Chapter Five
An-Other Human Prospect: Ethics in the Postmodern Age
The rejection of concerning oneself “only with oneself”
does not commit Levinas to the loss of self so feared by critics. . . . One can say that in responsibility the self forgets itself, but it is not forgotten.
(Ferreria 456)
Freedom can here be thought as the possibility of doing what no one can do in my place; freedom is thus the uniqueness of that
responsibility. ( Levinas 2000a: 181)
The ethical individuality presented in Mao II makes a significant dialogue with a rather controversial issue in the postmodern age: the possibility for self-assertion or self-recognition. DeLillo’s confirmation of the ethical individuality requires further elaboration on how individuality is achieved in the confrontation with the
overwhelming Other. More remarkably, the individuality construed in ethical relation would reconfigure the humanism which is no longer based on an easy
association with the ego-oriented modern subject. The individuality of the self raises attention not only to the self’s vulnerability and passivity but responsibility for the Other, which involves the temporal and spatial reconsideration and evokes new possibilities for the self. Hence, it is from the responsibility that the individuality is discerned and indicates reconfigured humanism in the postmodern age.
The viewpoints on the state of the self vary greatly along the history. More
radical changes come after poststructuralism. The self-sufficiency, autonomy and integrity guaranteed in modernity have been undermined in different theoretical groundings. Some theorists take the self as the consequence of the cultural
fabrications, others trace the self in the historical or social structures, and still others contend that the self could only emerge as the nodal point in the linguistic framework.
“Language as a mediator comes to play a major role in social constructionism. For example, Gergen argued that language is a form of interpersonal relatedness in which the individual is collectively immersed and therefore continually influenced by what is conveyed verbally” (Rychlak 41). One way or another, the views on the self are converging at the decentered and the provisional as Frederic Jameson claims “the death of the modern subject” in the postmodern age and DeLeuze’s nomadic self who is marked by evanescence and contingency in self-presentation. Corresponding to Levinasian ethical vein, DeLillo’s presentation of the ethics does make a significant dialogue with the remarks centering on the de-throned self in the postmodern age.
Ostensibly, the self engaged in the ethical relation is dissolved while the ethical Other is foregrounded and takes the upper hand of the self. But, DeLillo does not end up with the emphasis on the dismantled self in face of the overwhelming Other.
Stressing and portraying language as the ethical Other from the spatial to the temporal, from the sensually immediate to the technologically mediated, DeLillo illustrates the possibility of individuality in Mao II. Working on the language of the image, DeLillo means to explore the intricate and intriguing relation between the crowd and individuality. Nevertheless, as individuality no longer presupposes self-autonomy or self-centeredness as stressed or pursued in modernity, it is necessary to probe into the focal but tricky point: What brings out the individuality and what does DeLillo mean to present with the affirmation of individuality in the postmodern age?
According to Joseph F. Rychlak, individuality “has the meaning of setting a
person off from others for some unique behavior or characteristic” while the person is
“a neutral word signifying either individuals or members of a collective” (3-4). Such an idea on individuality has its significance in presupposing the existence of the individual’s relation to the social collective, either the mass or the crowd and individuality comes from the uniqueness of one’s behavior. Daniel Bell thinks that
“[t]he post-industrial society . . . is . . . a ‘communal’ society in which the social unit is the community rather than the individual” (35). Despite the differentiation between the community and the individual, Bell notes that the social unit is the community in the post-industrial society, implying the idea that the community has overwhelmed the intension of the individual, becoming the basic unit of the society.
Hence, we could no longer view individuality as a derivative of the modal self but is closely related to and actually threatened by the community which blocks his uniqueness.
DeLillo’s Mao II starts from the recognition of the crowd as an essential and tangible basis of the social structure. His observation of such a unifying social force is founded on the circulation and dissemination of the images duplicated in the media such as photographs, TV, and even writing. The image incarnates the confrontation of the crowd as the ethical Other which defies the self-autonomy and further denies the self the individuality. Yet, despite the recognition of the image as a
self-dissolving force, DeLillo’s depiction of the ethical relation means to probe into the possibility of individuality. DeLillo, in this aspect, goes against certain
postmodern theorists who regard the postmodern subject as fragmented, nomadic or decentered constructs. Neither does DeLillo base the notion of individuality on the modern subject featured by self integrity or autonomy. But, it is undeniable that DeLillo’s insistence on the individuality in the postmodern age demonstrates certain degree of trust on the human “creativity” or “freedom”, rippling the self-dissolving
trend of postmodern thinking. Nonetheless, does it mean that the creativity or originality presented in the self’s responsibility for the Other indicate the existence of humanism? To get a clue to what DeLillo implies behind his novelistic presentation, it is found helpful to take Levinas’s humanism of the Other as a dialoguing
counterpart and examine what humanism is designated by DeLillo’s individuality in terms of the ethical self.
I. Ethical Individuality: A Reconfiguration of Humanism
What makes humanity such a disputable issue is due to the fact that the postmodern age is not merely marked by its loss of grand narratives in social or historical discourses but the technological intervention disturbing the definition or delimitation of what the human should be or would be. As the human and the technological, the natural and the mechanic interpenetrate each other, the dethroned human sovereignties over the values and meanings thwart the humanism which is broadly defined as “the recognition of an invariable essence named ‘Man’, the affirmation of this central place in the economy of the Real and of his value which engendered all values” (Levinas 1990: 277). In face of the deflected and even defied humanism, theorists like Lyotard and Bruno Latour are depicting the difficulty for man to situate himself in the wake of the concoction of the human and the
technological, the natural and the artificial. Lyotard observes that technology, created by human and meant to facilitate human life, turns out to be the force which formulates human life and even determines and disfigures what is human since “any material system is technological if it filters information useful to its survival, if it memorizes and processes that information and makes influences based on the regulating effect of behavior” (1991: 12). Technology plays a decisive role in regulating human life, particularly demonstrated by the inevitable relation with TV in
White Noise or incessantly-duplicated photographs in Mao II. Man is overwhelmed
in the world of technology which he or she can not evade. It is in the state that
“everything . . . is so threatening that the reasonable mind cannot fail to fear in it, and rightly, an inhuman power of deregulation” (Lyotard 1991: 5). According to Lyotard, behind the life-regulating power of technology lies the very collision of the human and the technological which thwarts and dissolves the reason-based and logic-oriented social order. Life becomes the greatest Other to face.
