#enframing

And again, we find the same process at work if we observe a number of hegemonic strands of contemporary science, particularly in its ‘practical’ articulations such as those belonging to the field of neuroscience. Neuroscientific language presents itself as valid and trustworthy, because: (1) it can at least potentially grasp in an exhaustive fashion the whole of the object of its research; (2) more extremely, there is no emotion, feeling, thought-process and so on, apart from those that are already contained, however potentially, within the linguistic system of neuroscience itself.

Functioning as a form of scientific sentimentalism, neuroscientific metaphysics claims that mental processes that can’t even potentially fit within its language are nothing but mere fantasies or superstitions. Equally, this same process applies to the ontological discourse of citizenship: in the current post/anti-humanist age, citizenship isn’t predicated of a person, but rather personhood becomes an implicit benefit of citizenship status. Following Technic’s rejection of the very notions of life and death, as discussed above, the already abysmal ‘bare life’ that used to apply to stateless people, now resolves into a vanishing of presence towards absolute ontological nothingness.

As the recent debate on migration and asylum amply demonstrates, whatever falls out of citizenship’s linguistic series falls entirely out of the world. And again, the same is true of identity more generally, as suggested by the recent, obsessive proliferation of categories of identity, most noticeably in the fields of gender and sexuality. Whatever aspect of a living person refuses or is unable to be totally reduced to a set of serial units of language (a case of ontological refusal), or into the specific linguistic series that are at work in a particular society (a case of historical refusal), is instantly stripped of any legitimate claim to presence in the world.

While absolute existence lies beyond the grasp of any form of societal control, presence in the world in the age of Technic becomes the prime object of production and of policing."