Category: Language

One Speaks

‘In the beginning was the Word’. The Word, Logos. But what if there were no beginning, and no Logos, only logoi in the plural? Speech, says Sinthome, does not simply instantiate the transcendental structure of language, as though language as such and in general exists before and after its speakers. The structure itself is in the individuals who speak, even as it cannot be reduced to any one individual speaker. As an emergent pattern, it has a kind of agency of its own, depending upon the relations of feedback that give it a ever-provisional substance, letting it quiver above a particular community of speakers like a rainbow over a waterfall.

That is what a language is, or an idiom, and as it quivers, it changes, too; its life does not depend upon an act of History [Geschichte], as it does for Heidegger. True, a language can come close to death, to routine, to ruts well worn; but language can also be reborn, it gives itself to other uses as it is nothing other than this giving, abandoning itself to those uses that flicker between speakers. Between them, and not in them – language is not an interior affair, but belongs to our interrelation. Between us, and floating among the assemblage of which we are a part – the network of practices, of institutions that mean our utterances are collective and never simply individual, that we must be thought together with others, as part of a whole that we speak when we speak.

Not ‘I speak’, the linguistic cogito then, but ‘we speak’. But not that, either, for it is not that a collective subject replaces the individual one. An assemblage is not a ‘we’, a collection of individuals; when I speak it is to enage the ‘one speaks’ of language – to engage, speaking in the first person, but also to be engaged, so that it is language that speaks of itself. Of itself: but as that structure that cannot be reduced to the individuals that speak it, which has a consistency, a patterning confirmed and deepened by those movements of feedback between us.

One speaks – the collective, the quivering rainbow, rooted in nothing and spanning through nothing. Language like a swarm of midges over a river. Or like the flashing light on the river’s surface. But in Deleuze’s ontology, there is no river, or there is only flashing, only clouds and clouds of midges. Language nothing yet, nothing in itself, but that floats through an assemblage and cannot be thought in its absence. Nothing in itself, but still more than the individuals who speak it. Nothing – and much less than the enunciation of the Word, the Logos that stands at the beginning of everything.

Trust

No logos, as Sinthome says, but only local and emergent logoi. Logoi at different levels of scale and temporality, converging and diverging in different waves. And language as only one way in which these logoi can be thought.

The early Heidegger allows logos to translate Rede, discourse, using these words to indicate the common, shared world of which we are part and that lends itself to particular articulations. Rede is to be rigorously distinguished from Gerede, chatter; we will lose the things themselves by our idle talk. But if talk is never idle, if the logos is constituted by what we say such that language is not understood merely to articulate but to act? If the shared world is also what is made by particular uses of language (particular logoi in which language is engaged and engages us)?

Then perhaps there is a way of reclaiming for ourselves the efficacy of language, of speaking in a new way, not in a new language, but letting the old one resound differently. To disarticulate language, to discover the breaks at the level of syntax, to discover (to let there be discovered) a new style (a language within language, a rainbow that leaps up from the streaming of language) …

Acts of reading and writing, says Sinthome, are not the acts of a disembodied spirit who would judge, select, reject, dismiss … If the mind is the brain, reading leaves a physical trace; texts enter and interpenetrate me; I cannot have done with them even when I think I’ve had done with them. And so we’ve all been all the names in history; discourses by a million writers have coursed through us.

So too with writers, who have so many other writers in them, part of them. For a long time, I suppose a writer felt part of the tradition of these predecessors; the aim was to renew existing idioms, to give life to existing forms. With modernity, the burden on the artist changes: is it sufficient to trust the judgement of others with respect to his work? his own instinct? The latter seems more authorative than the former – and yet a modern artist like Kafka, as Josipovici has said, ‘seem to have been able to develop and grow through an innate trust in the act of writing itself, in their willingness to embrace confusion and uncertainty and to find a new voice in the process’.

A new voice: the young Miles Davis tells his father he’s dropping out of Julliard to play in jazz clubs. That’s okay so long as you find your own style, says his father, or at least this is what’s recounted in the autobiography. Your own style, your voice: then is style to be conceived in terms of individuality, as the mark of an original artist? Is it the result of deliberate effort, to be worked at or improved?

For Deleuze, style is to be thought as a way an idiom (language, music, painting …) might be inhabited, and not in terms of the activity of a particular person. As Lecercle puts it in his account of Deleuze’s thought, ‘the subject is not the origin, but the effect of her style: the author does not have style, it is style that has an author, that is inscribed, and in a way embodied, in an author’s name’. The subject can be understood as an individual, to be sure – as this author, this musician – but it is also a collective, an assemblage that speaks through her. ‘If there is a subject, it is a subject without identity’, Deleuze writes.

Then what, in this context, does it mean to place one’s trust in writing, as opposed to the authoritative judgements of others? What of the significance of being found by style (of letting a new voice float through an assemblage), and affirming it in turn? In the beginning was the Word, the Logos – but what of the logoi that are born with style?

Leaning Against the Wind

An example. The 8 year old Thomas Bernhard is cycling, and cycling as far and as fast as he can. His bicycle belongs to his guardian, but he has reclaimed it as his own, painting it silver and cycling around the countryside. Today he has resolved to visit his Aunt in Salzburg, 22 miles away. It’s a long trip; how can a child cycle this far, and on his own? But as little Bernhard does so, it is with the dream of joining the cycling elite, even though he’s too small to reach the pedals while he is sitting on the saddle.

The 8 year old knows his trip is forbidden, that he might be punished, but he thinks his audacity will be so admired it will annul his offence. One of his stockings is torn and covered with oil; he grows weary, and the road seems to become ever longer. Then – disaster – his bicycle chain breaks, and he tumbles into a ditch. It’s dark, and there are 7 or 8 miles to go, his bike is ruined and his clothes are torn …

Reading, rereading Gathering Evidence, I imagine the mature Bernhard as an action painter, spilling great loops of paint on a canvas laid flat. Great iterative loops, again and again, but each time growing wilder, more hyperbolic, stretching the sentence. Bernhard has his eye like Pollock on the whole of the composition, but if there is structural cohesion, exemplary control, it is cohesion in collapse, and into which every detail is caught up. The book turns like a whirlwind, gathering in its massive sentences all and everything such that there is never a distinct compositional focus, and no detail matters more than any other; there’s only the whole, the all-at-once that is reaffirmed on the canvas of each of his books.

