4 - The Night of the Human Being: Being and Experience under the Conditions of the Unrepresentable

Summary

Abstract

Around 1900, “the primitive” figured as the conceptual persona of an entirely spectral world of telecommunications. The density of primitive being as described in ethnological and anthropological studies consisted in a fabulous density of transmissions of forces and messages between beings and things. The world of the primitive thus outlined, in turn, was above all a fantastic manifestation of the lack of intelligibility of the age of communication, projected to the margins of the West. Prior to information theory and cybernetics, there simply was no exact system of notation that would have allowed the age to understand its own media technologies. The chapter reconstructs and contextualizes two ontologies of communication that—albeit still grounded in a fascination with the primitive—advanced radical redefinitions of communication that, given contemporary media realities, were extremely virulent: Lucien Lévy-Bruhl's thinking of “savage” media and his notion of primitives’ participative mode of being and Georges Bataille's thinking of sacred communication. Against the backdrop of today's media technological conditions, Lévy-Bruhl's original reflections on participation as a primordial constitutive relation that precedes the participating entities as such, in particular, must be reevaluated as a downright visionary hauntological description of the age of communication (even if Lévy-Bruhl himself still situated them in an outside, a primitive hell of telecommunications).

Keywords: the specter of the primitive; hauntology of communication; ontology of participation; Lucien Lévy-Bruhl; Georges Bataille

Primitiveness and crisis

The history of the genesis of thinking, thought up by Nietzsche in his non-Aristotelian furor, and driven, especially by the Durkheim School, deep into the savage infrastructure of Aristotelian logic, resulted from the decay of thinking in terms of categories and substance, a decay induced by media technologies and the exact sciences. Remarkably, the forays into the primitive grounds of thinking led through regions that in many respects resembled the post-Kantian, and generally post-Aristotelian, conditions of the age of the symbolic and of communication to a tee. In complete accordance with the present, the world of the “primitive” around 1900 was governed by a retreat of representability. A prehistorical not-yet of representational thinking corresponded in a peculiarly symmetrical way to its no-longer.