Telemorphosis: Theory in the Era of Climate Change, Vol. 1

Technology as Model

“Eco” comes from the Greek word oikos, the house or home. The prefix “eco-“ is used more broadly now to refer to the total environment within which one or another “living” creature “dwells.” Each creature dwells in its “ecosystem.” Included in that system are other circumambient creatures—viruses, bacteria, plants, and animals—but also the climate in the broad sense of the environment. The ecosystem also includes “technical apparatuses.” I mean all those manmade teletechnological devices like television sets, iPhones, and computers connected to the Internet, into which our bodies are plugged.

I would add this to Nancy’s formulation: The total environment more and more reveals itself to be “technological,” that is, in one way or another machinelike. The “body” is, according to Nancy “linked” to its technological ecosystem in manifold ways, as a prosthesis of a prosthesis. That body, however, is more and more being shown also to function like a machine. It is a technical product of the ecotechnical. “The body” is a complex set of interlocking mechanisms that are self-generating, self-regulating, and self-reading sign systems. “There is no ‘the’ body,” (“il n’y a pas ‘le’ corps”), in the sense of a unitary organism, says Jean-Luc Nancy (Corpus 104). These corporeal sign systems are the products of chance permutations extending over millions of years, such as those that have produced the human genome. These sign systems do not depend on human consciousnesses or on actions based on the choice of a voluntary code-reader in order to function. They just go on working and unworking.

This essay focuses on Kafka’s uncanny little story, if it can be called a story, “Die Sorge des Hausvaters” (“The Worry of the Father of the Family”) (1919). I use Kafka’s 474 word text as a way of thinking what results from a shift from an organic unity model to a technological model as a paradigm for thinking in various domains. My essay might be called a thought experiment. “What would happen if … we used a technological model rather than an organic model to understand X?” Whether Kafka’s text can be “used” as a way of thinking about this or about anything else, or whether anything at all can be done with “Die Sorge des Hausvaters,” remains to be seen. It does not go without saying.

Among the domains to be subjected to my thought experiment are languages, human and inhuman; sign systems generally; literature and literary criticism, along with literary theory; “life,” “the body,” the immune system, the endocrine system, the brain, consciousness, the unconscious, the self or “ego”; the atom-molecule-thing-virus-bacterium-vegetable-animal-human being sequence; societies, both human and inhuman, communities, nations, and cultures; history; the Internet and other such teletechnological assemblages (radio, telephone, television, cell-phones, iPhones, etc.); the global financial system; the environment, the weather, climate change; astrophysics from the Big Bang to whatever endless end the cosmos may reach. According to many scientists, the universe’s expansion is apparently accelerating. Galaxies are gradually getting so far apart that ultimately no light or other signals will be able to get from one to any other. Talk about the Pascalian “silence of infinite spaces”! The iPhone will be of no use then.

The organic unity model has had a tenacious hold on thinking in the West from the Greeks and the Bible down to Heidegger and present-day eco-poets and extollers of “the body.” We tend, moreover, to think of organisms as “animated” in one way or another. An organism is inhabited and held together by a soul (anima) or by some principle of life. Consciousness, mind, the ego, the soul animate human bodies, just as animals, trees, flowers, and the earth as a whole are alive, animated by an integrated principle of life, and just as dead letters, the materiality of language, the marks on the page, are animated by a meaning inherent in a collection of letters and spaces. As Martin Heidegger, notoriously, expresses this, “Die Sprache spricht.” Language speaks (210), as though it were animated by an anima. Another way to put this is to say that anthropomorphisms and prosopopoeias have been ubiquitous in our tradition as grounds for formulations in many domains. John Ruskin called these personifications “pathetic fallacies.” The Book of Numbers in the Old Testament, for example, asserts that “If the Lord make a new thing, and the earth open her mouth, and swallow them up, with all that appertain unto them, and they go down quick into the pit; then ye shall understand that these men have provoked the Lord” (Num. 16:30). Isaiah, in a passage cited by Ruskin, asserts that “the mountains and the hills shall break forth before you into singing, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands” (Isa. 55:12). Ruskin calls this a justifiable pathetic fallacy because it deals with God’s power, that is, with something that is infinitely beyond human understanding and language. St. Paul speaks of the way “the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain” (Rom. 8:22), as though the creation were an animate creature. A living thing, whether vegetable, animal, or human, is to be distinguished from dead matter by its organic unity. Every part works with the others to make that living thing more than a mechanical assemblage of parts. The human ego or self we think of as organically unified. We tend to think of a “natural language” as an organic unity of words organized by an innate, universal, grammar and syntax, such as that imagined by Noam Chomsky. A good community is an organically unified set of assumptions and behaviors. History is made of transitions from one set of such assumptions and behaviors to the next, in a series of Foucauldian “epistemes,” with inexplicable leaps between. Some of today’s eco-poets, like many native peoples, imagine the earth as a quasi-personified “Pan-Gaia,” Mother Earth. This lovely lady has human beings under her benevolent care, so we need not fear that climate change will harm us. Mama Earth would not let that happen. The “organic unity” model of a good poem or other literary work has had great force from the Romantics to the New Critics. If it is a good poem, it must be organically unified, with all its parts working harmoniously together to make a beautiful object like a flower or like the body of a graceful woman.

Martin Heidegger, in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Solitude, Finitude, asserts that the stone is world-less, weltlos, the animal is poor in world, weltarm, whereas human beings are world-building, weltbilden (389–416; original 268–87). A “world” is implicitly a whole, once more an organic unity. We tend to assume that in one way or another technology names a human process of making out of parts assembled together something that is in some way useful, a prosthetic tool extending man’s power and a product of his ingenuity, inventiveness, and manufacturing power. A technological artifact is not animated, though we tend to personify our machines, to refer to our automobiles, for example, as “she.” Techné is opposed to Physis, just as subject is opposed to object. Techné is a skill manipulated by subjectivities and their bodies. Technology adds something to a nature thought of as already externally out there and as organic. Heidegger hated modern technological gadgets. He refused to use a typewriter. Only a man holding a pen can think, he thought, that is, do “what is called thinking.” Human beings think with their pens. Heidegger saw the wholesale technologizing of Russia and the United States, and, through them, the technologizing of the whole world, as rapidly bringing true organic civilization, that is Greek and German culture, to an end. [1] “Only a God will save us,” he said on the famous occasion of an interview with Der Spiegel. He would no doubt have found the present global triumph of teletechnology abominable. We tend, however, even to personify our computers and the Internet. We feel that there is a God in the machine. Our prosthetic gadgets think and work for themselves, not always along the lines we want them to work and think.

Such examples of the organic unity model could be multiplied indefinitely. They are everywhere. Who would dare to say of them what Ruskin says of one of his examples of the pathetic fallacy (“The spendthrift crocus, bursting through the mould/Naked and shivering, with his cup of gold”): “This is very beautiful, and yet very untrue” (par. 4).

The alternative techno-machinal model has also a long history going back at least to Leibniz, to the idea of a watchmaker God, to such eighteenth-century books as de la Mettrie’s L’homme machine, and down to recent work that thinks of the human immune system as more machine-like than organic, or to the rejection of anthropomorphisms in thinking of the cosmos or of climate change. Our presupposed paradigm of the machine, however, has mutated over the last century from examples like the steam engine and the internal combustion engine to forms of technology that are embodied sign-systems or communications machines, like television, iPhones, and a computer connected to the Internet. Even automobiles these days are computerized. They are as much complex sign systems as they are gas-powered engines to turn the car’s wheels. Before looking a little more closely at the strange features of the ecotechnological model, however, I turn to Kafka as an exemplary thinker/non-thinker of the inhumanly machinal.