So with Bernhard’s narration of his cycling trip. The trip is the prose; to cycle like Kafka’s Red Indian, leaning into the wind is also to write against the good sense of writing. The effort of the 8 year old to climb upon on his silver-painted bike is the same as the 50 year old who writes the last volume of his memoirs …

The maelstrom of the prose is the maelstrom of language; Bernhard writes against the wind, against style in the effort of the prose, its forward movement as it gathers everything up in its momentum. How did he arrive at it, his style? By working at it, improving it – by mastering a literary skill? But its controlled madness, held together at the brink of falling apart, the great loops of the sentences rolling spastically forward is not the result of a deliberate organisation of language. Discord, disequilibrium: style strains language all the way to the point of breaking (but it does not break).

Standard language stammers, trembles and cries … but Bernhard’s inimitable style cannot be reduced to the brutality of his experiences. The events his autobiography reports are co-constituted by the manner of their telling; one feeds the other; his life is what his style permits, as it no longer represents the world, but enacts the forces that comprise it. Bernhard who writes as Van Gogh paints stars buried in the wells of night, or Pollock paints looping spirals – it is affect and intensity that dictates the content of his work, even his autobiography. Affect, intensity, as they lead Bernhard to select those events that enact what occurs when he begins to write.

Pitted Against Everything

In An Indication of the Cause, the second part of the English edition of the autobiography (though the first one Bernhard wrote), the 13 year old Bernhard takes up a scholarship in a school in Salzburg, even as the city is bring bombed from the air. Misery sweeps over him; he tries to hang himself. Bernhard’s prose is delirious with horror. In the third part, The Cellar, the 15 year old Bernhard drops out of school and takes up a position as a grocer’s apprentice in a grim housing project where he would contract tuberculosis.

‘I was pitting myself against everything’, he writes. Against the school and its teachers, against Salzburg, even against the dreams his beloved grandfather held for his protégé. Yes, against everything and leaning against the wind. The fourth volume, A Breath, does not tell of the first story Bernhard published in 1950, nor of his encounter with his lifeperson, with whom he travelled and as he later recalls, received terse encouragement for his writing.

By the time he published Frost, Bernhard discovers his style, or it finds him, such that as author, as writer, he is pitted against everything- against Salzburg, against Austria, against the Nazi past, against Austrian Catholicism: everything, and these selected, these drawn into the maelstrom of his narratives because of the style that found him and to the level of which he raised himself to be able to write. Ah, that style, that streaming that survives Bernhard and reaches us even in English translation.

In the Cold, the fifth volume, relates Bernhard’s mother’s painful death from cancer, and his own return from the sanatorium. His grandfather dies too, and he finds the death of his forebear, who laid claim to the tradition of Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, liberates his own early attempts to write. Bernhard reads his own poems to his dying mother, and it begins, that leap that takes him past the tradition of his grandfather, past philosophy and the whole of literature. A leap that braces him against the whole of what has become his past. He is the last of his line, he’s been picked out. There’ll be no other; his style is inimitable, but he is only a vortex in the whorl of his writing. Bernhard is a name for us of a plughole around which all of culture seems to swirl. But how did he pull out the plug?

The Hatred of Writing

It is not that Bernhard confirms, by his writing, the bygone world of which he was once a part and his own place within it. It is that this world is also born from his style: that a kind of hatred arises from the activity of writing. And this more than the hatred for Austria, the Nazis or the Catholic church. Or that swept up that hatred as part of its movement, its perpetual agitation.

Rereading, reflecting, I wonder if it is a surprise that the object of hatred was more fitting for an Austrian postwar writer than for others. The total compromise of authority, of state and church, and perhaps of the German language … And I think that with Bernhard the hatred that is part of style (the hatred of authority, of cultural models, or of an inherited model of literary style) met with what legitimately called forth hatred in an infinite spiral, rising up into a whirlwind of loathing, and that this was the motor of the storm of his work, that let it swirl into the stormclouds of European modernity.

How did Bernhard come to trust in his style (the style that lent itself to him, and from which as a writer he was born)? Was it through his lifeperson, who supported and encouraged his writing (but discouraged it, too, when necessary – causing him to throw whole manuscripts in the fire)? Was it the memory of his grandfather, who wrote, he said, for the unborn? Or was it as he found the correlate of its perfect storm in the horror that was perpetually reborn in Bernhard’s Austria, that fed back into the vast and looping sentences, and looping repetition of his books? But those same sentences were in search of the hatred that could justify them, and how could Bernhard, born of his style live but as he was pitted against everything?

In the beginning was the Word – is that it? Or is it that literature (modern literature, our eternally new modernity) writes against the Word as the good sense of language? In the end (modern literature always belongs to the end, to the last gasp) was the Word and the tearing down of the Word. And at the end, where writing was impossible (for modern literature begins with the impossibility of writing) is also the beginning, the logoi, the thousand styles of those writers who are born from the style they discovered and that discovered them.

Things and Their Words

Are we being duped by language, by the circulation it permits of words and things? Perhaps words and things might be other than they are, and we might dream not, perhaps of a new logos, of a way of naming everything anew all at once, but (following Sinthome) of logoi of different levels and different conjunctions with which language (different languages, different idioms) might intersect.

Think, as an example, of the narrator of Handke’s Repetition, rereading the study books of his disappeared brother. The brother had grown up speaking German, but learned to write in Slovenian at agricultural school. Until he came across his brother’s notebooks, the narrator had been repelled by Slovenian, since it sounded to him menacing and associated with authority, sounding like an ungainly hybrid, full of borrowed words.

But the words in the Slovenian-German dictionary the narrator consults tell the narrator of a tender and peaceable people who still have names for the humblest of things – for the space under the windowsill, or the shiny trace of a braked wagon wheel on a stone flagstone. A people who had names for the intimate and small, for places of hiding and places of safety. And the narrator finds himself weeping for ‘things and their words’ – for can be named in Slovenian and seem to call in him to look towards a similar kind of naming, a new circulation of words and things in his German.

He finds the word Kindschaft, literally childscape, but which also has the meaning of filiation of adoption. For what is the narrator looking? To rediscover a relation with a people through the notebooks left by his brother, to be sure. But also – since the novel is narrated twenty years after the narrator started reading those notebooks, and has begun his only journey into Slovenia and into Slovenian – to rediscover his relation to German, his filiation.

It is by placing one sentence after another the narrator says at one point that he discovers his forebears (he is named after a Slovenian hero). One German sentence after another, as Slovenian – his brother’s Slovenian – awakens in him a new logoi within language, not simply an idiom, but a way of drawing things into that new baptism he discovers in the wind blowing over the Karst region on his remembered journey.

A New Circulation

But how might a new circulation occur for us? Not simply through the agency of particular individuals, by individual agency. In another post, Sinthome argues that the individual must be thought in the context of more complex networks, through whom local connections harden themselves into what is taken for granted in the social world through those feedback loops that reinforce and replicate particular forms of social relation. Does this mean what the individual agent does does not matter? Rather that to think the individual without the structure is to forget the interdependency, the relation of inter-determination between these terms; the same, of course, if one privileges structure, treating it as invariable and eternal, forgetting thereby the fluid dynamism of social relations.

