Letter from Benjamin Mayer to Gary Hall about the book Masked Media
It’s a set of circumstances that has left many of us in a condition of melancholy, of unresolved mourning, for what we have lost: unresolved, because our attachment to a certain liberal manner of performing as academics and theorists is not fully acknowledged, so it’s not something that we can work through when we do experience its loss at the hands of neoliberalism. (Is the landfill of theoretical literature on the Anthropocene one expression of this melancholy?) In turn this unresolved mourning can be said to have led to a state of political disorientation and paralysis. Since it’s a loss we find difficult to acknowledge, we are unable to achieve an adequate understanding of how the process of corporatising the academy can be productively reinflected, or what kind of institution we should be endeavouring to put in place of the neoliberal university.
Dear Gary &:
Thank you so much for this rich and disquieting book. I have read it as a testimony, a theoretical-theatrical challenge, a compelling interpellation. I have been moved by it. It spells out many of the salient aspects of our lived experience over the last 40 years. Which also makes it a formidable account of some of the decisive aspects of contemporary cultural or intellectual history, marked by the analogue-to-(post)digital mutations. I read it, too, as a searing interrogation of the politics of the “critical” in our day – institutions, organizations. groups, persons. All of our dark sides, all of our authoritarian capacities.
I am particularly happy to read it at the inaugural stage of the Laboratory of Contemporary Writing, that has recently sprung among a group of us. Predictably, for me, you got me thinking that such a lab is also, again, a lab of social bonds. (I wish to welcome you again to 17, a platform that has ventured – for nearly 25 years now – to ponder experimentally the fear of Ivan Illich that electronic writing will not furnish a basis for communitas. Illich spells out his fear in his last book, In the Vineyard of the Text, his appraisal of Hugh of Saint Victor’s Didascalicon, considered as the first treatise of reading in the West, in the context of a primer of the knowledge of its day, back in the year 1130, at the dawn of Scholasticism, when scrolls gave way to codices, books as we know them). With Illich, and against Illich, we have taken up his challenge to assemble bonds in the midst of this very electronic broth.
Thank you, Gary &. you deepened my understanding of the way in which the mutating economies of writing are but indices of the transformation of social bonds. For media at once make, and break, social links. As Lacan might have it: there is no technological rapport. From this perspective, experiments with new media can be understood to be mobilized by the vital need to redress severed social bonds, and make conditions for the common newly (un)inhabitable. All of which, confronts us time and time again with a rather odd strategic choice, as Hegel Logic helps us to articulate:
Difference in itself is the difference that refers itself to itself; thus it is the negativity of itself, the difference not from another but of itself from itself; it is not itself but its other. What is different from difference, however, is identity. Difference is, therefore, itself and identity. The two together constitute difference; difference is the whole and its moment. The two together constitute difference: difference is the whole and its moment. -One can also say that difference, as simple difference, is no difference; it is such only with reference to identity (…)[1]
The ever-recurring strategic choice being: are we, therefore, to exercise difference by affirming difference as such, or by affirming difference-from-difference? A dilemma which in the end can only be dealt with improvisationally, as we go about performing our lives as best we can.
Allow me now to make an additional provocation and suggest that this dilemma poses something of a challenge to the intention, as reiterated in Masked Media, to defeat the Liberal subject (a challenge which of course is also ours – I mean me &): is not such an intention tantamount to attempting to defeat our “I”, in whatever historical and cultural forms it may take? [that “I” which is the quintessential operator of matters economical, political, legal, institutional, and so on.
Let me recall that for Freud, the “I” is a psychic agency that mediates between the drives, external reality, and the superego, providing the subject with a fragile – but necessary – sense of unity and continuity, however it might not be “master in its own house”, since much of psychic life remains unconscious. And let us remember, too, how Lacan radicalizes this view: the “I” would be above all a misrecognition, first forged in the mirror stage as an alienating identification with an image of unity, and later sustained in language where the “I” of enunciation can never coincide with the subject of the unconscious. So, while Freud treats the “I” as a limited, but indispensable, function of psychic organization, Lacan will insist that the “I” is necessary as a fiction that allows the subject to enter the symbolic order, even as it conceals the structural division at the heart of subjectivity. So, again, my devil’s advocate question is whether the intention to defeat the “I” is not comparable to the intention to defeat identity in the very field of difference? (Which is of course not to say the “I” should not be permanently interpellated…)
This is no simple quandary in a time of environmental unravelling and intensifying generalized war. That is the question: to affirm difference or difference-from-difference? Do we really have a choice? Isn’t the inevitability of having to do both, in turns, the very sign of the logical impossibility of the Liberal subject? To differentiate and differentiate from difference – impossibly at the same time. That is, to defeat the “I” while also enacting a supplementary differentiation of identity, not instead of identity, but alongside it…
Something I see taking place across the entire – and quite wondrous – string of the masked media initiatives, of which this book is such an eloquent archive. Whence do they spring? From an exemplary Critical Institution, which is the somewhat conventional name I have used to refer to an apparatus (a dispositif) capable of deploying in any number of social or organizational loci and situations, in whose element any, and every, Imaginary and Symbolic constellation (the Liberal subject included, of course) can playfully be defeated. In other words, a crucial subjective, cultural, social, political and institutional air vent. Which can here be clearly seen to concern itself with embodied world-(un)making, in the analogue-to-(post)digital flux.
“Please tear out the following pages if you would prefer this book to be more obviously theoretical and less obviously performative.” The very heart of the matter: insofar as defeat is inherent and necessary, theory is quite simply about exercising this simple fact. There is ultimately no theory, but only performance. Embodiment, action, invention, extemporization. Autography as de-facement, signed.
[1] Translated by George Di Giovanni
