From Word To Word

In the fifth chapter of Echographies of Television, a section entitled, “The ‘Cultural Exception’:The States of the State, the Exception”, Jacques Derrida talks about the desire to be “at-home” in ways that are intriguing to me because of my own preoccupations with what it means to be at home.

Derrida argues that the desire to be at-home is being intensified by the increase of teletechnologies. These technologies increasingly open us to images and discourses from beyond the boundaries of our nation and city and neighbourhood and family and home, and the effect is that our sense of “anchordness, rootedness, and the at-home becomes radically contested.” Because these technologies open us to a sense of dislocation and dissociation, our reaction becomes, “I want to be at home; I want finally to be at home, close to my friends and family.”

This desire for the at-home, according to Derrida, is not confined to the literal houses in which we live, but is extended more broadly to the various places where we feel a sense of identity. The desire to be at home is therefore also the desire to be part of a nation, of a neighbourhood, of a religion, of a party, or of a society. The problem for Derrida is that the desire for the at-home, contrary to the ways that I have been constructing it, can “project an image of closedness, of selfish and impoverishing and even lethal isolation.” Being at-home in this sense involves closing the borders to foreigners, gating the community to outsiders, restricting the membership in the party or the society or even the family to eliminate those who are not like us. It is the desire to make myself at home by eliminating from the home all those who might introduce something that is unlike myself.

Even though it bears this danger, Derrida affirms the desire to be at-home, saying that there would be no possibility of hospitality without out it. This desire, in his own words, “is the condition of openness, of hospitality, and of the door,” because it will always be impossible to welcome an other, to offer hospitality to an other, without a place in which to offer the other welcome and hospitality, even if this place be only a park bench. In order for me to host the other, I must first make myself at-home somewhere.

The desire to be at-home, therefore, is one that must be continually both affirmed for its openness and distrusted for its closedness. I must always be both finding ways to make myself at-home and ensuring that these ways do not exclude the other from the home. In a formulation that Derrida does not use but that I hope he would not reject, I must find ways to be at-home that also make others at-home, or, perhaps better, I must find ways to be at home precisely through making others at-home, whether as a member of a nation, a church, or profession, a neighbourhood, or a family.

Those who have read Ivan Illich, or who have at least read my recent post on Ivan Illich, will perhaps recognize that the title of this post plays with the title of one of Illich’s books, Energy and Equity (London: Marion Boyars Publishing, 1976). The central thesis of this book is that “High quanta of energy degrade social relations just as inevitably as they destroy the physical milieu,” or, in plainer language, dependence on tools that require energy not only destroys the physical environment but also the social environment. For this reason, Illich argues that any increase in energy usage, even environmentally responsible energy, will still result in increased “inequality, inefficiency, and personal impotence,” and that “Only a ceiling on energy use can lead to social relations that are characterized by high levels of equity.”

In the section of the book that is dedicated particularly to transportation, Illich focuses this argument still more, making the startling assertion that people in an equitable society should not travel any faster than the speed of a bicycle or a horse. “Free people,” he says, “must travel the road to productive social relations at the speed of a bicycle,” because the capacity to increase speed always comes at a broader social cost, both economically, in terms of the infrastructure that is becoming an increasing problem for governments of developed nations, but also relationally, in terms of how transportation prevents the formation of communities.

Illich suggests that what the transportation system actually accomplishes is the production of a new sort of person: the passenger. He describes the passenger in detail, and I will quote this description at length, because I think it is still true of most of us today: “The habitual passenger’s inherited perceptions of space and time and of personal space have been industrially deformed. He has lost the power to conceive of himself outside the passenger role. Addicted to being carried along, he has lost control over the physical, social, and psychic powers that lie in man’s feet. The passenger has come to identify territory with the untouchable landscape through which he is rushed. He has become impotent to establish his domain, mark it with his imprint, and assert his sovereignty over it. He has lost his power to admit others into his presence and to share space consciously with them.”

