kirbyVquantum

Notes on: Kirby V (2011) Quantum Anthropologies. Life at Large. Durham: Duke University Press.

Dave Harris

Preface

This book was a response to a challenge to her at a conference to focus what she was arguing about Derrida. She also wants to acknowledge Saussure. The main aim will be to refuse to split cultural studies from contemporary scientific enquiries, seeing natural and social phenomena as 'different expressions of the same phenomenon' (viii), an underlying differance. The specific attack is on a person called Protevi, who had argued that although sympathetic to deconstruction, its proper place is not in science, but in those studies focused on language and culture.

Derrida himself has suggested such a split is unfounded, and it would obviously we can deconstruction as a general approach. It has already shown all sorts of continuities in different fields — why should the nature/culture split be exempt.

Derrida uses terms such as general text or open system, writing in the most general sense, and these are really the same questions for Kirby that you find in the physical sciences — determination, causality, space-time involvement and so on. Including them would add important insights. The intention of this book, though is to question what is human or anthropological.

It begins with the [famous] inversion of Derrida's slogan 'no outside of text' which becomes 'no outside of Nature' (x). Derrida has certainly attacked metaphysics, but there is no reason to exclude matter: it could be seen instead as interior to the system. The old split represents a received meaning. Derrida on supplemenarity stresses this interiority [in the course of denouncing metaphysics — that's what he means by nothing outside the text, or no outside of text, because textual menaings are deeply implicated in any metaphysical argument — definitions, corollaries, opposites and all the rest of it]. It is not enough just to stress the differences between matter and language. The results will be also to indicate 'quantum implications', because there is a similar idea of an interiority with an 'articulating energy' and a rejection of simple identity and of simple chronologies. Barad is cited here on the entanglements of ontology and epistemology [so it all gets nicely circular and subcultural].

The common area is that there is no steady space-time continuum, no general field, no '"everything" that preexist the relationality that is the scene of writing, the scene of ontological genesis as enfolding' (xi).

Because quantum implications are now so popular in the humanities and social sciences, cultural critics 'are already practising science', [and their texts are material productions] so human exceptionalism no longer has value. 'Life reads and rewrites itself' in everything.

Chapter 1 Anthropology Diffracted

[This is drawn upon quite a lot in Barad, and I think I discussed the arguments — about clairvoyant stingrays or dark precursors — there. I think reading it in full suggests even more that we can make Derrida fit the natural sciences, as long as we turn him into Deleuze on immanence [='writing'} and actuality. I have glossed and simplified a good deal]

Let's focus on the issue of beginning [and probably, largely ignore the issue of logocentrism]. There is a common idea that there is a beginning and it has mutated, and this lies at the heart of conventional causal explanations, or for that matter conventional understandings of human decision-making. Deconstruction will understand this, but criticise it nevertheless. Our currently crude measurements will maybe become fractal.

Bennington has charted the scandalous implications that follow from Derrida on origins — an absolute past has never been present, there is originary repetition, supplements actually producing solid productions. Some of these radical implications have not survived the institutionalisation of Derrida. Deconstruction has become a particular style of criticism or a philosophical methodology. Actual implications, however are more radical although hard to take seriously, because we are used to assuming that entities simply are here, and that they are confined to simple locations. Explaining events as a consequence of deconstruction is a way of domesticating it, suggesting that complexity is merely apparent, the result of particular cultural perspectives, or attributable to the complexity and creativity of language [my argument really]. Post-modernism has particularly focused on the self-referential reality of language and how it underpins culture. By contrast, nature remains rigid, prescriptive.

This is not a rejection of cultural constructionism, however, [feminists can't reject anything that other feminists have done] and it has been very useful in dispelling conservative accounts of nature or culture. Instead, the implications have to be pushed further than before. For example, understandings of language are still restricted, and we have not yet fully grasped its 'sheer exorbitance' (3). Perhaps we've not explored these because there seems to be no immediately relevant way of 'resolving political and ethical quandaries'. This offers a restriction, even a censorship for politics. Science has long recognised some strange issues of identity and determination, as in quantum science, but this has been ghettoised as well, even by physicists. Barad is quoted again to show how this preserved conventional physics at the macro level.

Other social science disciplines have already elaborated deconstruction, but there is still a simple view of language. It is now extended to include different media, or it is used as a metaphor for wider behaviour. None of these would be acceptable to Derrida, because they would all reduce différance to a matter of relations between concepts. Derrida is not a traditional philosopher nor a linguist. Deconstruction is not just a subjective activity, but something with an objective nature. It can be seen as instrumental, but early Derrida's grammatology is a positive science [although possibly not attainable, as I recall]. Certainly, neither philosophy nor science is adequate, and this leaves open the possibility that deconstruction need not be focused upon objects in culture or language, or on purely subjective identities.

Kirby says she realised the difficulties by thinking about Saussure, and the contradiction in his work — that signs are arbitrary, but that they gain meaning only from a system of signs. There is only 'relational coherence'(6), and it is that that makes specific links [to referents, or between signifier and signified] arbitrary. This implies a reference to something outside the linguistic system, but Saussure argues that this very distinction between inside and outside must remain within language. Saussure proposed a further study which would explain where signs originate within society, a move from linguistics to semiology, an area of anthropology. [Kirby refers to Lotringer on Saussure -- which opened a whole new abyss for me]

Derrida's argument that there is nothing outside the text is similar, although he sees grammatology as the science of the system, something even broader than semiological systems [and this seems to produce the Magic Substance where systems do not preexist the communication between them]. So we have far more than a methodology. Grammatology wants to reject differences between objects and interpreters, or interpretive apparatus. Method is at best a cut [to establish causality, say] which engages the whole system of differences. Method cannot be conveniently isolated except by acknowledging its complexity [and the way it makes exclusions]. For Derrida, of particular importance is 'the sense of textual play' (8), which is not meant to indicate capriciousness but some notion of underlying processes including constraints.

When deconstruction is pursued in other fields, the notion of language is often still simplified, and thought is tracked to resonance or metaphors with linguistic and cultural representations [the example given is 'feedback' in cybernetics -- anthropomorphism too, of course]. This is what Derrida meant by the dangers of seeing deconstruction as involving 'a "general textuality"', 'a new "idealism"' where texts are understood still as culturally mediated, language only represents and the rest of it. Instead, 'differencing is "language", leaving nothing outside of the overall 'grammatological textile'. The representational approach sometimes is differentiated into humanist and anti-humanist variants, but they share a common view of language and subjectivity, human identity and its uniqueness.

Kirby then detours into two examples [which we've seen already discussed in Barad]. She was giving a paper and was worried about its reception, but a young biologist speaking before her described the amazing qualities of stingrays: their receptor cells can only be unlocked by a particular message, but they seem able to anticipate the message. For Kirby, 'it is as if [!] the identity and behaviour of any one observable receptor cell is somehow stretched, or disseminated, in a space-time enfolding' (9) [could be some unknown process that triggers both the reception and the sending of the message? Another dark precursor?]. If they are united over time, a message does not seem to be actually required to have an effect. There is both a question for origins and causality, and for identity as separated in space and time. Kirby even sees this sort of entanglement between herself and the other presenter of the paper which had 'already brought us together before our actual meeting' (10).

In the other example, lightning seems to display mysterious qualities, perhaps even some capacity for logical choice, hence its preference for particular sites. This seems to be a dark precursor for the actual strike, although its communicative capacities remain mysterious. Yet somehow, lightning chooses the most economical route to earth, and travels both ways in steps: however, the first steps are taken without any information about objects on earth underneath. The actual researchers refer by metaphor to human intentions, but another account says that a constant current flows beneath storms and the earth, which charges the earth negatively and, in other conditions, the clouds positively, and this is kept in balance by lightning strike, an action within a global field. This ever present field is detectable in other ways, for example by DNA [which apparently has electrical latency which changes].

For Kirby, these are 'instantiations of the graphematic (grammatological) structure' (12) that she is interested in, with human language itself unable to mediate these operations. [Nice --language cannot construct everything in Nature]. It is wrong to seek culture as the only area, with nature as its creation. At the same time, it is difficult to escape the ways in which nature displays a 'representational history', one which incorporates logical origins and causes, and denies identity and agency.

Of course, the implications of extending this notion of grammatology 'have yet to be robustly explored' (13) although Derrida certainly already extends grammatology beyond linguistics and representational systems. Textuality implies far more than the operations of the components of the sign. It is instead 'a splitting or trace whose infinite dispersal in genesis confounds all notions of dimensionality as aggregation', including conventional notions of place and time. We find writing in this general sense in culture and also in nature. Nature is not just to be added to culture, however. Instead the point is to argue that 'the same initial conditions'apply both to cultural activity and events such as clairvoyants in stingrays or lightning strokes. Both are the 'differant expressions of a unified field, a "general text"'.

Conventional differences between social sciences and science is therefore not so straightforward. It might be that culture assumes a dominant origin for general textuality because a proper understanding of nature has been lost irretrievably, with ensuing binaries and claims of original privilege for human thought. Politically, this equates otherness with some 'original simplicity and limitedness' (14) [the main issue?], and maintains this view with 'righteous conviction'. An adequate critical politics would not hesitate to pursue some of the more radical implications, even though they might be somehow uMPalatable.

The Cartesian view that a human mind constructs everything else [including God?] also means it's quite hard to grasp the reasons for the success of science. It is not just technological and political payoffs — 'such knowledges work'. Scientific success should be fully scrutinised, but its procedures are not seen as relevant to representation or communication. Language belongs only to culture. Therefore progressive politics can only be cultural, and other questions about nature seem naive or pre-critical. However, 'truth productions' in science cannot be omitted.

We fear opening the idea of a text to outside, something not coterminous with human subjectivity. Science therefore becomes 'a bad boy', lacking creativity. Yet cultural analysts still flirt with scientific approaches. Nevertheless, they believe that it is necessary first for humans to break from the natural world, to generate 'projections and ideations' (15) using language. Form is divided from substance, culture from nature, and one side of the binary is seen as 'base, primordial, and lacking'. However, a proper 'vigilance' for analytic activity would challenge this logic, and open a more 'surprising and provocative outcome' (15 – 16).

Some implications were raised at a 1966 conference looking at the interdisciplinary possibilities of structuralist and critical theory. A number of different scholars were involved, including Hyppolite and Derrida. The point was to try and identify common ground on matters such as language systems, objective and subjective judgements, links between microcosmic and macrocosmic dimensions. The young radical Derrida challenged the notion of language and structure implied, and Hyppolite challenged him in turn. Hyppolite agreed that the concept of structure was not at all straightforward and also argued that the natural sciences have progressed by undertaking a kind of deconstruction ['"destructuration"'].

Specifically, Hyppolite argued that we can learn from the natural sciences, that Einstein, for example focuses on a particular form of 'empiric evidence' and it is that that led to his discovery of constants, which go beyond empiricism and which also dominate the whole discussion of space and time. He was suggesting that there is a structure here more general than the actual uses of language, implying indeed even a form of writing producing novel and improbable results which exceed normal subjective understandings and thus has no authors. Yet he saw this as a mutation or accident, a defect of a structure, rather like the way in which random monkeys might produce Shakespeare. The broader implication was that human beings themselves are so different as to have arisen only from a similar mutation or error by nature [later described as a philosophy or experiment of nature]. In particular, could the term [still linguistic or cultural] structure mean something produced by chance, creating a genotype. It would have a mysterious origin, and therefore become a '"sign without sense"'. A mutant from nature had become capable of generating its own mutations and adaptations.

Derrida objects to certain words in Hyppolite's formulation, which reveal underlying assumptions. At this stage in his career, Derrida is actually a little bit insecure and uncertain. What might be at stake is different understandings of the centre, and how language relates to processes of evolution.

Hyppolite asks Derrida for his thoughts on the relevance of the Einsteinian constant [relativity? The timespace continuum?] for the human sciences. Derrida replies with a wonderful example of what I have called elsewhere conjuring up magic substances. First the constant is not a constant or centre because it embodies variability: therefore it is better understood as the concept of a game, not of a thing. Hyppolite wants to ask if this means it is one constant in the game, or a rule of the game, and Derrida replies that '"it is a rule of the game that does not dominate the game. Now, when the rule of the game is displaced by the game itself we must find something other than the word rule' (18 – 19).

