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Here it is, short and sweet, a rough draft of a proposal for the conference “Research Foundations for Understanding Books and Reading in the Digital Age: Text and Beyond” (in Kyoto, Japan, Ritsumeikan University: http://tinyurl.com/4yakpa7):
In theorizing reading the digital text, I will take a two-pronged approach: a) what aspects of reading cannot be accounted for by the types of digital textual analysis done so far in the digital humanities, and b) how can technology (be “used” to) account for such possibilities? To answer the second question, we need to stop seeing the computer as a “means” (i.e. we “use” a computer) and to start thinking about the computer itself as a part of the literary process. To ask such a question is perhaps to blur the distinction between e-literature and media studies on the one hand, and digital humanities on the other. At the same time, it presupposes that technology is not something to be feared (as “tampering” with the text), but that it is rather something intrinsic, to be conceived in its own terms. Indeed, the computer can enhance the literary experience and highlight aspects of the text that weren’t noticed before, and vice versa, in a sort of feedback circuit, bringing with it hermeneutic questions that hitherto have been only indirect. What might we discover from exploring the symbiotic relationship between the text and the machine and about the minds and bodies that encounter these? Such encounters occur not only through visualization, but through sonorization and through the body. Such work requires a broader view of language than that provided by information theory, which has apparently dominated digital literary studies. I will use my own digital humanities project on the visualization of French poet Stéphane Mallarmé’s works (http://mallarme.uvic.ca) to explore this.
Thanks to Lori Emerson (UC, Boulder) and Stephen Ross (UVic) for some insights into this.
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[This continues from a series of posts on my home page, the most recent of which is here]
I will consider the following things in my research question:
- I would like to think through the implications of enacted criticism and corporeality, since thinking about the body is key to my research questions. In particular, how can our interaction with technology and literature modify the physical experience, or vice versa, how can the physical modify our interaction with the former?
- Consequently, how can such a technology-literature-body triad be self-reflexive? How can we engage in this triad without reducing it to a relationship of “use” or “means” (“allotechnics”)? How can we encounter the triad where things are taken for their own good or value (“homeotechnics”)?
- Lastly, there is an excessive focus on form to the detriment of content in modern criticism. How do we address this problem when dealing with technology, since we are actually interrogating the medium?
1. Corporeality
What the members of the Enacted Criticism group in Germany (manifesto soon to appear on http://enactcrit.org/) assert is that scholars have not sufficiently taken the body into consideration for it’s own sake. Western thought in particular is very Cartesian in that it cleanly separates mind from body. The question thus is to figure out how the body can be thought about when it comes to the cultural artefact, and this question becomes increasingly important when we involve technology and literature. Thinking about the body has tended to melt mind and body, showing the co-dependency of the two, but this is usually in order to focus on mind. What then is the physical experience of cultural and linguistic experience, and how can this help us to better understand our relationship with technology? How do we account for such questions? What approaches to this can be taken? Beyond a purely theoretical point of view, what are some of the ways in which to examine the the body? Do we look at people interacting with technology, using eyetracking devices (such as this — thanks to Lori Emerson), or tracking their use of technology through other means of monitoring? What are the ways to think about the body when it comes to very mental processes such as literature. Yet when it comes to electronic literature, the body is in a very different state than when we read a book or listen. Furthermore, we need to think about our bodies as submitted to technology. It’s a commonplace that we are physically addicted to technology: we don’t know what something is, we need our smartphone with us so we can look it up on the internet. This puts us in a new relationship with knowledge, and it because a consequence and a part of technology. What artistic experiences have been created to account for this, and how can we apply this knowledge to the implementation of electronic archiving? This is in keeping with the general idea in my SSHRC application, which seeks ways in which we can account for the literary and the digital literary experience that go beyond the traditional notion of language as information, or of the word as beyond simply related to concepts.
2. Self-reflexivity
We are now used to the notion of self-reflexivity in literary studies: e.g. a poem or a novel that refers to itself or to its form, through various means such as through ekphrasis. French poet Stéphane Mallarmé took this further by writing poetry which attempted complete self-referentiality in that we were forced to think about form because content was inaccessible. All of this coincides with the philological crisis in the 19th century, one that would lead to the realization that there is no separation between form and content, and that meaning depends upon the way language is used, which is contradictory to Cartesian absolutes (think of language as a body). From then on, we have become more and more aware that language has its own purpose, its own becoming, and lives its own existence separate from any given content. This leads to the notion that an awareness of such a becoming is necessary: we need to be aware of where we stand because this very becoming of language threatens intellectual institutions and their claims to absolute knowledge. Hence thinkers like Bourdieu, Foucault etc. interrogating the institutional determination of knowledge. When working with digital humanities and electronic literature, we need to be aware of such questions. We need to see how our use of computers affects what we study and how this affects us. But at the same time, we cannot assume that what we study has no effect upon how we study. The literary can play a significant role in this. A higher degree of self-reflexivity needs to be taken into consideration. This will not only help us to understand our objects, but our objects will transform how we do things. This will create a “dialogue”.
