Avital Ronell: the work of survival.

Willems, Brian

THE ELECTRIC CONTACT WAS PRESSED AND A PHOTOGRAPH TAKEN. THE MEDIUM WAS EXHAUSTED, AND THE SITTING CAME TO AN END. FINAL EXAMINATION NEGATIVE.

ALBERT VON SCHRENCK-NOTZING, PHENOMENA OF MATERIALIZATION (1920)

Between 1909 and 1913, Munich psychical researcher Baron Albert von Schrenck-Notzing observed the medium known as "Eva C." (Eva Carriere) in order to discover whether the materializations of "ectoplasm" and spirits from her body were mere legerdemain. Von Schrenck-Notzing submitted the psychic sessions to a number of rigorous controls, including sewing Eva C. up in a garment and having her protectress Mme. Bisson carry out "gynecological and anal examinations" to look for any cards hidden up her sleeves. Perhaps the most striking aspect of von Schrenck-Notzing's investigations, however, is the photography of Eva C. in the very act of materialization. Despite later accusations of using wires and regurgitation to create Eva C.'s "effects," many of the 225 photographs that accompany von Schrenck-Notzing's Phenomena of Materialization: A Contribution to the Investigation of Mediumistic Teleplastics (1920) remain seemingly inexplicable documentation of psychical occurrences. Nevertheless, the questions these photographs raise are not really about the validity of Eva C.'s manifestations but the trustworthiness of images themselves.

A photograph of Eva C. showing a materialization hovering over her head and stretching a band of light between her two hands is featured on the cover of Avital Ronell's The UberReader: Selected Works of Avital Ronell (ed. Diane Davis, 2008). While not discussed in the texts themselves, the cover image raises questions regarding the roles of technology and testimony. The University of Illinois Press reader offers published and unpublished essays, book selections, and public talks ranging from Ronell's first book Dictations: On Haunted Writings (1986) to her most recent writings on technology, "stupidity," and testing. Central to UberReader's jostling themes is a rigorously experimental predisposition to contamination by all that which exists outside the master codes of signification. These interruptions of the symbolic order, as Davis states in her introduction, have the potential to be salutary rather than corrosive, since they aim "to call thought back to what unsettles it" (xxiii). As for the photographic "proof" of Eva C.'s manifestations, the obstacle is not the untrustworthiness of images, but rather the ethical call for emancipation from the rigors of analytical intelligence. Instead of attempting to allay suspicions of fakery, Ronell's position, according to Davis, is "resolutely anxious" (xxx) in that it celebrates the obtrusive stutter of the wrong answer. When discussing the work of New York artist Julia Scher, Ronell points out that it is only through a break in the seamless replication of master codes that a call to action can be issued: "Scher practices active forms of mimesis that depart from models or copies. She simulates the very structure that she criticizes, risking at every juncture to locate herself inside an apparatus whose hegemony she denounces" (93).

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In her "Video/Television/Rodney King: Twelve Steps Beyond the Pleasure Principle" (1992), Ronell discovers a similar ethical questioning of image unreadability in the Rodney King trial in Los Angeles during the early 1990s. The video of four LAPD officers beating up King calls into question the role of video itself as valid testimony. In court, painstaking, second-by-second analysis could neither confirm nor deny whether or not King took an aggressive step toward the arresting police: the gesture was caught on video, and yet it was impossible to read. The officers were eventually acquitted, sparking the 1992 L.A. riots.

According to Ronell, when the video of the beating was telecast in those TiVo-less, more aleatory times, it opened television up to its own blindness. This happened not because video film is somehow real and television fake, but because when the non-readability of the King video was shown nationwide, "television showed a television without image," and therefore "a rhetoricity of televisual blindness emerged" (76). However, Ronell warns that video is in no way the "truth" of television: "Rather, it is watching television; it is the place of the testimonial that cannot speak with referential assurance but does assert the truth of what it says. This is why I want to focus it as the call of conscience, which is to say that video responds in some crucial sense to the call of television" (74). Video can function as an ethical call because, in its very reversibility, it focuses our attention on the symbolic order that it can never capture or bring into evidence. In this sense, video is open to ghosts, to the possibility of being haunted by that which it cannot grasp: "What video teaches, something that television knows but cannot as such articulate, is that every medium is related in some crucial way to specters" (71).