Kirby sees this is a wonderful way to de-fetishise language. Apparently, discussing algebra, Derrida says that we can think of algebra as representing a field of ideal objects governed by human subjects, or as some '"disquieting mirror of a world which is algebraic through and through"'. A field is not defined by a centre or a subject, but acts more like a game. Kirby sees this not as 'complacently meandering' (19), but rather an indication of an early calling to explore the mysteries of the lightning stroke, clairvoyant stingrays, quantum action, developing awareness

For her, it leads to a view of language not as separate from nature or the world 'but as their playful affirmation' (20). Seeing language as entirely cultural is to assign it a misleading centre. And instead, we should use Derrida's terms that affirmation '"determines the non-centre otherwise than as loss of the centre… Surrenders itself to genetic indetermination, to the seminal adventure of the trace… Tries to pass beyond man and humanism"'

Human language is not the result of a mutation, something that established some originary qualities. Properly understood, human beings are in the text that nature writes, even if this is an error [and writing is defined positively as more than just random scribbling]. One implication is that the [human] subject of a graphematic structure is best understood as an 'originary articulation'. Another is that humanness itself contains this natural 'originary technicity'. This might be misunderstood as anthropomorphism, but, taken seriously, it would redefine it. We would certainly have to change a number of 'sedimented wisdoms' with effects on our moral compass. Specifically, anthropomorphism would become capable of considerable ['infinite', 21] differentiation, traceable to 'one implicated spacetimemattering'. Analysing that in its different forms and identities would 'open the question of the human, and writing, as if for the first time'.

Chapter 2 Just Figures?

[More of nature's exuberance or excess revealed here, causing problems for conventional notions of rationality, and for easy splits between culture and nature. It begins with a very interesting question about whether maths is natural or cultural --or whether scientific or classical language is. Ultimately, we are to ask whether we find writing and différance only in culture. This one draws on Derrida, but also enters some reservations and need to interpret or extend him]

This chapter opens with a quote from a certain Rotman asking why mathematical writing has not been addressed compared to literary writing, even though there are the same problems with mathematical signs — after all they make up allegedly the most rational language [although anyone who has done a bit of maths knows that there are the most extraordinary assumptions and recognitions involved]. [Later we're going to get back to the question that animated Derrida and Husserl — whether numbers were just ideal objects]

Kirby was watching a TV programme about the discovery of a human skull, and efforts to restore a human appearance. One thought immediately is that faces seem easier to grasp than bones, perhaps because we assume we can read faces better, or maybe grasp something of the actual history of the person involved. Facial reconstructions are relatively recent. Early forms involved simple observations, of the kind artists used, but in 1895 a more scientific method was considered. The skull was rendered as 'a template of measurements — a grid of longitude and latitude whose universal intersections provided an anchor for comparison' (24). This led to a statistical analysis of tissue depths, which in turn led to a better understanding of 'facial architecture' at a general level, enabling extrapolation to specific cases. This database has been recently greatly extended, with more population diversity built-in, and better technical techniques such as CT scans. We can now use algorithms to forecast 'the skull's cranial grammar'. The old methods involved identifying 28 to 32 points and then adding flesh to the average depth: the artist interpolated between these points, drawing upon an understanding of anatomy.

As a further development, information can be derived from the skull of the activity of muscle and tendon, a number of 'local conversations between flesh and bone' (25). They can even now be inferred from other places on the skull, even those without immediate proximity. Here it is 'the differences [which] are able to inform and even inhabit each other'. A particular case of forensic reconstruction in 1993 shows the possibilities. A lot of the skull was actually missing, yet calculations were possible from skull fragments and this was successful enough to recognise the victim. A whole collection of data was used in the prediction of characteristic '"landmark sites"' [note 5, pages 140 – 1 says this is still misunderstood, as an artistic, empathic endeavour rather than the result of more scientific forensic reconstruction].

A series of numbers therefore can generate 'an individual morphology' (26), in some cases producing results which counter common sense [a particularly long nose in one case]. It is an example of the mysteries offered by mathematics to cultural analysts, and raises questions about whether they are both examples of 'language', whether there is a generalised language which will include both. One commonsense observation is that maths seems much more precise and pragmatic than the language of literature. Seeing forensic reconstruction as language, though, shows how radically different material and bits of information can be put into correspondence to produce information. This is not just a process of finding an expression for some underlying presence. There is no factual identity being reconstructed. It's more like the quantum world where the particular bits of information have a defined locality 'as well as a global presence' (27) [a bit fanciful in my view, although it does show the exuberance of nature again that bits of bone can act like a kind of holograph].

Derrida looked at Husserl on the origin of geometry, partly because H clearly saw maths as the most ideal object, deployed apparently abstractly. He then considered the 'logic of supplementarity' required to attach mathematical signs to actual natural objects. This is clearly a very interesting general question, and extends to considering links between any body and any language, any subject and any world. There is also a sense in which mathematical and natural objects had different sorts of histories [actually historicity].

Husserl further investigated maths in terms of perception and experience, to get to this matter of engagement with natural objects. He wanted to see geometrical abstraction as really derived from the perceptions found in ordinary individual subjectivity, but it clearly had an intersubjective dimension as well, and, for that matter, a history. How do abstractions emerge as a 'functional representation' of natural events? Equally, how did geometrical artefacts emerge and endure, persist as culture: Husserl saw the implications for all knowledge, including spiritual and literary matters. Particular ideal representations, in the terms of the time, took on persisting factual existence, even after their inventors had died, even after the original arguments had been lost.

Husserl saw a contrast between the subjective historicity of ideal objects, and normal attempts to grasp and explain particular knowledge acquisitions, how original even idiosyncratic discoveries were transmissible without their original subjective conviction. Had these ideal objects already possess 'intersubjective and supertemporal purchase'? (29). They did not work by just recalling subjective meanings, but became objects both ideal and true, for everyone, independently of personal or social conditions. The problem in its most general is a matter of subjectivity going '"outside of itself in order to encounter or constitute the object"'. Both subjective and objective aspects are retained, because those objects can still make sense within specific cultures as well as having a meaning for all human activity. Kirby can see a connection with 'the quantum puzzles of space-time', although Husserl apparently referred to virtual communication at the intersubjective level. Even so, there are still problem of showing the connection with individual sense perception with its likely subjective variation. The very notion of sense implies this shared ideality.

For Kirby, this is a matter of quite 'uncanny structuration', where some requirement for the future is a part of the initial condition, 'as if the origin is already alive with what has yet to come' (30), where this future is part of the identity of the object. The future is no longer just 'the unfolding of supplementary moments in time' from an original starting point, but now a matter of identity, 'discontinuities or differentiations with/in itself' [does she just mean the potential as well as the existing characteristics — of course, this common understanding would assume great importance for philosophers]. The same implications will threaten the idea of pure ideality, and disturb Husserl's notion that ideal objects originate in culture, in the life world, while mathematics deals with the empirical world. [This is important to show the originary nature of subjectivity?]. Apparently, Derrida glosses Husserl as suggesting that the earth itself is some primal matter, exemplary element, and thus the [common] ground for the first idealities — happily, it also provided examples of early universal and objective identities, calculus and geometry.

Here, there is some 'identifying horizon of human existence' after all. But again there is a gloss from Derrida on Husserl — geometrical idealities might have emerged from this material horizon, but Husserl also wants to argue for an '"a priori"' necessity to develop abstract geometry from '"pre-geometrical experience"' [I think the argument is that only then can a properly ideal object develop, following this '"desedimentation"']. The process of abstraction and creation of ideal objects flows from something that is naturally present, and goes through a necessary severance with such natural knowledge. This somehow emerges from the more naturalistic forms of interpretation themselves, so that human intellection in the full sense appears to be autonomous — this is a bit like the argument in Hyppolite. [There would be a risk otherwise, as note 8, 142, points out — human qualities of agency and intellectual capacity would have to be developed somewhere before the actual arrival of humans]. The actual process of genesis is understood instead as 'a linear notion of temporality that segregates process from product' (31).

There is still a kind of genesis to be explained though when the different component parts of geometry collapse together [in actual applications]. The parts include an individual, the history of geometry, cultural representations and so on. Husserl seems to represent this odd process again as a linear almost causal or logical one, with phrases like '"this," and then, "this."' Somehow, a moment of individuation can produce a more global abstraction. For Kirby, this is really trying to reintroduce a segregation of space from time again, this time in the form of 'proximity or contiguity… linearity': if one thing follows closely from another, we can assume there is some connection.

Husserl elaborates this a bit, and sees it as a conundrum instead, a matter of how dimensions condense in linearity. We begin with a natural limitation or horizon for human perception, an outside which is not human. But this outside is not simply incorporated and included. Instead, a binary structure is preserved linking both outside and inside. The spatial divisions offer a radical qualification for the usual notion of identity as self presence, separated from any other.

Kirby says this is even more radical than Derrida recognises. For D, Husserl is suggesting there is a common horizon of experience, acting as an ultimate arbitration for understanding, regardless of the usual cultural superstructures which might vary. This would be reductive for Derrida, presuming some 'enduring univocity, or self presence, of the same' (32). Derrida says that technically such a pre-cultural nature would never be accessible, and he wants to take the opposite view, that '"noncommunication and misunderstanding"' are the '"very horizon of culture and language"'. There can be no universal absolute translatability or linguistic expression. But Husserl argues that nature and culture are '"inseparably intertwined"' [says Kirby]. [Implications here for her naturalism though? 'Nature' is inaccessible for Derrida -- so that has to be seen as too restricted --below. So Derrida must misunderstand Husserl here]

Derrida says that Husserl's model of language was restricted to the language of science [in his book setting out to investigate the origins of science], whereas instead, language actually offers us 'Joycean exuberance' as in Ulysses. There seems to be no univocity there, only constant equivocation, massive poetic potential, endless '"theasaurisation"' (33). Joyce's work shows that there is no fundamental natural foundation for language, but rather a general equivocation between all languages, [a kind of linguistic virtual] full of poetic synthesis and consequences, fully representing '"the labyrinthine world of culture"' itself equivocal and poetic. However, apparently Husserl can be seen as offering a parallel to Joyce, something transcendental [and subjective?]. Joyce himself never abandons intelligibility, producing a 'veiled promise of… univocity'. So in a way, both Husserl and Joyce show failed projects — Husserl can't fully acknowledge the dynamism of language, so there can be no univocity, but Joyce while celebrating plurivocity doesn't show how this is managed to produce intelligibility. In both cases too there is an implication that subjects are '"unfit"' to guarantee correspondence — but Kirby thinks that Derrida is still thinking of human subjects and has thus missed a chance.

She does not want to assume that language has been invented by humans to access a separated world. This affects both Joyce and Husserl — and Derrida also, at this stage 'lends itself to such a reading' (34). Assuming human exceptionalism, he has too limited a notion of general language or general textuality which really should be understood as 'a global articulation of and by the world', not confined to what is possible just for humans. This makes his critical purchase 'significantly limited'. However, properly thought, the aphorism that there is no outside of text leads to different implications [below] [and does at least dispose of the notion of simple origins in nature]. There is a 'relational involvement' with the world implied in this aphorism, one which cannot assume a natural outside that has no language.

Kirby wants to go further, to argue that if we look at this issue the origins of representations and the split between subject and objects, never completed neatly, we might conclude instead that we are talking about 'the Earth's own scientific investigations of itself'. We can then see Joyce's plurivocity as a matter of 'fractal arabesques that unfold within objectivation' (35) [possibly with the implication that scientific language is the kind of straight and direct version, and this rescues Husserl as saying something more positive, even if limited. However, Kirby might be arguing that we should see poetry and scientific language as not completely distinct?].

Language itself would be something global, a patterning of energies, whose exterior causes can also be understood as internal investigation, 'a comprehensive form of "self" alienation' as necessary to scientific knowledge [as in artistic alienation?]. No particular theory of language will be able to describe it as completely unaffected by the exterior. Derrida would be wrong to argue therefore that nature is inaccessible.

Instead, language is not confined to culture, but should be understood as a much more general 'encrypting'. The specifically linguistic forms should be seen as the last stage of a process, a final effort. There is no radical break with origins. The origin gives a different account of itself [it all sounds very Hegelian to me]. It would be misleading to say that writing exists at the origin, or that there is no difference between human language and general encryption — the difference is 'the system's enduring ingenuity', and the gap between general and human language is 'the stammer of language'.

Derrida sees language as emerging when we lose direct contact with nature, providing a limit which we can never go beyond, to ground our representations, for example. Since we can never fully identify this absence. We have to reinvent nature, [as second nature].. However, we can 'persist in reading Derrida against himself' (36) see his aphorism as an invitation to interrogate language, to explore whether there is general language, and can test the idea of a radical break in human language, seeing it instead as 'a process of differentiation whose energies it is'.

