An interview with David Wills (2001)

Sous la direction de Nathalie ROELENS et Wanda STRAUVEN HOMO ORTHOPEDICUS Le corps et ses prothéses a l’époque (post)moderniste L HW satan Table des matiéres Introduction. Du prothétique a l’orthopédique — Nathalie Roelens (avec la collaboration de Wanda Strauven) 7 I. HISTOIRE ET TECHNIQUE The delay of the machine age — Tim Armstrong La prothése, le moteur et la bombe. Un autre tournant de 23 siécle (1885-1910) — Yves Jeanneret 45 George Beard, electricity, and the nervous body in the nineteenth century — Sam Halliday 77 See me, feel me, touch me, peel me: technology and the cultural dynamics of the skin — Wilma Siccama 87 De l’exitologie en philosophie — Ann Van Sevenant 99 An interview with David Wills — Pat Bruggeman, Bart Buseyne, Paul Cruysberghs & Sofie Messeman 113 Il. LITTERATURE Prosthetic poetics — Mieke Bal 139 a Le spectateur mécanique. Cinéma et «pré-cinéma» ada Tortaj Maria — Pceuvre chez Alfred Jarry 167 Louise Montalescot, femme de charges, femme de charmes. La machine dans Impressions d’Afrique de Raymond Roussel (1910) — Sjef Houppermans 189 An interview with David Wills Pat Bruggeman, Bart Buseyne, Paul Cruysberghs & Sofie Messeman™ BB: Friedrich Nietzsche, whom Friedrich Kittler described as «the first mechanized philosopher’ as he was the first thinker to compose straight on a typewriter, wrote, in fact typed, on the back of a postcard sent to Peter Gast, that «our writing instruments contribute to our thoughts». The very idea of such a mechanical cooperation must give thinking, or at least some thinking, the creeps? DW: That is the question? I think it gives everything the creeps, everything and everybody, every body. I guess Kittler’s reading of Nietzsche draws attention to a relation that would too simply be described as instrumental, between thinking and something mechanical like the typewriter. One can suggest in the case of Nietzsche, because he is the first philosopher to write on a typewriter, that there is a specifically modern technological aspect to his thinking, although it remains within the realms of instrumentalism. But I would want to insist on the need to conceive of thinking itself, before any possibility of a typewriter, as being mechanical, and as being infected by the sense of the mechanical. You do not have to begin with the typewriter. As soon as you pick up a pen you are in a similarly prosthetic relation, as soon as you begin thinking, I should say, to the extent that you are involved in language. As soon as you use language you are in a prosthetic relation to something which is exterior to any pure thinking itself, supposing we could locate such an event. So, whereas one can locate, at certain points in history and in certain cases in the history * Pat Bruggeman (PB), Bart Buseyne (BB), Paul Cruysberghs (PC) and Sofie Messeman (SM) are members of the Mariage de Raison board. They conducted this interview with David Wills (DW) in December 1999 for Crossings, the Mariage de Raison Cyberzine (http://mdr.aletheia.be/crossings). ' Friedrich Kittler, «The mechanized philosopher», in Looking afier Nietzsche, ed. Laurence A. Rickels, New York, SUNY University Press (coll. SUNY Studies in Intersections: Philosophy and Critical Theory), 1990. of philosophy and art and so on, specific relations between thinking and the machine, or between the human and the machine, it only makes sense, logically speaking, to conceive of thinking as being always already mechanical and prosthetic. And that should give the creeps to thinking in general, or to a certain conception of thinking which would be humanist, which would rely on a notion of an origin, a creative origin, just as the idea of a prosthetised body gives the creeps to a conception of the body which is based on an organicist model and according to which a wooden leg is something that comes to be attached to the body within the context of a natural order. So, the idea of a thinking which is either a machine or which is a technology — I prefer to use the word «technology» in general, rather than just reduce it to the sense of the mechanical, because bio-technology, for instance, is as much a prosthetisation of the body as are artificial limbs, prostheses in the normal sense ~ provides plenty of pretexts for giving one the creeps. BB: Although hypertext may well be presented as a fulfilment of a metaphysical view of writing, as you indicate, it also allows possibilities for writing which can be germane to deconstruction. What possibilities would you stress in your experiments as a writer? DW: Once again, I do not think you have to wait for hypertext to be involved in hypertextuality. The problem with most analyses of hypertext — at least the few that I dealt with, somewhat summarily, in my work, essentially George P. Landow? and people like him who have written on it — is the presumption that hypertextuality is an event which occurs now, at this specific technological moment, and as a result it has certain effects: it opens up writing to certain possibilities, it involves a sort of democratisation of writing and so on. I would argue that writing is from the beginning hypertextual and that there is plenty to analyse in the workings of language and writing in general to argue for its hypertextuality before and beyond any notion of a particular technological moment which allows us to create windows and layers of signification and different relations between textual > George P. Landow, Hypertext, Baltimore, John Hopkins University Press, 1992. 114 those things are already there as soon as we begin to as language. use a f chnology such PC: So your thesis would be that hypertext actually shows time? what is happening, or has been happening all the nt historical importa an is it DW: Yes and of course it is not an but history, moment, within that context and within that , ting origina moment it is not really, for me, a transformational elements. All moment in terms of the notion of writing. If we accept a notion of writing that has come through Derrida and what he says about displacement, translation, and so on, these effects are always and differences, and already in effect. So I do not want to reduce the that has to be nce obviously the appearance of hypertext is a differe _ marked, but I do not think it is the same difference that Landow And since claims it is, or others who have written on the matter. the about enough ically theoret g thinkin they are not really ysical metaph into lapse to question, it is very easy for them discourses about writing and a thinking and a creation that suddenly becomes accessible to everybody. They forget all sorts of other differentiating factors and facts because they are concentrating so much on this particular type of difference that they think is so original. PC: Where would you situate the difference then, in your case, what would be its significance? DW: Well, I would have wanted Prosthesis’ to function as a type of hypertext, as a piece of writing that was to some extent a challenge to, an experiment with itself, to try and work with a piece of writing that allowed for these hypertextual possibilities on a single level, as it were. As if, while maintaining the fiction of a single surface of writing, to show that you can break the surface of writing and in effect create windows within it, on a single level, you do not have to rely on a particular technological instance like the computer with its complicated word-processing programs or innovative software. PB: In terms of technology, a new shift has been announced. In the near future one will no longer even have to type 3 David Wills, Prosthesis, Stanford, Stanford University Press (coll. Meridian Crossing Aesthetics), 1995. 