Neither structure nor individual exist in their own right; in the case of language, it cannot be thought either in terms of the exclusivity of the structure – of language in itself, considered at the level of a linguistic structure, that is, as a set of differential oppositions that define phonemic relations, as opposed to speech, in which a particular subset of relations are selected from the system. This means language is never entirely in possession of the individual; it is not ‘in’ the agent at all. We might say the agent is in language, and that language is a trans-subjective phenomenon.

For Deleuze and Guattari, to whom Sinthome directs us when thinking of structures and individuals, language is not representational, whether this is understood literally, that is, in terms of its exactitude or truth, or figuratively, that is, indirectly (and without the hierarchy between the literal and the figural) … Language, rather, is in the world acting within it and mixing with it; as such, it does not simply facilitate communication by means of referring to the shared world of a given society, but is itself a structuring process that constructs that world.

Yes, language lends itself to the production of a stable plane of meaning and subjects who communicate that meaning that gives rise to the account of the representational theory of language, but there is also the chance that it introduces an instability into that plane, distributing the relationship between word and world anew. For this relationship is one of circulation rather than representation, according to Lecercle’s formulation; words do not signify things, but are themselves things. But how is this circulation to be thought?

Deleuze and Guattari do not take interlocution as it involves a sender, who uses language to convey what is to be said, and a receiver, who listens and might therefore understand as the paradigm case of language. Meaning is not only what is meant; speaker and listener are part of an unstable relation of forces that means the relation between the represented and what would be represented is never simply given.

Language does not represent, but enacts – this is familiar from speech-act theory. But Deleuze and Guattari are reaching beyond the individualism with which, traditionally, this theory has been associated, focusing on the formation of order words or slogans [mots d’ordre] as part of what they call ‘a collective assemblage of enunciation’ – ‘that mixture of bodies, instruments, institutions and utterances, which speaks the speaker’.

As such, their concern is not with meaning, intention or interpretation but with those relations of power [rapports de force] that are ascribed and inscribed by utterances. The origin of language is neither author nor speaker; it is not ‘je parle’ that matters, but ‘on parle‘, or ‘il y a du langage’. It is from the anonymous position of the ‘on‘ that language must be thought.

Indirect Style

This is what they mean by claiming that all language is spoken first of all in an indirect style, which brings us to the section of A Thousand Plateaus quoted by Sinthome:

If language always seems to presuppose itself, if we cannot assign it a nonlinguistic point of departure, it is because language does not operate between something seen (or felt) and something said, but always goes from saying to saying.

The point of departure is not the individual who attempts to represent the world, but other narrative, as it forms part of a more complex assemblage. The utterance [énonce], for Deleuze and Guattari the basic unit of their analysis is a social act; it is not first of all declarative, an assertion about a state of affairs, but an order word as it is produced in that mixture that speaks the speaker.

We believe that narrative consists not in communicating what one has seen but in transmitting what one has heard, what someone else said to you. Hearsay[….] The ‘first’ language, or rather the first determination of language, is not the trope or metaphor but indirect discourse[….] Language is not content to go from a first party to a second part, from one who has seen to one who has not, but necessarily goes from a second party to a third party, neither of whom has seen.

On this model, communication is not the transmission of sign as information about the world, but the ‘transmission of the word as order-word’; ‘language is a map, not a tracing’. A map – then at issue is a philosophy of language that does without the grammatical subject [sujet de l’énoncé] or even the utterer [sujet de l’énonciation]; it is outside the subject that we find the utterance as it circulates in an assemblage. And likewise, Deleuze and Guattari think the psyche not as enclosed domain, an interiority, but as an exteriority; likewise, the unconscious is not to be found inside but outside us.

Then language is not simply that system of signs that would facilitate communication through reference to a shared world, but is itself a structuring process that constructs a world. A process that can be frozen into the representative conception of language, as it depends upon a stable plane of speaker and spoken, word and world, but that can also take an axe to break up the frozen sea inside us, as Kafka said.

Kindschaft

For what kind of utterance is the narrator of Handke’s novel searching? For a people, perhaps – a people in whose rough-hewn features he might discover kinship and beauty. ‘Each man of us the next man’s hero’, he dreams; each alive ‘in an immanent word obedient to the laws of weather, of sowing, repeating, and animal diseases, a world apart from, before or alongside history’. For a people – no: for another distribution of words and things in his own language.

And as it occurs, I think, in the story he narrates, even as he speaks of the things and words that call out from him in Slovenian from the heart of his childhood. And this is what makes the narrator (and Handke, too) more than a nostalgist, and the people (the Slovenes) more than those who might be celebrated in a simpleminded nationalism. The people of the Karst through which the narrator travelled became insurrectionaries (the Tolmin uprising); but in the brother’s time, they dispersed (taking the brother with them). And in their withdrawal the narrative, the act of narrating (Repetition itself) opens his German to another kind of Kindschaft.

‘My purpose had not been to find my brother but to tell a story about him’. To repeat the journey of his brother, retracing it, does not necessitate a literal reduplication. For it is the journey into a language that is being repeated, and the Bildungsroman of his brother’s treatise on husbandry. Living this repetition as an encounter with things and their language, letting them dance in that roundplay in which the world us held back for a moment before being baptised anew.

The narrator calls his brother his forebear. It is this forebear who still watches in kindness over him, and over his own starting-out into Slovenia to strengthen his peace and the peace of writing. ‘The only effective forebear, this much I know, is the sentence preceding the one I am writing now’.

Who speaks in Handke’s novel? What speaks? A Slovenia to come, followers of the one who said ‘that the Emperor was a mere servant and that people had better take matters into their own hands’? A Slovenian, giving words to things anew? Or this language as a gap within the narrator’s German, between language as it represents and as it acts, and as the novel Repetition is an act, letting words mix with the world? And finally, perhaps, it is writing that speaks as it lets resound the outside of language as it belongs to no one. Who speaks? It speaks; on, one.

I think that this is how the assemblage of which Deleuze and Guattari write quivers into being. Writing is the path that follows itself, and that does so through the books of the world, of which Handke’s novel is one. And that writes of itself and sings of itself by way of what is told, and springs up above them like a rainbow. As Mark comments, ‘all writing is writing about writing even if it doesn’t refer to itself as such’ … About writing, which is to say, itself, its own act, as words become things, as language ranges out into the world, acts …

And now I imagine writing as the river that has cut itself a valley through that mixture of bodies, instruments, institutions and utterances that form, for Deleuze and Guattari, the collective assemblage of enunciation. Or, better, it is writing that turns each component of this mixture into a line, a river in each and a river as whole. One speaks; language speaks: so speaks the unconscious, outside. So it speaks as writing.

