The Body ‘Prefers Not To’
Nietzsche on Ethereal Run in Melville and Acker
by Camelia Elias
Roskilde University
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Published in Hyperion: On the Future of Aesthetics, a web publication of The Nietzsche Circle: www.nietzschecircle.com, October 2007. Copyright © 2007 Camelia Elias and The Nietzsche Circle. All essays, interviews, and reviews are shared copyright between author(s) and The Nietzsche Circle. All rights reserved. Please contact editors for any concerns or for usage rights.
Page I
One of the main ideas in cultural studies, which takes into account the transformative processes in society and which has the potential to reconfigure humans, relies on the notion that individuals acquire agency only when they are narrated. It is thus through extension, through the agency of an other’s body and language, and through networking that a sense of identity emerges. In other words, we are what we are because we are supplemented. This law of the supplement in poststructuralist discourse opposes traditional thinking, which holds the notion that transformations come from within. The body as a container for thought poses several contradictions. First, insofar as thinking depends on the ability to make distinctions through language, the assumption that thought arises uncontaminated and in pure form rests on fallacious ground. What characterizes language and its arbitrary relations is not a unitary form framed by the singularity of one thought, but a fragmentary relation of dependency between language and the body. It is through our bodies that we articulate whatever conventions we follow, and hence a second contradiction arises. If thinking materializes as it sometimes does (one hopes), it is not because it finds itself in an immanent relation to the body, but because it transcends the body on its own terms—the body’s, that is. The materialization of thought occurs only insofar as the body desecrates it through arbitrary articulation. Hence, one can concur that the relation between thought and the body as mediated through language is bound to situate itself in the inscrutable, and the incalculable. This irreverential relation may be said to rely on opportunity rather than calculation, which means that the language of the body, if it chooses to articulate, is unpredictable. In this relation, if thought is capable of and hence retains any kind of singular manifestation, it will be a thought of the body’s ability to express a desire for immortality. According to cyber critics, this desire alone marks our entrance and ultimate belonging to the realm of the cyborg.
A(h)nnunciation
One of the philosophers who have anticipated the modern discourse on immortality in a most interesting way is Friedrich Nietzsche. In Nietzsche’s desire to act as a “physician of culture,” he makes a most remarkable statement, which I suggest links the idea of immortality with immortality’s recurrent return as grammar. In his Twilight of the Idols he thus states: “I am afraid we are not rid of God, because we still have faith in grammar” (Nietzsche, 1984c: 483), indicating the paradox of God’s ethereal yet continual domination over the body through the materialization of language. Nietzsche writes by fragments when he posits the hermeneutic idea that affirming one singular part of one’s life means affirming it as a whole, in its entirety. How the part becomes a whole, and how the part bestows singularity over the whole is seen particularly in Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo (1888/1979). In the paratextual subtitle of this autobiography, “How one becomes what one is,” we find Nietzsche’s attempt at translating description into an imperative that has the affirmation of a singular experience at stake: “become what you are.” As critics have already noted, there is a stringent correlation between the idea of immortality and the ability of an individual to create a ‘singular’ space in society that can be called his or her own and that can be ensured to be his or her own even after the person’s death. Daniel Ahern, in his Nietzsche as Cultural Physician (1995), juxtaposes Nietzsche’s concern with exhaustion, decadence, sickness and health—all constitutive of a “physiological dynamics”—with immortality and eternal recurrence—constitutive of what I would call “ethereal dynamics.” I suggest that what informs both these dynamics is an attempt at formulating a singularity of presence through affirmation. As Bert Olivier also observes in his “Nietzsche, immortality, singularity and eternal recurrence”:
What interests me here is the link between singularity, immortality and the belief in grammar. In Nietzsche’s work this link is formulated either as a demand, an imperative, or an apostrophe. When he exclaims in The Gay Science, beginning with an affirmation of a necessity: “One thing is needful. ‘Giving style’ to one’s character—a great and rare art!” (290; 1984b: 98-99), he indicates, by making a proto poststructuralist gesture, that we are already ‘other’ the moment singularity institutes itself in parenthesis, paratext, and ellipsis, or one could also say, at the margins of grammar. Olivier provides a good definition of singularity (as opposed to the fleeting nature of particularity) by way of quoting Joan Copjec: “This notion of singularity, which is tied to the act of a subject, is defined as modern because it depends on the denigration of any notion of a prior or superior instance that might prescribe or guarantee the act. Soul, eternity, absolute or patriarchal power, all these notions have to be destroyed before an act can be viewed as unique and as capable of stamping itself with its own necessity. One calls singular that which, ‘once it has come into being, bears the strange hallmark of something that must be,’ and therefore cannot die...” (Copjec, 2002: 23-24 in Olivier, 2007: 79).
