Sacred channels : the archaic illusion of communication 9789089647702, 9089647708

Table of contents :
Contents[-][-]From Aristotle to H rl by Jean-Luc Nancy[-][-]Preface to the German Edition[-]Preface to the English Translation[-][-]The Sacred Channels[-]Introduction[-][-]Part I [-]In the Shadow of Formalization: A History of Thinking[-]1 Blind Thinking around 1900: The Turn from the Intuitive to the Symbolic[-]Thinking the unthinkable[-]The symbolic and intuition[-]Leibniz as a prophet[-]2 The Symbolic and Communication: The Crisis of Thinking Since 1850[-]The dead skeleton of logic[-]Symbolist subversion[-]Operations research of the human mind[-]Unrepresentable communication[-]Structuralism and field theory[-]3 The Sacred and the Genealogy of Thinking: Descent into the Aristotelian Underground[-]The pre-Aristotelian situation of understanding[-]The prehistory of the categories[-]Descartes among the savages[-]Paths of reason[-][-]Part II [-]The Specter of the Primitive: A Hauntology of Communication[-]4 The Night of the Human Being: Being and Experience under the Conditions of the Unrepresentable[-]Primitiveness and crisis[-]Savage media[-]Sacred communication[-]Note on heresy[-]5 The End of the Archaic Illusion: Communication, Information, Cybernetics[-]Desacralizing the channels[-]Coding the real[-]Cybernetics and coldmindedness[-]A new mythology of the binary[-][-]Appendix: Heidegger and Cybernetics[-][-]Bibliography[-]Notes[-]Index[-]

Citation preview

The Archaic

Sacred Illusion of Channels Communication Ams te rdam Uni ve r si t y Press

ERICH HÖRL WITH A PREFACE BY JEAN-LUC NANCY

Sacred Channels

The book series Recursions: Theories of Media, Materiality, and Cultural Techniques provides a platform for cuttingedge research in the field of media culture studies with a particular focus on the cultural impact of media technology and the materialities of communication. The series aims to be an internationally significant and exciting opening into emerging ideas in media theory ranging from media materialism and hardware-oriented studies to ecology, the post-human, the study of cultural techniques, and recent contributions to media archaeology. The series revolves around key themes: – The material underpinning of media theory – New advances in media archaeology and media philosophy – Studies in cultural techniques These themes resonate with some of the most interesting debates in international media studies, where non-representational thought, the technicity of knowledge formations and new materialities expressed through biological and technological developments are changing the vocabularies of cultural theory. The series is also interested in the mediatic conditions of such theoretical ideas and developing them as media theory. Editorial Board – Jussi Parikka (University of Southampton) – Anna Tuschling (Ruhr-Universität Bochum) – Geoffrey Winthrop-Young (University of British Columbia)

Sacred Channels The Archaic Illusion of Communication

Erich Hörl With a preface by Jean-Luc Nancy Translated by Nils F. Schott

Amsterdam University Press

The translation of this publication was made possible by the

The translation of chapter 4, “The Night of the Human Being,” was funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) – Projektnummer 258454408. Originally published in 2005 as Die heiligen Kanäle: Die archaische Illusion der Kommunikation by diaphanes, Zurich.

Cover illustration: “Les opérateurs binaires” from Claude Lévi-Strauss, L’Homme nu, © Éditions Plon, 1971. Cover design: Suzan Beijer Lay-out: Crius Group, Hulshout isbn 978 90 8964 770 2 e-isbn 978 90 4852 560 7 doi 10.5117/9789089647702 nur 670 © E. Hörl / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2018 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book.

For Ksymena and Helen



Contents

From Aristotle to Hörl 9 Jean-Luc Nancy

Preface to the German Edition

19

Preface to the English Translation

23

Introduction 33

Part I In the Shadow of Formalization A History of Thinking 1. Blind Thinking around 1900

The Turn from the Intuitive to the Symbolic

47

Thinking the unthinkable The symbolic and intuition Leibniz as a prophet

47 58 63

2. The Symbolic and Communication

73

The Crisis of Thinking since 1850

The dead bones of logic Symbolist subversion Operations research of the human mind Unrepresentable communication Structuralism and field theory

74 81 89 108 120

3. The Sacred and the Genealogy of Thinking

133

Descent into the Aristotelian Underground

The pre-Aristotelian situation of understanding The prehistory of the categories Descartes among the savages Paths of reason

134 143 159 174

Part II The Specter of the Primitive A Hauntology of Communication 4. The Night of the Human Being

Being and Experience under the Conditions of the Unrepresentable

Primitiveness and crisis Savage media Sacred communication Note on heresy

5. The End of the Archaic Illusion

Communication, Information, Cybernetics

Desacralizing the channels Coding the real Cybernetics and coolness of mind A new mythology of the binary

199 200 205 225 238 251 251 262 269 280

Appendix 299 Heidegger and Cybernetics

Bibliography 323 Index of Names

343



From Aristotle to Hörl1 Jean-Luc Nancy

1 There can be no doubt that Erich Hörl’s thinking proceeds from a very steady and conscientious meditation—rumination, even, absorption and digestion—of Aristotle’s famous foundational formula: the human being is the animal to whom nature has given the logos, that is to say, language.2 Language differs from voice (phonē), which other animals also have and which signals affects. The logos does not signal affects but signifies concepts that are subject to debate. Accordingly, voice announces joy or pain, speech names good and evil, just and unjust, sensations or sensibilities (aisthesis) that, by themselves, establish the associations (or communities) constituted by family members and citizens. Elsewhere, Aristotle shows that the logos is what allows for exercising technai, for producing things that nature does not provide. A technē—what later, following the Latin, was translated as “art”—is the production of a work based on a reflected knowledge and with an end in sight. Situated beside the domain of action, where virtue (aretē), that is, ultimately, the quality of the agent, is at stake, the domain of production puts the quality of products, their effectiveness, at stake. This effectiveness can have contrasting properties: the art of medicine, for example, can produce a recovery or its contrary because the logos allows for knowing a thing and its negation or privation. The human being, then, is the animal whom nature provides with the possibility of knowledge with a view to effecting works that are prescribed neither by nature itself nor by virtuous disposition—which (abbreviating somewhat outrageously albeit admissibly in this context) allows us to discern what is just. This possibility is given by nature, by physis. That is the topic of Hörl’s meditation. Physis endows humans with a capacity that exceeds the mere exercise of what belongs to physis. In other words, the nature of the human being implies an excess over nature. Should we say “nature of the human being” or “nature in the human being”? Everything leads us to think that the two should remain united. Even without dwelling here on the Heideggerian motif of the distinction between physis and “nature,” we can say that if by “nature” we do not mean that which is supposed to be external to the human

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and placed before the human like an object but, rather, the ensemble of what unfolds (se déploie), of which the human is (however insignificant) a part, we must stop and consider for a moment the fact that with the human being, nature unfolds or allows for the unfolding of what we call technics (la technique). Technics must not be opposed to nature. It cannot even manifest itself as denaturing or as destructive of nature, or only to the extent that its natural origin is taken into account. While Aristotle, of course, does not take this path, he stresses that the “logical” character of human beings is conferred on them by nature. He does so by distinguishing between voice and discourse, and that is also to say between the expression of affects and the production of concepts. This difference is not a simple distinction between properties: it appears as a kind of dehiscence, that is, as an internal detachment in the same line or surface (the way a flower’s stamina open). This line symbolically crosses the throat and mouth when Homo sapiens becomes Homo sapiens sapiens (at least in the old classification that distinguished Homo sapiens from Homo neanderthalensis) or when a genetic transformation allows the hyoid bone to acquire a morphology apt for elocution. This symbolic crossing is at the same time the crossing of the symbolic, the crossing of the symbolic element understood as the order of relations (rapports) independent of sensibility (whatever role sensibility might play): associations, sequences, oppositions, comparisons based on values that do not derive from sensorial information but are formed according to their own order of distinctions, referrals, and combinations. That is what we call “language” (le langage), which also includes what we name “calculation” and what we designate as “thinking.” It is not a matter of indifference that the dehiscence takes place along the conduit of sonorous emissions of this bipedal mammal. Sensibility to sound features two distinct pathways for emission and reception; the other sensibilities possess specific receptors but their emitters are spread across the entire body. It is as if the sonorous must respond to a material structure of division and referral, opening and return: sound resonates, and the speaking body is, first of all, a resonant body. Yet dehiscence consists precisely in separating a strictly sonorous (phonic) aspect and a signifying (logical) aspect, the second being constituted, as just noted, by its internal relations alone. The phonic and the logical detach themselves as two sides of resonance—and as two sides, moreover, that refer to one another when they separate out to form the specific animality of the human animal. These two sides can also be designated signal and sign. The signal (in Aristotle, the sēmainein of phonē) alerts, warns, holds back, or attracts; it

From Aristotle to Hörl

11

is turned only to the outside. The sign, while signifying something, also designates itself in its autonomy as a sign; the referent is not the signified, and the signified—or sense itself—is as such only in being referred to the order that specifically belongs to language.

2 The dehiscence of the symbolic order and the sensorial (or, if you prefer, perceptive, intuitive, affective) order is certainly not a dissociation. Very early on, it introduces extremely complex exchanges between the two sides of what has divided itself. But it is nonetheless a dehiscence, a detachment of two aspects—those aspects we distinguish, at least since Aristotle, as “nature” and “technics,” as “given” or “innate” and “produced” or “acquired.” This distinction became so pronounced that after a while we fell into the habit of opposing the two aspects. We have thought technics as separate from nature and thought this separation itself as the fact of a heterogeneity according to which nature ends up becoming a relatively inferior register, subordinate to technics in that nature provides the material for technics. It seemed that human activity produced a second nature whose final achievement was to have been a universe, represented in the image of a “human nature” come fully into its own (“total man” or even “over-man”). Yet things got to a point where nature increasingly turned out to be integrated into the operations and logics of technics to such a degree that nature was no longer just the material but rather a part of a whole so integrally “technical” as to make it impossible to project any finality that would somehow be “supernatural”—that is to say, metaphysical in the sense stigmatized by Nietzsche and Heidegger, in the sense, that is, of an imaginary invention of “backworlds” or of the representation of an over-nature allegedly providing nature with its principles and ends. Understood this way, metaphysics supposes a foundational incompleteness of nature and seeks to endow the logos with the status of a superior authority that furnishes and includes the human capacity for logic. With logic—language, thinking, calculation—all of technics finds itself in a strange and precarious situation, relegated to the margins of thinking. On the one hand, it does indeed testify to the incompleteness of everything that is not brought to completion in the divine over-nature whose model is a nature’s “self-accomplishment.” On the other hand, however, it proceeds from an imitation or a delegation of the operational force of the divine logos,

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and its expansion in nature and over nature participates, in a way, in an economy whose goal is over-natural. This schema of thought is no longer Aristotelian. For Aristotle, technics was inherently limited: “the instruments of any art are never unlimited, either in number or capacity.”3 Undoubtedly, that is the reason why he does not dwell on the singular character of technics issued from nature: for him, all technics still lie within the purview of the whole of nature (and here it would be appropriate to speak of physis again). The modern age, however, is the age of the infinite logos (whether it is conceived of as indefinite or as actual infinite, as the logos of the infinite or as the infinite of the logos)—and for that reason, it is the age of infinite technics or what we may call “techno-logy,” taking up the sense or semantic constellation to which the word has led in English.4 Technical infinity or indefiniteness does not only consist in a quantitative and qualitative increase (“number and capacity”) but in an intensification, tending toward an absolutization, of a referral to itself. Cybernetics, all servo-technics, and so-called interactivity form a kind of expansion of the sign: the relation to an external reality is indissociable from a relationship internal to the system. The relation of technics to a supposedly external nature can no longer be dissociated from the techno-logical ensemble. Technical infinity thus means a tendency toward effacing the distinction between nature and technics. At the same time it means something with which it is contemporary: the destitution of metaphysics in the sense of a speculative elaboration of an over-nature. The “death of God” is essentially the birth of “technology” in a sense that might lead it to occupy the place of “metaphysics.” For this affirmation to become coherent at all—even if it may only be approximate—we have to acknowledge the need to dwell on a point that Aristotle could not have seen: technics is nature itself. And that means that nature, as the accomplishment of itself by itself, escapes by itself, it leaves its own image—over-nature or human nature—and compels us to confront head on an as yet unknown order of questions.

3 The reflection on “technics” cannot be a reflection on the uses and abuses of techniques, as if we had a horizon of reference allowing us to determine “good” and “bad” ones. That is not to say that there aren’t good or bad techniques; what it does mean above all, however, is that our perspective must not be that of transcendental sense.

From Aristotle to Hörl

13

Not that sense were not always and by itself a transcendence—an excess over the merely available. Yet it does not transcend toward a beyond: it transcends into what unfolds as an order (or even a disorder…) opened up by the dehiscence of voice and language. This order is one for which there is neither a pure “physics” (physis, the autotelia of the always-already given) nor a pure “metaphysics” (sovereign of the world, allotelia of the never-yet attained). What else could we call this neither/nor but a double insufficiency (because after God and after a certain kind of “man,” it is indeed in terms of a twofold lack, a twofold weakness that our age most often conceives of itself)? From the outset, Erich Hörl’s affirmation sets itself off from this neither/ nor and the sense of lack or loss it harbors—the sense of a loss of sacralities that supposedly, before they were lost (after Aristotle, for example…), ensured the sensible consistency of both a “physis” and a “metaphysis.” His affirmation states that technics—emphatically understood as the anthropological and physiological regime of what we might call an “ecotechnics [écotechnie]”—exposes the reality of sense to be the reality of communication and participation, of referral, relation, distribution, whose “metaphysical” driving force is the physical dehiscence of the logos (provided we choose to maintain the term “metaphysics” to speak of the thinking of the principles and ends deprived of their sacralities). Communication and participation in no way resemble those substitutes of sacrality that are the sentimental representations of an immediacy and immanence of contagions, of always more or less pious diffuse propagations, which are so obviously refuted by the ravages that traverse our world, a world fully engaged in transformation. With all his energy, Erich Hörl thinks the intensity of a communicating (rather than communicated) sense in terms of the nonimmediacy, the heterogeneity of senses, their “subjects,” and their “channels.” In doing so, he is perhaps more Aristotelian than it may at first appear. For while he tackles the paradox of the naturalness of technics or the technicity of nature head-on, he necessarily also arrives at the proximity between techniques and virtues Aristotle had emphasized. The virtues are active dispositions toward both intellectual and moral excellence, toward knowing how to do and knowing how to judge. Yet nature does not provide us with virtues in potency, the way it furnishes us with the sensible faculties: virtues must be acquired in experience.5 In a regime of limited techniques, a reasonable regulation of virtues may be possible. In an unlimited regime—which includes an indeterminate expansion of what can be said to be “natural”—it is likely that such a regulation must confront very different conditions of being-with that are no longer circumscribed by either an oikos or a polis or any other kind of

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koinōnia, of being-with or being-in-common that is not from the beginning also a being with technical objects and even technical subjects as much as with all other kinds of supposedly natural beings. This is the edge to which this book takes us.

4 Technological being-with is being “with” itself, we might say. Technical objects and subjects—if it weren’t so cumbersome a term, we might call them “techjects,” neither objects nor subjects—are aspects, segments, figures, and agents of our interhuman and intercosmic relations. It is quite obvious that techniques have always—and especially since the moment they began intervening with machines, even the simplest (wheel, lever, etc.)—been strictly linked to a diversity of relations in their inventions, fabrication, and use. One might well insist on how individualistic the use of automobiles is today, the fact remains that the conception, construction, and utilization of these vehicles has a number of very complex collective implications. There certainly is a correlation between social interaction and technical development. The phenomena of urbanity are by themselves a striking illustration of this point since the city itself is simultaneously a “techject” and the site of the intensif ication and complexif ication of indefinitely multiplied techniques. There is thus a “with”—a mit and a Mitsein—that turns out to be intrinsically technical. This has a correlate in a technical displacement of ontology: what I mean to say is that the thing in itself (or “being itself,” if you like) becomes indissociable from technics. The thing in itself never consisted of anything other than the effective positing of something. We must not think—as happens frequently—that for Kant the thing itself exists as a reality (however much it remains doubtful or mysterious) independent of phenomena (representations of the subject). Instead, in a completely different way, the thing in itself is nothing but the effective existence of something, whatever it is. This thing—all things—we can represent to ourselves. We can do so in a number of ways (logical, analogical, paralogical, etc.). Yet the existence of this thing is or owes itself to the fact that within the real there are some things in general (ourselves included) that are at the heart of, that are as it were the effectiveness of the real (the omnitudo realitatis, as Kant calls it). Reality is no longer (if ever it was) an “object” posited before a “subject” (be it human or divine). Rather, it realizes itself—lexical proximity tempts us to say, reifies itself. It is the incessantly active connection of things—it tends

From Aristotle to Hörl

15

toward the connection of all things—among themselves in an extraordinarily complex action–reaction of what we used to call “nature” and “culture” or “given” and “constructed,” etc. The real is as technical as technics is real. Yet it is precisely technical effectiveness that, ever since complex machines, energetic sequences and interdependencies, and, finally, self-governing systems entered the scene, has been perceived as a hypertrophy—a dangerous hypertrophy of what we still call, most of the time, “nonnatural” or “artificial” (the way we oppose “screens” and the “virtual” to supposedly good and solid supports of very real presences…). Is this a cancerous hypertrophy of the artificial or of the very unfolding of things themselves? A naive question when we think of the intense complexification we have long been familiar with of oppositions between nature and culture, authentic and derivative, thetic and prosthetic, proper and improper, science and fiction, consciousness and unconsciousness, etc. Thus, to name but one example, Derrida’s affirmation that there is “no outside-text”—so often interpreted as a fantasmatic reduction of the real to language—would seek to indicate that in the absence of any first and final referent, of any sense complete in itself, all we have to work with is the entanglement of mutual referrals between all beings and between all instances of existence (“nature,” “technics,” “animal,” “symbolic,” “effective,” “mythical,” etc.). In other words, the thing in itself or the thing itself owes its Kantian implication of “simple positing” to the following consideration: there is only what there is, there is no other real than the real, nor is there a first or final reason of this real. This “there is” is fortuitous, aleatory, contingent, to use concepts that as it were lean on their classic opposites (necessity, program, finality). It would undoubtedly be more correct to say that there is simply this—that there is (qu’il est simplement ceci—qu’il y a). In this way of putting it, the “il a” (lit., it has) proceeds from a substitution of “il est” (lit., it is) while the “y” (there) is an adverb of place equivalent to the preposition “à” (to, at, in, etc.): “il y a” thus signifies “it is to or toward or …” In sum, being is said or says itself [se dit] as a sending off (envoi) or referral (renvoi) to … nothing or to its very sending. Ontology here vanishes—or turns itself into a vanishing ontology—as much as the destination does.

5 Is this not what technology, according to which ontology vanishes, exposes to us and exposes us to? There is what there is, there is no prior and no final given, there is only the indefinite proliferation of things that transform,

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combine, supplement, and link up with one another in a never-ending referral from ends to means and means to ends. In the end, we may see in this indefinite reticulation—energies, speeds, efficiencies, information, transmissions, circulations, metamorphoses, expansions, contractions, and so on—the most implacable truth of nihilism: nothing leads to anything anymore, everything revels in an inane whirlwind of very high qualifications, precisions, and correlations. But we may also discern in it the possibility of a new sense of sense: the very sense of existence as a simple disposition of what happens to it. Technics would then be the lesson of the dehiscence of being between its “il a” and its “y”: the withdrawal of any initial donation and of any first referent, the fortuitous and fleeting existing for which its own ephemeral brightness is destined in the proliferation of its renewed appearances/disappearances. In the words of Pessoa: A espantosa realidade das coisas É a minha descoberta de todos os dias. Cada coisa é o que é, E é difícil explicar a alguém quanto isso me alegra, E quanto isso me basta. The astonishing reality of things Is my discovery every day. Everything is what it is, And it’s difficult to explain to anyone how much this gladdens me And how much this suffices me.6

The fact remains, however, that the most visible manifestation of this interconnection of existences dedicated to themselves and to their multiplied expansions is an intertwinement of violences such as the world, it seems, has never known before. It is as if technics, the more the perspective of a substantial end (“total man,” “second nature,” etc.) fades, cannot manifest anything but the power of destroying everything that had passed for being given, reserved, valid on its own, whether it was called “nature” or “overnature.” The overthrow of regimes of reference (principles, ends, essences, completenesses) comes not only with an exponential increase of capacities for transforming, converting, diffracting, and dislocating forces but above all with an ultimately unlimited disaggregation and/or liberation of the possibility of aiming for whatever end, of turning any means into an end, of setting up any and all “art” or “know-how” (tekhnē) as autonomous “values.”

From Aristotle to Hörl

17

This is what drives the ultraliberal economy as much as the military or biological technologies best suited for ensuring all the power calculations one could ask for. In a sense, the world of technics serves itself as nature, as natural and supernatural order… The only possibility of escape lies in a thinking—a culture, a civilization, a sociality—that trusts itself to a sense delivered from reasons and ends, that exits nihilism through its most intimate recesses, and travels or retraces in entirely new ways the old “channels” for communicating an allegedly “sacred” sense.

Notes 1.

2. 3. 4.

5. 6.

Rather than try and introduce a book that, like all good books, is quite capable of introducing itself and of developing of its own accord, I have chosen here to trace a path toward it, up to its threshold, the way I feel myself guided toward it. Aristotle, Politics, 1253a10: 1988. Aristotle, Politics, 1256b9: 1994 [modified]. This phrase comes in to support the claim that there can be no unlimited wealth. (I have chosen to translate megisthē as “capacity.”) This semantic replacement is remarkable: we have moved from “technology” in the sense of “study or knowledge of a technique or of the technic” to “technology” in the sense of “the technic or technical,” period, as if there was no difference between the practitioner’s study, practical appropriation, and mastery, and the technical operation. Moreover, it seems as if Jacob Bigelow, who initiated the generalized use of the term, had in mind a convergence of technique(s) and the sciences. Cf. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1103a25–1103b2: 1743. Pessoa, “A espantosa realidade das coisas.”



Preface to the German Edition

This is a book about the pathos of an age, about its epistemic and technological conditions and the imaginary that emerged in their shadow. As I was writing of this book, it increasingly became clear to me that history had shifted a little further, as if it had gotten over what I narrate in these pages. In the last years of the twentieth century, the pathos of the symbolist revolution against the dominance of intuitive thinking and the deep confusion into which, since about the middle of the nineteenth century, intuitive minds had been thrown by knowledge of the symbolic and the completely unintuitive facts of communication seemed to have come to a close. If we still believed that the owl of Minerva waits until dusk to spread her wings, of course, all the conditions for writing a history of the fascination symbolism has exercised would be met. In such moments, and if only for such a moment, everyone is still in good conscience a Hegelian. Symptomatic of our new situation, in any event, is the fact that under the heading “iconic turn” (Mitchell, Boehm), the partisans of intuition, which in the symbolic age was a great but more or less subterraneous current of thought, are the object of renewed attention. Now that images have become symbolic (since they can be generated digitally) and overwhelm us, the question of the originary constitution of iconicity has rightly become a central element of the effort to diagnose how our present conceives of itself. And if we do not want to succumb to the mobilization of the imaginary now employing symbolic means, there may be good reasons to oppose the symbolic imperative, to reexamine the pros and cons of intuition, and to develop intuitive skills anew. At one time, the task was to demolish the sovereignty of intuition over symbolic thought and revise epistemological and ontological foundations under the auspices of the symbolic; now, evidently, the tables have been turned. The very hegemony of digitalness gives rise to resistance because it has begun to subject intuition completely and totalize itself. But why should we, now, especially if we are interested in diagnosing the present situation, why should we be looking at the symbolist pathos and its beauty, at the crisis of intuition since 1850 and its effects on the imaginary rather than work at comprehending the current crisis of intuition? In fact, against all appearances, we still find ourselves in the same basic position (in the sense of Heidegger’s Grundstellung), which is characterized by the difference between the intuitive and the symbolic. What has changed is only the situation within this position. The balance of power has shifted, the frontlines have moved. That does not absolve us from studying that

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epistemic transition period, for we are still its children. An archeology of the present has to begin with spelling out that transition. Such an examination may protect us from a naive antisymbolist affect of the kind we are well familiar with from the confrontations of the day, and it may recall the epistemological and ontological stakes of the question in their entirety, which form the basis of our contemporary self-conception and yet run the danger of being lost from view. In addition to what has already been put to paper, this book seeks to contribute to this effort. It is a report on the archaic illusion of communication, a report embedded in a description of this illusion’s general historical-epistemological constellation. The present volume is a revised version of my dissertation, which I defended in the Department of Cultural Studies at the Humboldt University of Berlin in 2003. I would like to thank Thomas Macho, who supervised this work and was often confronted with the difficult task of finding out where exactly I was at a given moment—among philosophers, anthropologists, physicists, mathematicians, logicians, sociologists, or perhaps art historians, all of them protagonists of a story that is the history of the discovery of the historicity of thinking itself. Even when things got messy in my historical-epistemological digging, I never ran out of credit with him. Thanks go to Friedrich Kittler, who served as second advisor for a project that sought not to think strictly in McLuhan’s terms, to abstract from all his anthropologisms, and on the contrary immersed itself in the formative period of the archaic illusions produced by an age of cultural and media-technological upheaval still echoing in McLuhan. Kittler in a sense allowed me to wake the sleeping dogs of media history. I could not have written this book had not Daniel Tyradellis crossed my path as an interlocutor and as a friend. At the time, he was writing a study on Husserl and mathematics, and it was with him that I could think together, lay out mathematical as well as philosophical details, and thereby prepare the concentrated version I wrote down. Stefanie Peter greatly supported me, and in difficult moments of doubt she managed to get me back to work. With anthropological expertise, she kept an eye on my poaching in an intellectual reserve I was initially unfamiliar with. In conversations and written exchanges, Jean-Luc Nancy, my friend from the philosophical archipelago, encouraged me to thematize what had been left unthought, what might be unthinkable about an age and thus to discuss the matter of thinking as such. I thank Michael Hagner, Michael Hampe, Bernhard Siegert, Peter Berz, and André Gorz for reading the manuscript and for their many valuable suggestions. Burkhardt Wolf, Daniel Tyradellis, and Stefanie Peter swiftly proofread the original version. Claudia Lieb then

Preface to the German Edition

21

very patiently went over the entire text again and rekindled my faith in this book, which, once it had been written, quickly receded into the distance. I thank her for it. From 1998 to 2001, my work benefited from the support of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, via the DFG Research Training Group “Codifications of Violence in Medial Transformation” at the Humboldt University of Berlin. Zurich, August 2004



Preface to the English Translation

Since the writing of this book in the summer and fall of 2002, the historical movement it undertakes to unearth with a view to the history of media, culture, and knowledge—the transition from intuitive to symbolic thinking that had been taking place since the various waves of formalization in the nineteenth century and culminated in the information theory and cybernetics of the 1950s and 1960s—has continued to advance. The technical-medial condition of the present, which only barely announced itself ten years ago but whose having-become cannot be grasped without this sea change, has been clarified dramatically by the becoming-environmental of computation. Thus, even though no more than thirteen years have passed since it was first published in German, this book enters into a transformed situation, which calls for a certain recontextualization, given that, despite all its immersion in history, it is also always and perhaps above all concerned with understanding our own genealogy. Only now has it become fully clear—and this, precisely, is what I have since sought to establish in the diagnostic work on the technological condition, the genesis of a new techno-ecological culture of sense, and the definition of the new power formation that is environmentality 1—not only that information theory and cybernetics represented the high point and the end of the symbolist revolution, in which a certain epochal pathos of the purely symbolic came into its own and forced a redefinition of the matter of thinking, but also that a process of cyberneticization begun in the early nineteenth century took shape in a concrete theory and agenda for the first time here. The implementation dynamic of this process was yet to go far beyond its original institutional conception and reaches all the way to us, indeed reaches its high point only today: as the total cyberneticization of all modes of existence. The cybernetic problem has now proven to be the problem of our age. This brings out the historical power/knowledge dimension of the great transformation of cyberneticization that not only implements the transition from the intuitive to the symbolic but finally forces the switch to a different situation in the history of sense, a situation this difference, which will have been central to its appearance, can nonetheless no longer suffice to describe. What is characteristic of this new situation in the history of sense is not the end of all sense, an end pursued by the pure, mathematical-logisticaltechnical use of symbols that precisely pays no heed to sense and meaning. What shows itself instead is the rise of a new formation, the techno-ecological formation, that takes place in the shadow of this alleged end of sense. It

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ushers in a different sense of sense, no longer vouched for alphabetistically by a transcendental reading writing subject, that we can now describe with more precision. Even if reveries about the end of all sense have produced an entire formation of theory in media and cultural studies, it has now become questionable to what extent the concepts and conceptual strategies of this formation can still be used to work through the techno-ecological formation and to what extent this latter task requires entirely different ontological-political sets of tools that stem from a new, neither intuitive nor symbolic but, precisely, ecological-environmental image of thinking. This is what many people are working on in the most varied of ways and where one of the great challenges of thinking in our time is to be situated. Undoubtedly, there is throughout this book—and this, too, Anglophone readers should be aware of—a certain demythologizing optimism that propels its labor on the history of fascination of the symbolic. The book describes the extent to which the scientific-technical transition from an alphabetically mobilized to a postalphabetic culture unfolding since the nineteenth century also took place in the imaginary and how, in the process, it liberated wild speculations about prealphabetic states of cognition and being, how an entire discourse about the Sacred and the Primitive, a discourse very close to electromagnetic field theories and fascinated with preindividual relations of force and processes of transmission in which the episteme was steeped, testified above all to the way a culture fundamentally disoriented by its entry into postalphabetic conditions of communication struggled for a reconception, and, in so doing, offensively operated a shortcircuiting of the pre- with the postalphabetic. All of this unfolded up until the genesis of the new discourse network of cybernetics and information theory, characterized by a purely mathematical knowledge about information and communication, will, as a result of the symbolic purification of thinking this genesis entailed, have put an end to this hocus-pocus, clarified the foundations, drained the postalphabetic imaginary, and rung in the end of the archaic illusion of communication. Yet it is just this peculiar demythologizing optimism that have I since come see as historical, too, as a part of the symbolist fascination that, behind my back, inscribed itself in the book. Whereas Friedrich A. Kittler—in the foundational operation of German media theory, as it were—sought to trace the entire pathos of the symbolic to its machinic foundations and, in shortcircuiting the symbolic with the real, to cast out the last remnant of the imaginary and thus also all remainders of intuitive representational thinking (before later, he, too, in a strange echo of Heidegger’s archaic illusion, went to seek the rise of the symbolic in pre-Socratic Greece),2 the present book perhaps attempts

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nothing so much as to capture the historicity of this powerfully consequential foundational operation, to show that it is not merely idiosyncratic but practically concentrates an entire epistemic constitution. At the same time, this foundational operation intersects with a different history of fascination that I was not yet considering at the time, a history that renders this operation highly problematic, at least on the level of the politics of theory: the fascination exercised by nonmodernity.3 This fascination features eminently geopolitical characteristics. It belongs, to put it in more polemic terms, to an offensive anti- and countermodernism seeking to enter into a nihilistic alliance with technics, which in getting rid of intuition and of what Heidegger called representational thinking sought to get rid of modernity as such. 4 Even in an anthropocene age that undoubtedly demands that we give up modernity’s basic ontoepistemic attitudes, we should nonetheless be wary of adopting the philosophical politics of anti- and countermodernism. For a more precise understanding of the fascination with nonmodernity, which includes much more than reactionary anti- and countermodernisms in the West, one would also have to look at contemporary ethnological and social-anthropological discourses after Lévi-Strauss. The present study, however, ends with Lévi-Strauss’s dismissal of the archaic illusion in the light of cybernetics and information theory. Such newer discourses— paradigmatically proffered by authors such as Marilyn Strathern, Philippe Descola, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Tim Ingold, and, in a wider sense, Bruno Latour, and aptly summarized in anthropology by the keyword “ontological turn”5—would deserve an additional chapter. It would describe the formation of a nonmodern decolonial counterthinking beyond the archaic illusion. At the same time, it would emphasize the peculiar resonance of such a thinking with problematic situations of the techno-ecological culture of sense under the conditions of the anthropocene that modernism can no longer come to grips with: from the emergence of nonhuman agencies, the explosion of environmental agencies and the most radical ever exposition of environmentality it operates, via radical relationality and the redefinition of subjectivity, to the end of naturalist cosmology. This is where we encounter one of the significant scenes of writing today, a scene that gives the discourse-archeological constellation described in these pages a new turn. One voice is completely absent from this study: the voice of Gilbert Simondon. The book was written before I had read a number of his texts. Already back then, I should have been impressed by the untimeliness and originality of his contribution, which, at crosscurrents with the symbolist–intuitionist difference between structuralism and phenomenology, searched first for

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a universal symbolism and then strove for a fundamental rethinking of the symbolic function beyond the difference between intuition and the symbolic. Simondon suggested a wholly autonomous philosophical path toward a speculative metaphysics of becoming-environmental. On the basis of the relationships between organism and milieu, he reflected on a general-ecological reconceptualization of the symbolic and a techno-ecology of sense, which makes him our contemporary.6 Simondon also managed to avoid the pitfalls of anti- and countermodernism and demonstrated that it is possible to articulate a radically nonmodern(ist) agenda without simply dismissing the Enlightenment. Quite to the contrary, he recognized the historical dynamic, not to say the dialectic of the problem of the Enlightenment and its intrinsic link to the question of technology, which led him to a surprisingly contemporary renewal of the Enlightenment project in the first place. In principle, “every manifestation” of what he called “the encyclopedic spirit” appeared “as a fundamental movement expressing the need for attaining a state of freedom and adulthood, since the current regime or customs of thought retain individuals within a state of tutelage and artificial minority.”7 Now, following the two manifestations of the encyclopedic mind that were the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, a “third stage of encyclopedic thinking” was imminent: universal cybernetics.8 Its agenda presents itself as a liberation by means of a radical disclosure of mediation. Since the argument is as precise as it is unusual, it is well worth quoting at length. The “new magic”—and here there remained, even in Simondon, something of the archaic illusion—was to discover the rationalization of forces that situate man by giving him meaning within a human and natural ensemble. The very fact that teleology is treated as a knowable mechanism that is not definitively mysterious is indicative of the attempt not to accept a situation as one simply lives it and is subjected to it. Rather than seeking the procedure for the fabrication of objects without making a pact with matter, man frees himself from his situation of being enslaved by the finality of the whole, by learning how to create finality, by learning how to organize a finalized whole that he judges and appreciates, so as not to have to be passively subjected to a de facto integration. Cybernetics, being a theory of information and as a consequence also a theory of finalized structures and dynamisms, frees man from the constraining closure of organization by enabling him to judge this organization, rather than being subjected to it while venerating and respecting it because he is not capable of thinking or constituting it.9

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This conveys once more just how immense the hope inspired by cybernetics was, which has since been dashed by the total cyberneticization and the political-economic occupation of organizing it operates, in the course of which the Enlightenment has turned into its opposite. This English edition features an appendix not included in the original edition that addresses another far-reaching philosophical positioning of cybernetics: “Heidegger and Cybernetics.”10 This text, which I wrote immediately after concluding the book manuscript, situates Heidegger’s central project of redefining the matter and task of thinking in the historicalepistemic-technical process of cyberneticization, thanks to which it is largely decipherable and without which it is simply unthinkable. The book merely hinted at this aspect. Because this aspect is essential for understanding the constellation as a whole, however, including the essay in this volume seemed advisable. At the time I wrote it, however, some sources central for this kind of situating Heidegger’s thinking had not yet been published, the so-called Black Notebooks in particular. For that reason, it largely neglects the political question.11 That would no longer be possible today: Heidegger’s rejection of “calculative thought” and his entire mobilization against modern representational and production thinking, which he saw perfected and completed in “fabrication [Machenschaft]” and later in the Gestell of technics, and, even more generally, his great construction of the history of Being, which culminated in this constellation and in talk of another beginning promoted by cybernetics, simply cannot be had without the essential anti-Semitic inscriptions revealed in the Black Notebooks. Heidegger’s correctly so-called “metaphysical anti-Semitism”12 goes back a long way and is originally linked with the emergence of the question of technology in Heidegger and in the fundamental role it plays in his work. The Jewish people is turned into an agent of absolute “bottomlessness” and of the “rootlessness” of Being, and Heidegger’s notes leave no doubt that this rootlessness is above all the rootlessness of technics.13 This essential anti-Semitic contamination of the narrative of the history of Being and the key position the question concerning technology plays in this history does not, in principle, shift their historical-epistemic place such as I situate it in “Heidegger and Cybernetics.” But it is of decisive importance for assessing the philosophical politics Heidegger was pursuing with the question of technics. The question of technics absolutely compressed and concentrated this politics, which also entered into the way he positioned cybernetics in the history of Being and was ultimately to be picked up directly by a significant current of later German media studies (Friedrich Kittler’s project, that is).14 I will have to take up this difficult set of questions elsewhere. The as yet

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unpublished Black Notebooks of the late 1950s and the 1960s will provide further material on the problematic field of Heidegger and cybernetics.15 It is an honor and a joy that this book has the privilege of an English translation by Nils F. Schott and a far-reaching preface by Jean-Luc Nancy. I sincerely thank both of them. I am also grateful to the series editors, Jussi Parikka, Anna Tuschling, and Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, for taking the initiative in making Sacred Channels accessible to Anglophone readers, and to the staff of Amsterdam University Press for their careful implementation of this enterprise. I would like to thank the Alfried Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach-Stiftung and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) for funding this translation. I have refrained from including research published since the original edition first appeared and from systematically updating the bibliography. Not only would this work have immense, it would also have modified the shape of the book, which is something I—still persuaded of its original élan—wanted to avoid at all cost. Minor errors in the bibliographic references brought to light in the translation process have been silently corrected. Berlin, September 2017

Notes 1. 2.

3.

See especially, “Die technologische Bedingung” (a shortened English version has been published under the title “The Technological Condition”); “Introduction to General Ecology”; and “A Thousand Ecologies.” Kittler provides a paradigmatic presentation of this foundational operation in “The World of the Symbolic—A World of the Machine.” On Greece as “origin of the history of being,” see, for example, the last set of essays (chapters 18–23) in The Truth of the Technological World, 249–306, as well as Musik und Mathematik, vol. 1, pt. 1. The history of fascination is interested in epochal tensions, in that which keeps the thinking of an age running and alert, in the epochal repetition compulsions, and also in the reveries that propel its core projects. The fascination with nonmodernity is co-constitutive of our age. The term “history of fascination” was first coined by the scholar of religion, Klaus Heinrich. “Fascinating is what simultaneously attracts us and repels us, what has not been dealt with. Where there is something repressed that yet seeks to be dealt with. Where we perceive things of which we say, scared, that we will never be able to enter into a relationship free of ambivalence with them, this ambivalence will always remain. That is the history of fascination”

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4. 5. 6.

7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

12. 13. 14. 15.

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(Heinrich, “Über unseren Ausstieg aus den Höhlen,” 76–77). And what could be more ambivalent than modernity, than the attempt to delineate oneself from it as well? Heinrich uses the term with an Enlightener’s intention to designate the history of the species. I give the concept a turn to employ it in the history of discourse, media, and culture. In Zerrissene Moderne, Sidonie Kellerer has shown the extent to which the invention of Descartes as key protagonist of modernity inaugurated the history of fascination with nonmodernity. Compare Kohn, “Anthropology of Ontologies.” On the “new universal symbolism” “common to the machine and to man” that thereby makes their synergy possible, see Simondon, Technical Objects, 117. Later, in the lecture course Imagination et Invention, Simondon develops a general-ecological theory of the symbolic that goes back to the emergence of the symbolic function from the relationship between organisms and from their mixed milieus made up of nature, other organisms, and symbols that derive from the subsequent sedimentations of these relationships. In so doing, he also inaugurates a new concept of sense. Andrea Bardin has studied Simondon’s rethinking of the symbolic and of sense under the heading “techno-symbolic function” (Bardin, Epistemology and Political Phi­ losophy in Gilbert Simondon, 145–63). He writes: “‘Sense’ is neither produced by organisms nor by homo sapiens but emerges from the relations of communication through which groups of organisms and the organism itself, at different levels and through different milieus, are structured” (146). For some first reflections on Simondon’s ecology, see my essay, “‘Technisches Leben’: Simondons Denken des Lebendigen und die allgemeine Ökologie.” Simondon, Technical Objects, 112. Simondon, Technical Objects, 115. Simondon, Technical Objects, 119. The text was first published in 2004 as “Parmenideische Variationen: Heidegger und die Kybernetik.” The Black Notebooks published so far in volumes 94–97 of the Heidegger Ge­ samtausgabe comprise the years 1931–48. Of these, the notebooks from the years 1931–41 are available in English translation under the title Ponderings. Other relevant sources published later also include Heidegger’s Leitgedan­ ken zur Entstehung der Metaphysik, der neuzeitlichen Wissenschaft und der modernen Technik. See Di Cesare, Heidegger, die Juden, die Shoah, a milestone in this debate. On the question of “groundlessness” and “rootlessness,” see Nancy, The Banality of Heidegger. See, for example, Kittler, “Medien- und Technikgeschichte.” As the editor of the Black Notebooks, Peter Trawny, has told me in personal conversation.

All we have left is symbolic construction; and that is quite sufficient. —Hermann Weyl 1

Introduction “Humans,” Niklas Luhmann writes, “cannot communicate; not even their brains can communicate; not even conscious minds can communicate. Only communication can communicate.”2 This book is about the fact that Luhmann had to make this statement, and about why he had to make it, even nearly half a century after the formulation of an exact, that is, a technological-mathematical, concept of communication. Our question concerns the incubation period of an epochal proposition: There is communication. The history of how it appeared indicates how difficult it was for an entire age to understand its foundations and thus to interpret itself epistemologically and ontologically. The task, to put it in the terms of Heidegger’s archeology, is to answer the question: “Where and how did” this proposition “sleep for so long and presciently dream what is unthought in it?”3 To accomplish this task, we must elaborate the historical epistemology of the archaic illusion of communication that began to spread in the late nineteenth century and immediately preceded the emergence of the principle, There is communication. At its core, what today may seem mere reveries about a primitive world of transmitting sacred forces was a wild genealogy of the as yet uncomprehended facts of communication and of the revolution in the way of thinking that coincided with it. Despite all the obstacles to knowledge this illusion threw up, it did at the same time prepare the insight into the new basic position of an age. By projecting a primitive formation of world and experience, which could only be comprehended as deviating from the traditional categories and schemata of representational thought, the illusion marked the rejection of the cognitive primacy of intuition and representation, a rejection that was just then taking place in mathematics and physical field theory and thanks to technological media. Where a purely symbolic thinking clearly began to take shape in the sciences, the illusion demonstrated the arduous formation and childhood of all use of symbols. In explaining the becoming of elaborate symbolisms, insight into “the embryonic stage of the high-grade character”4 also promised to explain the enigmatic epistemic power with which symbolisms were upending the order of things. Speculations about the prealphabetic thinking of the

Hörl, E., Sacred Channels: The Archaic Illusion of Communication, Amsterdam University Press, 2018 doi 10.5117/9789089647702_intro

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“primitive,” about their peculiar logical distinctions and mental constitution provided an age transitioning to postalphabetic conditions with images of thought for its still-problematic foundations. Finally, the mode of being of the “primitive” sketched in the archaic illusion bore witness to what Being could mean under the conditions of communication. Total communities of communication appeared on the margins of history or as initial survivals in the midst of modernity, at the point where the new facts of communication themselves were still foci of an electromagnetic-energetic imaginary and starting points for the pictorial world of a savage realism of transmission. All of the ontological helplessness and worries of an age faced with the fact that it did communicate rather than not communicate concentrated on the site of a primitive, completely noisified Being exposed to hopelessly open channels. “Primitiveness” was the name of the other scene of an age, a scene onto which were shifted the ontological enigmas the pure There is communication posed for contemporaries. It was there that the channels were hallowed as long as they remained the unthought and the unthinkable of an alphabetic culture and society horrified by it. It is not by chance that the first thinker to pronounce the proposition was still enveloped in the slumber of the history of fascination with communication when he meditated across the boundaries of the Cartesian order of thought and knowledge: Georges Bataille. What for its part named both the upheaval of the conditions of possible experience as such and the ontological ground of this upheaval, he at first saw as the cipher of an inner experience. Yet many dreams—dreamed by anthropologists and social anthropologists, sociologists, historians of religion, and psychoanalysts, poets and philosophers—anticipated the proposition. For some, no doubt, it was a nightmare. It took the wakeup call of information theory and cybernetics, it seems, to bring an entire age back from the land of dreams into a waking state. When logarithms demystified the enigma of communication, the sources of the imaginary of the age began to dry up. The alliance of cybernetics and anthropology made primitive communications and sacred channels of transmission disappear. Since then, the human being has been understood as the effect of different modalities of a great communicative function even in domains where the archaic illusion had previously been constructed. All of a sudden, the sacred channels were a thing of the past and merely an expression of the mythology of an epoch. This event, too, has a name: Claude Lévi-Strauss. The father of sociological systems theory, to return to Luhmann, could not but designate the heart of his discourse with a variant of the principle that guided the age. The compulsive repetition of the proposition derived from

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the historical-epistemological foundation on which systems theory rests. The proposition needed continually to be rearticulated because it was not possible simply to ignore the fantasms concerning communication that had sedimented in the matter of communication during the time it had taken to grasp the proposition. Luhmann’s observation accords with the history of his discipline. It is a late echo of the years in which the discipline began to differentiate, an echo of Durkheim, the great “catalyst,” as Luhmann once called him. Sociology, concerned with positioning itself in the space of knowledge, and Durkheim especially were among the protagonists of the archaic illusion. Precisely because knowledge of the social was immersed in the age’s reveries about primitive communities of communication and sacred hells of telecommunication, its cyberneticization by systems theory also led sociology to a necessary act of conceptual auto-purification and auto-analysis. To shed light on the question how an age, going through a history of fascination, came to think of its guiding principle, we will have to explore discursive fields that may appear far off and at great distances the ones from the others and to make connections that will seem surprising only as long as they have not been thought. One might, for example, wonder what, for heaven’s sake, the work of the Irish mathematician, George Boole, who set out to develop an algebra of logic as a system of notation of the basic operations of the mind and thus played a major part in opening the path to the world of the symbolic, has to do with the genealogy of the Aristotelian categories developed by Émile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss, which penetrated the totemistic underground of thought and the rationality of “primitive” systems of classifications. Or what in the world might connect Michael Faraday’s experiments and James Clerk Maxwell’s electromagnetic field theory with Lucien Lévy-Bruhl’s explorations of primitive mentality or with the debate about the function of mana in elementary forms of religious life. The task here is to inspect the manifold epistemic facts and reveries of an age in order to gain insight into the shared knowledge at their basis. The thought constraints, to use Ludwik Fleck’s term, that impose their standards on entire epochs dominate them the way moods do. They draw on by the most varied sources and do not keep to the great watersheds that structure mental geographies and the order of knowledge. And once the clouds of the epochal imaginary are filled to bursting, once the atmosphere of the age’s specific imagination is tense, the great thundershower rains down indiscriminately on all epistemic regions. The concept “reverie” drives this endeavor to outline the incubation period of an epochal principle and to allow insight into the formation that arose from the erstwhile unthinkability of this principle. The concept originates

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with Gaston Bachelard. It is probably no coincidence that it was thought up at the end of and with regard to the period at issue here. Bachelard coined it to account for the fundamental fact that the birth of the new scientific spirit was accompanied by a strange insistence of prescientific experience. “Reverie” captured the fact that evidently there were problems “that no one has managed to approach objectively,” problems “in which the initial charm of the object is so strong that it still has the power to warp the minds of the clearest thinkers and to keep bringing them back to the poetic fold in which dreams replace thought and poems conceal theorems.”5 In the domain of objective knowledge, there were cognitive obstacles to be overcome by a “psychoanalysis of reason;”6 Bachelard believed this ought to be supplemented by a “special psychoanalysis that we believe would form a useful basis for all objective studies.”7 The task of such a special psychoanalysis would be to comb through the archives of reveries, as “reverie takes up the same primitive themes as it would in primitive minds, and this in spite of the successes of systematic thought and even in face of the findings of scientific experiments.”8 Bachelard himself came across sets of problems that over the course of time had served as vessels for dreams and time and again brought humanity back from hard thinking to poetry: the complex of fire, for example, or that of water, the complex of air, of the earth, or of salt, that of wine, of blood, of space. Despite ever-present historical refractions, reveries in Bachelard’s sense always reveal archetypal traits. Yet even this traditional concept of reverie belongs to the history of the fascination with the “primitive” to be investigated here. Although “for a psychoanalysis of objective knowledge there are other instances of primitiveness which seem to us to be ultimately more pertinent” than those the inquiry into “prehistoric man” via “still existing primitive people” brought to light, Bachelard, constrained by the thought of his time, insisted on a “psychology of primitiveness” that was to guide the endeavor of opening up the realm of reveries: Indeed, we need only consider a new phenomenon to verify the difficulty of adopting a truly adequate objective attitude. It seems that the unknown aspect of the phenomenon is actively and positively opposed to its objectivation. To the unknown aspect it is not so much ignorance which corresponds as error, and error that is most heavily overladen with subjective defects. In order to construct a psychology of primitiveness it is sufficient, then, to consider an essentially new piece of scientific knowledge and to follow the reactions of non-scientific, ill-educated minds that are ignorant of the methods of effective scientific discovery.9

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The impulse for this new psychoanalysis of knowledge came from the “discovery of the primitive mind” fully underway at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. Its object, however, was a primitiveness that was both more general and more specific, a primitiveness that an age, faced with its central unknown, grasped in waves from out of its innermost core. In the encounter with the unknown, objective experience abruptly turned into inner experience, and even knowledge acquired an “affective nature.”10 Whoever knew how to decipher this affectiveness at the heart of objectivity knew something about the imaginary ground of an epochality. For Bachelard, the “indispensable mine”11 for research on imaginary inscriptions of knowledge, in which what was specifically uneducated and primitive about an age was washed to the surface, was the epistemic history of electricity. Even if the concept of reverie, down to its very foundations, is marked by the epistemic situation I seek to explain here, I consider it to be an appropriate means for reading this situation. Provided we set aside everything that is archetypal about it, everything that is complicitous with the archaic illusion, which in Bachelard still instituted, more or less latently, the continuity of a poetics of knowledge, the concept allows us to describe how a knowledge just emerging, forming itself, generates images of itself that are partly an expression of the diff icult separation from what came before, partly a signature of the uncertainty its arrival necessarily entails. It is precisely a not understanding that governs such phases. There is no need to assume a history of the human species and its dreams to understand the genesis of reveries. Dream images are condensations of the ontological worries and epistemological needs of an age that has not yet come to grips with itself. As dreams of fear or dreams of desire, they keep epistemic threshold epochs in check. They presciently dream what it will one day, when a comprehensive overview returns, be possible to say clearly. To be sure, reveries might insist infinitely. An age never conceives of itself in its totality, and crystal clarity is an illusion. But there are approximations that take the pressure off an age to produce dreams; for only a moment, of course, until the next set, but a different set, of reveries comes in. The concept of reverie allows us to conceive of the formation of knowledge as a process that also always passes through the imaginary of an age. To say it again, this book is about the ascent of the proposition, There is communication—about the ways in which it was dreamed and anticipated until there was no more need for dreaming to process its arrival, until reveries had done their duty. The dream sequences faded when the proposition could be said and its enunciation could become a truism, a mere imitation of what was already clear.

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An exposition of the great reverie about the sacred and the primitive that began to preoccupy contemporaries in the second half of the nineteenth century demands, first of all, a description of the more general epistemic constellation in which this dreaming began. In the first third of this book, this constellation is conceived of in terms of a transition from intuitive to symbolic thinking, in which thinking itself entered a crisis, a transition in which an age lost its epistemological and ontological certainties. Two sites on which the dramatic nature of the crisis that forced contemporaries back into historicality in order to shed light on their own situation is apparent are to be explored here: pure mathematics and symbolic logic on the one hand and physical field theory on the other. What took place in these two domains was the elaboration of pure symbolisms whose task was, on the one hand, to address the basic modes of operation of the mind and, on the other, to provide systems of notation for the essential unrepresentabilities of electromagnetic communications. They were the key sites of a revision of foundations. Where science had once worked, as Nietzsche writes, “inexorably on the great columbarium of concepts” by burying intuition, it was now no longer concepts but symbolisms that constructed the “burial place of intuition.”12 The rise of the axiomatic age needs to be described—and this is the main objective of the present text—in order to then understand how, given the devaluation of traditional systems of categories thus promoted, reveries of primitive and sacred thinking grounds set in. The birth of the human being as animal symbolicum had to be witnessed in order to experience the shock of one’s own birthing from an appropriate historical distance. And when representational thinking was smashed to pieces in confronting the fundamentally nonintuitive facts of communication, when the lack of clarity of the phenomenal world generated by these facts could no longer be explained by representational images and intuition got lost in what cannot be intuited, one experienced the “torment of perception [Anschauungsqual]” felt by “primitive man.” This torment, Wilhelm Worringer writes, once had had to be “overcome … in order to gain fixed conceptual images instead of accidental perceptual ones” and thereby to obtain the “enjoyment of perception [Genuss der Anschauung].”13 It is this enjoyment, precisely, that Worringer’s contemporaries had just lost again. In the course of the communication age’s first wave of demythologization, which unfolded under the auspices of an exact knowledge of information, Lévi-Strauss lucidly diagnosed the existence of an “archaic illusion” that even in his day continued to associate the modes of thinking of children, the “primitive,” and psychopaths. When I speak of the archaic illusion of

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communication, I thus also aim to trace Lévi-Strauss’s diagnosis and even the emergence of structural anthropology back to its wider basis in the history of media and epistemology. Structural anthropology is thus to be considered the extreme stage of a history of fascination with primitiveness. It emerged where perhaps only one other reverie began, that of cybernetics, which displaced the reverie of the sacred and the primitive. This books seeks to acknowledge something that, at least as a premonition, already permeates Marshall McLuhan’s work. Because he himself was still writing under the lasting impression of the archaic illusion of communication, McLuhan was unable to recognize this illusion as such and to turn it into his main site of analysis. But in giving the greatest expression to it, he led it all the way up to the moment when it could be recognized. In the same year that Lévi-Strauss declared the savage thinker to be the information theorist of the first hour, celebrated his perfected symbolism, and thereby put an end to the contemporary myth of message mysticism and the mode of thought of the “primitive,” The Gutenberg Galaxy contained propositions that laid bare the origin and the condition of possibility of structural anthropology’s demythologization discourse: “Modern man, since the electromagnetic discoveries of more than a century ago, is investing himself with all the dimensions of archaic man plus. The art and scholarship of the past century and more have become a monotonous crescendo of archaic primitivism.”14 According to McLuhan, “we must learn today that our electric technology has consequences for our most ordinary perceptions and habits of action which are quickly recreating in us the mental processes of the most primitive men.”15 Thanks to the entry into the world of electricity, an entire epoch had been made “‘connatural,’ as it were, with non-literate cultures.”16 McLuhan’s sense for the archaic style of the age was acute enough to note that “it must often have puzzled the scholars and physicists of our time that just in the degree to which we penetrate the lowest layers of non-literate awareness we encounter the most advanced and sophisticated ideas of twentieth-century art and science.”17 His most important watchword, that of the “global village,” testifies to just how much he was obsessed with the idea of a return of tribal society. He abandoned himself to the reverie of a renewal of the “Africa within”18 to be brought about by the communication age and thought that the defining achievement of radio lay in “reviving the ancient experience of kinship webs of deep tribal involvement.”19 In these and similar lines, the primitive appears, for the first time and despite all archaistic fascination, as a conceptual persona and the offspring of a fundamental caesura in the history of media and thought. The exodus from the self-evident and thus unquestioned fundamental ground of cultural technique called alphabetic writing short-circuited an entire

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culture with its own becoming. The postalphabetic cultures that according to McLuhan induced the crisis of the epistemic-cultural hegemony of the alphabet and laid their hands on the alphabetic consciousness shared with prealphabetic layers an analphabetic rationality. At its end, the long duration of alphabetic mentality seemed to return to a time before its beginnings. McLuhan saw this peculiar repetition at work everywhere. It was the main generator of his media archeology with an anthropological intent. This turned something that had more or less unrestrictedly governed the process of working through the immense decay of certainty into a figure that instituted a new discourse, the discourse of media history. And what previously had generated savage speculations from out of the deep layers of discourse and shed light on the contemporary situation by imagining primitive states of being and the world now acquired a clear structure. In certain respects, then, the discourse of media history is itself the child of the archaic illusion of communication, a child, however, that was soon to begin disavowing its descent by exorcising the anthropologisms with which it had been endowed. The study of the illusion, in this regard, is also a contribution to the archeology of media history itself. The talk of magical channels we find in McLuhan’s emphasis on the magical aspect of media 20 originates directly in the archives of the great transformation this book delves into. It merely condensed what had been collected for about a century under the headings of the “sacred” and the “primitive” and had turned matters of religion into a matter of media processes. Everywhere in William Robertson Smith, who inaugurated the modern discourse of the sacred and, not by mere coincidence, also published, in 1870, a mathematical treatise On the Flow of Electricity in Conducting Surfaces, there is talk of transmission and communication of the sacred, notions that were elaborated in the course of several decades to follow.21 When, in 1913, Nathan Söderblom provided an overview of current scientific findings on the question of the sacred for Hastings’s Encyclopædia of Religion and Ethics, he chose “communication of holiness” as his leitmotif.22 And James George Frazer, to name another famous proponent, writes in his definition of “Contagious Magic”: “its physical basis, if we may speak of such a thing, like the physical basis of Homeopathic Magic, is a material medium of some sort which, like the ether of modern physics, is assumed to unite distant objects and to convey impressions from one to the other.”23 Around 1900, the core discourse about primitive worlds of transmission, which had been sparked by discussions of concepts like mana, brought about an immense spelling out of a wondrous world of the immaterial and the invisible beyond the reach of the senses, a world in which there was constant communication.24

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All that is left for us to do, after McLuhan, is to reexamine this caesura, which it seemed had unexpectedly transported an entire epoch back into primitiveness, both historically and epistemologically. In that endeavor we must separate out what in McLuhan is simply called electricity into two main currents of the history of knowledge: the formation of a purely symbolic thinking on the one hand and the discovery of the nonintuitive facts of communication on the other. Only then, only on the basis of this blueprint for the overthrow of the space of knowledge, is it possible to trace the genealogy of the two concepts that, to cite Foucault, were “hot” around 1900,25 the “sacred” and the “primitive,” and to explain what function they served in the entry into the age of the symbolic and of communication. Hence the structure of this book. Proceeding this way allows us to decipher discursive sediments deposited by an age in the process of sacralizing its channels and searching for a new conception of itself. There are rereadings of some better-known texts to show how much the spirit of the crisis coalesced in them. Other texts that have practically been forgotten or at most count as curious documents from a time strangely enthused by the primitive come to occupy a historically and epistemologically central position. The return of the concept of the sacred, which has been underway for some time now, is rendered strange by the realization of just how much this concept was the spawn of a lack of understanding of the new facts of communication. It originated in a fantasy of transmitting impersonal powers and forces, a fantasy that was able to shape discourse only as long as the question of communication could not be thought symbolically and without being led astray by intuition. The concept of the sacred, the ambivalence it contained, and the difference between the sacred and the profane were the effects of the imaginary of an epoch. Those who gasp for breath when they read diagnoses of contemporary culture whose fascination with the “sacred” and the “primitive” is unbroken are being strangled merely by the phantom hand of a long gone but by far not overcome positivism of a history of fascination. Today, now that the discourse of the sacred and with it that of the “primitive” has, thanks to cybernetics and information theory, long been dispensed with, these discourses’ afterlife comes into view only occasionally, on the epistemic margins. The knowledge that communication is a purely symbolic and systemic matter that has no need of human beings, or consciousnesses, or brains for it to function has made the archaic illusion of communication itself a matter of history. Modes of thinking and questions of transmission can no longer be mapped onto each other the way it used to be possible in the hermeneutics of primitiveness.

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Whether the incubation period of the proposition, There is communication, has come to an end or not I dare not say. I tend to doubt it. The proposition continues to give us plenty to think about. Its various versions continue to presciently dream much that is unthought. And we still have to speak up against the archaisms that emerged at the time of its arrival. These archaisms have become sedimented at the basis of discourse and constitute one of those basic strata of our own epoch that have not yet been cleared away and have not yet been understood.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

Weyl, “Wissenschaft als symbolische Konstruktion des Menschen,” 313. Luhmann, “How Can the Mind Participate in Communication?” 371. Heidegger, Principle of Reason, 4. Whitehead, Symbolism, 6. Bachelard, Psychoanalysis of Fire, 2. Bachelard, Formation of the Scientific Mind, 29. Bachelard, Psychoanalysis of Fire, 5. Bachelard, Psychoanalysis of Fire, 4. Bachelard, Psychoanalysis of Fire, 25. Bachelard, Psychoanalysis of Fire, 6. Bachelard, Psychoanalysis of Fire, 25. Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense,” 261. Worringer, Form Problems of the Gothic, 38–39. Another art historian who participated in the archaic illusion to an even greater extent than Worringer was Aby Warburg. It is particularly thanks to Ulrich Raulff’s Wilde Energien, esp. the discussion on pages 117–50 of Warburg’s thinking in terms of its adherence to the energetic imperative, that his historical theory of symbols might find a place in the history of fascination with primitive communication. 14. McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy, 78. 15. McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy, 35. 16. McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy, 52. 17. McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy, 30–31. 18. Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense,” 111. Cf. McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy, e.g., 52 and 36. 19. McLuhan, Understanding Media, 301. 20. I am referring to Die magischen Kanäle, the title of Meinrad Amann’s 1968 German translation of Understanding Media, to which the German title of the present book, Die heiligen Kanäle, alludes as well. Sacred Channels also constitutes a wide-ranging historical localization and critique of McLuhan’s enterprise.

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21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

Cf. Smith, Lectures on the Religion of the Semites, 152–56. Söderblom, “Holiness (General and Primitive).” Frazer, The Golden Bough, 37. Cf., for example, Marett, “The Conception of Mana.” Foucault, “Sexualité et vérité,” 137.

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Part I In the Shadow of Formalization A History of Thinking

1.

Blind Thinking around 1900 The Turn from the Intuitive to the Symbolic Abstract The chapter presents the main aspects of the great transformation from the intuitive to the symbolic, the key epistemic movement of the second half of the nineteenth century. Around 1900, the crisis of intuition—which resulted from the arithmetization of mathematics, the elaboration of non-Euclidian geometries, the field theoretical turn in physics, and the calculization of formal logic—weighed heavily on the entire space of knowledge. It came to a head in the philosophical confrontation about the matter of thinking, about whether thinking was grounded intuitively or symbolically. The new age of symbolic thinking that began there— whose agenda was nothing short of the purely formal description of what had previously been unthought and unthinkable about thinking itself, indeed about the reality of the mind—pushed the autonomization and ultimately the machinization of the symbolic. Leibniz—a very specific Leibniz, mobilized around 1900 particularly by the French philosopher and mathematician Louis Couturat as a pioneer of the blind use of symbols against Kant and the primacy of intuition—is being turned into the philosophical godfather of this movement. Keywords: intuitionism versus formalism; crisis of intuition; calculization of thinking; purely symbolic thinking; Louis Couturat

Thinking the unthinkable Talking about the contemporary relationship between logic and philosophy in a lecture at the Collège de France on December 8, 1905, philosopher and mathematician Louis Couturat did not mince his words. In giving his inaugural address, the thirty-seven-year-old representative of symbolic logic was acutely aware what an event it was to offer a course on the “History of Modern Formal Logic” in the heart of discursive power. The brilliant apology

Hörl, E., Sacred Channels: The Archaic Illusion of Communication, Amsterdam University Press, 2018 doi 10.5117/9789089647702_ch01

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of symbolic thinking to which the audience was listening parsed the deep structure of a space of knowledge in upheaval. Not since Barthélemy-Saint-Hilaire’s interpretations of Aristotle’s logic had the institution that ensured the order of discourse allowed anyone to speak on the subject. Kant’s dictum about the “secure course” of logic, which “since the time of Aristotle … has not had to go a single step backwards” but had “also been unable to take a single step forward,”1 had served to legitimize the refusal to accord a place to the new exact science of thinking modeled on mathematics, which had been on the rise since the second half of the nineteenth century. Where the boundaries of a science seemed to be clearly drawn because it was concerned with “formal rules of all thinking” given once and for all and already proven anyway, the threat of metaphysical deformation seemed by far to outweigh the usefulness of any revision. For the longest time, the formalists’ experiments in seeking out previously undiscovered laws of thought with the help of algebraization could therefore take place only on the sidelines, at the limits, and in the niches of official discourse. Around 1900, things had changed significantly. The rumblings concerning the question of thinking had become too loud to be ignored. Kant’s assessment that logic was complete (questionable already in his own day), and thus the rejection it justified of any kind of psychological, anthropological, and formal inquiry into logic, had become obsolete. Couturat demonstrated how much the debate about the history, nature, and formal structure of thinking determined the contemporary episteme, whose guiding epistemological difference was the difference between intuitionism and formalism. Couturat’s definition of a thinking without images, which proceeds below and prior to any language according to purely symbolic laws, as the object of a reformed and the only “true” logic served to assert the autonomy of logic on the terrain of the matter of thinking as such, a terrain hotly contested by psychologists, sociologists, philosophers, and logicians. The second half of the nineteenth century had generated a previously unknown positivization of thinking. On the one hand, within the framework of a “natural history,” thinking came to be seen as a simple “fact of consciousness,” that is, a matter of the physiology of perception, the mechanics of the senses, and neuromotoric schemata.2 Concepts, judgments, inferences were alleged to have experimentally observable, anatomical-physiological conditions, such as the nervous system and the perceptual apparatus, and to have their origin in experience and heredity. The search was on for physiological a prioris and insight into the natural foundations of transcendentality. On the other hand, thinking was considered a thoroughly historical fact, historical

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all the way to a historicity (be it economic, be it social) of a priori valid categories and forms of intuition. “Chimerical entities” like the collective mind or social consciousness had been introduced to account for the extent to which, “without our knowledge, ‘social constraint’ governs our mind as it does our actions; it imposes on us our ways of thinking as it imposes our ways of acting.”3 Sociolinguistic analysis had reduced language to a mere function of fundamental social relationships. And since language was to serve as the basis of relationships between ideas, ideas in turn appeared to be mere actualizations of extralogical relations that preceded them. But this, of course, did not say anything about the genesis of ideas as such. The discovery of a nature of thinking functioned, in the precise formula Foucault coined long after Couturat, as a quasi-transcendental aesthetics that studied the psychophysical conditions of knowledge. Labor on a history of thinking, on the contrary, operated on the model of a transcendental dialectics. It transposed the ground of humanity’s historical illusions of knowledge into the domain of the relationships between people that prescribed the forms of thinking in a given age. In this twofold way, the human being was posited as “a strange empirico-transcendental doublet” and, with the “precritical naiveté” that characterizes such an empirico-transcendental short-circuiting, placed at the heart of discourse: the human “is a being such that knowledge will be attained in him of what renders all knowledge possible.”4 The formalism that posited the matter of thinking as a purely symbolical fact ran at crosscurrents to such endeavors that conceived of the act of thinking from the perspective of its unthought aspects in psychophysical, social, and sociolinguistic terms and thereby brought all of the ideality of thought back home into the facticity of human being. In formalism, what was called thinking was a symbolic machine, and the task was to establish the precise rules of transformation of this machine. Beyond a primacy of inner and outer intuition, thinking seemed to be based first and foremost on formal procedures that could only be noted symbolically. The naturalization and historicization of knowledge thus achieved nothing more than regaling us with interpretations of symbolic ideality in the realm of facticity. From this formalist point of view, those who maintained the prejudice of the primacy of intuition for thinking and knowing and, in seeking to determine the matter of thinking, attempted to find the sources of our forms of intuition and categorial connection (be it in nature, be it in history) could not but miss them. All there was to be encountered in the realm of history and nature were forms of expression that served merely to bury formal facts underneath empiricities. Pronounced from the heights of symbolism, Couturat’s summary of those epistemic tendencies that

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transferred the essence of thinking onto extralogical grounds was aimed in particular against the psychologism prevalent in his time. Having read Husserl’s Logical Investigations very closely, he knew that psychologism both misunderstood the signif icance of truth values for an analytic of ideas and was blind to questions of validity. Psychologism desired to formulate laws of nature where it could only be a question of ideal norms, rules, and laws that needed to be heeded if the goal was to think truthfully and correctly. What psychologism lost in losing truth values—and this counted even more for a symbolic logician than it did for a phenomenologist oriented toward the philosophy of consciousness—was the essential difference between noetón and aisthetón, on which the Irish mathematician George Boole had insisted as early as 1856 and which provided the basis for the formalization of thinking: That which is known only by its laws and relations belongs to the understanding rather than to fancy or imagination; it is a noetón rather than an aisthetón. … In our concepts of things under the general notion of Class, two distinct elements are involved, viz.: 1st.—The representative by which these concepts image forth things. 2nd.—The noetic by which such imagery or representation is made in subjection to the general notion of Class; the laws of the intellectual operations with which Logic is concerned are independent of the former and are dependent solely upon the latter or noetic element.5

At the very latest since Boole’s agenda for what we might call operations research of the human mind (with which Couturat was well familiar), to think thinking had meant opening up, underneath images and with the analytical tool of a symbolic system of notation, the essential remainder of the noetic as a formal ground of all events of thinking (Denkgeschehen) and thus to state nothing less than the laws of thinking. Boole’s algebra of logic was a symbolic procedure for studying the logical relations in the realm of the necessary truths of the noetic. The facticity of thinking descended into the accidentality of true or false interpretations of the noetic and the formal rules in place there. For Boole, those who studied it simply contributed to the natural history of the factually elaborated forms of thinking but said nothing about the universal forms that pointed to the constitution of the human mind as such. In Boole’s eyes, even Aristotle’s logic and practically the entire history of logic were merely such a contribution to natural history. Logic seemed to him to devote itself more to the art of thinking and to

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mapping the factual, habitual paths and furrows beyond any limitation by formal laws than it did to the science of thinking, to the analysis of mind.6 Psychologism’s confusion of ideality and facticity, which Couturat had in mind in pursuing Boole’s agenda in the conflict about thinking, necessarily entailed a misunderstanding of everything formal. Not by chance did this misunderstanding manifest itself in psychologism betting on an ineluctable iconicity of thinking: Where the “necessary connection” of ideas was concerned, which for Couturat was to be formalized and certainly constituted no “object of intuition,” psychologism, undeterred, kept on investigating an entirely coincidental and accidental “association” of images. Because pure formal thinking, that is, a “thinking without images,” seemed to psychologists to be the unthinkable par excellence, the site of thinking in turn could only be a projection space, called consciousness, into which, as soon as thinking took place, images, and nothing but images, were cast. For a symbolic logician like Couturat, it was clear that “consciousness is … but a kind of screen onto which the operations of the intellect project capricious and fantastical shadows that hide them more than they reveal them. We have to step behind the screen to perceive the realities of which these phantoms are but the torn and distorted projections.” Behind the screen of consciousness, where the realities themselves, not yet pictorially distorted, were to be found, one could encounter the “operations of the intellect” that could only be shown formally since they forever “escape[d] consciousness.”7 Symbolisms that no longer represented anything but operated as pure systems of noting formal relations where there were no intuitions made it possible to posit the reality of the mind and thus thinking itself as nonconscious facts beyond the optical-medial paradigm of consciousness that had been in effect since Descartes, Leibniz, and Locke. The call to “step behind the screen” was a call to take leave of the deceptions of the great modern tradition of projection, which to bring the procedures of the mind to light studied the play of intuition in obscure chambers, as psychologism continued to do.8 The psychologists may have had an inkling of this, at least when beyond the traditional psychologistic prejudice, beyond facts of consciousness, they came up against the reality of the mind, the way Alfred Binet does in a 1903 essay on thinking without images. There, he points out that it was necessary to distinguish between pure thinking as idéation and as imagerie, the sensible and verbal representations of thinking. “[S]trictly speaking,” he writes, “the mind is not a ‘polyp of images,’ except perhaps in dreams or day-dreams. The laws of ideas are not necessarily the laws of images; to think does not consist solely of becoming conscious of images.” Thinking,

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instead, “is an unconscious act of the mind which, to become fully conscious, necessitates words and images.”9 But it was a typically psychologistic view to think that the reality of the mind—precisely because it essentially lay beyond or prior to all iconicity on the part of words and images, because it was the unrepresentable ground of iconicity, which could not be positively demonstrated—could only be a “stream of thought”10 or the pure stammering of an “inner language” (Binet’s langage intérieur).11 Someone who knew a little bit about the purely symbolic could instead stake everything on the possibility of formalizing precisely this unrepresentable and nonsubstantial, purely functional processuality and operationality called the mind. All it took was to distinguish between consciousness and the mind and to be aware that the life of the mind is to a great extent unconscious or subconscious, and that in any case the logical relations of ideas and the springs of our intellectual activity escape our inner intuition. It is not by psychological analysis that they can be attained but by logical analysis, which is entirely different.12

Logic and thus the matter of thinking could never be the subject of a “science of consciousness”; instead, they were part of a general “science of the mind.”13 Knowledge of the symbolic was the historical condition of possibility for no longer lowering the matter of thinking into the “depths of the human soul”14 or a “mine of intelligence”15 or whatever other names were given to the great inner workshops of the imagination. Thinking had now been released into the total exteriority of operations that could be addressed formally, into a domain, that is, in which their incessant processing no longer necessarily disappeared into an inner night. A precise indication of the place of symbolic thinking around 1900 is the remark by mathematician and engineer Claude E. Shannon in his 1938 elaboration of Boolean algebra that Couturat’s Algebra of Logic of 1905 presented all “those elementary parts of the theory that are useful in connection with relay circuits.”16 Symbolic thinking stood at the threshold of being implemented in reality. It stood where just a few years later, thanks to what Jacques Lacan once called “the fairy electricity,”17 not just pictures but the symbols themselves learned to walk and, because they could be switched into circuits, created effects in reality without having to take detours via any kind of consciousness. This robbed not just consciousnesses but the mind itself of quite some of its discursive power: this short-circuiting of the real with the symbolic rendered the question superfluous whether symbolic

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calculations corresponded to thinking as such, that is, whether or not they transcribed laws of thinking and thus the reality of the mind, and if yes, the question of the deeper foundation of this mysterious correspondence. Answering them now seemed merely to be a subordinate metaphysical interpretation, an ornament the new objectivity of the formal that was making its breakthrough could do without. This, however, only made something obvious that had long dawned on “logisticians,” as people like Couturat started calling themselves in 1904. For it was precisely a metaphysical abstinence (which, for its part, was to be considered a metaphysical figure even decades later) that constituted the condition of possibility for elaborating symbolic calculations. For Couturat as for any other logistician, the only thing that counted in answering the question of thinking were rigorously formal notions insofar as they concerned the necessary relations between any objects whatsoever. Anything that concerned the flood of images of an inner or an outer intuition had nothing to do with thinking. Strictly speaking, what was called thinking was even just a specific interpretation of a symbolic calculation. “The fundamental laws” of the logical calculus “founded by George Boole” and “developed and perfected by Ernst Schröder,” we read in the opening sentences of Couturat’s Algebra of Logic, were devised to express the principles of reasoning, the “laws of thought.” But this calculus may be considered from the purely formal point of view, which is that of mathematics, as an algebra based upon certain principles arbitrarily laid down. It belongs to the realm of philosophy to decide whether, and in what measure, this calculus corresponds to the actual operations of the mind, and is adapted to translate or even to replace argument; we cannot discuss this point here. The formal value of this calculus and its interest for the mathematician are absolutely independent of the interpretation given it and of the application which can be made of it to logical problems. In short, we shall discuss it not as logic but as algebra.18

These sentences convey the sobriety of someone familiar with the immanence of the symbolic, someone who knows that symbols do not always already have an extrasymbolic meaning but instead are subjected, first and foremost, to certain rules of formation and transformation, someone who knows that this can be known only by those who refrain from all interpretation, especially from interpreting the thinking of thinking in the use of symbols. Precisely because it desisted from interpreting thinking, insight into

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the purely symbolic, which chased any possible remnants of representation from symbolic logic, fundamentally changed what thinking could mean and, around 1900, raised the question of thinking in a radically new way. Of course, not even logisticians were able to bridle their philosophical tongue forever and speak without any reference to mind. The constraints an age puts on thinking do not disappear overnight. Knowledge, too, is subject to inertias and tenacities, as Ludwik Fleck has put it,19 especially when it comes to knowledge of thinking as such. Time and again, and thus in Couturat’s lecture as well, talk of the mind intruded, against better judgment, into the knowledge of the symbolic. But at least—and this is what counts—the question concerning the reality of the mind and its formalization could now be posed beyond imaginary interior views. Following psychologism, all sociologism, too, was undermined, and again in the “name of the mind.” “In its very progress, Formal Logic has come to constitute itself as an artificial language composed of well-defined symbols in order to be able to express in a precise and adequate manner the ideas and relations it studies and to free itself from the vagueness and equivocalness that stains all our languages.” What a formal language made it possible to demonstrate was that “the study of the relations between ideas thus comes before the study of language, and all the more so before the study of relations between human beings.” In the formal, prior to all language, Couturat read nothing less than the rules that fundamentally made languages and thereby communication between people possible. These rules were the code of thinking that pertained to an essential solitude: Materially, language is but a noise, a succession of vibrations propagating in the air from a mouth to an ear. It may be compared with the wire or, better, the current that links two telegraph stations. And, just as an observer recording the variations of the current would f ind nothing in them that resembles an idea, so spoken language [langage] is not, properly speaking, a vehicle for thinking: each of us is obliged, in the solitude of his consciousness, to interpret all the material signals he receives and to construct his dial. If men can communicate with each other, understand each other, and constitute themselves as a society, it is because they are capable of forming roughly the same ideas and above all of connecting them in the same way, of establishing the same relations between them.20

The recourse to the formal as the matter of thought—which, since it operated with the means of symbolic algebra, had to rely on symbolic

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immanence—seemed to be something like a last stop that prevented the mind from simply vanishing in the noise of the symbolic, noise of the kind generated by Morse keys and transmitted by telegraph currents. 21 The mind was the instance whose procedural rules could be demonstrated by means of symbolic algebra. Its laws could be addressed in purely symbolic terms and were for that very reason to guarantee the hegemony of the mind over everything symbolic. What shines through here is the basic problem of a pure language of thinking to which symbolic logic since Boole never stopped referring: wherever a symbolic radicalism beyond compare developed in the algebra of logic to formally determine everything that could be enounced—such that every thinking could as it were take place without thinking according to a mere “mechanism of thinking”22—one also always operated in the name of the mind, seeking to regulate, precisely by invoking the mind, a symbolic purged of all interpretation and all sense. The goal, after all, was to institute a science, not to fall victim to the kind of vertigo in the face of the abyss of the symbolic that Saussure had felt in 1894 and thereby run the risk of triggering an originary foundational crisis of the science of signs or of language that was yet to be founded: The lack of affinity from the first principle between [the sign and what it designates] being a RADICAL fact, one which excludes the slightest nuance, indicates that language may not be accounted for within a human rule, which is continually corrected or directed or is able to be corrected or directed by human reason. This reason gives rise to the other [human institutions and rules].23

According to Saussure, this deeply unregulatable regularity called language (langue) must not be thought from the perspective of “the fundamental contract between mind and sign,” since that would entail the risk of abolishing the “historical accident”24 essential to language. A science of language that renounced the introduction of the controlling instance, the mind, in favor of the originary, nonabolishable contingency of language, however, always already failed to attain its object because this object would then be lost in the contingency of the shifts to which it was subject. Such was Saussure’s dilemma: What philosophers and logicians have missed here is that with the action of time a system of symbols independent of the designated objects is itself bound to undergo shifts which the logician cannot calculate, while otherwise remaining necessarily …25

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For Saussure, language remained “a human institution” yet “by its very nature, any unfortunate analogy with any other human institution, except writing, can only misrepresent its real essence.”26 Unlike other institutions, both language and writing were not based on a concordance with the things of the world—hence their aporetic institutional nature drove Saussure to despair. If symbolic logicians like Couturat had their way, knowledge concerning the necessary relations between ideas would be situated precisely beyond such an incalculable symbolic and prior to any language in order to thereby constitute the condition of possibility even for relations between human beings in general, including language. The reality of the mind was the alias for a knowledge of the symbolic freed from anything that could not be calculated. But this, precisely, obscured what remained formally unthought in symbolic thinking and thereby what was most questionable and unthinkable about thinking itself, namely pure contingency or the event, one might even say: time. It would take another thirty years after Saussure’s insight until there was a warning against the mind, emphatic, comprehensive, no longer hidden in posthumous notes but to be heard by everyone, until “mind,” like “consciousness,” was listed among the concepts that only obscured things and were to be avoided.27 Around 1900, long before, that is, the socalled revolution of structural anthropology, what dawned on a logician engaged in the conflict about the matter of thinking was that speaking in the name of the mind was nothing less than an agenda of calculizing the human being—that same human being who was increasingly articulated as an empirical-transcendental dual being, also and especially thanks to psychologism and sociologism. That was the historical-epistemological straight talk that, thanks to Couturat, could be heard at the Collège de France as early as 1905. Going beyond his diagnosis of the age—and this may not be the least of reasons for his invocation of the mind—Couturat assigned the question of logic a succinct systematic role as “the necessary preface, the propaedeutic of a truly critical philosophy.”28 This offer of an alliance with philosophy hinted at the enormous historical stakes of the question concerning thinking, which consisted, as Cassirer put it, in operating the transition from “the schematism of images to the symbolism of principles”29 and heralding the new age of symbolic thinking. This triggered the crisis of thinking that was soon to reach its apex; it provided the backdrop for the debate of the logical question and made the debate so urgent. The agenda of arithmetizing mathematics, which imposed “the demand for exclusively arithmetical methods of proof”30 and thereby renounced traditional proofs through

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figural evidence; the elaboration of nonintuitive non-Euclidean geometries; the calculization of formal logic; and the field-theoretical turn of modern physics, which, against the evidence of the mechanistic view of the world, focused on the strictly formal, no longer representative symbolic character of physical concepts: all this had turned the detachment from intuition into the epistemic signature of the second half of the nineteenth century. The autonomization of the symbolic, which constituted both the foundation and immediate implication of formalization, attacked the primacy of intuitive thinking that had been the foundation of knowledge. The crisis of intuition weighed down on the entire space of knowledge. Around 1900, there was a debate raging about whether the ground of thinking and the constitution of knowledge was intuitive or symbolic. Talk like Couturat’s about the use and value of symbolic logic always already amounted to speaking from the very heart of this upheaval and the core of the great historical-epistemological transformation. The alliance between philosophy and the new logic was to operate this turn in reformulating the Critique of Pure Reason: in light of the transition from intuitive to symbolic thinking, “the Critique of Pure Reason is to be entirely remade or, rather, it remains to be made on the basis of a new Logic adequate to the current state of the sciences.”31 Where knowledge was no longer subject to the primacy of intuition, critique too could no longer begin with a definition of pure forms of intuition and the deduction of categories, with the foundations of a thinking of intuition. It could only start by discovering the purely symbolic foundations of mind. “Mind” was the fighting word of this new critique, speaking in the name of the mind was its motto, and noting down the reality of the mind its initial analytical achievement. To be sure, modern formal logic, as Couturat emphasized, does not claim to constitute all by itself the science of the mind and to absorb all of speculative philosophy, which, beside the methodology of the sciences, also includes Epistemology or the critique of the principles of science, the general theory of knowledge, and finally metaphysics as science of being insofar as [being] is or can be known and conceived of in its relation with the mind.32

But what sounds like modesty in this offer of an alliance was due solely to the fact that logic for its part could not entirely provide itself with its own foundation. It still implied primary concepts and principles that preceded it. Yet all critical examination, including the examination of the foundations of logic, was said to be possible only once the mind had been completely

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enciphered. No other agenda of logistic hegemony could more forcefully have borne witness to the awareness and the hope for a historical-epistemological zero hour beyond of the age of intuition.

