin of machines is the
relation to death. ... But what was to run by itself was
the psyche and not its imitation or mechanical
representation. For the latter does not live.
Representation is death. Which may be immediately
transformed into the following proposition: death is (only)
representation. (227)
Machine and representation are dead, however, not in the
traditional, metaphysical sense of being the opposite of
life; such a perspective no longer remains possible
following Freud's introduction of the "death drive."
Rather, the machine - narrowed to the function of producing
representation - is death within the psyche. As
representation and everything bound up with it, e.g.,
difference, delay, etc., the machine functions to interrupt
the pure spontaneity of memory, and thus to generate
psychic life. The localization of technology within the
psyche, Derrida contends, is simply the consequence of
Freud's insight into the complicity of life and death:
All that Freud had thought about the unity of life and
death, however, should have led him to ask other questions
here. ... Freud does not explicitly examine the status of
the "materialized" supplement which is necessary to the
alleged spontaneity of memory, even if that spontaneity
were differentiated in itself, thwarted by a censorship or
repression which, moreover, could not act on a perfectly
spontaneous memory. Far from the machine being a pure
absence of spontaneity [i.e., dead in the absolute sense],
its resemblance to a psychical apparatus, its existence and
its necessity bear witness to the finitude of the mnemic
spontaneity which is thus supplemented. The machine - and,
consequently, representation - is death and finitude within
the psyche. (227-28)
From Derrida's perspective, the psyche cannot be
fundamental (in the sense suggested by Freud's devaluation
of the machine), for it owes its constitution and operation
to death, not as the simple opposite of life, but as the
technical supplement, the interruption, that permits the
periodicity which opens the horizon or space of the
psychic. Since the complication of psyche and machine is
more profound than Freud admits, their resemblance cannot
be restricted to a merely external analogy. The machine
must not simply resemble the psyche from the outside; it
must be like the psyche - or more precisely, it must be
death and finitude within the psyche. Machine technology,
as representational technology, cannot be disjoined from
the self-constitution of the psyche.
Given Derrida's articulation of machine,
representation, and death, we can now understand why he
interrogates Freud's contribution to the "question of
technology" in the curious way he does. No doubt,
attentive readers of Derrida's text will have puzzled over
his odd methodology, his readiness to limit his
investigation to the textuality of the psyche. This
limitation, as he explicitly claims, reflects the
"metaphoric investment" of Freud's text: the two-fold fact
that, for Freud, 11[p]sychical content will be represented
by a text whose essence is irreducibly graphic" and that
"the structure of the psychical apparatus will be
represented by a writing machine." (199) If Derrida's
investigation of this "metaphoric investment" re-poses the
question of technology in fundamentally new terms, it is
not without a crippling adherence to the grammato-
phenomenological reduction of technology. For Derrida does
not merely ask if technology (the writing machine) is a
kind of text, but, what must technology be if it can be (or
more exactly so that it can be) represented by a text?:
We shall not have to ask if a writing apparatus - for

example, the one described in the "Note on the Mystic
Writing Pad" - is a good metaphor for representing the
working of the psyche, but rather what apparatus we must
create in order to represent psychical writing; and we
shall have to ask what the imitation, projected and
liberated in a machine, of something like psychical writing
might mean. And not if the psyche [and its technical
supplement] is indeed a kind of text, but: what is a text,
and what must the psyche be if it can be represented by a
text? (199)
For Derrida, the psyche is a "textual effect," not in the
trivial sense (often ascribed to him by his interpreters)
that it is "only language," but rather because it is
founded on writing - on the operation of differance, the
marking of intervals by the "two-handed machine." It is
for this reason that the machine can function, like the
heliotropic metaphor of "White Mythology," as a founding
metaphor: it is at once a representative of the psyche and
the technical supplement that opens its domain. Thus
Derrida's conclusion: "For if there is neither machine nor
text without psychical origin, there is no domain of the
psychic without text” [and machine]. (199) Not only is the
psychic essentially graphic, as Freud (through his effort
to find the adequate machine metaphor) increasingly comes
to realize, but the textual ontology of the psyche has as
its correlate the reduction of technology (machine) to
text. Derrida's re-posing of the question of technology
thus remains very traditional in its orientation: like
Heidegger's own approach, it restricts technology to a role
within an ontological-genetic history - that of the origin
of psychic life. If Derrida's liberation of the machine
overcomes the dogmatism of Freudian vitalism - a dogmatism
at the heart of the philosophical analysis of technology -
it nevertheless remains committed to a dogmatic reduction
of technology. If, as Derrida says, Freud's thought "opens
up a new kind of question about metaphor, writing, and
spacing in general," and one that interrupts the
metaphysics of presence, it does so only by closing off
another "question": that of the ontic or practical impact
of technology. For Derrida's extreme commitment to the
Freudian analogy - his identification of machine and
psychic writing beyond of the restricted domain of analogy
- is itself what compels the reduction of technology to
technical forms of memory. In this sense, we can see how
Derrida's liberation of the machine entails an initial
sacrifice of technological materiality, a loss that might
very well outweigh what is gained.
The traditional nature of Derrida's re-posing of the
question of technology can equally be gauged in his
commitment to the philosophical storage model of
technology. In transposing the relation between machine
and mind from the restricted rhetorical domain of analogy
to the materialist causal domain of resemblance, Derrida in
fact expands the jurisdiction of the textual reduction of
technology. Technology retains its essential determination
as supplement to memory. In its essence, it is archive,
information storage; only now in the post-Freudian era, it
finds itself spread over global dimensions. Recognition of
this resemblance is yet another "possibility" left
unexplored by Freud:
Nor does Freud examine the possibility of this machine,

which, in the world, has at least begun to resemble memory,
and increasingly resembles it more closely. Its
resemblance to memory is closer than that of the innocent
Mystic Pad: the latter is no doubt infinitely more complex
than slate or paper, less archaic than a palimpsest; but,
compared to other machines for storing archives, it isa
child's toy. This resemblance - i.e., necessarily a
certain Being-in-the-world of the psyche - did not happen
to memory from without, any more than death surprises life.
It founds memory. (228)
In a manner which is irreducible, this resemblancemarks a
causal interrelation of psyche with world. Thus, in one
sense, Derrida's analysis possesses a decisive advantage
over the Heideggerian question of technology: it deals
immediately with an historically-specific technologized
lifeworld. The constitution of the psyche through
differential periodicity is only ever possible in
conjunction with a determinate state of technological
238
evolution. The psyche is thus historical, in the
ontological sense that it opens and is itself opened
through a relation to a historically-relative other, i.e.,
the state of technological development at a given time and
place. The "Being-in-the-world" of the psyche is thus
irreducible. And this is so precisely because psychic life
essentially involves the work of machines.
In another sense, however, Derrida's analysis is (as I
say above of his reading of de Man) more Heideggerian than
that of Heidegger himself. For the notion of resemblance,
constrained within the confines of a textual ontology,
realizes, to a far greater degree than Heidegger's own
analysis, the metaphysical closure of the modern era, what
Heidegger designates as "the Enframing" [das Gestell]. In
short, Derrida's analysis concentrates the causal
interaction of mind with machine, of psyche with world, in
the moment of origin, in the original repetition
(differance) that founds life itself. Since this
primordial interconnection, this essential resemblance,
renders impossible the separation of mind and machine, the
metaphysical status of technology cannot be other than that
of storage, understood as an essential aspect of thinking
(or phenomenological) memory. Viewed metaphysically,
technology enacts a double movement: on one side, the
exteriorization of psyche in the world; and on the other,
the interiorization of the world in psyche. What this
means is that the above developed historical specificity of
239
the mind-machine relation has a merely theoretical
existence, since memory always looks for and finds the same
thing in technology: a means for deferral and ever new
dwelling spaces. Not only then is Derrida's analysis
committed to a metaphysical determination of technology
that trivializes the worldly specificity it claims to
uncover, but - more strikingly still - it entirely lacks
the means of redeeming this specificity and is thus
compelled to reduce it. For Derrida, as for Heidegger,
technology cannot be anything other than a reflection of
the "destiny" of mind (or thought).
III. Beyond the Machine Reduction
While Derrida's radicalization of Freud ends by
fortifying the ontological mode of questioning technology,
we must not, as I hope my analysis makes clear, draw the
conclusion that Derrida simply reproduces the Heideggerian
reduction tout court. For by doing so, we would overlook
the very real risk that Derrida takes: the risk of opening
thought to the material specificity of technological
worldliness.
If this risk has already surfaced in our discussion of
the causal resemblance between psyche and machine, it is
explicitly addressed when Derrida distinguishes two
valences of the machine metaphor. The relevant passage
concerns the priority of what Derrida calls a "solid"

y
metaphor (la metaphore solide] over any merely rhetorical
240
metaphor (e.g., metaphor in the sense of Freud's
"analogy"):
Metaphor as a rhetorical or didactic device is possible

here only through the solid metaphor, the "unnatural,"
historical production of a supplementary machine, added to
the psychical organization in order to supplement its
finitude. The very idea of finitude is derived from the
movement of this supplementarity. The historico-technical
production of this metaphor which survives individual (that
is, generic) psychical organization, is of an entirely
different order than the production of an intrapsychical
metaphor, assuming that the latter exists (to speak about
it is not enough for that), and whatever bond the two
metaphors may maintain between themselves. (228)
At first glance, such a passage appears to fit comfortably
within Derrida's early program for a rhetorical
deconstruction of the text of philosophy; like the
heliotropic metaphor, the exemplary metaphor, from "White
Mythology," the metaphor of the machine unites ontology and
rhetoric. It furnishes, as Derrida says, the "stage of
history" and permits the "play of the world."
Between the "sun" and the "machine," however, there is
a significant difference - one that testifies to Derrida's
self-proclaimed attempt, in his early work, to confront
materiality.4 To wit: the machine correlates the onto-
textual "archi-metaphor" with the material reality of the
technologized lifeworld. If the sun is "originarily non
natural" by dint of its necessary mediation in discourse,
the machine is "non-natural" in another, radically
different sense. It is, as Marx's analysis has
exhaustively demonstrated, the specific product of a
4. See Positions, third interview.
material process. With his introduction of the machine
then, Derrida has in effect opened ontological analysis to
the rhizomatic efficiency of technological materiality.
While the "sun," in its very abstractness and lack of
material determination, serves as the exemplar for a form
of analysis that need not break with the Heideggerian
poietic model, the machine, lacking such neutrality,
explodes the poietic reduction. On the one hand, the
machine never attains a state of purity like that of the
sun, an unbreachable reserve from all experience; and on
the other, it always operates in excess of its restricted -
or rhetorical - system of effects. While one can
meaningfully say of the sun that it shines by itself (even
if its rays only appears in language), the machine needs
energy to run, and thus always runs in directions and
spaces that lie outside the domain of the psyche.
Following his reading of Freud, and its inaugural role
for the cultural application of deconstruction, Derrida
should no longer be able to bracket the materiality of
technology, to exercise the grammato-phenomenological
reduction (epoche). By deriving a causal resemblance of
psyche and technology, Derrida opens deconstruction to
technology in a manner that cannot be derived from the
traditional "question of technology." In this sense,
"Freud and the Scene of Writing" must be read as the hinge
articulating the "negative" with the "affirmative" phase of
deconstruction, its critical and cultural functions. In
242
performing such an articulation, however, Derrida's Freud-
reading modifies the relation between these two phases in a
significant way: the theoretical movement from the
heliotropic metaphor to the machine embodies an historical
evolution in the material domain. As a result, Derrida's
early (and exclusive) theoretical focus on the onto-
rhetorical status of metaphor (whose correlate in terms of
reading-practice is the genetic investigation of the origin
of life) must give way enough to encompass other dimensions
of technology. The movement from the heliotropic metaphor
to the machine is therefore far more "disjunctive" than
Derrida himself recognizes, for what it entails is an
abandonment of the textual ontology of the world along with
the corresponding reduction of technology to text (machine
metaphor).
"Freud and the Scene of Writing" thus stands at the
crossroads of two ultimately incompatible tendencies in
Derrida's work: on the one hand, his commitment to an onto
genetic account of history; and, on the other, his
increasing awareness of a material dimension of history.
Put schematically, these two tendencies are embodied,
respectively, in Derrida's commitment to the Heideggerian
project of a "destruction" of Western ontology and to a
Nietzschean conception of force. The former commitment
yields Derrida's programme for the deconstruction of the
text of philosophy from the standpoint of metaphor, while
the latter stands behind Derrida's effort (which culminates
243
in the generalization of deconstruction proposed with
reference to de Man) to liberate the "discourse" of the
(technical) world from its metaphysical (and rhetorical)
closure. The former directs itself against the figure of
the "text" as the "form" in which philosophy strives to
present the "truth." It therefore defines a general
programme according to which any specific philosophical
discourse can be "deconstructed." In every case, including
Heidegger's, there will always be a supplementary metaphor,
a "metaphore-en-plus," that permits the (provisional)
closure of metaphysics, or the closure of the textual form.
The latter, on the other hand, because it has for an
"object" not a "preconstituted" and stabilized discourse,
but a world-in-flux, concerns a textuality whose metaphoric
mediation is characterized by a double movement: a feedback
relationship between temporary stabilizations of the
dominant metaphor — the machine — and the vicissitudes of
that figure in the actual technical world. As a result of
this double movement, the technical world is always in
excess of its temporary textualizations, and in a manner
that is other than that of deconstructive supplementarity.
This excess, in short, is the real or material
instantiation of the machine - an instantiation that can
never be exhaustively captured in the textualization of the
machine (the machine metaphor).
This tension inherent in Derrida's work cannot simply
be overcome through a modification of his programme, for -
as the reading of Freud explicitly and convincingly
establishes - the very introduction of the technical
lifeworld opens new problems that simply cannot find any
resolution within the still too pure space of Derridian
analysis. Since technologies cannot be restricted to the
ontological status of texts, their impact exceeds the
narrow scope of an onto-genetic account. In order to
achieve theoretical coherence, Derrida thus finds himself
compelled to limit the "resemblance" between mind and
machine - although precisely in an inverse direction from
that taken by Freud. Where Freud finds the machine to come
up short, on account of its inability to generate life,
Derrida encounters a machine that, so to speak, has too
much life. It is thus precisely to retain the
"resemblance" between mind and machine that Derrida must
limit its scope: the technical exteriority of the machine,
including its entire material history, is reduced in his
analysis to the always identical production of an abstract
"living present." Against such a maneuver, we must ask if
it isn't precisely the real operation of machines
(and the material history of technology) - and not their
origin - that the post-Heideggerian question of technology
(under any name) must address?
It is my contention, therefore, that Derrida's
explicit attempt to re-pose the question of technology
introduces a tension in his own approach that ultimately
undermines the coherence of the supplement as a figure for
245
the external world in general and for technology in
particular. Derrida's failure to furnish a viable approach
to the material force of technology ultimately indicates
the need for a broader accounting of its impact. It shows
us that technology is not simply a supplement guaranteeing
the production of thought/psychic life and thus that its
impact cannot be restricted to the impact it has on
thought. As a consequence, we must begin our search for a
more robust account of technology by broadening our
conception of human experience to include dimensions that
are not explicitly "textual."
IV. Experience Beyond the Psyche
This search, as I have already stated, will return us
to the text of Freud. More specifically, it will return us
to certain elements of Freud's thesis in Beyond the
Pleasure Principle that have been neglected by contemporary
theory. In the process, we shall be called upon to revise
certain inherited opinions concerning Freud that find
themselves bolstered through Derrida's exclusive focus on
the onto-genetic "resemblance" of mind and machine.
Generally speaking, these revisions will serve to restore
the significance of external experience against
Freudianism's dominant tendency toward interiorization;
moreover, to the extent that they proceed by exploiting the
material contradiction introduced with Derrida's turn to
the machine, they will also elaborate steps toward a
246
redemption of his thought from its resilient
phenomenological bias.
By way of conclusion to my reading of "Freud and the
Scene of Writing," I shall single out two reductive threads
of Derrida's analysis that, much to the detriment of
technology studies, intensify potentially reductive biases
already inherent in Freud. These reductive threads furnish
initial focal points for the reading of Freud to follow in
the next chapter. First, there is the wholesale reduction
of the materiality of consciousness (and perception).
Since Derrida is exclusively interested in working through
an onto-genetic interpretation of the origin of psychic
life, consciousness finds itself doubly reduced on his
account: not only is it subordinated to originary
representation (according to the principle of differance),
but its status is also - and more importantly - restricted
to that of a graphic product of a purely internal
dialectic. The properly perceptual function of
consciousness is rendered secondary and derivative with
respect to the more primary (and purely internal) writing
system that constitutes the psyche. Indeed, the reduction
of perception is so radical that it no longer appears as
anything other than the "originary repetition" of a
primordial psychic writing-system:
Since the transition to consciousness is not a derivative

or repetitive writing, a transcription duplicating an
unconscious writing, it occurs in an original manner and,
in its very secondariness, is originary and irreducible.
Since consciousness for Freud is a surface exposed to the
external world, it is here that instead of reading through
247
the metaphor in the usual sense, we must, on the contrary,

understand the possibility of a writing advanced as
conscious and as acting in the world (the visible exterior
of the graphism, of the literal, of the literal becoming
literary, etc.) in terms of the labor of the writing which
circulated like psychical energy between the unconscious
and the conscious. The "objectivist" and "worldly"
consideration of writing teaches us nothing if reference is
not made to a space of psychical writing. (212, emphasis
added)
For reasons that should be sufficiently clear, this
subordination of perception to psychic writing complements
the textual reduction of technology developed above.
Inversely, the liberation of perception (the moment of
sensation) from its representational basis comprises the
initial step toward the experience of technology beyond the
restricted ontology of the text.
Correlative with this subordination of perception is a
second reduction - that of the "protective shield"
introduced in Chapter IV of Bevond the Pleasure Principle.
Freud explains the evolution of such a protective shield as
a defense that the psyche develops, in response to the
constant bombarding from the outside, to prevent the
integration (into consciousness) of excessive amounts of
external stimuli. This protective shield, that is,
functions to ward off or repel stimuli from the psyche as
such; it simply prevents it from entering the Pcpt.-Cs.
system altogether. The important point to grasp is that
the protective shield has nothing whatsoever to do with the
unconscious system, but does its job prior to and
independently of the working of the psychic writing-system
(the dialectic of consciousness and the unconscious). When
Derrida conflates the protective shield introduced in
Beyond with the protective function of the top sheet from
the Mystic Pad article, he relocates the protective shield
inside the psychic writing-system. It is thus reduced to
an intra-psychic function - a means of defense, no longer
against stimuli from the outside, but against nothing other
than ... itself:
Neglecting the device's "slight imperfections," interested

only in the analogy, Freud insists on the essentially
protective nature of the celluloid sheet. Without it, the
fine waxed paper would be scratched or ripped. There is no
writing which does not devise some means of protection, to
protect against itself, against the writing by which the
"subject" is itself threatened as it lets itself be
written: as it exposes itself. (224, tr. modified)
The solidarity of this conflation with the textual
reduction of technology should once again be apparent: by
restricting the role of the protective shield to a machinic
function within the psyche, Derrida is able to discount a
dimension of experience (the "molecular") that never enters
the psyche proper, but is rather repelled or parried by the
protective shield. The liberation of the protective shield
from its intra-psychic reduction thus permits the discovery
of an experiential domain that lies beyond mediation by the
psychic writing-system. As we shall see, the significance
of this experiential domain is correlative to the
increasing "technologization" of the lifeworld.
CHAPTER 5
FREUDIAN EXPERIENCE AND THE QUESTION OF TECHNOLOGY
Insofar as it indicates the dead-end of the onto
genetic approach to technology (which can do no more than
reduce technology to a machinic function within the psychic
writing-machine), our interpretation of "Freud and the
Scene of Writing" calls for a reading of Freud that resists
his own impulse to focus on the mind-machine analogy. To
carry out the two-fold liberation we have proposed (the
liberation of perception from its subordination to
representation and of the protective shield from its intra
psychic reduction), we shall thus find ourselves compelled
to re-pose the question concerning (Freud's view of) the
status and function of external experience in a manner that
does not subordinate it to the project of representing the
psyche through an "auxiliary memory aid" or external
apparatus. Our effort to do so will initially focus on
Freud's discussion of trauma and of death in Beyond the
Pleasure Principle? while trauma provides the exemplary
Freudian category for the modern experience of technology,
the larger theme of this text, the so-called "death drive,"
proposes a fundamental reorientation in psychoanalytic
thinking that also focuses on the importance of external
experience. What the death drive undermines is the notion
that living organisms are governed primarily by internal
forces tending toward change and progress; the "phenomena
249
250
of organic development must,” on the contrary, "be
attributed to external disturbing and diverting
influences."1 "In the last resort," continues Freud,
what has left its mark on the development of organisms must

be the history of the earth we live in and of its relation
to the sun. Every modification which is thus imposed upon
the course of the organism's life is accepted by the
conservative organic instincts and stored up for further
repetition. Those instincts are therefore bound to give a
deceptive appearance of being forces tending towards change
and progress, whilst in fact they are merely seeking to
reach an ancient goal by paths alike old and new. (32)
Our attempt to follow through on this Freudian tenet -
to restore the importance of external experience - will
send us on a trajectory that is the precise inverse of
Derrida's: starting from a consideration of Freud's trauma
model of external experience in Beyond the Pleasure
Principle, we shall find ourselves driven backward to the
topological derivation of external experience developed in
the 1895 Project for a Scientific Psychology. Through such
a retrospective reading, we shall grasp an important
dimension of Freud's initial conception of consciousness
that has been subsequently overlooked - i.e., the "problem
of quality" and of the "temporal period" of external
experience. Far from subordinating the Freudian account of
consciousness to an originary temporality of the psychic
writing machine (as Freud seems to do himself at the end of
the "Note on the Mystic Writing-Pad"2 and as Derrida does
1. Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (New York: Norton,

1961), 32.
2. "On the Mystic Pad the writing vanishes every time the
close contact is broken between the paper which receives
the stimulus and the wax slab which preserves the
251
with specific regard to the Project3), such a conception
aligns Freud's account of external experience with that of
Henri Bergson: like the duree, the temporal period
articulates a point of contact between matter (which always
possesses a distinct temporal period) and mind (which
translates such a period into quality). If this alignment
with Bergson provides in general for a productive
reorientation of the Freudian model of external experience,
we shall discover (by considering several suggestions of
Lyotard) that it fails to break with the most basic tenet
of the onto-genetic memory model - namely, the priority of
psyche (and its duration) over material duration in the
proper sense. Insofar as mind retains the power of
selection, the experience of material reality continues to
undergo a fundamental reduction. The materialist
reorientation of Freudian theory thus fails to open a truly
new approach to technology; this failure shall return us to
Beyond - and specifically to the fresh emphasis Freud
places there on the protective function of the system
impression. This agrees with a notion which I have long

had about the method in which the perceptual apparatus of
our mind functions, but which I have hitherto kept to
myself. My theory was that cathectic innervations are sent
out and withdrawn in rapid periodic impulses from within
into the completely pervious system Pcpt.-Cs. So long as
that system is cathected in this manner, it receives
perceptions (which are accompanied by consciousness) and
passes the excitation on to the unconscious mnemic systems;
but as soon as the cathexis is withdrawn, consciousness is
extinguished and the functioning of the system comes to a
standstill." (212) This line of argument is, of course,
fortified by Derrida's reading.
3. See Chapter 4, above.
252
Pcpt.-Cs. As we shall see, it is this emphasis - more than
any other aspect of this revolutionary Freudian text - that
will lead us beyond the restrictive homology of mind and
machine (of agent and matter) and toward a non-memorial
model of experience in the technological age.
I. Consciousness/ Memory, and External Experience
In the course of discussing the evolution of
consciousness in Chapter IV of Beyond. Freud establishes
two modes by which the psyche experiences the external
world. On the one hand, the system Cs., that system
immediately abutting on the external world, is able to
receive a small portion of the stimuli constantly
bombarding it from the outside - what Freud calls a
"sample." Such samples pass through it as "mobile
cathectic energy"; they overcome no resistances, and thus,
like all phenomena of consciousness, leave behind them no
permanent traces, expiring instead in the very process of
becoming conscious. Such a process is what we commonly
know as perception.
On the other hand, the psyche experiences the external
world through a mode that cannot be characterized as
perceptual - a mode to which he gives the name "trauma."
Trauma ensues when the psychic system receives an
unmasterable influx of stimuli from the external world. It
presupposes a breakdown in the psyche's protection against
stimuli. The result is a psychic overload which witnesses
253
the suspension of the pleasure principle and the total
mobilization of the system's internal energy against the
intolerable influx of stimuli:
We describe as "traumatic" any excitations from outside

which are powerful enough to break through the protective
shield. It seems to me that the concept of trauma
necessarily implies a connection of this kind with a breach
in an otherwise efficacious barrier against stimuli. Such
an event as an external trauma is bound to provoke a
disturbance on a large scale in the functioning of the
organism's energy and to set in motion every possible
defensive measure. At the same time, the pleasure
principle is for the moment put out of action. There is no
longer any possibility of preventing the mental apparatus
from being flooded with large amounts of stimulus, and
another problem arises instead - the problem of mastering
the amounts of stimulus which have broken in and of binding
them, in the psychical sense, so that they can then be
disposed of. (23-24)
Following such a traumatic breach, there are two possible
outcomes (and these are again split along the Cs.-Ucs.
divide): either the psyche is able to muster enough
internal energy to bind and thus expel the invading
stimuli; or else a traumatic neurosis is produced.
Normally, if the former outcome occurs, it means that the
psychic system has attained an energized state, prior to
the moment of trauma, which allows it to bind the entirety
of the invading stimuli. In this case, Freud says that the
psyche is "prepared." When he furthermore specifies that
"anxiety" [Angst] protects the psyche from traumatic
neurosis, Freud enlists anxiety alongside conscious
sampling as means of preparing the psyche for traumatic
excitation. More specifically, he implies that such a
psychic state of readiness can be attained through the
psyche's production of anxiety (here viewed as energy
cathexis); the logic of this implication would, moreover,
seem to suggest that anxiety (which may itself stem in part
from conscious sampling), like purely conscious
preparation, neutralizes the factor of "surprise” that
precipitates traumatic shock (what Freud calls "fright" or
Schreck). Alongside such psychic modes of preparation,
there is, as I have said, another way in which the psyche
can overcome a traumatic excitation - a way that does not
require prior preparation by consciousness and/or anxiety.
When a "severe mechanical concussion" of the kind that
ordinarily results in traumatic neurosis is accompanied by
a "wound or injury inflicted simultaneously," traumatic
neurosis is normally avoided. The cathexis that
accompanies such injury furnishes the psychic system with
the energy required to master the traumatic excitation.
"Thus," Freud concludes, while "the mechanical violence of
the trauma would liberate a quantity of sexual excitation
which, owing to the lack of preparation..., would have a
traumatic effect," "the simultaneous physical injury, by
calling for a narcissistic hypercathexis of the injured
organ, would bind the excess of excitation." (27, emphasis
added) It is, therefore, only in the absence of the
requisite level of anxiety (internal cathexis) or of an
accompanying physical injury that the traumatic excitation
results in traumatic neurosis.
What this means is that traumatic neurosis is
equivalent with a general collapse of consciousness; it
results from an eclipse in the capacity of the psychic
system to bind and expel invading stimuli along non-
resistant pathways (i.e., through conscious discharge).
Thus, "the chief weight in the causation [of ordinary
traumatic neuroses] seems to rest upon the factor of
surprise, of fright [Schreck]." (6) Schreck, Freud
specifies, is a psychic state - "the name we give to the
state a person gets into when he has run into danger
without being prepared for it." (6) Theconsequence of
this forceful surprise, and the psyche'slack of
preparation, is that the traumatic stimuli go directly, as
it were, into the unconscious system: they are stored as
memory-traces of events that have never been consciously
experienced. Thus, the production of traumatic memory-
traces does not merely obey the general Freudian principle
underlying the division between the C s . and the Ucs.
systems ("becoming conscious and leaving behind a memory-
trace are processes incompatible with each other within one
and the same system" [19, emphasis added]), it does so in a
peculiarly radical manner: it betrays an absolute
incompatibility of consciousness and memory. Memory-
traces, Freud says, "are often most powerful and most
enduring when the process which left them behind was one
which never entered consciousness." (19, emphasis added)
Aligning trauma with Freud's typology of memory in his 1914
paper "Recollection, Repetition, and Working Through," we
can surmise that trauma functions like those "purely
internal mental activities" that originate in the
unconscious.^ As is the case for instinctual life, primal
fantasies, and a whole host of mental processes that are
not originally experienced consciously, trauma can only be
experienced through anamnesis, in which "something is
'remembered' which could never have been 'forgotten,'
because it was never at any time noticed, never was
conscious." (368) Trauma, moreover, distinguishes itself
by paralleling to a great degree those memories "of one
special kind of highly important experience" that normally
cannot be recovered; like infantile experiences which take
place "before they could be comprehended" (or, in other
words, prior to speech, in-fans), traumatic memories can
only be experienced indirectly, through dreams. What Freud
says of the former would seem to fit perfectly for
traumatic memories: "[o]ne gains a knowledge of them from
dreams, and is compelled to believe in them on irresistible
evidence in the structure of the neurosis." (368-69)
Indeed, in Beyond. Freud actually does draw such a
connection between traumatic neurosis and infantile trauma;
this connection is nothing less than the infamous
Widerholungszwang or "compulsion to repeat":
...it is impossible to classify as wish-fulfillments the

dreams we have been discussing which occur in traumatic
neuroses, or the dreams during psychoanalyses which bring
to memory the psychical traumas of childhood. They arise,
rather, in obedience to the compulsion to repeat... (26)
4. Freud, "Recollection, Repetition, and Working Through,"

Collected Papers. Vol. II (New York: Basic Books, 1954) ,
368.
In other words, both types of experience - which arise
originarily, as it were, in dreams - defy the wish-
fulfillment theory and the rule of pleasure principle which
underlies it. They thus betray a more primitive function
of dreamwork - a function that parallels, or indeed
embodies, the primordial aim of the death drive to restore
balance following environmental change. It is precisely in
such terms that Freud specifies the "work" of traumatic
dreams:
...it is not in the service of the [pleasure] principle

that the dreams of patients suffering from traumatic
neuroses lead them back with such regularity to the
situation in which the trauma occurred. We may assume,
rather, that dreams are here helping to carry out another
task, which must be accomplished before the dominance of
the pleasure principle can even begin. These dreams are
endeavoring to master the stimulus retrospectively, by
developing the anxiety whose omission was the cause of the
traumatic neurosis. (26, emphasis added)
Traumatic dreams display a compulsion to repeat the
traumatic situation in order, retrospectively, to prepare
the psyche to master the stimulus overload that, in the
original situation, caused the traumatic experience of
Schreck. The anxiety thus generated would place the psyche
in a state of inner excitation (of high energy cathexis)
that would facilitate the binding and expulsion of the
excessive stimuli.
Now that we understand the fundamentals of Freud's
notion of traumatic neurosis and the role of consciousness
in protecting the psyche against it, we are in a position
to evaluate it as an account of experience in the
technological age. Freud himself paves the way here, for
258
(as I have already implicitly noted) technology cannot be
separated from the phenomenon of modern neurosis: it is
precisely the modern experience of mechanical force (along
with the experience of World War I) that yields the notion
of "traumatic neurosis."5 Indeed, Freud defines this
latter with particular reference to modern technology: it
is "a condition," he says, "which occurs after severe
mechanical concussions, railway disasters and other
accidents involving a risk to life." (6)
While Freud is certainly on to something when he draws
a historical connection between experience and modern
technology, we must take note of the inherent structural
limitations of his approach. All aspects of Freud's theory
of external experience promote the same singular and
univocal motive: the conversion of exteriority into memory
- or, more precisely, the translation-reduction of the
molecular real into a molar figure (i.e., trauma). In
other words, in order to count as a truly significant
experience, a technically-influenced lived experience must
impact the psychic system proper (and not simply Pcpt.-
Cs.): it must either produce a traumatic neurosis or
threaten a trauma that is subsequently warded off. To put
5. In his footnotes, Freud refers his readers to his