The Writing on the Walls

Can an order word become a word of disorder? Perhaps that is what flashed up on the walls during the Events of May 1968. We might remember the handbills and pamphlets distributed in those weeks from the Committee of Writers which were subsequently published as ‘mots de désordre’ and identified as the work of Blanchot. As his work – but Blanchot was not alone – there were the other members of the Committee, who worked together to formulate ideas to which they could all sign their names, and of course the participants of the Events themselves.

Tracts, posters, bulletins; street words, infinite words; it is not some concern for effectiveness that makes them necessary. Whether effective or not, they belong to the decision of the moment. They appear, they disappear. They do not say everything, on the contrary they ruin everything, they are outside everything.

There will still be books, and worse still, fine books. But the writing on the walls, a mode that is neither inscriptional not elocutionary, the tracts hastily distributed in the street that are a manifestation of the haste of the street, the posters that do not need to be read but are there as a challenge to all law, the disorderly words, the words, free of discourse, that accompany the rhythm of our steps, the political shouts – and bulletins by the dozen like this bulletin, everything that unsettles, appeals, threatens and finally questions without waiting for a reply, without coming to rest in certainty, will never be confined by us in a book, for a book, even when open, tends towards closure, which is a refined form of repression.

A complex assemblage: the man Blanchot, ‘pale but real’ as Hollier remembers, the writer part of the Committee (with Duras and others); the stop [arrêt] put to the book, of the liberal-capitalist world with which the Events were a break; what Blanchot calls Communism, intolerable, intractable, as it is excluded from any already constituted community – that foreign party [le parti de l’étranger] that points the way outside – ‘out from religion, the family and the State’, as Marx said when he called for the end of alienation (of what constitutes the human being as interiority, comments the author of these lines (‘Blanchot’, an effect of this fragmentary discourse, of language outside …). 

And isn’t this what Deleuze and Guattari seek with their philosophy of language: not only to show that language is already outside, but to point a way that we might live in accordance with what falls outside us?

A community is not a people, says Blanchot. Communism leads us outside all interiorities. Is it possible to read the narrator’s Slovenia (and perhaps Handke’s) as more than a nationalism, as a celebration of a people (this is something Steve has been discussing for a long time)? And Repetition as being more than a book (what Blanchot names as a book)?

Language, says Sinthome, is nothing apart from ‘the ongoing operations of language in its use by speakers’. There are speakers and nothing else; just bodies between which relations of feedback allow there to emerge language itself – an ‘itself’ that is given through those particular acts that take place in concert, together: language is thus an intersubjective act, an ongoing co-constitution that is channelled in particular ways.

Language ‘itself’ – but there is no itself; only practices, channellings that feedback in various ways, changing language and, no doubt, changing the referents of language, making perceptible different features of the world, insofar as relations and interactions have a primacy over predicates, properties and substances (to paraphrase another post).

The question is not what we can know about the referent, but what they are insofar as they are brought into relation with us and are nothing outside of this relation. There is no in-itself to the world, nothing that stands apart from what is involved with them. Language does not represent the world, but co-constitutes it and between us, changing the sense of that ‘between’.

Then language is never given in itself just as the world is never itself, or in itself; it lives only as a relation, only in those relation of feedback that let it be channelled and hardened into particular idioms, particular natural languages.

And yet. Is there a way in which language might appear as it is set back from the capacity to refer, the way it calls forward a world? Is there a way of speaking, of writing, that would withdraw language into itself as claws into a cat’s paw, with no link, now, to the world outside of language?

Of course not. Language depends upon its users, and the world it allows them to co-constitute and share. And yet – what if there were a way that, while referring, even as it refers, belonging to a world or to a fragment of the world it simultaneously suspends reference, holding itself back.

This might be understood as a withdrawal into that dimension from which language might leap forward again, constituting, co-constituting the world in a new sense, naming things anew. That language has disappeared into itself to gather its powers.

But what if there were no powers, and nothing to gather. What if language were lost in itself somehow, that it dreamt, but of nothing in particular, that it moved through itself like fog in fog? Language that refers but without holding onto a world and without changing it. That refers, but hardly so, touching the world, brushing it, but too lightly? Language that has hardly anything to do with the world, loosening its powers from within?

This a dream, not an argument. Language ‘itself’, language that as it were lifts itself from the relations that give it reality. The ties of relation slackened. Telegraph wires drooping down to the earth. And then drooping so far as to be lost as in an eddy, a relation lost in itself, turning in itself. In which the most ordinary word loses itself in itself, and all of language is there, groaning, rumbling and without saying a thing.

I wonder if this is what Serres calls noise. I wonder whether language doesn’t become noise there where relation turns around itself like the tiger who ran round the tree until he became butter. And that all words between us might not turn thus, the most ordinary word becoming extraordinary, and no questions or answers making sense anymore.

Language itself, but not a substance. Language as relation, but that has withdrawn as relation, turning in itself, lost in itself, and dreaming of nothing in particular. And now imagine this wheel of fire turning through you, and that you, as speaker, as writer, are only that empty place where noise rumbles without words, but in words.

In words, with words, but apart from them. Saying nothing other than them, but hollowing out saying within saying. And saying itself, language itself, the cat’s paw without claws.

Language itself, but with no in itself. Itself as relation, and the turning of relation. The messenger who’s forgotten what is to be sent. The deserter who knows no longer what he left or what he’s looking for. The nomad without destination. An event that happens because it does, and for no reason. The without why of Silesius’s rose.

How to endure language itself? To let it pass, without getting in the way (but then it only goes deeper underground, looping there)? How to find that passage of language as smooth as a snake’s back in the sand, pure streaming? By what formulas might you wait for it? What words that it might shake apart, the whole sea of sense swelling like a tsunami?

‘I haven’t said a thing’, you will say, but your tongue is thick. Why are prophets inarticulate? Why are they said to stammer? I think prophets speak only of speech, and of the to-come of speech. Of the return of what was never there, noise at the edge of sense, language lost before reference and across it. Language that never comes in sense, never arrives, and for this reason belongs to the future.

A futural language, language itself, murmuring of itself and awaiting itself, as all of language seems to sink towards it, just as the sand must do to the ant drawn into the pit of an antlion. But a sinking that occurs between us, from one to the other. From one who addresses the Other, who becomes so (gaining a capital letter) only by drawing language itself forward, and letting it speak.