Hence, the inhuman or the posthuman is usually the words coined for the postmodern condition as Scott Lash in Another Rationality maintains that “[w]e are in an age of the unhuman, the post-human and non-human, of biotechnology and
nanotechnology” (1999: 12). Technology poses a great challenge and threat to man’s recognition of himself, and in turn makes it necessary to re-examine what the human might mean while the technological implies an irresistible trend to erode what the human originally means to us.
Steven Best and Douglas Kellner, differentiating the human from the posthuman, contend that
[c]lassical humanism articulates a notion of the self as an ahistorical given, whose timeless essence and nature is that of a rational mind, ontologically distinct from its body, in possession of free will and timeless truths. By contrast, posthumanism—in the form of
poststructualism and postmodern theory—immerses the self in history, social relations and institutions, and embodied reality. Reason is seen as epiphenomenal to the will, the unconscious, affective life, and
sociohistorical reality. Posthumanism dismantles the dualistic opposition between mind and body and makes the “truths” available to reason partial, limited, and context-bound. (195)
Best and Kellner depict the posthuman condition as one empirically engaged in the social or historical milieu. Man, no longer situated in the center of the world or equipped with universal reason, is subjected to the experiential context. A vision of a provisional or evanescent subjectivity makes the nexus of man. Best and Kellner differentiates the human from the posthuman by taking reason or logocentricism as the dividing line. The posthuman, thus, results from the loss of a self-sufficient, autonomous or rational self in social interactions.
Nevertheless, not all theorists take the rational being or the logocentrism as the criteria to define what is human. James T. Hansen, taking another angle to work into the issue of humanism, points out that
[t]he primary similarity between postmodernism and humanism is an appreciation for the complex and idiosyncratic over the simple and categorical. . . . a fundamental tenet of humanism is that each person must be appreciated as a unique being. . . . Postmodern . . . because they are rooted in anti-essentialism, also value the unique realities created by the individual groups. Thus, on a hypothetical continuum of
orientations that emphasizes categorization versus individuality,
postmodernism and humanism both fall on the far end of the continuum that emphasizes variations in human meaning structures. (7)
Different perspectives to read into what humanism or the human connotes raises greater ambiguity concerning the question if humanism still exists in the postmodern.
If the answer is affirmative, then what could it refer to? In terms of the emphasis on the individual and the different characteristics, humanism is confirmed in the
postmodern condition. It could be associated with what Nietzsche proposes about the idiocyncratic character in The Birth of Tragedy. Featuring in individuality and creativity without abiding by any presupposed laws or rules, it culminates in the
so-called philosophy of the overman. Nietzsche expresses beliefs in man’s power to create instead of regarding man as the consequence of the social or cultural
inscriptions or the incarnation of the absolute reason. Man’s individuality makes an essential anchorage for what the human might indicate.
But, another obstacle in the age of technology lies in the increasing difficulty to differentiate the human from the technological. All could be perceived is that the technological complicates what has been known about the human. On the other hand, the technological is taking a human face, confronting man with an irresistible power. Hence, instead of taking either side of the human or nonhuman, Bruno Latour, in the book We Have Never Been Modern, eclectically marks his perspective in face of the converging dimensions of the human and the nonhuman since
modernity has been lapsed into non-distinction as
Sciences multiply new definitions of humans without managing to displace the former ones, reduce them to any homogeneous one, or unify them. They add reality; they do not subtract it. The hybrids that they invent in the laboratory are still more exotic than those they claim to break down. (Latour 137)
As the sciences blend the human and the nonhuman, the hybrids turn out to be what marks the age since modernity. Latour holds that “nothing is sufficiently inhuman to dissolve human beings in it and announce their death. . . . The human is not a
constitutional pole to be opposed to that of the nonhuman. The two expressions
‘humans’ and ‘nonhumans’ are belated results that no longer suffice to designate the other dimension” (137). The intervention of technology in daily life makes impossible the modern purification and, most importantly, suspends the general recognition of the human. There is no longer a possibility to talk about the human or humanity alone as the dividing line is blurred or erased, and the hybrids makes more
differences than the sameness. Concoction of different degrees and different patterns overflows what could be categorized and regulated.
As a result, different perspectives concerning humanism in the postmodern intersect each other. It testifies again that the human is not what any single idea can determine in the postmodern age. However, one undeniable fact concerning the postmodern condition is the interpenetrating or inseparable relation among the human, the technological, the empirical, and the indeterminate, as those theorists observe in the ongoing analysis. It seems that we could not talk about the human without incorporating the experientially uncertain, which Don DeLillo, in the ethical trilogy, portrays as the ethical Other. It makes up man’s experience as a process of being challenged, defied, and even overwhelmed.
Our era is not defined by the triumph of technology for technology, as it is not defined by art for art’s sake, as it is not defined by nihilism. It is action for the world to come, surpassing one’s era, it is the surpassing of self that requires the epiphany of the Other, and this is the depth of the thesis upheld in these pages. (Levinas 2003: 28)
No matter how the human is theoretically reconsidered or reconfigured, one thing that is certain is that we cannot deny the substantially experienced life. Hence, rather than reminiscing the clear distinction between the human and the nonhuman or basing the human on the integrated, autonomous subject, the idea of the human requires further understanding and consideration to grasp what the postmodern age brings to this idea.
