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Introduction: The Human and an Economy of Exchange
Rhetoric and the Reproduction of the Human
The Entanglement of Writing, the Human, and Temporality in Civil Society
Writing and the Ontologization of Origins
Writing and the Ontologization of Origins
[F]ramings of the object as simultaneously ancestral and heralding a looming post-humanity…produce a kind of temporal abstraction that…occludes – by positing the object-world as “ancestral” and cryptically “to-come” – the present as an open field of political action. –Rosenberg
In the quote above, J. Rosenberg is discussing what he calls the “ontological turn”: a divestment from present worlds to focus on primitive/brink narratives in academia’s shift towards molecularization as a locus of analysis (“Molecularization”). Here, however, I apply Rosenberg’s explanation of the primitive/brink figuration to writing. Specifically, in Of Grammatology, Derrida argues that “[t]here is no speech, then, as we know, no song, and thus no music, before articulation…convention has its hold only upon articulation, which pulls language out of the cry, and increases itself with consonants, tenses, and quantity. Thus language is born out of the process of its own degeneration” (264, emphasis in original). In the process of articulation and the production of memory-work, writing both seeks and produces its own origin while simultaneously destroying itself. The object that Rosenberg is referring to, in this project, is writing, which emerges as both ancestral in origin, but also post-Human (to-come) as an immaterial and semiotic force.
To argue that writing operates within the primitive/brink dichotomy, I first focus on the primitivism of Western grammars and how they are origin-seeking in nature. Writing, in its many forms, manifests through articulation (in speech, physical inscriptions, images, and so on). The act of writing thus produces its own origin and demise in the (re)production of signs as the expansion of rhetoric is only possible with the signifier of the signifier. This, according to Derrida, “describes on the contrary the movement of language: in its origin, to be sure, but one already has the presentiment that an origin whose structure can be expressed thus—signifier of the signifier—flares up and erases itself in its own production. There the signified always already functions as signifier” (7). Signs themselves, then, function simultaneously as their own beginning and endpoint in the West, i.e. writing is necessarily ateleological as it lacks a coherent start or finish. The process of (re)signification divests signs from meaning as each iteration or manifestation of a sign imbues it with a different interpretation, hence how the evolution of writing presents the signifier of the signifier.
As the West conditions an idealized memory-work in the Western psyche, the “origin” of writing emerges as a cultural construct. Spillers says that “[t]he symbolic order that I wish to trace…an ‘American grammar,’ begins at the ‘beginning,’ which is really a rupture and a radically different kind of cultural continuation…that take[s] place on the subsaharan Continent during the initiative strikes which open the Atlantic Slave Trade” (68). Since writing is ateleological, the West must mark an originary moment to the American grammar to maintain a linear teleology of the past, present, and future. The slave trade comes to represent the historical (and ontological) origin of the symbolic order and Western grammars, abstracting writing from its fluctuating inception in articulation. To stabilize the temporality of language, then, is to dehistoricize and obfuscate the relationship between rhetoric and the inauguration of the political category of the Human.
Simultaneously, writing is captured within a brink figuration in the West. In “Humans Involved,” Tiffany Lethabo King indicts poststructuralism as a form of White transcendence. In this project, I recontextualize King’s criticisms of post-humanism to subjectlessness in writing. In the West, a dualism of material/immaterial is used to differentiate semiotics from corporeal infrastructures, such as the physical body and financialization. Western grammars become post-Human, in nature, as they are construed as devoid of subjectivity and agential capacity. As rhetoric is thought to be without subject and without identity, it ultimately operates under what King calls a “ruse of subjectlessness” as the “erasure of the ([W]hite) body-as-subject-as-ontology…[cover] the bloody trail of [W]hite/[H]uman-self-actualization” at the expense of Black and Indigenous life (178). The White, cis, middle-class, able-bodied male is the idealized Human subject. Whiteness, as the universalizing norm and presumed subject of Western grammars, is both a defining characteristic of, yet also transcends, the Human, an instantiation of a brink figuration by operating as a line of flight beyond the Human.
The primitive/brink dichotomy of writing thus stabilizes the Human as an enterprise of carceral and racial capitalism. As Rosenberg argues, “The ontological turn’s relationship to time becomes clearer now not only as a primitive/brink logic, but also as a set of fantasies around production – fantasies that become particularly legible in terms of the political economy of primitive accumulation” (“Molecularization”). As consumption and production accelerate, the internal contradictions of capitalism are increasingly discernable: the necessity of both (re)producing the Human as a category for social control and literal reproduction of humans-as-laborers, but simultaneous need to (over)exploit bodies for labor until their premature death (Berlant; Rosenberg; Wang). By necessity, the nuclear family emerges as the ideal kinship formation, normalized through writing in films, advertisements, books, etc., to maximize (re)production so growth can continue towards infinity. Reproductive and affective labor thus become intrinsic to the continuation of carceral and racial capitalism, necessitating the exploitation of primarily feminized and racialized bodies to maximize the quality and length of life of Humans in the West.
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when i awoke, i wondered
instead of falling apart
what would it mean to
fall together
and create
and dream
and desire
with the stars to light our way
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