Introduction to the collective volume, Psycho-Analysis and
the War Neuroses (London and New York, 1921), Standard
Edition, vol. 17, and to his 1905 discussion of "the effect
of swinging and railway-travel" in Three Essays on the
Theory of Sexuality (London and New York, 1949), Standard
Edition, vol. 11. On this point, see also Avital Ronnell,
The Telephone Book (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska,
1990), 84ff.
it bluntly, Freud's account of external experience betrays
a distinctly "molar" bias; technically-impacted experience
of the kind Freud discusses only becomes significant when
it alters (and indeed, by altering) the psyche. What this
means is that technology only has (or begins to have) an
impact on human experience after it reaches a certain
experiential threshold - after it breaches the protective
shield of the psyche. For proof of this molar bias, we
have only to invoke Freud's own description of what
distinguishes the psychoanalytic model of traumatic
neurosis from the "old, naive theory of shock":
The [shock theory] regards the essence of the shock as

being the direct damage to the molecular structure or even
to the histological structure of the elements of the
nervous system; whereas what we seek to understand are the
effects produced on the organ of the mind by the breach in
the shield against stimuli and by the problems that follow
in its train. (25)
Against Freud's tendency toward polarization, we must ask
if these two models exhaust the experiential possibilities
posed by the technological lifeworld. More specifically,
we must question the implicit reduction of conscious
experience that underlies the Freudian trauma model.
Wherever it appears in Beyond. consciousness is invoked
solely as a handmaiden to the psyche proper. Either it
operates as a means of sampling the outside world - a means
by which it informs the psyche of any potential external
threat; or else it functions in the service of binding and
expelling excessive stimuli that manage to penetrate into
the psyche. In short, though he never says so explicitly,
Freud views the test-function of consciousness explored
above in the same light as he does the C s . system's
contribution toward the mastery of traumatic excitation: in
both cases, consciousness is subordinated to the more
important mode of external experience, i.e., trauma. At
the most general level, the sampling of external stimuli
serves to prepare the psychic system as a whole to cope
with the outside world; the emphasis here is not on the
experience of the outside world qua outside world
(experience which might include non-psychic aspects), but
rather on the pragmatic considerations of the mental
processes alone. "The main purpose of the reception of
stimuli," says Freud, "is to discover the direction and
nature of the external stimuli; and for that it is enough
to take small specimens of the external world, to sample it
in small quantities." (21) In so doing, sampling informs
the psychic system about what it should expect from the
external world. Thus, in a more specific sense, the
reception of samples from the external world serves to
protect the psyche from external stimuli; the information
yielded through perceptual sampling helps the psyche
determine how great a store of cathected energy it will
need to master incoming stimuli and thus preserve its
equilibrium against the threat of trauma. We must
therefore conclude that sampling does not in fact comprise
a mode of external experience that could counterbalance the
molar bias of the trauma model.
261
II. Freud's Quality Model: the Emancipation of Perception
Beyond the Freudian program to put forth a molar or
traumatic model of experience in the technological age, a
rationale for this reduction of consciousness can be
discovered in Freud's compulsion to provide an onto-genetic
account of the origin of consciousness. As the correlate
of a theory that "attributes aetiological importance not to
the effects of mechanical violence but to fright and the
threat to life," such an account helps to distinguish the
psychoanalytic viewpoint from all "cruder" theories. The
distinction concerns precisely the relative importance of
consciousness: while mechanical theory views it as "the
universal attribute of mental processes," for
psychoanalysis, it is "only a particular function" of the
mental processes. (18) This devaluation of consciousness
allows psychoanalysis to account for its genesis; it is in
this sense that we must understand Freud's claim for the
superiority of psychoanalytic theory over cerebral anatomy:
if, as he says, psychoanalysis alone can explain (and has
need to explain) the localization of consciousness as "the
outermost, enveloping layer of the central organ," it is
only by dint of its broader capacity to account for the
general phenomenon of consciousness.6
In a sense, this onto-genetic commitment places
psychoanalysis in a situation similar to that faced by
6. See Beyond. 18 ff.
262
Derrida in his own reading of Freud: since its account of
consciousness is entirely in the service of a broader
narrative about the traumatic core of the psyche, it is
compelled to privilege only those aspects of consciousness
that are of immediate relevance. Just as Derrida cannot do
justice to his opening of thought to a materialist
technical lifeworld, Freud must downplay or ignore
dimensions of conscious experience that point beyond or
exceed the trauma model.
The onto-genetic bias of Beyond also plays a prominent
role in structuring Freud's 1895 Project for a Scientific
Psychology; it determines for example the latter's primary
aim of furnishing a genetic account of memory.
Nevertheless, the Project provides a fertile ground to re
pose the issue of external experience (and of the function
of consciousness), since its formulation antedates the
mature metapsychological conception of the unconscious that
lies behind - and virtually demands - the trauma model of
technological experience and the categorical privileging of
psychic or memorial experience that accompanies it.
In addition to furnishing a genetic (or "biological")
account of the origin of memory (which includes an etiology
of consciousness), the Project develops an explanation of
the perceptual function of consciousness that runs counter
to its later reduction.7 To the extent that it resists
7. By the time of Beyond, Freud has collapsed consciousness

and perception into the system Pcpt.-Cs.
263
identification with the neuronic system PHI (the system of
permeable neurons, i.e., the equivalent of the system Cs.
in Beyond), this perceptual function comprises a separate
system, Wahrnehmung ["perception"] (or OMEGA, following the
designation system of the Project), through which the
outside world can be experienced beyond the confines of the
trauma model.
Before we turn our attention directly to Freud's
account of Wahrnehmung, we must explore the major
argumentative thread of the first part of the Project that
sets the stage for its introduction. Freud's Project aims
to give a quantitative account of psychical processes that
would square psychology with the requirements of natural
science. Freud begins his sketch with a division between
stimuli originating in the external world and stimuli
coming from within. This division leads him to
differentiate between two psychic aims: while the "primary
neuronic system" aims to discharge whatever energy it takes
in from the outside world following the "principle of
inertia," the "secondary function" concerns itself with
stimuli originating "from the somatic element itself."8 In
the first case, the neuronic system simply employs the
quantity (of energy) it acquires from outside in order to
get rid of it. Things are not so simple in the second
case, however, for "the organism cannot withdraw itself
8. Freud, Project for a Scientific Psychology. in The

Origins of Psychoanalysis (New York: Basic Books, 1954),
357.
264
from [endogenous stimuli] as it does from external stimuli"
since these stimuli "give rise to the major needs" of the
body. (357) Since, moreover, these needs call for actions,
the organism requires a source of energy on which it can
draw. Consequently, the neuronic system must "abandon its
original trend towards inertia" and "learn to tolerate a
store of quantity (Qn) sufficient to meet the demands for
specific action." (358)
It is this functional necessity that compels Freud to
introduce the crucial notion of resistance - a notion that
will structure his entire model of the mind: "The secondary
function, which requires quantity (Qn) to be stored up, is
made possible by supposing that there are resistances which
oppose discharge..." (359) As these resistances take place
in the contacts between neurones, Freud dubs them "contact-
barriers." Their initial application is to explain the
possibility of representing memory, which Freud defines as
"a susceptibility to permanent alteration by a single
process." (359) Because these contact-barriers oppose the
free flow of quantity through neurones, they leave the
latter in a modified condition following each excitation,
and thus represent memory.
At this point, Freud's analysis encounters a
"difficulty" that is decisive for the path it is
subsequently to take: the possibility of permanent neuronic
alteration appears to conflict with the empirical fact that
"in general, fresh excitations meet with the same
265
conditions of reception as did the earlier ones." Freud's
method of solving this difficulty, as is well-known, is to
distinguish between two classes of neurones: "permeable
neurones (offering no resistance and retaining nothing)
which serve the function of perception, and impermeable
neurones (offering resistance and retaining quantity [Qn])
which are the vehicles of memory and presumably of
psychical processes in general." (360) From this
distinction in neurone class, Freud draws a significant
systemic distinction: "Henceforth, accordingly, I shall
call the former system of neurones PHI and the latter PSI."
(360)
Now, Freud goes to some length to emphasize that these
two systems, which anticipate the later metapsychological
divide between the conscious system and the unconscious,
are not distinct in essence, but have been prepared by
experience for their separate functions: the two systems
"retain their characteristics because the PHI-neurones are
connected only with the periphery and the PSI-neurones only
with the interior of the body. A distinction in their
essence is thus replaced by a distinction in the milieu to
which they happen to be located." (365) What this means,
genetically speaking, is that the two systems share a
similar etiological profile. While the PSI-neurones follow
differing paths depending on the degree of "facilitation"
(or conductivity) of the contact-barriers, they always face
some degree of resistance. Consciousness occurs as a
limit-point of facilitation, when a contact-barrier is, so
to speak, so travelled that it loses its resistance and
becomes permeable (i.e. open to the lower quantities which
characterize the PHI-system). Such an account, we should
point out, squares perfectly with the onto-genetic
explanation of consciousness given in Beyond. There, Freud
argues, consciousness arises when the organism, facing
constant bombardment from external stimuli, attains a point
of maximal permanent modification:
A crust would thus be formed which would at last have been

so thoroughly "baked through" by stimulation that it would
present the most favorable possible conditions for the
reception of stimuli and become incapable of any further
modification. In terms of the system Cs., this would mean
that its elements could undergo no further permanent
modification from the passage of excitation, because they
had already been modified in the respect in question to the
greatest possible extent: now, however, they would have
become capable of giving rise to consciousness. (20)
In short, consciousness arises when the resistances between
elements cease to exist: "In the system C s .," Freud says
bluntly, "resistance ... to passage from one element to
another would no longer exist." (20) Consciousness thus
arises as a radicalization of memory: with each
facilitation or "permanent trace of the excitation,"
resistance is diminished until the point that it simply
disappears.
At this point, we can properly appreciate the
implications of the posited exclusivity between
consciousness and memory that orients Freud's trajectory
from the Project up to the "Note on the Mystic-Writing
Pad." As a corollary of the functional separation of PHI
and PSI systems, this exclusivity coincides with the
principle division of labor underlying the Freudian
conception of the psyche (psyche as writing-machine): it
quite simply is one of a piece with the reconciliation of
limitless receptivity and the possibility for (selective)
retention. What this means, however, is that the PHI-
functions remain exclusively in the service of the PSI-
system: limitless receptivity is required (at least at this
point in Freud's account) not to facilitate conscious
experience, but rather to insure ever new content for the
progressive constitution of the PSI-system. As in the case
of the trauma model, everything here is in the service of
the psychic system proper:
...one peculiarity of neuronic systems - their capacity to

retain and at the same time to remain receptive - seems to
be explained by the hypothesis of there being two neuronic
systems, PHI and PSI... All psychical acquisition would on
this basis consist in the organization of the PSI-system
through partial and locally determined suspensions of the
resistance in the contact-barriers which distinguishes PSI
from PHI. (363, emphasis added)
Freud's functional separation thus masks the impact of a
hierarchical decision. From the moment that memory (and
the PSI-system) is posited as identical with "psychical
processes in general," the PHI-system is needed only to
explain how facilitations are possible - how quantities
select the particular routes through neurones that will
produce memory. Within such a schema, the exclusivity of
consciousness and memory will have no other function than
that of reinforcing the functional distinction itself; it
will be restricted to functioning as the condition of
possibility for the reconciliation of receptivity and
retention.
It is only when Freud relates the functional
distinction between PHI and PSI to the magnitude of
quantity (and thus to external stimuli) that his analysis
begins to diverge from its initial hierarchical path.
While permeable PHI-neurones are receptive to any quantity,
no matter how negligible, PSI-neurones can only be reached
by quantities above a certain threshold (commensurate with
the resistance of the contact-barrier): "...quantities pass
through the PHI-neurones against which the resistance
offered by the contact-barriers is negligible, but ... the
PSI-neurones are only reached by quantities which are of
the same order of magnitude as that resistance." (365)
Such a distinction, however, immediately introduces a
difficulty: since transmission into memory comprises the
sole means (at this point of the argument) by which
quantity impacts the psyche (i.e., modifies it in a
permanent way), only those quantities that exceed the
threshold required to lay down permanent traces will, so to
speak, make the cut. In short: the impact of the external
world is restricted to quantities above a certain
magnitude; all quantity that falls under this threshold
simply falls outside the realm of experience. With this
restriction, I need hardly point out, Freud's account
approximates the trauma model from Beyond. even if it lacks
the latter's "metapsychological" dimension. The final
result of this restriction is a massive reduction of
external experience, and specifically of experience that
can be considered "molecular" or "sub-representational."®
It is, I suggest, specifically in light of the threat
of such a reduction that Freud turns his attention to the
PHI-system itself. In his discussion, Freud employs the
opposition of quantity and quality in order to distinguish
two functions of the PHI-system: the reduction or screening
of exogenous quantities and reception through the sense-
organs. These two functions anticipate the important
distinction between protection and reception that Freud
introduces in Beyond.
Because exogenous quantities are presumed to be of a
magnitude greater than endogenous ones (which reflect the
psyche's tolerance level), they must be transformed in
order to be introduced into PHI and ultimately into PSI.
In order to explain this function, Freud introduces a
distinction between PHI-neurones proper and the cell-
structures (or "nerve-ending apparatus") into which they
terminate:
...the PHI-neurones do not terminate in an unattached

manner at the periphery, but end in cell-structures; and it
is these and not the PHI-neurones which receive the
exogenous stimulus. A "nerve-ending apparatus" of this
kind ... might well serve the purpose of not allowing
exogenous quantities (Q) to impinge upon PHI in
undiminished magnitude but of damping them down. (367)
The nerve-ending apparatus thus serves the same function
that we have explored above in Beyond: it allows the psyche
9. I have developed these terms in my Introduction, above.
270
to sample stimuli from the external world. "Such pieces of
apparatus," speculates Freud, "would then have the function
of screens against quantity (Q) which would only allow
quotients of the exogenous quantities (Q) to pass through."
(367) As is the case in Bevond. this screening function of
the nerve-ending apparatus is quickly appropriated to the
PSI-system (the unconscious). That is to say, the
reception of "quotients" of exogenous quantities is not
introduced in order to explain how the outside world is
experienced, but is again subordinated to memory; it serves
to protect the PSI-system from an overload of quantity, and
from the corresponding experience of pain, which Freud
defines as "the irruption of large quantities (Q) into
PSI." (368)
It is only when he poses the question of consciousness
proper that Freud addresses the content of external
experience. Explaining consciousness, which "knows nothing
of ... quantities and neurones," comprises one of the
requirements Freud places on his theory. Consciousness,
Freud contends, "gives us what we call 'qualities' -
sensations which show a great variety of 'differences' and
whose differences depend on relations to the external
world." (369) With this notion of quality, Freud
introduces a register of experience - a register no longer
appearing explicitly in Beyond - that would appear to
possess what is required to redress the reduction of
external experience carried out by PSI. Qualities are not
a function of quantity, or more specifically, of quantity
flowing freely or against resistance in the PHI and PSI
systems; "there is," says Freud, "nothing quantitative
about them." (369) As "differences," therefore, qualities
are not dependant on differences in quantity (as are the
differences in facilitation that underlie memory).10 They
are, rather, the internal modification of external quantity
(and science, according to Freud, teaches that there is
nothing but quantity in the external world). Thus,
qualities can stem neither from the PHI-system (since,
Freud assumes, consciousness results from the "higher
levels of the neuronic system), nor from the PSI-system
(since at least one PSI-function, recollection, is entirely
devoid of quality). In order to explain the origin of
qualities, therefore, Freud "must summon up enough courage"
to introduce a third system of neurones - "perceptual
neurones." (370) These neurones, which form the system
Wahrnehmung ["perception"] (or OMEGA), are "excited along
with the others during perception but not during
reproduction" and thus possess a special relationship with
the PHI-system. (370) Indeed, Freud seems to suggest that
perception shares with the PHI-processes a protective
function; while the latter hold off quantity by screening
it into manageable quotients, perception does so by
transforming it into quality: the perceptual system
10. Derrida reads the notion of quality entirely

differently. See "Freud and the Scene of Writing," 200-
205.
272
"consists in contrivances for changing external quantity
into quality. In this latter fact the original trend
towards holding off quantity seems to triumph once more."
(370) If PHI reduces exogenous quantities to intercellular
magnitudes, perception lets in even smaller quantities: "It
may be that the characteristic of quality (that is,
conscious sensation) only appears where quantities have so
far as possible been excluded." (371)
This conclusion introduces an "immense difficulty"
that leads to a most striking speculation. The difficulty
consists in an apparent paradox: while perception deals
with the smallest possible quantities, perceptual neurones
must be completely permeable and receptive without limit;
they appear, that is, to require the degree of quantity
necessary, according to Freud's quantity-theory, to achieve
permeability and receptivity. This requirement, however,
cannot be reconciled with the fact that perceptual neurones
are those possessing the least degree of quantity.
Consequently, in order to explain the permeability (and
receptivity) of the perceptual neurones, Freud is compelled
to modify the quantity-model in a stunning way:
I can see only one way of escape: to revise our basic

hypothesis on the passage of quantity (Qn). Hitherto I
have regarded it only as a transference of quantity (Qn)
from one neurone to another. It must have another
attribute, however - of a temporal character; for the
mechanics of the physicists have assigned this temporal
attribute even to the motions of masses in the external
world. I shall describe this attribute briefly as
"period." Thus I shall assume that the resistance of the
contact-barriers applies only to the transference of
quantity (Q), but that the period of neuronic motion is
transmitted without inhibition in every direction, as
though it were a process of induction. (371)
It is this passage that Derrida pressures in his reading of
the Project: for him, the introduction of a temporal period
justifies a synthesis of Freud's theory with the
Heideggerian analysis of temporality. According to
Derrida, the permeability of the perceptual neurones
proceeds from "pure time, from pure temporalization in its
conjunction with spacing: from periodicity."11 Periodicity
introduces "pure difference" as the condition for
perception: "The concept of a period in general precedes
and conditions the opposition between quantity and quality,
and everything governed by this opposition." (205) Despite
Freud's implicit rejoinder against such an assimilation
(since the period cannot be aligned with the quantitative
difference necessary for memory, i.e., a quantitative
difference internal to the psychic system), Derrida thus
conflates the difference marked by quality with the
differences among quantities that underlie memory. What
such a reading fails to address is the external provenance
of the period; there is no "period in general" but only the
period of specific stimuli stemming from the external
world. It is for this reason that Freud takes the further
step of reconciling his theory with "the general laws of
motion [which] must apply without contradiction":
perceptual neurones, he thus specifies, "assimilate the
period of an excitation." (371, emphasis added) Perception
11. Derrida, "Freud and the Scene of Writing," 205.
274
or consciousness is simply the integration into the psyche
of processes in the external world which possess their own
characteristic period (or "qualitative characteristic").
While this process of integration involves a reduction of
what in the external world is continuous into a
discontinuous segment (thus yielding an analogy and not an
absolute coincidence12), the period in the external
stimulus nevertheless retains a constitutive role: "The
characteristic of quality in the stimuli ... is represented
by a particular period of neuronic motion which is
certainly not the same as that of the stimulus but has some
relation to it, determined according to a reduction formula
that is unknown to us." (375) We must therefore refrain
from reducing the period "in the stimuli" to a primordial
"periodicity" originating in the psyche.
Freud's conception of the period would thus seem to be
more akin to Bergsonian "duration" [duree] than to
Heideggerian temporality. It is, of course, beyond our
scope here to undertake a thorough analysis of Bergson's
theory of perception, and the particular fusion of mind and
matter that it develops. Nevertheless, a brief comparison
of Freud and Bergson will serve to supplement Freud's
narrow and too quickly abandoned analysis of quality. It
will highlight, on the one hand, the latter's potential
contribution to a theory of experience in the technological
age, and on the other, its fundamental humanist limitation.
12. See Freud, Project, 372.
Working under the assumption that there is a complete
continuum between matter and mind (and thus allows for no
principial division of external and internal), Bergson
defines perception as a fundamentally pragmatic gesture:
that of aligning the rhythm of internal duration with the
rhythm of the duration belonging to external matter.
Through this process of alignment, perception is made
equivalent with an action of the body on the "totality of
images" (pure matter). On Bergson's supposition of a
continuum, moreover, there is no such thing as pure
perception (which, as an "ideal," signifies the total
coincidence or identity of "material" stimulus and
"spiritual" response). What this means is that all
perception "partakes" in some degree of memory (which can
roughly be defined as representational mediation). The
alignment of the respective rhythms of internal and
external duration can thus occur according to any of the
possible "alloys" of memory and matter that occupy the
space between pure perception (pure matter) and pure memory
(pure spirit). Depending on which pole is more prominent,
perception will either tend to obey necessity (the law of
matter) or to express freedom (the law of spirit). In
either case, the important point is that "sensible
qualities" (which parallel Freud's consciously experienced
qualities) are not internally- or psychically-generated
representations, but rather "choices" enacted by memory on
the real, on the "continuous flow of things":
276
Now, at the same time that our actual and so to speak

instantaneous perception effects this division of matter
into independent objects, our memory solidifies into
sensible qualities the continuous flow of things. It
prolongs the past into the present, because our action will
dispose of the future in the exact proportion in which our
perception, enlarged by memory, has contracted the past.
To reply, to an action received, by an immediate reaction
which adopts the rhythm of the first and continues it in
the same duration, to be in the present and in a present
which is always beginning again - this is the fundamental
law of matter: herein consists necessity. If there are
actions that are really free, or at least partly
indeterminate, they can only belong to beings able to fix,
at long intervals, that becoming to which their own
becoming clings, able to solidify it into distinct moments,
and so to condense matter and, by assimilating it, to
digest it into movements of reaction which will pass
through the meshes of natural necessity.13
What Bergson imagines then is a graduated continuum of
perception, from a point of absolute necessity ("pure
perception" or spontaneity) upwards - to ever increasing
degrees of mediation in memory, and thus of freedom. In
all cases, perception is viewed as an adaptation of
internal duration to external duration. In the case of
necessity, external duration will dominate this process,
calling for a wholly determinate response; with freedom,
internal duration will come to play a more significant
role, bending or contracting matter to fit its own rhythm.
On Bergson's model, then, quality - the Freudian content of
consciousness - is the form of matter within mind. The
greater an "intensity" of duration an organism possesses,
the greater will be its command over the material world -
its power to solidify matter into sensible qualities:
13. Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory. tr. N.M. Paul and
W.S. Palmer (New York: Zone, 1991), 210, emphasis added.
277
The greater or lesser tension of [beings'] duration, which

expresses, at bottom, their greater or lesser intensity of
life, thus determines both the degree of the concentrating
power of their perception and the measure of their liberty.
The independence of their action upon surrounding matter
becomes more and more assured in the degree that they free
themselves from the particular rhythm which governs the
flow of this matter. So that sensible qualities, as they
are found in our memory-shot perception, are, in fact, the
successive moments obtained by a solidification of the
real. (210-11)
In a recent article (appropriately entitled "Matter
and Time"), Jean-Francois Lyotard invokes Bergson's
conception of rhythm and the mutual interpenetration of
matter and mind in order to discuss the impact of the "new"
technologies. For Lyotard, new technologies provide new
means for extending our command over matter, since they
function as "transformers" of rhythms that exceed the grasp
of the human nervous system:
Even the transformer that our central nervous system is ...

can only transcribe and inscribe according to its own
rhythm the excitations which come to it from the milieu in
which it lives. If we have at our disposal interfaces
capable of memorizing, in a fashion accessible to us,
vibrations naturally beyond our ken, i.e., that determine
us as no more than "material points" (as is the case with
many forms of radiation), then we are extending our power
of differentiation and our memories, we are delaying
reactions which are as yet not under control, we are
increasing our material liberty.14
The "complex of transformers" comprising "techno-science"
furnishes a means of extending the range of the rhythms of
external duration that we can take in as "sensible
qualities." By delaying and decelerating those vibrations
"that determine us as no more than 'material points'" -
14. Jean-Francois Lyotard, "Matter and Time," in The

Inhuman: Reflections on Time (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP,
1991), 43.
278
that permit nothing but automatic response - techno-science
permits us to solidify more of the real into qualities. In
this way, it increases the intensity of consciousness and
thus achieves some degree of liberation from determinism.
With respect to Freud's analysis of quality, then,
Lyotard's proposal amounts to treating technology as an
exteriorization and extension of consciousness. Here too,
we should note, Lyotard's proposal coincides with the
spirit of Bergsonism: for what is at stake in it is the
possibility of an increase in human perfectibility.
A second thread in Lyotard, however, cautions against
such an optimism, and, I suggest, ultimately compromises
the force of the Lyotardian-Bergsonian conception of
technological evolution. We must beware, says Lyotard, of
reducing the drive behind the technological
"complexification" of matter to a form of desire modelled
on human "life.” Such a derivation would remain "far too
derivative of human experience, too anthropomorphic." (45)
It would misrecognize the profound destabilization of
"human narcissism" entailed in the complexification of
matter: the fact that matter merely makes use of us "to
perform its anamnesis." (46) We are not the "origin or
result, but ... a transformer ensuring, through techno
science, arts, economic development, cultures and the new
memorization they involve, a supplement of complexity in
the universe." (45) We must therefore learn that we do not
have the "monopoly of mind," i.e., of complexification, and
279
that matter complexifies itself "without humans necessarily
getting any [of the] benefit..." (45)
If Lyotard is right here, and my above analyses
suggest that he is,15 it becomes difficult to understand
why he preserves the privilege of cognition in approaching
the problem of technology. By conceiving of technologies
as "material extensions of our capacity to memorize,"
Lyotard must ultimately commit himself to human cognition:
if technologies can solidify "vibrations naturally beyond
our ken," such a memorization-function becomes useful to us
only on the supposition that it can (as he himself says) be
made "accessible" to us. In other words, the Bergsonian
operation of "solidification" can only be relative to a
human actor; nothing other than human understanding,
therefore, can serve as the ultimate arbiter determining
the bounds of experience. It is for this reason that
Lyotard views technologies as a supplementary cortex, an
externalization of the contact between the psyche (thought)
and the external world (matter):
These [new] technologies show in their own way that there

is no break between matter and mind, at least in its
reactive functions, which we call performance-functions.
They have a cortex, or a cortex-element, which has the
property of being collective, precisely because it is
physical and not biological. (43)
If technologies expand the range of perception by
introducing a collective cortex, they ultimately do nothing
to alter the prerogative of human cognition. In order to
15. See Introduction and Chapter 1, above.
280
advance our disposition over matter, what is memorized
technologically must always be "redeemed" through an act of
thinking which itself remains bound to the individual
psyche: to appear as the "content of consciousness" (or as
"sensible quality"), it must ultimately be aligned with
internal duration. It must, that is, be harmonizable with
the latter's range of rhythm.
Lyotard's radicalization of Bergson thus finds itself
split between two incompatible commitments. On the one
hand, it operates an ontological expansion of the domain of
human experience that makes an important contribution to
contemporary technology studies: it fundamentally disrupts
the homology between cognition and technology, the homology
that governs (and compromises) the psyche-apparatus thesis.
On the other hand, it retains the traditional philosophical
privilege of cognition, since technological memorization
can only extend our grasp of matter by extending our
consciousness of it. Because of this residual humanism, it
cannot come through on its promised expansion of human
experience in the technological era.
What I am suggesting, therefore, is that we abandon
the privilege of human thought (of the psyche as memory) in
our consideration of the impact of technology on human
experience. As long as cognition (or consciousness)
retains its privilege (as the operator of perception), the
"complexification" of matter introduced by technology can
only be experienced through the "reactive-function"; on
this line of thought, technology is viewed as a stimulus
that can be redeemed only by being assimilated (as Freud
says of external qualities). No provision is made for
material complexification that simply cannot be brought
into line with internal duration, that cannot achieve
consciousness. In this respect, Lyotard's commitment to
cognition ultimately coincides with a fundamental bias of
Freud's system: the privilege accorded to reception.
Summarizing his account of the origin of the "differences
in period" that comprise qualities, Freud concludes:
Everything points to the sense-organs, whose qualities must

be represented by different periods of neuronic motion.
The sense-organs operate not only as screens against
quantity (Q) - like every nerve-ending apparatus - but as
sieves; for they only let through stimuli from certain
processes that have a particular period. They probably
transfer these differences to PHI by communicating to the
neuronic motion periods with differences that are in some
way analogous [to those of the processes in the external
world]..-16
As long as technology - and the external world as such -
remains accessible to human experience only through the
category of reception, the structural limitations of human
perception will determine what can be experienced and thus
will always continue to restrict experiential
possibilities. This remains the case for Lyotard no less
than for Freud himself.
There is, however, one place in Freud's corpus where
this priority of reception is, at least momentarily,
suspended. Right in the midst of his onto-genetic account
16. Freud, Project, 372, emphasis added.
282
of the psyche in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Freud
alludes to the importance of "protection against stimuli,"
which is, he says, "an almost more important function ...
than reception of stimuli." Such protection is insured by
the development of a dead cortical layer of the brain:
...we have more to say of the living vesicle with its

receptive cortical layer. This little fragment of living
substance is suspended in the middle of an external world
charged with the most powerful energies; and it would be
killed by the stimulation emanating from these if it were
not provided with a protective shield against stimuli. It
acquires the shield in this way: its outermost surface
ceases to have the structure proper to living matter,
becomes to some degree inorganic and thenceforward
functions as a special envelope or membrane resistant to
stimuli. In consequence, the energies of the external
world are able to pass into the next underlying layers,
which have remained living, with only a fragment of their
original intensity; and these layers can devote themselves,
behind the protective shield, to the reception of the
amounts of stimulus which have been allowed through it. By
its death, the outer layer has saved all the deeper ones
from a similar fate.... (21)
This dead cortical layer provides another level of
protection beyond the sampling of stimuli leading to
consciousness. It functions by deflecting exogenous
stimuli away from the organism - by simply refusing
entrance to such stimuli.
This dead cortical layer opens up a potential
expansion of experience within the Freudian model. It
furnishes, alongside conscious sampling and unconscious
trauma, a third mode in which the organism can be said to
"experience" technology - even if such experience takes us
out of the space governed by cognition (or memory). It
thus has the potential to realize what Freud (in his
"nouocentric" stance) always finds himself compelled to
abandon - the function of the consciousness-memory
exclusivity outside of the metapsychological or writing
model (beyond the distinction of PHI and PSI systems). It
can liberate the system-Wahrnehmung (taking "perception" in
its widest sense) from its subordination to properly
psychic functioning (the interworking of PHI and PSI). By
thus demonstrating the necessity for a "cortex-level" of
experience, one that would remain separate in a radical way
from the cognitive and memorial functions of the psyche,
Freud's stress on protection from stimuli would seem able
to come through on an injunction voiced in 1895 by his
mentor, Breuer: "[the] perceptual apparatus, including the
sensory spheres of the cortex, must be distinct from the
organ which stores up and reproduces sense impressions in
the form of memory-images..."17 In its most radical sense,
what this means is that "perception" (as a blanket term for
external experience) must be detached from consciousness.
Moreover, a greater exclusivity - between non-cognitive and
psychic modes of experience - must replace the now merely
local (inter-psychic) divide between consciousness and
memory-trace.
17. The citation is from Studies on Hysteria (1895). It is

cited in The Origins of Psychoanalysis. 363, note. Freud
repeatedly marks his debt to Breuer whenever he brings up
the exclusivity of consciousness and memory-trace.
CHAPTER 6
THE REDEMPTION OF SHOCK EXPERIENCE: BENJAMIN, ERLEBNIS AND

THE IMPACT OF TECHNOLOGY
Now that we have traced the genesis of the memory-
model of technology up to its point of dissolution in
Freud, we can turn our full attention to the articulation
of an alternate and more robust account of technology's
impact on human experience. This task will take root in
Freud's suggestive introduction of the "dead cortical
layer" and the emphasis he places on the protection against
exogenous stimuli. We shall attempt to exploit the
potential of Freud's insight beyond its role within the
metapsychological model of the psyche. Once it is
liberated from its purely psychic role, the protective
function of the dead cortical layer attains the status of a
mode of experience in its own right. In the process of
shielding the psyche from traumatic excitations, the cortex
nevertheless experiences the constant bombardment of
external stimuli, only in a manner that leads neither to a
conscious impression nor to a memory-trace. The toll of
such bombardment on the organism is like the impact of
purely repetitive machine labor: it leaves no mark of
difference but is assimilated directly, so to speak, into
the body. The protective function of the cortical layer
thus inaugurates a mode of experience that is somatic or
physical rather than psychic.
Focusing on the work of the German writer Walter

284
285
Benjamin, I shall argue that this mode of experience is
intrinsically correlated with the evolution of modern
technology: as the exchange of energies in the external
world is accelerated, the protection against stimuli
attains an ever more prominent status. Since it thereby
comes to comprise an increasingly larger share of
experience, experience itself becomes less discursive or
memorial - that is, less "psychic." In this way, the
increased role of protection marks a fundamental change in
the "structure of experience" itself.
Benjamin acknowledges this when he speaks of a
narrowing of the domain of experience [Erfahrung']. Faced
with the constant threats presented by a technologized
lifeworld, modern man is compelled to utilize his
protective cortex more and more; he defends himself against
the experience of shock by closing off his psyche to
stimuli. As a result, a shift in the economy of experience
takes place: while memorial experience [Erfahrung]
diminishes, bringing about the dissolution of the "aura,"
lived experience [Erlebnis] comes to the fore.1 In short:
the modern period witnesses the domination of a mode of
experience that is immediately physical and not psychically
mediated; the majority of lived experiences are non
reflexive, taking place, as it were, automatically -
independently of and prior to mediation in thought.
One of Benjamin's constant obsessions, and one that I
1. For a discussion of these terms see my Introduction

above.
shall follow here, is his attempt to "redeem" this domain
of experience from the total oblivion that always threatens
it. This obsession, as we shall see, leads to an explicit
encounter with the memory-model of Freud; in his attempt to
develop a category of experience adequate to life in the
technological era, Benjamin finds himself compelled to
sever the connection of experience and psychic (or
thinking) memory - the connection that implicitly
structures (and compromises) all approaches of the Freudian
type. "Shock-experience" (the name Benjamin gives to this
domain of non-psychic experience) does not lend itself to
direct (psychic) representation, and thus can only
"redeemed" allegorically. For Benjamin, Baudelaire's
poetic practice inaugurates a mode of allegorical
redemption that only becomes representative of human
experience later, once technical reproducibility has come
to structure social life in all its facets. By correlating
Benjamin's analysis of Baudelaire with his diagnosis of
modern technology, I shall argue that a certain non
memorial encounter - what I shall call the technological
uncanny - provides a means of experiencing technology
beyond the machine-psyche reduction.
I. Voluntary and Involuntary Memory
As many readers have observed, Benjamin develops his
most explicit and convincing account of modern experience
in his studies of Baudelaire (and in the unfinished
287
Passagen-Werk) I n the following, I shall concentrate on
one of these studies, "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire," where
Benjamin anchors the experiential change characteristic of
the technological era in the decline of interiorizing (or

"involuntary") memory.
In "On Some Motifs," Benjamin investigates this
decline by analyzing the contemporary obsolescence of lyric
poetry: with few exceptions (the most notable being
Baudelaire's "Les Fleurs du mal") the lyric is no longer
"in rapport" with the experience of its readers.3 Benjamin
speculates that this obsolescence of the lyric is the
symptom of a change in the structure of their experience.
The decline of the lyric thus reflects the larger shift in
experience observed above: with the decline of reflective
experience in the face of an ever more "complexified"
external world, lyric poetry finds itself marginalized as
an expression of human experience.
In order to analyze this change - a task that will
ultimately lead him to reject the primacy of living or
psychic memory - Benjamin initially turns to philosophy, or
what he calls "philosophy of life." This invocation of
philosophy, he is quick to point out, immediately
2. See for example, Terry Eagleton, Walter Beniamin:

Towards a Revolutionary Criticism (London: Verso, 1981) ;
Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing (Cambridge, MA:
MIT, 1991).
3. Walter Benjamin, "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire," in