Machinal Auto-Co-Immunity as Context: Our Present State of Emergency

I do so, however, in a context. I am thinking not of the context of the important discussions between Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem, or between Benjamin and Berthold Brecht, on the question of whether Kafka is to be thought of as a mystic in the tradition of the Kabbalah or, on the contrary, as a faithful recorder of social conditions in pre-Holocaust Prague. [2] My context, rather, is our situation here in the United States and in the world today. Why and how should I read Kafka’s “Die Sorge des Hausvaters” today, this moment, on November 4, 2011? It does not go without saying that reading this little text is at all useful and justifiable in our present state of emergency.

What is that emergency? The United States is engaged full-tilt in four radical forms of apparently unwitting “auto-co-immune” self-destruction, to borrow Jacques Derrida’s neologism. The systems that should save and protect us are turning against ourselves.

One form of our suicidal folly is the refusal to move immediately to universal single-payer health care as the only way to keep health care costs from escalating further and further as a percentage of our GDP. That cost is already 16% of GDP, or even, according to some estimates, 20%, at least twice that of most European countries. This absurdity is bankrupting thousands when they get sick, killing tens of thousands of people every year who cannot afford health care, but also bankrupting the country, at the expense of making pharmaceutical companies and health insurance companies fathomlessly rich.

Another folly is the refusal to do anything serious to regulate the suicidal greed and risk-taking of banks and other financial institutions. Subprime mortgage-based credit default swaps and complex “derivatives” are the conspicuous example of this folly and greed. A minor consequence of the present “financial meltdown” is the dismantling of our educational system, especially public universities and especially the humanities. Our universities are in lock-step with finance capitalism. Harvard University lost about forty per cent of its endowment in the meltdown. Nothing has been done, for example raising taxes on the rich and large corporations, to ameliorate the outrageous discrepancy between the wealth of the top 1% and the remaining 99%. That 1% has survived the meltdown with increased income, wealth, and political power enabled through their manipulation of the media and “buying” of Congress.

A third form of auto-immune self-destruction is the refusal to withdraw from a disastrous war in Afghanistan, that “graveyard of empires.” Complete troop withdrawal is now scheduled for 2014. I hope I can be pardoned for being skeptical about whether that promise will be kept. It depends on who is in charge at that point. If Alexander the Great, the British, and the Soviet Union could not conquer and pacify that country, we are unlikely to be able to do it, even with a draft, millions of troops, and the further destruction of our economy, though of course the industrial buildup for WWII actually pulled our economy out of a decade of depression. It put everyone to work making guns, ammunition, tanks, and planes that would be then destroyed on the battlefield, in a triumph of the military-industrial complex.

The fourth looming catastrophe is the worst. It makes the others look trivial. We are doing practically nothing to keep this catastrophe from happening. Humanly caused global climate change, all but a tiny majority of scientists tell us, is most likely already irreversible. It is even now leading to more violent hurricanes, typhoons, and wild fires, the transformation of the United States Southwest into an arid desert, polar ice melt, tundra defrosting, glacial melting in Greenland, and so on. The ice and permafrost melting is generating feedback mechanisms that are raising global temperatures to lethal levels. The disastrous consequences of all these suicidal actions were more or less unintentional, though after a certain point we should have been able to see what was happening. The mystery is why we did nothing until it was too late. The internal combustion engine, chemical agriculture, and coal-fired electricity plants seemed like really neat ideas. They seemed to be technological inventions whose implementation would lead to improved quality of life all around. In a similar way, it seems a neat idea to be able to talk to or “text” to anyone anywhere in the world on a cell phone, though the concomitant changes in community and society were not at first evident. I mean the way these telecommunication gadgets are producing a mutation in the human species. The medium is the maker, and one thing it makes is the nature and collective culture of the human beings who use a given medium. [3] Global climate change on the scale it is happening will lead to widespread species extinction, water wars, the inundation of coastal plains worldwide (Florida, India, Vietnam, Australia, the Northeastern United States, where I live, small Pacific island nations, etc.), and perhaps ultimately to the extinction of homo sapiens, those wise creatures.

It is a feature of all four of these interlocked systems that changes in them are the product of chance, of random acts that statistically add up to a pattern. These systems are explicable by chaos and catastrophe theory. This means that they are all subject to sudden catastrophic change when they reach a certain unpredictable tipping point, as in the sudden unforeseen, but foreseeable, collapse of the investment companies Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, and the insurance giant AIG. Those collapses triggered the recent worldwide “financial meltdown.” Another famous example is the way the flap of a butterfly’s wing in Guatemala can, we are told, trigger a destructive hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico.

I can understand the head in the sand resistance to thinking about these linked domains and then trying to do something about them. Human beings have a limitless capacity for denial, for kidding themselves. Homo sapiens’ possession of sapience, however, suggests that we should at least have a look around as the water rises above our chins. How can we explain, if not stop, our penchant for self-destruction? Part of the problem of course is that we are not objective witnesses. We are ourselves part of these self-destructive processes, one element in interlocking stochastic system we only think we can control. I claim Kafka’s text might help us confront what is happening. That is a big and problematic claim.

Odradek the Illegible

What makes the reader queasy about “Die Sorge des Hausvaters”? This slight seasickness is brought about by the way this text resists being read according to any of the comforting organic unity models. These models are so ingrained as to be taken for granted. That is the case in general with ideological prejudices.

The English reader’s problems begin with the title and with the question of its translation, not to speak of the translation of the text itself. Stanley Corngold’s admirable new translation of Kafka’s stories translates “Die Sorge des Hausvaters” as “The Worry of the Father of the Family.” Peter Fenves, the translator of Werner Hamacher’s essay, gives “Cares” for “Sorge”: “Cares of a Family Man” (118). It is not entirely easy for an English speaker to get the hang of the nuances of the word “Sorge,” as it is used in German. My German/English dictionary gives a whole set of not entirely compatible meanings for “Sorge”: “grief, sorrow; worry, apprehension, anxiety, care, trouble, uneasiness, concern.” This list is followed by a diverse set of idiomatic phrases employing “Sorge,” e.g. “die Sorge ertränken” or “ersäufen,” to drown one’s sorrows in drink, and “keine Sorge,” “Don’t worry,” ”Never fear.” That is somewhat like what we say today: “No problem.”

Readers of Heidegger will remember the quite specific use he makes in Sein und Zeit of “Sorge,” as distinguished from “besorgen,” “Besorgnis,” “Fürsorge,” and “versorgen,” not to speak of “Angst.” Macquarrie and Robinson translate “Sorge” as “care.” Chapter Six of Section One of Sein und Zeit is called “Die Sorge als Sein des Daseins” (“Care as the Being of Dasein”), and “Sorge” is firmly distinguished from “Angst,” anxiety. Earlier Heidegger distinguished, in the permutations of words in “Sorge,” between “Besorgnis,” the “concern” we have for things ready to hand, from “Fürsorge,” the “solicitude” we have for other Daseins, in our primordial condition of “being with” other Daseins. Each is a different form of “Sorge,” care. (Being and Time 227, 157–9; original 182, 121–2). Is what the “Hausvater” suffers “care,” or “concern,” or “anxiety,” or just “worry”? Just what is he worried about? What are his cares? The text is not entirely clear about that, but we shall see what we shall see.

