The end of the book, the beginning of writing
The end of philosophy, the beginning of writing
The speculative realists, particularly those
advocating OOO, are frustrated with philosophy primarily concerned with texts,
writing, “signifiers,” and feel that, while we need to take account of these
things), philosophers have limited themselves by refusing to think of words as
material things that are always mediated, just like any other ‘object.’ For
instance, the words I am using now are “material” as they exist in the
blogosphere and, as such, may be read by anyone – or not. The results depend on
my circulation of these signifiers—do I post this on facebook? Do I email it to
friends (to whom I know I’ll read). Texts, then, are not ideal but material and
thus should take their place amidst all other objects, which includes
everything from a corporation to Jacob Riley to the straw currently sitting on
my table. A couple quotations from Levi Bryant’s recent blogposts will serve to
illustrate what I mean by an attempt to de-center texts as the main concern of philosophy:
“When speaking of society or culture, the story goes, we
will only speak of mental entities, norms, ideologies, and linguistic
entities. We will here only speak of texts. When speaking
of nature we will only speak of causes and so-called “material things” [. . .] The
problem is that this way of proceeding entirely distorts our understanding of
society. We speak as if the glue that holds people together were only beliefs, ideologies, norms,
texts, language, signs, etc.”
“Instead, those working in the tradition
of the early Frankfurt School (and primarily Horkheimer and Adorno),
post-structuralism (Foucault, Derrida, Butler, Baudrillard), structuralism
(Althusser, Levi-Strauss), and psychoanalysis (Zizek), tend to treat the social
world as merely a text to be
deciphered and power as residing in texts alone”
I can understand Levi’s frustration with
this focus on texts, particularly if all we do with texts is “decipher” or “interpret”
them. We in the humanities do tend to treat
the world and its components in a “textual” manner. Furthermore, despite the
insights that Derrida, Blanchot, Jean Luc-Nancy, etc. (and their followers)
have yielded for philosophy including OOO, they maintain metaphors related to
writing: trace, line, significance, sense. Writing in the “vulgar” sense seems
to be their default structuring metaphor and, as such, privileges “text” over
the material world—or so it seems (we will return to this later).
But we might ask: why do these philosophers talk about “writing”? I would argue very simply:
because they are writers rather than philosophers first and foremost, believing
that writing disrupts our usual ways of comprehension. Levi recently posted on the
problem of “philosophical style.” Levi identifies his work within the
continental tradition and even a cursory glance at Democracy of Objects provides more than enough evidence for this
claim. Levi claims, and again, there is significant evidence for this, that he
does not abandon the “correlationist” thinkers, but rather learns from them and
then seeks to expand from their philosophy. However, of their “styles” he
writes,
“A number of us Continentals have
abominable style as well (I’m looking at you Hegel, Derrida, Lacan, Deleuze,
and Adorno). Yes, yes, I know some folks delight at the “poetry” of these guys.
I don’t. I generally read these thinkers despite their style,
not for their style. In this regard, it’s
perfectly appropriate to ask for clarity. I know the arguments as to why these
styles are necessary. Nonetheless, you’re still asking readers to invest their
time. You should take some time in return.”
First off, I agree that we can ask for “clarity”
or, as he puts it citing Harman, “vividness,” but to suggest that these
thinkers are not taking their time writing and that this is why their style and
points are so convoluted is to miss the point these thinkers are trying to
make, which I would claim is something like the end of philosophy and the
beginning of writing. That is, even though Levi’s writing is lucid and powerful,
supporting and defining of his position with “real world” examples, he and the
other OOO’s want to still do philosophy.
To say that Derrida, Deleuze, or Nancy (although his name is not explicitly
mentioned) do not take time in their
writing is to assume that it is more difficult to write “clearly” in support of
a position then it is to write a different style of thinking. That is, to write
in such a way that is powerful and inspires more thinking, but does not devolve
into meaningless nonsense. The way that Levi uses the word “poetry” as a way to
dismiss the style of thinking that these writers (I will not call them
philosophers) advocate and practice, is to think that the style has little to
do with the thinking involved. In one sense, this claim in understandable,
since he may be able to reduce the style to a position that jives with Levi’s
own and that “teaches us” or “reminds us” of a certain claim (phrases that
every academic uses in order to get away from the interminable introductions
like “Derrida writes,” “Deleuze states” – I will use these in this post
etc.). Maybe it’s not academically
worthwhile to struggle with their text’s styles or poetry, but for me, the
passion of literature (to borrow a phrase from Derrida) is to undergo these
folks’ texts and deal with their texts as texts. Yes, texts have a materiality
in the sense that they are deployed in a medium, but at the same time, language
itself has a materiality, a resistance to meaning. Derrida writes in “Typewriter Ribbon Ink” on
the ‘materiality’ in De Man,
“The materiality in question – is not a
thing; it is not something (sensible or intelligible); it not even the matter
of a body. As it is not something, as it is nothing and yet it works [. . .]
this nothing that therefore operates, it forces, but as a force of resistance.