Illuminations. tr. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books,
1969), 156.
introduces a paradox, since its aim seems incompatible with
an analysis of actual conditions of life: rather than
originating from man's life in society, philosophy has
attempted "to lay hold of the 'true' experience as opposed
to the kind that manifests itself in the standardized,
denatured life of the civilized masses." (156)
Nevertheless, "towering above this literature" is Bergson's
"early monumental work," Matter and Memory. which - despite
its purity and abstractness - does succeed in making a
positive contribution to the analysis of contemporary
experience: in addition to distinguishing itself from run-
of-the-mill Lebensphilosophie by "retain[ing] links with
empirical research," it promises to restore solidarity
between individual experience and collective life.
Experience, on Bergson's model, is "less the product of
facts firmly anchored in memory than of a convergence in
memory of accumulated and frequently unconscious data."
(157) Divested of its private character, memory is
transformed into a site where diverse fragments of external
experience come together; in this sense, it brings the
individual into immediate or "material" contact with the
external world through both actual lived experience and
collective memory, beyond or before any private memorial
synthesis.
While Bergson's work thus posits a continuum of mind
and matter which could form the basis for a forceful
dialectical conception of experience, it is nevertheless
289
hampered by the fact that Bergson "rejects any historical
determination of memory." His theory must therefore be
historicized - it must be put into practice. Such a task,
Benjamin contends, falls to the poet:
...it was indeed a poet who put Bergson's theory of

experience to the test. Proust's work A la Recherche du
temps perdu may be regarded as an attempt to produce
experience synthetically, as Bergson imagines it, under
today's conditions, for there is less and less hope that it
will come into being naturally. (157)
In the process of putting Bergson's philosophy to the test,
Proust carries out an "immanent critique" of Bergson: he
rejects the optimistic voluntarism implicit in Bergson's
conception of action. In the "inhospitable, blinding age
of big-scale industrialism," the actualization or
solidification of matter from out of the continuous flow of
things can no longer meaningfully be ascribed to the
perogative of human agents; instead, it appears to devolve
more and more to sheer chance:
Proust ... does not evade the question [of the contemporary
conditions for experience]... He even introduces a new
factor, one that involves an immanent critique of Bergson.
Bergson emphasized the antagonism between the vita activa
and the specific vita contemplativa which arises from
memory. But he leads us to believe that turning to the
contemplative actualization of the stream of life is a
matter of free choice. From the start Proust indicates his
divergent view terminologically. To him, the memoire pure
of Bergson's theory becomes a memoire involuntaire. (157-
58, emphasis added)
By recasting Bergson's voluntarist memory as something that
can only be triggered by chance (as the taste of the
madeleine triggers Marcel's memory of Combray in Proust's
novel), Proust confronts what Bergson could not - the
change in the lifeworld ensuing with large-scale
industrialism. In a world where differences have been
dissolved into a general equivalence - what Benjamin,
invoking Nietzsche, calls the "eternal return of the same"
- man no longer possesses the luxury of representing his
own experience on his own terms. The faculty of
interiorizing memory [Erinnerungr] has lost its privilege.
It now stands at the mercy of chance, which means that
man's access to his past is no longer a purely interpsychic
affair; the past, Proust says, is "somewhere beyond the
reach of the intellect, and unmistakably present in some
material object."4 To explain the alienation thus
produced, Proust documents a shift in the economy of memory
that has taken place with industrialization: as Bergson's

s'
memoire pure has become involuntary, and thus less
prominent as a means of producing experience, what Proust
calls "voluntary memory" comes to the fore. Voluntary
memory differs from memoire pure (involuntary memory) in
two ways: first, it is in the service of the intellect; and
second, it gives information about the past, but without
retaining any trace of the past. While involuntary memory
involves the recollection of experience that has been
safely preserved, voluntary memory links us with the past
in a way that does not depend on the faculty of
interiorizing thought and that therefore cannot lead to
"experience [Erfahrung] in the strict sense of the word."
With this distinction, we return to the terrain of de
4. Proust, Combrav. cited in Benjamin, 158.
Man's reading of memory in Hegel. The two forms of memory
discussed by Benjamin coincide with those discussed by de
Man. Involuntary memory, or Erinnerung, must be aligned
with the symbolic, since the trace of the past which it
preserves is not arbitrary [unwillkuerlich] but "natural."
Like the symbol, it bears some intrinsic, substantial
relation to its object. Voluntary memory, or Gedaechtnis,
on the other hand, has only a fleeting and arbitrary
[willkuerlich] connection with the past, and thus falls on
the side of the sign. There is, however, an important
difference between the two divisions of memory. While
Benjamin shares with de Man the conviction that these two
forms of memory must be disjoined, his rationale is not
formalistic but historical: whereas de Man focuses
exclusively on the logical incompatibility of Erinnerung
and Gedaechtnis, Benjamin attends first and foremost to the
material conditions of lived experience. It is not the
disjunction in itself that is significant for Benjamin, but
rather the specific configuration that this disjunction
assumes in the technological age. If voluntary memory
[Gedaechtnis] eclipses involuntary memory [Erinnerung]
today, what it betokens is a fundamental change in man's
relation to the world.
By historicizing memory in this way, Benjamin is able
to liberate de Man's disjunction from its textual
boundaries in a manner antithetical to Derrida's proposed
generalization. Rather than introducing a supplementary
"juncture" that re-establishes a (purely subjective)
relation between thinking memory and its technological
exteriorization, Benjamin attempts to analyze the direct
experiential significance of the shift in the economy of
memory. In this way, Benjamin reveals the Bergsonian
foundation of his conception of memory: he treats voluntary
and involuntary memory as two modes in which internal
duration is aligned with external duration. The
disjunction, therefore, does not serve to demarcate the
discrete aspects of a single faculty of thinking that opens
a univocal horizon of experience (as it does for Derrida);
on the contrary, it marks the divide between two
antithetical types of experience: between a mode of
experience dominated by an active, thinking subject (a mode
that includes Derrida's grammato-phenomenological
experience) and a mode dominated by the structure of the
lifeworld. The contemporary predominance of voluntary
memory thus produces an alienation-effect, for it finds its
standard directly in the rhythm of external duration, in
the rhythm of the commodity world itself. If the rhythm of
human duration - of interiorizing memory - thereby finds
itself marginalized, contemporary man's task cannot be
simply to lament such a change, nor to find means to resist
its force; rather, as Benjamin insists, he must reinterpret
the meaning of experience so as to bring it into line with
the material object world. He must, in short, reinvent
experience on the basis of the contemporary material
293
domain.
It is for this reason that Benjamin finds himself
compelled to radicalize the account of voluntary memory
beyond the scope envisioned by either Proust or Bergson.
Despite the important contributions made by both, neither
figure explores the consequences of the shift in the
economy of memory underscored by Benjamin. For Bergson, as
Proust's "immanent criticism" witnesses, the actualization
of the continuous flow remains the absolute perogative of a
free and active human agent; what this means is that the
predominance of voluntary memory can always be overturned
through the human effort of extending the power of memoire
pure. All change in the structure of experience remains
ultimately within the control of human agents, or in other
words, subject to the priority of memory over matter that,
for Bergson, distinguishes man from all other beings. It
is precisely this aspect of Bergson's theory that Proust
criticizes; unlike Bergson, then, Proust does admit the
historico-materialist foundation underlying the ascendence
of voluntary memory. At the level of his own response to
this ascendence, however, Proust shows his essential
conservatism: rather than exploring the consequences of the
change he witnesses, he prefers to view the latter simply
as a threat to experience as such. It is for this reason
that he dedicates himself so heartily to the task of
preserving the mode of experience founded on interiorizing
memory. Proust, observes Benjamin, undertook "to restore
294
the figure of the storyteller to the present generation" -
an effort which, "from the outset ... involved him in the
primary task of resurrecting his own childhood." (159)
Proust's monumental effort thus parallels that of
Derrida in his reading of de Man. Like Derrida, Proust
attempts to combine a commitment to the primacy of thought
with an openness to the changing material conditions of
experience. In both cases, moreover, the disjunction
between an interiorizing memory and a material memory is
collapsed to the advantage of the former. What this means
is that Proust's restoration of interiorizing memory
operates a reduction of voluntary memory that parallels
Derrida's reduction of technology to a mere means of
exteriorizing memory. Benjamin addresses this reductive
aspect of Proust's enterprise by attending to the
collective dimension of Proustian memory. Since Bergson's
memoire pure has become "involuntary" in Proust, something
that can only be triggered by some external object, the
manner in which Proust preserves interiorizing memory
brings it into relation with the collective cultural
tradition. As a result, voluntary memory [Gedaechtnis] is,
as it were, incorporated into involuntary memory
[Erinnerung]. It is annexed by interiorizing memory to
serve as its triggering mechanism. The result, concludes
Benjamin, is a waning of the disjunction between the two
forms of memory:
[Memoire involuntaire] bears the marks of the situation

which gave rise to it; it is part of the inventory of the
295
individual who is isolated in many ways. Where there is

experience [Erfahrung] in the strict sense of the word,
certain contents of the individual past combine with
material of the collective past. The rituals with their
ceremonies, their festivals ... kept producing the
amalgamation of these two elements of memory [individual
and collective, MH] over and over again. They triggered
recollection at certain times [the function of Erinnerung,
MH] and remained handles of memory for a lifetime [the
"triggering" function of Gedaechtnis, M H ] . In this way,
voluntary and involuntary recollection [Eingedanken] lose
their mutual exclusiveness. (159-160)
Though he does not say so in explicit terms (perhaps on
account of his great admiration for Proust and for the role
of the storyteller), it is precisely this Proustian
conflation of voluntary and involuntary memory that
Benjamin finds himself compelled to oppose. Not only is
the decline of interiorizing memory and the correlative
ascendence of voluntary memory an historical reality that
cannot, in good faith, be avoided, but the very possibility
for man to appropriate his material existence hangs upon
his ability to reinvent experience in accord with those
conditions underlying the contemporary decline of
interiorizing memory. Man can only overcome the ensuing
loss of experience in its traditional sense by reinventing
experience on the basis of voluntary memory.
II. Benjamin's Freud
As I have already suggested, it is by invoking Freud's
discussion of memory in Beyond the Pleasure Principle that
Benjamin radicalizes the disjunction between Erinnerung and
Gedaechtnis. In reconstructing Benjamin's highly enigmatic
treatment of Freud, I shall thus attempt to justify the
296
following hypothesis: what Benjamin discovers in Freud's
text is the theoretical support for a dissociation of
voluntary memory from the domain of the psyche. In this
respect, I shall read Benjamin as accomplishing what
remained a neglected possibility in Freud: the development
of a physical or somatic mode of experience based primarily
or exclusively on the "protective function" of the dead
cortical layer.
Benjamin justifies his turn to Freud by citing the
necessity for a "more substantial definition of what
appears in Proust's memoire de 1 'intelligence" or voluntary
memory. (160) Initially, Benjamin begins to develop such a
definition on the basis of the familiar Freudian opposition
of consciousness and memory; his aim however, as he soon
specifies, is not simply to confirm the Freudian
opposition, but rather to investigate its "fruitfulness ...
in situations far removed from those which Freud had in
mind when he wrote." (160) Thus Benjamin turns to the work
of Freud's pupil, Theodor Reik, whose "writings on ...
memory are in line with Proust's distinction between
involuntary and voluntary recollection." Reik
distinguishes two faculties of memory - one that preserves
stimuli and one that seeks to expel them: "The function of
memory [Gedaechtnis] ... is the protection of impressions;
remembrance [Erinnerung] aims at their disintegration.
Memory is essentially conservative, remembrance is
297
destructive."5 Viewed in relation to Freud's "fundamental
thought" - that "consciousness comes into being in place of
the memory-trace" - Reik's distinction permits Benjamin to
align Freudian and Proustian terminology. Thus Benjamin
explicitly establishes a correlation between the Freudian
unconscious and Proust's involuntary memory: "only what has
not been experienced explicitly and consciously, what has
not happened to the subject as experience, can become a
component of the memoire involuntaire." And, he implies
that consciousness corresponds to voluntary memory, for
neither, we should recall, conserves any trace of the
experience it supports.
When Benjamin turns his attention to the protective
function of the cortical layer, however, he aligns
voluntary memory with something that exceeds the analogy
with Freudian consciousness. This move will call for
certain redemptive corrections of his exegesis of Freud.
The cortical layer, as we know from our earlier reading of
Freud, cannot be assimilated entirely to consciousness; it
performs an operation - deflecting stimuli - that serves no
psychic (i.e., memorial) function. Benjamin is thus
mistaken when he argues that consciousness has the
"important function" of protecting against stimuli; he
5. Theodor Reik, Per ueberraschte Psvchologe. Ueber Erraten

und Verstehen unbewusster Vorgaenge, cited in Benjamin,
160, translation modified. Note that Reik inverts the
terminology employed above. He uses Gedaechtnis to name
interiorizing memory (involuntary memory) and Erinnerung to
name external memory (voluntary memory).
298
fails here to distinguish between the receptive function of
the cortex, which does involve the operation of
consciousness, and the protective function, which does not.
If "conscious registration of shocks" does indeed furnish a
means of warding off their potential traumatic effect, as
Benjamin concludes, it is secondary in importance to the
protective function of the dead cortical layer, which
simply closes the organism off to the reception (conscious
or otherwise) of stimuli.
Given Benjamin's exegetical error, it is quite
striking to see him advance, as the very basis for his
theory of poetic experience [dichterische Erfahrung], an
argument that appears to assume the disjunction between the
protective function on the one hand and conscious
registration/unconscious dreamwork on the other:
The acceptance of shocks is facilitated by training in

coping with stimuli, and, if need be, dreams as well as
recollection [die Erinnerung] may be enlisted. As a rule,
however - so Freud assumes - this training devolves upon
the wakeful consciousness, located in a part of the cortex
which is "so blown out by the effect of the stimulus" that
it offers the most favorable situation for the reception of
stimuli. That the shock is thus cushioned [abgefangen],
parried by consciousness [vom Bewusstsein parriert], would
lend the incident that occasions it the character of having
been lived in the fullest sense [den Charakter des
Erlebnisses im praegnanten Sinn]. If it were incorporated
directly in the registry of conscious memory [unmittelbar
der Registratur der bewussten Erinnerung ihn
einverleibend], it would sterilize this incident for poetic
experience. (162)
If we are to make sense of this highly enigmatic citation,
we must divide Bewusstsein [consciousness] into two
separate functions: that of registering shocks within the
psyche and that of parrying them, of turning them away from
299
the psyche. The former involves what Benjamin, perhaps
following Reik, calls "conscious memory": this function
coincides with consciousness proper, consciousness as a
mode of psychic activity. The latter, on the other hand,
only involves consciousness peripherally (if at all), since
it is not quite right to invoke consciousness (as a psychic
system) in order to explain the protective function of the
dead cortical layer.
The important point is that, behind the terminological
confusion, Benjamin's distinction coincides exactly with
Freud's. In both cases, a third agency of experience
surfaces alongside conscious registration and unconscious
memory. It is this third agency alone that permits us to
experience the impact of technology (and of the external
world) directly, beyond and before its psychic mediation.
For, with respect to external experience, conscious
registration (which Benjamin calls, quite fittingly,
"conscious memory" [bewussten Erinnerung]) functions
exactly like unconscious memory and traumatic dreamwork:
its aim is to neutralize or "sterilize" stimuli. Benjamin
thus associates consciousness and the unconscious as two
aspects of a single psychic system; both are modes of
"recollection" [Erinnerung] whose function, following the
French poet Paul Valery, is to give us "the time for
organizing the reception of stimuli which we initially
lacked."0 Both conscious registration and unconscious
6. Paul Valery, Analecta, cited in Benjamin 161-62.
300
memorization function by means of a certain reduction of
what Valery calls "the impressions and sense perceptions of
man" which "actually belong in the category of surprises";
while the former is essentially destructive and the latter
essentially conservative, both aim to make up for "an
insufficiency in man" - what, in Bergsonian terms, we might
gloss as his lack of synchronicity with the rhythm of
external duration. In the end, therefore, the two Freudian
agencies that enable psychic activity [Erinnerung'] and the
constitution of experience in the strict sense [Erfahrung]
actually bring about a rarefication of lived experience:
they neutralize external stimuli or shocks - immediate
lived experience [Erlebnis] - by accommodating it in the
space of memory [Erinnerung].
It is only in the era of large-scale industrialism
that this rarefication attains enough prominence to inspire
criticism. In earlier historical periods, interiorizing
memory and reflective experience [Erfahrung] were for the
most part adequate to the task of expressing material
living conditions. Their repression of Erlebnis, that is
to say, went essentially unnoticed. Only with the
introduction of the factory mode of production and
industrial machinery is reflective experience eclipsed as a
means of expressing lived experience. With the
degeneration of human experience to the purely repetitive
labor characteristic of the factory system, man's daily
lived experience no longer yields difference and thus
301
remains unassimilable by memory and thought. "The jolt in
the movement of a machine, Benjamin argues,
is like the so-called coup in a game of chance. The

manipulation of the worker at the machine has no connection
with the preceding operation for the very reason that it is
its exact repetition. Since each operation at the machine
is just as screened off from the preceding operation as a
coup in a game of chance is from the one that preceded it,
the drudgery of the laborer is, in its own way, a
counterpart to the drudgery of the gambler. The work of
both is equally devoid of substance. (177)
Benjamin is unequivocal in his insistence that such
experience must form the lowest common denominator for any
theory of modern experience. The latter must find a way of
expressing the actual conditions of lived experience in a
way that does not rely on the registration performed by a
psychic apparatus.
It is an essential aspect of Benjamin's argument,
therefore, that the shift in experience characteristic of
the technological era - the vast increase in the prominence
of shock-experience [Chockerlebnis] - itself calls for the
constitution or invention of a new mode of experience.
With this in mind, it is no accident that the spokesman for
Benjamin's theory of experience is Charles Baudelaire, a
poet whose mission it was to live through, to the fullest
extent and without recourse to psychic accommodation, his
own shock-experience. Despite its name, Benjamin's theory
of poetic experience [dichterische Erfahrung] could not be
more opposed to traditional reflective experience
[Erfahrung in the strict sense]; it rejects nothing less
than the latter's principle tenet - the primacy of psychic
3 02
mediation.
III. A Lyric Poet in the Age of High Capitalism
Baudelaire's "Les Fleurs du mal" furnishes an example
of lyric poetry which, recalling the terms of Benjamin's
above discussed introduction of the topic of experience, is
"in rapport" with the experience of modern readers. It
comprises a body of lyric poetry that has "as its basis an
experience [Erfahrung] for which shock experience
[Chockerlebnis] has become the norm." (162) This rationale
already suggests the symbolic status of Baudelaire: with
his poetic activity (which, as we shall see, cannot be
restricted to the mere writing of poems), Baudelaire finds
a means of expressing the conditions of modern life. Where
psychology can only recur to an outmoded form of (memorial)
experience, Baudelaire's poetry is able to redeem modern
experience: to live through [er-leben] shocks and transpose
them into a specifically modern form of experience
[Erfahrung].
It is in this sense that we must understand Valery's
claim (cited by Benjamin) that becoming a great, yet
distinctly modern poet was Baudelaire's "reason of state."
Baudelaire took it upon himself to fill in the experiential
gaps that characterize high capitalism; it is this task, as
Benjamin explains, that gives his poetry the role of
founding a new historical mode of experience:
There is something odd about speaking of a reason of state

in the case of a poet; there is something remarkable about
303
it: the emancipation from experiences [die Emanzipation von

Erlebnissen]. Baudelaire's poetic output is assigned a
mission. Blank spaces floated in front of him [£s haJben
ihm Leerstellen vorgeschwebt], in which he inserted his
poems [in die er seine Gedichte eingesetzt hat]. His work
cannot merely be characterized as historical, like anyone
else's, but it intended to be so and understood itself as
such. (162, translation modified)
Despite appearances, Benjamin does not mean here to suggest
that Baudelaire discounts the domain of Erlebnis, as does
the psychological model of experience. Rather, by claiming
that Baudelaire emancipates himself from lived experiences,
Benjamin implies that Baudelaire understands his lived
experience in a manner which is foreclosed to the man in
the street. Baudelaire's "emancipation" gives him the
ability, not to evade the impact of Erlebnis, but rather to
appropriate it as an expressive means. In other words,
Baudelaire is able to grasp the principle underlying shock-
experience [Chockerlejbnis] - the automation of human
activity - which Benjamin illustrates by citing Poe's
account of the urban crowd:
Poe's pedestrians act as if they had adapted themselves to

machines and could express themselves only automatically.
Their behavior is a reaction to shocks. ... The shock
experience which the passer-by has in the crowd corresponds
to what the worker "experiences" at his machine [das
"Erlebnis" des Arbeiters an der Maschinerie]. (176)
Lacking the ability to pause and reflect on his experience,
the man of the crowd, like the machine worker, is forced to
develop a means of defense - automation of response - whose
function is not to capture and preserve lived events, but
rather to ward off their impact. If Baudelaire has an
advantage over these others, it is only because he has
304
discovered a way to redeem the impact of shocks that he has
warded off. Unlike the factory worker and the urban
pedestrian, who adapt themselves passively to the
industrial rhythm of life, Baudelaire attempts to
assimilate the "power" of that rhythm, to harness it as his
active principle. His work is historical in the most
profound sense, then, because his own lived experience
instills in him a "reason of state" - the mission of giving
meaning to shock-experience, of raising it to the level of
Erfahrung.
What differentiates Baudelaire from the man in the
street, therefore, is not anything essential (as is the
"gift" possessed by Heidegger's Hoelderlin), but rather his
higher degree of tolerance for shock. Baudelaire is able
to live through what the rest of us must either ignore
entirely or neutralize in consciousness, i.e., what remains
unremarked in our daily, automated experience. Benjamin
explains this capacity of Baudelaire in terms of a
"spiritual and physical" engagement: he is more able than
the rest of us to live the shocks of modern life without
recourse to psychological processing. It is only to the
extent that he parries the shocks, rather than registering
them in consciousness or letting them occasion a psychic
defense against trauma, that he preserves them for poetic
experience. He thus makes active use of his protective
faculty (the dead cortical layer); by parrying stimuli, he
prevents himself from transforming his lived experience
305
into reflection [Erfahrung]. In this, his activity affirms
the following economic principle which Benjamin distills
from Freud:
The greater the share of the shock factor in particular

impressions, the more constantly consciousness [or rather:
the dead cortical layer, MH] has to be alert as a
protection against stimuli [Reizschutz]; the more
efficiently it does so, the less do these impressions enter
experience [Erfahrung'], tending to remain in the sphere of
lived experience proper [literally, to fulfill the concept
of lived experiences, erfuellen sie den Begriff des
Erlebnisses]. (163, translation modified)
Baudelaire, that is, makes maximum use of his protective
faculty; he deprives himself of the psychic means for
mastering exogenous stimuli, acquiring in the process an
enormous fund of Erlebnis - the raw material for his
poetry. Where the "normal" psychological subject
experiences fright only as a corrective for breakdowns in
the neutralization system, the poet elevates fright - or
rather, the experience that ordinarily would occasion
fright - into a mode of existence. In this way, he "short-
circuits" the entire mechanism by which the external world
is reduced to fit the bounds of the psyche. Baudelaire,
asserts Benjamin, has given a name to this mode of
existence - the duel:
[If reflective neutralization] does not take place, there

would be nothing but a sudden start, usually the sensation
of fright which, according to Freud, confirms the failure
of the shock defense. Baudelaire has portrayed this
condition in a harsh image. He speaks of a duel in which
the artist, just before being beaten, screams in fright.
This duel is the creative process itself. Thus Baudelaire
placed the shock experience [Chockerfahrung] at the very
center of his artistic work. (163)
The activity of creation substitutes in Baudelaire's case
306
for the passive experience of trauma normally associated
with shock-overload. With this substitution, a mode of
experience that is somatic or physical eclipses the
psychic. "Baudelaire," says Benjamin, "made it his
business to parry the shocks, no matter where they might
come from, with his spiritual and physical self." (163)
Through this physical engagement, Chockerlebnis is elevated
into experience in the proper sense: Chockerfahrung.
The irreducible corporeality of Baudelaire's poetic
production can be discerned most clearly, Benjamin
suggests, in his own self-portrait. The shock-experience
to which Baudelaire exposes himself takes a direct and
unmediated toll on his physiognomic expression:
Since he is himself exposed to fright, it is not unusual

for Baudelaire to occasion fright. Valles tells us about
his eccentric grimaces; on the basis of a portrait by
Nargeot, Pontmartin establishes Baudelaire's alarming
appearance; Claudel stresses the cutting quality he could
give to his speech; Gautier speaks of the italicizing
Baudelaire indulged in when reciting poetry; Nadar
describes his jerky gait. (163)
The causal connection linking Baudelaire's shock-experience
to his physiognomy is not one mediated by mental
reflection, but is rather, like the automatic reaction of
the pedestrian or machine-worker, a physiological response.
By refusing to gather his experience in reflection,
Baudelaire effectively offers himself as a sacrifice to
shock-experience: he becomes a direct graphic expression of
its otherwise unremarked physical or somatic impact. In
this sense, the description Baudelaire gives of Constantin
Guys in "Le paintre de la vie moderne" can be read as
depicting his own activity:
...he stands there, bent over his table, scrutinizing the

sheet of paper just as intently as he does the objects
around him by day; ... he stabs away with his pencil, his
pen, his brush; ... he spurts water from his glass to the
ceiling and tries his pen on his shirt; ... he pursues his
work swiftly and intensely, as though he were afraid that
his images might escape him; thus he is combative, even
when alone, and parries his own blows. (164)
The creative artist engages in a combat with himself - a
combat against his own natural, psychic defenses. It is
not a question for the poet of reflectively drawing forth
images from a mental storehouse; on the contrary, such
images must be won through a physical struggle, one which
Baudelaire has brought to life with the image of the fencer
(in "Le Soleil"). Underlying Baudelaire's self-depiction
as fencer, Benjamin has discerned a hidden connection
between shock-experience and poetic language: the creative
duel shares a common background with shock-experience.
Just as the poet depicts himself fencing through the crowd,
parrying its blows, so too does he depict his combat with
language: he struggles, says Benjamin, with "the phantom
crowd of the words, the fragments, the beginnings of lines
from which the poet, in the deserted streets, wrests the
poetic booty." (165) Words, poetic lines, images, etc. are
not simply mental entities, the psychic translation of
external excitations. They are themselves shot through
with experience [Erlebnis], so that the poet, to the extent
he hopes to wrest from them a "booty" (or elevate his
experience of them into Erfahrung), must confront them,
must engage them in a duel and parry their blows.
308
IV. Technology and Involuntary Memory
In the Bergsonian terminology employed above, we might
say that Baudelaire engages in a combat with the external
world that does not presuppose the ultimate triumph of pure
memory, that does not begin by imposing the rhythm of human
duration on the rhythm of things. He thus testifies to the
eclipse of involuntary memory, to the radical shift in the
economy of memory that underlies our technological
modernity. Baudelaire's supreme contribution, then, is to
lay down the groundwork for an account of experience that
would be appropriate to the modern world. His creative
struggle takes the crucial step toward such an account - he
sacrifices psychic duration to worldly duration:
...Baudelaire battled the crowd - with the impotent rage of

someone fighting the rain or the wind. This is the nature
of something lived through [Erlebnis] to which Baudelaire
has given the weight of an experience [Erfahrung]. He
indicated the price for which the sensation of the modern
age [die Sensation der Moderne] may be had: the
disintegration of the aura in the experience of shock. He
paid dearly for consenting to this disintegration - but it
is the law of his poetry... (193-94)
In consenting to the disintegration of the aura, Baudelaire
renounces the use of his own memory (in the sense of
memoire pure) as an agency for generating experience
(sensation). His spiritual and physical struggle against
the world of things must therefore - to the extent that it
is a means of embodying experience (of transforming
Erlebnis into Erfahrung) - comprise a function of what
Benjamin calls voluntary memory. Here, we can grasp the
309
pay-off of Benjamin's enigmatic reading of Freud: the
voluntary memory is not a memory in the proper,
psychological sense. Rather, it designates the faculty by
which we can parry shocks and thus live them through
physically and spiritually (but not psychically). We can
therefore conclude that Benjamin's voluntary memory
coincides with the protective function of the cortical
layer (rather than with the system-Cs. as Benjamin
mistakenly asserts); it does not aim to capture or
neutralize stimuli, to hold them at bay or defer their
impact, but instead to let them take their toll,
immediately and directly. Thus, voluntary memory does not
aim to preserve experience: as Benjamin says, it retains no
trace of its object.
It is important to point out, however, that, in
sacrificing his memory, Baudelaire merely anticipates a
change in the structure of experience which itself stems
from technology and which attains a mature form in the era
of mechanical reproduction. He anticipates a mode of
experience that attains a normative status with the
technical transformation of the lifeworld. For Benjamin
then, technology impacts human experience not, as Derrida
would have it, by externalizing thinking memory, but rather
by externalizing voluntary memory. It gives us more means
to parry shocks from our psychic system, and thus advances
the shift in the economy of memory. It is in this sense
that we must understand Benjamin's account of Baudelaire on
310
photography:
...Baudelaire tried to take a more conciliatory view.

Photography should be free to stake out a claim for
ephemeral things, those that have a right "to a place in
the archives of our memory," as long as it stops short of
the "region of the intangible, imaginative": that of art in
which only that is allotted a place "on which man has
bestowed the imprint of his soul." This is scarcely a
Solomonian judgement. The perpetual readiness of
volitional, discursive memory, encouraged by the technique
of mechanical reproduction, reduces the scope for the play
of the imagination. (186)
Technology, in other words, extends the scope of voluntary
memory. Rather than improving the means by which psychic
memory grasps the external world, it fundamentally inverts
the hierarchical relation between subject and world. For
Benjamin, it is technology itself (or, more precisely, the
form of mechanical reproduction) that determines the scope
of experience in the modern world. Technology embodies the
rhythm of Erlebnis.
Technology thus brings about a "crisis in artistic
reproduction which manifests itself ... as an integral part
of a crisis in perception itself." (187) It forces us to
adapt our mode of experience to the rhythm of the external
world - or in other words, to alienate ourselves from our
normal psychological means of processing external stimuli.
It thus forces us to experience what Baudelaire
experienced: by depriving us of the ability to reflect, it
makes us live through shocks directly. In this way,
technology calls for an increase in our ability to parry
stimuli; it leads to a basic re-training of our
experiential faculties. Benjamin traces this re-training
311
to the principle of mechanization according to which "one
abrupt movement ... triggers a process of many steps."
(174) This principle, he contends, has quite literally
changed the speed of life:
A touch of the [photographer's] finger now sufficed to fix

an event for an unlimited period of time. The camera gave
the moment a posthumous shock, as it were. Haptic
experiences of this kind were joined by optic ones, such as
are supplied by the advertising pages of a newspaper or the
traffic of a big city. Moving through this traffic
involves the individual in a series of shocks and
collisions. At dangerous intersections, nervous impulses
flow through him in rapid succession, like the energy from
a battery. (175)
The result is an adaptation on man's part, a
"deterritorialization" of his perceptual faculties into
technical forms of voluntary memory:
Thus technology has subjected the human sensorium to a

complex kind of training. There came a day when a new and
urgent need for stimuli was met by the film. In a film,
perception in the form of shocks was established as a
formal principle. That which determines the rhythm of
production on a conveyor belt is the basis of the rhythm of
reception in the film. (175)
The imposition of film as the "frame of perception"
produces in the ordinary man an effect identical to that
achieved by Baudelaire only with a struggle: it forces us
to renounce our interiorizing memory as a means of defense.
It is precisely this aspect of film that distinguishes it
from photography and makes it exemplary for Benjamin.
Film's great advance over photography is its destruction of
the "aura" - the "unique manifestation of a distance,
however near it may be."7 The filmic principle of montage
7. Benjamin, "A Short History of Photography, " Screen 13.1

(Spring 1972), 7.
312
furnishes a means of redeeming aesthetically the "sub-
psychic" or "sub-representational" domain of experience in
the machine age. Film makes the rhythm of "machined life"
- the rhythm of automation - into a principle of
perception; it thus redeems the experience of the machine
worker. Just as mechanical labor barrages the worker with
a series of purely repetitive shocks that cannot be
represented, so film produces a mental eclipse - a total
breakdown in the psyche:
Before the movie frame, the spectator cannot [abandon

himself to his associations.] No sooner has his eye
grasped a scene than it is already changed. ... In fact,
when a person views these constantly changing images, his
process of association is immediately disrupted. This
constitutes the shock effect [Chockwirkung] of the film.8
The tactile experience of film viewing literally overwhelms
the memory, exploding its normal synthetic or associational
function. By experiencing the disruption of memory
produced by film, the modern subject acquires an aesthetic
analogue of his everyday experience. Such a disruption
comprises nothing less than the dominant mode of experience
in the mechanical age.
V. The Technological Uncanny
With his valorization of cognitive breakdown, Benjamin
displaces the focus of his account of technology from the
activity of the mind - and thus from theory - to
aesthetics, or in other words (recalling the Greek
8. Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical

Reproduction," in Illuminations. 238.
provenance of the term) to immediate, sensory experience.
Benjamin7s shift from theory to aesthetics moves us beyond
the territory that has been traditionally demarcated as the
sublime and into the realm of what I shall call the
"technological uncanny." As the aesthetic category
correlative with industrial technology, the uncanny
witnesses the literal eclipse of the mind, without leaving
any room for the subsequent moment of recuperation that is
the hallmark of the sublime from Burke to Lyotard. It thus
introduces a negative aesthetics, one that, in the words of
Freud, concerns itself not with "what is beautiful,
attractive and sublime," or in other words, "with feelings
of a positive nature," but rather "with the opposite
feelings of unpleasantness.1,9 The technological uncanny
designates the painful and direct confrontation with the
external world, in the absence of the psychological
reduction that I have explored in Part II of this
dissertation. Benjamin describes it as a kind of shock.
For him, the technological uncanny involves a situation
where "the expectation roused by the look of the human eye
is not fulfilled."10 It is the shock of disillusionment
that ensues when man confronts himself in an object which
does not return his gaze, when man is forced to recognize
his dependance on a perceptual rhythm that is not auratic
but machinic.
9. Freud, "The Uncanny," 122-123.
10. Benjamin, "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire," 189.
314
As we shall see in Part III, what ultimately is at
stake in such a negative aesthetics of the technological
uncanny is nothing less than the vocation of aesthetics
itself, and specifically, its role in a modern
technological world. In the Romantic texts that we shall
explore, the technological uncanny figures as a means of
experiencing the technological object machinically, as it
were - independently of our personification of it. The
genealogy of the technological uncanny that I shall trace
thus stands opposed to what, following Benjamin, we might
call an auratic conception of technology - a conception
whose enabling principle is the reduction of technology to
a support for psychic experience or thought. Benjamin's
contribution cannot be stressed enough: he furnishes the
critical principle for a robust account of technology that
finds its historical genesis in the Romantic critique of
the machine metaphor.
PART III
THE TECHNOLOGICAL UNCANNY
315
CHAPTER 7
"NOT THUS, AFTER ALL, WOULD LIFE BE GIVEN": THE SCIENTIFIC

