ducks

Tue Jul 23 16:10:31 CDT 2019

Sorry to come back so late – there were other matters more pressing.

In the meantime I read the whole essay. It's not bad, not as bad as that
quoted sentence, although I still regard it a sacrilege to mention Kiesow
in the same breath as Pynchon.

I'll tell you why. »Verentung des Rechtsstaats«, in Kai's translation:
"duckification of the legal state" (and especially »Digestion mittels
Enten«, digestion via ducks) is not funny, or not funnier as when you see
somebody slip on a banana peel he placed there himself. Vaucanson's duck
was, as you all know, a mechanical duck, with the emphasis on mechanical. I
think it's obvious that it cannot stand for the zoological family (which
would be necessary for the neologism »Verentung« to make sense, even a
twisted one); Vaucanson's duck is a sophisticated tin toy, it could have
been a pig, a dog, a mouse, whatever – no reason to speak of a
piggification, of digestion via pigs. It's a metaphorical dead end street
the author has got himself into because he made a wrong turn before.

Btw, for those of you who can read German, there was quite a good review of
Schmitt's *Gesetz und Urteil *by Ernst Neukamp who was a judge since 1882,
6 years before Schmitt was born.

http://dlib-zs.mpier.mpg.de/pdf/2085182/44/1914/20851824419140160.pdf

There's no indication that Kiesow has read it. Perhaps he better had.

Am Mo., 15. Juli 2019 um 21:39 Uhr schrieb Kai Frederik Lorentzen <
lorentzen at hotmail.de>:

