The Test Drive

Part 1. Proving Grounds

Part I Proving Grounds Dreams and beasts are two keys by which we are to find out the secrets of our nature. They are our test objects. – Ralph Waldo Emerson But what contributes most of all to this Apollonian image of the destroyer is the realization of how immensely the world is simplified when tested for its worthiness of destruction. This is the great bond embracing and unifying all that exists. – Walter Benjamin I always want to test everything to the point of death. Beyond. – Kathy Acker  Whether you mean to prove that you can do it, or we are driven by what Maurice Blanchot calls “the trial of experience,” and he submits himself endlessly to Nietzsche’s loyalty tests, or she is a runaway replicant whose human factor is being scrutinized, or the sadistic coach has us revving up for an athletic contest; whether you are entering college, studying law, or trying to get out of an institution; whether they are giving you the third degree; whether you are buffing up on steroids, or she had unprotected sex, or he doesn’t know what he has but he’s fatigued and nauseated; whether they have to prove their mettle or demonstrate a hypothesis or audition for the part, make a demo, try another way, or determine paternity ; whether you roll back to the time of the Greeks who first list their understanding of basanos, or to the persecution of witches and press forward to push out the truth in the medium of torture and pain: it seems as though everything – nature, body, investment, belief – has needed to be tested, including your love. What is the provenance of this need to torture , to test? A link between torture and experiment has been asserted ever since Francis Bacon; yet, what has allowed acts and idioms of testing to top out as an essential and widening interest,a nearly unavoidable drive? A kind of questioning,a structure of incessant research – perhaps even a modality of being – testing scans the walls of experience, measuring, probing, determining the “what is” of the lived world. At the same time, but more fundamental still,the very structure of testing tends to overtake the certainty that it establishes when obeying the call of open finitude.An unpresumed fold in metaphysics, testing – that is, the types and systems of relatedness that fall under this term – asserts another logic of truth, one that subjects itself to incessant questioning while reserving a frame,a trace, a disclosive moment to which it refers. There is nothing as such new about the desire bound up in the test; yet the expansive field or growing promiscuity of testing poses novel problems and complicates the itinerary of claims we make about the world and its contractions, the shards of immanence and transcendence that it TESTING1 On Being Tested     stillbears.OurcontractwithYahweh,whetherpiouslyobservedorabominated , involves the multiplication of test sites. Shortly after completing his Critique of Judgment, Kant, in response to a public questionnaire, examined the problem of testing the faith of theology students.1 Can faith be tested or is it not the essence of faith to refuse the test – to go along, precisely on blind faith, without ground or grade? Or again, perhaps the Almighty Himself has proven time and again to be addicted to the exigencies of testing. If God can be said to have a taste for anything, then it may well be located in the incontrovertible necessity of the test.No one is not tested by God, at least by the God of the Old Testament who showed a will to perpetual pursuit, perpetual rupture. Even the satanic beloved, who got away or was kicked out (depending on whether you are reading the satanic version of Goethe or God),became a subsidiary testing device for the paradisiacal admissions policy. In German, Versuch unites test with temptation – a semantic merger of which Nietzsche makes good use. The devil is the visible mark of a permanent testing apparatus. It is one name for an operation that engages the frazzled subject in a radical way. The figure of the test belongs to what Nietzsche saw as our age of experimentation . Nietzsche’s work can be seen to pivot around different appropriations of testing, and it is for this reason that I want to look at it more closely while tracking the phenomenon that appears to have flown beneath philosophical radars. Even...