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hello everyone and welcome to this first in a series of lectures on the theme of information I am Tim Beal I am the director of the Baker Nord Center for the Humanities and a professor in the religion department and on behalf of my associate director and helm Reich and myself I am very happy to welcome you all here this is the first in a series of three lectures by our three Baker Nord seminar visiting fellows on the theme of information and I just want to flag this little flyer for you about these about these three lectures so that you can make sure you make the other two as well which are both in in November we and the seminar have been blessed to have these visiting fellows with us and the opportunity to get to know them and think and work with them and this is a great opportunity for us to share them with you all and so we're happy you're here it's a great pleasure and honor for me to to introduce our inaugural lecturer professor avital Ronell especially after having had some time this week to to get to know her personally and enjoy the beginning of a friendship with her it's it's an even greater pleasure I think for many of you she needs no introduction but just by way of a couple highlights she is the professor of Germanic languages and literature's at New York University she's also professor of comparative literature there before her professorship there she was at Berkeley until last spring she was chair of Germanic languages and literature's of the Germanic languages and literatures Department at NYU she said man visiting appointments most recently at Princeton she's a regular summer faculty member at the European graduate school in Switzerland where she teaches with Judith Butler and Giorgio Agamben and and others like that she has taught seminars and courses with Jacques Derrida and Helene 6uu among others her books include most recently the test drive in 2005 a book called stupidity 2001 finitude score essays for the end of the millennium crack wars literature addiction mania the telephone book technology schizophrenia electric speech dictation on haunted writing back in 1986 and the newest one on its way out now which I love the title is the uber reader selected works of avital Ronell that might be a good place to start I don't know if you haven't had a chance to read her yet that's being edited by Diane Davis and is out very soon so that's all well and good but given that this is a series on information I thought that maybe I ought to check some real information sources while preparing my introduction so I went to Google and Wikipedia and of course finally to that ultimate source the great river of bookish information amazon.com it turns out that Amazon has run avatars latest book the test-drive through a couple of its machines to see what information it might give up and this is what I found there that it yielded individual concordance for the test-drive Nietzsche the word Nietzsche occurs 793 times whereas God occurs only 88 times on the flesh Kincaid index that got a rating of 15 Plateau you know information people you like real numbers right they've got a rating of 15 point 5 which means that there are 93 percent of other books at Amazon that are easier the book averages one point seven syllables per word and twenty eight point four words per sentence with a total of four thousand one hundred and thirty eight sentences it offers four thousand four hundred and ninety eight words per ounce for a value of three thousand three hundred and fifty two words per dollar and I did a little my own math and figured out that that's about three one thousandth of a penny per word so and that's whether you whether you bought Nietzsche or or God it's the same price the amazing and wonderful thing about avi tall to me is that I know she could do something interesting with this little Amazonian information machine she could help us see it not only as absurd and ridiculous but also as interesting maybe revealing something very profound and even disturbing about it and about we who go to it indeed whether avi tall is thinking and writing her way into the television or the telephone or whatever she helps us see the familiar becomes strange and in the process I think she helps us see and hear the ghosts in our machines and the strangers in ourselves her topic today is the test drive please join me in welcoming avital Ronell I'm very delighted to be here I'm quite astonished by the warmth and hospitality that you have all shown me I'm now contemplating nightly Christians fences Laura's relation to Foucault and can't Michels sadistic statistics Brent's critiques of his own project and the great pleasure that I've taken recently is to reread Tim's book that made such an important impression on a lot of us the book of hiding and these evenings in the hotel I was able to reread the chapter on insomnia with a great deal of gratitude the the crews magnificent and and frames our encounter in ways that we may want to discuss among us and I also deeply appreciate the communitarian inflection of this seminar I feel that I'll know and has been very kind to me and we've talked a lot about Delors and Derrida and I have a sense of where I think at least a sense of where people are going where they may have been and and some of their trajectories which is very moving and very unusual usually you just hop into a place and and scram afterwards so I'm really very very delighted to be here and thankful for the lovely accommodations as well it