The symbolic and intuition Ultimately, the opening lecture of the course, “La logique et la philosophie contemporaine,” was Couturat’s legacy. At thirty-seven years of age, the speaker had already reached the zenith of his theoretical work. Because he considered the field of symbolic logic to be more or less charted as far as the formulation of its fundamental laws was concerned, and because he believed that the completion of the reform of logic was imminent,33 he began in 1907 to focus all his efforts on propagating a langue internationale. He lost his life in a car accident in 1914. Couturat had come to international fame early, especially thanks to his work on Leibniz. There, he captured the epistemic situation of his age and, in essence, conducted a politics of knowledge. After two years spent studying Leibniz’s posthumous manuscripts in Hannover, he published La Logique de Leibniz d’après des documents inédits (Leibniz’s Logic According to Unpublished Documents) in 1901.34 Two years later, he followed up with another result of his archival work, a thick volume assembling previously unknown manuscripts on mathematics and logic.35 Thoroughly versed in symbolic logic, Couturat was able to demonstrate on the basis of his impressive source work that Leibniz’s metaphysics in its entirety could be derived from his logic. The book was an event. Along with the great studies of Leibniz by Russell and Cassirer,36 which it far surpassed in rigor, it marked a historicalepistemological turning point. The rediscovery of Leibniz made its entry onto the stage of philosophy. This rediscovery had been underway for a while on the discursive periphery, among logicians in England and Germany at the end of the preceding century, and consisted in both an engagement with Leibniz’s logic and a revival of the program of a universal language of calculus and a universal science.37 Leibniz had been working on an autonomous symbolic freed from the fetters of the representation of objects and had philosophically conceptualized the formal use of symbols in algorithmic mathematics in terms of a purely symbolic knowledge.38 Around 1900, he advanced to become the philosophical godfather of an age that, unlike any before it, saw itself entrusted to functioning symbolic machines. Where the hegemony and foundational power over knowledge was no longer assigned to intuition, where thinking seemed to be a matter

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of calculative reason and the mind itself a calculator, Leibniz was promoted to being a precursor of the great semiological adventure. From a historicalepistemological point of view, the proliferation of work on Leibniz as a philosophical forebear is telling. Two hundred years after its initial formulation, the difference between intuitive and symbolic knowledge Leibniz posited systematically in his 1684 Meditationes de cognitione, veritate et ideis served to schematize, in a peculiar manner, the debate about foundational questions. In a strangely precise way, this systematic difference made it possible to describe the rift that tore across the contemporary episteme. Leibniz had considered Descartes’s definition of clear and distinct knowledge in the Regulae, which, according to Foucault, had put an end to the age of similarity, to be insufficient. He undermined the role an intuition springing from the light of reason played for human thinking, which Descartes had emphasized. Leibniz as it were arithmetized Descartes. Although his idea of method was guided by modern analysis, which proceeded symbolically and therefore according to rules,39 Descartes in his foundation of knowledge was fascinated by the perspicacity of the new optical glasses and guided by the new physics of light, which broke with ancient emission theories. In analogy, he posited an intuition perspicuous in the light of reason (perspicue intueri) as the highest authority of knowledge, in opposition to the regime of cloudy relations of similarity. 40 Ultimately, the inferential chains of deduction, the second legitimate mode of knowledge, had to go back to the principles and simple propositions given in intuition. Only the absence of gaps between the links of these chains could guarantee that nothing could come in to cloud knowledge and that nothing that contradicted intuition could claim to count as knowledge. In Descartes, all employment of symbols was firmly anchored in the revelatory ground of intuition. The primacy of intuition can still be seen in the figural character of his symbolism, modeled on the theory of perception found in Kepler’s conception of the retina. 41 The distinction Leibniz articulated in opposition to Descartes, between short-sighted analyticians (whom Descartes thought of on the model of artisans in precision mechanics such as watchmakers or, precisely, lens makers) and far-sighted combinatorians who could see multa simul, was not just polemical. 42 As the “pioneer of the idea of calculus”43—that is, of a purely formal manipulation of signs free of all interpretation—he kept to the blindness of using symbols despite all the evidence of immediate, instantaneous viewing. Knowledge [cognitio] is either obscure or clear; clear knowledge is either confused or distinct; distinct knowledge is either inadequate or adequate,

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and also either symbolic or intuitive. The most perfect knowledge is that which is both adequate and intuitive. 44

At least when it came to composite concepts, Leibniz considered cognitio intuitiva to be a limit concept; given the finitude of human knowledge, God’s eye alone could have immediate insight into the whole of the characteristics of things. In any case, he hesitated on the question whether “a perfect example of this can be given by man.” At most, “our concept of numbers approaches it closely.” The decisive anti-Cartesian point, however, was that “for the most part, especially in a longer analysis, we do not intuit the entire nature of the subject matter at once but make use of signs instead of things, though we usually omit the explanation of these signs in any actually present thought for the sake of brevity.”45 Because intuitive knowledge is impossible and must be bracketed, as it were, the only adequate kind of knowledge left is symbolic knowledge. It ignores the things and the ideas of things generally and works only with the signs of things, which, so long as there is thinking going on, are manipulated only as signs, without any interpretation. Because it proceeded nonintuitively and was not founded on the evidence of an insight, Leibniz called symbolic knowledge “blind” (caeca). This essential blindness formed the basis of a calculized science named scientia generalis and constituted the condition for the characteristica universalis at the basis of this science, a universal language of calculus in which signs alone, not possible evidence, guided reason. 46 What looks like a purely systematic difference was itself deeply embedded in a historical-epistemological set of conditions from which it derived its divisive power in the first place. At the end of the seventeenth century, in the foundational age of logical calculi, and only thanks to them, it became possible to think, in all its systematicity, a difference that could assert its validity and achieve its epistemic breakthrough some two hundred years later on a much wider cultural-technological basis. In the course of mathematical-logical formalization around 1900, “blind thinking” (cogitatio caece), which ignored everything but symbols and which “we use … in algebra and in arithmetic, and indeed almost everywhere,”47 obtained a semiotechnical maturity Leibniz could hardly have dreamt of. The autonomization of the symbolic, that is, the emergence of symbols from the servitude of objects and the assertion of its autarky in the elaboration of purely symbolic calculi, endowed Leibniz’s difference with a new creative power and turned it into the cipher of an age. It served both to designate the fundamental difference in questions of method and to articulate the great epistemological opposition. Moreover, it guided an archeology of the

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present. It did not just parse the becoming of knowledge in the form of the difference between intuitive and symbolic thinking. Its play shaped the becoming of knowledge at its core: knowledge could be grasped at all only as a long movement from intuition to the symbolic. Around 1900, nothing proved as divisive as one’s attitude toward the blind thinking of the symbolic that operates nonintuitively. When in 1912, the Dutch mathematician Luitzen E. J. Brouwer in his Amsterdam inaugural lecture “Intuitionism and Formalism”48 gave names to the parties in the argument about the site of mathematical exactness—whether it existed in the human mind or on paper—his programmatic description of the division in contemporary mathematics went back to Leibniz’s difference, which had become determinative. It was precisely the knowledge of number, which Leibniz for his part had wanted to situate on the boundary between intuitive and symbolic knowledge, that was now traversed by this same difference. The intuitionists, and Brouwer above all, sought to found mathematics on the evidence of the originary intuition of whole numbers. All of mathematics was to represent the mere “auto-development [Selbstentfaltung]” of the “fundamental phenomenon” of “two-oneness,” of “the falling apart of moments of life” into two qualitatively different parts; from this auto-development derived the temporal succession of appearance of any given multiplicity.49 Symbols were regarded merely as purposive but nonmathematical aides in an essentially presymbolic “actual mathematical construction” that emanated from the “basal intuition” of two-oneness. In the radical terms employed at the height of the argument in 1927, the “unbridled detachment of mathematics from mathematical language and accordingly from the linguistic appearance of theoretical logic” constituted the core of the intuitionist agenda.50 The formalists or symbolists, on the contrary, highlighted “the creative power of pure reason,”51 free from inner as well as outer experience. The objects of mathematic contemplation were meaningless signs and their noncontradictory employment. Signs and their relations alone constituted the objects of number theory. The “solid philosophical attitude that I think is required for the grounding of pure mathematics,” wrote David Hilbert, was: “In the beginning was the sign.”52 When Ernst Cassirer sought to present the quintessence of his archeology of the contemporary problem of knowledge—which he had conducted practically throughout his life in the form of a “metaphysics of the symbolical”—and to indicate the metaphysical ground of his age, he, too, found himself referred to just this difference as the first distinction: “To be developed: the basic difference between the symbolic and the intuitive—the mental direction toward the symbolic seems to directly oppose the direction

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toward the purely intuitive.”53 Cassirer may be considered the chief witness to the discursive power of this tension, from which his gigantic project of a philosophy and history of symbolic forms arose. In all its programmatic ambition, this project itself belonged squarely to the great epistemological transformation of which it is one of the most powerful and diagnostically precise manifestations. For at the very moment that signs ceased expressing and representing anything, the moment that signs detached themselves “from the ground of intuitive organization [anschauliche Gestaltung] in which representation is rooted” and became “signs in the sense of a merely abstract attribution” alone, destined exclusively to record a “reciprocal relationship and correspondence captured in their general law” but without being or meaning anything “outside the relationship,” at that moment Cassirer in the sharp light of the symbolic gained insight into history as such.54 Entire ages were singled out according to the inner constitution of their concepts of symbols: history, from the savage state all the way to the present, unfolded along the lines laid down by the symbolic forms, which in a historical process transitioned from the function of expression via the function of representation to the function of meaning. The difference between intuitionism and formalism was thus systematically drafted into the concept of symbolic form in order to conceive of the history of symbolic forms as a function of this difference and as the play of this difference. The perseverance of the difference around 1900 thus testifies to a seminal event in the history of symbols: it was a signal of the transition from one epoch in this history to another, a mark of the turning point, and a cipher in the fight over the future of meaning. Cassirer’s endeavor can thus be read as an ever-renewed attempt at interpreting the event said to have been constituted by the emergence of purely symbolic thinking. Cassirer’s efforts aimed at nothing less than reformulating the Phenomenology of Spirit under the conditions of symbols that had become independent. Their appearance in the systematic center of the order of knowledge, precisely because it marked the highest stage and end of this order, was to allow for presenting the history of spirit no longer, as it had been in Hegel’s time, as a history of formation but as the history of “one and the same fundamental spiritual function”55 by the name of symbolic form, and that meant explicitly presenting it as a history of symbolic media.56 Many years later, the mathematician Hermann Weyl, one of the great partisans of contemporary intuitionism, retrospectively saw in the difference between intuitionism and symbolism not just a fundamental systematic difference but historically the two final stages of the development of symbolic thinking.57 The epistemic transitional situation expressed in

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the perseverance of this difference was also manifest in knowledge of the human being. It gave birth to a new anthropology that already contained the end of the transcendental-empirical concept of the human being, to the doctrine of the human being as animal symbolicum that mathematicians, logicians, and philosophers equally started adhering to, independently of whether they were closer to the intuitionists or to the symbolists. The disagreement about the foundation of mathematics had no bearing on the insight into the power of the symbolic. Accordingly, Cassirer in the notes for the lectures he gave during the 1929 Davos Hochschultage, which have survived, makes a clear connection between the resurgence he observed of philosophical anthropology and the epistemic situation strained by the autonomization of the symbolic. The former seemed to him to be an effect of the controversy about the intuitive or symbolic ground of knowledge, which urged a reformulation of the human being’s conception of world and self as such: “The great epochs of separation and decision, of krisis in the originary sense of the word—they lead us time and again to the problem of philosophical anthropology.”58

Leibniz as a prophet Couturat’s return to Leibniz was dictated not by some higher epistemological, ontological, or knowledge-political interest but directly by his work on the foundational mathematical-logical problems of his time. That is why his Leibniz was not concerned with a metaphysics of symbolic knowledge, which Leibniz himself but also Couturat’s contemporary Cassirer, for example, thought indispensable. The derivation of Leibniz’s metaphysical system from the logical foundation on the contrary demonstrated the loss of meaning metaphysical inquiry had suffered. This Leibniz marked the beginning of an epoch of a formalization allegedly about to be perfected, an epoch now buoyed by the promise of the free use of symbols, liberated from all ontological ballast that might have weighed down the free floating of signs within the framework of pure symbolism. A sentence like the following, pronounced in 1904 by the Berlin private scholar Gregorius Itelson at the Eleventh Congress of Philosophy in Geneva, conveys the sharply antiontological tone adopted by the symbolic logicians and mathematicians of the day: “Logic differs from ontology in that it is not worried about the existence of its objects or about the existence of any objects whatsoever.”59 It was quite simply the logic of any given object or, to quote Itelson again, “the science of objects in general.”60 It practically plied its trade as a counterconception

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to ontology and simply counted on the possibility of dispensing with all ontological inquiry.61 It was not by accident that around 1900 the formalists evoked Leibniz to counter Kant. With all his “ontological perspicacity,” as Heidegger’s student Oskar Becker, whose project of existentializing mathematics fully participated in these epistemic skirmishes, wrote in 1927, Kant had “opposed his predecessor’s all-too-brave flight of ideas” and, under the heading of a “discipline of pure reason,” subjected all use of symbols to regulation by a priori forms of intuition and thus to a certain kind of discipline that was ontological because it originated in human finitude.62 “The progress of logic and mathematics in the nineteenth century has weakened Kant’s theories and proven Leibniz right,” wrote Couturat in 1904, on the occasion of the one-hundredth anniversary of Kant’s death.63 According to him, it was possible to show now, at the height of the contemporary process of formalization, that mathematical judgments are not a priori synthetic but a priori analytical judgments, that mathematics was based on logic, and that intuition had no role to play in it. On a symbolic level, the fact that “the hundredth anniversary of Kant’s death is the fiftieth anniversary of pure mathematics” indicated to him the collapse of intuition as the foundation of knowledge and thus the collapse of the discipline of intuitive thinking, which for him owed its entire existence to Kant’s now-evident misreading of symbolic knowledge.64 “Reason has taken its revenge by breaking the rigid frames and scholastic formulas in which he [Kant] had thought to confine it forever.”65 Leibniz’s principle, “Toute vérité est analytique [All truth is analytical]”66 was to be the maxim presiding over the entry into the new century and presented contemporaries with the irrevocable end of a return to Kant that had lasted for half a century. The fight between intuitionists and symbolists in the foundational controversy derived its “problematic tension” in the strict sense from the “opposition between Kant’s and Leibniz’s positions.”67 In a wider sense, however, it drew on the return of Leibniz’s distinction and its new force, which imposed the schematization of epistemic layers and was due solely to the autonomization of the symbolic. Couturat’s Leibniz, in short, was an event, but, and this is a point of interest for discourse analysis, an event that in turn merely indicated an event brought about by the unconscious of the episteme, as it were: I simply set out to study in Leibniz the precursor of modern algorithmic Logic, to analyze his logical Calculus and his geometrical Calculus, and to reconstruct the idea of his universal Characteristic. But when I sought to go back to the philosophical principles of these theories I realized, on

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the one hand, that they stemmed from Leibniz’s original conception of universal Mathematics and his invention, as a youth, of combinatorial mathematics; on the other hand, that they were directly linked to his attempts at a universal Language and his great project of a demonstrative Encyclopedia, which occupied him his entire life; finally, that he deduced all his philosophical theses from the principles of his “general Science,” that is to say, his Methodology. This is what led me to discover that his Logic was not only the heart and soul of his system but the center of his intellectual activity and the source of all his inventions, and to see in it the dark or at least hidden hearth from which so many bright “sparks” gushed forth.68

This way, not otherwise, Leibniz was invented around 1900, with steps that initially no one had dreamed of, never mind been willing to take. These steps ultimately did not lead back to philosophical principles but led straight away from them, simply led time and again to the noninterpreting manipulation of symbols, to the pure employment of symbols. Now turned into the symptom of a new epistemic situation, Leibniz had to appear as a revenant but, to be sure, only as one who in no way hinted at a Kantian a priori of intuition to come.69 When, years later, what was possibly the twentieth century’s most powerful attempt at destroying logic sought “to reach a place appropriate for the recollection from historicity”70 from which a transvaluation of the relationship between thinking and being could be operated, it encountered, precisely, Leibniz. Not just any Leibniz, this Leibniz, the way he had appeared around 1900, the one to whom it had since then, and only since then, been possible to attribute an “inclination to develop logic out of itself and metaphysics, as it were, out of logic.”71 It was here and nowhere else that the forgetting of being culminating in contemporary logistics was initially to concentrate, the forgetting of being for which “thinking is the nearest” and for which Being “follow[s] thinking.”72 The “destruction [Abbau]” of traditional logic, which was to unearth its hidden ontological foundation and thus to prepare the historically “necessary task of a shaking up of logic,”73 had to set in with shaking up this Leibniz first of all, this Leibniz who in those years had become the poster boy of an antiontological or at least ontologically incomprehensible, merely calculating thinking. The emergence of the question of being, too, its emergence especially, stemmed from the antiontological radicalness of symbolic thinking. In its complete revision of the question of knowledge in terms of the question of being, Heidegger’s fundamental ontology was the most trenchant reaction imaginable to and

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most fundamental subversion of the entry into the symbolic beyond the exact sciences had undergone. In his analysis of a four-page manuscript discovered in 1895 by Bodemann, Couturat had shown that the principle of sufficient reason—nihil est sine ratione—contained all of Leibniz’s metaphysics: “In its exact sense, this principle means that in every true proposition the predicate is contained in the subject; therefore, that every truth can be demonstrated a priori by the simple analysis of its terms. In a word, that every truth is analytic.”74 Read this way, the principle of sufficient reason was, around 1900, the main philosophical principle of formalism. And it was precisely this principle that Heidegger spent practically all his life mobilizing with increasing intensity against all formalist forgetting of being as the point of entry of the question of being. At the very moment at which someone else, prompted by the “electronic brain” named computer, was asking himself whether machines can think,75 and after Heidegger had finally managed to bring together the historical starting point and “world-historical” stakes of the question of being in the question “What is called thinking?” the name Leibniz and “the odd history of this principle”76 allowed him to see the path of western European thinking as such. Leibniz thus determines not only the development of modern logic into logistics and into thinking machines. … The thinking of Leibniz supports and molds the chief tendency of what, thought broadly enough, we can call the metaphysics of the modern age. Therefore, for us the name of Leibniz does not stand as a tag for a bygone system of philosophy. The name names the presence of a thinking whose strength has not yet been experienced, a presence that still awaits to encounter us. Only through looking back on what Leibniz thought can we characterize the present age … as an age pervasively bepowered by the power of the principium reddendae rationis sufficientis.77

According to Heidegger, it took two thousand three hundred years, from the sixth century bce to Leibniz, for “such an obvious principle, which always directs all human cognition and conduct without being stated … to be expressly stated as a principle in the formulation cited above.” In a peculiar way, the event Leibniz, and that means the positing of the principle of sufficient reason, thus split the history of thinking in two, into the “incubation period” of the principle in which it “presciently dream[s] what is unthought in it”78 and the time of its might that asserts its claim to be foundational “unabatedly and without surcease across the modern age and out over us

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contemporaries today.”79 “Without this mighty Principle there would be no modern science,”80 which is based on the principle of all principles itself. As we know, Heidegger managed to resituate even the difference between intuitive and symbolic knowledge on the ground of a single metaphysical formation. This formation, whose principle, according to him, is the principle of sufficient reason itself, is the formation of modern thinking, for which all “[c]ognition is a kind of representational thinking [Vorstellen],”81 be it intuitionist or purely symbolic and thus blind. What counts for him is this: in the epoch of representation what can be reasonably represented merely “is,” that is, in this age, it “can be identified as being a being only if it is stated in a sentence that satisfies the fundamental principle of reason as the fundamental principle of founding.”82 Being founded, the signature of this basic metaphysical position, can be obtained from the unshakable ground of evidence and, more importantly, be secured by “the construction of a system of principles free of contradiction.” That is why he considered the “axiomatic thinking”83 of the kind formulated by David Hilbert in his project of axiomatizing the sciences in a “framework of concepts [Fachwerk von Begriffen]” constructed “in accordance with logical principles”84 to be emblematic of foundational thinking. For Hilbert, noncontradiction was the essential condition of existence as such. For Heidegger, purely symbolic thinking brought the epoch in which objecthood was to be represented as founded to its limit, to the point where formalisms rendered existence absolutely without object: The axiomatic character of axioms consists exclusively in this role of eliminating contradictions and safeguarding against them. What “axiom” could mean when taken on its own lacks objective meaning. The axiomatic form of scientific thinking that lacks an object in this sense today stands before unforeseeable possibilities. This axiomatic thinking already circulates without our noticing it or fathoming its import in so changing human thinking that it adapts itself to the essence of modern technology.85

Heidegger’s reflection on the principle of sufficient reason thus even turned into an archeology of the most advanced foundational endeavor of his day.86 The task was to go through modern axiomatic thinking and its hidden grounds in order to unearth what was worth thinking about in the principle that supported it and thereby to get to what was unthought and perhaps unthinkable about thinking itself. It was never a question of a simple rejection or of founding a new, different thinking beyond the powerful reach of the principle of sufficient reason—a refoundation that, read against the background of Heidegger’s question, was impossible anyway.

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In any event, for Heidegger, “the principle suddenly intones differently” now that the operation of symbolic machines had brought about a logical intensification; it “now … as a word of being” spoke Being as such, as it were. In the course of his destruction of Western logic, “nothing is without reason” had transformed into “nothing is without reason.” For him, Being had begun to “set the pitch” of logic and thus to ruin Leibniz’s (merely ontic) principle from the inside out. The principle had transformed from being the principle of calculative thought, said to have prevailed throughout an entire age called “modernity” as its “innermost, and at the same time most concealed, molding,”87 into the “answer to the question: what, after all, does ‘being’ mean?” which quite simply read: “‘being’ means ‘ground/reason.’” This meant that “[i]nsofar as being—which itself is ground/reason—grounds, it allows beings to be beings.”88 For Heidegger, the principle of representational thinking had thus turned into what was worthy of being thought by a thinking attentive to the claim of Being. This is the core of the reformulation of the matter of thinking that pervades his entire oeuvre. What the name of Leibniz indicated to Heidegger was that, around 1950, one was still and more than ever caught up in “the world-question of thinking.”89 This question runs through an entire epoch that we might call the age of the crisis of thinking in which, since about 1850, the detachment from the primacy of inner as well as outer intuition, with all the new projects and resistances it entailed, and the leap into the symbolic beyond were taking place.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B viii: 106. Couturat, “La logique et la philosophie contemporaine,” 320. Couturat, “La logique et la philosophie contemporaine,” 327. Foucault, The Order of Things, 318 and 321. Boole, “On the Foundations of the Mathematical Theory of Logic,” 68–69.
 George Boole, “Logic,” 136. Couturat, “La logique et la philosophie contemporaine,” 321. On the modern tradition of projection, compare Crary, Techniques of the Observer, ch. 2, 25–66. Binet, “Imageless Thought,” 219 and 221. James, The Principles of Psychology, ch. 9, 224–90. Cf., for example, Binet and Simon, “Langage et pensée.” Couturat, “La logique et la philosophie contemporaine,” 322. Couturat, “La logique et la philosophie contemporaine,” 323. [Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A141/B181:273.]

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15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

34. 35. 36. 37.

38. 39. 40.

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[Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, § 454: 205.] Shannon, “A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits,” 495n1. Lacan, “Psychoanalysis and Cybernetics,” 302. Couturat, Algebra of Logic, 3, my emphasis. Cf. Fleck, Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact, 27–38. Couturat, “La logique et la philosophie contemporaine,” 328, my emphasis. Wolfgang Hagen points to the semiological effect of telegraphy evoked here in his Radio Schreber, 89–90 and 112–13. Couturat, “La logique et la philosophie contemporaine,” 341. Saussure, Writings in General Linguistics, 149, my emandations. Saussure, Writings in General Linguistics, 143. Saussure, Writings in General Linguistics, 145, Saussure’s emphasis. Saussure, Writings in General Linguistics, 146, Saussure’s emphasis. See Heidegger, Being and Time, ¶10:71–72, as well as Derrida, Of Spirit. Couturat, “La logique et la philosophie contemporaine,” 340. Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. 3, 467. Klein, “The Arithmetizing of Mathematics,” 966. Couturat, “La logique et la philosophie contemporaine,” 339. Couturat, “La logique et la philosophie contemporaine,” 339–40. Thus we read in Couturat’s report from the Eleventh Congress of Philosophy in Geneva that the definition of logic as logistics, that is, as a general science of things concerned with the formal relationships between things but not with the reference of thinking to its objects, that this definition “does not constitute the reform of Logic” or serve as its starting point; rather, “it summarizes this reform, which is being achieved in our time, and serves as its conclusion” (Couturat, “IIme Congrès de Philosophie,” 1039). Couturat, ed., La logique de Leibniz. Couturat, ed., Opuscules et fragments inédites de Leibniz. Russell, Critical Exposition of the Philosophy of Leibniz, and Cassirer, Leibniz’ System. On the “rediscovery of Leibniz” by formalist logicians in England and Germany, see Volker Peckhaus’s detailed study, Logik, Mathesis universalis und allgemeine Wissenschaft. On the “Leibniz program,” see Krämer, Symbolische Maschinen, 100–114. Sybille Krämer provides a succinct summary in her article, “Symbolische Erkenntnis bei Leibniz.” Krämer, Berechenbare Vernunft, 214.
 We must not forget that the tenth, and oldest, section of La Dioptrique, which was written in 1629, shortly after the Regulae ad directionem ingenii (winter 1628/29), discusses lens making. The topic of the Ninth Rule is the “perspicacity in the distinct intuition of particular things.” To be sure, seeing, an activity of the senses, for Descartes was merely an analogy for the mental operation called intuition: “We can best learn how mental intuition is to be employed by comparing it with ordinary vision” (Rules for the

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47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52.

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Direction of the Mind, 33). This comparison was made possible by the switch from the ancient emission theories to modern theories of light rays and thus to Kepler’s physics of light (see Simon, Le regard, l’être et l’apparence, esp. 11–56). This, however, clearly brings out the historical epistemic and medial conditions of Cartesian intuitionism. It is also why in the Third Rule, Descartes explicitly refers to “my novel use of the term ‘intuition’” (Rules, 14). The Dioptrique furthermore offers insight into the optical-medial basis of the philosophy of consciousness: it is based on the camera obscura. The medial constitution of Descartes’s approach also sheds light on its figurative symbolism, which subordinates all symbolism to the configuration of objects and thus, ultimately, to the evidence of intuition. On Descartes’s figurative, not yet operative symbolism, cf. Krämer, Berechenbare Vernunft, 159–220 and esp. 213–20; on vision as Descartes’s model for intuition, see Serres, “Descartes: la chaîne sans chaînons,” and Schmeiser, Die Erfindung der Zentralperspektive. Cf. Rules Twelve to Fourteen, Rules for the Direction of the Mind, 39–65. This is pointed out by Serres, “Descartes,” 122n4. Krämer, Berechenbare Vernunft, 268. Leibniz, “Meditations on Knowledge, Truth, and Ideas,” 291. Leibniz, “Meditations on Knowledge, Truth, and Ideas,” 292. Leibniz, “Meditations on Knowledge, Truth, and Ideas,” 292. Recent research focusing on cultural techniques as conditions of knowledge has questioned the status of blind knowledge in Leibniz’s system. Emphasizing in particular the technologies and materialities of placing before the eyes and the production of evidence that kept Leibniz busy, this body of work more or less corrects the image of Leibniz symbolists fashioned for good reasons in the years around 1900. In his Passage des Digitalen, Bernhard Siegert, for example, stresses the significance of figural evidence for Leibniz’s characters and the role their “irreducible graphism” plays as the radical exterior of thinking, which cannot be reduced to the distinction between intuitive and symbolic knowledge. In Die Fenster der Monade, Horst Bredekamp even tries to present Leibniz as an advocate of intuitive thinking, citing Leibniz’s support for training facilities and laboratories of intuition as evidence against the symbolist reading. Leibniz, “Meditations on Knowledge, Truth, and Ideas,” 292. Brouwer, “Intuitionism and Formalism.” Brouwer, “Mathematik, Wissenschaft und Sprache,” 417; on the more profoundly metaphysical development of Brouwer’s “basal intuition,” also cf. “Life, Art and Mysticism.” Brouwer, Berliner Gastvorlesungen, 21. Hilbert, “From Mathematical Problems,” 1098. Hilbert, “The New Grounding of Mathematics,” 1122; on the foundational controversy in mathematics, see also Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. 3, ch. 4, 357–405.

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53. Cassirer, Zur Metaphysik der symbolischen Formen, 267. 54. Cassirer, “Das Symbolproblem und seine Stellung im Symbol der Philosophie,” 10. 55. Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. 3, 41; on the project of reformulating the Phenomenology of Spirit, see ibid., xiv–xv. 56. Cf. Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. 3, 1. 57. Cf. Weyl, “Wissenschaft als symbolische Konstruktion des Menschen,” esp. 319–22. 58. Qtd. in Orth, “Der Begriff der Kulturphilosophie bei Ernst Cassirer,” 197; on the animal symbolicum, see Cassirer, An Essay on Man, esp. 28–31. 59. Qtd. in Couturat, “IIme Congrès de Philosophie,” 1041. 60. Couturat, “IIme Congrès de Philosophie,” 1038. 61. The symbolists’ resistance to ontology was directed, of course, against a very specific way of talking about being as a matter of objectness. The ontology they incriminated was a current of propositions about existence that ultimately derived from Aristotelian sources. Even in symbolist mathematics, there were a good number of existential propositions—such as Russell’s existentialization of propositions—even if they were not considered and problematized as such at a time when the ontology of substances and objects was on its way out. In this confrontation, ontological notes were discredited as metaphysical. The deontologization of the symbolic, which drove the transition from thinking in terms of substance to thinking in terms of function and led to the collapse of objectness, marked the center of the anontological and ametaphysical self-conception of the formalists of the day. Note that the fixation on object ontology was a Continental matter. In American philosophy and logic, work was already underway on a process ontology—think of Peirce or, later, Whitehead. 62. Becker, “Das Symbolische in der Mathematik,” 336. Becker provides a magisterial overview of the deontologization of the symbolic since Vieta. The essay cited is a summary of Becker’s work on the question, which he elaborated simultaneously in his Mathematische Existenz. 63. Couturat, Les principes des mathématiques, 303. 64. Couturat, Les principes des mathématiques, 305. 65. Couturat, Les principes des mathématiques, 307–8. 66. Qtd. in Couturat, ed., La logique de Leibniz, xi. 67. Becker, “Das Symbolische in der Mathematik,” 337. 68. Couturat, La logique de Leibniz, XII. 69. Cf. Couturat, “Kant et la mathématique moderne,” 133. Cassirer, from an intuitionist standpoint, raised massive objections to Couturat’s reading of Kant and emphasized the usefulness and value of intuition for modern mathematics; cf. Cassirer, “Kant und die moderne Mathematik.” 70. Heidegger, The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, 22. 71. Heidegger, The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, 114. 72. Heidegger, The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, 27

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Heidegger, Logic as the Question Concerning the Essence of Language, § 4:6. Couturat, “On Leibniz’s Metaphysics,” 20. Turing, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” 441. [Heidegger speaks of an “electronic brain in What Is Called Thinking? 238.] Heidegger, The Principle of Reason, 5. Heidegger, The Principle of Reason, 33. Heidegger, The Principle of Reason, 4. Heidegger, The Principle of Reason, 24. Heidegger, The Principle of Reason, 24. Heidegger, The Principle of Reason, 23. Heidegger, The Principle of Reason, 23. Heidegger, The Principle of Reason, 19. Hilbert, “Axiomatic Thought,” 1108. Heidegger, The Principle of Reason, 19. Heidegger, The Principle of Reason, 14–24. [Heidegger, The Principle of Reason, 121.] Heidegger, The Principle of Reason, 125. Heidegger, The Principle of Reason, 129. On the historical epistemology of Heidegger’s rearticulation of the matter of thinking, cf. the appendix to the present volume, “Heidegger and Cybernetics.”

2.

The Symbolic and Communication The Crisis of Thinking since 1850 Abstract The crisis of intuition that affected the very foundations of Western knowledge starting in the mid-nineteenth century played itself out on two main sites: the elaboration of pure symbolisms in mathematical logic and electromagnetic field theory in physics, which conceived of communication as something that could no longer be presented intuitively but only described symbolically. The chapter studies both sites in detail. The genesis of mathematics as a science of purely symbolic relationships, which avoided all interpretation of symbols and pursued a previously unthinkable agenda of pure formalism, occupies a key position: it inaugurated the principles of a new system of notation, a new discourse network. Focusing on the archaeology of Boole’s exact science of logic, the chapter also describes the collapse of the opposition between thinking and calculating. Hegel had pinpointed this opposition as the salient feature of the presymbolic age just prior to its end, and it continued, in a kind of epistemic belatedness, to structure antimathematical and antitechnological affects well into the twentieth century. In a sort of parallel action, physical field theory, by means of symbolisms, that is, exact notation, cast out the specters of representation that until then had populated the problem of communication and had determined the imaginary of communication. The investigation thus shows what has previously been discussed as a foundational crisis of the sciences to have been a foundational crisis of thinking as such, a crisis that crystallized around the poles of the symbolic and of communication. Keywords: archeology of the axiomatic age; thinking and calculating; formalism and interpretation; exact science of logic; symbolic knowledge about communication; G. W. F. Hegel; George Boole; Heinrich Hertz

Hörl, E., Sacred Channels: The Archaic Illusion of Communication, Amsterdam University Press, 2018 doi 10.5117/9789089647702_ch02

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The dead bones of logic Martin Heidegger assigned a historically and ontologically exact location to the great epistemological transformation that came with the emergence of symbolic thinking and the move away from intuition as the foundational authority of knowledge. For him, the events that even in his day had not ceased to recast the foundations of knowledge were above all post-Hegelian. A note on the archeology of axiomatic thinking from 1955 shows just how precise his diagnosis was: But what in itself is contradictory cannot be. So says the fundamental principle of contradiction. Formulated briefly, it reads: esse non potest, quod implicat contradictionem; whatever implies a contradiction cannot be. Whenever and wherever we want to get at what can be and actually is, we must avoid contradictions—which means, we must adhere to the fundamental principle of contradiction. Thus, every effort to gain secure knowledge about what is aims not only at avoiding contradictions, but also at resolving contradictions that are present by adopting appropriate new suppositions. The sciences endeavor methodically to eliminate the contradictions that now and again surface in theories and the conflicts that crop up in observed facts. This style of cognition defines the passion of modern science. The fundamental principle of contradiction—its demand to unconditional adherence—is the hidden prod that goads modern science onward. … The constant appeal to the principle of contradiction may be the most illuminating thing in the world for the sciences. But whoever knows the history of the principle of contradiction must concede that the interpretation of its content really remains questionable. Over and above that, for the last one hundred and fifty years there has been Hegel’s Science of Logic. It shows that contradiction and conflict are not reasons against something being real. Rather, contradiction is the inner life of the reality of the real. This interpretation of the essence and effect of contradiction is the centerpiece of Hegel’s metaphysics. Ever since Hegel’s Logic it is no longer immediately certain that where a contradiction is present what contradicts itself cannot be real.1

Heidegger of course always sought to understand the widespread implementation of formalism qua logistics and axiomatic thinking and, ultimately, theory and cybernetics—whose deployment of symbols, in his words, “holds sway over … the present world-epoch”2 and had determined the horizon of his work since the early 1950s—as an event that had been a long time

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coming. The dominance of thinking over being, which in his own day entered the phase of its completion, was to date back at least to Leibniz’s days but, more fundamentally, belonged to the longue durée of all onto-theologically constituted philosophy. This is the well-known insistence of the history of Being in Heidegger’s inquiries, which like few other efforts surveyed the depths of the contemporary episteme. Yet passages like the one just quoted show that, despite the broad horizon of his inquiry into the historicity of the relationship between being and thinking, Heidegger always had in mind a caesura that lay historically close and had suggested the question to him in the first place. The caesura consisted in this: symbolic thinking derived a claim of being from an absence of contradiction and posited this absence as the condition of existence as such. It did not go without saying that the principle of excluded contradiction was a principle that applied to Being; it rather indicated a profound epistemic change. Heidegger’s central message for his listeners was that the birth of the axiomatic age was the epistemic event in which thinking triumphed over Being. The emergence of the new age constituted the epochal beginning of the effort to contest the forgetting of Being by thinking, the effort with which Heidegger tirelessly advanced the revaluation of the relationship between Being and thinking. It might even be considered the historical condition of possibility that pervades his entire work. The sheer force of his inquiry into the history of Being has obscured this historical-epistemological inscription. Yet Heidegger could decipher the history of Western thinking as a history of the forgetting of Being only in light of axiomatic thinking, on which its entire sense and the very possibility of narrating it hinged. For Heidegger, the epistemic power of the axiomatic doctrine was nowhere more apparent than in the ruin of Hegel’s system. The exorcism of Hegelianism presided over by axiomatic thought was a salient feature of the epistemic situation. That Hegel could posit contradiction as “the inner life of the reality of the real”3 and on that basis demonstrate the emptiness and externality of everything that was merely symbolic and formal was a historical-epistemological fact. It showed that every claim to reality and being on the part of a symbolic thinking based on the principle of noncontradiction could only have begun after Hegel. In turn, the unreality and beinglessness of symbolic thinking, which under the conditions of the foundational primacy of intuition simply had seemed to get lost in the nonintuitive, was precisely the condition of possibility of Hegel’s central principle: the reality of contradiction and the regime of sublation that depended on it. Only once functional symbolic calculi had wrested epistemic

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primacy from intuition could the presence of good formal reason and thus the absence of contradiction count as a ground of existence and set out to deprive contradiction of the last remnants of being. And since formalisms worked not only on paper but, thanks to their circuitabilty, in the real as well, Hegelianism was cut to the quick: the operation of formalisms did away with all evidence for the reality of contradiction. Symbolic machines unhinged the metaphysics of the continuous labor of contradiction at the core of reality. Their functioning produced antiHegelian principles of the kind David Hilbert addressed to Gottlob Frege on December 29, 1899: [I]f the arbitrarily given axioms do not contradict one another with all their consequences, then they are true and the things defined by the axioms exist. This is for me the criterion of truth and existence. … But it is surely obvious that every theory is only a scaffolding or schema of concepts together with their necessary relations to one another, and that the basic elements can be thought of in any way one likes. … In other words: any theory can always be applied to infinitely many systems of basic elements. One only needs to apply a reversible one–one transformation and lay it down that the axioms shall be correspondingly the same for the transformed things. 4

The existence of things no longer preceded some kind of merely representative symbols; things were no longer symbols’ ground of existence. Instead, being, thought radically axiomatically, was first of all a function of noncontradictory symbolic systems. That was the quintessence of the great epistemological transformation of which Hilbert sought to convince an unbelieving Frege who was still attached to a “third realm” of thought and thus to a certain Hegelianism.5 For Heidegger, this event marked the high point of the withdrawal of Being, yet at the same time it prepared the transition to “another historicity of thinking”6 that was to bring about an overthrow of which he fancied himself the protagonist. What he discussed initially was not the long duration of the incubation period or the logocentric origins of symbolic thinking but the short time span of the roughly one hundred years since 1850 that provided the age with its particular question about what thinking means, with “a world-historical question”7 that concerned the human relationship to the world as such. Even if Heidegger’s question in 1955 seemed a little belated—after all, since Kurt Gödel’s 1931 formulation of the incompleteness theorem it had been clear that a noncontradictory system could not prove the claim to noncontradiction it made and thus

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that contradiction could not once and for all be banned from the world of the symbolic—that did nothing to alter the fact that it described the epistemic upheaval after Hegel’s death. Just two years later, it should be noted, Heidegger approached the question of contradiction geopolitically: “The dialectic,” he wrote, “is today a, perhaps even the, world reality.” The reality of contradiction was now dramatically presented by the Cold War: “Behind this confrontation of worldviews, as one calls it, the struggle for mastery of the earth rages on. Behind this struggle, however, there reigns a conflict in which Western thinking itself is entangled with itself.”8 The philosophical archeology of the axiomatic age, which had declared the question of thinking to be “world-historical,” was in complete agreement with world-history itself. “[W]hat Hegel … could never think is a machine that would work,” we read in Derrida a good ten years after Heidegger’s historical observation on axiomatic thinking, “a machine defined in its pure functioning, and not in its final utility, its meaning, its result, its work.”9 There were, however, good historical-epistemological reasons for this incapacity. Thinking functioning machines, above all the functioning machine of thinking itself, simply could not be an urgent task around 1800, especially not for someone who sought to frame his age systematically in thoughts. Hegel belonged to the presymbolic age, he thought at its outermost limits, as it were. The knowledge whose history of formation he presented was not symbolic knowledge, which began increasingly to dominate the episteme. This knowledge at the apex of Prussian alphabetization was, rather, a knowledge of literate people who, in reading, allowed the sense of books written in phonetic script to enter them and thus let themselves be animated by the spirit of the letter.10 The acolytes of the letter around 1800, and Hegel chief among them, neither could nor wanted to know anything about symbolic calculi that were to formalize the reality of spirit, never mind the effective power of pure formalisms in the world. The basic opposition that pervaded his concept of knowledge was precisely the one thrown into question in the symbolic age, the opposition of thinking and calculating. If there is anything to demonstrate the presymbolic state of Hegel’s knowledge, it is precisely his conception of symbols and signs, even if it is only negatively grounded in intuition and pictoriality. For him, symbols and signs were the effects of the productive imagination. They aided the transfer of sense intuition into knowledge. On the three-part path to conceptual cognition on which the mere intuition of external objects is sublated and interiorized, they are the products of “symbolic imagination,” of “the imagination which creates signs” at the very heart of the intermediate realm of representation. In the “internal

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studio” of productive imagination, the contents of general representations were pictorialized, and as such, images, symbols, and signs intuitively presented meanings.11 They embodied the contradiction between interiority and externality that generated knowledge. All of thinking depended on such fantastic things as symbols and signs. It was they who functioned as media of thinking. For Hegel, it was impossible to think with purely symbolic signs and symbols beyond all intuition. Only through them and thanks to them could thinking, in an imaginary act called sublation that all signs and symbols served, acquire meanings; without them, it was only lost in thought. Symbols and signs were distinct from each other in that they were not equally free in dealing with intuition. And this measure of liberty decided what use and value each had for the labor on meaning the intellect is constantly putting into practice: The sign is some immediate intuition, representing a totally different import from what naturally belongs to it. … The sign is different from the symbol: for in the symbol the original characters (in essence and conception) of the visible object are more or less identical with the import which it bears as symbol; whereas in the sign, strictly so-called, the natural attributes of the intuition, and the connotation of which it is a sign, have nothing to do with each other. Intelligence therefore gives proof of wider choice and ampler authority in the use of intuitions when it treats them as designatory (significative) rather than as symbolical.12

Where there is symbolization, the “symbolic imagination … selects for the expression of its general ideas only that sensuous material whose independent signification corresponds to the specific content of the universal to be symbolized.” In turn, “[i]ntelligence, in indicating something by a sign, has finished with the content of intuition, and the sensuous material receives for its soul a signification foreign to it.”13 In the use indicating or signifying intelligence makes of it, “the intuition does not count positively or as representing itself, but as representative of something else. It is an image, which has received as its soul and meaning an independent mental representation.”14 Precisely because, in signs, image and meaning no longer roughly coincide, as they do in the symbol, that is, because meaning is essentially foreign to signs, signs taken by themselves do not mean anything. This distinguishes signs from symbols in the production of meaning, which takes place in the mind’s labor of interiorization. For once the meaning deposited in signs is separated from the externality that unavoidably clings to any and all employment of images, all that remains is pure thought. Of

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the images themselves, nothing relevant remains. The mind or spirit is to be free from all traces of the employment of signs; when it knows, it is supposed to be pure. And it does so, in the end, quite simply by reading—by “reading away [auflesen].”15 Whether symbols or signs are concerned, in either case it is up to thinking to read or pick out the meaning deposited in them, for “the meaning is only the thought itself,”16 liberated from all externality, which to variable degrees clouds and envelops it in signs and symbols. Thinking is the communion of spirit: as if sign after sign “were read away,” as “if by being understood it vanished as a thing, just as in the enjoyment of bread and wine not only is a feeling for these mystical objects aroused, not only is the spirit made alive, but the objects vanish as objects.”17 Ultimately, the sublating interiorization of an intuition at first external and then made pictorial can be accomplished only in this way, only through this eucharistic hermeneutics of spirit. In Hegel being and thinking coincide once more in the end; it is always in this loop that the mind or spirit produces meaning, even if “[t]hose who have no comprehension of philosophy become speechless … when they hear the proposition that Thought is Being. None the less, underlying all our actions is the presupposition of the unity of Thought and Being.”18 Symbols, but above all and first of all signs, which have more freedom and contain symbols’ external pictoriality only in a sublated form, are media of spirit on the path from intuition to the pure thought of its meaning. To get from intuiting via representing to thinking, therefore, it is necessary first of all to write down signs and then to read them away, best of all in the imagination. If we want to educate ourselves, that is, to know something via a labor of the mind, indeed, if we want to think, we have to master the basic techniques of the literate. Hegel considered this point important enough to emphasize in particular that “learning to read and write … contributes much to give stability and independence to the inward realm of mental life.”19 This—and only this—was the way in which Hegel thought of all activity of the mind or spirit, as a labor of reading and writing that sublated any and all sense intuition. For Hegel, talk of purely symbolic thinking would have been completely nonsensical. For him, as for so many before and after him, that would simply be a kind of calculation. Accordingly, his Logic, which after all strove to “display the realm of thought philosophically, that is, in its own immanent activity”20 over against all attempts at calculizing it, was a rampart against the externality of all symbols, against the emptiness of the employment of symbols, against “a calculus void of concept” and “the dead bones of logic”21 generally. While for Hegel, symbols were always “mere symbols,”22 number seemed to be such in the extreme: “[I]t has retained

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nothing of the senses except the abstract determination of externality itself, and in it the senses are thus brought closest to thought. Number is the pure thought of thought’s own externalization.”23 Because numbers are without any meaning whatsoever, they can neither be read nor thought, at least not by dyed-in-the-wool literate types. Accordingly, there was nothing to be gained for thinking from the science of number, arithmetic—quite the contrary, since arithmetic worked on knowledge of what was without meaning and thought. It was the apex of nonthinking itself: Arithmetic is an analytical science, since all the combinations and all the differences that occur in its subject matter do not originate in it but are imported into it entirely from outside. Arithmetic does not have any object that might harbor within it such inner relations as would be concealed to knowledge at f irst, because they are not given in its immediate representation, but are elicited only through the effort of cognition. Not only does arithmetic not contain the concept and the intellectual task of conceptualization that goes with it: it is the very opposite of the concept. Here, because of the indifference of the combined to the combining—a combining that lacks necessity—thought finds itself engaged in an activity which is at the same time the utter externalization of itself, a tour de force in which it moves in an element void of thought, drawing relations where there is no capacity for necessary relations. The subject matter is the abstract thought of externality itself.24

The externality of the employment of symbols that arithmetic displayed was most clearly expressed in the success Pascal, Leibniz, and, in Hegel’s own day, Charles Babbage had in constructing machines that calculated in the place of human beings. Precisely because “calculation is so much of an external and therefore mechanical business, it has been possible to manufacture machines that perform arithmetical operations with complete accuracy.” To calculate was simply “to dull the spirit and to empty it of both form and content,” it consisted “in holding on to something non-conceptual, and in combining it non-conceptually,” where a merely “external, thoughtless difference” prevailed. This “nature of calculation” prohibited any attempt at “making it the main instrument of the education of spirit, of stretching spirit on the rack in order to perfect it as a machine.”25 The living knowledge of a spirit knowing itself to be such, which Protestant literacy strove for, thus put up the fiercest resistance against the dead bones of a knowledge of numbers from which all spirit had fled. Against the mechanics of the computing machine stood the book, at once both the “Calvary of absolute

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Spirit”26 and, if read correctly, the medium of living memory. Again, more succinctly: the difference between thinking—that is to say, reading and writing—and calculating was the essential difference on which the presymbolic conception of knowledge was founded. The age of the symbolic no longer abided by the fundamental oppositions of Hegel’s system and thus demolished the conceptual enclosures of an entire epoch—chief among them the basic distinction between thinking and calculating, even if this had not entirely disappeared even in Heidegger’s day. The moment that, thanks to the detachment of the concept of the symbol from all intuition and meaning, it became possible to think not only with symbols that stood in for magnitudes and qualitative symbolic calculi emerged as well, the question concerning thinking, which as a mental activity Hegel had still been able to separate so clearly from the spiritless employment of symbols called calculation, opened up in a way completely inconceivable for Hegel. The process of knowledge formation appeared in a new light because knowledge and the world became a matter of the symbolic and entered the epoch of nonrepresentability. They were no longer a question of a hermeneutic that went from intuition via representation to thinking but had become a matter of nonintuitive formalisms that operated in the pure exterior and could not be sublated into the interior spaces of consciousnesses by any imagination whatsoever. It was irrelevant to formalisms what illustrations were mobilized to represent what exactly it was they posited. Ultimately, they accessed the real directly, without any imaginary mediations. A new logic of difference emerged that no longer thought reality as the result of contradictions but instead as a product of noncontradictory and for precisely that reason necessary relations. This epochal change in knowledge applied also and above all to its historical schematization. At the end of the process, alphabetic literacy would appear to someone like Lévi-Strauss as a long detour in human history. Where necessary relations and their systems of notation became the focus of epistemic attention it became apparent that the “savages” must already have had an inkling of the fundamental nonrepresentability of the real and of the mere “as-if” of intuitions and images, just as the symbolistically purified present came to know them anew once the adventure of alphabetic literacy had run its course.

Symbolist subversion Significantly, the formal disenchantment of the fantastic signs and symbols began with the problem imaginary numbers posed for minds trained on

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intuition. Up until the first quarter of the nineteenth century, mathematics was considered to be the science of quantities. Leonhard Euler wrote his standard textbook, first published in 1770 under the title Vollständige Anleitung zur Algebra (lit., Complete Instruction in Algebra, translated as Elements of Algebra), persuaded that “Mathematics, in general, is the science of quantity … which investigates the means of measuring quantity.” The “different branches of the Mathematics” were each “employed on a particular kind of magnitude.” Number was considered the expression of quantity as such and therefore “the foundation of all the Mathematical Sciences.”27 At the very heart of this science, however, there incessantly cropped up, in the form of imaginary numbers, entities that were indispensable for resolving higher-degree algebraic equations but had to be considered, within the framework of the knowledge of numbers, to be absurd and entirely nonsensical. Entirely unlike real numbers, square roots of negative numbers were considered the epitome of “impossible, or imaginary numbers” that “exist merely in the imagination.” They were “neither nothing, nor greater than nothing, nor less than nothing,” because 0 multiplied by itself yields 0 and, therefore, not a negative number as would have to be the case in squaring an imaginary number.28 There was no sufficient concept of imaginary numbers available. The strict separation between imaginary and real numbers also found an expression in the impossibility to geometrically construct imaginary solutions of equations, which would have to be possible according to the reciprocity of algebra and geometry Descartes had introduced. In the third book of his 1637 Geometry, we find the argument that the impossibility of constructing the roots of an equation merely indicates that there is no such root, that “the equation has neither a true nor a false root, but that all the roots are imaginary.”29 Under the conditions of intuition’s foundational power and primacy, the absence of the possibility of a geometric schema simply pointed to the impossibility of a symbolic entity: because there was nothing intuitive to correspond to imaginary numbers (since they could not be given in any spatial intuition) and because presentability was a condition of existence, imaginary numbers indicated the nonexistent as such. For reasons of usefulness, impossible numbers were employed in calculations irrespective of their essential meaninglessness and nonrepresentability. Until around 1800, there was no schema that could have endowed them with any originary meaning in intuition and thus with a foundation. According to Ernest Nagel, who published a lucid archeological study of the emergence of this destabilization in 1935—at a time, that is, when pure mathematics was shaken to its core—this difficulty had led to nothing less than a foundational

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crisis in mathematics as early as in the years around 1800. The resolution of the crisis, and this is part of the nature of such foundational crises, brought with it a radical redefinition of the traditional concepts of mathematics and, ultimately, of its very subject matter: mathematics became the science of the complex structures of symbolisms.30 Paradoxically, it took precisely the belaboring of and passage through the concept of the imaginary for mathematics to explode the correlation of algebra and geometry put in place by Descartes, to detach algebra from its geometric interpretation, and instead to institute a universal symbolic calculus beyond all intuition that made it possible to think the purely symbolic constitution of mathematics. Whereas originally, imaginary numbers merely marked the limit of representability at which all mathematical-logical intelligibility, which was ultimately due to intuition, would lose itself, around 1800 they blazed the trail for transferring mathematics to the domain of the unrepresentable. Because imaginary expressions were not just impossible but designated the impossible as such, the Scottish mathematician John Playfair argued in 1808, there could be no geometrical representation: the impossible was the unrepresentable itself and impossibility and unrepresentability were inseparable. Freed from any claim to schematizing imaginary numbers, Playfair could imagine the realm of the symbolic where mathematics operated only with signs according to certain rules, without heeding any meanings or actually existing referents whatsoever. Because he was no longer seeking to represent imaginary numbers but instead investigated the conditions of possibility of their appearance, Playfair discovered the regime and the power of signs as such. The emergence of imaginary expressions that shook the foundations of mathematics was to be grounded in nothing other than the autonomous employment of symbols. Their meaninglessness as it were showed the way to discovering a meaningless regime of symbols in general: The essential character of imaginary expression is to denote impossibility; and nothing can deprive them of this signification. Nothing like a geometrical construction can be applied to them; they are indications of the impossibility of any such construction, or of anything that can be exhibited to the senses. … There have been more than one attempt to treat imaginary expressions as denoting things really existing, or as certain geometrical magnitudes which it is impossible to assign. … The imaginary symbols, considering them quite abstractly from their significance, may be treated by the rules usually employed in those operations. … In this we have a most extraordinary power of signs. … A set of quantities, or of conditions, some of which are inconsistent with one another, are thus combined together:

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no idea is attached to the symbols; and from the series of operations, that may be said to be mechanical, and performed merely by the hand, a truth, applicable to quantities that really exist, emerges at last. … We come at truth by the help of the symbols alone; by the operations that are applicable to them alone, and that have no reference to anything really existing. Nothing, certainly, can show so clearly the power of conventional signs in matters of reasoning; and the importance, on many occasions, of neglecting the object, and attending to the sign alone.31

For intuitive thinking, talk of the impossibility of imaginary numbers had secured the boundary on which all symbols, as symbols, had always already been situated. Just as in the age of intuition, all possibility came to an end at the boundary with meaninglessness and nonrepresentability beyond which there could only be absurd symbolisms, so the step beyond this boundary led to the emergence of a new epoch in which it was possible to think purely symbolically prior to any and all representability and meaning. Subsequently the new view onto the symbolic basis of mathematics was radicalized such that the reference to quantity still present in Playfair was to disappear completely. While in Berlin, Hegel, with the peace of mind of someone thinking through (the end of) an age, railed against symbols’ purely “external nature” at the service “of the outer eye” and against all kinds of dead logic that operated only with external, purely quantitative determinations of thought and instead, in order to vivify, interiorize, and endow them with sense bet on the “means of designation that is appropriate to reason” and the medium of spirit called natural language,32 the solution of the difficulty the existence of impossible numbers posed for a hundred and fifty years began to dawn on British mathematician and logicians. Precisely by means of an unfettered affirmation of symbols’ complete lack of spirit and meaning, this solution inaugurated an epistemological revolution. Unlike generations of mathematicians before them, Robert Woodhouse, George Peacock, Duncan F. Gregory, Augustus De Morgan, William R. Hamilton, and George Boole no longer labored to find the possible sense of imaginary numbers. Instead, without wasting so much as a thought on the internality of spirit, they studied exclusively the rules of those procedures to which imaginary numbers owed their existence in the first place. By radicalizing the externality of symbols the study of formal relationships implied, they came to see the pure external of the symbolic as the basis and the proper field of mathematics and logic. The decisive idea elaborated around 1830 particularly in Cambridge, then the British center of mathematics, was impressively simple and yet, in the end, furnished an entire epoch with

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the logical-mathematical dream of a perfect metalanguage and a rigorous thinking: imaginary numbers were pure nonsense (albeit one indispensable for analysis) and mere signs of impossibility and nonexistence only so long as mathematics was conceived of as the science of quantities. But what if even quantity were merely a post facto interpretation of a pure and thus nonintuitive formalism that essentially preceded all interpretation, ignored all meanings and extrasymbolic references, and concerned itself exclusively with the relationships between signs?33 In that case, even the talk of “imaginary” and “impossible” numbers would only express a certain interpretation but say nothing about the “essence” or “nature” of the formalism at its base. Following its liberation from geometry, this idea of a difference between formalism and interpretation freed algebra from the tutelage of arithmetic as well and inaugurated the golden age of universal algebra and thus of purely symbolic calculi that brought the relational, not to say differential essence of everything symbolic to light. The question concerning the nature of mathematics implicitly raised by the existence of impossible numbers was answered by leaving the ground of the concept of quantity and intuition generally and entering into the realm of pure mathematics: mathematics had moved from being a science of quantity under the conditions of intuitive-geometric evidence, which both instituted and limited knowledge, to being a language that concerned itself with specific formal relationships that could be presented in the combinations admissible in a system of signs. Coining the difference between formalization and interpretation was an originary scene of “the crisis in intuition” that was later to be considered the signature of a profound epistemic change.34 Against the backdrop of this symbolic turn, the geometric presentation of imaginary numbers as points on a complex plane achieved by Caspar Wessel in 1799, Adrien-Quentin Buée and Jean-Robert Argand in 1806, and, in the form still authoritative today, Carl Friedrich Gauss in 1831, could count only as an interpretation. It was precisely not capable of providing imaginary numbers with a consistent logical-mathematical foundation, which was the only thing that really counted at the moment that symbolic theory undermined the foundational power of intuition. Despite the value it undoubtedly had for number theory, geometric presentation had nothing to say about what these imaginary entities were when they were not interpreted this way. Thus intuition was finished with as a foundational authority already at the emergence of non-Euclidian geometries, long before Weierstraß’s 1872 articulation of so-called monsters, that is, continuous but at no point differentiable functions that could be formally obtained although they seemed intuitively to be impossible. In a kind of a parallel action,

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Lobachevsky’s non-Euclidian geometric system of 1829, which attacked the primacy of intuition on its very own terrain, that of constructions in space, operated the epistemological transformation in question. According to Cassirer, it promoted the transmutation of geometry into a “system of symbols, a symbolic language,”35 also operated by Janós Bolyai and later (in 1854) by Bernhard Riemann, a transmutation that proceeded structurally underneath the previously precedent givenness of the concept of space and the basic concepts of the constructions possible in this space. And insofar as they already presupposed the arithmetizing of mathematics, Weierstraß’s monsters, considered the epitome of the crisis in intuition, were only possible on the condition that intuition had already been pushed back or shaken. They were symptoms of the crisis but most certainly not its trigger.36 The difference between formalism and interpretation had opened up the field of symbolic algebra for the mathematician George Peacock. In the course of the nineteenth century, this field was to become the site of experimentation with the autonomous deployment of symbols. An uninterpreted general system of signs concerning which the question of truth was devoid of meaning, symbolic algebra represented the basis of arithmetical algebra, which appeared as an always already interpreted special system of signs with extrasymbolic reference. In strictly isolating operative symbols such as + and – from all quantitative symbols, Peacock was able to turn the traditional order of algebra and arithmetic on its head: there simply were operations that were allowed in symbolic algebra but were valid in arithmetical algebra only within the limitations in place in this particular system of interpretation. This concentration on operative symbols shifted the focus away from some kind of symbols to be studied apart and filled with meaning, and toward the formal relationships between symbols and thus toward the symbolic construct as such. Arithmetical algebra fulfilled not a foundational but a heuristic function in discovering relationships between symbols that could be generalized and formally defined and thus exceeded the limited horizon of the arithmetical interpretation of symbols. The transition to the purely symbolic is clearly apparent in Peacock’s “principle of the permanence of equivalent forms,” which in his 1830 Treatise on Algebra he defines as follows: Whatever form is algebraically equivalent to another when expressed in general symbols, must continue to be equivalent whatever those symbols denote. Whatever equivalent form is discoverable in arithmetical algebra considered as the science of suggestion, when the symbols are general in their form, though specific in their value, will continue to be an equivalent form when the symbols are general in their nature as well as in their form.37

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A few years later, the difference between symbols that had permitted Peacock insight into the realm of pure form (as opposed to the realm of interpretation) was to lead to the idea of a symbolic algebra as the science of the symbolic that could be foundational for all other sciences. The opening sentences of Duncan F. Gregory’s “On the Real Nature of Symbolical Algebra,” read before the Royal Society of Edinburgh in May 1838, pointed to the age’s dream of formalizing thinking, which was to drive mathematicians’ and logicians’ efforts from this point forward: The following attempt to investigate the real nature of Symbolical Algebra, as distinguished from the various branches of analysis which come under its dominion, took its rise from certain general considerations, to which I was led in following out the principle of the separation of symbols of operation from those of quantity. … The light, then, in which I would consider symbolical algebra, is, that it is the science which treats of the combination of operations defined not by their nature, that is, by what they are or what they do, but by the laws of combination to which they are subject. And as many different kinds of operations may be included in a class defined in the manner I have mentioned, whatever can be proved of the class generally, is necessarily true of all the operations included under it. This, it may be remarked, does not arise from any analogy existing in the nature of the operations, which may be totally dissimilar, but merely from the fact that they are all subject to the same laws of combination. It is true that these laws have been in many cases suggested … by the laws of the known operations of number; but the step which is taken from arithmetical to symbolical algebra is, that, leaving out of view the nature of operations which the symbols we use represent, we suppose the existence of classes of unknown operations subject to the same laws. We are thus able to prove certain relations between the different classes of operations, which, when expressed between the symbols, are called algebraical theorems. And if we can show that any operations in any science are subject to the same laws of combination as these classes, the theorems are true of these as included in the general case.38

Knowledge about the meaning embedded in symbols, a knowledge thrown into crisis by the existence of absurd symbolisms, was transformed into knowledge about the relationships between symbols. The beginning of the end of all symbolic romanticism thus took place first and already in the minds of mathematicians around 1830—at a time, that is, when in other theaters of operation, symbols still counted as vessels of the absolute,

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when they were celebrated as appearances of an idea, expressions of the indissoluble ties that bound form to content, and sensual manifestations of the eternal power of pure content over form, when thinkers reveled in the “sentimental twilight”39 radiating from symbols. The distinction between formalism and interpretation presented mathematicians with a problem that was to characterize a century; in a peculiar way, this distinction, which robbed symbols of all profundity, traced the epistemic pathways of the hundred years to come. In light of this distinction, form and content split apart in an analytical and entirely unromantic fashion, and separately, they became starting points of the “two constant concerns throughout the nineteenth century” that, according to Michel Foucault, constitute the age’s basic epistemic characteristic. 40 Foucault recognized formalizing and interpreting to be “two correlative techniques” and “the two great forms of analysis of our time.” They emerged from the becoming-object of language; “the being of language, as it was constituted on the threshold of the modern age” was their “common ground of possibility.”41 What remained hidden from Foucault, however, is the epistemic event itself that unfolded this difference in the first place and at the same time guaranteed the possibility of systematically correlating the techniques growing out of it; he could not discover the site where this distinction developed, where the philological gaze peculiarly appeared as pure mathematics and, like a structuralism avant la lettre, recast the concept of language as a systematic concept. For Foucault, formalization and interpretation were, in principle, two strands running in parallel, “the nineteenth century’s double advance, on the one hand towards formalism in thought and on the other towards the discovery of the unconscious—towards Russell and Freud.” On one side, he saw “the attempt … to discover the pure forms that are imposed upon our unconscious before all content;” on the other, “the endeavour to raise the ground of experience, the sense of being, the lived horizon of all our knowledge to the level of our discourse.”42 As lucid as Foucault’s description may be, it was also duped by a myth that comes from the very core of the epistemic debate about the matter of thinking. Had it not always been a question of adding weight to one moment of the difference to the detriment of the other, to secure the dominance of one moment over the other and declare it to be the real or authentic moment of thinking? Yet the intersection of its moments was as old as the difference itself, their genealogy cannot be described as the history of an originary separation with a more or less fortunate ultimate fate. There always was an essential tension between formalization and interpretation; in fact, each existed and was able to structure the order of knowledge only thanks to this

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tension. Since about 1850, the order of knowledge had been characterized by a “dual transition from the naive to the formal (formalization) and from the formal to the naive (interpretation),” as Roger Martin’s apt characterization, in a different context, of the movement of the difference and the economy of this movement puts it. 43 Knowledge was produced in an incessant oscillation between these two moments, not in their definite detachment from each other. And this had been the case ever since the event in which they were coined, an event associated with one name before all others: George Boole. In Boole, we see this oscillation, which for him characterized the episteme, at work. It determines the ambivalent situation of his thinking in general. An understanding of the Boolean ambivalence between a rigorous formalism and a thinking of interpretation, of his radical symbolism that was nonetheless shot through with intuitionist moments is the entrance ticket for insight into the epistemic convolutions of the post-Hegelian age.

