Michael Grant

SOME RECENT WORK BY SIMON SMITH

2011-12-22T18:49:00.002Z

First Ode First (vErisimilitUde, 2011)
The Mayakovsky Ode (vErisimilitUde, 2011)

The recent writing of Simon Smith is a writing of interval and suspension. It introduces a space of juxtaposition, quotation and parenthesis. The words that confront the reader exist in a manner which is not that of words in a context of significant use. They exist rather as words between words, words beside themselves, exterior to themselves. In phrasings such as ‘and it is not grief/is not/to identify, to name/more’ or ‘but now is somehow a point of no return’ or ‘but there’s nothing to shout about/ no notes left, not an appointment, kick it over/then say who broke the book’ the temporality evoked is as though poised between the no longer and the not yet. The writing emerges as a sustained series of interruptions. The lines seem to be an effect of—even as they create—a space of reserve, in which things assume an aspect of immobility. It is a space the elements of which come into relation outside one another, preserving exteriority and distance as the principles of signification. We are positioned ‘in the middle of the walk best taken backwards’.

The sense of the neutral that emerges here is not unrelated to an emergence of the strange and the uncanny. Constructions such as ‘who knows/what else do you hear?’ or ‘the position just changed to, this page the only position/you need for which you receive the compliments of the day’, are forms that are not quite those of question, statement or assertion, nor yet of description, or indeed of evocation. It is a writing that partakes of neither the subjective nor the objective. It cannot easily be assigned to any genre; it is not general nor is it particular. Something is advanced which our modes of abstraction and generalisation fail to get a grip on. Even so, this writing is not the consequence of some bizarre or exceptional experience. It insists on the mundane nature of what is being dealt with.

And life means what it has up to now

and most of this is about listening

and behind the door marked ‘PRIVATE’ I receive no signal

This is the language of the everyday, a language the very ordinariness of which turns out to expose within common experience that which such experience cannot locate or grasp. As Maurice Blanchot has put it: ‘What is present in this present of speech, as soon as it affirms itself, is precisely what never lets itself be seen or attained: something is there that is beyond reach (of the one who says it as much as the one who hears it)’. Speaker and listener are both on the hither side of discourse, where language is still visible, where it is an event occurring this one time, here, now.

The political implications of the order of writing are exhibited, in both books, as an implacable refusal of language as that has been assimilated to the structures of management and administration. Smith refers to the end of the First World War: ‘November Eleven 1918, the full-grown men/return as though they’d just been born/the memory falling/into email/press the ‘send’/button at dusk’. This serves to align his work with the response to that war of earlier writers, of whom Mayakovsky is taken as exemplary, and to foreground his own exposure of contemporary forms of injustice and annihilation. We too are living in ‘the last days of mankind’. The writing of so exacting an exposure is, of necessity, a writing of exile, and the dissatisfactions of exile are inseparable from it. The poet is seen to stand outside the city, while at once being within and of it. He gives himself over to the foreign, and to what is without intimacy or limit. He sets himself against all that is connected with substantive reality and power, against all that pertains to unity and wholeness. He does not accept the rule of identity or the logic of the same. He effects, line by line, phrase by phrase, a restless dissemination of beginnings or fragments: ‘poetry is made of everyone and a glass of water’. It is work that brings to mind the question put by René Char: ‘how can we live without the unknown before us?’

[This review is published in Tears in the Fence Number 54 (Autumn 2011): 144-45]

GLASS TRACE

2011-07-08T22:36:00.007+01:00

I saw you walk across a sea of dazzling glass towards me
I thought then that it was you who spoke
there is the sun and there is the rain
and there is the trace of sunlight on red flowers

slivers of crystal had appeared between the hands
you carried fragments with you as you walked
in the lost cradle of the foliage the flame fails

The rose window
opens onto what cannot be seen

the earth is folded like white cloth outside the curtain

One need not ask
when the fire is to stop
or what must rise
from what abyss

There is silver cutlery
and there is the spider’s web
I believed I saw freedom
in the interval between the hollow moss

and the unheard-of flowers

The water that I saw you walk on
is a sea no longer

THE SOUND OF THE VOICES

2011-06-25T17:17:00.001+01:00

No one names you. There’s no sound, no voice.
You’re left alone enclosed by the dark boats. The ground you stand on
Is uncertain, and the words you have
Are not those whose wreckage is required of them.

