From Word To Word

I want to begin replying to TC’s comments on Social Holocaust by expressing how significant these kinds of responses are to me, whether they are received through this present medium, or through conversation, or through my classes. In each case I feel myself honoured beyond what I deserve, indebted in ways that I do not know how to repay. The responses of others continually recall me to humility, and I am always grateful for them.

TC suggests that eliminating the encounter with the other is also an elimination of the self, and that the decision to refuse the encounter with the other is perhaps the result of a decision, even if only a subconscious one, to refuse the self. Now, I think that TC is speaking psychologically here, and I am not at all qualified to respond in those terms, but I would agree that in ethical and philosophical terms this is precisely the case. The refusal of the other is always a refusal of the other in me. The more radically I refuse to encounter the other, the more completely I refuse to encounter myself. The refusal to encounter the other, therefore, is often an expression of my unwillingness to encounter myself.

I am aware that I have introduced some terminological confusion here, and in previous posts also, when I refer to encountering the self as other, and I think an explanation of my terminology in this respect might be useful to clarifying exactly why I think TC’s observation is both accurate and significant. In making reference to the self as other, I am following Emmanuel Levinas in his idea of “the third”, though I am using different terminology. Levinas argues that a pure ethics is never possible because, among other reasons, it requires my self and the other to be the only ones concerned. The introduction of a third person makes ethics impossible, because there are now two others, and my responsibility to each of them is infinite. Any fulfillment of my responsibility to the one will necessarily come at the expense of my responsibility to the other. The third, therefore, is a recognition of the practical limits of an ideal ethics.

Levinas goes on to argue that it is never possible to find a pure ethics by escaping the third, because if I were alone with the other I would not have escaped myself. The self who appears to me as myself always plays the role of the third for me, always introduces impossibility into the ethical responsibility that a bear to the other.  In this sense, I bear for myself an ethical responsibility also, just as much as I bear responsibility for the other, and even as a condition for the responsibility I bear for the other. I can love the other only as I love myself. I can bear responsibility for the other only as I bear responsibility for myself. This is to say that I necessarily love and bear responsibility for the other and for myself as an impossibility, because I must love and bear responsibility infinitely and must do so more than once.

Returning to TC’s comments, the implication for me here is that the rejection of the other cannot be separated from a rejection from the self, even on the most fundamental philosophical level. The desire or the need to refuse the self, whether or not it is subconscious, will always be also a desire and a need to refuse the other. Because I fear to encounter myself, I refuse to encounter the other. The logic of holocaust, then, proceeds from myself, from a fear of myself as other, and from a fear of encountering my self as other. I eliminate the other because I must eliminate my self as other.

Jean-Luc Marion, in an essay entitled “Evil in Person” (see Prolegomena to Charity), traces a similar logic in his description of evil. He argues that the logical end of all evil is suicide. Though suicide is not necessarily the worst of all evils, it is the end where all evil logically terminates, and for some of the reasons that I have been discussing. All evil, he argues, is evil because it separates us from the other, because it places the logic of revenge between us. This logic appears to affirm the self, insofar as it eliminates what is not the self, but in fact it is also a negation of the self, since it also eliminates the other in the self, to the point where self is nothing. The evil that I perpetrate on others, even and especially when this evil is revenge for the evil done to me, is thus always also an evil that I perpetrate on myself, and its result is always separation and isolation. The final end of this logic, of course, is suicide, the ultimate act of separation and isolation, the act in which is shown most essentially that the separation of the self from others is always accompanied and perhaps motivated by a desire to separate the self from the self.

It is for this reason, Marion argues, that “Hell is the moment when the soul finds itself alone.” Discovering itself apart from everything, even its self, the soul discovers itself absolutely alone, definitively imprisoned in its isolation, solely responsible for its isolation. The movement that I have been describing, therefore, and that TC has refined for me, the movement of holocaust, always ends up including the self in its destruction and perhaps even secretly originates in the desire for this self destruction. Social holocaust, in this sense, becomes the outworking of social suicide, the ultimate and essential act of separation.

I was very disappointed in Miseducation, a collection of Noam Chomsky’s essays supposedly on education. The book is edited and introduced by Donaldo Macedo, and represents itself to be an analysis of schooling and education, which is why I bought and read it. I am very interested in how education, learning, schooling, teaching, curriculum, and pedagogy function in political and cultural terms. I was hoping that Chomsky would be able to contribute something significant to my thinking of these questions.