3. Form and Content
Nevertheless, when I attempted to define the literary in my previous post, I tended towards a formal definition. Part of the problem with structuralism in the 20th century was that it was excessively formalistic, and did not take biography, for instance, into consideration. We should not repeat this when thinking about the encounter between literature, technology and bodies. There is a historical reason for this. That we tended towards excessive formalism was a product of the domination of science, and was the result of an underlying nihilism. When you know everything, as is the tendency of all disciplines, the fact that you cannot ever know everything leads to an acute sense of nihilism, which is the major symptom of science in modernity. The crisis of hermeneutics was itself a product of such a process: the emergence of thought about interpretation coincides with the loss of meaning, and occurs at the very point when the Enlightenment is renewed through Romanticism at the beginning of the 19th Century in Germany. The problem of formalism needs to be accounted for in any approach to the literary, and not any less in digital literary studies. This would contribute to better sense of self-reflexivity.
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OK, so SSHRC Question #1 was defined negatively through what has gone wrong in terms of language theory and digital humanities, and seeks to find out what aspects are missing from the information-theory and linguistics approaches to the literary.
SSHRC Question #2 seeks the possibilities for accounting for the otherness in language, and this entails not only the purely linguistic (language as information = the common-sense notion of communication), but the visual, the sonorous, the body, and perhaps other aspects such as free association and an embrace of the arbitrary. I do not mean the arbitrary in the structuralist sense, because that definition, even though it undermines the stability of the signifier, still upholds the signifier as signifier. One would seek the way a word, a string of words or a lose patch or any sort of combination of words might get away from the notion of “signification,” and explore the ways in which words exceed themselves.
This is where the relationship between the inter-artial and the inter-medial (the distinction is important) gets mixed with the hypermedial: a vowel can be associated with a colour or a musical note, a word with a sense, a phrase with a memory or a desire, a rhythm with a beat and a physical action (or lack thereof), a textual configuration with a painting or a piece of music, a long poem with a wide hall or a vast wasteland etc. Typically, these associations might be done in an “encyclopedic” way. If a mention is made of a skylark in a poem, then, just as with footnotes in annotated editions of a poem, the literary allusions and references are made. In this sense, the digital humanities would simply be an improvement on the printed annotated editions, in that more annotations, intertextual cross-references, pictures, music or the sounds of the skylark, interpretations and commentary and so on could be added, which is wonderful and all. Yet this would fundamentally alter the reading experience, and it presupposes that the reading experience is an encyclopedic or informed experience, and that an “uninformed” reader or reading is inferior.
Jacques Derrida already warned about this type of annotation, and what I am calling the implied “encyclopedic” reader, when talking about Joyce’s Ulysses, in Ulysse gramophone (1987). There, Derrida argues that we have to hear Joyce’s text, and warns about an impending literary archive such as I’ve described, one that will overdetermine the literary experience. Another similar warning is made by J. Hillis Miller in Illustration (1992) when he discusses the then new Thoreau Project. He says that, despite the democratic potential of such a project,the database
will presuppose, for example, that it is helpful in understanding Walden or A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers to hear the songs and see annotated pictures of the birds Thoreau mentions there. That would depend of course, on the critic’s interpretive goals.
And this project “embodies a set of assumptions about the way scholars do work and ought to work” (40).
Yet a look at some of the readings of difficult poets from the past that did not benefit from the help of scholarship is proof enough that critical apparatus does not a good reader make. Mallarmé and Joyce are cases in point: sure, early readers of these texts didn’t need the critical help because they had the cultural baggage to help them through the texts, but I think this is where the literary institution has failed. It has placed a great deal of emphasis on the literary as “content” (as either saying something: a moral, a lesson etc. = i.e. the allegorical definition of literature) and lost sight of the singularity of the literary experience. Inversely, Dante knew that it was better to “sweeten” the moral lesson with allegory. Granted that my definition of the literary is principally a formal one. Nevertheless, we can say, with some exceptions, that most literary texts cannot be translated into regular, constative prose. Besides, most so-called “constative” writing has been deconstructed and shown to be quite performative in that it plays with rhetoric. Even the scientific text plays the neutral game.
So the computer needs to be used differently. We are not afraid of, just as we aren’t afraid of the printed text. These can all open up not only the literary experience, but, as I’ve said in the previous post, our relationship with the tools we use, in this case the computer.
What I am then asking is, how can we do scholarship differently? What forms other than traditional literary scholarship are made possible by the computer, and that don’t presuppose a particular view of the text or overdetermine reading? Obviously, there is no such experience, but there is surely a way to self-reflexively encounter the text.