I mention all of this because I am most often a pedestrian, both by choice and by necessity, because our family owns one car, which is mostly used to convey my wife to work. Our intention is to have her transfer her job to Guelph when she can and to have the family go without a car entirely, but I am usually carless even now. This choice is mostly an economic and environmental one. Cars cost me and the environment in ways that I find increasingly unacceptable. Even so, I have lately been experiencing a heightened sense of the social cost that cars impose as a mode of transportation.

This past Thursday I set out with my two sons to meet some other parents in a park across town, a walk that takes us through the neighbourhood where we lived until this past fall. The walk would normally have taken about half an hour, only I had not gone even a block before I encountered some of my neighbours working on a new flagstone path. My eldest son was intrigued by this operation, so we stopped and talked for several minutes, during which time I realized how disconnected they were from their neighbourhood. Not only were they unaware that we had moved in just a few doors from them, but they had never met the woman who had lived in the house before us, not in the eight or ten years that they had driven past each other’s homes on a more than daily basis.

When we finally reached our old neighbourhood, I had a similar experience. There, a street or two from our old house, I encountered the mother of a friend of ours who was working in her garden. We stopped to talk again for several minutes, catching up on each others lives. This woman and I am only acquaintances. She has never visited my home, though I have visited hers occasionally. We have very little obviously in common. She is not a person that I would ever encounter if I did not walk through her neighbourhood. If I had driven to the park, the possibility of my encountering her, or someone else, would never have been opened.

This, to me, is the social cost of the car. It is the cost of letting ourselves become passengers who see the houses next to ours as so much untouchable landscape and who lack the confidence even to share space with their inhabitants. If we only drive through our neighbourhoods, it will never be possible to encounter our neighbours in the way that we can if we are on foot. In fact, in many ways, driving though our neighbourhoods essentially erases our neighbourhoods altogether, because it prevents those neighbourhoods from ever forming.

This is not to say that we cannot drive, of course, though I think that this is a more viable alternative than many people believe. It is to say that we cannot only drive, that we cannot primarily drive, not if we want to encounter those around us in ways that create neighbourhood, that foster hospitality, that enable ethical responsibility. The choice to walk is the choice to be open to encountering others, to share consciously with them the space in which we both live. It is a choice that implies an ethics far beyond economic and environmental concerns, because it implies an ethics of the neighbour.

In Dave Humphrey’s comment on Depth, Frequency, and Promiscuity, he suggests that the idea of rigour is often related to a certain professionalism, and he opposes to this professional rigour a kind of amateur irresponsibility in the use of “texts, and theories, and ingredients.” I am in substantial agreement with this idea, though I would suggest that there are responsibilities that I owe even and especially as an amateur in the sense that he is describing.

To the extent that an amateur irresponsibility is one that refuses to make itself responsible to an institution, or a discipline, or mode of publication, or an editor, or an anonymous reading public, to this extent, I affirm the amateurism that Dave is advocating. What I want, and what the web permits, is a writing and a publishing that escapes precisely these responsibilities. Irresponsibility of this kind comes at a cost to me, certainly, but the cost purchases a freedom to be responsible in other ways, in ways that are far more significant to me.

These other responsibilities arise, not in connection to an institution or a profession, but in relation to people and to the texts they share. I want always to have done what I can to make myself responsible to the friends with whom I am in conversation, to the authors and texts that I am reading, and to the texts that I am writing. I want always to have been rigorous in these relations, not out of a professionalism, but out of a sincere respect. I want always to have done what is proper in these relations, not out of a social expectation, but out of a sincere love. This kind of responsibility is the only reason that I write at all, and I want never to have been irresponsible in this sense, not to any extent, though I will always have failed in this responsibility to one extent or another, even now.

Commenting on my recent post, Some Reflections on the Medium, Dave Humphrey suggests that perhaps writing for the web has caused me to trade depth for frequency, though I think and hope that he does not intend this as a criticism. He describes this less deep and more frequent writing as promiscuous, an adjective I often use to describe the way that I read many kinds of text at once without any predetermined program, merely pulling books from my shelf as they surprise my interest. I am interested in these three adjectives, one implied, two explicit: shallow, or at least less deep; frequent; and promiscuous.