The separation you desire
Is not the tedium of assured departure.
You have no liking for the brackish water
You care nothing for the wind gusting through the trees.

Rather, you would say, rather go where the cruel dawn arrives in darkness
The palace whose utter ruin I have been.
Your one love is for the night as night
The words gaze at you and take your substance for their own.

ON HIS MORTALITY

2011-06-25T17:08:00.002+01:00

The doctor told me: get on with it, smoke your Virginias and drink your schnapps!
It’s obvious that with or without them we all have to go in the end.
In the mucus membrane of my eye there are for example traces of a cancer:
Given time it will see me off.

No one need of course despair on that account.
Each one of us can hope to see a good few years yet.
We can still stuff ourselves with blackberries and chicken.
Though it’s true we can expect a real pain in the gut one day soon.

There’s no way to set things right, either with the bottle or by kicking up a fuss.
Such a cancer grows undetected on the inside.
You could be scratched from the list
At the very moment you are walking to the altar with your bride.

My uncle, for example, kept his trousers pressed
Long after he’d been marked out for the kill.
He bloomed like life itself, but these were flowers for the coffin.
Every hair on his body was diseased.

For some it runs in the family
Though they don’t discuss it.
They can tell a bunch of grapes from a pineapple,
But when it comes to cancer and a rupture, they admit nothing.

On the other hand, my grandfather knew precisely what was coming
And let the doctors rule his life accordingly.
He was fifty by the time he got fed up with it.
A life like that is fit only for a dog.

You and I know better than to envy any man.
No matter how he lives he’s got his cross to bear.
As for me, my kidneys are in trouble
And I haven’t been allowed a drink these past five years.

2011-05-22T18:04:00.003+01:00

ON BLACK SATURDAY AT THE ELEVENTH HOUR OF THE NIGHT BEFORE EASTER: AFTER BRECHT, MANUAL OF PIETY

In the spring and under the green heavens
Somewhat brutalised by the loved and savage winds
I came swaggering on my way
Down to the black cities, the interior of my heart lined with cold sayings.

It was with the black creatures of the asphalt that I filled myself
I filled myself with water and with lamentation
I was left in the cold and my darlings in the light
I stayed throughout incomplete and light through it all.

And I know they were the ones who smashed the holes through my walls
And that even as they were to curse me crawled out of me again
There was nothing inside me but so much space and paper
I was the paper only—and they were to scream with their obscenities.

I grinned and as I did so walked at speed down between the houses
Into the open country. Soft and receptive
The wind was going now to run more swiftly through my walls.
The snow had stopped falling. There was to be the rain.

Thick snouts of thuggish bully-boys
Have found that there is nothing in me—in truth, nothing!
Wild boars had sex in me. From the radiant heavens
Ravens would often piss straight into me.

Feebler than the clouds! More delicate than the wind would ever be!
There is nothing visible. The light, being brutal and as festive
As any one of my own poems, I crossed the heavens
With a stork, its wings beside me, beating faster.

THE DRIVE

2011-04-05T20:09:00.005+01:00

In the Critique of Pure Reason Kant draws a distinction between negative and indefinite judgment. As Slavoj Zizek has pointed out, the example that Kant uses is very telling in the context of the un-dead: the positive judgment, by which a predicate is ascribed to a subject (S is P), is given as ‘the soul is mortal’; the negative judgment, by which a predicate is denied to a subject (S is not P), is given as ‘the soul is not mortal’, while the indefinite judgment, in which a certain non-predicate is affirmed (S is not-P), is given as ‘the soul is not-mortal’. The difference between the negative and the indefinite judgment thus appears as a matter of spacing. All this has an immediate bearing on the notion of the un-dead, or the living dead. As Zizek has also indicated, we resort to indefinite judgments in our ordinary language, exactly ‘when we endeavour to comprehend those borderline phenomena that undermine established differences such as that between living and being dead’. The same argument applies to the notion of the uncanny, which Freud similarly derives as an indefinite judgment, based on a consideration of the derivation of the word unheimlich and its relation to heimlich. (Nicholas Royle has shown that a similar relation holds between ‘canny’ and ‘uncanny’ in English.) The un-dead, that is, uncanny creatures such as vampires, zombies and so on, are neither alive nor dead: ‘he is un-dead’ thus is a perfect example of the indefinite judgment, inasmuch as vampires are excluded from the domain of the living without therefore being included in the domain of the dead. The un-dead retain the characteristics of a living creature, without being one. As Freud saw the matter, the uncanny pertains to all that was intended to remain secret, hidden away, but which has, nevertheless, come into the open. As Hal Foster has shown, the uncanny, with its attendant notions of repetition, the death drive and doubling, is as fundamental to the procedures of surrealism as it is to the horror film. The uncanny does not oppose the world; it hollows it out from within, opening it towards an abyss. The return from the grave of the un-dead is the appearance of something profoundly other, something that blurs the distinction between imagination and reality, between the symbol and what is symbolised. The vampire is an unrepresentable Thing, and the space he occupies is neither that of community nor that of society. The vampire occupies an uncanny space that Lacan called ‘l’entre-deux-morts’, between two deaths, a a gap between the Symbolic and the Real. For Lacan, it is what dwells here that is the ultimate object of horror.