Operations research of the human mind For Bertrand Russell, even more so than the steam engine and the theory of evolution, George Boole was the event from which the nineteenth century could derive its claim to fame. For him, Boole’s 1854 book The Laws of Thought was “the first ever written on mathematics”44 because it was there that for the first time mathematics was identified with formal logic and understood as a function of the symbolic. For Russell, its publication marked the birth of pure mathematics. This work by a strictly Catholic Irish son of a shoemaker, a self-taught mathematician and logician who lost his first job as junior teacher in a Methodist school for daring to read mathematical treatises on Sundays and solving equations during services, was to inaugurate the great hope of Russell and many of his contemporaries around 1900, the hope that “pure thought may achieve, within our generation, such results as will place our time, in this respect, on a level with the greatest age of Greece.”45 The association of Boole with a caesura that could measure up to that associated with Greece made sense. Boole did in fact have in mind a thinking beyond Aristotelian logic, which he considered merely a very limited and lacunar interpretation of the formal laws of thinking that could be presented in a much more exact, general, and complete manner by a logical calculus. For Boole, Aristotle’s logic and the scholastic logic that followed did not count as science but merely as a collection of a few scientific truths and formulae that never attained the first principles and simple processes of thinking. Boole’s project to develop a complete system of thinking on the

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basis of a pervasive logical-mathematical formalization marked a change of epoch that was to upend, first of all, the thinking of thinking. Although still venerated, Aristotelian logic was clearly on its way out. The merits and defects of the Aristotelian theory are both due to the same cause. We must regard it less as a Science than as an Art—and to a great degree as a mnemonic Art. It is rather a Natural History of the forms in which human thought has been actually developed than an inquiry into the possible—the universal—forms in which thought admits of being developed in virtue of the constitution of the human mind. … We might perhaps adopt a mechanical analogy and say that in the ages of its early culture human thought wore for itself tracks and grooves in which though not constrained by law it became dispersed by habit and association to run, and that the genius of Aristotle first sought to map out those tracks and to determine their plan. 46

Such a sober treatment of the great philosophical heritage of alphabetic thinking and the raw symbolism of letters already known to the Aristotle of the Prior Analytics was quite fitting for Boole, who had begun reading books in mathematics because unlike others, they could not simply be read through in one go; given his dire financial situation, mathematics simply gave him the most material to work through for his money. 47 When in 1847, Boole, aged 32, published The Mathematical Analysis of Logic, Being an Essay Towards a Calculus of Deductive Reasoning, he was already considered one of Britain’s most important mathematicians. Three years earlier, he had received the first gold medal the Royal Society had ever awarded for work in mathematics, for the essay “On a General Method of Analysis,” which explicitly continued the work of the Cambridge School on a pure procedural calculus and the symbolization of mathematics. What he presented now announced, in its very title, a revolution in the way of thinking. The opening sentences of the booklet spelled out the main principle of symbolic algebra—that one must operate with symbols without any interpretation, solely according to their laws of association—as the methodological principle for the reformulation of logic: They who are acquainted with the present state of the theory of Symbolical Algebra, are aware, that the validity of the processes of analysis does not depend upon the interpretation of the symbols which are employed, but solely upon the laws of their combination. Every system of interpretation which does not affect the truth of the relations supposed, is equally

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admissible, and it is thus that the same process may, under one scheme of interpretation, represent the solution of a question of properties of numbers, under another, that of a geometrical problem, and under a third, that of a problem of dynamics or optics. This principle is indeed of fundamental importance. … We might justly assign it as the definitive character of a true Calculus, that it is a method resting upon the employment of Symbols, whose laws of combination are known and general, and whose results admit of a consistent interpretation. That to the existing forms of Analysis a quantitative interpretation is assigned, is the result of the circumstances by which those forms were determined, and is not to be construed into a universal condition of Analysis. It is upon the foundation of this general principle, that I purpose to establish the Calculus of Logic, and that I claim for it a place among the acknowledged forms of Mathematical Analysis, regardless that in its object and in its instruments it must at present stand alone. 48

What then followed was the birth of logic as an exact science. Logic was to sever its ties with philosophy, which was considered to be the “science of a real existence and the research of causes,”49 that is, primarily, a metaphysics of being. Logic, instead, was to go beyond all metaphysical questions of existence and thus beyond the ontological tendencies constitutive of the Aristotelian tradition and enter into an alliance with mathematics, even assure mathematics of its foundations.50 That was possible because according to Boole, symbolic logic addressed the pure language of thinking and formalized nothing less than the reality of the mental processes on which all mathematics and, all the more so, philosophy as their mere interpretation were based. Because it symbolically noted precisely those mental acts it was itself founded on, logic was to manage the trick of understanding the origin and nature of its own principles. That was what distinguished it so decisively from mathematics and made it the perfect foundational science: “Logic not only constructs a science, but also inquires into the origin and the nature of its own principles—a distinction which is denied to Mathematics.”51 The decisive “mental act” was the capacity of the mind to select, from a set of random objects, those that belong to one class, to repeat this act, and then to state the relations between classes of things. The possibility of all logical propositions and thus all operations with and relations between propositions, which since Aristotle an extremely restricted regime of syllogisms had attempted to render intelligible, were based on this originary mental capacity for forming classes and on the originary logic of classification. The vision of the new science of logic consisted in expressing all fundamental

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operations of the mind, that is, the reality of mind as such, in the language of a universal calculus, which in turn was to constitute the basis of any and all interpretable calculi. The laws of thinking that formalized the reality of the mind corresponded to the laws of a universal algebra. Every spoken or written language, too, de facto embodied those laws whose most general presentation could only be achieved by means of universal algebra.52 Strictly speaking, every language was but a more or less appropriate interpretation of universal algebra. It is difficult to think a science of the symbolic in a more fundamental and consequential way than Boole’s project of what we might call, in contrast to Hegel’s history of the formation and phenomenology of the spirit, operations research of the human mind. Boole was on his way to a thinking of symbolic immanence that sought to bear witness to the reality of the mind alone. Some years later, he was to call for a nonmetaphysical language, no longer shot through with a logic of substance, “from whose vocabulary all such terms as cause and effect, operation and subject, substance and attribute, had been banished,”53 a language that would be capable of appropriately describing the mind and its laws in a pure language of relations. And this agenda, too, was imposed, as it were, by the logic of the symbolic itself, to the extent that this logic drove him to go beyond Aristotle and thus beyond an entire formation: “The aim of these investigations was in the first instance confined to the expression of the received logic, and to the forms of the Aristotelian arrangement, but it soon became apparent that restrictions were thus introduced, which were purely arbitrary and had no foundation in the nature of things.”54 It was not until seven years later that Boole provided a broad elaboration of this project of reformulating the matter of thinking in the terms of an analysis of the mind in his magnum opus, An Investigation of the Laws of Thought on Which Are Founded the Mathematical Theories of Logic and Probabilities. Read today, this book is a unique document of the epochal change and perhaps even represents the charter of structural thinking as such. The opening sentences of the treatise could not but call out all those attached to the illustrious old European entity called spirit or mind: The design of the following treatise is to investigate the fundamental laws of those operations of the mind by which reasoning is performed; to give expression to them in the symbolical language of a Calculus, and upon this foundation to establish the science of Logic and construct its method; to make that method itself the basis of a general method for the application of the mathematical doctrine of Probabilities; and, finally, to

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collect from the various elements of truth brought to view in the course of these inquiries some probable intimations concerning the nature and constitution of the human mind.55

The definition of the relationship between logic and algebra on which Boole’s calculatory “science of the mind” was based already highlighted just how deep the epistemic caesura breaking through here was, largely unheeded though it was by his contemporaries. So profound a transformation could not be grasped easily; that was Boole’s fate. The Laws of Thought had already been conceived as a comprehensive reformulation of Mathematical Analysis, which had not met with success, and until his early death at the age of 49 in 1864, Boole continued to pile fragment on fragment in hopes of teaching his contemporaries the basic insights into symbolic thinking, no longer in a mathematical exact language but in a philosophical prose he thought they might more easily understand.56 What logic and algebra shared could not be due to any kind of substantial agreement or founded on the being of its objects. Two “distinct systems of thought,” one dealing with the mere concepts of things, the other accounting for their numerical relations, they had “no community of subject.”57 Both systems of thought could only be associated on the basis of the symbolic way they proceeded. Their relationship was a function of their operational particularities alone, and demonstrating these particularities, according to Boole, led directly to the heart of thinking as a name for the symbolically structured procedures of the mind itself. The agreement in procedural questions was not simply a matter of analogies to be observed between the two. Everything analogical was merely an effect and fleeting glimpse of the formalisms behind it and had itself to be guaranteed by the firm foundation of formal laws. Only this way could the strict relationships between the two systems of thought be brought to light and everything accidental be expunged from the analytics of the function of the symbolic: “There is not only a close analogy between the operations of the mind in general reasoning and its operations in the particular science of Algebra, but there is to a considerable extent an exact agreement in the laws by which the two classes of operations are conducted.”58 Anyone who, like Boole following Gregory and Peacock, expanded the idea of the arbitrariness of signs to include the arbitrariness of their interpretation, could and had to focus on the hard facts of procedural congruence. That the interpretation of signs was only a question of conventions meant that signs could be employed in any sense whatsoever and that only the laws of their association could reveal the essence of the symbolic. All that remained when the sense deposited in signs no longer played any role in determining

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their essence was to study the way symbols were used and therefore the relations between them. The interpretation of a symbol introduced into a certain discourse had to be maintained throughout all the operations to which it was subject in this discourse. This, according to Boole, was one of the essential conditions of all employment of symbols. It also made it possible, in the analysis of discourse, to disregard the interpretations of symbols.59 Another peculiarity of symbolic thinking was that from time to time, it had noninterpretable signs appear and disappear again in the course of its processing, that is, it transitioned through noninterpretability.60 For Boole, process and interpretation diverged. The arbitrariness argument, of course, applied not only to symbols representing some kind of qualities but to the operative symbols themselves as well, which bore the brunt of analysis. The procedural laws of a discourse noted in operational symbols, for their part, were also only particular interpretations of a general procedure that essentially preceded them. They brought the laws of thinking to light only within the restricted framework of a discourse. To act within a particular discourse thus always already meant dwelling in a particular province of interpretation. Yet the provinces of interpretation—and here we are at the core of Boolean discourse analysis—belonged to one and the same empire, namely the empire of necessary truths. Algebra and logic were two separate and independent “provinces of interpretation … each subject to its own laws and conditions.”61 If, however, one found the formal agreement of their specific laws, one had reached the point where the “empire of Truth”62 and “the reign of necessity”63 began. In the empire of necessary truths, the only laws to reign were the laws of thinking. To isolate and formalize these laws as their shared basis was the goal of working through the symbolic operations of logic and algebra. That, precisely, was the task of Boole’s pure logical calculus: to present the formal system of thinking as such and to open up the empire of necessary truths prior to all specific interpretations, and that means also, and especially, prior to all applied logic and mathematics. The idea of the arbitrariness of interpretation thus led to the end of all arbitrariness, an arbitrariness that one could only be tempted into by an imagination attached to symbols, which buried the formal ground of discourse under a deluge of images. According to Boole, where there had been images, let there be strict notations to bring to the light of day the structural unconscious of everything discursive, everything that previously had disappeared into the night of thinking not yet purged symbolically. This unconscious consisted in the real operations of the mind and its formalization in the laws of thought that no imagination could capture. “[T]here exist

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general propositions expressive of necessary truths, but incapable, from the imperfection of the senses, of being exactly verified. … The domain of reason is thus revealed to us larger than that of imagination. … The empire of Truth is … larger than that of imagination.”64 It is in this sense, too, that Boole made the essential distinction between noetón and aisthetón. He declared thinking, insofar as it took place prior to all iconicity and representation according to laws and a regime of relations that could be defined with precision, to be a matter of a knowledge of the noetic.65 The exact science of knowledge brought out the noetic element, which did not depend on visualization and representation but on which, on the contrary, these latter depended. Beyond the noetic lay the empire of the art of thinking. The investigation and mapping of this realm had been the task of Aristotelianism, for example. There, in fact, it was the coincidence of the factual that reigned supreme; the unconditional reign of necessity in thinking, however, was not to be found in this domain. The symbolic notations that accounted for the noetic element could nonetheless only approximate, never completely present the reality of the mind, which as a matter of principle could not be represented. Boole was aware that the process of formalization—to which every “pure science” and above all the science that dealt with the noetic as such (and which Boole likely considered to be the epitome of pure science) was subject—was an open-ended process. Similar to Leibniz’s conception, the limits of formalization lay where the realm of pure intuition began, the realm of immediate, all at once insight into the real, an insight to which the human being qua finitude was denied access. The question of the ground of the possibility of formalizing thinking, the question of why the laws of thinking could be noted with mathematical precision at all, was—and this forms part of the signature of all formal reflection—quite simply suspended: Whence it is that the ultimate laws of Logic are mathematical in their form; why they are, except in a single point, identical with the general laws of Number; and why in that particular point they differ;—are questions upon which it might not be very remote from presumption to endeavour to pronounce a positive judgment. Probably they lie beyond the reach of our limited faculties. It may, perhaps, be permitted to the mind to attain a knowledge of the laws to which it is itself subject, without its being also given to it to understand their ground and origin, or even, except in a very limited degree, to comprehend their fitness for their end, as compared with other and conceivable systems of law. … These considerations furnish

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a sufficient answer to all protests against the exhibition of Logic in the form of a Calculus. It is not because we choose to assign to it such a mode of manifestation, but because the ultimate laws of thought render that mode possible, and prescribe its character, and forbid, as it would seem, the perfect manifestation of the science in any other form, that such a mode demands adoption.66

For a thinking of formal relations, there could no longer be any substantial reasons. The rejection of questions of origin went hand and hand with the concurrent insistence that a particular presentation was not for all that simply arbitrary but, in a way that could not be specified, constituted a function of what was to be presented, was in a sense its pure manifestation. The weight of thinking was no longer determined by some sort of incalculable substances, the burden of which it never ceased to bear and from which it ultimately derived all its substantiality. It rested solely in itself, in the immanence of its processes and their lawfulness, to which symbolisms, the notations of the real of the mind as such, bore witness. While logic and arithmetical algebra were in principle subject to the same formal laws, such as the commutative or distributive law, their difference culminated in the law, x2 = x, which applied to logic alone. Because it did not make sense when interpreted arithmetically, it was the clearest illustration of the dismissal of the arithmetical interpretation of algebra and symbolic thinking: [A]s constituting the essential ground of difference between those forms of inference with which Logic is conversant, and those which present themselves in the particular science of Number, the law in question is deserving of more than a passing notice. It may be said that it lies at the very foundation of general reasoning,—that it governs those intellectual acts of conception or of imagination which are preliminary to the process of logical deduction, and that it gives to the processes themselves much of their actual form and expression. It may hence be affirmed that this law constitutes the germ or seminal principle, of which every approximation to a general method in Logic is the more or less perfect development.67

It was just the kind of simplicity with which this law was to unlock the foundation of the logic that would also allow it to be developed: if the combination of two letter symbols in the form xy expresses the entire class of objects to which the names or qualities represented by x and y can be applied together, then it follows that the two symbols have the exact same meaning and that the combination expresses no more than what could

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be expressed by each symbol on its own. Formulated as an equation, this meant nothing else but: xy = x. Now, if y has the same meaning as x, then y in this equation can be replaced by x, which leads to xx = x or, according to the procedures of arithmetical algebra, to x2 = x. This law indicated the limit case in which x and y are in fact identical. The evidence Boole sought to express with this equation was that to the extent to which the different meanings of x and y approximate each other, the class of things designated by the combination xy approximates identity with that class expressed by only x or y. According to Boole, language provided a wealth of examples of this law: To say “good, good,” in relation to any subject, though a cumbrous and useless pleonasm, is the same as to say “good.” Thus “good, good” men, is equivalent to “good” men. Such repetitions of words are indeed sometimes employed to heighten a quality or strengthen an affirmation. But this effect is merely secondary and conventional; it is not founded in the intrinsic relations of language and thought. Most of the operations which we observe in nature, or perform ourselves, are of such a kind that their effect is augmented by repetition, and this circumstance prepares us to expect the same thing in language, and even to use repetition when we design to speak with emphasis. But neither in strict reasoning nor in exact discourse is there any just ground for such a practice.68

This law was basic for all of Boole’s formalism and ultimately even determined the preeminent epistemic position he assigned to his science of logic. It was basic formally because it indicated not only the difference between the logical and arithmetical systems of thought but, under certain conditions, also and especially their shared formal ground. That, really, was its systematic point: the law x2 = x applied not only within the framework of a logical symbolism but, for the values 0 and 1, to the symbols of numerical algebra as well. Given that all other logical principles corresponded to those of arithmetical algebra, Boole argued, the foundation would be laid for an algebra of logic if it were possible to give a “logical value” for the values 0 and 1. At least in formal terms, this algebra corresponded completely to a special arithmetical algebra. “The laws, the axioms, and the processes, of such an Algebra,” which could only take the values 0 and 1 and was thus binary, “will be identical in their whole extent with the laws, the axioms, and the processes of an Algebra of Logic. Difference of interpretation will alone divide them. Upon this principle the method of the following work is established.”69 The logical interpretability of the values 0 and 1 was to

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determine whether algebra could constitute the sought-for perfect mode of presenting the laws of thinking, which logic and arithmetic merely actualized in different systems. According to Boole’s solution, the values 0 and 1 in the system of logic stood for “Nothing” and the “Universe.” They marked the relative boundaries of every discourse, “for they are the limits of the possible interpretations of general names, none of which can relate to fewer individuals than are comprised in Nothing, or to more than are comprised in the Universe.”70 The 1 stood for the “Universe of discourse,” it described “the range of things concerning which we reason or discourse.”71 All discursivity was thus to fit into the narrow frame of a binary algebra; it was simply not possible to treat of more than everything and or less than nothing. To take the simplest example, which nonetheless captures the foundational mental act of classification: if x represented some class of things, then 1 – x stood for the complementary class of things, that is, for all objects of a whole that were not part of class x. So simple were the beginnings of what eighty years later made it possible for the universe of what can be said to fit into relay circuits, thanks to Shannon’s Boolean algebra. At the same time—and this is the highly problematic theological implication of Boole’s logic—the values 0 and 1 also indicated the absolute limits of human discursivity, which constrained even the efforts at formalizing this discursivity. For Boole, the limits of binary algebra, and the symbol 1 above all, were “limiting states” that delineated thinking as such, at least to the extent that, as finite thinking, it was always only approximating the universality, eternity, and infinity that reigned in the realm of necessary truths. Binary algebra was the most perfect form finite thinking could take. Nonetheless, this procedure amounted only to achieving the greatest possible proximity to the necessary truths. Finitude precluded an actual entry into this realm. Whether this should be interpreted metaphysically or not was, as Boole explicitly states, “a matter of indifference.”72 He nonetheless evoked, with an unmistakable theological accent, the unavoidable limits of all formalization. Human beings were left with no other option than to remain within interpretation, even if they reached the greatest heights of formalization.73 According to Boole, the law of thought x2 = x only noted in an exact form what metaphysicians since Aristotle had called the principle of contradiction. Without ever having gained insight into its own origin in the reality of the mind, this metaphysical axiom was to have been but a consequence and mere interpretation of what Boole considered the “fundamental equation of thought”74: “That axiom of metaphysicians which is termed the principle of contradiction, and which affirms that it is impossible for any being to possess a quality, and at the same time not

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to possess it, is a consequence of the fundamental law of thought, whose expression is x2 = x.”75 The equation x (1–x) = 0, which is a transformation of x2 = x within the framework of a binary algebra, stated that “the same attribute cannot at the same time belong and not belong to the same subject in the same respect” as Aristotle describes “the most certain principle of all” in the fourth book of the Metaphysics. For if x represented some class of things and 1–x the opposite or complementary class of things not contained in x, then x (1–x) = 0 simply stated that there exists no class that simultaneously is x and is not x. According to Boole, Aristotle had already understood that the principle of contradiction is the axiom of axioms, that is, the principle of axiomatic thinking, and had thereby recognized, implicitly, the essentially dichotomous structure of logical analysis. And he understood, moreover, that there had to be axioms like this principle that were, precisely, unprovable if thinking was not simply to get lost in an infinity of justifications. For Aristotle, it is proof of a “want of education” to demand proof of the most certain of principles, “for not to know of what things one may demand demonstration, and of what one may not, argues simply want of education. For it is impossible that there should be demonstration of absolutely everything; there would be an infinite regress.”76 Yet for him, just where demonstration was to come to an end was decided by philosophical knowledge of what is as such. Knowing that something cannot be and not be at the same time was a question of philosophical education. Breaking off demonstration was a question of basic metaphysical data. It is not by coincidence that within his system, Aristotle’s discussion of the question of logical axioms is situated in the Metaphysics. Yet for Boole, as he remarks in a posthumous note on the relevant section of the Metaphysics, the fact that the principle of contradiction could be shown to be a mere interpretation of a formal law indicated “that all true axioms whatever are but the necessary interpretation of the laws of the human mind—not truths innately stamped upon the mind without reference to its constitution, but immediate results of the conditions under which its operations are performed.”77 If the axiom of axioms could be deciphered as an interpretation of a law of the human mind, all the other axioms, which as a matter of principle were subordinate to it, had to be laws of the mind all the more. Deciphering the axiomatic as interpretative representation of the laws of thinking allowed for resolving the foundation of the unity of being on a logic of substance, on which Aristotle based the principle of contradiction and all axiomatics, in a logic of necessary relationships that testified to the conditions of the mind alone: “Nothing is more likely than that the mind should be subjected to some conditions and that these should determine the existence of some necessary relations

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among its conceptions.”78 In contrast to all the other sciences, which were only applications of the axioms, the science of the laws of thinking was to articulate the laws of thinking at the basis of the other sciences as such, to “embody” them even in their general methods, to be the incarnation of the laws of thinking themselves, “and become as universal in its actual processes as in the laws upon which they are based.”79 This marked the birth of the exact science of logic as the foundational science of axiomatic thinking. The practically unlimited number of known theorems and the infinite number of possible theorems yet unknown, and thus the general truths of the sciences as a whole, rested on the foundation of a few simple axioms: “Let us def ine as fundamental those laws and principles from which all other general truths of science may be deduced, and into which they may all be again resolved.”80 The exact science of logic, which testified to the reality of the mind and was in turn “confirmed by the very testimony of the mind,”81 prepared the ground for axiomatic knowledge as such. Its claim to truth and thus the claim to truth of all the sciences formally subordinate to axiomatic thinking was no longer entrusted to ultimate metaphysical positions. Instead, it had become—this much was clear already some fifty years before Hilbert82—a question of the “completeness” of the “system”83 of a few simple axioms and the generality of the symbolic method. In the age of axiomatic thinking to come, symbolic logicians, concerned with formalizing the operations of the mind and thus with the ground of all axiomatics, were to become sole custodians of what since Aristotle had been left to philosophers’ imagination alone: the matter of thinking. Perhaps nothing contributed as much to making Boole an epistemic event as the fundamental equation of thinking he saw in x2 = x. In any case, this equation lent his formalistic mind the wings that were to carry it all the way to the symbolic beyond. Boole expanded it into the “law of duality” and thus realized what was to become the fundamental tendency of twentieth-century structural thinking. Because the law x2 = x was a second-order equation, he simply concluded that we perform the operation of analysis and classification, by division into pairs of opposites, or, as it is technically said, by dichotomy. Now if the equation in question had been of the third degree, still admitting of interpretation as such, the mental division must have been threefold in character, and we must have proceeded by a species of trichotomy, the real nature of which it is impossible for us, with our existing faculties, adequately to conceive.84

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Insofar as it actualized nothing but the law of duality, the capacity for originary classification was seen as manifesting the structural constitution of the human mind as such. It testified to the originary mental act of dividing and forming relations and thus to an unavoidable structural order of things: For the first place it may be remarked that we are not confined to the contemplation of things as individuals unconnected with each other but we are able to conceive of them as arranged in classes each of which includes many individuals and under this aspect we designate them by a common or general name. … In short the world is so constituted as to embrace innumerable individuals possessed of common properties and attributes and the human mind is so constituted as to possess a capacity of forming general ideas and contemplating classes as well as individuals. Finally Language is so constituted as to admit of the expression either of individual things by proper names or of classes of things by common names.85

The mental act of forming classes on which all knowledge was based in the first place was expressed in the constitution of language, through which shimmered the regime of classification that structured the order of things. Language was conceived of as a “system adapted to an end or purpose” whose “elements” were to be isolated in order to then define their “mutual relation and dependence.” In Boole, “language” always meant a system of elements as “co-ordinate parts of a system.”86 Even if he could not yet have been aware of such elementary distinctions as phonemes, for example, and defined the elements of language as signs or symbols, language for him was already a systematic, strictly relational entity. For Boole’s systemic thinking, it did not much matter whether signs or symbols were conceived of as representations of things and their relationships or as presentations of concepts, representations, and intellectual procedures. As soon as one studied linguistic elements and the laws of their relationships, one always already studied dually-structured mental operations and the laws of thinking, which preceded them and of which, ultimately, these operations were but a manifestation. The system of language testified to the elementary structures and the in principle systemic constitution of the mind itself. The far-reaching consequence of Boole’s approach was that science in general, and the science of the laws of thinking in particular, was not weighed down by questions of essence but “independent of metaphysical distinctions”87 and concerned solely with the relationships between things: “The object of science, properly so-called, is the knowledge of laws and relations.”88 This

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was a principle of structuralism avant la lettre. Boole’s departure for the symbolic beyond inaugurated the discourse that was to become dominant a hundred years later thanks to Jakobson and Lévi-Strauss and to dream of a universal science of the mind that would trace the mind’s dual regime from the elementary structures of languages and societies all the way to the genetic information of the human being. Since Boole, and in this, too, the structuralists are his late inheritors, there has no longer been any need for metaphysical reflections on the nature or essence of the mind to articulate the laws that governed its operations: “if the laws in question are really deduced from observation, they have a real existence as laws of the human mind, independently of any metaphysical theory which may seem to be involved in the mode of their statement.”89 In this originary structuralism, the various faculties of the mind, generally referred to in philosophical and everyday discourse by names such as “Attention, Simple Apprehension, Conception or Imagination, Abstraction, &c.,” were amalgamated into a whole of formal operations that no longer needed any supporting essential entity and moreover refused to conform to the distinctions of philosophical asset management: “We may merge these different titles under the one generic name of Operations of the human mind, define these operations so far as is necessary … and then seek to express their ultimate laws.”90 “Mind” was simply the name given to a manifold of modes of operation. Whenever the traditional names of particular capacities of the mind came up in Boole’s own text, they allegedly did so only coincidentally, by force of habit, as it were: “I shall do so without implying thereby that I accept the theory that the mind possesses such and such powers and faculties as distinct elements of its activity.”91 The individual elements of every proposition concerning the laws of thinking had to be “independent of metaphysical theories of the nature of the mind,” just as “the practical application of such elements to the construction of a system or method of reasoning must also be independent of metaphysical distinctions.”92 If it proved impossible to stop speaking of mind or spirit, then it was hardly possible to adopt a more sober and as it were less spirited tone. As much as Boole’s formalization of the operations of the mind constituted a training in metaphysical abstinence, it moreover abstained from any kind of psychologization. A posthumous fragment succinctly articulates the systematic point of this double abstinence: The phenomenal study of things belongs to physics or to psychology, the inquiry into their absolute nature if indeed such an inquiry be possible is the business of metaphysics. Logic has other objects and is concerned

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with other relations—but as the relations with which it is concerned are universal. … Logic stands related to all other sciences.93

The exact science of logic occupied a peculiar position between a posteriori and a priori. Its objects, the laws of thinking, derived first of all from the structure of language and the mental acts apparent there and yet granted insight into symbolic immanence as such, thanks to the formalization of the reality of mental operations manifest in language. The oscillation between formalization and interpretation opened up the intermediary realm of a symbolic analysis of mind between all experiential sciences and metaphysical speculation. The progress of experimental psychology in the second half of the nineteenth century may have suggested the kind of post-facto misreading of the title Laws of Thought that was not limited to Russell’s assertion that Boole erroneously assumed to be dealing with the laws of thinking when, contrary to his conviction, the question of how human beings really thought was really quite irrelevant to what he was doing: “His book was in fact concerned with formal logic, and this is the same thing as mathematics.”94 For Boole, the question concerning thinking was exclusively of a systemic nature and situated solely in the domain of the noetic and the normative. Strictly speaking, then, thinking could really be treated of only in the language of pure mathematics insofar as in doing so one always already dwelled in the domain proper to the necessary truths beyond all experience and empiricity. The laws of thinking found in the procedures of concept formation and inference and in those operations whose instrument or expression was language, were “of the same kind” as the laws of the acknowledged procedures of mathematics. The descent into the turmoil of facticity only brought to light the fact that the actual implementation of thinking transgressed the laws of a mathematics of thinking: “The mathematical laws of reasoning are, properly speaking, the laws of right reasoning only, and their actual transgression is a perpetually recurring phænomenon. … We must admit that there exist laws which even the rigour of their mathematical forms does not preserve from violation.”95 In isolating the noetic element in the continual processing of the mind and giving it a purely mathematical expression, the laws of thinking even indicated the fundamental place mathematics occupied in the system of knowledge. But upon the very ground that human thought, traced to its ultimate elements, reveals itself in mathematical forms, we have a presumption that the mathematical sciences occupy, by the constitution of our nature, a fundamental place in human knowledge, and that no system of mental culture can be complete or fundamental, which altogether neglects them.96

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Boole’s treatment of thinking and mind may be due above all to the fact that the labor of symbolizing mathematics, as insight into the autonomy and immanence of all employment of symbols, brought out the function of the symbolic as such. He had an inkling of the necessary rearticulation of the entire episteme in light of the symbolic and of the possibility that the symbolic traverses the matter of the human being as such. The formalization of the operations of the mind and thus the attempt at demonstrating the formal constitution and symbolic ground of thinking were perhaps the most radical step that could be taken in this direction. Boole once spoke of the desire to understand that which allows for understanding everything else, a desire undermined and at the same time renewed by the emergence of new enigmas. The appearance of the function of the symbolic for him was such an enigma, one that an entire age was to tackle after him. The power Boole attributed to the law of duality as the signature of a systemically structured mind ultimately led him to conceive of the history of thinking expressed in philosophical and theological dualisms as an immense misinterpretation of the formal grounds of thinking and especially of the formalism of the first law of thinking. The law of duality came with a peculiar tendency toward error that drove the history of thinking. All accord and harmony, which this law in its pure form was able to bring about and which, not least of all, Boolean formalism amply demonstrated, could turn into a regime of conflict and opposition. This way, false dualist images of the world and of thinking had emerged and left their mark on the history of thinking. Yet they could not for all that be considered arbitrary because even in their state of error, they could be deciphered formally: As all other mental acts and procedures are beset by their peculiar fallacies, so the operation of that law of thought termed in this work the law of duality may have its own peculiar tendency to error, exalting mere want of agreement into contrariety, and thus form a world which we necessarily view as formed of parts supplemental to each other, framing the conception of a world fundamentally divided by opposing powers. Such, with some large but hasty inductions from phænomena, may have been the origin of dualism,—independently of the question whether dualism is in any form a true theory or not.97

The law of duality haunted the entire history of the great systems of thought—from the Pythagorean system, teeming with antitheses, the Manichean doctrine, the gnostic regimes of duality, and the Platonism of what is and what is not, all the way to the last and perhaps most powerful manifesto of the reign of contradiction, the Hegelian system.

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The reality of the mind, one might infer from Boole’s insight, actualizes itself to the extent that as such, that is, formally, it remained unthought and nonunderstood in more or less distorted figures. At the end of Laws of Thought, a genealogical gaze broke through on the ground of the partially cleared formal basis of the laws of thinking, a gaze that rendered the history of thinking intelligible as the long duration of a misunderstanding of the symbolic order of thinking. Boole conceived of thinking as a formal system; in turn, the history of systems of thought in large part stood for the imaginations that never ceased overgrowing and obscuring the as yet undiscovered symbolic ground, all the while remaining its most original actualizations. Beside the historical actualizations of the law of duality, Boole also pointed to another date in intellectual history that seemed to him a mere manifestation of the close formal relationship between the concept of unity in the realm of numbers and the concept of unity in the universe of logic. Just as each of these two concepts occupied the same relative place in their respective systems and were subject to the same formal laws, he argued, labor on demonstrating their identity and describing the nature of this unity had continued ever since the Presocratics’ metaphysical speculations. Boole quite openly dreamed of a history of thinking that would consist in aligning all laws of thinking in their scientific, and that meant formal, expression with those factual forms they were given by “the physical speculation in early ages, and metaphysical speculation in all ages.”98 The real writing of thinking always remained decipherable despite all obscurations and disfigurations. Boole shared this certainty with all attempts, of which there is no lack, at reading this writing. Hegel, for example, developed the history of spirit from the historical heights of alphabetical writing. Boole, in possession of at least the basis of a comprehensive symbolism, had understood in principle that the diachrony of thinking could not be resolved on the basis of its formal synchrony. The history of thinking he imagined would have been the history of actualizations of universal form, of the variety of forms taken by attempts at pure form—or the interminable history of the conflict between formalization and interpretation. It might be of interest to historians of science whether or not the setup of Boole’s algebra of logic and his law of duality especially can already be discerned in Leibniz.99 In any case, the event character of the radical reformulation of the question of thinking as exact science of logic remains unaffected. Boole played a fundamental role in gaining a deeper understanding of the relationships between symbols. He opened up the new discursive space of the symbolic relationships and thus emerged, historically as well as systematically, at the core of the transformation of a substantial into a strictly

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relational knowledge. Moreover, he resolved the fundamental problem of axiomatic thinking—the immanent justifiability of noncontradiction without recourse to a precedent Being—by referring to the completeness of the systems, and he did so at the very beginning of the history of the powerful figure of anchoring the system in the contradictory regime of Being and very early in the emergence of axiomatic thinking. The breaking of the spell of the completeness argument some one hundred years later is itself merely part of the episteme that Boole was instrumental in opening up. His work spelled out the historical-epistemological break that Cassirer described as the transition from substantial to functional concepts and in whose center emerged the problem of the symbolic that threw thinking, exposed to the regime of nonintuitive formalism, into crisis. In any case, in the wake of Boole, labor began on symbolisms resting purely in themselves, symbolisms that were even to become foundational of the symbolically constituted mathematics to whose emergence they owed their existence. In order to be truly symbolic, knowledge of the symbolic had to be detached from the last remnants of representation. A knowledge of the principles of a “symbolic notation” as such came into being. Symbolic logic thus sought to defend its place as a pure science of thinking against psychology in particular and rid thinking of its psychological ballast. Unlike nonlogistic opponents of psychologism such as Husserl, logistics, in the words of Heinrich Scholz’s 1931 survey of modern formal logic, would claim to have “symbolized logic to such an extent that a psychological interpretation of the symbolized expression is a priori impossible.”100 Like few others, Frege fought off psychologism. Thinking was no longer to be a representable process of the soul, “not an inner generation … but the grasping of thoughts which are already present objectively.”101 The desire to wipe out any and all representative functions, which Foucault once called, with great precision, the “concern for formalization,”102 distinguished the logistic agenda from the seventeenth century’s classical organizational agenda of a universal language which, despite all formalist dreams, was pervaded by the idea of representation. Then as now, the crucial point was the invention of a language. Yet this new language “would be a symbolism rather than a language,” and it “would for that reason be transparent to thought in the very movement that permits it to know”103 rather than merely come in to aid knowledge. Articulating the principles of a symbolism was to save thinking from the mistakes in which it would unavoidably become entangled should it keep too much to evidence and images, residually manifest in a language not yet purified symbolistically, not yet broken up into symbolic structure. Indeed, it even served “to liberate logic from the unbearable pressure of the problem of evidence”104 itself.

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On behalf of an entire current in contemporary research, Frege wrote to Husserl in the fall of 1906: It seems to me that logicians still cling too much to language and grammar and are too much entangled in psychology. … Only now that logical analysis proper has become possible can the logical elements be recognized, and we can see the clearing in the forest. … It cannot be the task of logic to investigate language and determine what is contained in a linguistic expression. Someone who wants to learn logic from language is like an adult who wants to learn how to think from a child. When men created language, they were at the stage of childish pictorial thinking. Languages are not made so as to match logic’s ruler. Even the logical element in language seems hidden behind pictures that are not always accurate. At an early time in the creation of language there occurred, it seems, a tremendous exuberance in the growth of linguistic forms. At a later time much of this had to be got rid of again and simplified. The main task of the logician is to free himself from language and to simplify it. Logic should be the judge of languages.105

Already in his 1879 Begriffsschrift, Frege had dismantled the structure of language and done away with the grammatical confusions of the subject– predicate relationship that threatened all rigorous thinking. Instead, the notation system of “pure thought” was henceforth governed by the relational concepts argument and function. Symbolic thinking was thus relieved of any remainder of substantial logic and any tendency toward venerating images, which might at least implicitly have been metaphysically grounded in a relational thinking that kept to the grammatical structure of language. Whatever the dark spot and the reasons for the impossibility of implementing the transparency ideal of, for example, a “formula language of pure thought” may have been: it did in fact take this kind of obsession with logical-symbolic form for the function of the symbolic really to be separated from the function of the imaginary and for symbolic thinking really to be separated from intuitive thinking. They were the necessary albeit not sufficient condition of a great historical-epistemological transformation at whose end the world could finally begin to become symbolic through and through. The exact knowledge of the structure of symbolic systems that began to accumulate in pure mathematics and logic in the second half of the nineteenth century was the epistemological precondition that would one day allow the order of things to appear as a symbolic order and for an understanding of world to map onto an understanding of structure. By

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1918, in any case, Wittgenstein was even able to think an iconicity purified of anything imaginary, in which “[e]very picture is also a logical picture” and where images strictly speaking had nothing in common with reality but their logical form.106 Moreover, it was now possible to articulate, in all desirable clarity, one of the negative-ontological principles of the new epistemic situation: “The facts in logical space are the world.”107 One had so far penetrated the symbolic nature of the world that the idea could arise that the symbolical constitution of world could no longer even be pronounced; it simply showed itself, nothing more. An entire age was encouraged to discard the Jacob’s ladder of the propositions that had once allowed it to ascend to symbolic heaven, to “surmount” them in order to see “the world rightly.”108 And indeed, some twenty years later, when formalisms on paper abounded, machines began to show, only to show, that the world is symbolic.

Unrepresentable communication Michel Serres has spoken of a “local knowledge that poses problems to knowledge as a whole or provides it with solutions and models” and a “local technology that upsets society, its relation to the world, and its internal balance of power.”109 There exist local events with a tendency to traverse and upset the space of knowledge as such, to transform the epistemic order as well as its principles. The pressure exercised by local events may even go so far as to force a reformulation of what thinking means as such and result in a great epistemic transformation, with all the messiness such a crisis implies. The emergence of a knowledge of the relationships between symbols was such a local event with an all-encompassing expansion, the local point where a massive epistemic conflagration was sparked. Intricately tied in with the problem of essential irrepresentabilities in the realm of quantities, it became engaged, as further irrepresentabilities emerged in other fields of knowledge that practically forced the abandonment of intuition, in an unstoppable movement of ramification and circulation. The crisis in intuition that dominated mathematical knowledge had a counterpart in a crisis of physical knowledge. And just as in the case of mathematics, the crisis both triggered and resulted from a new thinking of symbolic relationships, so in the case of physics, symbolism overthrew the foundational authority of intuition. Around 1900, the crisis of intuition in mathematics had reached such proportions that in writing against the symbolic turn, physicist and mathematician Henri Poincaré could designate with the “word … intuition”

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only “something else” than pure logic and appeal not to its traditional foundational function but to “its rôle as complement, I was about to say as counterpoise or as antidote of logic.”110 “Intuition,” he admitted, “does not give us certainty. This is why the evolution had to happen.”111 But for Poincaré, intuition was the only guarantee for mathematics’ connection with reality and, unlike empty logical repetition, it was an “instrument of invention.”112 The epistemic upheaval brought about by the entry into the symbolic age would continue as long as intuition had not assumed its new position as a corrective for symbolisms. In 1895, the mathematician, Felix Klein, who, seen through the prism of Poincaré’s distinction between “two entirely different kinds of minds,”113 may count as a truly intuitive mind, gave a lecture in Göttingen diagnosing “The Arithmetizing of Mathematics,” which counts among the most important documents concerning the situation of mathematics in those years. He described the starting point of the program of arithmetizing mathematics, which he considered characteristic of the nineteenth century, in terms of problems that arose with respect to intuition: Gauss, taking for granted the continuity of space, unhesitatingly used space intuition as a basis for his proofs; but closer investigation showed not only that many special points still needed proof, but also that space intuition had led to the too hasty assumption of the generality of certain theorems that are by no means general. Hence arose the demand for exclusively arithmetical methods of proof; nothing shall be accepted as a part of the science unless its rigorous truth can be clearly demonstrated by the ordinary operations of analysis. … The arithmetizing of mathematics began originally, as I pointed out, by ousting space intuition.114

As much as he celebrated “the establishment, as it were, of law and order after the long and victorious campaign”115 in the wake of the mathematical discoveries of the eighteenth century, Klein himself resolutely advocated a fundamental role for intuition in mathematics. Ever since his legendary inaugural lecture, the so-called Erlangen Program of 1872, he had never stopped emphasizing the value of intuition. In the essay on arithmetization, too, he called for “secur[ing] to intuition her due share in our science.”116 As important as logical deduction and noncontradiction might be in mathematics, intuition was nonetheless to preserve “its special province.”117 Spatial intuition, to be sure, was imprecise as a matter of principle. As the non-Euclidean geometries demonstrated, it needed to be “idealize[d]” “in order that we may subject it to mathematical treatment.” Yet once it was idealized, intuition could in turn give “rise to new refinements of our

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analytical ideas”118: “Logical investigation is not in place until intuition has completed the task of idealization.”119 The essential imprecision of intuition, only ever remedied by idealization, ruined its foundational function once and for all. Yet intuition still performed an indispensable, namely a heuristic function: for Klein as for Poincaré, it was a tool for securing the applicability of mathematics. That is why Klein developed a veritable pedagogy of intuition whose goal was to train “naïve intuition”120 already in school and to supplement the “one-sided adherence to logical form”121 in schools and universities with intuitive apprehension and processing. He admitted that, given his rather wide conception of the term, [t]he word intuition is perhaps not well chosen; I mean it to include that instinctive feeling for the proportion of the moving parts with which the engineer criticizes the distribution of power in any piece of mechanism he has constructed; and even that indefinite conviction the practiced calculator possesses as to the convergence of any infinite process that lies before him. I maintain that mathematical intuition—so understood—is always far in advance of logical reasoning and covers a wider field.122

The question concerning “the relation between the processes of intuition and those of logical thought,” however, he considered to be an entirely nonmathematical enigma. To the horror of all formalists, elucidating “the psychological conditions of mathematical thought and their particular varieties” was to be the task of the physiology of perception and of experimental psychology.123 The calculi of symbolic logic and the program of arithmetizing mathematics had undermined the foundational function of intuition by paving the way for a pure knowledge of the relationships between symbols and thereby a knowledge of symbolic immanence. The lengthy dispute between intuitionists and formalists that culminated in the foundational crisis of mathematics in the 1920s was a key epistemic event that keenly presented the stakes and the complexity of the problems concerning the foundations of mathematics in the age of the epochal turn away from intuitive thinking. Here, where the question did not concern possible applications, as it had in Poincaré’s and Klein’s apologies of intuition, but pure mathematics, the opposition of symbolism and intuition was radicalized once more, namely insofar as the intuitionists, to counter axiomatic intensification, demanded a return to intuition in the form of the originary intuition of whole numbers as the foundational authority of mathematical knowledge. In Brouwer, the dream

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of the foundational primacy of intuition made an intuitionist comeback insofar as it designated as principle of mathematical action and construction no longer the external intuition of space but the internal intuition of time. Basic mathematical-logical research entailed all kinds of explosive epistemological and ontological questions—concerning, for example, the way in which nonintuitive thinking constitutes meanings or the ontological status of ideal objects—and led to a veritable refoundation of philosophy as phenomenology. Despite its enormous epistemic disruptive power, however, it was not the only cause of the crisis in intuition that from 1850 increasingly seized the space of knowledge. Knowledge in physics played an equal role in disrupting the primacy of intuition insofar as it covered reality with its symbolisms and led it into symbolic immanence. Knowledge concerning electricity plowed up the entire physical space of knowledge and turned it into the evental space of antisubstantialist thinking, where things dissolved into mere relations that could only be noted in a symbolic language. Cassirer grasps this point, which is decisive for the upheaval of the space of knowledge, as the conjunction of logic-mathematical and physical knowledge: “In this transformation of the general ideal of knowledge, modern science and modern logic are both involved; the development of the one is in closest connection with that of the other.”124 He was not the only one aware of this enormous epistemic synergy of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. According to Wittgenstein, who in tracing the “nimbus” of thinking, was to speak of an order “of the purest crystal” untroubled by experience where timeless objects eternally possess the properties and relationships the laws of logic and mathematics attribute to them, this order “must run through all experience.” It must concern not merely the abstraction of the forms of thinking but had to testify to the most concrete as well. For him, it was “the order of possibilities, which the world and thinking must have in common.”125 The fact that, strictly speaking, the real could no longer be presented as a matter of experience but solely as a matter of a crystalline order of logical-mathematical forms that preceded it but nonetheless was said to be not simply abstract but “the most concrete” as such, did not, as one might think, represent a panlogistic zeitgeist or hypostasize the notion of formalization. The reciprocal penetration of abstraction and concretion only spelled out the upheaval of knowledge brought about by physical field theories since about the middle of the nineteenth century, which had exorcized the demon of intuition from knowledge of the real and posited the formalization of an unrepresentable reality, initially the reality of electromagnetic field, as the task of the age and as its epistemic leitmotif. As two contemporaries as different as Cassirer and Wittgenstein

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already saw, local knowledge and local technologies had to coincide to bring about the great transformation that let a knowledge beyond images emerge. At the least the logical-mathematical knowledge of the symbolic, the symbolic knowledge of electricity or the functioning of electro-technical media together had done away with the primacy of intuition. It is from this coincidence that the nimbus of thinking resulted, which in so wondrous a manner managed to let thinking encounter the real in a purely structural way, without the mediation of intuition, and which could simultaneously be as abstract as it was concrete. In the minds of physicists, the real had become a thoroughly communicative fact, the event of pure processes of transmission. It could no longer be thought intuitively, it could only be thought and computed symbolically. The substantial world of mechanics, in which all questions of transmission ultimately disappeared in the metaphysical obscurity of an enigmatic action at a distance exercised by forces of already given particles of matter, became the invisible world of the field, a continuous medium in which communication took place constantly, and soon all of the material world seemed to be merely its function. Under the heading “field,” labor had been ongoing on the concept of pure mediality, which was to be strictly distinct ontologically from all materiality and in the end was always already to precede matter. Signif icantly, the discovery of communication as the signature of the real and of the original events of the world set in with the suspension of questions concerning the nature and essence of both the forces transmitted and the transmission itself. As James Clerk Maxwell was to confirm later, the foundation of the new notion of the field was the surprising “new symbolism”126 developed by the British “chemist, electrician and philosopher” Michael Faraday, which consisted in curved lines of force that moved in all directions away from electrified and magnetized bodies. For Faraday, these lines of force were, initially, imaginary entities that merely indicated the arrangement of individual polarized particles as an effect of an electric current transmitted among immediately adjacent but not adjoining particles. Whereas the drawing on paper of curved lines had long since accomplished the transition from a notion of transmission as action at a distance to one that conceived of transmission as a continuum, Faraday continued to believe until the 1840s that all action was transmitted, if not across perceptible then across imperceptibly small distances between adjacent particles; that is, he thought to be transmitted discontinuously what his lines already emphatically schematized as a continuum. At the very latest in a January 1844 lecture before the Royal Institution, however, Faraday saw the point of his own geometry of lines of force. Henceforth it

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was no longer just the continuum of empty space between particles that was to be responsible for the communication of electric action. Matter itself became a continuum of forces. He supposed a system of forces that existed equally and without disruption at the center of forces and in the space surrounding it.127 At least in metaphysical terms, this set the course not only for positing lines of force as primary physical entities that traversed space independent of all matter but also for the theory of force fields that surrounded particles and thus for the field theory of the real. In 1852, Faraday stated unambiguously that the lines, previously mere “representants of the magnetic power” without “reference to the physical nature of the force at the place of action,” were now considered to have “physical character” and to be “of real physical truth.”128 The external forces of the poles of a magnet, for example, can only have a relation to each other by curved lines of force through the surrounding space; and I cannot conceive curved lines of force without the conditions of a physical existence in that intermediate space. If they exist, it is not by a succession of particles … but by the condition of space free from such material particles.129

Faraday had thus endowed the lines of force with the special ontological status of originary physical entities. He wisely remained silent, however, on their nature and on the medium in which they existed. I desire to restrict the meaning of the term line of force, so that it shall imply no more than the condition of the force in any given place, as to strength and direction; and not to include … any idea of the nature of the physical cause of the phænomena; or to be tied up with, or in any way dependent on, such an idea.130

While he may on occasion have indicated that the lines of force for their part might be transmitted by an action that could be a “function of the aether” he remained skeptical when it came to positing the existence of ether.131 Precisely because he was averse to the idea of an imaginary embodiment and substantialization of lines of force in the ether, Faraday was able to think the pure mediality of relationships of communication as such. The point of his notion of the field, in any event, is that force could no longer be thought mechanically and independently of mediality. It was to be found in the continuous field surrounding the particles of matter. Force was really just an effect of the field, the antiquated name, as it were, of the

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intensity of communication in the field and certainly no longer situated in bodies where yet it had once been thought to originate. The old “action at a distance” had become an “action in the medium.” Action was thus no longer transmitted materially in linear leaps in various fluida of corpuscules of light and heat, positive and negative electricity, or northerly and southerly magnetism, as it had been at the end of the eighteenth century. It was the simple fact of uninterrupted oscillations—and it did not change anything about the notion of the field as such whether or not this process of undulation was embedded in the imaginary substance of a continuous nonmaterial “elastic-solid” by the name of luminiferous ether that served as an absolute system of reference. The emergence of the notion of field marked the birth of modern media theory because it is only from then on that it was possible and necessary to think mediality as a fundamental feature, as it were, of the real, independently of questions of substance and essence.132 The more substance and force were abandoned as constitutive elements of the world in favor of the mediality of the field, the more the real became emblematic of all that withdraws. It was possible to work on formalizing and regulating the relationships that structured the real and invent models that did not contradict the formal descriptions of pure mediality. But it was and remains, to this day, impossible to represent the real as such, that is to say, in its essence. By 1900 at the latest, pure field theory’s thoroughly medial conception of the world, as crystal clear symbolically as it was inaccessible to any kind of experience, had emerged in parallel with the media-technological armament of the world. Fifty years after Faraday and William Thomson (Lord Kelvin) had introduced the concept of the magnetic field and a good thirty years after Maxwell’s mathematical and structural description of the electromagnetic field as “that part of space which contains and surrounds bodies in electric or magnetic conditions,”133 it had been demonstrated that the field amounted to physical reality per se. Physics was in the process of becoming a pure physics of fields. Because the concept of the field implicitly touched on the essential nonrepresentability of Being, it had practically attained the status of a negative-ontological key concept. Particles of matter, according to this dream of the end of Newtonian reveries, were no longer even to be points in the space of fields. Nonspatial themselves, they were simply plunged in the spatial surroundings in which the field action originated; they were nodal points of immensely concentrated field energy. Even if the “goal of erecting a pure electromagnetic field theory of matter remained unattained for the time being,” Einstein wrote, “in principle no objection could be raised against the possibility of reaching such a goal.” In

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his view, which yields profound insight into the historical-epistemological status of the concept of the field, all that was missing was a “systematic method leading to the solution. What appears certain to me, however, is that, in the foundations of any consistent field theory, there shall not be, in addition to the concept of field, any concept concerning particles. The whole theory must be based solely on partial differential equations and their singularity-free solutions.”134 Even those unwilling to go all the way to admitting the field as the only structure of the real, to seeing in matter only the spawn and manifestation of the field, could note around 1900 that physics basically deals only with the field, this extensive medium capable of structure, that ties all the different inextensive material individualities together into the effective whole of an external world. … All connections between individuals and all reciprocal influence can come about only by means of an expansion of field effects that takes place in the extensive medium of the external world according to the physical laws of fields.135

A “conception of the world” “dwelling” entirely in the four-dimensional space-time continuum, a conception that relegated the imaginary crutch of luminiferous ether, had taken shape. All being was becoming and had been transferred “into the state of the field, which can change in place and time.”136 Physicists were the first for whom being and world had become a function of communication, governed by the laws of a symbolic structure called field. Yet, as they were working on the concept of the field, physicists realized only gradually that knowledge about electricity forced them to think strictly nonintuitively. Well into the nineteenth century and despite the increasing mathematization, the history of electric knowledge had been the history of successive images of electric forces and, attached to them, metaphysical speculation about electrical substances and fluida. The fact that at the beginning of the twentieth century, even the most formal of minds could still be haunted by a notion like that of the ether testifies to the enormous significance of the imaginary in the history of knowledge about electricity.137 Maxwell’s 1864 field equations were revolutionary because they were the first ever to describe real electromagnetic processes taking place at the speed of light by means of a pure symbolism, in a manner entirely independent of representation, and without any derivations from experience. Maxwell had converted Faraday’s images of lines of force in the electrostatic field into an exact nonintuitive form. In the transposition into the symbolic,

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the enormous wealth of relationships that Maxwell was able formally to construct between appearances had brought to light the structure of the electromagnetic field far better than Faraday’s intuition had been able to. It had also made it possible to derive a previously unknown class of appearances, namely a continuous spectrum of electric waves propagating at the speed of light. Above all, Maxwell, unlike Faraday, had succeeded in introducing the factor of time into the description of transmission. This removed any remaining possibility of providing a mechanical explanation of electric action in the field via a merely spatial arrangement of particles and charges characterized by instantaneous transmission and action at a distance.138 What was novel about Maxwell’s theory was that, in Emil Cohn’s phrase, it had outpaced experience. Yet for it to become possible at all to see what those bizarre differential equations that contradicted all prior views on the matter really showed, Heinrich Hertz in Karlsruhe still had to notice that when discharged, the Leyden jars or Rühmkorff spark coils then in use in French, English, and German laboratories produced not just sparks but also strange “rays of electric force.” Having studied their propagation in space in more detail, the supposed rays finally appeared to him, in lab book sketches dating from around Christmas 1887, not in the form of rays but in the form of waves, in a form, that is, that lived up to the theoretical descriptions Maxwell had given. Hertz subsequently derived graphs from Maxwell’s equations that turned the scrawly laboratory sketches into beautiful images and thus gave shape to something whose existence Maxwell had discovered by purely symbolic means: electromagnetic waves.139 Hertz understood that what on paper assumed the impeccable shape of waves was itself completely shapeless and that his presentation was not the result of any kind of representation but of the formalization of the nonrepresentable and shapeless alone. His work on providing experimental proof for Maxwell’s equations led him to realize that detachment from intuition was the necessary condition and a fundamental fact of electric knowledge. In his view, electric knowledge could be nothing but symbolic if the essential nonrepresentability of the electromagnetic was not to be fantasmatically exaggerated, which would always already imply a failure to describe reality. Accordingly, the name “Maxwell’s theory” for him did not apply to “Maxwell’s peculiar conceptions or methods.” Instead “Maxwell’s theory is Maxwell’s system of equations,” no more than that.140 Those who wanted to continue to rely on intuition and imagination, thereby leaving the domain of the symbolic, were free to do so, albeit only post facto and no longer under the heading of theory:

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If we wish to lend more colour to the theory [which consists only of a system of equations—EH], there is nothing to prevent us from supplementing all this and aiding our powers of imagination by concrete representations of the various conceptions as to the nature of electric polarisation, the electric current, etc. But scientific accuracy requires of us that we should in no wise confuse the simple and homely figure, as it is presented to us by nature, with the gay garment which we use to clothe it.141

These sentences not only capture in all desirable clarity the distinction between the symbolic and the imaginary. They also articulate a law whose discovery is generally associated with the emergence of psychoanalysis: the law that the imaginary attaches to the symbolic only ever after the fact, never the other way around.142 For electric knowledge, all this meant that from then on, expressions like electricity or magnetism, which still implied something substantial behind the appearances but could be described symbolically, “have no further value for us beyond that of abbreviations” for systems of equations.143 They most certainly did not hit upon anything real. All images of electricity could only ever be simulacra because what electricity was in and for itself, what it really was could not be intuited. Electricity became the name for the pure withdrawal of the real. In a most fortunate epistemological insight, Hertz succeeded in recasting his fundamental insight into electric knowledge as a new principle of knowledge that stated the conditions of knowledge in the age of electricity as such: We form for ourselves internal simulacra or symbols of external objects; and the form which we give them is such that the necessary consequents of the images in thought are always the images of the necessary consequents in nature of the things pictured. In order that this requirement may be satisfied, there must be a certain conformity between nature and our thought. Experience teaches us that the requirement can be satisfied, and hence that such a conformity does in fact exist.144

Hertz’s theory of simulacra or symbols—which according to Cassirer “brilliantly” captures “the new ideal of knowledge, to which this whole development [of nineteenth-century knowledge] points”145—no longer knew of any representational conception of the image. What made it possible for images to lend themselves to cognition, what thus made them symbols rather than images, was subject exclusively to the logic of rigorous relationships and no

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longer tied to any kind of copying. The “certain conformity” between nature and mind thanks to which the necessities of nature and the necessities of thinking could be so strangely identical was based on “essential relations” that pervaded nature and mind equally. The totality of symbols simply had to reshape the totality of things in such a way that the relationships that govern the order of the symbolic corresponded to the relationships in the order of things, that is, in such a way that they became homologous. Images must not “contradict the relations of external things” in “their essential relations,” and “the one essential conformity” that had to exist between things and images was of a logical nature. To serve knowledge, images had no need of any other conformity with things, that is, any kind of extralogical conformity. Strictly speaking, any kind of further conformity even lay beyond what could be known and experienced: “As a matter of fact, we do not know, nor have we any means of knowing, whether our conceptions of things are in conformity with them in any other than this one fundamental respect.”146 For Hertz, all theory thus had become ideally pure and turned into an autonomous system of symbols on the model of “a logically complete science, such as pure mathematics.”147 The greatest possible restriction to necessary relationships did away with all questions of essence since such “illegitimate questions” only ever arise where “superfluous or empty relations” accumulated and “painful contradictions” arose148: But we have accumulated around the signs “force” and “electricity” more relations than can be completely reconciled amongst themselves. We have an obscure feeling of this and want to have things cleared up. Our confused wish finds expression in the confused question as to the nature of force and electricity.149

Questions of essence no longer needed to be answered. Because they were seen merely as the effect of avoidable contradictions arising from superfluous relationships, the task was to make them disappear and thus to dispense with them, at least in principle, by the greatest possible restriction to necessary relationships. Only in “reducing” the existing relationships, “our minds, no longer vexed, will cease to ask illegitimate questions.”150 The reason Hertz had been able directly to confront the vexing questions concerning essence was that they were particularly successful in causing mischief within a dispositif of knowledge whose crucial task was the presentation of the nonrepresentable reality of electromagnetic waves. A “fantasmatic dispositif of electromagnetism” had emerged, which idolized electromagnetic waves as a matter of the occult and took the question of their

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essence quite literally. The fantasms of electromagnetism led Strindberg, for example, not just to séances of tables tipping in rigorous Morse code and other medium spectacles, the way they had thousands of others: they led him to the Inferno. At the height of his psychotic process, demons in the shape of enemy electricians were close on his heels, the “idea that I was being persecuted by enemies who employed electricity began to obsess” him.151 Someone else, Senate President Schreber, was drawn into the madness of electromagnetic rays, about which he wrote an electrotheological manifesto. Hertz’s distinction between essential and empty relationships was an attempt to get a handle on an epochal excess of presentation that had not only badly affected physical knowledge but had an effect even on psychotic processes. Hertz suspected that the affliction with this vexing spirit was intimately connected with the properties of the “mode of portrayal” of “our special mind.” The mind produces images of the real that can never be entirely devoid of empty relationships “because they are simply images” and not pure symbolisms.152 His theory of knowledge introduced a pragmatics of the use of images, according to which, between two images, the one should be chosen that in addition to essential relationships contains less empty ones than others. This dietetics of images was to cut off the source that replenished an imaginary attaching itself to the symbolic and to liberate the age of the electrical from its fantasmatic representational fury. Historically, Hertz’s epistemology is situated directly at the crossroads of intuitive and symbolic thinking. It was no longer beholden to the primacy of intuition and not yet purely symbolic. This is indicated by his hesitation to posit a clear separation between images and symbols; he instead speaks of “internal simulacra or symbols.” The talk of a “certain conformity” of the symbolic to the real and, even more so, the distinction to be made between essential and unessential, that is, empty relationships that will always sneak into images, even if they are mere simulacra, place this pragmatic epistemology at the most extreme point of representationalist doctrine. Hertz was still incapable of thinking that what is could be given by codes and thus be a gift of pure symbolisms. He was a transitional figure. It is precisely this negative epistemology of simulacra, of the essential and the empty relationships and the mode of portrayal of our special mind that Wittgenstein examined in its ultimate logical and philosophical consequences in the Tractatus.153 While for Cassirer Hertz’s name, like Maxwell’s, stood for the “crisis in modern mathematical physics,” which allowed a “schematism of images” to be replaced by a nonintuitive “symbolism of principles” and outlined a “modern ‘electrodynamic‘ view of the world,”154 Wittgenstein for his part generalized exactly this revolution in the way

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of thinking because he turned the principles of this symbolist turn back onto the logical-mathematical. This simply aggregated in a system what historically and epistemologically belonged together anyway. In parallel with the mathematical-logical foundational work on the purely symbolic, reality was discovered in the second half of the nineteenth century to be quite simply a nonrepresentable event of communication that ultimately was to be addressed symbolically in just this nonrepresentability, without recourse to intuition. Electric knowledge, driven through the pure symbolisms of field theory, brought out the new knowledge dispositif of communication that raised a strict iconoclasm to the level of principle. What Leibniz called blind thinking because it disregarded everything but symbols had now not only been driven to fantastic formalist heights but had become, at a moment when nonrepresentabilities proliferated, the only guarantor of a clear view. In times of “empirical cloudiness or uncertainty,” the only way to obtain a crystal-clear view was to employ symbolic forms as hard as crystal that revealed an order “prior to all experience.”155 That is why, around 1900, concepts like “symbolic form” or “symbolic relationship” were indispensable not only to logicians and mathematicians but to physicists156 and on occasion even philosophers157 as well. The commandment, in Wilhelm Ostwald’s words, not only to have no images or parables but to keep to symbols and equations158 applied not only to physicists but became the categorical imperative of knowledge under the conditions of the symbolic and of communication.

Structuralism and field theory Finally, it was on the ground cleared by the foundational work done in logic, mathematics, and physics, where thinking was only a matter of functions and relations but no longer of precedent extrasymbolic substances, that what Foucault called the “counter-sciences”159 linguistics, ethnology, and psychoanalysis appeared. Their emergence completed the great epistemological transformation. These countersciences, however, did not just think in symbolic terms; each of them dedicated itself to a specific thinking of the symbolic as such. The relationship between the human sciences to the formal, a priori disciplines was thereby fundamentally renewed and revived. Human existence was not a dense irrecoverable ground that as a matter of principle withdrew from the regime of the symbolic. The function of the symbolic was to traverse human existence as such. The search was on for structures that permeated languages, societies, and desires, structures whose corresponding facts were mere actualizations.

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Instead of being content with schematizing and describing the evidence of that which appeared, researchers were busy with discerning a symbolic order underneath all the evidence. The symbolic order was to formalize the nonpresentable reality of linguistic, social, or libidinal processes as such. A language of invariances seemed to run through human existence. Durkheim, for example, supposed that the specific images with which certain societies represented themselves to assert and understand themselves were simply imaginary superimpositions on their mere functioning, a functioning that did not constitute a given society’s particularity but on the contrary obeyed a general regime this society shared with all others. Lévi-Strauss’s talk of a mathematics of the mind, a “mathematics of man,”160 is the end point or summary of the slow penetration of the notion of formalization into the ancestral grounds of human evidences that had been in operation since the end of the nineteenth century. The fact that around 1950, these sciences ended up dreaming their way to a shared universal science that was to articulate both human existence and nature in terms of the symbolic structures generated by a single great communicative function was only in keeping with the longue durée of epistemic logic. This dream surfaced at the very moment that electricity taught the symbols, liberated from the ballast of meaning, to flow. Functioning machines presented an entire age with its epistemic ground, the short-circuiting of the symbolic and the real, and ultimately pointed to its epochal truth, namely, in the future, to have been the age of the symbolic and of communication. The vision of a general science of communication that would dispense with the difference between human and natural sciences seemed like the last word of a great transformation. Ernst Cassirer, always in touch with the epistemic events of his day and throughout his life occupied with archeologically comprehending its epistemic situation, was not to hear this last word. He might have been able to see it as one big confirmation of his own diagnostic efforts since 1910, in which he had traced the crisis of thinking resulting from the switch from substantial to functional concepts in even the subtlest convolutions of the epistemic space. Cassirer saw the core of this upheaval, as he noted on many occasions, in the event of the ascendency of physical field theory. Pure field physics had taken “the last decisive step” in the history of symbols in that symbols had “passed from the area of intuition and presentation into the domain of pure meaning.”161 It may well have been the case already in logical-mathematical symbolism that the only thing that counted were the pure relationships between the elements, which for their part had no independent existence and were nothing outside of the relationships. Yet “the peculiarity of this detachment” of symbols from intuitive existence

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“stands out particularly prominently where it does not stop within the orbit of pure mathematics as an abstract-formal theory of relationships but spreads to the knowledge of reality and defines this knowledge according to the new ideal.”162 For the historian of knowledge that he was, the becoming symbolic of the knowledge of reality was undoubtedly the quintessence and main event of the epistemic transformation. Cassirer did not live to see how the emergence of cybernetic machines de facto made reality symbolic, turned reality into an effect of symbolic machines. His dense description of the episteme would undoubtedly have furnished him with the means to understand this new symbolic order of communication called information—on the condition, of course, that this symbolic world of the machine would also have marked the end of all idealism, which had never ceased thwarting Cassirer’s archeology of thinking, leading him to believe in the supratemporal nature of certain epistemological problems. For this new order merely concentrated the entire epistemic transformation he never stopped discerning in the most varied fields of knowledge in the natural and human sciences. Cassirer could not yet have known just how right he was to have been in making the “problem of the symbolic” the “systematic center” of all philosophy.163 In his last lecture before his death in the spring of 1945, Cassirer caught a glimpse of the future and even managed to read in his own archeology of symbolic knowledge the very structuralism that was to dominate his own field, the humanities and cultural studies, for at least three decades. Invited by the Linguistic Circle of New York, whose founding members included the émigrés Roman Jakobson and Claude Lévi-Strauss, he allowed his listeners insight into the structural ground of the entire epoch since Maxwell and Hertz. Under the title “Structuralism in Modern Linguistics,” he demonstrated that “structuralism is no isolated phenomenon; it is, rather, the expression of a general tendency of thought that, in these last decades, has become more and more prominent in almost all fields of scientific research.”164 The revolution in the way of thinking marked by the electromagnetic field was to have been the origin of the logic of necessary relationships and structures that was forcing its way into knowledge about language: The electro-magnetic field—in the sense of Faraday and Maxwell—is no aggregate of material points. We may, and must, indeed, speak of parts the field; but these parts have no separate existence. The electron is, to use the term of Hermann Weyl, no element of the field; it is, rather, an out-growth of the field (“eine Ausgeburt des Felds”). It is embedded in the

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field and exists only under the general structural conditions of the field. An electron is nothing but a part in which the electro-magnetic energy is condensed and assumes a peculiar strength.165

He then read the structural logic of thinking in terms of fields against the systemic conceptions of language developed by Bröndal, Jakobson, Meillet, Saussure, and Trubetskoy in order to show all of them to belong to the same formation of knowledge. It is strictly in keeping with the logic of such a historical-epistemological analysis that at the end of the talk, Cassirer raised the question “whether linguistics is a natural science or a ‘Geisteswissenschaft.’” He sought to conceive of structural linguistics as a “Geisteswissenschaft,” a science of the mind or spirit, on the condition that we must not understand the term “Geist” or spirit as designating a metaphysical entity opposed to another entity called “matter.” … The term “Geist” is correct; but we must not use it as a name of a substance—a thing “quod in se est et per se concipitur.” We should use it in a functional sense as a comprehensive name for all those functions which constitute and build up the world of human culture.166

This reformulation of the concept of mind or spirit required by linguistics placed the discipline at a decisive crossroads for the humanities in general: “Linguistics can, indeed, show us the right way and the wrong way. The wrong way consists in speaking of ‘Geisteswissenschaften’ as if ‘Geist’ were the name for a substantial thing.”167 The right way was to be the functional dissolution of the concept of mind. After the long transformation of knowledge and thinking from a matter of intuition to a matter of the symbolic, this finally marked the arrival of all sciences of the mind at the point where George Boole had wanted them to be. At the end of the process and in light of exact knowledge of the symbolic, that is to say, around 1950, the strong foundation of the distinction between natural and human sciences disappeared.

Notes 1. 2. 3.

Heidegger, The Principle of Reason, 17–18, my emphasis. [Heidegger, The Principle of Reason, 124.] [Heidegger, The Principle of Reason, 18.]

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Hilbert to Frege, 29 Dec 1899, in Frege, Philosophical and Mathematical Correspondence, 39–41. See Frege, “Thought,” esp. 337–38. Heidegger, “Negativity,” 43. Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking? 136. Heidegger, “Basic Principles of Thinking,” 84. Derrida, “The Pit and the Pyramid,” 107. On the place of Hegel’s history of the formation of absolute knowledge in the alphabetic discourse network around 1800, cf. Kittler, Discourse Networks, part I, esp. 161–68, as well as his “Das Subjekt als Beamter.” Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, § 457, 212, 211. Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, § 458, 213. Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, § 457, 212. Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, 212–13. [Here and in what follows, Hegel and Hörl evoke a second meaning of the verb lesen, to read, namely the act of selecting, and a third meaning, taking up an idea of Werner Hamacher’s, of eating. See Hamacher, Pleroma, esp. 191.—Trans.] Hegel, The Science of Logic, 181. Hegel, The Spirit of Christianity, 251. In Pleroma, Werner Hamacher has traced this fundamental eucharistic structure of Hegel’s hermeneutic in detail. Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, § 465, 224. Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, § 459, 218. Hegel, Science of Logic, 11–12. Hegel, Science of Logic, 32. [Hegel, Science of Logic, 180.] Hegel, Science of Logic, 178. Hegel, Science of Logic, 178. Hegel, Science of Logic, 181–82. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, ¶808:493. Euler, Elements of Algebra, 1–2. Euler, Elements of Algebra, 43. Descartes, Geometry, 200; cf. also Brunschvicg, Les étapes de la philosophie mathématique, 543. Cf. Nagel, “Impossible Numbers.” Leon Brunschvicg, too, emphasized the decisive role the issue of imaginary numbers played in the reconstitution of the foundations of mathematics. For an intuitionist like Brunschvicg, the detachment of algebra from its geometric interpretation triggered by the appearance of imaginary numbers was the turning point that led to a more precise conception of the roles the intellectual operations properly so called and intuitive images played in mathematics. Unlike Nagel, however, Brunschvicg was not familiar with how exactly the emergence of pure symbolism was connected with imaginary numbers. Hence there is no mention

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at all in Brunschvicg of the British birthplace of pure algebra studied by Nagel; cf. Brunschvicg, Les étapes de la philosophie mathématique, 542–50. 31. As John Playfair writes in an anonymous review of an article by Buée in the Edinburgh Review in 1808; qtd. in Nagel, “Impossible Numbers,” 174–75. 32. Hegel, Science of Logic, 545–46. 33. With enviable clarity, Ernest Nagel in “Impossible Numbers” traces the development of this idea whose essentials are merely sketched here. 34. The programmatic name of this turn comes from Hans Hahn, “The Crisis in Intuition.” 35. Cassirer, “The Influence of Language,” 319. 36. The claim that it was problems with intuition, which became evident in the appearance of monsters, that triggered the effort to arithmetize mathematics has been rejected by Klaus Th. Volkert as a “misleading construction of subsequent historians of mathematics.” In his Die Krise der Anschauung [The Crisis of Intuition], he stresses that monsters are “example[s] obtained formally (usually analytically)” that appear “intuitively impossible” (xxii). Arithmetization could thus certainly not be the result of problems with intuition but, on the contrary, only the condition of possibility “for ousting intuition from mathematics—of intuition as foundational principle as well as intuition as normative principle.” It was arithmetization that created the wider situation in which analysis could be developed “without relying on intuition” and producing monstrous functions. If, moreover, “intuition had still acted as a normative principle, Weierstraß’s monster would hardly have attracted much notice from his contemporaries. It might have been classified as a curiosity—testimony of what can happen when formalism is pushed too far.” As Volkert has shown in his article, “Die Geschichte der pathologischen Funktionen,” this was the discursive fate, well into the nineteenth century, of the so-called pathological functions, that is, those functions whose behavior changes abruptly: violations of the uniform behavior of functions within their range of definitions were merely “perceived as curious” (196). A willingness “to accept ‘exceptions’ as long as they did not become ‘too numerous’” was considered “an important trait of mathematical thinking in the last two centuries” (202). In the transition to the age of axiomatic thinking, this discursive rule could not but become problematic and ultimately had to collapse. Starting in the early nineteenth century, exceptions became refutations; in any event, “a systematic use of counterexamples,” according to Volkert, “can be ascertained only starting at the beginning of the nineteenth century” (203). It was not until the 1870s that functions emerged that could not be differentiated anywhere and yet were constant; before then—with the exception of the monsters discovered by Bolzano and Cellérier, whose findings were not published until the end of the century—only constant functions that could not be differentiated at a countable number of points within their range of definition had been known. Weierstraß was the first to announce the discovery of a constant

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53. 54. 55. 56.

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function that could not be differentiated anywhere, in an 1872 lecture before the Berlin Academy. Weierstraß’s monster “definitively brought down,” Volkert tells us, “the ‘principle of the reliability of intuition,’ which stated that what is intuitively evident can be proven formally-mathematically as well” (226)—even if some prominent contemporary mathematicians continued to air their loathing of such monstrous products of formalism. Peacock, A Treatise on Algebra (1830, 2nd ed. 1847), qtd. in Nagel, “Impossible Numbers,” 325n35. Gregory, “On the Real Nature of Symbolical Algebra,” 208–9, my emphasis. Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, 148; on symbolic Romanticism, esp. Creuzer and Görres, see, for example, Baeumler, Das mythische Weltalter, 90–114, and Kramer, Verkehrte Welten, 15–55. Foucault, The Order of Things, 296. Foucault, The Order of Things, 299. Foucault, The Order of Things, 302. Martin, Logique contemporaine et formalisation, 8. Russell, “Mathematics and the Metaphysicians,” 74. Russell, “Mathematics and the Metaphysicians,” 96. Boole, “Logic,” 136. For an appraisal of the role alphabetization played as the historical condition of possibility of the Aristotelian categories, see Goody and Watt, “The Consequences of Literacy,” 53–54. Boole, The Mathematical Analysis of Logic, 3–4. Boole, The Mathematical Analysis of Logic, 12. See Boole, The Mathematical Analysis of Logic, 11–14. Boole, The Mathematical Analysis of Logic, 13. Initially, Boole had little to say about the relationship between logic and language. At a time when his symbolic notation stood only at the beginning, language for him was instrument of logic, albeit one that one could do without. Yet only one year after the publication of Mathematical Analysis, a year in which fundamental aspects of his agenda must have become clear to him, language had become a system: The laws of universal algebra “are in fact embodied in every spoken or written language. … The view which these inquiries present of the nature of language is a very interesting one. They exhibit it not as a mere collection of signs, but as a system of expression, the elements of which are subject to the laws of the thought which they represent” (Boole, The Calculus of Logic, 127 and 140, my emphasis. This essay offers an account of Boole’s agenda in a much more condensed form than Mathematical Analysis, esp. 125–27). Boole, An Investigation of the Laws of Thought, 40. Boole, The Mathematical Analysis of Logic, 7–8. Boole, Laws of Thought, 1. Boole’s attempts at rearticulating the mathematical analysis of logic within the framework of a philosophy of logic—attempts whose constant stall-

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ing and fresh starts convey an impression of just how hopeless it may at times be for mathematicians to try to speak beyond their formalisms in the language of philosophy—did not reach the public until a century and a half after his death. In 1867, the influential Cambridge mathematician Augustus DeMorgan, who had been a regular correspondent of Boole’s, looked through the papers at the request of Mary Everest-Boole and, considering them not to be on a par with their author’s formal ideas, opted against publishing them. They ended up in the collections of the Royal Society. Numerous attempts at editing them—at Russell’s suggestion, Louis Couturat, for example, was under consideration for a short while—came to nothing. It took until 1997 for them to be published, along with some letters, by Ivor Grattan-Guinness and Gérard Bornet under the title George Boole: Selected Manuscripts on Logic and Its Philosophy. For a more detailed examination of the relationship between Boole’s logical-philosophical and his logicalmathematical works, see the editors’ introduction to that volume as well as Hesse, “Boole’s Philosophy of Logic.” 57. Boole, Laws of Thought, 46. 58. Boole, Laws of Thought, 6. 59. Cf. Boole, Laws of Thought, 24–25. 60. For Boole, the transition through noninterpretability became a general principle of knowledge: “It is an unquestionable fact that the validity of a conclusion arrived at by any symbolical process of reasoning, does not depend upon our ability to interpret the formal results which have presented themselves in the different stages of the investigation. … A single example of reasoning, in which symbols are employed in obedience to laws founded upon their interpretation, but without any sustained reference to that interpretation, the chain of demonstration conducting us through intermediate steps which are not interpretable, to a final result which is interpretable, seems not only to establish the validity of the particular application, but to make known to us the general law manifested therein” (Boole, Laws of Thought, 67–69). Not by chance did Boole choose an imaginary number as his example to demonstrate the possibility, in principle, of passing through the noninterpretability of symbolic thinking: imaginary numbers had stood at the beginning of the process in which the independence of the employment of symbols and the autonomy of the symbolic as such had been discovered: “The employment of the uninterpretable symbol √–1, in the intermediate processes of trigonometry, furnishes us an illustration of what has been said. I apprehend that there is no mode of explaining that application which does not covertly assume the very principle in question. But that principle … seems to deserve a place among those axiomatic truths which constitute, in some sense, the foundation of the possibility of general knowledge, and which may properly be regarded as expressions of the mind’s own laws and constitution” (69). Edmund Husserl, as Daniel Tyradellis pointed out to me, sharply insisted on a strict separation

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61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73.

74. 75. 76.

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between the possibility of freely operating with the imaginary (opened up by formalization, it was this possibility whose principles Boole had grasped, whose procedures he secured and rendered transparent) and “the problem of the imaginary itself.” “With what justification,” Husserl asked in a double lecture of which only sketches survive, “can the absurd be assimilated into calculation—with what justification, therefore, can the absurd be utilized in deductive thinking—as if it were meaningful? How is it to be explained that one can operate with the absurd according to rules, and that, if the absurd is then eliminated from the propositions, the propositions obtained are correct?” (Husserl, “Double Lecture,” 412). Where the formalist spoke of what could not be interpreted, the philosopher working on sense and on the foundational questions of arithmetic was concerned with the absurd and the justification of the transition through the absurd. Between Boole and Husserl, the symbolic shed light on the question of the imaginary as such. Boole, Laws of Thought, 6. Boole, Laws of Thought, 419. Boole, Laws of Thought, 408. Boole, Laws of Thought, 404, 405 and 419. Boole, “On the Foundations of the Mathematical Theory of Logic,” 68–69. Boole, Laws of Thought, 11. Boole, Laws of Thought, 6–7. Boole, Laws of Thought, 32. Boole, Laws of Thought, 37–38. Boole, Laws of Thought, 47. Boole, “The Nature of Logic,” 4. Boole, Laws of Thought, 402. On March 18, 1855, he writes to John Penrose about the “doctrine of the limit” his logical algebra implied: “It seems to be a law of human reason that we can in various instances affirm propositions without absolute certainty of their truth, respecting things which we can only picture or represent to ourselves as the limits of an indefinite process of abstraction. Nearly all if not all scientific truths are of this kind. … And the purport of my observation is that as the object of all pure science are things which it would baffle all our efforts to represent by the power of imagination only and which can only be approved as the attainable limits of thought but concerning which nevertheless the most vigorous of all propositions can be affirmed so upon the supposition that there exists a being possessed of infinite attributes we are not precluded by the impossibility of adequately concerning those attributes from affirming respecting them clear intelligible and affirmative propositions” (Boole, Letter to John Penrose, 13 March 1855, Selected Manuscripts, 200 and 201, Boole’s emphasis).
 Boole, Laws of Thought, 50. Boole, Laws of Thought, 49. Aristotle, Metaphysics, 1005b–1006a, 1588.

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77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95.

96. 97. 98. 99. 100. 101. 102. 103. 104. 105. 106. 107. 108. 109. 110. 111. 112.

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Boole, “Note [to Aristotle],” 166. Boole, “Note [to Aristotle],” 166. Boole, “Note [to Aristotle],” 166. Boole, Laws of Thought, 5. Boole, Laws of Thought, 5. Cf. Hilbert, “Mathematical Problems,” 406–36. Boole, Laws of Thought, 5. Boole, Laws of Thought, 50–51. Boole, “The Nature of Logic,” Selected Manuscripts, 2. Boole, Laws of Thought, 24. Boole, Laws of Thought, 40. Boole, Laws of Thought, 39. Boole, Laws of Thought, 40. Boole, Laws of Thought, 41.
 Boole, Laws of Thought, 41. Boole, Laws of Thought, 40. Qtd. in Bornet, “Boole’s Psychologism as a Reception Problem,” xlix. Russell, “Mathematics and the Metaphysicians,” 74. Boole, The Laws of Thought, 408; since one was even free to transgress the laws of thought, they were strictly separate from the laws of nature. If for no other reason, there was nothing that connected Boole with the laws spelled out later by a scientific psychology. Boole, The Laws of Thought, 423. Boole, The Laws of Thought, 417. Boole, The Laws of Thought, 410–11. Cf. Peckhaus, Logik, Mathesis universalis und allgemeine Wissenschaft, esp. 25–110. Scholz, Concise History of Logic, 72. Frege to Edmund Husserl, 30 Oct.–1 Nov. 1906, Correspondence, 66–70, here 67. Foucault, The Order of Things, 303. Foucault, The Order of Things, 297. Scholz, Concise History of Logic, 73. Frege to Husserl, 30 Oct.–1 Nov. 1906, Correspondence, 67–68. Wittgenstein, Tractatus, 2.181 and 2.2, 41, Wittgenstein’s emphasis. Wittgenstein, Tractatus, 1.13, 31. Cf. Wittgenstein, Tractatus, 6.54, 189. Serres, “Boltzmann et Bergson,” 131–32. Poincaré, Value of Science, 19 and 21. Poincaré, Value of Science, 18. Poincaré, Value of Science, 23; as a reaction to a 1905 series of articles under the title “Les Principes des Mathématiques,” in which Couturat introduced the French public to Russell’s The Principles of Mathematics (1903), Poincaré engaged with Couturat, as representative of the entire axiomatization

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113. 114. 115. 116. 117. 118. 119. 120. 121. 122. 123.