It resists both beautiful form and matter as substantial and organic totality.
This is one of the reasons that de Man never says, to seems ot me, matter, but materiality” (350).
Call this philosophical idealism if you
must, but is not this resistance, this ‘materiality’ of a text or a body or an
object or whatever, a resistance to understanding – a kind of “withdrawnness”
of whatever we attempt to write about or understand, but without the
metaphysical OOO claim that objects are “withdrawn”?
While Levi may be pushing philosophy further
in terms of content, I think it can be argued that these other folks are resisting the categorization
of “philosophy,” “theory,” or “poetry,” by their styles (Tim over at fragilekeys
has a great post on the difference between ‘poetry’ and ‘theory’ HERE.) Indeed,
Derrida, for instance, reads Being and
Time as an event, a ‘work’ rather than a philosophical text. In Aporias he writes,
“Being and Time would belong neither to science, nor to philosophy,
nor to poetics. Such is perhaps the case for ever work worthy of its name:
there, what puts thinking into operations exceeds its own borders or what thinking
itself intended to present of these borders. The work exceeds itself”
(32).
Maybe that’s the problem: maybe this phenomenon
called “thinking” (that Heidegger took as an explicit challenge) which is related
to writing is too anthropocentric and
too “correlationist.” “Thinking” might be different from philosophy. Maybe this
is an attempt at an “ideal” rather than “material” entity. But I don’t think it
can be because thinking never coincides with itself, but is always on the way
(again, I recognize the kind of quasi-poetic, unclear language I put this in –
maybe that’s what makes it an idealism in disguise).
Tim’s blog, fragilekeys, have prompted
me to revisit Jean-Luc Nancy to a greater degree than I ever have before, which
has gotten me to think once again about “writing.” Nancy is really talking
about the end of philosophy rather than its reconstitution or its salvation. He
writes,
“The end of philosophy is, without a
doubt, first of all a question of style in this sense. It is not a matter of
stylistic effects or ornaments of discourse, but of what sense does to
discourse if sense exceeds significations. It is a matter of the praxis of thought, its writing in the sense of the assumption
of a responsibility for and to this excess” (Sense of the World 19).
We need another style, another gesture,
tracing, or marking of what Nancy calls “sense.” In contrast, the “style” of literary effects
would be OOO’s constant reference to example
and “vivid” writing. But “vivid” writing implies that the goal would be to represent the real – to describe it in
the most accurate terms possible. In contrast, “style” has something more to do
with what Tim has called “syntax.” This is not necessarily that it has to be “poetic,”
in the general sense of “flowery” or “beautiful” but rather “poetic” in the
sense of resisting a fullness of sense (a fullness which would correspond to a
kind of “mythic” sense – that is, that we know exactly what that word
signifies). As someone who has studied
literature, it is not the outside of the text that is the most interesting, but
rather, how the text resists me as a reader – oh wait, I’ve fallen back into
correlationism – it’s what it is “for me” again.
I
quote again from Nancy (due to the style
of the thoughts):
“the end of philosophy is consequently
not the reconstitution of myth—of which romanticism still dreamed—but rather to
renewed tension, the exigency of writing, with any ideal or model of ‘style,’
turning style against style, “philosophy” against “literature,” sense and truth
against each other, both of them being “auseinandergeschrieben,” to use Paul
Celan’s untranslatable word”
When Nancy calls for
these ‘styles’ to be against each
other, we must take “against” not in terms of dialectics or as an agonistic
contestation, but rather in the sense of up against one another, leaning on
another, if you will. Nancy is a thinker of surfaces and of bodies rather than flesh.
Matter
is always singular or singularized it is signed,
but not signified – to be signed is
“sense as a singular coming” – the signature is always “a body, a res extensa in
the sense of an extension—areality, tension, exposition—of its singularity [. .
.] signature along the surface of the hide, the hide of being. Existence tans
its own hide” (58).
Here again, we encounter the privilege of writing
metaphors again: the signature of
being. Nancy’s “description” (if we can call it that) is not an attempt to make
any particular object vivid by choosing a signifier that conjures up a
particular image of an object, but rather an attempt to describe how the “signature”
of being operates/functions. The last line “existence tans its own hide” is a
phrase that some may call “poetic,” a phrase that does not give us much “meaning,”
or “clarity” but rather than ignoring it, I am pricked or touched by it. I
linger over it and am hesitant to try and explicate it or interpret it in any
definable manner or within any definable system. All matter—all existence-- in
Nancy’s text, is a singularity in the sense of an idiom:
“But writing as
an idiom is also the fact of the voices, silences, and gestures that do not
appear as or in the work. The words, their concepts and images, provide for
this praxis its relays of
signification and communication. In the end, each one is a ‘new idiom’ in the
process of being born, and the world is the common space of idiomatic
significances” (163).
