The Word
The entire process depends on the use and placement of specific key words. It is possible that the process can have begun many years prior to this moment in the present; that the concatenation of actions resulting in the process whereby systems of power came to rely on these key terms and situated those terms into something more permanent that stone. It may even be the case that the actions which led to the placement of these key terms precede the methods by which these terms now take on a permanent metaphysical life, and by metaphysical I mean that which is literally beyond or above the physical. As I said, the situating of the specific key terms in what has come to be more permanent than stone and relies on systems which operate and interoperate among the stars and beneath the ocean while being always at hand, always present, or at least available to be present. In any case, we begin with key terms.
The word thief determines the man whose chief activity is theft. Specifies him by eliminating—while he is so named—everything else he is other than thief. Simplifies him. The poetry lies in his full awareness of being a thief. (Jean Genet. The Thief’s Journal, 243.)
It is a poetry of subtraction, or at any rate, the thief is aware of a poetry of subtraction. By withholding everything about me, they (courts, judges, cops, employers, moralists, literary critics, etc.) are able to begin the process of categorization: a taxonomy of infraction. The poetry, then, lies in the cutting off, the disjunctive synthesis, if you will, of everything that is not a thief.
Evaluative Mechanisms
“Based on the information provided Safety Control Systems searched for public records in the sources referenced herein for criminal history information as permitted by federal and state law. Further investigation into additional jurisdictions, or utilization of additional identifying information, may be warranted.”
This is how it begins, and once it is begun, it cannot be stopped, nor will it ever be stopped. The search of the specific key terms reveals specific types of information which is then placed into the taxonomic categories to determine access, to evaluate my fitness for participation in various facets of contemporary life because there are certain realms within our contemporary world that demand additional security in order to ensure the safety of vulnerable populations.
You see, I already began using specific key words: “evaluate,” “security,” “vulnerable”—these are sensitive words, as are terms like “thief.” These terms are converted into data within a coded system that works at the speed of light. The system is also secured against unlawful intrusion so that the data which correlated to these key terms is not available to anyone but designated personnel who are themselves subjected to the very system in which I have been immersed. Thecoded forms of key terms are triggered along other codes designed and optimized to recognize these key terms in their coded forms. If specific triggers are activated, other sectors of the system
are then activated in turn.
It’s no calligraphy for schoolchildren. It has to be studied for a long time. Eventually, you’d be able to make it out too. It can’t be a simple script, of course—after all, it’s not supposed to kill right away, it’s planned for an average of twelve hours; the climax is calculated for the sixth hour. So lots and lots of curlicues have to surround the actual script: the script itself forms only a narrow belt around the body, the rest of the skin is reserve for the embellishments. (Kafka. “In
the Penal Colony,” 204.)
Embellishments = literary flourish
Taxonomies
The intricacies of the system lie in the layering of scripts, of varying signifying functions layered atop one another so as to facilitate the input of common English letters which are correlated to digital segments of code; the code is then aligned with other codes which can detect specific segments to be flagged and further correlated within taxonomic systems. This is all then correlated with modes of evaluation, judgment, and separation, but not before the codes themselves separate and render judgements programmed in advance into the codes and the system. In this way, the final determination are not attributable to anyone. No human agent is ever involved in the final determinations; only the system.
It looks like this:
Taxon ID Accepted Taxon ID Scientific Name Taxon Rank Vernacular Name
Thief Petty thief Larceny Fifth degree felony thief
Within the digital system, each of these terms carries a numerical value which can and is correlated according to evaluative codes within the system designed to render judgements. In the final analysis, what emerges is:
Valid Invalid
The Stigmata
Once determined to be invalid, the stigmata is affixed within the digital system for all time. From here I was rendered a sacred body, cut off from valid participation and permanently invalidated, compelled to wear the stigmata as the clear and outward signs of my infamy.1 A simple form will make certain anyone can access the metaphysical system and find the stigmata that is attached to my being, and only my being. Unlike the stigmata of old, these will live beyond my body. Long after I am dead, the stigmata that designates what I am will still live on. The word that designates the man, written in a calligraphy that is not for schoolchildren, and is designed to imprint the judgement, the guilt, and the responsibility into the most essential part of my being.