I have tended to avoid the metaphor of depth in describing my own writing, mostly because it entails for me an ideal that I do not find appropriate to every situation. Instead, I most often speak of rigour, which implies a metaphor of labour, where the rigorous one is the one who does the work that is required or expected of the job, or I speak of propriety, which implies a metaphor of social relation, where the proper one is the one who does what is required or expected of the relationship. Both of these metaphors appeal to me more because they recognize that depth is not always what is required, that at certain times it fulfils the demands of rigour and propriety to be relatively shallow. By returning me to the metaphor of depth, however, with which I am still uncomfortable, Dave makes unavoidable the fact that writing for the web, at least in this particular mode, has indeed forced me into a relative shallowness. It has limited the number of subjects that I can take up with propriety and rigour. It has forced me to take up improperly and unrigorously subjects that required a depth that I was unable to give them. To this extent, I accept and am troubled by Dave’s use of this word.

I accept with much less reservation his idea of frequency. Not only does it describe accurately how the web enables a much more frequent and therefore open mode of publishing than does the traditional publishing industry, but it bears connotations of the sound or energy wave, which I think are particularly apt. In order for a sound wave to be sent and received, it must be modulated to the proper frequency, and it here that the idea of propriety returns. What the web offers in return for an impropriety of depth, it returns here as a propriety of frequency. I am able to write at the proper speed and with the proper rhythm, with the proper frequency, so that I can hear and be heard. I am intrigued by this idea, and I may return to it as I have more opportunity to reflect on its implications.

Dave’s last suggestion, that my writing for the web is promiscuous in the way that my reading is promiscuous, relates to this idea of frequency also. If what I read is not programmatic, though at times it has this element, and if the films that I watch and the conversations that I conduct and the activities that I perform are similarly without curriculum, if they are promiscuous in this sense, then it is perhaps only proper that my writing be promiscuous also. Perhaps it is precisely in this respect that the web offers me a frequency that is proper to me. Perhaps the rhythm of my reading and my thinking and my life can be best described by this idea of promiscuity. I may need to return to this possibility also.

This past Saturday was Dinner and a Doc night again. We ate homemade carrot soup and watched Errol Morris’ Fog of War, which made a good combination in my estimation, since each reminded me of truths that I have a tendency to forget.

The soup’s story began longer ago than you might expect. Last year at about this time, my mother-in-law continued a tradition of her late husband’s by planting a substantial vegetable garden. She planted tomatoes for me to sauce, potatoes for me to store, strawberries for me to jam, and some other things, including a few carrots. Now, to be clear, when I say that she planted a few carrots, I mean merely that she planted more carrots than any single woman with a mostly absent son could have reasonably hoped to eat in a decade. She had bushels of carrots. She had far more carrots than she could dig or I could process. Fortunately, a friend mentioned that she could cover the undug carrots with some leaves and the carrots would stay fresh until the spring. So, we had a reprieve of several months, but for the past week or so I have once again been drowning in orange vegetables that neither of my sons will even eat.

I added the tops to stock until I had emptied my freezer of soup bones. I froze more bags of sliced carrots than I want to contemplate. I put carrots in one form or another on the menu three times last week. I made six different carrot soups to put in the freezer, and I brought a massive pot of my favourite soup to this month’s Dinner and a Doc. The recipe comes originally from one of the Moosewood cookbooks, its primary flavours being mint and yoghurt. Speaking only for myself, it was one of the best tasting soups that I have ever had, though its consistency could perhaps have been better.

It was also a reminder, albeit an ironic one, considering that the carrots were not exactly in season, of a truth that I always seem to be forgetting and relearning: seasonal ingredients, because of how suddenly they are harvested and how quickly they need to be used, force me to cook creatively and to discover new and interesting ways to prepare food. I had never realized what could be made with a carrot until this past week, and I have had similar realizations with everything from strawberries to garlic scapes to kale over the years. Seasonal ingredients force a kind of seasonal preparation that almost disappears with supermarket shopping, where almost everything is available all the time, and this seasonal preparation fosters culinary creativity and a connection to the seasons in a way grocery store produce does not. This is the truth that the carrot soup recalled to me.