“Hausvater” brings its own problems. No straightforward English equivalent exists, since “the father of the family” does not carry the implication of patriarchal domination and responsibility within the house. The Greek word “oikonomos” meant manager of a household, from “oikos,” house, and “nomos,” managing, or lawgiving. “Hausvater” is a precise enough translation of “oikonomos.” “Eco” as in “economy,” or “ecology,” or “ecotechnology” refers to the house in the extended sense of “environment.” An “ecosystem,” says the American Heritage Dictionary, is “an ecological community together with its physical environment, considered as a unit.” The whole earth can be thought of as one large ecosystem that is now undergoing rapid climate change, or change in the house within which all earthlings dwell together in a global village. Jean-Luc Nancy’s term “ecotechnological” suggests that the whole environment is to be thought of under the aegis of the technological. This is a pantechnologization into which we and our bodies are plugged as a flash memory stick is plugged into a computer’s USB connection, ready to receive whatever information is downloaded into it.

I have not even yet quite finished with the title. Who assigned the title? Who is to be imagined as speaking it? Presumably Franz Kafka, the author, who gave a name to what he had written. He had a right to do that, as a Textvater. Who then speaks the text? Presumably the Hausvater, who says of Odradek authoritatively informed things like, “Sometimes he disappears for months at a time; he has probably moved into other houses; but then he inevitably returns to our house (doch kehrt er dann unweigerlich wieder in unser Haus zurück)“ (73). Since both title and text seem to be spoken or written in versions of Kafka’s characteristically neutral, deadpan voice, it is hard to know how much irony the title directs at the concern, care, sorrow, or worry of the house-father. Is Odradek really anything the Hausvater ought to worry about? The house-father perhaps has more serious things at hand that ought to generate concern. “Sorge,” however the reader takes it, seems, at least at first, an excessive term for what Odradek might justifiably cause.

If my reader thinks I am paying too much attention to nitpicking questions of translation and semantics, the first paragraph of “Die Sorge des Hausvaters” is my model and justification. It does not yet describe Odradek. Rather it speculates, fruitlessly, about the word’s etymology and meaning. I agree it is a strange word, but are not all proper names strange, singular, unique? Nevertheless, they all tend to have semantic meaning, as does my family name, “Miller,” or my wife’s given name, “Dorothy”: “gift of God.”

Before looking at what the text says about the word “Odradek,” let me, in the interest of getting on with what might become an interminable reading, suggest a working hypothesis. I claim that the name “Odradek,” the “thing” called Odradek, the text about Odradek, and the implied speaker(s) of the title and text have a common destructuring technological structure. “Structure” is not an entirely good word for what I am trying to describe, since it suggests a static assemblage. The oxymoron “destructuring structure” suggests not only that the assemblage in question is in a process of constant dynamic movement, but also that this movement is in one way or another a dismantling, I would even dare to say a deconstructuring.

The relation among the four odd deconstructuring structures I have identified is difficult to name. The relation is not metaphorical, nor allegorical, nor even exactly analogical. Perhaps one might say these structures are in resonance, or consonance, or Stimmung. The resonance, however, is not exactly a harmonious chiming. It is more a “Klang.” All are dissonant versions of one another.

The best model I know to describe these strange structures is to say that they are all are extremely peculiar little machines, each one sui generis, unlike all the others except in being strangely and contradictorily machinelike. What is machine-like about these structures, and what is peculiar about them if we think of them as machines? Each is made of parts that are assembled or articulated to make something that works. It does something, like any good machine. Each is both machine-like and also a self-functioning sign-system. Each seems in some way the product of techné, of an art of know-how. Each, however, is in one way or another incomplete or fissured, fractured by a crack, or cracks. Moreover, each forbids rational description or explanation. Each seems to be lacking meaning and identifiable purpose. The maker, finally, of these little unworked or inoperative (désoeuvrées [4] ) machines cannot be easily identified, nor can one imagine what weird intention motivated his (her? its?) exercise of a manufacturing technique. Each of these non-machinal machines has what Walter Benjamin, speaking of Kafka’s parables and stories, called a “cloudy place,” a place where reasonable understanding and interpretation fails. [5] Let me look at each of these unworked machines in turn, in their echoing disconsonance.

The first paragraph of “Die Sorge des Hausvaters,” strangely, discusses what contradictory things experts have had to say about the word or the name “Odradek.” I say this is strange not only because a discussion of etymology is an odd way to begin a story or a confession, if it is either of these, but also because it is not at all evident how linguists have got hold of a word which appears to be a secret kept between Odradek and the Hausvater. Only now, it appears, is the father of the family revealing a secret that has been up to now apparently kept inside the house, so to speak. He conspicuously does not begin by saying, “I have submitted this name to linguists expert in etymologies, and here is what they say.” Nevertheless, the word has apparently already been the subject of a lot of (fruitless) speculation. The Hausvater’s “cares” may have to do with his unsuccessful attempts to figure out, with the help of experts, what the word means. “No one,” however, he says, “would occupy himself with such studies if there were not really a creature called Odradek.” The Hausvater has Odradek in his care, at least during those times the strange animal-machine is roaming around the halls and stairways of his house or lurking in the attic. Therefore it is the house-father’s care or Sorge to figure out what the creature’s name means. Since Odradek, so far as I know, exists only in Kafka’s text, I and other readers who have taken the word into their care are doing just what the Hausvater says no one in his or her right mind would do.

Nevertheless, linguists have got hold of the word somehow, says the Hausvater. Structural linguists and etymologists, we know, do not really care all that much about the existence or non-existence a word’s referent. It is a word’s putative meaning as an item in a network of differential relations to other words that interests them. Moreover, the linguists in this case disagree sharply. The speaker concludes, irrationally, from their inability to agree, that etymology is of no use in assigning meaning to the portentous sounding conglomeration of three syllables, “Odradek.” “Some say,” the little text begins, “that the word Odradek has roots in (stamme aus) the Slavic languages, and they attempt to demonstrate the formation (Bildung) of the word on that basis (Grund). Still others maintain that its roots are German, and that it is merely influenced by the Slavic” (72).

Somewhat unreasonably, the Hausvater concludes that this disagreement or uncertainty means that such researches are useless in finding a meaning for the word. Just because experts disagree, it seems to me, is no valid reason for giving up the search. “The uncertainty of both interpretations (Deutungen), however,” says the text, “makes it reasonable to conclude that neither pertains, especially since neither of them enables you to find a meaning (Sinn) for the word” (72). I do not see how that uncertainty makes it reasonable to conclude any such thing. The Hausvater’s reasoning is as irrational as the word “Odradek.” One or the other of the schools of linguists may be right. Nor does it rationally follow that trying out one or the other, or both, of the hypothesized roots might not reveal a plausible meaning for the word. What would forbid the word “Odradek” from being a hybrid, like Kafka’s disturbing kitten-lamb in “A Crossbreed,” or like Kafka himself as a speaker of both German and Czech? “Odradek” may be a combination of Slavic and Germanic roots somewhat uneasily joined, with a fissure or fissures, perhaps a bottomless cloudy chasm, [6] opening up within the word, between its syllables or within them. Many such hybrid words do exist, for example in a polyglot or mongrel language like English.

What is at stake in this question of identifying meaning from etymons, however, as the reader will have noticed, is nothing less than the organic model as it dominates the traditional terminology of etymology, as in the term “word stem.” The word “Odradek,” experts claims, “has roots in” (stamm aus) either Slavic or German. One or the other of those languages is its “basis” (Grund). The word “Odradek” is rooted in the ground of either Slavic or German languages. The word has grown from them as a flower grows from its roots and stem.