It is no longer necessary to think of human beings as the author of this arrangement. In Derrida, this appears as the objection to Husserl on natural origin of human language. [We must not get too sociological and risk] an account implying that every specific language would bear the mark of '"empirical subjectivity of an individual or society"'. Husserl does not think that we can explain human subjectivity in this [social] scientific way. However, this may be overdependent on the idea of concepts rooted in individual perception, a kind of self presence that Derrida wants to refute. If we turn to Saussure instead, we see that signifier and signified 'are consubstantial', and this would seriously qualify Derrida's critique of self presence. We need to reject the idea of communication as an individual representing reality necessarily imperfectly to another, and think instead of language as 'the system's playing with itself' (37). Kirby then extends this to say that language 'is the world's reproduction of itself' through encryption.

The world can be present to itself, engaged in self absorption, trying to analyse data, a set of '"presents"'. No individuals are involved, no individual receivers of something which is to come. Terms like inaccessibility or the unrepresentable no longer apply.

We can explore this further by looking at Derrida on phonocentrism. He wants to criticise the idea of speech as pure immediate meaning, integrity, compared to writing. But locating this process entirely in culture invites 'complacency'. If we rhetorically replace culture with nature, we can deconstruct this underlying Gestalt. We have to do what Derrida encourages to do 'elsewhere' (38) by questioning conventional space and time [that is more than just invert culture and nature]. We can reverse the conventional sequence of time, for example by asking 'how might writing be speech?' [Very difficult stuff here]. We might find Husserl of more value [with his quest for a natural origin for speech?].

Derrida, glossing Husserl, says that he is arguing that some grasp of common objects, the Earth, can be a common ground for science [reminds me of Popper saying that the basic statement is the final common ground] however, that would still leave the problem of explaining the emergence of this common ground — there would need to be some transcendental notion of Earth, some underlying science of the Earth. This would be impossible because we could never escape our own particular earthly locations and relative grasp of the Earth. Human objectifications [in science] would never extend to grasp the infinite horizon of the Earth, the Whole.

But this implies that the whole is the usual notion of a totality internally differentiated into fragments. This is indeed how languages are usually understood, with fragments such as words, letters or phonemes. These fragments produce particular expressions [or particular scientific descriptions], while the Whole is the 'horizon of potentialities' (39), which is never just the sum of all those fragments.

However, we can be more radical, following Saussure and [other bits of] Derrida. The unit is not distinct from the system in the first place, but is authored by it. The relations between unit and system is neither structured nor contingent, because 'relationality is not an "in between"' of entities. Instead, we can think of fragments or parts in terms of 'virtual geometry with hologrammatic resonance'. This in turn would mean we have to alter classic notions of scale and dimension in virtual geometry. The generation of humanness could also be seen as 'an internal articulation of and within itself'. So there could be no separation or lack of access to the Whole. Humanness would be a unique determination yet one which still 'would speak of earthly concerns' [terribly vague poetic language here and hints of the Magic Substance].

We would see human identity not as a secondary outgrowth of a process moving from speech to writing or nature to culture. Those conceptions risk 'anthropocentric relativism' or humanness as some unique capacity and separation. Instead, humans would be 'an expression of the world's measured subjectivity'. Since the human realisation of this subjectivity clearly involves reflexivity, we can equally argue with that human reflexivity is '"the objective science of the Earth itself"' [to get back to Husserl's interest] [so we can grasp the Whole]. In this conception, 'the world itself provides the intention to measure, the object to be measured, and the apparatus through which that calculation will be determined' (40). [The Earth wants to get to know itself and chooses human subjectivity as the route to self-knowledge. Magic substances abound throughout].

If we go back to the idea of forensic analysis of skulls, we can now see the face as 'a connective tissue wherein flesh and bone resonate with numbers and names', a figure or figuration. This is 'decidedly uncanny' because a particular face is being mirrored in other faces that reference its contours. Nevertheless, a unique face becomes evident 'in the myriad faces that have never encountered it' [a rather mystifying account of predictive modelling]. Somehow, a unique likeness is found 'in the anonymity of statistical tables, shards of bone… DNA signatures… tomographic separations'. Identity is not something achieved against these fragments and involves both 'reflection and refraction' to provide a 'strange unity'. The language involved refers to ideas of field, system or structure, and it is these that Derrida means by general language or textuality 'in other contexts' [with an obscure quote from one of his afterwords]

There is no doubt that language is a dominant feature of human status and 'species privilege' connected with sociation, abstraction, intellect, something that marks us out among primates, who can only offer 'comparatively puny… "natural languages"' (41). However there are still problems such as 'pheromonal literacy in ants'. Explaining these as the result of some hardwired instinct is not helpful because it still needs to explain the capacity to adapt to unexpected circumstances – perhaps this should be better understood as 'a reading/writing program'. Similar considerations apply to the rapid adaptations to antibiotics among certain viruses and bacteria, which seem to involve some calculation somehow expressed in mutation. Why should genetic characteristics be shared between fish and tomato plants? It may be true that we would not even notice these connections if it were not for 'human experimental voyeurism' but they do present problems of 'ontological confusion'. The language of life seems to cross species divisions. If we consider the extent to which biology is affected by geologies, we may have to question the distinction between living and non-living systems. We might not wish to confine mathematics to human affairs but see it as involved in 'the poetry of molecular parsings whose alphabet is the periodic table'. Are these just metaphors of language or actual language, and if the latter, what is the subject which authors and reads? Why has an extension to nature [of the kind she proposes] been censored?

Her interest was also aroused by reading about Saussure's obsessions with anagrams [see the results of my own investigations in Lotringer], and how his discoveries of an apparently infinite regress of units led him to doubt his own sanity. He managed some of the complexity, but by focusing on the notion of the referent as a constraining relation with units beneath the word. Kirby 'has a definite sense' (42) that this might refer to an expression of life, an energy flow. Saussure was forced to speculate that there might be some hidden author or set of poetic conventions to explain these anagrams, but he was particularly baffled by those that just seem to appear spontaneously and in large quantities.

Kirby is particularly interested by the possible links with mathematics, and how these anagrams might display '"an algebra of discourse"', with its own regularities and rules. This would be a serious challenge for Western metaphysics, and raises questions about the guarantees of signs. It indicates a play of language rather than simple linearity, or simple origins. Lotringer cites Derrida on the ways in which mathematical notation has challenged the ideology of the alphabet [I did not understand it there either]. Saussure achieves coherence by attempting to return to the importance of the name, which he assumed was a reflection [actually shadow] of the number [and see Kinser for this ideological detour], and pursuing an analysis that saw individual elements adding up [geddit?] to an overall sum, decomposed in the anagram. Saussure himself was never so sure [!] that the reader could be excluded from the exercise, and that was one of the reasons he abandoned the project.

If we re-examine the project, though we might see similarity in the reading of ink blots, some 'insistent appearance' of a figure in anagrams as well, like the fragments used in forensic work on a face, we would have 'informational chaos whose poetics exceed even the wildest Joycean associations' (44) but one which might still have a coherence.

Saussure had evidence that suggested nonlinear processes without conventional motivations, 'whose manifestations were strangely phantasmatic' [in the Freudian sense?]. Abandoning linearity meant 'a vertigo of infinite connections and disjunctions' and impossible perversity. Yet there still seem to be a guiding thread, even though Saussure was unable to grasp it as a motivation or some external coherence. This produced a crisis in Saussure, and he avoided the notion of '"semiotics freed from the tyranny of speech"' in Lotringer's words.

Lotringer traced this inability to not considering psychoanalysis, but this still preserves some internal coherence for the human subject, some human exceptionalism. Lotringer assumes that language is unique to human subjectivity, and [even with the Freudian Unconscious] cannot develop a coherent subject at work in anagrams. This means he sees language as self-sufficient, but the complexity of language is still seen as 'a specifically human capacity'. What [nice and affirmative things] might be concluded?

Saussure achieves progress by abandoning the referent, but eventually had to recuperate it. He split the sign into its parts, but then confused the terms. He tried to separate natural reality from language yet never succeeded. He insists both that language is somehow a systemic necessity [hinting at something beneath words] and yet still says that the sign is arbitrarily related to the referent. He discovered both linear order and its absence in language. He kept finding links with mathematical calculations, which puzzled him. The overall problem was that there had to be coherence and system, including some agreed referents within a language community, but identity for any data 'was inherently plastic' (45). There was both living mutation and stability. There was both specific semiotics and linguistics and a general semiology.

Lotringer sees the difficulties and tries to restore the position with [the Freudian unconscious] and some autonomy for language, but he still sees language as 'synonymous with humanity' (46), still arising from some original loss of the world. Any perception must risk misrecognition. He is [?] implying that the Unconscious is the reason for Derrida's aphorism about no outside, even though Derrida himself would reject this idea of some origin before language [what about Lacan's version, that the Unconscious is language?].

For psychoanalysis, language and writing displaces an original referent or reality, and so language becomes a substitute for reality, a signifier separated from the signified, preventing any final coherence or fixed meaning. For Derrida, however, writing is the worldly origin of humanness, where the referent presents itself. This referent might be deferred or displaced, but it would be misleading to see that therefore the entity referenced is inaccessible [as is 'conventional within deconstruction'].

We should place the human under erasure, and make the subject in question language itself. Language can now re-present itself. Difference becomes not a space between entities, but an effect of an internal differential. There is no origin for presence or speech, nor some absent origin that permits writing and therefore culture. Writing instead 'expresses the energetics of an originary unfolding' [and then an odd implication that the human subject never actually fails in grasping referents because the world is so complex that there can always be 'countenance' (47)].

Returning to the forensic reconstruction of faces, there is an allusion to other human beings, seemingly arising by chance, although offering 'a strange precision'. We can grasp this by thinking about something underneath the world, or all possible worlds found in every text in Saussure's terminology. Or in Husserl's notion of a vital horizon animating actual measurement representation. Or Derrida's generalised writing or textuality. We might conclude that the world, at least in its becoming world, produces an 'archive' in every word, name or calculation.

'These are difficult thoughts' [!] that we've met already when considering the nature of mathematics. Derrida provides a comment in his discussion of Rousseau where he says '"there is nothing outside the text": it is not that we can only access external matters such as details of the life of Rousseau through language [which seems to be Lacan's argument]. There are '"are more radical reasons"' — real-life existence itself appearing in text '"has never been anything but writing"'. This is a usefully 'expanded ' sense of textuality for Kirby, going beyond Lotringer's attempt to extend the [still human] subject.

Any definition of human assumes some 'nonhuman and inarticulate outside', and human exceptionalism is propped up by it. Seeing language as properly human reproduces human self presence and identity — 'the tyranny of the human' (48). It is easy to confine nature to 'babble', but what about the operations described in anagrams, cryptography, naming, or reconstructing faces: these are not merely '"cultural constructions"' ['if we grant the term "language" to nature in its vaguest capacities and remark on the invention of its programs']. [This hints, I think at some possible circularity in the whole thing — if we allow nature to have a language, then we can see that language as behind the complexities of its programs, which assume a language].

We should 'take very seriously the notion of an originary writing/mathesis' and an 'original scriptibility'. There is no nonlinguistic origin. Everything is writing technology and invention. Language presents itself in a more radical form. Normally, we look at the way in which it is constrained by humans, whether this involves humanism or antihumanism. Some 'feminist and minority discourses' show the same problems when they want to argue for property rights and borders by excluding themselves from Nature [and thus from culture too if it has a natural origin]. However, re-asserting a distinction between nature and culture can also have divisive effects, even for antihumanism as long as it still sees culture as the main constitutive force. Instead we need 'a more radical commitment to a horizon of possibility and change', expressed in the dictum that '"there is no outside of Nature"': that would be wholly beneficial in 'claiming Nature's "textuality," it's literacy, as our own'.

[I can still see some problems for univocity, here, of course. Fascists and patriarchs would also not be excluded from Nature or culture, rape would be like sexual flexibility, but these would require an extra dimension of undesirability or artificiality: Hindess'n'Hirst with their points about dogma or incoherence are applicable here. Their writings are also traceable to general language and to self-disclosure by Nature. The commitment to possibility and change is always assumed to be in the direction of liberation -- it is good to dispel any limited versions of nature but philosophy takes us only so far, still ends in relativism not any positive commitment to queer sexuality or whatever?].