The truth that the film recalled to me also begins some time ago. When I was first designing Documenting Justice, the documentary course that I teach, I had been told of a particularly relevant film, Seeing is Believing by Peter Wintonick. The film explores the use of the camera, particularly the handicam, as a tool or as a weapon in situations of social injustice. While it does draw attention to the problems inherent in the assumption that we can believe the filmed images that we see, its central thesis is essentially that the visual images produced by the video camera do inspire belief in a way that make handicams a powerful weapon. To phrase this thesis in a way that the film would not, the handicam is effective as a tool or a weapon precisely because most people are niave enough to believe in what they see.

I few months later I saw Fog of War for the first time. I enjoyed it very much, and it remains one of my favourite films, even through what was my fourth or fifth viewing on Saturday night. The film is really an extended interview with Robert S. McNamara, and it is structured around a series of lessons that he draws from his tenure as the United States Secretary of Defence during the cold war and the first years of the Vietnam War. What struck me on my first viewing and again on my fifth was one of those lessons: it reads, “Sometimes both seeing and believing are wrong.” This seems a simple and obvious statement, but I seem always to be forgetting it.

I keep forgetting McNamara’s lesson for at least two reasons: first, because the niave view, that I can actually believe what I see, is the dominant assumption of my culture and its media; and second, because the more critical and cynical view, that I see only what I want to believe, is the dominant assumption of most critical discourses in my culture and its media. Yet, what McNamara recognizes, and what I seem to be continually relearning, is that, while seeing and believing may function together to reinforce a particular perception of the world, both may be wrong. I would even argue that both are always wrong, in every case, to one degree or another. No amount of seeing, whether through the gaze of the camera or the data of a scientific instrument, and no amount of believing, whether in the goodness of humanity or the omnipotence of God, will suffice to guarantee the rightness or truth of anything.

This does not mean, at least to me, that we cannot know rightly and truthfully. It merely means that we can have no guarantee of this, and that both our seeing and our believing need to be characterized by a fundamental humility. I need to be humble in this sense, not provisionally, not because I have yet to find what will guarantee my seeing and believing, but absolutely, because I recognize that I will never be able to find this kind of guarantee. Though I am sure that McNamara did not mean to say quite this, it is nevertheless the truth of which Fog of War reminds me each time I see it.

I know that it has only been a few weeks since I began writing this thing that bears some resemblance to a blog, but the experience has been so singular for me that already I feel the need to reflect on what I have been learning. It is not so much that I have been surprised in my expectations, but that I had no real expectations to surprise and have found that perhaps I should have expected more.

As I have already indicated in a previous post on Writing for the Web, I have found the most difficult aspect of writing for the internet to be the demand for speed and brevity, and I have been experiencing this pressure as an intensification of the anxiety that I described in On What I do not Write, the anxiety that what I write will be inadequate because of insufficient introduction, contextualization, and rigour. I always feel that I am doing an injustice to the authors and texts and ideas that I am discussing, because I do not give them the time and the space that I feel them to deserve.

In my recent post on Ivan Illich, for example, I would have liked to give whole pages to the life that he chose to live, on the death that he chose to die, on each of the books that he wrote, on the places he worked, on the people he influenced, and these pages would have been what were proper to him. He required volumes to do him justice, where I could give him only paragraphs, or only sentences, or nothing at all. Even more troubling is the way that the demand for brevity forced me to be entirely reductive in my explanation of his ideas and their influence on me. What I found myself able to write was not even a just summary, not even a just recapitulation. This is the position in which this medium seems always to place on me, the effect that it seems always to have on me.

I do not have a solution for this position and this effect. Even my current length and style stretch the conventions for the medium of the blog. Anything longer or more rigorous would quickly become entirely unwieldy. It might be possible to push conventions even further with the sort of serial writing that I have been attempting through the posts on Other Things, but it would not be nearly sufficient to do justice to many of the subjects I would like to discuss. To some degree at least, I must be content with this inadequacy, even as I feel that I must continually draw attention to it.

