Prolegomenon to The Test Drive by Avital Ronell

At this point I choose simply to retain the sense, the mood, the spark of dissipation and reflection within a domain that is not meant to be against or about science. These reflections are offered by – what shall I say?- an admittedly driven yet nonetheless poetic, if often scholarly, sensibility that seeks to understand without appropriation, to grasp without the use of claws.

At one point Nietzsche sees the experiment freeing us from the constraints of referential truth. Science amazes him, though a reactive tendency to reduce itself to calculative efficacy also lands squarely in his repertoire of illusions, dissembling interpretations, and masks. He redirects  science to art, ligaturing an ancient complicity.

For my part I am neither averse to nor obsessed by science- options that seem useless. I feel the weight that presses upon our bodies, our embarrassed sense of promise and emptiness and connection to the world, the tests to which I am put and others have to endure –tests by which that being, still tagged as human, nowadays receives definition. One has every right, in  fact it is a duty, to ask of science if it is capable of devoting itself to securing the conditions for thinking joyousness and the affirmation of life. (Those conditions are not to be construed as simplistic or regressive-utopian, as anyone who has been circuited through psychoanalysis realizes.) Or is science really only able in the end to promote the glacialization, the sterilization, the steely calculative grid of the technological dominion, allied as it is with the persistent menace of world loss and money-eating privilege? One does not have to be a withering Marxist, a vegan or eco-militant to see that there are all too few scientific activists in our mist, not enough to carry around its effusions. Yet science amazes me.  .  .

Literary and philosophical studies, art and art criticism, risk getting sucked in by the ruling scientific claims, the alienating authority of what Husserl calls ‘objectivism.’ The attitude that science gives us, this Einstellung, is life-depleting and aura-sapping. It has left a toxic residue of un-interrogated policies, now becoming decisive. The delusion of self-sufficiency, a mark of the self-evisceration of the sciences detached from their reflective ground and forgotten abysses, is dangerous for us all, blocking vision and eclipsing futurity. So Husserl, more or less. Upgraded by historicity. The other one Nietzsche cried: ‘The wasteland grows.’ Still, I am not about doom and gloom but want to heed what Husserl and others, some whose names you do not know, say about “mans now unendurable lack of clarity about his own existence and his infinite tasks.’ This may sound old-fashioned, that is to say, pre-Freudian, ante-Battaillean, post-Enlightenment, and so forth. For who today hungers for clarity as if darkness did not send out its own special light, perhaps a solar storm of another order? And who today would restrict her rhetorical-existential quiver  to ‘man’?

Here is the question that I bring to the table: Why has the test- throughout history, and perhaps most pervasively today- come to define our relations to questions of truth, knowledge, and even reality? It is not a matter of choosing between a science of fact and a science of essence –between an account of why things are actual rather than possible. Nor is it simply a matter of technological self-understanding, as if the scientific reflection on its own procedures and premises could satisfy a philosophical hunger.

The term ‘subject position’ would not cover the calamity of the field that encompasses the will to test. At times my said subject position seems reduced to that of a quivering rabbit, or less glamorously, to that of a rat, prodded and probed, sectionalized and cornered by the technological feeler. As a receptor to the invasive demand my little rabbit ears are shaking – a figure conjured by Heidegger to represent exemplary listening. I do not know if my listening device is exemplary, nor do I insist on sustaining the pathos that propels the images gathered in this place. Like a good Nietzchean, I am attuned to the conflicting valuations, the gains and losses, of the phenomena under consideration. I am not insensitive to the liberating potential of testing one’s ground, which is to say, of recanting one’s certainties, throwing off the security blanket of time and history.  .  .  .

The test drive covers a lot of ground and splits off into different and related semantic fields. There are moments of local or functional reduplication, overlap and support. One side of testing is as assertive in its finding as the other is vulnerable when counting its losses. There is the test which stands its ground, standardized, and equipped with irrefutable results. So it claims and so it stands. There is the other test that crashes against walls, collapses certitude, and lives by failure- lives by dying, or at least by destroying. All sorts of issues come to the fore, including those institutions and acts that deal with norms and establish boundaries and those that rely on expertise, or, in a court of law, on expert witnesses. The one register offers testing results – certitudes – by which to calculate and count  on the other (including the self as other, as tested other). Another register consistently detaches from its rootedness in truth: self-dissolving and ever probing, it depends of boundary-crossing feats and the collapse of horizon . . .the two principal registers do not lead separate lives in the world but imply and breach one another at several critical junctures of thought. . . .

I will focus on the ways in which the test – and in particular the rhetoric of testing –has restructured the field of everyday and psychic life. Whether clearly stated or largely disavowed, models of testing inform diverse types of social organization, legitimating crucial and often irreversible discursive tendencies and mandating critical decisions. In terms of the political implications of testing, one need only consider the way wars are waged on material sites and objects, and the way the state uses drugs in order to take possession of the body. Testing means, among other things, that your pee belongs to the state or to any institution or apparatus that thrives on the new civic readability. It is my duty to bring us back to a more original readability of your urine sample, or, at least, if I am unable to restore your pee to its proper place, to trace the contours of the complicated extravagance of testing. . . .

The act of obtaining knowledge of the real is a light that always somewhere casts shadows. It is never immediate and plain.