Logics of the Living

While a linguistic paradigm dominated theoretical inquiry in the humanities in the last decades of the 20th-century, crucial questions of literature, philosophy and politics are increasingly formulated in terms of "life" rather than language. Extending across disciplines, whether medical, environmental, juridical, philosophical, anthropological, or biological, an open-ended concept of "life" has also come to inform critical thinking in the humanities. How does an emerging life paradigm in the humanities reflect or lead to the development of various "logics of the living" through which "life" becomes an organizing principle or system, whether aesthetic, conceptual, or social? How do these "logics of the living," as metaphors, actualities, ethical foundations, or theoretical frameworks, come to inform cultural criticism? On October 12 th and 13 th in the A.D. White House at Cornell, the graduate students of the Department of Comparative Literature brought together presenters from a variety of disciplines to offer further reflections on how the question of "life" is ordered, represented, repressed, celebrated, idealized or domesticated in the humanities today.

Taran Kang (Cornell) opened the panel “Productive Logics” on Friday, October 12 th, with his paper entitled “Reproduction and Recognition in Wilhelm Jensen’s Gradiva.” In his paper, Kang investigated the concept of reproduction, its ontological and epistemological significance, and the possibilities it opens for “productive ways of approaching and reading works of literature.” Jensen’s 1903 novella is known today mostly because of Freud’s interpretation of it. The novella tells the story of a young archaeologist named Norbert Hanhold and his fascination for a plaster copy of a bas-relief of a robed woman. Gradiva is Latin for “the one who walks,” and Hanhold later dreams of being transported back to Pompeii where he is struck by the unusual gait of the same woman as in the relief, before the ashes of the volcanic eruption consume the city. In an instance of psychoanalysis of a fictional character rare in his oeuvre, Freud interprets Hanhold's fetish as the result of his feelings for Zoe Bertgang, his childhood playmate. Kang offered to shift the focus of inquiry from the workings of unconscious processes to “a broader meditation on the status of intellectual activity in relation to life.” Kang then directed the audience’s attention to the juxtaposition of archaeology and zoology in Gradiva, where the two scholarly quests— archeological discovery of antiquities and the categorization of living beings— are brought together in a novella that reveals a fascination with surfaces and valorizes certain modes of living at the expense of others.

In her paper “Media and Biopolitics, or, The Animatic Apparatus,” DeborahLevitt of The New School challenged the invocation of life as a scientific concept in political discourses and the mainstream media. Instead, following Agamben, she affirmed life as an ethico-political concept. She then drew attention to “devices like the zoetrope” and to “the names of the first cinema cameras patented in 1895: the U.S Vitascope, German Bioscope, and English Animatograph,” where new technologies and media are linked to new concepts of real life (such as the concept of a “live” broadcast). Referring then to Agamben’s “Notes on Gesture,” Bernard Steigler’s Technics and Time, and Brian Massumi’s Parables for the Virtual, Levitt showed the ways in which definitions of life are (re)produced “biopolitically” in “media as an animatic apparatus.”

Mickey Reich-Casad (Cornell University) concluded the panel with “Living Code: Language, Acculturation, and the Trope of Pregnancy in Yoko Tawada’s Ein Gast.” Reich-Casad continued Levitt’s media-theoretical perspective and chose to focus on the rise of the virtual, “the increasing recognition and acceptance of the interpenetration of communication systems and material life.” Reflecting on the concept of material life, Reich-Casad held that the word “genome” understood as a “code of life”, introduces a new model for cultural reproduction by supplanting the older writer-addressee model. This older model, she argued, implied a male writer and a text that flows between him and an idealized female reader, whose body is figured “as a site of cultural reproduction.” Referring to a recent e-mail by Judith Roof in the listserv of a media arts discussion entitled “The Poetics of DNA: The Evacuation of Representation,” Reich-Casad presented the new problems posed by “the genomic logic of the virtual,” namely that it allows the notion of genetic determinism to insinuate itself into cultural production and mythology. Roof describes this process as an “evacuation of representation” or a “foreclosure of representation.” Reich-Casad posited a kind of “virtual indexicality” as a viable critical apparatus to current cultural preoccupations. She then brought this new indexicality to bear upon notions of fertility treatment, “a fragmentizing intervention” by techno-science enacted in the name of age-old “configuration of identity and power.” Reich-Casad then turned to the importance of the figure as it relates “cultural reproduction to biological reproduction,” exemplified in Yoko Tawada’s 1993 novel Ein Gast. Ein Gast, she argued, plays out the question of the virtual around the trope of pregnancy, and opens this trope onto “broader ways of thinking the virtual in terms of ideology and empowerment.” (Gizem Arslan)