CONTEXT OF FRANKENSTEIN AND THE PARODY OF ROMANTIC POETICS
"... the connexion of

chemistry with physiology has
given rise to some visionary
and seductive theories; yet
even this circumstance has
been useful to the public
mind in exciting it by doubt,
and in leading it to new
investigations. A reproach,
to a certain degree just, has
been thrown upon those
doctrines known by the name
of chemical physiology; for
in the applications of them
speculative philosophers have
been guided rather by the
analogies of words than of
facts. Instead of slowly
endeavoring to lift up the
veil concealing the wonderful
phenomena of living nature;
full of ardent imaginations
they have vainly and
presumptuously attempted to
tear it asunder."
— Sir Humphry Davy1
The past two decades have witnessed the redemption of
Mary Shelley's gothic parody, Frankenstein, from its
ungenerous handling by proponents of the predominantly male
model of Romantic criticism that held sway from the 50's
through the 70's and early 80's.2 In a virtual explosion
1. Davy, Sir Humphry, A Discourse. Introductory to a Course

of Lectures on Chemistry (London: John Johnson, 1802), 9,
quoted in Anne K. Mellor, Mary She1lev: Her Life. Her
Fiction. Her Monster (New York: Routledge, 1989), 84.
2. This model can be divided into two stages: a "poetics of

phenomenology" and a "poetics of materiality." For
316
317
of critical activity beginning with the publication of
Ellen Moers' essay "Female Gothic" in 1974, feminists have
waged a war against the exclusive valorization of poetic
language that had been the benchmark of the male model.3
The central theme of this critical onslaught has been the
role and status of mothering - an issue which spreads
important texts representing the former stage, see: Harold

Bloom, The Visionary Company (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1971);
Bloom (ed.), Romanticism and Consciousness (New York:
Norton, 1970); Geoffrey Hartman, The Unmediated Vision (New
York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1966); Hartman,
Wordsworth's Poetry: 1787-1814 (New Haven: Yale UP, 1964);
Meyer Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp (New York: Norton,
1953); Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism (New York: Norton,
1973) . Important texts representing the "poetics of
materiality" include: Paul de Man, The Rhetoric of
Romanticism (New York: Columbia UP, 1984); de Man, "The
Rhetoric of Temporality," in Blindness and Insight
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983) ; J.
Hillis Miller, The Linguistic Moment (Princeton: Princeton
UP, 1985); Andrzej Warminski, Readings in Interpretation:
Hoelderlin, Hegel, Heidegger (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1987); Warminski, "Missed Crossings:
Wordsworth's Apocalypses," MLN, vol. 99, No. 5 (December
1984); Warminski, "Facing Language: Wordsworth's First
Poetic Spirits," Diacritics (Winter 1987).
3. Important texts include: Ellen Moers, "Female Gothic" in

Literary Women (Garden City, New Jersey: Doubleday, 1976),
91-99 (originally appeared in The New York Review of Books,
March 21, 1974); Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, in The
Madwoman in the Attic (New Haven: Yale UP, 1979), 213-47;
Barbara Johnson, "My Monster/My Self," in A World of
Difference (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1987),
(originally appeared in Diacritics 12 (1982): 2-10; Mary
Poovey, "My Hideous Progeny: Mary Shelley and the
Feminization of Romanticism," PMLA 95 (May 1980): 332-347
(reprinted in Poovey, The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer
- Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft.
Marv Shelley and Jane Austen [Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1984]); Margaret Homans, Bearing the Word:
Language and Female Experience in 19th Century Women's
Writing (University of Chicago Press, 1986), Chap. 5;
essays by George Levine, U.C. Knoepflmacher, Judith Wilt,
and Kate Ellis in The Endurance of Frankenstein■ ed. Levine
and Knoepflmacher (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1979) ; Anne K. Mellor, cited above.
318
laterally to encompass socio-political concerns as diverse
as technology, the family structure, and the French
Revolution, but one which ultimately returns to some form
of reflection on the writing process itself. Whatever else
is at stake in these divergent interpretations, Shelley's
Frankenstein has been read by feminist critics as an
allegory of female writing (and thinking). Under their
critical gaze, what appears to an influential (male) critic
like Harold Bloom as nothing more than a clumsy and
simplistic reflection of the more sublime poetry of
Shelley's male contemporaries becomes a work of merit in
its own r i g h t . ^ In Frankenstein. feminist critics discover
an entirely different relation to language and the literary
tradition, one that is quite simply antithetical to the
male model of "Romantic poetics."
I. Invention and Materiality
The strongest statement of this difference can be
found in readings which explicitly criticize the
traditional understanding of "invention" as the unique and
4. See Bloom's evaluation of the novel in his "Afterward"

to the Signet edition of the novel: "I am suggesting that
what makes Frankenstein an important book, though it is
only a strong, flawed novel with frequent clumsiness in its
narrative and characterization, is that it contains one of
the most vivid versions we have of the Romantic mythology
of the self, one that resembles Blake's Book of Urizen,
Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, and Byron's Manfred, among
other works. Because it lacks the sophistication and
imaginative complexity of such works, Frankenstein affords
a unique introduction to the archetypal world of the
Romantics." Bloom, "Afterword" to Mary Shelley,
Frankenstein (New York: Signet, 1972).
primordially creative production of the privileged Romantic
genius. Mary Shelley's own 1831 "Introduction" - in which
invention is diametrically opposed to creation - provides
the impetus for (as well as the first example of) such
readings:
Everything must have a beginning ... and that beginning

must be linked to something that went before. ...
Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in
creating out of the void, but out of chaos; the materials
must, in the first place, be afforded: it can give form to
dark, shapeless substances, but cannot bring into being the
substance itself.5
One feminist critic of the novel, Mary Poovey, has read
this passage to betoken Shelley's not altogether positive
humility before her "public" and the (male) tradition;
specifically, contends Poovey, it captures Shelley's
(revisionary) attempt to discount her own role in the
creation of Frankenstein and thus bears witness to the
problematic situation of the female Romantic. Compelled by
the double-bind placed upon her (as a female author) both
to "be original" and to remain a subservient woman, Shelley
attempts the only resolution possible: she modifies the
status of the author. "Shelley," asserts Poovey,
"developed a pervasive personal and artistic ambivalence
toward feminine self-assertion.1,6
This ambivalence can itself be discerned in Shelley's
5. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus.

ed. Maurice Hindle (New York: Penguin Books, 1885), 8. The
text is that of the 1831 (revised) edition. Subsequent
citations will include page numbers in parentheses.
6. Mary Poovey, cited above, 332.
own words. In her account of childhood from her
"Introduction,11 she distinguishes two functions of the
imagination:
My dreams were at once more fantastic and agreeable than my

writings. In the latter I was a close imitator — rather
doing as others had done than putting down the suggestions
of my own mind. What I wrote was intended at least for one
other eye — my childhood's companion and friend; but my
dreams were all my own; I accounted for them to nobody...
(5)
As a woman barred from equal participation in the literary
(and Romantic) tradition, Shelley views writing negatively
- as a hindrance to, rather than an enabling medium for,
self-expression. Poovey opposes this position to that of
Percy Shelley, for whom the public responsibility of poets
- the "unacknowledged legislators of the world" - could not
be greater.7 In Poovey's rendering, Mary's experience
serves to indict Percy's centrism, and with it the
"egotistical" male model of poetic creation shared by the
major Romantics: "lacking the support of both tradition and
public opinion, [Mary Shelley] separates the permissible,
even liberating expression of the imagination from the more
egotistical, less defensible act of public self-assertion."
(344) Shelley, Poovey concludes, views imagination as a
"vehicle for escaping the self, not a medium of personal
power or even of self-expression." (344)
While it furnishes an important alternative to the
7. "A Defense of Poetry, or Remarks Suggested by an Essay

Entitled 'The Four Ages of Poetry'," in Shelley's Poetry
and Prose, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Sharon B. Powers (New
York: Norton, 1977), 508.
male valorization of public expression, I suggest that this
ambivalent model of female authorship does not entirely
succeed in presenting a positive model of female invention:
as long as it retains the allegiance between expressive
power and the self - the keystone of the male tradition -
it can do no more than demonstrate the compromise of the
female writer in relation to a (male) standard that remains
intact. In this sense, Poovey's reading of Shelley appears
to retain the Romantic privilege of the self, albeit in a
negative guise, and thus to fit within the model of
Romantic creation as the equivalent of "intellectual
intuition." In Poovey's hands, Mary Shelley is quite
simply a failed Romantic genius, a figure who - like any
strong Bloomian poet - makes a virtue of her limitations.
"In her depiction of the monster and the 1831
Frankenstein," concludes Poovey, "Mary Shelley essentially
raises feminine powerlessness to the status of myth..."
(346) While Shelley gives new content to the traditional
Romantic myth of the creative self, and thus shows its
debilitating disregard for the (gendered) socio-economic
framing of the individual, her fictional allegorization of
her own predicament appears to share something essential
with its high Romantic counterparts: an obsessional
fixation on the self.
Despite its important role in pointing out the
gendered overdetermination inherent in Romantic poetics
then, such an evaluation - precisely because it remains
allied with a privileging of the self - fails to do justice
to the subtlety and force of Shelley's critique of the male
Romantic model. Far from comprising a concession on her
part, I suggest, Shelley's definition of invention and her
distinction between imagination and writing indict the
traditional Romantic notion of poetic creation in a far
more forceful way. Imaginative creation cannot intuit the
real - as Kant himself recognized in discounting the
possibility of "intellectual intuition"; it can only react
to the real, and thus yield original, if dependent,
productions. By restricting invention (and its poetic
medium, language) to the task of organizing ("giving form
to") the material afforded by a given world, Shelley
suggests that language (and thought) can do no more than
"seize on the capabilities of a subject." (8) Her humble
view of invention can thus be seen to stem directly from
her view of the material world - and in particular her
conviction concerning its exteriority with respect to mind
- that, as we shall see, owes much to Percy Shelley's
critique of 18th century materialism.
With this restrictive definition, Shelley counters the
entire Berkeleyian tradition lying behind Romantic poetry
from Blake through Wordsworth. Her privileging of matter
over mind questions the fundamental principle of Berkley's
idealism - esse est percipi - as well as its refinement in
Blake's notion of "Poetic Genius," which Northrop Frye (in
his classic study of Blake's poetry) defines as follows:
323
Perception ... is not something we do with our senses; it

is a mental act. ... There can be ... no distinction
between mental and bodily acts. ... To be perceived,
therefore, means to be imagined, to be related to an
individual's pattern of experience, to become a part of his
character. There is no "general nature," therefore nothing
is real beyond the imaginative patterns men make of
reality, and hence there are exactly as many kinds of
reality as there are men.8
In stressing the "exteriority" of matter in her definition
of invention, Mary Shelley forcefully repudiates precisely
such a restriction of the "real" to the imaginable.
Imagination cannot intuit the real, but only react to it.
It is this particular restriction, I suggest, that explains
the negative evaluation she lends her youthful forays into
writing. "Imaginative patterns" are (for her) inevitably
written schemas which require (especially from female
authors) a compromising act of imitation rather than a free
expression. For Shelley, the Blakean restriction of the
real to the imaginable comprises nothing less than a
wholesale destruction of the conditioned freedom of the
imagination itself.
Hence, while the new model of the imagination proposed
by the "Introduction" is indeed important for the reasons
that feminists have pointed out (as a counterpart to the
male model, it redresses the errors of the latter's biased
command of the "real"), what I am suggesting is that it
also introduces a far more radical critique - one that
questions the very adequacy of any linguistic mediation
8. Northrop Frye, Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William

Blake (Boston: Beacon Press, 1962), 19.
324
which purports to "command" the real and one that is all
too easily overlooked in readings that focus on gender
problems. The basis for this critique is Shelley's curious
account of imagination. In her description of the free
imagination, Shelley stresses the latter's liberation from
any mediation by language and writing. Her model thus
pressures the traditional correlation of imagination with
linguistic articulation and opposes itself to the modern
conceptualization of the imagination as set forth by Kant.
Whereas Kant's account actually fortifies Berkeley's view
by conceiving the imagination as the bridge articulating
sensation with cognition, and thus as the crux of the
schematism making experience possible as such, Shelley
takes a further step: she attempts to detach the
imagination from its correlation with a cognizing subject!9
Continuing the depiction of her childhood, she opposes
imagination to self-experience:
It was beneath the trees of the grounds belonging to our

house, or on the bleak sides of the woodless mountains
near, that my true compositions, the airy flights of my
imagination, were born and fostered. I did not make myself
the heroine of my tales. I could not figure to myself that
romantic woes or wonderful events would ever be my lot; but
I was not confined to my own identity, and I could people
the hours with creations far more interesting to me at that
age than my own sensations. (6)
9. The articulation of sensation and cognition - the two

ingredients that compose "thought" in Kant's famous
definition from the first Critique - is the burden of The
Critique of Judgement. See for example Kant's recourse to
"symbolic hypotyposis" in paragraph 59. For the
schematism, see The Critique of Pure Reason. Book II,
Chapter 1, "The Schematism of the Pure Concepts of the
Understanding."
325
On a first reading, this depiction would seem to buttress
Poovey's contention that imagination comprises a "vehicle
for escaping the self." I suggest, however, that it
functions as such a vehicle in a far more radical sense
than Poovey has in mind. Far from leading to a private
retreat from the world that would fortify the self as the
autonomous maker of representations, imagination places the
individual in a relation with the world that is not
mediated through (and thus not restricted by) the
linguistic/cognitive self. Imagination, in short,
comprises the experiential faculty which binds the
individual to that part of the real that escapes
representation. In this sense, Shelley's model of the
imagination is far broader than that of the male Romantic
tradition. Rather than subordinating the real to what
amounts to a poetic version of the "principle of reason"
explored above (i.e., the real is the imaginable), Shelley
celebrates the imagination precisely because (as she
implies in noting that she "accounted for [her dreams] to
nobody") it requires no account.
It is in such terms that Mary Shelley describes her
original conception of the monster:
When I placed my head on my pillow, I did not sleep, nor

could I be said to think. My imagination, unbidden,
possessed and guided me, gifting the successive images that
arose in my mind with a vividness far beyond the usual
bounds of reverie. I saw - with shut eyes, but acute
mental vision - I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts
kneeling beside the thing he had put together. (8-9)
Shelley's vivid reverie corresponds to no known or possible
experience, but invokes an event - the artificial creation
of life - that is literally unthinkable and ungroundable.
What she sees in her "mind's eye" is not an intellectual
transcendence of sensory experience - as definitions of
poetry from Blake to de Man suppose - but rather an
experience that is entirely outside of her rational or
cognizing mind. As Shelley's depiction suggests, it is
the force of the image itself (and thus of the "real") -
and not the power of her imagination - that is responsible
for the reverie she experiences, a reverie that in all
other respects would seem to embody the "unmediated vision"
championed by the male Romantics.10 Detached from
cognition (and thus from the self as the operator of the
principle of reason), the imagination is able to step
outside the bounds of reason in order to consider
potentialities which are not (thinkable) possibilities.
Shelley's expanded conception of the imagination opens
experience (the imaginable) to what, from the standpoint of
the cognizing subject, is impossible and inhuman.
II. Shelley's Critique of science
In describing her original dream, Shelley employs a
motif that has come to define the modern genre of science
fiction: the radicalization of scientific evolution.11
10. The phrase is, of course, Geoffrey Hartman's. Cf. The

Unmediated Vision.
11. See Mellor, 89: "Mary Shelley grounded her fiction of

the scientist who creates a monster he cannot control upon
327
Looking beyond the modest empirical success of contemporary
galvanism (and in particular Erasmus Darwin's animation of
vermicelli12), Shelley takes literally the possibility that
"vital warmth" could be introduced into a manufactured
creature. In recounting her vivid reverie, she ascribes
this possibility to the workings of an unknown "powerful
engine" or (unaccountable) efficient cause:
I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and

then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of
life, and stir with an uneasy, half-vital motion.
Frightful must it be; for supremely frightful would be the
effect of any human endeavor to mock the stupendous
mechanism of the Creator of the world. His success would
terrify the artist; he would rush away from his odious
handiwork, horror-stricken. He would hope that, left to
itself, the slight spark of life which he had communicated
would fade; that this thing, which had received such
imperfect animation would subside into dead matter... (8-9)
In her novel, Shelley concretizes this unknown "powerful
engine" as the force of electricity: Frankenstein creates
by "infus[ing] a spark of being into the lifeless thing"
that he had assembled from dead material gathered from
graveyards and charnel houses. (56) As an application of
electrical force, the creation scene repeats an earlier
natural event (and the paradigm of the sublime from
Longinus onward) - the destruction of an "old and beautiful
oak" by lightening - which had left a lasting mark on the
youthful Frankenstein and which, moreover, marks the origin
an extensive understanding of the most recent scientific

developments of her day. She thereby initiated a new
literary genre, what we now call science fiction."
12. As Shelley recounts in her Introduction, Dr. Darwin

(Charles' grandfather) was said to have "preserved a piece
of vermicelli in a glass case, till by some extraordinary
means it began to move with voluntary motion." (8)
328
point of his fatal fusion of modern scientific methodology
with the Faustian dreams of the alchemists. Through this
homology with natural destruction, the creation scene gives
us a particularly moving picture of the transgressive
aspect of Frankenstein's task - the fatal presumption of
"any human endeavor to mock the stupendous mechanism of the
Creator of the world."
The presumption of Frankenstein's creation is driven
home by its result: rather than yielding a natural being,
it produces an unnatural monster. This result, I suggest,
is not due to Victor's failure as a parent or to his haste
in assembling his creation; rather, it testifies in favor
of what, following Donna Haraway in "A Manifesto for
Cyborgs," we might call the ontology of the monster. Like
the female cyborgs Haraway discusses, the monster subverts
natural boundaries: it "skips the step of original unity,
of identification with nature..."13
The unnatural "ontology" of the monster brings
Shelley's materialism to bear on contemporaneous scientific
theory, criticizing its blindness to the emerging domain of
applied science or technology. Because of its unnatural
origin, the monster cannot be accounted for by science; as
the product of a purely artificial technical creation, the
monster is quite literally portrayed as a perversion of
contemporaneous biology's theory of monstrosity. In her
useful study of the scientific background of Frankenstein
13. Donna Haraway, "A Manifesto for Cyborgs," 174.
("A Feminist Critique of Science"), Anne Mellor has drawn
attention to the influence of Erasmus Darwin's evolutionary
theory, and especially his concept of the hierarchy of
reproduction, on the act of creation depicted in
Frankenstein.14 Specifically, Darwin's concept of the
superiority of sexual reproduction over paternal
propagation entails a theory of monstrosity that, Mellor
suggests, had a major impact on Mary Shelley. Mellor
stresses the shift in Darwin's theory of monstrosity that
occurs as the result of the evolution of his conception of
sexual reproduction from 1794 to 1801 (the date of the
third and corrected edition of Zponomia). Having initially
attributed the production of monstrosities to excessive or
insufficient nourishment by the female, by 1801 Darwin had
begun to ascribe them instead to the faculty responsible
for "determining both the sex of the child and its
outstanding traits": namely, the male Imagination. For
Mellor this striking shift forms a rich and obvious source
for Shelley's allegory of the disastrous impact of
unregulated male science.
While this reading does in fact shed light on the
scientific context underlying Shelley's fiction, it would
be a mistake to conclude (as I think Mellor does) that
14. Mellor, Chap. 5. See also Carl Grabo, A Newton Among

Poets: Shelley's Use of Science in Prometheus Unbound (New
York: Gordian Press, 1968), Chapter IV.; and Desmond King-
Hele, Shelley: His Thought and Work (Teaneck, Rutherford
and Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press,
1960/1971), Chapter VIII.
330
Shelley simply translates Darwin's theory into the domain
of technological reproduction. What Shelley demonstrates,
I suggest, is rather the failure of such a translation, and
the ensuing imperative to address technology on its own
ground. Victor Frankenstein's act of creation differs from
the reproductive acts considered by Darwin (and by Mellor)
in one fundamental respect: unlike the latter, it falls
outside the domain of natural production. As a purely
technical product, the Frankenstein monster is radically
non-natural and must thus be distinguished from the various
sorts of natural monstrosities with which it is easily
mistaken; its productive source, or what in philosophical
language is called its "efficient cause," lies beyond the
boundaries of nature and is, moreover, outside the grasp of
the explanatory doctrine of causality.
To find a category appropriate for this kind of
production, we must recur to Aristotle's largely overlooked
doctrine of chance [tuche], and specifically his notion of
the "automatic*1.15 In Physics II, 6, Aristotle
distinguishes two types of chance: "luck" and "the
automatic." Luck defines the workings of chance relative
to human thought and natural reproduction, while the
automatic comprises a larger category of chance relative to
the workings of the physical world. Because the efficient
cause of a lucky event remains internal to the nature of
the agent, luck strains natural necessity while still
15. I have developed this argument at length in Chapter 1.
331
remaining natural. The automatic, on the other hand,
broaches nature, since it only comes into play when things
take place para physin ("contrary to nature").
Interestingly enough in the present context, the crux of
Aristotle's distinction concerns a comparison of examples
focusing on the problem of monstrosity:
...this case [of a reproductive monstrosity, MH] is

different from that of the horse [which exemplifies the
automatic]; for the horse's escape was due to an external
cause, but the causes of Nature's miscarriage are internal
to her own processes.16
However perverse it may sound, natural monstrosities then
must be said to be due to luck, since their cause remains
internal to the act of reproduction. An unnatural
monstrosity (though Aristotle himself doesn't envisage such
a thing) would accordingly stem from a "cause" that is para
physin ("contrary to nature").
Now, if the Frankenstein creature is the embodiment of
precisely such an unnatural monstrosity, as I am
suggesting, its creation cannot be ascribed to natural
causes, and thus cannot simply be extrapolated from
contemporaneous evolutionary theory, as Mellor and others
have argued. The creature's origin points in an entirely
different direction. As the application of natural force
(electricity) to a non-natural assemblage, Frankenstein's
creation quite literally comprises an instance of modern
applied science or technology. The monster, as one recent
16. Aristotle, Physics, tr. Wikestead and Cornford (Oxford:

Clarendon Press, 1982), 161.
332
critic has argued, is not so much a deformed man as "...a
product of technology strictly defined as applied
science."17 Frankenstein's goal in creating the monster is
not purely scientific (culminating in demonstration), but
is rather oriented from the start toward the productive
application of science's theoretical command of nature:
When Victor Frankenstein learns the secret of "reanimating

lifeless matter," instead of just reviving a corpse, he
quickly sets up a one man factory... There he manufactures
a unique product, a Monster who marries the horrors of
Gothic ghosts and spectres to the goal of the Industrial
Revolution — science used to imitate and replace man.
(ibid.)
On this point, Shelley's text is even more forceful than
her critics suggest, since it stresses the fact that
Frankenstein literally goes behind the causal laws of
Newtonian nature in order to discover the capacity of
"bestowing animation upon lifeless matter." (51) When
Victor Frankenstein discovers the "principle of life," he
realizes nothing less than the Promethean dream inhabiting
modern science: the impossible possibility of reaching
behind causality in order to discover a "first cause." His
own account of this discovery stresses the necessary leap
beyond knowledge of causes:
I paused, examining and analyzing all the minutiae of

causation, as exemplified in the change from life to death,
and death to life, until from the midst of this darkness a
17. Martin Tropp, Images of Fear (Jefferson, NC: McFarland

and Co., 1990), 30. See also Tropp, Mary Shelley's
Monster: The Storv of Frankenstein (Boston: Houghton
Mifflin Co., 1976), Chap. IV. For a critique of Tropp's
argument as refined version of a "technological
reduction," see Chris Baldick, In Frankenstein's Shadow
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987).
sudden light broke in upon me. ... After days and nights
of incredible labour and fatigue, I succeeded in
discovering the cause of generation and life; nay, more, I
became myself capable of bestowing animation upon lifeless
matter. (51)
His success represents the culmination, rather than the
repudiation, of his youthful devotion to the "wild fancies"
of the alchemists and to the Faustian tradition. From
these latter he acquired a "fervent longing to penetrate
the secrets of nature," a longing that compels him to cast
away the narrow rigor of modern science and in particular
its commitment to extending the explanatory doctrine of
Newton's causal model of the universe. Here then,
Frankenstein stands in stark antithesis to the figure of
the modern scientist who does not inquire into final (i.e.,
first) causes, who remains entirely descriptive in his
outlook and is structurally barred from "entering the
citadel of nature":
The untaught peasant beheld the elements around him, and

was acquainted with their practical uses. The most learned
philosopher knew little more. He had partially unveiled
the face of Nature, but her immortal lineaments were still
a wonder and a mystery. He might dissect, anatomize, and
give names; but, not to speak of a final cause, causes in
their secondary and tertiary grades were utterly unknown to
him. (39)
What Frankenstein shows in an unparalleled way is the
modern destiny of the hidden Promethean mandate of science:
when the Promethean dream is coupled with modern scientific
method, the result is precisely the a-causal and unnatural
production that defines technology in its modern (post
industrial) form.
Frankenstein's creation is thus neither properly
334
alchemical nor properly scientific, but is instead a
Promethean accomplishment that, unlike alchemical
speculation, in fact leads to actual production, but that
does so in a way distinct from the process of modern
science whose ordered causal logic it fundamentally
disturbs. The technological mandate behind Frankenstein's
creation forcefully demonstrates that "the desire to play
the part of the First Cause is at the root of all human
vision of a man-created creature" and is in fact "the very
essence of Prometheanism.1,18
Because it reaches beyond the causal interconnection
defining Newtonian nature, Frankenstein's creation is
essentially a technological application. His capacity to
"bestow animation" is not something that he possesses as
theoretical knowledge; rather it is gained only in actual
practice:
...the information I had obtained was of a nature rather to

direct my endeavors so soon as I should point them towards
the object of my search, than to exhibit that object
already accomplished. (51)
In this respect, Frankenstein's creation exemplifies the
priority of technology over science in the modern period:
his leap beyond the causal interconnection governing
Newtonian nature cannot be defined prior to the moment of
application, and thus has no stable and independent
theoretical status. As the result of automatic production,
18. Louis Awad, "The Alchemist in English Literature:

Frankenstein," Bulletin of the Faculty of Arts (Fuad I
University, 13, 1964, 52, quoted in Botting, op. cit., 169.
335
the monster embodies the radical possibility that Marx
discovers in the "motive mechanism," i.e., the use of a
machine power source to drive other machines: it embodies
the potential autonomy attained by technology when it
becomes the dominant principle of production and calls for
man's subordination as mere mechanism.
By suggesting that the potential significance of his
discovery can't be known prior to or independently of the
moment of application, Frankenstein in effect presents his
act of creation as an example of technological production.
As opposed to natural production (i.e., reproduction),
which can only "create" on the basis of an internal and
thus preexisting "cause" (in Aristotle's fourfold sense),
Frankenstein creates para physin ("contrary to nature") or,
following the fiction of Shelley's novel, ex nihilo. He
does not just reproduce another human being or animal
through means that supplement nature; rather he aims to
produce, in one quasi-divine act, an absolutely "new
species" that would, as he says, "bless [him] as its
creator and source." (52) The origin of his creation
therefore falls outside of the Newtonian domain of nature,
which means that, like Aristotle's automatic, it cannot be
accounted for by causal principles. It quite literally
exceeds the "principle of reason" governing modern
(Newtonian) science - the principle which, in Leibniz'
classic formulation, states that "nothing is without (a)
reason" [nihil est sin ratio] or in other words, that every
336
effect must have a cause.19
Consequently, what lies beneath Shelley's critique of
the modern principle of reason for failing to encompass
technological production is nothing less than a fundamental
indictment of contemporaneous science for its facile
adoption of Newtonian mechanics. Rather than tying her
fictional embodiment of the automatic efficiency of
technological production to a particular development in
science, she directs it more generally against the
reductive materialism that had prospered in the
Enlightenment. In imagining a creation ex nihilo, Shelley
unites her husband's critique of 18th century materialism
with her own insight concerning the priority of technology
over science. The result is a powerful indictment of the
"machine metaphor" - the reduction of technology (and its
productivity) to the hermeneutic horizon of poiesis - that
(as I have argued at length above) has dominated our
thematization of technology from Julien de la Mettrie's
L'homme-machine to Derrida's Of Grammatolocrv. As the
prototype of technological production, the impossible ex
nihilo creation of the monster illustrates the distinction
between the "real" and reality (or nature) that must be
drawn if the automatic production defining modern
technology is to be addressed and not simply repressed.
Since the monster's creation takes place para physin -
19. See Leibniz, "On Freedom and Possibility," in

Philosophical Essays, tr. Ariew and Garber (Indianapolis,
IN: Hackett, 1989), p. 19.
337
which means that it is not subject to predictive science -
it is quite literally unrepresentable. It falls outside of
the "closure of representation"20 and thus embodies the
real, outside and independently of representation. In
short, automatic production embodies the exemplary modern
form of something that Schopenhauer, in his long addendum
to Kant, referred to under the rubric "occult quality"
[qualitas occultas] and that Lyotard has recently called
the "inhuman."21
In thematizing such a radical "exteriority" of
technology, Shelley not only draws directly on her
husband's critique of 18th century materialism, but
actually radicalizes its implications to a point beyond his
own accomplishment in Prometheus Unbound. The crux of
Percy's indictment of materialism concerns his own insight
into the allegiance between causality and human
thought/representation. "Mind," he says in "Essay on Life"
(1812-14), "is said also to be the cause. But cause is
only a word expressing a certain state of the human mind
with regard to the manner in which two thoughts are
20. The phrase "closure of representation" is used by

Derrida to radicalize the command of representational
thought posited by Heidegger in "The Age of the World
Picture" and elsewhere. See, for example, Derrida's essay
on Artaud, "The Theater of Cruelty and the Closure of
Representation," in Writing and Difference (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1978), 232-250.
21. See Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and

Representation. tr. Payne (New York: Dover, 1969),
paragraphs 25-27; J.-F. Lyotard, The Inhuman: Reflections
on Time (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1988), especially Lyotard's
introduction, "About the Human."
338
apprehended to be related to each other."22 Mind, in

other words, remains structurally barred from interacting
directly with the physical world and is thus limited in an
almost Kantian manner. More specifically, mind is unable
to answer the question that is asked (and answered) by
Victor Frankenstein: the question concerning the origin of
life. As against the "matter" of the physical world (the
real), mind can only perceive; it cannot create. Percy
continues:
What is the cause of Life? That is, how was it produced,

or what agencies distinct from life have acted or act upon
life? All recorded generations of mankind have wearily
busied themselves in inventing answers to this question;
and the result has been - Religion. Yet, that the basis of
all things cannot be, as the popular philosophy alleges,
mind, is sufficiently evident. Mind, as far as we have any
experience of its properties, and beyond that experience
how vain is argument! cannot create, it can only perceive,
(ibid., 174)
In light of this account of the exteriority of matter over
mind, what Victor Frankenstein accomplishes in his ex
nihilo creation is something beyond the capacity of any
human inventor, whose activity, as Shelley alleges in her
introductory account of invention, is restricted to that of
giving form to pre-existent material. In creating the
monster, Victor Frankenstein achieves more than he could
have possibly hoped for and, given the destructive outcome
of his creation, certainly more than he can handle. Yet it
is not quite accurate to speak of him, qua human inventor,
22. Percy Bysshe Shelley, Shellev/s Prose: or the Trumpet

of a Prophecy. ed. David Lee Clark (New York: New Amsterdam
Press, 1988), 174-75.
339
as creator, since in actuality he cannot be said to do more
than merely channel natural force to technically productive
ends. Rather, like Shelley's own imaginative production,
the creation in which he plays a part must be said to be
the result of an automatic production or technological
application on the part of "nature" itself, now defined not
as the representational construct of the physicist or of
the poet, but as equivalent with the real in its entirety.
III. Toward a Materialist Critique of Romantic Poetics
We are now in a position to see that it is Shelley's
broad commitment to the exteriority of matter - and
specifically its automatic application in modern technology
- that distinguishes her allegorical fiction (as well as
her concept of invention) from the male model of the
Romantic genius. Central to this distinction is the
disjunction between two modes of production: the natural
(including human) and the radically unnatural. Writing in
the aftermath of the age of Rousseau - an age witnessing
the deconstruction of the nature-culture divide23 - Shelley
shows that, in addition to the "logic of the supplement"
that paradoxically binds techne to physis, there is a gap
within culture itself: a gap internal to techne, between a
"restricted" and a radical techne. Only the former
"domain" of techne (techne subordinated to poiesis) offers
itself to the hermeneutico-phenomenological economy of
23. As Derrida argues in Of Grammatology.
340
thinking, most appropriately described in this context by
Lacoue-Labarthe's notion of "onto-mimetology."24 It is in
the light of this gap within techne that we must evaluate
the parodic import of Shelley's dramatization of a
technically-produced Rousseauean "homme sauvage
Shelley's monster is trapped in a no-man's land between
nature and culture: while it cannot be classified as
''natural” in the sense that Rousseau lends the term in the
Second Discourse, it is also barred from entering the human
cultural community. Shelley's novel dramatizes the
exteriority of this technological entity with respect to
human law and institutions, among which the most
fundamental (because constitutive) must be numbered the
binding (or symbolic) function of language.
Her text therefore allegorizes the impossibility of
bringing automatic or technological production into the
domain of language (and, by implication, human culture):
the impossibility of textualizing the technological thing.
Elizabeth's lament following the monster's murder of
William and framing of Justine for that murder stands as
the emblem of this impossibility, since it turns from the
narrow ground of epistemological inquiry to the realm of
the ethical: "Alas! Victor," she implores, "when falsehood
can look so like the truth, who can assure themselves of
certain happiness?"25 The monster's actions - precisely
24. See Lacoue-Labarthe, "The Caesura of the Speculative."

