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Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences, Volume 25, Numbers
1 & 2, Fall/Winter 2016, pp. 17-33 (Article)
Access provided by San Diego State University (15 Feb 2018 00:54 GMT)
All Too Human
A Conversation with Elizabeth Grosz
elizabeth grosz: Thanks for this question, and thank you for
understanding the process of writing that I tried to develop in the
book. I felt in writing the book that I had to turn myself inside out
in order to evacuate all my thoughts from interiority, from self, in or-
der to open up to the forces that in any case occupy us but which we
normally fend off. And I had hoped to evoke something of the verti-
go that is involved in a real decentering of the self. Reading Darwin,
Deleuze, Bergson, and others was both remarkably difficult and joy-
ously affirming— difficult because one can’t read or understand any
of their work without some intellectual effort, but also joyous and af-
firming because each (and other writers to whom I feel attracted) has
also had to turn himself inside out in order to produce the beautiful
and rich concepts of life that they did. There is a kind of unraveling
of self-importance the more one becomes aware of everything else
that occurs around and within oneself, the more one understands, as
Grosz & Stirner: All Too Human 19
you say, one’s personal smallness, but also one’s fundamental connec-
tion to almost everything, a connection we don’t often recognize but
which is more satisfying, in the long run, than self-affirmation. This
is an affirmation of belonging to the world, to nature, to society, to
others, and not just of one’s domination of these domains. In recog-
nizing not only our connections with the things that compose our
world but also the fact that we are ourselves nothing but these con-
nections, recognizing that relations to the inhuman are what make
us human internally and without resistance, we must give up some-
thing of the capacious, masterful, acquisitive, self-referential perspec-
tive and instead come to marvel at our own existence and the innu-
merable conditions which made it possible.
We become undone whether we want it or not, not only as we
age and every cell, muscle, and organ is replaced by others, but as we
change, as we grow and are transformed. Becoming is always a be-
coming undone insofar as we become other without being sure what
it is that we have become. The trick is to come to understand this pro-
cess as one of the conditions for both creativity and politics. Today,
in other words, we have no choice but to think beyond the human,
in light of both our growing knowledge of the interconnections be-
tween the animal and the human, or more broadly, the human’s de-
pendence on the inhuman, and in light of the ecological mess, or
rather, the environmental disaster that humanity has created and may
not be able to overcome. While we have rarely, in the humanities and
the social sciences, looked beyond the human, we will have to do so
with increasing insistence in the near future, as the existence of the
human is increasingly imperiled, or imperils itself.
ss: When the world population hit the seven billion mark in 2011,
official celebrations coincided with warnings about humanity’s im-
minent doom. Ulrich Beck’s analysis of our contemporary fear that
“even the privileged classes of the world inhabit a global ‘risk society’
whose hazards cannot be anticipated, calculated, and controlled, much
less escaped” seems more pertinent than ever.4 The human species
has exploited the planet’s resources to the point of no return. As I am
writing this, I see that even such an unlikely magazine as Forbes runs
an article that announces humanity starving by 2050—unless we make
20 qui parle fall/winter 2016 vol. 25, nos. 1–2
ss: I find the thought of us as a field over and within which be-
comings occur fascinating. It seems to visualize that our life is not
a one- directional impulse but rather intensification in space. I guess
what influenced (and maybe misdirected) my question is that when
thinking about becoming, I am constantly tempted to translate the
idea to that of the acceleration of life particular to processes of mod-
ernization. I think of Marx’s capital chasing around the world or of
the speed of information surpassing our speed of travel. How do
these forces relate to the becomings you describe?
eg: These forces that surround and internally constitute us are in-
deed spatial, as you suggest, but also temporal. I have attempted to
think about becomings beyond the model of the dialectic, which,
Grosz & Stirner: All Too Human 23
eg: I think that you are correct to suggest that art is positioned
as it were midway between the forces of chaos and the process of
framing—territorialization and deterritorializing—that provisional-
ly organizes some of these forces. But I am not sure that I agree that
art is about unleashed becoming and the desire to contain it. Nor do
I think that art is about the illusion of containment; nor is it about
translation into another mode of experience. I am not at all sure that
art is about experience: that was the provocation of the book that I
set out to explore. Security, risk containment, and border- drawing are
what characterize the state and its apparatuses, as well as, increasingly,
corporations and their movements. The frame is not a border in the
sense that a border is policed, regulated, maintained; rather, it is the
process of cohesion that draws together its constituents. The chaos
that is drawn upon and invoked in art is the chaos of the impersonal,
the world itself. Politics is a parallel framing, in which framing, now
by economic policies and by the practices of each state’s self-security,
that is, through police, army, and intelligence forces, is oriented to
securing borders, just as corporations are another mode of framing
the organization and movement of labor and goods according to the
logic of profit. This does not mean that art is apolitical or even anti-
corporate; rather, its politics, its economics, and its energetics are self-
defined, determined by art itself and its practices of production and
circulation. For me, what art produces is the intensification of sen-
sation, not the sensations of a subject or even that which an object
elicits for a subject, but that impersonal force, or forces, which make
possible a relation between subject and object. Art is the summon-
ing up of inhuman forces, the forces of the real, or chaos, within a
very narrow and self- defined problematic. In Francis Bacon’s paint-
ings, the problem, among many he addressed, was how to make paint
convey gravity, contortion, particular affects that impact the human
body—how to contain a human body within a force field as it is on
the point of disintegration. This is not the same kind of containment
as that sought by nations in their attempts to secure borders; in fact,
Grosz & Stirner: All Too Human 25
from the affects and sensations that art produces, art is not reducible
to capitalist production.
