TechnoLogics: Ghosts, the Incalculable, and the Suspension of Animation

2. On-(the)-Line

2 On-(the)-Line T here is a low humming in the background. Everything is now on-line. Powered up. We must, whether we want to or not, put ourselves on the line as well. What, though, is a line? What is the course of the line between the living and the dead, the animate and the inanimate? What does it mean that now, driven by the program of technology, we are attempting crossings back and forth across that line that has long been prepared for, but never before, not in the same way, driven along? What is a line? A mathematical stratagem. The shortest distance, we have been told since we were children, between two points. Or, to put it a bit differently, a line is the Aufhebung of the point: As the first determination and first negation of space, the point spatializes or spaces itself. It negates itself by itself in its relation to itself, that is, to another point. The negation of negation, the spatial negation of the point is the LINE. The point negates and retains itself, extends and sustains itself, lifts itself (by Aufhebung) into the line, which constitutes the truth of the point. (Derrida 1982b 42) The point is that the spatializing point produces the line of time, one point after another as one “now” gives way to the next, but this, Heidegger will argue, is but the “vulgar conception” of time, a contention that will not remain unchallenged. 21 A line is a boundary that marks off divisions of the land, like a cadastre, a survey of the topography like the one that will occur in “Bartleby.” The surveyed is the surveilled, and everything, all too soon, will be measured and positioned beneath the grid of observation outlined by the eyes in the sky and by the network of closed-circuit cameras that are becoming an invisible part of our urbanscapes.1 It’s as if the lawyer’s oversight of his guest, the one who says no, has been projected into an entire system of watchfulness, but one that can see only objects within a certain set of parameters and will, out of a structural necessity, miss its own blind spots. Continuous oversight, we might say, is blind from the beginning. And, as I will suggest, Oedipus, who mans the line of western metaphysics, is one name for the operator of this system. Lines multiply. A lifeline runs across the palms of our hands and we’ve all pondered that short, curved indentation of the flesh. The line is always one of life and death, their codetermination. Lines are always connectors—drop me a line when you get a chance; I think of you often—but the lines can, always, go dead. The figure of the line combines technologies of communication, the alphabetic and the electronic. There is always, of course, a small hookup fee, a small unbehaglich tax—the merest sliver of the pleasures of the flesh—and it gives power, a buzz that lights up the night. The line is a command, but is a line up really needed? Are these really criminals we’re looking at? In a laboratory of Plato or Cornelius Agrippa, in the offices of lower Manhattan, the reading room of the British Library, in an old Cistercian monastery, or in the watchtowers of respectable society? Thugs numbered and profiled in silhouette? Are they part of the mob? How can we identify the right one, when we’re not sure what, or even if, crime has occurred? And what lineup are we standing in? The disaster has occurred; we all know that The devastation of the earth can easily go hand in hand with a guaranteed supreme standard of living for man, and just as easily with the organized establishment of a uniform state of happiness for all men. Devastation can be the same as both, and can haunt us everywhere in the most unearthly way—by keeping itself hidden. Devastation does not just mean a slow sinking into the sand. Devastation is the highvelocity expulsion of Mnemosyne. (Heidegger 1968, 30) But is this a crime? Mnemosyne has been out of fashion for quite some time. Can someone, anyone, be held responsible? What are the roles of agency, ethics, and memory in the transepochal shift we are 22 TechnoLogics undergoing? Especially if “agency” is reexperienced along the lines Andrew Pickering suggests when, discussing the...