A film that gives an overwhelming sense of this order of horror is Dreyer’s Vampyr. A similar order of experience is evident in Murnau’s Nosferatu. The film ends as Nina Harker sacrifices herself to save the city of Bremen. Jonathan rushes into the bedroom and embraces her, only for her to sink back and die. What one can say is that Nina is only able to destroy the vampire if she is willing to join him in that space between two deaths, and this she does, in her passivity, for all the time during the night while he remains beside her, bent low over her neck. It is the book Jonathan returned with, the Book of the Vampires, that has brought Nina to this condition: in other words, it is the Symbolic order itself, as represented by the book, an order that stands for death, in the sense of mortifying the Real of the body, that brings her to that which eludes symbolisation. As does Dreyer, Murnau associates the vampire with the very film that we are watching. Both films present us with issues of representation and meaning as they are inflected by the death drive, a force that, neither living nor dead, partakes of the demonic.

CINDERELLA’S ASHTRAY

a little shoe was part of it
finality
a slippage without cause

which I think was traced already
in my childhood

an image that should have stayed concealed
a sound one ought never to have heard again

the object
of objective chance

is a hole made of lilies

*

I must retrace my steps

the street’s deserted
the door open

a gold branch hangs above the stairwell
a sliver of crystal twists in a moulding of white sand

a woman pledged herself one day in that same space

a copper wire conducts the light

*

I attach no importance to it
it accords no significance to me

the plaster figures have lost nothing of their expression
the tears I shed are not mine

2011-01-05T21:51:00.002Z

SALON

The narrow frame of
midnight is the opening
the image
identical yet ghostly

is the signature
the monogram
of essence
not the thing itself

the reference
ends here
fool’s gold binds heaven
with the fine thread of

undreamt dreams
soon no doubt
to drop from the black heart
in front of you

author of a ruin
there is no answer for
born of impulse
solid as the eye’s flame

its one penance is the sodden
grief breathed by death
so much the worse for those
whose servitude

is vengeance I give my memories a shove
we are leaving
where was it that you said
the dog of scripture has returned to its vomit

ON CHARLES OLSON

2010-11-15T12:34:00.006Z

‘The unconscious is knowledge; but it is a knowledge one cannot know one knows, a knowledge that cannot tolerate knowing it knows’ (Lacan, ‘The Non-dupes Err’)