I am finding, however, that what writing for the web offers me in return is not just the openness to response and to sharing that Dave Humphrey and Chris Land have noted, but a mode of publication that accommodates the rhythm of a lived life. It would not be possible for me to write in the sustained ways that the traditional publishing industry requires, even in the unlikely event that it would publish the sorts of things that I would write, because writing, for me, takes place in the cracks and the crevices of other things. I write words between marking papers and feeding bottles to babies, sentences between stirring pots on the stove and digging stumps in the yard, paragraphs between reading stories to children and conversing with visitors. The web allows me to write even despite the fact that I do not have, and do not want, the space to be a writer in the traditional sense.

This is not to say that I do not value the media through which writers have traditionally published themselves. My appreciation for the book in my hand and the pages on my fingers approaches the quality of a fetish. Even so, I recognize the fact that many people, even some who might have useful things to say and useful ways to say them, may find the traditional press unsuited to the ways that they want or need or are forced to write. My duties as a father, and a husband, and a friend, and a teacher, and a student, and a cook, and a gardener, and a reader, all make the avenue of the publishing industry an absurdity for me, and I am unwilling to sacrifice any of these things to any degree whatsoever in order to make that avenue less absurd. The rhythm of my life and of my writing are not compatible with the traditional press.

The internet, however, accommodates not only my rhythm, but many rhythms. Though its natural movement is celerity and brevity, it can be made to open itself to other ways of writing than that of the expert and the professional. It allows me to be a writer who takes the practice of writing seriously without needing this practice to be a profession or even a professionalism. It allows me to write as an amateur, not in the sense that I take writing and thinking lightly, but in the sense that I do not make these things my profession or depend upon them for my livelihood. It allows me the freedom to write in ways that would otherwise not be available to me.

It seems to me, then, that the task laid for the writer of the web, or at least for this writer of the web, is to find ways to both resist and welcome the web. The task is to reject the impulse to write hastily and thoughtlessly for the sake of being current, but yet to embrace the impulse to write according to a personal and idiosyncratic pace. It is to write with a rigour and a slowness and a lengthiness that challenges the web’s demand for currency, and yet to write with a singularity, an intimacy, and a personality that is made possible by the openness of the web to the amateur and the nonprofessional. It is this balance that I am trying to find.

Between the reading that I am doing in preparation for my courses and for my various conversations, I have been finding spaces to read a fantastic little book by Bill Buford called Heat: An Amateur’s Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany (Anchor Canada, 2007). The book is much what the subtitle advertizes it to be, and it is written with the same sense of humour that the subtitle advertizes also. What appeals to me most about the book, however, is Buford’s obvious passion for food, bordering on obsession, as he recognizes himself at one point in the narrative. It is among my most firmly held beliefs that food, whether in the garden or in the kitchen or on the table, should be approached with a kind of fierce frivolity. Food should be both serious and celebratory, simultaneously. Buford’s book has this sense about it.

At one point, relatively late in the book, after Buford has already narrated his experiences in one of New York’s most renowned Italian kitchens, in one of Italy’s most obscure pasta restaurants, and in one of the world’s most famous butcher shops, he pauses to reflect on how his understanding of food has changed. He notes that what he keeps finding in good food is a disregard for commercial success, an insistent respect for tradition, a determination to do things with the hands: a collection of qualities that he describes as “smallness”. He contrasts the idea of smallness explicitly to that of slowness, the approach to food advocated by the slow movement, not because he necessarily disagrees with the principles of the slow movement, but because he finds the metaphor of slowness inadequate in some ways. He notes, with ample justification, that some very good foods are prepared very quickly, and suggests that smallness perhaps describes better the ideal approach to food.

I too have always been dissatisfied with the metaphor of slowness to describe a proper approach to food, but Buford’s idea of smallness is not much better to me, since, as his own narrative describes on several occasions, good food is sometimes made on a grand scale. Buford’s book does provide, however, a criterion for good food that is perhaps more satisfactory than either smallness or slowness. Relatively early in the book, he relates how many of those working with him in the Italian restaurant would talk about food that is “made with love.” This, to me, is the place where we should begin to talk about good food. Food made with love, a love both for the food itself and for the people who will eat it, does indeed describe well what distinguishes what is produced in a fast food restaurant or a factory farm from what is prepared in the home table and in the artisan shop. It is this love that appreciates food at the proper speed, whether slow or fast, food in the proper proportion, whether small or large, and food in the proper style, whether traditional or innovative. It is this love that insists on only the best.

