What annie thinks about @ 4am

Since Noble’s note on Hiroshima, there has been little consideration for other cultures and their approaches to technology. Kudos to Paul Wolpe for pointing out the differences in ‘eastern’ and ‘western’ approaches to technology.

Yet, only a small portion of the Wolpe’s article mentions “Sushi Science”, and it seems his questioning of ethics remains somewhat, in a narrow and restricted.

The article begins with an interesting discussion on pomo culture and the ethics of genetic science. However, it’s a shame Wolpe doesn’t expand on the differences of cultures and the questioning of a ‘self-identity’ in a postcolonial context. Instead, Wolpe uses what seems to be staple to ethicists in this discourse: the Diaspora and victimization of Jews. Though the examples of Diaspora, the embodied self, and Eugenics illustrate the tensions of cultural construction and biological determinism, in a pomo-poco setting, these are issues that are experience on a global level.

In one of his essays, Said’s speaks of the immigrant experience as an “exile’, that is having a ‘house’ but no ‘home’. Though Wolpe mentions the import/export setting of a pomo world, is not a cultural identity crisis experienced by any Canadian with a hyphenated identity? Under the title, “Jews in Diaspora”, for the sake of postcolonialism, lets appropriate Wolpe’s opening sentence to the following:

insert any Canadian hyphenated identity here] struggle to live in some dynamic tension between the expectations of society and the expectations of being [insert any ‘race’ here]”.

As for the issue of Jews and Eugenics, I’m surprise Wolpe departs from the “Negroes”, as not equally a victim of eugenics. Though not with the same tone as Hitler, the physiognomic rhetoric of the “other body” nonetheless justified racism and the torment of Africans during the slave trade.

I’m criticizing Wolpe not because I don’t think he’s wrong (I really liked the article). Ethicists that use the holocaust or the ‘jew example’ need to reflect it back to the world, and not as a point in history. As Athena points out in her article, the risk of seeing the holocaust as a stand-alone example makes invisible the ‘language of eugenics’ (another facet of biopolitics) occurring on a global scale, just as Wolpe’s negates the racism against Africans.

what's Athena's beef?

With Heidegger that is....

Alright so let's break it down Athena's article without the jargo jargon:

The “cut body of humanity” refers to the Other / Humane dualism. You can't be 'humane' with out knowing what it is to be inhumane. So we point to other 'bodies' as "Other" to stablize our concept of "humane" as the opposite.

Athena criticizes Hiedegger for ignoring the power politics of "Enframing" in reference to Auschwitz. Rather than seen as a part of the tandem of sitting reserved: agricultural production and airplanes...etc; mass deaths (not corpses) have to bee seen as a separate segment of that tandem to understand the biopolitics at work. If it is dismissed as a just a product of "enframent", then it falls into the danger of "neutralizing biopolitcs", that is letting it go unnoticed.

Athena adamantly re-reads Hiedegger’s Enframing as the “technomediated representation of bodies,” and thus, “the language of biopolitics”. In other words, if bodies are seen as “sitting reserved”, then a body of power (sovereign) can determine whether these bodies are worth living, and which are not. Hiedegger does not differentiate between the body of the “sovereign” and the bodies of the “other”- the victims of enframing.

Thus, Athena concludes (I’m omitting of course many other points raised in the article) that the biopolitics experienced in the Holocaust, is experienced presently on a global and local forefront. Yet, it is the invisibility of biopolitics that is responsible for the “loss of humanity”, not enframent as Hiedegger claims.


A Question of Ethics: Discussing the languages of representation

Poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. –Adorno.

Athanasiou proposes to take up Foucault’s challenge to “rethink technology”. That is to re-orient the body outside of an ‘enframing’ biopolitics, and towards an ‘ethicopolitical force’ that manages the welfare of individuals and populations, and acknowledges human life (145). Yet she concludes the essay with little aid in providing a path, and unlike Heidegger, refers to Rose’s “Holocaust Piety”, purporting that art is not the way.

Thus, we are left with the dilemma of how to steer clear of the technomediated body as a political site “sitting reserved”, while avoiding the danger of mystification of literary, poetic, or artistic representation. The dilemma then precipitates into the paradoxes within the languages of representation, since both fail to represent the ‘Other-ed’: the former as silenced, the latter as aestheticized or dismissed as the “limits of language”.

Yet, is not the ‘enframing’ of art as a means of representation the negation of individual agency? Can art be appreciated as a terrain of individual expression, and not singularly as a project of representation; but equally as a process of exploring the sentiments experienced as humans? Can the failure of language in art be recognized rather than the limits of language, but the ambiguities inherent in the aporias of expressing ‘human life’? In Defense of Poesies, Philip Sydney argues poetry (and art) does no seek truth, or attempt to be “Truth”, but rather a process of dealing with the fragility of language and understanding.