124. 125.

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movement, in a violent debate about the usefulness and value of intuition in mathematics; cf. Poincaré, “Mathematics and Logic,” and Couturat, “Pour la Logistique.” [Poincaré, Value of Science, 15.] Klein, “The Arithmetizing of Mathematics,” 966–67. Klein, “The Arithmetizing of Mathematics,” 966. Klein, “The Arithmetizing of Mathematics,” 969. Klein, “The Arithmetizing of Mathematics,” 967. Klein, “The Arithmetizing of Mathematics,” 968. Klein, “The Arithmetizing of Mathematics,” 970. Klein, “The Arithmetizing of Mathematics,” 969. Klein, “The Arithmetizing of Mathematics,” 971. Klein, “The Arithmetizing of Mathematics,” 969. Klein, “The Arithmetizing of Mathematics,” 970. To a large extent, Klein’s concept and pedagogy of intuition can be traced back to the physiology of perception; this is more than obvious in his 1905 lecture at the University of Vienna on “Grenzfragen der Mathematik und Philosophie [Questions at the Limit of Mathematics and Philosophy].” Immediate spatial perception was said to be essentially inexact and to feature a “threshold of exactitude.” This was true for the eye as well, especially for the eye, however “armed” it was. Yet it was even more true for the abstract representation of space. When constant functions that could nowhere be differentiated appeared, one might have thought that one could not obtain an intuitive image of them as one could of normal functions. In fact, however, Klein asserted, we do not even have “the capacity for thinking even more simple examples of function theory and infinitesimal calculus at the same time exactly and intuitively.” Spatial intuition even “fails” already where the issue is “the exact details of those curves that are presented by whole functions.” So long as one was dealing merely with analytical curves it was not possible to notice “that we are in no position at all to really represent matters intuitively such as infinitesimal calculus presents them,” quite simply because the “mathematical properties of analytical curves more or less parallel the intuitive properties of the bands” we have before our eyes when we speak of a curve (Klein, “Grenzfragen der Mathematik und Philosophie,” 248). What the appearance of the monster thus did was basically to allow mathematicians to understand the essential inexactitude of intuition and to make the idealization, elaboration, and development of intuition one of the foremost tasks of mathematics. Even non-Euclidean geometries, and on this point Klein’s pedagogy joined Helmholtz’s empiricist theory of intuition, might one day be brought back to the solid ground of intuitive evidence; cf. Hermann von Helmholtz, “On the Origin and Significance of the Axioms of Geometry,” esp. 5–6, and “The Facts in Perception,” esp. 154–58. Cassirer, Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, 389. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 97:49e.

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126. Maxwell, “On Action at a Distance.”
 127. Cf. Faraday, “A Speculation Touching Electric Conduction and the Nature of Matter,” esp. 290–91. 128. Faraday, “On the Physical Character of the Lines of Magnetic Force,” 407–408 (no. 3243). 129. Faraday, “On the Physical Character of the Lines of Magnetic Force,” 414 (no. 3258), first emphasis Faraday’s, second mine. 130. Faraday, Experimental Researches in Electricity, vol. 3, series XXVIII, § 34, no. 3075, 330.
 131. Faraday, Experimental Researches in Electricity, vol. 3, series XXVIII, § 34, no. 3075, 331. For a concise presentation of how Faraday’s thinking of fields developed, see Heimann, “Faraday’s Theories of Matter and Electricity.” 132. On the history of the concepts of “field” and “ether,” see Harman, Energy, Force, and Matter, esp. ch. 4, 72–119; Williams, The Origins of Field Theory; Doran, “Origins and Consolidation of Field Theory in Nineteenth-Century Britain.” 133. Maxwell, “A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field,” 527. 134. Einstein, “Physics and Reality,” 365. 135. Weyl, Was ist Materie? 58–59. 136. Weyl, Was ist Materie? 42.
 137. It is not a coincidence that in his history of imaginary “obstacles to knowledge,” Bachelard likes to draw on examples taken from the realm of the electric imagination. Under the heading “Histoire épistemologique de l’éléctrisme,’” Dominique Lecourt has edited a number of writings in this vein; see Bachelard, Epistémologie. Still unmatched in its wealth of detail is Edmund Whittaker’s History of the Theories of Aether and Electricity. On the historical-systematic connection, namely that the premodern knowledge about electricity was tied to the circulation of images one had of electricity and that the becoming-modern of physical knowledge coincides with the insight into its nonpresentability and an essential iconoclasm, see Hagen, “Funken und Scheinbilder.” 138. Nancy J. Nersessian (“Aether/Or,” 185) has emphasized this essential point. 139. Wolfgang Hagen (“Funken und Scheinbilder,” 95–104) provides a short but on-point description of Hertz’s experiments; historical details can be found in D’Agostino, “Hertz’s Researches on Electromagnetic Waves.” 140. Hertz, Electric Waves, 21. 141. Hertz, Electric Waves, 28, my emphasis. 
 142. Wolfgang Hagen has pointed out “that the development of the concept and the conception of the unconscious, which Freud and James developed around the turn of the century in quite similar fashion has to do with the crisis of physics, which had to admit nonpresentabilities” (“Funken und Scheinbilder,” 106–7). 143. Hertz, Electric Waves, 25. 144. Hertz, The Principles of Mechanics, 1 [modified].

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145. 146. 147. 148. 149. 150. 151.

152. 153. 154. 155. 156. 157.

158. 159. 160. 161. 162. 163. 164. 165. 166. 167.

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Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. 1, 75. Hertz, The Principles of Mechanics, 2 [modified]. Hertz, The Principles of Mechanics, 7. [Hertz, The Principles of Mechanics, 2 and 8.] [Hertz, The Principles of Mechanics, 7–8, modified.] Hertz, The Principles of Mechanics, 8. August Strindberg, Inferno, 184; this seventh chapter is a particularly vivid depiction of Strindberg’s electroparanoia. On the pathography of this paranoia, see Jaspers, Strindberg and Van Gogh, especially the section devoted to “The Climax of the Process,” 58–65. 
 Hertz, The Principles of Mechanics, 2 [amended]. Peter Barker provides a detailed presentation in his “Hertz and Wittgenstein.” Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. 3, 467 and 452, respectively [amended]. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 97:49e. Cf. Duhem, The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory, 196. Wolfgang Orth has traced the origin of the concept of symbolic form in Cassirer back to scientific debates at the end of the nineteenth century and demonstrated that it originates in the passage from Duhem just cited; see his “Ernst Cassirers Philosophie der symbolischen Formen,” esp. 120–21. Ostwald, Überwindung des wissenschaftlichen Materialismus, 22. [Foucault, The Order of Things, 379.] [Lévi-Strauss, “Introduction: The Mathematics of Man.”] Cassirer, “Das Symbolproblem,” 17, Cassirer’s emphasis. Cassirer, “Das Symbolproblem,” 15, Cassirer’s emphasis. Cassirer, “Das Symbolproblem,” 1. Cassirer, “Structuralism in Modern Linguistics,” 120. Cassirer, “Structuralism in Modern Linguistics,” 101. Cassirer, “Structuralism in Modern Linguistics,” 113–14. [The Latin quotation is taken from Spinoza’s definition III in the Ethics: “By substance I mean that which is in itself and is conceived by itself.”—Trans.] Cassirer, “Structuralism in Modern Linguistics,” 112.

3.

The Sacred and the Genealogy of Thinking Descent into the Aristotelian Underground

Abstract The exodus of thinking from Aristotelianism, which with its logical primacy of the concept of substance and the subordination of relations had long dominated it, characterizes the epistemic situation at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. The breakthrough of purely symbolic thinking in physics and mathematics operated the collapse of the traditional logical formation based on substance. It also prompted the reopening of the question of thinking, which marked the historical condition of possibility for the emergence of a genealogical perspective that was interested in the pre-Aristotelian origins of thinking not least of all because it hoped thereby to decipher the post-Aristotelian situation of thinking. To grasp the most remote origins of the forms of intuition, the having-become of the categories, the beginnings of practices of symbolizing and relating, the genesis of idealities, and the appearance of the function of classification, philosophers, sociologists, and anthropologists explored the “primitive” world of the sacred and of communication. In the primitive underground, they sought the extralogical grounds—the concealed institutional sources—of the essential forms of thinking. The chapter charts a number of such enterprises, in which an entire age descended into its primitive noological ancestry, focusing on the project of a prehistory of the categories and the elucidation of the preparatory pathways of reason on which the Durkheim school concentrated its efforts. Keywords: prehistory of the categories; totemism; animism; history of the emergence of thinking; genealogy of relating; the sacred; Ernst Cassirer; Émile Durkheim; Marcel Mauss

Hörl, E., Sacred Channels: The Archaic Illusion of Communication, Amsterdam University Press, 2018 doi 10.5117/9789089647702_ch03

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The pre-Aristotelian situation of understanding In 1910, Ernst Cassirer wrote an early masterpiece of discourse archeology: Substanzbegriff und Funktionsbegriff: Untersuchungen über die Grundfragen der Erkenntniskritik (lit., The Concept of Substance and the Concept of Function: Studies on the Fundamental Questions of the Critique of Knowledge, translated as Substance and Function). It presented the crisis in thinking brought about by the emergence of a pure symbolism in such a way as to tempt readers to see the birth of an archeology of knowledge laid out in these pages as the most characteristic effect of the crisis itself. Cassirer’s keen epistemic eye was barely distracted by the agenda of a philosophy of consciousness that would later lead him to become less of an archeologist and more of a philosopher again, a philosopher who believed in the eternity of certain questions of the critique of knowledge and subscribed to a certain Hegelianism concerning their specific historical elaborations. Relatively unencumbered by any claim to reformulate the subject matter of a philosophy ravaged by the crisis—the way Husserl, for example, sought to do during those same years in terms of philosophy as a rigorous science—this archeological Cassirer aimed above all at describing the event that had been eroding epistemic foundations for at least half a century and come out into the open around 1900: the exodus of thinking from Aristotelianism. For Cassirer, the longue durée of the age that thanks to symbolism’s entry onto the scene was breathing its last could be articulated in terms of a principle of Aristotelianism, according to which “the conception of the nature and divisions of being predetermines the conception of the fundamental forms of thought.”1 Symbolic thinking drove a wedge between logic, ontology, and metaphysics, whose interconnections had proliferated since Aristotle, according to whom logic found its ontological bearing in a metaphysical concept of substance. The ontological guarantee came to a head in the traditional doctrine of the concept and logic of classification: The determination of the concept according to its next higher genus and its specific difference reproduces the process by which the real substance successively unfolds itself in its special forms of being. Thus it is this basic conception of substance to which the purely logical theories of Aristotle constantly have reference. The complete system of scientific definitions would have to be a complete expression of the substantial forces which control reality.2

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The “logical and grammatical varieties of being” found “their ground and real application” only “in a fixed thing-like substratum.” The “various determinations of being” were “thinkable” only “in given, existing substances.” The only really substantial form constituted the indispensable ground of symbolic form. The task of the categories was none other than “to trace through and make clear this division of being into its various subspecies”3; they were only to spell out the divisions, that is to say, the kinds and meanings of the substantial forms into which being divided itself. The “logical primacy of the concept of substance” was apparent above all in the subordinate position of the category of relations, which remained “not independent of the concept of real being” and contributed merely “supplementary and external modifications” to things and their properties. 4 Even the psychologization of logic, operated by John Stuart Mill in particular, was unable to change anything in this respect. Quite the contrary, in fact: it merely shifted the scene from external things to the inner space of representations and their psychological correlates and introduced the primacy of the concept of substance from the physical into the psychological domain. The breakthrough of purely symbolic thought in nineteenth-century mathematics and physics, which Cassirer traced in even its most delicate ramifications and distant historical antecedents, marked the breakdown of the formation of substance logic. The “free production of certain relational systems”5 by pure symbolisms undermined the matter of thinking itself such as it had shaped Western thought ever since its Aristotelian origins. Symptomatically, the mathematical concept of function, which for Cassirer had become the concept that guided the historical-epistemological structure, was just the offspring of that symbolical thinking that obstructed the foundation of mathematics on the evidence of intuition and thus on an essentially precedent Being, however refracted that might be.6 The strict separation between mathematical and ontological concepts operated in the transition of mathematics toward a science of symbolical structures led to the death of thinking in substantial concepts. The invention of the thoroughly symbolical world of physics, too, could not be conceived nor given a foundation in the terms of a logic of substance and the concepts of representation. Around 1900, the historical-epistemological point of this transformation, the structural core of symbolical thinking as taught by algebra—that a value can only ever be conceived as a function of another value, that anything can thus only be known as a function of something else—applied first and in most instances to thinking itself. The discursive power of symbolism, which denied all substantial reasons, however transcendentally refracted

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they might be, and its reopening of the question concerning thinking constituted the historical condition of possibility for a genealogical perspective to emerge. Beyond Aristotelianism, this perspective focused on the pre-Aristotelian origin of all thinking. The crisis in thinking had rendered the supratemporality of categories and forms of intuition questionable and flung all a prioris into the maelstrom of history. A genealogy took shape that sought to capture the most remote origins of thinking and show how the categories had come into being. The task was no longer what Nietzsche had called the metaphysical search for “a miraculous source,” the great program of substance logic, which denied that “the more highly valued thing[s],”7 at least, like the logical, the rational, thinking, had their origin in their opposite and thus never found anything at the point of origin other than the purest possibility of being, absolute identity, and interiority beyond all temporality and contingency. Nor was thinking enclosed once more within an ideality to be rethought on the basis of a new thinking of relations. Beyond the crisis mode of epistemology and the philosophy of consciousness, thinking revealed its essential exteriority. The crisis had thrown open the gates to the categorial underground because the traditional categorial order of thought, which someone like Kant had still been able purely to deduce from and found upon itself, had been shaken. It allowed the question of what remained unthought in categorial thinking to arise, the question of possible other sites that did not belong to it but where it had once taken shape and as whose function it was to be understood. While, as Nietzsche has it, “mankind likes to put questions of origins and beginnings out of its mind,” the crisis had rendered at least some thinkers “almost inhuman” and fostered in them “a contrary inclination.”8 It seemed that initially, thinking had been nothing but a function of primitive institutions and a primitive Being with all its desires and affects, errors, exaggerations, and masquerades. The task was to describe the genesis of thinking from out of the density of an originary pragmatic-institutional meshwork that had once provided human beings with their essential distinction and laid the foundations of their capacity for judgment. Shedding light on its lineage meant going back to where all institutional order emerged, to the great variety of primitive practices, in order to there, precisely, bear witness to the birth of the categories. The totemistic world of the sacred was to present the categorial order in statu nascendi and mark the point zero of the long, and equally long-winded, path of idealization. It was believed that all principles and schematisms ultimately owed their existence to the collective representations of a primitive world of the sacred and of communication, a world that presented itself as the foundation of any institutional ordering

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of the sacred. To understand the genesis of idealities, one had to study the genesis of communication. To come to terms with the becoming of thinking, one had to take a different path than, say, Husserlian phenomenology, and see idealization as a process, look at the process of idealization historically in all its meanderings and its materiality, without allowing for any kind of ideal horizon of sense. This rejection, precisely, of any precedent ideality of sense that would always already schematize the having-become of thinking was the critical point of all genealogy and perhaps the hardest thought to bear in the moment of crisis. To discover the unconscious of everything categorial, one had to find the common ground of ideality and empiricity. There mustn’t be any unbridgeable gap between facts and idealities or else genealogical work on the becoming of the ideal would come up empty. To understand how institutions could endow thinking with its essential symbols, one had to find the practice of symbolization as such to be at work at the bottom of the institutional. Even if it was not always possible to keep up with this horizon of the genealogical question and instead to give in to the temptation, for example, of instituting another great transcendental subject called “society” in order to thwart the looming loss of sense in the dispersion of practical-institutional multitudes, even then, this horizon did concentrate the epistemic event-ness of the genealogical enterprise. At the very least, this event is associated with—to cite but the most important among them and those who thought this enterprise most clearly and advanced it the most—the names of Émile Durkheim, Marcel Mauss, Henri Hubert, Robert Hertz, Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, Marcel Granet, and Stefan Czarnowski. The program of a genealogy of thinking placed itself at a neuralgic point of the epistemic crisis. Seeking to understand the matter of thinking, it descended into the primitive world of the sacred and of communication and in so doing became deeply embedded in the fantasms of electromagnetism, which traversed all contemporary discourses. Under the heading “the singulare tantum of the sacred,” a discourse emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century that sought to understand the “primitives”’ constitution of world, experience, and reality from out of an exchange of information with spirits, ghosts, and demons and a belief in magical action at a distance, and it ascribed the emergence of this archaic world of transmission to an initial delirium of the use of categories. An entire discourse had dragged contemporaries into an animistic or preanimistic world governed by the madness of unrelenting communication with beings from the beyond and a regime of all-pervasive forces and powers, into a world in which a surplus of messages produced nothing but noise. It was no coincidence, then, that on occasion the founder of this fantastic animism, Edward Burnett Tylor, described

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his studies of primitive culture as an ethnology of modern spiritism, which, in strict correlation with the emergence of technical media, had befallen America and Europe in those days.9 The spiritist aberration in the entry into the world of electromagnetism, it seemed, could be seen as a “survival” and late echo of the originary mistake that constituted culture, the mistake the illiterate had to make as they undertook to spell out the world without as yet having that sovereign transcendental subjectivity at their disposal, which, according to Kant, was capable of “spelling out appearances … in order to be able to read them as experience.”10 In the age of the crisis of intuitive thinking and representation, a discourse had invented the primitive world of the sacred. Something that essentially only revealed the characteristics of the dawning age of communication itself, whose phenomena could no longer simply be presented and thought by means of intuition and the alphabet of the categories, was said to testify to an originary confusion and an incessant drawing of false conclusions. As Tylor writes in Primitive Culture: “Man, as yet in a low intellectual condition, having come to associate in thought those things which he found by experience to be connected in fact, proceeded erroneously to invert this action, and to conclude that association in thought must involve similar connexion in reality.” The signature of the early human mental constitution, the first law of the operations of the early human mind, was simply but erroneously having “mistak[en] an ideal for a real connexion.”11 Following Tylor, James George Frazer in his gigantic labor of securing the traces of the originary delirium of thinking found the human being’s superstitious stupor to be one big misapplication of the category of causality.12 This animistic world of an initial crisis of representation, in which people trusted, no matter what the cost, in the images in which thoughts depicted the world, this world was imagined at the very moment in which an age was confronted with nothing less than the collapse of the thinking of representation as such, in which intuitive thinking, faced with essential nonrepresentabilities, was no longer able to obtain a correct picture and experienced the obsolescence of its traditional schemata, even of schemata as such. The “omnipotence of thoughts,” which later seemed to Freud to be the principle of the animist “system of thought” and whose “survival … is most clearly visible” in “obsessional neuroses,” entered the stage of the episteme at precisely the moment in which the realm of thoughts for its part had run its course, a moment when, faced with the impossibility to grasp the world intuitively, all it was good for was the “formation of symptoms” and a neurotic fashioning of the world.13 Preanimism as it was elaborated around 1900 extended the concept of “mana” beyond the regional meaning Robert Henry Codrington had shown

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it to have in Melanesian religion and introduced it as a basic category of primitive Being. It thereby invented a category that allowed for going back further than even all those entities and personages that were said to populate the animist world of flows of messages as senders and receivers. It was as if one encountered the communicative ground of primitive Being itself. “Primitive” human beings existed in the total presence of obscure forces that lay beyond the reach of the senses and stood for what was completely invisible and immaterial. They were merely something like a transition point of omnipresent forces, locked up in a total communication; their Being-in-the-world was a Being-in-communication. The “primitive” were seen as completely subject to the reign of the supernatural and seemed to live in a magical world of actions at a distance, in a world imagined as an effect of permanent transmissions of supernatural forces and as manifestations of intensities.14 Preanimism updated the question concerning the sacred and the religious origin of everything institutional in the terms of the contemporary episteme, an episteme whose excess of representation was out of joint with the essential nonrepresentability of the electromagnetic world. As long as the question of communication had not yet been articulated in the nonintuitive terms of a logarithm of information, it, and all that was fantasmatic about it, was pushed into the archaic. Engaging in a savage hermeneutics of facts of transmission and processes, an entire age set out to sacralize its channels. Historically and epistemologically, the place the discourse of the sacred occupied was highly significant. The concept of God, once the transcendental mainstay and deep ontological ground of a logic of substance, was depersonalized and evaporated to become a mere variable in a relational field of communicating forces. Around 1900, the field-theoretical turn of thinking and the conflict between substance and function had found direct expression in the discourse of the sacred; this affected even the double, both substantialist and dynamic, conception of the originary category of mana.15 This was the dawn of a new knowledge about the religious based on the essential polarity sacred–profane and on the communication between these two worlds, a knowledge that undermined the “Mosaic distinction” between true religion and false religion, which according to Jan Assmann had once “severed or cloven … the space” of Jewish-Christian-Islamic monotheism.16 The new knowledge of the religious, which was concerned no longer with personal gods but with the genealogical study of anonymous religious forces and their manifestation in the institutions of a primitive world, had set out on an exodus from the intellectual space of theology and driven theology itself into a crisis.17 In its recourse to a primitive constitution of reality and experience in a world of the

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sacred, the dawning age of communication even encountered its own, diffused ground of thinking and knowing, where even the concept of God, the guardian of substance, crashed. Whatever fantasms were attached to it, the discourse of the sacred was thus both an effect and an agent of the epistemic turn. To discover a pre-Aristotelian state of understanding from which categorial thought had allegedly once arisen, the genealogists of thinking worked through this fantasmatic ground of the sacred in its entirety and articulated its historically and epistemologically decisive point. And they did so in synchrony with the switch from a thinking in concepts of substance to a thinking that reckoned with the essential nonrepresentability of the real. What at first looked like a gigantic objection to purely symbolic thinking and the great epistemological caesura as such, what seemed to show thinking to be intuitionistically situated and externally justified, in the institutional meshwork of primitive sociality, was ultimately to lead, through the fog of historical becoming, straight back to the insistence of the formal. For what, in the end, became visible through the archaic institutions, which were supposed to show the birth of the categorial and of the categoriality of aprioricity, were the traits of a rigorously symbolic constitution of the world of the “primitive.” In working through the fantasms of an originary world of the sacred, of impersonal powers and the communication of anonymous forces, whose analysis initially searched only for the emergence of the first essential distinctions and thus for the birth of thinking, what began to take shape in the very crisis of thinking was a beyond of the thinking of representation. Where one had once been looking for the prehistory of representation, the aftermath of representation was to allow for finding the originary formalism of the human being. Where one had once been chasing the genesis of collective representations, one finally came to recognize an originary labor of symbolization that did not represent but encoded the real. At the end, when genealogists of thinking had long since become genealogists of efforts at encoding, it became possible to claim that “[m]an is engaged with all his being in the procession of numbers, in a primitive symbolism which is distinct from imaginary representations.”18 After half a century’s worth of excavations, the motto of one of the first genealogists of knowledge still applied: the goal of these investigations of thinking was “the explanation of some actual reality which is near to us … this reality is man, and more precisely, the man of to-day, for there is nothing which we are more interested in knowing.”19 And around 1900, what else could this reality have signified but a world of the symbolic machine from which, thanks to the dissolution in the regime of formalisms, the human being itself was about to vanish? The discovery of a history of thinking belonged squarely

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to this time of crisis. It was both the symptom and the working-through of the epochal turn away from a certain Aristotelianism of thinking. The full extent of this upset can be discerned in the shadow world of formalization and at the same time at the site of one of its least expected triumphs. And this, precisely, is what Cassirer, the diagnostician, had no inkling of. At the moment he turned to “mythical thought” in elaborating the second volume of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, he was unable archeologically to grasp the connection between the exodus from Aristotelianism and the project of a genealogy of the forms of intuition and the categories. His archeological eye trained in the history of the exact sciences failed him where it came to a central question concerning philosophy’s self-assertion, namely the possible untenability of the difference between mythos and logos. His desire to elaborate a system buried the possibility that his search for mythical thinking might itself be an expression and a consequence of the crisis he never stopped describing. Historically and systematically, his efforts at presenting “the genesis of the basic forms of cultural life from the mythical consciousness” served the purpose of depicting scientific philosophy’s tremendous struggle “to effect a separation and liberation” from mythical thinking.20 Where it seemed that the dismissal of intuition and the implementation of pure symbolisms caused philosophy to lose its grip on the matter of thinking, it had first of all to make sure both of its beginnings and its historical task and return to the site where it had once taken over thinking from myth. To be sure, Cassirer acknowledged mythical thinking to be a “true spiritual action” and an autonomous kind of knowledge.21 Along with language, myth was a figure of one and the same breakthrough to symbolic form.22 Yet just as in Cassirer’s day one could witness the transition from the thinking of representation to symbolism’s pure thinking of signification, so there was once to have taken place that other key scene in which thinking moved from the expressive to the representational function, which now, faced with functioning symbolic machines, seemed to come to an end. The renewed encounter with the mythical served the purpose of leading back to philosophy’s originary function, the critique of knowledge, which was said to always already have consisted in grasping symbolic form as such, detaching it from mythical superimpositions, and leading it toward idealization. The renewed thinking of the mythical thus formed part of the agenda of philosophy’s self-assertion in the time of crisis. It served philosophy’s new deployment in an epistemologically central position. Philosophy now appeared as the guardian of symbolic form; it historically and critically synthesized the disparate scenes of symbolic form formation and explained the position entire ages, its own included, held in the history of symbols.

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Insofar as it described the history of the symbolic function starting from its mythical origin, Cassirer’s working through the long lineage of symbolic thinking promised to help this thinking achieve its pure shape and guarantee the future of knowledge. Grasping mythical thinking in terms of “its own immanent, structural law” and as “the unity of a specific ‘structural form’ of the spirit” served to block the “infringements of myth on the province of science.”23 This came down to conceiving of the stillpervasive persistence and insistence of substance ontology as a long-lasting after-effect of the mythical. The stated goal of Cassirer’s agenda for a new philosophy of mythology was the extension of the epistemological program of demythologization that pure mathematics, symbolic logic, and physics were de facto implementing. What was the case for “the concept of causality, the general concept of ‘force,’” that it “must pass through the mythical intuition of efficacy before dissolving in the mathematical-logical concept of the function,” seemed to be the case for all categories. “Thus everywhere, down to the configuration of our perceptive world, down to that sphere which from the naive standpoint we designate as actual ‘reality,’ we find this characteristic survival of original mythical traits.”24 Even in scientific knowledge, which progressed toward a rigorous knowledge of relations, “the boundaries between the ‘substantial’ and the ‘functional’ are ever and again blurred, so that a semimythical hypostasis of purely functional and relational concepts arises.”25 Reformulating mythical thinking, going back to what Cassirer called the form of thinking, intuiting, and living of the mythical was to expel the survivals of substance logic from an entire episteme by, first of all, revealing the mythical becoming and mythical content of the concept of substance. The detachment from the concept of substance and the transition to the age of the concept of function as the extreme end of the history of the symbolic function itself could only be implemented and completed as a farewell to the mythical. This was as true of the natural sciences as it was of the humanities and philosophy. The discovery of the mythical underground of thinking served to establish and secure what Hermann Usener called the “necessary condition [nötiger Unterbau]”26 of an epistemology on a par with the perfection of the symbolic function. From this perspective, the current crisis was simply the most extreme moment of the unstoppable progress of the history of the human mind conceived of as the lengthy breakthrough of the symbolic function whose perfected figure was now beginning to take shape in pure mathematics and field physics. In going back to the “spiritual ‘crisis’”27 in which the symbolical function had once appeared “on the threshold of a new spirituality,”28 that is, in going back to the mythical “original division”29 between the sacred

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and the profane, the age was to take the measure of the full extent of the crisis it had been allotted and come to understand itself as a threshold age: as the age on the threshold of the actualization of a pure symbolic function. The momentousness of the contemporary transformation seemed comparable to nothing less than the arrival, once upon a time, of the animal symbolicum. This arrival could be read as the primal scene of the contemporary critical situation. In immersing himself in the pre-Aristotelian ground of thinking, Cassirer merely obeyed the logic of the episteme and thus was unable to wrest from it the slightest archeological meaning, something that had always been his strong suit. The immersion in the genealogy of thinking, which had become systematized especially thanks to the Durkheim school and to Lévy-Bruhl and which submerged (and offended) an entire age in its “primitive” origins, robbed even the most wily archeologist of his day of much of his diagnostic acumen in epistemic matters and drove right into the fantasmatics of the crisis. Cassirer’s text thus became a symptom of that great transformation in which symbolic machines refashioned the outlines of knowledge and an entire age struggled to maintain its composure by “distinguish[ing] between the mythical and the logical form of thought.”30 As early as 1878 Nietzsche, with a certain relish for the metaphysical turmoil to come, had clearly seen all the bewilderments the episteme was to confront: “Almost all the problems of philosophy once again pose the same form of questions as they did two thousand years ago: how can something originate in its opposite, for example, rationality in irrationality, the sentient in the dead, logic in illogic, disinterested contemplation in covetous desire, living for others in egoism, truth in error?”31

The prehistory of the categories In February 1902, prompted by the need to fill the pages of L’Année sociologique, the journal he cofounded in 1898, Émile Durkheim wrote to his nephew, Marcel Mauss: “Would you be able to do an article with me, until August, say, on the primitive classifications of things (a rough and provisional title)?”32 To avoid any misunderstanding concerning the study, which seems to have come as quite a surprise to Mauss, he followed up with a short sketch some weeks later. The half-page draft of this stopgap article was to contain the gist of the Durkheim School’s future program in the sociology of knowledge, strictly obeying the logic of the crisis, which, in order to work through this great reversal and derive sense from it, schematized knowledge historically and pulled it down from the heavens of ideality

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to the hard ground of its factual having-become: “The mental operation called classification did not take shape all of a piece in the human brain. Something must have led human beings to class beings in this manner. The genera are not given in the things. They are created.”33 According to the published article, the “classificatory function,” that is, more exactly, “the procedure which consists in classifying things, events, and facts about the world into kinds and species, subsuming them one under the other, and determining their relations of inclusion or exclusion,”34 was to be related to the social origins of kinship relations by going back historically to the most elementary divisions among the “primitive,” and the logical hierarchy was to be shown to be a function of the social hierarchy. If only because the function of classification lay at the basis of all of Aristotle’s logic and of the doctrine of the categories in particular,35 this project concealed the historical ploughing up of Aristotelianism. The text, cowritten by Durkheim and Mauss, finally appeared under the title “De quelques formes primitives de classification: Contribution à l’étude des représentations collectives” (“On Some Primitive Forms of Classification: Contribution to the Study of Collective Representations”). It was to become seminal. It led contemporaries straight into the totemistic underground, where the “primitive” coined the first logical distinctions and created those forms of intuition that much later and after going through a long process of homogenization and idealization were to be considered a priori givens. Durkheim and Mauss as it were breathed in the mountain air of Sils Maria; they seriously set about the “history of the genesis of thought” Nietzsche had envisaged. True, nothing might have been further from these cool minds, concerned as they were, each in his own way, with the systematic foundation of sociological knowledge, than the ardent fervor for demolishing empty idealities, a prioris, and transcendental constraints by which Nietzsche sometimes got carried away. Nonetheless, whether they liked it or not, they situated themselves on that same line of flight of the episteme that drove down into the subterraneous labor of traditional layers of thought that set to drilling, digging, and undermining. In 1878, Nietzsche had made out a “lack of historical sense” to be the “family failing of all philosophers.” Black on white, the first installment of Human, All Too Human asserted: All philosophers have the common failing of starting out from man as he is now and thinking they can reach their goal through an analysis of him. They involuntarily think of “man” as an aeterna veritas, as something that remains constant in the midst of all flux, as a sure measure of things. Everything the philosopher has declared about man is, however, at bottom

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no more than a testimony as to the man of a very limited period of time. … They will not learn that man has become, that the faculty of cognition has become; while some of them would have it that the whole world is spun out of this faculty of cognition. Now, everything essential in the development of mankind took place in primeval times, long before the four thousand years we more or less know about; during these years mankind may well not have altered very much. But the philosopher here sees “instincts” in man as he now is and assumes that these belong to the unalterable facts of mankind and to that extent could provide a key to the understanding of the world in general. … But everything has become: there are no eternal facts, just as there are no absolute truths.36

“Historical philosophizing” was the watchword of the hour.37 “One day” the “laborious process of science” was to “celebrate its greatest triumph in a history of the genesis of thought.”38 As was only proper for a historical philosophizing, Nietzsche had provided the historical index of this genealogical program avant la lettre: the demolishing of the world of representation by rigorous science and above all the liquidation of representations of the substrate or substance.39 Science had revealed propositions of the kind “that there are enduring things; that there are identical things; that there are things, kinds of material, bodies; that a thing is what it appears to be” to be “erroneous articles of faith” that had at one point become part of “basic endowment of the species” only because they were useful in sustaining human life. 40 When the real of the world of the sciences became a process, became fluid, thinking in terms of substance no longer seemed to have any use for life. At the very moment, at least, that conceptions of substance obviously only served to obscure the order of things and became founts of a fundamental disorientation, it became possible to see the conditions of possibility of the concept of substance in history and in the lifeworld: Similarly, in order for the concept of substance to originate, which is indispensable to logic though nothing real corresponds to it in the strictest sense, it was necessary that for a long time changes in things not be seen, not be perceived; the beings who did not see things exactly had a head start over those who saw everything “in a flux.”41

All at once, science in doing away with such substantialist-metaphysical principles, allowed insight into “the illogical”42 that had grounded thinking since its very beginning and pervaded it “down to the most remote areas of

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pure logic,43 the “illogical original relationship with all things”44 and “illogical disposition” that “first supplied all the foundations for logic.”45 It unearthed all “the bad habits of illogical thinking” with which “we have for millennia made moral, aesthetic, religious demands on the world, looked upon it with blind desire, passion or fear,” to which we “abandoned ourselves”46 and to which we owed the becoming of the world as representation, all of the variety and deep significance, the mystery of this representation. A terrible power of error and intellectual blunder schematized the history of knowledge at the very moment that science pulled out the rug from under the blunders of substance logic. What flared up with great historical and epistemological precision in the cry, “Long live physics!”47 was the lineage of the project of intellectual history and the genealogy of knowledge. Ever since it had become impossible to deny the possibility that the world “includes infinite interpretations”48—in accordance with the contemporary state of knowledge, we might say: infinite interpretations of nonintuitive formalisms of the real—it had become necessary to live with the idea that thinking, and the image one had of thinking, was just one possible interpretation among many, one that had a concrete history and a reason that did not lie in it itself. For Nietzsche, the emergence of the genealogical question “Where is the origin of logic in man’s head?”49 contained the real core of the reversal whose contemporary he was, the crucial point of the crisis of thinking in his day. It was not as if science were to settle accounts, as if it could do away with this “accumulated treasure of the entire past” on which “the value of our humanity” depended. It was by no means the task of science to break with “the power of habits of feeling acquired in primeval times.” “Only very naive people” might indulge in the belief “that the nature of man could be transformed into a purely logical one.”50 The use and value of science was to consist solely in its ability, “quite gradually and step by step, [to] illuminate the history of the genesis of this world as idea—and, for brief periods at any rate, lift us up out of the entire proceeding.”51 Lifted up by this science-induced crisis above the philosophical common sense in matters of knowledge, Nietzsche undertook test drillings into the historical underground of thinking. Where philosophers saw a calm procession of logical thoughts and conclusions, there had in reality always been a “process and battles of drives.” All one experienced was the result of a well-practiced “ancient mechanism” continually refined over the course of history, without even a hint of the conflict between drives at the basis of knowledge.52 It took an epistemic break to lift the engine back to the surface. Nietzsche brought to light the basest form of the sensation of pleasure and pain at the basis of all judgment. Having adopted, as part of his curious dietics of

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reading, a diet of religious history from the animists’ kitchen, he traced the logic of the dream which humanity was once to have obeyed even in the waking state. As a philologist, he posited the practice of language as “the first stage of the occupation with science.”53 He forged aphorisms about magical “preludes to science,” “faith in cause and effect,” and the category of causality thus appeared to him as one of the “aftereffects of the oldest religiosity.”54 “[S]peculation on usages” revealed itself to be a “tremendous exercise ground of the intellect” and a “venerable if dreadful prehistoric world of science.”55 Aware of the then-ongoing subterraneous work on the thinking about the dawning axiomatic age, Nietzsche with a kind of Homeric laughter could then make “being able to stand contradiction” pass for a “high sign of culture” and to celebrate “being able to contradict” as what was “really great, new, and amazing in our culture,” as “the step of all steps of the liberated spirit.”56 But the daring bird, whom the crisis had provided with the first program of a history of thinking and who was now flying across the ocean of intellectual becoming, was well aware that “[o]ther birds will fly farther!”57 Yet even this awareness of his own situation, the momentousness of the thinking to come, and the ploughing up it was to operate belongs to a true thinking of the transition. Some twenty years later, around 1900, the detachment from substance logic had already progressed so far, the spell of the concept of substance been broken to such an extent that, in order to systematically work through the contemporary mental danger, it was just this genealogical procedure that was adopted. Guided by the Aristotelian list of the categories, thinkers undertook to work out the becoming of the elementary categorial forms with which all thinking had once begun. The question of the origin of the function of classification, which Boole had formally salvaged from the history of its misinterpretations and elevated to the rank of the first law of thinking, triggered one of the most remarkable projects of the first half of the twentieth century. Even if an entire school participated in it, no one, perhaps, understood this project more thoroughly than Marcel Mauss. And in the course of the next few decades, this kind of history did indeed bear Nietzschean traits, if you like. A multiform genealogy—of festivals or collective excitement, of wealth, rivalry, and waste, of orientation, techniques of the body, or the calendar, of magical practices, concepts of food, personality, or prayer—was to push ahead to the institutional origins of the Aristotelian categories. It was also tasked with advancing the search for all those categories of which thinking might once have availed itself and whose traces, unrecorded as they were by Aristotle, had been lost in history. When Mauss, toward the end of his productive days, once more penned “a note on the principle underlying these

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kinds of research,” a principle called “the social history of the categories of the human mind” attempting “to explain them one by one,” he claimed to be “using very simply, and as a temporary expedient, the list of Aristotelian categories as our point of departure. We describe particular forms of them in certain civilisations and, by means of this comparison, try to discover in what consists their unstable nature, and their reasons for being as they are.”58 The first pages penned by Durkheim and Mauss provided the century just beginning with an agenda that was to shape the next sixty years, at least until Lévi-Strauss’s Savage Thought. It was a call to do away with the illusions to which the thinking of thinking was attached, a call just right for inaugurating a century that was always also about disappointments and about a beyond of representation as such, a century that, for its part, was to distrust the images of thinking: The discoveries of contemporary psychology have thrown into prominence the frequent illusion that we regard certain mental operations as simple and elementary when they are really very complex. We now know what a multiplicity of elements make up the mechanism by virtue of which we construct, project, and localize in space our representations of the tangible world. But this operation of dissociation has been only very rarely applied as yet to operations which are properly speaking logical. The faculties of definition, deduction, and induction are generally considered as immediately given in the constitution of the individual understanding. Admittedly, it has been known for a long time that, in the course of history, men have learned to use these diverse functions better and better. But it is thought that there have been no important changes except in the way of employing them; that in their essential features they have been fully formed as long as mankind has existed. It has not even been imagined that they might have been formed by a painful combination of elements borrowed from extremely different sources, quite foreign to logic, and laboriously organized. And this conception of the matter was not at all surprising so long as the development of logical faculties was thought to belong simply to individual psychology, so long as no one had the idea of seeing in these methods of scientific thought veritable social institutions whose origin sociology alone can retrace and explain.59

Such talk programmatically wrested the logical from the deceptions of logical and psychological immanence. It drew on the fact that obviously, the core mental operation called classification could not have come about spontaneously and by natural necessity, that it must have “other origins”60

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than logical-psychological ones. The traditional conception of the classification function seemed to be “relatively recent”: At the bottom of our conception of class there is the idea of a circumscription with fixed and definite outlines. Now one could almost say that this conception of classification does not go back before Aristotle. Aristotle was the first to proclaim the existence and the reality of specific differences, to show … that there was no direct passage from one genus to another.61

There must have been “a considerable prehistory” between the event Aristotle and an originary confusion mentale, that initial “state of indistinction from which the human mind developed”62 and which shone through myth and primitive mentality as much as it ontogenetically kept on incessantly repeating itself. Those who sought to study the genesis of the classification function had to immerse themselves in this prehistory; there, they had to find strong reasons for the mental confusion being cleared up and a “complete lack of distinction”63 being transformed into a first effort at organization. There was no model, either in the external world or in consciousness, for the constitution of groups and their being organized according to special relationships from which, eventually, a hierarchical structure of genera and species evolved. The order of things and entities had to be due to an essential contingency that provided the human being with the function of classification. To all appearances, it was this contingency alone to which the birth of the classificatory animal was due, the animal that began relating things and entities. To answer the true genealogical question where the practice of relating and ordering came from, it was necessary “to investigate the most rudimentary classifications made by mankind, in order to see with what elements they have been constructed.”64 On the threshold of post-Aristotelian thinking, readings of pre-Aristotelian classification data promised to discover the “extralogical origin” of logical concepts.65 Where once the auto-development of a substantial Being had metaphysically guaranteed the divisions of logic and its secondary operations, the exodus from the Aristotelian formation argued for the historical becoming of the putting-into-relation that was the essential precondition of this formation. Forays into the primitive underground were to discover in the genesis of the practice of relating the previously unthought beginning of the classification function and thus shine a light into the obscure origins of everything logical. At the moment of the transition from a logic of substance to a logic of relations, the question of the origin of relating was the focus of

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epistemic interest—the question how the activity of relating had once come into the world or into people’s minds and how it was possible in the first place to have the idea of relating something to something and to establish an entire classificatory system of thought on the basis of this practice. Durkheim and Mauss’s study operated on the sore spot, as it were, of an order of knowledge rapidly recasting itself. Where others, faced with the dissolution of the world into relational contexts that could be noted purely in symbols, sought to find refuge in an originary mental act (Brouwer) or an originary effort of consciousness (Husserl), each of which already stood for the given fact of relating, they opened a breach for a fantastic historical intuitionism that could not only account for the lineage of Aristotelianism but conceived even its contemporary, relationalist dissolution and overcoming as part of the necessary course of the history of knowledge and as an event in the long duration of idealization. The study of the “primitives’” most elementary systems of classification brought to light a “curious organization of ideas, parallel to that of the society”66 and an application of “the social divisions … to the primitive mass of representations.”67 In the simplest case, for example, that of two moieties, the classification of things seemed simply to reproduce the dual classification of people. The dichotomization of things by two opposing generic concepts proceeded strictly according to the dichotomization of people by the moieties, which for their part gave their names to the genera and thereby established relationships of inclusion and exclusion even between things and people. And just as there were no differences within the moieties, so there were none within the genera. The originary confusion mentale thus still characterized the simplest systems of classification. In more complex cases, the moieties corresponded to the generic concepts, and marriage classes, which derived from the exogamous clan organization between moieties, corresponded to the subordinate concepts of species for the ordering of things. This was an example of actually “hierarchized concepts” in primitive classificatory systems.68 Ultimately, the schematization of things was even to be able to follow the differentiation according to clans and subclans. The logical relationships that determined the order of things and entities among the “primitive” very strictly obeyed the order of their kinship relations. That was Durkheim and Mauss’s conclusion. Kinship relations were universal in the truest sense of the word: things belonged to the corresponding social groups or classes of entities; all things, entities, people of a class were related to one another. From time to time, there even were higher-order cases in which the totemistic structure of kinship determined the distribution of things and entities in space: “Cosmic space and tribal space are … only very imperfectly distinguished, and the mind passes from one to the other without difficulty,

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almost without being aware of doing so. And in this way things are connected with particular quarters.”69 The “primitives’” various types of classification, from the simplest to the complex, all derived directly from the heart of society. In the most rigorous cases, each and every individual was tied into a universal kinship relation that throughout schematized what the world was: When it was a matter of establishing ties of kinship between things, and of constituting more and more vast families of creatures and phenomena, this was done with the aid of ideas supplied by the family, the clan, and the moiety, and the totemic myths were taken as starting point. When it was a matter of establishing relations between spatial regions, it was the spatial relations which people maintained within their society that served as starting point. In one case, the framework was furnished by the clan itself, in the other by the material mark made on the ground by the clan. But both forms are of social origin.70

The external form of classes of things, like the relationships between them, was an effect of the order of the social. The logical hierarchy of concepts corresponded to the social hierarchy. Even the conception that “the totality of things is a single system” was simply due to the representation of society as the origin of wholeness, the first whole as such, and “the unique whole to which everything is related.” In this way, “the unity of knowledge,” too, had once been “nothing else than the very unity of the collectivity, extended to the universe.”71 The ultimate reason, however, why the classifications of society left their mark on thinking and why the social framework served as the framework of thinking, was affective in nature. The same sensations that determined domestic and other social relationships were also at the basis of the logical distribution of things. Things attracted or opposed one another the way people were related through kinship or opposed and separated from each other in a vendetta. And when things mingled in thinking, they only imitated the members of a family. Affinities between things corresponded to affinities between people, “and they [i.e., individuals] are classed according to these affinities.” “States of the collective mind (âme),”72 with all their affective impetus, governed the lineage of thinking and drove it into the infinite task of separating and relating. The collective affective ground at the basis of the distribution of things in genera and species had once been religious through and through. This was the lesson to be drawn from the classifications of the “primitive”: Things are above all sacred or profane, pure or impure, friends or enemies, favourable or unfavourable; i.e. their most fundamental characteristics

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are only expressions of the way in which they affect social sensibility. The differences and resemblances which determine the fashion in which they are grouped are more affective than intellectual.73

The retreat of the collective and the loosening of the social bond called affect was to have replaced the essential imprecision and inconsistency of this original logic with the precision and consistency of the concept. While “[t]he first logical categories were social categories,”74 the burnout of the affective grounds of thinking had opened the path for the history of idealization to run its course such that it became possible, at some point, to speak of pure thinking and logical autonomy. Yet even if everything seemed to suggest that kinship relations provided the relations of thinking with their model and that society provided thinking with its certainties and imposed a constraint on it: shining through this socio-historical intuitionism was the unavoidable power of the symbolic order of which systems of kinship and systems of thought were only particular instantiations. For just as the order of kinship was to produce the order of thinking, it was inversely possible for the system of thinking to affect the system of kinship. Systems of classification traced lines of segmentation whose strict logic the becoming of the social order itself followed: What characterizes the latter [i.e., systems of classifications—EH] is that the ideas are organized on a model which is furnished by the society. But once this organization of the collective mind exists, it is capable of reacting against its cause and of contributing to its change. We have seen how species of things, classed in a clan, serve it as secondary or sub-totems; i.e. within the clan a particular group of individuals, under the influence of causes which are unknown to us, comes to feel more specially related to certain things which are attributed, in a general way, to the whole clan. The latter, when it becomes too large, then tends to segment, and this segmentation takes place along the lines laid down by the classification. We must beware of thinking, in fact, that these secessions are necessarily the products of revolutionary or tumultuous movements. More often, indeed, it seems that they have taken place by a completely logical process. … Once begun, moreover, the same process may be continued for ever.75


The logical lines of separation set out the lines of society’s development. The social segmented along the logical differences. There was a logic of becoming according to which systems of thinking and systems of kinship

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were coupled in a feedback loop or, rather: systems of kinship were systems of thinking—and vice versa. This basically disavowed Durkheim and Mauss’s talk of the “social nature” of thinking. The quasi-substantiality of society that began to take shape as the ground of thinking was undermined, as was the proper thing to do around 1900, by a rigorous thinking of relations that intimated a different, a pure outside that served as the shared ground of systems of thinking and kinship: the symbolic structure, to which Mauss advanced some twenty years later in his Essai sur le don. The procedural division taking place according to the short-circuiting of systems of thinking and of kinship, moreover, was moving toward the complete dissolution of the systemic as such. The entropy of the “primitive” order of thinking as of the social order took shape according to the symbolic logic of becoming: [T]he whole society ends up as a scattering of little autonomous groups, all equal among themselves, none subordinate to another. Naturally, the classification is changed in consequence. The kinds of things attributed to each of these sub-divisions constitute as many separate genera, all on the same level. All sign of hierarchy has disappeared. … So the old classification will have given place to a simple division without any internal organization, a division of things per capita and no longer by origins. But, at the same time, as it is made between a considerable number of groups, it will be found to cover practically the entire universe.76

The moment of the total dispersion of the social coincides with an “extreme dispersion of things.”77 The end of totemistic history thus once more threatened an absence of distinction and confusion mentale. This entropy was the real motor of idealization. The entropy of the shattering of people and things drove the volatilization of the affectivities that had once tied them together within the framework of a universal order of kinship. The fate of the totemistic order, which served as the extralogical ground of the logical, had as it were been systemically traced out in advance: from out of itself it had in its demise always already been engaged in obscuring the traces of the origin of thinking and in preparing the faith in the purity of thinking. It was the survivals of totemism that were to allow for an arduous reconstruction of how thinking had become what it was. The first philosophical classifications had buried the history of their becoming underneath the abstraction and purity of their great principles. Yet in doing so, they showed themselves to be the effects of totemistic entropy. Where once it had been society that thought, it was now the reflection of the individual that reigned, a reflection no longer aware of the genesis of the distinctions essential to it and indulging

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in a belief in pure thinking. The history of thinking thus revealed itself, and not by accident, to be one big withdrawal of its grounds—thereby, strictly speaking, only obeying the logic of its lineage. Going back to the totemistic order was certainly the problematic point of this f irst element of the history of the genesis of thinking on which Durkheim and Mauss’s socio-historical intuitionism rested. The concept of totemism subsisted on giving preference to primitive kinship relations and marriage rules in the spirit of believing oneself to be the descendant of animals and plants over against all other phenomena of classification and the legal and moral institutions based on them. Ever since a series of articles by John F. M’Lennan in The Fortnightly Review in 1869 had launched the scientific engagement with totemism,78 interpretations of totemism’s origin proliferated. A constant search was on for so fantastic a misreading of human relationships and the world. Yet the more a formal reading of the varied relationships one sought to combine under the concept of totemism gained hold, the more the concept began to fall apart.79 Around 1900, the question of kinship relations, a central question of totemism, had become a privileged site of desubstantialization. Durkheim and Mauss had long known that kinship could not be a question of blood, not an expression of physiological conditions, and that totemism could not, as Frazer had still believed,80 and as Freud, on his cue, still believed in 1910, be based on a fundamental misinterpretation of paternity. The study of the totemistic clan order had demolished the physiological prejudice in questions of kinship, which had still been very powerful in the second half of the nineteenth century, and made it possible to think kinship as the work of society. In 1918, Spengler—and this hints at the demythologizing tendency of the kinship question all the way to its later formalization by Lévi-Strauss, André Weil, and others—was to speak of the “primitives”’ “mathematical instinct” that he claimed led them to introduce “such fine shades of language” “for expressing degrees of affinity” “as not even the higher Cultures themselves can show.”81 Durkheim and Mauss had not yet arrived at seeing an illusion in totemism as a whole and recognizing that what one was dealing with in all the phenomena that had been grouped under this heading for fifty years was only a “tendency of mankind to classify out the universe,” as Tylor suspected as early as 1899.82 So long as these phenomena in their entirety were not understood to be the effect of a regime of opposites, as matters of a pure symbolism and thus as “a direct expression of the structure of the mind”83 and its attitude toward things, as Lévi-Strauss later did so thoroughly, it was possible to bet on the primacy of kinship relations and to trace systems of thinking as well as thinking itself back to an intuitionist ground called

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society. The relations of thinking could be grounded in relations of kinship only because one was unwilling and unable to suppose that one and the same order of the mind had always already traversed the various series of phenomena. Here, more so than anywhere else, it becomes apparent just how much the project of a genealogy of thinking may have been an expression of the crisis and a phenomenon of the transition from the concept of substance to that of function. The symbolic dissolution of these questions and their processing in the concepts of information theory was to dispense not only with totemism as the godfather of this powerful genealogy of knowledge. Even the history of thinking would become the history of labor on the formal and the mere history of interpreting a basic formalism that Boole had already dreamed of around 1850 and whose outline Lévi-Strauss sought to trace mutatis mutandis some one hundred years later under cybernetic conditions. The genealogical exorcism of the illusions thinking had about itself was itself based on an illusion. The first draft of this history of thinking by Durkheim and Mauss marked the entry on the epistemic stage of the central actor, the great transcendental subject called society. In the wealth of relationships between human beings, the study of the classification function had found the genesis of human beings relating anything to anything at all and thereby found—this much would have to have been clear at a point where the age of relational concepts was already in full swing—the lineage of the basic function of thinking. The human being’s being-in-relation served as the transcendental for the thinking of relationships as such. Knowledge of human relationships seemed to bear witness to the lineage of the thinking of relations. This allowed it to advance to the status of a key knowledge for the epistemic transformation in the course of which the free production of relational connections had become the main site of knowledge and the category of relation had become the first category, whereas the traditional main category substance was erased. It thus became possible to say that thinking had always already been a real “social institution” and that its genesis could only be grasped against the background of historical knowledge about human institutions. The switch from a transcendental to a social deduction of the categories operated a transfer of the matter of thinking from the care of philosophy under the roof of sociology. In thus occupying a leading epistemological position, sociology’s claim to an autonomous discourse, such as Durkheim had staked in his 1895 Les règles de la méthode sociologique (The Rules of Sociological Method), acquired downright hegemonic traits. The newly minted polemic term “sociocentrism,”84 which, along with philosophy,

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relegated psychology, another contender in the fight about the matter of thinking, to a secondary epistemic rank, simply pointed out what light sociology throws on the genesis, and consequently the functioning, of logical operations. What we have tried to do for classification might equally be attempted for the other functions or fundamental notions of the understanding. We have already had occasion to mention, in passing, how even ideas so abstract as those of time and space are, at each point in their history, closely connected with the corresponding social organization. The same method could help us likewise to understand the manner in which the ideas of cause, substance, and the different modes of reasoning, etc. were formed. As soon as they are posed in sociological terms, all these questions, so long debated by metaphysicians and psychologists, will at last be liberated from the tautologies in which they have languished.85

In the muddled epistemic situation, it would have been hard to imagine a more explicit leadership claim than this surprise takeover of the matter of thinking. Durkheim’s 1912 opus magnum, Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse (The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life), accordingly, is the direct continuation and elaboration of this agenda and constitutes a manifesto of the sociogenesis of thinking. It argued the necessity of a “renovated … theory of knowledge”86 in the spirit of “the highest reality in the intellectual and moral order that we can know by observation,” namely society,87 and thus directly subordinated epistemology to sociology. The genealogical subversion of the epistemological question that burdened philosophers in the crisis and was itself mainly a product of the great transformation88 was supposed to show that “[r]eally and truly human thought” always remains to come and merely marks “the ideal limit” toward which thinking, as “the product of history,” has been pushing since its inception but which we nonetheless can only approximate.89 For Durkheim, every pure theory of knowledge that denied social life as the source of logical life could not but fail to grasp thinking because it counted on the givenness of idealities where sociology saw nothing but the long and, as a matter of principle, interminable history of idealization and the long duration of a logical evolution. “The categories are no longer considered as primary and unanalysable facts” was the quintessence of the new knowledge about thinking. The categories no longer appear as very simple notions which the first comer can very easily arrange from his own personal observations and which the popular

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imagination has unluckily complicated, but rather they appear as priceless instruments of thought which the human groups have laboriously forged through the centuries and where they have accumulated the best of their intellectual capital. A complete section of the history of humanity is resumed therein. This is equivalent to saying that to succeed in understanding them and judging them, it is necessary to resort to other means than those which have been in use up to the present. To know what these conceptions which we have not made ourselves are really made of, it does not suffice to interrogate our own consciousnesses; we must look outside of ourselves, it is history that we must observe, there is a whole science which must be formed, a complex science which can advance but slowly and by collective labour.90

Throughout his life, Mauss, too, was obsessed with the discursive-political idea of sociology’s supremacy over the problem of knowledge. For him, the task and the fate of sociology entirely depended on this idea. In 1923—Mauss had just been accepted for membership by the Société de Philosophie and been asked to respond to a lecture by Lévy-Bruhl on the mentalité primitive—his very debut consisted in familiarizing the members of the audience with the, in his view, imminent end of their discipline: Mr. Lévy-Bruhl and myself are equally sociologists because we assume that the human mind has a history and that this history cannot be written without at the same time undertaking to write the history of societies. For the history of the human mind [ésprit] is the history of the spirit [ésprit] of these societies and of these societies themselves. … I would even go so far as to say that anthropology, once completed [and studying the total human being by combining historical sociology, linguistics, and psychology—EH], could replace philosophy because it would precisely comprehend this history of the human mind, which philosophy presupposes.91

When, in 1927, he opened the new series of L’Année sociologique with a programmatic essay on the “Divisions et Proportions des Divisions de la Sociologie” (“Sociology: Its Divisions and Their Relative Weightings”), he told readers: “These studies of the forms of thought, primitive or not, should appear at the end, to crown and to synthesise our studies.” Knowledge of the “origins of reason” and “the primitive forms of thought” was neither part of the prolegomena of sociology, nor was it a subdiscipline; it formed “the conclusion of our sciences and not merely of some of them.”92

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The history of the genesis of thinking, which was to inquire into the lineage of all categories human beings might have employed at one point or another, appeared as the high point and completion of all knowledge of human relationships, understood in essentially historical terms. At a time when others in the foundational crisis were engaged in a war over the symbolic or intuitive ground of mathematics and opinions were divided on the question whether thinking was above all a symbolic machine or possessed presymbolic mental foundations and an extrasymbolical horizon of sense, this knowledge promised to decipher thinking as above all an issue of collective practice and thus as a practice itself—and as a practice of relating something to something and, thereby, of constantly forming a world as a single relational context. At work at the basis of thinking as of the social, Mauss surmised in the early 1920s, there was a powerful “drive” that sought to connect human beings, things, and entities: “There is, from the origin, a Trieb, a violence the mind inflicts on itself to surpass itself; there is, from the origin, the will to connect.”93 Strictly speaking, society and thinking as schematizations or symbolic expressions of this real drive to connect had to be equi-originary: “Society exists when there is a set of ideas linked beforehand, and in this respect all societies resemble each other.”94 The originary genealogical correlation thus discovered, which penetrated the entire history of the human mind down to its finest ramifications, was the correlation between the formations of thinking and the formations of society, which for their part already represented effects of the real foundational drive. The incessant labor of the drive to connect could be read off the various historical collective representations in which formations of thinking and of society were irresolvably entangled. They were tied to one another and obeyed one and the same movement of becoming and dying off. The rise and fall of the one coincided with the rise and fall of the other. Nonetheless—and that is precisely why in Mauss’s proposition, the drive immediately had to become a will—society was to have primacy. Society counted as the first and most powerful expression of the drive to connect, which allowed a subject to master it to emerge as the great subject of all collective representation that schematized everything else, including and above all thinking: “that which categorizes, I say, are societies and their history. The untranslatability of languages, of mentalities, betrays the heterogeneity of societies, of families of peoples, of areas and strata of civilizations. The categories live and die with peoples and their various contributions.”95 Yet it was the talk of a drive that pushed analysis to its limits: it was no longer possible to state as a matter of course that society was indeed the extralogical ground of everything logical, that it was the great transcendental

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subject that had from the origin accompanied all operations of the mind, that it was that which categorizes. All that could still be known was that it connects, that it relates, and that thinking, once thought to be pure, that pure reason originated in a dark, impure ground of connecting and relating. Nothing else is meant here by the admirably precise articulation of Nietzsche’s genealogy of knowledge in the word Trieb. This crisis of genealogical analysis, which arose to the extent that the labor on the history of the genesis of thinking led to a dissolution of society, the great agent of that history, in a ground of drives, could only be stopped or endured by the will to award sociology discursive sovereignty in the matter of thinking. The means for understanding systems of thinking and of society, which seemed to penetrate one another the more intricately the more one learned about them, as intertranslatable encodings of the real were simply not yet available. As long as one did not think in terms of encoding, never mind engage with the cultural techniques that determined the achievements of coding, the concept of drive governed this grey area of the real and indicated the failure of a thinking of intuition and representation.96 Moreover: Does not every genealogical analysis at some point risk drifting beyond what it posits and at the same time to perish because of it—perish because of these positings, which analysis needs to avoid drowning in the maelstrom of genealogy? And was it not a virtual necessity for this child of the crisis, for the genealogy of thinking to be dissolved and resolved in a new system of recording (Aufschreibesystem)? This system, called information theory and cybernetics, thought it had overcome the crisis, and it was able once more to feed the illusion that there could be such a thing as a correct image of thinking. This was the image of a thinking that was per se imageless, an image that would shed light on all aspects of the history of thinking such that the true history of the human mind could henceforth be told.

Descartes among the savages Although they cosigned the first and programmatic text on the matter, and although for both, society remained the great agent of the history of thinking, in hindsight Durkheim and Mauss appear like two poles of the genealogical enterprise. The discursive fate uncle and nephew obeyed strictly separated their thinking according to the logic of the new and the old episteme. Durkheim was writing at the most extreme end of the age of representation and intuition, an age not only shaken by the sciences, mathematics, and media technologies but also moving toward its final

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defeat by psychoanalysis, linguistics, and philosophy, in the last and most thorough instance by Heidegger. Just how much Durkheim was beholden to the thinking of representation is made more than clear by his most important concept, “collective representation” (représentation collective). The collective life, “like the individual,” seemed to be “composed of representations,” and it could thus “be presumed that collective and individual representations are in some ways comparable.” Both were said to “maintain the same relations with their respective substrata”97 and each to have “its own particular manner of being.”98 As was only proper for someone who inaugurated a discourse, Durk­ heim posited the independence of the collective from the individual world of representations. Social and individual consciousness were autonomous realities that could not be reduced one to the other; each had an unconscious representational basis to be worked on by specific disciplines, namely sociology and psychology. Later, when sociology had become established and could dare to make more and more discursive claims, Durkheim posited a certain hegemony of the collective over the individual representation of world, despite their autonomy. Collective representations stood on the ground of an unconscious mechanics of social forces; they were merely the offspring of these forces in the realm of presentation. The “major role of the collective representations is to ‘make’ that higher reality which is society itself”99 and thus to institute the main authority concerning all practical and theoretical evidence that also, and especially, traversed the individual world of representation. Significantly, even certainty, since Descartes the last and highest authority of the thinking of representation, derived from the authority of the collective.100 Durkheim rested firmly in the Cartesian basic position. By introducing a great subject named society, his thinking of collective representation attempted a refoundation of Cartesianism at the very moment Cartesianism lost its epistemic organizational power. The collective representation produced reality as such. All Being continued to count as a product of being represented; only now, the subject of representation was no longer an individual but a collective one.101 Throughout, Durkheim, in keeping with the epistemic logic of the thinking of representation, remained “totally pre-Saussurian” and developed a “topic [topique] of the social without language.”102 Even his genealogy of thinking, which traced the collective representations that consolidated in the categories, became engrossed in a profound speechlessness. It drifted into a peculiar dynamist world of the sacred; ultimately, all symbols and therefore the general symbols of the mind we call concepts and categories as well were, as collective representations, supposed to be post-facto objectifications of an ephemeral mystic communication of collective communities of

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excitement. Durkheim’s conception that thinking meant, first of all, to think from the source of clear and distinct ideas, beyond the turbidity of unclear symbols, left its mark even on the genealogy of thinking. Faithful to the Cartesian image of thinking, it focused on the extrasymbolic foundations of a collective intuition on the part of the “primitive.” It sought to gain insight into the reality of social forces underneath the symbols, a reality onto which a primitive intuition was supposed to latch for the purpose of forming symbols. This was how Durkheim sought to explain the lineage of the representational regime of thinking, which at just this time, of course, was dying off in the crisis of intuition. Mauss’s genealogical investigations, in contrast, increasingly sought to discover the symbolic foundation of collective representations. They advanced toward a thinking of symbolic structures in which everything that was categorial about thinking seemed once to have formed. With at least one leg, Mauss, who unlike Durkheim was also a philologist, stood on the ground of symbolic thinking and began to describe the genesis of the categorial from the functioning and immanence of primitive systems of symbols without constantly arguing the primordiality of a reality that the symbols, thanks to an unparalleled collective effort of intuition, allegedly always already represented and idealized. Durkheim died in 1917. Mauss lived until 1950 and thus simply witnessed for a few decisive years longer the time of the crisis and consolidation of the order of knowledge as the symbolic world of the machine was implemented. These two poles delimit the spectrum on which an entire school’s backbreaking intellectual work on the genealogical question took place. For Durkheim, thinking was above all a matter that proceeded from religious grounds. The study of the elementary forms of religious life provided him with “a means of renewing the problems which, up to the present, have only been discussed among philosophers.” In his view, “religion has not confined itself to enriching the human intellect, formed beforehand, with a certain number of ideas;” rather, “it has contributed to forming the intellect itself.” Advancing to the most elementary forms of the religious life thus meant proceeding to the place of the genesis of the most elementary forms of the human mind itself. The forensic history of religion and the genealogy of knowledge coincided: At the roots of all our judgments there are a certain number of essential ideas which dominate all our intellectual life; they are what philosophers since Aristotle have called the categories of the understanding: ideas of time, space, class, number, cause, substance, personality, etc. They

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correspond to the most universal properties of things. They are like the solid frame which encloses all thought; this does not seem to be able to liberate itself from them without destroying itself, for it seems that we cannot think of objects that are not in time and space, which have no number, etc. Other ideas are contingent and unsteady; we can conceive of their being unknown to a man, a society or an epoch; but these others appear to be nearly inseparable from the normal working of the intellect. They are like the framework of the intelligence. Now when primitive religious beliefs are systematically analysed, the principal categories are naturally found. They are born in religion and of religion; they are a product of religious thought.103


Durkheim consolidated the socio-historical intuitionism he first outlined with Mauss by investigating how the human mind had been shaped by the first distinction between the sacred and the profane. This, the “distinctive trait of religious thought”104 brought to light by his study of totemistic systems, had once been at the basis of the primitive separation of the world into two areas, the world of sacred and that of profane entities and things. The “normal working of the intellect” was said to have been inaugurated by the emergence of this distinction.105 For Durkheim, the “heterogeneity” of the sacred and the profane was “absolute.” It was the first indication, as it were, that at the beginning of thinking, where all thinking set in with a classification of entities and things and a representation of relations, there must have been a rigorous regime of mutually opposing forces at work: In all the history of human thought there exists no other example of two categories of things so profoundly differentiated or so radically opposed to one another. The traditional opposition of good and bad is nothing beside this; for the good and the bad are only two opposed species of the same class, namely morals, just as sickness and health are two different aspects of the same order of facts, life, while the sacred and the profane have always and everywhere been conceived by the human mind as two distinct classes, as two worlds between which there is nothing in common. The forces which play in one are not simply those which are met with in the other, but a little stronger; they are of a different sort.106

According to Durkheim, this separation, which gave thinking its first two categories and made all primitive labor of relating possible, could not derive from sense experience, for “nothing in sensible experience seems able to suggest the idea of so radical a duality to them.”107 It was the work

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of society. In a countermovement to the profane world, the world of the sacred received everything that served to objectivize collective ideals. In it, the supremacy of society over the individual manifested itself, it was the trenchant expression of society’s moral authority and the consolidation of its ideality, a kind of constitutive auto-deification of the collective order in which the collective ensured its functioning and survival. “In a general way,” Durkheim writes, “it is unquestionable that a society has all that is necessary to arouse the sensation of the divine in minds, merely by the power that it has over them; for to its members it is what a god is to his worshippers.”108 Society is “constantly creating sacred things out of ordinary ones.”109 Robert Hertz, in his study La Prééminence de la main droite: Étude sur la polarité religieuse (The Pre-eminence of the Right Hand: A Study in Religious Polarity), had already pointed to the essential dualism to be found in primitive thinking. Hertz’s preliminary study for a genealogy of the form of intuition of space discovered an order of the hands that characterized the formation of, at least, the Indo-European order of space. For him, the difference between left hand and right hand penetrated the entire schematization of the world; it was at the basis of the order of things because it set out the areas in space that served as tableau for the primitive classifications. Hertz writes: The axis which divides the world into two halves, the one radiant and the other dark, also cuts through the human body and divides it between the empire of light and that of darkness. Right and left extend beyond the limits of our body to embrace the universe. … Thus the opposition of the right and the left has the same meaning and application as the series of contrasts, very different but reducible to common principles, presented by the universe. Sacred power, source of life, truth, beauty, virtue, the rising sun, the male sex, and—I can add—the right side; all these terms are interchangeable, as are their contraries, they designate under many aspects the same category of things, a common nature, the same orientation towards one of the two poles of the mystical world.110

The order of hands was where the microscopic and macroscopic order had once been brought into agreement. Here, the structuring of the world and structuring of the body came together. Right and left, for Hertz, were “true categories” that preceded individual experience and were originarily connected with the structure of the social itself.111 The distinction between right hand and left hand seemed to express a polarity of religious representations,

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to be the manifestation of the primordial antithesis of the sacred and the profane. This way, there was nothing congenital about the distinction, nor did it smack of the metaphysically absolute. Even if it went beyond the experience of the individual, there was nothing transcendent about it where collective consciousness was concerned, for it was there that the distinction originated. The lineage of this separation, however, remained hidden for Hertz; at the end of his study he explicitly postpones the search for its cause and meaning. Hertz’s investigation of the binary organization of the primitive world, which itself formed part of the genealogical program, led Durkheim to the brink of the genealogy of the sacred and the profane as original polar categories of thinking in and for itself. For Durkheim, and this was the point, this separation stood in for the emergence of duality as such. It was the original separation par excellence. Its emergence inscribed pure difference in the nondifferentiated real and inaugurated the regime of the mind as such. Unlike contemporary Bergsonians—and unlike pragmatists like William James in their wake112 —Durkheim did not think of the real as a completely undivided continuum mendaciously misrepresented, and therefore misunderstood, by the logical mind as something discontinuous. “In things,” rather, “there is already a relative distinction.” “[R]eality is far from resistant to any form of distinction, and to some degree tends of itself towards it.” “Heterogeneity” was already present even if it was “entailed by a state of confusion,” where things “intermingled” and were “indistinct.” For Durkheim, “[t]hings are rich in potentially diverse elements, separable parts and varied aspects. Consequently, there are discernible elements, since they tend of themselves to separate, although they never manage to free themselves of each other completely.” Accordingly, there was a “need for distinction and separation [that] lies in things themselves, and is not simply a mental need.”113 What counted was to bring out this need; the very possibility of structuring the world according to representations hinged on it. The merit of the difference between the sacred and the profane was to have sparked the development of this distinction. Everything that followed was the fabulous history of separation and differentiation at whose ideal end the spirit of the distinction completely coincided with the distinctions of reality. When Durkheim said that “doubtless, we sometimes dream of a science that would adequately express all of reality” but at the same emphasized that this was only an “ideal” we infinitely approximated but could never reach, he only gave voice to a temporalized depiction theory (Abbildtheorie) of thinking and truth that was already falling apart, historically and epistemologically speaking. Keeping a certain genealogical distance, Durkheim’s intuitionism

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was still in pursuit of the genesis of this representationalist image of thinking in order to refound the thinking of representation at the moment of its crisis. Studying the formation of the first great dualism was thus also and above all meant to shed light on the constitutive duality of the human being as a being of the senses and of the mind and, as interior repetition, on the nature of those human cognitive capacities that concerned sense knowledge and conceptual knowledge and thus on the lineage of the problem of knowledge as such. For its part, “the duality of our intellectual life,”114 glory and misery of the human being in Durkheim’s view, was to be shown to be “real” and situated on its true ground. In its entirety, the particularity of the human being that consisted in “the constitutional duality of human nature” of which humanity had a “keen sense”—evident in all ages in religious, philosophical, and scientific systems—sprang from the fabulous division of the world into sacred things and profane things: it sprang from the reality of the social.115 The fact that the soul or the mind had once belonged to the world of sacred things and that the body was an integral component of the profane world showed the great totemistic separation to run right through the human being, even created the human being in its essentially dual nature in the first place: “The duality of our nature is therefore only a particular case of this division of things into the sacred and profane that is found at the basis of all religion.”116 If it was true that society, as the necessary condition of its genesis, inscribed itself in the psyche of the individual, penetrated the individual consciousness, made it like itself, and created it in its image,117 then this was above all because the great difference was constitutive of society itself. These first categories were at the basis of the mental constitution of the human being and of the genesis of the human cognitive and evaluative faculties; they were ultimately responsible for the mind’s problematic relationship with the real and its interminable labor or presentation. Where others saw mental conditions for a first schematization of world, Durkheim pursued precisely the provenance of the mental conditions from religious grounds that preceded them and could not simply be explained psycho-genetically. And instead of developing the first structuring of world from the immanence of the mind and its possible errors or even conceiving of the dichotomous primitive world as a misinterpretation of a formal law of thinking, as Boole would have done, even the mind and everything about it that seemed to indicate innateness, an inexplicable spontaneity, or simply the procedural unfolding of an always already given formalism, were first of all to stem from an immense totemistic symbolization effort that separated mind from not-mind in the first place. The essential external reason for the “double centre of gravity” of the “internal life,”118 the eternal antagonisms between

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personal and impersonal states of consciousness, and the fate of incessantly belaboring self-produced aporias as well as for the dual structure of thinking and the entire problem of knowledge as such was none other than the basic totemistic difference. This genealogical determination deeply embedded all thinking in its sacred original grounds. What appeared in the sacred was the essential outside of thinking itself. It seemed that the thinking of the sacred, without any kind of metaphysical bias, forced the genesis of everything categorial and the formation of the human mind from the darkness of history. In order to understand the event of thinking and its problematic relationship with the real in an appropriate, historical and systematic way, it was necessary to trace the becoming of the sacred, to study the process of the separation of the sacred and the profane. While Durkheim was Cartesian by conviction, he was not someone who got lost in meditating upon the last certainty of the cogito but rather someone who situated humanity’s essential Cartesianism already at its totemistic dawn. The I think was once to have been preceded by a We think that had provided thinking with its framework and its form, its universality and its bindingness, a We that, rather than being originary, emerged from the structuring by collective representations of an anonymous It of social forces. That was Durkheim’s peculiar message, which, between the lines, propagated the unavoidability of Cartesianism and endowed even the primitive origins of thinking with a certain Cartesian constellation. For him, Descartes’s Meditations must have constituted the event in the history of idealization; like this history, however, they could only have become possible thanks to the retreat of the collective and the slow disappearance of the totemistic origins of thinking. At the beginning, as the violence of the first opposition showed, there may well have been an overheating and overstimulation of the collective representational faculty, an extreme “super-excitation of the intellectual forces.”119 Yet this was necessary for a “first intuition of the realm of truth”120 to arise and the presentation of world and the labor on the image of the world to begin. The truth of religion lay in its “speculative function.”121 The collective representation growing from religion and its guiding difference provided “the germ of a new mentality … to which the individual could never have raised himself by his own efforts: by them the way was opened to a stable, impersonal and organized thought which then had nothing to do except to develop its nature.”122 At a time when the controversy over the intuitive or symbolic constitution of thinking schematized the epistemic landscape, Durkheim’s genealogy was a matter of discourse politics through and through. It told of the original Cartesian conception of thinking. It was a fabulous apology. “Still today,” we read at the end of his lecture on the history and sociology

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of learned instruction in France, “we must remain Cartesians”—but, to be sure, Cartesians “who are concerned with clarity of thought,” not Cartesians of mathematical reason and pure “geometrical forms.”123 As if he had come to appreciate the full import of his genealogical idea only in retrospect, Durkheim, shortly after the publication of Les Formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse, made it abundantly clear that the great surprise of his texts—one that had so far gone unnoticed by critics—consisted in shedding light on the lineage of homo duplex and assisting the birth of Pascal’s “monster of contradictions.”124 Durkheim saw his magnum opus as, first of all, characterized by a real genealogical question: “What is the source of this duality and antinomy?”125 or, on a slightly different but perhaps even more precise note: “how does it happen that we actualize [réalisons] a sort of antinomy?”126 With this latter question in particular, Durkheim’s history of the genesis of thinking seemed to guide the dawning axiomatic age in the mind’s terrifying endeavor to find itself, shedding light on the path it had taken since its primitive origins. For in the end, the fact that there was such a thing as aporias and contradictions—the most basic epistemological worry of the age of noncontradiction—was due to the emergence of the capacity for thinking and knowledge from the most radical of contradictions, that between the sacred and the profane. Since totemistic times, the human being had been an aporetic animal through and through, unable to stop producing contradictions and existing itself as one big contradiction. The work of contradiction was inscribed at the core of its mental constitution. This idea was as untimely, in the good sense, as it was almost brute. Unlike Lévy-Bruhl, who at this same time argued that “primitives” were insensitive to contradiction and classified their thinking in relation to a logic based on the principle of contradiction as “prelogical,” Durkheim considered that between the logic of religious thought and that of scientif ic thought there is no abyss. The two are made up of the same elements, though unequally and differently developed. The special characteristic of the former seems to be its natural taste for immoderate confusions as well as sharp contrasts. It is voluntarily excessive in each direction. When it connects, it confounds; when it distinguishes, it opposes. It knows no shades and measures, it seeks extremes.127

Yet it was to the extremism of separating into sacred and profane and the ensuing extremism of relating that all thinking owed its existence— including the fine points of axiomatic thought, which, while despising

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contradiction, nonetheless came into being thanks to it and more or less futilely railed against the original constitution of thinking with a symbolic radicalism. Of course there was a “logical evolution”128 (Durkheim’s name for the process of idealization) that correlated with social evolution. But how could the idea’s labor of correction and refinement ever have transformed the structure of the mind, born from the sharpest of contradictions, into the mindlessness of noncontradictory symbolisms? In the end, the impossibility of thinking this transition was the point of a genealogy that enthroned the mind itself as sovereign over everything symbolical and, as the manifesto of representational thinking this genealogy constituted, denied nothing so much as it denied, between the lines, the possibility of purely symbolic thought. Durkheim’s genealogy was pervaded by an antisymbolist affect that flushed the entire realism of communication and transmission of his age to the surface of his text. The core of The Elementary Forms turned into a manifesto of the antisymbolic genealogy of symbol formation. Already at the beginning of the book, in the programmatic statement about going into the real underground of symbols to which they were said to owe all their sense, all of the mistrust an age shaken to its core by media technologies and electrophysics harbored against the spirit of the letter affected the question of the symbolic as such: “When only the letter of the formulae is considered, these religious beliefs and practices undoubtedly seem disconcerting at times, and one is tempted to attribute them to some sort of a deep-rooted error. But one must know how to go underneath the symbol to the reality which it represents and which gives it its meaning.”129 Underneath the symbols, there were “true reasons.”130 At a moment in which a regime of representation was driven mad by the unrepresentable reality of the electric world, Durkheim not only stopped trusting in letters, he stopped trusting all formulas that might have been able to state the alleged insanity beyond all intuition. Instead, he, like so many others at the time, immersed himself in the insanity of the real such as it was supposed to have reigned at one point in an anonymous world of forces of the “primitive.” He did so in hopes of grasping an intuitive moment of the becoming of symbol and sense and thus to reveal the ideality of this insanity and its meaning for the history of thinking. The current crisis of presentation found a correlate in the initial crisis of a delirious formation of symbols. There already, at the beginning of the adventure of the mind, mastering the crisis had exclusively been a matter of the good will of the intuitive mind. The study of Australian societies brought to light two phases in their lives. A phase of dispersal into small groups that pursued their everyday tasks independently of each other, and a phase of assembly and aggregation

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over the course of a certain period of time and at a certain location, which violently disrupted this dispersed life: Since the emotional and passional faculties of the primitive are only imperfectly placed under the control of his reason and will, he easily loses control of himself. Any event of some importance puts him quite outside himself. Does he receive good news? There are at once transports of enthusiasm. In the contrary conditions, he is to be seen running here and there like a madman, giving himself up to all sorts of immoderate movements, crying, shrieking, rolling in the dust, throwing it in every direction, biting himself, brandishing his arms in a furious manner, etc. The very fact of the concentration acts as an exceptionally powerful stimulant. When they are once come together, a sort of electricity is formed by their collecting which quickly transports them to an extraordinary degree of exaltation. Every sentiment expressed finds a place without resistance in all the minds, which are very open to outside impressions; each re-echoes the others, and is re-echoed by the others. The initial impulse thus proceeds, growing as it goes, as an avalanche grows in its advance. And as such active passions so free from all control could not fail to burst out, on every side one sees nothing but violent gestures, cries, veritable howls, and deafening noises of every sort, which aid in intensifying still more the state of mind which they manifest. And since a collective sentiment cannot express itself collectively except on the condition of observing a certain order permitting co-operation and movements in unison, these gestures and cries naturally tend to become rhythmic and regular; hence come songs and dances. But in taking a more regular form, they lose nothing of their natural violence; a regulated tumult remains tumult.131

“Primitive” man was said to no longer know himself in this state of excitement: “feeling himself dominated and carried away by some sort of an external power which makes him think and act differently than in normal times, he naturally has the impression of being himself no longer.” The individual consciousness was torn from its habitual inner reserve. It as it were fell into a delirium of communication. The “primitive,” at least, believes himself to be really … transported into a special world, entirely different from the one where he ordinarily lives, and into an environment filled with exceptionally intense forces that take hold of him and metamorphose him. How could such experiences as these, especially when they are repeated every

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day for weeks, fail to leave in him the conviction that there really exist two heterogeneous and mutually incomparable worlds? One is that where his daily life drags wearily along; but he cannot penetrate into the other without at once entering into relations with extraordinary powers that excite him to the point of frenzy. The first is the profane world, the second, that of sacred things.132

This concentration of collective life on a specific period of time, in which it intensified in an ecstasy of communication and the primitive experienced his complete dissolution in streams of communication, was the origin of “the violence of [the] contrast” between the sacred and the profane and people’s vivid “sentiment of the double existence they lead and of the double nature in which they participate.”133 The sacred was thus first and foremost the name of the impossible experience of total communication where all channels were open and only noise was left, the name of what was disturbing and terrifying about Being-in-relation itself. In light of the sacred, and this was Durkheim’s decisive point, all “religion ceases to be an inexplicable hallucination.” It was said to be based not on “imagination” but in the “reality” of social forces, it was an intensive communication that “always does a sort of violence … to the individual consciousness” and puts it in a state of ecstasy and a kind of delirium.134 Durkheim took the image for this reality of communicative excitation and exposure to impersonal forces directly from the stock of images of his day, a time unhinged by media technology, the stock of images of the electromagnetic imaginary of his age. Ultimately, for Durkheim, the sacred he described—and this might already mark the beginning of the misery of a sociology that is idealistic because it forgets about media—was merely an originary albeit perhaps necessary failure to recognize the ideal communication community called society. For the electrifying effect of the clan on its members led directly to the elaboration of an immense symbolism and of the sacred order of things. Because the existence of social sentiments is too “uncertain,” they had to be pictorialized and objectivized, that is to say, to “attach” to an object,135 to be attached to arbitrary things that in this act became sacred, if fleeting collective experiences of communication and communion were to become anything like an enduring society with stable conditions of intercourse, in which communication could take place in less excited a manner. This “delirious … state in which the mind adds sense intuition to the immediate data given by the senses and projects its own sentiments and feelings into things”136 was the basic trait and main starting point of Durkheim’s intuitionist theory of symbol formation. Symbols were thus the “constituent elements”

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of everything social: “social life, in all its aspects and in every period of its history, is made possible only by a vast symbolism.”137 Symbols had allegedly once been nothing but intuitive transmissions of excitation energy to some object, the act, precisely, which turned mere things into signs. In this transmission, “some sign takes its place.”138 In the end, however, what had been projected onto the sign was the cause of the excitement; it was the sign itself, not society, that had to serve as the source of the sacred excitement. However necessary the sacralization of the signs might originarily have been, it constituted the cause of the extreme overestimation of everything sign-like that henceforth characterized history—an overestimation, by the way, of which Durkheim’s own day provided ample proof and which must have seemed to him a strange survival from the days of savage symbol formation. Of course signs were arbitrary, even if “this contagion … is much more complete and more marked when the symbol is something simple, definite and easily representable.”139 What was not arbitrary, however, was the emergence of symbolism as such, the fact that there were signs rather than no signs at all. This way—and not otherwise—“the first religious conceptions” were based in the “reality” of society.140 In society, all arbitrariness ultimately disappeared in solid real reasons. At the price of a fantasmatic theory of communication and transmission about the ecstatic ground of the social as the secret of all becoming-semiotic, symbolism had sold its autonomy, which had only just begun epistemically to impose itself. That was the point of Durkheim’s genealogy of the essential intuitionism of the human being, which enthroned the mind and, behind it, society as the sovereign of symbolism. Because the world was populated, thanks to an enormous intuitionist effort, by effective symbols, the idea of forces had emerged, forces that although they are “purely ideal, act as though they were real.”141 The notion of purely omnipresent, all-pervading, anonymous, and impersonal forces that the study of totemistic belief systems had brought to the light of day in strict correlation with the imaginary of the electromagnetic world as the fundamental principle of these systems, was given its foundation in the reality of “communication” and “communion” of originary collective communities of excitation and in the human symbolism that came with and necessarily arose from them.142 It was thus precisely the concept of force, which around 1900 was being completely desubstantialized by field theory, that served as “the initial notion”143 of thinking as such. “So the idea of force is of religious origin. It is from religion that it has been borrowed, first by philosophy, then by the sciences,”144 which developed only its profane aspects, as it were. The concept “of physical forces is very probably derived from that of religious forces.” The latter “undoubtedly …

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are different from those which the modern scientist thinks of, and whose use he teaches us; they have a different way of acting, and do not allow themselves to be directed in the same manners; but for those who believe in them, they are no more unintelligible than are gravitation and electricity for the physicist of to-day.”145 The event Durkheim short-circuited the entire energeticism of an age that often remained incomprehensible to itself, an energeticism that with the primitive foundations of thinking drove representational thinking to its limits. For its part, the symbolism that threatened the regime of intuition was henceforth to be able to address the reality of communication without having to take recourse to intuition and seemed to stem, above all, from an archaic context of communication that one did not understand, a context which it had once taken human beings all of their intuitive minds to come to terms with. Symbolism was imagined to be the effect of one of those “great mental effervescences”146 that had at one point allowed human beings to embark on the history of the mind. Their initial “error” had been “merely in regard to the letter of the symbol” they used to represent the “concrete and living reality” that moved them.147 Yet [i]n fact, it is through it that the first explanation of the world has been made possible. Of course the mental habits it implies prevented men from seeing reality as their senses show it to them; but as they show it, it has the grave inconvenience of allowing of no explanation. For to explain is to attach things to each other and to establish relations between them which make them appear to us as functions of each other and as vibrating sympathetically according to an internal law founded in their nature.148

It took this detour via the false letter, this originary misreading of symbolism itself, for the mind to begin its work of establishing relationships between things. Subsequently, the mind—and this was its main business—had to keep the proliferation of the signifier in check in order to obtain a correct presentation of reality. In any case, the history of thinking sets in with the initial feeling, to be purified by the mind, that there is an inner connection between things. This feeling of connection was the condition for all science and philosophy, which ever since have not stopped relating something to something and erecting an order of things: The great service that religions have rendered to thought is that they have constructed a first representation of what these relations of kinship between things may be. In the circumstances under which it was attempted, the enterprise could obviously attain only precarious results.