The German word Grund, moreover, does not just mean “ground” in the “literal” sense of earth, garden soil. It is the German equivalent of the Greek logos or the Latin ratio. Latin ratio is afflilated with radius and radix, root, as in our English word “radish,” an edible root. Heidegger’s book about the principle of reason is called Der Satz vom Grund. He follows Schopenhauer in making this translation of the Latin phrase principium rationis. As a translation of the Latin formula, the Leibnizian idea that everything has its reason, that reason can be rendered to everything, der Satz vom Grund sounds extremely odd to an English-speaker’s ear. “Grund” for “reason”? That is not reasonable. It does not make sense.

“Etymon” comes from Greek etumos, true, real. The branch of linguistics called “etymology” is the search for the true original word from which later words are derived, as flower from root. The organic model, in this case, carries with it the whole system of Western metaphysics as embodied in that complex word, logos, meaning word, mind, ratio, rhythm, substance, ground, reason, and so on. In casually repudiating a procedure of reasoning out the meaning of the word “Odradek” by way of tracing its stem back to its roots in a grounded etymon, Kafka’s speaker is rejecting the claim of that whole branch of linguistics to be able to identify true meaning: “neither of them [the two hypothesized language roots: Slavic, German] enables you to find a meaning for the word” (“man auch mit keiner von ihnen einen Sinn des Wortes finden kann”) (72).

In spite of the speaker’s firm prohibition, Kafka scholars from Max Brod to Werner Hamacher have not failed to take the bait. They have risen to the occasion. They have proposed all sorts of meanings for the separate syllables of the word “Odradek.” These various meanings are to a considerable degree incompatible. Brod’s essay containing his solution to the riddle of the word “Odradek” was already published in Kafka’s lifetime. It presupposes Brod’s characteristically religious reading of Kafka. Brod claims that the word “Odradek” contains “an entire scale of Slavic words meaning ‘deserter’ or ‘apostate’ … : deserter from the kind, rod; deserter from Rat (counsel), the divine decision about creation, rada.” (qtd. in Hamacher 319). Brod puts this succinctly in another essay: “(Slavic etymology: having defected from counsel [Rat]—rada = Rat)” (Hamacher 319). Hamacher ironically wonders whether this reading of Odradek as meaning an apostate from the kind or rod says something about a man whose name was Brod. Wilhelm Emrich, in a book on Kafka of 1958, also cited by Hamacher, embroiders a bit on Brod’s definition and secularizes it:

That is all quite rational and clear. What Emrich says, however, does not jibe with what Brod says. For Brod, Odradek is in the condition of being an apostate. For Emrich, Odradek is someone who dissuades someone else from something. They cannot both be right. Moreover, neither Brod’s meaning nor Emrich’s is exemplified in the text itself. The Hausvater’s Odradek neither is shown to be an apostate from any faith, nor does he attempt to dissuade anyone, the Hausvater for example, from anything. Odradek just nimbly races up and down stairways, corridors, and halls, or lurks in the attic. These places are those inside/outside regions of a house or home that appear so often in Kafka’s writings, for example as the locations of Joseph K.’s (almost) endlessly postponed trial in The Trial.

Werner Hamacher’s own reading/non-reading of the word “Odradek” is by far the subtlest and most extensive I know. It goes on for pages. I cannot do justice to it here, but a sketch of what he says may be given. You must read Hamacher’s essay for yourself. I identify three central features of what Hamacher says about “Odradek.” 1) Hamacher is a distinguished master of what might be called paronomastics, the study of puns and wordplay, not the same as the science of word interpretation. Even the most apparently far-fetched associations are grist for Hamacher’s mill, hay for his making. Hamacher makes a lot of hay. 2) The result is an amazing series of more or less contradictory words that Hamacher finds buried in “Odradek.” If William Carlos Williams says a poem is “a small (or large) machine made of words” (256), Hamacher sees in “Odradek” one of those little unworked machines I am claiming is a new paradigm for thinking in many realms. The series Hamacher generates is like a forever incomplete set of variations on a few given sounds, like music by John Cage, John Adams, or Philip Glass, like a certain form of postmodern generative poetry, that by Georges Perec, John Cage, the Oulipo group, [7] or like some apparently mad sequence of superimposed words and phrases in Finnegans Wake, [8] or like the ones and zeroes in a computer file stored in the hard disk’s random access memory, or like the just over three billions of DNA Base pairs in the human genome. The human genome is a huge set of permutations accumulated over millions of years, many of them meaningless or without apparent function. They are variations on a handful of basic letters naming chemical agglomerations. 3) Hamacher repeatedly insists that the upshot of this paronomastic investigation is not to identify the meaning, however complex, of the word “Odradek,” but to confirm its lack of meaning or its paradoxical meaning as asserting that it is outside any meaning, that it means meaninglessness. Most etymologists agree that the first syllable, “od,” is a privative, and that the last syllable, “ek,” is a diminutive. The problem is the seemingly limitless plurivocity of the syllable “rad”:

Here is the strange Oulipian poem that emerges if I just run Hamacher’s paronomastic word lists along in a row, with some of Hamacher’s commentary interpolated. The reader will note that Hamacher takes away with one hand what he gives with the other. He wants to have these associations and at the same time to repudiate them as all false leads. The effect of the echoing potentially interminable series of words and word fragments is that they all gradually lose meaning and become mere sound, “rad, rad, rad, rad,” in a crescendo of nonsense, as does the whole word “Odradek” if you repeat it often enough, as I am doing here, with Hamacher’s help:

If I abstract just the German, Czech, and Latin words from Hamacher’s series I get the following Oulipian or Cagean more or less meaningless and unreadable poem. The individual items have meaning, but put together in this way, without grammar or syntax, they lose meaning and become variations on a mere sound or on possible ways of arranging a small selection of letters of the alphabet: rada, Rat, rád, rádek, Rede, Verräter; ratio, Od-rade-K, Od-Rabe-K, Od-raven-K, Kafka, radix, “od-radix”; odrodek, odroditi, odraditi, odranec, odranka, odrati, odrbati, odrek, odrh, odrod, odrodek, Odradek.

This string would be akin to the many unverifiable meanings that Jacques Derrida gives to the enigmatic phrase that starts his essay on “How to Avoid Speaking: Denials”: “Pardon de ne pas vouloir dire” (which means, among other possibilities, “I beg your pardon for not wanting to speak,” or “I beg your pardon for not meaning anything” (119–121; 161, 163**)), or to the variations in meaning that Thomas Pynchon, in one segment of Gravity’s Rainbow, gives by changes in punctuation, emphasis, and context to a single word string “You never did the Kenosha Kid”:

Another example would be the string of words, phonemes, and putative Indo-European roots in “g” that I spin out, with help from Derrida’s Glas, in “Line,” the first chapter of Ariadne’s Thread: graph, paragraph, paraph, epigraph, graffito, graft, graphium, graphion, graphein, gluphein, gleubh-, gher-, gerebh-, gno-, guh, gn, gl, gh, gr. (9–10). Derrida’s “Telepathy” appropriates another such multilingual string from Freud’s strange essays on telepathy: “Forsyth … Forsyte, foresight, Vorsicht, Vorasussicht, precaution, or prediction [prevision].” Elsewhere in “Telepathy” Derrida appropriates a dazzling sequence, generated from the name “Claude” (ambiguously both male and female) from his own Glas: “glas … (cla, cl, clos, lacs, le lacs, le piége, le lacet, le lais, là, da, fort, hum … claudication [cla, cl, closed, lakes, snare, trap, lace, the silt, there, here, yes, away, hmmm … limp])” (260–1, 234 (translation modified), 235; 269, 245, 246). [9] Other examples of such Oulipian poems can be found in the discussions of Cage, Perec, and Joyce in Louis Armand’s “Constellations,” referred to in footnote 8.

