Undecidable Sense and the Logics of Ineffectivity

Abstract

In Indexicalism and now, again, in Memory Assemblages, Shajara Bensusan has insightfully perceived how a main occupation of the historical tradition of metaphysics, and a central project of global contemporary capitalism (perhaps culminating in the massive contemporary ideological project of “artificial intelligence”), can be seen as united in what is essentially a single program: that of the extraction of intelligibility in a unitary form from phenomena and events for the purpose of their comprehension, mastery and control.[1]  This project of violent extraction may also be seen -- as Bensusan’s critique suggests, and as I shall argue further here -- as a project of the attempted extraction and stabilization of the senses of the beings and lives of the earth: that is, of the extrication and appropriation, in a unitary form, of the possible direction and directedness of their temporal becoming and possibilities of significant presentation, to or for one another. Seen in this way, what gives unitary direction to this project of the extraction of senses is the value, assumption or ideological form of an effective – that is, in principle effectively decidable -- predictability, comprehension and control by means of the exercise of a (presumptively human) capacity of rational intelligibility and intelligence.  

In recent work and publications, I have tried to critically investigate and interrogate the underlying logic of this project of effectivity, which (I have argued) begins with Aristotle’s application of the idea and value of a general and unitary rational capacity of decision or judgment, thought to be possessed uniquely by human beings, and finds a characteristic contemporary form in the idea of the human subject or agent as the possessor of language.[2]  By reflecting on the logical-metaphysical form and foundations of the project of effectivity, I have argued, we also are in a formal position to begin to articulate what I have called, by contrast, several “logics of ineffectivity” that (I have argued) could both critically witness the limits of the coherence of these assumptions of effectivity and rational capacity and, thereby, point to alternative forms of life no longer as much marked by their characteristic violence.  

The main aim of this paper is to further develop the underlying idea of a logic of ineffectivity by developing the formal connection between the formally demonstrable undecidability of presentational sense and the actual witnessing of this ineffectivity on the level of practice: that is, of the forms of a collective global and geopolitical life.  In particular, I will consider how a formally grounded consideration of the question or problem of sense and its direction, developed in the neutral positional terms of the (essentially indexical) relationships of a(ny) one with (any or all possible) others, can orient both a critique of the logic and ideology of presumptive effectivity that underlies the contemporary techno-capitalist project of extraction, and (more positively) a series of critical logics of practice that witness the consequences of the undecidability of sense on the level of the global organization of collective life.  I consider how critical reflection on the logical and formal-semantic determinants of the extractive project within (what Emmanuel Severino terms) the “nihilistic” project of Western cosmopolitics offers to evince the alternative development of logics of ineffectivity that thus provide a possible response on the practical level to this global nihilism, without relying on something like a metaphysical principle of full presence or a theological position of the plenitude of possible sense.  In the last section of the paper, I raise a couple of interpretive and critical questions about Bensusan’s development of (what he terms) some of the possible “routes” to ineffectivity, in the specific context of the spectral realism and pan-mnemism he argues for in Memory Assemblages,  and thereby to reassess, from a slightly shifted perspective, some of the positive claims of justice, historically oriented memory, and messianic anticipation that he offers on behalf of spectral realism there.