The Test Drive

by Avital Ronell
University of Illinois Press, Urbana and Chicago, 2004
356 pp., illus. 29 b/w. Trade, $35
ISBN 0-252-02950-X.

Reviewed by Michael R. (Mike) Mosher
Saginaw Valley State University, University Center MI 48710 USA

mosher@svsu.edu

The density, oh, the density! One mustn't pick up a book by Avital Ronell expecting breezy summer beach or front porch reading. The Test Drive is a curriculum, whose allusions and citations shoot the reader in numerous directions. One does not know it as a chemist might an unknown substance, by scraping off a few chips and running them under a battery of (intellectual, conceptual) reagents. The book demands to be unpacked over numerous re-approachings, so any reader of this review might question how deep an artist’s reading of a big book by philosopher Ronell can go.

Ronell states, "This work originally grew out of study devoted to Alan Turing". Turing sought consistency, completeness, and decidability: This computer has convinced us it is human; this computer can distinguish all dogs from all cats. The author seeks to interrogate the history of science and assumptions we live by, from hypothesis to scientific test to conclusive results. The basis of testing is provisional, the hypothesis: this might work. Yet despite experimentation, hypothesis, probability, and proof interrogated, the result may be a permanent dislocation and decentering.

Ancient Greeks invented the test in the form of torture, when the seeds of scientific method saw Socrates seeking rigor in philosophical proofs. Freud's "reality test" designated what belonged inside and what outside the psyche, endeavoring to prove what went where. Ronell proceeds to draw from Plato, Nietzsche, Popper, Derrida, Lyotard and Levinas. Beneath philosophers, literary allusions are inserted like tesserae in a mosaic, from Frankenstein, Kafka's "In the Penal Colony", Pindar's Odes and others. Humanity becomes tangible through theory where real life is an endless library. Nietzsche's physics are ascertained by test or temptation, yet experience frees us from referential truth with its codes of refutability and restraint. Ronell quotes approvingly from Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil to upbraid the social tendency towards oversimplification, a vice for which she is certainly not guilty.

Ronell’s politics flicker, difficult to discern. Burglary leads to circumcision, and then greater intrusions; the hegemonic state as the poison apple in "Sleeping Beauty". "Who needs a cell when the state can get inside your body and resignify your cellular structure?", she asks. Holocaust-denier Robert Faurisson's demand for "proof" that the event really happened butts up against postmodernist indeterminacy. She finds a "Trial Balloon" in von Husserl, appreciates Levinas' critique of positivism, dances with Heidegger and Arendt. Ronell examines herself as she endures discomfiting medical procedures and the disconcerting wait for results and admits her fixation upon Frederick Nietzsche. "Supposing Philosophy is a woman––what then?" fretted mad Frederick. Ronell’s penultimate chapter "Testing Your Love, or Breaking Up" personalizes her imaginary relationship to a long-dead philosopher, much as Susan Sontag did with her own, to Walter Benjamin, in "Under the Sign of Saturn".

What is the best form for a philosophy book? The Test Drive sees its text broken into sections suggesting laboratory reports: "Testing 1", "Testing 2", "Prototype A", "Prototype B", "Prototype .01""Prototype .02", "Prototype 1.0". Nostalgically cyberpunk, the conceit brings to mind the late-1980s all-caps ASCII manifestoes of California artist Walter Alter. Ronell treats philosophy like a dance track, a DJ scratcher’s sequenced voice commanding "Start over". She digresses, repeatedly adds Case One, starting over each time, not building upon results. Is each case, therefore, sui generis? She enjoys a postmodernist authorial freedom of subjective, fluid text. Perhaps she needs a blog? She writes one here, one with the density of five books.

Chapters are introduced with an arrangement of Suzanne Doppelt's mysterious photographs, often like a decorative screen separating a room. Occasionally the reader stumbles into curious graphics embedded in the text, seemingly random pictos and motifs derived from warning signs. These add a certain 1980s industrial cool and further ambiguity as one tries to bridge meanings in picture and text. The word "AMGINE" appears, Enigma spelled backwards, which may allude to Turing's wartime codebreaking project. Or perhaps a contraction for a command to the imagination. Or perhaps a term for its imagination’s lack, like asexual or ahistorical? Look how it evokes "Engine" too. But ultimately, what of it? Why are there candies stuck in this meat? How does the visually punning amusement advance her argument, or multiple arguments? There are uncaptioned layouts of microphotography, and a sculpture of eighteenth-century scientist Robert Boyle in both positive and portentously negative full-page images. One wonders if designer Richard Eckersley was given the sole directives to make it look cool, lab-like, deep, opaque.

The book’s title, The Test Drive, evokes the suburban Detroit proving grounds of American cars. Beyond bookending experiences in Michigan receiving and giving academic testing, this reviewer has experience observing user tests of products––computer hardware, productivity software, instructional books and interactive training––of a California technology manufacturer. The humbling epiphany is that any aspect of the computer experience seeming so clear and intuitive to its designers can baffle the majority of fresh users who encounter it, and must subsequently be rethought and redesigned. Ronell certainly has spent time reading of Nietzsche to provoke his effects upon her and her own effusive thoughts. Yet I'm not sure how much time the author has spent in testing or laboratory settings, or read scientific journals recounting procedures and results. I wonder if the University of Illinois Press has sent this volume to chemistry or biology journals to see how it plays among scientists. Whatever those results, this difficult encounter, with its mixed results, still makes this reviewer want to pick up Avital Ronell’s earlier books Crack Wars, Stupidity, and The Telephone Book, if only for a test drive.