We need to teach people, not to eat small for the sake of smallness or to eat slowly for the sake of slowness, though smallness and slowness might be a result of this teaching. We need to teach people to love their food enough to have it grown and raised well, to have it cooked and prepared well, to have it eaten and appreciated fully. I am an advocate of this kind of love.

In order to continue the history of my engagement with ideas of ethical responsibility, I indicated in The First of Those Other Things that I would turn next to Ivan Illich’s Rivers North of the Future (Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 2005), which is what I intend to do in this post. Unfortunately, except for those who were reading radical literature in the sixties and seventies, relatively few people recognize Illich’s name any more, so perhaps something of an introduction is required.

Ivan Illich was a Catholic Priest who rejected a promising career in the church hierarchy and chose to work most often on the fringes of the church and the university. He served for several years with the Puerto Rican community in New York. He became the director of the Catholic University in Puerto Rico until he was forced to resign over a political disagreement with the Vatican. Having become highly critical of institutionalized education, he founded the Center for Intercultural Formation in Cuernavaca, Mexico, which provided language training for people wishing to work in international development, and which received intense criticism for its rejection of traditional development strategies and organizations. He taught and lectured widely, though never took a permanent position, living mostly in Mexico and Germany.

The majority of his books are focused on analyzing the central social institutions of Western culture: the educational system in Deschooling Society; the medical system in Medical Nemesis; transportation and energy in Energy and Equity, and several others. Tools for Conviviality, which sets out a somewhat broader philosophy on the function of tools and systems in society remains one of my favourite books. To understand Illich more broadly, however, it is his later books that I find most helpful, especially Rivers North of the Future and Ivan Illich In Conversation, both of which are transcribed interviews with David Cayley of the CBC. Where his earlier works are focused on analysing a particular subject, his interviews with Cayley range more widely and provide both the context of Illich’s broader philosophy and the perspective of thirty years on his earlier work.

I first encountered Ivan Illich, as I have first encountered several authors, through Dave Humphrey, who gave me a recording of the CBC Radio interviews that formed part of Rivers North of the Future. Illich fascinated me immediately. Not only was his approach to theology and philosophy remarkably different than I had encountered in anyone else, but his voice, with its vaguely European accent that bears the inflections of the many languages he speaks, has a kind of slow precision and gravity that captivated me. I bought several of his books, read them all, read some of them twice, and have been greatly influenced by his ideas.

Of Illich’s texts, however, it was Rivers North of the Future that influenced me most in regard to this little history that I am telling. Working through the story of the Good Samaritan, Illich basically argues that what causes the Samaritan to know his responsibility is not some abstract idea of the neighbour but a “movement in the belly.” He says that the key phrase, usually translated from the Greek as something like, “He was moved to pity,” would be more accurately rendered as something like, “He was moved in his belly,” or “He felt it in his bowls,” akin to the English phrase, “He had a feeling in the pit of his stomach.” The one who acts as a neighbour, therefore, is not the one who renders a predetermined duty to anyone, nor even the one who renders a predetermined duty to the one who appears as a neighbour. The one who acts as a neighbour is the one renders the duty that is moved in the belly, according to the bond of the neighbour. The neighbour is the one who is open to the movement of the belly, who attends to this movement, and who renders the duty that it requires.

This understanding of ethical responsibility is essentially theological. It is not comprehensible within the logic of a philosophy or of a legality or of a religiosity. It is never determined by a premise or by a law or by a commandment. It is in every case determined by an attentiveness to this movement in my belly that does not come from myself but from elsewhere, from I can never guarantee where, but that I nevertheless believe to be my right and proper duty. However I construe this elsewhere, its movement in me bears the structure of a revelation and, therefore, of a theology.