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My SSHRC Research question #1 can actually be broken down into two questions:
1. What aspects of reading cannot be accounted for by the types of digital textual analysis done so far in the digital humanities?
2. How can technology (be “used” to) account for such possibilities?
In the previous post, I deal mainly with the first question, and it’s primarily from a negative perspective, as in, “the computer is used in the wrong way unless a better understanding of language can be attained. Linguistics and information theory are inadequate to the task of properly understanding the dynamics of the literary experience”. Here, I will focus primarily on the second question, and I believe that we need to stop seeing the computer as a “means” (i.e. we “use” a computer) and to start thinking about the computer itself as a part of the literary process.
This question says that technology is not a problem or something to be feared. It’s the people that use it. (“Computers don’t kill the text, people do…”) Indeed, the computer could enhance the literary experience and highlight aspects of the text that weren’t noticed before. This can occur through visualization and sonorization, and even through the body, as we will see. I will use my own digital humanities project to demonstrate this. As Martin Jay has stated in Downcast Eyes: the denigration of vision in twentieth-century French thought, Western culture until the 20th Century is very oculo-centric (this prejudice is “visible” in the word “illustrate” and “demontrate,” and of course, the “Enlightenment”), and 20th-century thinkers started to challenge this by thinking about the body. When it comes to literature, especially poetry, we cannot ignore sound, yet sound has been embattled by the visual since the literary has been predominantly in print (cf. Genette, Mimologiques), and now increasingly on a monitor near you.
Still, literary studies have benefited from the consideration of the visual in the literary, and this “visuality” needs more self-reflexivity. The literary is also an “inter-artial” or “inter-medial” mode. But, I will argue, the potential of technology can illustrate a “hyper-medial” nature of the literary text, where the text is seen in and for itself (not in comparison with or as another art/medium), and is “hyper-” in the sense that the medium exceeds itself. However, the inter-artial and inter-medial is very important and we cannot split things so easily. One the one hand, we have literary texts that speak about themselves in their own textuality. On the other, these very texts are in a medium (voice, handwriting or print; analogue or digital), and this medium becomes “the message,” as McLuhan would say. Yet, since the literary text thus doesn’t suffice to itself, to reformulate McLuhan, it is more the case of “the medium” being “the message” about another medium. This awareness can also contribute to a better understanding of the role of computers. As I said, computers aren’t just there to be “used,” just as language isn’t simply a “means,” without presupposition (the assumption of the Enlightenment and information theory). We need to think in terms of “interference,” “symbiosis” and parasitism (such as with Michel Serres’ work) or in terms of thinking through such problems as “homeotechnical” where the means is taken in and for its own terms, creating a “dialogue” between humans and nature, as opposed to “allotechnical,” which has been humanity’s predominant relationship to nature (cf. Sloterdijk, La Domestication de l’être), bearing in mind the problem of the medium. And we need to broaden such an experience to include not only the visual but the other aspects mentioned.
Visually speaking, there are ways of displaying the text that can show us just how dynamic reading is. In my Coup de Dés project (mallarme.uvic.ca), a digitized version of the famous poem Un Coup de Dés jamais n’abolira le hasard by Stéphane Mallarmé, we can see that, through this difficult poem that is anti-hierarchical and decentered, the eye moves is any possible direction and the text is therefore very open (indeed, it is a prototype of the “open work” that so characterizes 20th-century art). Interpretation is multiple and the text is as much a visual experience as it is one about its content. In fact, this poem highlights the very visual nature of reading, especially of reading poetry. It brings out what was only implicit or latent in the standard forms of poetry, such as the sonnet, which is nevertheless quite visual. Yet the computer only represents the text here as a collection of links and nodes, which presupposes that the text is simply about linguistic content. The challenge is to find more sophisticated ways of displaying the text that can account for other aspects of language. One could, for instance, superpose the Mallarmé text onto Google sky, much like Ollivier Dyens uses Google Earth to superpose fragments of text from his La Condition inhumaine. Or, as Dyens collects fragments of text and finds interesting ways of visualizing this in his hypertext project Continent X. Another model, perhaps better if it can be open-sourced, would be the Visual Thesaurus. All of these ways show how the text is dynamic, and they manifest visually what happens implicitly in the process of reading.
But as I’ve said, reading is much more dynamic than this, and we also have to consider sonority. For Mallarmé’s poem is also an aural experience. Actually, as I have argued, it is a poem that subsists on the threshold of poetry as an oral and a visual mode, between the lyrical poet who sings and the poet as a writer. Penny Florence attempted to put The Coup de Dés to Débussy’s music, and this brought out a major problem, because it favoured the sonorous, which is a linear medium, and it forces a particular reading order for the text; whereas we’ve seen that Mallarmé’s poem is anti-linear and spatial, like architecture. Yet the sonorous would be radically transformed were such openness exploited through digital media. It is possible to identify sound patterns in the poem and to display these, thereby adding new depth to the poetic and digital experience.