115 with one’s fingers, but command and address the computer jy one’s voice. DW: Once again, it will be a difference, and perhaps radical difference, one we will have to come to terms with in different ways, but I do not think it will be the difference between non-prosthesis and prosthesis, or between non-technological writing and technological writing, or between non-hypertext and hypertext. You have to find another vocabulary for dealing with these qualitative changes. They are obviously qualitative changes, there is no doubt about it. We have to find a vocabulary and we have to construct a vocabulary, to deal with it. But the vocabulary that has been developed so far by people who have written on hypertext — I have to add that I am not really au courant in the field, I have read a very limited amount, there may be many other people who write much more intelligent things than Landow and company, but that was what was available to me in terms of literature on hypertext at the time I was writing the book, it was limited to those thinkers — does not amount, in my opinion, to a very interesting set of terms for dealing with the question. BB: In an interview with Seulemonde, Geoffrey Bennington noted that the «increase in ‘communicability’» made possible by electronic communication leads to a «commensurate increase in ‘contaminability’ of all sorts», adding that «Perhaps something about information technology made it possible for Derrida to formulate things about communication and contamination that turn out to have been around since Plato», Would you say that computerised writing, or some aspect of it, made it possible for Prosthesis to engage in «the ‘systematized’ contamination [it] aims to achieve»*? Or would you say it did not, not structurally? DW: No, for me it did not depend either conceptually or structurally on those possibilities, but given that the time I conceived of writing this book was about the same time as I started using the word-processor ~ I spent some ten years working on it, so I started it in about 1984-85, which was the point at which I was ‘ hitp://www.cas.usf edu/journal/bennington/gbennington.html * David Wills, op.cit., p.323. 116 ing to use a word-processor for the first time — I am sure that me to think certain things. I was very interested in the notion of eating text, traitement du texte, as text processing, both im terms the work a literary critic does in processing a text, because my rmation was in literary criticism and theory, and in terms of what ., mechanised form of text processing, which came along at the e time, could provoke and evoke in terms of similar questions. provoked a certain thinking on my part around the idea that texts e going to be processed in certain automatic ways by machines, from now On. Back then it was pretty primitive compared with now, even DOW it is still quite primitive, but we can imagine, for instance, getting to a point where children do not have to learn ammar any more, do not have to learn how to form plurals, how to conjugate verbs, how to maintain the sequence of tenses and so on; all these grammatical rules, you can have a program that can fix that, so that children just start writing and the mechanics of it becomes automatic. One can imagine an automatisation of language that would be much more radical than what we have now, let alone what we had ten years ago, so I was thinking if we have this technological automatisation of language, it would be interesting then to see how one could try and react to that with a more adventurous type of textual vis-d-vis the more traditional text processing of literary criticism or theory or philosophy. BB: In the interview you and Peter Brunette did with Derrida, you say that «every time I hear talk of a computer virus and read how more and more programs are written to defend against such attacks, it seems to me we have an example of logocentrism in all its obstinacy being confronted by what we might call the unavoidability of adestination»’. Would you, attached to your computer, try to give some more welcome to the virus, or be more receptive to the generative spread of its contamination? DW: This brings us back to the quote that you gave from Bennington about contaminability. It is a hard question: what does one do with a virus? One tries to kill it, but one cannot kill a virus 5 Peter Brunette & David Wills, «The Spatial Arts: an Interview with Jacques Derrida», in Deconstruction and The Visual Arts. Art, Media, Architecture, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1994, p.11. 117 in the normal way, because it is not the same as a microbe, right, One tries to deal with it. One also, in a perverse way, tries to encourage it, I guess because one is interested in the effects. I think one has to develop a range of strategies that first of all involve a thinking of the virus that therefore becomes some sort of understanding of a viral contamination that is not just an accident, but that is originary, once again, in its conception, just as prosthesis is. I think the sense of prosthesis and the sense of the virus could be transposed, without any problem, I could rewrite the book and call it Virus mstead of Prosthesis, it probably would not change much — I would have to change my father’s wooden leg into a... something else — if we accept the idea that first of all one has to conceive of the virus as originary, that does not mean to say that one has to sit there and be invaded or mutated by the virus and simply become an effect of it. But it means that the relation to the virus cannot be elaborated simply in terms of normal forms of resistance. You cannot just go to war against the virus, you cannot just kill it with an anti-biotic. You have to find ways of understanding the virus and of performing some sort of genetic mutation. If I can continue these