I discuss Lacoue-Labarthe's work above, Chapter 1.
341
because they cannot be thematized within the principle of
reason (or in other words, cannot be given linguistic
representation) - disturb the pre-Kantian (i.e.,
Aristotelian) schema which seeks the ground for practical
activity (whose aim is happiness or eudaimonia) in the
secure tenets of theoretical knowledge. These actions
breed an epistemological confusion which Frankenstein
thematizes as a parody of textual undecideability. Since
the monster's actions (the consequences of a purely
unnatural or automatic production) radically resist
attempts at cognitive (or epistemological) recuperation,
they cannot be textualized. It is for this reason that the
linguistic code comprising human law cannot but find
Justine guilty: not only does her possession of William's
locket provide sufficient material proof, but — more
importantly - the actions of the monster quite simply
cannot be possible referents in any textual system. From
the standpoint of human law, that is to say, it is as if
they simply didn't exist.
If Shelley allegorizes the impossibility of
textualizing the technological thing as the human
experience of referential undecideability, she does not do
so with the purpose of discovering the cognitive/ textual
correlate of modern technology in a de Manian "crisis of
reading." Since the actions of the monster are not subject
to referential capture, they cannot "become texts" in the
25. Frankenstein. 90.
342
special sense de Man lends the term in his account of
allegory: i.e., "by revealing their dependence on a
referential agreement that uncritically took their truth or
falsehood for granted."^6 The dilemma they pose thus
cannot take the form of a de Manian allegorical text, whose
deconstructive burden is the disarticulation of the
linguistic categories of truth and falsehood from the
intentional values of right and wrong. The radical lament
voiced by Elizabeth instead calls for a response that moves
entirely outside the descriptive and foundational sphere of
the linguistic: a resituation of the ethical outside of
epistemology.
To restate my point in blunter terms, Shelley's
allegory of the impact of automatic technological
production points to a domain of human experience - what I
have above developed in terms of the "molecular" or
"imperceptible" - that remains ungraspable on the de Manian
account of Romantic poetics. Shelley's insistent
demonstration of the failure of textual recuperation
attests to the need for a movement beyond the "closure of
representation" if the impact of (modern) technology on
human life is to be opened to experience. This movement,
Shelley's text contends, can only come at the expense of
the linguistic bias underlying the poetic model of
Romanticism. It is for this reason, I suggest, that she
26. Paul de Man, "Allegory (Julie)," in Allegories of

Reading, op. cit., 204-205.
343
includes the frame story, whose narrative purpose is to
pass on to other subjects the ethical burden presented by
the monster. Her text not only fails to achieve closure,
it renounces the very attempt to do so: by ending with the
monster's own admission of his failure to integrate himself
into the human social and linguistic community, the text
indicts its own discursive mode - the liberalization of the
trope of apostrophe. In this way, it unveils the double
bind that modern technology presents to representational
thinking: since we can only represent technology by
personifying it, we will have always already humanized
technology into something other than what it is. In
Shelley's text, not insignificantly, it is the monster
himself who enunciates this critical insight: responding to
Walton's accusation of hypocrisy, the monster proclaims
11... it is not thus - not thus, ...; yet such must be the
impression conveyed to you by what appears to be the
purport of my actions." (212) Incapable of grasping his
"purport," human reason can only impose on his actions its
own schemas (whether intentional or linguistic) - schemas
which translate the material "reality" of his actions into
humanized impressions and appearances. Human reason, that
is, can only treat "him" as what he cannot be - a human
being. By closing the novel with the words of the monster,
Shelley leaves this dilemma unresolved, thus passing it on
to her (future) readers in the form of the ethical
imperative to leave behind representational theory's narrow
344
fixation on epistemo-descriptive problems.
It is Shelley's adherence to the central tenet of
materialism - the radical exteriority of matter - that
informs the two registers of her understanding of
invention. As I have argued above, Shelley conceives of
literary creation according to a model vastly different
from that of the male tradition: for her, literary
invention is not the aesthetic equivalent of "intellectual
intuition" championed by the (male) Romantics and in the
German cult of genius (as interpreted by Lacoue-
Labarthe27) . Moreover, invention for Shelley must not be
restricted to its rhetorical register, the pivotal register
for a certain phenomenologico-linguistic interpretation of
production that extends from Cicero's De inventione to
Harold Bloom's theory of poetic agon.28 In her remarks on
her own authorship, Shelley, we have seen, stresses the
humility of the author's task: to "give form to dark,
shapeless substances." By thus accentuating the author's
debt to a material world, Shelley suggests that the
perogative of an author (especially, but by no means
exclusively, when that author is a woman) is not the free
and genial creation of an effective rhetorical retort to
27. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, La fiction du politique

(Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1987).
28. On Cicero, cf. Derrida, "Psyche: Inventions of the

Other," in Reading de Man Reading, ed. Waters and Godzich
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 25-29.
(French original in Psyche [Paris: Galilee, 1987], 11-62.)
For Bloom, see The Anxiety of Influence (London and New
York: Oxford UP, 1973).
345
her predecessors and that such a model of authorship has
forgotten its own material anchoring. For Shelley, in
other words, there is something else at stake in authorship
than simply the narcissistic thrill and/or existential
Ucausen of proving oneself a "strong poet." Literary
invention brings the author into a relationship with the
"real" - a relationship calling for a response whose aim is
something other than mastery and control. In this respect,
literary invention is a paradigm for invention as such,
including the modern form of invention that we have
encountered in our analyses of technology: in all these
cases, the experience of novelty captured in the
phenomenologico-linguistic category of invention stems from
an encounter of human thought with the "real" - what
Deleuze and Guattari aptly name the "milieu of
exteriority."29
Given her modest estimation of invention, Shelley's
fascination with the technological creation of life is
hardly accidental: the fictionalized ex nihilo creation of
the monster furnishes the most appropriate means of
debunking the phenomenologico-linguistic valorization of
human invention. The creation of the monster embodies the
most radial operation of chance or "automatic" production -
that "mode" of production prevalent in modern technology;
literally the product of electrical animation, the monster
29. See Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand

Plateaus. tr. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1987), for example, 378.
346
owes its spark of life not to some engendering geniality of
a human inventor but rather to something that, despite its
apparent impossibility, nevertheless remains concrete and
material: something that Michel Serres, in his analysis of
the upsurge of chance in thermodynamic energy conversion,
has called the "principle of fire."3® Here we find the
flip-side of Shelley's above discussed indictment of
apostrophe: in so far as it embodies random or "automatic"
production, technology is radically other and inhuman, and
cannot effectively and adequately be constrained by, nor
represented through, phenomenologico-linguistic means.
In this light, Frankenstein's hyperbolic assumption of
a fatal responsibility for the creature has more to do with
his own personal pathology than with some generalized
ethical dilemma of the technological age. Making certain
(significant) adjustments for the monster's "unnatural"
origins (see above), we might then credit Barbara Johnson's
suggestion that the novel depicts Frankenstein as a mother
experiencing post-partum depression.31 On such an account,
Frankenstein's obsessional doppelgaenger relationship with
the monster - a literally fatal relationship culminating in
his death - can be interpreted as the consequence not of a
30. I have discussed Serres' analysis at some length in

Chapter 1. The relevant Serres' text is "Turner Translates
Carnot," in Hermes: Literature. Science. Philosophy, ed.
Harari and Bell (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1982), 54-63;
French original Hermes IV: La distribution (Paris: Minuit,
1977) .
31. Barbara Johnson, "My Monster/My Self," in A World of

Difference (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1987), 144-154.
more or less successful act of creation, but rather as the
residue of a failure to invent, or more precisely, a
failure of invention (a failure of invention to invent a
mirror of the self, to occasion "an invention of the
same") . As numerous critics of the novel have pointed out,
Frankenstein suffers because the monster is too much of an
other to serve his narcissistic desire for a mirror of the
self. What causes difficulty for Frankenstein - and for
all who would personify technology - is the disjunction
between his humanist ("egomimetological"32) conception of
invention and a more modest conception correlative to
actual material production in the real or the "milieu of
exteriority." While his creation is the product of a
radically autonomous production (which cannot be restricted
to "invention" qua invention of the same), Frankenstein
himself remains caught in what Derrida calls the "invention
of the same" - a concept of invention that domesticates the
alterity of the real, or as Derrida puts it (aping the
Hegelian idiom), that "preserves and nullifies chance as
such." In "Psyche: Inventions of the Other" - a text
ostensibly dedicated to the de Manian concept of allegory -
Derrida glosses invention as follows:
Such is what all governmental policies on modern science

and culture and war attempt when they try - and how could
they do otherwise? - to program invention. The aleatory
margin that they seek to integrate remains homogenous with
calculation, within the order of the calculable; it
32. The term is Juliet MacCannell's. See The Regime of the

Brother: After the Patriarchy (London and New York:
Routledge, 1991).
348
devolves from a probabilistic quantification and still

resides, we could say, in the same order and in the order
of the same. An order where there is no absolute surprise,
the order of what I shall call the invention of the same.
This invention comprises all invention, or almost.33
In Frankenstein's case, however, invention fails to produce
the expected and desired mirror image of the same. In thus
eclipsing the scientific aim of Frankenstein's statist and
philosophical program (to wield the "power of bestowing
animation" as the demonstration of pre-determined
scientific principle), his "creation" (like all true
instances of "automatic" technology) cannot be grasped by
any conception of invention as invention of the same. It
cannot be accounted for on the phenomenologico-linguistic
model of invention that Derrida defines:
What is an invention? What does it do? It finds something

for the first time. ... It discovers for the first time,
it unveils what was already found there, or produces what,
as techne, was not already found there but is still not
created, in the strong sense of the word, is only put
together, starting with a stock of existing and available
elements, in a given configuration. This configuration,
this ordered totality ... makes an invention and its
legitimation possible........it gives rise to an event,
tells a fictional story and produces a machine by
introducing a disparity or gap into the customary use of
discourse, by upsetting to some extent the mind-set of
expectation and reception that it nevertheless needs; it
forms a beginning and speaks of that beginning, and in this
double, indivisible movement, it inaugurates. This double
movement harbors that uniqueness and novelty without which
there would be no invention. (43)
In Frankenstein's suffering, Shelley dramatizes the failure
of such a model of invention to capture automatic
technological production. Her novel thus indicts the
33. Derrida, "Psyche: Inventions of the Other," 55,

emphasis added.
349
stated homology of machine with text, the homology
underlying Derrida's theory of invention as well as the de
Manian conception of allegory (and Romantic poetics) on
which it comments. Specifically, Shelley's text questions
the capacity for a genetic concept of the text to function
adequately as a model for the machine. By demonstrating
the necessity for a response that would occur "outside"
language, Shelley criticizes the very reduction of
technology that is implicit in de Manian poetics.
Like Derrida, de Man derives the machine from the
linguistic. In his final chapter on Rousseau in Allegories
of Reading. he contends that
The machine is like the grammar of the text when it is

isolated from its rhetoric, the merely formal element
without which no text can be generated. There can be no
use of language which is not, within a certain perspective
thus radically formal, i.e., mechanical, no matter how
deeply this aspect may be concealed by aesthetic,
formalistic delusions. (294)
This hidden mechanical foundation of the text automatically
deconstructs its rhetorical (i.e., referential) claims:
Barely concealed by its peripheral function, the text here

stages the textual machine or its own constitution and
performance, its own textual allegory. ... The text as
body, with all its implications of substitutive tropes
ultimately always retraceable to metaphor, is displaced by
the text as machine and, in the process, it suffers the
loss of the illusion of meaning. The deconstruction of the
figural dimension is a process that takes place
independently of any desire; as such it is not unconscious
but mechanical, systematic in its performance but arbitrary
in its principle, like a grammar. (298)
With this movement from the "text-body" to the "text-
machine," de Man radicalizes his earlier (anti-
Heideggerian) analysis of the Romantic image as a purely
350
linguistic entity without a secure ontological foundation
in the natural phenomenal realm.34 The reading of Rousseau
recasts the imagination as textual machine, replacing its
poetic capacity for autonomy - its ability to "exist by and
for itself"(16) - with a more extreme linguistic
materialism.
As one recent commentator has suggested, this
radicalization has significant consequences for the general
relation of literary studies with technology. In a free
interpretation of de Man's reading of Pascal ("Pascal's
Allegory of Persuasion"), Geoffrey Bennington reads de
Man's evolution as a movement away from the Heideggerian
devaluation of the merely technical:
Traditional literary studies habitually use the language of

machines in a negative way, deploring the mechanical and
the technical as the death of the values attached to life,
form, inspiration, and so on. ... Some of this can be
found in de Man's writing... But elsewhere...this
traditional system is disrupted: already in "Semiology and
Rhetoric" there are references to "the programmed pattern
34. See "The Intentional Structure of the Romantic Image,"

in The Rhetoric of Romanticism, op. cit., 1-18. See, for
example, p. 15: "The ontological priority, housed at first
in the earthly and pastoral 'flower,' has been transposed
into an entity that could still, if one wishes, be called
'nature,' but no longer be equated with matter, objects,
earth, stones, or flowers. The nostalgia for the object
has become a nostalgia for an entity that could never, by
its very nature, become a particularized presence." With
the autonomy of the imagination, reference is detached from
ontology. The poetic transcendence of nature opens a
material poetic realm that is unconnected with the natural
phenomenal realm: "But this 'imagination' has little in
common with the faculty that produces natural images born
'as flowers originate.' It marks instead a possibility for
consciousness to exist entirely by and for itself,
independently of all relationship with the outside world,
without being moved by an intent aimed at a part of this
world. (16)
351
of grammar,” to "the impersonal precision of grammar” where

the "merely technical" or "mechanical" sense is suspended;
this will be increasingly the case as syntax is thought to
be prior to semantics, grammar to reference, and so on.35
Given the autonomy or materialism of the linguistic in de
Man - which severs all ontological or phenomenal connection
to nature - the very ground for the devaluation of the
technical is lost: without the ontological priority of the
natural object (the "intended" object of the traditional
Romantic image), any distinction between the natural and
the mechanical can only be purely ideological and aberrant.
The mechanical foundation of the text imposes the absolute
disjunction of reference from ontology as the condition of
possibility for reading; the dialectic of text-body and
text-machine - the dialectic that generates texts as well
as their allegorical deconstructions - operates in an
ontological vacuum, in a space that (despite de Man's
antipathy towards Heidegger) can only be demarcated by a
retreat from the natural world.
With this understanding of de Man's theory of
technology, we can now better appreciate his category of
the ethical. The ethical emerges in response to the
problem of the technical. It is precisely the divorce of
reference from ontology that makes the crucial moment of
the ethical a moment of reading: ethics, and with it any
calculus of decision, emerges from the disjunction between
text-machine and the referential aberration (the "ideology"
35. Bennington, "Aberrations: de Man (and) the Machine," in

Reading de Man Reading. 214.
352
or text-body) it produces. By detaching reference from
ontology, the text-machine severs the epistemo- referential
categories of truth and falsehood from their natural and
intentional referents, i.e., right and wrong. The ensuing
"ethical moment” reflects the obligation of the reader to
witness the fragile foundation of any moral system, whose
principles stand only as the ideological aberration of an
impersonal text-machine:
But in the allegory of unreadability, the imperatives of

truth and falsehood oppose the narrative syntax and
manifest themselves at its expense. The concatenation of
the categories of truth and falsehood with the values of
right and wrong is disrupted, affecting the economy of the
narration in decisive ways. We can call this shift in
economy ethical, since it indeed involves a displacement
from pathos to ethos. Allegories are always ethical, the
term ethical designating the structural interference of two
distinct value systems. In this sense, ethics has nothing
to do with the will (thwarted or free) of a subject, nor a
fortiori, with a relationship between subjects. The
ethical category is imperative (i.e., a category rather
than a value) to the extent that it is linguistic and not
subjective. Morality is a version of the same language
aporia that gave rise to such concepts as "man" or "love"
or "self," and not the cause or the consequence of such
concepts. The passage to an ethical tonality does not
result from a transcendent imperative but is the
referential (and therefore unreliable) version of a
linguistic confusion. Ethics (or, one should way,
ethicity) is a discursive mode among others. (206)
As I have argued above, however, Shelley's text urges a
more radical move by calling for a response outside of any
legitimative matrix. Her text demonstrates that the very
category of reference - the category to which de Man,
despite the most radical destabilization, must nevertheless
hold36 - is itself the problem. As the embodiment of
36. See Allegories of Reading. 207: "The heterogeneous

texture of Rousseau's allegorical narratives is less
353
automatic technology, the Frankenstein monster disturbs the
referential economy between truth and falsehood in a way
more fundamental than that envisioned by de Man: it puts
into question the very constitution of the ethical as a
response to (or witnessing of) referential undecideability.
If technology evades referential capture, it calls for an
ethical response - and a category of the technical - that
is not founded poetically, as simply one "discursive mode
among others."
Shelley's text, in short, exposes the technological
reduction underlying de Man's Romantic poetics: because de
Man can only interpret the machine as the purely formal
mechanism of grammar, his account of its impact is
necessarily restricted to the representational or "molar"
model of rhetoric, to the aberrant tropological systems or
referential figures that are generated by grammatical
positing. As the product of a more radical - i.e., non-
poietic - mode of production, the monster simply cannot be
recognized on this model of the text-machine. Shelley's
text thus demonstrates the necessity of maintaining the
independence of the ethical not only with respect to
epistemology (as Bennington urges), but more generally with
respect to the genetic model of textuality as such. The
"archi-performance" of the machine - its operation in
surprising if one keeps in mind that his radical critique

of referential meaning never implies that the referential
function of language could in any way be avoided,
bracketed, or reduced to being just one contingent
linguistic property among others..."
354
excess of any descriptive legitimation - cannot be
constrained to the production of aberrant referential
claims. Since the performance of any machine lies behind
the scenes of (attempted) legitimation to which it gives
rise, the ethical concerns the moment of disruption of such
legitimation - the moment in which the machine exceeds its
theorized function. Like any linguistic image generated by
a text-machine, the various narratives of legitimacy
generated, not secondarily and merely subsequently to the
invention of the machine, but in and as that very invention
must be recognized as aberrations and an ethical burden
must impose itself precisely in the absence of
legitimation. Bennington provides an example with his
analysis of Pascal's invention of the calculator:
...the prescriptive elements of the text are not simply

extraneous to, or superfluous with respect to, an
essentially performative legitimation, but ... the
apparently disruptive language of justice, legitimacy,
paternity, and signatures is in fact called up precisely by
the apparent indifference of the logic of performativity to
any such concerns. For the logic of the supplementary
machine is that it must be able to work independently of
inventor or father, that it is necessarily cut off from any
origin in Pascal's intentions or mental labor, that it can
be reproduced ad infinitum and respond promiscuously in the
hands of anyone at all. The "legitimate" machine has to
have its legitimacy certified, signed, and sealed,
precisely because in its essence it exceeds legitimacy. ..
(212, emphasis added)
When, however, the machine's performative disruption
radically compromises the linguistic structure of
reference, as it does in Shelley's text, its impact cannot
be recuperated within the textual model. The indifference
of the machine to its legitimation and to its destiny is
355
more radical than that permitted the "supplementary
machine." Like chance in Derrida's interpretation of
invention, the machine's functioning (its
"archiperformance") exceeds the dialectical amortization of
performativity operated in the de Manian ethics of
undecideability. The reduction of technology in de Man's
poetics generates an ethical dilemma that exceeds the
descriptive space of his restricted, genetic theory of
ethics.
It is precisely the emergence of ethics "outside" the
linguistic domain of textuality that comprises the
allegorical burden of Mary Shelley's minor Romanticism.
Against the dominant tendency of Romantic poetics to
glorify the creative or inventive power of the genius-poet,
Shelley's Frankenstein poses the problem of technical
"monstrosity" not in terms of propriety or legitimation,
but rather in terms of its molecular or sub-
representational impact on human experience.
IV. From the Sublime to the Uncanny: Toward an Aesthetic of

Technology
As Thomas Weiskel suggests in his study The Romantic
Sublime, the sublime can be viewed as the aesthetic
correlate of the poietic theory of invention.3^ For the
Romantics, it is the sublime that facilitates the poetic
work of genius, since it best captures the peculiar play of
37. Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins

UP, 1976), 7-8.
356
the poet with nature - the play in which he borrows his
creative orginality from nature's fount:
In Longinus' text, hypsos is a quality immanent in great

writing which refers us to eternity (aion); it is not
distinction itself, but that which produces distinction...
Hence it is the resource and the goal of great-souled men,
especially in times of cultural degeneracy. Hypsos may be
attained through the mimesis and emulation of the masters.
Longinus' Platonism is evident, and he was also influenced
by the Stoic conception of Nature (physis) as the
demiourgos, the "artificer of man"(43.5), who "implants in
our souls the unconquerable love of whatever is elevated
and more divine than we" (35.2). Nature is beneficial and
methodical, and it is thus possible to speak of her art as
the ground of that which is beyond human or technical art.
(1 2 )
Like the invention of the same, the sublime transpires
within a mental space, as the adjustment of the faculty of
imagination (thought) to the real (or what Kant will call
the "ideas of reason"). This subjective vocation of the
sublime is clearly attested in Kant's summation of its
referential burden, which "is not to be sought in the
things of nature, but only in our ideas."38 Like the
invention of the same, the sublime occurs as the
introduction of a "disparity or gap" in discourse: it
transpires as the essential destabilization of the
tropological and referential system comprising the economy
of aesthetic perception. As de Man points out in his
forceful reading of the Critique of Judgement, the shift
from "apprehension" (apprehensio) to "comprehension"
(comprehensio aesthetica) that underlies the subjective and
aesthetic recuperation of the sublime (as well as the very
38. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement. tr. Bernard (New

York: Hafner, 1951), 88.
357
necessity for the movement from the mathematical to the
dynamic sublime) disarticulates the tropological unity of
the imagination:
The necessity to extend the model of the mathematical

sublime, the system of number-extension, to the model of
the dynamic sublime as the system number-motion, as well as
the interpretation of motion as empirical power, is not
accounted for in philosophical terms in the analytics of
the sublime... The only way to account for it is as an
extension of the linguistic model beyond its definition as
a system of tropes. Tropes account for the occurrence of
the sublime but, as we saw, in such a restrictive and
partial way that the system could not be expected to remain
quiescent within its narrow boundaries. From the pseudo
cognition of tropes, language has to expand to the activity
of performance... The transition from the mathematical to
the dynamic sublime, a transition for which the
justification is conspicuously lacking in the text ...
marks the saturation of the tropological field as language
frees itself of its constraints and discovers within itself
a power no longer dependent on the restrictions of
cognition.39
The movement from outer to mental experience, from sensory
intuition (diachronic or successive apprehension of an
object) to the breakdown of synthetic comprehension - the
very movement which contains the essence of the sublime for
Kant (as for Longinus) — is thereby seen to depend on a
text-machine that detaches its referential functioning from
ontology (its noumenal source). In this sense, the sublime
comprises an exemplary instance of the de Manian "Romantic
image": as the aberrant production of a text-machine, it is
absolutely disjoined from sensory intuition and thus, as de
Man argues, is "not itself accessible to the powers of
transcendental philosophy" (which furnishes the laws for
39. Paul de Man, "Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant,"

in Silverman and Aylesworth, eds., The Textual Sublime. 17.
358
the constitution of objective sensory experience).
Turning to Shelley's employment of the Romantic motif
of the sublime, we should therefore expect to discover a
parallel to her modest theory of invention. In the same
way that her text resists the restriction of the ethical
within the textual, it parodies the linguistic theory of
the sublime as an impotent attempt to ward off the threat
of the real. Similarly, just as Shelley situates ethics at
an experiential level impervious to reference, she urges a
movement beyond the sublime, a reintroduction of aesthetic
experience beyond the linguistic. She urges, in other
words, a movement from the sublime to the uncanny - a
movement which, according to the Lacanian critic Mladen
Dolar, disturbs the autonomy of the symbolic order (the law
of the signifier) or, what amounts to the same thing, the
autonomy of the linguistic. Dolar documents this movement
by tracing Frankenstein's theme of the doppelgaenger:
We can now see the trouble with the double: the double is
that mirror image in which the object a is included. So
the imaginary starts to coincide with the real, provoking a
shattering anxiety. The double is the same as me plus the
object a, that invisible part of being added to my image
.......imagine that one could see one's mirror image close
its eyes: that would make the object as gaze appear in the
mirror. This is what happens with the double, and the
anxiety that the double produces is the surest sign of the
appearance of the object. ... Here the Lacanian account of
anxiety differs sharply from other theories: it is not
produced by a lack or a loss or an incertitude; it is not
the anxiety of losing something... On the contrary, it is
the anxiety of gaining something too much, of a too-close
presence of the object. What one loses with anxiety is
precisely the loss — the loss that made it possible to
deal with a coherent reality. "Anxiety is the lack of the
support of the lack," says Lacan; the lack lacks, and this
359
brings about the uncanny.40
The uncanny is the aesthetic category of the experiential
encounter with the real (and more narrowly with technical
automatism); while it shares with the sublime the breakdown
of imagination, i.e., representation, it retains a
rootedness in the material world that the linguistic
sublime cannot retain, but only revalue as a subjective
gain (pleasure) obtained with the restabilization of
representational power.
Shelley's text dramatizes this uncanny encounter as an
explicit parody of the sublime. Having grasped the above
examined failure of human law to constrain (or legitimate)
his monstrous invention, Frankenstein seeks a final escape
from his intolerable ethical burden: he retreats into the
solitude of nature where he will attempt a self-
transcending apostrophe to the natural force of the (West)
wind (?). This retreat into nature repeats a pattern that
has already transpired several times in the text - in each
case as the means of escaping his responsibility to/for the
monster and for recuperating from its physiological
correlate, illness. Frankenstein's presentation of the
natural landscape plays with commonplace notions of
Romantic aesthetics (as well as fixtures from Gothic
literature); Frankenstein, that is, experiences nature
according to well-demarcated aesthetic categories; his
40. Mladen Dolar, "'I Shall Be with You on Your Wedding-

Night': Lacan and the Uncanny," in October 58 (Fall 1991),
13.
assent brings him into the proximity of:
Ruined castles hanging on the precipices of piny mountains;

the impetuous Arve, and cottages every here and there
peeing forth from among the trees, formed a scene of
singular beauty. But is was augmented and rendered sublime
by the mighty Alps, whose white and shining pyramids and
domes towered above all, as belonging to another earth, the
habitations of another race of beings. (91)
In this passage and the numerous similar ones that populate
the novel's catalogue of natural scenes, Frankenstein
depicts himself as, literally, a prisoner of literary
convention. His experience of nature is thoroughly
mediated by Romantic categories that serve to transform
brute nature into an aesthetic object. Like Wordsworth
looking to nature for recuperation, Frankenstein finds in
his translation of nature a tranquility and self-
forgetfulness :
These sublime and magnificent scenes afforded me the

greatest consolation that I was capable of receiving. They
elevated me from all littleness of feeling; and although
they did not remove my grief, they subdued and tranquilized
it. In some degree, also, they diverted my mind from the
thoughts over which it had brooded for the last month. (93)
This calm restoration soon proves a too weak dose for a man
in Frankenstein's situation, as a change in the weather
brings the return of his "old feelings." Missing his
proximity to a thoroughly personified nature - to the
summits of the mountains, whose "faces" were then hidden by
clouds - Frankenstein sets out on a more ambitious pursuit.
Resolving to ascend the summit of Montanvert, he undertakes
the Romantic poet's archetypal quest for aesthetic
transfiguration:
I remembered the effect that the view of the tremendous and
361
ever-moving glacier had produced upon my mind when I first

saw it. It had then filled me with a sublime ecstasy that
gave wings to the soul, and allowed it to soar from the
obscure world to light and joy. (93-4)
The ascent is marked by the increasing desolation of the
landscape - a desolation that is accompanied by a mounting
sensitivity on Frankenstein's part:
The pines are not tall or luxuriant, but they are sombre
and add an air of severity to the scene. I looked on the
valley beneath; vast mists were rising from the rivers
which ran through it and curling in think wreaths around
the opposite mountains, whose summits were hid in the
uniform clouds, while rain poured from the dark sky, and
added to the melancholy impression I received from the
objects around me. (94)
Not incidentally - given his schooling in aesthetics -
Frankenstein's extreme sensibility leads him to lament the
powerlessness of man in the face of all powerful nature.
Before citing Percy Shelley's "On Mutability" as the apt
emblem of his sensory experience, Frankenstein is at the
point of confounding "wind" and "word" - of hearing
nature's muteness as articulated discourse:
Alas! why does man boast of sensibilities superior to

those apparent in the brute; it only renders them more
necessary beings. If our impulses were confined to hunger,
thirst, and desire, we might be nearly free; but now we are
moved by every wind that blows, and a chance word or scene
that word may convey to us. (94)
Man thus finds himself in a precarious predicament: if his
humanism derives from a superior sensibility with respect
to animals, this sensibility risks enslaving him to his
"poetic" vocation - to the all-too-human liability of
personifying what is "other."
While Frankenstein indulges himself in such poetic
melancholy, however, he comes to the top of the ascent.
362
Viewing the "awful majesty" of the Mont Blanc, his sorrow
gives way to joy; he resolves to turn his poetic
sensibility to advantage, enunciating an apostrophe to
nature that - reminiscent of Percy Shelley's "Ode to the
West Wind" - seeks to transcend'his sensory engagement with
the physical world in favor of a mental or "material" image
of the sublime:
From the side where I now stood Montanvert was exactly

opposite, at the distance of a league; and above it rose
Mont Blanc, in awful majesty. I remained in a recess of
the rock, gazing on this wonderful and stupendous scene.
... My heart, which was before sorrowful, now swelled with
something like joy; I exclaimed — "Wandering spirits, if
indeed ye wander, and do not rest in your narrow beds,
allow me this faint happiness, or take me, as your
companion, away from the joys of life.
Despite his mood swing from melancholy to joy - a mood
swing that takes its cue and draws its authority from the
natural scene - Frankenstein's apostrophe backfires.
Instead of the "faint happiness" of transitory unity with
nature (or a more permanent self-transcendence), the
response Frankenstein receives is the literal (and
terrifying) appearance of the monster:
As I said this, I suddenly beheld the figure of a man, at

some distance, advancing towards me with superhuman speed.
He bounded over the crevices in the ice, among which I had
walked with caution; his stature, also, as he approached,
seemed to exceed that of man. I was troubled: a mist came
over my eyes, and I felt a faintness seize me; but I was
quickly restored by the cold gale of the mountains. I
perceived, as the shape came nearer (sight tremendous and
abhorred!) that it was the wretch whom I had created. (95)
Far from producing the ecstatic epiphany anticipated by
Frankenstein, the sublime here culminates in personal and
social disaster. "Rage and horror" replace sublime joy,
363
depriving Frankenstein of his voice - the literal vehicle
of apostrophe. Following this prototypical fall, things
will never be the same for him: his attempts to retreat
from the everyday world give way to an increasingly
forceful obsession with the monster, leading directly
toward his death.
If Shelley's play with Romantic tropology parodies the
blindness of subjective recuperations of the real -
including the sublime - it does not just mark the limit of
language, but displaces the "arena” for ethical response
away from the too narrow linguistico-hermeneutic horizon
presupposed by apostrophe. When Frankenstein's apostrophe
misfires, it fails to bring off its performative effect,
its rhetorical magic: the animation of the inanimate. Yet,
if Frankenstein's poetic powers are dead, they are also
shown to be essentially powerless against the threat of the
real: the intrusion of the technical object. In this
sense, Shelley's text suggests that the failure of rhetoric
to capture the real cannot be explained (exclusively)
within the space of the "closure of representation," i.e.,
in language. Shelley's critique differs in principle,
then, from de Man's reading of the text-machine: it is not
the supplementary dependance of rhetoric on grammatical
positing that underlies the interruption of Frankenstein's
apostrophe. The failure of his apostrophe cannot be
ascribed to the autonomous textual movement of
deconstruction. Rather, the monster - as the embodiment of
364
automatic technology - constitutes a threat stemming from
outside the disjunctive juncture of grammar and rhetoric.
Its appearance announces a demand from the material world
that exceeds the textual horizon of thought and that
compromises its poetic operations.
The intrusion of the monster transforms a sublime
scene into a paradigm experience of what I above named the
technological uncanny. The misfiring of Frankenstein's
apostrophe is equivalent to a failure of his poetic
"vision" to grasp the purely "material" image that de Man
stresses in his reading of Kant. Not only does the monster
bring teleological considerations ("interests") back into
the sublime scene, but his appearance fractures the
autonomy underlying the material or poetic image that Kant,
in the section on the dynamical sublime, assimilates to
aesthetic (sublime) vision as such:
To call the ocean sublime, we must regard it as poets do,

merely by what strikes the eye [was der Augenschein zeigt]
- if it is at rest, as a clear mirror of water only bounded
by the heaven; if it is restless, as an abyss threatening
to overwhelm everything.41
It is this passage that de Man stresses in his own account
of the materiality of the sublime:
Heaven and ocean as building are a priori, previous to any

understanding, to any exchange or anthropomorphism which
will allow Wordsworth to address, in Book V of The Prelude,
the "speaking face of nature" [and which allows
Frankenstein, or at least Percy Shelley, to address the
"animating wind"]. There is no room for address in Kant's
flat, third person world. Kant's vision can therefore
hardly be called literal, ... [but must be called] a
material vision... In the same way and to the same extent
41. Kant, Critique of Judgement, op. cit., 111.
365
that this vision is purely material, devoid of any

reflexive or intellectual complication, it is also purely
formal, devoid of any semantic depth and reducible to the
formal mathematization or geometrization of pure optics.
The critique of the aesthetic ends up, in Kant, in a formal
materialism that runs counter to all values and
characteristics associated with aesthetic experience,
including the aesthetic experience of the beautiful and of
the sublime as described by Kant and Hegel themselves.42
If de Man's radicalization of the materiality of the
sublime destabilizes the tropological system comprising the
economy of the aesthetic experience it defines, it can be
argued that it essentially defines the sublime itself -
which, remember, quintessentially occurs (from Longinus to
Bloom) as the introduction of a "disparity or gap" in
discourse. As de Man points out, the material sublime thus
defines the sublime as an essentially impossible
experience: it marks the end of the sublime as a
(phenomenal) category of aesthetic experience.
In the primal scene of the sublime in Frankenstein.
however, it is precisely the articulation of such an
autonomous material image - the linguistic sublime - that
is put into question. As Barbara Freeman points out, the
appearance of the Kantian sublime in Frankenstein produces
"neither peace of mind nor aesthetic pleasure, but rather a
vision of and an encounter with monstrosity. Each time a
sublime landscape is depicted, it is linked to the
monster's appearance."43 With the appearance of the
42. Paul de Man, "Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant,"

op. cit., 22-23.
43. Barbara Freeman, "Frankenstein with Kant: A Theory of

Monstrosity, or the Monstrosity of Theory," Substance, No.
366
monster, the material sublime - generated through a
"vision" [Augenschein] purified of all teleological (and
ideological) concerns - is compromised. A different
materality intervenes - one that cannot be discovered in
the linguistico-phenomenological space of
invention/thought; this materiality - the materiality of
technological automatism - which approaches, as
Frankenstein observes, with "superhuman speed," destroys
the distance necessary for the material Augenschein.
The shock thus engendered cannot be transformed by a
trick of the imagination into a feeling of tranquil
superiority, as it is in the Kantian account. Rather, it
must be lived through as shock - as the encounter with a
technological materiality that, like the Freudian uncanny
once detached from its representational reduction (and the
Lacanian object a or "extimite," under the same condition),
cannot be experienced through representation, but only as
the aesthetic experience of the uncanny.
52 (1987), 24. On the sublime in Frankenstein. see also