Chapter 3. Enumerating Language. "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics"

[Gripping questions here like why is maths such a good representation of natural events compared to alphabetical language, why don't social scientists use maths to describe their world]

Popular crime series show us that the 'cryptogram of the crime scene' (49) can be solved, but is this just a triumph for mathematical computation managing seemingly random events, or is there some other ontological penetration with maths?

Maths is not often discussed, because it usually requires that you can do it. Many mathematicians are not interested in philosophy but just want to solve problems,but it occasionally claims to be about order, patterns and structure, and may have the same 'combinatorial possibilities' (50) as ordinary language. It certainly displays the internal relations that Saussure notices with ordinary language, but it is functional [in terms of applying to referents?], and less ludic or exuberant: that makes ordinary language more suitable for human cultural activities.

In ordinary language, we often find 'productive imprecision of words' and 'subjective nature of interpretation'. Problems remain with maths, its symbols and its object, whether it is a cultural invention again, or whether it has some more 'natural and objective pretensions'. How to explain its resonance with scientific information, or its ability to inspire music?

Rotman is both mathematician and cultural analyst. For him, it is the 'peculiar efficacy' (51) of maths that leads us to suspect it is the language of nature, possibly divinely authored, something to be discovered not invented, and enduring. [Rotman wants to reject divinity as a source for the mathematical harmonies of nature]. It is so different that there is the famous split between two cultures in academic life, posing serious problems for those who want to engage in dialogues [we could replace nature altogether with culture, but of course Kirby wants to show problems with that and suggest a synthesis].

We could examine maths' '"foundational hygiene", or mathematical rigour, provided by rules, conventions and protocols that produce intersubjective agreement. One implication is to reject '"the alphabetic dogma"' [an explanation of its appearance in the earlier chapter]. This dogma assumes first that speech is the original form of communication [because alphabetic characters can be spoken, pronounced?] [So we get to logocentrism and other implications]. There are more general implications too.

[But we have to wait for them] most mathematicians apparently take a Platonic view of the relation between maths and real objects — mathematical objects are not drawn from culture but are real and objective [says Rotman] Numerals indicate some underlying reality of number. They do not constitute, which minimises 'the material context and bodily engagements' implied in any form of communication, any notion of performance. Apart from anything else, this does not explain the great usefulness of mathematics.

It is tempting to think of the process of '"writing"' familiar to the humanities, but there are problems with mathematics, and dangers in assuming some underlying identity with literature. Rotman points to alphabeticism, and its 'conventional linear morphology' in writing. This is a 'prejudice' for Rotman, although it does appear in maths in the form of '"linear strings of symbols… [In]… normalised sequences"'. This makes linearity look logical and proper. That is carried by '"ideograms such as [mathematical symbols]"' [eg + or

≻

] (54). For some mathematicians, these linear equations are more important than, say, diagrams, which become mere 'figural ornaments or superfluous illustrations', even though they have an essential role in the '"actual doing of mathematics"'. They appear unrigorous and imprecise. Again 'alphabeticism's installation of the grams in implicit and prior say-ability is at work here'.

Derrida has pointed to an additional [quasi-autonomous?] underlying conception of time as linear successivity, since 'phonologism imbues certain entities and events with a temporal priority' that becomes 'an ontological integrity', capable of being disturbed only by something from the outside, something coming later. Instead we should see apparently autonomous phonemes as 'an entanglement of systemic energies ("writing in the general sense")' [a haecceity or event in deleuzian terms -- see below].

For Kirby, this implies a holographic conception where any particular unit can be seen as 'a unique instantiation of the system's own reinvention (or rewriting) of itself' (55), [Hegelian stuff?] and this is what 'confounds linearity'. This preserves a very general [virtual] notion of language, going beyond the specifics of sayability [or leaving it as a specific actualisation to be explained in phonographic language]This will also imply that there is the same split between speech and writing within mathematical representations, so that mathematical language [expression] 'is always a writing practice', although this might involve disagreement with Rotman.

Maths does have an illustrative logic which takes the form of the sentence, and also an apparent '"timeless and agentless language of sets"' [Rotman]. This formal structure gives rigour, and the seemingly universal applicability and beauty of maths. This implies an emerging difference with ordinary language about the relation between speech and writing. Conventional language is understood as involving speech as the true expression of experience, something immediate and true, even if it involves deliberate deception. Writing become something secondary, supplementary, with more chances of misrepresentation and alienation because it is beyond personal control: it can even be an 'external violation' (56) of these expressive qualities of speech. This makes writing in ordinary language, especially its capacity to abstract, both instrumental and morally suspect.

Mathematical notation appears instead as 'originary writing', however, where abstraction is accepted as some sort of 'pure voice of reason itself', something virtuous, something beyond human distortions, not affected by motivations or context and thus appearing as some truth, 'the inexorable unfolding of a natural calculation', a 'mathesis naturalis' [wouldn't this be the mistake of denying positionality for feminists? Affects Kirby's naturalism too?] . It displaces human beings as original author. Rotman sees this as a problem because it neutralises perception and motivation. The very fallibility of mathematical calculation somehow guarantees an independent existence. Kirby wants to rescue this by saying that we can read him as suggesting there is still a natural foundation for human activity, that nature has conceived the human just as humans conceive concepts. Arguing otherwise is to restore human exceptionalism and to risk phonocentrism again as an example of the cultural domination of nature. This will also leave the 'informational transfer' (57) found in mathematics unexplained.

Rotman seems to assume that scriptability is introduced into a mathematical imagination, whereas for Kirby it is 'already at work in… Nature'. He assumes that the characteristic '"foundational hygiene" is not natural — but what if the body, or Nature is 'already that field of mathematical imagination and invention'?.

We need to go beyond Rotman to explain how the gram actually works in culture. He does notice 'exuberant bodily connectivities' that are found in mathematics [he says they enable mathematics, but Kirby thinks we can just say they are mathematics]. He suspects there is virtual writing, something more than Derrida's archewriting. This would not involve grams [I think]. However, Derrida has an underlying 'graphematic structure' which supplements [well-- accounts for?] the gram. The gram is just a visible sign of it. The relation is not simple one [of course] [assuming additional dimensions which can be added together] but presupposes some fundamental identity [a holographic one again for Kirby where each atomic identity 'resonates through webs of implication'. This is where quantum physics can be generalised --'webs of implication that are universally encompassing is [sic] not peculiar to quantum physics'. (58).]

Even systems that see nature and culture as separated occasionally refer to their mutual dependence, although this odd combination is not explained. Einstein's own work, challenging '"spooky action at a distance"' at least acknowledged the puzzle. In the humanities, though there is still a belief in a physical reality, something unaffected by our representations, something with constancy and temporal priority. There is often simply a view that work in the physical sciences can have very little to do with, say, literature — but 'the questions we engage are often uncannily similar' (59). The analytic unit is a problem, for example [it is 'chimerical'], and we already have some notion of 'an always/already that undermines causality', or problems relating ideas to material factors. The usual explanation is that we have an inadequate linguistics and representational scheme, and it is these 'secondary technologies' that produce distortions and errors. This really keeps intact the investment in the underlying binaries such as speech/writing, presence/absence: we are critical of them in our field, but not in science.

Derrida's implications similarly are seen as restricted to the humanities, but if he is right to suggest 'a general writing… an "inclusive systematicity"' then nature can no longer offer us fixed and immutable lessons, not separate, but part of the articulations of complexity. If the gram means more than the classic atom of thought, it appears more like a quantum entity, 'its apparently tiny dimensions have a universal resonance' and the prospect of a mathesis generalis is back on.

Going over some of the steps, it is obvious that mathematics 'figures', meaning both to produce a shape and to take the form of one. The lines drawn between items are as problematic as the entities they connect. Yet there is something in maths and in all writing systems [for her] that makes them legible ['their "presenting"' (60)]. Rotman begins with the constraints of alphabetic and its ambiguous legacy — a stabilising anchor, grounded in speech and its unfolding, but also implying some 'unmediated reality, or referent, whose haecceity [sic] speech instantiates'. The alphabetic text is particularly authoritative, and this can mean that it's taken as definitive writing, with mathematical writing as something non-linguistic.

The distinction actually is confused. Rotman points to the support for alphabetic writing in literature which produces a phobic response to the use of mathematical signs. The same goes for the absence of 'schematic visual representation'. Words are just seen as self-sufficient, diagrams, really rare, let alone '"figures, arrows, vectors, and so forth"'. However, we can extend this by arguing that alphabetic letters also have a dimension of visual representation or diagram, but there is no barrier to those being sayable [unlike the term

△

]. The way in which those graphemes produce phonemes is unexamined and taken for granted, although we are talking about exterior and different representations in each case: Derrida himself says that it is unlikely that graphic and phonic representations can be simply derived from each other.

How does mathematical notation gain such status, when it can be seen as inferior to the closure and clarity of alphabetic writing? [There are apparently hints in Saussure of a strange tendency for alphabetical language to not just mean something in the usual sense, but to show '"coming to count"']. Cryptography shows 'intimate connections' between maths and literature, we could see the spacing of symbols and their operations as a kind of algebra, imposing a pattern. How might we explain all these connectivities, especially if they dispense with linearity?

[As a diversion, she offers an exercise with her students to present them with all sorts of different representations — Braille, voice prints, hieroglyphs, genetic codes and so on, she even considers 'the pheromone trails of ants', the phenomenon of grafting in plants or the 'syntax of the atomic tables'. These are unfamiliar examples designed to provoke questions about what they might have in common, how their machinery actually works, why one system is deemed to be more coherent than others, why they can be translated into forms that bear no obvious relation to them, and what legibility actually is. The idea is to get to how meaning and reference are produced, whereas they just appear self-evident in ordinary language, how solid they are, how confined to numbers, or languages].

Rotman says that maths is a uniquely human technology, not some Platonist correspondence to reality, especially when applied, and obviously contaminated by cultural and historical context. The issue is how its '"unreasonable effectiveness"' (62) remains nonetheless. It is a similar problem with we consider natural bodies, which can also be grasped as abstractions from particular empirical patterns and regularities. The body too poses problems of connections between its internal differentiations [different modalities, maybe different senses?], and is not immediately and simply present. It's inner coherence displays both a set of discriminations and some 'geometry that eschews division'.

If we consider perception, for example interpretation produces coherence from disconnected events. This is not seen as the same as 'intellection', however. There seem to be differences again with reading or writing. Maybe perception provides a kind of general abstractive potential as well as the raw materials. This could easily be seen as a kind of 'inherent literacy', just like conventional literacy which also involves some perceptual discrimination within 'an intricate immersion'.

These operations clearly go on and terms like 'corporeal practice' can minimise them. In Rotman's terms, the body is a kind of physical container that enables calculation, but still with some Cartesian subjective pilot. Carnality is not the same as actual calculating and thinking. Corporeality itself is not seen as being able to 'intelligently take measure of itself' (63). There is still a split between inside and outside, even though the origin of mathematics is not in some platonic reality but in grounded human practice. There is still phallocentrism, where perception provides the raw materials, and conscious reason organises them. There is danger of needing to split humanness from nature as well in order to stave off Platonism.

How does Rotman think that we get intellectual activity from biological performativity, without them being the same? The idea of a body given to us before cultural interpretation is still like theology or Platonism, with mathematics as a kind of '"miraculous gift"' (64). Is there another kind of corporeal intelligence available to us? Vision operates in a complex 'synaesthetic' way, beyond simple recognition, for example. There is 'amplitude', with consequences for other biological processes — our blood races at particular sights.

One example of this is in a study on conversion hysteria, which classically is seen [to be cured] in terms of a restoring the body to knowledge production, in effect 'somatophobia'. This particular study is not particularly compatible with some feminisms, but it has an unusual rigour. It's focused on how hysterics actually convert mental processes into physical responses. One of Charcot's patients could actually operate on her hysterical performances, performing on cue, or arranging them into various other tableaux, but this apparent control was gained at the expense of another hysterical symptom — 'she began to see everything in black and white' [after being repeatedly photographed] (65). One source of misunderstanding is Charcot's own 'dehumanising desires and insensitivities' that prevented him seeing the whole person, but there is distortion as well from an attempt to explain symptoms via an expert 'hidden agenda' [by other feminists -- symbolic violence of course]. Apart from anything else, this ignores the 'quite extraordinary representational capacities' involved, and places all the emphasis on the unconscious rather than on the role played by the body and biological forces in their own right. Kirby proposes that this whole performance, which is 'intersubjective, psychological, biological and even machinic [connecting with the camera]' could itself be seen as a gram, [with an implied underlying graphematic structure].