figures drawn from medicine and science that | am not competent really to talk about ~ I have no idea really how viruses work, I am conjecturing here, but it seems that the virus requires a different type of resistance, a different type of reaction, and a different type of practice so that the normal discourses that we would bring into play and into operation within a more traditional conception of contamination are not sufficient to deal with the virus. We have therefore to find different forms of contamination and even a different conception of contamination. I guess an experiment like Prosthesis is about trying that as well, it is about trying to deal with contamination in a different way, for what it is worth and to the extent that it works, which is a whole other matter. Fortunately I do not think anybody will die from reading Prosthesis... maybe they will cut off their leg... BB: How was the book received in the anglophone world, and then in France? DW: I do not have much of a sense of how it has been received in France, I have not had much feedback at all. It is a book that only has a small circulation. In the anglophone world it 118 seems to have been received, very positively, by a small group of people. The people who have read it, have connected with what it is trying to do in there. They have received it very sympathetically and positively. PB: Did you collaborate closely with the translator? DW: I did the translation. PB: You did the translation in French? We came upon some small ‘interesting’ divergences between both versions and may quote a few later on... DW: It is more contamination! BB: For instance: from «unconscious» in English to aconscient» in French, I think. DW: I do not know what to say about a slip like that! I produced the first version of the translation, and then Catherine Malabou kindly worked over it with me so that there would not be any problems with the French. PB: On page 22 of La Prothése 1, you write «la prothese ne veut rien dire sinon placer, déplacer, remplacer...»’. This 1s to translate: «Prosthesis being about nothing if not placement» etcetera. There is a lot in there to make for a whole story, but what about the «ne veut rien dire». La prothése ne veut rien dire? A calculated reference? DW: Maybe, maybe it was unconscious, maybe it was conscious, | do not remember. BB: Still, /a prothése ne veut dire? DW: La prothése ne veut rien dire, non? It is better in French, it is better in translation. There are certain points where I consciously was aware of changing the English because I thought | had improved my thinking in the interim and I could say it more clearly, also because the French seemed to lead, you know the French has its own rhythm and its own locution and phraseology and so on, and I allowed that to work, to have its course in a sense. I had the liberty to do that because it is my own translation. If 1 am translating somebody else, of course I have to be very strict with myself about that, but in translating myself, if I did not like the 7 David Wills, La Prothése 1. Hamilton, 1970-Berchtesgaden, 1929, Paris, Galilée, 1997. 119 English, I changed it. So if the French started to lead somewhere else or to something more, which may be the case with an expression like «ne veut rien dire», I let that happe n. BB: One final question concernmg infor mation. technology: in «Geneva, 1978» you note that «however sophisticated the apparatus for information transfer, it stil] presumes to mask the naive conception of transf er upon which it is based, discounting the very effects of relay and deferral that constitute it»*. What exactly is to be learned from this fact, as you say? DW: Well, one thing which is to be learned from it, is that you cannot retain the sort of naive conception of commu nicability that people writing on hypertext seem to have, and think that the complexity of textual effects still allows for a simpl e transfer or transferability of sense. Another conception of the same question that I have been thinking about more recently and that amounts to something of a reproach to Bernard Stiegler, that offers some sort of critique of what I think in his work La technique et le temps’, is a fall into, a lapse into a notion of continuity that come s from his emphasis on speed and his reference to real time and the instantaneity of communication. It seems to me he lets drop to some extent the disjunction and the disjunctiveness that has been such an important feature of technology throu ghout the whole argument, in his work, and that when he come s to talking about Husserl and the temporal object and so on, he gets on to this way of thinking which privileges continuity over and against discontinuity. And I think, once again, that is a failure to really continue to think communicability in terms of a structurally indissociable disseminatability. Every communication has necessarily to be a miscommunication or a decommunication or a dissemination. Similarly, we can say that if we follow through with everything that Derrida says about différance and the trace as not just either writing or speech and not Just langu age either, but every thing we can possibly conceive of as a trace, then I think we have * David Wills, Prosthesis, op.cit., p.312. * Bernard Stiegler, La technique et le temps 1. La faute d ‘Epiméthée, Galilée, Paris, Galilée (coll. La philosophie en effet), 1994: La technique et le temps 2. La désorientation, Paris, Galilée (coll. La philosophie en effet), 1996. 120 to say that the electrical impulse itself, which seems to obey a simple law of physics, that governs computing for instance, we have to say that the electrical impulse falls within it, structurally speaking, within the possibility of miscommunication. That does not mean that the law of physics is overthrown or neglected, but that at the moment that the electrical impulse is emitted its destination is not assured. If contamination is originary, contamination is originary. If the breakdown is originary, the preakdown is originary. I] mean you cannot then go about and say that it becomes an accident. But I do not think too many computer programmers would agree... BB: There is some discussion among computer scientists about whether computer viruses can generate spontaneously, mutate in the very process in which they get rewritten or reproduce. Some argue that that is excluded; others leave open that possibility, at least in theory, to add that such generation is statistically so unlikely that it probably never ever materialised. DW: We are at the point in our thinking where we have to reposition ourselves in terms of a whole set of priorities, that just seem so inevitable, just so ineluctable and so unavoidable, such as the reproduction of the virus, and I am suggesting that we are