Frances Ferguson, "The Nuclear Sublime," Diacritics (Summer
1984), 4-10; Mellor, 131-133.
CHAPTER 8
A CLEAR CONSCIENCE AND A NEW LIFE: THE DOMESTICATION OF THE

UNCANNY IN HEINRICH VON KLEIST'S "THE MARQUISE OF O— "
With the purest and sincerest

good will, I was always
filled with horror and
disgust by this writer, as
though by a body well
intended by nature, but in
the grip of an incurable
disease.
— J. W. von Goethe (of
Kleist)
...when will men again feel

in the natural Kleistian
manner, when will they learn
again to judge the meaning of
a philosophy with their
deepest and most sacred
feelings?
— Friedrich Nietzsche
If Friedrich Schlegel can be said to speak for his
age, German literature has produced no critic of
Romanticism more forceful than Heinrich von Kleist. From
his early twenties on, Kleist's work challenges Schlegel's
ecstatic enumeration (in the famous Athenaeum Fragment 216)
of the "great tendencies of the age" - the French
Revolution, Fichte's philosophy, and Goethe's Meister. The
rally-cry that Schlegel raises for a "revolution that isn't
noisy and materialistic" finds its most steadfast opponent
in Kleist, who can see in this no more than a profound
intellectualist evasion of the practical realities of
everyday life.
Kleist's position is perhaps most concisely

367
exemplified in his literary agon with the great Goethe.
His parody of Goethean pantheism - and the intellectualist
poetics that it grounds - constitutes nothing less than the
linchpin of his latter assault on Romanticism. The parodic
critique of Faust developed in Amphitryon lays out a
strategy that Kleist will refine in his later works and
will deploy successfully against both the Kantian subject
and the Goethean motif of the eternal feminine. By
radicalizing human cognitive limitations, Kleist
effectuates a "becoming-woman" of the subject which calls
for an empirical assimilation of the anorganic and the
acausal. Becoming-woman, the subject is able to experience
the non-cognizable and non-representable (and thus the
technological uncanny) without first domesticating it into
the "closure of representation." Since it ultimately
replaces the (male) aesthetics of the sublime with an
aesthetics of the uncanny, this becoming-woman opposes all
transcendentalizing movement, including the sublating
aesthetics of Hegel and the ironizing poetics of Schlegel.
I. On a Crash-Course with Goethe: the Kleistian Uncanny
Kleist's Amphitryon constitutes the primal scene of
this secularizing movement. It stages the credo of
pantheism - that the gods are, in the Wordsworthian phrase,
"all in all" - as an epistemological problem. Seduced by a
selfish and philandering god (Jupiter) who assumes the
guise of her husband (Amphitryon), a faithful wife
(Alkmena) must choose between god and man. She is,
however, absolutely unsuited for this choice, since (as a
mortal and a possibly impregnated woman), she is unable to
employ the godlike logic, the prosopopeic Aufhebung, which
finds consolation in the notion of a sublime pantheistic
unity: in the "truth" that Jupiter, since he is "[d]as was
da war, was 1st, und was sein wird" ["all things that were,
and are, and ever shall be"], is (also) Amphitryon.1 In
her textual study of Kleist and Goethe, Katharina Mommsen
has demonstrated how Kleist mimics Goethe's Faust in the
scene (Act II, v.) with which he supplements the legend.2
There, Jupiter's statement of the doctrine of pantheism -
the personification of nature - is ironically undercut by
his motives: the base seduction of an unwitting woman.
What Kleist's drama ultimately demonstrates is the
practical problem thus created for Alkmena qua woman: as
the mere pawn in a game of divine hubris, she can only wish
to be spared her predicament, since it allows for no
cognitive resolution. Following Jupiter's expansive
celebration of the pantheistic doctrine, she responds by
wishing for a return to earlier, simpler times: "Und koennt
ich einen Tag zuruecke leben,/ Und mich vor alien Goettern
und Heroen/ In meine Klause riegelfest verschliessen, / So
1. Heinrich von Kleist, JDramen, Zweiter Teil (Muenchen:

Carl Hanser Verlag, 1964), 157. English translation: by
Charles Passage, in Kleist, Plavs (New York: Continuum,
1982), 162.
2. Mommsen, Kleists Kampf mit Goethe (Heidelberg: Lothar

Stiehm Verlag, 1974), 19-24.
370
willigt ich -"(133).3 Yet, because she has conceived a
child in the process, there can be no fulfillment of this
wish. In Kleist's handling, the practical consequences of
the sublime pantheistic doctrine come to the fore: behind
its poetic transcendence, the human subject experiences an
uncanny predicament - the utter failure of cognition to
grasp the real. The poetics of personification is thereby
shown up as a fundamental evasion of the practical and the
everyday: no retreat into the sublime will explain away the
practical - and incomprehensible - impact of Jupiter's
selfish deed.
If Kleist's drama ultimately resolves this problem by
championing the power of the gods, its critique of Goethe
prepares the way for Kleist's later treatment of the same
issue in "Die Marquise von O— ."4 In this novella, the
3. English: "If I could just live backwards one day's

time,/ And shut myself away inside my room/ From gods and
heroes, under lock and key,/ I would be willing . . . "
(Plavs. 137).
4. I have consulted several secondary source accounts of

Kleist's story, including: Walter Mueller-Seidel, Verstehen
und Erkennen: Ein Studien Ueber Heinrich von Kleist (Koln
und Graz: Boehlau Verlag, 1967); Robert Helbling, The Major
Works of Heinrich von Kleist (New York: New Directions,
1975) ; Denys Dyer, The Stories of Kleist: A Critical Study
(New York: Holmes & Meier Publishers, 1977; John Gearey,
Heinrich von Kleist: A Study in Tragedy and Anxiety
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1968);
James M. McGlathery, Desire's Sway: The Plavs and Stories
of Heinrich von Kleist (Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1983);
Dorrit Cohn, "Kleist's 'Marquise von O...': The Problem of
Knowledge," Monatshefte, Vol. 67, No. 2, 1975, 129-144;
Jochen Schmidt, Heinrich von Kleist: Studien zu seiner
poetischen Verfahrensweise (Tuebingen: Niemeyer Verlag,
1974) ; Peter Horn, Heinrich von Kleists Erzaehlunaen
(Koenigstein: Scriptor, 1978); Gerhard Fricke, Gefuehl und
Schicksal bei Heinrich von Kleist (Berlin: Neue Forschung,
371
uncanny predicament underlying the transcendentalizing
sublime is completely detached from all ties to the divine.
A female subject, the Marquise, is faced with a crisis;
raped while unconscious, she finds herself in an unbearable
predicament: she is pregnant without any knowledge of the
cause. In this sense, the Marquise is like any number of
Kleistian heros: enduring what can loosely be called a
natural catastrophe, the Marquise finds her circumstances
suddenly altered in an entirely unfathomable way. For
example, her situation appears at first glance to parallel
that of the lovers in "Das Erdbeben in Chili11 ["The
Earthquake in Chile"] who, with the occurrence of an
earthquake, are granted reprieve from imminent death. From
her standpoint, the rape is like the destructive fury of
nature unleashing itself as an earthquake, since it
punctuates her life in a way that is beyond her ken. In
both cases, the human subject is confronted with a
disrupting intrusion of the real.
Yet the Marquise's violation differs from such a
natural disaster in an important respect: whereas the
earthquake disrupts causal explanations about the external
world and questions the legitimacy of human law, the rape
disturbs the Marquise's causal construction of her own
selfhood. Unable to represent to herself the "cause" of
1929); Walter Silz, Heinrich von Kleist: Studies in His

Characters (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
1961); Helmut Koopmann, "Das 'raetselhafte Faktum' und
seine Vorgeschichte: Zum analytischen Charakter der
Novellen Heinrich von Kleists," Zeitschrift fuer deutsche
Philologie 84, 1965, 508-550.
372
her pregnancy, she cannot integrate the event, and its real
consequence, into the self-representation that comprises
her self-knowledge.
This difference can be defined in terms of the
aesthetic categories of the sublime and the uncanny: while
the sublime adequately characterizes causal breaches
produced by external events, invocation of the uncanny is
necessary in the case of breaches of an internal origin.5
After the initial terror it produces, the earthquake can be
recuperated into a sublime representation of the
unrepresentable. The source of the sublime - nature's (or
God's) force - is put at a distance and the painful
experience of imaginative failure is transformed into a
pleasurable aesthetic feeling.6 It is hardly accidental,
therefore, that the lovers in "Das Erdbeben1'
retrospectively view the earthquake as an expression of
God's "unbegreifliche und erhabene Macht" [inconceivable
and sublime power].7
No such distanciation is possible in the Marquise's
case. Precisely because it strikes at something intimate -
5. In the dissertation, this distinction is defined at

length in a preceding chapter.
6. For a comprehensive treatment of the sublime, see Thomas

Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP,
1976).
7. "Das Erdbeben in Chili," in Saemtliche Erzaehlunaen und

Anekdoten (Muenchen: Hanser Verlag-DTV, 1977), 154.
English translation, "The Earthquake in Chile," in The
Marquise von 0— and Other Stories, tr. David Luke and
Nigel Reeves (Middlesex, England and New York: Penguin,
1978), 61.
373
the Marquise's own knowledge of and propriety over her
"self" - the intrusion of the real cannot be neutralized
through aesthetic revaluation. Unlike the earthquake,
whose impact is punctual, the rape presents the Marquise
with an entirely empirical and practical problem which is
nevertheless uncanny in the highest degree. Like Victor
Frankenstein, she must deal with something that, to her
rational faculty, can be nothing other than an absolutely
uncaused effect, a sort of modern day miracle. Her
predicament thus fits the anti-Freudian model of the
uncanny linked by Freud's predecessor, the psychologist E.
Jentsch, to automatic and/or mechanical processes in
nature.8 To her mind, her pregnancy is what we might call
a "freak of nature" or - in the words Aristotle uses to
define "automatic" (i.e., inhuman or non-rationalizable)
chance - "contrary to nature" [para physin]. It is uncanny
because it defies the modern principle of reason, the
principle defining the real (or the existent) as that which
has a determinable cause.9
Yet, Kleist's story adds something significant to this
definition. By portraying the uncanny effect as something
radically intimate and untranscendable - that is, as a
miraculous conception - Kleist seems to suggest that the
female subject is, by dint of her marginality within the
8. See Freud's account of Jentsch in nDas Unheimliche."
9. I have previously developed Aristotle's category of the

"automatic" and its ambivalent relation to the Western
"principle of reason" in my first chapter.
374
patriarchal symbolic order, in a privileged position to
experience it. What Kleist helps us to see, I suggest, is
the special facility of the female subject to experience
what remains unrepresentable for the male (Kantian) subject
of reason. By narrating the "becoming-woman" of the
subject, he thus makes a virtue of something that feminist
criticism has treated as a gender-determinate limitation.
Whereas the (male) rational subject follows the Kantian
recipe for experience - and thus limits "possible
experience" to what can be constructed according to the
apriori "forms of intuition" and "categories" - the female
subject, exemplified by the Marquise, has no such
"privilege." Forced to live^with^etfects^that— eannstr^be-----
schematized causally, it is the female subject who is
responsive to the "molecular" or sub-representational
forces composing the real.
The significance of the becoming-woman theorized by
Kleist becomes clear in the light of my critique of
linguistic theory's failure to address the incremental
impact of technology. As a "deterritorialization" of the
Kantian subject, it opens experience [Erlebnis] to the
intensive or quantitative impact of shock whose radical
increase Walter Benjamin correlated with the
technologization of the modern world.10 It is this
Kleistian becoming-woman of the subject that liberates
10. I have discussed Benjamin's theory of experience in a

previous chapter.
375
experience from the restrictive (phenomenological)
"threshold of perception." As the exemplary anti-Kantian
movement, becoming-woman focuses on the "imperceptible" -
that is, on movement itself - as the constituent matter or
content of experience [Frlebnis]:
Movement has an essential relation to the imperceptible; it

is by nature imperceptible. Perception can grasp movement
only as the displacement of a moving body or the
development of a form. Movements, becomings, in other
words, pure relations of speed and slowness, pure affects,
are below and above the threshold of perception.11
In light of this valorization of the imperceptible, the
marginalization of the female subject typically bemoaned by
psychoanalytically-centered feminist criticism is
transformed into a strength. For it is precisely the
female subject's inability to frame or to represent the
"cause" of her predicament that explains her ability to
experience [erlejben] technology "below and above the
threshold of perception." Far from simply marking a
powerlessness that bolsters an imaginary male fantasy of
omnipotence, her representational failure can also be seen
as an advantage, in that it attunes her to the incremental
movements which compose the real.
To appreciate the significance of this Kleistian
becoming-woman, we have only to evaluate it in the light of
recent feminist criticism of filmic horror. In effect,
Kleist inverts the aesthetic hierarchy between the sublime
11. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, tr. Brian

Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1987) , 280-
81.
376
and the uncanny which implicitly informs such criticism's
hierarchical distinction between "the desiring look of the
male-voyeur-subject" and the "woman's look of horror." He
transforms the woman's lack of distance from the monster -
and her consequent inability to look - into an advantage:
unable to represent the monster, she must experience its
threat as real and/or literal. It is only in this way, I
suggest, that those (Kleistian) human predicaments which
remain cognitively undecidable can be lived through.
Kleist thus furnishes a reading of the experience of
"horror" that provides an alternative to feminist film
criticism, which, despite its critical aim, continues to
valorize the (male) bias in favor of representation.
Initially, however, both Kleist and feminist criticism
agree in distinguishing the male and the female looks
according to the criterion of distance that conditions
representation. In a reading of Murnau's Nosferatu, Linda
Williams develops this distinction:
...Nina's look at the vampire fails to maintain the

distance between observer and observed so essential to the
"pleasure" of the voyeur. For where the (male) voyeur's
properly distanced look safely masters the potential threat
of the (female) body it views, the woman's look of horror
paralyzes her in such a way that distance is overcome; the
monster or the freak's own spectacular appearance holds her
originally active, curious look in a trancelike passivity
that allows him to master her through her look.12
Kaja Silverman's analysis of the shower scene in Psycho
makes a similar point. Like Williams, Silverman attributes
12. Linda Williams, "When the Woman Looks," in Film Theory

and Criticism, ed. Mast, Cohen, and Braudy (New York and
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 564.
the female subject's (and the spectator's) inability to
frame the murderer to the lack of the proper distance
necessary for cinematic representation:
There are nine shots inside the shower before Marion's

killer attacks. They are remarkable for their brevity, and
for their violation of the 3 0-degree rule (the rule that at
least 30-degrees of space must separate the position of the
camera in one shot from that which follows it in order to
justify the intervening cut).13
While the exposure of the patriarchal apparatus at work in
these exemplary scenes is certainly significant (since it
reveals the partiality of the male symbolic order), the
line of affiliation Kleist draws between the female subject
and the (technological) uncanny points in another
direction. For it is exactly her representational
"failure" that grants her privilege, and also her
exemplarity. If the female subject cannot frame the
technology that is seeking (or that is being directed) to
frame her, she is not alone in her predicament. In her
"failure," she embodies the predicament of the modern
subject (including that of the male subject) in its
relation with technology. Because she is unable to flee
the threat of the real by entering the symbolic, "the hedge
against the real,"14 she experiences technology in a way
undistorted by the deformation to which the symbolic order
subjects it. Her submission to the "gaze" of the monster -
13. Kaja Silverman, "On Suture" from The Subject of

Semiotics, quoted in Film Theory and Criticism. 206.
14. Joan Copjec, "Vampires, Breast-Feeding, and Anxiety" in

October 58 (Fall 1991), 31.
378
and her inability to master and revalue it as a "sublime
truth" - mark her vulnerability to the real, but also, and
I suggest more importantly, grant her a privileged
position; unlike the male subject who wards off uncanny
anxiety by fleeing the threat of the real - by symbolizing
or sublating the impact of technology - she cannot but
dwell with the threat, cannot but let the threat permeate
her everyday existence. She thus lives with the uncanny in
a way unimaginable on the Lacanian model.
In narrating the becoming-woman of the subject, Kleist
brings the uncanny into the realm of everyday experience,
where it embodies the peculiar experience of cognitive or
representational failure that, as I have argued, embodies
the relation of immanence binding technology to the
subject.15 For all that, however, Kleist does not just
celebrate the female subject's ability to accept the
15. In this way, Kleist's treatment of the uncanny differs

fundamentally from that of the Lacanians. He does not
treat the uncanny - and its exemplary cinematic scene of
the female subject's representational failure - as a
fantasy projection of the impossiblility of witnessing the
primal scene, of coinciding with the object a or "object
cause of desire" to which the subject owes its being. For
a statement of the Lacanian theory of the uncanny, see for
example, Mladen Dolar's article, "'I Shall Be with You on
Your Wedding Night': Lacan and the Uncanny," in October 58,
op. cit., 13: "...the Lacanian account of anxiety differs
sharply from other theories: it is not produced by a lack
or a loss or an incertitude; it is not the anxiety of
losing something (the firm support, one's bearings, etc.).
On the contrary, it is the anxiety of gaining too much, of
a too-close presence of the object. What one loses with
anxiety is precisely the loss - the loss that made it
possible to deal with a coherent reality. 'Anxiety is the
lack of the support of the lack,' says Lacan; the lack
lacks, and this brings about the uncanny."
uncanny intrusion of the technological outside; rather, he
shows how that acceptance opens the possibility for a new
relation with technology - a becoming-technological of the
subject.
In "Die Marquise von O— ," Kleist thus does more than
link the technological uncanny with the problem of self-
representation; he narrates a movement beyond the memorial
horizon defining the boundaries of the Kantian rational
self - a movement which permits the integration of
something that, from the perspective of Kantian causal
reason, is literally not a possible experience. With the
character of the Marquise, Kleist brings to completion the
subversion of the Enlightenment subject that commenced with
his 1801 Kant-crisis and that led him to take on Goethe.
It is this movement that I shall now trace.
II. First Movement: Kleist's Kantkrisis
Of the numerous monumental events in Kleist's short
life, the breakdown occasioned by "the newest so-called
Kantian philosophy" is perhaps the most significant.
According to his own account, the reading of Kant deprived
him of his "highest goal" and left him unable to work. In
a letter of March 22, 1801, addressed to his fiancee
Wilhelmine, Kleist explains the cause of his despair with
an account of the epistemological consequences of Kant's
thesis on the transcendental ideality of the material
world:
380
Wenn alle Menschen statt der Augen gruene Glaeser haetten,

so wuerden sie urteilen muessen, die Gegenstaende, welche
sie dadurch erblicken, sind gruen - und nie wuerden sie
entscheiden koennen, ob ihr Auge ihnen die Dinge zeigt, wie
sie sind, oder ob es nicht etwas zu ihnen hinzutut, was
nicht ihnen, sondern dem Auge gehoert. So ist es mit dem
Verstande. Wir koennen nicht entscheiden, ob das, was wir
Wahrheit nennen, wahrhaft Wahrheit ist, oder ob es uns nur
so scheint. 1st das letzte, so ist die Warheit, die wir
hier saiameln, nach dem Tode nicht mehr - und alles
Bestreben, ein Eigentum sich zu erwerben, das uns auch in
das Grab folgt, is vergeblich.
What Kleist seems to find objectionable in Kant's
philosophy is nothing less than the central thesis of Die
Kritik der reinen Vernunft: that we can know the material
world not as it is "in itself" [an-sich] but only as it
appears to us phenomenally. If we take Kleist at his word,
that is, he appears unable to make the Copernican turn,
unable to let go of the rootedness of phenomenal life in a
noumenal reality. It would therefore seem that Kleist
simply misunderstands the Kantian doctrine, since Kant's
entire effort is marshalled toward the goal of guaranteeing
the objectivity of phenomenal reality subjectively. Kant,
that is, sacrifices metaphysical realism only to reclaim
subjectively the ahistorical truth it guarantees. If we
16. Heinrich von Kleist, Saemtliche Werke und Briefe,

Zweiter Band (Muenchen: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1952), 634.
English translation: Philip B. Miller, An Abyss Deep
Enough: Letters of Heinrich von Kleist (New York: E.P.
Dutton, 1975), 95: "If everyone saw the world through green
glasses, they would be forced to judge that everything they
saw was green, and could never be sure whether their eyes
saw things as they really are, or did not add something of
their own to what they saw. And so it is with our
intellect. We can never be certain that what we call Truth
is really Truth, or whether it does not merely appear so to
us. If the latter, then the Truth that we acquire here is
not Truth after our death, and it is all a vain striving
for a possession that may never follow us into the grave."
381
cannot know "das Ding-an-sich," still the fixed and
universal structures of our sensibility and intellect - the
apriori forms of intuition (space and time) and the
categories - preserve the objectivity of our knowledge, and
indeed can be said to make possible such objectivity in the
first place.
If critics have not taken Kleist to task for the
amateurism of such an interpretation, neither can they be
said to treat his objection as a serious one.
Interpretations tend typically to whitewash Kleist's
specific arguments, both in the Kant letters and the later
literary works, dissolving the Kant-crisis into a "general
disillusionment" concerning human reason, that - when mixed
with Kleist's pathological quest for subjective certainty
or a "firm inner disposition" - yields the form of
skepticism for which he has long been celebrated. Robert
Helbling's account is exemplary in this respect, since it
construes Kleist's obsession with feeling (an obsession
previously commended by no less an authority than
Nietzsche) as a sort of practical supplement to Kant's
ep istemo1ogy:
The question then is ... what ideals were shattered in

[Kleist] by the Critical Philosophy. ... [Factors in
Kleist's psychological make-up] suggest that he used Kant's
philosophy as a ready-made foil for his own personal
anguish, which he could never entirely conceal behind the
borrowed philosophical optimism of his precrisis days.17
For this reason, Helbling concludes, it is "of minor
17. Helbling, 25.
382
importance to know exactly with which work of 'Kantian'
philosophy to associate [Kleist's] crisis." (32) Since
Kleist's various dramatizations of the "gebrechliche
Einrichtung der Welt" ["fragile order of the world"] all
presuppose the phenomenal constitution of objectivity that
comprises the core of Kant's thesis concerning the
transcendental ideality of the external world, his later
work appears to back away from any serious confrontation
with Kant. Kleist's critical function is limited to that
of philosophical gadfly.
I suggest, however, that Kleist's work raises an
objection far more radical than what is typically found in
the secondary literature. By dramatizing the practical
limitations of Kantian epistemology - and specifically its
hypostatization of memory - Kleist's fictional texts
(especially the stories) allegorize the disjunction between
the theoretical (linguistic) doctrine of causality and
practical life.
It is this disjunction that Kleist experiences for the
first time during the Kant-crisis. Reading Kant did not
just force him to confront the cognitive impossibility of
foundational certainty; his crisis cannot be restrictively
described as a "crisis of undecidability."18 Rather,
18. Cf. Andrzej Warminski, "A Question of an Other Order:

Deflections of the Straight Man," Diacritics. vol. IX,
Winter 1979, 76: "...the reason his goal is sunk is not
only that he is now convinced 'that here below no truth is
to be found,' but that the "relation between objective and
subjective knowledge, truth and verisimilitude, Wahrheit
and Wahrscheinlichkeit, is undecidable... [that] [i]n short
383
reading Kant forced him to renounce the practical or
experiential relevance of any predetermined theoretical
foundation or "goal in life" ["Lebensziel"]. The
debilitating skepticism Kleist describes is thus
irreducibly practical; he is not concerned with cognitive
undecidability, but with his own experiential paralysis.
His inability to touch a book [habe ich nicht wieder ein
Buch angerueht], his inner revulsion from knowledge [aber
mich ekelt vor allem, was Wissen heisst] are but symptoms
of a forced inactivity or indisposition [Untaetigkeit].
What Kleist bemoans in his post-crisis attempts to read
(and to think) is not the impossibility of achieving
decidable meaning, but rather the more crippling inability
to find, through reading, a guiding purpose for his
practical life. His failed reading of the "Kettentraeger"
(an anonymous novel attributed to Goethe's disciple
Friedrich Klinger) is a case in point:
Die Rede [im "Kettentraeger"] war von Dingen, die meine

Seele laengst schon selbst bearbeitet hatte. Was darin
gesagt ward, war von mir schon laengst im voraus widerlegt.
Ich fing schon an unruhig zu blaettern, als der Verfasser
nun gar von ganz fremdartigen politischen Haendeln
weitlaeufig au raesonieren anfing - Und das soil die
Nahrung sein fuer meinen gluehenden Durst? - Ich legte
still und beklommen das Buch auf dem Tisch, ich drueckte
mein Haupt auf das Kissen des Sofa, eine unaussprechliche
Leere erfuellte mein Inneres, auch das letzte Mittel, mich
zu heben, war fehlgeschlagen — Was sollst du nun tun, rief
ich? Nach Berlin zurueckkehren ohne Entschluss? Ach, es
ist der schmerzlichste Zustand ganz ohne ein Ziel zu sein,
nach dem unser Inneres, froh-beschaeftigt, fortschreitet -
und das war ich jetzt - (635)19
the crisis of reading (Kant) is a crisis of

undecidability."
19. English: "[The Chain-bearer] spoke of things that my
384
In short, what the reading of Kant destroyed for Kleist was
the very possibility of theorizing his "self" - of
"expressing" [auszusprechen] his "innermost being" [das
Inneres] in a language whose conceptual overdetermination
prevents the grasp of complex feelings. Through his
expressive impotence and feeling of inner emptiness, Kleist
experiences the non-representational status of the Kantian
self as an irreducibly practical problem. His inability to
cognize inner confusion literally enacts the denial of
objectivity that Kant imposes on feelings, when (in the
third Kritik) he distinguishes them from "sensations" in
the proper sense:
Wenn eine Bestimmung des Gefuehls der Lust oder Unlust

Empfindung gennant wird, so bedeutet dieser Ausdruck etwas
ganz anderes, als wenn ich die Vorstellung einer Sache
(durch Sinne, als eine zum Erkenntnisvermoegen gehoerige
Rezeptivitaet) Empfindung nenne. Denn im letzteren Falle
wird die Vorstellung auf das Objekt, im ersteren aber
lediglich auf das Subjekt bezogen, und dient zu gar keinem
Erkenntnisse, auch nicht zu demjenigen, wodurch sich das
Subjekt selbst erkennt.20
soul had already wrestled with long ago, things that I had
long since refuted in my mind. I began leafing through it
impatiently when the author began discussing entirely
irrelevant political events at great length. Was this then
to be the satisfaction for my parched thirst? Silent and
dejected, I laid the book on the table, rested my head on
the sofa cushion, an unspeakable emptiness filled my
innermost being, the last remedy had failed to uplift me.
What will you do not, I thought? Return to Berlin without
a resolve? Ah, it is the most painful state of mind to be
completely without a goal in life, something toward which
our inner self, in joyful occupation, might unswervingly
progress - but such was my state at that moment." (Miller,
97)
20. Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft (Hamburg: Felix

Meiner Verlag, 1990), 42-43. English translation: Critique
of Judgement. tr. J. H. Bernard (New York: Hafner, 1951),
40: "If a determination of the feeling of pleasure or pain
is called sensation, this expression signifies something
385
With his failure to represent or objectify his internal
state, Kleist thus lives a "truth" about the self - that it
lacks a proper content or "manifold" - which Kant need
merely recognize as a theoretical given.
If Kleist's innerliche Unruhe ["internal unrest"]
presents the disjunction between cognition and action as a
fundamental practical problem, the aftermath of the Kant-
crisis yields an escape-route from the debilitating
skepticism that had shattered the innermost sanctum of his
soul [hat mich in dem Heiligtum meiner Seele erschuettert] .
Working-through his Kant-problem, what Kleist discovers is
quite simply the constitutive role of action in an unstable
and ultimately unfathomable world. In a precrisis letter
(to Ulrike, 2/5/1801), Kleist gives an account of the move
that will later bring him out of his paralysis:
Liebe Ulrike, es ist ein bekannter Gemeinplatz, dass das

Leben ein schweres Spiel sei; und warum ist es schwer?
Weil man bestaendig und immer von neuem eine Karte ziehen
soil und doch nicht weiss, was Trumpf ist; ich meine darum,
weil man bestaendig und immer von neuem handeln soil und
doch nicht weiss, was recht ist. Wissen kann unmoeglich
das Hoechste sein - handeln is besser als wissen. (629)21
quite different from what I mean when I call the

representation of a thing (by sense, as a receptivity
belonging to the cognitive faculty) sensation. For in the
latter case the representation is referred to the object,
in the former simply to the subject, and is available for
no cognition whatever, not even for that by which the
subject cognizes itself."
21. English: "Dear Ulrike, it is a well-known commonplace

that life is a game; and why is it difficult? Because one
is forever expected to throw out a new card, but without
knowing what is trump; by which I mean, one is forever
expected to act but without knowing what is right.
Knowledge cannot possibly be man's highest: to do is better
than to know." (Miller, 93)
386
It is man's subjection to chance - to the "Strome der Welt"
and the "Strudel des Lebens" - that calls for the shift to
action which Kleist describes. Unable to know in advance
the impact of his action and to understand "life" before
acting, man must follow where his "Natur triebt."
Kleist's own predicament thus comprises a prototype
for the Kleistian hero; like his fictional characters, he
lacks the kind of psychological insight requisite for
meaningful action. One could even say that Kleist resolves
his Kant-crisis by constructing himself as the hero of a
real-life Novelle, the curious genre which Friedrich
Schlegel dubbed "an analytical novel without psychology."
It is certainly the case that Kleist's turn to action
brings with it a rhetorical revolution; the hyperbolic
rhetoric of inferiority characteristic of the crisis period
gives way to the rigorous eschewal of psychological
representation that identifies the Kleistian novella.
Caught in a "raetzelhaften Zustand..., mit einem innerlich
heftigen Trieb zur Taetigkeit, und doch ohne Ziel"
["enigmatic condition, with a passionately intense drive to
do something, and yet with no goal"], Kleist experiences a
form of forgetting (or non-knowledge) that, as Deleuze and
Guattari propose, is central to the "essence" of the
novella as a literary genre:
...the novella has little to do with a memory of the past

or an act of reflection; quite to the contrary, it plays
upon a fundamental forgetting. It evolves in the element
of "what happened" because it places us in a relation with
something unknowable and imperceptible (and not the other
way around: it is not because it speaks of a past about
387
which it can no longer provide us knowledge). ... The

novella has a fundamental relation to secrecy (not with a
secret matter or object to be discovered, but with the form
of the secret, which remains impenetrable)...22
The Kleistian predicament (his own, but also that of his
characters) is thus more radical than has been suggested by
his critics. Since he categorically forecloses all
possibility of representing inner knowledge, his paralysis
cannot be explained on the model of psychological
breakdown: it is due not simply to the expressive or
linguistic failure ensuing from the psychic impact of
"violent and conflicting emotion," but to a fundamental and
constitutive incapacity of language to present inner
states.2 3
What I am suggesting is that the stylistic trademark
of Kleist's authorship - the rhetoric of exteriority, of
hyperbole and irony - finds its source in the resolution of
the Kant-crisis. As his post-crisis letters attest, Kleist
is able to escape his paralysis by travelling; recourse to
external reality furnishes fresh content with which, I
suggest, he is able construct his "self-representation."
Ultimately, this recourse to outer representations embodies
the central principle in a fundamental modification of
22. Deleuze and Guattari, 193.
23. Cf. Dorrit Cohn, "Kleist's Marquise von O— : The

Problem of Knowledge," for an exemplary statement of the
prevalent critical view of this issue: "If Kleist so rarely
presents inside views of his characters it is because their
psyches are usually subject to such violent and conflicting
emotions that words are powerless to describe them, the
narrator's as well as their own."(140)
388
Kant's doctrine of self-knowledge that I shall develop in
detail below.
Kleist first mentions his impulse to travel at the end
of the famous letter to Wilhelmine. Travel, he seems to
think, will bring him an escape from his cognitive
obsession:
Liebe Wilhelmine, lass mich reisen. Arbeiten kann ich

nicht, das ist nicht moeglich, ich weiss nicht zu welchem
Zwecke. Ich muesste, wenn ich zu Hause bliebe, die Haende
in den Schoss legen, und denken. So will ich lieber
spazieren gehen, und denken. Die Bewegung auf der Reise
wird mir zutraeglicher sein, als dieses Brueten auf einem
Flecke. Ist es eine Verirrung, so laesst sie sich
vergueten, und schuetzt mich vor einer anderen, die
vielleicht unwiderruflich waere. (635)24
To rid himself of the burden of Kantianism, Kleist
therefore sets out on that archetypal quest of the male
Romantic poet - the quest for solace, away from sociality,
in the sublimity of nature. Like Victor Frankenstein, it
is a fear of responsibility that motivates him:
...nur ruhig kann ich jetzt nicht sein, in der Stube darf
ich nicht darueber brueten, ohne vor den Folgen zu
erschrecken. Im Freien werde ich freier denken koennen.
Hier in Berlin finde ich nichts, das mich auch nur auf
einen Augenblick erfreuen koennte. In der Natur wird das
besser sein. (638)25
24. English: "Dear Wilhelmine, grant me time to travel.

