From Word To Word

In What Is Called Thinking? Heidegger says, “What must be thought about turns away from man.  It withdraws from him….  But – withdrawing is not nothing.  Withdrawal is an event.  In fact, what withdraws may even concern and claim man more essentially than anything present that strikes and touches him….  What withdraws from us draws us along by its very withdrawal, whether or not we become aware of it immediately, or at all…. To the extent that man is drawing that way, he points to what withdraws.”

In my last post on this book, I was asking about what it is in us that recognizes that we are still not thinking.   The above quotation relates to this question, I think, in that it gives agency to what must be thought, to the question of why we are not yet thinking, rather than to we who would think it.  The reason that we are not yet thinking is not solely because we fail to reach out to what must be thought, but also because what must be thought turns itself away from us, withdraws from us.

This withdrawal, however, is not nothing, and Heidegger is insistent on this point.  Though the withdrawal of what needs to be thought means that we never encounter it as something present that strikes us or touches us, it nevertheless draws us along, makes us follow after it, pulls us in its wake, and we therefore point to it through our own motion in relation to it.  We may not recognize that we are drawn in this way, but we are nevertheless drawn, and we point towards what draws us, for ourselves and for each other.

In a sense, this answers the questions of my previous post, because we are no longer required to recognize that we are not yet thinking despite the fact that we are not yet thinking.  Rather, what must be thought, the question of why we are not yet thinking, is itself actively drawing us, and we need only to recognize that we are being drawn.  Even so, at least this much is required of us: that we realize that we are being drawn, that this drawing must point toward something that withdraws, and Heidegger himself acknowledges that some do not ever make this realization.    So what is it, to reformulate my previous question slightly, that causes some to make this realization and not others?

There is also the question of the agency that Heidegger ascribes to what must be thought.  After all, in what sense can we speak of something to be thought as active, as withdrawing, as drawing us after it?  What kind of agency can an object of thought actually exercise, especially when it is really only an object of thought in relation to the human capacity for thinking?  If it is the question of why we are not yet thinking, and if it is what must be thought by us, then it is what it is only in relation to us.  How, then, can it act upon us?  How can it draw us after it?

Can we speak, perhaps, of a structure of human being in the world that itself produces what must be thought as an essential by-product of its being in the world, whether consciously or otherwise?  Does the human mode of being in the world, in other words, somehow essentially and structurally presuppose the question of why we are not yet thinking?   If so, do we cast this question ahead of ourselves, so to speak, setting in motion the very thing that will withdraw from us, that will draw us after it?  Are we simultaneously driving this question before us and being drawn after its withdrawal?

How then would we understand thinking?  What would our relation to it be?  Is it this question itself that puts us on the way to thinking?

Graham Ward’s The Politics of Discipleship -  I really enjoyed Ward’s earlier book, Barth, Derrida, and the Language of Theology, a careful and insightful work that responds to Derrida’s thinking with a respect that I have not often found in Christian thinkers, so I was expecting something more than I got from The Politics of Discipleship.  It still carries itself with a certain care and respect in its more philosophical sections, but much of its argument ventures into sociology and economics and politics in ways that I thought were less convincing.  I frequently found myself wishing that Ward would move more slowly, more cautiously, more precisely, more rigorously.  Each of the book’s sections needed its own book, needed to take its time, needed to make some time for what it had to say. Even so, there was much in it that I found useful, and I have quoted one section of it on several occasions now, so it is probably worth a read.  Just moderate your expectations.

John Gardner’s Grendel – I first read this book a number of years ago.  I liked it very much then but even more now on my second reading.  It is short, and it reads quickly, so it can feel deceptively simple, but it rewards an attentive reading with profundity.  I am addicted to the Beowulf legend, so I read or watch every adaptation that I can find, but I am almost always disappointed by portrayals of Grendel.  Everyone seems to want Grendel to be more human.  They try to develop sympathy for him by humanizing him, and they fail to understand how essential it is that he be evil, essentially and absolutely, in order that Beowulf might become the sort of hero that he is.  If Grendel is humanized, then Beowulf’s heroism is ambiguous, and this might make a perfectly good story, but it is no longer the story of Beowulf.  Gardner’s Grendel does not fall into this error.  Though his Grendel does inspire a certain sympathy, it is a sympathy for the role that he must play as monster rather than a sympathy for a humanity that is simply hidden behind a monstrous appearance.  This Grendel is never anything than a monster, and it is precisely this that inspires our sympathy.  He is my favourite portrayal of the Grendel figure outside of the original.