is important and usually under mine to think about the architecture that that holds us as we try to talk to each other and I'm often used to well different types of architectural spaces including the municipal degrading dilapidated kind of neighborhoods that I push myself through with a lot of conviction of course but it's also depleting so as usual I don't go to the target of what has summoned me here but I want to consider some of the presuppositions and what makes it possible for us to even talk about information or deformation or the instability the necessary instability of transmission systems and problems so I thought I would roll back to the Nietzschean critique and consider some of the genealogical threads that he he creates for us to follow so I'd like to offer a way of destabilizing the theme that brings us here which means that you may have to treat this as a kind of rodeo just hang on and see how long you can hang on you can also treat me as a television and pause me and talk and ask questions and start talking at any point so some of this may not be immediately intelligible and I'm also if I may say so a thinker of the necessity of the unintelligible and the flawed and the the breakdown in so-called communication if we could communicate we wouldn't need to communicate so it's very necessary to consider also kind of right-wing ideologies of clarity like it's part of the white lie to be perfectly clear read my lips kind of rhetoric you that may sound and resonate familiarly so sometimes the scratch marks in in in what I present are so difficult maybe to to retain or understand and that's part of a rhetorical politics that I hope you welcome and if not that you listen to maybe as you would to music that sometimes is weird so today I thought I would present something again that it allows for us to discuss certainly in our seminar tomorrow but in discussion afterwards here what the in a good old Foucauldian way what the conditions for the possibility of even discussing information might be and I thought I would present niche on American proving grounds so how Nietzsche migrates to America in certain ways how Nietzsche reads America how America reads Nietzsche so you may want to put on your allegorical ears because there's I'm working on at least six tracks or registers not not too bad I don't I don't think so let me just begin with a citation from Neuromancer William Gibson of course quote wasted a fair bit of patriotic young flesh in order to test some new technology so testing one we do not always know how to calculate the importance of a work in some cases there is nothing even to guarantee that the work will arrive some works seem to set an ETA there is a sense that it will take them years to make their arrangements overcome the obstacles of an unprotected journey get past the false reception desks blocking their paths in the more assured and seductive version these works follow the itinerary of Benjamin's secret rendezvous targeting the geheime otha up ladle so the secret rendezvous that a work has made with the singularity of a destination in the form perhaps of a future reader the reader or receptor from the future assumes the responsibility of being addressed of signing for the work when it finally arrives helping it originate yet little tells us how many hits a work will have taken on its way or whether we will be there to receive it so this might sound a little star Trekkie perhaps the work will be prevented from showing up at the appointed time on the other hand some works barrel toward their destination causing a lot of trouble for a lot of designs Heidegger once said that it can take 200 years to undo the damage inflicted by certain works I think he was evaluating Plato so thousands of years for my part I cannot tell whether the gay science has arrived or even really where it was going when Nietzsche sent it on its way still I am prepared to sign for it that is to say I have prepared myself for it I am NOT reluctant to assess the damage for which it still may be responsible assuming the work has arrived and I can find its point of entry or whether but this is not a contradiction this work has fashioned essential trajectories that provide existence with ever new supplies of meaning I'm using work here in the widest possible sense because Nietzsche well Nietzsche was the absence of the work so it's it's a myth that Nietzsche had a work he continues to pose the dilemma of the most unauthorised of authors so many signatures styles and shredders nonetheless something keeps arriving and returning under that name something that addresses us with uncommon urgency so the gay science to the extent that science is meant to promote life Nietzsche makes it his business to put demands on its self understanding for Nietzsche science or more to the point the scientific interpretation of life owes us an account of itself if only to give us access to its overwhelming use of force over diverse discursive populations it would not be stretching thing too far to say that in Nietzsche's estimation science needs to be audited at every turn each year by the way Nietzsche's birthday is October 15th I hope you celebrate the philosophical pressure is on for science to come clean to declassify the language usage and rhetorical combinations that have supported the prodigals of science over the other interpretive interventions and possible worlds if Nietzsche wants to keep it clean this is in part because he needs science in order to make some of his most radical claims his relation