1 “From now on, let no one make trouble for me; for I carry the marks [stigmata] of Jesus branded on my body” (Galatians 6.17. from The New Oxford Annotate Bible).
The Phantasm
Thus designated and separated as one who is, in essence, a monster. The term takes on the force of the thing. As Genet clearly explains, it is “the word” which stands out as the only significant consideration. This power of the word as that which functions with the power of the things stretched back through linguistics, psychology, politics, and law as they have been manifested since classical antiquity. We find, going back only as far as medieval Italy, that “Sensible objects impress their forms on the senses, and this sensible impression, or image, or phantasm (as the medieval philosophers prefer, in the wake of Aristotle) is then received by the phantasy, or imaginative virtue, which conserves it even in the absence of the object that has produced it” (Agamben. Stanzas, 71). As Giorgio Agamben will explain, the phantasm then can take on the life of the object in the mind of the one who has experienced the sense impression. From this, the masturbatory weight of the phantasm will displace the real living object of desire as a supplement for the loved object. In this way, the melancholia built on a desire for an object that never existed but is nevertheless experienced as lost remains overwhelming in the mind of the soul who is trapped in the thrall of the phantasm.
As a supplement, then, the phantasm designates that absent object within the (non)space of the trace. “The fact that access to the written sign assures the sacred power of keeping existence operative within the trace and of knowing the general structure of the universe; that all clergies, exercising political power or not, were constituted at the same time as writing and by the disposition of graphic power; that strategy, ballistics, diplomacy, agriculture, fiscality, and penal law are linked in their history and in their structure to the constitution of writing” (Emphasis added. Grammatology, 92). It is the sacred power of the trace which designates an absence that is more powerful than the thing (or being) designated by the signifiers in question regarding the object or the being. (Our digital system has laid hold of and claimed the sacred power of the
trace).
The Chora
The absence, the emptiness wherein nothing is lost because nothing was ever present nevertheless remains in fact a space. It is what Julia Kristeva designates as “a chora, a receptacle” (Powers of Horror, 14). This bears down on the subject as the space of drives prior to language but which forms the almost-language of all linguistic functions. It therefore preserves those drives which are at odds with all conscious awareness and ego function. As such, it is the space of abjection; the chora retains the drives and desires for everything at odds with civilized and rational and imaginative thought. Deep within the well of language is this monstrous drive which is present within the images, the phantasms which function as the supplement for the object.
The Unclassifiable Remainder
The word designates, but it designates by subtraction, by elimination. This necessarily means everything else is free of the designation. The thief, the monster, the object that wears the brands of the stigmata is only present in its phantasmatic form whereas everything else is cut off as non-existent. Yet it all does exist. All that I am that is not bound in the system, the metaphysical system, remains free and ungovernable, not subject to those modes of power (and even the reign of the chora), and fully engaged in anything beyond that which falls under the realm of power, politics, and governance.
They subtracted the poetry from my designation.
The divine body of the criminal
The monstrosity as designated by the formal systems of separation and validation; a form of being in opposition to its own nature and refusing the bonds and responsibilities of culture. That which is the incarnation of the abject and it’s anti-social/cultured drives and desires. Not ungovernable; unnamable. The Thing that is nature turned against nature, and that which has turned on what it was meant to protect.
In fragrant arms, within your snowy castles!
Lord of dark places, I still know how to pray.
It is I my father, one day, who cried out:
Glory to the highest of heaven to the god who protects me
Hermes of the tender foot! (Genet. Complete Poems, 33.)
Like the fragile and imperceptible lining of a membrane, adjacent to the abject, there is the divine body. Its purity and holiness bearing down with precisely the same force as its monstrosity, and this is the source of the horror in the face of the divine body. Its corporeality: blood, sweat, pus, cum, piss, shit, sputum… its breath of the divine space, its ethereal beauty… On the edge of what is abjected, on the edge of the most high. The ambivalence of the sacred in the body of the sacred man. His body is banned and made the source of defilement, while that same body moves freely in a world unknown to those bound by the system.