Charles Williams’ The Greater Trumps – I never understand a Charles Williams novel.  I only experience it.  I experience it as a mystery and as a pleasure and as a wonder.  My capacity for description is always beggared by his writing, and I can only ever tell others to read him for themselves, so I will say it once more: read Charles Williams for yourselves.

Margaret Atwood’s  Oryx and Crake – I read this book on the recommendation of a friend, though I have never been a big fan of Atwood’s.  It is not a bad book.  If I had not known who the author was, I would even have said that it was a fairly good book, on the higher end of the science fiction genre with respect to its writing, though not much by the way of science fiction, seeing as it represents a futuristic world in which people are still using CD ROMs.  Yes, I said CD ROMs.  Unfortunately, it is not the work of some middling science fiction writer but of the most recognized name in Canadian literature, and so it stands as one more example of why Atwood simply does not deserve this status.  The story is mostly interesting.  The characters are sometimes engaging.  The plot is well structured.  All well and good, to be sure, but none of this sets Atwood above any of a dozen genre writers I have read over the years, and she offers precious little else.  There is not a single sentence in the whole of the book worth savouring as a sentence, as language, as literature.  It is not a bad book, as I said, and maybe it was intended to be nothing more, which I can respect, but I do wish people would stop telling me how wonderful a writer she is.

John Porcellino’s Thoreau at Walden – If I had ever imagined the story of Henry David Thoreau at Walden Pond being told in cartoon, which I assure you is a thing I have never imagined, I would have been very doubtful about the wisdom of such a project.  I would have suggested that the very fine balance between romantic ideal and practical wisdom in Thoreau, a balance that too often teeters in one direction or another even in the original, would have been impossible to maintain in something as simple as a cartoon.  I would also, it seems, have been wrong, since Porcellino’s book maintains the sensibility of Thoreau’s writing admirably, though its art is very simple.  It was only a matter of minutes to read, but it’s effect lingered much longer.

I have been reading Heidegger’s What is Called Thinking? and I am realizing very quickly that it is not the kind of book that can be read and then summarized after the fact, a problem that I encounter again and again with the more philosophical books that I read, but that I am feeling acutely now with respect to this particular book.  So I will try to write a little differently about it as I am reading, as a kind of experiment.  I will offer a quotation from the book, or perhaps a brief summary of a section, and then I will add my own questions and reflections, and I may write more than several times about the book over the course of a few weeks.  Hopefully there will be those who are willing to think these things with me, or, as Heidegger might say, hopefully there will be those those who are willing to journey with me on the way to thinking.

Heidegger says, “What of itself gives us most to think about, what is most thought-provoking, is this – that we are still not thinking.”

If we are not yet thinking, what is it in us that recognizes this ’still not”, this thinking that might be but is ’still not’?  What is it in us that recognizes that we are still not thinking, that we are perhaps not yet even on the way to thinking?  What is it in us that undertakes, or perhaps does not undertake, the way to thinking?  What is it in us that would make an ideal of thinking, that would desire to learn how to think?

This recognition of thinking, this desire for thinking, this will to thinking, cannot be said to belong essentially to all human being in the world, since there are many who refuse it and who are no less human for this refusal.  It cannot even be said to belong potentially to all human being in the world, since there are many who are not even capable of thinking in this way and who are no less human for this lack.  Yet there is something, something that appears only in relation to human being in the world, something that nevertheless, in some cases, perhaps only here and there, but again and again, recognizes, and desires, and wills thinking.   What is this thing?  Though I may not yet know how to think, though I may not yet even have undertaken the way to thinking, why is it that I desire to undertake it?  Why do I want to know what is called thinking?

I was supposed to give a weekend of talks on home and the threshold last year about this time, and I promised a reader that I would post my notes, but the talks were subsequently postponed until the fall, and then I forgot about posting them entirely. I ran across them this afternoon, however, as I was going through a completed notebook before filing it, so I thought I might still post them here, though it is now long after the fact. They are not notes in the sense of an outline for any talk or talks in particular, because I do not really speak in this way. Rather, they are the short reflections on the home that informed my thinking going into those talks. I am posting them merely as I wrote them, almost unedited.