With the stress on the overwhelming and imposing Other, Emmanuel Levinas
names ethics as the humanism of the Other. It significantly diverts the focus of humanism from the self to the Other. “All that is human is outside” (2003: 59).
He elaborates that “[o]thers challenges me, empties me of myself and keeps on
emptying me by showing me ever new resources” (2003: 30). The messages
contained in Levinas first indicate that humanism is not anchored to logocentrism, but his affirmation of new resources embedded in the Other. It is the new possibilities that Levinathian humanism is pivoted. But, what is distinct about Levinas is that, based on his ethical paradigm, the Other gives rise to the sources of these new possibilities. It is thus termed the humanism of the Other. Besides, such an argument, in a sense, might correspond to the postmodern discourse which
emphasizes the importance of the different, the heterogeneous. Nevertheless, the stress of the Other, the heterogeneous, might end up with the persistent deferral or unsolvable abyss of the different. In contrast with Levinas, DeLillo makes a point of the self’s individuality with the generation of new possibilities in the ethical
responsibility. Man is undeniably an empirical being; hence, it is almost impossible to silence what man empirically perceives and announce that there is nothing human in the daily interaction. Such a perspective of DeLillo shifts the focus of the
humanism from the Other back to the self. It is the self that is regarded as a potential source of the new possibilities which are theorized as the crucial index of humanism.
Despite the uncertainty of the postmodern age, it would surely render a new understanding of humanism in regard with the new possibilities of the self. Such an understanding of the human or humanism could be negatively testified in Lyotard’s argument of what is inhuman:
Inhuman is everything which forces the individual to ‘subscribe to a determined being’. Inhuman is everything which gives the individual the already written script of the novel she or he is going to be able to write. Dehumanization is the processual tendency of circumstance to foreclose on the possibilities which the individual experiences him or her self as having in relation to the situations she or he is thrown into.
(Lyotard 1991: xi)
Lyotard, like Levinas, thinks that new possibilities are what determine the human.
However, while Levinas contends that the new possibilities come from the Other, Lyotard maintains that the self is denied new possibilities once he or she is woven into the social fabric. Their focuses are different. Levinas centers on the possibilities of the Other, while Lyotard suggests that while man is thrown to a relation or a situation, the new possibilities are defied or denied. Hence, it is the inhuman instead of the human that characterizes the social relationship in the postmodern age. The ongoing analysis at least confirms one thing: it is the new possibility that founds one’s
individuality. More importantly, their ideas seem to contradict what DeLillo means to portray in Mao II. For one thing, DeLillo does not think the self is deprived of the new possibilities in social situations or relations. For another, DeLillo does not lay as much emphasis on the Other as on the self. The novel works out what they think impossible—affirming the possibility of the individuality in the ethically-engaged self.
That is, the self is capable of taking his own angle in facing and responding to the overwhelming Other.
However, with what does DeLillo affirm humanism in the postmodern age marked by the individuality of the self, referring to the releasing of new possibilities into empirical reality? Interestingly, the self who is responsible for new possibilities in life ambivalently corresponds to the self in reflexive modernity advocated by Scott Lash. He states that while the traditional modernization means subjugation to the universal rules, the reflexive modernization “involves the empowerment of
subjects . . . . opens up a genuine individualization, opens up positive possibilities of autonomous subjectivity in regard to our natural, social and psychic environments”
(1994: 113). As the reflexive modernity refers to the “self’s confrontation with the effects of risk society that cannot be dealt with and assimilated in the system of
industrial society” (Beck 6), the self is seemingly deprived of the trust that the society used to provide in the expert-system1. The self can’t help but live a life with
groundless grounding. That is how and why individuality is stressed in Beck’s and Lash’s notion of reflexive modernity. Although uncertainty and threat increase in reflexive modernity, the self is granted more freedom to assert his own individuality as the social no longer has the imposing and regulating power over the individual behavior. With the prevalence of the media, the community no longer indicates a group of people living in the same place sharing the necessary social regulations or codes. The territorialized community is replaced by the “cultural communities”
which means “collectivities of shared background practices, shared meanings, shared routine activities involved in the achievement of meaning” (Lash 1994: 147). These shared meanings and practices are what Harbemas, according to Lash, takes as the basis of the communicative rationality which indicates that reason or meaning is still attainable through mutual communication and interaction. Such an understanding presupposes a reason which is not a prerequisite but a consequence of social
interaction or communication. However, the affirmation of a shared meaning related to the constitution of social values still implies the possibility of a social order or system. However different reflexive modernity is from the traditional modernity, an autonomous self with the ability to reach a commonly-recognized reason and
applicable meaning is confirmed. It is what Scott Lash terms as another rationality.
Hence, despite the fact that the groundless condition of reflexive modernity account for part of the self’s situation in the postmodern ethical condition in the generation of new possibilities, a rudimentary difference persists since the reason or meaning which
1 The expert system designates the consequence of the knowledge-generating or releasing mechanism which is believed to bring social progress and order. Besides, it is an important base to trigger social trust as “in simple modernity trust is invested in abstract systems and in expertise ‘based purely on the assumption of technical competence’” (Lash 1999: 205).
could be fundamental to the social communication or interaction is scarcely possible in the postmodern ethical relation.
DeLillo’s divergence from the groundless grounding in reflexive modernity or another rationality lies in his focus on the self in the wake of facing the perpetually
irreducible Other. It is a process which does not guarantee the emergence of so-called shared reason or the hardly-thwarted self-consciousness. In contrast, the self, as mentioned in the ongoing, is engaged in the responsibility for the Other before one’s consciousness. He reacts by answering the call or the unknowable demand of the Other. And it is the reaction that we discern the individuality of the self. But, as it does not conform to what is maintained in reflexive modernity, then, what is individuality based on or in what way could we probe into it?