Language itself – is this what might be named by the saying, rather than the said, as it bears speech, the whole of what is said and might be said? Itself – and this as difference, as a kind of relief, the river finding the sea?

But it is not you who address the Other, but language itself. Language itself in you, as you, letting you become the anonymous current of speech, a river in which you have not stepped, and not even once. ‘I spoke’. – ‘You took up a position within speech.’ – ‘I spoke’. – ‘Language gave you a position to speak, just as it will take it away’.

But how to speak this speech? How to let it resound? But you can hear it anywhere. In gossip, for example, in rumour without substance, mere hearsay. In the whisper of pages of celebrity magazines. In the oceans of wrecked blogs, abandoned and unread. In the mausoleum of vanished languages. Or in a old page of wood s lot, from 5 years ago, half the links dead. Or in a sky crowded with dead satellites, beaming no message to anyone. In Major Tom orbiting the earth …

A neglected language. An automatic one, lapping between surrealists. Or returning on the couch of Doctor Freud. The speech of the savant or the medium, closed eyed, speaking without thought. ‘I didn’t mean what I said’. ‘I forgot every word’.

Of course, in the end, language can never be itself, that is, separated from every relation. It cannot tear itself away, or not refer. It belongs to relation and to the movement of relation. And to that movement where it seems to lose itself, to be in lieu of itself, that is, without relation.

A dream. In gossip, in chatter, language looks for itself without knowing it.

Empty Forms

Tired, so this again and for the hundredth time….

The word ‘I’ is not a concept, that would grasp this particular tree in terms of a universal. Nor does it refer to that particular in its singularity, since the ‘I’ is wholly taken over by anyone who speaks. But here, it is not as if there first exists a subject who then expresses himself using language. The ‘I’ is a position afforded by language that gives birth to the subject.

Benveniste (via): ‘In some way language puts forth "empty" forms which each speaker, in the exercise of their discourse, appropriates to himself and which he relates to his "person"’. But note the capacity of the speaker to relate such forms to himself depends upon his birth as a speaker. He does not take up the empty form of the ‘I’, since he, as a subject, does not pre-exist the personal pronoun. Then language is not first of all personal, but the condition of the subject who can then use pronouns. Somehow – strange miracle – the subject takes up a position with respect to the impersonal streaming, the ’empty forms’ of language. It appears as a subject. But what appears?

The subject does not pre-exist language. And yet now there is a self that can speak. ‘Can speak’ – but from where does this power come? Is the self (is it yet a self?) fated to language? Can it not not speak? Either way, as subject, it has the power to speak: the ability, with respect to language (and not just over language), to be able. Somehow, it is given that power. The power comes from that movement that catches up the not-yet-self, the pre-subject, and makes of it a subject.

Fated to speak, then, and to have power over speech. But only by taking over and animating the empty forms of language. Forms, concepts, that pre-exist the subject and will outlive him. Language that streams with him – without you or I – but to which we owe what we can be. The murmuring of language that streams behind us like the tail of a comet, and streams after us, the tail of other comets, speakers, who come to themselves as you came, and so did I.

Lean Into the Wind

You speak; you’ve made a dent in the streaming of language. Speak – and you’ve made a stand in speech, although it is by means of speech that you’ve made this stand. But what kind of stand is this? To let the wind pass over the aeolian harp you are. To let current seize the vessel of your life. Not a stand then, but a granting. A being granted with respect to which you are not the origin and that is not within your power. Lean into the wind, like little Bernhard on his grandfather’s bike. Lean into the streaming of language and let it catch you. And be gathered to the position of subject as the wind carries up the clocks of dandelions and disperses them.

We know Heidegger looks beyond idle chatter and aimless curiosity. That what matters is to speak in your own name (even if the power to speak belongs to the ability to be that being also grants; being is mine, says Heidegger – remember that), and as only you can speak. A stand must be taken; no – it has already been taken, insofar as being always gives itself in individuated Dasein. There is a stand to be taken, the position ‘I’ that must be reconquered. What else but authenticity is this? No longer the marshes and valleys of curiosity. No longer the fields over which rumour and idle talk pass like the wind. Speak as being-there allows you to speak. Speak from the mountaintop from which everything can be surveyed.

But those same winds – gossip, rumour – are ways in which the impersonality of language gives itself to be experienced. Notions belong to no one. Gossip never substantiated, that floats free of any particular event. And idle talk – where we speak of what happens to others and never to ourselves; where language fails to attach itself to the stability and self-presence of an ‘I’. But stability? Self-presence? Does being really give itself as what is mine?

Perhaps we could say being is never mine; that it trails after me from the impersonal field of language an experience that belongs to no one in particular. Being is not mine, then; it is the impersonality of language, empty forms and concepts in their perpetual streaming. An impersonality that remains impersonal, and returns as such, dissolving the opposition authenticity-inauthenticity.

Then a different account of the genesis of the speaking subject than Heidegger. Prepersonal syntheses of various kinds (Deleuze, Simondon) and then the coming to itself of the ‘I’ through language (Hegel, Blanchot). (My version of what Sinthome said, one time or another).

Black Meat

Think of Bernhard instead, at his farm or away from it, in hotels in Italy or Spain, where he did most of his writing. Bernhard showing his manuscripts to his lifeperson, who pronounces upon them, tells him to publish or discard. Showing her beginnings of manuscripts, and asking, shall I go on? And in between writing – you can’t write all the time -, overseeing the renovation of his farmhouse, or of the other farmhouses he buys.

Think of him as he first begins to write, as he finds the strength to continue. Narrators much like the narrators in all his books. Each pretty similar to the other. But the strength to begin again, to see through a book! The strength to hold it together, to write through the days and nights! To let himself be caught and borne up the rhythms of language. And in the breaks of that rhythm, like the hard carapace of a lobster cracked open: the meat of language in its density, its thickness. Language in its black, glistening darkness, there before any story, before anyone could say ‘I’.

There are no autobiographies. Or none that can reach back into the black blood that surges before the beginning. Impersonal language, like a sea of oil. Language whose waves must part before anyone can say ‘I’. No autobiographies. For how might you write of your birth into language?

What did Bernhard discover when he wrote Frost (or when his first story was published, or his first poem)? Language open to enclose him. As though he had struggled back up the stream; he found his way to the head of the waters, to the rivers rising on the mountains where there were no speakers yet. To write – isn’t to come under the spell of the origin? To travel back through language until there was no speaker yet. Or is it to travel forward, when language breaks like black oil upon no shore?

And once you have begun to write there is no end, just as there is no end to speech. One book, another. One and then another, all the way up to the end. Newfoundland: wasn’t that to be the last book, the last feast, when language breaks open its carapace? When it reveals itself as only black oil, black blood, black meat?