Given language systems or multiple interwoven language systems are non-rational assemblages in which the meaning of a given phoneme or string of phonemes may be apparently limited by context, by intonation, and by its difference from other phonemes or strings of phonemes. Nevertheless, a given string always exceeds its context and its differential limitations toward a limitless horizon of more and more remote but never entirely excludable puns, homonyms, and chance associations. The words or phrases in these lists are not ordered either by priority or temporally or as a narrative sequence. They could be given in any order. Implicitly they are simultaneous, like all the data in the Internet or like the items in a hypertext. The first item is not a beginning, nor is the last word an end. That makes Louis Armand’s Mallarméan figure of the constellation appropriate, even though “constellation” implies a fixed pattern rather than the dynamically and unpredictably changing assemblage I am exemplifying here. The items in these sequences are like those bits of different colored thread knotted and twisted together that are wound on Odradek as if he were no more than a spool for saving used thread. Each list I have cited could be extended indefinitely in either direction. Ultimately, by a more and more outrageous process of substitution and permutation, such as Hamacher brilliantly deploys, as if he were a machine for making puns, any item, such as the “rad” in “Odradek,” could lead to all the words in the Czeck and German languages, and to all the words in other languages too. It is no wonder sane people dislike puns and say of them what Samuel Johnson said: “He that would make a pun would pick a purse.” Punning robs language of its rationality, as do the alliterations in Johnson’s witty formulation. Paronomasia, like accidental alliterations, reveals that language is already an irrational machine. The will to meaning, the “vouloir vouloir dire,” can never capture or control this machine, anymore than the Hausvater can capture or control Odradek.

I have hypothesized that the thing that calls itself Odradek has an unstructuring structure that is analogous to the unworking (désoeuvrant) word-machine “Odradek.” Let me be more specific about this. For one thing Odradek the thing is, like the word “Odradek,” homeless. When the Hausvater asks Odradek where he lives, he says “No permanent residence (Unbestimmter Wohnsitz)” (73), [10] and then laughs. “But it is a kind of laughter that can only be produced without lungs. It sounds more or less like the rustling of fallen leaves (wie das Rascheln in gefallenen Blättern)” (73).

For me this is the most uncanny moment of “Die Sorge des Hausvaters.” It is akin to the skin-crawling and hair-raising moment when the Hunter Gracchus, who is caught permanently on his death-barge drifting between this world and the next, says: “My barge has no tiller, it is driven by the wind that blows in the nethermost regions of death” (Kafka’s Selected Stories 112). Laughter is, experts claim, a form of distinctively human gesture-speech. We assume that animals cannot laugh. What, however, is laughter that is produced without lungs? It is laughter without laughter, an ironic undercutting of real laughter. Odradek’s laughter is directed, oddly, toward the assertion that he has no permanent residence. It is an inhuman sound, like that produced by the rustling of fallen leaves. As Hamacher has recognized, however, “Blättern” is also the German word for the leaves of a printed book. Odradek’s laughter, one might say, is a purely literary laughter. It is a sound generated by the words on the page and by their comparison with the sound of fallen leaves. But the leaves of this text are fallen, dead, dried out. They can only rustle. They are not legible and they cannot be read, like Odradek’s laughter. Why does he laugh? No reason is given for why he finds having no permanent address risible. It hardly seems a laughing matter, or even an object fit for ironic non-laughing laughter.

The Hausvater’s description of Odradek the thing is as anomalous as the word that names him or it. Odradek is neither a human being, nor an animal, nor a thing, but rather a strange sort of talking and nimbly moving machine. Odradek is a (not very successful) robot, a technological construct that seems to have been made by someone not very good at designing robots. Or rather it is difficult to imagine that it had any designer at all. It seems to be the product of techné without a technician, as, it may, are the universe as a whole and human bodies within that universe, with their defective genomes, potentially self-destructive immune systems, and faulty endocrine systems. All three are prone to lethal non-working. We and our ecosystem may be the result of chance alterations over billions of years that have never yet quite got it right from the perspective of what we human beings think would be good for us.

Attractive as the argument from intelligent design is, since it gives a meaning to the creation and to all the creatures in it, the evidence strongly suggests that Darwin and recent physicists and geneticists are right: the universe and everything within it has evolved through billions of years of random variation, with the more or less random survival of the fittest determining which variations last longest. No rational designer could have put together the human genome, the endocrine system, and the immune system. Almost anyone could have done better than this bricolage of spare parts, with a lot of left-over parts (the nonsense sequences in the human genome) that do not seem to have any purpose or function at all. They may, however, have some hidden function that we have not yet identified, or may never be able to identify.

The same thing can be said of Odradek. The Hausvater says nothing at all about Odradek’s genesis and genealogy. He seems to have no origin and no kin, to be sui generis, a one off, just as he seems to have no end in the sense of purpose or goal: “At first it looks like a flat, star-shaped spool for thread, and in fact, it does seem to be wound with thread; although these appear to be only old, torn-off pieces of thread of the most varied kinds and colors knotted together but tangled up in one another. But it is not just a spool, for a little crossbar sticks out from the middle of the star, and another little strut is joined to it at a right angle. With the help of this second little strut on the one side and one of the points of the star on the other, the whole thing can stand upright, as if on two legs” (72). If you try to imagine what this strange machine would look like, you have difficulty making sense of it. I never yet saw a spool for thread that was star-shaped, though commentators have seen a reference to the Star of David, first employed in Prague as a way of marking Jews. Nevertheless, how would you wind thread around the points of the star? In and out? They would slip off the star’s points. The bits of thread are all tangled and knotted in any case, like those word and phoneme strings I discussed earlier. They have no apparent purpose beyond showing that Odradek or someone who uses him (it) is a thread-saver, though for no apparent reason. Perhaps some obscure reference may be encoded to Kafka’s works as what he called a “patchwork” of narrative elements knotted together in a random sequence.

I can see how such an apparatus might stand upright, but I do not see how it can move so nimbly up and down the stairs, down the corridors, in the hallway, in the attic, as the Hausvater says it does. It is so extraordinarily mobile that it can never be caught: “Odradek außerordentlich beweglich und nicht zu fangen ist.” Though Odradek appears to be made of wood, it is self-propelled and it can speak and laugh, though it is without lungs. Like the kitten-lamb in “The Crossbreed,” or the talking ape in “Report to an Academy,” or like all those other talking and thinking animals in Kafka’s work, Odradek belongs to no identifiable species. It is neither thing, nor plant, nor animal, nor human being, but a disturbing mixture of all these that defies reasonable classification.

The reader might be tempted to think that Odradek is incomplete, unfinished, or broken in some way, but the Hausvater says no proof of that exists, though he has sought evidence of it. If Odradek is incomplete and the missing parts could be found, then it might make better sense as a technological machine with some identifiable purpose: “It is tempting to think that this figure (Gebilde) once had some sort of functional shape {zweckmäßige Form] and is now merely broken. But this does not seem to be the case; at least there is no evidence for such a speculation; nowhere can you see any other beginnings or fractures that would point to anything of the kind; true, the whole thing seems meaningless yet in its own way complete (das Ganze erscheint zwar sinnlos, aber in seiner Art abgeschlossen)” (72). That would be a good description of Kafka’s works, as well as of the paradigmatic Kafkesque word “Odradek.” All these are complete, even the works he did not finish, but meaningless.