Lyotard’s notion of pagan games might help shed light on what DeLillo’s notion of individuality implies. Taking language as an exemplary basis, he considers language the primordial modulating force of social condition or even personal
perception of daily life. However, as he believes that “[t]here cannot be a sensus communis. . . we judge without criteria” (Lyotard 1989: 14), Lyotard proposes the
notion of language games which is conducive to personal individuality. The game is based on paganism which seemingly corresponds to Levinas’s ethical configuration.
He elaborates on paganism by saying that
there is the intuition, the idea. . . the idea that no maker of statements, no utterer, is ever autonomous. On the contrary, au utterer is always someone who is first of all an addressee, and I would even say one destined. . . . the recipient of a prescription, and that he is merely a relay;
he has also been the object of a prescription. . . . oppose it to the theory of autonomy. (Lyotard 1989: 31)
Based on the idea to judge without criteria, the self in the pagan language games no
longer presupposes the self-autonomy. As he is being addressed before he could communicate with the world, the self is heteronomous. More succinctly put, the self, in a sense, has to be a relay before he could utter any word of his own. However, it does not mean he is merely an imitator or replica of what he is addressed. This is the focal point concerning how the self, being an addressee with a heteronomous
character,2 comes to generate new possibilities. “What is pagan is that the
acceptance of the fact that one can play several games, and that each of these games is interesting in itself in so far as the interesting thing is to play moves. And to play moves means precisely to develop ruses, to set the imagination to work” (Lyotard 1989: 61). Every language game is distinct from each other and every utterance engages the self who is able to assert his individuality by making new moves.
Besides, it is a condition in which the self could rid himself of the social constrains or regulations without developing the common reason or grounding for anchorage. The language game gives the self a new context to deal with and at the same time evokes new possibilities. It is the new moves made by the self in heteronomy. This reverses what Scott Lash contends—the groundless grounding, since every game, paradoxically, is founded on certain set of rules to follow. This is the point of departure where new possibilities in the narrative are inspired. Interestingly speaking, there is a paradox to induce new moves from the self who is, otherwise, stifled or becomes rigid in social regulations. That is, a game as an interesting concept is made of a set of rules imposed on the player. However, the rules do not suppress one’s individuality but, instead, solicit imagination and creativity. The self enters an arena where rules or regulations evoke differences. While the rules set the
2 The heteronomy character stressed by Lyotard is meant to make a contrast with the modern autonomy, the self-determination and the cogito of the modern subject. It designates the embedded
heterogeneous aspect of one’s narrative. Besides, as heteronomy is essential to paganism, the self is no longer able to claim the authorship in narration.
context and even the immediate scene of speaking, what is especially remarkable is that no player could copy what others did before. Precisely speaking, it requires innovations in every move. The innovation in every move hence is critical in forging the individuality in DeLillo’s ethical self, since every game renders different situation for the self’s response. It resembles what DeLillo depicts in the ethical trilogy: the uniqueness is embedded not merely in the awareness of the
un-thematizable Other but in the ethical responsibility.
Both Lyotard and DeLillo presuppose the inevitability of the Other. In
answering the pre-original Other as a response to the heterogeneous or heteronomous, the self makes new moves, brings out new possibilities to the world. But,
differences between them are as unavoidable as irreducible. Lyotard employs the notion of the game to account for how the self can’t help but go in and out of different language games. While newly-made possibilities are inserted onto the content of the narrative, the self in a way is taken merely as a player drifting from one language game to another. Little concern is made about the self. Language speaks louder than the self; new possibilities are viewed as something added to language, instead of the human self. Hence, though it is plausible that new possibilities are made by every player, Lyotard thinks it is a mere act to increase the diversity and complexity of numerous language games and that man is at most the player bringing up new moves to enrich the game. Like Lyotard, DeLillo admits language engages the self pre-consciously. The heteronomous goes before the autonomous. However, without differentiating language into distinct language games, he takes the absolute Other as what the self constantly faces up to. That is, DeLillo does not restrict his perspective of the Other to the language made by word-sound linkages but relates it to the sensory reading of the world, including the temporal-spatial perception, the bodily language, and particularly the language of the image in which the new possibilities of
the self are confirmed. Of course, DeLillo’s reading of life, under the scope of Levinas’s ethical configuration, would seemingly makes the impression of a totalizing attempt. The presentation of the predominant and overwhelming Other marks the passivity and vulnerability of the self and at the same time demands the self to be responsible for the Other as well. However, paradoxically, as the Other is
inaccessible, incomprehensible and inconceivable, the self in the Other-confrontation gets most of the portrait and it is from the responsibility of the overwhelmed self that new possibilities in responding to the Other construe the self’s individuality.
New possibilities of every individual are confirmed and generated in
responding to the Other in Mao II as analyzed in the preceding chapter. But, as we could not refer to the self without first considering or involving the Other, the heteronmous, or the inderterminate, the risk, according to different theorists, what does the individuality hinging on new possibilities indicate in the postmodern? To be put in another way, what does DeLillo aim to demonstrate about the notion of the self as new possibilities are confirmed and stressed in the ethical relation? The answer to these questions is conducive to clarify the humanism implied in DeLillo’s ethical trilogy. Yet, before getting the answer, we might have to re-examine the axis of DeLillo’s ethical relation which is pivoted on time as well as space.
II. Time as the Axis of the Ethical Self
Time has played a significant role in the ethical relation as the notion of diachrony illustrates the unreachable gap between the self and the Other. The significance of time is also asserted in Bergson, maintaining that ‘[t]he questions relative to subject and object, their distinction and their union must be posed in terms of time rather than space’ (Lyotard 1991: 39). Time serves as the premier channel to probe into the idea of the self, no longer presupposing a linear or universal
perspective. Besides, time functions as an essential element to understand the self in the ethics of the postmodern age partly because of the technological impact, as mentioned above, and partly because of the reconfiguration of time in relation to the self along the historical imagination. Time has played a crucial part in the transition of the philosophical understanding. As it has been conceptualized as a spatial and fixed linear order, the abstract and incompatible character of time is suppressed.