If mathematical processes are explained by cultural and social contexts alone, how does this lead to emergent enduring patterns that can even react back on themselves? Why should this not be seen as reading and writing? If the body has the capacity to engage in corporeal mathematics, why can't it do these extra functions as well? We could instead see nature itself as 'actively literate, numerate and inventive' (66) as much as culture is, and this might explain conversion hysteria, or perception. Does the distinction between culture and nature still stand, and if it does not, how might 'distinctive differences [be] effectively synthesised'?

There is still a tendency to domesticate the implications of the studies of mathematics or biology, as a recent exchange between a mathematician and a neurobiologist in France indicates. The latter begins by seeing mathematical reality as entirely cultural, but when he considers the human brain and its amazing capacities, there is clearly an excess there again, beyond the normal consideration of what is human. If it is this brain that achieves mathematical reasoning and other forms of creativity, through biological energy, the agency of culture arises from 'a misguided dichotomy'. Instead, we should begin to think of biology as 'a "unified field" of operational differentiation… a mathesis naturalis', a form of 'evolving and implicate calculation'.

There might well be a subject with self-consciousness in this field, but we might be able to render its characteristic self-discovery as a 'reinvention'. [Reversing Foucault and Deleuze] 'exteriority then, would be but a fold in interiority' [so usually it is the externality of nature that is also produced, or rediscovered, while really it is the subject that is the external fold] (67) by the biological energies of the brain. Platonic argument that mathematics is discovered in nature can be reconciled with the view that it is 'also fabricated in the synchrony of what appears at that same moment of discovery' [the synchrony between it appearing in nature and appearing to humans?].

To end with, this might help us uMPack Derrida's aside about the relations between rationalism and mysticism — '"a certain complicity"'

Chapter 4 I have notes on this already

Chapter 5 (Con)founding "the Human"

[Several themes here, including a specific critique of an essay by Butler which I have not read, part of her general discussion of Butler that she has carried on elsewhere. The main thing for me was the rethinking of the old two-stage nature/culture issue, where nature provides the material base, as it were, and culture then adds significance meaning and social and cultural dimensions. Butler seems to have this view. Kirby wants to argue it out in terms of a discussion of Freud. In essence, it concerns the bit where Freud is deriving heterosexual identity from an initially unfocused and libidinous and sexuality or bisexuality. BUt he also offers a model of homosexuality that implies an illness or lack of social maturity. This is connected to Lacan on the mirror phase, where there is the same kind of cultural regulation of natural states, and also to Lacan on the emergence of the phallus as the general signifier, and its connection with male and female sexual organs. In essence, I think Kirby is arguing that this transition should be seen rather in terms of an original connection. The implication may be that cultural constraint is also natural in origin, although generally, the thrust seems to be that heterosexual identities for men and women should be understood as a 'loss', with consequences for connections between sexual identity and illness, specifically hypochondria. It does seem to jar a little with people who argue that nature provides excess: Kirby seems to be arguing that it provides constraint as well? It's very difficult technical and I may not have understood very well]

There have been criticisms of the humanist subject of several kinds, including from psychoanalytic interpretations which have raised doubts about the reliability of their recollections of subjective pasts and personal desires, and therefore of agency and accountability. Discourse theories too want to challenge the subject as a self-sufficient agent, in favour of 'cultural "patternments"' (89) [a note on p.150 explains that patternment is a term used by the linguists Sapir and Lee Whorf, trying to explain how particular gestalts have 'functional purchase' over other equally likely patterns, how an apparent bond between a sign and a functioning referent develops. Apparently, this has led to further debates about reality and the practice of science]. It seems as if subjects have to be interpellated first [presumably not just by culture though] if they are to be recognisable to themselves and others.

Sexual identity and sensual pleasures raise further problems in that bodily experience is affected by historical and cultural contingencies. Our anatomy is not simply a natural fact — for example, 'what constitutes pleasure and pain varies dramatically across time and space' (90).

It seems impossible to break out of historical and cultural frames to access some external and different form of life. There seems to be a necessary boundary between nature and the animal, and culture and the human. In some ways cultural developments depend on this barrier as being absolute [we escape nature etc]. Culture is seen as producing purely internal effects on relations, across the board [of social theorists] , and this is also favoured by political activists. Naturalist arguments produce genuine unease: nature is ineffable, primordial and inaccessible, except through science. However, there is a lurking conservative legacy here, despite a humanist version [of Cartesianism] if we argue that these differences are simply apparent, reproduced in reflection. Even introducing the unconscious will not correct this reflectionist view that we can easily detect the 'difference between a fact and an interpretation'. Thought and the technology of language preserve human exceptionalism, even for some feminist and queer theory wanting to attack associations with nature as restrictive.

Keeping nature at bay is 'a political practice in itself' (91), and it is increasingly threatened by 'medical and computational breakthroughs' especially in the sciences [because of the 'referential purchase' of things like forensic investigation, genetic testing or the 'predictive capacity' of maths]. It is hard to see how representation and abstraction actually work if cultural constructs 'cannot in reality be that world'. Of course scientific results are still contestable. The point is to ask how they can hold to the truth, and still be open to cultural criticism: it is not simply a matter of pointing to 'errors' in either field.

Recent scientific advances have deepened the crisis by grasping the world 'as a body of interlocking information' (92) at all scales. There are 'interwoven, interacting sign systems', suggesting that the different languages familiar to the human world [including linguistics and science or maths as above] 'are not alien technologies' transmitted between different entities. Instead, material being can be seen as 'also information' [hint of a magic substance], denying a split. Hence 'there is no outside the textile of information'. And the question is how identities are individuated, from the process of emergence and reproduction and maintenance.

Is this just a further development of cultural processes like metaphysics and epistemology? Kirby thinks that 'these terms have assumed such curious dimensions' that we must now think that nature itself is a 'meta-physics', 'an involved meditation, mediation and reproduction of itself that is essentially queer in character'.

We have to acknowledge the importance of cultural interventions especially that address identity and forms of communication that produce them, but we should not be insisting on segregating out what is cultural from something else deemed to be alien and inarticulate. She does not want to support cultural constructionism which sees nature as an appearance disguising culture, nor in grasping some underlying 'logic of assemblage, Nature and Culture'. She wants to identify instead 'strange condensations confusing collapsed differences into the mirror maze of an "always/already"', which she intends to describe as 'facts of Nature' (93). [Resembles Latour on the intertwinings of human and mechanical such that there is no point in distinguishing them in general terms? Based on quantum indeterminacy though? ] .

Butler has conceded that cultural constructionist arguments may be inadequate to explain empirical complexity, but she still confined nature to something inaccessible and unrepresentable, even though we cannot dispense with it. She also hints that she perhaps overemphasised culture over nature in her earlier work [Gender Trouble] in order to avoid any justification for natural heterosexuality. She now realises that there may be something else in nature that cannot simply be used to legitimate these.

Her particular favourite is a certain A Fausto-Sterling [AFS] who looked at the possibility of productive contributions from both sides — how biology conditions cultural life, and how cultural life affects biological reproduction in particular. She goes on to describe the relation between nature and culture as 'chiasmic' rather than determinist from either end. However, this still sees nature and culture as two different entities or systems, even if related by a chiasm [note 5,.151 sees these terms especially associated with Merleau-Ponty and can be defined as a kind of interactivity between entities rather than an entanglement — this seems to miss the apparently contradictory form of the chiasm, as in Adorno]. This does mean that nature does not exactly collapse into culture, and allows for some kind of intercourse between them. — Kirby likes the implication for copulation and prejudices about sex. Butler is right to argue that apparently natural facts are informed by cultural bias, and this will have to be taken into account, [I'm not sure Kirby ever actually does this, because she never develops a sociology] but a different perspective is available.

Nature and culture seem to be seen as separate before they interact, sometimes with nature temporarily prior, although this can lend some support to the idea that identity was originally 'coherent and wholesome' before being violated by otherness (95). Butler also installs 'a sort of incest taboo', a moral prohibition about what counts as intercourse and the forms it can take — cultural activity is equated with political activity, especially restrictive and dominating forms. This is almost seen as acceptable — at least it is not used in instrumental calculation. But this makes intention and calculation traceable only to [and a major function in] culture, a sort of fall from grace scenario, mirrored in the work of AFS and minimising [non-dominating] agential processes.

Lots of arguments once accepted that human beings depended on nature — 'even Descartes'-- but it is less easy to accept that humans 'are inherently natural' instead of just composed of two entities added together. What if culture collapsed into nature? What if nature reads and writes, 'calculates and copulates with itself' in both creative and destructive ways? What if nature is political through and through, and if even the arguments in this book are 'a manifestation of natural intent'? We have to addresses issues even though they are normally considered to be 'improper, unspeakable — unnatural'.

Cultural criticism has often stressed inherited logics and assumptions as initial conditions for evaluation of behaviours. However, if we borrow arguments from quantum theory, there may be no initial conditions preceding final conditions, but rather 'space-time condensation' (96), where all sorts of concepts seem to collapse together including ideas and material reality.

Butler [Bodies That Matter] argues that idealisations can be realised or materialised, but she uses this mechanism to explain how cultural valuations are embodied, as controlling and regulating mechanisms. It is true that nature offers some resistance and is not fully compliant. Barad has rebuked this argument as a matter of offering puns on 'matter' [rich coming from her!], a matter of materialisation being in practice seen as signification — hence the complaint that everything matters except matter.

Butler does rely on temporal and spatial separation that quantum theory challenges, and performativity itself follows because culture never fully naturalises norms. The several areas can interpenetrate in the chiasm, but this is still not complex entanglement. It does not take into account asynchrony 'where thought experiments can anticipate what will have already taken place' (97). Kirby insists that these experiments have produced results which have been 'retrospectively actualised and empirically verified' [note 8, 152 cites a certain J Wheeler arguing that quantum resonance between the choice of the observer and the compliance of the observed phenomenon also implies the collapse of separate events in time — 'and this appears to be the case'. {Much more cautiously} 'the spatial separations of causality, at least in the presumption of a single origin of influence and efficacy, will not hold in quantum explanations'. This is been met with 'overwhelming acceptance in the scientific community' although it still 'remains contested' Davies is quoted as saying that the world is a network of relations, that he takes an approach associated with Heisenberg, which Kirby sees as similar to Butler's understanding of interference. Kirby cites Barad on the dispute with Böhr. None of this can justify the claim of empirical verification, though]

If we look at cultural constructionism but allow certain 'incestuous outcomes', greater perversity and involvement, we might think that attributing arguments to Nature is 'an anthropocentric projection' (97). This is what Butler thinks — that whenever we represent natural qualities, we attribute cultural and political significance to them. She recognises that this makes it difficult for her own additive solution to link nature and culture. Kirby intends instead to explain that all the complexity attributed to culture arises from a 'unified, if heterogeneous, field of expression [which] is "Nature"'.

This reawakens problems of determinism or the collapse of categories, but we have to risk this in order to explore the full implications. Kirby realises that the difference attached to the human might be minimised. An implication follows for science, and at the end, it might be nature that is 'political, perverse, contestatory' (98), and that we should grasp its mutatability.

We can start with Butler again and sexual identity. We are going to argue that the complexities involved stem from Nature, requiring no supplement from culture. Kirby is not suggesting that we can apply conventional physical and biological sciences, but that arguments intended to exemplify Culture actually reveal 'the impossibility of such a claim' [immanent critique then], drawing on the notion of entanglement. Butler's essay on the lesbian phallus will be examined in detail.

This begins with Freud's essay on narcissism. There is an underlying libido which is fluid and provides energy and this is what accounts for the personal significance of bodily experience, 'excitations'. We can understand the movement as offering a kind of economy, investing forces with different intensities, responding to things like pain and injury with different intensities. However, we know that the experience of pain actually varies across different cultural and social contexts and within subjects. It is common to see this as arguing that pain is both physical and psychical, one of these additions again with biology as the first cause.

Freud explains toothache like this, but thinks hypochondria is more complex, and offers the reverse 'explanatory direction' -- it arises from psychical forces first that 'manifest as biological symptoms' (99). Generally, for Freud, physical and imaginary injury are theoretically inseparable. Butler says that this has an implication for what constitutes a body part of any kind, especially an erotogenic one. So for example, with narcissism hypochondria '"lavishes libido on a body part" that does not actually exist for consciousness until it is so invested. As with Lacan and the mirror stage, Freud thought that a sense of self was acquired through the realisation of body boundaries in the process of separation from the mother, but again there is the paradox that consciousness seems to have provoked this sensation — but it also seems to have been present at the start of the process. The pain [of self-discovery ?]might be of the hypochondriac type. Similarly, there might be an underlying erotogenicity that means the idea of a particular body part is 'coincident with the phenomenology of its perception'.