A more “corporeal understanding” of the literary text seems to be on the horizon. A friend in Germany who will remain unnamed is developping what his research group calls “thinking as bodies,” and I believe that this corporeality can greatly contribute to a better understanding of electronic textual encounters, and could further deepen the “dialogue” that Sloterdijk talks about. Such thinking comes in part from the Nietzschean tradition of the body as inseparable with thought, and is in contrast to the Western denial of such a connection, such as with Descartes, but already present in Plato. Nietzsche, in some ways, goes back to the pre-Socratics to recuperate the body. In the 20th Century, we have Deleuze and Foucault continuing such a trajectory, but in different ways. For Mallarmé, the experience of language was very much a physical or bodily one (even though he called himself a Cartesian), for he recognized that “conversation” exceeds the words being used. In terms of digital reproduction, how is the body implicated in seeing and hearing and are other aspects of the body enlisted that might not be with the print edition? How can we thus develop a hermeneutic and phenomenology of reading in the digital?
Finally, what can we add? If for Rimbaud vowels can have colours, how could the computer display such associations? It would be important to abandon the need for certainty here, and embrace the randomness of literary experience. Once this is done, we could actually get closer to an understanding of a “dialogue” between the literary and the computer. Mallarmé’s poem is interesting in this respect as it is all about “le hasard,” or randomness.
These points, I believe, can contribute to a better understanding of my research question #1, in that they ask what aspects of reading have not been accounted for in digital literary studies.
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What aspects of reading cannot be accounted for by the types of digital textual analysis done so far in the digital humanities, and how can technology be used to account for such possibilities?
Most approaches to the electronic text assume that the text is “information,” and so apply linguistic computing models to the text. However, the information theory model of language is inadequate when it comes to a fuller understanding of the experience of language. By way of example, it is well-known that poetry cannot be translated, because there is much more going on in a poem than the simple communication of ideas. If the Enlightenment saw nothing but danger in the poetic text, because of its rhetorical nature (some even went as far as saying that anything in poetry could/should be expressed in prose), the 19th century was in part a reaction to such a limited view of language. There is nothing really to distinguish such an Enlightenment view of poetry from the information theory view of language, since both presuppose that language use does not alter the information. The literary text (and there has been a lot of debate as to what it actually is) can highlight the problem of language in special ways since a poem, for instance, has layers of (often conflicting) meaning and ambiguity that cannot be captured by the usual linguistic-semantic structures; nor can the signals and codes of information theory compute such things as rhyme, rhythm or enjambment within its own notion of communication. Furthermore, the experience of reading also entails much more in terms of association. As with 19th century French poet Rimbaud’s famous poem, “Voyelles”: because the reader can associate colours with vowels, what else happens when a reader encounters language that is rich with imagery, that is synaesthetic? Indeed, the poetic language from the mid-19th century on is increasingly rich in this sense, and has moved the linguistic experience beyond the common-sense notion of language that information theory represents. Yet, computing is rich in potential and can help us to see the text differently, even when we can only see the limits of such technology. The goal is to find new ways to explore the text with digital technology without limiting what the reading experience could be.
Much work has been done in terms of interface and display recently (cf. Drucker, and Ruecker, Sinclair et al.), and some with metrical and sound patterns using phonetic transcription (Plamondon). What are some of the ways of displaying poetry that allow us to see the text differently?
Here are some rough notes in my attempt to define tragic-poetic Modernism. More will follow, with development and unpacking of what is here. This is an outline. Part 2 will also deal more with concrete examples, and perhaps the addition of further elements.
1. Elements towards redefining tragic-poetic modernism must perhaps begin with the question of the subject, to which any aesthetic or poetics are unfortunately bound; they are determined by subjectivity, even if negatively (cf. Ricœur, for instance, in Soi-même comme un autre). This is most often expressed through the impersonal or depersonalization, whether in Baudelaire and his wake, Rimbaud’s “JE est un Autre”, T.S. Eliot’s attack of personality, Barthes “death of the author” and so on. A truly post-subjective turn needs to be careful of this negatively reoccurring subject, even or especially when it is supposedly destroying subjectivity. Why was it important to destroy the subject? Once this subject is effectively destroyed, its primal status can be set aside, as an unnecessary error that helped us understand the next step. A poet like Mallarmé took this step, but looked back as Orpheus did to his subjective other the Notion-Eurydice whilst exiting the underworld, and she died. Let us say that he is haunted by this loss.