One way in which one’s character acquires style is at the moment when “faith in grammar” gets to be articulated while there is also an attempt at escaping the constricting rules of grammar. If style in its more archaic form means a reduction of things to the bare essential, to gesture, grammar in its most reductive form is manifested through interjections; a mouth gesture (speech) rather than a hand gesture (writing) is bound to have different value stylistically. Interjections have no real grammatical value, and are known as “hesitation devices.” It may be that Nietzsche, being well acquainted with rigorous philological approaches to language, was aware of the value of hesitation when he peppered his works, especially the aphoristic kind, with such interjections as ‘Ah!’ and ‘Oh!’ These interjections usually have no connection to the grammatical sentence which transmits a thought. Such examples of interjective and interruptive yet supplemental kind, one might add, are nowhere clearer articulated than in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. I will engage no further with this work, but let it ghost other examples of writing in which the faith in grammar, once it has come into being, cannot therefore die. Insofar as it can be postulated that Nietzsche was engaged in ghostwriting for Zarathustra, he was interested in the mechanisms of expressing himself in the margins of Zarathustra’s eloquence through interjective interposition. In other words, he explored the possibility of expressing himself through contingency on the must be (Ah!) as a preference for not dying (Oh!).
In his book TechnoLogics: ghosts, the incalculable and the suspension of animation, Gray Kochhar-Lindgren advances the argument that the ancient dream of immortality is now realized through cloning, genetic research, and artificial intelligence. As he puts it:
What I find interesting in the growing body of literature and film engaging with both ghosts and cyborgs is the idea that immortality, while implicitly expressing a right to never die, also takes refuge from itself in the guise of an ethereal body. Immortality is on the run, a refugee, as it were, materialized in the language of the body that would “prefer not to” die. As a departure from Nietzsche, but not in spirit, I want to look here at such different texts as Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener” and Kathy Acker’s “The language of the body” and make the claim that the body, in its attempt to achieve immortality by ghosting either being, writing, or machine, violates its own right to remain in a state of becoming, or crossing over. Melville’s protagonist, a law-copyist, by repeatedly informing his employer that he prefers not to do any of the tasks imposed on him, institutes a crisis that has consequences for his body: he ends up starving to death in a prison, a situation induced by the state of never either refusing or accepting to eat. Acker’s text posits a similar situation in which the language of the body is translated into rendering an absence. By having an abortion, the protagonist neither refuses nor accepts the potential of the extra body (the baby) to cross over into life. Here I want to suggest that the suspension of animation is contingent on the ethereal body as manifested in the figure of a ghost or a cyborg.
O(h)ntology
One of the trajectories that the logic of the technological takes is to consider the separation of the living from the dead. This separation is often seen in cyber criticism as a relation based on annihilation: as bodies narrate their existence through language, they at the same time undermine that very existence through perpetual violations of language. Where bodies are concerned, language functions as a mechanical supplement subject to change, transformation, and improvement. In computer science, language is already seen as a machine which can be coded and programmed according to an object-oriented ontology, which is to say that desire is brought into the machine as a means to operate with the differential and binary character of language. As Aden Evans puts it: “The result is a fold in the code, which extends outside of its plane toward another dimension, to rub against the human world” (Evans, 2006: 90). This rubbing against each other of man and machine engages creativity that does not rely on a transcendental subject. This latter idea is traced back to Walter Benjamin by critics such as Warwick Mules, for whom Benjamin’s search for a fold in language that would embody experience as unmediated by form is an expression of materiality and plasticity. Benjamin’s thoughts, claims Mules, are furthermore “a reflection on the singularity of experience itself, bereft of the certainty of formal knowledge, dangerous and ruined […] Creativity is the release of singularity captured in form. To write this sentence as I have just done (but who is this “I”; at what time does this “I” write?) is to make a case for creativity” (Mules, 2006: 75).