Instead, by far the greater part of the volume addresses issues of media misinformation, one of Chomsky’s most common, if perhaps also most necessary, themes. It is only the first two essays that speak to the question of schooling and education directly, and only the first that does so in any sustained way. What there is about education specifically is what you would expect of Chomsky, that is, schools play a central role in maintaining a system of control by socializing students to believe that supporting the interests of those in power is necessary to survival. So far so predictable, and perhaps so true, but I could have written as much myself. I had hoped that I would find a deeper and more systematic analysis of the educational system, in the same mode as Chomsky has critiqued the media, but I found instead some tangential remarks that were never developed into a coherent and consistent argument.

Of course, the fault here is not Chomsky’s. He was not the one who gathered these particular papers and chose to publish them under the title of Miseducation. It was not his intention in any of the collected papers to provide the systematic analysis that I wanted and that I was led to expect. The fault here is Macedo’s, whose Miseducation, unfortunately, is mostly a misrepresentation.

Gordon Lester, a friend from my time in the MA English program at the University of Guelph, has recently been contacted by someone arranging publicity for Gayatri Spivak, the famous theorist who wrote, among other things, the introduction without which I would not understand Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology even to the very small degree that I do. Apparently, Spivak would like to use Gordon’s painting, Gayatri Spivak with Bear, in the promotional material for her CRASSH lecture in Cambridge, England on October 9th. Gordon has produced a whole series of pictures depicting famous theorists with bears, of which I have the Naomi Klein original. If you are interested to see the whole series, there is a link to Gordon’s site in my blogroll.

At about 3:00 AM this past Tuesday morning, approximately nine hours into the fourteen hour drive home from Black Mountain, North Carolina, I was reflecting on some of the things that tend to preoccupy me when I have the time to be preoccupied. In order to keep myself awake, I was reflecting aloud, and in order to keep my children asleep, I was reflecting in a sort of muttered whisper that my mother-in-law was probably interpreting as yet another sign that her daughter’s husband is not altogether stable. I feel a great deal of sympathy for those who have to live with me.

The subject of my reflection was the nature of giving in a theological sense, specifically the question of how it is possible for God to receive a gift. Now, I do not have the time or space here to introduce the philosophical and theological idea of the gift in even a rudimentary way. The weight that this word bears in philosophy and theology is immense, and even a very inadequate contextualization would require me to write at length on the role of gift and givenness in an extensive list of phenomenological, deconstructive, and poststructuralist thinkers. Even to make a list of the relevant authors would take too much time and explanation for this medium, but by way of beginning such a list, I would recommend Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida (especially La Carte Postale, where he responds to Heidegger directly, and The Gift of Death), and Jean Luc Marion (especially Being Given and in John D, Caputo and Michael J. Scanlon’s God the Gift and Postmodernism, where he and Derrida discuss the idea of gift together).

Recognizing, then, that I can only gesture in the direction that this topic requires, let me summarize as succinctly as I can the problem of God as a recipient of the gift.  The problem begins not with God but with me, in the fact that it is never possible for me truly to give a gift because I always stand to gain in some way from what I give, even if it is only the satisfaction of having given without having anything to gain. To give a gift, therefore, is always to open an exchange of gifts, to participate in an economy of gifts, and is not truly to give a gift at all. Similarly, I can never truly receive a gift because, to the degree that it is really a gift to me, it will always require me to return a gift, even if it is just the gift of gratitude. To receive a gift, therefore, is also to enter into an economy of gifts, and is not truly to receive a gift at all.

Now, God, insofar as God is absolute, is usually regarded as the only one who can truly and absolutely give, because God can give without standing to gain anything. Since nothing can add anything to God that God does not have already, not even the satisfaction of having given, then God can give without receiving anything in return, can give truly and absolutely. If God gives, therefore, God gives as a part of God’s nature, not with any expectation or possibility of return. The gift of God would be a gift that disrupts absolutely the economy of the gift.

However, the problem with this idea is that it prevents God, by definition, from ever receiving a gift. Though God has given to me absolutely, I am always unable to give to God in any way, because nothing that I give to God can add anything that God does not already have. In fact, if God condescends to accept my gift, though God has no need of it, than even this acceptance becomes another gift to me. Because God gives absolutely, apart from any economy of the gift, God can only give to me, cannot actually receive a gift from me. Even when God graciously accepts the gifts that I give, it is only in the guise of giving another gift to me.