More precisely, time in the classical age designates a state in which “advent and passing, future and past, are treated as though, taken together, they embraced the totality of life in one and the same unity of meaning” (Lyotard 1991: 25) which in turn endows the self with a definite and fixed identity assuring one’s social position and ethical obligations. However, Kierkegaard and Saussure, contending that
“temporality cannot be rationalized. . . . Time, therefore, escapes every system that lies to assimilate it” (Taylor 15). In contrast with space, time has been a more unstable variable to the relation between self recognition and the world in that it is not a factor which could be systematized or categorized. As it is usually compared to a stream of force, it flows not merely in various directions but in different dimensions as the complicated relation woven by the intersecting and overlapping of the present, the future, and the past. Every contact between the self and the world could be a nodal point that contextualizes or concretizes the notion of time. Man in the great stream of time is thus mostly seen as the product of contingency. It is the
indeterminacy and unpredictability that greatly challenge the stableness of the self.
Besides, the idea, directly or otherwise, makes impossible any claim of truth or meaning.3 As time is involved in the meaning-designating mechanism and thus puts
3 The recuperation of the irreducible or inassimilable time in relation to the generation of meaning or truth is more forcefully elaborated in Derrida’s elaboration of difference which designates the perpetual deferring of the signifying process, as “to differ” suggested by difference in the first place means “to temporalize, to resort, consciously or unconsciously, to the temporal and temporalizing mediation of a detour that suspends the accomplishment or fulfillment of ‘desire’ or ‘will,’ or carries desire or will out
into question the social transactions, especially in terms of ethics, the heteronomy or fracture between expression and meaning inevitably emerges. Such an idea is emphasized by Lyotard, and Levinas. Hence, if we want to re-examine the self in the Other-oriented ethical relation, time would be the premier dimension to be examined. As understood, the temporal exploration of Bergson and Heidegger4 greatly inspires various ideas of time in relation to the notion of the self. However, more conspicuous is the one implied in Lyotard’s notion of the event. He maintains that the passing moment of the present is ungraspable as “[i]t is always too soon or too late to grasp presentation itself and present it. . . . The event makes the self incapable of taking possession and control of what it is. It testifies that the self is essentially passible to a recurrent alterity” (Lyotard 1991: 59). Lyotard’s notion of the present is especially significant and distinct in stressing the ungraspability of the present which, along with the irrecoverable past and the unpredictable future, makes time a perpetual indeterminacy to the self. It corresponds to what Levinas
asserts—the ethical moment starts preconsciously. People are conscious of the event or the ethical relation only after its occurrence. The situation makes up a haunting alterity to the self as it is an inescapable part of life. In terms of time, the event in a way accounts for the ethical moments. Here, time no longer allows us to treat the present as an object distinct from the subject. It is part of the heteronomous moment
in a way that annuls or tempers their effect” (Derrida 1978: 29-30). To differ, indicating the general understanding, demonstrates the idea of not being the same or the identical but the different.
4 Bergson’s notion of time has greatly inspired latter thinkers such as Heidegger, Levinas, and even Derrida and so on. The most remarkable idea is duration (durée) which is “heterogeneous, qualitative, and dynamic.” It goes against the western tradition which was founded on the basis of “space,”
being “homogeneous, quantitative and static.” Duration, meant to describe the time of conscious experience, is composed of our memories, perceptions and affections. They “interpenetrate and cannot be sharply distinguished. Duration is history, experience and anticipation—past, present and future, real and virtual. . . duration cannot be measured and its progress is not predictable.” (Linstead and Mullarkey 6). It significantly defies the causal relation and deterministic vein implied in the spatial sense of time. Bergson awakes us to a dynamic, indeterminate or creative perspective of time.
His influence on Levinas is obvious in the way Levinas associates time with the indeterminate or irreducible Other.
imminent in the self which we could only perceive or, ethically speaking, respond to.
Resisting any representation, it is elusive as well as indeterminate.
Lyotard’s notion of the event demonstrates the imminent alterity embedded in the self while a temporal lapse persists in making up new possibilities in asserting his individuality. That is, the event not only indicates the ungraspable moment of the present but the self’s awareness of the Other, engaging the self in the response and responsibility for the Other. The time involving the responsibility is the focal point that the self’s individuality could be discerned.
In the wake of the awareness of the pre-conscious heteronomy or alterity, the time of the event arouses the conscious reaction toward the different in Lyotard’s idea of the event. Andrew Quick interprets Lyotard’s notion of the event as the
confrontation with a difference whose temporality is stressed.
Difference, for Lyotard, is not the network of oppositions which establish and enervate the system of semiology and structuralism but is, rather, the temporality of the event itself which occurs (happens) when ‘things’ are placed irreconcilably alongside or against each other. It is a temporality which resists sublimation into any terminology defined by time whether it be past, present or the future. As such, difference resists being inscribed into a meaning, reduced to signification, or transformed into a concept.
Hence, Lyotard’s emphasis on the temporal quality of the event in which he urges us to be ‘open’ to the ‘It happens that’ rather than to the ‘What happens’. (Quick 237)
The temporality of the event is associated with the aesthetic experience of the sublime which could be illustrated by what Newman claims about the painting—“The
concerns with space bores me . . . . It insists on my sensation of time—not the sense of time but the physical sensation of time” (Malpas 204). He stresses the perpetual
elusiveness of time, no longer regarding the painting as the representation of the world. Time, thus, becomes the essential element to account for the unthematizable difference or otherness. Baudrillard observes that “[t]he outcome of ‘the pure event’ . . . is ‘the catastrophe of meaning’ . . . As a result of the absence of
consequences the event is ‘open to all possible interpretations’ . . . The event becomes open to a multiple and aleatory ascription” (Quick 236). Yet, Baudrillard’s
observation still remains within the scope of interpretations since Baudrillard suggests that it is possible to impose different or even contradictory meanings on the event.