Some of the implications of considering subjectivity which is caught between experience and the body are seen by Kochhar-Lindgren through an ethical prism which filters an essential question: in the face of technology, to what extent can we talk about human nature? The logic of the technological is to compress existing definitions of human nature, which situate human nature in context à la Jose Ortega y Gasset: “Man, in a word, has no nature; what he has is history” (Ortega y Gasset, 2002: 217) with definitions that state that human nature somewhat has to do with the ways in which we define our fears. One could give an example that goes back to Cartesian thinking. “I think therefore I am” can be said to basically formulate all our fears of not having our thoughts embody our bodies—or our bodies embody our thoughts. This dialectical thinking is what prevents us from considering possibilities of crossing various thresholds and developing a cognitive awareness of a pseudo-identity. If we go back to Nietzsche, however, we see a re-valuation of all values through the plastic figurations of the pseudo-self. This self is a-historical insofar as its constitution is not contingent on the dynamics of historical change but on the dynamics of crossing thresholds. Says Nietzsche: “Every profound spirit needs a mask: even more, around every profound spirit a mask is growing continually, owing to the constantly false, namely shallow, interpretation of every word, every step, every sign of life he gives” (Nietzsche, 1966: 51). For Nietzsche, the profound spirit, otherwise aiming to be free, follows a historical trajectory when it masquerades fear into knowledge.
Kochhar-Lindgren, who follows closely in Nietzsche’s footsteps, puts it this way:
are the aliens, we are already other, and the work of the hetero- and the auto- must be enacted, with as much panache as we can muster, keeping in mind that the logic of such a move must deal not with an imitation of the human form, much less an ideal Platonic form, but with a technologics of production that wills the perfection of nature along certain of its axes. (Kochhar-Lindgren, 2005: 127-128; author’s emphasis)
If we pause to ponder some of the words in this passage, written by means of borrowing “ontological thresholds, non-linear thresholds of irreversibility, and creative thresholds of heterogenesis and autopoeisis,” we may conclude that some prevalent ideas passed down to us from the German Romantics are clearly obsolete. In spite of the Romantics’ effort to elude the traps of dualism, when Herder for instance, declares in 1774 that “The body is the symbol, the phenomenon [the real manifestation] of the soul in contact with the universe,” he presupposes that there is no threshold to be crossed, and thus finds himself caught in another master’s house. This house is however haunted by the notion that symbolism must sacrifice expression in the name of interiority. I suggest that what Kochhar-Lindgren is positing in his demand for the enactment of the ‘already’—“we are already other through the workings of hetero-and auto-which must be enacted”—is the idea that in cyberspace there is only exteriority and singularity mediated by the dissolution of (symbolic) form. Hegel, for instance, in the first volume of his Aesthetics, defined the symbol as “an external existent given or immediately present to contemplation, which yet is to be understood not simply as it confronts us immediately on its own account, but in a wider and more universal sense. Thus at once, there are two distinctions to make in the symbol: (i) the meaning and (ii) the expression” (Hegel, 1975: 303-304). For cultural theorists such as Kochhar-Lindgren, cybernetics offers a third element that supplements Hegel’s dialectics: the idea that “we are all temps.” A symbol in cyberspace, especially the ghost, consists of meaning, the expression, and the untimely (Kochhar-Lindgren, 171). Even chronologically, it takes time to get from the Ah! of existence to the Oh! of death.
But before I move on, I should, ah, mention that in Gray Kochhar-Lindgren, the grey zone occupied by the ghost is circular. His book is paratextually ‘signed’ by Nietzsche who autographs the beginning singularly and the end by proxy: Thus spoke ‘Nietzsche’ in the epigraph to the introduction: “The most concerned ask today: ‘How is the human to be preserved?’ But Zarathustra is the first and only one to ask: ‘How is the human to be overcome?’” And thus spoke ‘Zarathustra’ in the epigraph to the conclusion: “Higher than love of the neighbor is love of the farthest and the future; higher yet than the love of human beings I esteem the love of things and ghosts. This ghost that runs after you, my brothers and sisters, is more beautiful than you; why do you not give him your flesh and bones?” Oh, between Nietzsche and Zarathustra it is all Gray.
