What does a spyce trade look like?
It, like trading, is movement--it is defined by movement. The spyce trade relies on maps to navigate, yes, but these are new types of maps that unpetrify the eye from theory. In theory, the scopic gaze arrests our vision and becomes invisible. Simon Ings, in his book A Natural History of Seeing, notes experiments conducted at Brown University in Rhode Island and Reading University in England that proved the importance of eye movement for seeing. Test subject's eyes were fitted with contacts that kept a little spotlight--a little dot--in line with the center of the eye. Whereever the eye moved, the spotlight moved with it. But because the eye could not manuever around this dot of light, it ceased to see it--the spotlight disappeared. This is called saccadic movement.
Our eyes' natural propensity to move in order to see--its saccadic movement--perhaps comes from our natural evolution into predators: our eyes, Ing notes, are incredibly similar in physical design to squid eyes, both are focused towards the front of the head which helps us capture prey (as opposed to horses, which have a more sideways placement in order to avoid capture). Perhaps this argument works, perhaps it doesn't. But the fact remains, that our ability to see relies on the movement of our eyes.
This saccadic movement is represented in movies when, for example, in The Blair Witch Project freaked out characters stare into the camera moving their eyes from left to right as if they were looking for something--anything--to confirm or relieve their fears: just let us see it already! Of course, we never see the Blair Witch--we only hear it--leaving us, the viewer, to our own vain saccadic movement. Is the Blair Witch out there in the woods, or is she here staying in line with the saccadic movements of my eye? If the latter, then I guess I'm screwed.
But it is this latter case that is analogous to what theory is: theory is that Blair Witch that follows the saccadic movement of our critical eye, tormenting our psyches. Unable to see theory--can you point to theory?--theory in fact horrifies us. It is that elusive object petit a, which we structure our fantasies around. Theory is that never seen "Other" in the TV series Lost--the mystery that never seems to be fulfilled. To compensate for our horror, we publish anthologies and create carreers and institutions--all around that slippery noun, theory.
That is not to say that we must abolish theory. But rather, we should admit that a claim to use theory is equivalent to saying that I believe in something that I don't see--I believe in ghosts and they are haunting my house! Seeing is not always believing. And this is fine. But we lose the certainty that we are sane, that what we hear, taste, smell, and feel but cannot see is real. Theory does not uncover an unconscious, making this unconscious visible--for example, making the underlying means of production visible. This is mere inference--it is visible because I say it is visible, because through the scope of a particular theory it becomes visible. Even such created and fabricated visibility, however, does not add to our certainty. It affects us as all things affect us--without an end, without telos.
This appproach--admitting that theory accesses truth no more than our coffee in the morning--flattens the hierarchy of tactics (theory, history, anthropology, science, whatever) onto one non-hierarchical horizontal plane: a plateau. Theory does not access deep structures or even reveal instability of a text. It merely affects as all things affect. But our insistence that theory is some type of pure hermenuetic instrument that permits clear readings which might reveal, say, the cause of inequity keeps it tormenting us--just a little bit more thoery and we'll be there (akin to a drug addict: just one more hit! But one more is never enough). The Blair Witch can exist and elude our sight, but it does not have to torment us.
More productive, I think, is a supple hermeneutics--one which accounts for that material affect, which comes in the form of all senses and sense-memories. Relenquish the idea of a Biblical-type hermeneutics that conceives of interpretation as a metal act alone. Pick up instead, say, C.S. Peirce's assertion that all thinking is behavior, all theory is practice, all interpretation is affect. Relenquish Plato's detachment from the body--his "theory" of forms--and fully insert yourself into the polluted mess of the senses. This is where theory is truly at home: the affective domain of material senses.
This opens theory and our saccadic sight to the schizo of the self and the movement of the senses: open to the flow.
Let the spyce trade begin.