at the point where we have to rethink these fundamental priorities of cause and effect. That is to say that we have to think them over again, analyse them, which is not to say there are no more physical laws. Obviously the sun rises, objects fall, an electrical charge occurs. Those are physical laws. But we still may need to think the ‘event’ of such laws anew, to know what the rising of the sun, the ‘event’ of rising means. Another example is the notion of artificial intelligence. If we supposedly get to the point where a program can reproduce the genetic code, if an artificial program can reproduce the genetic program, and so become life, as it were, and reproduce itself precisely, in the same sense as the virus, then the whole notion we have of what comes first is open to serious requestioning. PB: Towards the end of «Africa, 21% Century», you write: «this then is the matrix, the only jacking in is to death [...], the death in the machine of course, the technological gris-gris, but more than that, the massive consolidation of memory, the 121 exponential compounding of the past, of course, but still more the connecting to a landscape that is all mutation, shifting into the transit to a foreign place that trades in overwhelmi ng loss, otherness of pure invention whose paradigm is death ». Could you elaborate, perhaps, on. this linkage of cyberspace -death-loss. invention? DW: It is a difficult passage. I remember when 1 have reread it myself, I have tried to think about what I was trying to say or to cram in by means ofa series of evoca tions, and I am not always sure I can reconstruct the precise logic of it. But with any exteriorisation, prosthetisation or jacking in, there is a sense of loss, an infraction with respect to what was consi dered intact, hence there is a relating to death in some form. The relation to the machine, or any machine, any technology, is neces sarily a relation to death. And once again this is something that Stiegler will emphasise, from a different perspective, but it is very strong. So the sense there is that when you jack in, whatever you jack into, in other words, when, if we preserve the distin ction between the human and the machine, when the human connects with the machine then the human is necessarily and automatically transformed. And that transformation is neces sarily a radical displacement, for which the paradigmatic reference It would be the same with any supplementation. I mention memory for has to be death. supposedly exterior instance, the sort of exteriorisation of memory that takes place, with memo memory is an exteriorisation, it seems to me, ry itself — by definition, and a technology, for that same reason — is necessarily inscribed in a relation to death as that which remains exterior to life or experience. To the extent that these exteri orisations remain, in a different form, the archive and the trace and memory and so on are necessarily references to death. BB: And the relation to invention? DW: To the extent that the shift into othern ess, this displacement that is involved, necessarily opens the possibility of something, is a necessary structure of the other, it can announce the completely new. Death is an unpredictable inevitability. Perhaps ” David Wills, Prosthesis, op.cit., p.90. 122 more than anything else, every time it happens, it happens for the frst time. Much more so than birth, I think. So an opening, the ossibility of an event, whatever event it be, and particularly in the cases that I am talking about here, the event of a relation to an otherness that is technological and mechanical and so on, opens the possibility of invention, and, in fact, mechanical invention, technological invention is that process, it is the production of an otherness, often a radical othemess, often a threatening otherness that is also an invention. I do not remember the exact context, but elsewhere also I am trying to counteract the sort of melancholy and nostalgia that usually comes with the notion of otherness and death, by relating it also to newness and invention, because the two inhabit the same structure, I think, they fall within the same structure. PB: You would seem to attribute some «deconstructive propensity, as it were», not only to William Gibson’s trilogy, but also to «the fact of cyberspace itself, its explicitation of the constructedness of realities in general and of the prosthetisation of the human subject»". Like hypertext having a deconstructive propensity? DW: I think so, I go along with discussions of hypertext to the extent that there is a certain mise en scéne which is different and in many ways might be more... 1 do not know what word you should use, more immediate, more acceptable, more explicit perhaps, just more explicit than other forms, more dramatic perhaps, and more related to changes within our history and our experience which we could call its «deconstructive propensity». But each time you say that you fall into the trap, the same trap I was talking about before, of making the distinctions which very soon appear not to be the distinctions you thought they were, and that is something once again I think Stiegler does in terms of his emphasis on consciousness as a type of cinema. He privileges one particular technological moment which certainly from another perspective does not have the same importance, and | think | risk doing the same there and so I would not want to emphasise too " Ibid, p.73. 123 much a deconstructive propensity to cyberspace any more than to, say, a wooden leg. PB: As is suggested at one point in La Prothése 1, «cette prothése [i.e. the writing or the leg] représente une pratique politique ou sociologique: démystification, résistance, information, affranchissement»”. DW: That is definitely something ] remember adding in the French, that | changed in the French, and it is not in the English, as I remember, certainly not in the same terms. So what is the question, sorry? BB: Well, what would Prosthesis’ political sense of urgence or intervention be? How would prosthetisation rearticulate or reinvent or renegotiate the political? It is certainly not an emphatically political book... DW: You would have to tell me what an emphatically political book was. PB: Our reference would be Donna Haraway’s Modest Witness”. DW: No, it is not like that. However, I think that if you put together all the claims or all the analyses or all the suggestions that are put into effect through the book, I would hope that it amounts to a political statement. It certainly amounts to a political statement within a certain institutional framework, within the institutional framework that it belongs in, in the first instance, which is the academic framework, and within the precise academic framework of the institution of literary criticism and theory and maybe philosophy. This represents a definite political intervention with respect to that immediate framework. PB: «Mentone, 1888», for instance, would cross institutionally or academically recognisable or accredited readings or interpretations of the painting with a prosthetic reading. And that would be how Prosthesis at every occasion insinuates its effects? DW: Yes, I think in general that, call them traditional academics, traditional philosophers, traditional literary critics and ? David Wills, Prothése 1, op.cit., p.143. " Donna J. Haraway, Modest_Witness@Second_Millenium. FemaleMan©_Meets _OncoMouse™, London, Routledge, 1997. 