However, what draws our attention in the notion of the event rests on how new possibilities of ideas are elicited in the self to respond to the event rather than imposing a meaning which is only possible in certain perspectives, as Heidegger argues how Ereignis opens the possibility for thinking about Being. As he contends in Contributions to Philosophy, “the ‘setting free’ of thought in Ereignis as it is
‘grasped out of the clearing of t/here [Da], is simultaneously the withdrawal from any representation-calculation and holds sway as refusal.’ Ereignis is
unrepresentable—irreducible to conscious thought or calculating reason” (Malpas 206). Heidegger’s statement indicates not only the irreducible and unrepresentable character of the event as the confrontation of the Other. More significantly, it indicates the necessity to think and react in excess of any rule or system. ‘ Every event is at once a demand and challenge to the self. First of all, it immediately involves the self. It happens at the moment while the self neither anticipates nor prepares himself for it. No rules could be counted on and followed to deal with it. Time in the cloak of the event is no longer a linear process or an
objective or calculable totality but an opening to such a challenge. The event, according to Deleuze, delineates how
[t]he milieu and its forces incurve on the character, throw him a challenge,
and constitute a situation in which he is caught. The character reacts in his turn (action properly speaking) so as to respond to the situation, to modify the milieu, or his relation with the milieu, with the situation with the other characters. He must acquire a new mode of being . . . or raise his mode of being to the demands of the milieu and of the situation.
(Paik 44)
The temporality of the event is unneglectable in that it poses a great threat to the self and requires him to act differently and individually. No model or sample is there for him to duplicate. He is compelled to react or respond in an original way. As the temporal heteronomy or lapse of the event first designates the self’s passivity and vulnerability to its occurrence and imposition on the self, it paradoxically clears a space for the emergence of new possibility in thought and action.
In a way, the self is overwhelmed or dissolved by the elusiveness in the temporality of the event. On the other hand, individuality as innovation in thought and action emerges while the confrontation with the inevitable ethical Other, directly or otherwise, compels the self to figure out his own way to respond to the temporal alterity. As DeLillo illustrates in the ethical trilogy, James in The Names, originally a risk analyst, delved into the mysterious murder by associating the names of the murdered with the place of the murder as language incarnates the unbridgeable temporal gap. Jack Gladney in White Noise deliberately established himself as the representative of Hitler studies in his college as a way to confront his deep-rooted fear for death. Bill in Mao II chose to have his picture taken to preserve certain sense of self in face of the self-diminishing crowd in the age of the media. Hence, as the event occurs, the self is not only involved in an alter time which characterizes but reforges himself in the ethical response. In addition, as life is composed of events, it could be roughly stated that the self is a mere process of becoming or provisional
consequence which goes from one event to another. In DeLillo, every confrontation with the alterity marks a lasting and expanding effect of the event which starts from the recognition of the self heteronomy in temporality. The notion of the event thus reforms, or more precisely expands, the nexus of Levinasian ethics which lays more emphasis on the overwhelming and irreducible Other than on the vulnerable and passive self. The necessity for and the actualization of the different and original action and thought reconfirms man’s dignity as a human being—being able to create and add new possibilities to the world.
Yet, man’s individuality elicited in the event does not re-claim self-autonomy in the modern subject since the self’s passivity and vulnerability along with the
possibility of his new actions and thought are simultaneously stressed in the ethical temporality. This makes the difficulty to get a general understanding of the self.
What on earth makes the self, absolutely passive and vulnerable, assert his
individuality in action and thought? Concerning the paradoxical situation, time is responsible for the generation of new and individual possibilities. Following Kant’s redefinition the relation between time and movement, Deleuze innovates the notion of the self which is constituted in time. It designates the losing center of the self. The self is vulnerable to the consistent incorporation of time, which in turn prompts the self’s reconstitution in releasing new possibilities in every response. According to Deleuze, time, from Kant on, “‘is no longer related to the movement which it measures, but movement is related to the time which conditions it: this is the first great reversal in The Critique of Pure Reason’” (Deleuze 1984, vii). With that, time is not merely an ungraspable present, slipping in and out of the event. Time makes an effect which manifests the split of the self into the passive (the ego), and the active (the I). The passive self is the one engaged in the movement of the time before the consciousness, while the active self is the one who reacts against the effect of the time
and “performs the temporal synthesis of transcendental apperception that constitutes time” (Crocket 278). Hence, in time, the self is constantly reconstituting himself, because time turns out to be an interior force that “constantly divides us from ourselves, splits us in two: a splitting in two which never runs its course, since time has no end” (Deleuze 1984: ix). Similar paradigm of the self is seen in George Herbert Mead, who maintains that the self is composed of a “me” and an “I.” “The
‘me’ is the self as the generalized other . . . as a reflection of the whole community.
It is the attitude of the community, the internalized attitudes of the social roles that make up the community in which the self is located” (Wallace 178). The
socially-inscribed self by the generalized other is essentially different from the ethical Other or the event as the former does not cause as much threat or indeterminacy to self. However, what is significant is that Mead makes a concrete and actual image of time with the social or cultural inscription on the self. Time renders an image of the self from passivity to creativity. And, it is the passivity or vulnerability that elicits the self’s individuality in one’s action. Hence, the effect of either the Other or the general other which raises the consciousness of the “me” only accounts for one half of the self. The “I” is what reacts against the social or cultural inscriptions.
