There are indeed versions of media and cultural studies that deserve a good kicking. I wish it happened more often, as it might help stop the apolitical creep in the field I like to call ‘mine’ (although you can keep media, really… ;-)). Bugs me, that, particularly each December (CSAA can have me teetering on the edge of despair, yanked back by the occasional shining light).

Anyway: woo, v. OT. Sorry, NP. :-)

I should also point out that when Derrida charges a certain phenomenology of perception with “neglect[ing] the prosthetic and technological dimension”, he follows it up (in a few sentences elided in the above quotation) with references to “an enourmous literature on the touching eye“, from “Descartes, Berkeley and so on up until Husserl”. So I don’t know that Derrida means to inscribe MP in that history.

Then again, I know nothing about MP, except what I get by way of Caputo’s Against Ethics (and I’m not even sure that it’s MP that the latter mentions), so don’t believe anything I have to say about what Derrida has or has not to say about MP…

I’ve just sort of eyeballed many of the posts you mention here, I know nothing about Heidegger or Husserly, and I still haven’t found my copy of Specters, but — on reading your discussion of the ellipsed-out passage (great catch, by the way!) I thought of two things.

One is the physical hands of workers, particularly in the injury cases I’ve been reading a bit about recently, where workers got their hands partly or wholly burnt, crushed, cut, etc and lost a lot of previous function (usually ended up in some sort of medical amputation too).

The other is the … whatsits … metonymy? synecdoche? (this is why I couldn’t hack being a comp lit person) … the substitution implied in terms for talking about workers: a hired hand, a manual worker, etc, where the whole worker is identified with her hands (as part of the person being reduced to being just a worker qua variable capital). The two tie together in that the worker with the damaged hand was less capable of being a fully functional hired hand, according to the norms and labor processes of the time.

Not sure that adds anything or is even relevant to this discussion, but that’s the association I had.

take care,
Nate

Intriguing quote, rob, btw. I’m struck, in particular, by Derrida’s evident thinking of MP, but also by the kinda bizarre construction of it: it’s not so hard to argue that MP does actually quite explicitly engage with technologisation (I’m thinking here of the example of the blind man with his stick; crude tech, I guess, but MP suggests that it becomes part of the body and its possibilities).

Our relation, and even our critical, political relation to visual culture today should take into account these complications. They have nothing to do with one sense dominating the other, rather, with another structure of a general technoprosthetic virtual possibility.

I like this. I (and some colleagues, actually) are working particularly with the way that Merleau-Ponty’s idea of ‘perception’, which is both broader than you might expect and a serious challenge to empiricist concepts of it, works to constitute the world. The question of visibility comes up a lot: the question of what the background is that allows something to be visible (background in two senses there). I actually think, NP, that this might have broader usefulness to you, in the sense that it’s an existing vocab for the processes by which things become apparent, visible, as well as inevitable, hidden, unmarked. [shrug] Anyway. Thesis calls.

Seriously, though: the associations are extremely helpful – precisely because there is just so much I’m having to reach for, here, mainly through an engagement with this one particular text…

The only thing I can try here is to locate the place where this struggle for the hegemony or supremacy of one sense over the other, seeing over hearing, seeing over touching or smelling, takes place. The stakes of this struggle are enourmous. it is first of all a humanistic struggle for power, privileging the hand/eye relationship in the long process of humanisation. This raises the first question of the animal. Second, it is always caught up in a phenomenology of perception which neglects the prosthetic and technological dimension, which allows not only for a synaesthesia (the collaboration of the senses, or the substitution of one sense for the other) but also for the metonymic substitutions of one sense for the other…. Third, this phenomenology of perception ignores the teletechnology, the virtualisation and digitalisation of the field.

So this is why this struggle for power, for hegemony or supremacy, calls for an analysis of the so-called senses, the sensible data or perceptors. An analysis which should integrate from its inception, from the beginning, a taking into account of power as techne. Techne as art as well as prosthetic teletechnology in the spectral field of virtuality….

Our relation, and even our critical, political relation to visual culture today should take into account these complications. They have nothing to do with one sense dominating the other, rather, with another structure of a general technoprosthetic virtual possibility.

This is why from the very beginning … a long time ago I started trying to elaborate a concept of writing, of trace, of différance, gramme, or other reading which should be as foreign as possible to this endless competition between the so-called intuitive senses (spatial or temporal: seeing, touching, hearing). (pp.21-2)

Looking over it now, I can see how much of Derrida’s point about another structure of general technoprosthetic virtual possibility confirms or resonates with NP’s conclusion to “The Exorcism of Exorcism” post.