124 on, would not, if they read Prosthesis, like it, because of its défi. pink it mounts a certain number of challenges to the institutional rms they are used to. Mostly by means of contamination, mostly of pecauise it contaminates those forms, it contaminates the forms the On s. jogic, many of the bases of academic pursuit and analysi other hand, the risk of that sort of contamination 1s the same risk as the avant-garde in general, that it does not amount to any serious not want to olitical challenge in the final analysis. So I would e I go into becaus just that argue for one as against the other, or say about pages an autobiographical drift, and write these lyrical-type ming any my father and my history and so on, that I am perfor two, trying to serious political act. But the combination of the nt, on the argume phical philoso preserve the rigorous logical and is for other, the on , inated one hand, and allowing it to be contam all les, princip the me a political intervention. But as I said, I think in those principles that come up in the discussion, of contamination a much wider sense, of prosthetisation in a much wider sense, of lity calling into question of cause and effect in terms of the possibi of set serious a for make can forth, of reversibility and so on and so political questions. PC: Does that mean that your notion of the political is of rather broad? Political as an intervention in the sphere institutions? DW: To me that is a precise rather than a broad sense of the political: the polis is not just people milling around but the people forming the institution of the city. The political would be first and foremost an intervention in the definition of an institution, or the institution, the operation of institutions in general as well as specific institutional instances. PB: In «Mentone, 1888» you focus on the painting or the artist, but also on the spectator, while an academic reading of the painting would only focus on the artist and his work. You focus on the signature, or rather contre-signature, which is forgotten in an art-critical reading. That focus is, for me, a political gesture. And then, you also address the institutions of the work of art, the museum and the history of art. 125 DW: All the while following the example of The Truth in Painting". But art history can be an easy target, you know. PB: There is a passage that most impressed me, but left me rather confused: you suggest that it is precisely what you call «the prosthetization of the body, its originary and final nonintegrality, that produces the ethical problematic surrounding death, as well as that of life». Some questions, as I rephrase them from reading: would prosthesis first open-up the ethical? What ethics would prosthesis call for, if not an ethics that presumes integrity or integrality? What becomes of the ethical if ablation or loss of integrality, some expropriation is the law? These are all questions — would you have some answers? DW: You are asking hard questions, I am allowed to ask some hard questions too! It does not mean I have the answers. Let me say that the ethical question in terms of prosthesis was not something I was very conscious of as I was working on it, but it was brought to my attention a number of times, in terms of, once again, very local questions such as the relation to the father and my exploitation of somebody else’s infirmity. Things’ like that started me thinking about the question and I got as far as the formulations you cite, but I do not know that I got much further. There are already some good questions there, but I would have to try and write something else to develop them. What I try to encourage by means of my questions is a displacement of certain ethical dilemmas. From my point of view an ethics that refers back to an inviolability of the human, the body, and so on, leads to certain impasses. So how would that change, I am asking, if we tried to think ethics on the basis of the originary violability that prosthesis represents? So we need to think originary prosthesis and . nonintegrality as an ethical question rather than avoid it until it presents itself in the form of a question about something like genetic engineering. If the body were indeed inviolable, constituted as Original intactness, those dilemmas would not be dilemmas, they would be solved already. There would be no question: you do not touch it because it cannot be touched. Logically speaking it can * Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington & Ian McLeod, Chicago / London, University of Chicago Press, 1987. *° David Wills, Prosthesis, op.cit., p.143. 126 = nly be because the body is prosthetic that we can be arguing about e extent to which we can interfere with it. So, let us think an thics based on prostheticity and bring that to bear on current prosthetic possibilities. PB: In my job I am working on gene-therapy, and the idea there of integrality or integrity is very important and it is forgotten n ethical questions about gene-therapy. DW: It seems to me that, traditionally speaking, you cannot conceive of an ethics without a notion of identity, what I just called «inviolability», although if we think of ethical hilosophers, we think of Levinas and then Derrida’s reading of him, that sort of question is starting to be asked in terms of the relation to the other. If ethics can only be conceived of in terms of a relation to the other, can we not call it a prosthetic relation? Is every relation to the other not necessarily prosthetic anyway? And does it therefore not raise questions of non-integrality, if identity cannot be conceived of otherwise? I think you should write a book about that, because that is your field. BB: We were wondering whether you would have some reservations about the word cyborg. The term crops up only rarely, for instance on page 2, where some «cyborg synthetic ecstasy» gets interpreted, beautifully, as «the fiction of a science or the science of a fiction and the love of a machine past all fear of rejection». In the French translation, that cyborg disappears, though «l’extase synthétique et cybernétique». The cyborg, defined