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But then, does it ever attain any that are definite, and is it not always necessary to reconsider them?149

The human inclination and capacity for idealizing the real as a system of essential relationships had grown entirely on the ground of the sacred, this first great spawn of collective thinking. The individual had first had to pass through “the school of collective life,”150 that is to say, the school of an excessive symbolism, to learn how relationships are produced and idealized in the first place. Then had come the turn of the history of the mind, which correlated with the retreat of extreme collectivism and the advance of the individual, that is, with social evolution, to transform the originary semiotic excitation into the calm progress of thinking. This is the adventurous way in which a genealogy of thinking around 1900—at a time, that is, when one had just begun to think the world in purely symbolic terms as one great spawn of relationships—the history of thinking came full circle as history of the intuitive mind. For Durkheim, all conceptual functions originarily came from the collective school of thinking. “Conceptual thought is coeval with humanity itself,” and concepts merely “express the manner in which society represents things.”151 This was true first of all and above all of the most binding of all concepts, the categories: “It can even be said that there are no other concepts which present to an equal degree the signs by which a collective representation is recognized. In fact, their stability and impersonality are such that they have often passed as being absolutely universal and immutable.”152 Their contents only designated certain basic aspects according to which social reality was schematized: the category of class was at first indistinct from the concept of the human group; it is the rhythm of social life which is at the basis of the category of time; the territory occupied by the society furnished the material for the category of space; it is the collective force which was the prototype of the concept of efficient force, an essential element in the category of causality. However, the categories are not made to be applied only to the social realm; they reach out to all reality.

For Durkheim, the highest category, which provided conceptual thinking with its universality and the idea that thinking could embrace the entirety of things, was the concept of totality, to which he devoted his most detailed studies. Totality for him was “the abstract form of the concept of society” itself.153

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It is hard to believe what one reads in Durkheim at the end: “A day will come when our societies will know again those hours of creative effervescence in the course of which new ideas arise and new formulae are found which serve for a while as a guide to humanity.”154 Because he was too much of a Frenchman (and because he drew his image of the creative excitation of a society above all from the Revolution of 1789)155 and, on top of that, a sociologist as well, Durkheim was unable to grasp that he was writing in and as if from out of the very midst of such a phase of excitation. In this one, there was no upheaval that toppled traditional social institutions. But nonetheless, it was nothing less than the mediatechnological foundation of an entire alphabetic culture in whose basic, representationalist terms Durkheim still thought. His own project of a history of the genesis of thinking was the effect of this great creative excitation in the entry into the age of communication which upended the matter of thinking. To a surprising extent, the thinker of the originary crisis of the communicative excitation of the human being remained in the dark about the crisis of thinking in his own day, which, though unaware of doing so, he worked on obsessively. This is remarkable for someone whose day and age afforded him the insight that “only events of a greater gravity can succeed in affecting the mental status of a society.” In Durkheim’s day, the mental infrastructure had already been undermined to such a degree that for his apology of Cartesianism, a sociologist had to descend all the way into the delirious world of the “primitive” and in so doing even discovered the sacred origins of the Aristotelian categories. The history of the genesis of thinking that thus emerged belongs to the swan song of the entire formation designated by the names Aristotle and Descartes, the formation of substance logic.

Paths of reason As early as 1903, Mauss was fully aware that the transition through religions ideas the history of the genesis of thinking had to undergo could only be a temporary detour. The “state of the science,” he cautioned at the time the study on primitive classifications was published, did “not yet” allow for direct access to “collective representations as such.” While the majority of concepts might well have been formed at the heart of religion and initially had a deeply religious character, while, accordingly, “the very nature of the facts” justified the detour via religious representations, he nonetheless dreamt of a “more general” study that would assign the collective representations taking shape behind the concepts and categories “their proper place.”156

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There is in Mauss an insistence of the genealogical question. This insistence is motivated by the search for the “proper place” of collective representations. More or less explicitly, the problem of the origin of the categories traverses all of Mauss’s oeuvre. There are innumerable references to this effect unexpectedly strewn even into studies that seem to be quite remote from this problem. In an intellectual self-portrait he wrote in 1930 as part of his candidacy for a chair at the Collège de France, he notes that “the question of the categories of thought” is “of the utmost importance” and, beside the idea of the sacred, “looming over all my work.”157 Because he aligned the genealogy of thinking with a genealogy of language, Mauss’s drilling into the Aristotelian underground, unlike Durkheim’s, broke through even the supposedly deepest layer of the sacred and the profane and thus undermined, to a certain extent, the primacy of representational thinking including the primordiality of the socially determined intuitive spirit. Insofar as the question of the origin of thinking crossed with the question of the historicity of language, genealogical analysis lost the orientation the realm of religious representations had hitherto provided. The collective representations that stood behind the genesis of the manifold of categories were themselves always and essentially structured linguistically as well. The analysis could thus not stop at demonstrating a basic social realism of forces first manifest in religious communities of excitation, a realism that had governed thinking since its beginnings only in a symbolically disfigured way. Since the 1904 publication of the Esquisse d’une théorie de la magie (lit., Outline of a Theory of Magic), cowritten with Henri Hubert, the concept of mana assumed the position of “an unconscious category of understanding” that was “not the work of individual spirits” but a “category of collective thinking.”158 It appeared to be the first category as such. Because on the one hand, it could not be reduced either to experience or to spontaneity and because, on the other, both represented the original form of the categories of quality, substance, activity, and causality and stood behind the first classifications of things, mana was to stand for the origin in collective thinking of the categories of the understanding as a whole. The concept of mana or, rather, concepts of the mana type (like orenda, manitu, wakan, or brahman, to name just those that were best known around 1900) served as the originary category of the mind. Their study was to allow for conceiving of “how the categories present themselves in the mind of the primitive.”159 A critique of magical judgments, in which the sociologist and philologist Mauss sought “to use the methods of philosophy,”160 had transformed magic from a natural sophism of the human mind (the view of the English social anthropologists in particular) into an originary problem of judgment and

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understanding to be studied within the field of the historical becoming of collectivity. According to Mauss, “magical judgments existed prior to magical experiences.” Experiences simply served to confirm the already fixed “chains of representation” since judgments determined and structured experiences, not the other way around. “[M]agical judgments, even from the outset, are … well-nigh perfect, a priori synthetic judgments. The terms are connected before any kind of testing.” The source of these prejudgments had to lie outside the individual, the collective always already provided the individual mind with them: “If we have magical judgments we also have a collective synthesis.”161 In 1909, Mauss had a clearer view of the role magical judgments played in the history of the genesis of thinking: if these judgments and conclusion were to be able to claim validity, they had to have a principle that, while it lay beyond verification itself, constituted the condition of possibility for making judgments and assumed the role of schematizing magical experiences. A principle of this kind was just what in philosophy, we call categories. Constantly present in language without necessarily being explicit there, they usually exist rather in the form of habits that guide consciousness and are themselves unconscious. The idea of mana is one of these principles: it is given in language; it is implied in an entire series of judgments and conclusions. When we spoke of the attributes of mana, we said that mana is a category. But mana is not only a special category of primitive thinking. On the path of reduction, it is still today the first form that other categories, still functioning in our minds today, have taken: substance and cause.162

Even if at the basis of magical judgments, Mauss like Durkheim a decade later was to see the principle of pure efficacy, painted in all the colors of the fantasmatic dispositif of electromagnetism that was to stand behind the concept of mana, imagined as “a kind of ether, imponderable, communicable,” and explain how it could “spread … of its own accord,”163 the decisive point that separated his analysis of magic from Durkheim’s was the enduring presence of the concept of mana in language. In contradistinction from Durkheim’s efforts at sealing the discourse of sociology in general and the genealogy of knowledge in particular off from language, Mauss from the very beginning considered language to be an excellent means for studying collective representations. The 1904 essay on magic had already stated unambiguously: “In magic, as in religion and linguistics, unconscious ideas are at work.”164 The word mana “enjoys the same role which the copula plays in a grammatical clause.”165 Characteristically, it “is a noun, an adjective

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and a verb”166 all in one and structures experiences linguistically. By simply showing up in magical judgments, the word “transforms” propositions that were originally synthetic into analytical propositions. Moreover, insofar as it “dominates and conditions all experience,” it “converts … a priori to a posteriori arguments.” In operating this double transformation, the concept mana relieves magical judgments of their absurdity and ensures that these propositions are not expressions of error and lack of logic but “have plenty of rationalism.” “Thanks to the idea of mana, magical dreams not only become rational but they also become confused with reality.”167 Certainly Mauss never envisaged a pure symbolism of which societies, along with the systems of categories they determined, would but be expressions. But even if he was not looking for the symbolic origin of social and intellectual systems and always came to see forces at work where others, after him, would see a regime of structure, he did nonetheless place the collective representations that had appeared at the basis of the problem of the categories within the general symbolical framework of society, within the necessary symbolism of the social. Sociology had to understand “all the symbolic elements of representation” if it wanted to grasp “the history of human knowledge and their logical sequence.” Beyond a basically energetic history of the foundation of collective representations, there was to be a systematic history of the “symbols and chains of symbols” that governed them and served humanity as the “total expression of … things and their sciences, their logics, their technologies and at the same time of their arts, their affectivities.”168 What started off as work on the distant institutional origins of the logic of classes and still stood entirely within the horizon of the traditional substantialist logic of genera à la Aristotle, in the end aimed for discovering the symbolic-logical structures at the basis of all institutions and thinking, thanks, not least, to an alliance with linguistics and in full agreement with the great epistemic tendencies of the day. The goal, again, was to find the “proper place” of collective representations in the symbolic assemblage of societies. Since the mid-1920s, the “general study” of societies had become for Mauss a question of a comprehensive “anthropology of the symbolic” that equally studied social, linguistic, and psychological facts within an alliance of human sciences. The place occupied by linguistic phenomena within the realm of collective representations was an ambiguous one. They were crystallizations of the collective world of representations, in them, collective thinking manifested itself with fabulous density, and they even possessed a certain degree of autonomy. At the same time, however, they were irreducibly social facts, even if privileged ones. If language was the condition of sociability this

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did not mean, for Mauss, that the social was a function of the symbolic; in opposition to any kind of formalism, it only meant that “language is the most elementary, most primitive social phenomenon.”169 The “symbolic aspect” lay at the heart of social facts themselves. In a 1927 text that presents his thinking about language in as dense a fashion as no other, Mauss writes: In the first place, the linguistic phenomenon is more general and more characteristic of social life than any other phenomenon of social physiology. As a rule, all other activities of society find their expression in it; it condenses their basic premises, and it transmits their traditions. In it there lies the majority of the notions and priorities of collectivities. This does not mean that a society contains nothing but what can be expressed in words. Some very important categories of thought can govern a multitude of acts and ideas and yet correspond to nothing which is grammatical, sometimes even to nothing which is logical, sometimes even to nothing expressed. Thus the categories of sex, or gender, are not predominant in numerous languages of societies where, nevertheless, they rule both mythology and philosophy and indeed the division of technical labour and sometimes the very location of things and persons. We are alluding to China and the Chinese, and to Polynesian societies in general. However, while the “social” is not necessarily conscious or verbal, surely everything which is “verbal” is conscious and social. A more important point: everything which is “verbal” exhibits to a very high degree, frequently to a higher degree than any other practice or collective representation, the singular character and specific character which individualises each civilisation and each society: it is essentially the creation of a community.170

In accordance with the ideas of Antoine Meillet, whose lectures in linguistics he continued to attend (often being the only one to do so) even when he had come to occupy a chair at the École des Hautes Études himself, Mauss dreamed of a “sociology of language [sociologie du langage].” Meillet had tried to show that when words change their meaning and assume another value, they do so in exchanges between coexisting or successive social milieus.171 The essential motor of the history of languages, for him, was the history of the societies that spoke them. Linguistics shed light on the history of the social and vice versa. Language was “eminently a social fact”172 in the Durkheimian sense, it was external to the individuals speaking it and highly coercive. Meillet called his method, concisely and altogether nonformalistically, “historical and genealogical.” While Saussure’s discovery had been the synchrony of language as a system, while the difference between la

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langue and le langage founded the autonomous area of linguistics as a subject,173 Saussure’s student Meillet was looking for the reality underneath the abstractions of the system, for the reality of things of which the laws of phonology and morphology, in his view, were mere analogies. For Mauss, “this linguist, this philologist, this historian,” as he called him, “perceived ideas behind words and forms and forces behind ideas.”174 Thus “religion, morality, economy, aesthetics and technology” were said to be “crystallised” in language: “They are transmitted more or less entirely in language even though this latter has a certain autonomy towards them.”175 The problem of thinking and the problem of language resembled each other in their generality. Both traversed the totality of the collective world of representation, both were embedded in it and structurally tied in with this totality. Those who sought to study “the making of the human mind,” the “‘construction and edification’ of reason” that had once more become “fashionable,” had to comb through the entire practical and institutional field of numerous civilizations simultaneously, just as genealogical linguistics had to as well. Insofar as even linguistic data and knowledge contributed to this study, it seemed so comprehensive as to be able to crown, as Mauss planned to, the science of sociology: The data which must be taken into account are aesthetic, technical, and linguistic, and not only religious or scientific. Here too, mixtures must be detected and quantitative proportions must be established. After this has been done, it is necessary to stir up the mixture and to synthesise it in terms still more precise. This will bring to light the factor of “totality” in history: the empirical, the illogical, and the logic of the beginning, the reasonable and the positive of the future.176

It seems as if the genealogical study of linguistic phenomena had heightened the sense for the functioning of totalities and driven the project of a history of the genesis of thinking far beyond its initial boundaries. The famous final remarks with which Mauss concluded his 1924 lecture on “Real and Practical Relations between Psychology and Sociology” before the Société de Psychologie give an inkling of how monstrous the “very serious problem of the categories of the mind” had become twenty-five years after its first treatment. The reach of the genealogical question had extended beyond measure: The Aristotelian categories are not indeed the only ones which exist in our minds, or have existed in the mind and have to be dealt with. Above all

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it is essential to draw up the largest possible catalogue of categories; it is essential to start with all those which it is possible to know man has used. It will be clear that there have been and still are dead or pale or obscure moons in the firmament of reason. The big and the small, the animate and the inanimate, the right and the left have been categories. Among those with which we are familiar, take for example that of substance, to which I have devoted highly technical attention: how many vicissitudes has it not undergone? For example, among its prototypes there is a different notion, especially in India and Greece, the notion of food. All the categories are merely general symbols which, like other symbols, have been acquired by mankind only very slowly. This work of constitution needs to be described. This is precisely one of the main chapters of sociology understood from the historical point of view. For this work was itself complex, hazardous, chancy. Mankind erected its mind by all possible means: technical and non-technical, mystical and non-mystical; using its mind (senses, sentiment, reason), using its body; at the whim of choices, things and times; at the whim of nations and their achievements or ruins.177

To the extent that Mauss was thinking symbolically and found his way to the concept of the total social fact, the pathos of the sacred along with the attendant electromagnetic fantasms began to lose ground in the history of the genesis of thinking. Sober symbolic structures began to take shape where Mauss faced the threat that the incessantly asked question of the origin of thinking fall apart in an excess of institutional multiplicities because it was no longer integrated by an image of a primitive reality of omnipresent forces furnished by the imaginary of the age. In 1899, when Mauss to all appearances was as yet unaware of the urgency of the question of thinking that was soon to become the guiding question of all his work, the Essai sur la nature et la fonction du sacrifice, which he cowrote with Henri Hubert, was still entirely under the spell of the sacred and the problem of communication as the keystone of the system. The procedure of sacrifice, considered by practically all authors at the time to be crucial for the origin of the institutional as such, “consists in establishing a communication between the sacred world and the profane world through the intermediary of a victim, that is, through something destroyed in the course of the ceremony.”178 But just a few years later, when the concept of mana marked the introduction of the problem of the symbolic into his thinking—even if, again, a formation of forces was always to continue operating underneath and Mauss was never to think purely symbolically—the difference between the sacred and the profane had already lost its determinative and foundational role in

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the genealogy of thinking. There is a well-known moment of hesitation in the essay on magic: “not only is the idea of mana more general than that of the sacred, but … the sacred is inherent in the notion of mana and derives from it. It would probably be fair to say that the sacred is a species of the genus mana.”179 In the self-portrait, the section on “religion and ideation” concludes with the retrospective observation: In particular … at the base of magic as of religion, I detected a vast shared notion I called mana, borrowing a term from Malayo-Polynesian. This idea of mana is perhaps more general than that of the sacred. Later, Durkheim tried to deduce it sociologically from the sacred. I was never sure that he was right, and I still speak of the magicoreligious base. In any case, like the notion of the sacred, mana presents itself in the manner of a category. This opened up a new problem.180

This new problem consisted in separating the question of the sacred from that of the origin of thinking even if they were mixed up with one another when they had first been raised and, in this blending, had for a long time determined the work of the entire Durkheim school, as Mauss himself explicitly emphasized.181 And as we saw, the magicoreligious base was not to remain the only, the true base of thinking but merely a part of a widely ramified totality in which thinking took shape. In explicit studies on the “social history of the categories of the human mind” like those on the category of substance182 or of the person or I, the concern is with working through chains of representations and symbols across civilizations and epochs in strictly methodical fashion, without speculating in any way about the sacred basis of thinking that lay behind them. “Yet do not let us speculate too much,” Mauss said in 1938: Let us say that social anthropology, sociology, history—all teach us to perceive how human thought “moves on” (Meyerson). Slowly does it succeed in expressing itself, through time, through societies, their contacts and metamorphoses, along pathways that seem most perilous. Let us labour to demonstrate how we must become aware of ourselves, in order to perfect our thought and to express it better.183

This is the last sentence of the last essay Mauss ever published. Its topic was the long history of the becoming of the fundamental category of consciousness called “I.” Unlike Durkheim, Mauss considered Cartesian certainty to be lost in going from

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a simple masquerade to the mask, from a “role” (personnage) to a “person” (personne), to a name, to an individual; from the latter to a being possessing metaphysical and moral value; from a moral consciousness to a sacred being; from the latter to a fundamental form of thought and action—the course is accomplished. Who knows what progress the Understanding will yet make on this matter? … Who knows even whether this “category,” which all of us here believe to be well founded, will always be recognised as such?184

The price Mauss paid for his analytical stringency, without much being bothered by it, was the fragmentary and incompletable nature of his labor on thinking. His work as it were shipwrecked on the difficulty of what it strove for, breaking through to the symbolical structure. As in Nietzsche, the history of the genesis of thinking remained an announcement and a prophecy; only a few elements were worked out and highlighted. The project announced in the candidacy for the Collège de France of a collaborative work with Henri Hubert in two or three volumes on the category of substance, which was to work through the long duration of a category on the verge of disappearing in the very moment of the great transformation from substance to function, an undertaking able and obliged to show everything at stake in the genealogical project, never came to fruition. Yet in precisely this failure, his oeuvre was but a symptom of the unyielding logic of the episteme. After all, could the great genealogical project ever be more than a transitional phenomenon, more than an effect of the crisis? Where a thinking shaken to its very foundations began working its way back to its pre-Aristotelian origins and encountered what had hitherto remained unthought about it, namely primitive confusions that resembled to a tee the current failure of intuitive thinking, it could not but succumb in the end to the constraints a new formation imposed on thinking in the form of symbolism. The project of a history of the genesis of thinking was the long passage through the fantasms of the sacred and the primitive. Thanks to this passage, an epistemic unsettlement began to understand itself. And it served that purpose until the real power of formalisms set off a settling of the scores with precisely those illusions of archaic communication an age of the symbolic and of communication had initially entertained to comprehensively come to terms with the crisis of thinking it had itself triggered. When these illusions began to dissolve in light of the new evidence produced thanks to the mobilization of cybernetics and the precise symbolic, nonintuitive conception of the

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problem of communication, the project of a history of the genesis of thinking, too, left the prominent place it had occupied on the stage of knowledge. Under the constraints symbolic machines imposed on thinking, the question concerning thinking lost the genealogical undertones it had had for so long in the age of the great transformation. In a 1948 article in Scientific American, Norbert Wiener presented the new matter of thinking in plain English. The vagueness that had characterized the question as long as it was approached from the human perspective and, one would have to say, in light of human history and under the care of the human sciences, was to make way for the exactness of algorithms of control and communication. This, at least, was the goal of the cybernetic dream: Cybernetics is a word invented to define a new field in science. It combines under one heading the study of what in a human context is sometimes loosely described as thinking and in engineering is known as control and communication. In other words, cybernetics attempts to find the common elements in the functioning of automatic machines and of the human nervous system, and to develop a theory which will cover the entire field of control and communication in machines and in living organisms. It is well known that between the most complex activities of the human brain and the operations of a simple adding machine there is a wide area where brain and machine overlap. In their more elaborate forms, modern computing machines are capable of memory, association, choice and many other brain functions. Indeed, the experts have gone so far in the elaboration of such machines that we can say the human brain behaves very much like the machines. The construction of more and more complex mechanisms actually is bringing us closer to an understanding of how the brain itself operates.185

A few years later, a poet fascinated by cybernetics—the same who demanded from his peers that they be “close to everything” and “know where the world stands today,” a poet with “nostrils on all launch pads and paddocks” of intellectual as well as technological and material culture: Gottfried Benn—signed the death certificate of everything that had hitherto gone by the name of thinking. We might say that what humanity in the last few centuries has called thinking was no thinking at all but something entirely different—now, in any case, it is being taken over by cybernetics, which predicts being able, thanks to installations and apparatuses, to return to the human

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the animism it has lost, its magical abilities, its natural ability to see and its lost senses.186

Even in the explicit reminder of the former launch pad and paddock of the genealogical crisis discourse, Benn pointed to the complete rewriting of the history of thinking in full swing at the very moment it was allegedly coming to an end. Animism and magic no longer stood for the past Aristotelian underground but all of a sudden were opening up to the non-Aristotelian, read: cybernetic future of the episteme. In 1950, in any event, Lévi-Strauss, who later, under the pressure exercised by the evidence of functioning cybernetic machines, was to transform the genealogy of thinking into a narrative about the birth of information theory among the “savages,” could speak, in completely nonpoetic fashion and yet with the same nostrils as Benn, of “translating,” albeit also amplifying some of its symbolic components, “Mauss’s conception … from its original expression in terms of class logic into the terms of a symbolic logic which summarises the most general laws of language.”187 This movement of translation, which turned Mauss into the father of structural anthropology and an algebra of the social, concentrated the epistemic fate of the program of the history of thinking and knowledge. Studies of “primitive” formations of symbols were replaced, to use Maurice Godelier’s expression, with a big bang theory of language according to which “the entire universe all at once became significant.” The history of the human mind no longer took shape as a collective smithy of categories and as the history of the homogenization and abstraction of the categories, as an exodus of thinking from its primitive grounds that came with the retreat of the collective. Henceforth it meant, in a much more technological or cryptographic manner, “to identify certain aspects of the signif ier and certain aspects of the signified,” or, more precisely, “to choose, from the entirety of the signifier and from the entirety of the signified, those parts which present the most satisfying relations of mutual agreement.” It was a “work of equalising of the signifier to fit the signified.” “What people call the progress of the human mind and, in any case, the progress of scientific knowledge,” Lévi-Strauss proclaimed in his structuralist recasting of Mauss’s project, “could only have been and can only ever be constituted out of processes of correcting and recutting of patterns, regrouping, def ining relationships of belonging and discovering new resources, inside a totality which is closed and complementary to itself.”188 This was the end, as if epistemically programmed, of the savage hermeneutics of the real that lay beneath the letter, a hermeneutics that had a lot of trouble encountering

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not merely the imaginary of its own age—the end of a veritable discourse of crisis known as the history of the genesis of thinking. But perhaps we have to be more careful, perhaps we should not trust the logic of the episteme too much, perhaps we have to be blind on one eye in order to see not just what the episteme forces on us. After all, at the moment in which a new system of notation was implemented, there existed certain transgressions of this logic that each in its own way continued the heritage of the crisis. On the one hand, there was the attempt to tell the history of the relationship between reason and unreason, no longer in the great gesture of a history of knowledge or a genealogy of thinking but nonetheless with methods it owed not just to Nietzsche but also and above all to Mauss. Once again, the task was to write the history of a relation reason entertained with madness, dementia, delirium. Yet what fifty years earlier had still popped up at the margins of history and its primitive origins, often enough been denied as a mere effect of certain other social formations, and been read as a great detour on reason’s path to itself, now appeared as the spawn of reason itself at the margins of the age of reason, as a heritage of the great imprisonment of thinking in the total Cartesian basic position, which was now thought not just philosophically but also institutionally and on the basis of practices and experiences. Once again, it was a matter of writing the history of a relation within the framework of a thinking of forces and a thinking of powers underneath the letters. But with one difference: what now counted was no longer the positive structure of social forces that left their trace in thinking and its categories and determined ideas but the negative structure that constituted these forces via its exclusions and rejections, a negative structure a history of power-knowledge was to render visible through the positivities.189 The task of a History of Insanity in the Age of Reason was to provide “a structural study of the historical ensemble—notions, institutions, judicial and police measures, scientific concepts—which hold captive a madness whose wild state can never be reconstituted.”190 On the other hand, in the wake of the matter of thinking having become questionable beyond its traditional conception in terms of a logic of substance and of the genealogical distancing, an equally insistent inquiry not just into the unthought but into the unthinkable of thinking arose. This may have been the most fortunate of cases because it provided an age of crisis thinking through its situation within the history of media with its key question: What is thinking? This question balked at the outcome of the crisis, at the resolution of its foundational conflict, at the logic of the crisis itself and still bitterly opposed even the cybernetic rewriting of the history of thinking.191

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After almost a quarter century of working on the history of the human mind, Mauss realized that this labor, too, obeyed a general trend of knowledge. In 1925 he writes in the conclusion of an omnibus review that also discusses Cassirer’s Philosophy of Symbolic Forms: It is certain that a general idea is beginning to emerge. It is more than a scientific fad. Under simultaneous pressure, sociologists, psychologists, and psychopathologists—logicians and philologists, too, and even the logisticians are shaken—all arrive at a notion of the mind’s “symbolic activity.” … The consensus omnium, to be sure, is not proof of truth. But the agreement of scholars from all disciplines, certainly independent of each other, [and] the heuristic value of these theories that have inspired so many observations prove that the history of the human mind is everywhere being rewritten and better written. Few scientific developments could have satisfied Durkheim more: no one really denies the value of the research methods advocated in the Année anymore. And what is being systematized are no longer philosophies but facts.192

Where this pressure came from, which in his view was released on such different sites of knowledge, where the shocks came from, which could be felt across the episteme and so fabulously enjoined all disciplines to rearticulate the history of the mind in the terms of the symbolic, Mauss obviously did not know. His genealogical endurance ultimately did not suffice to allow for a deeper understanding of his own situation. Yet it was no coincidence that the newly consensual insight into the mind’s basic symbolic trait, which was to shape the rewriting of the history of the mind, became his insight, too, after he had written the Essai sur le don (The Gift). This treatise not only introduced the concept of the total social fact, which made it possible to think the existence of facts that “involve the totality of society and its institutions,” that systematize concretely and by themselves, and that comprehend “entire social systems” in their “totality.”193 Where to all appearances the issue was the description of the total social fact of exchange relationships as the transcendental of social relationships as such, there dawned, between the lines, a genealogical reworking of the new epistemic main category of relation. Unlike in the first discussion of the question of relation in the study on primitive classifications, what now came into view was the purely relational symbolic ground of thinking as such, no longer always already limited by class logic. Yet Mauss never said a word about this great theme hiding in the essay on the gift. When the question later arose, “[w]hy did Mauss halt at the edge of those immense

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possibilities” opened up by the structural thinking lying in wait there, “like Moses conducting his people all the way to a promised land whose splendour he would never behold,” it was probably less due to a “crucial move” Mauss failed to make194 than to his being a genealogist through and through who refused becoming a formalist. As someone working on the history of the genesis of thinking he was acutely aware of the whole significance of the relational. He pushed the genealogical question so far into the grounds of the social that his work itself got lost there.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

7. 8. 9.

10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

Cassirer, Substance and Function, 4. Cassirer, Substance and Function, 7–8, Cassirer’s emphasis. Cassirer, Substance and Function, 8. Cassirer, Substance and Function, 8 [translation amended]. Cassirer, Substance and Function, 12. In Die Krise der Anschauung (47–79), Klaus Th. Volkert provides a historical overview of the development of the concept of function since Leibniz resolved the geometrically-intuitive concept of curves in an analytical concept of functions, which transformed functions from being means of description into independent objects. Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, 12. Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, 12. In his 1869 lecture, “On the Survival of Savage Thought in Modern Civilization” (in Notices of the Proceedings at the Meetings of the Members of the Royal Institution of Great Britain 5 [1866–69]: 522–35), written as he was working on his chef d’œuvre Primitive Culture, Tylor says: “This early animistic doctrine is to a great degree superseded by science, which sees in dreams and visions, not objective spiritual visits, but subjective phenomena of the mind … Yet it survives largely in popular belief, and has even from time to time come up vigorously in revivals. One of the revivals is the great modern Spiritualistic movement” (524). In his 1872 “Notes on Spiritualism,” he writes: “In November 1872, I went up to London to look into the alleged manifestations. My previous connexion with the subject had been mostly by way of tracing its ethnology” (92). Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A314/B370–71: 396. Tylor, Primitive Culture, vol. 3, 104–5; the term “savage thinker” appears on page 453. Cf. Frazer, The Golden Bough, 26–76. Freud, Totem and Taboo, 86 and 94. On preanimism and the dynamic concept of mana, cf. Marett, “Pre-Animistic Religion,” “The Conception of Mana,” and “Mana.”

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15. 16. 17.

18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

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Cf. Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. 2, 75–76. Assmann, Moses the Egyptian, 2. See my article, “Analphabetische Menschenfassungen”; on the crisis of theology around 1900, see Troeltsch, “Christentum und Religionsgeschichte,” or Harnack, Die Aufgabe der theologischen Facultäten. Walter F. Otto, who in the early twentieth century sought to capture what living faith in the Greek gods had been, was suspicious of the contemporary effort on the part not just of historical but also of religious discourse to exile the gods. He diagnosed the background of this banishment with remarkable acuity. Not only did he recognize that “fragmented, mechanistic thinking” was penetrating “belief in the deity … dissipating its forms only to place them together again artificially to fit the pattern of a historical process.” He also saw that the driving force of the banishment was “the poverty-stricken concept of ‘the powerful,’” which to his contemporaries’ mind played “the dominant role in primitive world views under the name of Mana, Orenda, etc.” In his view, “this so-called primitive way of thinking” was highly suspect if only because “it is suspiciously like our dynamic way of thought.” For Otto himself—and this makes him a figure quite out of sync with his time—there could be no doubt that “the road to the gods never starts from ‘powers’” (Dionysus, 11–12). Lacan, “Psychoanalysis and Cybernetics,” 307. 
 Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, 1. Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. 2, xiv and xiii. Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. 2, 23. On this point, see especially Cassirer, Language and Myth. Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. 2, 4, 11, and xvii, respectively. Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. 2, 14–15 [modified]. Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. 2, 59. Hermann Usener, Götternamen: Versuch einer Lehre von der religiösen Begriffsbildung (1896), qtd. in Cassirer, Language and Myth, 20. Cassirer, Language and Myth, 12. Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. 2, 78. Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. 2, 79.
 Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. 2, 69 [modified], Cassirer’s emphasis. In “Die Begriffsform im mythischen Denken,” Cassirer forcefully insists on the systematic significance of this delineation. Logic, to be sure, “has become aware of its real philosophical task and of its systematic form only because its own development took place simultaneously with the development of scientific thinking and constantly referred to the latter” (3). Nonetheless, “the categories of the logical become fully transparent only if we do not content ourselves with seeking them out and observing them in their own domain but juxtapose to them the categories of other domains and modalities of thinking, especially the categories of mythical consciousness” (11).

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31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70.

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Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, 12. Durkheim, Lettres à Marcel Mauss, 318.
 Durkheim, Lettres à Marcel Mauss, 320.
 Durkheim and Mauss, Primitive Classification, 4. This was the point already of Porphyry’s famous Isagoge, which systematically set out to define genus, difference, kind, proprium, and accidens; see Porphyry, Introduction, 3–19. Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, 12–13. Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, 13. Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, 20. Cf. Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, 22. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 110. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 112. [Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, 28.] Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 110. Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, 28. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 112. Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, 20. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 187. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 239–40. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 112, my emphasis [modified]. Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, 28. Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, 20. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 112–13. Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, 16; on Nietzsche’s study of Tylor’s animism and other sources in cultural anthropology he drew on for his history of thinking, see Orsucci, Orient–Okzident. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 170. Nietzsche, Daybreak, 27–28. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 169. Nietzsche, Daybreak, 228. Mauss, “A Category of the Human Mind,” 1. Durkheim and Mauss, Primitive Classification, 3. Durkheim and Mauss, Primitive Classification, 4. Durkheim and Mauss, Primitive Classification, 4–5. Durkheim and Mauss, Primitive Classification, 5. [Durkheim and Mauss, Primitive Classification, 6.] Durkheim and Mauss, Primitive Classification, 9. Durkheim and Mauss, Primitive Classification, 8. Durkheim and Mauss, Primitive Classification, 23. Durkheim and Mauss, Primitive Classification, 20. Durkheim and Mauss, Primitive Classification, 14. Durkheim and Mauss, Primitive Classification, 65. Durkheim and Mauss, Primitive Classification, 66.

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71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80.

81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96.

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Durkheim and Mauss, Primitive Classification, 83–84. Durkheim and Mauss, Primitive Classification, 85. Durkheim and Mauss, Primitive Classification, 86. Durkheim and Mauss, Primitive Classification, 82. Durkheim and Mauss, Primitive Classification, 32–33. Durkheim and Mauss, Primitive Classification, 35. Durkheim and Mauss, Primitive Classification, 39. M’Lennan, “The Worship of Animals and Plants.” This is the point of Lévi-Strauss’s Totemism. Frazer wrote in the fourth volume of his Totemism and Exogamy: “We conclude, then, that the ultimate source of totemism is a savage ignorance of the physical process by which men and animals reproduce their kinds; in particular it is an ignorance of the part played by the male in the generation of offspring. Surprising as such ignorance may seem to the civilised mind, a little reflection will probably convince us that, if mankind has indeed been evolved from lower forms of animal life, there must have been a period in the history of our race when ignorance of paternity was universal among men” (61). Spengler, The Decline of the West, vol. 1, 58. Tylor, “Remarks on Totemism,” 143. Lévi-Strauss, Totemism, 90. Durkheim and Mauss, Primitive Classification, 86. Durkheim and Mauss, Primitive Classification, 88. Durkheim, The Elementary Forms, 19. Durkheim, The Elementary Forms, 16. On “the rise of an autonomous discipline called Erkenntnistheorie” that symptomatically coincides with the entry into the crisis of thinking, see Köhnke, The Rise of Neo-Kantianism, 36–66. Durkheim, The Elementary Forms, 445. Durkheim, The Elementary Forms, 19–20. Mauss, “Mentalité primitive et participation,” 126 and 127–28. Mauss, “Sociology,” 39 and 38. Mauss, “Mentalité primitive et participation,” 130. Mauss, “Mentalité primitive et participation,” 126. Mauss, “Catégories collectives et catégories pures,” 150. This opens up an immense field for discourse analysis. Profoundly connected with the emergence of the genealogical question, it once more leads us right into the great transformation of thinking. An archeology of the concept “drive” would have to describe its exact epistemic position and function around 1900. It would have to inquire, on the one hand, how it was this concept, precisely, that pushed thinking according to the logic of substance to its limits or, rather, how far it marks the boundary of a thinking that did not yet think symbolically and nonetheless tried to grasp the real in its essential nonrepresentability by employing nonintuitive means. On

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97. 98. 99. 100. 101. 102. 103. 104.

105. 106. 107. 108. 109. 110. 111. 112.

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the other hand, one would have to study the extent to which the concept of drives was inscribed in fantasms of electrophysics and energetics, the extent to which it belonged to the conceptual mythology of an epoch of thinking the unrepresentable. “Drive” might be something like the name of the unrepresentable-real, the name of the unavoidable indeterminacy and indeterminability of ground. Freud suggests, in his 1933 New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis: “The theory of the instincts is so to say our mythology. Instincts are mythical entities, magnificent in their indefiniteness. In our work we cannot for a moment disregard them, yet we are never sure that we are seeing them clearly. You know how popular thinking deals with the instincts. People assume as many and as various instincts as they happen to need at the moment—a self-assertive instinct, an imitative instinct, an instinct of play, a gregarious instinct and many others like them. People take them up, as it were, make each of them do its particular job, and then drop them again. We have always been moved by a suspicion that behind all these little ad hoc instincts there lay concealed something serious and powerful which we should like to approach cautiously” (95). It was just this drive that, much later and within the framework of a libidinal economy or a thinking of desiring machines, became the key element of a subversion of the total symbolic thinking that was structuralism. An archeology of the drive concept cuts across everything discussed in these pages. Durkheim, “Individual and Collective Representations,” 1. Durkheim, “Individual and Collective Representations,” 9. Durkheim, Pragmatism and Sociology, 85. Cf. Durkheim, Pragmatism and Sociology, 99–102. On the Cartesian “fundamental position,” see Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture.” Tarot, De Durkheim à Mauss, 245. In this great study, Tarot traces Durk­ heim’s forgetting of language in great detail; see esp. chs. 11 and 13, 209–25 and 245–64. All quotations taken from Durkheim, The Elementary Forms, 9. Durkheim, The Elementary Forms, 37; on the various phases of the elaboration of the concept of the sacred by Durkheim and those around him that led to this conception, see Isambert, “L’Élaboration de la notion de sacré dans l’‘école’ durkheimienne.” [Durkheim, The Elementary Forms, 9.] Durkheim, The Elementary Forms, 38–39. Durkheim, The Elementary Forms, 42. Durkheim, The Elementary Forms, 206. Durkheim, The Elementary Forms, 212. Hertz, “The Pre-eminence of the Right Hand,” 102 and 103; on Hertz, see also Durkheim, “Notice biographique sur Robert Hertz.” Hertz, “The Pre-eminence of the Right Hand,” 112. On the Bergsonism of pragmatism, see James, A Pluralistic Universe, 83–124. 


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113. 114. 115. 116. 117. 118. 119. 120. 121. 122. 123. 124.

Durkheim, Pragmatism and Sociology, 95, Durkheim’s emphases. Durkheim, The Elementary Forms, 19. Durkheim, “The Dualism of Human Nature,” 36. Durkheim, “The Dualism of Human Nature,” 42. Durkheim, “The Dualism of Human Nature,” 35. Durkheim, “The Dualism of Human Nature,” 37. Durkheim, The Elementary Forms, 238. Durkheim, The Elementary Forms, 437. Durkheim, The Elementary Forms, 430. Durkheim, The Elementary Forms, 444. Durkheim, The Evolution of Educational Thought, 348. [Compare Pascal, Pensées, fragment Lafuma 131/Sellier 164/Brunschvicg 434, 36: “What a chimera then is man! What a surprise, what a monster, what chaos, what a subject of contradiction, what a prodigy!”—Trans.] Durkheim, “The Dualism of Human Nature,” 38. Durkheim, “Le Problème religieux,” 71; “The Problem of Religion,” 8 [modified], my emphasis. Durkheim, The Elementary Forms, 239. Durkheim, The Elementary Forms, 234. Durkheim, The Elementary Forms, 2. Durkheim, The Elementary Forms, 3. Durkheim, The Elementary Forms, 215–16. Durkheim, The Elementary Forms, 218. Durkheim, The Elementary Forms, 219. Durkheim, The Elementary Forms, 225 and 227. [Durkheim, The Elementary Forms, 233.] Durkheim, The Elementary Forms, 227 [amended], my emphasis. Durkheim, The Elementary Forms, 230 and 231. Durkheim, The Elementary Forms, 220. Durkheim, The Elementary Forms, 220. Durkheim, The Elementary Forms, 223. [Durkheim, The Elementary Forms, 228.] Cf. Durkheim, The Elementary Forms, 188–204. In these pages, Durkheim defines the concept of the totem principle as a “notion of an anonymous and diffused force” (194) that traverses things, entities, and human beings and schematizes the system of the elementary representations of belief. Through this analysis, he arrives at his energetic theory of symbol formation which is to serve as the foundation of the reality of this system of representations. Durkheim, The Elementary Forms, 203. Durkheim, The Elementary Forms, 204. Durkheim, The Elementary Forms, 26. Durkheim, The Elementary Forms, 236. Durkheim, The Elementary Forms, 225.

125. 126. 127. 128. 129. 130. 131. 132. 133. 134. 135. 136. 137. 138. 139. 140. 141. 142.

143. 144. 145. 146. 147.

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148. 149. 150. 151. 152. 153. 154. 155.

156. 157.

158. 159. 160. 161. 162. 163. 164. 165. 166. 167. 168. 169. 170.

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Durkheim, The Elementary Forms, 237. Durkheim, The Elementary Forms, 237. Durkheim, The Elementary Forms, 423. Durkheim, The Elementary Forms, 438. Durkheim, The Elementary Forms, 439. Durkheim, The Elementary Forms, 442. Durkheim, The Elementary Forms, 428. In the very midst of the decisive passages of his excitation theory of symbol formation and even before he calls on Australian societies as chief witnesses for an originary human intuitionism, we find the reference to the French Revolution: “This aptitude of society for setting itself up as a god or for creating gods was never more apparent than during the first years of the French Revolution. At this time, in fact, under the influence of the general enthusiasm, things purely laical by nature were transformed by public opinion into sacred things: these were the Fatherland, Liberty, Reason. A religion tended to become established which had its dogmas, symbols, altars and feasts. It was to these spontaneous aspirations that the cult of Reason and the Supreme Being attempted to give a sort of official satisfaction” (Durk­ heim, The Elementary Forms, 214). Cf. Mauss, “Représentations religieuses.” Mauss, “An Intellectual Self-Portrait,” 40 [modified]. In numerous essays N. J. Allen has attempted to show that the project of a history of the categories (which, unfortunately, he does not situate epistemologically) may be seen to endow Mauss’s fragmented work with a certain kind of coherence. In my view, it constitutes the great coherence of Mauss’s thinking. See Allen, Categories and Classifications, especially the essay “Mauss and the Categories” on pages 91–99, as well as his chapter, “The Category of Substance: A Maussian Theme Revisited.” Mauss and Hubert, A General Theory of Magic, 146 and 149. Hubert and Mauss, “Introduction à l’analyse de quelques phénomènes religieux,” 29. Mauss and Hubert, A General Theory of Magic, 151. Mauss and Hubert, A General Theory of Magic, 152–53. Hubert and Mauss, “Introduction à l’analyse de quelques phénomènes religieux,” 28–29, my emphasis. Mauss and Hubert, A General Theory of Magic, 138. Mauss and Hubert, A General Theory of Magic, 143. Mauss and Hubert, A General Theory of Magic, 151. Mauss and Hubert, A General Theory of Magic, 133. Mauss and Hubert, A General Theory of Magic, 156. Mauss, “Catégories collectives et catégories pures,” 151, emphasis Mauss. Mauss, “Typologie des races et des peuples,” 1901, in Œuvres III, 362–65, here 364. Mauss, “Sociology,” 45.

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171. See Meillet’s programmatic essay, “Comment les mots changent de sens.” 172. Meillet, “Comment les mots changent de sens,” 1. 173. On the relevance of this difference for epistemology and discourse politics, see Fehr, “Saussure: Zwischen Linguistik und Semiologie.” 174. Mauss, “In Memoriam Antoine Meillet,” 549. 175. Mauss, “Sociology,” 46, my emphasis; on Mauss and Meillet, see Tarot, De Durkheim à Mauss, 432–39. 176. Mauss, “Sociology,” 72. 177. Mauss, “Real and Practical Relations between Psychology and Sociology,” 32–33. 178. Hubert and Mauss, Essai sur la nature et la fonction du sacrifice, 302; on the contemporary fascination with sacrifice, see my “Der heiße Begriff des Opfers.” 179. Mauss and Hubert, A General Theory of Magic, 146. 180. Mauss, “An Intellectual Self-Portrait,” 39–40. 181. Mauss, “An Intellectual Self-Portrait,” 40. 182. See “Anna-Virāj” (1911) and the 1939 lecture, “Conceptions Which Have Preceded the Notion of Matter.” 183. Mauss, “A Category of the Human Mind,” 22–23. 184. Mauss, “A Category of the Human Mind,” 22. 185. Norbert Wiener, “Cybernetics,” 784. 186. Gottfried Benn, “Probleme der Lyrik,” 528. [This passage was not included in the English translation of Benn’s lecture, “Problems of Lyric Poetry,” where it would find its place on page 22—Trans.] 187. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss, 64. 188. Lévi-Strauss, Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss, 60, 62, and 61. 189. In a lecture entitled “La folie et la société” he gave in Tokyo in 1970, Foucault stresses this turn and explicitly defines his own efforts in relation to and distinction from the project of the Durkheim school: “I would like to explain why I am interested in this problem of insanity and society, in the relations between insanity and society. We may say that the tradition of European sociology, of, let’s say, Durkheimian sociology, and equally the tradition of the history of ideas as it was practiced in western Europe at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, was essentially interested in positive phenomena. One attempted to seek out the values that were recognized within a society, to determine in what way a society affirmed its own system, affirmed its own values, affirmed its own beliefs. In other words, one sought essentially to define a society or a culture by its positive, intrinsic, internal content. For a number of years now, sociology, and ethnology even more than sociology, has been interested in the inverse phenomenon, in what we might call the negative structure of a society: What is being rejected in a society? What is excluded? What is the system of prohibitions? What is the game of impossibles? … I wonder whether it is possible to apply to the history of ideas what ethnologists have done when

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192. 193. 194.

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it comes to societies—this attempt to explain negative phenomena at the same time as positive phenomena. What I have wanted to do, and what I want to do again since my first attempts no doubt weren’t very good, or precise, or sufficient, what I would like to do is to operate a conversion of the same kind. Rather than explaining—as was done at the time of Paul Hazard or, in Germany, Ernst Cassirer—explaining the culture, science, and ideas of an age starting from the system of beliefs, rather than seeking first what is admitted, recognized, or valorized by a society, I asked myself, and I still ask myself, if the interesting thing would not on the contrary be to seek out what in a society, what in a system of thought, is rejected and excluded” (Foucault, “La folie et la société,” 478). Michel Foucault, History of Madness, xxxiii. On the task of thinking at the moment when cybernetics completes philosophy see, in addition to What Is Called Thinking? the lecture “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking”; on the problem of situating Heidegger’s question concerning thinking in the history of thinking, see the appendix to the present volume. Mauss, “Notes à l’essai sur les ‘divisions de la sociologie,’” 262. Mauss, The Gift, 102 and 100. Lévi-Strauss, Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss, 45.

Part II The Specter of the Primitive A Hauntology of Communication

4. The Night of the Human Being Being and Experience under the Conditions of the Unrepresentable Abstract Around 1900, “the primitive” f igured as the conceptual persona of an entirely spectral world of telecommunications. The density of primitive being as described in ethnological and anthropological studies consisted in a fabulous density of transmissions of forces and messages between beings and things. The world of the primitive thus outlined, in turn, was above all a fantastic manifestation of the lack of intelligibility of the age of communication, projected to the margins of the West. Prior to information theory and cybernetics, there simply was no exact system of notation that would have allowed the age to understand its own media technologies. The chapter reconstructs and contextualizes two ontologies of communication that—albeit still grounded in a fascination with the primitive—advanced radical redefinitions of communication that, given contemporary media realities, were extremely virulent: Lucien Lévy-Bruhl’s thinking of “savage” media and his notion of primitives’ participative mode of being and Georges Bataille’s thinking of sacred communication. Against the backdrop of today’s media technological conditions, Lévy-Bruhl‘s original reflections on participation as a primordial constitutive relation that precedes the participating entities as such, in particular, must be reevaluated as a downright visionary hauntological description of the age of communication (even if LévyBruhl himself still situated them in an outside, a primitive hell of telecommunications). Keywords: the specter of the primitive; hauntology of communication; ontology of participation; Lucien Lévy-Bruhl; Georges Bataille

Hörl, E., Sacred Channels: The Archaic Illusion of Communication, Amsterdam University Press, 2018 doi 10.5117/9789089647702_ch04

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Primitiveness and crisis The history of the genesis of thinking, thought up by Nietzsche in his nonAristotelian furor, and driven, especially by the Durkheim School, deep into the savage infrastructure of Aristotelian logic, resulted from the decay of thinking in terms of categories and substance, a decay induced by media technologies and the exact sciences. Remarkably, the forays into the primitive grounds of thinking led through regions that in many respects resembled the post-Kantian, and generally post-Aristotelian, conditions of the age of the symbolic and of communication to a tee. In complete accordance with the present, the world of the “primitive” around 1900 was governed by a retreat of representability. A prehistorical not-yet of representational thinking corresponded in a peculiarly symmetrical way to its no-longer. Where epistemic primacy was no longer awarded to intuition because one was dealing with questions below the threshold of perceptibility and operating with nonintuitive formalisms, where one had come across the nonrepresentable world of communication that destituted the categorial representation of the Kantian rational order inspired by Newtonian mechanics and Euclidian geometry, where one exclusively allowed for a strict regime of functions to capture communication in symbols that exploded the Aristotelian constitution—there, precisely, appeared at the same time a world of the “primitive” that quite obviously was not yet familiar with the spirit of the categories, of intuition, and the parameters of representability. The significance of this world consisted in a fabulous exposure to forces and powers that were as invisible as they were anonymous and in an experience that mysteriously synthesized in this permanent communication, an experience whose axioms and schematisms were opaque. Time and again, the hermeneutics of primitive reality amounted to a certain disastrous inability to spell out this reality in categorial terms, an inability that marked the boundary of thinking as such. And when “the primitive” made inferences, their inferences did not enter the narrow frame of Aristotelian syllogistics—a frame modern logicians for their part ignored as well. The world of the “primitive” could only be grasped by leaving the traditional grounds of conceptualization. What initially, on the secure grounds of representative thinking, might have been imagined as the childhood spawn of the transcendental subject, as a certain deficiency of the prehistorical epistemic situation, around 1900 became a precarious—and sometimes even, as in Durkheim, almost delirious—primitive originary ground of everything categorial. Thinkers left the long cherished immanence of thinking behind to get lost in the extralogical ground of thinking and to search for new landmarks in the realm

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of social relationships that would be capable of rendering the becoming of thinking transparent, as the present day forcefully demonstrated. The contemporary crisis had a correlate in the initial critical position of the thinking of the “primitive.” The historically and epistemologically inexorable result that emerged around 1900 was a short-circuiting of the preliterate and the postliterate conditions of understanding, of the rise and fall of faith in a certain dependability and unavoidability of the categorial, of the prehistory and the posthistory of representational thinking. Through and through, the “primitive” was a figure of the crisis, a figure by means of which a formation struggled to understand its own break with the traditional regime of thinking in terms of intuition, representation, and substance. The “primitive” was the specter of the crisis itself. The virulence in those days of the question of the “primitive” is apparent in the most profound reaction to the crisis, namely Heidegger’s fundamentalontological undermining of the regime of categories by an analytics of existentials, which by discovering the structure of an always already given disclosure of the world elevated philosophy to the epistemic standard of the new technological and medial conditions of the everydayness and Being-inthe-world of “a highly developed and differentiated culture,” and its attempt precisely to delimit itself from anthropological interpretations of “primitive Dasein”: “Primitive Dasein often speaks to us more directly in terms of a primordial absorption in ‘phenomena’ (taken in a pre-phenomenological sense).” According to Heidegger, “A way of conceiving things which seems, perhaps, rather clumsy and crude from our standpoint, can be positively helpful in bringing out the ontological structures of phenomena in a genuine way,” simply “because ‘primitive phenomena’ are often less concealed and less complicated by extensive self-interpretation on the part of the Dasein in question.” Heidegger’s attempt, at the moment of crisis, to reinterpret the traditional question of knowledge as the question of Being and thereby to de(con)struct and overcome the traditional thinking of representation by uncovering the structures it had obscured, not only acknowledged the special stakes and status of the question of the “primitive.” It also testified to the possible “positive significance [Bedeutung]” that “orient[ing] the analysis of Dasein towards the ‘life of primitive peoples’” might have methodologically. Yet in his view, “information about primitives” of the kind ethnologists, sociologists, and psychologists pursued suffered from lacking a guideline called existential analysis. In other words, in seeking to interpret “primitive Dasein,” they did not go far enough in suspending intellectual reasoning and thus always already misread primitive phenomena. 1 In a footnote on Cassirer’s study of mythical thought, which he, probably much more

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thoroughly so than its author himself, conceived of as an interpretation of “primitive Dasein” as such and not just of “primitive” thinking, Heidegger notes with all desirable clarity: From the standpoint of philosophical problematics it remains an open question whether the foundations of this Interpretation are sufficiently transparent—whether in particular the architectonics and the general systematic content of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason can provide a possible design for such a task, or whether a new and more primordial approach may not here be needed.2

Heidegger saw that the framework of representational thinking unable to live up to the stakes of the question of the “primitive,” which concerned a reality, an experience, and a world, a Dasein that was just as much beyond the reach of the categorial regime as was the world and epistemic situation surrounding Heidegger that provided him with the insight into the necessity of revising the framework of reasoning and with the agenda of fundamental ontology. In an extensive review of the second volume of Cassirer’s Philosophy of Symbolic Forms published in 1928, Heidegger elaborates on his objection by pointing to the necessity of a “structural determination” “from out of the whole structure of mythical Dasein” of the “mana-representation” which Neo-Kantians presented as the basic category of mythical thinking as such: [I]s this fundamental “representation” simply present at hand in mythical Dasein, or does it belong to the ontological constitution of mythical Dasein? And if this latter, as what? In the mana-representation, what becomes evident is nothing other than the understanding of Being that belongs to every Dasein as such. This undergoes specific transformations according to each basic way of Dasein’s Being—in this case, the mythical—and it illuminates in advance thought and intuition. This insight, however, leads to the further question: which is the basic way of Being of mythical “life,” such that within this life precisely the manarepresentation can function as the leading and illuminating understanding of Being? The possible answer to this question presupposes, to be sure, an anticipatory elaboration of the basic ontological constitution of Dasein as such.3

The most urgent task for Heidegger, besides the struggle of a new approach to be enthroned as first philosophy (or whatever the name of this desire for

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discursive hegemony may be), was to shift the question concerning primitive thinking away from the genealogical study of the becoming of institutions and, more generally even, of social practices and toward ontology. In those years, a good part of everything going by the name of the “primitive” was a manifestation of the electromagnetic imaginary. It rested securely on a basic discourse about the sacrality of communication and a sacralization of its channels. Around 1900, the “primitive” was the conceptual persona of a profoundly spectral world of communicative flows. The density of primitive Being, it seemed, consisted in a fabulous transmittance density of forces and messages between beings and things. What was called the Sacred described above all the totality of the primitive world constituted by mythical-religious relationships of communication. The world of the “primitive” in turn was a projection and manifestation of the lack of intelligibility of the age of communication, which, in the days prior to information theory and cybernetics, did not have the basic concepts or, better, the exact notations (i.e., algorithms) needed to understand the phenomena produced by media technology. What from the perspective of representational thinking could not but count as one immense delirium of communication, in its ontological revision led to the “primitive” as a Dasein characterized by a fundamental Being-outside and Being-open and by exposure to sudden events of transmission. The agenda of an ontology of “primitive Dasein” basically promised to break through to an ontological self-conception of the present whose situation was determined by the technologies and facts of communication. It promised to merge with all the uncanniness felt by Dasein, with the indeterminate “that in the face of which” of anxiety, the dread of world as such, with not-Being-at-home as Dasein’s basic disposition of Dasein, with the appeal character and the understanding of the appeal as modes of the disclosure of Dasein, which were said to belong to the basic existential data of Dasein as such and thus beautifully fit in with the ontological horizon of those years. Heidegger must have sensed that what could be read ontologically into or, more precisely, framed in the terms of the fundamental ontological structure he elaborated in Being and Time in ethnological, sociological, and social-anthropological studies was very close to his own ontology of communication, which nonetheless always remained implicit where it was not actively obscured (as the precarious position of Being-with in his analyses suggests).4 His sketch of an ontological interpretation of “primitive” being, which, not surprisingly in 1928, he saw as being “primarily determined through ‘thrownness,’” hinted at the basic traits of a primitive world of communication to be taken up by Cassirer and everyone else who sought to think the “primitive”:

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In “thrownness” there is a being-delivered-over of Dasein to the world, so that this being-in-the-world is overwhelmed by that to which it is delivered over. Overpoweringness as such is capable on the whole of announcing itself only for a being that is delivered over to something. In this being referred to the overpowering, Dasein is dazed by it and is capable therefore of experiencing itself only as belonging to and affiliated with this actuality itself. In thrownness any and all uncovered beings have, accordingly, the Being-character of overpoweringness (mana). If the ontological interpretation were to push forward to the specific “temporality” that grounds thrownness, then it could be made ontologically understandable why and how what is actual as mana always makes itself evident in a specific “instantaneousness.” In thrownness there is a proper being driven here and there that is open from out of itself for what is always in each case the suddenly extraordinary. The specific “categories” of mythical thought must then be “deduced” by following the guiding thread of the mana-representation.5

Quite openly, Heidegger told all those struggling with the hermeneutics of primitivity and of primitive thinking in particular that “the further course of research … will be accomplished by recapitulating what has already been ontically discovered, and by purifying it in a way which is ontologically more transparent.”6 This amounted to nothing less than a call to go through all of the material once more. Disfigured by insufficient preconceptions and preinterpretations of Dasein, the material was now to be reconsidered on the basis of a structural analysis of Dasein that no longer participated in representational thinking. Only those who went beyond the limits imposed by representational thinking—whose decay was in full swing at the time, no matter how much genealogical work had been done to show its origin to lie in a primitive extralogical underground—could gain insight into the limit case called primitiveness that arose on the firmament of the age of communication. Heidegger himself, incidentally, suspected that the archaic illusion might be one of the “fabrications of the age of technology.”7 To be sure, his construction of a history of Being, which unfurled the present epistemic-technological situation archeologically, from the beginning, still accorded with the dominant tendency toward the Archaic and the Early. Undoubtedly, however, he sought to delimit his own work on the “inception,” his descent into the Pre-Socratic and his return to the sayings of early thinking, from all complicity with the contemporary search for “primitive” mentality: “The fundamental error … is the opinion that the inception of history is primitive and backward, clumsy and weak. The

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opposite is true. The inception is what is most uncanny and mightiest.”8 Compelled to prevent any confusion between the thinking of the beginning and “primitive” thinking, he finally arrived, at the opening of his lectures on Parmenides, at a lucid definition of “primitiveness”: In essential history the beginning comes last. … To be sure, at first, at the outset, the beginning appears veiled in a peculiar way. Whence stems the remarkable fact that the beginning is easily taken for the imperfect, the unfinished, the rough. It is also called the “primitive.” And so the thinkers before Plato and Aristotle are said to be “primitive thinkers.” Of course, not every thinker at the outset of Western thought is by that very fact also a thinker of the beginning, a primordial thinker.9

Talk of “the primitive” now appeared as a peculiarity due only to the fact that the beginning was obscured and obstructed. Only at the end, when the technologically mobilized present turned out to be the perfection of the always already disfigured beginning and the inception could for the time appear unveiled, in all its violence and greatness, only then all impression and sense of “primitiveness” dispersed. All those who were still thinking on this side of this turn of history could not but continue to conceive of the Early in terms of “primitiveness.”

Savage media Long before Cassirer and Heidegger began to meddle philosophically in the genealogical subversive labor in the pre-Aristotelian grounds of thinking, a philosopher shocked his contemporaries by outlining a “primitive mentality.” In 1910, at the moment of the “unfettering of the logical” (as Hermann Broch once described the years of the triumph of axiomatic thinking),10 Lucien Lévy-Bruhl under the title Les fonctions mentales dans les sociétés inférieures (lit., Mental Functions in the Lower Societies, published as How Natives Think) sketched a way of thinking that to all appearances was indifferent and insensitive to contradictions and which he therefore called prelogical. In an age in which various crises of foundation struggled with the emergence of contradictions, this rejection of the unity and universality of the human mind founded on a loathing of contradiction was a provocation of the first order. Only a few years earlier, Henri Bergson’s Introduction à la métaphysique had gone straight for the heart of the age and inaugurated metaphysics

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as the intuitive science of the mind. The main task of metaphysics was henceforth to “break with symbols,” to tear through the “rich tissue of symbols” with which a “universal mathematics” captured the totality of the real; it sought to follow the “undulations of the real” in a “direct vision” and enter into “direct contact with reality” beyond all symbolic disfigurement.11 This time, it seemed, a maneuver to escape the clutches of the formalist enterprise came from the depths of the history of the mind in the name of a prelogical way of thinking. Like Bergson’s intuitionist manifesto, Lévy-Bruhl’s exodus from the universal realm of logical discursivity must have sounded unsettling to epistemologically attuned ears. But at a moment when the epistemological and ontological stakes of the transformation from intuitive to symbolic thinking were anything but clear, Lévy-Bruhl (no less than Bergson) meditated on and at the limits of a representational thought in its death throes. For him, the mentality of the “primitive” had become the site beyond the regime of representation where thinking, the constitution of experience and world, would be comprehended. His work was thus less an objection than a labor on the epistemic self-discovery of an age that, to paraphrase Merleau-Ponty, did not have any rigorous theory of symbolism that could have served as secure ground for its own comprehensibility, that is, as secure ground for understanding the turn taking place within it. Even if on the first page of his book, Lévy-Bruhl in a gesture toward Durkheim pledges allegiance to the project of a genealogy of thinking, writing, among other things, that “it is undoubtedly the study of the collective representations and their connections in uncivilized peoples that can throw some light upon the genesis of our categories and our logical principles,” he operated a transformation of the epistemological agenda. He was precisely not interested in spelling out the genesis of individual categories, the winding road of the becoming of thinking. He concentrated instead on discovering “the most general laws governing collective representations in undeveloped peoples,” on the question of “the guiding principles of primitive mentality, and how these make themselves felt in the primitive institutions and customs.”12 In his hands—and this, according to Émile Bréhier, was the event associated with his name—the search for the genesis of the human mind became the question of its structural history. Defining an originary, irreducible mental structure of the primitive won out over opening breaches in the thicket of becoming that only ever got lost in prehistory.13 But in studying collective representations and giving an ever more intricate structural description of what he called mentalité primitive, Lévy-Bruhl—famous for his legendary lectures on Descartes, which he gave until his mid-fifties at the Sorbonne,14 and a historian of philosophy who knew all the tricks

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in the book of classic rationalism—ended up shooting for the totality of primitive Being, for the immanent determination of the type of Being, of the structure of Being of primitiveness as such. In other words, he did not stop at describing a mental structure but aimed for insight into the ontological grounds of such a structure. For over thirty years starting in 1910, the ramified analysis of participation, in which he saw the basic mode of primitive Being-in-the-world, the study of mystical experience, of the affective category of the supernatural, and of the symbolic ambition of the primitive, inexorably led him toward the ruin of representational thinking, which he reached at the end. This destruction, which was not to spare even and especially his own interpretations and was thus characterized by him in his later years as “the slope where I now find myself,”15 was as it were the slope of an entire age. It was on the grounds of the primitive mode of being that Lévy-Bruhl went “in search of forgotten categories.”16 Ultimately, however, it was on these grounds that he denied the unavoidability of categoriality as such. This did not differ in principle from the main point of departure of the “return” of ontology in the early twentieth century. In the face of a decaying a priori order of reason, ontology pulled out the rug from under the traditional epistemological constraints and for the first time posed the formerly categorial questions of the constitution of meaning and truth not on the level of transcendental subjectivity but on the level that preceded it, that of Being-in-the-world. In 1957, when Lévy-Bruhl, who had died in 1939, would have celebrated his one-hundredth birthday, Lévinas, who probably understood Lévy-Bruhl better than anyone else—yet within the limits of how one philosopher can understand another, that is, largely ignoring the historical-epistemological situation—pointed to the “explosion of categories” in Lévy-Bruhl’s work. It “breaks with the representation that grounded all psychological life, and with the substance that supported being.” Its analyses do not describe experience as cast in the categories that, from Aristotle to Kant—all nuances aside—claimed to condition experience, but in which with a bit of inconsistency, magic and miracle are also accommodated. Lévy-Bruhl questions precisely the supposed necessity of those categories for the possibility of experience. He describes an experience that makes light of causality, substance, reciprocity—of space and time—of those conditions of “every possible object.”17

Strangely forgetting that this was a core problem of the contemporary scientific-technological mobilization of which Lévy-Bruhl’s thinking was

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only a symptom, Lévinas concludes: “The problem of categories themselves is thus raised.”18 Across six books and, moreover, in an unprecedented review of everything ever put down on paper about the primitive in the posthumous Carnets, Lévy-Bruhl, just as Heidegger had demanded, liberated “primitive” Being from all misleading and obscuring preconceptions and preinterpretations. In complete agreement with the logic of the episteme, he encountered at the heart of the existence of the “primitive,” on the ground of its constitution of world and experience that could no longer be understood by Kantian, never mind Cartesian and Aristotelian means, the outlines of an ontology of transmission, of Being-in-communication as such. In “primitive” Being, he caught sight of the ontological foundations of the age of communication itself. Thanks to Lévy-Bruhl, the figure of the “primitive” explicitly became what he had implicitly been ever since his inscription in a discourse about anonymous forces and powers: a specter revealing the schemes of a ghostly time, a time deprived of its schema by the loss of fundamental certainties about what experience, reality, thinking, and perception were, certainties shaken by media technology and natural science. The “primitive” appearing in ethnological, social-anthropological, psychological, and philosophical discourses as well as in the avant-gardes was the insistence of the imaginary, almost even its embodiment at a time when the imaginary was about to lose its epistemological key position as the productive power of the imagination, the last salute perhaps to its sliding into the symbolic beyond, a beyond that enchained it and conceived of it, at best, as an appendage (even if it was difficult to think of it as absent). Accordingly, the “primitive” became for a symbolic thinker at the end of the 1940s, Lévi-Strauss, the protagonist of the “archaic illusion” in which an entire age of transition indulged, an age driven mad by the absence of an exact notation of the basic communicative phenomena that generated its culture. The “primitive,” the Being of the “primitive” was thus—the spawn of an epistemological decay. The ontological stakes, brought out and highlighted by the way Lévy-Bruhl asked the question of the “primitive,” were to be completely forgotten by this kind of structural analysis. Epistemological self-certainty produces blind spots. Already when Lévy-Bruhl first introduced it in Les fonctions mentales, the point of the concept of collective representations was that a collective representation was nothing less than it was a representation; at the very least, it was not a representation in the sense of being purely a fact of consciousness or a fact of that inner experience in which the understanding qua apperception had an image or idea of an object. Instead, the term denoted a simultaneously motoric, emotional, and intellectual fact. “In default of a

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better … term”—a formula that Lévy-Bruhl, moving on the very limits of a formation, found himself compelled to use time and again in his struggle against preconceptions sedimented in the existing concepts—he described it as essentially “mystic.” Without in any way “referring … to the religious mysticism of our communities,” it was to mean “something entirely different” and be understood “in the strictly defined sense in which ‘mystic’ implies belief in forces and influences and actions which, though imperceptible to sense, are nevertheless real.”19 “Mystic” served as a counterconcept to the order of representation. It was the name of the beyond of the regime of representation, a beyond forced by the nonrepresentability of the communication between beings and things constantly taking place in the world of the “primitive,” the name of the originary transgression of the Cartesian constellation, or of the impossibility of this constellation under the conditions of communication: What we are accustomed to understand by representation, even direct and intuitive, implies duality in unity. The object is presented to the subject as in a certain sense distinct from himself; except in states such as ecstasy, that is, border states in which representation, properly so called, disappears, since the fusion between subject and object has become complete. Now in analysing the most characteristic of the primitive’s institutions … we have found that his mind does more than present his object to him: it possesses it and is possessed by it. It communes with it and participates in it, not only in the ideological, but also in the physical and mystic sense of the word. The mind does not imagine it merely; it lives it.20

The perception of the “primitive” in its entirety seemed to be already mystically oriented. It lacked any power to determine objecthood; it was not a source of objectivity but deeply embedded in a world of total communication that always already undermined any differentiation of fields of perception: That which to us is perception is to him mainly the communication with spirits, souls, invisible and intangible mysterious powers encompassing him on all sides, upon which his fate depends, and which loom larger in his consciousness than the fixed and tangible and visible elements of his representations.21

The emblematic form of the mystic order of perception was the dream. The dream state, accordingly, was not the opposite of the waking state but simply its highest form, “one in which, since its material and tangible elements are

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at a minimum, the communication with invisible spirits and forces is most direct and most complete.”22 Where perception was oriented mystically, that is, where the question of sense deception was mute because perception was not a matter of sense perception of objects but only of communication with forces imperceptible to the senses, where the difference between dream state and waking state was not only redundant but no longer made sense, something like a Cartesian quest for certainty could not even get off the ground. No need to fear being exposed as a naked fool when one fancied oneself a king clad in purple robes, no need for eyes wide open, for moving one’s head to show it was not caught up in sleep, or for consciously stretching out one’s hand. What was lacking now was an initial doubt to drive the examination of the self that could have shown the way to the safe harbor of subjectivity. The very reasons that stood at the beginning of the Meditations on First Philosophy, indeed, the very problem of certainty itself did not apply. Meditations were brought up short before they could even begin. The Cartesian primal scene disintegrated. One always found oneself to be this side of representational thinking, this side of its loneliness and all its strong reasons. These first facts of primitive Being cited by Lévy-Bruhl, which aimed straight for the heart of the Cartesian constitution, were merely the new fundamental certainties of the age of communication—if indeed we are willing to apply the name of certainty to the fact that this age had jumbled, that indeed it had done away with central distinctions of a traditional formation of representational thinking such as subject and object, perception and deception, dream and reality. The chipping away at the foundations of knowledge operated by media technologies and the exact sciences, which threw every basic conviction held by an alphabetic culture into doubt, echoed in the depths of the primitive grounds of thinking. The fundamental concept of this destruction of representational thinking on the ground of communication was that of participation. Lévy-Bruhl’s central conceptual creation, its elaboration allowed the study of the “primitives’” mode of thinking to penetrate onto ontological pastures in the first place. In a move parallel to Heidegger’s, the concept of participation aided in transforming the analysis of the human mind from a matter of logic or psychology into a matter of elaborating structures of Being that could be seen through mental dispositions—and not the other way around. The “mystic relations” primitive connections of representations featured pointed Lévy-Bruhl to “a general law, a common foundation”: In varying forms and degrees they all involve a “participation” between persons or objects which form part of a collective representation. For this reason I shall, in default of a better term, call the principle which

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is peculiar to “primitive” mentality, which governs the connections and preconnections [préliaisons] of such representations, the law of participation.23

Again, this hesitation about creating the concept; again, this doubt whether the concept is appropriate. However, it is followed this time by the remark that this groping for concepts is not due to chance but that it has good reasons: what was to be expressed “scarcely enters the ordinary framework of our thought.” For in the collective representations of primitive mentality, objects, beings, phenomena can be, though in a way incomprehensible to us, both themselves and something other than themselves. In a fashion which is no less incomprehensible, they give forth and they receive mystic powers, virtues, qualities, influences, which make themselves felt outside, without ceasing to remain where they are.24

Lévy-Bruhl named this basic datum of “primitive” thinking, which qua participation ruined the clear outlines of the concept of substance, multipresence, later bi-presence and consubstantiation. The law of participation that governed all “primitive” thinking and ignored the distinction between the one and the many, between the same and the other, was the reason for the scandal “primitive” thinking constituted for a logical thinking that obeyed the principle of contradiction. It was a way of interpreting experiences and things incommensurable with such a logic, one that could not but “scandalize and reduce to despair”25 anyone thinking according to the principle of contradiction and a secure capacity for making distinctions: Oriented differently from our own, and pre-eminently engaged with mystic qualities and connections, with the law of participation as its supreme guide and control, primitive mentality perforce interprets in a fashion other than ours what we call nature and experience. Everywhere it perceives the communication of qualities (through transference, contact, projection, contamination, defilement, possession, in short, through a number of varied operations) which, either instantaneously or in the course of time, bring a person or a thing into participation with a given faculty.26

Phenomena and events were “the result of a mystic influence which is communicated [se communique], under conditions themselves of mystic nature, from one being or object to another.”27

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Under the conditions of participation, there were strictly speaking no already-separate entities between which relationships of communication would exist; entities themselves were merely the effect of comprehensive communicative events. For the “primitive,” communication was the real and things themselves the manifestations of communication. When LévyBruhl, hesitating as usual, called this way of thinking “prelogical” and explicitly not “antilogical” or “alogical,” he did so because “it does not bind itself down, as our thought does, to avoiding contradiction. It obeys the law of participation first and foremost.”28 All relationships were first grasped in terms of mystical relationships of communication, what counted first were “mystic realities, each of which determines a champ de force.”29 Experience was schematized first by “the uninterrupted feeling of participation.”30 The fundamental parameter that determined everything was a “continuum of spiritual powers”31 prior, in a nontemporal sense, to all logical separations. This priority of the relationship that was felt, called participation, over the relationship that was thought logically was due to a different order of thinking that operated beyond Aristotelian logic with a certain indifference in matters of noncontradiction. The prelogical and the mystic were merely “two aspects of the same fundamental quality, rather than two distinct characteristics.”32 There is, incidentally, a certain irony in the association of Lévy-Bruhl’s name with, of all things, the creation of the concept of the prelogical. He used it only for a few years and, as he moved from more epistemologically inspired reflections to the study of the primitive structure of Being, ended up bitterly fighting against it. This conceptual bastard he had launched in 1910 bedeviled him for the rest of life and he felt compelled to object to it even in the kind of conversation with himself he meticulously recorded in his notebooks starting in January 1938. There we read that this indiscretion in his first analyses haunted him on his walks in the Bois de Boulogne. Time and again, for example, under the heading “abandonment of ‘prelogical,’” he sought to exorcise a concept he had not been using for decades, one that had, moreover, long since become a phantom. He denied its right to exist and demonstrated all its absurdity, along with certain fallacies he himself had committed in coining the term. From the first to the last page, his Carnets are an apology for having created it. Initially, participation, the leading concept that became ever more important as his studies continued, was merely the name for thinking under the conditions of total communication. According to Lévy-Bruhl these conditions, in strict parallel with the imaginary of the age, shaped the primitives’ constitution of world and experience and allowed it to appear at the limits of representational thinking. Participation had been invented as the basic

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characteristic of a thinking of communication in the true sense, which was always already embedded in a complex structure of connections, in a network of preconnections, that is, of connections that collective representations had as it were made permanent, always already set out in advance for primitive mentality and thereby schematized. Even if as early as 1910, Lévy-Bruhl noted that participation “is not to be understood as a share [partage],”33 it only became clear as the years went on that it was to be understood as communication in the ontological sense of an always already given Being-with, a Being-together and irreducible common appearing. In the effort to go back to before the distinctions of representational thinking in order to account for communication as the basic process of mystical experience, he came across this ontological structure. In 1910, still completely under the impression that it was necessary to spell out a remarkable priority, that of essentially synthetic primitive thinking over analytical logical procedures, he wrote that “collective representations” are not “analysed and then arranged in logical sequence. … They are always bound up with preperceptions [préperceptions], preconceptions [préconceptions], preconnections [préliaisons], and we might almost say with prejudgments [préraisonnements]; and thus it is that primitive mentality, just because it is mystical, is also prelogical.”34 This constant discovery of something prior, this insistence of something Earlier, which constantly referred Lévy-Bruhl’s belaboring of representational thinking to another order of a prioris prior to the categories, also tore him out of the logocentric constitution. It was the beginning of an ontological questioning—never made explicit and always obscured by a peculiar talk of feeling—that finally led him to the problem of the “primitives’” mode of being, which was always already manifest in their grasp of beings that could not be made intelligible in terms of representation, and it led him to the understanding of Being that in advance governed all grasping of beings, that is, to an a priori of Being-in-communication that was no longer misread in epistemological terms.35 The question of primitive thinking that in LévyBruhl initially—as part of the condensation of the electrophysical fantasms deposited around 1900 in the conceptual persona of the “primitive”—still had all the traits of the imaginary of the age of communication reached an ontological resolution that was just as phenomenal. On March 30, 1938, after six books on the topic and just a few days before his eighty-first birthday, what dawned on him was the main ontological connection that he believed would finally allow him to decipher the structure of the thinking of the “primitives”: Here is a remark which may reduce the difficulties which we have with the participations to which the primitive mentality adapts itself very easily.