At 3:00 AM, however, somewhere in Virginia, it occurred to me suddenly that Christian theology potentially accounts for this difficulty through the doctrine of incarnation. By insisting that God can be both absolutely God and absolutely human simultaneously, it may be that the doctrine of incarnation opens the possibility that God can both give absolutely and receive absolutely, can both give to me and receive from me truly. As absolutely God, lacking nothing, God can only give to me,  but as absolutely human, lacking everything that I lack, perhaps God can also receive from me.

Even more, because the incarnate Christ, God as absolutely human, claims to do nothing of himself but only the will of his father in heaven, he gives nothing of himself but only what his father in heaven wills.  To this degree at least, then, God as human does not give at all, but only receives, and does so absolutely, so that God as God can give through him, and do so absolutely.  God as God would thus be the God who gives, absolutely, and God as human would be the God who receives, absolutely.  As both God and human, as incarnate, it would therefore be possible for God both to give truly and to receive truly and still to escape the necessity of an economy of the gift.  God, incarnate, would  enact the gift perfectly and essentially, would incarnate the gift as such.

Admittedly, this is a very rough sketch of an argument that would need to be articulated with greater specificity and greater rigour.  Admittedly also, it is an argument that, despite incarnational elements in other faith systems, is possible only within a certain tradition of Christian theology.  Even so, the direction of this logic appeals to me, and I am interested to see how it might develop with further thought and discussion.

My regular Wednesday conversation with Don Moore was actually a Friday conversation this past week, the kind of enforced flexibility that is an occupational hazard of being a parent. Our discussion went in several directions, many of which deserved a post or more in their own right, but one of which resulted in one of those things that are so precious to any serious reader: a recommendation, in this case, Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkely: University of California Press, 2002).

I have not yet read the book, of course, though I ordered it yesterday, so I want to emphasize that what I am valuing in this recommendation is not the book in itself, nor even the knowledge of the book as such. What I am valuing in this recommendation is the relational gesture that it performs between Don and I. The recommendation is valuable in this sense because of the risk that is implied when he says, “Read this; I think you will like it,” and the recognition of that gift when I say, “Yes, of course; I respect your judgement.” It is valuable because the gesture itself says, in its giving and its receiving, “Let this book be something that we have between us as a common ground and a common experience.” It is valuable because it says, “Let us try to know one another better by knowing that I have offered this, and you have received it, and we both have read it.”

The one who recommends, in this sense, gives a part of the self, opens a part of the self, to the one who receives it, and the one who receives the recommendation is one who receives the other through it, the one who is hospitable to the intimacy that the other offers. For this reason, it is possible for me to name a book to another without really recommending it, without it being a gift of my self to the other. The recommendation as such depends on the willingness of one to offer it or of one to receive it precisely as a recommendation, and it achieves what it is in potential only when both the giver and the receiver will it in this way.

The lending of a book, therefore, from one to another, has the potential to be an incarnational and a sacramental act, in that it both is and is not the embodiment of the relational gesture of recommendation. Though it can never be the recommendation as such, it is the body and the flesh of a recommendation. It bears, or it can bear, if it is willed to bear, the intimacy of the offering and receiving, the sharing and the remembering, that is implied in the recommendation. By physically offering what is mine, or by physically receiving what is yours, I enact with you the gestures of giving and receiving, the gestures of recommendation, that form the relation between us.

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.

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.

This afternoon I met with a friend of mine, Don Moore, who has just defended his PhD in English Literature and has just completed his teaching for the semester so is now available to come and entertain me. In preparation for a course he will be teaching in the fall, we have decided to read Jacques Derrida and Bernard Stiegler’s Echographies of Television (Malden: Polity Press, 2002), which means that I may well be writing on this text off and on over the next few months.

Our conversation today only brushed on the text itself, focusing more on the course that Don is preparing, but we did discuss briefly one of the ideas in the first section of the volume, “Artifactualities”, which is an interview with Derrida. The idea relates to one of my recent posts, “Writing for the Web“, where I suggest that writing for the web is driven primarily by the need for speed and currency. Derrida, speaking more broadly of technological media, which he calls teletechnologies, makes a similar suggestion. He says, “The least acceptable thing on television, on the radio, or in the newspapers today is for intellectuals to take their time, or to waste other people’s time there.” This demand for haste, he argues, “can reduce certain intellectuals to silence,” as they “refuse to adapt the complexity of things to the conditions imposed on their discussion.” In other words, the choice before the intellectual is to simplify the complexities of thought to the speed, the brevity, and the utility that teletechnologies require, or to be silent.