No wonder the Hausvater is worried. Kafka, I imagine, must have taken great delight in imagining a thing that would defy reasonable explanation, be meaningless, and yet “in its own way” complete, abgeschlossen, closed in on itself. He also must have enjoyed inventing a responsible and reasonable patriarch as “narrator” whose attempts to make sense of the creature that has invaded his household lead over and over to the verdict: “meaningless (sinnlos),” just as the name Odradek defies all attempts to give it a verifiable meaning. Both the name and the thing are cunning technological constructions whose “purpose” seems to be to defy reasonable explanation by human beings.

The final characteristic of Odradek is the one that causes the father of the family the most worry or Sorge. This is his fear that Odradek may be unable to die, again like the Hunter Gracchus. Anything mortal, the Hausvater says, has at least an identifiable goal, that is, to die. For Heidegger, an essential feature of Daseins is that they can foresee their death, as, according to him, animals cannot. Sein zum Tode, being toward death, is therefore what Daseins are. “Can he die?” asks the Hausvater about Odradek. “Everything that dies has previously had some sort of goal (Ziel), some kind of activity (Tätigkeit), and that activity is what has worn it down (zerrieben); this does not apply to Odradek” (73).

The principle of reason or Satz vom Grund that this strange little text radically puts in question presumes that anything with a rational meaning has that meaning because its activity is goal-oriented. Its meaning can be defined in terms of its goal or purpose, its Zweck or Ziel. Odradek has no goal and therefore his (its) activity does not wear him out until he (it) dies, as even a machine, however cleverly made, ultimately wears out. Only a technological construction without goal, purpose, or meaning can be immortal, perhaps like the universe itself in its endless movement of expansion and then contraction back to a new Big Bang. The Hausvater’s most haunting worry is that Odradek will outlive him and “that one day, with his bits of thread trailing behind him, he will come clattering down the stairs, at the feet of my children and my grandchildren[.] True, he clearly harms no one (Er schadet ja offenbar niemandem), but the idea that, on top of everything else, he might outlive me, that idea I find almost painful (fast schmerzliche)” (73).

After all this I have said about the word “Odradek” and the thing “Odradek” as a way of exemplifying the model of self-destructuring inorganic technological structures I have in mind as a replacement for thinking on the model of the organic, I can give short shrift, [11] or, to make a pun of my own, short Schrift, in the sense of just a few written words, to the two other forms of the inorganic machinal or technological this text exemplifies.

If “Odradek” is a word that is not a word and if Odradek it(him)self is a machine that is not a machine, Die Sorge des Hausvaters is an anomalous text that belongs to no recognizable genre. It is neither a story, nor a parable, nor an allegory, nor a confession, nor an autobiography, nor a scientific report, nor does it conform to the laws of any other recognized genre. It is an anomaly, an inorganic hybrid assemblage of words mixing aspects of many genres but conforming lawfully to none. It is not even much like other texts by Kafka. It is sui generis, a species with one exemplar, no parents and no offspring.

In a similar way, Die Sorge des Hausvaters does not create in the reader’s mind the illusion of some recognizable character or personage. We learn little about the father of the family except that he is worried about Odradek. Kafka excels in creating a cool, slightly ironic, narrative voice that can hardly be called a “point of view,” or a perspective, or either a reliable or an unreliable narrator, or the recognizable speech of a person. “Die Sorge des Hausvaters” is just a strange assemblage of words that seems to have fallen out of the sky, like a meteor, or like an inscribed astrolith, or like a scratched stone we might find on the beach. It just lies there like an indecipherable message in code. Though we know Kafka wrote it, nothing we can learn about Kafka the person explains or accounts for this fantastically inventive little text written in pellucid German. Its meaning is its successful resistance to interpretation, its failure to mean. It is sinnlos.

Whatever Works

Before turning to some present-day examples of destructuring structures, let me summarize the features of such a model as I have identified it in “Die Sorge des Hausvaters.” Such a technological artifact seems to have no creator. It seems to be self-generated and self-generating. It is certainly not the result of human will and technological knowhow. It is best described as a machine, but as machine that is unworked, inoperative, or disarticulated, though it goes on and on doing its thing, working away, like the Energizer bunny. It is techné without a technologist or technician, but a mad techné that produces machines that do not make sense from the perspective of human needs and wants, or from any other imaginable perspective.

I want in conclusion to set in parallel five systems that I claim are understandable, if they can be understood, according to the linguistico-machinal model I have sketched out, with Kafka’s help: the environment, the global financial system, the nation-community, the body, and language. These mechanical sign-systems work. They make something happen, often in the end disaster from the human perspective. Each system can be seen as a figure for the others, but no one is the literal of which the others are displacements, figures, supplements, substitutions, or symbols. All are interconnected. Together they make an all-inclusive ecotechnological non-integrated whole into which each one of “us” is plugged.

One such system is terra, the earth. The earth, scientists are more and more discovering, is a complicated machine made of almost innumerable atoms and molecules that signal to one another. This machine is out of our control. It just goes on doing what it does do, that is, create the ever-changing climate within which we live, as in our environment, our house or oikos. The clever scientists, technicians, and engineers who invented and perfected the internal combustion engine that uses gasoline as a fuel, and then linked it to a vehicle with wheels, like the scientists who developed chemical fertilizers and pesticides, or coal-fired electrical plants, did not intend to cause catastrophic climate change. Nor did they at first know that, once started, climate change accelerates rapidly through feedback mechanisms. Scientists these days keep saying in amazement, “This is happening much faster than we thought it would!” The rapid increase of carbon dioxide and other green house gases in the atmosphere as a result of the later stages of industrialization has intervened in the ecosystem to trigger its self-modifying gears and levers. We intended no such thing, but that did not keep it from happening, mechanically.

The earth is not a super-organism. It is not an organism at all. It is best understood as an extremely complex machine that is capable of going autodestructively berserk, at least from the limited perspective of human needs. Global warming will bring about widespread species extinction. It will flood our low-lying islands, our coastal plains, and whatever towns, cities, and houses are on them. An example is our house on the shore of Deer Isle, Maine, where I am writing this, in sight of the ocean, only fifty feet away, its surface only a few feet down, at high tide, from the ground level of our house.

Moreover, as we continue to build up carbon in the atmosphere to higher and higher levels, we never know when the next emitted carbon-dioxide molecule will tip over some ecosystem and trigger a nonlinear climate event—like melting the Siberian tundra and releasing all its methane, or drying up the Amazon, or melting all the sea ice at the North Pole. The systems I am describing are best understood by way of chaos theory and catastrophe theory, that is, in terms of instantaneous breaks. Moreover, when one ecosystem collapses, it can trigger sudden unpredictable changes in others that could abruptly alter the whole earth (Friedman).

Another such machine is the global financial system. That machine is linked now to the Internet and to a host of computer-based data-storage and data-manipulation devices. Global capitalism in 2007 imploded, causing a worldwide recession and much human suffering. The unemployment level in the United States is at almost ten per cent, not counting the millions who have stopped looking for a job. The financiers, bankers, and CEOs whose decisions brought about this catastrophe did not intend to bring the financial system to the edge of total breakdown. Each acted rationally, so they thought, to maximize profits and garner their own high salaries, bonuses, and stock options. The financial meltdown happened, apparently, because too many people believed in the magic of a simple computer program formula that was supposed (falsely) to measure risk comparatively, i.e, the joint default probability of mortgages. David X. Li, then in Canada and the United States, but now back in Beijing, wrote the formula, a Gaussian copula formula of elegant simplicity (Salmon). The formula was fatally flawed by the assumption that house values would not, could not, go down. All the bankers and investment managers believed in that assumption, however, including the ratings agencies, paid by the financial “industry,” that were giving AAA ratings to bundles of eventually almost totally worthless securities.