‘Our manner of excluding,’ writes Maurice Blanchot, ‘is at work precisely at the very moment we are priding ourselves on our gift of universal comprehension’. The manner of excluding to which Blanchot is referring here works to suppress within language the very silence that underlies and supports it, the silence out of which the text itself speaks. It is such a silence that James evokes, in The Turn of the Screw, ‘…a stillness, a pause of life, that had nothing to do with the more or less noise we at the moment might be making…'. I want to suggest that to engage with poetry, with the literary thing, requires of one a peculiar kind of libidinal investment, an investment beyond the regime of pleasure, manifest in a decisive rupture of legibility and identification. It will require an engagement with what Lacan calls ‘something beyond, something at the point of origin of the signifying chain’. This something is, of course, jouissance—the enjoyment that Lacan explicitly contrasts with pleasure. The notion of jouissance is intended to evoke a movement of language beyond the representable or accountable: the literary thing is an enigmatic signifying event, an act that shows itself forth in ‘a suspension of constituted reality’ (Zizek), a point of singularity that resists any form of verbal equivalent and yet drives us irresistibly on towards it. To quote Luke Thurston, there is something about the literary thing that ‘resists our reading, and encumbers or drags against our attempts to enmesh it in a discursive network or introduce it to an economy of signifying exchange or translation’. Aesthetic experience testifies to some fundamental opacity—something not to be read, beyond analysis—at the heart of the fantasmatic investment. The attempt to enmesh the thing in an order of signification, an order of comprehension, is the very act that puts it beyond us: the dimension of the literary thing is the dimension of ex-sistence, the dimension—as Lacan would have it—of the extimate. ‘To explain art with the unconscious seems to me to be highly suspect; but it is what analysts do. It seems to me more serious to explain art with the symptom’. To identify with the singular, an unidentifiable particular, something impossible to reduce to a symbolic identification, is a distinctive procedure or act that Lacan designates (in Encore) as the not-all, pas-tout. This, for him, is a position of creative excess, where one may, perhaps, locate the feminine. One may also perhaps think of Antigone, of Lady Macbeth, or Laertes’s response to Ophelia’s madness: ‘This nothing’s more than matter’.

If we are to see sublimation as the elevation of an object ‘to the dignity of the Thing’, then I would suggest it has been characteristic of one approach to Olson’s work to see in it an operation of sublimation so understood. In De magia Giordano Bruno wrote of a ‘language of the gods’ immune to the change and decay of ordinary language. The hieroglyphics of ancient Egypt had been man’s last contact with the ancient symbols, before the invention of letters such as we use today brought about ‘a tremendous loss, first of memory, and then of divine science and magic’. To restore such a divine language would require the grammar of ordinary language to be displaced into a more originary structure, one in which the obfuscations that derive from the customary use of syntax and predication give way to an order of language that embodies what originates it—the primordial. To cite the ghost of Hamlet’s father: ‘I could a tale unfold whose lightest word/Would harrow up thy soul’. The ambition of such a language is to speak out of the very energies of the earth itself, to articulate in a concatenation of names—understood by analogy with the hieroglyph or ideogram—the essential configurations of being. Of a writing so understood it seems plausible to say, as has J.H. Prynne in his review of the later Maximus poems: ‘The nouns have an almost secret insistence, lent now to great fluent transitions of discourse and lyric measure, so that the passage-work here is powerful and immensely poignant’. Prynne’s account here implies, I think, some order of homology—even isomorphism—between what is made manifest within the ‘rhythmic flux & balance’ of the metrical energies of the writing and the energies of earth and sea. He clearly intends the following lines to be seen as an exemplary instance of such an intertwining of ‘flux & balance’:

The top of Dogtown
puts one up into the sky as free-
ly as it is possible, the extent of
clear space and air, and the bowl
of the light equalling, without at all
that other, false experience of mountains
climbed, heaven

It is passages like this, and others, including the opening lines of ‘Maximus from Dogtown—I’ and ‘Maximus at the Harbor’, that are able to persuade the critic ‘all over again’ that the concretion here achieved is that of ‘the man speaking to men’. What these lines manifest, Prynne avers, is ‘the image of the most exact freedom to be gained now, from the sustained sequence of full-grown poetic speech, and from nowhere else’. The voicing, the uttering, of the sequence of lines is inseparable from, is immanent within, the sequence itself: what generates the metrical energy is made manifest by it. The origin of the lines, their source in the breath and so in the voice and hence in the being of the poet, is given palpable existence in those same lines. The enounced is what it is inasmuch as it is the articulation of the process of its enunciation. The poet speaks as ‘the man speaking to men’ inasmuch as his words, in their rhythmic expressiveness, embody the function that engenders them. (I would be inclined set this beside an aphorism of Lacan’s: representation is the representation of the lack of the function that engenders it.)

