A Philosophy of the Concrete

Kafka, Inc,

A brand is a promise, says the marketer; the symbols to which it is linked (the logo of Coke, the curved line of Nike …) advert to the values associated with its products. But isn’t anything, thereby, product-like? Not simply the brand mark on the cow’s haunch, to stop one herd from getting tangled up with another, but also the insect’s markings, which advert to the fact that it is dangerous to eat.

There’s nothing, then, that protects the name of a writer like Kafka or Beckett from such branding. You cannot lament the Kafka teeshirt or the book called Beckett Country as qualitatively different from the experience of reading Kafka or Beckett; each time, it is a question of a promise symbolised by Kafka, inc. or Beckett ltd. in which the photographs that stare out from the editions of Calder have the same value as the words inside them. Kafka’s mouse-like face rises behind all possible readings. The brand is the photograph, a writer’s themes, his concerns – it is present in the details of the prose, its style, just as it is present in the plaque that commemorates his house and in the fat biographies that recount every detail of his life.

Then to write is to brand the white page and to brand oneself; to write is to be your own marketer and public relations company. The book you deliver to the publishing company offers itself to the whole world – it celebrates you, its author, in your power and glory. You are substantialised by what you have produced, by the distinctiveness of the experience promised by your brand. And then there’s the question of your brand’s relationship with others – of a brand management that sees it linked to other, analogous writers, to the literary critical industry, to the scholarly empire … 

The Space of Waiting

To say that Beckett and Kafka are not brands like any other risks installing a new set of values and a new kind of branding. Now it is as if Beckett and Kafka belong to that rarefied world of culture which speaks of the essence of the human being, or holds safe those great values that belong to an elite. What must be understood, by contrast, is the way their work and their lives, insofar as they are related to that work, break themselves altogether from the sphere of culture.

Beckett and Kafka promise nothing with respect to edification, to cultural value; if their work is symbolic, it is so in a way that joins it to the post- or pre-cultural … Contrast them to the author for whom her books concern the richness of human existence, the spread of all the varities of human life. This is impressive; her novels flash back to the world the glory of itself in its massiveness, its complexity; nothing compares to the novel as panorama. Everything that can be seen is made to be seen; everything is granted to the measure of narration; the author is the demigod to whom nothing denies itself. And as such, her name is also a brand, a promise that the world will open itself like a peacock’s tail in its colours and splendour.

But what of Beckett, of Kafka? Now it is that the measure denies itself; the world is etiolated and reduced. Blanched characters, bare incident; human existence cramped and confined. Of what is Moran concerned but with the immediacy of his assignment? Of what Joseph K. but the attempt to find who has put him on trial and why; and then to exonerate himself of that and any crime?

Character reduced to silhouette; plot as a tightening of the screws on panicked, crushed individuals: not for nothing have such books been read as bound to the great disasters of the twentieth century: times when human beings could not appeal to rights, to institutions. In which, that is, the world of value was shattered and culture exposed itself to be the lie it always was, as if it was supposed to be part of the ethical edification of its admirers. Bare characters, blanched incident: the nineteenth century novel, in its glories has run aground … what is left for the survivors of the great calamity?

Nothing to write and no means by which to write, says Beckett to Duthuit; but this does not mean the pen is set down and the notebook untouched. Impossible – this word can no longer be understood modally but as an experience of what both cannot be done and must be; as the imperative that drives a writing along its edge, searching for a place from which to begin.

What is the impossible? Perhaps it can be understood as a suffering so complete there is no one to undergo it; a pain so absolute that it is endured by no one. The writer waits, and then – miracle of miracles – writing is possible. The writing of the impossible becomes possible where the ‘merciful surplus of strength’ Kafka invokes allows the sufferer to write. Pain subsides for just long enough for writing to begin. And the writer – Kafka, Beckett – can now ring changes on the impossible, giving it the shape of a story and the silhouettes of characters.

But what courage this takes! What magnificence of patience, and then courageousness! First the waiting – Kafka with his pen, his notebook in the early hours of the morning; Beckett at Ussy. To wait – but for what? For suffering to subside just enough. To make a beginnning there where the beginning is impossible. To begin – just that. To have been afforded the chance to begin. And then the beginning itself, when it comes, must be seized upon. A frenzy of activity: write, write: there are not enough hours in the day.

And then, once again, the falling away. Waiting stretches out; the impossible is impossible once more; it is a wall of mountains that no one can cross. How to ascend those peaks? How to climb up again to the plateau? Wait, just wait; weeks and months pass, but you must not give up. The impossible must become your fate; it must wait for yourself in you. Until all you are, as writer, is a waiting that has become intransitive, that has lost its object and any object. Until, as writer you are no one but the open space of waiting.

The World Undone

How could they let themselves trust what they wrote? Molloy is unlike any book. The Trial is utterly unlike the work of Kafka’s peers. They were written, and quickly – all at once. At once, as by a single stroke. Out of a storm of which their lives were only a dark precursor. Nights catch fire in Prague. Days burn away at Ussy. The smoke billows up: the work: it is a sign of the work. A signal is sent into the sky, another in a line of signals across our epoch, where one writer begins as he sees a prior signal sent and knows it for what it is.