The general question is how physical manifestations actually happen. Kirby's view is that the physical body conceives itself differently, including through ideas 'such that an idea is a biological cause/effect' (100). The initial conditions for manifestations are always 'inherently unstable and mutable', and it would be wrong to give consciousness a particular priority over biological complexity.

Freud is still ambiguous about what comes first. For example he says that the original biological process of an organ becoming sensitive to pain is changed into a genital organ being excited. Of course he thinks of the masculine case as a universal one However, any erogenous zone can respond in a similar way. The genitals may be prototypical but 'they do not inaugurate this chain of substitutions'. Freud says that all organs are erotogenic. Butler is able to explain that if male genitals are not ontologically privileged, the development of phallic masculine privilege is simply one of several possible transfers of the erotogenetic. By implication then, the phallus conferring masculine privilege is not the same as the single organ of the penis, because its erotogenetic qualities is a property of all organs, something infinitely plastic and transferable. The phallus is important as a process of investiture of libidinal energy. Any one particular organ actually has a threatened identity by this process and its complex 'congested and condensed network system of referral' (101). Even a toothache can invoke a vagina dentata, orifice, something being penetrated and so on, with the tooth both something which enters and which is entered.

Freud wrongly conflates the phallus with the male organ. It justifies patriarchy only when a transformative process is stopped and connected to a thing — which is when 'man appears to have the phallus'. For Butler, a lesbian phallus is an interesting object. It might be a substitute for women's lack. Lesbianism cannot be explained from some single origin — nor can any sexual identity. At the personal level, it arises through the processes of the infant's self recognition, and before that process takes place 'the plenum of the world is selfsame with the child'. Even if the infant does apparently coincide with the world, this should not be understood either as a homogenous unity, or something provided by 'the cut of difference' in language or culture. Self sameness is originary, inherently entangled in processes of non-identity and referral. Infants need to manage this complexity '"properly"'. Even Freud originally described human sexuality as 'constitutionally bisexual and polymorphously perverse' (102). We have to be careful here because bisexuality can also assume separate identities added together. Kirby is more interested in 'bisexuality as the splitting of desire that renders all identity incoherent and perverse from the start', with no single origin. Sexuality does eventually 'segregate bodies and pleasures into distinct identities and appropriate practices', but this has no 'fixed and stable foundation'.

It is wrong to think of the libido as originating in the male organ — 'an imaginary illusion'. Libidinal energy is much more plastic and destabilising. That the whole system is fragile is emphasised by Freud's connection with erotogenetic self-discovery and illness and suffering, as in hypochondria. This link between sexuality and illness is developed when hypochondriacs are found to be associated with and structured by guilt. 'Normally' narcissism gets externalized to other objects and other people, and refusing to do this produces 'guilty pleasure', whose ambiguity produces physical illness as well as an affirmation of narcissism if the deception [of being ill] works.

Butler goes on to argue that conformity to regulatory sexual practices requires prohibition and the threat of pain, but this will also 'induce irregular outcomes' (103). They might lead to important body surfaces capable of erotic transfer that are not conventionally located in any anatomical sexuality. The lesbian phallus is Butler's example. Freud originally saw the connection of sickness and narcissism as something found in homosexuality, 'the love of self – same' which must be turned around and aimed others in heterosexuality. This necessarily coincides with 'a conscience — the will to conform to social regulation'. This implies that normal sexuality 'is built on the pain and guilt' associated with homosexual pleasures. For Butler, more creative or productive solutions are available in the appearance of the body as 'an imaginary schema of meaningful parts' [I think the implication is that the conventional notion of the body has to be constantly reinforced by the conventional 'libidinal investments', and if these are not available, more imaginary bodies can develop]. In particular, Butler talks of '"compensatory fantasy and a fetishistic mask"' as an alternative to either conventional heterosexuality, or illness and pain.

Butler also considers Lacan and the mirror stage. The child develops a notion of itself as coherent only by identifying itself from another's perspective, a process of recognition in a mirror. As a result, our subjective notion of the body is always 'a dynamic vacillation between projection and misrecognition' (104). We never resolve the tension between seeing ourselves as an 'amorphous ubiquity and a coherent entity with agency. The ego remains attached to the body, but this is not fixed but dynamic, engaging in recognition and mutation. There is a connection between this whole scheme and how we perceive the visible world, 'the shape and definition of otherness'. The subject becomes the process of projection and misrecognition, differentiating both self and world, but always unstable, necessarily taking the form of an '"imago, that is, as an identificatory relation"' [quoting Butler], and identifications are never just achieved but always 'insistently constituted, contested and negotiated'.

The child's ego is peopled with others, as Lacan argues, just as its anatomy is engaged with social relations and various conversions, including a perceived anatomy [a particularly open-ended perception leaves open the possibility of the lesbian phallus]. However, Lacan sees the Symbolic order as 'a given system of binary identifications' (105) operated by a 'transcendental signifier — the phallus'. It operates at a universal system of differentiation not something specifically cultural or social, which is why Lacan agrees that the phallus can never be just the penis or any other organ. However Butler's emphasis on political inequalities leads her to suggest that there is a 'performative consequence' that this position ends with the penis having the same symbolic privilege as the phallus in patriarchy [so this is a patriarchal appropriation of a universal possibility?]. That arises because Lacan fails to distinguish adequately between the Symbolic and the Imaginary [seen here as a 'wishful process of representational identification that enables the infant to overcome (and deny) its inadequacies']. Kirby thinks that the same division appears in Butler when she thinks that cultural forces are quite different from natural ones, and interprets findings instead to stress '"the constant instability" of biology'.

If any body part is to be identified as separate, this takes place against the overall erotogeneticity of the body and its ability to signify, [especially in representing wholes of the body in terms of parts, maybe]. Lacan acknowledges in principle that the phallus can take 'myriad imaginary forms' not just the penis [which might be denied in effect when Butler talks about the lesbian phallus?]. This means that sexual identity is no longer fixed by the position of body parts. Butler goes on to identify a nasty ambiguity for those who do identify the phallus with the penis — their '"anatomical part is never commensurable with the phallus itself"' (106), so they might experience castration and loss. For those who do not perform this identification, including Lacan who says that women can therefore have a phallus, there might still be castration anxiety [of a symbolic kind]. [Butler also points out that women being able to have a phallus introduces an 'implicit heterosexuality' into lesbian relations, and and implicit homosexuality in hetero ones].

We find in the bodily ego these necessary 'phantasmic crossovers', meaning that the usual binaries of identity and desire will never fit and must be sustained by '"marginal" subjectivities'. For Butler, the margins and the centre are the same [but this complicates 'a pluralist politics of inclusion' and also celebration of marginality as a site of play]. For Butler, there is no central point of identity, no logic of non-contradiction, only identities that are 'thoroughly messy, implicated, and ambiguous'. Whoever has the phallus is not a matter for anatomy. Constant reference to the phallus [as in phallogocentric philosophy as well as everyday practice?] is therefore 'a performative fiction'.

For Lacan, the phallus inaugurates signification, precisely because it cannot be represented, producing a dynamism. This affects the 'lived significance of anatomy' which must be always in play, including its referents. The phallus cannot be symbolised only through anatomy, for Butler, hence the possibility of the lesbian phallus, but this risks '"an aggressive reterritorialization"' [to match the one in patriarchy?]. The concept of the lesbian phallus thus points towards the complexity of phantasmatic anatomy for everyone, and the way in which desire is condensed into different objects and expressions.

Butler has a return to consider anatomy in order to show that it is unstable as a reference, that it takes an imaginary form, driven by the 'pain of loss… failure and incapacity' to represent an ideal, a necessary misrecognition of itself, a compensatory fantasy. Nature has become inaccessible and forbidden again. Butler sees hypochondria as the general process at work where pain and loss is rewritten as pleasure. She also sees 'masculine, heterosexual melancholy' is a necessary consequence for being unable to accept loss, unlike [hetero] women who can compensate through the heightening of feminine identification [maybe, 108]. Ironically, the most melancholy lesbian true to herself is therefore the straight woman.

The problem is that anatomy is seen as inherently mutable, but also as an illusion or fiction, and Butler is therefore still attempting to penetrate the ambiguity to reveal some underlying truth. For Butler, this would be the notion of femininity that defines the mother [Kirby suggest this might be the only adequate way to compensate for loss]. But for Kirby, the mother is phallic, lacking nothing, representing the whole world, offering endless 'transfiguration and genesis' for the child, that even enables children to express their own difference and develop their own desires. This cannot be the subject of misrecognition or masquerade. Instead we find 'the incestuous nature of Nature, it's "unnatural" capacity to reproduce itself in myriad manifestations that, in a very real sense, are all true'

Should we understand this as a cultural misrecognition of what is actually or naturally true? Freud saw hypochondria as a 'foil for narcissistic self attention', which has to be guiltily hidden. We cannot apply this to 'the plenitude of primordial erotogeneticity' (109), however. That is not individuated, something separate from children and worlds, something 'originally consubstantial' [attributed to Saussure,says note 14, p. 153,indicating the sign is ambiguous as both an entitiy and as a token in a system of referral. Suassure also should have abandoned the idea of 'separate and different functions and attributions' says Kirby] something that endures as well as showing variants [magic substance] which defies any easy resolution of the paradoxes discussed by Butler, certainly not a simple reversal. The different identities are not segregated and then implicated. Instead 'identity is never given', and the identities are always entangled. [Bit of magic substance?]

Butler wants to deny simple understandings of homosexual, especially lesbian sexuality. She wants to reject the idea that there is narcissistic self possession at the origin that turns into homoeroticism. That will lead to the argument that only the male heterosexual is properly socially mature, while other erotogenic paths are pathologised, as in hypochondria. Butler saw it as particularly relevant to stress this when homosexuals are being blamed for AIDS.

The violence of homophobia does need more than moral appeals. The logic of discriminating needs to be challenged. Homophobia misogyny and racism are all 'nourished by the notion that a primitive type of sexualosed self absorption precedes the social' (110) and this threatens social order and legitimacy. Of course there is hypocrisy here in the idea that legitimacy requires repression. It meshes with other narratives about movements from primitive to civilised or from nature to culture. Butler needs to question the idea that nature is inherently selfsame.

Seeing the social and cultural as a regulating force coming in after nature sees identity as dualist, 'either present or absent, true or fictional'. It offers a view of differentiation as something within a system, separated from the outside. It is just like reifying the phallus, turning the process into a thing. Butler tries to question the origins of such ways of thinking, and she does offer 'open-ended… possibility'. But she also seems to preserve 'an incest taboo' that connects legitimacy with prohibition. It also sees the cogito as only available to humans. What if nature was 'always/already multiple, contrary, disseminated, incestuous?'. Why should culture exist only to repress? [maybe].

Chapter 6 Culpability and the Double – Cross. Irigaray with Merleau-Ponty

[it's not Hegel, it's Merleau-Ponty that links the world and the knowing subject. Kirby opts for general otherness not originally split, unlike Derrida. Merleau-Ponty gives a great example of a magic substance that also contains all its own differences and contradictions]

She really rated Irigaray at first, especially the way of revaluing the negative and its deficiency. Political inequities seem to be mirrored in binaries in language, a hidden structure that equated otherness with incapacity, something 'feminised, racialised, broken, and somehow wrong' (111). She became particularly interested in the connections between simplification and life itself, bodily being. Irigaray was inspiring because she critiqued binary logic in phallocentrism which led to seeing woman as a failed man, not a subject. Binary differences in language were 'sexually and racially inflected' (112). They all seem to join up, so that being feminised also involved being primitive, while males were more evolved and somehow had escaped their primordial origins'— this is 'tautologous logic'. Irigaray was to argue that conventional notions of equity will be always compromised by the binaries which install man as the reference point. However, her project offered 'a form of mimicry, a loving "espousal of the philosophers"' involving close attention to phallocentric logic to disclose the value of what is repressed and disavowed.