Studying is out of the question, it is impossible, it would
serve no purpose. I would be condemned, if I stayed at
home, to sit with my hands folded and think. I would
rather walk and think. Movement on a journey would seem
more bearable that this brooding in one place. If this is
a confusion of some kind it will heal, and protect me from
another that would perhaps prove incurable." (Miller, 97)
25. English: "...but I cannot be at peace now, I cannot sit

brooding on it here in my room without fearing for the
consequences. At large, I shall be able to think more
clearly. Here in Berlin, I find nothing that could cheer
me even for a single moment. In nature it will be better."
That Kleist ends up in Dresden and then Paris, rather than
in Chamonix or on the Mont Blanc, should be enough to
dispel the analogy with Frankenstein. For if both seek
self-transcendence, their means could hardly be more
different; while Frankenstein seeks absolution in the
Romantic sublime, Kleist craves engagement in the worldly.
A newly discovered appreciation for beauty attests to his
hunger for presence: "Nichts war so faehig mich so ganz
ohne alle Erinnerung wegzufuehren von dem traurigen Felde
der Wissenschaft, als diese in dieser Stadt gehaeuften
Werke der Kunst."26 Unlike Frankenstein, Kleist's intense
quest for "forgetfulness" does not lead outside the self,
but rather into unexplored dimensions of self-experience -
into the imperceptible. For this reason, Kleist's
"forgetfulness" and his turn to outer representations must
be seen as a first stage in a new self-fashioning.
The principle of this new self-fashioning - what I
have already called the "becoming-technological" of the
subject - is the new kind of "being for space" that it
imposes on the Kantian formula for self-knowledge. Deleuze
and Guattari call it "Kleist travel" (as opposed to "Goethe
travel") or, alternatively, "voyaging smoothly" (and not
"in striation"). It enacts a kind of becoming ("a
difficult, uncertain becoming") that eschews the
(Miller, 99)
26. English: "Nothing could have led me with such total

forgetfulness from the melancholy fields of learned
abstractions as has the art collected in this city."
(Miller, 105)
390
demarcation of movement as progress via indices that are
educational, memorial or cultural; on the smooth-journey,
the subject experiments in an amnesic space, moving forward
in a manner absolutely without relation to the (memorial)
history of its reason.2^ Such travel allows for movement
beyond the paralytic "madness of words" ensuing from the
hermeneutic subject's inability to make sense of random
events that are, as Paul de Man puts it in "Shelley
Disfigured," absolutely without any "relation, positive or
negative, to anything that precedes, follows, or exists
elsewhere."28 Eschewing memory entirely, the subject casts
off its dependance on hermeneutic (memorial) modes of
understanding, turning instead to a more robust notion of
experience as experimentation and/or Erlebnis.29
Kleist will formalize this model of smooth travel in
Ueber die Allmaehliche Verfertigung der Gedanken beim Reden
["On the Gradual Fabrication of Thoughts While Speaking"]
(1805), a text which deserves to be considered the very
manifesto of Kleist's war against Kantianism, since it
27. Cf. Deleuze and Guattari, 482.
28. Paul de Man, "Shelley Disfigured," in The Rhetoric of

Romanticism (New York: Columbia UP, 1984), 122.
29. In this way, the subject sidesteps entirely the double

bind of the de Manian language machine which demonstrates
the necessity of a necessarily aberrant hermeneutic
recuperation. The above-cited text from "Shelley
Disfigured" continues: "[The Triumph of Life] also warns us
why and how these events then have to be reintegrated in a
historical and aesthetic system of recuperation that
repeats itself regardless of the exposure of its fallacy."
(122)
391
spurns the rational provincialism of the "reproductive
synthesis" whose operation organizes and enables Kantian
self-knowledge. It is hardly incidental that the problem
Kleist proposes to address in this essay does not concern
the formal properties of thinking, but the entirely
practical and empirical process of thought production.30
Thoughts are not generated through a purely interior
process of reasoning, along the lines of the Kantian
genesis of thought-content through the formal conjunction
of sensation and concept. Indeed, the recipe Kleist gives
for fabricating thoughts becomes useful only upon the
failure of "meditation." In such cases, only the recourse
to some external factor, unrelated in form or content to
the matter at hand, can facilitate the successful
fabrication. By contending that l'idee vient en parlant,
Kleist thus seeks to overcome the habitual conception of
speaking as the mere announcement of a pre-constituted
thought content. Again, he takes himself as example:
Oft sitze ich an meinem Geschaeftstisch ueber den Akten,

und erforsche, in einer verwickelten Streitsache, den
Gesichtspunkt, aus welchem sie wohl zu beurteilen sein
moechte. ... Ich mische unartikulierte Toene ein, ziehe
die Verbindungswoerter in die Laenge, gebrauche auch wohl
eine Apposition, wo sie nicht noetig waere, und bediene
mich anderer, die Rede ausdehnender, Kunstgriffe, zur
Fabrikation meiner Idee auf der Werkstaette der Vernunft,
die gehoerige Zeit zu gewinnen. Dabei ist mir nichts
heilsamer, als eine Bewegung meiner Schwester, als ob sie
30. Nevertheless, critics more often than not end by

celebrating the role of the language machine - the
temporality of sentence production - in the production of
thoughts. Such a reading does little to disturb the
privilege of inferiority that orientates the Kantian
privilege of the reproductive synthesis.
392
mich unterbrechen wollte; denn mein ohnehin schon

angestrengtes Gemuet wird von diesen Versuch von aussen,
ihm die Rede, in deren Besitz es sich befindet, zu
entreissen, nur noch mehr erregt, und in seiner Faehigkeit,
wie ein grosser General, wenn die Umstaende draengen, noch
um einen Grad hoeher gespannt.31
We must, however, not be misled by Kleist's explicit
reference to figures of speech and modes of speaking, for
while these latter furnish him the time necessary for
fabricating an idea, it is the intrusion from the outside
that sparks the fabrication.32 A linguistic pattern or a
31. Kleist, Anecdoten: Kleine Schriften. dtv Gesamtausgabe,

Bd. 5 (Muenchen: Hanser Verlag, 1964), 53-54. English
translation in P. Miller, op. cit., 218-19: "Often, while
at my desk working,I search for the best approach to some
involved problem. I usually stare into my lamp, the point
of optimum brightness, while striving with utmost
concentration to enlighten myself. ... I mumble
inarticulately, drawl out my conjunctions, use unnecessary
appositions, and avail myself of all other dilatory tricks
to gain the time required for fabricating my idea in the
workshop of Reason. Nothing on such occasions can have a
more salutary effect than a casual gesture from my sister
as if to interrupt, for my intellect, already sorely
exercised, becomes all the more agitated at this external
threat to tear it away from the speech which is guiding it,
and, like a great general when circumstances marshal
against him, I am suddenly a degree more capable of my
objective."
32. This distinction has not been appreciated by Kleist's

critics. Both de Man and J. Hillis Miller see nothing more
in the gradual fabrication model than the disjunction
between subjective intention and the language machine. It
is as if the intrusion from the outside could be reduced to
a convulsion of grammar. In "Aesthetic Formalization:
Kleist's Ueber das Marionettentheater," de Man
characterizes the grammatical mechanism of the model:
"... the memorable tropes that have the most success
(Beifall) occur as mere random improvisation (Einfall) at
the moment when the author has completely relinquished any
control over his meaning and has relapsed (Zurueckfall)
into the most extreme formalization, the mechanical
predictability of grammatical declensions (Faelle)." (in
Rhetoric of Romanticism, 290) In a complementary reading,
Miller stresses the undecidability engendered by this
model: "...the final image of the fabrication of ideas in
causal series finds its completion, not solely due to the
mechanical workings of its intrinsic formal laws, but
rather through its interaction with a completely random,
automatic or acausal and radically exterior element - an
element that remains unrecuperable in the form of
representation, that is inaccessible on the constative-
performative model of history as reference or as
retrospective reading.33
Accordingly, the historical and social impact of ideas
fabricated in this way is, as Kleist's example of
Mirabeau's famous speech demonstrates, akin to natural
events that defy causal explanation. Hearing Mirabeau's
pronouncement, the King's Master of Ceremonies is plunged
into a state of voelligen Geistesbankerott ["total mental
bankruptcy"]. The impact follows
the workshop of Reason both suggests a reasonable activity

of the deliberating mind and, at the same time, implies a
mechanical fabrication taking place of its own accord and
in its own good time, outside the realm of the speaker's
conscious control, if he just draws out his sentence long
enough to let the fabrication take place." (Versions of
Pygmalion [Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1990], 105, emphasis
added.)
33. See Miller's account of the retrospective production of

history that is achieved by reconstituting the performative
impact of a speech act (here, Mirabeau's speech in front of
the prospective National Assembly): "It happens through
the retrospective reading of the completed sentence or
period. Once the speech has been made, it can be turned
back on and seen to make semantic sense, to have
referential validity as a reading of the signs makingup
the situation. As such, the speech now enters political or
historical time. It was abstracted from time during the
moments it was being made, since it had not yet been
recuperated through any technique of historicization.(Ill)
See also, Derrida's "Mochlos - ou le conflit des facultes"
and related texts in Du droit a la philosophie (Paris:
Editions Galilee, 1990), 397-438.
394
einem aehnlichen Gesetz, nach welchem in einem Koerper, der

von dexn elektrischen Zustand Null ist, wenn er in eines
elektrisierten Koerpers Atmosphaere kommt, ploetzlich die
entgegengesetzte Elektrizitaet erweckt wird. Und wie in
dem elektrisierten dadurch, nach einer Wechselwirkung, der
ihm inwohnende Elektrizitaetsgrad wieder verstaerkt wird,
so ging unseres Redners Mut, bei der Vernichtung seines
Gegners zur verwegensten Begeisterung ueber. ...dadurch,
dass er sich, einer Kleistischen Flasche gleich, entladen
hatte, war er nun wieder neutral geworden... (55)34
The fabrication model, in short, places the subject into a
field of exteriority, where the distinction between
physical and moral phenomena - the very bedrock of
Kantianism - gives way to a merkwuerdige Uebereinstimmung
["remarkable correspondence"].(55) Caught up in a complex
relay of forces, the subject experiences its own becoming-
force - its transformation into a "Kleistian bottle" -
while at the same time it casts off the interiority that
had long been held to constitute its subjecthood. As
Deleuze and Guattari argue, with Kleist the secret "becomes
a form, identified with the form of exteriority that is
always external to itself"; feelings are "uprooted from the
interiority of a 'subject'" and become affects, forces
operating in the field of exteriority. (356)
34. English: "...a similar law, according to which an

electrically neutral object entering the field of an
electrified object instantly assumes the opposite charge.
And just as the originally electrified object is
strengthened in its charge by a process of reaction, so did
our speaker's boldness, upon the annihilation of his
opponent, reach a veritable pinnacle of defiance.
[Then] having in that manner of a Kleistian Bottle
discharged himself, he had once again become neutral..."
(Miller, 220, translation modified)
395
III. Domesticating a "Monstrous Accident": the Becoming-

Technological of the Kantian Subject
It is thus by placing the Kantian subject into the
force-field of the real that Kleist finally overcomes his
Kant-crisis. For the exteriorization of the subject as
affect explodes the reign of the "reproductive synthesis"
and opens for the self the recourse to the external world
that Kleist had unwittingly discovered through the
restorative effect of his travels. In "Die Marquise von
O — ," Kleist dramatizes this exteriorization as the
becoming-woman of the Kantian subject.
The Marquise, as I suggested in my introduction, finds
herself in a paradigmatic uncanny situation: raped while
unconscious, she has no knowledge, beyond what she can
garner from physical evidence, concerning the cause of her
state. Like Kleist himself, deprived of a pre-constituted
cognitive goal, the Marquise cannot emerge from her
"crisis" without overturning the prescriptive priority of
the theoretical. The subject of her novella is thus not
only or not primarily the failure of language as
hermeneutic system, but instead the judgement's
transformation into the "synthesizer" - the liberation of
the (Kantian) synthetic judgement from its memorial and
individual embodiment in a "subject of enunciation.11
It is for this reason that her novella begins with the
her recourse to the media. Realizing the futility of
searching her memory for a solution, the Marquise resolves
to "fabricate" the missing cause:
396
In M. . ., einer beaeutenden Stadt iin oberen Italien, liess

die verwitwete Marquise von 0..., eine Dame von
vortrefflichem Ruf, und Mutter von mehrerern wohlerzogenen
Kindern, durch die Zeitungen bekannt machen: dass sie, ohne
ihr Wissen, in andre Umstaende gekommen sei, dass der Vater
zu dem Kinde, das sie gebaeren wuerde, sich melden solle;
und dass sie, aus Familienruecksichten, entschlossen waere,
ihn zu hieraten.35
With this recourse to the media, the Marquise concedes her
cognitive failure - her inability to resolve her crisis
through any subjective hermeneutic reconstruction. Critics
who search the text of her novella with the intention of
discovering or of showing the impossibility of discovering
a hermeneutic key thus miss the boat entirely. Like
Frankenstein. "Die Marquise von 0— " presupposes the
failure of textual recuperation and hermeneutic closure as
its narrative cause. In this sense, it is not only or not
primarily an allegory of the unreadability of a random
event. Rather, the Marquise takes her "linguistic
predicament" for granted; hers is the struggle to move on.
By placing her ad, she "extrojects" her individual
subjectivity into the larger field of exteriority, where a
"resolution" that was barred at the memorial or textual
level can in fact be attained.
35. Heinrich von Kleist, op. cit., 104. English, op. cit.,
104: "In M , an important town in northern Italy, the
widowed Marquise of O , a lady of unblemished reputation
and the mother of several well-brought-up children,
inserted the following announcement in the newspapers: that
she had without knowledge of the cause, come to find
herself in a certain situation; that she would like the
father of the child she was expecting to disclose his
identity to her; and that she was resolved, out of
consideration for her family to marry him."
397
The Marquise's recourse to the media operates a
fundamental shift from the retrospective textual/memorial
horizon associated with the detective story to the
prospective field of exteriority in which meaning no longer
remains the construction of an individual, privileged
subject of enunciation. It is this shift, according to
Deleuze and Guattari, that defines the generic form of the
novella, which "relates, in the present itself, to the
formal dimension of something that has happened, even if
that something is nothing or remains unknowable."(194) By
placing her ad, the Marquise submits her self - her status
as speaking (and knowing) subject - to the "collective
assemblage" of enunciation. She renounces her self-
command, her ability to say "I," in order to be taken up
into the domain of language in its entirety (indirect
discourse) where her status is that of the "neutral voice,"
of the third-person pronoun, elaborated by Maurice
Blanchot:
The "he" of the narration in which the neuter speaks is not

content to take the place usually occupied by the
subject... The narrative "he" dismisses all subjects...
in the neuter space of the tale, the bearers of speech, the
subjects of the action - who used to take the place of
characters - fall into a relationship of nonidentification
with themselves: something happens to them, something they
cannot recapture except by relinquishing their power to say
"I" and what happens to them has always happened already:
they can only account for it indirectly, as self-
forgetfulness, the forgetfulness that introduces them into
the present without memory that is the present of narrating
speech.3 6
36. Maurice Blanchot, "The Narrative Voice," in The Gaze of

Orpheus and other Literary Essays, tr. Lydia Davis (New
York: Station Hill Press, 1981), 140. French Original in
398
In view of Blanchot's position, the Marquise's submission
to the impersonal voice of public opinion dramatizes the
very process of novella writing. Hers is a "meta-novella"
or a novella about the novella-form, since it performs the
movement beyond memory and personal subjectivity that
brings out the "imperceptible" event.
Yet Kleist's novella adds something important to
Blanchot's formula. It embeds the neutral voice within a
particular techno-social and intellectual context. The
Marquise's subject-dissolution responds to a particular
historical necessity stemming from the marginality of the
female subject within the frame of Kantian reason.
Consequently, her recourse to the media is marked by two
antithetical (but complementary) movements: the
"deterritorialization" of the Kantian self (the Marquise's
disavowal of Reason) and a subsequent
"reterritorialization" within an enlarged sphere of
discursive rationality (her successful search for paternal
legitimacy).
Such ambivalence itself embodies the antithetical
tendencies that emerge with the practical application of
Kantian rationality to the empirical world. Faced with the
challenge of accounting for her uncanny pregnancy, the
Marquise experiences a structural "short-circuit" intrinsic
to the Kantian account of self-knowledge. Because she
never experienced the rape qua event, her Verstand has no
L'entretien infini (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1969).
399
representation of it, no representation from which - as
Kant's theory of self-knowledge requires - a proper content
or determinate "manifold" of inner sense can be fabricated.
She is like Benjamin's assembly-line worker, whose
repetitive experience [Erlebnis] escapes memorial (i.e.,
representational) capture since it leaves no differential
traces.
In this predicament, the Marquise stumbles up against
the representational bias of Kant's account of self-
knowledge, which maintains that a self-representation can
only be constructed as a second-order reflection on
external representations. By emptying inner sense of any
proper determinant content (feelings, remember, are merely
"subjective"), Kant unequivocally denies the possibility of
immediate, determinate self-knowledge:
...der innere Sinn die Blosse Form der Anschauung, aber

ohne Verbindung des mannigfaltigen in derselben, mithin
noch gar keine bestimmte Anschauung enthaelt, welche nur
durch das Bewusstsein der Bestimmung desselben durch die
transzendentale Handlung der Einbildungskraft,
(synthetischer Einfluss des Verstandes auf den inneren
Sinn) welche ich die figuerliche Synthesis gennant habe,
moeglich ist. (B154)^7
In order for the self to know itself, therefore, it must
37. Immanuel Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft (Hamburg:

Felix Meiner Verlag, 1990), p. 170b. English translation,
Critique of Pure Reason, tr. Kemp-Smith (London: MacMillan,
1964), 166: "Inner sense, on the other hand, contains the
mere form of intuition, but without combination of the
manifold in it, and therefore so far contains no
determinate intuition, which is possible only through the
consciousness of the determination of the manifold by the
transcendental act of imagination (synthetic influence of
the understanding upon inner sense), which I have entitled
figurative synthesis."
400
represent itself to itself as an object. Kant calls this
the "paradox" of inner sense:
Hier ist nun der Ort, das Paradoxe, was jedermann bei der
Exposition der Form des inneren Sinnes (paragraph 6)
auffallen musste, verstaendlich zu machen: naemlich wie
dieser auch sogar uns selbst, nur wie wir uns erscheinenf
nicht wie wir an uns selbst sind, dem Bewusstsein
darstelle, weil wir naemlich uns nur anschauen wie wir
innerlich affiziert werden, welches widersprechend zu sein
scheint, indem wir uns gegen uns selbst als leidend.
verhalten muessten. (B152-153, emphasis added)38
This paradox of inner sense is the logical consequence of
Kant's thesis on transcendental ideality: just as knowledge
of the noumenal world is foreclosed, so too is knowledge of
the self as a Ding-an-sich. Self-knowledge, in fact,
involves a further stage of phenomenal mediation than
knowledge of the external world, for the self can only
appear to itself as a phenomenal object through a
modification of its objective representations. Because it
has no manifold of its own, inner sense must borrow its
content from outer sense: it must take its representations
of (outer) objects as its own objective content.
Kant traces this possibility to a functional division
within the understanding [Verstand] - a division between
two applications of the understanding to sensibility
[Sinnlichkeit]:
38. English: "This is the suitable place for explaining the

paradox which must have been obvious to everyone in our
exposition of the form of inner sense (paragraph 6):
namely, that this sense represents to consciousness even
our own selves only as we appear to ourselves, not as we
are in ourselves. For we intuit ourselves only as we are
inwardly affected, and this would seem to be contradictory,
since we should then have to be in a passive relation [of
active affection] to ourselves." (165-66)
401
...die transzendentale Synthesis der Einbildungskraft ...

[ist] eine Wirkung des Verstandes auf die Sinnlichkeit und
die erste Anwendung desselben (zugleich der Grund aller
uebrigen) auf Gegenstaende der uns moeglichen Anschauung
ist. Sie ist, als figuerlich, von der intellectuellen
Synthesis ohne alle Einbildungskraft bloss durch den
Verstand unterschieden. Sofern die Einbildungskraft nun
Spontaneitaet ist, nenne ich sie auch bisweilen die
produktive Einbildungskraft, und unterschiede sie dadurch
von der reproduktiven, deren Synthesis lediglich
empirischen Gesetzen, naemlich denen der Assoziation,
unterworfen ist, und welche daher zur Erklaerung der
Moeglichkeit der Erkenntnis a priori nichts beitraegt...
(B152)39
This first application of the understanding to sensibility
(which Kant also refers to as the "figurative synthesis"
and "schematism") has the burden, within Kant's system, of
laying the ground for all subsequent empirical syntheses:
it determines the representation of a single objective time
(and space) within which experience of objects obtains
objectivity. In the case of self-representation, however,
a second, supplemental application of the understanding -
"the empirical synthesis of apprehension" - is necessary.
This application involves a second-order reflection on
external representations by which the understanding
39. English: "...the transcendental synthesis of

imagination ... is an action of the understanding on the
sensibility; and is its first application - and thereby the
ground of all its other applications - to the objects of
our possible intuition. As figurative, it is distinguished
from the intellectual synthesis, which is carried out by
the understanding alone, without the aid of the
imagination. In so far as imagination is spontaneity, I
sometimes also entitle it the productive imagination, to
distinguish it from the reproductive imagination, whose
synthesis is entirely subject to empirical laws, the laws,
namely, of association, and which therefore contributes
nothing to the explanation of the possibility of a priori
knowledge." (165)
402
"produces" [bringt...hervor] a combination of the manifold
in inner sense.(B155) Whereas in the transcendental
synthesis inner sense perceives an object (e.g., a boat
moving upstream) by means of a succession of perceptions
all of which are representations of that object, in the
empirical synthesis inner sense takes the sequence itself
for its object. Kant's example is the experience of
attention [Aufmerksamkeit]:
Ich sehe nicht, wie man so viel Schwierigkeiten darin

finden koenne, dass der innere Sinn von uns selbst
affiziert werde. Jeder Aktus der Aufmerksamkeit kann uns
ein Beispiel davon geben. Der Verstand bestimmt darin
jederzeit den inneren Sinn der Verbindung, die er denkt,
gemaess, zur inneren Anschauung, die dem Mannigfaltigen in
der Synthesis des Verstandes korrespondiert. Wie sehr das
Gemuet gemeiniglich hierdurch affiziert werde, wird ein
jeder in sich wahrnehmen koennen.
(B156, Fussnote)40
What the phenomenon of attention illustrates is precisely
this second-order reflection that constitutes a determinate
content (or intuition, Anschauung) of inner sense
corresponding to the manifold given in the synthesis of the
understanding (transcendental synthesis of imagination).
The second application of the understanding (or empirical
synthesis of apprehension) can be designated an act of the
"reproductive imagination" since it involves a search by
40. English: "I do not see why so much difficulty should be

found in admitting that our inner sense is affected by
ourselves. Such affection finds exemplification in each
and every act of attention. In every act of attention the
understanding determines inner sense, in accordance with
the combination which it thinks, to that inner intuition
which corresponds to the manifold in the synthesis of the
understanding. How much the mind is usually thereby
affected, everyone will be able to perceive in himself."
(168, note)
403
the subject of its already experienced representations: a
quest for those representations that, once attended to or
made into objects of inner sense, will yield a coherent
self-representation.
On Kant's account, self-knowledge thus presupposes
outer experience; in order to appear as an object to
itself, the self must have available a stock of outer
representations that can be reflectively revalued as the
determinate content of inner sense. Kant gives his
clearest account of this experiential privilege of outer
representation in his preface to the second edition of the
Kritik der reinen Vernunft:
Allein ich bin mir meines Daseins in der Zeit (folglich

auch der Bestimmbarkeit desselben in dieser) durch innere
Erfahrung bewusst, und dieses ist mehr, als bloss mich
meiner Vorstellung bewusst zu sein, doch aber einerlei mit
dem empirischen Bewusstsein meines Daseins, welches nur
durch Beziehung auf etwas, was mit meiner Existenz
verbunden, ausser mir ist, bestimmbar ist. Dieses
Bewusstsein meines Daseins in der Zeit ist also mit dem
Bewusstsein eines Verhaeltnisses zu etwas ausser mir
identisch verbunden, und es ist also Erfahrung und nicht
Erdichtung, Sinn und nicht Einbildungskraft, welches das
Aeussere mit meinem inneren Sinn unzertrennlich verknuepft;
denn der aeussere Sinn ist schon an sich Beziehung der
Anschauung auf etwas Wirkliches ausser mir, und die
Realitaet desselben, zum Unterschiede von der Einbildung,
beruht nur darauf, dass er mit der inneren Erfahrung
selbst, als die Bedingung der Moeglichkeit derselben
unzertrennlich verbunden werde... (B XLI, emphasis added)41
41. English: "But through inner experience I am conscious

of my existence in time (consequently also of its
determinability in time), and this is more than to be
conscious merely of my representation. It is identical
with the empirical consciousness of my existence, which is
determinable only through relation to something which,
while bound up with my existence, is outside me. This
consciousness of my existence in time is bound up in the
way of identity with the consciousness of a relation to
something outside me, and it is therefore experience not
404
In short, self-knowledge depends on external experience in
a way that distinguishes it from knowledge in general. In
order to constitute itself as an occurrence in objective
time (and space), the subject must assemble representations
of external objects in such a way that the representation
they produce itself falls under the apriori conditions of
possible experience. In so far as it can experience itself
as an object, the self must submit to the causal order of
the phenomenal universe.
It is, however, just this restriction of self-
knowledge to the "reproductive imagination" that poses a
problem for Kleist's Marguise. Because her mind contains
no external representations of the rape, she literally has
no material or determinate manifold which she could,
through reflection, take as the object of her inner sense.
By admitting in her ad that the rape occurred "ohne ihr
Wissen" ["without her knowledge"] the Marquise qualifies
her lack of knowledge as absolute non-knowledge. It is not
the result of repression, for the simple reason that she
never experienced anything which could be repressed. I
must therefore disagree with the prevalent line of
interpretation that discovers a "cognitive duplicity"
behind the Marquise's intense desire not to know, "as
invention, sense not imagination, which inseparable

connects this outside something with my inner sense. For
outer sense is already in itself a relation of intuition to
something actual outside me, and the reality of outer
sense, in its distinction from imagination, rests simply on
that which is here found to take place, namely, its being
inseparably bound up with inner experience, as the
condition of its possibility." (34-5, note, emphasis added)
405
though Kleist had endowed her with an unconscious form of
knowledge unacknowledged by her conscious self."42 This
hermeneutic reading makes the same mistake as rhetorical
readings which focus narrowly on the problem of the famous
hyphen, the syntactic marker of the rape. In both cases,
the memory of the individual subject - whether as mind or
as text - remains the tribunal for the resolution of a
cognitive dilemma. As long as critics stay committed to
such textual versions of the Kantian reproductive
imagination, the Marquise will herself remain trapped in
the stasis of undecidability, able only to repeat the same
failed recuperation:
What the narrative recounts, then, is the impossibility of

its reading the ellipsis except by liberalizing it, in a
reading that takes the form of the repetition of its
unreadable point of departure on the basis of an
irreducible residue - the pregnancy. It is the effacement
of this insight, the striking of this thought - the
Gedankenstrich - that makes the temporal succession of the
narrative possible as well as inevitable. In place of the
thought, the text delivers the story of the thought, its
reinscription in an allegorical Gedankengang,43
Not only do readings of this sort ignore the prospective
movement of Kleist's novella, but they hypostatize the
Marquise's dilemma as a purely epistemological one, when in
fact, according to the text, her concern with its
42. Cohn, 132. Not insignificantly, the initial proponent

of this view is Kleist himself, who in an anonymous review
of the novella, wryly suggested the possibility that the
Marquise merely kept her eyes shut. To my mind, this
suggestion merely sets a further trap for the hermeneutic
understanding.
43. Deborah Esch, "Toward a Midwifery of Thought: Reading

Kleist's Die Marquise von O— ," 152.
406
resolution stems from purely pragmatic motives - namely,
the eventual welfare of her child. After an initial effort
to reconcile her uncanny predicament with state-authorized
codes of reason in its parental, religious, medical, legal,
and even psychological forms, the Marquise is content just
to give up. Decamping with her children to the country,
she thus represents the very antithesis of the Romantic
poet (and the Kantian subject): resolute in her
schuldfreien Bewusstseins, she is prepared simply to
renounce the imperative of resolving her dilemma. She has,
in short, resolved to live with the uncanny:
Ihr Verstand, stark genug, in ihrer sonderbaren Lage nicht

zu reissen, gab sich ganz unter der grossen, heiligen und
unerklaerlichen Einrichtung der Welt gefangen. Sie sah die
Unmoeglichkeit ein, ihre Familie von ihrer Unschuld zu
ueberzeugen, begriff, das sie sich darueber troesten
muesse, falls sie nicht untergehen wolle, und wenige Tage
nur waren nach ihrer Ankunft in V... verflossen, als der
Schmerz ganz und gar dem heldenmuetigen Vorsatz Platz
machte, sich mit Stolz gegen die Anfaelle der Welt zu
ruesten. (126)44
It is this heroic acceptance of the uncanny that I above
construed as a privilege of the female subject. The text
narrates the gradual deterritorialization of the Kantian
subject: faced with a breach in the "principle of reason,"
the Marquise is able to overcome her initial (Kantian)
44. English: "Her reason was strong enough to withstand her

strange situation without giving way, and she submitted
herself wholly to the great, sacred and inexplicable order
of the world. She saw that it would be impossible to
convince her family of her innocence, realized that she
must accept this fact for the sake of her own survival, and
only a few days after her arrival at V — her grief had been
replaced by a heroic resolve to arm herself with pride and
let the world do its worst." (Luke and Reeves, 93)
drive to set things right precisely because she has to.
Unlike the male subject, for whom the possibility of a
flight into the aesthetic remains open, the Marquise can
take no distance from the uncanny effect that has so
intimately interrupted her life. If this limitation leads
in the short run to exile from society, it ultimately
allows her to step out of the double-bind of textual
undecidability that, as Lacoue-Labarthe reminds us,
underlies the (literally) fatal problem of the Romantic
genius in German letters.45 The Marquise is thus able to
take a step beyond Kant that anticipates Wittgenstein's
pragmatic move in On Certainty. Rather than conceding to a
dogmatic Reason, she relies on her own common-sense; her
clear conscience stems from belief, not knowledge, and thus
echoes Wittgenstein's bracketing of epistemology: "Dass es
mir - oder Allen - so scheint, daraus folgt nicht, dass es
so ist. Wohl aber laesst sich fragen, ob man dies sinnvoll
bezweifeln kann."46 In this sense the Marquise inaugurates
a fundamental relaxation of the principle of reason - a
becoming-woman of the subject - that, I have suggested,
opens the "imperceptible" (and with it, specifically, the
technological imperceptible) to experience.
45. See especially, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger,

Ar t . Politics (London: Blackwell, 1990) .
46. Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, bilingual text (New

York: Harper and Row, 1972), 2. English: "From its seeming
to me - or to everyone - to be so, it doesn't follow that
it is so. What we can ask is whether it can make sense to
doubt it." (2e)
408
Nevertheless, she does not simply throw Kantian reason
by the wayside in order to retreat into a realm of "female
experience.11 Her pragmatic resolve to live with her
(unexplained) predicament is tempered by one unertraegliche
Gedanke ["unbearable thought"]: namely that her innocent
and pure child, as long as it lacks a father, "was destined
to bear a stigma of disgrace in good society" [ein
Schandfleck in der buergerlichen Geschellschaft ankleben
sollte].(127) The gender privilege I discuss above is here
rendered a liability, suggesting the inescapability of
social power structures. As a single mother in the 18th-
century, the Marquise is categorically deprived of the
social standing requisite to get what Juliet MacCannell,
following Goffman, calls "footing," namely an "entry into
the game of the 'larger social affair.'"47 To acquire
legitimacy (for herself and for her child), the Marquise is
thus forced to reenter the social symbolic order; she must,
47. Juliet Flower MacCannell, "Forms of Talk/Figures of

