1. With some novelists, it seems their characters substitute for them in some way – and that they may ever be sacrificed to a fate the writer might wish upon himself. I have never written a line of fiction – I dare not – and I wonder if this is because language seems an impassable barrier between what I would write and what it is given to me to write.
I am strongly drawn to programmatic notes, to prefaces and statements of methods in works of philosophy, or, especially, those moment in which a text draws attention to itself, and meditates upon the conditions of its own appearance. What status has a written text of philosophy that would condemn writing? Derrida, of course, has explored this question with great brilliance.
For my part, I ask the question more stupidly, but still as insistently. Or should I say the question returns in me, or that I am sometimes very little other than the place in which it returns? And I admit, too, that I am drawn to those moments when texts that are otherwise theoretical become autobiographical – that refer, in an example, to the room in which they are writing, or to the circumstances of composition.
And better still, when the text is allowed to reflect on its own gratuitousness, on that peculiar bootstrapping that allowed it to be born, lifting from the life of the writer, allowing it to make claims about what is true, and right, and just: yes, this is very beautiful, when the philosopher falls from her own text to confess that what she has written rides above her. When she asks, and who am I, husk of the work that has given birth to itself through me, and by pushing me aside?
I love to bring a reading of a text as close as possible to psychologism. Isn’t there that it becomes most striking how a text can leap from a life, out of it, transcending it? Isn’t it at that moment the text becomes most blazingly magnificent? As though the philosopher, too, had to sacrifice herself in order to write. That there has to be sacrifice, the dying of a life that, henceforward, is only the husk of the work.
And then I think I hear it again, that rumbling, that murmuring that precedes everything that might be said, and in any of our names. It is language that rises up – medium, vehicle of sense, that speaks itself and against the claim that is made through language. At this moment, I move from a fascination with what passes periously close to psychologism to something else: what is the name of that reading that would press a text back into the thickness of language, to the way in which it congeals even before any message can be delivered?
Nevertheless, of course, despite that thickening, there is still sense; words must mean. But I think language loses itself in every text; I dream of an ‘itself’ of language that wanders in its own labyrinth, that speaks of itself and sings of itself in everything written.
2. But what kind of song is this? Perhaps the one sung, in Blah-Feme‘s post, by anon who comes out of the forest, and that is remarked again and again. A possessing song, a dispossessing one, inhabiting language and turning it aside. Is it outside language, or does it, by contrast, turn language outside, tearing it from anyone who would speak in their name? The first person becomes the third, the ‘I speak’, ‘it speaks’; language is as though snagged by itself, being drawn repeatedly to that event in which it loses the capacity to make sense.
Before song, before music, only noise without form and without rhythm. Isn’t the musical exactly this? For Kafka, as Blah-Feme says, the moment of writing was about pain, about discomfort. Certainly; but wasn’t it also about the transmutation of suffering – that strange crossover wherein to write of one’s pain and to ring changes upon it brought with it a remarkable shift.
By that ‘merciful surplus of strength’ is the pleasure of writing given; Kafka lies beneath his characters, dying as they die, but enjoying their death and pain. But his unfinished work shows, perhaps, that such enjoyment itself has its limit, there where dying cannot claim them, and where K. wanders without consolation and without death.
Kafka, too cannot die – is that why he broke away from the text and from what is unmasterable about language as it wanders in its own labyrinth, in language ‘itself’ as it no longers refers, no longer makes sense, even as it seems to speak by way of reference and by way of sense. It is here I find the musical – or perhaps only the noisy. Not a song, but a cry.
3. ‘This book ought to have sung’, Nietzsche writes in a preface to The Birth of Tragedy. Sung – and of its own pain, of the pain from which tragedy and music both issue. Then pain must be marked in song, and in the becoming-song of writing; music must sing in the text, with it, even if, for Nietzsche, music precedes what can be said and escapes it.
