FOR ANNE,
Haru no iro
For some time I have searched for a particular way to state my ideas. Often, when I am off the clock, or as it were—not in front of any recording device, be it microphone, computer, sheet of paper, boyfriend, or any other capacity for inscription save the body itself. [1] I find myself taken by the question of style, however naïve and unproductive that may sound. Within this context, that is, writing tends to be troubled by the necessities of production—the high volume, mediocre quality of promise and apprenticeship. It is not all bad across the board, as it does play the margins quite well and manage a negative quality within its readings. It achieves a style, perhaps only of parody, which it almost always misrecognizes, but misrecognizes with a kind of honesty that appears as untrue, and in truth, is untested.
This search is of course my own, although any writer worth their salt knows that private languages are lonely and unrewarding. What is the point, rather, of writing anything down if you don’t want to? Or worse, if you have nothing to say?
In either case, the very practice of writing and the question of its being at all is necessarily tied to some question of the other. Or, I hold all these persons partly responsible—but you should not hold them guilty—for what is said in this writing. This is a simple, yet obvious, but powerful observation to make. Literacy, let’s say, is an important tool in contemporary society. Indeed, it is the basic foundation of all secular education, for instruction upon the phonetic alphabet is rivaled only by counting in the schooling of the child; yet, learning to spell and count would seemed to be displaced by a more primal, and instrumentally essential technology: speech. For human infants, it is the transformation of the cry into the voice and finally into speech and identity. On a basic level, the child’s inscription of its name by habit marks its interpellation into the social order as a subject.These are difficult words to write, particularly in the rather clipped and compressed manner of the above darstellung[2], or depiction of what I’m trying to tell you. In other words, the question of writing is to be found in the voice, which is the essence of speech, and the very supplement of both meaning and objective reality. That is to say, it is the style of writing—the valences of its use value—that determine its value as something to be exchanged. Why not call this index of exchange value identity? Or perhaps it should be named as representation. Thus, it would seem that the problem of writing as writing is always going to be some mediation of the antinomy between identity and representation.
Yet, it is here that another obvious question arises—or, rather, I should really say that it is obvious simply because it is naturalized into our political and social reality as to disappear in the true irrelevance of plain sight. That is, while it is necessary that everyone should be taught the capacity of literacy (a capacity that forms the phantasmatic core of Western citizenship), it is unnecessary that anyone should ever write anything beyond their name. This gap of contingency between literacy and writing is the formal matrix by which democracy reflects upon itself as itself. In philosophical terms, this is a problem of conceptual distinction between subject and object. The so-called sublime object of ideology is the simply the illusion or belief that society actually exists, as a subject. Crudely put, as all this must seem, the very essence of democracy has nothing to democracy itself but with the democratization of democracy itself. Each idea of the object—social existence—is simply the attempt to cover back over the gap of the object doubling back into itself as a subject.
Every attempt to think the I necessarily involves a recourse to the non-I, and vice-versa: what the non-I formally means outside of material reality. This is the basic notion of metaphysics. Traditionally, metaphysics has been considered to be the discipline which deals with fundamental propositions (principles) which are not subject to empirical verification. “Metaphysics is nothing other than a philosophy of the first principles of our knowledge.” These first principles are accepted as the foundation upon which secondary propositions can be raised in building an edifice of thought (philosophy).[3] Since these principles transcend verification or falsification by empirical evidence, it has commonly been thought that they must be established on purely rational, or better put, speculative grounds.
Many philosophers, however, hold onto the notion that metaphysics is in-capable of extending our knowledge of reality. The ground by which this claim establishes itself is hard won in the writings of Immanuel Kant in the 18th century. Kant argued that we do not gain any knowledge of new objects through speculative metaphysics. The appearance that we are able to extend our knowledge is only an illusion. “Metaphysics is a completely isolated speculative science of reason, which soars far above the teachings of experience, and in which reason is indeed meant to be its own pupil.”
If speculative metaphysics is alone in its regard for illusion, if its science necessarily has an illusory quality, then it seems that it runs into a crisis of legitimacy. That is to say, if reason itself is the arbiter of the limit between what counts as knowledge of reality and what is-not, then it would necessarily be extensive to non-reality, or that which counts as illusion: in the science of metaphysics, by the very gesture of posited its own limits, reason is supplemented by illusion. In basic terms, the constitution of reason itself is founded by its pursuit of illusion, and the exile it dictates by the necessities of law.
