Artifactualities
In "Artifactualities," Derrida begins by stating that "to think one's time" means, more than ever, thinking how this "time" is artificially produced, an artifact. He argues that "actuality" is always a matter of "artifactuality," involving selection, editing, performativity, and thus amounting to a "fictional fashioning." Derrida therefore argues that we must develop a "critical culture" concerning this production of actuality, but he immediately appends three cautions to this statement:
- the need to recall that despite the "internationalisation" of communication, ethnocentrism still predominates in the form of the "national"
- advances in the domain of "live" broadcast and recording give the illusion of an actuality which is not produced
- the artifactuality of actuality must not be used as an alibi, by concluding that therefore nothing ever happens and there is nothing but simulacrum and delusion.
What is least acceptable in the media today, he argues, is to take one's time, or to waste time, and hence what is perhaps most required is to effect a change in the rhythm of the media.
Derrida then asks what it means to be concerned with the present, or to do so as a philosopher. It may be a matter, he notes, of in fact being untimely, of not confusing the present with actuality. One must, on the one hand, take one's time, hold back, defer, while, on the other hand, one must rush into things headlong, urgently—one must be both hyperactual and anachronistic. Derrida has never thought there to be an opposition between urgency and différance. If différance involves a relation to alterity which is a form of deferral, it is nevertheless also, and for this reason, a relation to "what comes," to the unexpected, to the event as such, and therefore to the urgent. We cannot oppose the event, which is the very possibility of a future—we only oppose those particular events which bring things which are not good. The performativity of the event exceeds all anticipation or programming, and hence contains an irreducible element of messianism, linking it to justice (here distinguished from law), as well as to revolution.
Between the most general logics and the most unpredictable singularities comes "rhythm." If, for example, we could know in advance that the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe were doomed to failure, the pace and rhythm at which this occurred could only be understood retrospectively, taking into account causalities which had been previously overlooked, such as the way in which the fall of the Berlin Wall was immediately inscribed in a global telecommunications network.
Politics must retain a sense of the unanticipated, of the arrival of the absolutely unexpected, the absolute arrivant. A politics which loses all reference to a principle of unconditional hospitality is a politics, Derrida argues, that loses its reference to justice. This may mean, for example, that it is necessary to distinguish a politics of immigration from a politics of the right to asylum, because the former presumes the equivalence of the political and the national (immigration policy is a matter for the nation-state), while the latter does not (since, for example, motives for immigration, such as unemployment, may fail to conform to immigration requirements, but nevertheless are a kind of dysfunction of the nation, if not indeed the indirect result on poor countries of decisions made by wealthy countries). On this basis, Derrida provides a critique of the way in which borders are conceived by Jean-Marie Le Pen and the French National Front.
It remains necessary, Derrida argues, to take up the battle fought by Enlightenment philosophy against the "return of the worst." As a struggle against return, it is a matter of a "law of the spectral," of spectres, ghosts, and phantoms. It is a matter of understanding that what comes back is on the one hand what must be fought against, and on the other hand irreducible, originary, and necessary. Thus when we are striving to remember the worst (for example, the complicity of the French state for the treatment of Jews during World War II), we are striving to recall the victims, but this means also to call them back, not just for the sake of a present, but for an ongoing struggle, and thus for a future.
All this is a question of spirit and of inheritance. There is more than one spirit, and thus when we speak of spirit, we choose one spirit over another, affirm one injunction or interpretation over another, and thus take up a responsibility. To inherit is to reaffirm an injunction, but to take it up as an assignation to be deciphered. In so doing, we are what we inherit. We must decide, and we can only decide, on the basis of what we inherit, but these decisions are also the transformation of what we inherit, and therefore always also involve invention.
Derrida concludes by stating that he does not believe in the return of Communism in the form of the party, yet he does believe in the return of critiques which are Marxist in inspiration and spirit. This new International without party, which does not accept the imposition of a new world order, must be more, Derrida argues, than a matter of being able to take the time to read Marx slowly and carefully, now that "Marx is dead." In this sense, it is a question of more than simply the elaboration of critiques.
Read more about this topic: Echographies Of Television