The computer programs “quants” devised allowed linked computers and databases to do things no human brain can understand. All the bankers and heads of financial institutions like Merrill Lynch, Bear Stearns, AIG, Citigroup, Bank of America, and so on, said, as their institutions were going belly up, that they did not understand what a credit default swap is, or what a CDO (collateralized debt obligation) is, or just what are the workings of programs that make tranches and tranches of tranches to distribute subprime mortgages into more and more remote slices. This procedure was supposed to spread the risk so widely that no one would suffer appreciable loss if someone defaulted on one of the mortgages. Those in charge of banks and financial companies were not lying when they said they did not know how far in debt they were. It appears that many were totally insolvent. One hundred and four smaller banks failed in the United States by October 24, 2009, and bank failures have continued worldwide since then. CDO’s added up to $4.7 trillion in 2006. By 2007 the amount of credit default swaps (CDSs) outstanding was the astounding sum of $62 trillion. The banks and financial companies were destroyed, or would have been destroyed if they had not been saved by a massive infusion of billions of dollars of taxpayers’ money, by something built into the system that was not an object of cognition, though some whistle-blowers put up warning signs. This is a little like the way I do not understand just what is going on somewhere deep inside my computer when I press certain little keys on my keyboard and get this present sentence on my screen in twelve point Palatino, double-spaced, with certain pre-set margins and other automatic formatting. Our cats are adept at accidentally pressing fortuitous combinations of keys that cause my laptop to “crash,” just as the stock market crashed. Like the CEOs already mentioned, in relation to their highly paid computer quants, I have no idea just what my cats have done, nor how to undo it.

It is an essential feature of the modern financial system that it depends on computer programs and elaborately interconnected computers for its workings. These workings exceed human comprehension. That does not, however, keep them from going on doing their thing, in what might be called by anthropomorphism a revenge of the robots. The unexpectedly accelerated pace of global warming and species extinction is parallel to this unknowabilty of the workings of the financial system. Experts have to keep revising the time frame for the inundation of our Deer Isle house. It keeps getting more and more imminent. “Get ready! The end of the world is at hand!” “Get ready! The financial system is in meltdown!” It will not have escaped my reader’s notice that “meltdown” and “toxic,” as in “toxic assets,” are terms borrowed from the vocabulary of climate change. Thomas Friedman, in the New York Times Op Ed column cited above, expresses our inadvertently-caused plight as follows:

[Addendum 11/29/11: Friedman’s scenario of self-destructive high interest rates has not taken place yet in the United States, but just this event has recently occurred in the “Club-Med” nations of the Euro-zone that are on the verge of bankruptcy: Greece, Ireland, Italy, Spain, Portugal. Both the Euro-zone nations and the United States, however, are making the same disastrous ideological (that is, robot-like) mistake of thinking they can return to economic well-being by slashing government spending and lowering taxes on the rich and on big corporations. This is exactly the wrong thing to do, as Ireland’s present plight demonstrates. Following this strategy would be a catastrophe eventually even for the rich and for corporations because it would greatly reduce the income consumers must have to buy the goods corporations make. Meanwhile, unemployment in the United States remains at over nine percent (much higher if you count those who are underemployed or who have stopped looking for a job); hundreds of thousands of people are losing their houses through mortgage foreclosures, some illegal; the top 1% of Americans make 20% of the national income and control 40% of the nation’s wealth; national health care costs are rising to 20% of GDP and will go on rising; soaring tuition costs are putting higher education out of the reach of more and more Americans, in a litany of interlocked auto-co-immune disasters.]

The third such system is a community or a nation. Such a construct is an interrelated conglomeration of human beings controlled by laws, institutions, constitutions, legislatures, and all the machinery of government, what Foucault calls “governmentality.” The financial system is an important part of a given national fabric, especially in a militarist-capitalist-teletechnoscientific plutocracy like the United States. What is most conspicuous about the United States today, if we think of it not as an organism but as a technological artifact, a product of techné, is its penchant for mindless or at least irrational self-destruction.

Why is it that a large group of apparently well-meaning and apparently sane human beings are hell-bent on auto-destruction? The best description of this I know is Jacques Derrida’s hypothesis of what he calls “auto-co-immunity,” that is, a penchant within any community that turns its forces against itself. Such a community destroys itself by way of what is intended to make it safe, whole, indemnified from harm, just as autoimmunity in the human body’s immune system turns the body against itself. I have discussed Derrida’s “auto-co-immunity” at some length in For Derrida (123–9), but here are the essential passages, from Derrida’s “Faith and Knowledge” and “Rogues.” They speak for themselves:

The Patriot Act and the Department of Homeland Security have made United States citizens conspicuously less safe by taking away our precious civil liberties, subjecting us to universal surveillance and the danger of indefinite imprisonment, perhaps by way of “extraordinary rendition,” to be tortured in a secret prison in a foreign country. I identify in iteration in variation four further regions where the United States is currently engaged in auto-immune self-destruction.

One, perhaps the worst, is the refusal to have done anything serious about global climate change until it is already too late. It is already too late, I mean, to keep the atmospheric temperature and the ocean levels from rising to levels that will make the planet in most places uninhabitable.

Another auto-immune gesture is the refusal to do anything serious to regulate the financial system. Bankers and investment officials are already returning to their old ways of excessive risk-taking along with setting outrageous salaries and bonuses for themselves. Banks and investment houses are fighting tooth and nail to keep regulation from happening. This is perhaps because they secretly know that climate change will cause devastation. They know what they are doing will cause another financial meltdown, but are squirreling away huge sums of money so they can pay to be part of the surviving remnant living in gated communities perched high above the rising waters. Or so they imagine.

A third example of auto-immune behavior is the refusal even to consider the only rational solution to our catastrophic health-care system, namely single payer government-run health care. The Republicans have sworn to repeal the modest and not very effective health care bill that was passed when Democrats still controlled both houses of Congress. They also want to eviscerate Medicare and Medicaid, which would cause tens of thousands of our citizens to die from lack of adequate healthcare, in a perhaps not entirely undeliberate process of population culling. It is difficult to believe that the Republicans, some of them at least, do not know what they are doing. Without a robust so-called “public option” the “reforms” that passed Congress and was signed by Presideny Obama will only make the health care insurance companies and the pharmaceutical companies immensely richer, costing far beyond the current sixteen to twenty per cent of the Gross Domestic Product that we spend on health care in the United States.

A fourth example, also already mentioned, is the delay in withdrawing from the war in Afghanistan and bringing our troops home. Trillions of taxpayer dollars have already been sunk into the wars of occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan, not to speak of the human toll in killed and wounded on all sides.

If you just stand back a little and look at these four problems, it is easy to see the rational solutions. Our collective auto-co-immunity, however, seems to make it extremely unlikely that any of these solutions will be chosen. Apparently we will remain blindly bent on self-destruction.

An additional realm of the technological is the “human being,” thought of as soul embodied, material spirit. The body is now more and more seen as not organic in the warm fuzzy sense we have tended to mean that, but as a complex product of techné, with the universe as ecotechnician. The human immune system is exemplary of the body’s machine-like self-functioning, as is the endocrine system. You cannot direct your antibodies to do this or that by thinking about them. They act on their own. It is L’homme machine, as de la Mettrie said, or La femme machine, but with a tendency to self-destruction built in. Hypothyroidism is, for example, apparently an autoimmune disease, as is, perhaps, pancreatic cancer, and as are many other diseases and cancers. Many forms of cancer appear to be brought about by random mishaps in the genetic code. We cannot influence by thinking the way a string of genetic code generates a certain protein or enzyme, as it is programmed to do, or the way the immune system produces antibodies against what it perceives, not always correctly, as invading alien antigens. These mechanical systems do not always work all that well. They are cumbersome, redundant, and prone to error. Recent work on the human genome and its functions, on cell biology, on the endocrine system, on the immune system with its terrifying power of self-destructive autoimmunity, and by neuroscientists on brain chemistry and the brain’s “wiring” is showing that a technological paradigm is a better way than a traditional organic paradigm to understand the body and even its most human-appearing concomitants of consciousness and the accompanying senses of self-hood and volition.