The community in which one lives is to respect choices and act in a largely procedural way to keep possibilities open. New roles are to be created to meet new needs or to overcome old oppressions. One chooses among the widest possible field of possibilities, without any of the possibilities being taken as defining what one is. The modern individual is stripped down to a unified core: a perceiving, choosing being—potentially free to maximize whatever is desired. If one decides to live within some traditional values and ways, they are something unified in terms of self, a chosen self-definition rather than something taken for granted and defining the self. The point is that one chooses. This does not necessarily mean a selfish “me first” attitude; altruism is also a value one can choose. The self as unified and unifying becomes the center of reference. The commonplaces I have been collecting suggest that many people think being modern involves a new ideal of personal and social identity, a new way of relating to values.
The concept of honor implies that identity is essentially, or at least importantly, linked to institutional roles. The modern concept of dignity, by contrast, implies that identity is essentially independent of institutional roles. In a world of honor the individual is the social symbols emblazoned on his escutcheon. The true self of the knight is revealed as he rides out to do battle in the full regalia of his role; by comparison, the naked man in bed with a woman represents a lesser reality of the self. In a world of dignity, in the modern sense, the social symbolism governing the interaction of men is a disguise. The escutcheons hide the true self. It is precisely the naked man, and even more specifically the naked man expressing his sexuality, who represents himself more truthfully. Consequently, the understanding of self-discovery and self-mystification is reversed as between these two worlds. In a world of honor the individual discovers his true identity in his roles, and to turn away from the roles is to turn away from himself—in ‘false consciousness,’ one is tempted to add. In a world of dignity, the individual can only discover his true identity by emancipating himself from his socially imposed roles—the latter are only masks, entangling him in illusion, alienation, and bad faith. It follows that the two worlds have a different relation to history. It is precisely for this reason that modern consciousness, in its conception of the self, tends toward a curious ahistoricity. In a world of honor, identity is firmly linked to the past through reiterated performance of prototypical acts. In a world of dignity, history is the succession of mystifications from which the individual must free himself to attain “authenticity.”
Yet, should we recognize in Heidegger’s description of our occasional longing to escape life a possible intepretation of what Freud called the death drive? Could the origin of our (more or less occasional) desire to be dead, inert matter, lie with our ontological structure, as opposed to our psychic apparatus? Is it not by chance that the vocabulary I am using here borders on that of psycho-pathology. At issue, however, in Heidegger’s thought, is the possibility of interrogating anew this reality we call psyche (along with its relation to this other reality we call the soma, or the body).
These are realities we have come to take for granted. They are born of a certain scientific turning withing our conception of nature as a whole, however. This truning can be traced back to Galioleo or Newton, and consits of reification, and an objectification of natural ‘phenomena.’ According to this conception, reality is essentially mechanistic; it consists of a series of causes and effects. Understood ‘scientifically,’ the mind is, according to Heidegger, a projection and an extension of this epistemic world-view. Freud himself, with his idea of the psychic apparatus, transfers scientific, mathematical-physical causality, and its concept of energy, to the understanding of our relation to the world and others, and the various ways in which it can break down. Similiarly,the body that is envisaged in relation to the psyche, in what amounts to a reworking of the Cartesiam dualism of body and soul, of material and psychical reality, is primarily an object, a thing that I, as a living, existing being, can never appearance (experience).
It is an idealization, and so a form of abstraction. Heidegger makes a distinction here, inherited from his master Hussurl, and taken up subsequently by the French phenomenology of the body (Sartre and Merleau-Ponty), between corporeality and the lived body. The point of departure, in examining abnormalities and dysfunctions in one’s life, must not be the relation between psyche and soma, or between the mind and the body, a mind and body posited separately and abstractly and connected, as Freud argued, via the basic drives and instincts—but the fundamental phenomena of incarnate existence, which characterizes us in our being. Behind and beneath the projection of who we are as unity of body and soul, or corporeality and psyche, lies the reality of existence, understood as being-in-the-world. This is the phenomenon that needs to be interrogated.
Hussurlian phenomenology began as a critique of empirical psychology, which claimed to solve the enigma of human consciousness by developing models of representation borrowed from the natural sciences. Instead, Hussurl insisted, what was needed was pure science of consciousness, or a transcendental psychology, based on the principle of intentionality, and the infinite correlations that made it possible. Instead of looking at actual innerworldly states of consciousness, Hussurl suggested we look at the way in which these states are given, at how they present themselves to consciousness, and describe them in the most rigorous way, without any a priori restrictions regarding what may or may not count as a genuine phenomenon for consciousness. Whilst very much influenced by Hussurl, and by his critique of psychologism, Heidegger believed his master had not gone far enough.