>
> Hm ...
>
> "The Man Voltaire call'd a Prometheus,--- to be remember'd only for having
> trespass'd  so ingeniously outside the borders of Taste, as to have
> provided his Automaton a Digestionary Process, whose end result could not
> be distinguish'd from that found in Nature." (M&D, p. 372)
>
> That the crap was fake - in one container food was collected, in a second
> pre-stored feces were processed - is not really important (especially since
> Vaucanson "hoped that a truly digesting automaton could one day be
> designed", as Wikipedia puts it). What's significant is the construction as
> such which became kinda Icon of modernity. As this it pops up in novels
> (not only in M&D, but also in books by Peter Carey, Lawrence Norfolk, &
> Lavie Tidhar) and in the present case the author makes use of its
> metaphorical dimension in context of legal theory.
>
> For Pynchon, spinning the story beyond its authentic historical content,
> the expansion of the inanimate (& this is one of his key motifs since V!)
> and the corresponding entropy on side of intimate human culture - the
> duck's "strange Metamorphosis, which has sent it out the Gates of the
> Inanimate, and off upon its present Journey into the given World" (p. 372)
> - seems to be a crucial aspect. Can nowadays' Robocracy be traced back to
> the 18th century?
>
> For Kiesow, the mechanical duck is a metaphor for the naive idea that
> there could ever be a tight coupling between the abstract law (dt. Gesetz)
> and the concrete juridical decision (or judgment or verdict or sentence;
> dt. Urteil) in the actual legal practice. Rereading young Carl Schmitt's
> "Gesetz und Urteil" from 1912, Kiesow emphasizes that the concept of the
> legal state which imagines that the judge's verdict can be a direct outflow
> from the politically programmed law is an illusion. Schmitt opens his book
> with the sentence: "The decisive question is this: When is a judgment
> correct?". And in the fourth chapter the following answer is given: "Today
> a juridical decision [or judgment or verdict or sentence] is correct when
> one can assume that an other judge would have decided the same way. 'An
> other judge' here means the type of the modern 'jurisprudentially educated'
> [? - dt. rechtsgelehrt] jurist". So the practice of law itself generates
> the adequate criteria. And this means for Schmitt that the question for the
> correct judgment mustn't be immediately identified with the one for the
> correct interpretation of the law. The necessity to decide cannot be
> reduced to a mechanical application of rules. In contrary to this, a common
> understanding of the legal state claims that completeness (dt.
> Lückenlosigkeit) is a quality of the legal order & that the will of the
> legislator can always unmistakenly be identified. This standard
> interpretation forgets about the multidimensional social conflicts in the
> modern practice of law & about its enforced politicization in times of
> crisis, --- which Schmitt later thematized under the formula State of
> Exception (or State of Emergency; dt. Ausnahmezustand). These shortcomings
> of the standard interpretation lead Kiesow to his take on Vaucanson's
> automaton. The formulation "'duckification' of the legal state" (dt.
> Verentung des Rechtsstaats) refers exactly to that idea that there's
> nothing outside the law and that the body of law simply needs to be applied
> mechanically in order to always get correct results on the level of
> concrete decisions. I consider this to be a fine & funny use of metaphor,
> and it's interesting to see that Vaucanson's mechanical respectively
> mechanickal (as Pynchon has it) duck is humorously used also in
> non-fictional literature.
>
> Later on in his essay, Kiesow, leaving the Schmittian terrain (C.S., see
> The Nomos of the Earth", emphasizes the concrete unity of law which he
> defines as "unity of order and local orientation", dt. "Einheit von Ordnung
> und Ortung [literally: locating]"), states that the practice of law means
> processing multidimensional binaries, not only Law/Non-Law as the basic
> autopoietic distinction in the sense of Niklas Luhmann, but also regarding
> conflicting opponents inside & outside the courtroom (which includes not
> only natural but also juridical persons). Like, for example, creditor &
> debtor. Here logic never rules and - as it is put with a paradox
> formulation - every case is a border case and a normal case at the same
> time. In this context, Kiesow doubts the fruitfulness of Schmitt's
> distinction between regular legal practice & the State of Exception. Can
> the rights of ALL be respected & met when we consider the law to be a
> contingent form and fight for its openness in every single case?
>
> In the last paragraph of his essay, Kiesow draws a parallel between the
> early Schmitt and a writer whose influence on Pynchon is well known. Franz
> Kafka, an insurance jurist, wrote not only the novel "The Trial" (orig. Der
> Process) yet also the short but very intense story "The Judgment" (orig.
> Das Urteil). In this story the judgment stands in no rational relation to
> the things that happened. Kafka wrote it in --- 1912, the year Schmitt's
> "Gesetz und Urteil" got published. The traditional hermeneutics of law is
> dead.
>
> What Pynchon & Kiesow share is a decided critique of a one-dimensional
> affirmative understanding of so-called progress & the historical
> enlightenment aka the 'Age of Reason'.
>
>
> Am 14.07.19 um 18:50 schrieb Jochen Stremmel:
> »die Verentung des Rechtsstaats, die Digestion mittels Enten« – an
> intellectual feat only for and from Dösbaddel.
> (Did he even know that Vaucanson's duck couldn't digest?)
>
> Am So., 14. Juli 2019 um 17:43 Uhr schrieb Kai Frederik Lorentzen <
> lorentzen at hotmail.de<mailto:lorentzen at hotmail.de>>:
>
> Nichts für Dösbaddel ...
>
> Am 14.07.19 um 11:41 schrieb Jochen Stremmel:
> + ... Man sieht hier, in seiner Kritik an der Methode, an den herrschenden
> Theorien über die juristische Entscheidung und die Rolle des Richters, man
> merkt hier, in seinen Sarkasmen über den Glauben daran, man könne qua
> Deduktion aus gesetzlichen Prämissen zu einem unbedingt sicheren Urteil
> gelangen, man begreift bereits hier die tiefen Vorbehalte Carl Schmitts
> hinsichtlich der Möglichkeit eines Rechtsstaats, der nichts anderes als
> eine Technik wäre, ein Verfahren zur Erzielung von Ergebnissen, eine
> vaucansonsche Rechtsstaatlichkeit, die Verentung des Rechtsstaats, die
> Digestion mittels Enten, wie sie Jacques Vaucansons weltberühmter Automat
> aus dem 18. Jahrhundert zeigt, kurz gesagt, dass es nichts als das Gesetz
> geben würde, dem man nicht entkommen kann, denn es wird als geltend
> ausgeführt, angewandt, und diese Anwendung ist nichts anderes als eine
> Mechanik ... +
>
> kurz gesagt: duckshit.
>
>
> Am Sa., 13. Juli 2019 um 06:14 Uhr schrieb Kai Frederik Lorentzen <
> lorentzen at hotmail.de<mailto:lorentzen at hotmail.de><mailto:
> lorentzen at hotmail.de><mailto:lorentzen at hotmail.de>>:
>
> "A mechanickal Duck that shits?" (p. 372)
>
> + ... Man sieht hier, in seiner Kritik an der Methode, an den herrschenden
> Theorien über die juristische Entscheidung und die Rolle des Richters, man
> merkt hier, in seinen Sarkasmen über den Glauben daran, man könne qua
> Deduktion aus gesetzlichen Prämissen zu einem unbedingt sicheren Urteil
> gelangen, man begreift bereits hier die tiefen Vorbehalte Carl Schmitts
> hinsichtlich der Möglichkeit eines Rechtsstaats, der nichts anderes als
> eine Technik wäre, ein Verfahren zur Erzielung von Ergebnissen, eine
> vaucansonsche Rechtsstaatlichkeit, die Verentung des Rechtsstaats, die
> Digestion mittels Enten, wie sie Jacques Vaucansons weltberühmter Automat
> aus dem 18. Jahrhundert zeigt, kurz gesagt, dass es nichts als das Gesetz
> geben würde, dem man nicht entkommen kann, denn es wird als geltend
> ausgeführt, angewandt, und diese Anwendung ist nichts anderes als eine
> Mechanik ... +
>
>
> https://www.merkur-zeitschrift.de/2019/06/24/zwischen-gesetz-und-urteil-gibt-es-keine-hermeneutik-oder-wie-1912-die-traditionellen-auslegungsmethoden-ihr-ende-fanden/
>
> https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainer_Maria_Kiesow
>
>
>
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>