as «a hybrid of machine and organism», may rely, for its possibility, on some accepted binarism based on stable, knowable identities which are always implied. It may also imply the notion of an originary, single source. Is it that prosthesis may perhaps trouble such notions and identities? DW: I hope so. In reading Haraway — I have not read the later Haraway, but in reading the earlier work, such as The Cyborg Manifesto — 1 was struck by the fact that it did not really go very far towards asking the sorts of questions that I wanted to ask and, in fact, it seemed to rely on the sort of distinctions that you just referred to. It still seemed to presume an originary integrity of the body, even though everything it was saying suggested otherwise. And then I was worried about the sort of politics that seemed to be 127 coming out of that which, once again, I thought was more a reactive type of what I will call avant-garde politics, for want of a better word, than a theorised politics. I tried not to get too close to the question of the cyborg, so I would not have to deal with it. I guess that is a simple answer. You should tell me more how you read Haraway and related work in terms of these questions, maybe I should get back and read some more, or to what extent you think she has come to a more, shall we say better theorised point of view, BB: In her Cyborg Manifesto, Donna Haraway indicates that her practice of cyborg-figuration depends on what she identifies as implosions of subjects and objects, that are evident in late-twentieth-century technoscience."* Cyborgs would be the offspring of these recent implosions. So life has become, or is becoming life enterprised-up, and that development makes for a new or original given of our times. Your practise and thematics of prosthesis, although it may also on occasion refer to «the prosthetic age», would seem to resist the periodising drift to narratives that would have humanity evolve into some post-humanity over a phase of trans-humanising up-gradings? DW: Absolutely, that is my major problem with it. The moment you get into that sort of periodisation or historicisation, then you are backing away from the originariness of the prosthetic or call it the cyborg or call it what you will. I have the same sorts of questions about the emphasis on modernism. In the chapter on the entrance of the word «prosthesis» into English, or the discussion of Ambroise Paré and the introduction of prosthesis as a medical possibility, such moments are presented as fictive histories to a great extent. Although historicisations are possible and necessary, the emphasis is always on a modern or the modernist or the first modern and so on, and this sense of an evolution of the human towards the posthuman is certainly something I would want to resist in terms of my argument for an originary prosthetic. PB: Perhaps you would have to put the emphasis on the org in cyborg, precisely for prosthesis to deploy its activity. In the cyborg literature there are two camps, the one stressing the ’ Donna Haraway, «A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist- Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century», in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention ofNature, New York, Routledge, 1991, pp.149-181. 128 mn BP a Fe CD aed DD. eS licium- and the other the carbon-side of the matter, the nformation and the body of the cyb-org. You would have to stress ne org, for prosthetisation to develop... DW: That makes sense. I accept that as a reading of my perspect ive, sure. BB: The space of that originary prosthetic would seem to be particularly spooky: «Whatever sets itself up as originary in the development of prosthesis — this writing, that wooden leg — has all the consistency of a ghost.»” As a writing in prosthesis, Prosthesis would not merely describe the spectralisation it also describes, but partake in it, provoke it, explore it, up an ante here and there? DW: I hope so. But how do you produce a ghost? How do you provoke a ghost? Maybe you can, maybe that is what you do with ghosts, you call them, you invoke them, summon them. Is that not what they do in Hamlet? They summon the ghost to appear. So there is a sense in which writing Prosthesis is an attempt to be a medium, perhaps, for that sort of ghostly apparition. Whether it is successful is another story. But there is an important sense of provocation, sure. BB: Naively conceived of, prosthesis presents as an gartificial appendage to natural member». Yet you argue that it better be apprehended, not as an addition or replacement, but as an extension of something that is very present, some constitutive loss of integrity. Could you expand on that? DW: Why repeat myself? I do not think I can explain without repeating myself! In a sense that is what I have been trying to say all along, but extension, extrapolation, originary noncontinuation, all these things would have to be conceived of as elements of the conception of prosthesis, and the other thing you can do or the other thing I could point to in terms of the notion of replacement, in order to try and give that another twist and make it function in a different sense, is what I referred to previously in terms of reversibility. Once you have the idea that an addition destroys the integrity or integrality of that which it is added to, then that which is added to can no longer operate as the origin or as the David Wills, Prosthesis, op.cit., p.10. "* Ibid., p.18. 129 prior element or as the preceding element, and so you also have strictly speaking the possibility of reversibility, you have the possibility that prosthesis was there before the body came to be added to it. And in terms of the particular historical moment that | was referring to before, of Ambroise Paré, it is very interesting that he conceives of prosthesis at the same time that he is medically learning to amputate a limb and to suture the arteries so that it heals properly which will allow it therefore to wear a prosthesis. It is as if you could almost suggest that first he invented the prosthesis, then invented the method of amputation so that the prosthesis could be made to work. Even historically you can make that suggestion, but just in terms of the logic of prosthesis, if the logic of addition, supplementarity is such that it destroys the intact integrality of the origin, then there is nothing to give the now deconstructed origin priority and so you have the possibility of reversibility. That is the whole conceit of Derrida’s postcard after all, the relation between Plato and Socrates. BB: The only authenticity that you would ascribe to the body, if any, would be the authenticity of some «originary mourning»”. This reminded me of a remark by Derrida, in answer to a question posed to him by Peter Brunette: «the body itself is ruptured, or let’s say, riven by nonpresence, by the impossibility of identifying with itself. The body is, how should I say, an experience in the most unstable sense of the term; it is an experience of frames, of dehiscence, of dislocations»”. Would prosthesis be a name forjust this lapse, that is somehow originary, of the body out of presence, or self-presence? DW: I think so, and now that you have reminded me of that quote I regret I had forgotten about it when I was writing the book, for it is a very good quote. Exactly, that idea of the body is what I am trying to put into effect in writing Prosthesis. BB: According to the logic of the prosthetic, there never was any idea of the human constituted without reference to prosthetic articulations, there is no human_ pre-prosthetic condition; «what seem to be the possibilities of subsequent " Ihid., p.13. ” Peter Brunette & David Wills, op.cit., p.15. * David Wills, Prosthesis, op.cit., p.145. 