This unreadability of the image is perfectly captured by the above von Schrenck-Notzing epigraph. The picture is taken, the subject is exhausted from the effort, but the image is still resistant. For Ronell, such hauntings are proactive since they allow something from beyond the established order of intelligence to survive within it. Ronell develops this concept of survival along the lines of Walter Benjamin's differentiation between uberleben (surviving) and fortleben (living on) in his essay "The Task of the Translator" (1923). For Benjamin, "living on"--the mere biological continuance of life--differs from "surviving," in which something no longer is transformed here and allowed a space within life it no longer has. Benjamin develops his thought through the independent and vigorous life a translation takes on beyond the "death" of its source, but Ronell, apropos Jacques Derrida's studies in hauntology (Specters of Marx [1993]) and Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok's cryptonomy (The Wolf Man's Magic Word: A Cryptonomy [1986]), sees a number of literary and techno-media events as the end result of letting what has passed survive: "Not empirical or chronologically clocked but fundamental, the structure of surviving means that one of you will be left behind, responsible and responsive to the intemporal, irretrievably mute other" (236). The uber of Benjamin's uberleben is the same uber as in Ronell's UberReader: continual reading allows that which is beyond to survive.

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The untrustworthiness of the image also literally extends to the text in The UberReader. In the book we find a copy of Ronell's U.S. citizenship papers (she was born to once German-Jewish parents in Prague, representing Israel) as well as a number of photographs arranged in what looks like a photo album, featuring Ronell with a number of friends and great thinkers, including Jacques Derrida, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Judith Butler, Jean-Luc Nancy, and others. What is not called into question here is whether the photographs are "real," but what these photographs capture in moments of life when compared to how these people are allowed to survive after they have passed (or lose themselves in time).

The preface to Ronell's Dictations, included in the reader, develops just such a mechanism. Dictations traces the work of Goethe's assistant Johann Peter Eckermann, who even after the poet's death continued to take down his words, completing Goethe's last work, Conversations with Goethe (1836-48), without the actual biological presence of the great German luminary. "Despite the pious thoroughness of Germanist scholars, Goethe opened the vertiginous experience of a suspended transcendence of the work. [...] the effects of Goethe's signature were so powerful that he continued to sign on the texts which any simple logic of chronicity could never comprehend. [...] His signatory powers tend to be invoked in works that name their struggle for survival" (145). Eckermann, because his channeling of ghostly dictations is open to the charge of foolishness, "discloses the testamentary structure of every work [...] allothanatography, or writing's relationship to death. To the extent that every text poses itself as a demand for survival" (146).

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For Eckermann to be open to Goethe's call, a position of "responsible passivity" is needed: "Eckermann was for me the figure of the ethical relationship from which I drew a lesson on responsible passivity. Staking his life on the fine lines distinguishing writing from passivity, Eckerman receded into the exigency of text as testimony" (147). This position of testimony is "ethical" because it allows that which is not part of symbolically ordered life to become present, although, as Ronell warns, "it does not belong to the economy which it haunts. Hauntedness allows for visitations without making itself at home" (154). This is not a contradiction or denial of the structures of intelligence, but rather it "scrambl[es] the master codes" (191) so as to extend life beyond what is currently known.