The limits of the home are defined by the beyond of the home, by the street, by the neighbourhood, by the town or the countryside. The home is the home because of what is not the home, because it divides the space of the world into the at home and the not at home. In a significant sense, therefore, the home can only know itself as home to the degree that it knows what is not home. The home is defined by what is beyond the home.

To say this most radically, I can perhaps become at home only through my practice of being not at home.  The home is always, by definition, distinct from what is not home, but the practice of home begins when I am not a at home.  The practice of the home begins as a practice of the street and of the neighbourhood.  It is a practice of  the road.

The practice of the road is a practice of openness to encountering the other person.  It is an openness to being moved by the other person.  It does not try to manufacture an encounter through its own activity.  It maintains an active openness to what may encounter me.  It is an active passivity, an active waiting.  It maintains an availability to the approach of the other person, a kind of hospitality in advance.

The practice of the road is pedestrian.  The driver is transported and so is closed to the other person. The pedestrian is not transported.  The pedestrian is always potentially open to encounter.

The road is the image and the metaphor of what is not the home.  It leads to and from the home.  It begins and ends at the doorway of the home.  There is no home without a road, no home from which one does not depart and to which one does not return.  Without this coming and going, without this journeying to and from the home, there is no home, not of any kind.

My journeying is always in relation to the home.  I circulate around this pole, around this center.  It remains before me and behind me, an object of my longing and my nostalgia.

When I am encountered on the road, I am always encountered in relation to the home, in relation to my coming and going, in relation to my longing and nostalgia, in relation to my ground and my center.  My response to the other is grounded precisely in this relation to home.  The home determines how I turn myself toward the other, how I hold myself open to the other, how I maintain myself in anticipation of the other.

The road is the place where I encounter the other, always, without exception.  There is no other place where I am confronted by the other.  If I am confronted by the other, I am on the road, no matter where I am.

The confrontation, the encounter, brings me alongside the other, even if only for a moment.  It turns me in the same direction. It causes us me walk with the other.  The road makes us companions, fellow travelers, strangers walking in the same path.

The place of the threshold is the limit of the home and the not home.  It is the membrane.  It is the hymen.  It is the sacred curtain.

The door cannot be left open, not always.  Only the home can be always open.  If the door is always open, if anyone can enter the home at any time, the limit between the home and the road is erased.  The home ceases to exist as a home.  It ceases to be distinguishable from the road.  Its intimate space is no longer distinct from the public space of the world.

The open home is not the home that has its doors open to the other always and in every case.  It is the home that is always open to the possibility that the door might be opened to the other always and in every case.  It is the home that desires that the door might indeed be opened to the other always and in every case, though this desire always remains impossible.

The open home always anticipates the other’s approach.  It always receives the other at the threshold, even if, for whatever reason, the other cannot be invited across the threshold at this time.  It is a home that always welcomes the approach of the other, even if this welcome cannot become an invitation across the threshold.  The open home is not an absolute hospitality.

At the same time, the practice of the door expresses itself as a desire for the invitation.  The open home may not be able to extend an invitation to the other in every case, but it always desires to do so.  It is always broken-hearted when it cannot do so.  The open home is always characterized by a willingness to lay aside whatever it can in order that an invitation might be extended.  It delights to sacrifice itself in order to receive the approach of the other with an invitation.

The open home is essentially, but not absolutely, hospitible.  It does not make of one the host and of another the guest.  Its desire  is to make everyone at home, to whatever degree it is able.  It does not reserve the invitation for an occasion, because its invitation is not to an occasion.  Its invitation is to the home, as it is at that moment, as it is striving to be at that moment.

When an exile reaches the foreign shore, it is not an arrival, for only a return to the native shore can be an arrival for the exile, but neither is it a departure, for the departure was accomplished the moment that the exile left the shores of home. The foreign shore, therefore, is neither a coming nor a going. It is an eternal between, a place that is never here and a time that is never now.