This revelatory and theological approach to ethical responsibility satisfied the question with which I had been struggling since reading King Lear; that is, how do I determine my duty as a neighbour in any given situation. It accorded with my experience of responding to others that often, beyond any sort of rule or commandment, I knew what was required of me, sometimes in ways for which I could not find satisfactory explanation. To this extent, Illich’s interpretation of the Good Samaritan story seemed to me proper and right.

Still, Illich’s interpretation did contain one point of concern for me that I could never quite resolve: If the neighbour is the one who acts according to the movement in the belly, how can Christ’s story of the Good Samaritan portray the Levite and the Priest as not acting as neighbours? After all, perhaps their bellies were not moved. Perhaps they looked at the man beside the road and felt nothing. Perhaps a situation might occur where everyone who passed by felt no such movement and the man beside the road would die unaided. How could any understanding of ethical duty permit this possibility? In other words, if ethical responsibility depends on the movement in the belly, what happens when there is no movement? This question, at last, brings me to Jean-Luc Marion’s Prolegomena to Charity, which I will take up in a later post.

The kitchen and the table are the condition for a certain philosophy, not the condition for all philosophy, of course, for there is much philosophy conducted elsewhere; and not the condition even for a particular aspect of philosophy, for the philosophy of the kitchen is not restricted in this way; but the condition for a philosophy that proceeds at a certain pace and with a certain rhythm. The philosophy that occurs in this way, between those who are cooking and eating together, takes on the rhythms of the meal. It gives to each subject it encounters the time and the pace that it requires, whether it be the periodic rising and kneading of a bread, or the continual simmering of a reduction, or the focused heat of a grill, and it allows all of these things to happen simultaneously, one layered upon the other, informing each other like the mingling scents of different dishes. Philosophy conducted in this way is held by the teeth, savoured on the tongue, inhaled by the nostrils.

This philosophy of the table does not, however, occur of its own accord. Like a good meal, a space and time has to be made for it, not only in the banal sense of holding a place open in my schedule or making sure there is a space available, but in the much more profound sense that I need to create, to fashion, to shape the space and the time to do a meal justice, to do a conversation justice. It is not a matter of saying, “I can squeeze you in for an hour between this previous thing and this later thing,” because this way of making time always assumes that the meal and the conversation will be made to fit the time that I allot for it. Rather, it is a matter of saying, “I will make myself available for however long that this meal and this conversation requires, and I will do what is required to do it justice,” because this way of making time is willing to take its time, to pass its time, to be of its time.

For example, I spent this past Saturday evening at Dave Humphrey’s house. His wife and daughters were vacationing. My wife and sons had released me for the night. True to our practice, we had little in the way of recipes. We had decided on some ingredients in advance: We had steaks from locally raised, hormone free, field grazed beef, t-bones, with beautiful large sirloins. I prepared a wet, garlic rub for them. Dave began a reduction to accompany them on the plate. We had thick, slab-like bacon, also locally raised and hormone free. We fried and cut it for the vegetables and potatoes. We added some simple spices to the drippings and poured them over hasselbacked potatoes. We had shrimp. We sauted them in the remaining bacon drippings and mixed them with the vegetables. We had a beautiful olive bread. We ate until we could not even stomach the thought of the grilled mango cheesecake that Dave had prepared for dessert, to my lasting regret.

I dwell on this because we also dwelt on it. We began cooking at 3:30 in the afternoon, and we finished eating sometime late in the evening. We opened our first bottle of wine shortly after I arrived, and we finished the last one when it was late enough that we had long since stopped looking at the clock. Among those in between was a particularly nice Bordeaux that we could not make linger nearly long enough. It flowed through the meal like the theme of a poem or a song. We followed where it meandered.

In this time and space that we had prepared, our conversation, the philosophy of the kitchen, also meandered according to its own theme and its own gait. It began by circling around ideas of media and spectrality, because this is what I have been reading lately and because this relates to Dave’s occupation. It brushed often against questions of pedagogy. It wove its way through the practice of reading and writing in various media. It was punctuated repeatedly by the matters of the home, and the table, and the garden, and the meal. In short, it took its time. It allowed its thinking and its speaking the time necessary to do themselves justice. This is the philosophy of the kitchen, not merely a philosophy about how and what the kitchen is, but a philosophy that finds it proper habitation in the rhythms of the home and the meal and the conversation.