2. This destruction also needs to be thought of in terms of its violence. Is this a sacrificial violence, like the tragic? Is it a founding violence, and if so, is it legitimate to associate Modernism with such violence? I am thinking about Walter Benjamin’s work — and reactions to it by Dominick LaCapra — or Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy’s Derrida-inspired work on the literary absolute and on Heidegger, for instance. A sort of constellation emerges around responses (starting with Benjamin’s) to Carl Schmitt‘s theories of sovereignty: in particular, Jacques Derrida’s Force de loi and Giorgio Agamben’s Homo sacer, both of which deal with Schmitt and with Benjamin’s text on the latter. The important question is to see how art connects to originary violence and the form of power that it takes, or the type of violence that is required to unsettle power. Another important text is a very little-known, untranslated article by Agamben on Benjamin’s and/on Georges Battaille and the Collège de sociologie (which can be seen as a part of the avant-garde — associated with Modernsism). Agamben sees the potential for fascism in the Collège’s very anti-fascist configuration (“Bataille e il paradosso della sovranità”).
3. There is also the notion of désœuvrement (or inoperativeness), a concept developed by Jean-Luc Nancy that Agamben associates with “decreation“, in The Coming Community, related to the notion of potentiality. As we have seen in my previous post, the tragic is important for this, and which is related to the violence and negativity of postsubjective aesthetics.
4. In thinking of decreation and violence, aesthetics comes to mind. On must however get past the notion of the tragic as genre (theatre) or as primarily an aesthetic (i.e. perceptive) category. Several references come to mind, starting obviously with the ur-text on the matter, that of Aristotle, whose Poetics discusses tragedy as the ultimate form of mimêsis. Mimêsis is the imitation of things — of nature; it is the unveiling (aleitheia) of truth, and poetics (poiêsis) is the creative part of this. Tragedy is the ultimate form of imitation because it confronts the audience with the problem of human freedom and destiny. How is Oedipus is fated to do certain things, and how much freedom does he have against such a fate? Such questions traditionally refer to redemption. German Idealists and Nietzsche, Kierkegaard etc. have changed the way this question can be seen (generally ignored in the “Anglo-Saxon” world). Szondi (Essay on the Tragic) distinguishes between tradegy as genre and the tragic, a philosophical question: “Since Aristotle, there has been a poetics of tragedy. Only since Schelling has there been a philosophy of the tragic.” (Szondi, p. 1) This means that Aristotle subsumed the tragic under the umbrella of poetics. From Schelling on, the tragic is seen in and of itself, requiring a theoretical-philosophical approach. Yet even an Idealist and contemporary of Schelling, Hegel, still insists upon genre when talking about tragedy. Wagner will of course do so as well when he elaborates and creates what has been attributed to him as Gesamtkunstwerk or “total artwork” (which for him is the tragic opera).
However, despite this separation of aesthetic questions and the outlining of a theoretical conception of the tragic, we have to bear in mind the relationship between literature and thought, so that we see that poetics come back into the question through the back door, so-to-speak. For since the 20th century, it has been unacceptable to separate the literary and the philosophical. This is what Derrida insists upon in Dissemination, when talking about the problem of mimesis precisely in terms of the literary history of philosophy, something echoed in David Farrell Krell’s introduction to his Tragic Absolute (a book about German Idealists Schelling, Novalis and Hölderlin, and the post-Idealist Nietzsche). It is important here to qualify the rhetorical/literary (distinctions will have to be made, but for now let’s conflate them) if we are trying to delimit the definition of the tragic as genre; yet it is equally important to recognize that the literary and the philosophical (i.e. reason) are inseparable. Nevertheless, poetics cannot be there to limit the object of the tragic. The tragic is of many genres and takes many forms — not just drama or Wagnerian opera.
5. Furthemore, redemption is hitherto a “poetic” question in that it is bound to the problem of technê (a broader term for art that encompasses all human productive potential), and thus poiêsis (pro-duction) and physis (nature). We have Heidegger (“The Origin of the Work of Art”) and Agamben (The Man without Content) to thank for this. Let’s not take these considerations lightly, but let’s not take them as given, either. The problem of redemption is poetic in that form has overtaken content, and the “emptying” of depersonalization can be seen as a type of kenosis (purifying) and eventually a resublimation and a soteria, a Mallarmean “salut” (salvation, salvaging). Modernist redemption occurs thus less through content (still it does) than through form. Western culture is saturated with redemptive ideals, even when it is critical (I would include Rancière’s in this =>below).
We therefore have to include the “poetic” when dealing with the tragic. Hence my use of “tragic-poetic” when trying to rethink Modernism.