The “I” is his action over against that social situation within his own conduct, and it gets into his experience only after he has carried out the act. Then he is aware of it. . . . He had in him all the attitudes of others, calling for a certain response; that was the “me” of that situation, and his response is the “I.” (Paik 178)
Of course, his generalized other designating the social or communal influence differs a lot from Levinas’s ethical Other or Lyotard’s notion of the event. Levinas’s ethical moment does not make allowance for the cultural or social impact owing to “the anteriority of sense with regard to cultural signs” (Levinas 2003: 36). Nonetheless,
Mead’s division of the self into the “me” and the “I” attests to the inescapable confrontation or even connection with the alterity. The stamp of the Other does not eradicate the possibility of one’s individuality. Rather, the socially-inscribed being demands “the freedom from conventions, from given laws” (Paik 179). Hence, the division of the self into the “me” and the “I” in the self, according to Mead, undergoes an incessant process of detachment and authorship. The response implies “a robust of autonomy understood as involved capabilities of self-invention, self-direction, and self-control” (Paik 187). Mead’s argument confirms the self as a process of
becoming in the perpetual alternation between self-dissolving and self-invention.
More significantly, the “I” functions spatially as it detaches from one location and generates the possibility of another.
III. Space for the Individuality
With the split of the self, time plays an ethically-significant role which Deleuze recognizes as “the possibility of thinking . . . . the possibility of a future, what is possible or unforeseen, which is given rise to by the creative interval of time that constitutes the fault-line of the brain” (Crocket 185). More importantly, while time brings out new possibilities, it renders the self a new post with different qualities.
Here is where the notion of the space incorporated. Despite the fact that time plays a premier role in the self’s confrontation with the ethical Other or the generation of one’s individuality, space is what we could not neglect. Ethically, the “I,” in the wake of the consciousness of the Other, has to take the responsibility for the Other.
Remarkably, it demands the un-adequatable thinking as well as the post of the self.
That is, as time reveals the inescapable confrontation with the Other, space is meant to renew the possibilities in the self. Mead’s notion of the self’s split into the “me” and the “I” partly echoes what Deleuze’s idea of the deterritorialization and
reterritorialization which designates the contingent ongoing process of becoming.
Both of them notice the spatial incorporation of the self.
Yet, the spatial incorporation does not mean the representable or identifiable position of the self. It actually comes from the pre-conscious ethical relation. The first site of the space goes from the body which is open to the empirical stimulations or confrontations, as mentioned in the preceding chapters. The body is a delicate receiver whose sensibility is never a programmed scheme. There is no fixed pattern designating any possible center of the self. Instead, the space is more unexpected than determinate, more Other-oriented than self-centered, as Richard A. Cohen maintains that “[e]mbodiment, for Levinas, is not the inevitable closure of the
mortality of each; rather, it is openness to the mortality of others. . . . The significance of embodiment is neither attachment to self nor attachment to being but rather
vulnerability to the other, hence moral compassion” (Levinas 2003: xxxiii). The body acts as the very first site of the confrontation with the Other. If time evokes the possibility of new thought or actions, the body “inseparable from creative activity”
(Levinas 2003: 15) incarnates the new possibilities in the ethical response. The new possibilities in thoughts and actions are registered in the sensibility of the self.
However, these thoughts or actions do not make a coherent representation of the self.
More contradiction than compromise is found in the self’s ethical relation with the Other. In Moa II, Karen, as an individual, makes different responses to the image of the crowd. She seemingly rids herself of the least bit of individuality by joining the mass wedding under the guidance of a spiritual guru who even assigned her a
never-met spouse. The act dissolves her in a crowd, like being immersed in an embryonic capsule. But, as she returned to her normal life, her commitment in the mass wedding had little effect on her as her sexual relation actually alternated between Billy, the writer, and his assistant, Scott. However, in the case of the
homeless people, she felt compassionate and willing to stand up for them—a strong way to demonstrate her ideas and beliefs in social justice. The point is that her involvement did not last long enough to indicate any self-integrity. In Karen’s case, there is no denying that the image of the crowd would provide certain sense of belonging while surrounded and intoxicated by the ambience. The self is
encompassed by the self-diminishing power lying behind the image of the crowd.
On the other hand, the self is awakened to the threat of the devouring power of the crowd. The sense of the threat, put in another way, signals her consciousness of being an individual and prompts her to react individually and originally. Thus, her reaction to the image of the crowd by doing things irrelevant or even contrary to the image of the crowd is her way to add new elements to the world. Being one member of the crowd or crowds, Karen maintains her novelty in facing up the
incomprehensible ethical Other.
Despite the fact that the self is not centered on a coherent belief or attitude, it does not mean that the self is a provisional and contingent fabric. There is no doubt that life is contingent in the sense that people could never choose what confronts and influences their life. Life is somehow determined by what surrounds them. No matter what, Karen demonstrates that the new possibilities are more individual than provisional and evanescent, since being provisional or contingent designates collage of certain kind, clinging to or grafting what is around. The provisional or the contingent does not make a fixed attachment as the responsibility of the self would make a different construct with different components. In contrast, the individuality in Karen comes from her breaking out of the delimitation of the ethical confrontation and responds in an unprecedented and unpredictable way. She does not merely take advantage of what is contingently around but has her way to deal with it. More importantly, the influence of the crowd does not completely disappear; it comes back
in the scene of another crowd. Her decision to voice for the homeless is an evident application of the ideas she gathered from the Master Moon. It appears that Karen easily slides in and out of the boundary set for the crowd of the spiritual guru. There is surely the provisional and evanescent part of the self but individuality is what marks the self in an ethical relation in the wake of his responsibility for the ethical Other. To be specific, the individuality features not in the contingent concoction of different elements but freeing himself from the constraints of the boundaries or delimitations. The emancipation from the conventional boundaries or provisional engagements means the space spared for one’s individuality. The individuality expresses the self’s uniqueness in having his way to response to the ethical Other.
