Plastic Sovereignties: Agamben and the Politics of Aesthetics by Arne de Boever

Author:Arne de Boever [Boever, Arne de]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Philosophy, General
ISBN: 9780748684991
Google: NDVYDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Published: 2017-04-19T01:10:13.129000+00:00

Another Turn of the Screw

In the “Best of 2009” issue of Artforum, Jonathan Crary recommends Agamben’s What is an Apparatus? as one of the best books of 2009. Crary’s brief recommendation focuses on the twenty-four-page title essay in the collection, arguing that it provides insight in developments that it does not even address, namely the “remaking of the book into an electronic shopping appliance,” “the fate of paper and printing,” and “the optical properties of illuminated screens.”73 Agamben’s essay, Crary argues, takes the reader

across two millennia of related theological and philosophical problems of governance to a concise account of the current phase of capitalism, with its massive proliferation of apparatuses and its production of “the most docile and cowardly social body” in all of history.74

“Apparatuses are inseparable from what makes us human,” Crary continues; but Agamben’s essay demonstrates that the apparatus is also “what uses us.” Contrary to what one might think at first sight, apparatuses thus actually destroy “our capacity to communicate with one another about what we share in common” – in short: “politics.”75

Crary appears to suggest here – even though his work shows that he knows better – that such a destruction of politics was not yet ongoing before the book was remade into an electronic shopping appliance. The book – printed on paper, and not projected on an illuminated screen – appears to emerge in Crary’s short text as something that is outside the history of the apparatus that Agamben outlines. Anyone who has read Agamben’s essay, however, will know that for Agamben, this is emphatically not the case. “I shall call an apparatus,” Agamben writes,

literally anything that has in some way the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control, or secure the gestures, behavior, opinions, or discourses of living beings. Not only, therefore, prisons, madhouses, the panopticon, schools, confessions, factories, disciplines, juridical measures, and so forth (whose connection with power is in a certain sense evident), but also the pen, writing, literature, philosophy, agriculture, cigarettes, navigation, computers, cellular telephones, and – why not – language itself, which is perhaps the most ancient of apparatuses – one in which thousands and thousands of years ago a primate inadvertently let himself be captured, probably without realizing the consequences that he was about to face.76

In Agamben’s essay, there clearly is no such a thing as a happy age of the book, of paper and printing, before the illuminated screens that Crary mentions. Instead, language itself is presented as an apparatus – a thing through which power operates – in which primates when they first learned to speak became captured.

As might already be clear from the list that was just quoted, Agamben’s vision of technology risks taking on, at times, panicky proportions. A few pages later, Agamben, who was a student of Heidegger’s, writes:

For example, I live in Italy, a country where the gestures and behaviors of individuals have been reshaped from top to toe by the cellular telephone (which the Italians dub telefonino). I have developed an

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