Speech," in Beyond Goffman: Studies on Communication,
Institution, and Social Interaction, ed. S. H. Riggins
(Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1990), 297. More
specifically, MacCannell favorably contrasts Kleist's
account of the social game with that of Goffman: "More than
a matter of some human (or feminine) inability to express
an 'inner self' except through words that fundamentally
distort it, Kleist anticipates Goffman's sense that the
self is only formed or grounded within the politics of the
interactional setting... But what Kleist shows more
powerfully than Goffman, is that the turf or proving ground
of the self remains an undemocratic and a masculine arena.
Kleist ... shows how the openness and flexibility of
undecidability... easily yields to the tyranny of
indeterminacy, keeping play out of play and the game safe
from having its ground rules altered to accommodate others
by undermining the grounds of the ground. More often than
not, the person deprived of ground is a woman." (301)
409
in short, furnish a self-representation that meshes with
the dominant schemes of social (Kantian) rationality. It
is precisely this search for a grounded self-representation
that compels her to overcome her repugnance at the thought
of entering into a relation with the man that had tricked
her and to welcome a marriage with someone who could only
belong to the very scum of mankind [zum Auswurf seiner
Gattung gehoeren muesse].(127)
Nevertheless, precisely because of her uncanny
predicament, the Marquise is barred from schematizing her
experience in a rigorously Kantian manner. She must thus
employ ein sonderbares Mittel, one which simply fell into
her head [war ihr eingefalien] and which so shocked her
initially that she dropped her knitting [das Strikzeug
selbst vor Schrecken aus der Hand fallen Hess]. (127) The
shock or fright [Schrecken] that the Marquise experiences
suggests the stakes of her game with Kantianism. By taking
recourse to the media, she will in effect submit herself to
an informational machine whose operation remains beyond the
control of human thought (and Kantian subjectivity). What
she discovers in the popular press, in short, is a means to
fabricate a "replacement representation" that will give her
the (missing) material on which to reflect and thus
constitute a formally- acceptable (i.e., Kantian) self-
representation. If the Marquise deserves to be considered
a hero, it is on account of her bravery:for the sake of
her child, she willingly submits herself to a
410
representational machine that does not obey the Kantian
pattern of causality developed in the second Analogy of
experience, that does not, in other words, protect the
subject from the purely random, the uncanny. The "content"
of the replacement representation that she seeks is, from
her standpoint, absolutely foreign or random in the radical
sense of Aristotle's to automaton. It must be integrated
into the mind in a manner that dispenses with the
prescriptive law of analogy, according to which (in
Aristotle's classic definition from the Poetics) an unknown
event can be domesticated by comparing its relation with a
known event to another relation between two known events
[unknown A:B::C:D].48 This integration thus exemplifies
the possibility of experiencing the technological uncanny
without first translating it into representation (and
reducing its "imperceptibility").
Yet if it produces a shock for the Marquise, it sends
the Kantian model of the cogito - with its operative
restriction of self-knowledge to the "reproductive
imagination," or in other words, to the figure of analogy -
quite literally into psychotic convulsions. By renouncing
her ability to say "I," the Marquise submits her case to
the arbitration of the neutral voice (Heidegger's das Man),
which, as I have suggested above, is embodied in the
historically-specific discursive regimes composing the
collective assemblage of enunciation that underlies her
48. For a reading of analogy in Kant, see Warminski.
411
experience. Just as the placement of the ad operates a
shift from the first to the third person pronoun, it lets
the Marquise's cogito be penetrated by indirect discourse.
It thus deterritorializes the Kantian subject a second
time, by stepping out of the frame of reference imposed
through the second Analogy:
...every statement of a collective assemblage of

enunciation belongs to indirect discourse. Indirect
discourse is the presence of a reported statement within
the reporting statement, the presence of an order-word
within the word. Language in its entirety is indirect
discourse. Indirect discourse in no way supposes direct
discourse; rather, the latter is extracted from the former,
to the extent that the operations of signifiance and
proceedings of subjectification in an assemblage are
distributed, attributed, and assigned, or that the
variables of the assemblage enter into constant relations,
however temporarily. Direct discourse is a detached
fragment of a mass and is born of the dismemberment of the
collective assemblage; but the collective assemblage is
always like the murmur from which I take my proper name,
the constellation of voices, concordant or not, from which
I draw my voice. I always depend on a molecular assemblage
of enunciation that is not given in my conscious mind, any
more than it depends solely on my apparent social
determinations, which combine many heterogeneous regimes of
signs. ... In this sense, there is indeed a schizophrenic
cogito, but it is a cogito that makes self-consciousness
the incorporeal transformation of an order-word, or a
result of indirect discourse.49
With the opening of her cogito to indirect discourse, the
Marquise's subjectivity is "extrojected" into the domain of
exteriority, where the completion of her self
representation comes about through a synthesis that can no
longer be confined to a cognizing subject.
The Marquise's recourse to the popular press in effect
liberates "societal reason" from its Kantian restriction -
49. Deleuze and Guattari, 84, emphasis added.
via intersubjectivity - to reproduction. Her experience
shows the necessity of a more radical "transcendence" of
the isolated cogito than that proposed by Kant in the
"Canon of Pure Reason" (and in the second Kritik). In a
section entitled, "Vom Meinen, Wissen und Glauben," Kant
articulates the practical analogue of the recourse to
external representations that inner sense must take in
order to guarantee the objectivity of its self
representation:
Der Probierstein des Fuerwahrhaltens, ob es Ueberzeugung

oder blosse Ueberredung sei, ist also, aeusserlich, die
Moeglichkeit, dasselbe mitzuteilen und das Fuerwahrhalten
fuer jedes Menschen Vernunft gueltig zu befinden...
(A820/B848)50
In the practical sphere, the transcendental structure of
the subject cannot guarantee truth, but only "persuasion"
[Ueberredung], which Kant qualifies as "a mere appearance"
[ein blosser Schein] whose ground lies solely in the
subject [lediglich im Subjekte liegt] and which can thus
lead only to judgements possessing "private validity"
[Privatgueltigkeit]. Objective truth in the empirical
world, like the objectivity of self-representation,
requires an appeal to something outside the transcendental
imagination - something, finally, outside the memory of the
isolated cognizing subject. While Kant thereby embeds
experience within a larger social context that might permit
50. English: "The touchstone whereby we decide whether our

holding a thing to be true is conviction or mere persuasion
is therefore external, namely, the possibility of
communicating it and of finding it to be valid for all
human reason." (Kemp-Smith, 645)
resolutions prohibited to the isolated subject, he does not
in fact escape the cognitive or memorial frame of reference
that we observed in the restriction of self-knowledge to
the reproductive imagination. By connecting the empirical
embodiment of reason to intersubjective concensus on a
cosmopolitan and universal plane, Kant simply conceives of
the public sphere as a giant memory bank or archive - the
synchronic (technical) externalization of society's "mind."
Moreover, since such a global concensus can never be
experienced immediately, but only through retrospective
reconstruction, it (secretly) appeals to the theoretical
model of the transcendental mind, which consequently
retains its priority. Habermas makes this point in his
study of the public sphere: "This agreement of all
empirical consciousness, brought about in the public
sphere, corresponded to the intelligible unity of
transcendental consciousness."51 The result is that
practical experience finds itself submitted to boundaries
that are conservative, since they always reflect an earlier
(i.e., no longer legislative) embodiment of global
concensus and since, more generally, they obey the
restriction of self-representation to the reproductive
imagination that a transcendental model imposes.
Ultimately, what is barred on such a model is the
possibility of a "paradigm shift" in the social symbolic
51. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public

Sphere. tr. Burger (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), 108.
414
order: the possibility for the self to reach beyond its own
stock of experiences and/or the stock of experiences
authorized intersubjectively by society in order to produce
itself in a more radical way.
It is exactly this possibility that the Marquise's
self-production exemplifies. Kleist's novella allegorizes
the disjunction between action and knowledge - first
grasped in the Kant-crisis - by following the impact of the
Marquise's ad along two lines of flight, both of which
effectuate deterritorial-izations of societal reason. The
first such line of flight addresses the Marquise's
withdrawal from social intersubject-ivity, while the second
dramatizes the societal crisis that her action provokes.
The series of interactions between the Marquise and
the Count immediately following the placement of the ad
operate a deterritorialization of direct discourse: the
shift from a hermeneutic or textual model of meaning to an
informational model. Through this line of flight, the
Marquise prepares herself for the verdict of the media
machine by casting off all remnants of the reproductive
model, including all traditional hermeneutic
communicational means. This interactional series begins
when the Count, having returned to M— , learns of the
Marquise's banishment from her father's home. Hearing of
her alleged moral infraction, and naturally convinced of
her innocence, the Count resolves to "renew his offer to
her" orally. The interchange between the two characters,
415
at least on the surface, seems to concern knowledge. The
Count qualifies his certainty of the Marquise's innocence
in the most absolute terms, "as if I were omniscient, as if
my own soul were living in your body" [als ob ich all
wissend waere, als ob meine Seele in deiner Brust wohnte].
(129) His figuration of this omniscience in terms of pure
interiority sparks only her incensed rejection. His
renewed proposal is greeted with her emphatic renunciation
of knowledge as such:
Lassen sie mich augenblicklich! rief die Marquise; ich

befehls Ihnen! riss sich gewaltsam aus seinen Armen, und
entfloh. Geliebte! Vortreffliche! fluesterte er, indem
er wieder aufstand, und ihr folgte. - Sie hoeren! rief die
Marquise, und wandte sich, und wich ihm aus. Ein einziges,
heimliches, gefluestertes -! sagte der Graf, und griff
hastig nach ihrem glatten, ihm entschluepfenden Arm. - Ich
will nichts wissen, versetzte die Marquise, stiess ihm
heftig vor die Brust zurueck, eilte auf die Rampe, und
verschwand. (129)52
Far from a veiled admission of unconscious guilt, this
cognitive renunciation in fact stems from the Marquise's
hyperbolic rationality. She refuses to consider the
Count's potential culpability - not to protect herself from
an unconscious truth - but merely because it lies outside
the bounds of cognitive possibility. To do so would quite
simply bring into question all of her rational assumptions
52. English: "'Let me go immediately!' she cried, 'I order

you to let me go!', and freeing herself forcibly from his
embrace she started away from him. 'Darling! adorable
creature!' he whispered, rising to his feet again and
following her. 'You heard me!' cried the Marquise, turning
and evading him. 'One secret, whispered word!' said the
Count, hastily snatching at her smooth arm as it slipped
from him. 'I do not want to hear anything,' she retorted,
violently pushing him back; then she fled up on to the
terrace and disappeared." (Luke and Reeves, 97)
416
- the entire edifice of her causal understanding of the
world. The pragmatism here displayed by the Marquise
indicates the significance of a disjunction more radical
than that of Wahrheit and Wahrscheinlichkeit ['•truth" and
"probability" (or, literally, "true-seeming-ness")] - a
disjunction, operating across the category of Moeglichkeit
["possibility"], between the material domain of the real
and the descriptive domain of (causal) explanation. Her
denial, in other words, is of an entirely conscious order.
It serves to ward off the threat of events that cannot be
integrated into the constructed domain of her
"understanding" [Verstand]. To overcome such a conscious
denial, the Marquise will have to receive the
representation of the truth from a far more mechanical and
external "agent" than the Count.
In his reaction following this scene, the Count
realizes as much: walking to his horse, "he felt that his
attempt to pour out his heart to her in person [an ihrem
Busen] had failed forever [fuer immer fehlgeschlagen sei]."
The temporal qualification, "fuer immer" ["forever"] is not
simply a hyperbolic escalation of the Count's
disappointment: it indicates a categorical failure of a
mode of communication - speech. It is as if direct verbal
communication were too immediate for the Marquise; because
53. The Wahrheit-Wahrscheinlichkeit has been much discussed

in recent Kleist criticism. See Carol Jacobs, "The Style
of Kleist," Cynthia Chase, "Telling Truths," and Warminski,
"Deflections," all in Diacritics, vol. IX, Winter 1979, 47-
76.
417
the unknown event cannot fit into her causal self-
representation according to the rules of any hermeneutic,

she can have no role in legitimating it. In short, since
it must be produced by something outside her own
mind/memory, she must accept it only as a purely passive
recipient. Precisely because she has had no experience of
the event, she has no authority to decide it. In rejecting
the Count, what the Marquise rejects is in fact his choice
of communicational means, his choice to "explain himself to
her breast." By flat-out rejecting any message conveyed
through the interiority of a face-to-face encounter, the
Marquise quite literally accepts her cognitive impotence,
which prohibits her enlightenment through such a personal
means of communication.
Realizing this, the Count instantly turns his thoughts
to another communicative medium: writing. When he
subsequently informs the Marquise's brother ofhis plan to
"clarify the issue" in a letter, the latter calls for the
latest newspaper so as, apparently, to bring the hopelessly
love-struck Count back to his senses. The result, of
course, is the precise opposite:
Der Graf durchlief, indem ihm das Blut ins Geschicht

schoss, die Schrift. Ein Wechsel von Gefuehlen
durchkreuzte ihn. Der Forstmeister fragte, ob er nicht
glaube, dass die Person, die die Frau Marquisesuche, sich
finden werde? Unzweifelhaft! versetzte der Graf, indessen
er mit ganzer Seele ueber dem Papier lag, und den Sinn
desselben gierig verschlang. Darauf nachdem er einen
Augenblick, waehrend er das Blatt zusammenlegte, an das
Fenster getreten war, sagte er: nun ist es gut! nun weiss
ich, was ich zu tun habe! (130)54
418
When he sees the ad - whose "content" he literally ingests
(verschlingen, to devour), he becomes at once relieved and
resolute. Grasping the ground rules that she has set for
his revelation, he is aware of the futility of a letter
whose form remains too personal (it would bear his
signature), and (for the same reason) of a direct response
to the ad. He realizes that he must instead make an
anonymous appeal - one where the "content" of the message
(i.e., "it is me, the Count, whom you are seeking")
preceeds its connection to a speaker, to a signatory: where
content is accepted before and independently of its causal
connections and implications, that is, outside the scope of
Kant's Second Analogy. Only in such a way - under the
constraint of her "own" rules, or in other words her
willing submission to the rules of the media - will the
Marquise be forced to hear his plea.
Grasping this communicational necessity, the Count
naturally abandons the idea of writing a letter, chosing
instead to submit himself to the informational machine by
placing an ad of his own - an anonymous response to the
Marquise's ad:
Wenn die Frau Marquise von 0... sich, am 3sten... 11 Uhr

morgens, im Hause des Herrn von G..., ihres Vaters,
54. English: "The Count flushed suddenly as he read it;

conflicting emotions rushed through him. The Marquise's
brother asked him if he did not think that she would find
the person she was looking for. 'Undoubtedly!' answered
the Count, with his whole mind intent on the paper,
greedily devouring the meaning of the announcement. Then,
after folding it up and stepping over to the window for a
moment, he said: 'Now everything is all right! Now I know
what to do!'" (Luke and Reeves, 98)
419
einfinden will: so wird sich derjenige, den sie sucht, ihr

daselbst zu Fuessen werfen. (131)55
The appearance of this ad places the Marquise (and
ultimately her parents) in the position of passivity
necessary for the reception of a substitute, technically-
fabricated representation. Deprived of all cognitive and
discursive command, they must mechanically follow the
directions of the technical "indirect discourse" machine.
The latter's impersonal commands find narrative embodiment
in the proliferation of indirect discourse and of the
passive voice in Kleist's text, thus proving that these
Kleistian stylistic traits are not simply formal virtues
(as critics typically maintain), but are in fact actual
social relations binding individuals to the domain of
exteriority.56 With the appearance of the Count's ad, the
resolution of the Marquise's search is thus only a matter
of time: since the two implicated parties have both
committed themselves to a media-abjudication, they must
simply wait for its programmatic conclusion.
The fact that the novella does not simply end here
attests to the force of socially embedded rationality (the
social symbolic order). In order for the Marquise's
resolution of her individual representational crisis to
55. English: "'If the Marquise of 0— will be present at 11

o'clock on the morning of the 3rd of — in the house of her
father Colonel G— , the man whom she wishes to trace will
there cast himself at her feet.'" (Luke and Reeves, 99)
56. See V. N. Volosinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of

Language. tr. Matejka and Titunik (Cambridge, MA and
London: Harvard UP, 1973), 109-159.
acquire "objective validity," it must be sanctioned through
societal (or intersubjective) recognition. Yet since this
resolution requires the integration of the uncanny - the
experience of pure randomness - into the empirical
Verstand, what such a sanction entails is nothing short of
a relaxation in the socially-authorized principle of
reason: a deterritorialization of the transcendental
foundation of society. Kleist dramatizes this
deterritorialization in a series of domestic scenes that
depict a gradual movement away from the descriptive or
reproductive conception of identity. When the test
designed to trick the Marquise into spontaneous self
betrayal backfires, it induces a massive hemorrhaging of
the societal architectonic of reason that ultimately
culminates in the complete collapse of patriarchal law. It
is only following this collapse that the Marquise's parents
are able to accept her claims of innocence and to take on a
passive position in the resolution of her dilemma.
This immense movement begins with what appears to be a
fortification of Kantian reason: namely the reaction of the
Commandant, who confronted with the Count's (anonymously-
published) ad simply refuses to alter his conviction as to
his daughter's guilt. In this misguided expression of
rational solidarity, Kleist depicts the provincialism of a
normative conception of reason. Secure behind his
causally-sound and socially-legitimated belief that his
daughter must know the identity of her ravisher, the
421
Commandant cannot come to any conclusion other than that
his daughter is trying to trick him. Calling his daughter
a "sanctimonious hypocrite" [verschmitzte Heuchlerin], with
"the shamelessness of a bitch coupled with the cunning of a
fox and multiplied tenfold" [{zjehnmal die Schamlosigkeit
einer Huendin, mit zehnfacher List des Fuchses geparrt], he
aggressively announces his adherence to a descriptive view
of identity, insisting that the ad is nothing more a
prearranged plot designed to simulate the workings of
chance:
Ihre nichtswuerdige Betruegerei, mit Gewalt will sie sie

durchsetzen .... Auswendig gelernt ist sie schon, die
Fabel, die sie uns beide, sie und er, am Dritten 11 Uhr
morgens hier aufbuerden wollen. Mein liebes Toechterchen,
soil ich sagen, das wusste ich nicht, wer konnte das
denken, vergib mir, nimm meinen Segen, und sei wieder gut.
Aber die Kugel dem, der am Dritten morgens ueber meine
Schwelle tritt! (132)57
With this paranoid construction, the Commandant practically
cites the Kantian restriction of identity to the
reproductive synthesis. To his (male) imagination, the ad
can betoken nothing other than a trick - the trick of
making something already known (stored in memory) appear to
be newly learnt (the product of the two ads); the
coincidence that it seems to propose is quite literally
57. English: "She is determined to force us to accept her

contemptible pretence. She and that man have already
learnt by heart the cock-and-bull story they will tell us
when the two of them appear here on the third at eleven in
the morning. And I shall be expected to say: 'My dear
little daughter, I did not know that, who could have
thought such a thing, forgive me, receive my blessing, and
let us be friends again.' But I have a bullet ready for
the man who steps across my threshold on the third!" (Luke
and Reeves, 100)
422
beyond the possibility of thought ("who could have thought
such a thing?"), and thus can only be a dirty fraud
[nichtswuerdige Betruegerei], a mere fiction [Fabel] made
up in advance and memorized so as to simulate truth. As
the embodiment of Kantian reason, the Commandant is not
prepared to let a fabricated story acquire the status of a
causally-grounded truth.
Up to this point in the story, his evaluation -
despite its obvious provincialism - has triumphed.
Invoking the sanction of a patriarchal society, he has been
able to enforce his normative conception of thought through
personal tyranny. Yet it is precisely this notion of
thought that comes under attack in the Marquise's trick.
Like the Hegelian "ruse (List) of reason," this List makes
up for (empirical) reason's shortsightedness: it takes
reason unwittingly beyond its own perceived limits.
The initial attack on this normative conception of
reason comes in the mother's entirely different reaction to
the second ad. While the Commandant can only give himself
up to fantasies of violence, his wife appears better able
to cope with the undecidable situation, concluding
dass wenn sie, von zwei unbegreiflichen Dingen, einem,

Glauben beimessen solle, sie lieber an ein unerhoertes
Spiel des Schicksals, als an diese Niedertraechtigkeit
ihrer sonst so vortrefflichen Tochter glauben wolle.
(132)
58. English: "...that if she was to believe one of two

incomprehensible things, then she found it more credible
that some extraordinary quirk of fate had occurred than
that a daughter who had always been so virtuous should now
behave so basely." (Luke and Reeves, 100)
423
Putting her trust in her daughter above the impersonal rule
of reason, she is able to withstand the assault of
patriarchal reason, remaining "emboldened" [dreist gemacht]
enough to proceed, against her husband's obstinate will,
with a plan for clearing the matter up, a plan "which her
heart, troubled by doubts as it was, had for some time been
harboring" [den sie schon lange, in ihrer von Zweifeln
bewegten Brust, mit sich herum getragen hatte].
The crux of the mother's plan is to test whether the
Marquise already knows the claimant - whether, that is, her
memory already contains the representation of the rape:
Sie werde die Marquise, falls sie wirklich denjenigen, der

ihr durch die Zeitungen, als ein Unbekannter, geantwortet,
schon kenne, in eine Lage zu versetzen wissen, in welcher
sich ihre Seele verraten muesste, und wenn sie die
abgefeimteste Verraeterin waere. (13 3)59
Claiming that the truth has already been produced, that the
claimant has presented himself early, the mother hopes to
displace [versetzen] the Marquise out of the horizon of her
controlled, i.e., memorized fiction. Such a claim would
force her into into a new situation [Lage] in which her
inner truth [her soul, ihre Seele] would, as it were,
automatically betray [sich...verraten] her own attempt at
external deception (thus making her a Verraeterin). Her
soul, which knows the inner truth, would "undeceive" or
"betray" [sich...verraten] the deceiver [Verraeterin]
59. English: "She undertook to devise a situation in which

the Marquise, if she really knew the man who had answered
her advertisement as if her were a stranger, would
undoubtedly betray herself, even if she was the world's
most sophisticated deceiver." (Luke and Reeves, 101)
424
herself: would undeceive her, that is, if there actually
was such an inner truth (a memorial representation) behind
or within the external appearance.
The scene of this test demonstrates clearly that the
Marquise's memory contains no such truth. Faced with her
mother's claim, the Marquise can do nothing but mutter
repeatedly: "who?” Yet in her function as societal police
agent, the mother must not let herself be convinced by such
a rational disclaimer. She must try her trick again, from
another angle. Hence she identifies the ravisher as
Leopardo, the groom, and asks the Marquise if she has
"reasons for doubting it" [Hast du Gruende, daran zu
zweifeln?]. (135) The Marquise, who can neither provide
such a ground nor even desire to defend herself against the
charge, is overcome by confusion. Having long before
accepted the inadequacy of her reason, she can only express
her rational collapse by proclaiming in the interrogative
mode: "How? where? when?" Still, it is only after a
further reaction - a non-discursive, physiological response
- that the Marquise's mother relents. By claiming that
Leopardo holds "the secret" [das Geheimnis] to her
daughter's uncanny predicament, she stages the final "test"
as a test of the novella-form itself - a test of its
generic tie to exteriority (and repudiation of all
inferiority, including the hermeneutic motif of the
secret). Far from being led into recognizing such a
"secret," however, the Marquise reacts so naturally and so
425
naively that her mother can do nothing but admit her
innocence:
Gott, mein Vater! rief die Marquise; ich war einst in der
Mittagshitze eingeschlummert, und sah ihn von meinem Diwan
gehen, als ich erwachte! - Und damit legte sie ihre kleinen
Haende vor ihr in Scham ergluehendes Gesicht. (135)60
In the end, it is the Marquise's physiological reaction -
and not her discursive assurances - that sway her mother's
opinion; only such a spontaneous and automatic reaction
could demonstrate conclusively that she is indeed possessed
of no secret and has absolutely no predetermined truth to
offer - that, finally, she is genuine in her appeal to the
domain of exteriority.
If this physiological reaction on the Marquise's part
automatically affects her mother, so that she cannot
refrain from spontaneously revealing her artifice, it
begins a larger process of collective collapse that claims
the reason of both mother and father. Forced to abandon
the keystone of their respective worldviews - the
reproductive stance entailed by Kantian reason's
fetishization of knowledge - both experience a loss of
emotional control. The consequences of this rational
breakdown bring about a renewed perception of freedom, the
lifting of a massive (rational) repression, whose
ambivalent status is expressed in Kleist's tendency toward
60. "'Oh, God in heaven!' cried the Marquise: 'it did once
happen that I had fallen asleep in the mid-day heat, on my
divan, and when I woke up I saw him walking away from it!'
Her face grew scarlet with shame and she covered it with
her little hands." (Luke and Reeves, 103)
426
parodic hyperbole. The mother, throwing herself at the
Marquise's feet, literally goes into a hysteric state; in
discovering her own desire, she rejects her own subjection
at the hands of a patriarchal Reason: "I defy the whole
world; I want no greater honor than your shame..." [Ich
biete der ganzen Welt Trotz; ich will keine andre Ehre
mehr...].(136) Upon her recovery, something ensues that
had never been quite possible before: her relation with her
daughter unmediated by the paternal logos (cf. the jesting
between the two with regard to Leopardo). This rational
collapse in turn renders the Commandant virtually
catatonic, unable to speak or move. Kleist describes him
as "going almost into convulsions" and as being generally
out of his senses. Moreover, once he regains his composure
- on the far side of the reproductive stance - his former
Prussian rigidity has given way to a disturbing
licentiousness that has baffled many of Kleist's critics:
through the mother's eyes (compounding the perversion),
Kleist portrays the Marquise literally embracing her
father:
still, mit zurueckgebeugtem Nacken, die Augen fest

geschlossen, in des Vaters Armen liegen; indessen dieser,
auf dem Lehnstuhl sitzend, lange, heisse und lechzende
Kuesse, das grosse Auge voll glaenzender Traenen, auf ihren
Mund drueckte: gerade wie ein Verliebter. (138)61
61. English: "...with her head thrown right back and her
eyes tightly shut, [the Marquise] was lying quietly in her
father's arms, while the latter, with tears glistening in
his wide-open eyes, sat in the armchair, pressing long,
ardent, avid kisses on to her mouth, just like a lover."
(Luke and Reeves, 107)
It is as if Kleist were here indicating a rigid economic
law behind reason's repression of pleasure: the more avid
the commitment to reason, the more extreme the
disintegration ensuing upon its eclipse.^
With this collapse of reason, the Marquise has
successfully convinced her family of her sincerity: father,
mother, and daughter now await the coming of the 3rd "with
the most strained expectancy" [unter den gespanntesten
Erwartungen].(140) All have come full circle from their
earlier fixation on a hermeneutic key. Together, they now
embrace a position of pure passivity, signalled textually
by the passive voice, from which they can do nothing other
than look to the prospective event to produce an
explanation: "Nun gait es, beim Anbruch des naechsten
Tages, die Frage: we r nur, in a H e r Welt, morgen um 11 Uhr
sich zeigen wuerde..."(139)63 Moreover, by reporting the
Marquise's resolve to accept unconditionally the person who
will appear, the narrator further emphasizes the her
passivity: 11Die Marquise hingegen schien willens, in jedem
Falle, wenn die Person nur nicht ruchlos waere, ihr
gegebenes Wort in Erfuellung zu bringen..."(139)64 With
62. See Lacan, "Kant avec Sade," in Ecrits (Paris: Editions

Seuil, 1966); English translation in October 46.
63. English: "The question now was, who in the world would
turn up at eleven o'clock on the following morning..."
(Luke and Reeves, 108)
64. English: "It seemed, however, to be the Marquise's wish

to keep her promise in any case, provided the person were
not a complete scoundrel..." (Luke and Reeves, 103)
428
this dissolution of her speech in the passive voice, the
Marquise's submission to the generative rules of her
solicitation takes on its ultimate form.
When the Count is announced, however, she violently
resists the very outcome that she had prepared herself to
accept. In a momentary last stand of direct discourse, the
Marquise rediscovers her capacity to speak when the Count
is announced at the door. She cries [rief]: "Verschliesst
die Tueren!" ["Shut the doors!"] as if his appearance were
an event of chance (and a further torment) that could only
interfere with the successful unfolding of her search. Yet
when the Count penetrates into the house, wearing the very
uniform he had worn on the day of her rescue, the Marquise
once again loses her voice. She lapses into sheer
confusion [glaubte vor Verwirrung in die Erde zu sinken]
and is on the verge of flight [wollte eben in ein
Seitenzimmer entfliehn], when her mother takes stock of the
situation. Posing the rhetorical question, "Why...whom
have we been expecting?" [wen erwarten wir denn -?], the
mother immediately domesticates this random appearance,
reterritorializing the materiality of the event into the
causal order of representation. When the Marquise
subsequently collapses from shock [stuerzte, beide Haende
vor das Gesicht, auf den Sofa nieder], her mother lightly
challenges her reaction, wondering at her surprise: "Was
ist geschehn, worauf du nicht vorbereitet warst?n ["What
has happened that can have taken you by surprise?"] The
Marquise's reaction is, of course, a final attempt to
escape the fabricated representation of the media machine,
which she quite sincerely did not expect; her voice returns
and she cries: "gehn Sie! gehn Sie! ... auf dinen
Lasterhaften war ich gefasst, aber auf keinen - - -
Teufel!n ["Go away! go away! I was prepared to meet a
vicious man, but not - not a devil!"] The appearance of
the Count, whom she had hitherto reckoned an "angel," is
literally unthinkable to her. To avoid total collapse, the
Marquise flies into a rage and takes flight, informing her
family of her refusal to marry. In her hysterical state,
she is on the brink of forgetting her initial reason for
publishing her ad: the desire to insure the well-being of
her child [sie erwiderte, dass sie, in diesem Fall, mehr an
sich, als ihr Kind, denken muesse]; and she is restored to
reason only through the intervention of her father, who
reassumes his position as enforcer of the law, declaring
dass sie ihr Wort halten muesse. In short, it is only
after experiencing the most extreme threat to her reason
that Marquise submits herself to the verdict of the media
machine. Since the representation it produces is literally
an invention, it must be accorded "objective validity."
There is no original against which it could be judged
false. As long as she retains her reason (and in order to
retain it), the Marquise has no choice but to accept it.
With the Commandant's intervention - to dictate the
marriage arrangement - the order of the world is restored.
430
Yet the Marquise takes more time to restore order to
her "self.” It takes her over a year to accept the Count,
or in other words, to integrate the replacement
representation that allows her to complete her self-
identity. This temporal protraction reverses the
acceleration for which Kleist is famous, emphasizing the
"cost" an individual must pay for societally-recognized
self-knowledge. It is, Kleist suggests, in the humble act
of constituting its own empirical identity (and not in the
transcendental function of the pure "Ich denke") that the
Kantian self is split. The provisional completion of her
novella (and her self-representation) comes at the cost of
the Marquise's propriety over her identity: she can never
efface her reliance on technical exteriority, but can only
"suture" it by integrating the content that it imposes on
her.
And yet, despite this cost, the split subject is far
from being the menace to reason for which Kleist's
commentators have often taken it. By depicting the
successful becoming-technological of the Marquise, Kleist
suggests that the splitting of the subject is simply the
corollary of an "imperfect world." His great contribution
is to show that we can (and must) accept it as our
condition if we are to move on in life. Indeed, Kleist's
text ends with the telling image of a second beginning:
[Der Graf] fing, da sein Gefuehl ihm sagte, dass ihm von
alien Seiten, um der gebrechlichen Einrichtung der Welt
willen, verziehen sei, seine Bewerbung um die Graefin,
seine Gemahlin, von neuem an, erhielt, nach Verlauf eines
431
Jahres, ein zweites Jawort von hir, und auch eine zweite
Hochzeit ward gefeiert, froher, als die erste... Eine ganze
Reihe von jungen Russen folgte jetzt noch dem ersten; und
da der Graf, in einer gluecklichen Stunde, seine Frau einst
fragte, warum sie, an jenem fuerchterlichen Dritte, da sie
auf jeden Lasterhaften gefasst schien, vor ihm, gleich
einem Teufel, geflohen waere, antwortete sie, indem sie ihm
um den Hals fiel: er wurede ihr damals nicht wie ein Teufel
erschienen sein, wenn er ihr nicht, bei seiner ersten
Erscheinung, wie ein Engel vorgekommen waere. (143)65
Yet despite the promise of this image, its textual
anchoring in indirect discourse attests to its fragility,
to the ever-present possibility of further uncanny
intrusions from the imperfect world.
65. English: "[The Count's] instinct told him that, in

consideration of the imperfection inherent in the order of
the world, he had been forgiven by all of them, and he
therefore began a second wooing of the Countess, his wife;
when a year passed he won from her a second consent, and
they even celebrated a second wedding, happier than the
first... A whole series of young Russians now followed the
first, and during one happy hour the Count asked his wife
why, on that terrible third day of the month, when she
seemed willing to receive the most vicious of debauchees,
she had fled from him as if from a devil. Throwing her
arms around his neck, she answered that she would not have
seen a devil in him then if she had not seen an angel in
him at their first meeting." (Luke and Reeves, 113)

1994tesis On Horror

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INFORMATION TO USERS

The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the

Oversize materials (e.g., maps, drawings, charts) are reproduced by

Photographs included in the original manuscript have been reproduced

University Microfilms International

From H eidegger to horror: The defiguration of the m achine in

Hansen, Mark Boris Nicola, Ph.D.

Copyright © 1994 by Hansen, Mark Boris Nicola. All rights reserved.

From Heidegger to Horror: the Defiguration of the Machine

submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for

Mark Boris Nicola Hansen

Professor Juliet Flower MacCannell, Chair

Professor J. Hillis Miller

Professor Andrzej Warminski

Professor Wolfgang Iser

All rights reserved.

and is acceptable in quality and form

for publication on microfilm:

University of California, Irvine

May it be urged against this method that

CURRICULUM VITAE ....................................... vi

DISSERTATION ABSTRACT ................................. vii

PART I: THE MACHINE M E T A P H O R .......................... 79

CHAPTER 2 .............................................. 137

CHAPTER 3 .............................................. 182

PART II: MEMORY AND TECHNOLOGY ........................ 226

CHAPTER 4 .............................................. 227

CHAPTER 5 .............................................. 249

CHAPTER 6 .............................................. 284

PART III: THE TECHNOLOGICAL UNCANNY ................... 315

CHAPTER 7 .............................................. 316

CHAPTER 8 .............................................. 367

My thanks, first of all, to my chairperson, Professor

Financial support for this project was provided by the

Mark Boris Nicola Hansen

1987 B. A. in Comparative Literature, New York

1987 1988 Regent's Fellow, Comparative Literature,

1988 1990 Teaching Assistant, English and Comparative

1989 M. A. in Comparative Literature

1990 1991 Fulbright Scholarship (Graduate Fellow),

1991 1992 Teaching Assistant, English and Comparative

1992 1994 Adjunct Assistant Professor, Philosophy,

1994 Ph. D. in Comparative Literature, University of

Dissertation: "From Heidegger to Horror: the

From Heidegger to Horror: the Defiguration of the Machine

Mark Boris Nicola Hansen

Doctor of Philosophy in Comparative Literature

University of California, Irvine, 1994

Professor Juliet Flower MacCannell, Chair

The dissertation examines the function of technology in

modern European literary and theoretical texts from the

late 18th century to the present. I argue that the

linguistic bias of contemporary literary and cultural

theory is ultimately unable to account for the impact of

technology on human experience. Focusing on the

progressive evolution of the machine metaphor in twentieth-

century theory from Heidegger and Freud to Derrida and

Lacan, I show how, in each case, an initial openness to

technology's materiality is compromised in order to

maintain the classical privilege of representational

thought as constitutive of the real. With the help of

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's notion of the "machinic

assemblage” and Walter Benjamin's theory of "shock-