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Despite all our efforts, we do not understand how things which are distinct and separate from each other nevertheless participate with one another, sometimes to the point that they form only one (bi-presence, dualityunity, consubstantiation). But these arise from mental habits different among us and them. For the primitive mentality to be is to participate. It does not represent to itself things whose existence it conceives without bringing in elements other than the things themselves. They are what they are by virtue of participations: the member of the human group through participation in the group and in the ancestors; the animal or plant through participation with the archetype of the species, etc. … If participation were not established, already real, the individuals would not exist.36


“Pour la mentalité primitive être c’est participer”—that is the formula LévyBruhl finally found. The Carnets had already begun on a note very different from all the texts that preceded it, one that had often got lost in all the material amassed there. But this new note was the result of a long contemplation of “primitive” facts that sometimes seemed hopelessly entangled, and the late fruit of a dogged effort. When we try to describe participation in terms of a representative or cognitive activity, Lévy-Bruhl writes, “we inevitably apply to it the general scheme of representation and knowledge as established by ancient philosophy, and by modern psychological thought or attempts at a theory of knowledge. Now, to try to apply this scheme to participation is to do it violence and to distort it.”37 The plain-talking contained in the eleven notebooks or two hundred and fifty print pages was one great swan song for this schema. Concepts were cleansed of any hint of representation. All prior talk of laws, principles, an affective category of the supernatural, even the very concept of experience were erased as belonging to representational thinking. None of them could serve any longer to decipher the primitive; they were simply the wrong codes. In a Bergsonian register, participation advanced to being an “immediate datum”; not one of consciousness, though, but “of the feeling that the individual has of his own existence” and namely of an existence that always already participates in someone and something else: “the formula involves nothing relating to knowledge or thought. We are not at the level of representations, even the most elementary ones, but at another, situated in the depths of the individual.”38 This meant that participation was not a datum among others but the immediate datum as such: “What is given in the first place is participation.”39 As an “feeling sui generis”40 that was undoubtedly felt but nonetheless withdrew from all

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sense perception and all the more so from all representation, participation disclosed world, stood for the primitive disclosure of world as such. The world of the “primitive,” to be sure, was a dual world contained in one, in which the visible and the invisible world were irresolvably intertwined, the one a world of the senses, the other the world of participations. The latter, however, was of greater importance for the worldhood of the “primitive” world; it was in the world of participations that “primitive” existentiality primarily took place as a Being-in-communication. Accordingly, “mystic experience,” to which Lévy-Bruhl had dedicated an entire book in 1938, was intertwined with ordinary experience yet counted as “primitive men’s” first, as it were, experience.41 It had no cognitive function in epistemological terms and nothing to do with the visible world. It simply indicated the fact of a world of immediate communication in which it participated. It was a pure medium of the revelation of a disclosure of world, pure medium of the revelation of a primitive being that was, as a matter of principle, open: “We have seen that if the mystical experience is revelation, from the very fact of the feeling which is inseparable from it, this revelation yet reveals nothing but this same feeling.”42 Sometimes, when he seemed unable to attain the ontological horizon of the question he had arrived at and certain paradoxical figures that emerged from it, Lévy-Bruhl was plagued by doubt whether all efforts at defining the order of participation might not be in vain. In those moments, he repeated like a mantra the reference to the necessity of suspending all epistemological reflection: In every case, if there is some chance of attaining a positive result it is on condition that the search for anything which resembles a conceptual form, a scheme or organized or organizing thought, a principle of generality relevant to the understanding is avoided. 43

Those were the darkest hours of someone who did not, as Heidegger, for example, could, dispose of a systematically elaborated fundamental ontological project to guide the explication of the material with a steady hand and without ever falling into epistemological questioning. The turn that led Lévy-Bruhl to participation, whose importance he had always suspected but not fully recognized, took place in his 1931 Le surnaturel et la nature dans la mentalité primitve (lit., The Supernatural and Nature in Primitive Mentality, published as Primitives and the Supernatural). Before he dived into the data as usual, what could be heard for the brief duration of the preface was the radically negative-epistemological accent that, repeated and varied countless times, was to gain the upper hand later and especially in the

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Carnets. He evoked a mentality beyond the “Aristotelian or conceptual ideal,” a mentality that, unlike traditional philosophy, logic, and psychology, not only knew generalities as the content of ideas and effect of conceptualizing and classifying operations, of forging relationships, but felt them. “To denote both the emotional and the abstract nature of this element,” an element with a certain “coloration” or “tone” and common to a series of basic and strictly speaking unrepresentable conceptions of the “primitive,” “may we not say that they are derived from an ‘affective category’? The term ‘category’ must not be taken here in either the Aristotelian or the Kantian sense, but simply as a uniting element in the mind for conceptions which, even while they differ among themselves in all or in part of their content, yet affect it in the same way.”44 He later recognized that the function of participation, which as a disclosing function was essential to understanding the structure of the mind, was basically identical with this affective category of the supernatural. This category had only served as a bridge to gain insight into the ontological sense of participation; “this duty done, it has nothing more to do and accordingly has only to disappear.”45 One last time, albeit already in quotation marks, very carefully, and as always for lack of a better term, Lévy-Bruhl had taken recourse to a category. Yet once this had brought him definitively onto the territory of at least a negative-epistemological structural analysis, whose necessity he was unaware of in the days when he belabored the “prelogical,” the spirit of the categories itself might well abdicate. In an homage to his teacher, Pierre-Maxime Schuhl recounts that, shortly after the publication of Le surnaturel, he asked Lévy-Bruhl how it was that no one had noticed so essential a category as the affective. “‘It’s Aristotle’s fault,’ he responded: he was thinking of the doctrine of the categories.”46 From a historical-epistemological perspective, Lévy-Bruhl’s answer is on solid ground. The news of somewhat unconventional lectures on Aristotle delivered since the beginning of the 1920s in Freiburg and Marburg had certainly not reached him. But there, too, the epistemic break made Aristotle appear as a figure who obscured and obstructed. Even if it was possible to find a certain Aristotelian “sense of origin” for the origin of the categories in the facticity of life and in “having been had along with [Mithaftigkeit],” this sense had been lost “even with Aristotle himself … under the pressure of the pre-shaped ontology” and “in the course of the further development of ontological research” it fell “into the indeterminate averageness-of-meaning of reality and actuality.” As such, it “provide[d] the approach for the epistemological problematic.”47 The Carnets are one great testimony to the impossible endeavor “to be entirely outside what has been described and analysed from Plato and

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Aristotle down to Hume and Kant.”48 Under the heading of participation, Lévy-Bruhl incessantly charged at the impossible experience of the nonrepresentable; again and again he practiced putting himself in the nonsite of the nonrepresentable, whose very possibility had always already been denied by representative thinking. Representative thinking could only ever think participation as starting from two already given beings and things that, as separate entities, participated each in the other after the fact and entered into a relationship of communication or even merged at the risk of losing their identities. It presupposed the presence of two entities between which a relationship then arose. A thinking of participation on Lévy-Bruhl’s model, by contrast, inquired into the very becoming of beings and things. Here, participation was conceived of as a gift of “bi-presence” or “multi-presence” prior to all representability, of a presence split in itself that decayed as soon as it emerged, that was strictly speaking never present but continually to come. This is where the never-ending, incompletable genesis of beings and things took place. Representations and concepts were thinkable only after the fact, on the basis of what was happening in and as a process of “intimate participation.”49 The reality of the “primitive” constituting itself in participation, Lévy-Bruhl concluded on more than one occasion, was completely independent of what representational thinking since Kant’s day had been calling “condition of possibility”: “participation has nothing to do with the logical or physical conditions of possibility. … There is, therefore, for the primitive mentality an objectivity which is independent of the conditions of possibility, and this is revealed in participation.”50 Participation was indifferent to “the determinations of time and space.” It was “felt as real without the subject who feels it needing to have regard to the situation, in time and space, of what participates and what is participated in.”51 At its core, what Lévy-Bruhl described as participation, was undermining the category of causality, it was its opposite concept as it were: “the most essential trait of this mental disposition … is that of not subjecting what is taken for real to have any a priori condition of possibility”; rather, “nothing is impossible a priori.”52 From an epistemological point of view, it amounted to thinking the impossible. Even and especially for that reason, primitive reason was not rattled by seemingly contradictory ordinary experience. Because its sense horizon was different, participative, it knew no sense of impossibility and no impossibility of sense. The interpretation of the “primitives’” mode of being bore all the traits of a surreal ontology of the indeterminate and anonymous. The “primitive man” himself had become the point where communicating forces strangely intersected, a relay chosen for the transition of forces, as it were. He was

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merely a more or less precarious “centre of participation,”53 as L’Âme primitive bluntly puts it. There were “coexistent and intertwined participations, as yet not merged into the distinct consciousness of an individuality which is really one.”54 Participating, accordingly, meant being condemned to a permanent interest in the unceasing flux of messages between beings and things. The multiprésence Lévy-Bruhl introduced in 1927 as signature of the precarious situation of the primitive consciousness and soul was a cipher for and indication of the telecommunicative horror that could not but seize a consciousness or cogito used to thinking of itself as always close to and with itself when confronted with the implosion of the mechanical worldview triggered by field theory and the media-technological conditions of telegraphy, telephony, television, and radio. It is an indication of the historical-epistemological conditions of this new type of subversive questioning, which ultimately aimed at developing an always already given communicative disposition of Being, that this same year, 1927, also saw the publication of another text, Heidegger’s Being and Time, that questioned the traditional ontology of proximity and an originary Being-with-oneself with its long dominant Cartesian coordinates and launched a historically and systematically broad agenda for destroying it. Lévinas, who short-circuited the “downfall of representation” in Lévy-Bruhl with Bergson’s intuitionism and built an entire ontology of duration around the notion of feeling, accordingly came up with a formula of existence as a constant “contact with being” or a “field of forces in which human existence stands,” an existence that always already escaped the categories of representative thinking.55 He realized that “this theory of participation is not without value in explaining the modern feeling of existence.”56 However, referencing long passages in the Carnets in which Lévy-Bruhl in Durkheimian fashion discovered the prototype and the roots of participation in individuals’ feeling of belonging to a group,57 Lévinas interpreted this theory as saying that “we belong to a philosophical era in which the conception of being, which had been conceived on the model of the living being, and then identified with the being of mechanistic matter, has been replaced by social experience as the primary intuition of being.”58 Yet Lévy-Bruhl, even and especially in those passages, kept his distance from sociocentrism, simply because it turned social relationships into “a kind of scheme.”59 On occasion, he even viewed it as an unsettling anthropomorphism that falsified and undermined the analysis. Had Lévinas given a more coherent form to the series of conceptions of Being he cited and let the age of mechanistically moved matter be followed by the age of communication, Lévy-Bruhl’s ontology would not have appeared to him as an ontology of the social but as one of telecommunication

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and Being-in-connection. While this might not have captured the spirit of a philosophical epoch, it would have captured that of Lévy-Bruhl and with it the spirit of the times, the spirit of the crisis, that is, that found expression, in highly condensed form, in the study of “primitive mentality.” In the Carnets’ section “Einstein’s Reflections,” Lévy-Bruhl himself had come close to the historical-epistemological conditions of possibility of his analyses. Einstein’s text “Physik und Realität” (“Physics and Reality”), first published in Paris in the free press of German scientists in exile in 1938, situated “the eternal mystery of the world” in “its comprehensibility” and provided Lévy-Bruhl with a key to understanding his own contemplation of the incomprehensibility of the world of the “primitives.” Yet Einstein’s general epistemological skepticism, which rose from the core of the foundational crisis of physics, not only testified, in true Kantian fashion, to the unavoidable nonintelligibility of sense as such, it furthermore denied the possibility of “final categories in the sense of Kant”: In speaking here concerning “comprehensibility,” the expression is used in its most modest sense. It implies: the production of some sort of order among sense impressions, this order being produced by the creation of general concepts, relations between these concepts, and by relations between the concepts and sense experience, these relations being determined in any possible manner. … In my opinion, nothing can be said concerning the manner in which the concepts are to be made and connected, and how we are to coördinate them to the experiences.60

Of course there had to be rules for connecting concepts. Yet they rather resembled the arbitrary rules of a game. They could never be set down forever and had “validity only for a special field of application.”61 These were the words of a physicist drawing the consequences the nonuniformity of his discipline had for the reach of the categorial. The decay of the basis of physics, the claim to universal validity of Newtonian physics, was also the decay of the universality of the a priori order as such, which Kant had elaborated and which hinged on Newtonianism. Einstein for his part was of a classical mindset through and through; he was in search of the truth, and the fundamental rationality of the world for him was a matter of course. He placed all his hopes for a uniform foundation in pure field theory, that is, in a knowledge about pure mediality and communication. Yet of course he suspected that in the end this possible uniformity, too, with all the a priori constructs on which it would be based would constitute but a transitional phase of the never-concluding process of knowledge.

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For Lévy-Bruhl, however, Einstein’s text must have been confirmation that he had been right to avoid all epistemological questions. The incomprehensibility of mystic experience, he noted after reading Einstein, differed from the incomprehensibility of discursive knowledge only by degrees. While the one was incomprehensible only in its details, the other marked the transition to the incomprehensibility of world as such. What Lévy-Bruhl performed as an analysis of “primitive mentality” was an operation in the blind spot of discursive reason in crisis, an operation in the sore spot of the episteme. The inquiry into the ontological structure of the hermeneutic situation, which for a purely epistemological inquiry marked the limit of comprehensibility, in those days was the starting point of the new ontological kind of inquiry, the site of the genesis of the question of Being. Such was the case in Lévy-Bruhl’s rather tentative but highly significant ontological impulse in interpreting participation, but it was no less the case in Heidegger, to whom we owe not only the explication of the entire question but also the elucidation of its function with a view to the foundational crisis of the sciences raging since around 1900.62 Lévy-Bruhl’s firm grounding in ontology is clearly indicated by his fundamental concept of participation. Participation, in Greek methexis, had been a basic feature of Western ontology and metaphysics when they were first inaugurated by Plato and Aristotle. It was thus no coincidence that it constituted the starting point for their destruction and the rearticulation of the question of Being. Pierre Aubenque has shown in great detail how Aristotle’s metaphysics of substance and the doctrine of the categories that comes with it can be derived from a critique of the aporias of the Platonic doctrine of participation.63 In the Sophist, Plato under the heading of participation attempted a twofold metaphysical solution to the problem of the coexistence of the One and the Many at the heart of a matter, the problem how the unity of something with the manifold of its determinations is possible. To provide a foundation for the manifold of determination, that is, for the fact of predication as it occurred in discourse, he on the one hand supposed a participative community and blending of genera and, on the other, invented a theory of the participation of things in ideas and of ideas in one another that was based on imitation. “Plato ruins ontology before he institutes it,” as Aubenque has it,64 because he introduces non-Being at the very heart of Being to be able to suppose something like otherness and manifolds at all. For the Aristotle of the Metaphysics, the concept of participation was nothing but an empty word and a poetic metaphor.65 He instead explicated the sense of the word “to be,” studied the role of the copula and the relationship it produced between subject and predicate. The logical

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study of the problem was inseparable from its foundation in a metaphysics of substance and the development of manifold determinations of the being of substance, called categories. In this respect, Aristotle performed an exorcism of participation—a first epistemological taming of the “swarm of essences (smēnos ousiōn),” as his commentator Alexander of Aphrodisias once called the doctrine of methexis.66 That is one of the main reasons, apparent already in its own primal scene, why epistemology is upset by nothing as easily as by swarms and clouds, vortices, fogs, and mixtures, in short, by chaotic distributions and noise in entities and things.67 Without him ever working through it, this event in Western metaphysics provided the constant background to Lévy-Bruhl’s descent into the “primitives’” pre-Aristotelian thinking. Plato’s name, at least, hardly ever came up. In the course of a discussion of L’Âme primitive at the Société française de philosophie, Léon Brunschvicg, who had a nose for epistemic situations, once tried to force a clarification of Lévy-Bruhl’s attitude toward Plato’s theory of participation. “The notion of participation,” he objected, “was introduced into Western reflective thinking precisely to oppose what you call participation.”68 Lévy-Bruhl seems to have been rather surprised by this; in any event, he responded merely with a brief ironic remark: That is something for me to think about. … I shall do that when I have a moment. Right now, in any case, I would like to proffer my apologies to Plato and the Platonists should I have upset them by using the word “participation” in an insufficiently noble manner. I used the term entirely on my own account, and in my thinking it in no way implies an interpretation of Platonist [methexis]. It is difficult enough for me to determine the sense of the ethnological documents I rely on. Heaven keep me from propounding a theory of Platonism!69

Despite such parrying, Lévy-Bruhl’s concept of participation could indeed be read as such an interpretation of the key scene of metaphysics, Brunschvicg was right about that. To Lévy-Bruhl, the Platonic theory must have seemed an after-effect and symptom of decline and at the same time a conceptual taming and exorcism of primitive mentality—a transition from the participative Being of the “primitive” to the Western ontology of substance. At the moment he had fully realized that that the facts of participation were to be sought prior to all categorial predeterminations, beyond all epistemological determinations, and thus without guidance from the Aristotelian ideal, he posited in the Carnets (maybe as a result of pondering Brunschvicg’s

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remark, maybe not) a difference between two kinds of participation that perfectly corresponded to the Platonic order of methexis: participation as community of beings, or consubstantiation—“Participation equals community of essence”—and participation as imitation—“Participation equals imitation.”70 Yet unlike Plato and the Platonists, he claimed—and this made all the difference—a nonnoble “true participation (μέθεξις)”71 to be the essential trait of the mode of being of the “primitive.” This true participation was as it were the ground of Being of the two kinds of participation that determined their mode of thinking. It was this ground, precisely, that Plato had thought away. Lévy-Bruhl found an indication of this constitution of Being in the fact that the majority of primitive languages did not contain any expression to correspond to the verb “to be” in our languages. And “even where a verb ‘to be’ exists,” it was “used to express participation, that is to say that what is ‘participated in’ and what participates are reunited into only one, in such a way, for example, that the portrait or the footprint is the very man or animal.”72 Participation was felt as real, it was immediately comprehended, it was nothing that needed expressing. The lack of the word “being” basically also indicated the ruin of Aristotle’s critique of participation: under the conditions of a Being-in-communication, all predication and the development of its substance-logical order failed to grasp and disfigured the basic ontological constitution. What could appear as the question of the relationship between a being and its merely accidental determinations only on condition of positing an acommunicative or noncommunicating Being was always already felt by participative Being as consubstantiation or as “duality–unity.” What emerged between the lines as the point of the study of primitive mentality was that the meaning of Being, of existing in the age of communication could be grasped neither with the means of Aristotelian ontology and logic nor by going back to Plato. What was needed to understand the full import of the principle of the age, There is communication, was a revision of the basic concepts, indeed, the destruction of the Platonic-Aristotelian basic position. The emergence of the question of participation was not a coincidence. It obviously followed a certain historical-epistemological tendency inscribed in the age of communication’s efforts at understanding the basic relationships of knowledge and world at the moment of their upheaval. This is clear when we look at the privileged place it occupies in Heidegger’s elaboration of the question, “What is called thinking?” In the early 1950s, when in the wake of the information-technological mobilization of World War II the world was in the grips of the cybernetic fever and functioning “electronic brain[s]” represented for Heidegger the last stage, to date, in the “irresistible

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development” of symbolic logic on the “road” of “European thinking” “appointed” by Plato and Aristotle,73 he considered the all-out attack on the traditional relationship between thinking and Being a worthy topic for his first two series of lectures after being banned from teaching for a few years. Given the complete withdrawal of thinking in the machine age, in which thinking no longer maintained any relation to Being whatsoever but only ever chased completely reified beings, he sought to bury representational thinking in the ground once and for all. The new foundational science of logistics, which provided the notation for predicabilities that could be switched into circuits and thus made the “electronic brain” possible (which for Heidegger marked the beginning of the long process of the completion of modernity), naturally embodied the culmination so far of this withdrawal: “In America and elsewhere, logistics as the only proper philosophy of the future is thus beginning today to seize power over the spirit.”74 It constituted “the global system by which all ideas are organized,” in which a certain “view of the nature of thinking had come to predominate and is still in force.”75 Yet what counted as thinking in those days, what made it possible to believe that symbolic machines were on the cusp of taking over thinking, was an urgent reminder for Heidegger that “thinking itself is least familiar with the origin of its own essential nature.”76 He pointed to what was unthought in thinking, perhaps even to unthinkability and the unthinkable itself. “We learn thinking,” he said, “only if we radically unlearn what thinking has been traditionally.”77 At a moment when others finally thought to have reached the halfway secure ground of a symbolic thinking just then celebrating its great applications, Heidegger diagnosed the decay and an entire age’s complete incomprehension of the matter of thinking. This was not just a philosopher fighting for his position and for being heard again; Heidegger was also, as philosophers are wont to, fighting for what philosophy was all about. Yet these lectures turned out to be the beginning of what only a few years later, in an explicit engagement with cybernetics and information theory, was to become the funerary eulogy of philosophy—the great discourse about the task of thinking in the completion and end of philosophy. In the second to last hour of the lecture course, which was concerned with gathering forces one last time in the fight against the symbolic-logical aggravation of propositional and representational thinking and, most decisively, with discovering its blind spot, he came to see in the participle Seiendes (being, ens) the “participle which gathers all other participles into itself” and the key for deciphering the history of thinking. What initially seemed to be merely the grammatical name for a word “participat[ing]” in two meanings that “refer to each other”—which in itself constitutes the trauma of an exact

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definition of predicability—pointed to a participative relationship between beings and Being that all participles always already “tacitly designate.” This linguistic ambiguity which he named, using a “word … fundamental to Plato’s thinking,” metéchein, “taking part of something in something,” was based on methexis, the “participation of beings in Being.” Yet prior to it, and this was Heidegger’s point, lay the “duality of being and Being” that guaranteed the possibility of participation in the first place.78 The inquiry needed to address the structure of this duality if its goal was to understand the origin of thinking. Back there, all there was to be found was a presence and an absence, a disposing, a happening, there were appeals, addresses, calls, in a word, a precarious communicative assemblage of Being to which thinking had to be open because it gave us to think. What Plato interpreted as “participation” was thus anything but obvious, it was a fundamental advance decision for the course of Western thinking and its misery, where a certain relationship to Being took shape that highlighted “other traits in the Being of beings” very different from presence and absence: “the objectivity of the object … the reality of the real.”79 Where Lévy-Bruhl, at the moment of the crisis of representational thinking, had been tracking a pre- or nonrepresentative thinking qua direct givenness of participation, Heidegger, too, was drawn into an interpretation of the question of participation. Thinking, both would agree, had to be understood primarily in terms of an openness, be it toward flows of communication, be it toward the claim and address or the call of Being, an openness that always already undermined an order of representational thinking unable to account for this openness. Both were concerned with a Being-in-communication that, on different paths, pushed for a redefinition of the matter of thinking. In both cases, it was coming a long way, from “primitive” grounds in the one, from pre-Platonic or pre-Socratic grounds in the other. The ontology of participation as presented in Lévy-Bruhl’s studies on primitive mentality brought out a historical-epistemological fact of the first order that had been buried since the late nineteenth century in the knowledge of the history of religion, ethnology, social anthropology, and sociology. At a moment when the age of communication had not yet been consolidated by the exact notation of its basic communicative relationships in information theory, when the answer to the guiding question concerning communication itself remained largely a matter of the imagination, LévyBruhl’s contemporaries came across, first of all, a community with the “primitive.” The outline of a primitive world brimming with messages and transmissions provided the age with the experience of a strange haunting. The incompleteness of knowledge about communication returned from the

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edges of history as the image of communities of total communication. The “primitive” was the specter haunting the episteme around 1900. The “primitive” emerged from the darkness into which spirit of categories had fallen as phenomena escaped it, he was the dream in which the mind indulged in its loss of itself and lived through the entire history of its origin once more. Like no one else, Lévy-Bruhl entered into the reveries about the primitive grounds of reason and thinking. He passed through this darkness and, at the end of the night, saw the ascent of the star of a new ontology tracing the mode of being of the “primitive” that so miraculously coincided with the auto-interpretation of the new age.

Sacred communication “Those who have looked searchingly into the hypotheses of living thought,” Oswald Spengler wrote, will know that it is not given to us to gain insight into the fundamental principles of existence without contradictions. A thinker is a person whose part it is to symbolize time according to his vision and understanding. He has no choice; he thinks as he has to think. Truth in the long run is to him the picture of the world which was born at his birth. It is that which he does not invent but rather discovers within himself.80

While across the English Channel and the Atlantic, everything was ready for an exact science of communication in which the facts of communication were to be nothing but a function of the symbolic, occupied Paris in 1943 saw the event of the publication of a text in which communication became the cipher for interpreting inner experience. This may have been the last moment that, completely untouched by the disenchantment of the concept operated by information theory and cybernetics, everything that had been dreamed about the matter of communication during at least half a century in a discourse about the sacred and the primitive could be discovered in oneself in silent mediation and condensed in an ontological manifesto. It was the time, perhaps, that communication could be shown to be a transcendental of existing before the concept lost the splendor of its productive indeterminacy and before its technological determination for a long time interfered with any possible purely poetic or philosophical discourse, which now began to ignore technology. The name of the book that provided the age of communication with its own Meditationes

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was L’expérience intérieure. And the name of the one who in Descartes’s footsteps contested all traditional certainties and in so doing meditated on the epistemic uncertainty of his own postmechanic age beyond the limits of Cartesian intuition and evidence was Georges Bataille. Everything it has since been possible to say ontologically about communication—be it Lévinas’s humanism of the Other or Nancy’s thinking of partage and être-avec81—was merely the (albeit congenial) echo of this last possible discourse in which the regime of representational thinking fell apart in the course of a long interior monolog. Here, the history of the fascination with communication spelling itself out in fantasms of the sacred and the primitive reached its apex and at the same time its end. One more time, Bataille spoke from the heart of these fantasms that manifested the crisis of thinking at the dawn of the age of the symbolic and of communication. It is well known how deeply he was immersed in it. It is evident not only in his writings, which in all their urgency and ambivalence deal with the survivals and the possible return of the sacred under the conditions of its retreat in the present. It is even more evident in what Bataille himself called his time of action, a time at the end of the 1930s when he, along with Michel Leiris, Roger Caillois, and others, was caught up in a secret society and attempts at instituting a new religion.82 At the same time, however, and this is what counts, the physics of communication, whose conceptual and representational uncertainties he was fully aware of, allowed him insight into the ongoing upending of the conditions of Being as such. Bataille engaged the guiding question of the age poetically-philosophically. And in fact, he didn’t have a choice. He knew better than anyone that he was thinking through communication because he had to, because it was incumbent on him to do so. The demolition of traditional ontology followed from what was evident in those days, that is, from the thought constraint of a conception of the world being overthrown. Once it was recognized from within the fixation of an age as the fundamental fact of a libidinous economy of existence, “the desire to communicate”83 practically enjoined a rediscovery of the grounds of Being. For Bataille, the proposition that “existence is communication,” which had only just become possible and summed up the historical-epistemological situation, meant “that every representation of life, of being, and generally of ‘something’ must be reconsidered in this light.”84 This amounted to, in Jasper’s terms, a broad program of “existential elucidation”85 on a par with its time. Even if this agenda was presented at the time as an insight into previously unseen conditions of Being and grounds of existence, the radical revision Bataille envisioned always also included denying the possibility of all ontological discourse. “Being,” Bataille writes, “is ‘ungraspable,’ it is

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only ever ‘grasped’ by mistake; the mistake is not only easy, in this case, it is the condition of thought.” Yet even this thinking of the withdrawal of Being was still but the last consequence of a reformulation of ontology on the ground of a thinking of Being in terms of communication that thought Being only as “being in relation” beyond the “illusion of an isolated being.”86 Bataille’s Inner Experience—whose time of composition, from November 1941 to the summer of 1942, is as strong an indication of the historical and epistemological significance of the ontological turn of the question of communication as can be imagined—bears all the traits of a nonepistemological questioning and of breaking through to an ontology of Being-exposed, Being-outside, and Being-in-connection such as we find in Lévy-Bruhl’s Carnets, written three, four years earlier and then as yet unpublished. Even if central passages of the text take up and rework publications from the early 1930s, Bataille certainly did not have the guiding idea of communication before November 1938, in exactly those days during which this question haunted Lévy-Bruhl’s walks in the Bois de Boulogne.87 Yet Inner Experience furnished an entire age with its ontological constitution in a general way that in Lévy-Bruhl still remained buried under the particulars of the “primitive” mode of being. What in Lévy-Bruhl was so clearly tied to the provenance from the sacralization of communication such as the discourse of the sacred and the primitive had operated it in a time uncertain about its own situation, in Bataille achieved the full reach and force of a new ontological discourse arising at the heart of modernity itself. Admittedly, it was a strange discourse of Being that was intoned in the war years, strange in particular to philosophical ears because of its mystical, in Sartre’s view even mystagogical, accent.88 Bataille himself inserted it into the larger frame of a “new mystical theology”89; some years later, it formed the core of a Summa Atheologica, projected for five volumes but never put into practice as such. This discourse was entirely under the spell of what he called “inner experience.” This meant, to begin with, simply “that which one usually calls mystical experience: the states of ecstasy, of ravishment, at least of meditated emotion.” Mystical experience was in no way structured by confession or dogma. Instead, it was an experience of the unknown, “a bare experience, free of ties, even of an origin, to any confession whatever” and an authority and principle onto itself.90 It was the name of the contestation of discursive experience and knowledge, of the breaking up of discourse, of a nonknowledge in which the mind, stripped of all categories, laid itself bare: Experience is questioning (testing), in fever and anguish, what man knows of the facts of being [du fait d’être]. That in this fever, he has some

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apprehension, of whatever kind, he cannot say: “I have seen this, what I have seen is this”; he cannot say: “I have seen God, the absolute in the depths of the world”; he can only say “what I have seen escapes understanding,” and God, the absolute, the depths of the world are nothing if they are not categories of understanding.91

The negative-theological or atheological horizon of his ontological discourse merely served clearly to indicate Bataille’s core concern with unearthing the general scheme of a Being-in-communication that no longer included a God of Substance as support and confirmation of a categorial order of reason and as limit concept and apex of a pyramidal order of Being but instead dissolved any concept of a personal God in the impersonal-anonymous communicative flows of a mystical experience of the sacred. Feverish experience, first of all, corresponded to the contestation of thinking in terms of categories and substance in the fever of the great epistemological crisis. When Bataille saw in an experience a “journey to the end of the possible of man,” it had been science that had sent him on this journey.92 The decay of the categorial boosted by science sharpened Bataille’s sense for the “extremity [l’extrême] of the possible”93 whose rights over against discursivity he now asserted. As he was working to establish the “essential facts of communication,” it dawned on him that it is undoubtedly pitiful, but man only gains access to the notion that is most charged with burning possibilities by opposing common sense, by opposing the facts of science to common sense. I do not see how, without the facts of science, one would have been able to return to the obscure feeling, to the instinct of the man still deprived of “common sense.”94

The end of common sense was nothing other than the end of intuitive evidence, the end of the evidential pressure of intuition itself as brought out, especially, by field theories in physics and mathematics. Bataille had been furnished with the possibility of thinking the unknown as such, beyond dogma and beyond knowledge, by the dawning nonintuitive knowledge of the symbolic and of communication, which by retreating from the regime of representation asserted the rights of the nonrepresentability of the real. What he claimed for mystical experience, namely a movement which carries us “to the most obscure apprehension of the unknown: of a presence that is no longer distinct in any way from an absence,” belonged to the basic experience of a science setting out to demolish the Cartesian order of knowledge.95 The one who said that “[i]nner experience is driven by

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discursive reason” because “[r]eason alone has the power to undo its work, to throw down what it has built up” was clearly an attentive observer of the great epistemic transformation who knew that it was reason that tore down the traditional order of understanding.96 The historical condition of possibility for the pathos of a nonknowledge and an inner experience escaping from discursive thinking, the pathos of rendering reason inoperable, if you like, lay in the dramatic dissolution of reasons. The entry into the age of communication thus drove someone like Bataille, who was profoundly familiar with the history of religion and deeply rooted in the Catholic tradition, to reinterpret what was habitually called mystical experience. In it, he saw a nonepistemological pocket of resistance, as if custom-made for the contemporary urgent revision of representation. The crisis of the mystic became the image of thought for the epochal crisis of representational thinking as such. Where a discourse lay dying, it was only right to silence “discourse within us” as well.97 Bataille advocated “the continuation of the ‘ancient man,’” not, to be sure, as “a return to the past” but as opening up a space beyond the devastations of representational thinking. The “memory of Plato, of Christianity, and above all, most hideous, of modern ideas” was to extend “like a field of ashes.”98 Such phrases were practically dictated by the spirit of the crisis. What by all accounts seemed to announce a new mysticism thus on the contrary belabored a discursive thinking coming up against its limits. The mystical note came directly from the epistemic underground that in those days still allowed the thinking of communication to go hand in hand with a thinking of the sacred. It indicated the degree to which the two were still intertwined. Given that communication did not yet have an exact information-theoretical notation (or that war time requirements kept this notation, where it existed, a secret), it appeared as the sacred par excellence: unless one was an engineer or a physicist, saying “communication” amounted to reaching for the unknown, ungraspable, and impossible, for the extreme limit of the possible, indeed into the realm of nonknowledge as such. The bareness that led across to the mystical was but an echo of experience, experienceability, knowledge, and mind being stripped bare under the conditions of the symbolic and of communication—naked experience being the extreme point and at the same time the effect of the age’s metaphysical nakedness as such. “I have seen in the end that the idea of communication itself leaves bare, knowing nothing,” as Bataille puts it with all desirable clarity. In this “[s]tate of nudity, of supplication without response” where “specific knowledge remain[s] as such,” “only the ground, its foundation, giv[es] way.”99 Could there be a

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state in the age of communication testifying more clearly to a bareness than the state of being without response—and, moreover, without response concerning the ground of phenomena as such, without response concerning the ground and reason of the world? L’expérience intérieure responded to the contemporary foundational epistemic crisis in the transition from thinking in terms of substance to thinking in terms of function and from intuitive to symbolic thinking. Communication was emblematic of the experience that contested the traditional order of knowledge, another name of nonknowledge as the signature of the great transformation. The “spirit of contestation” concentrated in communication, which sought to revive “the tormenting genius of Descartes” that had been calmed too early,100 was the newly awoken spirit of contestation haunting the budding anti-Cartesian age. Even Bataille’s floundering on philosophy, which he lamented as much as he affirmed it, still echoed philosophy’s profound difficulties with the gaping fundamental questions, condensing them in an often unbearable personal drama. Bataille the mystic was a figure of the crisis. The reasons for the mystical register were thus primarily historicalepistemological. This was true in particular for the core of his mystical experience, which he then recorded in ontological terms, namely the revelation that there was nothing to be revealed except the fact of communication and its bare There is. Communication was but the discovery and indication of the groundless ground of an out of joint age of communication. It is thus no accident that the ascendency of the idea that the sacred could be grasped as communication, “that the sacred is communication” bore the traits of a revelation. In a later diary entry, Bataille recorded this moment of clarity in writing “The Sacred”: “I recall that around that moment, there was on the trees, then red, which formed a very high line a hundred paces from my window, a short beam of sunlight, of dazzling beauty. I tried then to begin the next passage yet I sketched only two sentences, with difficulty.”101 What initially blinded him, though, was probably not a “beam of sunlight, of dazzling beauty,” but the sentences he had written not much earlier, which, not by accident, distilled the idea of communication from the discourse of the history of religion: But the development of knowledge touching on the history of religions has shown that the essential religious activity was not directed toward a personal and transcendent being (or beings), but toward an impersonal reality. Christianity has made the sacred substantial, but the nature of the sacred, in which today we recognize the burning existence of religion, is perhaps the most ungraspable thing that has been produced between men:

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the sacred is only a privileged moment of communal unity, a moment of the convulsive communication of what is ordinarily stifled.102

Then, his sentences broke off, be it in his mind or just on paper. But that was something that is part and parcel of any revelation. Having gained some distance, however, he managed to wrest a series of propositions from the evidence with which his age had provided him. Under the heading “La ‘communication,’” they are the heart and ontological core of L’expérience intérieure. Moreover, they can be found dispersed in other pieces, sometimes even written into older texts included in the same book, such as Le labyrinthe (ou la composition des êtres), that were thus bathed in the light of communication in order to develop their entire ontological content, a content they had acquired in the course of a slowly rising contestation of traditional philosophy on the basis of knowledge in the natural sciences and the history of religion.103 Bataille the fundamental ontologist raised communication to the level of an existential. Explicitly referring to Heidegger, he writes that “communication is a fact that is in no way added to Dasein, but constitutes it.”104 Being and world, subject and thing, knowledge and sense were to be rearticulated in light of this existential and to be understood as functions of communication. The program thus aimed “to speak of communication by grasping that communication”—or at least the “summit of communication”—“pulls the rug out from under the object as from under the subject.”105 This implied a revision of the Cartesian order of knowledge and its ontological foundations. This had, of course, already been undertaken by Heidegger; yet Heidegger’s revision, as his “ally” in the fight for the renewal of thinking, Karl Jaspers, had seen even before 1933, had in a sense forgotten about communication, and this characterized his sketch of Dasein as being “proximally and for the most part” with itself.106 The dispersal of sense in a pure relationality of communicating entities that were constituted in and as communication in the first place and were thus not previously given had to be the core of an anti-Cartesian “representation of the world”107 toward which the age of communication was striving. No one understood this like Bataille did when he wrote that “there is no meaning for one alone,” since meaning, sense is first of all and most of the time meaning “for others.”108 This shook the very foundations of the order of knowledge. For the thinking of communication, there was “above all no more object,” no “subject = object” as the main axis to institute meaningful knowledge “but a ‘gaping breach’ between the one and the other and, in the breach, subject and object are dissolved; there is a passage, communication, but not from one to the other: the one and the

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other have lost their distinct existence.”109 For Bataille it was a “fundamental principle” that “‘Communication’ cannot take place between one full and intact being and another: it wants beings who question being in themselves, who place their being at the limit of death, of nothingness.”110 Where communication as such applied, the “questions of the subject, its will to know are suppressed: the subject is no longer there, its interrogation no longer has any meaning or principle which introduces it. In the same way, no response remains possible. The response should be ‘such is the object’, when there is no longer any distinct object.”111 Henceforth, neither the simple proposition “tel est l’objet” was to be possible, nor was “oneself” given as a “subject isolating itself from the world.” “Oneself” was merely “a place of communication, of fusion of subject and object,” an originary Being-outside-oneself, a Beingbeside-oneself, an irreducible openness of Dasein. What appeared in inner experience was precisely this precarious place; inner experience was “as subject nonknowledge, as object the unknown.”112 Subject and object were now merely “perspectives of being at the moment of inertia”113 in which communication was interrupted; they were the spawn of projection, phantoms, fantasmagoric entities of the absence of communication. Inner experience made it possible to view Being under the conditions of communication and the resulting necessity fundamentally to revise the meaning of knowledge and thinking—and to do so from the perspective of the extreme limit of non-knowledge and non-sense, a limit that communication was itself reaching in baring the traditional order of epistemic certainty. The ongoing occurrence of being was henceforth governed by “a law of communication … organizing the play of the isolation and the loss of beings.”114 This law was the basic given of the ontological turn. It concentrated the basic fact of all possible communication, namely that for communication to be possible in principle it takes two, but also no more than two distinguishable states. Bataille chose the symbol for the choice between two states, which he called “decision,” with a precision that in those precybernetic days could not have been greater: “At the same time the door must remain open and closed.”115 “A door,” Lacan would say twelve years later, after knowledge about communication had been cybernetically purified, “must be either open and then shut, and then opened and then shut.” The door itself, however, remained what it had already been in Bataille, “a real symbol, the symbol par excellence, that symbol in which man’s passing, through the cross it sketches, intersecting access and closure, can always be recognised.”116 Bataille had been wrong only about the temporality, not about the principle. Bataille articulated the principle governing this fundamental revision of the Cartesian image of the world in the form of a law and mentions it

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almost as if in passing: There is communication. The principle addressed communication as the groundless ground of Dasein as such and as a mode of disclosure of world. The human being was an existence bared in and through communication. Communication appeared as the unhuman itself. It was a journey to the end of the night of the human being. Bataille’s ontological image of thinking came directly from physics. Already before he came across communication as his guiding question, he encircled, yet without a relevant concept, the structure of a universal Being-in-relation. Guided by the decay of the concept of the object in physics, he drifted into the thinking of communication, which then came to conceive of communication as an existential and of communication actually taking place as a derivative mode of this existential. For Bataille, the basic revision of representation in physics, the farewell to the universal character of the representations of mechanics, prompted a new conception of Being, which he later conceptualized more precisely in terms of communication. In spelling out the “composition of beings,” as he called it,117 the labyrinthine make-up of Being, he drew the decisive motifs from a lecture published in 1934, in which the physicist Paul Langevin spoke directly from the crisis of mechanics. In La notion de corpuscules et d’atomes, Langevin, who had occupied the chair in physics at the Collège de France since 1909, laid out the epistemological problems the notion of particles posed to physicists: [T]hese difficulties are truly profound, they touch on the very conditions of our knowledge and on the necessity, for us, initially to employ old notions to represent new facts, notions acquired in a previous experiment that may turn out to be inadequate to meet the needs of the new reality or of the new appearance of this reality.118

In particular, Langevin attacked the traditional notion of objects. He called for renouncing the “individuality of the particle, the individuality of the photon, the individuality of the electron” and for rejecting the concept of individuality.119 For him, the representation of the object, a representation that became more and more untenable the more one descended into previously unknown regions of the real, was an anthropomorphic projection of the subjective concept of the individual onto the universe of things. The “isolable and recognizable individual appears only starting at a certain degree of complexity”120 of a structure that had already long been undermined by quantum physics and relativity theory, to make just the most evident point. “To individualize, to follow and recognize the object, we must be able to distinguish between a minimum of characteristics that endow personality

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with an experiential sense, and that already presupposes a rather high degree of complexity.”121 The concept of individuality was thus to emerge only to the extent that a structure complexified. The structure of an electron, for example, could no longer or, rather, not yet be precisely represented because it was situated below a complexity threshold above which it was possible to represent something as an object in the first place. Langevin concluded: “The particle, whose name, by the way, should be changed, stops being an object to become a simple degree of excitation of the state attributed to it, and all that counts, naturally, to define a complexion is the number of the degrees of excitation to be attributed to each possible state.”122 The concept of an isolable object had merely served to “humanize our representations.” Yet it had become so familiar to us that some of us think that we cannot use anything else as the basis for constructing our representation of the world. They believe that the particle, an extrapolation from the notion of the object pushed to the limit, is and always will be indispensable to our mind for interpreting the real. I, for my part, have greater confidence in the possibilities of our mental development.123

And this development, as we know, had long been pushing toward the nonrepresentability of a purely symbolic thinking and the unavoidability of the world’s being a mere simulacrum. In Bataille, Langevin’s propositions directly join a profound ontological revision. Someone as interested in states of excitation, which he had first become familiar with from the history of religion, could not but be affected by the fact that even physicists became thinkers of excitation and conceived of the world as an aggregate of states of excitation. Yet where physicists, starting at a certain hypocomplex level of description, denied the singularity of objects because for them, all individuality was lost in an elementary simplicity of degrees of excitation, the ontologist sought to attack that singularity that went by the name of selfhood or, as he called it, ipseity. For him, all Being dissolved in a hypercomplex aggregation governed by the fleeting movement of “waves” and “waters.”124 The philosopher-ecstatic thus gives an ontological turn to the physicists’ reflections: “I can, if necessary, admit that from an extreme complexity, being imposes upon reflection more than an elusive appearance, but complexity, raised degree by degree, is for this more a labyrinth in which it wanders endlessly, loses itself once and for all.” Being could no longer be encapsulated in a “simple, indivisible element” because Being necessarily implied selfhood whereas a simple element did not include anything but

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itself, which, in turn, was a condition sine qua non of selfhood. Yet while the atom, in its elementary complexity, was to be conceived of as an aggregate yet “relative simplicity” and passed below the threshold of selfhood, the extreme complexity of the aggregation of Being made it appear as a dispersal and loss of selfhood.125 Being implied selfhood and at the same time a losing-itself of selfhood. Being, in other words, was “engaged in the play of compositions.”126 As Bataille puts it in Inner Experience, “What one calls a ‘being’ is never simple, and if it has a single enduring unity, it only possesses it imperfectly; it is undermined by its profound inner division.”127 From now on, the concern was with the relative permeability of existences, with their sliding between a certain autonomy and transcendence, between isolation and loss of self. And the human being? It had become a particle inserted in unstable and tangled ensembles. … Only the instability of the liaisons (this banal fact: however intimate a bond might be, separation is easy, is multiplied and can be prolonged) permits the illusion of an isolated being, folded back on itself and possessing the power of existing without exchange.128

Where in Langevin, the concept of the object disappeared in light of particle physics, in Bataille, the concept of the subject imploded; the way was paved for the transition beyond the human, that is, to Being-exposed, to an uncertain Being, to the uncertainty of Being-together-and-beside-oneself: “Being is always a group of particles whose relative autonomies are maintained. These two principles—composition transcending the constituent parts, relative autonomy of the constituent parts—order the existence of each ‘being.’”129 States of excitation such as laughter or tears, which now had become ontologically relevant figures of Being, were indicators of “the inanity of being that we are” and thus momentarily touched on the truth of Being: “Being eludes itself in us, we lack it.”130 The human being had entirely become a movement of flight, embedded in an excited ongoing event of Being and subject to the conditions of a withdrawal of Being.131 Bataille’s swan song for isolated beings was, in strict accordance with the historical-epistemological situation, recast in the precise concepts of communication. Speaking directly from the night of the human being, it said: What you are comes from the activity that links the countless elements that compose you to the intense communication of these elements among themselves. These are contagions of energy, movement, heat, or transferences of elements, which constitute internally the life of your organic

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being. Life is never situated in one particular point: it passes rapidly from one point to another (or from multiple points to other points), like a current or a kind of electrical stream. Thus, where you would like to grasp your nontemporal substance, you only encounter a slippage, only the poorly coordinated play of your perishable elements.

And just as life is “stream[ing]” within, it also streams outside as well and opens itself incessantly to what flows out or surges toward it. The enduring vortex that composes you throws itself toward similar vortices with which it forms a vast figure, animated by a measured agitation. Now to live signifies for you not only the flux and the fleeting play of light that unifies itself in you, but the passages of warmth and light from one being to another, from you to your fellow being or from your fellow being to you … : words, books, monuments, symbols, laughter are only so many paths of this contagion, of these passages. Individual beings matter little and enclose unavowable points of view.132

Vortex, stream, flow—we might add “fog” as well—they all belong to the random distributions of the real as they emerge, under the conditions of communication, at the center of knowledge and leave traces of uncertainty in Bataille’s ontology. The indeterminacy of the “that in the face of which” of anxiety, which, just a few years earlier, was supposed to express the entirety of Dasein’s care in its Being-in-the-world—in what might be the most radical formulation: “Da-sein means: being held out into the nothing,”133 which McLuhan saw as emblematic of the epoch of electricity, the “Age of Anxiety”134—in Bataille had become more concise as the anxiety about communication. More precisely, anxiety was the “path toward communication”135 and presupposed “the desire to communicate, which is to say to lose myself” yet at the same time testified to “my fear of communication, of losing myself.”136 It was “a stop before the communication that excites the desire.”137 Overcoming this anxiety, however, led to the “inhuman, disheveled joy of communication,”138 that is, to Being-with itself. Hence Bataille’s Nietzschean assertion: “‘I teach the art of turning anguish into delight’, ‘to glorify’: the entire meaning of this book.”139 L’expérience intérieure settled the score with the basic disposition or state of mind (Grundbefindlichkeit) of an age threatened by exposure to unrepresentable powers and forces; it was both purely dealing with and purely shedding light on the age, simply because the one who wrote it lifted the existential torment he was living through under the conditions of

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communication onto the appropriate conceptual level. The shock and the state of an epistemic disorder resulting from the encounter with technical media and the emergence of new physical facts of communication, the entire excitation of the great transformation of the situation of knowledge and the basic data of existing that could not but afflict contemporaries convinced of their interiority, began to clear up within the frame of a meditation that, on par with its times, began by dispensing by and large with the rumored redemptive qualities of human interiority. Concentrated in Bataille’s “night of nonknowledge” was a report on the crisis of the night of the human in the confrontation with the extreme limit of the possible of communication. “If one had to grant me a place in the history of thought,” he writes in the 1953 Post-scriptum, I believe it would be that of having discerned the effects, in our human life, of the “disappearance of the discursive real,” and of having drawn a senseless light from the description of these effects: this light is blinding, perhaps, but it announces the opacity of the night; it announces the night alone.140

In his 1952 Genet, Bataille embedded the existential reflection in a theory of literature and made it more concise. He now distinguished between “powerful” and “feeble” communication. Powerful communication—he had previously called this the “summit of communication”—was “primary,” “a simple ‘given,’ the supreme appearance of existence, which reveals itself to us in the multiplicity of consciousnesses and in their communicability.”141 It was the greatest of all of communication’s possible intensities. It was indicated by the failure of “feeble communication,” which made use of “profane” language and provided the basis of “profane society.”142 Feeble communication appeared as a derivative mode of powerful communication, which strictly speaking made feeble communication possible in the first place. Feeble communication stood for the “universal supremacy of communication over beings who communicate.” And Bataille stressed—and here we must not forget that at this point, cybernetic machines were no longer running under the veil of silence drawn by the war and that knowledge about information was being popularized and urged the formation of a new configuration of knowledge—that he was now sure about one thing: humanity is not composed of isolated beings but of communication between them. Never are we revealed, even to ourselves, other than in a network of communications with others. We bathe in

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communication, we are reduced to this incessant communication whose absence we feel, even in the depths of solitude, like the suggestion of multiple possibilities, like the expectation of the moment when it will solve itself in a cry heard by others.143

At this point, Bataille’s thinking of communication breaks off. Others took care of it, henceforth on a different note that no longer had anything to do with a sacred world of communication and the insights into the ontological depths it allowed for. The principle that communication is the sacred and vice versa had begun to lose its plausibility long ago. In light of algorithms of information, the obscure grasp of the unknown was no longer a possibility. Bataille’s bared thinking, perhaps the extreme limit of the age’s being bared by the symbolic and by communication, certainly, in any case, the untimely scream of a contemporary consumed by uncertainty as the echo of the timely uncertainty of his age, was shelved in the archives of poetry. There was hardly anyone left who could decipher the stenogram of the great transformation it so carefully recorded. The utterance “the sacred world (communication)”144 as Bataille uttered it was soon deprived of its utterability, which had once been prepared by a discourse of the sacred and the primitive engaged in the genealogy of communication. It was taken to be only a “new way of thinking,” such as the author wants the “dissolving” of philosophy he has presented to be understood.145 The historical epistemology to be found in Bataille was consigned to oblivion.

Note on heresy During those same years and at the same place, Gaston Bachelard reduced this new form of thinking, which in Lévy-Bruhl’s and Bataille’s contestation of the Aristotelian and Cartesian ideals was spelled out in forays to the margins of Western knowledge to its exact historical and epistemological core. His 1940 Philosophie du non was a manifesto about the great transformation of the grounds of knowledge. It spoke from the heart, as it were, of the decline of what was Western. Where Lévy-Bruhl and Bataille had taken the paths of “primitiveness” and “sacredness” and laboriously wrested principles of a new ontology from the confusing epistemic situation, Bachelard’s study of the basic forces of the decay of contemporary science cleared the fogs of the transition. In all clarity, Bachelard made it possible to see what, somewhat opaquely, had so moved Lévy-Bruhl and Bataille, be it as living through the slippery slope of one’s own thinking, be it as enduring the

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torment of nonknowledge as such. He resolutely conceptualized what their post-Aristotelian attempts had tentatively outlined. In so doing, however, he demonstrated how completely these attempts accorded with the general tendency of the change of the grounds of thinking. The text Bachelard presented as he took over from Abel Rey as Professor of the History and Philosophy of Science was a lucid definition and settling of accounts with the Aristotelian formation whose overcoming characterized the episteme both in its scientific heart but also in places apparently as far off as knowledge of the sacred and the primitive. Following an idea articulated in the light of the crisis by the American historian of science Oliver Reiser and developed in detail by Bachelard, the formation whose decline one was just then witnessing had been the trinitarian system of Euclidean geometry, Newtonian physics, and Aristotelian logic. According to Bachelard, the exodus from this ternary constellation had determined the course of things in matters of knowledge since the middle of the nineteenth century. One was caught up in the transition to an essential non-Aristotelianism, which meant that knowledge stepped out of the immanence of the trinitarian regime and was no longer subject to its fundamental, interconnected, and mutually supporting principles. It had nothing to do, of course, with rejecting Euclidean geometry, Newtonian physics, and Aristotelian logic. Because Euclidean geometry could now only be thought as a particular case within the framework of non-Euclidean geometries, because Newtonian physics was comprised in a non-Newtonian physics, and Aristotelian logic only counted as a special case of a nonAristotelian logic, their epistemic alliance could quite simply no longer claim hegemony over the epistemic situation. In his 1937 essay “Non-Aristotelian Logic and the Crisis in Science,” Reiser had demonstrated for eight essential postulates of classical physics that they had to be read as developing the three basic laws of thought of the Aristotelian tradition: the principles of identity, of contradiction, and of the excluded middle. He also pointed out that the as yet unthought nexus between classical logic and classical physics always presupposed Euclidean geometry. This latter was the “historical bridge between logic and physics” and “a third essential member of the trinitarian system.”146 Where the postulates and main characteristics of Newtonian physics could be defined as a necessary consequence of the postulates and main characteristics of Aristotelian logic it became possible to conclude reversely that acknowledging a non-Newtonian physics had to entail acknowledging a non-Aristotelian logic, which, moreover, was being developed at just this time. Reiser himself had already pointed to the emergence of such a logic two years earlier. With the looming disappearance

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of the three laws of thought that Brouwer and others had long been attacking, it had become possible to access the logical heart of the Aristotelian tradition. In addition to the attack mounted by non-Newtonian physics, the time had come for the last stand of Aristotelianism on the terrain of logic as well: Now the last citadelle of absolutism is being attacked. The three laws of thought mark the f inal battle line, and the fate of absolutism will be determined by the outcome. If the laws of thought should fall, then the most profound modification in human intellectual life will occur, compared to which the Copernican and Einsteinian revolutions are but sham battles.147

Bachelard fully developed Reiser’s insight into the epistemological trinity of the Aristotelian formation by highlighting with all desirable clarity the destructive function of non-Euclidean thinking. Since Kant’s final formulation of transcendental (as opposed to applied) logic, one basic given of this formation had stood out more clearly than ever, namely the fact that general logic amounted to a physics of the arbitrary object. The most general logic was the one that completely disregarded what was specific about the object. On closer examination, however, which became possible only in the course of the nineteenth century, the arbitrariness of the object, which served as the basis of Aristotelian logic as well as of the transcendental logic that critically purified it, turned out to come with an essential restriction: the object did in no way shed all specificity but always retained one particular property—the property of Euclidean localization. This specificity, Bachelard writes, is difficult to discern and even more difficult to eradicate, because it is implied both in intuition and in discursive knowledge, in the form of external and of internal perception. It may be broadly stated as follows: the object of all ordinary cognizance keeps the specificity of Euclidean geometric localization. So much for external perception. It also keeps substantial specificity: it is completely in accord with the conception of substance as the “permanence of reality in time.” So much for internal perception.148

It remained to be shown how Euclidean geometry was inscribed in the representation of substance, for “[s]ubstance contained its qualities, as a volume or a surface contains its interior.”149 This defined what, taking up a 1934 formulation from Bachelard, we may call the “geometrical unconscious”

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of epistemology.150 Because contemporary science proved the existence of objects that “violate[d] the principles of Euclidean localization,”151 the “Euclidean mentality”152 of all traditional epistemology could now be understood. “[T]he any-object-whatsoever of the old epistemology”—as Bachelard says with indubitable epistemic acuity—“was relative to a particular class. … But inasmuch as the classical sciences have just been distributed in their initial concepts as affirmed with respect to a micro-object which does not follow the principles of the object, criticist philosophy needs to be fundamentally recast.”153 What was thus revealed was nothing less than a “perfect correlation” between classical logic and the Euclidean representation of world. This was vividly illustrated by “the fact that all syllogistic rules could be illustrated or ‘intuited’ by interdependencies shown on the Euclidean plane.” The task of liberating the mind from the Aristotelian fixation fell to a “psychoanalysis of unreflected Euclidean practices [psychanalyse des entraînements euclidiens].”154 This was the watchword Bachelard had wrested from the epistemic development. At the very moment that in Lévy-Bruhl or Bataille the ongoing devastation of the traditional matter of thinking and of the conditions of Being were slowly being given shape and perspective thanks to an ontological reverie about communication that came from within a fantasmatic dispositif of the sacred and the primitive, in Bachelard, the three main strands of the upheaval in the space of knowledge—non-Euclidean geometries, nonNewtonian physics, non-Aristotelian logic—came together in a program for a “philosophy of epistemological detail,”155 which included a pedagogical guide to a “non-Aristotelian education.”156 A “differential, scientific philosophy” was to serve as the rearguard of the epistemological deconstruction set in motion by the new scientific spirit. As an “appendage to the integral philosophy”157 that firmly rested on the Aristotelian foundations, its primary task was to teach the renouncement of the closed transcendentalism of a mind that always already categorically laid claim to completeness and the acceptance as such of the transcendental opening the age provided. It was to prepare a “synthetic epistemology” and establish complementarities of contradictory central propositions and systems, whose proliferation was a basic experience of the age.158 This in fact showed it to be merely a repetition of the innermost principle of the epistemic transformation, which Bachelard described as follows: “Indeed the whole impetus of scientific thought for a century now stems from dialectical generalizations of this sort, which embrace what has been denied.”159 For him, the statement “that new experience says no to old experience,” which, taken as generally as possible, summed up the main principle of the great transformation, became the slogan of the new scientific

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spirit, a mind on a par with the historical-epistemological foundational revision because it “constitutes itself by working on the unknown, by seeking within reality that which contradicts anterior knowledge.”160 All the energy of contestation liberated by the age of the symbolic and of communication as it passed through the contemporary imaginary was thus channeled, for a moment, in the gesture of distancing oneself from “literary,” not to say literal, “culture.”161 Picking up on the pedagogical program for “develop[ing] an open-ended psychology” laid out in Alfred Korzybski’s 1933 Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and Semantics, Bachelard demanded a cure for the idée fixe of the Aristotelian ideal. Aristotelian minds were to be turned into shifting characters capable of mental “segmentation.”162 A boost for instruction in mathematics and physics was to convert the poetry of the epistemological revolution into the prose of a postliteral culture. The mathematical education of humankind was to supersede its literary education. Henceforth, non-Aristotelian minds were to be thought by symbolism, not the other way around, and they were to be capable of a “self-generating” formal activity.163 The lack of a great nonliteral system of notation that could have transferred the transition from concepts of substance to concepts of function, the farewell to intuitive thinking, and the step into the symbolic beyond into new domains of knowledge was thus reforged into the great virtue of the new scientific mind. Bachelard’s philosophy of no had gotten in touch with the age’s fundamental epistemological no: it concentrated the triple non- that characterized the episteme as a move away from the trinitarian system of Aristotelianism. Given the “open-ended philosophy”164 he envisaged for the future, a philosophy to be prepared by a non-Aristotelian education, the hope for a general system of notation for him would have to be filed away under “reverie”—as a reverie about the return of a closure in the process of falling apart. In the move away from the spirit of never-changing categorial a prioris, others had sought epistemic refuge in spelling out the origin of thinking in primitive grounds. They had turned back to the pivotal age of categorial thinking and sought to give a reading of its emergence to account for the possibility of its decay and obtain points of reference for the surprisingly self-destructive course idealization was now taking. Moreover, the facts of communication boosted the imaginative power of the dawning postAristotelian era. Images of sacred communicative communities and projections of what it meant to exist under the conditions of communication made their rounds in contemporary discourses. They testified to the epistemic situation, which, unsettled in the post-Romantic period, no longer obeyed the Aristotelian ideal and rejected its trinitarian God. The “primitive”

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haunted the ruins of a thinking that had taken leave of its senses. He was a Robinson from another age in the midst of an alphabetic culture shaken to its core, deprived of certainty about what experience, what perception and what reality, what thinking and what Being meant. In pushing a non-Aristotelian perspective, Bachelard toppled such images of thought of the crisis. Yet their immense power is apparent in the fact that they left certain traces in his thinking of the crisis of the sciences: fragments of the fantasmatics of the crisis survive even in his theory of the obstacles to knowledge that undermine the formation of the scientific mind—the obstacle of the first, of primitive experience, for example, or the animistic obstacle to knowledge, including an account of the mentalities that correspond to them.165 Bachelard’s impressive grasp of the fantasms of knowledge, obtained thanks to the distancing of symbolic thinking, could not completely avoid transitioning through the imaginary. Accordingly, with his second face, always turned to the beauty of errors, he explicitly abandoned himself to the poetry of knowledge and the history of reveries.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

Heidegger, Being and Time, ¶11: 76. Heidegger, Being and Time, 390 note xi. Heidegger, Review of Cassirer, 188. On the question of “Being-with” in Heidegger, see, for example, Fynsk, “The Self and Its Witness”; Ronell, The Telephone Book, 51–61; and Nancy, Being Singular Plural. Heidegger, Review of Cassirer, 188. Heidegger, Being and Time, ¶11: 76. Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking? 186. Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, 172–73. On how to situate the discovery of the Presocratic historically, see Most, “Zur Archäologie der Archaik,” and “Pólemos—Pánton—Patér.” Heidegger, Parmenides, 2. Broch, “Der Zerfall der Werte,” 20. Bergson, The Creative Mind, 229–30, 232, 31, and 35. Lévy-Bruhl, How Natives Think, 4. See Bréhier, “Originalité de Lévy-Bruhl.” See Étienne Gilson’s testimony in “Le Descartes de L. Lévy-Bruhl.” Lévy-Bruhl, Notebooks, 57. These notebooks, written between January 1938 and February 1939, were published posthumously in 1949. Maurice Leenhardt in his preface to Lévy-Bruhl, Notebooks, xvii. Lévinas, “Levy-Bruhl and Contemporary Philosophy,” 35.

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18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47.

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Lévinas, “Levy-Bruhl and Contemporary Philosophy,” 35. Lévy-Bruhl, How Natives Think, 25. Lévy-Bruhl, How Natives Think, 324. Lévy-Bruhl, How Natives Think, 46. Lévy-Bruhl, How Natives Think, 46. Lévy-Bruhl, How Natives Think, 61. Lévy-Bruhl, How Natives Think, 61. Lévy-Bruhl, How Natives Think, 325. Lévy-Bruhl, How Natives Think, 83, Lévy-Bruhl’s emphasis. Lévy-Bruhl, How Natives Think, 62. Lévy-Bruhl, How Natives Think, 63, my emphasis. Lévy-Bruhl, How Natives Think, 331. Lévy-Bruhl, How Natives Think, 327. Lévy-Bruhl, How Natives Think, 87. Lévy-Bruhl, How Natives Think, 63. Lévy-Bruhl, How Natives Think, 64. Lévy-Bruhl, How Natives Think, 91. On the ontological conception of the “in advance” and thus of aprioricity, which presents the undermining of representational thinking and the epistemological question that comes with it in all its urgency—which Lévy-Bruhl, albeit via entirely different paths, must have felt as well—see Heidegger, The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, 146–148, and The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, 324–26. Lévy-Bruhl, Notebooks, 17–18, Lévy-Bruhl’s emphasis. Lévy-Bruhl, Notebooks, 1. Lévy-Bruhl, Notebooks, 83, my emphasis [modified]. Lévy-Bruhl, Notebooks, 2, Lévy-Bruhl’s emphasis. [Lévy-Bruhl, Notebooks, 55, modified.] Cf. Lévy-Bruhl, L’expérience mystique et les symboles chez les primitifs, 9–14. Lévy-Bruhl, Notebooks, 91 [modified]. Lévy-Bruhl, Notebooks, 90. Lévy-Bruhl, Primitives and the Supernatural, 32. Lévy-Bruhl, Notebooks, 106. Schuhl, “Hommage à Lucien Lévy-Bruhl,” 399. Heidegger, “Phenomenological Interpretations with Respect to Aristotle,” 392. This text became known by the name “Natorp report.” Heidegger wrote it in 1922 when he applied for positions as professor extraordinarius of philosophy in Marburg (to succeed Nicolai Hartmann) and Göttingen (to succeed Hermann Nohl). In the report submitted to Paul Natorp (Marburg) and Georg Misch (Göttingen), he outlined—quite simply because he did not have a publication record—the study of Aristotle he was then planning for Husserl’s Jahrbuch, which he never wrote. For this text, he drew on the material he used in his Freiburg lectures on Aristotle, which he continued in Marburg starting in the winter semester 1923/24.

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Lévy-Bruhl, Notebooks, 27. [Lévy-Bruhl, Notebooks, 2–3.] Lévy-Bruhl, Notebooks, 5. Lévy-Bruhl, Notebooks, 113. Lévy-Bruhl, Notebooks, 121 and 120. Lévy-Bruhl, The “Soul” of the Primitive, 202. Lévy-Bruhl, How Natives Think, 73. Lévinas, “Levy-Bruhl and Contemporary Philosophy,” 37. [Lévinas, “Levy-Bruhl and Contemporary Philosophy,” 44.] Lévy-Bruhl, Notebooks, 76–81. Lévinas, “Levy-Bruhl and Contemporary Philosophy,” 44. [Lévy-Bruhl, Notebooks, 77.] Einstein, “Physics and Reality,” 351. Einstein, “Physics and Reality,” 351. See Heidegger, Being and Time, ¶3 “The Ontological Priority of the Question of Being,” 28–31. Aubenque, Le problème de l’être chez Aristote, esp. 134–63. My short presentation here follows Aubenque’s reading throughout. [Aubenque, Le problème de l’être chez Aristote, 151.] Aristotle, Metaphysics, 991a 20–31, 1560.
 Qtd. in Aubenque, Le problème de l’être chez Aristote, 149. Michel Serres has studied just these kinds of figures in Hermès IV: La distribution. Léon Brunschvicg in Lévy-Bruhl, “L’Âme primitive,” 131. Lévy-Bruhl, “L’Âme primitive,” 131–32. Lévy-Bruhl, Notebooks, 108. Lévy-Bruhl, Notebooks, 112. Lévy-Bruhl, Notebooks, 72; on the problem of the participation of appurtenances in opposition to a thinking of accidents, see 69–71. Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking? 238. Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking? 21. Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking? 163–64. Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking? 136. Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking? 8. Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking? 220–22. Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking? 238. Spengler, Decline of the West, vol. 1, xiii. [Translated into English as “sharing/dividing” and “being-with.” In the German translation, Mit-Teilung, the former term immediately calls up Mitteilung, “message.”—Trans.] See Denis Hollier’s volume, The College of Sociology (1937–1939), which contains most of the documents dating to the active period of the secret society, Acéphale, and its profane branch, the Collège de Sociologie. The goal of their anti-Durkheimian agenda was the revaluation of the sociol-

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83. 84. 85.

86. 87.

88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99. 100. 101.

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ogy of the sacred in terms of a sacred sociology: “The precise object of this contemplated activity can be called Sacred Sociology, insofar as that implies the study of social existence in every manifestation where there is a clear, active presence of the sacred” (Caillois, “Introduction,” 11). Bataille, Inner Experience, 33, 48, 58, and 131. Bataille, Inner Experience, 100, Bataille’s emphasis. This was the title of the second volume of his Philosophy, published in 1932. It provided a detailed existential interpretation of communication (47–103). Bataille certainly knew this text, if only because he was friends with and studied under Jasper’s student Kojève. Jaspers’s starting point was the proposition “I am only in communication with another,” which referred to “something that becomes a paradox when we express it: to the origin of self-being, which comes by itself and yet, in essence, is not of and by itself alone” (47). His main distinction is between “communication in existence [wirkliche Daseinskommunikation]” and an “existential communication [existentielle Kommunikation]” that essentially precedes it and is deployed by Jaspers to pinpoint the absence of communication from Heidegger’s existential analytic. He himself, however, largely failed to live up to the paradox and at times even seems to have favored reading communication in terms of a philosophy of identity diametrically opposed, as we shall see, to Bataille’s ontology of communication. Bataille’s thinking, and this is what is important for us here, was much more deeply rooted in the epistemic movement of his age. The relationship, the differences and convergences between Jaspers’s and Bataille’s existentialization of communication would have to have to be developed in a separate study. Bataille, Inner Experience, 85, 86, and 87. In a diary entry of September 30/October 1, 1939, Bataille dates the emergence of the idea “that the sacred is communication” back to the afternoon of November 2, 1938, when he was working on his essay “The Sacred” (Œuvres complètes 5, 507, Bataille’s emphasis). Sartre, “A New Mystic.” [Bataille, Inner Experience, 101.] Bataille, Inner Experience, 9. Bataille, Inner Experience, 9–10. Bataille, Inner Experience, 14. [Bataille, Inner Experience, 121.] Bataille, Inner Experience, 87. Bataille, Inner Experience, 10. Bataille, Inner Experience, 52. Bataille, Inner Experience, 20. Bataille, Inner Experience, 34. Bataille, Inner Experience, 19–20. Bataille, Inner Experience, 108. Bataille, Œuvres complètes 5, 507 and 506.