We are all exiles in this way, however much we succeed in forgetting it.  We are all out of place and out of time.  We all inhabit this eternal between, exiles from home, haunting a foreign shore.

Since I posted on the work of writing in the age of digital replication, I have begun, finally, to read Lev Manovich’s The Language of New Media, part of which relates to what I was addressing in that post.   My argument was essentially that a digital copy of a digital object “is always entirely identical to its original and to every other copy,” but Manovich proposes, among his several principles of new media, a principle of variability, which states that “a new media object is not something fixed once and for all, but something that can exist in different, potentially infinite variations.”

What Manovich means by this is that the same digital object can be, and often is, altered and modified according to the specifications of each user, so that each user has, at least in potential, access to many variations of the same digital object.  For example, the digital object of this post will be used to produce many variant digital objects by different users.  Some will read it through one or another feed reader.  Some will read it through this site itself.  Some will see it first in a search engine’s display.  These people will be using various browsers, various graphics drivers, and various operating systems.  All of these things will manipulate the original digital object and create a variation of it for the end users.

Now, Manovich’s principle and my own are not mutually exclusive, but they do emphasize two apparently opposing characteristics of the digital object, and they do raise the question of how exactly digital objects are related to the copies and the variations that are made from them.  In this respect, I would suggest that it is necessary to refine the idea of the copy as such, whether it is being used to describe digital objects or physical ones, and I would argue that every copy is distinct from its source object both in space and in time.  Whatever continuity there may be in the content of the object, in the words or the code or the images that it bears, it is always temporally and spatially discontinuous from every other copy.  Whether I am printing a new edition of a book or copying a file for a friend, the copy is always discontinuous from its original.

This distinction may seem obvious, but it is necessary to insist on it in order to realize the difference between how digital objects relate to their copies as opposed to how physical objects do so.  When I take a physical object, I can mark it, individualize it, make it more unique.  When I do so, I create an object that is new, in a very real sense, but one that is not temporally and spatially discontinuous with the one that it replaced.  When I add notes in its margins, or spill coffee on it, or put a dedication on its flyleaf, or bend the corners of its pages to mark my place, I make that object different from the object that it was, but this object is not discontinuous in time and space from the previous object.  This is what allows the user to fetishize the physical object, what makes it available to the user as an object of nostalgia or obsession. It is a new and unique object, but it is physically and historically continuous with the object of the user’s memory.  It takes a place in history.  It is, in fact, entirely irreplaceable.

When I make changes to a digital object, however, these changes do not modify an object that remains continuous with the one that was changed.  Instead, they always create an entirely new digital object.  There is never any way for the digital object to be changed except to be created as entirely new.  It can only be the source for a new object that is in every case entirely discontinuous spatially and temporally from the one that preceded it, and this new object can only be identical with the source object or not.  It has no other way to appear.  There will never be the digital equivalent of coffee stains or bent corners, because any such interventions become embodied in the new object itself.  Even if it replaces the object that preceded it, it is a new and discontinuous object.  Even if it maintains a history of the changes that have been made to it, it is a new and discontinuous object.

It is precisely because digital objects function in this way that they can be made identical, producing copies that are able to replace their originals in every respect.  One copy is a good as another.  So long as they are copies, any one will do.  This is why, while it is still possible to fetishize the function and the history of a digital object, it is never possible to fetishize one copy of this digital object over another.  It is possible for me to have nostalgia for a digital song or computer program, but one copy of these objects will always be as good to me as another, because they will always be entirely interchangeable.  They will never have dog ears or creases or stains that make them identifiably mine and identifiably a part of my history.  They will always remain invisible to my memory and to my history and to my nostalgia.

What Manovich’s principle of variability recognizes, therefore, is the ability of a particular digital object to be manipulated endlessly, but what it fails to recognize is that these manipulations are not variations of the original digital object at all, but entirely new digital objects in themselves.  Though they have used the original object as a source, they are no longer continuous with it spatially or temporally.  In other words, exactly counter to what I quoted from Manovich in my opening paragraph, a new media object is indeed fixed once and for all, however many further objects might use it as a source.  It cannot, as Manovich claims, exist in potentially infinite variations.  It can only be a source for a potentially infinite set of new objects.  While a physical object might potentially exist in many ways as it becomes subject to the alterations of time and space, this is precisely the thing that the digital object can never do.