An authoritative recent feature essay in Science News, “Enter the Virosphere,” summarizes recent work on viruses in ways that indicate how the workings of genes are machine-like, but make big problems for assumptions about what constitutes “life.” Viruses were thought not to be alive, but scientists are now increasingly not so sure, hence the pun in the title “Virosphere” rather than “Biosphere.” On the one hand, viruses do not eat, respire, or reproduce. They have no metabolism, so they must be dead. On the other hand, viruses are made of genetic material that acts in many ways like that in “living organisms” such as bacteria, algae, rabbits, and human beings. A gene is a gene. Whether a given gene is in a virus or in the human genome, it is a pattern that constructs things like proteins. Viruses are everywhere. “A thimbleful of sea water contains millions of virus particles” (Ehrenberg 22). Viruses make up about 90 percent of the ocean’s biomass, killing an estimated 20 percent of that biomass every day. “Their killing feeds the world” (22), since so many “organisms” feed on dead organisms killed by viruses. Just as a living cell’s nucleus uses its surrounding cytoplasm “to replicate its own DNA using machinery outside of itself” (qtd. from Jean-Michel Claverie in Ehrenberg 25), a virus is made of genetic material that acts like a nucleus in entering a host cell and using the machinery of that cell to reproduce itself. Viruses borrow genes from other gene systems and either pass them on to “infect” other gene systems, or incorporate them in their own genomes.

It might be best to say that the new evidence does not so much lead to the conclusion that viruses are alive as suggest that all so-called living things are subject, like viruses, to the machine-like processes of gene action. It may even be that the first “living thing” was a protovirus that ultimately mutated into biological cells, though that hypothesis is highly controversial. It might aid coming to terms with “Die Sorge des Hausvaters ” if we think of Odradek as virus-like, or at any rate of we include the virus along with thing, plant, animal, and human beings in Odradek’s hybrid mixture of language-like systems. The virus’s relation to language is indicated in the terminology used to describe the two different ways bacterial and animal viruses enter a host cell, replicate themselves, and then leave the cell to continue their work. This is often a work of killing. According to how virologists express this process, the viral genome enters a cell, “replicates” itself, then “transcribes” itself,” then “translates” itself, finally “assembling” and “packaging” itself before the replicated viral genome exits the cell in new multiple copies, like those made by a copying machine.

Figures drawn from the workings of language are, you can see, essential to expressing the results of genetic research. The three dominant metaphors in Ehrenberg’s article are “machinery,” “language,” and “infection.” These are used unselfconsciously and unproblematically. They are the usual figurative words for the way a virus works. One paragraph, however, ostentatiously, with evident irony, uses a sustained metaphor comparing the way viruses work to the global financial system, with sinister implications for the mindless technicity of both. The paragraph also reinforces my claim that we tend to think of each of these systems by figurative analogy with the others, in the absence of any grounded literal terminology. Any description of these products of techné is catachrestic, that is, the borrowing from one realm of a term then used to name something whose working has no satisfactory literal name: “Viruses also may keep genes they’ve procured, and even bundle these assets together, as appears to be the case with several photosynthesis genes recently found in marine viruses. These findings hint at the vast viral contribution to the ocean’s gross national product and viruses’ significance in global energy production” (22).

Fifth: Textual systems, sign systems generally, are also machine-like in their action. This can best be seen in the interference of constative and performative forms of language. Once these systems come into being (who knows how?) they are out of our control. They do things on their own which we are powerless to stop. As Paul de Man argued, we cannot prevent ourselves from making the same errors of misreading all over again even when we have correctly identified them as errors. [12] Decisive here is de Man’s idea that performative utterances work on their own, not as a result of human agency. They work mechanically, through the force of language. And they work in weird and unpredictable ways. De Man always emphasized the mechanical, non-human, and arbitrary workings of language, as does, in a somewhat different way, Louis Armand throughout Literate Technologies. [13] The first draft of the present essay was written by way of examples that were accessed spontaneously and somewhat randomly from the database stored somewhere in my brain’s memory center. Sentences just formed themselves magically in my mind, as words were fitted into pre-existing grammatical and syntactical paradigms. This happened by a process of invention in the double sense of discovery and making up. I then typed these sentences into my laptop. I suppose most writing by anyone gets done that way. It is uneasy-making, however, to realize that writing is so little under the writer’s conscious control and volition. I never know what I am going to write until I write it. Die Sprache spricht: Language speaks. It speaks through me by a species of ventriloquism that uses me (in the sense of my body and my computer literate, keyboard-tapping, conscious self and fingers) as medium.

For Paul de Man, a performative utterance makes something happen, but not what is intended or predicted. The last sentences of de Man’s “Promises (Social Contract)” express this in terms of that paradigmatic performative, a promise: “The redoubtable efficacy of the text is due to the rhetorical model of which it is a version. This model is a fact of language over which Rousseau himself has no control. Just as any other reader, he is bound to misread his own text as a promise of political change. The error is not within the reader; language itself dissociates the cognition from the act. Die Sprache verspricht (sich); to the extent that is necessarily misleading, language just as necessarily conveys the promise of its own truth” (de Man 277). The German phrase is an ironic allusion to Heidegger’s portentous, Die Sprache spricht, “Language speaks,” cited earlier. “Versprechen” means “to promise,” as a reflexive: “to promise itself,” but it also means “to make a slip of the tongue.” This happens because of the doubleness of the prefix “ver-,” which can mean both for and against. De Man’s little phrase is an example of the nonsensical paronomasias, puns, and wordplay, built mechanically into language. Language speaks all right, but it says things the speaker does not intend, that are necessarily misleading, for example in the form of a promise that cannot be kept. De Man goes on, notoriously, to assert that such rhetorical complexities, such linguistic mixups, “generate history.” As de Man expressed this unsettling feature of performative language in a graduate seminar: “you aim at a bear and an innocent bird falls out of the sky.”

Put these five domains together, working like the interconnected machines that they are, linked as one big and extremely cumbersome and désoeuvrée machine, and you get the revolt of the robots big time. Using the technological model as a way of outlining what is happening in these five realms will not keep what is occurring from occurring. Like Odradek, my prime model in this essay of the inorganic ecotechnological, these unworked machines just keep on mindlessly doing their thing. This alternative paradigm does, however, provide a better techné or tool than the organic model for sketching out what is happening as the water rises around us. Unfortunately, however, as my emphasis on what is irrational or aporetic about the (non)machines of various sorts I have named, the ecotechnological model does not lead to clear cognition or understanding. At most it invites the sorts of performative action, such as passing laws about carbon emissions, that seem exceedingly unlikely to take place. The implacable law of auto-co-immunity forbids that.

This failure of both cognition and of effective action is taking place in fulfillment of a weird translation into Mayan hieroglyphs of Christ’s words on the cross. The oral expressions of these hieroglyphs were then transliterated into Western letters, according to a perhaps fallacious mystery story I can no longer find among our books: “Sinking, Sinking! Black ink over nose.” This essay might be thought of as the inscription in black ink, exemplifications of the technicity of the letter, written on the nose of someone drowning in black ink.

November 5, 2011, Deer Isle, Maine