6. The question of joy or jouissance or plaisir: these can be used interchangeably. They lead to the problem of politics. Deleuze’s multiple can resist domination, Kristeva’s view of poetics makes of it a revolutionary poetry, Rancière says that modernism offers new ways of interpreting and seeing, and that this is radical, etc. But, Žižek offers a criticism of this perspective, in that it is the new form of capital: post-Fordist, decentered, postmodern. The distinction between postmodernity as a condition and postmodernism as an aesthetic is no longer so easy. Benjamin saw this allegorized by/in Baudelaire (essay on Paris and the 19th Century). To what extent does a radical postmodernism participate in capital, even when it is decidedly opposed to it? Nevertheless, we tend to exaggerate the power of art. Art is anticipatory in that it provides the form of capital; or does it simply reproduce formally its logic, in a kind of mimesis as reproduction of the process of production. This can offer a different way of approaching Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”. It certainly helps to think of Benjamin’s notion of history/witnessing because it is clearer for us to see how art and capital function, thereby leading the way to a sharply articulated notion of resistance. If you look at dominant culture, it has assimilated some of Post/modernist aesthetics and postmodernist ethics. Yet has the main thrust of it been reterritorialized? Democracy in contemporary digital culture: thus, in the rush to critically respond to this threat, the answer seems to be “everyone has a voice, therefore no one has a voice” (cf. Jodi Dean). This is pessimistic of digital culture: nowadays, people can be mobilized much faster, and the forms that mobilization takes are frequently very disruptive and at least allow us to think in new ways. The irony that is so stereotypical of contemporary postmodernism is still quite effective e.g. the London Slut Walk. Furthermore, videos can witness more effectively; Republicans can fall because of Youtube. Though we are as far as we could be from living a digital paradise, opposition simply takes on new forms and is not total; it is more the work of bricolage. The obscene underside of Jodi Dean is Stalin — even Žižek will admit this — where there would be some perfect, total system of resistance. The critique of postmodernism — which I will collapse into Modernism more generally (more on that later) — is based on its form, its structure. I am afraid that the contemporary left is simply repeating the logic of structuralism in negative terms by focussing on the digital or institutions as superstructure, and losing sight of the immanence or irreducible singularity of resistance.
7. Joy and the tragic? Is Nietzsche thus the prototype of postFordist capitalism? This is as ridiculous as saying that he is a Nazi. Still, what Zizek says about Deleuze and Guattari (20th-century Nietzscheans) has some weight. What if the capitalist today is Deleuzo-Guattarian? Still we are a far cry in Nietzsche from the idea of “enjoying our symptom”. What would be better thought through is the Nietzschean acceptance of life and his rejection of politics as partaking in slave morality. Yet Nietzsche’s tragic is an acceptance of chance as necessity (cf. Deleuze): this is the joy of the tragic; there is no need for redemption because all eventualities are accepted as they are in and for themselves. What is life denial in contemporary radical criticism? Exhibit A: Terry Eagleton, Exhibit B = Žižek, C = Dean.
8. It may seem that I use “Modernism” and “Postmodernism” interchangeably, and to a certain extent, this is possible. Aesthetically, there is very little difference between Joyce’s Ulysses, Kandynski’s paintings, Duchamp’s toilet or Schoenberg’s music on the one hand, and the nouveau roman, Godard’s Le Weekend or Pop art on the other. The attempts at distinguishing the two seem to me to be arbitrary, and reflect themselves their own institutional constructs. It is more and more apparent that it is rather a question of continuity. Philosophically speaking, the concerns of Derrida, Deleuze or Baudrillard rely heavily on questions that were already present in the 19th century, even in Hegel, and certainly in Mallarmé reflecting on philology, Nietzsche, and Rimbaud in his correspondence and in his poetry. Where we cannot conflate Modernism and Postmodernism is at once obvious and less so: historically, it is post-world war II, and critically, there is a clear demarcation. But that is precisely the point — historically means institutionally. The rub is where culture and thought meet society and power. Power is becoming more and more “postmodern”, but only in specific ways: fluidity of markets, capital, consumer identity, the work force and so on. Nevertheless, as I argue above, this is only really in certain ways. I fail to see the possibility of a truly Nietzschean society and social structure — and let’s say for the sake of argument that Nietzsche provides us with the best way to live in secular modernity (be it modernist or postmodernist) —, given that he was so anti-social. Unless it were governed by the ethos of the agôn — the joust, the struggle, the contest (see my previous post).
Filed under: Etymologies, Laughter, Mallarmé, Nietzsche, philology, Poetics, Tragic
I will be posting regularly on this blog once again in order to share research notes. My research has gone in new directions, and I feel it’s a good idea to post my ideas here in order to draw on your collective intelligence in the form of comments. The orientation of this blog is now less etymological, but still quite philological. I am fascinated with the idea that Western philosophy and tradition is the product of mistranslations. E.g. Heidegger says that the Latin translation of to be was a mistranslation of the Greek (ref. G. Steiner). Inspired by Heidegger, Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben frequently uses such mistranslations to dig up the genealogies of Western thought. There are some brilliant examples in The Man Without Content (1970, 1999), for instance, which it turns out Agamben wrote 2 years after meeting Heidegger (not in 1994: see Leland de la Durantaye’s great critical introduction to Agamben, Chapter One, p. 26- and 396, n. 1). Much earlier, Stéphane Mallarmé, in Les Dieux antiques, says that the gods were the result of errors in language.