130 rosthetic attachment [...] are in fact the constituting principles of e human mechanism»”. This ‘originary prosthetisation’ would eem to turn what may still be called le propre de l’homme into a ossibility that somehow precedes man, and that is inhuman? DW: I can only return to what we were saying just now pout reversibility, that necessarily the logic involved is precisely at. You can point even to the historical conception of prosthesis those terms, even in terms of a history of it, and a particular jstorical moment which gave rise to a particular explicitation of prosthesis that would not be possible, it seems to me, unless the human were already conceived of as a prosthesis; and you can also int to all sorts of very traditional conceptions of the human, starting with Vesalius for instance, in terms of a mechanics of the machine and its articulation, or perhaps a combination of discourses which relate to a type of fluidity and an organicist conception and a mechanicist conception. There is sufficient evidence of this mechanicist conception throughout history and then strange relations between the organic and the organicist and mechanicist to suggest that the body has been seen for a long long time in many, even in many traditional ways, as a machine. The last part of your question referred to... BB: ...man’s proper as a possibility that precedes man and that is inhuman. DW: Inhuman as preceding the human? It is fine by me! We have to conceive of what precedes the human as inhuman, no? by definition! PB: At times you would seem to make a differentiation between two types of inhumanity and prosthesis, no? I wrote a thesis on Lyotard and... DW: ...I did not make any reference to... PB: ...no, but I was just wondering whether such a differentiation between types of inhumanity was what was implied and... DW: I am sorry, you have been reading it more recently than me, I cannot think now what the context was, but I know thatI do not make that formulation that you just referred to in terms of ” Ibid. p.71. 131 the inhuman, the pre-human as the inhuman if you like, I do not deal with that. By implication I do suggest that prostheticity is lesg inhuman than the presumed non-prosthetic human, but again those are questions for a whole new book. BB: I would like to read to you a passage from Bernarg Stiegler’s «Persephone, Oedipus, Epimetheus»... DW: ...which is the one thing by him I have not read, but never mind, it is in the same vein. BB: So it goes: «Let us accept that man is an originarily prosthetised being, for whom prostheses are vital. Let us further accept that tools, inorganic organs, inert matter that is neverth eless organised, are an organic projection that engender a proces s of exteriorisation as a result of which life, as differe ntiation, js pursued through means other than life. If so, then one must add that the originary organic projection of the human tool (which places the human in lack of an origin: he has no essence, he is only artefact, without qualities, open to his fate of being a ‘Prome thean god’) is also the constitution of a new memory in the history of living beings.» Now, it seems to us that there is an obviou s convergence between Prosthesis and La technique et le temps. But there is also a world of difference, which may have to do with the writing. Prosthesis may be demonstrative and thetic, as it undertakes to «demonstrate to what extend a supposed natural creation relies on artificial devices of various kinds»™. Yet, the «parameters» of that demonstration «tend to collapse within the experiment itself»*, and so Prosthesis becomes more of a prosthesis. DW: I hope so! I have the utmost respect for Bernard Stiegler’s work. Now, the difference that you point to in terms of . writing practice is certainly an important difference that | would acknowledge, I think that much is obvious, if one reads Prosthesis and if one reads La technique et le temps, you see that they are two different writing practices. Stiegler says the most import ant things or the most ‘technological’ things when he creates effects which ” Bernard Stiegler, «Persephone, Oedipus, Epimet 1994, * David Wills, Prosthesis, op.cit., p.10. * Ibid. p.11. 132 heus», Tekhnema, 3, Spring TED Memes eo AES o> eee oo AES promi GA So emg re almost plays on words, or poetic language, or call it what you ‘ll, rather than when he is developing his rigorous philosophical ogic oF his rigorous analysis of anthropology and paleontology nd so on. There is a quote in the middle of the first volume of La achnique et le temps, where he says: «L’homme est cet accident ‘automobilité que provoque une panne d’essence.»”* Une panne ‘essence, a breakdown and out of gas, but also a breakdown in essence. In French it works, and in English essence does not mean petrol or gasoline. But in French it does, so my argument is finally that there is a technology of language which Stiegler ignores in all however much he talks about it, because he does emphasise the work on Leroi-Gourhan, for instance, that immediately there is man there is language, immediately there is technological man, man as conceived technologically, immediately he is upright and using tools, he is ‘speaking’, using language. This means that from the beginning language is a technology, that language, corticalisation, the use of tools, temporality and so on, memory, exteriorisation and so on, all these things fall within the same structure, which is the structure of technology. But then he goes on to talk about the development of all these other things, and the developing technology of them, but it seems he never talks about the developing technology of language. Now I am not saying | know how to do that. It is not an easy question, but what I try to argue is that there is a sense of language which is technological to the extent that it operates at the speed of light. And not only does it operate at the speed of light, but it is capable of operating in two directions at once, at the speed of light. So when you have une panne d’essence, which means two things, then you have language which is failing to respect the laws of physics in a sense, because it goes in two directions at once at the speed of light. And this brings us back to the question we were talking about, of trying to conceive of even the electronic impulse as linguistic in the Derridean sense of dissemination. So if we conceive of language as dissemination and as différance, which Stiegler must and does, then it seems there is a technology, there is a way to start to talk about différance in relation to language and in relation to 6 Bernard Stiegler, La technique et le temps 1, op.cit., p.132. 