The Test Drive [Hardcover]

The twin structure of the institution of test and justice is erected on the foundation of pro-test and injustice. What is at stake in the interminable business of tests, testing, and being tested is the truth -- the incontestable kind; and its various modulations in the mode of the hidden.

In The Test Drive Ronell examines the ramification of testing's coming to be as the predominant mode by which the possibility of "I am" is preemptively X'd out in the unclosable space of infinite deferral and waiting-for-verification. Ronell's survey of the topos/terrain of the test drive offers us a field reporter's view of the carnage that covers the landscape of Dasein in the wake of the test drive's ascendancy to the status of business-as-usual on a global scale.

"There is a vast area of scientific activity that is simply not submitted to the rigors of reflection or that aggressively risks sinking into the autism of one or another form of closure. The scene of this repression, which arguably governs our Dasein, is what needs to be addressed." (p.8)

Ronell addresses this site by pointing out the forgetting of the bond between `test' and `testimony', `testament', `contest', and `protest'. In this book, she re-members them by putting the `test' back in `protest', and forming a line of Resistance against the regime of certainty, settled conclusions, definite answers, and final solutions. Ronell sets out to measure, and give measure to, the ramification of the increasing acceleration - now clocking at warp speed - of the test drive's becoming-immanent in the space that is "circumscribed by an endless erasure of what is." Test, contest, protest, and testimony: they are bound by an unseverable linguistic consanguinity at the depth of etymon. But the metaphor of the blood-tie often exceeds its status as a metaphor to show up on the floors of gas chambers and killing fields.

Insofar as testing is a form of anticipation (hypothesis) forged out of suspicion, the relationship between `test' and `pro-test' is intimately tied to diction - the utterable as such; and thus tied fatefully to `prediction' and `retrodiction' (a sort of "prediction in reverse", as in, Jesus would have had to exist because Edison invented the light bulb) - two possible modes of charting the chiasmic trajectories of anticipation (hypothesis) and re-vision regarding `what pro-visionally IS' toward the endlessly receding horizon of `what really IS.'

Nietzsche says: "When history speaks, it always speaks as an oracle, and only to those with ears to hear." Well, Ronell has ears, maybe several, and she hears things, like a sibyl, and deciphers sounds that might pass for static or garble. Indeed, there is much in The Test Drive that is oracular, by which I mean the uttering of the `to-come' AS `what-is-already-here-to-be-revealed-in-its-hiddenness: the apo-calyptic (removing the cover).

A tale: When Robert Schumann had finished playing his most recent composition, a serious young man inquired: "Extraordinary, Herr Schumann! But what does it mean?" Robert sat down and played it again, this time as an "explanation."

With that puppy display of eagerness to engage the composer in pedantic theoriesprache about music, the youth failed the simple test that called for a well-tempered silence of thinking thanks. Ronell would have chided the boy by telling him that sometimes silence is (the only possible) testimony to the truth of "events that surpass the holding capacity of a linguistic act." (109) Quoting Lyotard, Ronell reminds us why beauty is always vulnerable to the injustice of tests, critiques, cross-examinations, and reviews.

"A wrong is a damage accompanied by the loss of the means to prove the damage."

If the medium really is the message - bearing in mind that the medium IS style, and that the word `medium' can also mean `oracle' - then something about Ronell's style of writing deserves mentioning, if only briefly. I have elsewhere compared her to Bruce Lee and described the askesis of her work as `literary kongfu'. Just as any ordinary household object can be a weapon in the hands of a martial arts expert, all narrative techniques and voices seemingly become thermonuclear at the tip of Ronell's stylo. Each voice indivisible yet all fused to bring about a detonation at ground zero of graphôs. I make this analogy based only on what Ronell herself had to say about the relationship between (her) writing and dictation by way of haunting; AND because the word Kongfu when used as a precise technical term comes closest to what Levinas means by épreuve - a word that Ronell prefers to éxperience. "In the word épreuve there is at once the idea of life and of critical verification which overflows the self of which it is only the scene."

As is the case with her other books, her writing in The Test Drive demands to be read as a literary performance that bears witness/testimony to the act of performing in and with language - text as adverb. That is to say, it performs as medi(t)ation in dunamis, in which the kinesis of `language and its not' are set free to roam nilotically...like...a river: with varying speeds, with innumerable swirls and eddies, hugging the lay of the topos while overflowing its banks constantly to deposit the silt of questions that always beg the tiresome inquistion: Philosophy or literature? How about Arche or Prôtos? Principium or Initium? If push came to shove, I'd say Ronell is on the side of literature...which is... what? A prototropaic ordeal of striving for the protean power in the prôtos: the first. Or, "News that stays new." (Ezra Pound).

Perhaps Heraclitus was speaking - by way of retro-diction - of literature, or the épreuve of it, when he spoke of never being able to enter the same river twice. But then, Napoleon says, every river can be crossed in a single leap if you go to the source.