Another
Quite a considerable amount of literature has been written on Melville’s story “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street” (1853). However, only few writings are dedicated to considering the relation between the character Bartleby and a cyborg. (I am thinking here of Klaus Benesch: Romantic Cyborgs: Authorship and Technology in the American Renaissance (2002). Benesch discusses however Melville’s “Dollars Damn Me” rather than Bartleby). In Donna Haraway’s definition, a cyborg is “a cybernetic organism, a hybrid machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction” (Haraway, 1991: 149). While the idea of cyborgs populating the American Renaissance exhibiting transcendental and Romantic concerns may seem far fetched, the truth of the matter is that authors such as Melville have been preoccupied, not to say obsessed, by the dialectic between nature and technology. However, if the Romantics considered the link between organicity and mechanization they did so by means of still looking for the sublime. This latter concept has undergone significant changes, and in the current age of the posthuman, the sublime has more ontological rather than symbolic implications. For a cyborg the sublime is a manifestation of a beatific state embodied by extensions such as prostheses that mediate between the desire brought into the machine and the singular experience that this desire yields (see for instance the work of Cypriot cyborg performance artist Sterlarc). As Klaus Benesch also puts it, the link between “cybernetic images” of man-machine in early nineteenth-century literature enters “more of a symbolic than an ontological lineage with their postmodern, posthuman relatives” (Benesch 2002: 27).
The reason why Bartleby is an interesting figure in this relation is because he embodies several contradictory states. Each of these states violates the other. After having acted as a automaton (which represents the first level of embodiment)—copying the same type of legal documents again and again—he discharges himself of his duty, not by refusing to work as such, but by assuming a position of enunciating a preference based on contingency. When the narrator of the story, who is also Bartleby’s employer, asks him whether he will not continue with his work, Bartleby always delivers the same automated answer: “I prefer not.” Though Bartleby speaks in the name of his preference, which in turn bespeaks him, the subject who speaks (I prefer not to) and the subject who is spoken of (“I” as the body that prefers not to) are never identical.
Cultural theorists such as Mules and Kochhar-Lindgren would identify Bartleby’s predicament as that of a subject who has already joined the Borg by positioning himself in the context of the already Other, the already Alien enacted by heterogenesis and autopoiesis. The more Bartleby articulates “I prefer not to,” the more the body becomes inert. This inertia can be seen as a moment of crossing over into ethereal immortality, which Bartleby experiences by becoming a ghost by proxy, an extension of the already Other language embodied in the phrase “I prefer not to.” In his essay “Bartleby, or on Contingency” (Potentialities, 1999) Giorgio Agamben advances the convincing claim that the grammatical value of this sentence (a negative plus an infinitive), which traces and marks incompleteness, creates a space called “potentiality” and enables Bartleby to transcend both existence and nothingness. In Agamben’s scheme, a potentiality is not just a potentiality but also a potentiality for the opposite. Bartleby thus actualizes and realizes at the same time Nietzsche’s project of overcoming faith in grammar.
The phrase “I prefer not to” had already become a ghost, haunting Bartleby’s colleagues who had started using it themselves quite unconsciously. While Bartleby finally dies from a violently slow death induced by inanition, insofar as he prefers not to eat, his “I” as the subject that kept enunciating itself in a potential state of becoming manages to transcend the limits of finitude. As Bartleby’s singular statement stands out from the beginning, it nevertheless proliferates within multiplicity—it haunts all the others. This turns Bartleby’s death into a secondary experience: his death is not an absolute death but what remains in experience after Bartleby has abandoned Being. Insofar as Bartleby’s death is mediated by the creative language machine, which in its folds is capable of making space for potential states rather than their actualization, it becomes a platform for other events to take place, such as becoming ethereally immortal. It is to this state that Bartleby’s narrator makes an anticipated reference when he contemplates doing something for him: “I might give alms to his body; but his body did not pain him. It was his soul that suffered, and his soul I could not reach.” The difference between Bartleby and the narrator here is that, unlike Bartleby, the narrator is unable to cross a creative threshold and imagine on his own what Bartleby’s motives for his behavior are.
Warwick Mules states: “Creativity […] begins from the contingent, the specific—wherever one begins. It takes as its starting point the medium of expression in which objects are made apparent in their singular ‘givenness’ to perception” (Mules, 2006: 77). Melville ends his story with the narrator’s double exclamation: “Ah Bartleby! Ah humanity!” adding to the feeling not only that Bartleby has gone to meet his maker—himself, that is—in that space of autogenesis and autopoiesis—but that in the process he has also turned himself into an object apparent in its singular givenness to the perception of a virtual world, which the narrator cannot see. Or prefers not to.
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