to science is by no means driven by resentment but rests on appropriative affirmation Nietzsche says if we didn't have art which pumped us and primed us for science we'd all commit suicide because art is what already introduces a relation to illusion and fiction and tears us away disengages us from the tyranny of the truth okay and then science goes on its own tracks with no concern further and a certain metaphysical level for truth or or it's others yet it is from a place of exorbitant responsibility that Nietzsche wrote up his version of science and against the many pronounced inclinations of science made joyousness joyousness that's why it's the gay science the joy is frivolous frolicking science a new prerequisite of scientific endeavor not one to get tangled in OP Celeste subjectivities Nietzsche at times saw himself as a scientific object thus in an effort to explain himself as a prophetic human being he writes I should have been at the electric exhibition in Paris as an exhibit at the world science fair elsewhere as we know nietzsche comes out not so much as a man but as dynamite taking these articulated mutations seriously one of his masks will have been the scientific object how can we make sense of Nietzsche's call today what relation to information or deformation or disinformation does nietzsche portend testing one two if we are prepared only now to receive his version of the question concerning technology here I'm referring to Heidegger's important text the question concerning technology this is because he ran it along the lines of a delay called forwarding system he made us wait holding up the scientific punch he wanted delivered the call put out by nietzsche remains the urgent question of a text that bears the burden of an enigmatic encounter with science nietzsche gives us science as an assignment as a trust to be taken unconditionally neither the first nor the last to make science part of an irrevocable curriculum nietzsche saw in science the potential for uncompromising honesty in terms of understanding who we are and what we can become at this point only the scientific interpretation of life is capable in principle of zapping those dubious mythologies and bad drugs that keep things hazy enslaved grimly pessimistic on some level science does not owe anything to anyone it does not have to bend its rules to suit this or that transcendental powerbroker there's a lot in each on how God vetoes science and the great scientist is of course Eve with whom Nietzsche will identify and who still punished for her wise ass scientific inquiry in principle science does not have to rhyme with good nation state or God but should be able to bypass the more provincial toll booths of ever narrowing global highways science if it wanted to could in principle travel its zones with a free pass more imposingly still science could kick its way out of any religious holding pen and put down deadly fanaticism z' in a flash of its idiomatic brilliance in his rendering and genealogical breakdown nietzsche did not mean for science to become a servile instrument of a corporate state though he saw how that could happen but when nietzsche takes on science commanding its future nietzsche had first dibs on at least one or two of the possible futures allotted to the domains of science he addresses the promise of science according to all together singular categories drawing up new amendments to manage its manifestly powerful constitution nietzsche continually offers a model for cognition that cannot simply account for itself or maintain its results within the assumed certitudes of a controlled system of knowledge at some level the correlated acts of discovery and invention exceed the limits of what is knowable or even as Derrida has argued strictly recognizable if there's a true invention it can't be recognized it might blow you up in a sense cognitively the meaning of scientifically which concerns Nietzsche and which can be seen to dominate the technological field in which we moderns exist embraces the qualities both of destructive and artistic modes of production involving an ever elusive and yet at the same time tremendously potent force field our being has been mobilized by the various technologies in ways that have become fairly recently to receive serious attention in the domains of ontology ethics political theory information theory cybernetics critical thought and artificial intelligence yet what concerns Nietzsche belongs neither literally inside nor outside any of these domains but has nonetheless infiltrated their very core something indeed that Nietzsche's gas I was first to articulate succinctly Nietzsche variously motivates the scientific premise of his work by terms that indicate the activities of testing which include experimentation trial hypothetical positing retrial and more testing if anything gates I signals to us today the extent to which are at poor to the world has undergone considerable mutation by means of our adherence to the imperative of testing the consequences of this grid are considerable involving to say the least our relation to explanatory and descriptive language truth conclusiveness result probability process even identity testing moreover implies for niche a very specific temporal inflections henceforth everything will have to stand the test of time which is to say that ever provisional things as well as concepts must be tried and proven and structurally regulated by the destruction of a hypothesis that holds them together the logic of the living as