133 technology that he does not, that would make for a product ive dialogue, I think, between my work and his. Once again, it goes back to my emphasis on wanting to develop a writing practice, that comes from a relation to language which is different from his, anq comes from a relation to a discipline which is different from his and so on. BB: A question on autobiography, as the end is drawing near: early in «Hamilton, 1970», you indicate that «the oft-repe ated ‘T’ should always be read as a prosthetic ‘I’ [...]; no ‘TP’ that is not related to an event of prosthesis, to an event of writing”. Prosthesis is involved in an inventive rewriting of autobiography, which it «recount[s] in the mode of the anecdote», introducing q «persistent disordering of discourse»®. I would like you to ask how your anecdotal automation reformulates the autobiographic al function of writing. Autobiography is commonly considered to be an ordinarily human activity that reduces the life term to a coextension of meaning with history. Your prosthetic indulgence would seem to trouble the value of the human, the relation of being to its end. Instead of being in relation to the end (which may be a phantasm), the value of the human is re-estimated with a view to what is foreign to the end, writing. Writing somehow writes itself, and it is intolerant of finitude: towards the end of one of the chapters a cry is echoed «for this to end and never end in urgent gentle dilapidation»”. DW: Your questions are frightening in their precision. Yes, that is at the end of the chapter on Peter Greenaway, in which the autobiography relates less to the father, is more indulgently autobiographical. Obviously I want to prosthetise autobiography, and I want this very, as you say, ordinary, natural, presumably ordinary , presumably natural practice which presumes that the life, the bios can be written — biography, or autobiography makes the presumption that it can be written in some form of wholeness and continuity and integrity — I wanted very much to resist that and therefore the recourse to anecdote which, it seems to me, first of all has the advantage of not being faithful, of being trivial, as trivial * David Wills, Prosthesis, op.cit., p.19. * Ibid., p.316. ” Ibid., p.213. 134 as eS EE ce ch EE eer Die er ie i ; can be... anecdotal means of course not accurate, not faithful, ot correct, not historical and so on. But also of course, anecdote of narrative, and the idea of narratives is that they akes the form multiply and they self-multiply and they are viral. So, anecdote for me was a virus that could be introduced, I did not say it in these terms, but now ] am saying it, it sounds like I should have. It was the virus that I was trying to introduce into autobiography, to try, in seifa sense to trivialise it, but also to have it multiply and contaminate and proliferate, which is what narratives have always done, and of course narrative is a form of technology that is immediately introduced once language is available. The technological form in the sense of an archive, and in the sense of an exteriorisation of language, to take Stiegler’s terms, that comes into effect immediately we have language occurs as the narratives that start to be retold and reworked and transmitted and inherited and so on. The anecdote for me was the virus let loose in autobiography to try and write it in a different form, sure. Perhaps I should add that it does not come without some attachment to the bios, in terms of emotional investment, getting back to your emphasis, your suggestion that I was going to emphasise the org in the cyborg, by the same token, in the autobiography the anecdote does not just function as an impersonal machine, but it is also a machine of memory, a machine that has invested in the bios, that has invested in whatever we say constitutes the bios in terms of affect and history. BB: One final question: Derrida’s «Envois» are amongst the texts you love the most, at least you say so, and you have written on several occasions on the postal. Now, cette putain de la poste has a general autobiography of its own, shameless in sharing its privacy openly. Yet this postal sharing, this general autobiography, and its open pro-statuere, is structural to the movement of the autobiography. Without the postal potential for loss, the distance for meaning could not be generated: «there is distancing, the post, what there has to be so that it is legible for another. So it was all there in the post: autobiography, distance, prosthesis, prostitution, exhibition? DW: The prosthesis is a post: in the chapter on «Mentone», there is the idea of the stake — rods, poles and perches 135 — and it comes back in «Geneva», I think. The prosthesis is a stake, and it is a post in that sense. So it is postal in that sense. It is postal, definitely, because it deals with the question of adestination ad infinitum, and perhaps deals with nothing else. It is exhibitionistic, it is a form of prostitution, some sort of exploitation of the body for some sort of gain. It is less explicitly postal in terms of its self. explicitation, I mean in those specific instances I have just referred to, it refers to the questions of the postal and questions of adestination, but it is a fact that in terms of Derrida’s work the notion of the postal is the one that always seemed the most striking for me, so I think necessarily it will all come back to the post in the final analysis, sure. And now it has been posted, so it is: your problem. ; Dans un entretien avec des membres du collectif Mariage de Raison, David Wills discute du concept de la prothése originaire, parcourant un champ de références allant de I'hypertexte, au virus et & la biotechnologie, 4 la traduction, 4 1 'écriture et @ l'autobiographie. La discussion porte également sur les contrastes qui existent entre la (pro)thése de Wills et les travaux de Bernard Stiegler. 136