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102. Bataille, “The Sacred,” 242. 103. Compare the unpublished note Bataille originally intended to feature in the 1954 revised edition of Inner Experience, where he provides details about the composition of the text and the dates its components were written in Œuvres complètes 5, 421. 104. Bataille, Inner Experience, 31 [modified]. In this same paragraph, Bataille employs the term “human reality” (réalité humaine), thereby reproducing Corbin’s translation of Heidegger’s Dasein. 105. Bataille, Inner Experience, 59. 106. Cf. Jaspers, Notizen zu Martin Heidegger, esp. part 1, 27–45. 107. Bataille, Inner Experience, 59. 108. Bataille, Inner Experience, 42. 109. [Bataille, Inner Experience, 64, Bataille’s emphasis.] 110. Bataille, On Nietzsche, 33. 111. Bataille, Inner Experience, 64. 112. Bataille, Inner Experience, 16. 113. Bataille, Inner Experience, 58. 114. Bataille, Inner Experience, 5, Bataille’s emphasis. 115. Bataille, Inner Experience, 95. 116. Lacan, “Psychoanalysis and Cybernetics,” 302. 117. Bataille, “Le labyrinthe,” 435. First published in Recherches philosophiques (vol. 5, 1935–1936: 364–72), the text was thoroughly revised and expanded when Bataille included it in Inner Experience (85–96). The core of the original version’s argument, however, was left untouched. 118. Langevin, La notion de corpuscules et d’atomes, 4. 119. Langevin, La notion de corpuscules et d’atomes, 36. 120. Langevin, La notion de corpuscules et d’atomes, 36. 121. Langevin, La notion de corpuscules et d’atomes, 36.
 122. Langevin, La notion de corpuscules et d’atomes, 38. 123. Langevin, La notion de corpuscules et d’atomes, 45. 124. Bataille, Inner Experience, 98. 125. Bataille, Inner Experience, 86. 126. Bataille, Inner Experience, 58. 127. Bataille, Inner Experience, 96. 128. Bataille, Inner Experience, 87. 129. Bataille, Inner Experience, 88. 130. Bataille, Inner Experience, 93. 131. In his 1983 essay “The Inoperative Community,” Jean-Luc Nancy studies Bataille’s thinking of community, which is taking shape in Inner Experience under the transcendental of communication. The historical-epistemological conditions under which Bataille elevated communication to the status of a predicative autodetermination, a transcendental that cannot be ignored, did not enter his consideration. Nancy continued what had started

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134. 135. 136. 137. 138. 139. 140. 141. 142. 143. 144. 145. 146. 147.

148. 149. 150. 151. 152. 153. 154. 155.

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with his reading of Bataille in the elaboration of a “coexistential analytic” in his 1996 Being Singular Plural. Bataille, Inner Experience, 96–97. Heidegger, “What Is Metaphysics?” 91; see also ¶40 of Being and Time, 228– 35. In Heidegger, anxiety singularizes, it opens up Dasein as “solus ipse.” In Bataille, the opposite is true, anxiety leads to a contestation of ipseity. In “Method of Meditation,” he makes this very point: “I set out from laughter and not, as Heidegger does in What Is Metaphysics? … from anxiety: some consequences result from this perhaps, justifiably, on the level of sovereignty (anxiety is a sovereign moment, but in escaping itself, negative).” He admonishes Heidegger’s “professorial work, in which the subordinate method remains glued to its results,” and the published work, insofar as he knew it, appears to him as “more a factory than a glass of alcohol” (Bataille, The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge, 284n6 [modified]). Bataille was correct to the extent that Heidegger understood just this point. In the Beiträge, for example, there is nothing left of this being glued to results, indeed there is a detachment from Western thinking. And is this not where the mystical sound of their discourses on Being meet? McLuhan, Understanding Media, 252. Bataille, Inner Experience, 100, Bataille’s emphasis [modified]. Bataille, Inner Experience, 58. Bataille, Inner Experience, 147. Bataille, Inner Experience, 42. Bataille, Inner Experience, 40. Bataille, The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge, 206, Bataille’s emphasis. Bataille, “Genet,” 200–201; the phrase “summit of communication” appears in Inner Experience, 59. Bataille, “Genet,” 200. Bataille, “Genet,” 198–99. Bataille, Inner Experience, 84. Bataille, Inner Experience, 16. Reiser, “Non-Aristotelian Logic and the Crisis in Science,” 143. Reiser, “Non-Aristotelian Logics,” 103. In the preface to his Idee und Grundriß einer nicht-aristotelischen Logik, Gotthardt Günther uses Reiser’s essay as starting point for a pointed presentation of the historical “monstrosity” and ontological implications of non-Aristotelian thinking. Bachelard, The Philosophy of No, 92. Bachelard, The Philosophy of No, 93, Bachelard’s emphasis. Bachelard, Le nouvel esprit scientifique, 41. Bachelard, The Philosophy of No, 92. Bachelard, Le nouvel esprit scientifique, 42. Bachelard, Le nouvel esprit scientifique, 42, Bachelard’s emphasis. Bachelard, Le nouvel esprit scientifique, 42. Bachelard, The Philosophy of No, 12.

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156. Bachelard, The Philosophy of No, 111. 157. Bachelard, The Philosophy of No, 12. 158. [Bachelard, The Philosophy of No, 121.] In “Non-Aristotelian Logic and the Crisis in Science” (138), Reiser had presented a selection of eight antinomies in the natural sciences around 1930 to illustrate the foundational crisis. He went on to show that they could be conceived as contradictions only within the framework of Aristotelian logic; within the framework of a non-Aristotelian systematization, the spirit of the crisis was to vanish. Bachelard, for his part, discussed the dominant dualisms of wave and particle, matter and radiation, determinism and indeterminism in Le nouvel esprit scientifique. 159. Bachelard, The Philosophy of No, 117. 160. Bachelard, The Philosophy of No, 9. 161. Bachelard, The Philosophy of No, 112. 162. Bachelard, The Philosophy of No, 109. 163. Bachelard, The Philosophy of No, 112. 164. Bachelard, The Philosophy of No, 7, Bachelard’s emphasis. 165. Cf. Bachelard, Formation of the Scientific Mind.

5.

The End of the Archaic Illusion Communication, Information, Cybernetics Abstract The chapter’s detailed discussion brings out the role cybernetics and information theory played in the conceptualization of structural anthropology and thereby allows for a fundamental reevaluation of what was at stake for the postwar episteme in structuralism. From the perspective of media history, the short-circuiting of knowledge about the human with the exact knowledge about communication reveals itself to be the very heart of Lévi-Strauss’s structural anthropological program. While ethnology and social anthropology since the second half of the nineteenth century had advanced the sacralization of the channels and thus assumed a central role in the production of phantasms that at the moment of the entry into the postalphabetic condition compensated for the lack of an exact knowledge of communication and the ensuing loss of orientation, structural anthropology in its effort at demythologization concentrates on desacralizing the channels and exorcising the archaic illusion of communication. Anthropology’s cybernetic epistemology marks the end of the history of the fascination with the “primitive” who are now replaced by the alliance of “savage” thinking with cybernetics and information theory. Keywords: Cybernetics; information theory; mathematics of man; savage thinking; Claude Lévi-Strauss; Claude E. Shannon

Desacralizing the channels In New York in the 1940s, two strands of the history of knowledge that had previously been running indifferently alongside each other crossed: knowledge about the human being and an exact knowledge of communication. A few days after his arrival, Claude Lévi-Strauss rented an apartment not far from the corner of 11th Street and Sixth Avenue. This is where until his return to Paris in January 1945 he wrote, encouraged by Roman Jakobson, Les

Hörl, E., Sacred Channels: The Archaic Illusion of Communication, Amsterdam University Press, 2018 doi 10.5117/9789089647702_ch05

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structures élémentaires de la parenté (The Elementary Structures of Kinship). One day, a young Belgian emigrant told him that one of her neighbors, as she put it, “was busy ‘inventing an artificial brain.’”1 Although at the time Lévi-Strauss was dreaming of demonstrating the dual regime of reciprocity that pervaded all kinship relations by means of an algebraic conception of kinship systems and thus of bringing out nothing less than “certain fundamental structures of the human mind”2 that produced societies as total symbolic entities, the “idea struck [him] as bizarre.”3 Immersed as he was in his effort at formalizing his ethnographic material as well as in the structural linguistics he had discovered through Jakobson, he did not, in any case, consider the idea to be significant. Nor could he, strictly speaking. The concrete contents of the “idea” were at the heart of the contribution the New York City Bell Labs made to the American war effort and thus, quite simply, classified. Projected as early as 1940 and systematically applied in the telecommunication giant’s research facilities starting in 1943, 4 it was not to become publicly accessible until 1948 in publications entitled, for example, The Mathematical Theory of Communication and Communication in the Presence of Noise. For, as Lévi-Strauss learned only in the mid-1970s, the mystery man who was haunted by the idea of a machine imitating the human brain, an idea specified by information theory (as not only the neighbor but Alan Turing, too, attested), was none other than the engineer and mathematician Claude Elwood Shannon, who had started work on the mathematical theory of encryption and other questions of telecommunications relevant to the war effort at the Bell Labs in 1941. They never met during the four years of their literal coexistence. “It is too bad,” Lévi-Strauss once remarked, “but at the time I wouldn’t have understood.”5 It is just this American Claude who provided communication with a relational schema and information with a logarithmic notation. For the mathematical theory of communication, messages were no longer hermeneutic facts of some kind of sense to be laboriously spelled out. As a function of the freedom to choose one specific message from among all possible messages, it had turned messages into purely symbolic facts of an amount of information that could be statistically calculated, namely from the transition probabilities of its constitutive elements. It was thus possible to resolve all problems of transmission and processing, irrespective of meaning, in an optimal way, by calculation. Information acquired the status of a quantifiable entity. The basic idea was that the more surprising, the more improbable the elements of a message were, the higher was its information content. Information, from this point of view, was a measure of disorder in a communication system. Greater disorder came with greater information and inversely, greater order

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meant a lower information content. Of course, one also had to distinguish between desired improbability and undesired improbability (i.e., resulting from distortions in transmission), as Warren Weaver, Shannon’s first and probably most influential commentator, stressed. Otherwise, interference would have had to count as an increase in information and mere noise be regarded as the maximum of transmitted information. Deploying information as the unit of communication systems allowed Shannon to posit a close relationship between information and entropy. This connection between thermodynamics, statistical mechanics, and communications theory by itself indicated that communications theory could not be considered a scientific byproduct of technology of interest only to engineers; it also revealed a necessary peculiarity of the description of the physical universe.6 Shannon’s identification of information and entropy was diametrically opposed to the conception of information as negentropy Léon Brillouin had introduced in his reading of Maxwell’s demon. As Catherine Hayles has pointed out, not only was the shift in the evaluation of entropy implied in “Shannon’s choice” relevant to the theory’s mathematical elegance, it constituted a veritable revaluation of entropy. In hindsight, that is, with an awareness of the immense importance of self-organizing systems in the cyberneticization of knowledge, positing the identity of information and entropy appears as the decisive epistemic turning point. From then on, entropy could be thought of less as a heat pump inexorably leading the world to freeze to death and more as a thermodynamic motor driving systems to self-organize. It could become more complex and generate new life. Where an increase in disorder could be thought as an increase of information, entropy could be thought positively as an increase in complexity.7 Despite its far-reaching theoretical implications, Shannon’s choice also showed that the protagonist of this revaluation earned his living as an employee of a big telecommunications concern. Someone working for a company where business benefited from nothing as much as it benefited from people’s curiosity, where the transmission of surprises meant that more money would be coming in, was more likely to bet on surprise as the unit of a message’s information content even in theory.8 Unlike the logarithmic laws of information transmission his predecessors Harry Nyquist and R. V. Hartley,9 also working at Bell Labs, had articulated within a more restricted technical framework in the 1920s, Shannon’s theory was not limited to the study of special communication technologies that aimed to optimize transmission capacities. Shannon endowed the age of communication with its General Theory. In 1949, Warren Weaver stressed the theory’s sensational impact:

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The word communication will be used here in a very broad sense to include all of the procedures by which one mind may affect another. This, of course, involves not only written and oral speech, but also music, the pictorial arts, the theatre, the ballet, and in fact all human behavior. In some connections it may be desirable to use a still broader definition of communication, namely, one which would include the procedures by means of which one mechanism (say automatic equipment to track an airplane and to compute its probable future position) affects another mechanism (say a guided missile chasing the airplane).10

Thanks in large part to Shannon’s exposition of the overarching mathematical structure of problems of communication, an age that had been taught by the war that it was impossible to overestimate the significance of an exact concept of information and information processing had acquired the core of its new system of notation. The name for this system that came to be widely adapted during those years was a term coined by Norbert Wiener: “cybernetics.” Interpreted exactly, Shannon’s famous schematic diagram of a general system of communication could serve as a calque for a systemic reading of relationships between human beings, machines, and organisms. “What began as a study of transmission over telegraph lines,” William Aspray summarizes, “was developed by Shannon into a general theory of communication applicable to telegraph, telephone, radio, television, and computing machines—in fact, to any system, physical or biological, in which information is being transferred or manipulated through time or space.”11 Practically overnight, Shannon’s speculative audacity was vastly outpaced by the transgression of the limits of the communication problem his theory of information implied. In his view, the unfettered application of what had been conceived as a general “technical tool for the communication engineer” contained “an element of danger.” In a 1956 paper, he called for moderation in applying the concepts of information theory as a kind of panacea: Information theory has, in the last few years, become something of a scientific bandwagon. … In part, this has been due to connections with such fashionable fields as computing machines, cybernetics, and automation; and in part, to the novelty of its subject matter. As a consequence, it has perhaps been ballooned to an importance beyond its actual accomplishments. Our fellow scientists in many different fields, attracted by the fanfare and by the new avenues opened to scientific analysis, are using these ideas in their own problems. Applications are being made to biology, psychology, linguistics, fundamental physics, economics, the theory of

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organization, and many others. … While we feel that information theory is indeed a valuable tool in providing fundamental insights into the nature of communication problems and will continue to grow in importance, it is certainly no panacea for the communication engineer or, a fortiori, for anyone else. Seldom do more than a few of nature’s secrets give way at one time. It will be all too easy for our somewhat artificial prosperity to collapse overnight when it is realized that the use of a few exciting words like information, entropy, redundancy, do not solve all our problems.12

Shannon saw the threatened sell-out of information theory. To let some air out of the speculative postwar bubble, he emphatically insisted that the “hard core of information theory” was still a branch of mathematics and a rigorous deductive system. “Workers of other fields should realize that the basic results of the subject are aimed in a very specific direction, a direction that is not necessarily relevant to such fields as psychology, economics, and other social sciences.”13 Shannon was certainly confident that the conceptual regime of information theory could be useful in those fields—that conformed to the thrust of his conceptual work. What he disliked, however, was that self-styled applications of information theory avoided careful study of the mathematical foundations like the plague and replaced both the formulation of hypotheses based on this study and the experimental verification of such hypotheses with a simple transfer of concepts. For Shannon, the only way to secure the epistemic expansion of information theory beyond the narrow confines of rigorous mathematical construction was to convert mathematical facts into experimental facts. The success his own theory met with inspired a certain uneasiness in the mathematician whose work for good reason had captured the spirit of the times. At the very least, he was skeptical about the new epistemic space opened up by the great system of notation derived from his theory. Just as philosophers of Prussian doctrine had once set out to clear a critical path through the hostile thickets of metaphysics on the model of mathematics and physics and, in backbreaking categorial labor, widened it into a highway for the triumph of reason, Shannon, too, in his most daring moments saw elegant avenues run through the various districts of the episteme, blasted open by the force of the new mathematical arsenal of concepts. Applied with appropriate exactitude, information theory seemed to be the means for limiting the metaphysical outgrowths of the idea of communication cropping up everywhere. Only in information theory, only in being processed by information theory was communication promoted to the rank of a kind of regulative idea to guide the interpretation of the human being, machines,

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and the world without falling prey to any sort of substantialist reverie about ultimate reasons. Information theory had become a new critical authority of sorts for the age of communication: “The subject of information theory has certainly been sold, if not oversold. We should now turn our attention to the business of research and development at the highest scientific plane we can maintain. Research rather than exposition is the keynote, and our critical thresholds should be raised.”14 To appreciate the enormous effect of Shannon’s great formal deed has had on the history of knowledge despite or precisely because of the transgression of critical thresholds, it suffices to turn to Lacan’s insight into the epistemic situation, which he articulated in a simple statement (that for its part was deeply historical, too): “Everything intuitive is far closer to the imaginary than to the symbolic.”15 As long as communication and information could not be thought as a function of the purely symbolic without abstracting from all intuition (as would be expected of such nonintuitive problems), they as it were generated the imaginary. Shannon’s desubstantialization of messages and the demise of the semantic illusion cut off an entire age, whose imagination had been dedicated to sacralizing the channels of transmission and the sense circulating there to draw from them its discursive fantasms, from its imaginary currents. That at least is how Shannon’s message was understood by his namesake and onetime neighbor LéviStrauss. The “work of communication specialists” “[f]irst systematically expounded by Claude Shannon, the engineer and mathematician,”16 led the other Claude to devote himself to symbolically demolishing just those fantasms of communication whose shadows had burdened two generations of scholars before him. From Tylor to Lévy-Bruhl, the discourse of social anthropology and ethnology with its questions concerning spirits, ghosts, and demons, the force field of the sacred, the polarity of the sacred and the profane, or the remote action of magic had fantasized nothing other than a genealogy of human communicative conditions penetrating into the archaic. The world of the primitive had been described as a kind of telecommunications hell in which for an excess of messages there seemed to be nothing but noise. The “primitive” had been conceived of as a kind of node in a network of communicative currents that constantly passed between the living, the dead, supernatural entities, and things. The world of the “primitive” was an abyss, it was where the age of the transition from intuitive to symbolic thinking that had lost the certainty of its basic schemata gazed from a literate into a nonliterate world. That is why it is no coincidence that Lévi-Strauss, who since his New York days had acquired a basic knowledge of information and game theory as well as of cybernetics, saw in “the idea

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that the universe of primitives (or supposedly such) consists principally in messages”17 an essential discursive stratum of all social anthropology. In light of Shannon’s information theory, he found himself facing the project of symbolically demystifying social anthropology, obsessed as it was with the illusion of archaic communication. Of course he had initially been “eager to learn from modern linguistics the road which leads to the empirical knowledge of social phenomena,” as he put it in 1945.18 Phonology taught him how to make the transition from the study of conscious phenomena to the investigation of their unconscious infrastructure, how to aim no longer for expressions as independent entities but for the system of relationships between the expressions. Yet only a few years later, he—like the structural linguists and chief among them his close friend Jakobson—had been totally won over to concepts of information and communication and set out to remodel the structural conception according to the new system of notation. This is how he succeeded in grasping the fantasmatic world of communication that had been the object of his own discipline’s reveries for at least half a century. Not the least of reasons for the fact that the mathematicians’ epoch-making work could leave so programmatic an imprint on so distant a discourse was the unforeseeable profound effect a superficial epistemic transfer could have. In the days prior to Lévi-Strauss’s discovery of the symbolic order, the symbolic for its part had become a hard fact, and the world had become symbolic. And the discursive status of mathematics—which had stopped being a science of magnitudes to become a science of the symbolic in the early nineteenth century and turned to the study of certain formal relations and their expression in the legitimate combinations of a system of signs—had changed profoundly as well. People who had had to live with the reproach that their nonintuitive formalisms existed only on paper could suddenly claim them to exist in reality. Not least thanks to Shannon, the “necessary relations” formalized by logic ever since Boole’s foundation of modern symbolic logic, relations Lévi-Strauss imagined to be the rigorous symbolic foundation of the unconscious categories of the mind and the basic relations between people, had moved from an age in which they were merely computed to an age in which they had real efficacy. Already in his 1937 dissertation, Shannon had proven that every circuit can be “represented by a set of equations, the terms of the equations corresponding to the various relays and switches in the circuit.” Henceforth, the desired characteristics of a circuit could be noted as a system of equations and be “manipulated into the form representing the simplest circuit” by means of “simple mathematical processes, most of which are similar to ordinary algebraic algorithms.” This not only made engineers

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happy, since from now on, it was possible to derive circuits from equations and to optimize them, but anthropologists as well. Because the calculus of circuits developed by Shannon was “exactly analogous to the calculus of propositions used in the symbolic study of logic,” it had become possible, inversely, to switch symbolic logic into relay circuits and thus to embody it in the real.19 Necessary relations were now no longer to be conceived of as mere representations of the real, governing the real behind the scenes, as it were, as its ultimate hidden ground. The real could now inversely appear as the rule, as the normal case of necessary relations, and—this is the point—as a problem of symbolic regulation. Against this background, social anthropologists in pursuing the fundamental question of the power and efficacy of symbols that had animated them since the turn of the century could stop looking for a reality underneath the symbols, renounce all reality of drives, and even avoid shifting the problem to a hypostasized collective or social unconscious as the ultimate ground of all things symbolic. The moment the real and the symbolic could be short-circuited and the real thereby turned out to be a function of the symbolic, all those who were talking about the symbolic and aimed at an epistemic breakthrough toward the autonomy of the real could reasonable assume that they were no longer compelled immediately to reintroduce through the back door the transcendence and the God they had just thrown out. The human being had entered the symbolic beyond, the order of the symbolic, which, in its totality, was not located in the heaven of ideas but constituted the reality of human beings as such. It was to be conceived as the offspring of necessary relations that, for their part, now had a claim to the real. The goal was no longer to seize mere representations of human reality schematizing a naked and, in principle, prerepresentative immediacy but to prove the elementary structures of reality, that is, the codes that generated the reality of human beings from its rule-governed regime in the first place. That is what separates Durkheim’s and even Marcel Mauss’s symbolism from Lévi-Strauss’s. In 1949, at the moment he had reached the threshold of symbolic thinking and perhaps for the last time believed it possible to speak largely without reference to technology—and yet in so doing executed the technical unconscious of the episteme—Lévi-Strauss wrote: “The effectiveness of symbols would consist precisely in this ‘inductive property,’ by which formally homologous structures, built out of different materials at different levels of life—organic processes, unconscious mind, rational thought—are related to one another.”20 Because symbols could be implemented in the real, it was possible to resolve even the mystery of an “inductive property” acting between formally homologous structures. Labor on the enigmatic efficacy of symbols

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was replaced by investigations into how one symbolic system could be transformed into another. Lacan was probably the first fully to grasp this fundamental connection between Lévi-Strauss’s thinking of the symbolic function and the emergence of functioning symbolic machines. When, in 1954, he set out to present to his listeners “[w]hat is original in Levi-Strauss’s notion of the elementary structure,” he found it to consist in “the human order” being “characterised by the fact that the symbolic function intervenes at every moment and at every stage of its existence.” For Lacan, Lévi-Strauss’s message, even before the latter popularized it far and wide under the heading “savage thinking,” was this: “As soon as the symbol arrives, there is a universe of symbols. … Everything which is human has to be ordained within a universe constituted by the symbolic function. It’s not for nothing that Levi-Strauss calls his structures elementary—he doesn’t say primitive.” It was now possible not just to say goodbye to the “primitive” but also to forget about any kind of “psychological entification.” As soon as there are symbols, as soon as the symbolic function functions, it guides any attempt humans make “to bring order to” phenomena, “much more” so “than any sort of direct apprehension,” that is, than the immediate intuition of phenomena. Lévi-Strauss’s human beings, from this point of view, were machines that, unlike animals, were not fixated and blocked but had, just as in a Shannonian communication system, “freedom,” that is, a “multiplicity of possible choices.” In this respect, Lévi-Strauss’s machine plant only spelled out the “mutation” that had long been “taking place in the function of the machine, which is leaving all those who are still bent on criticising the old mechanism miles behind.” His exegesis of Lévi-Strauss culminates in the assertion: “The meaning of the machine is in the process of complete transformation, for us all, whether or not you have opened a book on cybernetics.”21 Lacan knew what he was talking about, both when it came to cybernetics and when it came to Lévi-Strauss’s symbolism. In 1951, he began to meet regularly with Émile Benveniste, Lévi-Strauss, and the mathematician Georges-Théodule Guilbaud. Together, they were working on symbolic structures, fabricated and studied topological models, and sought out connections between mathematics and the human sciences.22 It was this same Guilbaud who in 1954 published a concise but thorough introduction to cybernetics. Four years earlier, moreover, he had written about the epistemological change driven by cybernetics, a change that operated the breakthrough of “the logic of machines.” The new machines opened up “new pathways of knowledge.” They brought out the connections between science and technology as such, as well as the unique way of “thinking with one’s

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hands and with the tools that extend them.”23 In Lévi-Strauss’s thinking of the symbolic, or at least in the most radical interpretation of this thinking, Lacan saw an instance of these new machinic pathways of knowledge. “The fact that anything can be written in terms of 0 and 1,” the fact, furthermore, that the symbolic could now be switched into circuits and thus have effects in the real directly, without detours via the imaginary, began “to be totalised and … to start functioning all by itself,”24 as Lacan has it in a precise summary of the consequences of Shannon’s achievement that went by the name of cybernetics, these facts do not by any means imply that the specter of the imaginary had stopped plaguing discourses. As we know, the contributions of the two Claudes combined were instrumental in creating the discursive dream of an unfettered regime of the symbolic function, of pure difference, and of structure, a space whose unthought aspects were soon to be questioned under such headings as différance and “desiring machines.” Yet what ultimately remained of this epistemic event had already been stated with utmost clarity by Lacan in the terms of that genealogy of symbolic thinking called psychoanalysis. What remained was the separation between the imaginary and the symbolic functions, which, prior to the machine age, had ruled despotically, secretly, and in unison.25 Against this backdrop, the anecdote from New York in the 1940s almost analyzes itself. Perhaps it was supposed to inaugurate after the fact the primal scene of the epistemic break that allowed the new discursive space of a universal science of communication to arise, which thinks in terms of codes and no longer in terms of representation. The switch to machinic thinking was to exorcize the concept of the human along with its “metaphysical ghosts,”26 a concept that had for more than a century acted as a quasi-substantial double and superelevation of the empirical realities of labor, life, and language. Where there had been empirical facts there would henceforth be invariants manifest in the empirical variety of human societies. Instead of constituting the human, the task of the human sciences was now to dissolve the human. The existence of the human being would no longer be the subject of “the analytic of finitude”27 but instead appear in the “symbolic beyond”28 of the regime of the mind’s unconscious structures and in the “modalities of a great ‘communication function.’”29 This existence would be found, it was thought, at the intersection of nature and culture where different systems of communications crossed, to be studied by biologists, neurophysiologists, social anthropologists, linguists, economists, and psychologists alike. Henceforth, not just “social phenomena and human societies” were to be conceived of as “great communication machines,” when it came, for example, to “the communication of women

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from one social group to another through prohibitions and matrimonial preferences” or to “the communication of goods in services in the economic domain” or to “the transmission of messages in language” or many other operations. No, “all of human life, from its most secret biological origins to its most massive and ostentatious manifestations” seemed “to be a matter of communication.”30 Lévi-Strauss’s later version of the New York anecdote, in any case, simply states, as if everything else went without saying (as is always the case once a primal scene has been revealed): “Only a few yards apart, he was creating cybernetics and I was writing Elementary Structures of Kinship.”31 Here, not knowing of the other seems not only to be a part of the mystification of the epistemic event that put the anthropologist and the engineer and mathematician in such unforeseeable proximity, it also seems to be part of the conditions of possibility of such events that are ipso facto anonymous. Amidst the epistemic aftershocks, in any case, it was possible to claim that one might “imagine the anthropologist as modeled after the engineer, who conceives and constructs a machine,” a machine, however, that “has to work”—“logical certainty is not enough.”32 Moreover, it was now possible for the anthropologist to dare go public with a title like “The Mathematics of Man,” in which he posited a “domain of necessities” that applied to human beings’ nonquantifiable relationships. In any event, his new “qualitative mathematics,”33 equipped with the tools of set theory, group theory, and topology, was meant to establish “rigorous” relationships between human beings and “to break away from the hopelessness of the ‘great numbers’” to which the human sciences in their faith in the distribution graphs of essential empirical facts like birth, death, or suicide rates had heretofore limited themselves.34 The anecdote about Claude the anthropologist and Claude the mathematician and engineer highlights a primal scene of structural anthropology that extends the discipline’s genealogy far into the fantasmatic dispositif of communication. There is thus a more profound reason in the history of knowledge why the short-circuiting of knowledge about the human with the exact knowledge about communication could become the core of anthropology’s destructive project. Social anthropology and ethnology had imagined the human under the conditions of complete telecommunication and called this telecommunications system “primitive.” The desire for insight into their own media-technological situation formed part of their undiscovered foundation, from which, at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, sprang a veritable flood of fantasmatic texts on the primitive existential situation. Social anthropology was structurally drained

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the moment its great source of discursive imagination ran dry, that is, the moment that the imaginary of communication fell apart in the confrontation with information theory’s exact notation of communication. The “primitive,” wandering about a cultural shadow world of long distance connections and making entire social formations look like telecommunication alliances, like the very emblems of telecommunications systems, had to yield to a new actor who had always already operated in a quasi information-theoretical manner in a world constituted symbolically through and through, who was no longer a prisoner of the imaginary of the world of communications. The reading of elementary kinship structures, classificatory systems, and mythological machines was to outline, not primitive aberrations that sprang from first efforts at category formations, but the always already given great space in which formal thinking was active. Ultimately, this originary symbolist and information theorist of the first hour ended up once more being called “savage.” But instead of praising his goodness and happiness, what was admired now was his formalist competence. He became the protagonist of a new agenda that sought to understand the human as a function of communication and explicitly sought to think the human as savage.

Coding the real In 1945, still writing The Elementary Structures of Kinship, Lévi-Strauss updated the audience at the Linguistic Circle of New York (which he had cofounded with Jakobson and others) on the state of the formalization of anthropology. The kinship problem he was working on at the time had become the f ield where he tested the extent to which anthropological problems could be connected with the structural revolution of the linguistic discipline, phonology. Lévi-Strauss noted a sustained formal analogy between phonological and kinship systems: Like phonemes, kinship terms are elements of meaning; like phonemes, they acquire meaning only if they are integrated into systems. “Kinship systems,” like “phonemic systems,” are built by the mind on the level of unconscious thought. Finally, the recurrence of kinship patterns, marriage rules, similar prescribed attitudes between certain types of relatives, and so forth, in scattered regions of the globe and in fundamentally different societies, leads us to believe that, in the case of kinship as well as linguistics, the observable phenomena result from the action of laws which are general but implicit. The problem can therefore be formulated as follows:

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Although they belong to another order of reality, kinship phenomena are of the same type as linguistic phenomena.35

When applied to “phenomena of another order,” the breakthrough of formal thinking in one of the human sciences, phonology, which emphasized the relationships between terms rather than the terms themselves as independent entities and which therefore aimed for uncovering concrete systemic structures such as the necessary relations manifest in the relations between terms, promised to pull neighboring fields into the symbolic beyond as well. Henceforth, the fortune of social anthropologists, too, depended on asserting that one was always already “dealing strictly with symbolism,” with no way out. It was thus no longer necessary to spend all one’s efforts on developing some kind of naturalistic conception of the “emergence of symbolic thinking” as such. According to Lévi-Strauss, the first appearance of symbols in history had already instituted an irrevocable symbolic order. Once such an order “is given, the nature of the explanation must change as radically as the newly appeared phenomenon differs from those which have preceded and prepared it.”36 The new nature of the explanation, which was basically as old as the symbols themselves, consisted in the differential analysis performed, for example, in phonology. Strictly speaking, the transition to purely symbolic thinking in the sciences since the middle of the nineteenth century was still an echo of the beginning of history, of the moment that symbols emerged as such. All naturalism was lagging behind history as it were. This daring idea not only integrated the human sciences into the general epistemic movement borne by mathematics, symbolic logic, and physical field theory, which had abandoned faith in intuition and established the new symbolic standard of knowledge that held the promise of a glorious epistemic future. The great transformation of the foundations of knowledge was in turn said to feed into the symbolic function asserted by the human sciences and thereby acquired an immense anthropological dimension. In the end, Lévi-Strauss would come to think of it as one great short-circuiting with and belated historical rehabilitation of savage symbolism. In fact, The Elementary Structures of Kinship pushed Lévi-Strauss far beyond the formal analogy with linguistics, straight to the heart of the epistemic turn. Because his work on the kinship problem dispelled the illusions of intuitive thinking, he could not but become thoroughly familiar with symbolism. Phonology here acted as something of a constantly invoked godfather on the part of the human sciences, testifying to the disillusionment about the epistemic function of intuition, which, after the exact sciences, was now gripping the human sciences as well. But phonology was

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far from the main agent of this disillusionment. It was the mathematician André Weil (a cofounder, with Henri Cartan and Jean Dieudonné, of the Bourbaki group, which sought to overcome the division of mathematics on the basis of a concept of structure)37 who wrote a short chapter in The Elementary Structures of Kinship and succeeded in providing an exemplary algebraic notation of kinship laws on the basis of the oppositions, groups, systems, and rules governing kinship relations Lévi-Strauss had cataloged on the phonological model. Weil showed that algebra and the theory of substitution groups, the core of Felix Klein’s arithmetization agenda, could aid in studying and classifying problems of kinship and make it possible to advance to the stage of proving structures that intuition was incapable of discerning even in relatively simple systems. Lévi-Strauss’s text, to be sure, was pervaded by an immense intuitive effort, modeled on phonology’s systemic generalizations and supported by a symbolization of relevant relationships. Yet as Lévi-Strauss admitted later, Weil’s “mathematical demonstration went further, but it was in line with what I was trying to work out on a more modest level for systems of less complexity.”38 Weil’s symbolic notation had not only confirmed his intuition, it had surpassed it. The universe of social facts constituted by marriage and lineage had become a totality of operations that could be studied and interpreted algebraically. From that point, Lévi-Strauss thinking never stopped moving on the outer edges of an intuition schooled and continually refined by mathematical structural models as he turned from kinship problems to discovering transformation groups and determining their invariant relationships in primitive classification systems or mythological systems. In 1955, for example, when he published his programmatic essay “The Structural Study of Myth” that contained the famous “canonical formula,” intended to be a rigorous expression of “the genetic law of the myth,” he saw the reason for the desolate state of general mythology in its unwavering faith the discipline placed in intuition. If a myth was, as he argued, “the aggregate of its variants,” all of which had to be considered with equal seriousness rather than choosing one particular version as a kind of original, then the necessary comparison of variants increases the “number of dimensions required” until it appears quite impossible to handle them intuitively. The confusions and platitudes which are the outcome of comparative mythology can be explained by the fact that multi-dimensional frames of reference are often ignored or are naively replaced by two- or three-dimensional ones. Indeed, progress in comparative mythology depends largely on the

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cooperation of mathematicians who would undertake to express in symbols multi-dimensional relations which cannot be handled otherwise.39

Because western European universities were lacking the facilities, the technology, and the staff that would be needed, he told his American listeners, his current work was quickly approaching the limits of what could be handled. Mythical literature to him seemed so “bulky” that it required “breaking … down into its constituent units,” “team work,” and “technical help”: A variant of average length requires several hundred cards to be properly analyzed. To discover a suitable pattern of rows and columns for those cards, special devices are needed, consisting of vertical boards about six feet long and four and a half feet high, where cards can be pigeon-holed and moved at will. In order to build up three-dimensional models enabling one to compare the variants, several such boards are necessary, and this in turn requires a spacious workshop, a commodity particularly unavailable in Western Europe nowadays. Furthermore, as soon as the frame of reference becomes multi-dimensional (which occurs at an early stage, as has been shown above) the board system has to be replaced by perforated cards, which in turn require IBM equipment, etc. 40

Such was the American dream of the long since repatriated anthropologist struggling with the limits of intuition and with technologically overcoming them. During his work on the Mythologica, starting in the 1960s—now equipped not only with a Chair at the Collège de France but also with a Laboratoire d’Anthropologie sociale (which, admittedly, was bursting at the seams)—he ended up not running IBM equipment. But, handicraft enthusiast that he was, he built cardboard models of mythological structures to increase the complexity of his analysis and improve his grasp of the invariant relationships of mythical transformation groups. 41 In The Jealous Potter, he would work with a topological model, the Klein bottle, to, first of all, discover and then understand certain mythological transformation groups. But the work on savage thinking had already confronted him with the limits of intuition: The greater our knowledge, the more obscure the overall scheme. The dimensions multiply, and the growth of axes of reference beyond a certain point paralyses intuitive methods: it becomes impossible to visualize a system when its representation requires a continuum of more than three or four dimensions. But the day may come when all the available

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documentation on Australian tribes is transferred to punched cards and with the help of a computer their entire techno-economic, social and religious structures can be shown to be like a vast group of transformations. 42

Since the 1950s, the dream of electronic data processing resurfaced regularly; the late 50s and early 60s were even “largely devoted to discussing the use of descriptive codes, punched cards, and computers in our disciplines, as well as the relationship between ethnology and philosophy in the light of recent works.”43 Ideally with the help of computers, at the very least, however, equipped with a generous amount of mathematical inspiration, one had to invent models that actualized structures, of which specific mythological or classificatory systems were merely concrete expressions. Models were to reflect and thus bring to light “mental patterns” that had been unconsciously at work in the originary construction of concrete expressions. At the same time, they had to be sufficiently general “to have been conceived of anywhere at all, without recourse to experience or observation.”44 They were needed because unlike what phenomenology had dreamed of, experience and the real were a discontinuous order, and there was no simple transition between them: “to reach reality one has first to reject experience, and then subsequently to reintegrate it into an objective synthesis devoid of any sentimentality” reads one of the reflections that from time to time punctuate the lyrical flow of Tristes tropiques. The only “object” was “to construct a model and to study its property and its different reactions in laboratory conditions in order later to apply the observations to the interpretation of empirical happenings, which may be far removed from what been forecast.” The power to develop models was to transfer the task of “understand[ing] being in relationship to itself and not in relationship to myself” from philosophy to science. 45 Thinking in models formed part of the basic stock of Lévi-Strauss’s unacknowledged symbolist ontology. The idea that one was always already moving within symbolism immediate entailed problems with intuition and the possible errors the latter produced. The fact, increasingly coming to light thanks to mediatechnological innovations since the mid-nineteenth century, that there was a break between experience and the real, pushed Lévi-Strauss, for one, to develop a crystal-clear epistemology of the model: The term “social structure” has nothing to do with empirical reality but with models which are built up after it. This should help one to clarify the difference between two concepts which are so close to each other that they have often been confused, namely, those of social structure and of

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social relations. It will be enough to state at this time that social relations consist of the raw materials out of which the models making up the social structure are built, while social structure can, by no means, be reduced to the ensemble of the social relations to be described in a given society. 46

Models were “the proper object of structural analyses.”47 They were considered “symbolic representations”48; they encoded the real but they were not exhaustive representations of the real, which for their part were tied to the apron strings of a more or less naive intuition and experience. Models were to keep analysis clear of things “as they appear,”49 remove the intellectual constraint exercised by immediate evidence, and provide “a way of showing that what appears superficially disparate may not be so, and that behind the bewildering diversity of empirical data, there may exist a small number of recurrent, identical properties, although they are combined differently.”50 Modeling social relations made it possible to move from “the earlier, empirical level” where these relations first appeared to “a deeper one, previously neglected,” the level “of those unconscious categories which we may hope to reach by bringing together domains which, at first sight, appear disconnected to the observer.”51 “Of course,” to avoid simply producing empty formalisms, “the final word should rest with experience.” But experiences were not to have the first word. They had to undergo a modeling process, and “experience counseled and guided by deductive reasoning will not be the same as the unsophisticated one with which the whole process had started.”52 Experience was no longer counseled and guided by the rational regime of pure forms of intuition and a priori categories, as in the Euclidean age of Kant, but by the rationality of models. For a model to “deserve … the name ‘structure,’” it had to meet four criteria: First, the structure exhibits the characteristics of a system. It is made up of several elements, none of which can undergo a change without effecting changes in all the other elements. Second, for any given model there should be a possibility of ordering a series of transformations resulting in a group of models of the same type. Third, the above properties make it possible to predict how the model will react if one or more of its elements are submitted to certain modifications. Finally, the model should be constituted so as to make immediately intelligible all the observed facts.53

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In the 1940s, models were an essential means in the production of knowledge and suspended the differences between humans, animals, and machines.54 In their 1943 “A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity,” for example, Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts presented a model for studying the nervous system, in particular the human brain. This mathematical model of the neuronal network was based on Carnap’s logical calculus and Turing’s work on computable numbers. In 1942, John von Neumann and Oscar Morgenstern’s game theory created a model for studying economic behavior. The concept of the model on which this work was based constituted the source of Lévi-Strauss’s model-theoretical conception of structure.55 In the summer of 1941, Norbert Wiener and Julian Bigelow had started constructing their antiaircraft predictor, which was to determine the flight path of an enemy aircraft, calculate its future positions, and on the basis of this prediction fire an antiaircraft missile. Creating models was an essential characteristic of the cyberneticization of knowledge, which, if Wiener’s reveries were to come true, would soon comprehend the entire universe by modeling empirical facts as feedback systems.56 The fact that the concern was no longer with studying the particularity of objects but instead with searching for invariants via symbolic modeling of relations marked the historical and epistemological turning point of the farewell to representation operated by non-Euclidean geometries and group theory.57 The move toward models, which no longer rendered anything intuitive but instead were purely symbolic constructions, had been made in physics as well. Hertz’s epistemology of simulacra had been an emphatic indication of the turn toward the use of symbols in the form of models. Now the study of human and nonhuman behavior, too, had largely become a question of correctly deploying models. Most of its principles had been articulated as early as 1943 by Arturo Rosenblueth, Wiener, and Bigelow in what is widely considered the foundational document of cybernetics, the “manifesto for a new form of knowledge” that triggered a “cognitive implosion,” the essay “Behaviour, Purpose and Teleology”58: Given any object, relatively abstracted from its surroundings for study, the behavioristic approach consists in the examination of the output of the object and of the relations of this output to the input. By output is meant any change produced in the surroundings by the object. By input, conversely, is meant any event external to the object that modifies this object in any manner. The above statement of what is meant by the behavioristic method of study omits the specific structure and the intrinsic organization of the object.59

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Such was the minimal definition of a new mode of investigation that left aside the particularities of the objects to be studied and instead articulated in a model the relationships between an object and its environment. Modes of behavior were to be studied exclusively via such models. In pure relationship analysis, the difference between living organisms and machines dissolved. They were all systems of communication.

Cybernetics and coolness of mind The epistemology of models at Lévi-Strauss’s disposal since the early 1950s marked the connection he established between structural anthropology and cybernetics and information theory. He himself was fully aware of the genealogy of his transformation of anthropology into a science of invariants and, in 1952, freely proclaimed it in a place that was certainly the right place for this kind of revelation: New York. Structural studies are, in the social sciences, the indirect outcome of modern developments in mathematics which have given increasing importance to the qualitative point of view in contradistinction to the quantitative point of view of traditional mathematics. It has become possible, therefore, in fields such as mathematical logic, set theory, group theory, and topology, to develop a rigorous approach to problems which do not admit of a metrical solution. The outstanding achievements in this connection—which offer themselves as springboards not yet utilized by social scientists—are to be found in J. von Neumann and O. Morgenstern, Theory of Games and Economic Behavior; N. Wiener, Cybernetics; and C. Shannon and W. Weaver, The Mathematical Theory of Communication.60

Within just a few years, what he had not been interested in during his exile years in New York had caught up with him. It was in any event now possible for anthropologists, too, to “experiment” with models, that is, to apply a “set of procedures aiming at ascertaining how a given model will react when subjected to change and at comparing models of the same or different types.”61 The entire sense and relevance of structural analysis hinged on the possibility of transferring structures onto models that could be compared with one another, models whose formal properties were independent of the elements that constituted them. Otherwise, structural analysis would have run dry in empty formalisms. Only the possibility of comparison guaranteed by the hard facts of relationships of transformation, not by soft resemblances,

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could ensure interpretation. A method that was “transformational rather than … fluxional” saw societies not as being in flux but as a structured set of internal relations, as a “system ruled by an internal cohesiveness” discovered by a study of transformations “through which similar properties are recognized in apparently different systems.” The concepts structure and transformation were inseparable. This methodological choice was anything but arbitrary but responded to “a cue from the object.”62 By an elementary deployment of the transformation method, the analytical social anthropologist transformed his discipline into a distant province of mathematics, turning himself into an experimenter and technical designer, the savage twin, as it were, of the engineer. The models he was dealing with could in principle be conscious or unconscious. The main principle was “that a category of facts can more easily yield to structural analysis when the social group in which it is manifested has not elaborated a conscious model to interpret or justify it.” Conscious models merely “stand like obstacles between the observer and his object.”63 They basically always already deformed the deeper structure that really governed phenomena. Society’s blindness to the models that rendered its functioning transparent, that is, the mechanisms that regulated the totality of social facts, was itself the best guarantee for the success and the truth of structural analysis. It was the ideal ground for the technical designer’s blind thinking. One thought fathered by a model-theoretical reflection offered the best of all possible justifications of social anthropology. The distinction between mechanical and statistical models current in the natural sciences allowed Lévi-Strauss to discern the difference between “cold” societies and “hot” societies. Mechanic models obtain their constitutive elements directly on the level of phenomena, their time is reversible, they consist of clear oppositions—and that means symmetrical relationships—their operations are all strictly reversible, and, above all, there is no element of choice in them. They are a matter of algebraic structures. Statistical models operate with more complex systems of reference, long time sequences, their time is irreversible, they feature orientations, essential asymmetries, and a freedom of choice. They are governed by the laws of probability. Elementary structures that were, ideally, strictly symmetrical could be translated into mechanical models, while complex structures governed by asymmetries called for statistical models. Accordingly, and with all the programmatic aspirations appropriate to the occasion, Lévi-Strauss’s inaugural lecture at the Collège de France

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presented cold societies as societies whose “internal environment borders on the zero of historical temperature.” They resist history and are distinguished by the limited number of their people and their mechanical mode of functioning from the ‘hot’ societies which appeared in different parts of the world following the Neolithic revolution. In the latter, differentiations between castes and between classes are emphasized unceasingly in order to draw from them change and energy.64

Hot societies corresponded to a “type of civilization which once inaugurated historical development” by turning the differential distances between human beings into asymmetrical relationships of dominance and into the engine driving culture, and turned human beings into machines.65 Cold societies, governed by a strictly symmetrical regime of relationships, functioned like mechanical models; hot societies, in contrast, like statistical models. But there were neither any absolutely cold nor any absolutely hot societies. The distinction was purely theoretical, it named extreme limits or types of structural analysis. The “machine revolution of the nineteenth century” now revealed “a rough sketch of a different solution,” different from the solution that had been operating since the Neolithic Revolution and tended toward turning cold into hot societies. The rise of a world of machines implemented a “conversion” in this process of dissolution. LéviStrauss foresaw a process of “integration” that would “progressively unify … the appropriate characteristics of the ‘cold’ societies and the ‘hot’ ones.” Information theory and electronics in particular now seemed to offer the unique opportunity that “[h]enceforth, history would be made on its own and society, placed outside and above history, could once more assume this regular and quasi-crystalline structure which the best-preserved of primitive societies teach us is not contrary to humanity.”66 This “perspective, utopian as it may be,” showed that social anthropology’s inquiries into cold society and their crystalline structures were of more than historical and comparative interest. In the “most troubled times” especially, they kept watch over “a permanent hope for mankind” to escape the violence of history as the societies it studied so impressively demonstrated.67 Social anthropology was concerned with the islands of symmetry in the ocean of entropy. It was the guardian of the “small islands of organization” scattered “in this vast empirical stew, if you’ll pardon the expression, where disorder reigns.”68 Social anthropologists, and Lévi-Strauss chief among them, were fascinated by cold societies. Theirs was a cold gaze, the view from afar which, as Mauss put it, looks at people and groups and their behavior the way a mechanicist

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“sees masses and system.”69 In a certain way, they were the inverse of a Kwakiutl visiting New York whom the symmetry of the city, the network of high-rises and the streets cutting through them, left indifferent because he was interested only in what really threw the organization of his own culture into question, the really “hot” things: “He reserved all his intellectual curiosity for dwarfs, giants, and bearded ladies who were exhibited at the time in Times Square, for automats, and for the brass balls ornamenting the base of staircase banisters.”70 It was just this cold gaze, which Lévi-Strauss had conquered on behalf of an entire discipline by introducing thinking in models and the theory of transformation groups aimed at determining invariances, that Norbert Wiener as recently as 1948 had denied to anthropologists and social scientists generally. In a text that prepared his contemporaries, just recovering from the war, for the Cold War’s epistemic order, Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, Wiener emphatically urged caution against the false … hopes which some of my friends have built for the social efficacy of whatever new ways of thinking this book may contain. They are certain that our control over our material environment has far outgrown our control over our social environment and our understanding thereof. Therefore, they consider that the main task of the immediate future is to extend to the fields of anthropology, of sociology, of economics, the methods of the natural sciences, in the hope of achieving a like measure of success in the social fields. From believing this necessary, they come to believe it possible. In this, I maintain, they show an excessive optimism, and a misunderstanding of the nature of all scientific achievement.71

The problem of the social sciences was that their field did not afford them the high degree of isolation between phenomenon and observer that Wiener saw as largely responsible for the great successes of the exact sciences. The “sufficiently loose coupling with the phenomena we are studying” that was possible in astronomy or modern nuclear physics—possible simply because “we are too small to influence the stars in their courses, and too large to care about anything but the mass effects of molecules, atoms, and electrons”—could not be achieved in the domain of the social sciences. There, “the coupling between the observed phenomenon and the observer” could not be “minimize[d]” by giving “a massive total account of this coupling,” quite simply because the observer was on the same level as the phenomena observed. There, observing always already meant influencing phenomena

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in a mathematically incorrigible manner. Anthropologists, sociologists, and economists did not have “the advantage of looking down” on their objects “from the cold heights of eternity and ubiquity. … We are not much concerned about human rises and falls, pleasures and agonies, sub specie aeternitatis.”72 Wiener, moreover, thought that the interesting statistical processes, the temporal sequences available to anthropologists, for example, were too short to give birth to a cold gaze. “[A]ll you could ever get out of people like Wiener was, ‘You need a longer run,’” Margaret Mead once said recalling the discussions at the Macy conferences at which, after the war, anthropologists like Gregory Bateson and herself, together with neurophysiologists, linguists, mathematicians, psychologists, endocrinologists, economists, physiologists, sociologists, and engineers were struggling to rehearse cybernetic thinking under the conditions of peace.73 And it was most likely at these conferences, which began in 1946, that Wiener came to learn about the “false hopes” of his friends in the human sciences. Wiener’s arguments, which amounted to excluding the sciences of man from the new system of notation, missed their target. They could not attain the anthropologists with a cold gaze if only because Wiener’s objections did not address the system of language, which constituted the core of the labor of formalizing the human, the search for necessary relations. Although Wiener did discuss language at length in his 1950 The Human Use of Human Beings, his concept of language was insufficiently complex. His thinking of language started with speaking and had only one goal, to conceive of language as system of communication in order to integrate human and machine. Thus he writes, for example: “In a certain sense, all communication systems terminate in machines, but the ordinary language systems terminate in the special sort of machine known as a human being.”74 Language, to be sure, was “what (perhaps) separates the human from the animal the most.”75 At the same time, however, it was “not exclusively an attribute of living beings but one which they may share to a certain degree with the machines man has constructed.”76 In a 1951 article published in American Anthropologist, entitled “Language and the Analysis of Social Laws,” Lévi-Strauss mobilized the entire formal potential of phonology to show that the conditions set by Wiener for a mathematical investigation could indeed be met by structural linguistics and, in its wake, by structural anthropology as well. Because phonology shifted the salient linguistic modes of behavior onto the level of unconscious thinking, it presented language as a social phenomenon manifesting the “independence of the observer.” The longue durée of language, in turn, yielded sufficient material for long statistical runs. Moreover, “certain linguistic

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problems” seemed to suggest they might “be solved by modern calculating machines.” For example: With a machine into which would be “fed” the equations regulating the types of structures with which phonemics usually deals, the repertory of sound which human speech organs can emit, and the minimal differential values, determined by psycho-physiological methods, … one would doubtless be able to obtain a computation of the totality of phonological structures for n oppositions (n being as high as one wished). One could thus construct a sort of periodic table of linguistic structures that would be comparable to the table of elements which Mendeleieff introduced into modern chemistry. It would then remain for us only to check the place of known languages in this table, to identify the positions and the relationships of the languages whose first-hand study is still too imperfect to give us a proper theoretical knowledge of them, and to discover the place of languages that have disappeared or are unknown, yet to come, or simply possible.77

The argument’s decisive point was that phonology had succeeded in going beyond superficially conscious and historical statements to reach “objective realities” and meet the criteria for applying mathematical methods of prediction. This, precisely, is what sparked the anthropologist’s formalist dream and the short circuiting with cybernetics and information theory he would henceforth be seeking to operate in his own peculiar way. The “objective realities” linguistics could attain “consist[ed] of systems of relations which are the products of unconscious thought processes.”78 If, then, other social phenomena lent themselves to the kind of reduction phonology presented, and if the same method led to the same result, one had to presume that the various “forms of social life are substantially of the same nature.” The question was—and just asking this question showed that the anthropologist was ascending to the Olympus of formalization—whether the various forms of social life were not simply “systems of behavior that represent the projection, on the level of conscious and socialized thought, of universal laws which regulate the unconscious activities of the mind.”79 In the response to Wiener’s rejection, the concept “message” became the decisive analogy that allowed for turning the question of the mind’s unconscious activity from its head onto the feet of cybernetics and information theory. Now, the study of kinship structures was said to have already demonstrated that “marriage regulations and kinship systems” were to be considered

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a kind of language, a set of processes permitting the establishment, between individuals and groups, of a certain type of communication. That the mediating factor, in this case, should be the women of the group, who are circulated between clans, lineages, or families, in place of the words of the group, which are circulated between individuals, does not at all change the fact that the essential aspect of the phenomenon is identical in both cases.80

The relationships of restricted and general exchange, which somewhat surprisingly appeared on the very last pages of the monumental work on kinship, albeit somewhat vaguely and merely in quotation marks, as “modalities of a great ‘communication function,’”81 were now presented as a “system of communication between men” in an emphatic sense, a sense they owed to the formalization of the concepts of information and communication. All of a sudden, it had become urgent for anthropologists and linguists to wonder “whether or not different types of communication systems in the same societies—that is, kinship and language—are or are not caused by identical unconscious structures.”82 The discourse of the fundamental structures of the human mind of which Lévi-Strauss had long been a staunch proponent began to acquire a hard core and in the process decided the epistemic position of his anthropology. One year after the dispatch to Wiener, Lévi-Strauss in his concluding remarks on behalf of the anthropologists present at a joint conference of linguists and anthropologists in Bloomington encouraged all sides to “now turn to study the communication system.”83 His friend Jakobson, who summarized the conference’s linguistic results, had articulated the agenda of a “study of language in operation” deeply indebted to the mathematical theory of communication and information theory: “Although communication engineering was not on the program of our Conference, it is indeed symptomatic that there was almost not a single paper uninfluenced by the works of C. E. Shannon and W. Weaver, of N. Wiener and R. M. Fano, or of the excellent London group.”84 His entire paper was concerned with systematically bringing this symptom to the fore. It was first of all a symptom of the epistemic situation. The basic concepts of communication theory provided Jakobson with a blueprint for commenting on the restructuring of his discipline. The new linguist thus had to approach the language of the enemy like a cryptanalyst: The receiver understands the message thanks to his knowledge of the code. The position of the linguist who deciphers a language he doesn’t

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know is different. He tries to deduce the code from the message: thus he is not a decoder; he is what is called a cryptanalyst. The decoder is a virtual addressee of the message. The American cryptanalysts who, during the war, read the Japanese secret messages were not the addressees of these messages. Obviously, the linguist must develop the technique of cryptanalysts.85

The study of the bridging function of language, that is, of the tendency of members of neighboring linguistic communities to understand each other, was being short-circuited with the “‘code switching’ of the communication engineers.”86 In Jakobson’s view—and in complete agreement with the cybernetic postwar order of knowledge—the different fields of study and procedures of linguistics had been taken out of their previously practiced isolation; the “iron curtain” had been torn down. A new model of scientific procedure had emerged. Even if linguistic analysis treated certain elements separately, it was well aware of the artificiality of separation: “it is simply like an acoustic filtering—we can exclude high frequencies or, on the contrary, low frequencies, but we know that it is only a method of scientific experiment.”87 Questions of translation were modeled on a “translation machine” that operated beyond questions of sense. For Jakobson, the conference had demonstrated his discipline’s epistemic reorientation. In his concluding remarks, Lévi-Strauss saw even more fundamental perspectives opening up for the future of the humanities and social sciences, guided by information and communication theory. Because linguistics, in “the past three or four years,” had developed not just on the level of theory but also made a “practical connection” with the engineers of the new science called cybernetics, a “small door” had “opened between the two fields,” which had for so long seemed to be entirely separate: “For centuries the humanities and the social sciences have resigned themselves to contemplating the world of the natural and exact sciences as a kind of paradise which they will never enter.” The door had been opened not by some Maxwell demon but by the strange “guest” always present in Lévi-Strauss’s text, a guest he claimed to have spotted in the audience at Bloomington as well: “this uninvited guest which has been seated during this Conference beside us and which is the human mind.”88 Thanks to the collaboration with communications engineers, this guest, for whom language and culture were said to be simply “two parallel ways of categorizing the same data” and who in his unconscious activity obviously proceeded with binary encodings, as structural linguistics and anthropology had so far demonstrated on a purely theoretical level, switched from being a phantom to being a real embodiment. When

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linguistic facts were switched into circuits, the guest acquired a concrete shape that anthropologists, too, could now latch onto. For Lévi-Strauss, the communication-theoretical interpretation of society as a whole thereby made possible constituted nothing short of a “Copernican revolution.”89 He saw the advent of an “anthropology conceived in a broader way—that is, a knowledge of man that incorporates all the different approaches which can be used and that will provide a clue to the way according to which our uninvited guest, the human mind, works.”90 This is astonishing. Barely thirty years after Marcel Mauss’s reverie about an anthropology of the total human being arising from an alliance between sociology, linguistics, and psychology, it was once more a social anthropologist who set to dreaming. This time, however, the secret of the formal laws of this history had still to be deciphered. This was the discursive policy, presented in all desirable clarity, that, on the shoulders of cybernetics and information theory, lifted anthropology from the status of an inferior to that of a superior science. At issue was a repositioning of the human sciences as analysis of the mind in the widest sense. Accordingly Lévi-Strauss declared in his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France that social anthropology, backed by the full discursive power of information theory and cybernetics, had “not yet lost hope of awakening, in the hour of the last judgment, among the natural sciences.” In a conversation with Lévi-Strauss about this enterprise, a philosopher greatly disturbed by the intrusion of calculation into the refuge of the human, Paul Ricœur, did not mince his words: “as far as you are concerned there is no ‘message’: not in the cybernetic, but in the kerygmatic sense.”91 The gospel of information theory and cybernetics, as would be expected of a message under electronic conditions, set in with chasing everything kerygmatic from the messages. Instead of being proclamations of sense, contained primarily and most of the time in books, messages were now primarily questions of data transmission, processing, and storage in human beings, animals, and machines. Labor on sense had yielded to labor on the code, deciphering to decryption. To the extent that the human sciences conquered a place in the new system of notation, any kerygmatic aspect disappeared from them as well. A hermeneutic of the human had abdicated in favor of the calculization of the human. Other discussions of the strange guest who was never invited but always present would later continue to nourish anthropological reveries about the door opened between nature and culture. Thus “cerebral anatomy and physiology,” for example, promised to provide “an absolute foundation” for the elementary structures.92 Even if “genuine structuralism,” as Lévi-Strauss writes at one point, “seeks first and foremost to grasp the

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intrinsic properties of certain types of categories,” these categories could always also be understood as expressing “the organization of the brain envisaged as a network whose various properties are expressed by the most divergent ideological systems in terms of some particular structure, with each system revealing, in its own way, modes of interconnection of the network.”93 Structuralism could thus pass for a critique of ideology under cybernetic conditions, modeled on neuronal circuits, as an analysis of the reality of the operations of the mind in the domain of culture. In the most daring moments, “mathematical thought” was said to reflect … the free functioning of the mind, that is, the activity of the cells of the cerebral cortex, relatively emancipated from any external constrained and obeying only its own laws. As the mind too is a thing, the functioning of this thing teaches us something about the nature of things: even pure reflection is in the last analysis an internalization of the cosmos. It illustrates the structure of what lies outside in a symbolic form.94

Genetics, too, was part of the epistemic-political arsenal with which the anthropologist time and again and in step with epistemic developments set about the apology of human unconscious symbolic activity. The “discovery and cracking of the genetic code” had endowed linguists’ differential systems—and thus, indirectly, the differential systems Lévi-Strauss discovered on their model to be the foundation of mythological, classificatory, and kinship organization—with “a natural and objective status.” “As can be seen,” he concludes from the work done on the genetic code, “when Nature, several thousand million years ago, was looking for a model, she borrowed in advance, and without hesitation, from the human sciences: this is the model which, for us, is associated with the names of Trubetskoy and Jakobson.”95 In the double move of naturalizing the symbolic and symbolizing the natural, sentences like these made the opposition of nature and symbol disappear in order to lead a science of the human to the paradise of the natural sciences. Yet where nature knew no hesitation there was a retreat and vertigo on the part of Lévi-Strauss as he realized the radicalness of his own discovery of the symbolic order. As early as the mid-fifties, Jacques Lacan pointed his friend’s wavering before the jump into the symbolic out to his listeners. This epistemologically highly explosive wavering had evidently been reinforced subsequently by exact scientific knowledge. In a lecture no longer extant that Lévi-Strauss gave on Lacan’s invitation, he had, according to his host, admitted “that, after all, he found himself, at

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the edge of nature, prey to vertigo, asking himself whether the roots of the symbolic tree weren’t to be rediscovered in her.” He was “in the midst,” Lacan concluded, of backtracking as regards the very sharp bipartition which he makes between nature and symbol, whose creative value he nonetheless well appreciates, because it is a method which allows him to distinguish between registers, and by the same token between orders of facts. He wavers, for a reason which may seem surprising to you, but which he has made quite explicit—he is afraid that the autonomy of the symbolic register will give rise to a masked transcendentalism once again, for which, as regards his affinities, his personal sensibility, he feels only fear and aversion. In other words, he is afraid that after we have shown God out of one door, we will bring him back in by the other. He doesn’t want the symbol, even in the extraordinarily purified form in which he offers us it, to be only a re-apparition, under a mask, of God.

That is what lies at the base of the wavering which he showed signs of when he put into question the methodical separation of the symbolic from the natural plane.96 At stake, at risk in this wavering was all of Lévi-Strauss’s analysis. For if the symbolic function had constituted, ever since its emergence, the order of the human in its totality, then it was unthinkable to find any extrasymbolic guarantees that endowed symbolical structures with existence such that they were mere illustrations of structures of the outside. It sufficed that the function of the symbolic functioned and in just this way constituted the universe of the human. For “[i]f the symbolic function functions, we are inside it.”97 We would then be as if taken out of the denuded outside and it would be the symbolic function that would have always already guided us through the phenomena. One might—but this, of course, was and remains a decisive threshold—one might waive existence for symbols and thus for thinking. Yet the fear of the transcendence of symbols, the fear that dictated the defensive conjuring of finding symbols in nature, obeyed the logic of the traditional episteme. In an age when the function of the symbolic was being purified by cybernetics and information theory, God made his home at precisely that point where, beyond the short-circuiting of the symbolic with the real, thinkers once more, once again succumbed to the fascination of the real, the real that, withdrawn from the symbolic, was at the same time entirely preoccupied with modeling structures. God made his home in the enigma of an as it were naked structure, for example, in a nature that

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had for billions of years been searching for a model. But what was it that Lacan said? We often find in people who introduce new ideas a hesitation to maintain the full acuity of their ideas that makes them fall behind these ideas. Yet sometimes even these concealments provide those coming later with sheer unfathomable material for thought.

A new mythology of the binary Lévi-Strauss deprived an entire age of its archaic illusions. For half a century, one had been hard on the heels of the ghost of the “primitive” to come to terms with the insecure epistemic situation. The elucidation of the conditions of preliterate existence and knowledge was supposed to yield insight into the new postliterate conditions of the symbolic and of communication. There were reveries about primitive thought-smithies where blanks for the success story, now coming to an end, of Aristotelianism and Cartesianism were produced, reveries that were, so to speak, crawling around the world of symbols. The pre-Aristotelian history of the rise and fall of categories and the history of the primitive use of symbols served to understand the long historical provenance of the great transformation of the conditions of knowledge that was taking place. These reveries were scattered in the light of invariances that were now entering the province of the human. Where one had once thought to witness the genesis of mature symbolic thinking from the nursery of primitive symbolisms, one now saw completely savage systems of symbols blazing at the very beginning of history. Moreover, an entire age had descended into the shadow world of magical transmission relations and communications between the sacred and the profane in order to sacralize its new, as yet unthinkable channels. Yet Lévi-Strauss’s decryption of the binary codes governing “savage” societies’ classificatory, mythological, and kinship systems of control, which paralleled the differential deciphering of the facts of communication by engineers and mathematicians, moved the archaisms of communication to the stage where they were being demystified. With Lévi-Strauss, the two passages through the imaginary that had characterized the episteme since the late nineteenth century came to a halt. The analyst’s work, which he himself saw as “nibbl[ing] away tirelessly at [the] edges,”98 undermined the ground of the double genealogical speculation about the symbolic and about communication. Thanks to cybernetics’ new system of notation, Lévi-Strauss’s disillusioning work on structures acquired immense discursive power. Cybernetic models made their way into structural anthropology and explained the

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insights into the nature and value of the symbolic function gained thanks to phonology and the theory of transformation groups. It was now possible not just to work on discovering an algebra of elementary structures such as Lévi-Strauss saw them take shape behind kinship phenomena and in the form of a notation of the basic operations at work there. Structures now increasingly came into focus in their function as symbolic techniques for regulating societies. In the course of cyberneticizing structural anthropology, Lévi-Strauss focused on logical classificatory and mythological systems. They appeared as symbolic procedures with which cold societies (unlike hot societies, which had internalized historical becoming as the engine driving their development), in a kind of auto-assertion of their structural particularity, struggled against the facticity of events and thus against the power of history. Under the anthropologist’s cold gaze, so-called primitive societies arose as cybernetic entities that in drifting through time struggled to maintain their fundamental states of equilibrium. They advanced to be models of a present whose entry into the cybernetic age seemed to announce an entire civilization taking leave of history. This provided cybernetics with its grand narrative, one that even the discursive genius of Norbert Wiener, who proclaimed the new age of control and communication in 1948, never dared dream of: The Savage Mind, the Magna Carta of structuralism, if you like, was a book about the origins of information theory. The text reconstructed the models of the first symbolic machines thought up by human beings. Twentieth-century cyberneticists beheld the face of an untimely twin who, despite all appearances, had always already—and that meant prior to all grey theory—unconsciously been a cyberneticist, a twin of whom to date nobody had been aware. First in a hot then in a cold war, first in secret then openly, mathematicians had waged a battle against the “evil” of disorder.99 In the peacetime calculus of anthropologists who like Lévi-Strauss did not have to take the enemy’s deviousness into account but were primarily interested in the bad moods of chance and the threats it posed for the beauty and the quiet course of symbolically well-structured societies, this battle had advanced to become the task of thinking and the initial condition of culture. The principle that set the course for the interpretation of savage thinking was that “[t]he thought we call primitive is founded on this demand for order” but only to the extent that all thinking was founded on this demand.100 This definition allowed for distinguishing between “two parallel modes of acquiring knowledge,” the magical and the scientific. Although “their theoretical and practical results differ in value,” they resembled each other in that “both … require the same sort of mental operations.” Their differences

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were not differences “in kind,” they were a matter of “the different types of phenomena to which they are applied.”101 Both were certainly not a function of different stages of development of the human mind but rather of two strategic levels at which nature is accessible to scientific enquiry: one roughly adapted to that of perception and the imagination: the other at a remove from it. It is as if the necessary connections which are the object of all science, neolithic or modern, could be arrived at by two different routes, one very close to, and the other more remote from, sensible intuition.102

These sentences blew out an entire tradition that, where it did not regard magical thinking as an offspring of the prelogical, had turned it into a kind of hesitant and stuttering science and saw in the overcoming of the prelogical by science the stakes and the engine driving the history of thinking. The farewell to the epistemic primacy of intuition—which had been one of the leitmotifs of the epistemic crisis since the second half of the nineteenth century and one of the triggers of the crisis project of a genealogy of thinking as such—now came into focus as something that concerned less the very foundations of thinking than merely the approach to phenomena. Magical knowledge was the “science of the concrete” and characterized by an “unflagging exercise of intuition.”103 It was rooted in that period in the history of thought in which “man began by applying himself to the most difficult task, that of systematizing what is immediately presented to the senses, on which science for a long time turned its back and which it is only beginning to bring back into its purview.”104 However, the “real question” was “whether there is a point of view from which” two things could “be seen as ‘going together’ … and whether some initial order can be introduced into the universe by means of these groupings.”105 This guiding question suggested that ever since there had been thinking, the primary issue had to have been the fact of structuring, that is, a symbolic effort. The fact that there was classification, not how it was done had become the main issue the moment that thinking could be posited as a function of the symbolic. The question what importance intuition was to be assigned was secondary. “Any classification is superior to chaos and even a classification at the level of sensible properties is a step towards rational ordering.” The weight of intuition as well as its kind (be it sense intuition or inner intuition or one that appeared in the process of knowledge thanks to work on models) varied according to the strategic level on which thinking achieved symbolic order.106

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In principle, the savage tracing “a diagram in the sand” to explain to the anthropologist how, for example, rules of marriage and his kinship system functioned performed the same gesture of thinking as “a professor at the École Polytechnique demonstrating a proof on the blackboard.”107 The only reason why the “savage” could appear beside the professor was that “the ‘structuring’ has an intrinsic effectiveness of its own whatever the principles and methods which suggested it.”108 The “savage” and the professor were so to speak in search of essential relationships. Only the level on which their respective logical effort was applied differed. Unlike the mathematician or the engineer, the “savage” was working on a “concrete logic.” He was familiar with “the polyvalent nature of logics which appeal to several, formally distinct types of connection at the same time,” to relations of resemblance, for example, and to relations of contiguity. His logical systems operated along “several axes,” with “the number, nature and ‘quality’ of these logical axes” not being “the same in every culture.” Based on “the formal properties of the systems of reference to which they appeal in the construction of their classifications,” it was possible to distinguish between simpler and more complex systems.109 As a matter of principle, however, it was safe to assume that “the existence of some connection is more essential than the exact nature of the connections.” And according to Lévi-Strauss, the “savages’” concern with order was such that “[o]n the formal plane one might say that they will make use of anything that comes to hand.”110 All that matters on the level of form is that a code is usable. It has nothing to do with things themselves. Plants, animals, stones, celestial bodies, etc. that served a significant function in a particular system of classification never counted as such but only ever as bearers of “features that can be combined to fabricate more complex messages.” As mere “means of thinking,” these “terms never have any intrinsic significance.” Their significance solely depended on their position within the system; it was “a function of the history and cultural context on the one hand and of the structural system in which they are called upon to appear on the other.”111 That was why the only constant over time within the system were the relationships; the elements varied. Savage thinking thus appeared as a total encoding of the real. It gave expression to an immense formal concern, namely “preoccupation with exhaustive observation and the systematic cataloguing of relations and connections.”112 And the native himself appeared, all in all, as a “logical hoarder,” unceasingly pulling all the strings and keeping together all the strands of the real.113 The logical machines he constructed revealed to Lévi-Strauss the full extent of a neolithic art of control that aimed at preserving through time the order once wrested from

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disorder thanks to a “structural orientation,”114 keeping it on course during the onslaught of events such as wars, migrations, or demographic developments. The savage thinking machines bore all the traits of protocybernetic machines. As long as an event did not shatter the structure entirely, “new structural solutions” could be found “along approximately the same lines as the previous structure.”115 Most of the time, only partial systems of a structure were affected by the intrusion of history. Because cataclysms did not immediately bear on all its levels, it was possible for some partial systems, that is, in some local logics, to preserve “all or part of their original orientation”: If, for the sake of argument, we suppose an initial point at which the set of systems was precisely adjusted, then this network of systems will react to any change affecting one of its parts like a motor with a feedback device: governed (in both senses of the word) by its previous harmony, it will direct the discordant mechanism towards an equilibrium which will be at any rate a compromise between the old state of affairs and the confusion brought in from outside.116

Occasionally, the thinking of the natives quite openly operated on “the hypothesis of a structural regulation of the historical process.”117 Thanks to speculative countermeasures, “disorganization” was followed by “a reorganization as closely as possible in line with the earlier state of affairs.”118 The “care for differential distances” that pervaded savage empirical as well as speculative activity made it possible for their institutions “to navigate, as it were, the stream of intelligibility … always at a safe distance from the Scylla and Charybdis of diachrony and synchrony, event and structure, the aesthetic and the logical.”119 Through “the institutions they give themselves” on the basis of their symbolic systems, Lévi-Strauss concluded, cold societies seek “to annul the possible effects of historical factors on their equilibrium and continuity in a quasi-automatic fashion.”120 The series of transformations their structures underwent were the purest expression of their art of maintaining their equilibrium in the maelstrom of history and navigating the ocean of unintelligibility in the cold current of its own intelligibility. Cold societies as modeled by Lévi-Strauss bore a remarkable resemblance to the homeostatic systems studied by the British psychiatrist and cyberneticist, Ross W. Ashby, in the 1950s, systems capable of maintaining a stable state in an ongoing struggle with a hostile and difficult environment.121 The “primitives’” systems of classification that allowed them to navigate disorganization operated the same way as the one adopted “on the plane of technical activity”: “the existence of differentiating features is of much greater importance than

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their content.” The “operative value” of their system lay in their being “codes suitable for conveying messages which can be transposed into other codes, and for expressing messages received by means of different codes in terms of their own system.” They created symbolic “grids” that, superimposed on something unintelligible to decipher it, made “divisions and contrasts” visible, that is, they brought out “the formal conditions necessary for a significant message to be conveyed.”122 The “meshes of the net … filter” the real.123 Thanks to a rigorous regime of dichotomous operations and multiple referential axes that united the general and the specific, the abstract and the concrete, and thus secured access to the real, these machines succeeded in the constant mediation of nature and culture and in organizing resistance against the corrosive power of history. Lévi-Strauss presented the effects of the savage thinking machines in extenso, on all levels on which they accessed phenomena. In ascending to the general and the abstract, “reality undergoes a series of progressive purifications, whose final term will be provided, as intended, in the form of a simple binary opposition (high and low, right and left, peace and war, etc.).”124 In descending, the qualitative variety of natural species and appearances became the matter of symbolic organization. Throughout, “the principle of all or nothing” reigned—not only as the basic law of all rigorous binary code but also and especially as the condition of possibility of technically implementing it in the real and as the basic supposition with which models of neuronal circuiting operated. This principle, accordingly, not only possessed heuristic value, it was “an expression of a property of what exists: either everything, or nothing, makes sense.” Relegated to a footnote, there is an essential supplement: “Everything, except the existence of what exists, which is not one of its properties.”125 Here again, the question gaped open that Lévi-Strauss could never keep himself from asking, the question of the ground of being of the symbolic, the question that as soon as it emerged once more entangled the symbolist in metaphysics. It was only because his own age provided him with the tools to decipher it that Lévi-Strauss could admire in savage thinking both a “consuming symbolic ambition such as humanity has never again seen rivalled” and the attention to the concrete this ambition entailed. Thanks to information theory and cybernetics, the “sustained interest” savage thinking inspired could be articulated in terms of hard facts.126 At the high point of modernity, these facts displayed the short circuiting of the symbolic with the real that Lévi-Strauss considered to be at work already in the Neolithic Revolution: This language with its limited vocabulary able to express any message by combinations of oppositions between its constitutive units, this logic

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of comprehension for which contents are indissociable from form, this systematic of finite classes, this universe made up of meanings, no longer appears to us as retrospective witnesses of a time. … This time is now restored to us, thanks to the discovery of a universe of information where the laws of savage thought reign once more: “heaven” too, “walking on earth” among a population of transmitters and receivers whose message, while in transmission, constitute objects of the physical world and can be grasped both from without and from within.127

Sentences such as these pointed to the twilight of a history of fascination with primitiveness that marked the transition from the age of intuitive to that of symbolic thinking and the entry into the age of communication. Everything that had once belonged to a discourse under the spell of primitiveness—the search for the extralogical foundations of the logical in totemistic aberrations, the effort to discover the primitive primal scene of the use of symbols and gain insight into the historical pathologies of this use of symbols, the struggle to establish a beyond or before or below of representational thinking, and the discovery of a primitive world of communication, a world of charges and discharges, of communications of messages and transmissions of forces—all this was ejected from knowledge about the human by a new myth, the cybernetic myth of the present age, which told of the return of savage thinking: The idea that the universe of primitives (or supposedly such) consists principally in messages is not new. But until recently a negative value was attributed to what was wrongly taken to be a distinctive characteristic, as though this difference between the universe of the primitives and our own contained the explanation of their mental and technological inferiority. … Physical science had to discover that a semantic universe possesses all the characteristics of an object in its own right for it to be recognized that the manner in which primitive peoples conceptualize their world is not merely coherent but the very one demanded in the case of an object whose elementary structure presents the picture of a discontinuous complexity.128

The end of anthropology’s discourse about “savages”’ mysticism of messages paralleled the logarithmic demythologization of the problem of communication. The moment the contemporary channels were demythologized, the primitive channels, too, were desacralized. Leaving images of thought of primitiveness far behind, it was now possible to claim that savage thinking

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had simply taken the opposite path of information theory. Where savage thinking was said to have gained access to physical phenomena exclusively by interpreting them as messages, information theory discovered the world of information to be a part of the physical world: In treating the sensible properties of the animal and plant kingdoms as if they were the elements of a message, and in discovering “signatures”— and so signs—in them, men have made mistakes of identification: the meaningful element was not always the one they supposed. But, without perfected instruments which would have permitted them to place it where it most often is—namely, at the microscopic level—they already discerned “as through a glass darkly” principles of interpretation whose heuristic value and accordance with reality have been revealed to us only through very recent inventions: telecommunications, computers and electron microscopes.129

Savage thinking appeared to be a preflection (Vorahmung) of information theory the way information theory could be considered a reflection (Nachahmung) of savage thinking. Stretching out between the two was the history of knowledge. The becoming of thinking, which had been the object of half a century’s subterraneous labor, seemed suddenly to have entered into a feedback loop. Strictly speaking, it was only the path by which the two fundamental modes of knowledge, the “neolithic” and the “modern,” encountered one another in so unexpected a fashion. The genealogist’s hot gaze, which had once sought to open up diachronic breaches in the synchronicity of thought, was now being replaced by the cold gaze that saw the history of thinking with the eyes of a cyberneticist as a closed system that, after a long series of adjustments that had increased its complexity, found itself more or less in the position from which it had started. We have had to wait until the middle of this century for the crossing of long separated paths: that which arrives at the physical world by the detour of communication, and that which as we have recently come to know, arrives at the world of communication by the detour of the physical. The entire process of human knowledge thus assumes the character of a closed system and we therefore remain faithful to the inspiration of the savage mind when we recognise that, by an encounter it alone could have foreseen, the most modern form of the scientific spirit will have contributed to legitimize the principles of savage thought and to re-establish it in its rightful place.130

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These passages, which concluded a cybernetic epistemology that structural anthropology had developed by staying close to its material, gave voice to the full extent of the historical and epistemological self-conception of the discipline. Having entered into an alliance with the natural sciences, Lévi-Strauss was fully confident in his ability to gauge the full extent of the history of the illusions of his discipline. Moreover, this history presented with utmost clarity the historical conditions of possibility of his own effort at disillusionment. Even if Lévi-Strauss did at one point speak of these final pages of La pensée sauvage as bad poetry, they remained decisive in the long years of his work on myth that followed. The historical-epistemological poetry of the validation of savage thinking by modern science returned in more or less intense variations. The cybernetic orientation of structural analysis was refined and extended. In addition to the savage thinker’s information-theoretical intuition, however, increasing emphasis was now placed on his group-theoretical intuition: “myths or variants of myths were arranged like Klein groups including a theme, the contrary of the theme and their opposites.”131 A savage group theory, as it were, constituted the unconscious schema of savage thinking. A myth no sooner comes into being than it is modified through a change of narrator, either within the tribal group, or as it passes from one community to another; some elements drop out or are replaced by others, sequences change places, and the modified structure moves through a series of states, the variations of which nevertheless still belong to the same set.132

There was no “matter of mythology” that analysis might “crystallize again into a whole with the general appearance of a stable and well-def ined structure.” Myth was “a shifting reality, perpetually exposed to the attacks of a past that destroys it and of a future that changes it.”133 Its movement obeyed the laws of transformation. Mythic thinking itself, it seemed, “operates essentially through a process of transformation.”134 Yet unlike mathematics, “myth subordinates structure to a meaning, of which it becomes the immediate expression.”135 Because myth, like the savage logics of classification, was primarily a self-controlling machine for transforming nature into culture, that is, nonsense into sense, it must not lead to sense-disfiguring distortions of a structure, as could be the case, for example, for topological figures. The transformations a myth adopted to respond to changes, disequilibria, and tension with a meaningful structural variation, that is, the possible “states of the group,” were therefore subject, counter to all mathematical theory, to an essential restriction. Instead of

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passing from one variant of one and the same myth to the next by way of gradual differences, mythical transformation always functioned by way of “clear-cut relationships such as contrariness, contradiction, inversion or symmetry” and “only some of the possible states of the myth are actualized.”136 The mythic machinery was a specific mode of “processing reality”137 and as such subordinate to the procedures of the mind. The mind, however, opposed any tendency toward distortion and always aimed at preserving the clear “logical armature”138 of structures and only ever subjected them to discrete changes. The creation of sense demanded discontinuity, markers in the continuum of the real that lay beyond all sense. Myth, like all speculative enterprises of savage thinking, like all operations of the mind in general, selected symbolic “cross-sections of reality.”139 The fact that the mythical requirement of sharp oppositions was to be an effect of a requirement of the mind in turn obeyed a historicalepistemological intellectual restraint. Under the conditions of symbolic thinking in the age of cybernetic machines, talk of “mind” could only mean an entity functioning in an essentially binary manner, and thinking could only appear as a question of binary encodings. In perfect harmony with the historical-epistemic situation, thinking and mind were encased in a dichotomy. With the calm conscience of a contemporary of the exact knowledge of communication that shattered all discursive boundaries, Lévi-Strauss could assume that an “arrangement of matching opposition inbuilt, as it were, in the human understanding, begins to function, whenever recurrent experiences, which may be biological, technological, economic, sociological, etc., in origin, activate the control.” This was the hardware of all “conceptual,” but also of all “mythic machinery.” It is at this exact point that the “problem of the genesis of myth” became “inseparable … from that of thought itself.” For a myth to be generated, it was simply necessary “that an initial opposition should be injected into experience.” A “systematic application of rules governing opposition” led to the emergence of myths, and to the transformation of myths into other myths, which were transformed in turn, and so on. What emerged from the attempt to determine the successive transformations of a mythic system for all accessible variants of a given myth, to reduce them to their essential outline, was that a mythical system could be reduced not merely to “the expression of an opposition,” to an “absolutely undecidable sequence,” but, “to be more accurate, to the expression of the opposition as being the initial datum” as such.140 Myth amounted to a kind of offspring of a human cybernetic premonition. Its expression of the opposition as such intuitively grasped an essential binarism to be the fundamental datum and the condition of the possibility

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of every symbolic construction that captured the real. It implied a kind of protocybernetic ontology according to which nature itself rushed toward human symbolic activity. A myth’s undecidable sequence was thus said to be reducible to the assertion that the “being of the world” consists of a disparity. It cannot be said purely and simply of the world that it is: it exists in the form of an initial asymmetry, which shows itself in a variety of ways according to the angle from which it is being apprehended: between the high and the low, the sky and the earth, land and water, the near and the far, left and right, male and female, etc. This inherent disparity of the world sets mythic thought in motion, but it does so because, on the hither side of thought, it conditions the existence of every object of thought.141

The binary distinctions that guaranteed the mythic legibility of the world thus existed not only in human language. They lay in the real as such. In a kind of prestructuring, the real by itself furnished the clues for its own enciphering, which had initially been mythic and now entered the stage of perfected efficacy thanks to modern science. For Lévi-Strauss—in harmony with the cybernetic promise of his time, which had emerged above all from the happy conjunction of information theory with biology, physiology, and neurophysiology—“a preexistent rationality” was revealed, “immanent to the world,” a rationality without which “thought could never apprehend phenomena and science would be impossible.” Myth presented itself as a thinking that although it seemed to be the height of irrationality nonetheless moved in a kind of “rationality” that constituted “a kind of external framework.” Myth was comprised in the universe yet nonetheless constituted an “objective thought, which operates in an autonomous and rational way, even before subjectivizing the surrounding rationality, and taming it into usefulness.”142 Cybernetic knowledge marked the apex of this domestication, the point at which domesticated thinking, after its long passage through internalization and subjectivation, unexpectedly bent back into its savage version. Cybernetics was a savage thinking in purified form that rendered this thinking its intelligibility in all its glory and enchantment. Lévi-Strauss was fully aware that cybernetics was the historical condition of the possibility of his work on myth. In a five-part series of lectures on the radio 1977, he explained to his listeners in the register of historical-epistemological poetry that certain properties of myth could only be understood

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at a time when cybernetics and computers have come to exist in the scientific world and have provided us with an understanding of binary operations which had already been put to use in a very different way with concrete objects or beings by mythical thought. So there is really not a kind of divorce between mythology and science. It is only the present state of scientific thought that gives us the ability to understand what is in this myth, to which we remained completely blind before the idea of binary operations become familiar to us.143

The historical-epistemological awareness of the conditions of his own efforts at demythologization in turn tipped over into a mythologization of cybernetics and information theory. His work on myth was always also a work on the myth of his own age of the symbolic and of communication. In the end, structural analysis itself would live on this mythologization of the new system of notation in particular: “In fact,” we read in the great finale of his Mythologica, “structural analysis, which some critics dismiss as a gratuitous and decadent game, can only appear in the mind because its model is already present in the body.”144 In its peculiar way, Lévi-Strauss disenchantment of the age’s fantasms about the “primitive” grounds of thinking and the “sacred” worlds of transmission, which he operated by cyberneticizing anthropology, actualized the project of a history of systems of thought sketched by George Boole at the end of The Laws of Thought. Boole had envisioned a reading of the history of thinking as a history of the misinterpretations of the symbolic laws of thought that manifested the reality of the mind. The core of this forensic project dreamed up at the beginning of the age of the symbolic was to consist of the failures to recognize the main law, the binary constitution of the human mind. A good one hundred years after the use of symbols had been perfected and at the moment it became possible to implement in the real the functioning algebra of thinking Boole had thought up on paper alone, Lévi-Strauss, with a small twist, showed that where there seemed to be the least hope of finding the purely symbolic activity of the mind, it was nothing but this activity one found to be at work. Boole’s first law of thought, the work of the greatest historian of necessary relations the twentieth century has known suggested, governed all of the symbolic ambitions of the “savage.” In between, there may in fact have been a long history of misrecognition yet to be written, but it had been necessary to transition from the stage of the unconscious deployment of human symbolic activity to the stage of the conscious employment of symbols.