much as the inscription of the decline have to go to trial later on we can discuss the Democratic implications of this thought who'd have thought that Nietzsche could instruct us on democracy the logic okay so if it weren't too explosive one could say that Nietzsche laid the fundamental groundwork for corroborating poppers theory of falsifiability Nietzsche Nietzsche Nietzsche our volts at a science that like a warrior can go out and test itself repeatedly so for Nietzsche testing means you can discard you can recant you can rescind which is a very new philosophical act of destruction that he he affirms so if you test yourself there's always a limit that you can overcome and destroy the the last results by if today's world is ruled conceptually by the primacy of testing nuclear testing drug testing HIV admissions employment pregnancy SAT GRE M SAT and DNA testing limits testing a state's capacity for justice as I just read in today's paper etc then this growing dependency on the test is coextensive with Nietzsche's recognition of the modern experimental turn the experimental turn as we now know it from a history of fluke successes and near misses in its Genesis and orientation travels way beyond good and evil its undocumented travel plan there are so many secret destinations of which we still remain ignorant is perhaps why experimentation is a locus of tremendous ethical anxiety no matter how controlled we cannot know where it is going you know we're still discussing whether it's ethical to use the results of experiments and concentration camps which are still classified one could argue that nowadays since the fateful advent of the gay side but perhaps not solely because of it there is nothing that is not tested or subject to testing let us set up this phase of our inquiry by discussing Nietzsche's unprecedented emphasis on experimentation which is what I believe provides the crucial access code to the possibility of his gay science or a gay science testing 1 2 3 a vaguely threatening insinuation the challenge sparked by the utterance try me could come from any number of places it could be the case that it speaks from the place of an action hero a mundane bully as a girl gang member a new appliance a car or humo whomever you're buffed up interlocutor might be today in fact when you hear someone say try me it is very likely that he's speaking from the essence of Technology a shorthand formula intended to establish a tone of defiance in joining the other less you to test a limit try me may challenge you to see what happens if the line is crossed it also allows one to encounter the subject on a trial basis there's there is something yet to be seen or recanted in the field of the encounter with the other a call to test the space between us try me however soon reverts to a foe experimental generosity for a while it gives the green light to go ahead and probe limits it switches on the glare of a red light as well protecting a designated turf it does both at once inviting an experimental advance and intimating caution averting its execution one throws one's body in the way of an advance Nietzsche's gesture moves the challenge in a different direction when he invokes fazool canvas let's try it try me as if in response to the tapered challenge his work often says let's try it or let's try it out let's give it a try so the giving it a try is something that turns the trial into a gift and here I'm considering also in a condensed form all of dairy does immense work on the gift and the gift of death turning the trial into a gift Nietzsche creates a space of recessive limits at least as concerns dogmatic assertions and cognitive boundaries he makes his conditions known in order to earn Nietzsche's praise a given assertion must be trial ready inviting the type of responsiveness that allows for the experiment what Nietzsche sees as a highly responsible stipulation and structure Nietzsche the thinker of the test site from the selective test of the eternal return to Sara to stress trials and the experimental language shots of the f-4 istic texts the word essay also means to try and trial put on trial to say something insisted on these very conditions Nietzsche insisted on these very conditions fazool envious circumscribes the space of an unceasing series of audacious experiments here's Nietzsche I would praise any skeptics to which I am permitted to reply let us try it but I do not want to hear anything anymore of all the things and questions which do not permit of the experiment for their courage has lost its rights so for Nietzsche experiment the experimental disposition is about courage under the flag of courage Nietzsche henceforth closes his ears to anything that disallows experimental probity one could argue that in human all too human dawn and the gay science Nietzsche sets up a lab in which he performs the countless experiments on which later theories might be built each a fur ism is set up as an experiment to be tested observed and where necessary rescinded performing a kind of anti sublation rescind ability is the true test of courage where Hegel might gather and hold an affable orsa blazing Nietzsche in and on principle discards let's go his work depends on the bounce of rescind ability on the ability to mourn that which cannot prove or seriously legitimate itself such acts of letting go have nothing to do with wimping out or would simply betraying what has been instead they provide a way of articulating the enhanced capacity to take the cuts of criticism basing nothing on faith