Speech Adrift

And now I think of the voiceovers in Malick’s films. That drift across the scenes, almost despite them. Voices speaking, but saying what. It is as if, with Malick, what they say is the Same. A voice belonging to a man or a woman. Belonging to them, but also somehow, not of them. A voice that is not quite their voice, that stretches what they say into a membrane through which something else shines. The glow of speech behind speech. Of the ‘that there is’ that speaks speech. Isn’t that the Same that is always said, the saying of the said?

Speech drifts across Malick’s films. It is allowed to drift, until you’re unsure who’s speaking. As you listen, you know you’re close to something. But to what? Not to the presence of the speaker who speaks with speech. But to the presence of speech, just that, the ‘that there is’ of speech, of language that sings neutral-voiced, neutralising, with all that is said.

Speech drifts in Malick’s films. Until it seems to speak as speak the continuity shots – the chameleon half hidden against the bark, the vermillion parrot that turns its head – as part of a whole order of which the human being is part. Part of an order, but that is not that of nature, the natural. It is not that speech speaks like the parrots squawk.

I admit I distrust the visual, the splendours of the visual. Films seem a kind of pornography to me, that is, except for a very few. They’re too visible, and so rarely have room for speech. But Malick is different, who sets speech adrift like a log that slips along a jungle stream. Malick stays close to the origin of the world, of subjects, of speakers. Not to nature, understand, in its simple immensity, but to that leap that lets speech lift itself from what is natural and makes it gratuitous, wayward. As though it had torn apart the immanence of what is. With Malick, speech rides the origin like the log its water …

Why does Malick refuse interviews and to be photographed? There are no autobiographies. But perhaps, with Malick, everything is autobiography, whole films, as they let voices hover close to where they are brought to birth. Everything – as Malick diffuses his existence across the existences of those who are brought to life in his films. Everything is autobiography, but only as it is the entry into language that is allowed to express itself – that and the comet’s tail it cannot help but trail behind.

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 …

Ill and at home, but well enough again to read. Which book? I have a wall of books piled up. That one: Duras, Lol V. Stein. That one again, and not because it is familiar. To reread this one is to be gathered up again around its mystery, as though it replaced my own heart. But isn’t that the joy: to be gathered around what I cannot enclose, the outside inside, which means this new heart is as great and as wide as the night, and the space within is like the space without, as though I could take vast astronomical x-rays of quasars, planets’ rings and stray comets. As though that evisceration of which Mishima used to dream was already accomplished, and I could know my innards were always bleeding outwards to the stars.

Duras’s words are pieces of light, I tell myself, streaming above me. Absolute words, flashing like the light above the poles: how is it they have seemed to have detached themselves from anyone – from her narrator, and from Duras herself? How was she able to place word after word that it was another who spoke in her, that it was all of narration that gathered itself up to speak? As though it were the pressure of time, pressing itself forward in words that flash. Ah, but what does any of this mean?

The young Mishima felt words falling within him; he wrote. At sixteen, he was admitted into an elite literary club. His friend Kawabata – who eviscerated himself only a few months after Mishima (though he was Mishima’s senior, his advisor, and, unlike him, a Nobel laureate) – knew that such a writer only appeared every two hundred years.

No doubt – but Mishima also felt those falling words a sickness and sought to hone his body in the sun in recompense. No doubt he was right to fear those falling words, that made themselves, with him, into stories, essays, plays of all kinds, in but a single draft, knowing that as they were given to him, they were also turned away.

Opaque pebbles. Markers on what gameboard? He didn’t understand. They played him. They fell, indifferently, into the abyss they’d opened in his heart. No stalagmite in him could reach up to touch the source of their instreaming. For a long time, he bent his neck and words fell hard like rain across it. Then he raised his face, his eyes, and looked up through the words. High above, at the cave’s summit, the sun. And it was the sun that he would reach to him.

I think it was the dream of his death that allowed his words to flash. Death, that would join him to a sun above writing. A dream, for certain. There is no silence, only murmuring. Pythagoras was right: the universe is noisy. The planets turn in their gyres and a great roaring is heard. It is that we must stop hearing to hear. To speak with silence, and not words, if only to hear what will not be silenced.

What did Mishima hear as he died in the characters he let die by evisceration? The roaring of the sun, heard from within the sun. What did he see? Light, as it’s seen within the source of light. He knew what would come to befall him. It was the object of his erotic fantasies, and he staged his death over and again in his stories. He rehearsed for death – but death had already reached him. He wanted to silence the words, to make his body all surface without depth. There would be no dark, interior space within which words would fall, only brightness, as rain falls flashing in the sun.

But what does this mean? That it is my some kind of break that writing might be allowed to echo the ceaseless streaming of language. Some break, some block, as though there had to be a rack upon which the author is stretched. White sheets of agony – yes. But imagine an agony that is owned by no one and a rack upon which no one is stretched. Is it the body of the night that is pulled apart? Is it light that is torn into jagged flecks? Now I imagine it is all of language that turns there like a Chinese dragon. Turns, and is turned against us. Language seeks to attain itself. Molten language, words and sentences still, but running. Isn’t that what flashes in Mishima’s words and in those of Duras?

What are their characters? Wicker men and women to be sacrificed. What are their stories? Offerings to be burned. What unfolds in the time of their narratives? The setting fire of time; the sacrifice that must always happen again.

Language doubled, language that no longer disappears into mediation: how does it call you, how does it come to claim you? When the right word does not come, perhaps: when the word that would allow you to speak eludes you and, in its absence, seems to unjoin your capacity to speak from itself. When you stammer, and language seems to stammer, according to a rhythm that interrupts the rhythm of speech. Or is it arrhythmical, the voice that joins yours? Stuttering, hesitancy – distrust the ability to speak. Speak by way of blocks and breaks. Then what you cannot say joins what you say. Speak, and it is not only you that is speaking.

Or – another example – speak by way of what everyone says. Engage gossip, be engaged by the rumour – pass speech along without detaining it; speak of nothing, of nothing in particular, and least of all yourself. Lightness of a speaking that belongs to no one. Light speech, that seems to stream without reference to what is said.

And then there is the speech of the infatuated – errant, wandering because it cannot yet pose what is obvious: the fact of attraction. Speech wanders from what both parties would want it to say. Wandering speech, that speaks by way of what cannot be said. Think of the dialogues of Henry James.

And still another kind of speech – the one that accompanies images, but seems to have little to do with what is presented. That belongs to itself, that clears a space for itself, letting those images become more dense and more strange. The poems of Tarkovsky’s father in Mirror. The dialogue in Godard’s In Praise of Love. What are they saying? What is going on? And the image of the Seine, the bridges: what does it mean? Errant speech, again. Wandering speech, once again.