My favourite philosopher (right now) is F. W. Nietzsche, and his work and works on him have preoccupied much of my time lately. He was trained not as a philosopher, but as a philologist, much like Mallarmé and many European thinkers in the 19th century. Alexis Philonenko (Nietzsche, le rire et le tragique, LGF, 1995) says that, by philology,
Nietzsche means not only the study of foreign languages and of their lexical structures, but also that of the main arteries [nervures saillantes] of the civilizations they manifest: collective representations materialised in works of art, visions of the world incarnate in poetry, music and theatre. (23, my transl.)
My work is Nietzschean in that it will be examining questions of laughter and the tragic from Romanticism and Modernism and beyond, or what I am calling the post-Enlightenment in this context. It’s a complete coincidence that Philonenko’s subtitle has “le rire et le tragique”, as I had developed these notions before discovering Philonenko’s book. However, there are many books about both these questions in Nietzsche, starting as early as Lev Shestov’s The Philosophy of Tragedy, Dostoevsky and Nietzsche (1903); and laughter and the tragic are two terms frequently associated with Nietzsche, though most often separately.
What interests me is how these questions can help elucidate the problems of post-Enlightenment thought in/on/and aesthetics. For example, how does the (philosophical rather than aesthetic) notion of the tragic help us reconsider Mallarmé’s poetics and thought? Here’s a proposal I made (accepted) for a collective on Thinking Poetry: Philosophical Approaches to Nineteenth-Century French
Poetry (ed. by Joseph Acquisto):
Mallarmé’s ‘Salut’ and the Tragic ‘Acte’
Mallarmé’s ambiguous, loaded term “salut” refers to humanity’s salvation through art’s openness. The term can also be linked to the Aristotelian notion of “sotêria” (salvation, preservation), a concept transmuted by philosophers like Hegel. This concern continues today, such as in Giorgio Agamben’s The Time that Remains or Potentialities. Sotêria, employed in reference to tragedy in Aristotle’s Poetics, is a preservation of the potential in the actual. In the Nineteenth Century, tragedy was associated equally with lyrical poetry and drama, especially with the German Idealists like Hölderlin and Schelling. For Schelling, the tragic implies a paradoxical expression of free will precisely through a sotêria; for Hölderlin, it is the very weakness of the tragic that is its freedom (Szondi, An Essay on the Tragic). For Agamben, sotêria‘s preservation implies a radical otherness in which it is the “impotential” that is retained in the actual, thereby changing the way we think of actuality, and thus of freedom and determination. This can realign our understanding of the tragic. Nevertheless, a full development of the tragic is apparently of secondary or indirect concern for contemporary philosophers in dialogue with modernist poetics. Rethinking the tragic in Nineteenth-Century lyrical poetry can help us reevaluate contemporary philosophy. Looking at the way this poetry has been appropriated in contemporary thought shows that what Mallarmé called an “Acte,” which is a linguistic-poetic preservation of impotential, reflects the hitherto unthought relationship between subjectivity, language and the tragic as drama — drama as “acted,” as the mimesis of action, and modern subjectivity as identified with agency — and belies a redemptive logic in contemporary philosophy.
When I wrote this, I wasn’t thinking about Nietzsche, except perhaps indirectly. A philological bent is clear in this proposal, with my looking at sotêria and “salut”, and drama as “acted” in connection with agency. The tragic is a focal point of Western (especially modern) notions of salvation. Nietzsche interests me because his definition of the tragic is life-affirming, whereas Western, specifically Judeo-Christian, morality has erected metaphysical systems which are effectively nihilistic in their denial of life. Nietzsche, commonly misconceived as nihilistic, turns the tables on metaphysics and their handmaidens morality, religion etc. by seeing them as the real nihilism (see a long quote by him on nihilism) in that they deny the value of life for itself, turning instead to afterlives and redemptive ideals. For Nietzsche, the tragic is the joyous affirmation of will. Nietzsche’s joyous message (no doubt modifying the “Good News”): “Will, this is what the liberator and the messenger of joy is called” (Zarathustra II, “On Redemption”, quoted by Deleuze, Nietzsche et la philosophie, 41). This leads to a philosophy or theory of laughter, that for Russian critic Mikhael Bakhtin upsets the hierarchy imposed by church authority; and such laughter reflects an impersonal universality that posits a different way of thinking about the subject. For Bakhtin, and for many others, the Enlightenment was destructive in its invention of the individual subject. Laughter was the cure, so-to-speak.