Hussurl still believed in consciousness (albeit as pure, or transcendental) as the originary site of our encounter with the world and its myriad of phenomena. Inevitably, and as a corrolary, he could not quite move away from a certain dualism of subject and object. So long as we think of ourselves primarily in terms of consciousness, we are positing ourselves against a world that is ontologically different from us. Heidegger’s effort to understand who we are as Dasein, or as being-in-the-world, was his response to the problem he identified in Hussurl. Philosophy, as phenomenology, needed to be existential and ontological, and not psychological. What we see in Heidegger, then, is a radicalization of the Hussurlian critique of psychology.
The most rigorous and relentless practitioner of this approach after Heidegger is the French philosopher Jacques Derrida who, despite his indebtedness to the German philsopher, sees aspects of heidegger’s own philosophy as still caught within the metaphysics of presence its seeks to neatralize. This ‘failure’ alone, Derrida believes, testifies to the need to adopt a slightly different, more duplicitous, deconstructive strategy. For Derrida, to philosophize will always mean to run the risk of falling back into the metaphysical presuppositions one is trying to avoid; it will always involve a tight negotiation with the vocabulary, the concepts and the oppositions of metaphysics, and the training of the eye for the exact moment at which a given, metaphysical text reveals the conditions of its own impossibility by indicating the excess (the reality beyond presence) that governs it, and which it cannot master. In so doing, the text carries out its own transgression, and points to an irreducible alterity within its own identity. Prior to—and at the very core of—the constitution of the metaphysical text in its identity and self-presence, and prior to its commitment to presence as the meaning and ground of being, there is a differential economy, and a logic of radical alterity (of the trace), which deconstruction sets out to free in every instance. Far from being a merely playful, and purely textual exercise, deconstruction is the constant and relentless effort to liberate the voice of difference and radical alterity that speaks from the depths of our metaphysical destiny. It is the forever renewed attempt to provide a space from within metaphysics itself for a reality ‘older’ than metaphysics. It is an ethics as much as it is a philosophical strategy, a politics as much as it is a reading of philosophical (or literary, anthropological, theological, legal, etc.) texts. Derrida is certainly one of the most prolific philosophers of the last hundred years. His influence in and outside philosophy has been perhaps as great as that of Heidegger himself, and testifies to the profound originality and radical nature of his thought.
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subjectivity
How is any system used to consider that which is not verifiable legitimated by reason?
[1] Incidentally, there are many writers who wish to emphasize themes of technological mediation upon both the individual and culture itself. This is often referred to as a politics of the body, whether in the style of Foucault and his biopolitical archaeologies, or subaltern studies of othering such as queer and racial subjectification and pattern recognition of pedagogical imperatives within a kind of canonical imaginary or archive of material production.
[2] They would locate modern subjectivity within the context that cannot be presented in the familiar terms of the usual modern self-description. There is something beyond the subject-Object relation typical of modern selfhood. We must let that something more happen as it does, accepting modern selfhood as already made possible within some deeper context. When we acknowledge that context as what it is, we find ourselves accepting limitations and no longer facing the indefinitely open possibilities characteristic of modernity. (of Object—Transcendental Illusion)
[3] And here, exiled to the footnote like a common digression, is the basic problem all over restated, the encounter by which I began this inquiry. That which remains the beloved pupil of liberal-democracy, that which wears the sensuous veil of connectivity. What speculative form (metaphysics) of writing forms the necessary illusion that sustains the very essence of writing and all the other couples of terms that engender writing as such? By what manifold can writing ground itself as such? “These first principles are accepted as the foundation upon which secondary propositions can be raised in building an edifice of thought. ” In this basic sense, what must writing accomplish in order to be read as writing. It doesn’t matter, one could object, this is not relevant because writing is unnecessary, and it is simply contingency that determines the value of writing. Moreover, the evaluation of value and contingency is clearly a formal concern. The everyday relevance of literacy only borrows certain pragmatic gestures from such formal concerns. In other words, there are compensated fields of specialization that handle the administration of such formal concerns (those professions that handle the letter: civil services, law, literature, advertising). Although all writing is marked by metaphysics, there is no metaphysical literacy. Illusion, it would seem, is simply not a concern of those who do no write. Plagiarism doesn’t make you smarter.
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