Painstaking investigation led to 'transgressive leverage from within', a 'difference "on the inside" of phallocentrism', In particular how it argues for 'an identical self sameness and an absolute prohibition'. The concepts are incoherent. Man is no longer a solid reference point, so women cannot stand for insufficiency. Despite all the efforts to develop 'coordinates and cross-referencing' the system is not stable — 'like Dr Who's Tardis'(113) there are all sorts of surprising interior dimensions. Kirby noticed the similarity to Derrida, especially in arguing that freedom or play in the system is not external requiring something outside like a bricoleur, but rather internal, generated by 'the system's own internal operations'. It follows that there can be 'no outside [of?] logocentrism' either, but this does not lead to quietism, since feminism and other contesting programs are 'born within the interstices of logocentrism's commitments and practices'. There is a different possible 'economy evaluation, indeed, different worlds' found within the structure. Both Irigaray and Derrida work with 'contamination and confusion rather than… thinly disguised forms of purity and redemption'.

However, Irigaray still believed that 'sexual difference is irreducible' amid all the ambiguity. She develops this in a conversation with Merleau-Ponty (MP). Kirby wants to argue that all identity is still 'necessarily fragile and contingent' and to build on 'feminism's promiscuous appearance in unexpected places and forms'.

Irigaray in An Ethics of Sexual Difference explains why it is difficult to conceive justice and a sense of right, because these rest on 'devaluation and erasure of the feminine', seen in the attempt to exclude 'corporeal demands and connections such as affect' (114). We need a complete overhaul and reinterpretation extending to the issue of relations between the subject and discourse, the subject and everything else, why the subject is always written in the masculine form even if it claims to be universal or neutral. This subject masters time and orders the world.

Merleau-Ponty offers another discussion of the feminine and the maternal, rejecting the old split of mind and body and thus of materiality and cognition. In The Visible and the Invisible, there is a choice to develop non-dualistic ontology, developed from within [which looks to me at first light as an extension of Husserl and apperception, or Schutz — I'll try and read it]. It is different from Irigaray. Irigaray still wants to differentiate the feminine within 'the identity of humanity proper', especially re-evaluating the maternal. Merleau-Ponty still talks of '"the flesh of the world"' which seems neutral: Irigaray wants to talk instead of the [foundational] '"maternal feminine" [apparently in French, the term feminin means both cultural connotations and the female sex, which questions the old nature culture split].

Merleau-Ponty has a broader interest, humanity and how it emerges in Nature as '"the flesh of the world" (115). Irigaray thinks he has just appropriated feminine attributes in this discussion like 'the doublecross that corrupts and divides the identity of the maternal from itself' and which leads to the exclusion of the feminine and sexual difference. Kirby wants to see it differently, as essential to 'an ethics of any sort'.

Irigaray's discussion of the maternal points to history and origins and implies some time when there was some original 'nurturing maintenance' of life. She warns us that we should not be nostalgic because this threatens an ethics of the modern world. She wants to consider '"the whole problematic of space and time"' [not just return to some golden time]. Nostalgia does reveal all the ways in which we are constantly trying to 'discover and reconnect' (116) with our roots. It really reveals anxiety especially about 'the carnality of [human, in her case male] ...history'. This leads to commodification, a desire to make things accessible and controllable while at the same time keeping it in the past. This is a constant circling, an attempt to return to the maternal, prevented by constant '"envelopes, containers, houses"' which always intervene. Men are always building homes for themselves, including in language and theory: culture is itself 'an inherently masculine set of endeavours and attributes' guided by the need to inhabit.

This prevents a real understanding of foundations and origins, in the flesh. The world itself becomes uninhabitable because it is dominated by unfortunate images, especially producing '"an uninhabitable" [functional] body, like the technical world and all its sciences. Or like the scientific world and all its techniques"' [obviously Kirby is not going to go along with that]. Scientific enquiry is entirely instrumental, deceptive and managing the world, but this is a highly specific form of being. The very notion of reflection and management of the world 'recapitulate[s] the alienated relationship he has to his own flesh'. He has to distance himself from his body in order to control it, to replace some crucial '"organic rhythm"', and to produce a generally distanced stance 'in the triumphant guise of scientific mastery and machinic usefulness'.

Irigaray wants to explore this alienated space, and work out the implications of even the usual notions of the feminine, as something attuned to the outside, something sensuous. An alert sensibility produces a perception that is 'mobile, active, and generous' (117). It is not distant or closed. There is a 'corporeal capacity for generosity, receptivity, and caring' even in the conventional notions of the woman and feminine. The female subject is indeed elusive, but this only shows the inadequacy of the conventional definitions that find her lacking, negative, passive. We need to thoroughly reconstruct and revalue these consequences.

Merleau-Ponty's last chapter on the intertwining and the chiasm helps us develop this idea, seemingly in some state of resonance with Irigaray. His stuff on the phenomenology of perception is helpful in challenging most of the conventional notions of subjectivity, and the corresponding usual anti-humanist critique. He wants to abolish the division between the ideal and the material, culture and nature, human and other. This is done by describing the world as '"the flesh" which implies 'intelligence usually reserved for human subjectivity' (118). The world is sensible and can perceive itself through a 'will to self-knowledge'. This takes the form of a 'worldly becoming' without any final arrival or single beginning. Humanness is not some entity in the world and separate from it, something exceptionally engaged in intellection. 'The world, by implication, would always have been in the process of discovering, exploring, redefining, and reinventing the nature of its humanity'.

The flesh embraces itself (and,in a lot of tautologous magic substance stuff], this is reversible, so perception can only be 'a form of self- encounter' (118). So what is the Self? --something 'comprehensive and comprehending'. There is an 'expansive corporeal personification of "the Sensible"' Luckily, this causes a 'transsitive collapse' of lots of distinctions -- 'birth and thought, substance and form, body and mind, and origin and outcome'. To an extent, M-P sees this as the maternal --Nature and flesh are the mother -- but this is a disrupted view of maternity, a 'complete dislocation of the temporal and spatial coordinates'[which means really radical and good for Kirby] This is what Irigaray picks up, although she does not agree with the specific form of M-P's disruption, which she says erases the specificity of the feminine.

Irigaray's whole ethical position depends on there being sexual difference, although she also agrees that we should reconsider space and time as well. She finds MP to be misguided, dispersing maternity into some general capacity, the flesh. For Kirby, sexual specificity is not precluded, however, and Irigaray misses this by just seeing MP as working with the same old logic of the same.

For Irigaray, perception in feminist terms must involve openness to the difference of others, 'a gesture of generosity'. Any conceptual duality is seen as threatening closure, keeping back from the good and the creative. MP does find a way through, though. He also sees perception working through the feminine and invokes a specifically feminine term '"invagination"' to describe how the flesh of the world folds back upon itself [cf Deleuze on the fold]. Perception must therefore depend on an experience of difference, non-coincidence, and this energises how the world perceives itself. The intention is to grasp 'the essential fullness of Being in all its expressions' (119). The flesh has an insatiable desire for carnal knowledge which takes diverse and perverse forms: even when it seems to withdraw into itself 'it nevertheless remains in touch with itself'. This is 'thoroughly comprehensive' in its unqualified openness: 'even closure is intrinsic to its make up' [proper magic substance]. All dualities and negations are within it, never independent, so the flesh cannot be defined against closure — 'closing, sealing, and separating are intrinsic to its desire for itself', so any closure is really 'an internal movement, or differential of "the flesh"'.

Nevertheless there must be internal divergence, dissonance, which is where perception turns into self interrogation. This is the context to the understanding of the feminine. There is a debt to the maternal, but MP wants to undo the limits of maternity, its 'spatial and temporal location as straightforwardly in the past, in a single, identifiable place… Given by only one body, one gender and through one sexual act' (120). Perception instead is akin to conception. It is a 'desiring organ', encountering its own alienness and thus reconceiving itself. In this conception, knowledge is related to birth, 'epistemology emerging as the entanglement of ontology' a form of 'perverse intercourse': the subject questions 'porous being' and receives '"a confirmation of its astonishment"', in a form of gestation — 'one same corporeity or visibility in general' in the very depth of being.

The flesh displays a turning back onto itself, 'chiasmic reversibility'. It does not seek to return to one origin. Instead it offers 'dehiscence, or bursting open, of the origin' in infinite iterations. Perception does not depend on the subject or some primordial self pre-existing the capacity to engage the world, despite a hint of this in the earlier work.

A lengthy extract from Signs says that we discover others in the world's flesh, that recognition does bring them into existence, but that it is possible to decipher some kind of self presence. It is impossible to understand the world or to develop a vision without invoking the '"whole fabric of the perceptible world… and with it… the others who are caught in it"' (121). Others are not fictions arising in spirit but '"twins or the flesh of my flesh"'. They are distant, but when we consider the perceptible world, we realise that it can '"haunt more than one body without budging from its place"' we might have an individual perception of a table, but we also '"know that at the same moment it presses upon every glance in exactly the same way. For I see those other glances too"' together, these glances can offer '"a new compresence"' [it is the notion of apperception and the ability to take the view of the other in Husserl and Schutz ].

So ontological differentiation is semiotic, leading to experience and understanding. It all takes place outside of conventional space and time, as a kind of 'contagion'. What seems to be preexistent is still becoming. MP claims that this is not just an ideal based on 'philosophical abstraction' [of course it is]. Irigaray notes this via MP's own awareness that philosophy must be more than reflection since this presumes some pre-judgement and he suggests that we should philosophize with new experiences that have not been worked over, that these will provide resources for philosophy [which smuggles in realism].

Irigaray soon parts company, though and operationalises MP's original harmony by saying that we must go back to pre-discursive experience, but this implies some notion of linear time again. Irigaray criticises this nostalgia in male consciousness, but reproduces it here. MP has a much broader project, and an 'interrogative' one rather than an attempt to find some foundation for sexual difference as if we already knew how these differences emerged and what they were. We can see the differences in Irigaray arguing that we need to find some 'originary space' for something before dispersion or incarnation. She imposes a sequence between first cohering and then connecting as we develop our sense of touch, while vision both 'dissects and forgets' (123). There is some original integrity which gets split. This might be explained by her psychoanalytic understanding of subject formation, where the child's entrance into culture involves loss and denigration of the '(m)othered part of itself'. The whole thing is inspired by fear of increasing technological and scientific dissection and dissolution.

For MP, there is life even in dispersion. There was no original beginning to be split, 'all identity is given chiasmically'. Indeed dispersion can be understood as maternity where a particular identity arises from a continuing involvement of the flesh. Of course there might well be particular locations or condensations, singular experiences, but these still depend upon shared understandings [as with the perception of the table] [I think he will probably see it as shared participation in the flesh rather than mundane understandings].

Fields are unified by their very 'enduring intention to differentiate', [handy!] so particularity is permitted' there are no atomic entities uniquely and particularly located in linear time, but rather a set of coordinates 'whose "compresence" evokes the whole of the world as "the flesh" takes measure of itself' through difference. The bodily senses are measuring instruments for being, 'dimensions' not to be seen as anything [empirically?] adequate or immanent.

Kirby sees a parallel between this 'wild and counterintuitive logic' and some quantum implications: MP has split 'the atom of identity', refused any separation into agent or representation. He sees becoming an entity as like the 'spreading movement and expansive pool and undertone of a wave' (124) [the actual quote talks about coiling, circling and, indeed, a wave linking what is visible immediately with a horizon — maybe — which helps him talk about the development of whole other consciousnesses into landscapes?]. These points are magical, poetic, 'suggestive', but there is enough to argue that there is no stance 'against the feminine', despite Irigaray, partly because to defend it against improper use would imply that we validate it as a concrete manifestation in the first place. Instead we have an 'utterly referential' interior grasp of the Sensible. It coheres because it offers 'an implicated weave' that both connects the visible together in a fabric, and also connects it to '"a fabric of invisible being'' [proper magic substance]. So identity is only a particular node in a way, '"a concretion of visibility"'.

Semiosis itself is 'corporealised' as flesh, in contact with itself, 'articulate in its perceptions. Both subject and language are incorporated. Irigaray sees this as 'masculinist reductionism', but this 'might be misguided' (125), baffled by MP's 'quite exquisite feel for the intricacy and wonder in this seemingly simple word, "language"'. [As anyone normal would be]. Irigaray shows 'irritations', arising from her own nostalgic desire for self presence which emerges after all.

MP sees an ontological discourse, 'a becoming sensible' proceeding by making explicit '"the architectonics of the human body", how it sees and hears itself and constructs a mute world that also contains '"all the possibilities of language"'. The phenomenological world is its langue, neither prior to specific words, nor subsumed by them, but rather representing 'intertwining… enfoldings'. This is similar to what is implied by entanglement in contemporary physics — 'a living ground'.