or mere durability it is a mark of vitality that points to the minimally paranoid path if that should be conceivable of scholarly pursuit so Nietzsche like like flow Barre says no conviction I'm going to proceed I'm not going to hang on to something I think as a truth or might work I'm going to be prepared to let go of it and to mourn it so this is something that I think changes the path of philosophy and technology the demands put to us by Nietzsche in the articulated forms of the autobiographical traces as well as the various inscriptions of his thought prompt a number of questions sometimes the questions that he makes us ask evoke the quality of something like an unthought layer of sketches he proposes for as much as he Thema tais as it explicitly he also appears to take testings pervasive Poe for granted so some of the questions that he makes us ask is what finally is the nature of the test does it have an essence is there an essence of the test or testing is it pure relationality how does it participated Nietzsche's great destabilisation x' or prompt the nihilistic slide of values why today is our sense of security whether or not we are prepared to admit this based on testability there's a desire to have everything and everyone tested and I'm not unaware of the sinister resonance of this observation but since when has a desire signaled by humanity not been pulled by a sinister undertow testing which are designs encounter everyday in the multiplicity of forms already enumerated ranging from IQ to cosmetics engines stress and arms testing one two three broadcast systems not to mention testing your love testing your friendship testing my patience in a word testing the brakes was located by Nietzsche mainly in the eternal joy of becoming becoming involves the affirmation of passing away and destroying the decisive feature of a Dionysian philosophy I'll just read a few more pages so that we can then have a discussion testing which we read as one of the prevailing figures of our modernity still makes claims of absoluteness something has been tested and proved we have test results but this absoluteness now comes in the form of temporary nice it opens up the sight that occurs Nietzsche suggests after Christianity has fizzled arriving together with a crisis in the relationship of an of the interpretation of interpretation to experience so there's a crisis of the relationship of interpretation to experience no longer is it a question of interpreting one's own experience as pious people have long enough interpreted theirs namely as though it were providential a hint designed and ordained for the sake of the salvation of the soul all that is over now since Nietzsche now we godless ones test we rigorously experiment we are the Christian conscience translated and subbed into a scientific conscience converted to scientific we still however carry a trace of Christianity because what triumphed over the Christian God was Christian morality itself the concept of truthfulness that was understood ever more rigorously as it became more refined Christianity forced intellectual cleanliness upon us this would be Nietzsche's view that Christianity in a sense installed in itself a kind of rigor that was going to necessarily crash against its walls of dogmatism so it came clean by pushing science as the sublimation of its own murkiness now man's conscience is set against Christianity it is considered indecent and dishonest by every more refined conscience the Christian God in some split off from Christian morality which necessarily went down at rands valuating path less traveled and turned against its recalcitrant origin the truth March required Christian morality to give up the God what interests me is the additional twist of transvaluation that Nietzsche's shadow history sketches namely when the value earning truth converts into the currency of testing henceforth in strictly Nietzschean terms reactive positing x' will have to stand up to the scrutiny of recursive testing with the spread of the technology testing lost some of its erratic and exceptional qualities and started hitting everyone with its demands that is anyone who wanted to gain admission anywhere and all institutions started testing to let you in and let you out if something weird happens you are taken in for psychiatric testing technological warfare belongs to the domain of testing as well and does much to support the thesis that there is a little difference between testing and the real thing to the extent that testing counts as warfare today in today's paper Korea is testing and and this requires some hermeneutic intervention is is Korea's testing nuclear weaponry the real thing or a test how to read a test and so on and so forth politically what are the implications to the extent so that testing counts as warfare today it marks the steady elimination of boundaries between weapons testing and their deployment the test already functions as a signal to the enemy other what this means among other things is that the Cold War was a war it also means that W could at once invoke and scramble these codes by announcing on the eve of 9/11 that the attack on the World Trade Center was in his words a test so the president came out on the evening of 9/11 and said our nation is being tested so how does his language at that moment of crisis how does his language usage work here appearing to introduce a new rhetoric of justification for imminent military action the president in fact reverted to a citation of pre technological syntax that