There is a way of being between that is a balance, that is a caution and a calculation and a measurement, that is a careful poise on the edge of every possible direction, that is a walk on a line, foot in front of foot, to prove one’s sobriety.  This between is a refusal of any extreme, of any discipline or extravagance, of any sacrifice or excess.  It is a moderate moderation, a balanced balance, a considered consideration.  It is a swallow of warm water.

There is also a way of being between that is a suspense, a tautness and a tensity, a pulling and a straining, that is a dangling in the void, that is a stretching on the rack, inch by inch, to prove one’s faith.  This between is a desire that is both lascivious and ascetic, both wanton and austere, both carnal and sacred, simultaneously.  It hangs between these things.  It is drawn and quartered.  It is agonized and exaltated.  It is a live coal on the tongue.

Over the several weeks since I completed it, Pierre Bourdieu’s On Television has kept me thinking about what it means to appear publicly, particularly through the media, but also in the many other places where we are asked to “make an appearance” in a formal sense, to deliver a conference paper, for example, or to give a sermon, or to teach a class.  More specifically, it has kept me thinking about the conditions, often unspoken and unrecognized, under which we agree to make these kinds of appearances.

Bourdieu argues that, “by agreeing to appear on television shows without worrying about whether you will be able to say anything, you make it very clear that you are not there to say anything at all but for altogether different reasons, chief among them to be seen,” and while he is referring to television specifically here, his argument is more broadly applicable.  Whenever we are asked to appear, whenever we are asked to make an appearance, we are confronted by this question of whether the conditions of our appearance will enable us to say anything, will enable us to do anything but be seen.

Throughout On Television, Bourdieu discusses several factors that silence those who try to say something by appearing through the media, and central among these factors are time limits, which he says “make it highly unlikely that anything can be said.” This is one of the reasons that On Television takes the form it does.  It was originally delivered as two television lectures for which Bourdieu imposed his own strict conditions.  He was allowed to speak as long as he liked without interruption by advertizing and without editing or censorship of any kind.  Bourdieu agreed to appear, in other words, but only under conditions that he believed would allow him to say something rather than just be seen, which meant in large part insisting on having sufficient time.

Jacques Derrida says and does some similar things in Echographies of Television, arguing that “the least acceptable thing on television, on the radio, or in the newspapers today is for intellectuals to take their time.”  The central part of this book, the interview with Bernard Stiegler, was also to have been shown on television, though the broadcast never took place, and Derrida agreed to appear in this way only after asking for a right of inspection, a right to inspect the conditions under which he would appear.  Though he says that he had no illusions about his right of inspection being able to guarantee that anything would in fact be said or that what was able to be  said would not be misappropriated, Derrida insists on the principle of this right, on the principle of at least trying “to reconstitute the conditions in which one would be able to say what one wants to say at the rhythm at which and in the conditions in which one wants to say it.  And has the right to say it.  And in the ways that would be least inappropriate.”

I agree with this argument, and I am very concerned with the conditions under which I have to appear in various senses, but I am discovering that the right of inspection is not available to most of us in the way that it is available to Bourdieu and to Derrida.  These thinkers are able to insist on this right only because they already possess a certain status and a certain influence that allows them to negotiate the conditions of their appearance from a position of relative power.  The vast majority of us, however, in the vast majority of the situations where we might appear, are not operating from a similar position.

For example, I recently had the opportunity to appear on a local Christian radio show as a participant in a panel on ethics, but I knew immediately that it was not an opportunity that would, in Bourdieu’s terminology, allow me really to say anything. The constraints of time and of the moderator’s questions and of the station’s political position would have made it very difficult for me to say anything worth being said. I would have liked to do as Bourdieu and Derrida did, to have negotiated a different way of appearing, but I lack completely the kind of influence that would allow me to make such demands.  To appear in a way that would have allowed me to say something was simply not possible for me in that situation, so I decided not to appear at all.

This is not to say that opportunities do not exist that would allow me to appear under conditions that I would find more acceptable.  I was also recently approached by a parenting show on the local university radio station to participate in a discussion on fathers who stay at home and who homeschool their children.  I was initially very skeptical again, and I have no guarantee that I will not be disappointed in the event, but my conversation with the host was a very positive one, and I felt that I would be permitted the time and the space to say something worth saying, so I decided that I would appear on the show.