However, the question immediately arises as to why the orders of intelligence remain receptive at all to contamination from the outside. And what it might mean to allow such an interruption in identity. Ronell responds to this conundrum in a talk on the sub-worlds of novelist and poet Dennis Cooper, by precisely pondering, "Why is the body prepared for drugs?" (193). Drugs, in one sense, are able to enter the body and disrupt orders of intelligence. "Drugs not only belong to a repressed thinking of culture but point to a nanotechnology installed in the human body, which is set up with receptors to receive the chemical prosthesis" (193). Such chemical receptors allow the body to become transported into zones of hallucination or unreadability. By causing a "fatigue of identity" (194), drugs "blur the boundaries between intelligence and idiocy" (197). By becoming stupid on drugs, there is a possibility for questioning what really happens when something from the outside is allowed to survive inside: "Drugs make us ask what it means to consume anything, anything at all" (137).

Ronell's quintessential concept of stupidity holds up a dull and diminishing mirror to intelligence. Stupidity is not merely the absence of the latter, but is what remains when the regime of cleverness is absent. In a selection from her book Stupidity (2002), Ronell argues that, "it is in the nature of stupidity to stump--to enfeeble and intimidate--but also to release" (261). She discusses a piece of graffiti Flaubert saw during a trip to the Orient. The novelist, in the midst of a reverie over Pompey's Pillar, sees the name "Thompson" scrawled on the monument: the stupidity of this traveler is forever emblazoned for all those who come after him to see. Ronell argues that for stupidity to exist, there first has to be some order of intelligence for it to demolish, for "there is no stupidity without monument" (268). The power of stupidity, as Flaubert encounters it, is that it is "the name that spells out the ruination of any monument" (269). In this sense, stupidity permits a challenge to be hurled in the face of the received pillars of wisdom.

Stupidity in testing comes forth in an excerpt from The Test Drive (2005) on the Zen koan. The interrogative structure of the koan, the Zen master's test question practiced during meditation, not only functions as a step on the road to enlightenment but can even, by its very inquisitive nature, reflect enlightenment itself. Often described as no-exit situations which take years to answer, koans are seemingly nonsensical at first, even childish, but often point toward a kind of aporia, disengaging themselves from the easy way out of an answer. According to Ronell, "Zen does not merely erase testing but holds it in reverse, situating it otherwise [...] the test becomes even more pervasive because it can at no point be satisfied by a conclusive answer or a definitive response to the probe that has been put out" (308). Ronell describes what it is like sitting for such assessments in which there is "no exit." The conclusion is that the koan offers "a test site in which the self is placed at absolute risk" (307).

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This holding of the koan question in reverse place is complicated by the koan itself: the question seems to do all it can to bring about failure, which in this case takes the form of a too-hasty answer. This dilemma of orders is made brutally evident in a well-known koan from The Gateless Gate (Mumonkan): "If you meet a man of Tao on the way, greet him neither with words nor with silence. Now tell me, how will you greet him?" Such a koan partakes in the course of things by being "on the way," but it also indicates an extension of one's self in the form of the passivity required in greeting some other. The koan so reveals itself as a place of reserved resistance: a part of you gets passively left behind when you become open to the greeted one. As Ronell argues, "The Greeting is a staying behind but also a going-along" (217), meaning that "The Greeting first establishes a distance so that proximity can occur" (298). For Ronell, the koan can be seen as a rigorous sheltering of blindness, much like video: "The koan does not quarrel with its own state of blindness. It stays with the question, suffers blindness. With time, it becomes evident that the awaited answers are not about their discursive content or levels of perception but about the ever-harassing experience of answering. Answering to the call of the koan, you discover that you are not judged for the quality of the rightness or wrongness of your answer but are turned back upon the ungraspable experience of seeking to answer. Floundering has its own life" (314).

As reflected in this reader, Ronell's thought attempts to incorporate the difficulties of reading in the texts themselves. It can be seen in the questioning surrounding the validity of the image in von Schrenck-Notzing's photography, in the ethical challenge video can issue to television by foregrounding its own blindness, and through the impossibility of forming a rational question at the heart of the koan. All these examples in The UberReader (and more besides) give voice to the risk--and wisdom--of seeing the call for answers as an "impoverished cipher" (315) via the proactively passive position of ghostly survival.

BRIAN WILLEMS is assistant professor of literature at the University of Split, Croatia.