And finally, the free association of the analysand, the automatic writing of the Surrealist: it comes close that murmuring that undoes the sense of speech, that seems to indicate a secret meaning only for meaning to withdraw its measure. Who speaks? What speaks? ‘A modest recording device’, says Breton, and now we cross from speech to writing.

Write, tell, until writing chokes its own channel. Write until the grit fills the filter. What was it that you meant to say? What did you mean to write? Writing lives its own life, away from you. Lives it, and draws what you write of your life into its streaming. Indifferent to you, turned away from you, concerned with itself, only it has no ‘itself’ and has no face. Setting your life quietly aflame. Setting what you have written coldly aflame.

Or there is a practice of fiction that leads narrative away from chronologically arranged sequences to their interruption and their condition. That speaks of what makes writing strange to itself and its writer as it pushes back before the capacity to speak, to write, was first granted. A before that never issues into a beginning, but accompanies it, doubling, mocking it, parodying the certainty with which it cannot coincide. Dub writing. Hauntology.

Or poetry, performative writing, that burns up a life, sacred speech that catches flame in words detourned from the world, in a naming that names the world’s absence, its interruption. Or the painted word, Cy Twombly at the Tate: what is he trying to write, aphasiac, in the half-light. What has written? But writing has written in those blazing words. Writing where words let speak the speaking of words.

Or song, where the voice floods sense with nonsense. Flooded sense, pools where darkness burns in darkness – a singer possessed, dispossessed. Who has lost herself by way of her voice. Her voice is loss. Lyrics that double what is lost by way of that loss. Cat Power. The desolation of singing. You Are Free: but by what freedom? The voice lost in its own corridors. Lyrics lost without sense. But the ‘without’ blooming like a night flower.

Or the choked blog, like a dawn marsh with steaming fog. A blog running nowhere, standing water, stagnant water. Or that is like rusted metal, turned all colours. Or the objects from Stalker’s nightstand underwater. An encrusted hull in drydock. A throat filled with mucus.

In the beginning there was language, say that. In the beginning, language set itself back from the beginning, the fact of speaking from the capacity to speak, so that it might always return, regardless of the will of anyone who spoke, who wrote. But what returned?

Failed language, language whose sense was suspended in sense: a word that referred but also suspended this reference – a sentence that presented only a parody of sense. Language seemed to be given twice over – firstly as that gift that allowed you to speak of the world, but then again as what robbed speech of speech: the fascination of words, the drone or the mantra, the sung words of ritual or the magic words of incantation. Right away, language belonged on the side of the sacred – it separated itself from itself, and the world from the world.

Language itself: but how can language be experienced as language? Only when the sacred is reduced to itself, when there is nothing divine. The sacred, the separate – certain kinds of writing, of speech follow the detour of sense, but by way of sense. Language was led to itself, but only because its author, its speaker, was ensorcelled, was lost in a trance. Led to itself, but not by one who would use language, who would dispose of it.

In the beginning, language, but language set itself back from the capacity to speak, to write. Always the chance of a writing, a speaking to come. Always the chance of return and by way of what spoke, what wrote, without the will of the speaker, the writer. By way of fate, then – by necessity. But also by freedom, language’s freedom, as it opens, through a sudden leap, that space that gives speaking and writing life anew.

Their rebirth, their eternal novelty, but only by way of came before – by that writing over which none of us could exert our power. Does this mean, then, that language only belongs to a greater order of power, that, like God, it lets open the field of creation, the playground of possibility? But the terror is that no power belongs to it; there is no language itself. Unless this names only that wandering that lays claim to writing as it fascinates the speaker, the writer, and fascinates her listeners, her readers in turn.

Is it necessary to know whether we are being duped by language? It is perfectly familiar: the words which stream round us, directed by the media, ruled by the demands of sales and viewing figures, are motivated not so much as by imparting information as of attracting interest. The same for our politicians, who seek to appeal to what they take to be the desires of their audience. But whose attention do they seek? The readers, viewers and listeners whose desires they claim to discover in focus groups and surveys. What they seek is to confirm a consensual reality – the circulation of words and things, values and signs according to the general equivalent of what are presumed to be the narcissistic investments of particular groups: the ‘caps and gowns,’ the ‘pools and patio’ etc. Ultimately what matters is drawing a line between our friends and families, people like us and the outsiders, prowlers and scroungers.

Are we so easily duped? We expect little else; this is the age of Sloterdijk’s cyncism: we know what we do, but we will do it anyway. Our leaders appeal to words like good and evil which echo feebly in a direction they cannot reach. Are they, these words, the sources of value of an older, more stable world? A world in which, unlike ours, meaning had not began to volatilise? But it is too late and this is why we are cynical: the great unloosening has already happened. There are no longer names and the values attached to those names, but a kind of streaming, a flow of language deterritorialised from traditional markers. Like capital in the Communist Manifesto, such language is the great liquefier of reality, stripping away every value except its own, which no longer has any intrinsic worth. What matters is surplus value, or in the realm to which the media and politicians seek success, surplus attention.

What does it matter whether we are being duped by language? Words, signs, hollow idols, believe and desire in our place. new commanders of language are like the capitalists Marx and Engels tell us are born from the streaming of capital. Are we are the workers to whom will fall the great task of remaking language and remaking the world? Workers who have yet to awaken to their revolutionary potential? But we have already awoken, and this is the tragedy: we know too much; we are no longer innocent; we know, but we carry on regardless. The great lesson of 1992 General Election in the UK: polls predicting the victory of the Labour Party were in error – why? Because no one wanted to admit they would vote Conservative.

‘Outside language’: outside the language we take to be at our disposal. Words substitute themselves for singular experiences. No: the experiences themselves are already mediated, according to their significance in a system of discourse. But this significance, the sign they are made to bear, the values they are made to reflect, does not exhaust the being of language.

The language of the immediate – this is only a very crude way of invoking the excessiveness of language above signs and values. Language as indication – language which points beyond its letter in the manner of Apollo at Delphi; language as the speech of Pythia which calls for an interpretation which can never have the last word: this is an unsubstitutable experience. Singularity marks itself on the body of language. It is inscribed there.

Exhausted language, frayed language: perhaps it is not a question of the being of language but that experience which prevents language from suggesting any kind of permanence or stability. Language which does not posit. Irresponsible language? Certainly it is spurious (of dubious birth) – its illegitimacy arouses the philosopher’s suspicions: here is a language which will not settle itself into a thesis. A sceptical language (although scepticism is also philosophy). It is never a question of leaving philosophy behind, but of opening in philosophy, as philosophy, the experience which scepticism names.