captured the erratic pull of the test in this context the term sparkles as an anointment the president bears the mark of election by virtue of the test if a few months earlier he was elected by dubious political means he is now elected by divine mandate to meet the demands of a terrific test in order to create history which he begins to do by Rhian scribing the Crusades saying that the terror attack was a test President Bush leaves no room for the undecidability of Abraham the contestability of job or the intricated martyrdom of Christ in the desert or on this cross disturbing the codified usage of trial to which the test alludes the utterance subverts the condition of being tested by offering that at the moment of its mention the test has been passed the test will already have made sense and turned in the result one would not have been chosen to withstand it the logic goes if one had not already passed the test of history and countersigned of history countersigned in this case by God so when Bush says we are being tested he reverts to a biblical language and tradition and his sense of the test therefore means in uttering that we are being tested he's already passed the test he's been elected anointed so that this nation has passed the test whereas the Nietzschean and other thinking of tests require an open relation to a kind of open infinity or what I was calling undecidability rien scribing and repeating the Wars of his father this little Isaac Bush jumps at the chance to return to traumatic sites like Isaac neutralized and silenced by the father's package deal with a sacred this one wants to dig into the earth signing a legacy to which he was and was not called a lot of my work has to do with whether you know you're receiving a call and what it means to be uncalled or not cold but still jump up and think you're the elected one part of the vision thing that we call testing the first Gulf War was conducted primarily as a field test but it also Fantas matically displayed the characteristics of a national AIDS test in which America scored HIV negative owing to the Bloodless and safe war the Gulf War set out to prove the hypothesis that no technology will ever exist without being tested but once it is tested we are no longer simply talking about a test nothing will be invented no matter how stealth nuclear or unthinkable that will not be tested that is at some level of calibration realized hence in addition to related issues of deployment testing is always written into treaties the necessity of treaties conventions and regulative discourse in itself underscores in the manner demonstrated by Kant and benjamine in their critiques of violence the extent to which testing like war has become naturalized and can be only provisionally suspended by treaties that try to ban them so at this point in what I was preparing to discuss with you I wanted to show how Nietzsche slides and migrates into America and how America becomes the test site bollocks and longs for Nietzsche and why and how America is a place he predicts where actors will one day rule and there's some very Californian moments here there's also you have to remember that Nietzsche when I say trans valuates he has a machine that affirms and is destructive of the very uh pterence --is that he puts forth so being an actor or a role player for Nietzsche is also something to celebrate because if you can fictionalize and produce different masks and selves you're already on the science on the level of art and science to a certain degree for Nietzsche the role players which is to say those who had to go with the flow and who do not drop anchor in a kind of essence of identity they're the Jewish people they've had to tuck and roll move go with the flow change personalities and identity papers and they're able to do this and Nietzsche praises them for this at the same time one grows into ones mask in a way that privileges becoming and changing and producing proliferating personalities and possibilities and trajectories and there's no longer faith in kind of monumental architectural projects because there's such a fast turnover of who you can be in you're becoming so there's no longer a kind of commitment to the future or plans that would be transgenerational so who today says nietzsche would plan for the future and truly be committed to the future of generations that we can't even imagine whereas so he predicted a lot of things via some of his notions of experiment and testing and this is where the paper would have gone but I would like to invite you to make your own interventions and comments and they don't have to be in the undie constructed form of QA you can just have something to say that does or does not ask for a response and may ask for response from the future and not from whatever position I'm pretending to occupy here so thank you for your attention acai was very sensitive to it it's it's this hard stuff and I appreciate that you're letting me speak to you and some of this stuff is also of course very controversial so let me explain one thing that one of my decisions to go with Nietzsche is because I do feel that it's necessary especially today in this very depleted historical moment to go to the limits of what a consensus would hold as decent I think one has to travel to those frontiers and ask very aggressive difficult incorrect kinds of questions so it's it's not easy nietzsche himself was a polite and modest person i would say i am too so it's not easy to to to produce the effect of a rant or a rigorous denunciation