But what is known? Only that there was a writing of the impossible; that there was a writing of the tain of the mirror that one allowed authors to contentedly represent the world. It is not that their books separate themselves from the world. There are still details, human beings; the usual rules, for the most part, seem to apply. But that the whole book becomes a quivering indication, that it points to itself and what happens in the depths of the ‘itself’ – to a wandering in the labyrinth, to an obsession with what cannot be said, at least directly.

Now it is the saying of language itself that speaks. The ‘that it is’, its existence; the fact that it is. Impossible speech, that speaks of the condition of all speech. Impossible, as it is drawn back from the world – the totality of relations that is the world – as it is ordered through discourse. As if discourse had another side. As if it was the outside that spoke, but via discourse, words unsaying themselves, sentences crossing themselves out. Language under erasure, suspended, spun out over nothing … As though Beckett and Kafka belonged not to themselves, but to the fate of language.

Who are they, Beckett, Kafka? Vortices of language. Whirlwinds who catch up in what they write the unravelling of the world. It is not that they speak in a wild language, in the avant-garde that would shatter the means of speaking. Ordinary language speaks; the same language – banal, everyday, as that we all use. But as it speaks it also suspends the power of reference; at once, it refers to the world – to a fictional world that obeys, roughly speaking, the laws of our own – and as though to what is there before it, as though it were performing the opposite of a cosmogony.

The world undone, unmade. Language even as it speaks that is suspended in its power to refer, to evoke. Language that, even as the text is intelligible, meaningful, also suspends the power of meaning (even if sense, now, is only to be understood in another sense). Lost language, language wandering. Words that do not close upon themselves; sentences that do not end. The murmuring of paragraphs that say nothing. The rustling of a language deprived of itself. Sense unbound from the power of sense. Or that raises it to another power, without the human being. So that the human becomes an adjective, a particular modification of the streaming of sense.

A Rose is a Rose is a Rose

What fascinates, if it does, in the work of Beckett, of Kafka? What makes it necessary to reread their work? Nothing outside of it, first of all that. No context of which their work is part. It is not their culture they reflect, since they are more than culture, or that they unfold culture from within by means of the opposite of origami, until what is shown is that the inside was only ever a pleat of the outside and that to have lived within was always to have lived without.

Culture cannot be adjusted to fit Beckett or Kafka; it is not the hem that needs widening; the whole garment is shown to have clothed nothing. What was contained by culture now swirls along the edges of a singularity like water around a plughole; what matters is the work, as it draws the book and all of culture towards itself. And this is another kind of disaster: one that, in the wake of religious consolations and old theodicies leaves a sky without stars, the blank night.

Nor is it the ‘metaphysic’ that Lawrence used to set out before he wrote his novels (that will sometimes overwhelm his characters, his plot, though not as often as one might suppose); it is not that the work of either thinking embodies a system, or a method of inquiry. To read them thus would be to leap over the specificities, the details of which they are made.

Theirs is a philosophy of the concrete, if such a thing is possible. Of the concrete become absolute; of a specificity that expands to enclose the whole world. A metaphysic that speaks by way of the most ordinary words, the words of the everyday. That lets them speak, vague words, ordinary words so as they stand in, proxies, for what cannot settle itself into a name. Now philosophy will speak in the most common words. It is the common words, at last that are allowed to speak.

What fascinates, then, in the work of Beckett, of Kafka? A rose is a rose is a rose, said Stein. And now language is language … is language, for a third time. For an infinite number of times. This is the meaning of saying: saying as it speaks by way of what is said. That there is communication by way of communication. Communication is itself a thing – or rather, the relation that it is doubles itself up, thickens, and appears as itself. But only by way of the ordinary words of the fiction of Beckett, of Kafka. Only by means of words that usually do the relating. What is the style of Beckett or Kafka other than this? What does it mean except to give body – a certain tone – to communication such that it can double itself up? A philosophy of the concrete (the new empiricism) is accomplished through style.

Style as Thought

It is as though, in the writer, language – the ‘there is’ of language, of communication – becomes fascinated by itself. As though the writer’s style were nothing other than the locus of this experience, joining the experience of the singular, the concrete, to language, which always depends upon the particular and the abstract.

Here, style is not something an author can develop, like a scientist in a laboratory. Style happens; style catches up writing, like a current seizes a boat. Write enough, and it will happen. Write day after day, and it will begin to happen, but only insofar as it also the impossible that you are broken against.

This is why talent is such a distraction – why a facility with words stands in the way of an experience of language. Perhaps it is only the aphasiac, the dyslexic who can experience language. Only those who stammer like Moses or the writer who, as Deleuze says, makes the whole of language stammer. Write, do not fail to write. Or rather: to draw yourself into that space where writing might be possible, even in its impossibility.

(Peculiar, pretentious formulations, but what else will do? How to speak of the condition of speaking? By compelling language to unspeak itself, suspending ‘good sense’ and ‘common sense’ … although perhaps only to give voice to another experience of the common …)

Perhaps the question of language can only be fated rather than asked. Or perhaps it is not a question at all, but a kind of collapse, as when a house sags into a mineshaft. Perhaps language can only be known by a subsidence of language, or (another metaphor) by the damp on the walls of sense …

And perhaps there is a kind of philosophising that does not know itself as such; a thinking by way of the concrete, by way of the impossible. Style as thought; style as thinking …