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Useless humanities, useless machinesEmile Fromet de RosnayFrench/CSPTUniversity of [email protected]@emilederosnay
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What are the implications of a tool that “doesn’t do anything,” of a “useless machine”? Beyond the dull paradox of successful failures or the scientific notion of productive failure, how can we think about a machine that produces nothing and from which we can have no practical use? Such a question requires great creativity, the utmost intellectual rigour, and perhaps even a soul-crushing despair.
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“My argument is quite different: that quantum and topological models of analysis are applicable to imaginative writing tout court, that these models are more adequate, more comprehensive, and more enlightening than the traditional models we inherit from Plato and Aristotle to Kant and Marx. "Quantum poetics" in this study does not signify certain figures and tropes that stimulated the practices of a certain group of historically located writers. On the contrary, it comprises a set of critical methods and procedures that are meant to be pursued and then applied in a general way to the study of imaginative work.
“[...]"The Ivanhoe Game" models a new form of critical method. Its applicability is of a general kind—as much for Yeats and Pound as for Keats and Byron, for Shakespeare or Dante, for Ovid, Lucretius, the Bible. It is a model that we propose to build in a new kind of textual environment—a digital one. Finally, it is only a model—one model. We propose to build it in the hope that it may stimulate others to develop and build more adequate critical tools.”
(Jerome McGann, Radiant Textuality, xv) 4
Who said that… ?“Philosophy has become mathematics for modern thinkers, although they profess that mathematics is only to be studied as a means to some other end.”
Aristotle, Metaphysics 992a, trans. W. D. Ross [Clarendon, 1933]
(accessed on http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/)
=> ἀλλὰ γέγονε τὰ μαθήματα [that which is learnt, i. e. arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy] τοῖς νῦν [now] ἡ φιλοσοφία, φασκόντων ἄλλων χάριν αὐτὰ δεῖν πραγματεύεσθαι [work towards].
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Galloway, “Network Pessimism”
“The humanities will need to save themselves, and not only for the crass reason that going to university can cost an insane amount of money, so students choose to go into business, medicine, economics, etc., to remake the money as soon as possible. It’s not just that, although that cannot be simply dismissed. In the 20th century the natural sciences have produced some amazingly stunning and beautiful theories in physics, and genetics, and in biology. The humanities have produced nothing of this sort [WTF!]. Literature, art, in a sense even political history (mostly in a horrendous way), have produced enormously interesting objects, but the study of these objects, that is to say the disciplines of the humanities — the study of literature, the study of history — have lagged behind. The humanities have lagged behind in conceptual imagination and in boldness. I totally understand why a 20-year old would choose to do astrophysics rather than literature. It’s so much more interesting in many ways, just for the pleasure of the intelligence. That is what the humanities have to work on.”
(Franco Moretti, LARB, March 2, 2016)8
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Thaumazein, the origin of philosophyThaumazein (θαυμάζειν) = wonder, perplexity
The arkhê philosophias of Plato’s Theaetetus (155d)
See also:
Aristotle, Metaphysics, 982b
Hegel, The Philosophy of History
Kierkegaard, Stages on Life’s Way
Heidegger, Basic Questions of Philosophy (Erstaunen vs Verwunderung)10
“...and not on account of any use”1 Archeology: use is already implied in the notion/affirmation of thaumazein
However, chresis, chrestai (use, to use) has a very different meaning today:
Modern definition relates to a subject, to the accusative (a subject exhausting a potential)2
Ancient Greek chresis untranslatable as use of something insofar as it relates to the dative and genitive, and is in many ways impersonal (in Benveniste’s sense)
1. “καὶ οὐ χρήσεώς τινος ἕνεκεν” => Aristotle, Metaphysics, 982b (“not for any practical utility”)2. Cf. Giorgio Agamben, Uso dei corpi (2014)
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The useless has always accompanied the useful● There is no primordial Eden of perfectly non-utilitarian, sacred knowledge● An archeology of the useless implies not an original integrity on a
chronological linearity (diachronic), nor does it imply a structural totality (synchronic)
● Sacred becomes fragmented (Babel)
➢ the fragmented becomes the sacred, integral (mythologization/mythologeme): the legal
becomes sacred, not the other way around (“religion does not precede the law but rather follows it” Sacrament of Language, 27)
➢ There is a temporality, a “future antérieur” of the archive (“nothing will have taken place but the place” (“rien n’aura eu lieu que le lieu”)
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● Examples:● Plato’s thaumazein● Modernism since Gautier (art for art’s sake):
➢ Mallarmé ➢ Jacques Carelman: Catalogue des objets introuvables (1969)
● Rube Goldberg ● Natali Leduc: Churnatron 1400
Modalities of the useless
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Malevich, “White on White” (1917-1918)
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This is not a “marvelous machine”... 15
Duchamp’s ready-made
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Jacques Carelman (1929-2012)
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Taunting the useful
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Simon Biggs’ “This is not a hypertext” (littlepig.co.uk)
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