The sense of this escape, I think, makes him the last thinker of music as music – of music as it is unsubordinated to the fixity of language. But isn’t it curious that Nietzsche, the composer, gave way to the writer who thought language should be made to sing? And who seems to glimpse, in the preface to his earliest book, the chance of a writing of pain, perhaps of a musical language, that would re-enact, in our time, the birth of tragedy?
Are we too early for music as music, or too late? (The right response to these kinds of questions: incredulous laughter – is this how high philosophy has lifted itself? Higher than everything? – Too high; it rides above me, and who am I that has fallen beneath?)
Naively, impatiently, and nagged by the meditations of Deleuze and Klossowski, I have always supposed a barrier exists between ‘us’ and Nietzsche: that there were disclosed in the twentieth century, suffering so base, so basic that it fell below any redeeming performance of pain?
Wasn’t it with mass death that tragedy – the philosophy of tragedy, revived by Schelling, pursued by Hegel and Nietzsche and then completed in Heidegger – came to an end? I think the dream of a Dionysian music also ended there, in murmuring and noise, in a diffuse and general cry.
4. But there are other musics. What would it mean to claim that pain cannot be made to sing, not anymore? Only that the philosophy of tragedy is laughable, and that the idea of a great tradition of art music, that has come to hollow itself out is also laughable. Isn’t it necessary to violently juxtapose say, Heidegger, with, say, Madonna?
Music as a gleeful practice, with no lofty ambition, no link to what posits itself as the great tradition of European music – pop, innocent and new born, the eternal cheeriness of a song that spreads like gossip or rumour through the world. Escapism? Rather a lightness without nostalgia for the discourses of authenticity – to those gloomy callers to order for whom each person is to return to himself.
The lightness of forgetting – not of what happened and continues to happen, the great misery of the world – a kind of optimism of language. Late at night among the bookshelves of an eminent philosopher, it was for a CD of Dionne Warwick we searched to accompany our drinking. But to group the popular under the category of lightness is ridiculous: isn’t this another academic temptation: to take refuge in the forms that seem farthest away from academia?
Is this a call to acknowledge the debt of popular musics to that of slaves and the sons and daughters of slaves? A music that, one might think links itself to the plight of Israel, conjuring for itself a hopeful mythology out of abasement? But this, too, is naive: as if a music hasn’t already deterritorialised itself from what might be discovered by way of political economy. As if the idols of authenticity had not already shattered. Doesn’t Eric Clapton play the blues? Doesn’t the blues become simply a style among others, in the Imaginary Concerthall?
But perhaps there is a way of tracing this and other musics back, up the stream of deterritorialisation. If blues or jazz have taken on aspects of art music – the latter, in particular, entering the academy at the point at which it seemed to become most radical – what would an investigation of country, the Low Other of popular music, reveal?
Reading Richard Middleton’s Voicing the Popular, I read of the Gramscian notion of articulation as developed by Laclau and Mouffe and by Stuart Hall. But who are the people who might be reached thus? Are they the lumpenproletariat, raiding the dressing up box of older historical styles, who repeat history simply as farce, or the proletariat, the universal exception, who would reveal the tragedy of the bourgeois revolutions of the eighteenth century and then come to themselves? From tragedy to hope. Songs which sound that tragedy – ‘We’re low, we’re low, we’re very, very low’ – but in which there flashes the coming revolt, the last repetition.
But I always wonder about those who have fallen from the proletariat and from any proletariat – the nameless, the indefinite. The fallen ones. Not even a proletariat; not even a people.
5. I dream of a song that is born out of suffering just as Kafka describes his writing to be begin in that ‘merciful surplus of strength’ that carries him into writing, and transmutes the suffering from which he begins. A singing that allows a particular suffering to pass into the greater suffering that rumbles and murmurs in language. Is it the blues that sings? The blue note of jazz?
Or perhaps pain cannot be made to sing. Or it is the unlimiting of the song, the passage from music to anonymous rumbling. Today I tell myself – foolishly, stupidly – that it is only in falling that you will let sound the language blues. ‘Who am I?’ – ‘Anon.’ – ‘Who am I?’ – ‘The one in whom language lets sing what cannot be sung.’
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