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After the nineteenth century had ended with a “twilight of the gods,” the calculization of the human by structural anthropology anticipated, if Lévi-Strauss had his way, the “twilight of humanity” thanks to cybernetics and information theory. From a historical-epistemological point of view, nothing could be more coherent. The twilight of the gods that followed the sciences’ entry into the realm of the autonomous use of symbols entailed what amounted to a discourse of dedeification under the heading of the sacred. Around 1900, the place where the gods had once dwelled was initially taken over, in step with the technological-epistemic development of a field-theoretical thinking of the sacred, by anonymous forces that served as the basis of elementary forms of religious life. Stories about the transmission mysticism of the “primitive,” about the diffuse conditions under which a primitive use of symbols emerged, and about the birth of the categories told of the foundations of “a happy and liberated humanity” that seemed to be on the ascendency thanks to a superior handling of symbols. The concern with genealogically tracing the sciences’ total profanation of the use of symbols that had toppled the foundations of knowledge back to its sacred origins, where the homo symbolicus was to be found, led to an immense historical assessment of the revision of the epistemic foundations. One sought to find out everything about the use humanity had made of symbols and the value they had held ever since symbols had first emerged. The gods allegedly behind the power of symbols were cast aside. But the moment that the characteristics of the symbolic could be turned over onto the real and symbols functioned all by themselves, without people to guard or control them, even an anthropologist could not but note the disappearance, after the disappearance of the gods and along with disappearance of the tale of the sacred and primitive, of the human being as such. “Man,” Lacan once said, on a par with and in reference to his friend Lévi-Strauss, “is engaged with all his being in the procession of numbers, in a primitive symbolism which is distinct from imaginary representations.”145 Tied into the procession of numbers, humans had to dismiss also and especially those imaginary representations they fashioned of themselves and their becoming. Today, we have a sense that this includes even the dream of our own disappearance in the current of intelligibility into which symbolisms have drawn the human being. Every time an age switches from the stage of epistemic poetry to that of rational prose, it becomes aware of the blind spots it has produced, to which it owes the most beautiful texts and the happiest reveries. Despite all the historical-epistemological distancing that is one, if not the vehicle of our rational prose today, we know only too well that it is to this blindness that we owe almost everything we are tasked with thinking through.

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Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

29. 30.

Lévi-Strauss, “New York in 1941,” 260. Lévi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship, 84. [Lévi-Strauss, “New York in 1941,” 260.] See Hodges, Alan Turing, 250. Lévi-Strauss and Eribon, Conversations with Claude Lévi-Strauss, 30. See Aspray, “The Scientific Conceptualization of Information,” 124. See Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 102–3. This view of “Shannon’s choice” was first articulated by in Hayles, Chaos Bound, 59. In that chapter (pp. 31–60), Hayles tells the story of the connection of information and entropy in detail, especially Brillouin’s instauration of information as negative entropy and Shannon’s identification of information and entropy. See Nyquist, “Certain Factors Affecting Telegraph Speed,” and Hartley, “Transmission of Information.” Shannon and Weaver, Mathematical Theory of Communication, 3. Aspray, “The Scientific Conceptualization of Information,” 122, my emphasis; on Nyquist and Hartley, see 120–22. Shannon, “The Bandwagon,” 462, Shannon’s emphasis. Shannon, “The Bandwagon,” 462, Shannon’s emphasis. Shannon, “The Bandwagon,” 462. Lacan, “A, m, a, S,” 316. Lévi-Strauss, “Introduction: The Mathematics of Man,” 582 and 582n2. Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, 267. Lévi-Strauss, “Structural Analysis,” 31. Shannon, “A Symbolic Analysis,” 471. Lévi-Strauss, “The Effectiveness of Symbols,” 201. All quotations from Lacan, “The Symbolic Universe,” 31–32. See Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan, 363. Guilbaud, “Divagations cybernétiques,” 283–84. The 1954 volume he published in the Que sais-je? series was called La Cybernétique.
 Lacan, “Psychoanalysis and Cybernetics,” 300. Cf. Lacan, “Psychoanalysis and Cybernetics,” 300. Lévi-Strauss, “The Scope of Anthropology,” 5. Foucault, The Order of Things, 312–18. Lacan, “Freud, Hegel and the Machine,” 76. Hermann Weyl, in his Philosophy of Mathematics and Natural Science, also speaks of the “leap into the beyond” of the purely symbolic (38 and 50). Even if the remark was aimed strictly at Hilbert’s project, Weyl was certainly aware that his remark could also be read as a general comment on the epistemic situation. Lévi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship, 494. Lévi-Strauss in a conversation broadcast on French television on February 19, 1968; see Lévi-Strauss et al., “Vivre et parler,” no. 1222, 4.

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31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

40. 41.

42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57.

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Lévi-Strauss, “New York in 1942,” 260. Lévi-Strauss, “The Scope of Anthropology,” 9. Lévi-Strauss, “Introduction: The Mathematics of Man,” 585. Lévi-Strauss, “Introduction: The Mathematics of Man,” 585 and 586; on the question of “great numbers,” see Katzmair, “Ordnungen des Zählens.” Lévi-Strauss, “Structural Analysis,” 34, Lévi-Strauss’s emphasis. Lévi-Strauss, “Structural Analysis,” 34 and 51. See the programmatic text: Bourbaki, “The Architecture of Mathematics.” Lévi-Strauss and Eribon, Conversations, 53. Lévi-Strauss, “The Structural Study of Myth,” 228 and 219. In Lire LéviStrauss, Lucien Scubla traces the history of the canonical formula of myth in Lévi-Strauss’s oeuvre as a whole, spells out its formal implications, and discusses the mathematical comment or treatment it has received. These and the following quotes: Lévi-Strauss, “The Structural Study of Myth,” 228–229. Note that the French and German translations of the English original, significantly, leave out the reference to the IBM equipment. With the exception of one model that Lévi-Strauss kept as a souvenir in his office at the Laboratoire d’Anthropologie sociale, none of these have survived. They were, he told me in a letter, fleeting objects, meant only for the moment of working on a specific structure. Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, 89. See Lévi-Strauss, “Comparative Religions of Nonliterate Peoples,” 62. Lévi-Strauss, The Jealous Potter, 157. Lévi-Strauss, Tristes tropiques, 57–58. Lévi-Strauss, “Social Structure,” 279. [Lévi-Strauss, “La notion de structure en ethnologie,” 306; the phrase is lost in the English translation of the essay, “Social Structure,” where it would find its place just after the last quotation.—Trans.] Lévi-Strauss, “The Meaning and Use of the Notion of Model,” 81. Lévi-Strauss, “The Meaning and Use of the Notion of Model,” 78. Lévi-Strauss, “The Meaning and Use of the Notion of Model,” 79. Lévi-Strauss, “The Meaning and Use of the Notion of Model,” 80. Lévi-Strauss, “The Meaning and Use of the Notion of Model,” 80 [modified]. Lévi-Strauss, “Social Structure, 279–280. Pierre de Latil devotes an entire chapter of his La Pensée Artificielle (translated as Thinking by Machine) to “The Use of Models” as a new generator of knowledge. Lévi-Strauss, “Social Structure, 297. For an account of the history of power-knowledge behind Wiener’s dream, see Galison, “The Ontology of the Enemy.” 
 This has been pointed out by Barbosa de Almeida, “Symmetry and Entropy,” 386. On the axiomatic method and model construction, see Weyl, Philosophy of Mathematics and Natural Science, 18–29. Bernd Mahr provides a historical-systematic account of the concept of models in “Modellieren: Beobachtungen und Gedanken zur Geschichte des Modellbegriffs.”

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58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64.

65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73.

74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87.

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Kay, Who Wrote the Book of Life? 82. Rosenblueth et al., “Behavior, Purpose and Teleology,” 180. Lévi-Strauss, “Social Structure,” 283. [Lévi-Strauss, “Social Structure,” 280.] Lévi-Strauss, “The Scope of Anthropology,” 18.
 Lévi-Strauss, “Social Structure,” 281 [modified—cf. “La notion de structure en ethnologie,” 309—Trans.]. Lévi-Strauss, “The Scope of Anthropology,” 29; on the difference between statistical and mechanical models, see Lévi-Strauss, “Social Structure,” 283–89. In addition, Barbosa de Almeida (“Symmetry and Entropy,” 374–75) provides a detailed account of this difference under the heading “Timecancelling Machines” and stressed the role it plays in Lévi-Strauss’s work. Lévi-Strauss, “The Scope of Anthropology,” 30. All quotes from Lévi-Strauss, “The Scope of Anthropology,” 29–30. Lévi-Strauss, “The Scope of Anthropology,” 30. Lévi-Strauss and Eribon, Conversations, 102. Mauss, The Gift, quoted in Lévi-Strauss, “The Scope of Anthropology,” 28. Cf. Lévi-Strauss, “The Scope of Anthropology,” 27. Wiener, Cybernetics, 162. Wiener, Cybernetics, 163–64. 
 See Brand et al., “For God’s Sake, Margaret,” 36. On the Macy conferences, see Heims, The Cybernetics Group, and Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 50–83. The proceedings of the conference, longtime out of print, have been republished under the editorship of Claus Pias in Cybernetics: The MacyConferences 1946–1953, vol. 1. Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings, 79. This sentence from the opening of the fourth chapter in the first German edition was not taken up in the second edition, on which the English translation is based. Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings, 75–76. Lévi-Strauss, “Language and the Analysis of Social Laws,” 57–58. Lévi-Strauss, “Language and the Analysis of Social Laws,” 58. Lévi-Strauss, “Language and the Analysis of Social Laws,” 58–59, my emphasis. Lévi-Strauss, “Language and the Analysis of Social Laws,” 61, Lévi-Strauss’s emphasis. Lévi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship, 494. Lévi-Strauss, “Language and the Analysis of Social Laws,” 61 and 62. Lévi-Strauss, “Linguistics and Anthropology,” 73. Jakobson, “Results of a Joint Conference,” 556. Jakobson, “Results of a Joint Conference,” 560; for a more detailed description of the historical background of the introduction of the concept “code” in linguistics, see Fehr, “Interceptions et interférences.” Jakobson, “Results of a Joint Conference,” 560. Jakobson, “Results of a Joint Conference,” 555.

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88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99. 100. 101. 102. 103. 104. 105. 106. 107. 108. 109. 110. 111. 112. 113. 114. 115. 116. 117. 118. 119. 120. 121.

122. 123.

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Lévi-Strauss, “Linguistics and Anthropology,” 70–71. Lévi-Strauss, “Postscript to Chapters III and IV,” here 83. Lévi-Strauss, “Linguistics and Anthropology,” 80. Lévi-Strauss, “A Confrontation,” 74. Lévi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship, xxix (preface to the second edition); on the question of the structuralist brain, see Mendelsohn, “Das wilde Gehirn.” Lévi-Strauss, The Naked Man, 627. Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, 248n. Lévi-Strauss, The Naked Man, 684 and 685. Lacan, “The Symbolic Universe,” 35. Lacan, “The Symbolic Universe,” 31. Lévi-Strauss and Eribon, Conversations, 7. See Galison, “The Ontology of the Enemy,” 231. [Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, 10.] Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, 13. Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, 15. Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, 12 [modified]. Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, 11. Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, 9. Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, 15. Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, 251. Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, 12. Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, 66, 61, and 63. Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, 66. Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, 54–55 [and 67]. Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, 10. Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, 267. Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, 68. Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, 68. Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, 68–69. Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, 69 [modified]. Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, 71. Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, 73–74 [modified]. Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, 233–34. See, for example, Ashby, “Homeostasis,” and An Introduction to Cybernetics. The study of cold societies furthermore demonstrated that, contrary to what the great theoretician of social homeostasis, Walter B. Cannon, thought, “primitive” societies are precisely not comparable to heterostatically regulated organisms incapable of developing organizational structures. On Cannon’s transition from the physiological to the social concept of homeostasis, see Tanner, “‘Weisheit des Körpers’ und soziale Homöostase.” Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, 75–76. Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, 168.

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124. 125. 126. 127. 128. 129. 130. 131. 132. 133. 134. 135. 136. 137. 138. 139. 140. 141. 142. 143. 144. 145.

Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, 217. Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, 172–73 and 173n. Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, 220. Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, 267. Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, 267–68. Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, 268. Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, 269. Lévi-Strauss, The Naked Man, 649. 
 Lévi-Strauss, The Naked Man, 675. Lévi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked, 3. Lévi-Strauss, The Naked Man, 675. Lévi-Strauss, The Naked Man, 650. Lévi-Strauss, The Naked Man, 675. [Lévi-Strauss, The Naked Man, 603.] Lévi-Strauss, The Naked Man, 675. Lévi-Strauss, The Naked Man, 604. All quotes from Lévi-Strauss, The Naked Man, 602–4, my emphasis. Lévi-Strauss, The Naked Man, 603. Lévi-Strauss, The Naked Man, 687. 
 Lévi-Strauss, “‘Primitive’ Thinking and the ‘Civilized’ Mind,” 23. Lévi-Strauss, The Naked Man, 692. Lacan, “Psychoanalysis and Cybernetics,” 307.

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Appendix Heidegger and Cybernetics Our adventure is actually a great heresy. —Warren S. McCulloch 1 But there are a few [people] left who are able to experience a [kind of ] thinking which is not calculating. —Martin Heidegger2

Abstract The essay contrasts Warren McCulloch’s experimental epistemology, whose nervous calculus made it possible in principle to lay out a circuit diagram for every thinkable thought—a key moment in the epistemological experiment of cybernetics that brought thinking and switching together in the first place—with Heidegger’s rethinking of the question what thinking means, a rethinking that dominated the relaunch of Heidegger’s philosophical thinking after 1945 and focused on the question of technology. This contrast shows Heidegger to have been engaged in a vast philosophical archaeology of the formalization, calculization, and mathematization of thinking. Yet it is only in the light of cybernetics and information theory that this undertaking can become a diagnostic tool for him: it allows him to contrast calculating thinking, culminating in the cybernetic end of philosophy, with the necessity of another beginning of thinking and the—still merely dawning—possibility of a new task for thinking. For Heidegger, cybernetics marks the apex of Western metaphysics, it is emblematic of the Gestell. Information theoretical formalization and the construction of mainframe computers perfect and actualize a certain logocentric conception of language (already launched by Aristotle) in signals that are now electronically switchable. To counter it, Heidegger seeks to mobilize what has remained unthought in, by, and about thinking, which he considers to be nothing more but also nothing less than the unthought of cybernetics.

Hörl, E., Sacred Channels: The Archaic Illusion of Communication, Amsterdam University Press, 2018 doi 10.5117/9789089647702_app

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Keywords: experimental epistemology; the cybernetic end of philosophy; philosophical archaeology of formalization; thinking and calculating; Martin Heidegger; Warren McCulloch

1 For James Clark Maxwell, clarity about the real relationship between the operations of the mind and the facts of the brain could be obtained only by taking a certain risk. The path to the hidden, dim region where the real of the mind was waiting to be elucidated, in any case, seemed to lead through the “den of the metaphysician.” For a moment, though, in an 1870 address to his colleagues, the British physicist and mathematician was able to dream of a physics of mathematical thinking that was to describe the relation between “the mental operation of the mathematician and the physical action of the molecules.” But the prospect, in this search, of having to traverse metaphysical cavern systems and of coming across “the remains of former explorers” made Maxwell recoil.3 Maxwell’s fright stemmed not only from a mathematician and scientist’s fear of the long metaphysical shadow obscuring the psychophysical question. It had very precise historical-epistemological reasons. For, in the age of the great epistemic transformation from intuitive to symbolic thinking—of which Maxwell, the man who had demystified the electrophysical imagery, was after all the protagonist—the challenge was to avoid a reentry into the projection spaces and shadow plays of Western knowledge. Yet in his day, the relationship between thoughts and facts could not be captured without images; it could not be described purely symbolically, in the language of a calculus or in a system of partial differential equations. Any “man of science” was thus strongly cautioned against further pursuing a problem that evidently could not be broached symbolically.4 To be sure, George Boole, with his epoch-making The Laws of Thought of 1854, had already launched the calculization of mental operations as the core of a new “science of the mind.” Yet the notion that the symbolic machine called “mind” was not a mere idealization of thinking as it actually took place, that moreover it was or could appear, as such, embodied in brains and machines, this notion remained downright unthinkable until the late 1930s and early 1940s, until, that is, the exact parallelization of machine and mental states had become possible in the development of mathematical-physical information theory and its alliance with neurophysiology. For its part, Maxwell’s great vision of the mathematician’s self-knowledge in the strictest sense, which consisted

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in spelling out the mental states he went through in calculating, seemed to be no more than the product of yet another fantastic cave. Like an uninvited guest, it had joined the august company of the mathematicians and physicists of the British Association in an untimely manner. Just how untimely is evident in that as late as 1938, at the threshold of the short-circuiting of computing machine and brain that was to chase out the mind, Charles Sherrington—neurophysiologist, Nobel laureate, and dualist—in his Gifford Lectures could not make do without invoking the spectral nature of the mind: “Mind … goes … in our spatial world more ghostly than a ghost. Invisible, intangible, it is a thing not even of outline; it is not a ‘thing.’ It remains without sensual confirmation, and remains without it forever. … Naked mind.”5 At the end of March 1948, another neurophysiologist, invited by the Philosophical Club at the University of Virginia, reported on his descent into Maxwell’s cave. In his lecture, whose title, “Through the Den of the Metaphysician,” he borrowed from Maxwell, he ostentatiously ignored Maxwell’s warning and did not seem to be bothered in the least by Sherrington’s ghost either. This was possible only because he had at his disposal a set of calculi that spelled out the mathematics of the formation of ideas in neuronal networks. The audience must have been stunned. The lecturer presented them not only with the core of a new universal science dedicated to investigating regulation and message transmission in organisms and machines. On top of that, he claimed to present the basic position of this epistemic event. He presented this event, which that same year (thanks to Norbert Wiener) came to be called “cybernetics,” as a peculiar repetition of pre-Socratic physics and epistemology: We are again in one of those prodigious periods of scientific progress—in its own way like the pre-Socratic period to which we are still indebted for the crisp formulation of our physical problems and, consequently, for our epistemological quandary. Anyone who has had the good fortune to listen to Wiener and von Neumann and Rosenblueth and Pitts wrestling with the problems of modern computing machines that know and want has a strange sense that he is listening to a colloquy of the ancients.6

There was, however, at least one name missing from this series of founders of cybernetics who gave the present a pre-Socratic allure, the name of the man giving the lecture: Warren McCulloch. McCulloch’s conception of cybernetics as a reentry into the preSocratic interpretation of the world hinged entirely on the new physics of

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communication. Thanks to calculi of information, physical and epistemological facts could, as in the earliest of times, be mapped onto each other. Only this time, this could be done in an exact manner. “For the first time in the history of science”—and this was the novelty that not only brought the pre-Socratic spirit back after a long historical detour but pushed it beyond itself—“we know how we know and hence are able to state it clearly” because “[w]e are about to conceive of the knower as a computing machine.”7 In principle—this was the core of the “technoepistemic transformation”8 brought about by the new representational space of discourse about information—there was no difference between computing machines produced by human beings and the human beings themselves, as procreated computing machines. Brains and computing machines served as models for each other. The work McCulloch was doing on the procreated machines was called experimental epistemology.9 It sought to work out the calculi of knowledge, and more particularly calculi such as they were taking place in the knower. In 1943, together with Walter Pitts, McCulloch had laid the conceptual and notional foundations of the mental mathematics, as it were, that in the tradition of Boole’s project of an operations research of the human mind articulated the real of the mind. “Because of the ‘all-or-none’ character of nervous activity,” they posited in their epoch-making paper, “neural events and the relations among them can be treated by means of propositional logic.”10 Theoretically—since the McCulloch–Pitts calculi were obviously working with idealized neuronal networks—it was possible to map out for every thought the corresponding, formally equivalent neuronal network that switched it into a circuit. From the point of view of experimental psychology, thinking and switching were inseparable. The science of the mind and thereby the matter of thinking itself became a theory of signals grounded in logical algebra. Henceforth, not only engineers and mathematicians but neuroscientists, too, were constructing circuits.11 Yet unlike those who built computing machines, those who constructed neuronal networks remained quite openly in a state of war. In 1948, McCulloch for one, not just a scientist but an officer and Cold Warrior, still found himself “confronted by the enemy’s machine.” And that, precisely, is what he considered the specificity of his dealings with procreated machines: “I have not been told and must learn what it is, what it does, and how it does it. It is a complicated computing machine consisting of 1010 relays.”12 The genealogy of cybernetics was deeply embedded in McCulloch’s self-conception as a scientist. What resurfaced in his image of thinking was nothing but Wiener’s work on the statistical predictability of enemy bomber pilots’ maneuvers for the purpose of steering antiaircraft guns, which Wiener himself constantly

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evoked as the primal scene of cybernetics. Heidegger, as late as 1965, drily remarked in a seminar in Burghölzli that “the model of the human being must be understood in terms of antiaircraft cybernetics.”13 The mathematical definition of the neuronal net by “a calculus for nerve cells”14 gave McCulloch some daring ideas that nonetheless stood in the neoKantian tradition of the physiology of the aprioric.15 He saw himself on the threshold of an experimental reformulation of transcendental philosophy. Thanks to this rearticulation, “the unknowable object of knowledge, the ‘thing in itself,’ cease[d] to be unknowable.” The task of the mathematics of the mind was to account for “the role of brains in determining the epistemic relations of our theories to our observations and of these to the facts.”16 And since the “nervous system is par excellence a logical machine,”17 the schematism ceased to be an obscure art hidden in the inaccessible depths of the human soul. The inner workshop of the imagination had become a computing machine that operated beyond all pictoriality. Finally, certainty, that foundational operator of modern thinking, appeared as the effect of an immense “corruption” of information, generated by “a high probability that what goes on through the nervous system does correspond to something in the world.”18 In its experimental-epistemological rearticulation, transcendental philosophy saw in the knower primarily a net of about 1010 relays. The “Quest [for] the Logos” had taken the concise form of work on neuronal circuits.19 According to McCulloch, the world of relays into which knowers and the physics of the world that included them had been transformed, exhibited Heraclitian characteristics. It was “always ‘on the move’” since “its business is with information which pours into it over many channels, passes through it, eddies within it, and emerges again to the world.”20 Heraclitus, the thinker of currents and conflict, offered himself as ancestor of a knowledge that emerged from the communication-technological mobilization of the Second World War. Alfred North Whitehead already had promoted Heraclitus by making him a predecessor of an ontology of events and processes compatible with cybernetics. As early as 1885, when, following the presentation of a paper on the subject, the secret debate club, the Cambridge Apostles, held a vote on which of the two philosophers had come closer to the truth about the nature of things—“Democritus or Heraclitus?”—Whitehead had joined the majority in voting for Heraclitus and thus for a continuous, continually transforming and processing world and against a changing but discrete world.21 McCulloch sympathized with the Heraclitian intuition of currents of being and an order of things constituted by processes, which Whitehead was to rearticulate in the terms of contemporary mathematics and physics.

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For, in McCulloch’s view, the “world of physics” was “fairly described by Whitehead’s ‘Aether of Events’” of 1920.22 On the other side of the Atlantic, a seminar on Heraclitus began in the winter semester 1966/67. In its patient reading of fragments 64 and 41, that is, those passages that concerned pre-Socratic questions of steering,23 not of currents, the seminar in a way provided a truly European answer to the cybernetic challenge. For Martin Heidegger—who conducted this dialog with the philosopher from Ephesus, this “experiment”24 in diagnosing the contemporary situation together with Eugen Fink, who had succeeded him in his chair in Freiburg—“the meaning of cybernetics lies in being derived [Abkünftigkeit]” from Heraclitus’s conception of the phenomenon of steering or control.25 “[T]o gain more clarity” about this phenomenon, which determined “the whole of natural science and the behavior of humans” equally and served as the epistemic cipher of the age, Heidegger and Fink interpreted Heraclitus under the spell of cybernetics.26 To understand what control means, Heidegger drily remarks, “[w]e need no philosophy of nature; it suffices, rather, if we clarify for ourselves where cybernetics comes from and where it leads to.”27 The philosophy of nature he rejected in favor of a better archeological understanding, however, could have yielded the insight that, thought in a Heraclitian manner, questions of control and questions of process go hand in hand. According to McCulloch, however, the pre-Socratic atmosphere of the age had other early intellectual godfathers as well. Operating as they were with discontinuous units—“quantized” signals—that either occurred or did not occur, the modern computing machine and the processor called brain were thoroughly Democritean apparatuses: “every modern computing machine of any great size or scope works in a Democritean manner.”28 The same could be said of the nervous system since not only was its structure “quantized” in neurons, its effects, too, were “quantized” in the most minute signals or impulses. And even though there is only one mention, in passing, of “Parmenidean unity,”29 it constitutes the decisive indication of the return of the pre-Socratic. After all, did not communication in the human and the machine in fact and relentlessly demonstrate the truth of Parmenides’s assertion, “for the same thing is for conceiving as is for being”?30 This “saying” may very well have served as the guiding principle of all experimental epistemology. According to Heidegger, the “saying became the guiding principle of Western philosophy” to the extent that “it was no longer understood, because its originary truth could not be held fast.” Indeed, the moment in which the “Greeks themselves began to fall away from the truth of the saying”

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marked the birth of philosophy.31 The subsequent history of philosophy then represented only “variations on this one theme.”32 In citing Parmenides, McCulloch in contrast situated the agenda of experimental epistemology—as the appropriation and the end of philosophy, as we will see—in the main branch of the Western tradition. The possibility that the cybernetic and the pre-Socratic could come so close is part and parcel of the history of both and thus in a sense belongs to the logic of the episteme itself. Hermann Diels had published his edition of the Fragments of the Pre-Socratics in 1903. For the first time, the fragments had been liberated from the traditional context that threatened to conceal them and become accessible as texts sui generis. Until the dawn of the “age of Diels,” they had almost disappeared (not surprisingly, given the conditions of their preservation) in the “thicket of their commentary.”33 Their availability curiously coincided with the fascination with everything that was early, archaic, and primitive that had gradually, since the 1870s, become the epistemic signature of the age. At a time when electrophysics, pure mathematics, logistics, and technical media had thrown traditional categorial thinking into crisis, social anthropologists, ethnologists, philosophers, and sociologists, especially the Durkheim school, were searching for the pre-Aristotelian, more precisely: the primitive categories. The most concise formulation of the project of the age, to descend into the archaic underground of thinking, comes from Marcel Mauss: The Aristotelian categories are not indeed the only ones which exist in our minds, or have existed in the mind and have to be dealt with. Above all it is essential to draw up the largest possible catalogue of categories; it is essential to start with all those which it is possible to know man has used. It will be clear that there have been and still are dead or pale or obscure moons in the firmament of reason.34

The postalphabetic age imagined prealphabetic grounds of thinking to work through its own epistemological and ontological insecurity. It as it were invented itself in projecting a prealphabetic thinking. For, what returned in the images of thinking that outlined “primitive” mentality were the traits of an episteme thrown into crisis, deterritorialized by electrophysics and symbolic logic. Even Martin Heidegger could not avoid marking his own work on a more “inceptual” thinking off from the archaic illusion of a more primitive mentality.35 Insofar as cybernetics, in conjunction with information theory, completed an epistemological change of epoch because it consolidated a long period of crisis, a long transition toward a radical thinking

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in functional concepts, it was only coherent to align it with the thinking of the origins. Between the two lay the long duration of the adventure of metaphysics or thinking in terms of substance. This adventure appeared as a long detour of history, which now, purified by science, returned to its origins. McCulloch was not the only one to make that correlation. Claude Lévi-Strauss, for example, working on cyberneticizing the human sciences under the heading “structural anthropology,” was to regard cybernetics as the great rehabilitation of “savage thought” and see in the “savage thinker” a protocyberneticist and an information theorist avant la lettre.36 In turn, we ought to see in such historical hypostatizations symptoms of the cybernetic illusion that posited cybernetics itself as the crisis of the European mind, as a great ontological as well as epistemological caesura comparable only to a major event like Greece, that is, the birth of philosophy.37 There were additional reasons for McCulloch’s short-circuiting of the pre-Socratic with the cybernetic that can be stated with even more precision. An ontological reflection had inspired in McCulloch the vision of the end of philosophy by cybernetic means, which alone brought cybernetics into immediate historical proximity with the pre-Socratics. According to Gotthard Günther’s reports on his meetings with him, which took place for almost a decade starting in 1960, McCulloch lamented “the lack of fundamental ontological orientation” in the elaboration of cybernetic theories. In fact, cyberneticists working at the most advanced level of symbolic thinking generally considered themselves delivered of ontological questions, which as it were had entered the forbidden behaviorist den called “black box.” It sufficed, as everybody knew, to take up position at the entry and exit points and then to formalize. McCulloch on the contrary considered each and every logic and calculus humans could think up to be a more or less appropriate formalization of ontological concepts. The ontological worry that haunted McCulloch and brought him to articulate the demand for a philosophical foundation of cybernetics came from a very precise source that sheds a curious historical light on the entire cybernetic program. “The revelation,” Günther writes, “came one evening when McCulloch started to talk about Martin Heidegger and produced a copy, very shabby and dilapidated from intensive use, of Sein und Zeit.” In the eyes of McCulloch (which it seems were opened by this present from Eilhard von Domarus, who had audited classes by both Husserl and Heidegger), philosophy since Plato and Aristotle had forgotten about being because it did not consider the problems of cybernetics with sufficient rigor. It had mistaken “mere objectivity without self-reference … for ‘Sein’” and failed to understand that Being is always “both: subject and object as well.” On this view, that is,

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according to a fantasy about Greece whose modernity lay in its retroactive attribution of subject and object to Greek thinking, cybernetics represented the exodus from the forgetting of Being and the end of philosophy.38 While thanks to Heidegger’s talk of the forgetting of Being McCulloch’s ontological worry acquired some historical depth, it ultimately remained a far cry from what was going on in continental Europe under that heading. It did not aim at the problem of objecthood, not at the problem of the Being of beings as the final version and limit of all object-based ontology; instead it followed in the wake of American process ontology. Where in accordance with Whitehead, Being was to be thought as a process, the dissolution of objectivity and the emergence of the nonintuitive or of nonintuitive symbolisms could not be the bête noire it represented for European ontologists. From a process-ontological perspective, in any event, it was possible to believe that ontology could work through cybernetics. Ontology did not have to resign itself to demonstrating an unavoidable forgetting of Being on the part of cybernetics, which allegedly culminated in the closure of control circuits. Ontology, that is, did not have to resign itself to the necessary destruction (Destruktion) of cybernetics.39 If we believe Günther, it had to have been a long night for McCulloch to engage in that kind of talk. But night, as we know, is the mother of ontology. Those not fortunate enough to spend the night with McCulloch, however, could still interpret the Virginia lecture on the pre-Socratic return as cybernetics’ funeral eulogy of philosophy—especially if such an interpretation started with the end of the speech, where McCulloch identified some of the bones in Maxwell’s cave fantasy: “One of these is surely the femur of Immanuel Kant—his confusion of the empiric with the epistemological ego. This supported him on the solid ground of science while his skull was highest in the realm of theory. Another is certainly his skull, which housed his computing machine, for the net of his relays embodied his ‘synthetic a priori.’” And, supposing that unexpectedly he did not make it unscathed through the den of metaphysics and met, not the end of philosophy, but with his own end alongside the philosophers, he secured himself a final resting place at Kant’s side: “If my bones are to fall beside them, I hope aftercomers will recognize my spine.”40

2 The matter of thinking such as McCulloch’s experimental epistemology conceived of it was not a marginal phenomenon. It stood at the center of the

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epistemological experiment as a whole that was known as cybernetics. The alignment of “engineering” and “neurology” was undoubtedly a constitutive feature of the cybernetic agenda. Accordingly, Wiener on January 24, 1945, told Arturo Rosenblueth about an informal meeting meant to outline a new field of research “yet not even named” that was to convert the wartime knowledge about communication into a peacetime knowledge: The first day von Neumann spoke on computing machines and I spoke on communication engineering. The second day Lorente de Nó and McCulloch joined forces for a very convincing presentation of the present status of the problem of the organization of the brain. In the end we were all convinced that the subject embracing both the engineering and the neurology aspect is essentially one, and we should go ahead with plans to embody these ideals in a permanent program of research. … [W]e definitely do have the intention of organizing a society and a journal after the war, and founding at Tech or elsewhere in the country a center for research in our new field. 41

According to Wiener, the new concept “cybernetics” that was to name this novel field was meant to combine “under one heading the study of what in a human context is sometimes loosely described as thinking and in engineering is known as control and communication.” Based on the definition of “the common elements in the functioning of automatic machines and of the human nervous system,” its task consisted in developing a general “theory which will cover the entire field of control and communication in machines and in living organisms.”42 John von Neumann, too, despite his many well-founded reservations about Wiener’s tendency to generalize, considered the construction of computing machines as imitations of the human brain to be the way forward. 43 One of the major points of his 1945 First Draft was precisely that neuronal functions, simplified according to the Pitts–McCulloch calculus, were to be imitated by vacuum tubes. And even if a yet to be elaborated logical theory was needed to understand highly complicated automata and, in particular, the central nervous system, “in this process logic will have to undergo a pseudomorphosis to neurology to a much greater extent than the reverse.”44 It was this vast experiment on the matter of thinking that provided Martin Heidegger—a silent observer in the years immediately following the war, for well-known reasons—with his main question, “What is called thinking?” Only in light of the cybernetic question, which in its innumerable variations defined the age, in light of the question whether machines can think or not

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did Heidegger come to articulate the diagnosis that guided all of his late philosophy: “Most thought-provoking in our thought-provoking time is that we are still not thinking.”45 The cybernetic expulsion of all vagueness from thinking was met with a call from Freiburg to rearticulate the task of thinking. For Heidegger, it brought the “world-historical question” to a head.46 What followed were long years of explicating “the world-question of thinking.”47 What thus came to light was thinking—thinking as that which as yet remained (and had for a long time been) unthought about the age of thinking machines itself. At the same time, however, historically working through this blind spot of the contemporary episteme allowed Heidegger, always eager to exert influence but politically discredited, to resituate his agenda in the changed discursive landscape of the Cold War. Working on the present and future threat of universal planification and control, able to capitalize philosophically on this threat, he precisely did not have to talk about the past. 48 In his first lecture course after being barred from teaching for several years, which he gave in 1951/52 under just this title, “What Is Called Thinking?” Heidegger made no effort to conceal what prompted this question. “In America and elsewhere, logistics”—the name for symbolic logic that had become common since 1900, especially thanks to Louis Couturat and Gregorius Itelson—“as the only proper philosophy of the future” was poised “to seize power over the spirit.”49 Yet there were specific archeological reasons for this (at least to Heidegger’s mind). Because at one point, at the beginning, to be precise, thinking had happened as logos and because since then, the logos had concealed thinking, “logistics today is developing into the global system by which all ideas are organized.”50 “[W]e today [wir Heutigen],” in turn, “can learn thinking only if we radically unlearn what thinking has been traditionally.”51 Heidegger had been on track to develop the question of logic in such an archeological manner since his earliest work. As early as 1912, in his review of “Recent Research in Logic,” written from an entirely neo-Kantian perspective as an intervention in the “fight about principles” then raging, the question of his life comes up for the first time: “What is logic? Already here we stand before a problem whose solution is reserved for the future.”52 The question of logic, undoubtedly, came to him directly from the epistemic situation. Around and after 1900, it was the guiding epistemic question. It separated those who claimed an intuitive ground of thinking and those who, in keeping with the rise of axiomatics, sought to calculize thinking. In what can only be called an immense act of philosophical self-assertion, Husserl, for example, whose background was in mathematics, had positioned

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phenomenology against what for intuitive minds was the meaningless “rattle” of symbolic machines and sought to refound intuitive thinking in the terms of a philosophy of consciousness. Thanks to this refounding, nonintuitive, that is, pure symbolisms were to be reconstituted as constructs of sense.53 To the extent that he freed himself from the neo-Kantianism he had been brought up in, Heidegger in Being and Time replaced the age’s schematizing approach to fundamental questions, in which an age in crisis sought to find ontological and epistemic certainty, with a more originary, namely an existential-analytic approach. His renegotiation of the problem of judgment or propositions in terms of a hermeneutics of Dasein, which was to deprive “pure intuition of its priority” and show both “‘[i]ntuition’ and ‘thinking’” to be “rather remote” “derivatives” of existential “understanding,” fully remained within the horizon of the question of logic.54 The “analysis of assertion” or proposition was by no means just one element among others. It had “a special position in the problematic of fundamental ontology, because in the decisive period when ancient ontology was beginning, the lógos functioned as the only clue for obtaining access to that which authentically is, and for defining the Being of such entities.”55 The beginnings were decisive, this much was clear already in 1927, because the end of the long duration of the logos had already begun, thanks to logistics. The great force of the symbolic transformation of the grounds of knowledge dissolved judgment “into a system in which things are ‘co-ordinated’ with one another,” made it “the object of a ‘calculus,’” but precisely did not turn it into “a theme for ontological Interpretation.”56 Because it converted thinking into calculating—and this opposition undoubtedly constitutes Heidegger’s heavy Hegelian heritage—and because, more precisely (even if this was to become clear only a long time after Being and Time), it converted thinking into a blind and deaf business over against the claim of the unconcealed and revealed, Heidegger saw in logistics the very hotbed of the forgetting of Being. Like nothing else, it was logistics that thanks to its calculization of propositions made it a necessity to ask the question of the meaning of Being. Moreover, the “exposition of the question of the meaning of Being” in ¶3 of Being and Time stated black on white that the question of Being as such was liberated by the epistemic shakeup of the foundational crisis. The fact that Heidegger would henceforth give lectures on logic, under a variety of titles, shows the insistence of the question of logic and the importance it had for his agenda. We might call this a philosophical archeology of formalization. It was ultimately to discover the basic positions of the Western mind that had been pushing toward the machinization of thinking ever since the Greeks. The path Heidegger had to take introduced

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a foundational problem into the history of the becoming of thinking and ultimately led to the historically necessary destruction of his own discipline. In Marburg in 1928, he spoke of “a critical dismantling [Abbau] of traditional logic down to its hidden foundations.”57 He “tried to destroy the assumption that logic is something free-floating, something ensconced within itself.”58 This was an attack on the autonomy of the logical that mathematicians and symbolic logicians had fought so hard to achieve, an attack on the foundations of symbolism. This view of the logical prejudice had itself become possible thanks to an insight into the archeological power of a difference that was henceforth to organize Heidegger’s conception of the history of Being as the history of the basic positions it brought to light, the difference between Being and thinking. This difference was Heidegger’s machine to diagnose his age. With this machine he was able to generate entire epochs based on what interpretation of what is determined all their manifestations. What had brought the historical force of this difference home for Heidegger, what marked it as an archeological guiding difference, was its radical modern manifestation: If “Being follow[s] thinking,” he writes, “Being must thoroughly and in principle be in such way that it is completely determined by thought.” The core of the “task” of modernity now seemed to be to liberate logic from its original, namely Greek, “bond” with Being, and this had gone all the way to the complete disappearance of the question of Being in pure formalisms.59 In the summer semester of 1935, the great figure of Heidegger’s archeology, which was to become famous thanks to “The Age of the World Picture,” emerged—“representational thinking [Vorstellungsdenken].” This figure gave a precise description of the modern situation: the “definitive dominance” of the difference between Being and thinking came to light where “[t]hinking sets itself against Being in such a way that Being is re-presented to thinking, and consequently stands against thinking like an ob-ject [Gegen-stand].” Thinking thus became pivotal, “the basis on which one decides about what stands against it, so much so that Being in general gets interpreted on the basis of thinking.”60 This interpretative power was the immediate precondition for work on the logical calculi to unfold, calculi that would ultimately neither present nor represent any being but rather generate Being itself in the first place, as an effect, and thereby dissolve all objecthood. The modern basic position thus also contained within itself, as its most own possibility, its overcoming toward the non(re)presentable that the symbolisms it generated were exploring. The age of the world picture found its own definition and limit in pictoriality. With his own search for the “word of thinking” that is “poor in images [bildarm],”61 indeed, for the “imageless

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[bildlos]” ‘essence’ of truth, for “what is imageless and nonintuitive” and “endows everything pictorial with its ground and necessity in the first place,”62 Heidegger—in a certain proximity, certainly, to the blind thinking of nonintuitive symbolism—marked the site of his thinking at the extremity of the modern formation. The boundary of traditional ontology, the decay of objecthood, and the intrusion of the nonintuitive and the nonrepresentable was reinterpreted as the true site of the event of truth and Being. In this sense, Heidegger’s work of destruction was a curious repetition of the destruction of ontology the natural sciences and mathematics had presented since the end of the nineteenth century. The difference between Being and thinking advanced to become a historical condition of possibility for what had always been called logic. This difference had always already been made and developed for logic to appear as the determinative interpretation of thinking as that which has the power of Being in the first place. It took the logistical concentration of cybernetics for Heidegger decisively to inquire into or back to what came before the development of this difference because only in light of cybernetics could he gain insight into the full historicality of this task. The very saying of Parmenides that had allowed a cyberneticist enthusiast about ontology to assess his own situation in the history of thinking was subjected to a thorough reinterpretation. There was no longer any talk about an identity of Being and thinking to be found there. Ultimately, the logos, whose being interpreted as assertion or proposition would put philosophy on a logical course it could not reverse, this logos would first of all delight, beguile, compel because it seemed simply to bring together, simply to let appear—aimylioi logoi, Homer says only once, sweet and beguiling “saying.”63 This was the limit, already at the very beginning, of everything that could be controlled and predicted, indeed of everything that could be thought. On Heidegger’s own view, the key site of his philosophical archeology was the lecture on logic he gave immediately after resigning from the rectorship. There, he transformed the question of logic into the question of the essence of language. Those who “want[ed] to shake up logic as such from its outset, from its ground”64 had first of all to attack the primacy of propositions not only in the terms of fundamental ontology, they had to undo the conception of language it manifested, the common conception of language as presentation and representation, as expression and communication. The destruction of the proposition deprived all formalization of its basis. The turn toward language served the question of logic, a service that as such—especially for a professor ordinarius—was a “service of thinking.”65 At the end, on the final stretch of this work of destruction, the historical concealment of the

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essence of language as “mere emission of signs [Zeichengebung]” would turn out to be the condition of possibility not only of the “information-theoretical technicization” of language but of information theory as such, including its machinization.66 To be sure, the “reformatting of language as mere information” at first sight brought out only “what is proper to modern technology.” But, listeners at the Comburg teachers’ training center in Schwäbisch Hall were told in 1962, the “target and possibility of reformatting language as technical language, i.e., as information” came directly “from the essence of language” itself. “Saying as indicating,” as Heidegger went on to define the essence of language, “could be represented and implemented in such a way that indicating [Zeigen] meant only: emitting signs [Zeichen].” This, however, meant that language would have to be rewritten as a binary series of signs or, rather, signals in the “formulas of a logical calculus.” The history of language thus became decipherable as the long duration of its transformation into the writing of calculi. Switched into “series of currents and electrical impulses,” this would lead directly to the mainframe computers of Heidegger’s day: “The construction and performance of mainframe computer systems rest on the technological-calculative principles of this transformation of language as saying into language as merely sign-emitting signaling.” Yet, “as a matter of principle,” poems “cannot be programmed.”67 If for Heidegger thinking and writing poetry seemed to be moving closer to each other, if thinkers said Being the way poets named the sacred, this was quite simply the result of his work on the origin of formalization.68 Heidegger’s question, “What is called thinking?” such as he had been asking it since 1950 had advanced—on the basis of these archeologically significant figures—thanks to the progressive historical explication of the very formalization that simultaneously represented the condition of possibility for the emergence of cybernetics. The clarifying encounter between both had been a long time in the making. It provides a view on an epistemic threshold period in which a new universal science and its archeology appeared simultaneously, and in whose wake we still find ourselves (at least where the horizon of our epistemological and ontological problems is concerned). It was not by chance that in December 1951, Heidegger wrote to Hannah Arendt: “I am only now getting really close to the things that are actually worth thinking about.”69 The matter most worth thinking about was the matter of thinking itself. In those days, Heidegger addressed his listeners countless times with the formula, “we today.” This alone indicates the full event character of the enterprise. Strictly speaking, for those “today,” “What is called thinking?” was an as yet unasked question. It had to be made

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“problematical” in the first place, it lay “in the shadow” of a “weakness” of all “traditional thinking” that announced the dawn of a new “era.” “Today” meant that “the perhaps protracted process of the consummation of modern times is just starting,” the process in which Western logic had turned into logistics, whose “irresistible development” had led to the “electronic brain.”70 The emergence of the question was the event of the transition and the question itself was “the historic question.”71 The uninhibited spread of information theory, for Heidegger, was the most salient symptom of the fact that only now the question what thinking was was really emerging.72 Yet those who did not start thinking at the beginning, who did not keep the archeology, the origin of the computing machine, and the cybernetic modeling of the real in mind, were unable to think the transformation of thinking that was presently taking place. Heidegger demanded of those today that they think today, that is, in the face of the machine: For contemporary thinking, logic has become still more logical, on account of which it has been given the modified name “logistics.” By this name, logic procures its ultimate—which means universal—and planetary form of dominance. In the age of technology, this appears in the form of the machine. The computers that are set to work in business and industry, in the research institutes of science, and in the organizational centers of politics, we surely cannot conceive as devices merely employed for more rapid calculation. The thinking-machine in itself is already much more the consequence of a transposition of thinking into a manner of thought that, as mere calculation, provokes a translation into the machinery of these machines. Thus we overlook what happens here as an alteration of thinking, as long as we do not keep our eyes open to the fact that thinking must become logistical because it is inceptually logical.73

On October 30, 1965, Heidegger gave a lecture honoring Ludwig Binswanger, already quite advanced in years. At this point in time, it had been over a year that the famous message about the end of philosophy being brought about by cybernetics had arrived at UNESCO in Paris.74 To be sure, what he regaled the audience with at Binswanger’s celebration repeated the Paris masterpiece on a number of points. But he surprised his listeners with a certain elaboration: “At the end of philosophy the final possibility of its thinking arrives in earnest.”75 But what exactly was the audience to understand by this final possibility of philosophical thinking? As he had already done in the Paris manuscript, Heidegger noted a novel way of unifying the new with every already existing science in the

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shape of cybernetics, which took the relay from philosophy (which was disintegrating). If the decisive characteristic of philosophy since the Greeks had been that within the “field of vision” it opened up, it diversified into sciences that sought to become autonomous within this field, a change was now taking place in that the sciences were precisely leaving the field of vision of philosophy.76 This change “announces itself in the fact that the different thematic fields of the sciences are thoroughly projected unto a unique happening,” namely the “happening … of steering and information.” Cybernetics, however, unif ied all sciences “in a new sense of the word ‘unity.’” It was no longer a “grounding science”; it left the field of vision of the reasoning thinking called philosophy. Its “leading ideas” of control and feedback, “in a way that one could almost call uncanny,” transformed the “principal concepts like ground and consequence, cause and effect, which until now have been authoritative in the sciences.” This change affected above all the principle of all principles, the principle of reason. The “unity of ground” had disintegrated, the unity itself had become “in a strict sense technical.”77 Cybernetics served as the name of an event that could no longer be thought philosophically because it could no longer be thought fundamentally. Philosophy had reached the limits of what could be thought with the means of what thinking had been thus far—the only means philosophy had. It could no longer think the significant epistemic event of its day. That was its end. It died of historical failure. It was the history of thinking itself that overcame philosophy. If the task of philosophy since its beginning had been to think the presence of what is present and if the course of its history followed nothing but the various guises of this presence, then the final guise of this variation escaped it. Orderability, Bestellbarkeit, this most extreme realization coming from the core of representational thinking that operated the transition to the nonrepresentable, turned out to be what philosophy was quite simply unable to think. That was the end not just of the modern but of the philosophical galaxy. And because cybernetics, too, as the most extreme realization of what had been the case so far, could not think itself, it merely served to indicate an ending. For Heidegger, its historical significance was due entirely to its being one of the “marks of the end of philosophy.”78 Defining the “power of the challenging placing” that was reaching its apex required instead “a different thinking for which presence as such becomes worthy of questioning” because “presence entails something still unthought whose proper character withdraws from philosophical thinking.” The change in the ontological situation cybernetics implemented made a new task urgent and visible in the first place, namely not merely to trace its various figures

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philosophically but “to think what-is-present with regard to its presence … in view of that which determines it as such.” It pointed beyond philosophy: “The question concerning this determination thinks into a region that remains inaccessible to the thinking of philosophy.”79 Heidegger’s agenda and its postwar relaunch triumphed. Cybernetics, along with history itself, had brought him face to face with the new task of thinking. This new task had the advantage of entrusting the destiny of the world, against all appearances, to European hands, indeed to leave it in European hands. For in Heidegger’s view, logistics and thus cybernetics as the implementation of logistics were originarily European matters, even if they might have reached him on a detour via America. Yet their origin had also been the source of how one came to terms with them. Already in the Zurich seminar of November 1951, Heidegger thus struck a geophilosophical note in commenting on the situation of the world’s destiny: The fact that logistics is being considered the philosophy has to do with Europeanization. … Logistics is so developed that it plays an uncanny role in mathematical research (thinking and computing machines). That is, what began with Descartes is developing here in an uncanny way such that today, China in the coming decades, perhaps centuries will exist in a European way, just like Japan—this is Europeanization, that is to say: the essence of modern thinking determines humanity as such not just through machines but through its kind of technics, its basic relationship with Being. And my private opinion is that this turn of the destiny of the human is likely to start only from where this final state of the planet today began to grow.80

America, on the contrary, was not to be counted on. As Heidegger could tell from chance encounters, “these people”—Americans—“have no idea where they are the moment you start talking to them about what is going on today.”81 There was simply no “interest of America for the ‘question of Being’” because the military-industrial complex blocked the view onto reality.82 The reality Heidegger was speaking of was defined by the epistemic order of the Cold War in which cybernetics implemented the concealment of the question of being as such. What one encountered coming from America was only Europe itself. America figured Europe’s own question. America figured the question of Being that had arisen in Europe, figured it in its complete forgetting. A geopolitical difference returned as a geoontological difference. The question of Being could only be thought in a European way, only starting with Europe, only, more precisely, from out of a descent into the deepest strata of the European tradition.

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No matter whether we have ever read a single line of Heidegger’s or not, we all find ourselves in the aftermath of this thinking. Confronting cybernetics with a vast archeological program, it discovered the technical ground on which thinking always moves. And in bringing philosophy to its conclusion, it also brought philosophy’s forgetting of technology to an end. Ever since, we have been thinking not just what is, not just presences; we also think their historicality and we think back to their technical determinacy. But it may well be that precisely in so doing, we are the creatures of a history of fascination called cybernetics—we today who want to be anything but philosophers, do anything but sing of the Parmenidean variations.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

McCulloch, “Through the Den of the Metaphysician,” 144. Heidegger, Zollikon Seminars, 74, interpolation Mayr and Askay. Maxwell, “Address,” 216. [Maxwell, “Address,” 216.] Sherrington, Man on his Nature, 256. McCulloch, “Through the Den of the Metaphysician,” 143. McCulloch, “Through the Den of the Metaphysician,” 144. Kay, “From Logical Neurons to Poetic Embodiments of Mind,” 593. See McCulloch, “A Historical Introduction to the Postulational Foundations of Experimental Epistemology.” Pitts and McCulloch, “A Logical Calculus,” 19. Kay, “From Logical Neurons to Poetic Embodiments of Mind,” as well as Abraham, “(Physio)Logical Circuits.” McCulloch, “Through the Den of the Metaphysician,” 143. Heidegger, Zollikon Seminars, 91. McCulloch, “The Brain as a Computing Machine,” 493. McCulloch situated his work in the tradition of Hermann von Helmholtz and Helmholtz’s students Rudolf Magnus and, especially, J. G. Dusser de Barenne, who greatly influenced McCulloch’s conception of experimental epistemology. Magnus, for example, wrote in the manuscript for the 1927 Lane Lectures (which his sudden death prevented him from delivering) under the heading “The Physiological a Priori”: “Kant’s a priori, naturally, ought to be considered mainly philosophically-psychologically, as a factor of our psyche. It soon became clear, however, that a part of these a priori factors of our intellectual power must have a purely physiological basis” (97). According to Magnus, there are numerous mechanisms that operate unconsciously and, in part, subcortically, and prepare the work of our psyche. The results of these operations are then present a priori even before sense perception and its psychological evaluation set in. McCulloch declared in 1961: “The

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16. 17. 18.

19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

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inquiry into the physiological substrate of knowledge is here to stay until it is solved thoroughly, that is, until we have a satisfactory explanation of how we know what we know, stated in terms of the physics and chemistry, the anatomy and physiology, of the biological system” (McCulloch, “What Is a Number?” 1). Pitts and McCulloch, “A Logical Calculus,” 37 and 35–37. McCulloch, “Why the Mind Is in the Head,” 73. McCulloch, “Why the Mind Is in the Head,” 75. Corruption was defined as the “ratio of information in the input to that in the output. … We pay for certainty with information. The eye relays to the brain about the hundredth part of the information it receives. The chance that what it does relay is due to chance is fantastically small, 2-100, a billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a tenth of one percent” (74 and 76). McCulloch, “What Is a Number?” 3. McCulloch, “Through the Den of the Metaphysician,” 144. See Lowe, Alfred North Whitehead, 136–38 (with thanks to Michael Hampe). McCulloch, “Through the Den of the Metaphysician,” 148. On Whitehead’s theory of the event, see Whitehead, The Concept of Nature, 74–98. The fragments (41 and 64 in Diels’s numbering) read in Laks and Most’s translation: “One thing, what is wise: to know the thought that steers all things through all things” and “All these things the thunderbolt steers” (Laks and Most, eds., Early Greek Philosophy, vol. 3, D44:159 and D82:177). [Heidegger and Fink, Heraclitus Seminar, 12.] Heidegger and Fink, Heraclitus Seminar, 16 [modified]. Heidegger and Fink, Heraclitus Seminar, 12. Heidegger and Fink, Heraclitus Seminar, 14. McCulloch, “Through the Den of the Metaphysician,” 144. [McCulloch, “Through the Den of the Metaphysician,” 151.] Parmenides, fragment 4, 58 (no. 3 in Diels-Kranz). Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, 161–62. Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking? 179. Most, “Pólemos—Pánton—Patér,” 89. Mauss, “Real and Practical Relations between Psychology and Sociology,” 32. Heidegger, Parmenides, 2. Most, “Zur Archäologie der Archaik”; Holl, Kino, Trance & Kybernetik; LéviStrauss, The Savage Mind, 269. In the fall of 1950, the French mathematician Georges-Théodule Guilbaud had sensed the coming of a certain illusionism linked to cybernetics, which for him was tied into the very structure of the new science: “Confusion does not spare fashionable words; the name Cybernetics, which is currently becoming famous, is thus in danger. Improper associations, vague meanings, even myths threaten it. The danger is all the greater because, by its very nature, cybernetics is a science at the crossroads [science-carrefour]: that is

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40. 41. 42. 43.

44. 45. 46. 47. 48.

49. 50. 51. 52.

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its very reason to exist and its most important characteristic” (“Divagations cybernétiques,” 281). Günther, “Number and Logos.” My thanks to Michael Hampe for pointing me toward this distinction between process ontology and object ontology, which had such far-reaching historical-epistemological and geophilosophical consequences. On process ontology, see Whitehead, Process and Reality, 208–15. For an appraisal of the position of Whitehead’s theory of process in the history of science, and of mathematics in particular, see Hampe, “Whiteheads Entwicklung einer Theorie der Ausdehnung.” McCulloch, “Through the Den of the Metaphysician,” 156. Norbert Wiener to Arturo Rosenblueth, January 24, 1945, quoted in Heims, The Cybernetics Group, 50–51. Wiener, “Cybernetics,” 784. On von Neumann’s reservations, which especially had to do with questions of measuring and attacked the fundamental status of brain physiology for the cybernetic agenda and thereby attacked cybernetics itself, see Hagen, “Die Camouflage der Kybernetik.” Von Neumann, “The General and Logical Theory of Automata,” 24. Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking? 6. Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking? 136. Heidegger, The Principle of Reason, 129. And where he did talk about it, he did so only in a roundabout way and sublated, as it were, in a certain situation in the history of Being. It is downright disturbing to see that, in expounding the task of thinking in the lectures of the winter semester 1951/52, he goes on for pages and pages about Nietzsche’s “spirit of revenge” and “pursuing [Nach-stellen]” as final expressions of representational thinking. Heidegger obviously considered his being barred from teaching as resulting from the idea of revenge and thus saw himself as a victim of the death throes of the metaphysics of the age of representation. Nietzsche’s thinking—and Heidegger could not have made it any clearer for those able to hear—“focuses on a spirit which, being the freedom from revenge, is prior to all mere fraternization, but also to any mere desire to mete out punishment, to all peace efforts and all warmongering—prior to that other spirit which would establish and secure peace, pax, by pacts. The space of this freedom from revenge is prior to all pacifism, and equally to all power politics. It is prior to all weak do-nothingism and shirking of sacrifice, and to blind activity for its own sake” (Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking? 88). Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking? 21. Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking? 163. Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking? 8 [modified]. Heidegger, “Recent Research in Logic,” 32, emphasis in original.

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53. 54.

55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60.

61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72.

73. 74.

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Husserl, Logical Investigations, “Expression and Meaning,” vol. 1, 181–233, esp. § 19, 209–10. Heidegger, Being and Time, ¶31:187; See also Mohanty, “Heidegger on Logic.” Mohanty, too, argues that Heidegger’s approach to ontology and metaphysics has its origin in his engagement with the problem of judgment and therefore in questions of logic. Heidegger, Being and Time, ¶33:196. Heidegger, Being and Time, ¶33:202. Heidegger, Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, 21. Heidegger, Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, 103. Heidegger, Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, 27–28 [modified]. Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, 128–29. It is worth noting—and I thank Ursula Renz for pointing me in the right direction—that “representational thinking” goes back to Heidegger’s philosophical antecedents in latenineteenth-century criticism of psychologism. Heidegger had grown up in the opposition to representation, that is to say, in a rejection of representation as a logical unity. With the term “representational thinking,” of course, he succeeded in turning the problem of representation into the cipher of the age and in transforming an epistemological into a historical-ontological problem. Heidegger, “Logos,” 221. Heidegger, “Der Anfang des abendländischen Denkens,” 137. Heidegger, “Basic Principles of Thinking,” 151–52. Heidegger, Logic as the Question Concerning the Essence of Language, § 4:6. [Heidegger, What Is Philosophy? 92.] Heidegger, “Zeichen,” 211. Heidegger, Überlieferte Sprache und technische Sprache, 22–25. Heidegger, “Postscript,” 235. Heidegger to Hannah Arendt, December 14, 1951, in Arendt and Heidegger, Letters, 108. Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking? 159–60 and 238. What Is Called Thinking? 103. Thus we read at the end of the lecture: “The growing effort at ‘transforming’ the traditional doctrine of thinking, logic, into logistics, the increase in counting on turning language as such into logistic technics … suggest that the perfection of metaphysics, which thrives on not thinking about the twofold of its essential origin, stands only at its tentative beginning” (Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe, vol. 8, 265). [This quote comes from the twelfth lecture in the second part of What Is Called Thinking? which Heidegger did not deliver and was therefore not included in the first German edition and hence the English translation.—Trans.] Heidegger, “Basic Principles of Thinking,” 98–99. See Heidegger, “The End of Philosophy.”

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Heidegger, “On the Question Concerning the Determination of the Matter for Thinking,” 214–15. 76. Heidegger, “The End of Philosophy,” 57; cf. “On the Question Concerning the Determination of the Matter for Thinking,” 218. 77. Heidegger, “On the Question Concerning the Determination of the Matter for Thinking,” 215. 78. Heidegger, “On the Question Concerning the Determination of the Matter for Thinking,” 216. 79. Heidegger, “On the Question Concerning the Determination of the Matter for Thinking,” 219. 80. Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe, vol. 15, 437–38. 81. Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe, vol. 15, 438. 82. Heidegger, Four Seminars, 56.

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Index of Names

Alexander of Aphrodisias 221 Argand, Jean-Robert 85 Aristotle 9-17, 48, 50, 89-92, 95, 98-100, 134-136, 140-141, 143-144, 147-150, 161, 174-175, 177, 179, 205, 207, 216, 220-223, 238-244, 280, 306 Ashby, Ross 284 Aspray, William 254 Assmann, Jan 139 Aubenque, Pierre 220 Babbage, Charles 80 Bachelard, Gaston 35-37, 131, 238-243 Bataille, Georges 34, 226-238, 241, 246, 248 Bateson, Gregory 273 Becker, Oskar 64 Benjamin, Walter 88 Benn, Gottfried 183-184 Benveniste, Émile 259 Bergson, Henri 164, 205-206, 214, 218 Bigelow, Julian 268 Binet, Alfred 51-52 Bodemann, Eduard 66 Boehm, Gottfried 19 Bolyai, János 86 Boole, George 35, 50-53, 55, 68, 73, 84, 89-95, 97-106, 123, 126-128,147, 155, 165, 257, 291, 300, 302 Bredekamp, Horst 70 Bréhier, Émile 206 Brillouin, Leon 253 Broch, Hermann 205 Bröndal, Viggo 123 Brouwer, Luitzen E. J. 61, 110, 150, 240 Brunschvicg, Léon 124, 221 Buée, Abbé 85 Cannon, Walter B. 296 Carnap, Rudolf 268 Cartan, Henri 264 Cassirer, Ernst 56, 58, 61-63, 69-71, 86, 106, 111, 117, 119, 121-123, 134-135, 141-143, 186-187, 201-203, 205 Codrington, Robert Henry 138 Cohn, Emil 116 Couturat, Louis 47-54, 56-58, 63-64, 66, 69, 127, 129, 309 Czarnowski, Stefan 137 DeMorgan, Augustus 127 Derrida, Jacques 15, 77 Descartes, René 51, 59, 69-70, 82-83, 159-160, 166, 174, 206, 226, 230, 316 Dieudonné, Jean 264 Durkheim, Émile 35, 121, 137, 143-144, 148, 150, 153-156, 159-168, 170-176, 178, 181, 200, 206, 218, 258, 305

Einstein, Albert 114, 219-220 Euclid of Alexandria 200, 239-240 Euler, Leonhard 82 Fano, R. M. 275 Faraday, Michael 35, 112-116, 122 Fleck, Ludwik 35, 54 Foucault, Michel 41, 49, 59, 88, 106, 120, 194 Frazer, James George 40, 138, 154, 190 Frege, Gottlob 76, 106-107 Freud, Sigmund 88, 131, 138, 154, 190 Gauss, Johann Carl Friedrich 85, 109 Gödel, Kurt 76 Godelier, Maurice 184 Granet, Marcel 137 Gregory, Duncan F. 84, 87, 93 Guilbaud, Georges-Théodule 259, 306 Hamilton, William R. 84 Hartley, R. V. 253 Hartmann, Nicolai 244 Hastings, James 40 Hayles, N. Katherine 253 Hegel, G. W. F. 62, 74-81, 84, 92, 105 Heidegger, Martin 11, 19, 24-25, 27-29, 33, 64-68, 74-77, 81, 160, 201-205, 208, 210, 215, 218, 220, 222-224, 231, 246-248, 303-317 Helmholtz, Hermann von 130, 317 Hertz, Heinrich 116-119, 122, 268 Hertz, Robert 137, 163-164 Hilbert, David 61, 67, 76, 100 Hubert, Henri 137, 175, 180, 182 Husserl, Edmund 20, 50, 106-107, 134, 137, 150, 306, 309 Itelson, Gregorius 63, 309 Jakobson, Roman 102, 122-123, 251-252, 257, 262, 275-276, 278 James, William 164 Jaspers, Karl 231, 246 Kant, Immanuel 14-15, 47-48, 64-65, 136, 138,200, 202, 207-208, 216-217, 219, 240, 267, 303, 307, 309-310 Kepler, Johannes 59, 70 Kittler, Friedrich A. 20, 24, 28 Klein, Felix 109-110, 264-265, 288 Kojève, Alexandre 246 Kopernikus, Nikolaus 240, 277 Korzybski, Alfred 242 Lacan, Jacques 52, 232, 256, 259-260, 278-280, 292 Langevin, Paul 233-235

344  Leenhardt, Maurice 207 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 51, 58-61, 63-68, 95, 105, 120 Lévinas, Emmanuel 207-208, 218, 226 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 25, 34, 38-39, 81, 102, 121-122, 148, 154-155, 184, 208, 252, 256-264, 266, 268-273, 275-281, 283-285, 288-292, 306 Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien 35, 137, 143, 157, 167, 205-222, 224-225, 227, 238, 241, 256 Lobachevsky, Nikolai 86 Locke, John 51 Luhmann, Niklas 33-35 Martin, Roger 89 Mauss, Marcel 35, 137, 143-144, 147-148, 150, 153-155, 157-159, 161-162, 174-182, 184-187, 258, 271, 277, 305 Maxwell, James Clerk 35, 112, 114-116, 119, 122, 253, 276, 300-301, 307 McCulloch, Warren 268, 300-308 McLuhan, Marshall 20, 39-41, 236 Mead, Margaret 273 Meillet, Antoine 123, 178-179 Meyerson, Émile 181 Mill, John Stuart 135 Misch, Georg 244 Mitchell, William J. T. 19 M’Lennan, John F. 154 Morgenstern, Oscar 268-269 Morse, Samuel 119 Nagel, Ernest 82, 124 Nancy, Jean-Luc 20, 28, 226, 247 Natorp, Paul 244 Newton, Isaac 114, 200, 219, 239-241 Nietzsche, Friedrich 11, 38,136, 143-147, 159, 182, 185, 200, 236, 319 Nohl, Hermann 244 Nyquist, Harry 253 Orth, Wolfgang 132 Ostwald, Wilhelm 120 Otto, Walter F. 188 Pascal, Blaise 80, 167 Peacock, George 84, 86-87, 93 Peirce, Charles Sanders 71 Penrose, John 128 Pessoa, Fernando 16

SACRED CHANNELS

Pitts, Walter 268, 301-302, 308 Platon 104, 205, 216, 220-224, 229, 306 Playfair, John 83-84 Poincaré, Henri 108-110 Pythagoras von Samos 104 Reiser, Oliver 239-240 Rey, Abel 239 Ricœur, Paul 277 Riemann, Georg Friedrich Bernhard 86 Rosenblueth, Arturo 268, 301, 308 Rühmkorff, Heinrich Daniel 116 Russell, Bertrand 58, 71, 88-89, 103, 127 Scholz, Heinrich 106 Schreber, Daniel Paul 119 Schröder, Ernst 53 Schuhl, Pierre-Maxime 216 Serres, Michel 108, 245 Shannon, Claude E. 52, 98, 252-260, 269, 275 Siegert, Bernhard 70 Simondon, Gilbert 26 Smith, William Robertson 40 Söderblom, Nathan 40 Spengler, Oswald 154, 225 Strindberg, August 119 Thomson, William 114 Trubetzkoy, Nikolai 123, 278 Turing, Alan 252, 268 Tylor, Edward Burnett 137-138, 154, 187, 256 Usener, Hermann 142 Volkert, Klaus Th. 125, 187 Von Neumann, John 268-269, 301, 308 Warburg, Aby 42 Weaver, Warren 253, 269, 275 Weierstraß, Karl Theodor Wilhelm 85-86 Weil, André 154, 264 Wessel, Caspar 85 Weyl, Hermann 31, 62, 115, 122, 293 Whitehead, Alfred North 71, 303-304, 307 Wiener, Norbert 183, 254, 268-269, 272-275, 281, 301-302, 308 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 108, 111, 119 Woodhouse, Robert 84 Worringer, Wilhelm 38