I would affirm Derrida’s analysis here, and also his solution, which involves, in part, a decision not to be of this present time, to be anachronistic, untimely, and disadjusted, in order to “not necessarily miss what is most present today.” This mode of writing and thinking in ways that are out of their time and place in order to reveal the question’s that their time and place conceal is exactly what I want to accomplish in this space that is not a blog. I want to write in ways that, while certainly not escaping the teletechnologies that structure and enable it, call attention precisely to the question of how these technologies impose a certain structure and rhythm on public discourse. I want to write slowly and lengthily, so that what I write requests that you read slowly and lengthily, so that perhaps together we can begin to ask what we have lost by acceding to the demand that writing be always in haste, in brief, and in utility.

I have been reading Jean-Francois Lyotard’s Postmodern Fables (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), one of which relates to what I am doing, or hope to be doing, with the Luke’s Wiki project that I am beginning on my Moodle site. In “The General Line”, Lyotard talks about the second life that we all maintain, the secret life, the no-man’s-land, that is separated from public life by a “general line”. This general line is what separates the life that everyone sees from the life of the individual, the life of absolute privacy and absolute freedom.

This private and secret life is not a way to conceal something, to hide a secret. It is a way to be alone with myself apart from any secrets that I may be hiding from myself. Lyotard says that the second existence suspends the first “a little; it dwells within it from time to time and sweeps it away, but without one knowing anything about it. The second existence does not really wrong the first one; it opens little parentheses within it.” He goes on to say that “You grant your hours of solitude to that existence because you have a need not to know more. That is how it is that you can encounter what you are unaware of. However, you wait for it. And you can try to make it come. You read, your drink, you love, you make music, you give yourself over to the ritual of your little obsessions, you write.”

This second life is critical to Lyotard because he sees it as being “at the very foundation of human rights.” He argues that it is “the human right to separation that governs our declared rights,” because “rights and respect for rights are owed to us only because something in us exceeds every recognized right.” If, therefore, the general line begins to dissolve, if there is no longer a secret and hidden life, “if humanity does not preserve the inhuman region in which we can meet this or that which completely escapes the exercise of rights, we do not merit the rights that we have been recognized.”

Yet, according to Lyotard, the general line is coming under attack in liberal democratic societies, not from the overt and violent denial of privacy that characterizes totalitarianism, but from a subtle and unrelenting demand that we express ourselves continually, that we give our opinions instantly, that we publish and represent ourselves entirely. “Heavy pressures,” he says, “are put on silence, to give birth to expression.”

All of which leads me to my current project, which, to no small degree, involves the kind of publishing and representing of the self that concerns Lyotard so much. By trying to find a way to present my writing in ways that permit it to be partial, incomplete, varied, and interconnected, I also permit it, in effect, to be presented in ways that are more total and more exhaustive. The more effective the project is, by which I mean, the more completely my writing begins to take place in this other mode, the less of my writing and my thinking remains in the second world and the more it appears in the first.

Lyotard’s concern is one that disturbs me, because it articulates a concern of my own that I have often felt but never been able to verbalize. It is obvious to me that my writing will necessarily differ depending on the audience to which I direct it, that this current mode of writing, intended for anyone who might want to read it, will be very different from the mode of writing in which I conduct personal correspondence or the mode of writing in which I struggle to articulate new ideas to myself. It is for this reason that I have resisted requests from several people to post our correspondence on blogs or other forums. I felt that, somehow, though there was nothing personal in these exchanges, to make them public was to violate a boundary of privacy, the “general line” of a conversation and a relationship, to use Lyotard’s phrase.

I feel much the same conflict about Luke’s Wiki. In most cases, including the short reflections I have already posted, the writing that I wish to present in this format was not intended for a general audience. It is the writing of my second and secret life. Publishing this sort of writing causes me discomfort, not because it embarrasses me, though some of it does embarrasses me for other reasons; rather, it causes me discomfort because it represents a radical reduction of the secret space that makes me separate as such.

After all, will it ever again be possible for me to write in the ways that produced this kind of secret and secondary writing when I am always cognizant that it will likely appear in my first life also. What space does this leave for me to be hidden and separate? This is one of the questions that I think the project will increasingly pose to me.