I want to focus briefly on the last clause of this
quotation, “and the world is the common space of idiomatic significances” because
this seems to compare the ‘existence’ of the world (another term that would
need more clarification—existence rather than ‘subject’ or ‘object’ – the “there,”
etc.) to a linguistic idiom. In other words, the “signatures” of matter are the
idiomatic marks of being. Perhaps what OOO’s are so concerned about with this
is that this does not take into account the other metaphors that we might use
rather than “writing”? That by reducing “existences”
(at least on the level of the word) to “signatures” we are trapped in a kind of
correlationsim because even though we know that “writing” does not merely mean “text”
or does not merely mean what I am doing right now, the term still maintains
that common denotation. And perhaps this is what Ian Bogost means when he
writes that “writing is dangerous for philosophy—and for serious scholarly
practice in general. It’s not because writing breaks from its origins as Plato
would have it, but because writing is only
one form of being” (Bogost 90). Bogost goes on to cite Levi Bryant, who
writes “The differences made by light bulbs, fiber optic cables, climate
change, and cane toads will be invisible to you and you’ll be awash in text,
believe that these things exhaust the really real” (90).
That writing is only one way to engage with being is
correct. Even if we understand other objects as “writing” too (in the Derridean
use of “writing” to mean trace, mark, etc.) we are still using writing as the
dominant metaphor to describe our relation to being. I have a difficult time arguing against this claim and when
Bogost writes (I cannot find the quote right now) that we should multiply correlations and multiply relations. Furthermore, for
Bogost, we should think about “doing” philosophy in different ways other than
writing texts—by making things. He
calls this, drawing on Harman, “carpentry.” Bogost suggests that “perhaps a
metaphysician ought to be someone who practices
ontology” (91).
But by making things are we really “practicing”
ontology? If this is so, then this is where Bogost’s ontology gets interesting
because the ontology he sets up in the book is simple and flat (following Levi
Bryant’s ‘flat ontology), but he calls it a tiny
ontology:
“I call it tiny ontology
precisely because it ought not demand a treatise or tome. I don’t mean that the
domain of being is small—quite the opposite, as I’ll soon explain. Rather, the
basic ontological apparatus needed to describe existence ought to be as compact
and unornamented as possible” (21).
Fair enough. But if the
ontology is that simple, then we wouldn’t be practicing ontology¸ but practicing phenomenology through making things,
right? Or is it that each time we make something – getting our hands dirty in material
things – we are building an ontology – contributing to the different types of being?
“Practice”
vs. “Praxis”
I will write more about Bogost later, as I’m at odds
with his strategy of “ontography” and Latourist litanies, but for now I want to
return to Nancy.
In The Sense
of the World, Nancy claims that he, too, is concerned with praxis (slightly different than “practice”).
But it seems to me like Nancy sees writing as praxis, which is different than “practice.”
For example, Nancy (and, if I remember correctly, I think Blanchot has similar
sentiments) says that “writing is thus political ‘in its essence’, that is, it
is political to the extent that it is the tracing out of the essenceless of
relations” (119). Nancy here is clearly stretching the “sense” of the
political. But Nancy does not harbor some sort of delusion that by describing
the world or writing the world we can therefor forget about acting on the world. He writes,
“Every discourse on the sense and significance of
the world can be suspended, tipping over in insignificance, through a
conflagration of misery or sovereignty, through a major technological mutation,
through an unheard-of genetic manipulation, through a catastrophe inextricably
mixing “nature” and “society,” as well as by an accident, a suffering, a joy,
in my immediate surroundings [. . .] delivering my discourse up to the derision
of ‘all talk, no action. But this in
itself bears witness to sense” (79)
I’m not quite sure what to make of this passage,
given that many would argue that his discourse is already offered up, by most
people, to the derision of “all talk, no action.” Is this to say that this
writing is to spur us on to action or to force a response in writing? If the
former, could not the OOO’s argue that by dealing with “the great outdoors” or
concrete examples they are able to philosophize in a better way that would lead
to better action? If the latter, are we just swimming in an endless array of
texts in obscure idioms that break the easy categories of “philosophy,” “theory,”
“poetry,” or “literature”? Does that lead us toward anything? Does it lead us toward the world (as Nancy puts it)?
Works
Cited
Bogost, Ian. Alien
Phenomenology
“Hominid Ecology,” “Reflections on
Style,”
Derrida, Jacques. Aporias
--“Typewriter
Ribbon: Limited Ink (2) (“within such limits”)
Nancy, Jean-Luc. The Sense of the World
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