If we focus only on the question of art for a moment, what is sig-
nificant about capitalism is its inability to properly value art in the
strict terms of capitalism. Art is the irrational excess of capitalism. It
is only art, and only very rare art, that is capable of commanding the
excessive sums that so- called great works attain. While at the same
time, artists themselves, for the most part, find it nearly impossible to
earn a living wage. So one of the reasons that I have been interested
in art is the peculiar place it plays in capitalism as one of the sites of
its irrational excess. When a painting can sell for hundreds of mil-
lions of dollars, capitalism (state or corporate) has gone momentarily
mad. This madness is fascinating. Why is it that those rare individuals
who could buy anything tend to buy what can’t be really bought?
Now regarding capitalism more generally, you are right to indicate
that a new phase of capitalism is emerging, a phase in which it is no
longer the production and sale of commodities that is the primary
goal. This phase postdates the writings of Deleuze and Guattari: cap-
italism is not only oriented to the saturation of markets with com-
modities; it is now also focused on the production of experiences, in
which art and especially music play an outsized role. If it is not only
goods and services that are now for sale, but also sensory experiences,
art, and especially art at its most commercial, and the experiences it
generates becomes as it were the next object for sale. There is barely a
store that sells, say, clothing or shoes that does not play bland but ap-
pealing music. Why? It helps to make people happier, more relaxed,
more inclined to buy.
eg: I don’t see the point of an “As if” hypothesis. We could equally
ask, What if all people on Earth treated each other with respect? That
is, for me, the same kind of question you are asking. That is, what if
the world is different than it is?
I want to go through this a little more carefully. Alternative modes
of parenting are fine—there have been “alternative modes of par-
enting” to the nuclear family for most of recorded history. How we
should choose the social relations in which children are raised is a
very different kind of question than how a child is made, and makes
itself in utero. For that, you need ova and sperm, and for the time
being there is no way to avoid this. We can live our lives, as male or
female or as intersex, as we choose and as our culture dictates, but
we can’t choose how human gametes are capable of reproducing hu-
man beings. For me, you are mistaking an ontological relation for a
social relation. I think, moreover, that feminist and queer theory have
worked to dismantle sexual oppositions—that is, where the two sexes
are considered mutually exclusive and mutually exhaustive—not sex-
ual difference, which I understand is the right to define oneself and
one’s other according to one’s own terms, not those devised to char-
acterize the “human” (that is, white, Eurocentric, able-bodied mascu-
linity). Difference is the undoing of opposition.
30 qui parle fall/winter 2016 vol. 25, nos. 1–2
ss: Related to your visions for the future of feminist theory, I was
wondering about your thoughts on the future of the humanities at
large. It seems a commonplace to point out that the humanities are
in a crisis right now— every other day there is a new article that jus-
tifies and praises the value of the humanities, most of the time in an
attempt to reinscribe it again into circuits of value production. The
humanities seem as threatened as their namesake. You yourself have
made an argument for the need to rethink the humanities and sug-
gested that understanding the human in its inhuman context would
allow for hybrid forms of knowledge and for the ability to account
for finer gradations of differences within the human species—and
beyond. Most recently, the undoing of the humanities took on a cruel
and twisted reality in Denmark, where the government slashed fund-
ing in an unprecedented way—a move that especially affects small
humanities programs centered around minoritarian identities and
languages: among others, there will be no new students admitted
to Hebrew, Turkish, Balkan studies, or Eskimology. How can such a
move be critiqued from within the position that the humanities at
large do need to be rethought? And how does your take on the hu-
man and the humanities affect your own work, your teaching and
research as someone with an appointment in the humanities?
Notes