The problem, therefore, is not that there will never be a place where we can appear under the kinds of conditions that Derrida calls least inappropriate.  The problem is that most of us have no power by which to insist on these conditions, and so our right of inspection amounts almost entirely to a right of refusal, and if those who have something to say must constantly refuse to appear, than the only ones who will appear are those who are interested merely in being seen.  In this way, our right of inspection as right of refusal will most often serve to reinforce a media culture that is concerend primarily with being seen rather than with actually saying something, and though I think this cost is perhaps necessary, it is nevertheless a vastly heavy one to bear.

I do not very often remove subscriptions from my blog reader, even if they have gone silent for months at a time.  This is partly just laziness, but it also reflects a foolish hope that whoever had been writing in the first place will find the time and space to write again.  Of course, this hope remains unfulfilled in almost every case, so I was startled and pleased this morning to see two posts on Void Manufacturing, which has not posted anything since January.

Void Manufacturing posts mostly interviews and articles from major thinkers, usually contemporary and always from the political left.  What attracts me to this particular blog, however, is not so much its content, though this is often very interesting also, but the ways that it reimagines intellectual writing and publishing outside of traditional institutional and academic systems.  I have always been alarmed at how most thinkers, even those who are otherwise very radical, even those whose thought has a vested interest in engaging a broader public, have been content to think and to write and to publish so entirely through traditional academic channels like conferences and journals.  While these channels have their place, certainly, they remain exclusive and self-referential to a degree that inhibits or even prevents the ability of the broader public to engage with the thinking that is taking place through them.

Most online journals do very little to address this problem.  Many of them have fees for some or all of their content, and even those that do not are still clearly more concerned with speaking into the circularity of the ongoing academic conversation than they are with opening this conversation to the public.  They are on the internet, but not of it.  They are available through the internet, but they have refused to avail themselves of the opportunity that the internet offers, an openness to new and broader audiences.  Void Manufacturing, however, does go some way toward opening the conversation, in several ways:

First of all, the content is free, and this factor cannot be undervalued in an age where information and ideas are increasingly being shared without direct cost.  Any thinking that is serious about engaging the public must find a way to give itself to the public freely, not only with respect to its cost but with respect to restrictions on its republication and distribution.  Intellectual thought must give itself up to the public in order to engage with it effectively.

Second, the posts are open to comments and questions, even if they are not ones that will necessarily be seen or addressed by the author whose thinking has been posted.  Thinking that wants to engage the public must be open to having itself engaged in return, because this is how the public is encouraged to begin thinking itself.  People come to thinking by being able to question and to converse with those who are thinking already, and the ability to comment is a small gesture in that direction.

Third, the material is often topical.  It posts what the thinkers of our time have to say about the economic crisis or about the war in Iraq, which engages people on the questions that are significant to them but in ways that are more considered and more reflective and more critical than traditional media can allow.  In order to engage the public, intellectual thought must demonstrate that it provides a relevant and productive alternative perspective on the issues of our time, and this means speaking into those issues specifically.

Fourth, the posts are often interviews, so that the thinking is presented in the form of a dialogue.  It is my firm belief that a thoughtful conversation is the most effective way to understand ideas, and the strength of a well conducted interview is that it approaches this kind of conversation and engages the readers or listeners in it, even if they cannot participate directly.  This dialogue is open in a way that a lecture or an essay is not, and it is one of the most effective tools available to the kind of thinking that recognizes the importance of interacting with people beyond the confines of institutional academia.

Now, Void Manufacturing does not by any means accomplish all of these thing perfectly, especially not during a nine month hiatus, but it does represent an attempt to open a dialgue between intellectual thought and the broader public, so I am an advocate for what it is trying to accomplish, and I am glad to see that it has returned.

It is the responsibility of power to love.

Power may choose only to love or to oppress; there are no other choices that power can make.

Choosing to love almost always involves choosing to set aside power in favour of weakness.

This is the nature of power that oppresses: it continually chooses to be powerful.

This is the nature of power that loves: it continually chooses to be weak.