The Test Drive

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