The individuality in the ethical relation is characterized by the process of the spatialized time. It starts with the recognition of time as the axis of the ethical relation in which the self is vulnerable and passive in face of the self-diminishing Other and proceeds with the self’s engagement and responsibility for the Other. It is in the responsibility for the Other that new possibilities are evoked and the space for individuality is refound. As the Other preconsciously imposes on the self but evokes the self’s individuality, time comes to take on the spatial contour. Concretely
speaking, the time of the event might slide by but the effect of the event lingers on.
As Karen makes her sexual relation a way to walk out of the self-dissolving force of the crowd, the body helps explore new and different elements and record the
newly-made inscriptions. Bill the writer makes more radical efforts to preserve his individuality in face of the reading public in his journey to rescue the poet who was taken as the hostage. The body makes the space for one’s individuality. The spatialized time of the ethical relation does not converge with the traditional linear and spatialized time. The spatial feature of time on the one hand corresponds to the unbridgeable gap between the self and the otherness, illustrated by Levinas’s notion of
diachrony. On the other hand, the utter alterity prolongs and complexes time which does not end with the self’s recognition of his own heteronomy and vulnerability. To put it in another way, the reason why the self’s response could extend the time of the event rests on the situation that every response of the self could be regarded as the way to deal with the Otherness, the step approaching the alterity, as well as the means to remake him-self. Hence, the time of the event is spatialized in the self’s creating difference, and, more importantly, uniqueness in his response to the alterity. It is different from DeLeuzian notion of the “schizophrenic table,” which is based on the theory of deterritorialization and reterritorialization, as if the self could easily drift from one event to another without any hesitance or resistance against the effect of any particular event. In actuality, DeLillo portrays that the self is first awaked to the pre-conscious responsibility for the Other and it follows that the self starts from such an awareness to the generation and insertion of new possibilities into the ethical relation. The temporal character of the event corresponds to the confrontation of the ethical Other. However, as the relation with the ethical Other includes not merely the moment before the self’s awareness of the existence of the Other but, more decisively, after the moment which involves the response. And it is in the response that time would be embodied and spatialized as different sensual confrontation would equip the self with stimulations for new possibilities.
However, the new possibilities generated in different events are not totally irrelevant from each other, though. Instead, they might become certain kind of reference in the coming response to the Other. DeLillo’s portrait of the self in the ethical moment or event (in Lyotard’s terms) lays out that every event might engage the self and induce new possibilities which might be the referring point for next event as Karen could walk in and out of the crowd led by the spiritual guru randomly.
While her sexual relation breaks her commitment to the crowd of the Master Moon,
she applied the doctrines learned from Master Moon to her devotion to another group, the homeless. She was and was not severed from what happened before. But, what is worth-noting is that these referring points do not follow any causal order; yet, the only thing they have in common is they come from the self’s compulsory response to the ethical Other, which is illustrated by Karen’s constant change from one way to another and to whatever new possibilities there could be. Nevertheless, this is not a defiant attitude that she took. She enjoyed certain kind of ease and freedom and, interestingly, had her individuality sustained in those responses to the Other.
Besides, different characters demonstrate their individualities in response.
While Karen makes her individuality by trying different angles to involve herself in the crowd, Bill the writer more acutely felt the self-dissolving threat from the crowd.
Being a writer, he is destined to have a reading crowd to face. First, he wrote a novel which he was reluctant to finish, deliberately deferring the time for its
publication. He meant to preserve his individuality by means of keeping something of himself from the crowd. Second, he had his photograph taken by a photographer:
on the one hand to sustain his fame as a writer but on the other to preserve more freedom to claim his sense of being an individual behind the picture. More radically, he joined a plan to rescue the writer taken as hostage by terrorists. In the rescue, he partly journeyed through the rescue process but partly made new possibilities by writing in the persona of the hostage.
The temporality of his experience is embodied, that is, spatially incorporated.
While the events always unpredictably and ungraspably lie before his experience, the vulnerability and possibility of the self are first detected as “Others challenge me, empties me of myself and keeps on emptying me by showing me ever new resources”
(Leivnas 2003: 30). That is the moment the self is emptied out so that the Other emerges in the self. The imposition of the Other on the self is a paradoxical situation
as Sandra B. Rosenthal comments that in Levinas’s ethical time, “Levinas preserves both the uniqueness of the individuality and the openness of the future” (193). It is
“me,” not anyone else that answers the immediate call of the Other. The
confrontation with the Other not merely dissolves the self-autonomy but particularly marks the individuality engaged in the responsibility for the Other. The space occupied by the Other actually calls for the reconfiguration of the self who could no longer sustain the way he was but requires new thoughts or actions in face of the irreducible alterity, as Levinas details that ‘it is not because the novelty that it ‘gives room’ for a relation of transcendence. It is because the responsibility for the Other is transcendence that there can be something new under the sun” (Levinas 1989: 245).
The responsibility for the Other embodies one’s individuality as derived from the utter alterity. Ronald C. Arnett maintains that
Levinas’s ethics begins with answering the call of the Other that shapes the identity of the “I” as a by-product. . . . Ethics becomes a
phenomenological call to the responsive care of the Other, from which action shapes the “I.” The “I” is derivative of attentiveness to the Other and responsive to an ethical call.” (40)
The responsive “I” thus constantly lays different marks on the terrain of the self.
This could be illustrated by what Don DeLillo says about how he remakes himself whenever he is engaged in writing. Writing becomes a form of ethical responsibility and simultaneously founds his individuality.
Judging from the ongoing discussion, it is assured that the self, though no longer self-sufficient or autonomous, still maintains the individuality which could add new possibilities to the world while responding to the Other. The ethical relation, pivoted on the temporal and spatial reconfiguration, is at a paradoxical brink, because the individuality revives the concern about whether we are resuming the humanistic