The digital system of separation, evaluation, control, and validation traps everyone, while the sacred man, leaving behind only his stigmata, moves just beyond the digital system. The ever-present danger present in the ever-present sacred aura of his presence.
From then on, and forever, one is—I am—never anything but… that. Hence… There is the unknown, which none of the theorists ever seem to want to admit of. Not the chora, not the trace, not the metaphysical physics of the system; the unknown wherein one moves around freely just as long as one avoids the permanent pivot of the word that designates. To designate and simultaneously preserve the unknown.
To pin down the sacred one requires the balance of the simple grammatical equation. Part of the beauty of the digital system is that for all its vast complexity, it relies on an elemental grammar. A subject and an object provide the basic coordinates for every other function in the system. At the same time, the system is designed, indeed it was conceived to create a condition wherein there is no subject. No primary actor performs any task. This is the role of the system which, of course, lacks subjectivity. It creates the space of the subject around the absence of a subject. This is how it is able to isolate any and all objects as objectively the same, although this is an arguable point. There are living humans at some point down the chain of causality who create and write the codes with which the entire system performs its functions. As a result, any biases and prejudices detected from the outset can be and are written into the codes.2 The cultural bigotry remains unchallenged by a system that claims to have eliminated such things with its arbitrary and objective rendering of objects. At any rate, the subject is an abstract position within the system, situated across from the objective object. Once I/we enter the space of the unknown, no such grammatical arrangement exists.
I/we exist in what Blanchot calls the neuter because “the unknown is neuter” (Blanchot. The Infinite Conversation, 300). We have left behind the grammatical arrangements which make possible the series of interventions presented above which are designed specifically to isolate what is to be known, categorize the known, and capture and control the known. This demands a grammatical system of fixed and isolatable subjects and objects. As the ejecta of the system, there is no such arrangement: “The unknown is neither object nor subject. This means that to think the unknown is in no way to propose it as ‘the not yet known,’ the object of a knowledge still to come” (300). I/we are not a category which will at some point become known, nor are I/we a category that supersedes the known as an abstract metaphysical entity. Our (non)presence indicates something altogether other in that “we are supposing a relation in which the unknown would be affirmed, made manifest, even exhibited: disclosed—and under what aspect?—precisely in which keeps it unknown” (300). We are not hiding, and we did not formerly organize this category. It is a case in which an enormous expression of power focuses its grasp on the word that designates and determines. Consequently, all else that could designate and determine is and will remain unknown because the system cannot detect or recognize all else but the word. The unknown, devoid of a subject and an object, but acting with the volition of a subject which now functions in the absence of an object now “supposes a relation that is foreign to every exigency of identity, of unity, even of presence” (300). I/we constitute a “mystical fusion.”
We are destitution itself.
2 See for example Jackie Wang’s analysis of predictive policing in the “age of big data” in Carceral Capitalism. pp. 238-253.
Works Cited:
Agamben, Giorgio. Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture. Translated by Ronald L. Martinez. Theory and History of Literature. Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1993.
Blanchot, Maurice. The Infinite Conversation. Translated by Susan Hanson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993.
Coogan, Michael D. Editor. The New Oxford Study Bible. Third Edition with Apocryphal/Deuterocanonical Books. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.
Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1976.
Genet, Jean. The Thief’s Journal. Translated by Bernard Frechtman. New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1964.
Kafka, Franz. The Metamorphosis, In the Penal Colony and Other Stories. Translated by Joachim Neurgroschel. New York: Scribner Paperback Fiction, 1995.
Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Translated by Leon Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982.
Wang, Jackie. Carceral Capitalism. Semiotext(e) Intervention Series No 21. Pasadena: Semiotext(e), 2018.
Michael Templeton is an independent scholar and writer. He is the author of The Chief of Birds: A Memoir published with Erratum Press, Impossible to Believe from Iff Books, and The Ohiomachine forthcoming with Dead Letter Office/Punctum Books. He has published articles and essays on contemporary culture and numerous works of creative non-fiction as well as experimental works and poetry. He lives in the middle of nowhere in Ohio with his wife who is an artist.
minor literature[s] 