I appreciated Chris Land’s response to my post on Currency and Incompletion, not only because it raises several interesting questions about writing on the web, which it does, but also because I am glad to have his measured and reflective voice among those contributing to the discussion. I am hopeful that he will agree to contribute on a more regular basis and in a more formal role.

Chris’s comments are particularly relevant to what I have been thinking myself since I met with Don Moore on Wednesday for our weekly discussion of Jacques Derrida’s Echographies of Television. Our Wednesday conversations seem only to perch on the text for brief moments between long migrations elsewhere, so I never had the opportunity to ask Don about a section of the text that relates to his recently completed thesis. Don’s thesis, which explores some of the ethical issues surrounding the rhetoric of 9/11, employs the idea of hauntology that Derrida introduces in Spectres of Marx (London: Routledge, 1994). I am by no means confident in writing about this text or about the idea of hauntology, but I was interested, given my conversations with Don, to see that Derrida employs a similar language of ghosts and haunting in his analysis of the media.

In Echographies of Television, Derrida talks about how the “live” image is actually not living at all but a dead image that nevertheless lives on, appearing like a ghost or an apparition, like a spectre that can be summoned, that can be made to appear with the proper incantations. This “simulacrum of life”, as he calls it, is captured by machines that function like “a kind of undertaker”, dividing the present between “its life and its afterlife,” producing images of images that are like spectres, phantasms, and ghosts. While Derrida makes these remarks primarily in regard to visual media, and while he utters them at a time when the internet was little more than an afterthought to media like television, radio, and film, he does assert that this structure of haunting has always accompanied any technical means of inscription, which is to say every means of inscription, including even the most traditional modes of writing. The implication, then, is clearly that the kinds of inscriptions enabled by the internet will be productive of ghosts and spectres also.

For this reason, it was particularly interesting to me when Chris’s comment included a similar concern with issues of media spectrality when he says that he “cannot escape the haunting feeling that there are ghosts encircling our little chat; people whose faces I cannot see, and whose presence I may never truly acknowledge.” Here, Chris seems to be recognizing a kind of ghostliness, not in the dead but still living inscriptions of our conversation, but in the possibility that there are others who do not inscribe themselves but only read anonymously, ghosts who cannot or will not be summoned. This recognition interests me, because it makes explicit a preference for the ghosts who can be summoned, who can be made to speak in one way or another, who can speak for themselves or, perhaps, somehow, for those living ones whose ghosts they are. The preference is for those who are willing to write themselves, despite the spectrality that this involves, rather than for those who are willing to be readers only. The concern is that the ghosts who will not be summoned, who will not speak for themselves, who will not be writers but readers only, may in fact be malevolent, may be haunting us.

I would like to suggest that Chris’s discomfort is not with ghostliness per se, but with something different enough to need a distinct term of reference, something that I might call monstrosity, the possibility that the ghosts who hover invisibly about us as we converse might be monstrous. This rhetoric of monstrosity, of course, already circulates frequently in relation to the internet, found in the fear that the ones I encounter there may be other than what they appear to be, may be pedophiles or terrorists or something worse and always unnameable. This risk of monstrosity is always operative, of course, even when the invisible ghosts allow themselves to be summoned and interrogated, but it is infinitely intensified when they refuse to appear, refuse to speak for themselves.

In these ideas of the ghostly and the monstrous are perhaps also contained the possibilities and risks of the internet more generally. In a sense, my willingness to inscribe myself spectrally in the medium is an invocation, a summoning that calls for the ghosts who circle about me to come forth, to consent to appear and speak to me. This is the fundamental hospitality of the internet, the willingness to summon whomever will come, whomever will consent to come. Even so, in every case, this openness is also an openness to the possibility that this coming will be the coming of the monstrous. My every inscription is a hospitality that risks the possibility that the ghosts it summons may appear as monsters.