I am therefore concurrently working on the question of laughter. This idea came to me whilst writing my dissertation. It occurred to me that the anguish in Mallarmé, such as in his famous Sonnet en -yx is actually funny, with the possibility of self-parody (for a hilarious parody/rewriting of Mallarmé, see Raymond Queneau’s “La redondance chez Phane Armé”). Not to mention that the use of “angoisse” and “agonise” in the Sonnet en yx allude to the tragic agôn, or contest/combat/rivalry/joust. Nietzsche has a great early piece contemporary to The Birth of Tragedy on this, “Homer’s Contest” (Homers Wettkampf), again, discussing themes of affirmation and play vs “our morality”. The self-parody is only latent, and Mallarmé is certainly not “Nietzschean”; however, Nietzsche’s thought can help us develop a proper critique of such agonistic phenomena that are related to the subject’s self-destruction or depersonalisation. George Steiner, in the article referenced above, notes that Jacques Derrida’s work might be optimally seen as comic, perhaps from this perspective. The personal struggle (another synonym of agôn) and agony (fr. Gk. agonia), perhaps related to angoisse (anguish), is that of the poetic subject coming to terms with his own nihilism, his impotence as poetic subject; and this is tragic in that the sacrifice of the self is a type of depersonalisation (“céder l’initiative aux mots”, “to relinquish the initiative to words”), and it becomes a sublimation and a redemption of the poetic “Acte” through the creation of poetic space. But this happens to a nauseating degree in Mallarmé, and when you write a dissertation on him, you go nuts or you start to laugh, and then you publish a book.
Consequently, it occurred to me that humour has a large part to play in the gestures of Modernist poetics—the sort of violent, dislocative humour in Rimbaud or Hélène Cixous, for instance. I followed this up and found that laughter is a major theme in the 19th century, beyond Nietzsche, as with Hugo’s famous essay on the topic in conjunction with the grotesque (see also Bakhtin’s book on Rabelais that takes up, in possibly Nietzschean terms, laughter and the grotesque, and who takes apart Hugo), or Baudelaire’s essay on laughter. Then in the 20th century, there’s Henri Bergson, Bakhtin and, perhaps most famously, Cixous’ “Rire de la méduse”. My concurrent work therefore looks like this:
The Maladies of Reason and the Ethics of Laughter in Modernism
This paper will explore how Nietzsche and Bakhtin’s post-subjective philosophies of laughter can contribute to a reconsideration of Modernism. From this perspective, I will examine theories of laughter in late Romanticism (Hugo), early Modernism (Baudelaire) and after (Bergson, Freud, Cixous), and see to what extent Modernism can be redefined with respect to dislocation, fragmentation and multiplicity. I will demonstrate that an ethics of laughter has provided an inverse, affirmative and co-dependent model of Modernist dislocation that critics have hitherto undertaken through melancholy and mourning (Benjamin, Derrida, Kristeva), in what I argue we can call the subjective, negatively theological maladies of Reason. (This is soon to be submitted)
So what I seem to be doing is digging up the bones (or outlining the “nervures saillantes”) of post-Enlightenment thought and aesthetics.
Filed under: Etymologies
Dear 20th-century philosophers of language,
The word sèma is polysemic, according to Plato: it is at once the sign (indeed, the origin of “sign”), and a tombstone. And further, this sèma is derived from sôma, the body (Gorgias, 493a. Cf. Genette, Mimologiques, p. 20).
Filed under: Uncategorized
Is language an organism? Ollivier Dyens seems to agree with this idea, go as far as to say that language is a virus (in a forthcoming paper, but implicit in La Condition inhumaine, Paris Flammarion, 2008). To what extent can this hold true for 19th century philologists? If Max Müller claimed that language is nature, and if nature is organic and evolutionary, is Müller Darwinian? And if viruses and genes are the substratum of life, can we go as far as Dyens? The question is at least worth pursuing.
We have evolved genetically because of language (those who couldn’t use it died). We contain it, but do we do so as a virus?
Filed under: Uncategorized
A quote by the biologist Jacques Monod:
Beaucoup d’esprits distingués, aujourd’hui encore, paraissent ne pas pouvoir accepter ni même comprendre que d’une source de bruit la sélection ait pu, à elle seule, tirer toutes les musiques de la biosphère. La sélection opère en effet sur les produits du hasard, et ne peut s’alimenter ailleurs; mais elle opère dans un domaine d’exigences rigoureuses dont le hasard est banni.*
Le Hasard et la nécessité, Paris, éd. du Seuil, 1970, p. 135.
Can this be said of language? Is language nature, as the philologists of the 19th century claimed (such as Max Müller)? Does language, though operating upon the “products of chance”, equally operate “in a zone of rigorous requirements from which chance has been excluded”? This opens up a whole panorama of questions, to be pursued…
* [Quoted in the Trésor de la langue française: "Even today, many distinguished minds seem unable to accept or even understand that, from a source of noise, selection could have drawn, for its own sake, all the music of the biosphere. Selection operates in effect on the products of chance, and cannot nourish itself in any other way; but it operates in a zone of rigorous requirements from which chance has been excluded." My translation.]