In both discourses despite very different objects and methods, the gap between the ideational and the physical 'entirely collapses, and for similar reasons' and is replaced by notions of intertwining and entanglement. There is also a sense of 'an "in between" [God help us] pre-existing entities'. Space and time as localising reality does not obtain, in MP nor 'in current evidence of quantum complexity' [note 2 just says that Einstein was wrong to want to return to a classical understanding of the universe, and refers us to chapter 1, note 1, which summarises Einstein's position and a debate with John Bell — apparently Einstein {the EPR thesis} 'could not reproduce the myriad predictions of quantum mechanics. Somebody called Aspect operationalised Bell to produce an actual experiment that confirmed it 'and proved quantum non-locality'].

Perhaps the debate in science has relevance for Irigaray and the location of the feminine? Irigaray's 'complaint against MP echoes the wider debate about non-locality. Einstein himself had doubts when he realised that reality was not easily divided into separate entities but was entangled — he referred to '"spooky action at a distance"' (126). He simply asserted that we should still try to hold onto physical reality, something existing and actual, something 'real in one part of space' which could be seen as independent of something thought of as real in another part of space. Einstein insisted that it could not depend on measurement [Barad 2007,p.315 is the source for this discussion]. Irigaray seems to have a 'shared commitment' to classical notions of locality and identity, something that preexistent measurement representation. Einstein would have been defeated by later experiments that confirmed Bohr, argued Barad, and this is 'in rhythm with my reading of MP'.

Kirby goes on to quote Barad on how our sense of reality is made up of individual objects, but we should really deal with phenomena 'whose very being is always and only an articulation of entanglement'. The two slit experiment, showed this, including the delayed-choice variant.

MP apparently has the same understanding 'of phenomenal complexity — phenomenal reality' (127). He denies that the senses can provide a material ground, some realm which then has to be imperfectly translated into language [Kirby sees these as reflecting nature and culture respectively]. He's like Derrida in reworking language, agreeing that language is 'the brain twisting suggestion of difference itself… A process that gives rise to the perception of an event as a divided phenomenon'. There is no outside ground of reference, no substance, but only something 'already intrinsic to its systematicities'. Meanings are not added as a kind of layer, but as given with the words themselves, becoming '"the totality of what is said, the integral of all the differentiations of the verbal chain"'. For MP, '"language is everything, since it is the voice of no one, since it is the very voice of the things, the weights, and the forests"' (128).

Meaning always involves disjunction, for example between what is heard and what is said, some internal dialogue. MP still wants to privilege the visible, though, and this is phallogocentric for Irigaray. For MP, the relation between touch and vision 'is intricacy itself', however so that a particular perception leads to 'a relational enfolding' [apperception]. Vision is associational and synaesthetic, saturating all the senses.

This makes visibility the same as Derrida's textuality or general writing. Derrida is not privileging writing over speech, just destabilising the usual distinctions between them, so that we get to see the limits of ideas about origins, or progress from simple to complex, and from truth to intellectual corruption. This is the same 'founding division that informs the nostalgic imperative' in Irigaray — nature as something feminine dominated by the masculinist something secondary and instrumental. She also interprets the ambiguities in MP 'as simply erroneous'.

MP on 'corporeal semiosis', the articulation of flesh with itself denies any self presence or 'separate sensory modalities'(129). Nor can the world just be seen as an assembly of individual bodies. His approach is 'like a grammatology writ large'. In one phrase, he says that we can detect the presence of other people within ourselves, and that we can deduce that our bodies are in some sort of system with other bodies, a fold that continues to touch itself 'even as it opens itself up', as with invagination.

Irigaray erases this 'utterly extraordinary… Reading of carnal speech', a generalisation of the two lips approach. She sees it as masculinist theft, and restores a hierarchy between flesh and language. She admits that we can no longer contact this primordial ground, but says we should not bury maternity altogether as if it had no relevance to the present — this is what denigrates it, seeing it as a past 'expendable moment'. Instead she says the past is still present to us, while any attempt to represent maternity will reify it and repress its specificity. If we explore the differences between these two we can get to see the need for sexual ethics for her.

For Kirby, this still works with a notion of duration [sic] as linear time linking separate moments. This is even presumed when Irigaray tries to see 'tactility at the origin' (130) [instead of vision]. This becomes some ground or 'nurturing support', something feminised, which loses itself in what becomes sensible. Maternity is the given, not parented by anything else.

MPs vision of maternity differs. He does acknowledge a debt that was given, of which we can still feel the effects. But he radicalises the conventions of space and time and the mechanism of transfer. So maternity can revalue the future as well as the past, and should be understood as 'the generative capacities of men as well as women' and even a general vitality found in the animate. His vision is actually the same as tactility, and there is no primordial segregation and alienation, no erasure of primordial voice, no distortion of it into reified law. This would wrongly appeal to the origin in its immediacy, 'speech before writing' (131), nature violated by culture and language. Flesh is not itself engendered but is something given that proceeds becomings, 'in simple terms, it just is'. Irigaray does acknowledge some internal movement or differential within, but the primordial essence is somehow preserved.

The origin is sealed off, requiring some outside encounter — sexual encounter, which renders men as obviously 'violating perpetrator'. Women cannot engage in intercourse among themselves. This sees heterosexual encounter as the foundation of sexual difference. The very identity involved is 'already a scene of ethical consideration' for Kirby, however. Irigaray's ethics of sexual difference is about how we encounter someone alien, not just an inversion of ourselves, but this still leaves otherness is a mystery and it is not clear why we should ground an ethics on sexual priority, 'assuming we know what that is.' Ontological difference involves a much more general notion of a copula, and we need to investigate it to explain sexual difference.

Irigaray advocates a provision to be made for the maternal feminine, to preserve its difference, and avoid total or masculine appropriation. This is the basis of her ethics. MP, on the other hand wants to rethink the implicit 'metaphorics of purity and danger'. We cannot manage something from the outside. Penetration might be understood as the ability of the flesh to touch itself, which is also an investigation of itself. We will have to rethink the whole notion of violation.

There are differences in the conception of language which runs throughout the entire projects of both thinkers. Irigaray takes a Lacanian view of subject formation, where language is already in the world ready to replace maternal origins, already acting as a kind of duplication of '"the maternal gift of flesh"' (132). Language must always therefore display some lack in its attempt to substitute for 'carnal beginnings'. MP by contrast sees no difference between the body and language, but sees instead 'carnality as thoroughly garrulous; as an originary vociferousness', something already containing all the possibilities of language.

Irigaray sees the internal dialogue of the flesh as a repression of difference, with language simply reproducing the same, without contact with carnal foundations. She finds MP puzzling in asserting that an origin 'could be pregnant with language' and tends to see this only as an erasure of the feminine, by implying that the feminine cannot be a source of extra creativity. MP however sees language as an expression of the world, a process of 'self violation/self evolution' (133). The tactile is itself a language that differentiates and discriminates: we see this in Braille and also in our response to pressures and textures where touch becomes a kind of 'sensate writing/reading'. Touch is not undifferentiated [or something simple or primitive] but depends on 'an entire field of corporeal sensation'.

Language is not just a representation or model of a world, but 'an ontological energy through which the world makes itself known (to itself)'. MP sees drawings and maps, as having this capacity to implicate what is being mapped, not just represent it, that maps and what they depict have a '"common inner framework"'. They are reality in another dimension, and '"Being is dimensionality itself"' so that is accessible by perception at a number of levels of scale. This is the same 'counterintuitive complexity that Barad captures in her descriptions of quantum entanglement' [well — both are counterintuitive, and both seem to deny any particular effects of scale itself]. MP is agreeing that the desire to know 'is implicated in the very ontology of what it is that he is looking at'. A perceptual event depends on an intention to look as well as anything inherent in the object.

Overall the world itself does 'language, representation, modelling' as part of its 'ongoing manufacture'. There is no violation, nothing to be condemned [indeed, everything is forgiven as usual], 'no moral flaw in this scene of genesis' (133 – 4). [So we have to find out what's bad by applying some additional preferences?]. For MP, 'identity is utterly violated' and 'corruption engenders' (134), so masculinism 'could be said to mother feminism in the same gesture that discovers feminism… affirming masculinism'. Appropriation is birth as well as theft. Identity emerges [actualises from 'structured moments and rhythms of intercourse'], but 'every act is generally born, and yet never in the same way'. Sameness is no longer a problem, nor do we need radically different identities to found sexual ethics 'radical alterity is already present 'within the apparent unity and coherence of individual identity'. Thus sameness is actually 'impossible'. Culture and masculinity cuts itself apart from nature, and this is seen as a wounding, masculine, outside for Irigaray, but for MP 'this fault line is chiasmatic… fractured and dispersed' ubiquitous and across the scale 'like a Mandelbrot filigree of repetitive transformation that is integral to all identity'. So if there is this cut, 'the entire universe is essentially at fault' [entirely apologetic at this stage].

So 'no one is to blame'. We can't develop an ethics based on blame, any more than we can find pure and indivisible lines anywhere else, especially in separating human from nonhuman. Derrida says as much, and recognises that this will leave us 'uncertain about how to proceed' — his only response is that we should openly welcome doubt, responsibility and the difficulties of being ethical as the '"unrescindable essence of ethics"' [like one of these absolute but unattainable commitments to otherness — philosophical rigour preserved by abandoning any actual evaluations]. Blame and violence are not precluded exactly, but culpability 'cannot be attributed to any one', has no origin or cause. This should at least make us 'more forgiving and generous' when we make judgements and political decisions, and cause us to think about them again afterwards [become like Christ really and float above all the mundane struggles].

Irigaray began by calling for thorough reinterpretations between subject, world, language and everything. This does make the male subject unstable with a 'friable identity' but, so is the 'collective subject of Mankind' (135) our whole notion of shared humanity and its capacities, which can no longer be defined against some nonhuman inferior world. Mankind is a sexist term, but we do not avoid instability by simply re-describing it as a more inclusive Humankind.

One of MP's passages is 'literally, wonderful'. It avoids the usual split between humanist and anti-humanist positions, but neither are dismissed 'as simply mistaken', an example of his 'inclusive sense of generosity'. He does not intend visible flesh to just refer to humans, but talks of 'carnal being' at different levels, latent being, prototypes of Being of which our own bodies are a variant, however remarkable. This will not lead us immediately to want to end sexual discrimination or racism, or even global exploitation. Apportioning culpability might be 'pragmatically necessary' but we can not 'fail to acknowledge that behaviours, even when individual, are enabled by/through community'. The reversible flesh gives us a general sense of responsibility when no one is to blame, since 'all individuals and acts issue' from it, in a 'constant process of realignment and renewal, intertwining.

This will help us disarticulate the negative associations of the feminine and the corporeal, including those attached to the notion of the primordial other. Nor is woman the origin of everything, later violated by man. The single term man 'will not locate the culprit' (136). So we are provoked to practice politics differently: 'to effectively instrumentalise a critique of instrumentality… to explain inequality and oppression without reinforcing their terms of reference… to appreciate that puzzles about "the enigma of woman" have universal application'. This will sacrifice the coherence of feminism, but feminists have always recognised that they are riddled with their own 'undoing... impropriety... wilful curiosity.'

Back to Barad on the inseparable parts of the phenomenon. For Kirby, 'if this truly resonates with the science and drama of MPs Vision — and originary chiasmatic structure', not relations between separated entities, we can reconsider difference. It is not just loss or failure. Alterity is intrinsic in Being, 'an expression of [its] intra-ontology'. There are no entities that limit my situation or knowledge. All limits are 'chiasmatically given'. An individual situation is always 'more than local'.

There is another likeness between the quantum problematic and MPs Vision. Someone called Dastur draws on MPs ideas on temporality, especially how we can see it as fractured in Cezannes' paintings. MP sees vision as a means where we can become absent from ourselves and take part in '"the fission of Being from the inside"', and Dastur adds a gloss. Vision reveals a splintered presence not a unified agency, and this is '"the mystery of simultaneity"', something that can coexist across distance and time [via the through-and-through-interconnectedness of subjective time, for me]. This is how MP has reframed the central questions of ontology, epistemology, ethics and science 'by radically recasting the anthropological'

[Good eg of the difficulties of monism - -everything can be forgiven, no-one is to blame etc. Politics becomes philosophy or general ethics. Interesting to see this as an ethical implication of entanglement in Barad --more than she does?]

Kirby page