Maintain this opening in the name of philosophy. In the name, perhaps, of what Kant called critique, or Husserl phenomenology: an awakening or vigilance, an insomnia which awakens us from a world which cannot help but totalise itself, lending itself to a movement of identification. Philosophy, scepticism: these names events in language. Events which find a locus in a certain kind of writing. In literature? – Yes, in a certain experience of literature. In what is called ‘ethics’? This word is too imposing. Write, simply, of the opening to the Other. An opening which is neither good or bad. Which marks itself into the play of language.

When you speak a kind of substitution occurs. Speak and the words you speak, if they are to be intelligible, are not your words; others have said them and others still will say them; there are always others to say the same, as if, over an infinite expanse of time, it is the same that would be repeated, the same sentences in the same order (however dubious this cosmological hypthesis might be). No escape: then language itself is infinite, everywhere, it is the condition of our experience over which we assert only a borrowed mastery. No exit! It is as if language were a fine, glistening web that had spread over everything, covering our faces and our mouths: impersonal horror. But this is still to evince nostalgia for a true speech, for an uncovered mouth, for an edenic language which would name everything again.

Proceed in another direction. It is a question of what is outside the movement of sense and was outside from the start. But outside with respect to what? With respect to the language that places itself at my disposal. For the most part, language functions. And when it does not? When I lose my power over language? When the capacity to speak, to find a word, fails me? When I fall from my capacity to express myself? Then I am lost in the frozen ocean where words emerge from the obscurity like ice-bergs, drifting, vast and in their stillness, they no longer offer themselves as the means by which I might communicate with others. My words? No one’s words, for the ship of meaning has shattered against them and gone under.

Stranded words. Now they are detached even from the possibility of exchange, like coins from an abandoned currency. Yet, like those coins, obscure markers, they become nonsubstitutable, valuable to no one. Who would dare linger in their presence? Only those who have to linger there, for whom speaking, writing, for one reason or another, is no longer possible. But for these powerless speakers, another substitution has occured. Who are they, as they speak, as they fail to speak? Who are they, the ones stranded amid words (and not only words, but sentences, too – tendrils which lead nowhere)? Those who fall beneath the power to appropriate language and thereby outside the world which, through communication, is held in common.

I admit it: I am completely lost before the massive task of writing the new book. I am too busy at work, for one thing: there are constant administrative tasks and a huge flood of essays to mark. Then there is a low level illness which prevents me from ever assembling any thoughts, or following from one idea to another. Still, these are good days: summer is here, my loud neighbour has moved out, I can get to sleep at a reasonable hour…. But the frustration of falling below the level of work!

The Sisyphean task, every day, to take out my notebook and try and write from what I have written there – it is absurd, work without work, a wheel idly spinning and nothing is done. A list of posts I shall have to write to fill in gaps in the book on my whiteboard: Levinas on illeity, the fragment, Hegel on Heraclitus, and, most bafflingly: exteriority – being (how pretentious!) Then there is W.’s book manuscript on a similar topics to my published book and the one I am writing with which I torment myself with – am I right? Is he right? We can’t both be right! What does it matter who is right? Isn’t it philosophy that is at issue – the attempt to do philosophy (whatever that means)?

Doing philosophy? What a luxury! And one you can’t afford! You are a writer, a humble writer, I say to myself, knowing straightaway this is sheer affectation. Still there is the chance of redeeming the first book in the second – this is the ruse: write another book, always another, to erase the mistakes of the last one. But to write another book is to make new mistakes, so the path to yet another book is cleared.

Sisyphean task! Laughter at the great comedy of the academic writer. Who will read the book? What does it matter? It’s exhausting – it exhausts me! Where did I learn that ponderous style? Here I am, at the office. On a Saturday at the beginning of summer. Tomorrow, the Lake District – that is a consolation. Today – is too long; I know nothing will begin, that what failed to begin yesterday and all the other days will fail again today.

Why does the experience of the neutrality of language (as described in the previous post) escape most novels? Because they are content to reflect the world back to itself – because language is not uncanny, or its uncanniness lies solely in its capacity to effect a representation. Because language is made to bend to the virtuoso’s will– the novelist who is all too present, all too obtrusive. But then to allow sentence to fall gently after sentence – is it a matter of the novelist’s will? Is it a question, here, of what the novelist sets out to accomplish, or might one write of a kind of necessity or fate within writing itself? A fate that plays itself across the work of different authors?

The danger of imparting a kind of volition to writing is obvious: a dualistic metaphysics, where writing takes the place of what Schopenhauer would call the will. But to invoke writing is a way of figuring those movements which traverse the human being without being reducible to a particular will. For is the individual will not a way of connecting with transpersonal forces? Understand the human being in terms of the forces which traverse it without positing the primacy of the world of representation, and you have a monistic metaphysics.

Writing, then: no longer a question of the style of a particular individual (I will come back to this). It is a force – a becoming – but of what? Of language – and it will have been there from the start. Language, it appears, locks us into representation: call a cat a ‘cat’ and you have already assimilated it in its living immediacy into a category. But what if it was never even there in its immediacy – or if its immediacy was such that it is already given as a ‘cat’? Language articulates a world, it is true – but does not also co-constitute that world to the extent that to struggle against a determination of the world is also to struggle against language?

Fortunately, there is always an ‘outside’ of language – of any possible language: the ‘noise’ which separates message from medium, infinitely deferring the possibility of ever capturing the world in a language. This ‘noise’: rhythm, syntax, texture, sonority, colour offers a chance to resist. Irony, buffoonery, ‘improper’ and patois (Deleuze and Guattari: minor) uses of language can perform variations on major codes. Where is the novel in all of this? Perhaps what I have called writing falls into a genealogy of variations on a major language – variations linked to the literary work (as well as many other phenomena).

Plato allows Socrates to criticise the Rhapsode because he does not really know of what he would speak (he is only an imitator of Homer). And the novels which fill our bookshops? It is not, here, a question of what prizewinning novelists would know or what they would not know, but of the imitation of a particular model of the novel (a classicism). And to break with imitation? Perhaps it is to give way to an experience of writing that simply happens – and does so with particular vehemence in that period called literary modernism – in the joy of writing outside a classical idiom (the regulation of verse)? Perhaps this is too quick and too crude (for has this not already occurred with Cervantes and Sterne – and certainly with Holderlin)?

The classicism of the novel (of most, perhaps nearly all novels) is a retrenchment against the experience in question. Read Beckett’s The Unnameable, Kafka’s The Castle, Cixous’s work in general (The Book of Promethea) and what do you find? Summary in place of a reading: writing without model, writing writing writing.