The review concludes with a characterisation of Olson’s writing as such, a characterisation in which language is seen as ‘a mythic likeness resting on the earth, the mappemunde of man’s being, and not by any means a “universe of discourse”’. What we encounter here is ‘not secondary assemblage but primary writing’. Unlike the ‘great unifying sentimentalities of dream’ or the merely naïve procedures of ongoing narrative, Olson’s work ‘retains the whole freedom of primary speech’. That there is a slippage here between ‘mythic likeness’ and ‘universe of discourse’, a slippage whose effect is to bring into question certain aspects of the position being argued for, has been made clear by Anthony Mellors in his book on late modernist poetics, and I won’t rehearse his arguments on this occasion. What I would say is that the mesmerising power, the sheer bewitchment, of language used in this way should not under-estimated. The notion of poetic language as being in some sense an enactment of those processes whereby words are returned to some primordial adherence to things exerts a powerful fascination. Such a vision of language implies that it might in some way be possible to say pure existence itself, to say the originary presence of pre-linguistic space. It is as though the impossibility inherent in such an enterprise is what recommends it. That it is an impossibility is something Giorgio Agamben has made clear: as he says, there is a distinction within language, first made clear by the Greeks, between onoma (name or term) and logos (speech or proposition): ‘primal and simple elements can have no defining discourse but only names. A proposition cannot say what the name has named’ (Potentialities p69). He cites Wittgenstein’s Tractatus (3.221): ‘I can only name objects….I can only speak of them. I cannot assert them’.

It is in connection with Wittgenstein that something further emerges concerning the correlation of language with what lies outside it. In the Big Typescript, he reflects on the concept of a sentence: ‘Can one understand anything other than a sentence? … In a certain sense, there is no such thing as half a sentence’. In a discussion of this passage, Katherine Morris has suggested that the issue of whether something is to be counted as a sentence or a proposition is linked to the question of whether it is used to communicate something, of whether it makes sense to speak of understanding what is said. Seen in this way, there is no such thing as half a sentence. On this view, ‘Fire!’ may well count as a sentence (something may be said with it), whereas on a conception of the proposition to which ideas of syntactic structure are central (that of subject and predicate, say) it would not pass muster. For Morris, an approach to the proposition based on saying and understanding is to be contrasted with a different idea, according to which meaning is inseparable from rules and an order imposed by syntax and its articulation. Given that neither position in this contrast can impose itself definitively on us, the notion of there being a correlation between the forms of language and the forms of reality loses its immediacy and power of fascination. It is pertinent to note that in his earliest writings, in the Notebooks, Wittgenstein observes:

The method of portrayal must be completely determinate before we can compare reality with the proposition at all in order to see whether it is true or false. The method of comparison must be given me before I can make the comparison. (NB 23)

As Denis McManus has pointed out, one may be inclined to think that this true-false matching is ‘made possible by a deeper meaningful-meaningless match between the “forms” of proposition and possible fact. But this deeper match or mismatch must itself presuppose a “method of comparison”, not merely in order for us to be able to test whether the match holds, but in order for what it is for the match to hold or not to hold to be a determinate matter: only if the method is given, is it settled just what the test in question is….settling on the method is settling on what the relevant kind of similarity and dissimilarity is’. Or to evoke the idiom of Lacan, there is no Other of the Other: there is no metalanguage. The ‘autonomy of the signifier’ is strictly correlative to the ‘subjectivisation’ of the signifying chain. As Slavoj Zizek has it: ‘This is what the “arbitrariness of the signifier” means: not the fact that we can “compare” from outside words and things and ascertain that their connection is arbitrary (table is called “table” or “Tisch” or …), but quite on the contrary the very impossibility of assuming such an external position from which we could “compare” words and things’. Any ascertaining of a ‘correspondence’ between words and things, as when we ascertain the truth or falsity of a proposition, is possible only within the already established field of language. Any attempt to establish the accuracy of a factual statement already relies on language for the very meaning of the proposition to be established. That this is so is clear from the following set of remarks, remarks in which Wittgenstein also brings out with astonishing clarity the lack of foundation of language, the lack which alone supports it, its emergence ex nihilo:

Even where the feeling that arouses joy is localised, joy is not: if for example we rejoice in the smell of a flower. – Joy is manifested in facial expression, in behaviour. (But we do not say that we are joyful in our faces.)
“But I do have a real feeling of joy!” Yes, when you are glad you really are glad. And of course joy is not joyful behaviour, nor yet a feeling around the corners of the mouth and the eyes.
“But surely joy designates an inward thing.” No. “Joy” designates nothing at all. Neither any inward or any outward thing. (Zettel §§486-87)

(One might substitute jouissance for ‘joy’ and the point will, I think, remain.) Our having the concept of joy that we do is part of our having that kind of complex life with language, its words, its grammar (in Wittgenstein’s sense) into which agreement—agreement in judgements, not just in definitions—enters in specific and often unforeseeable ways. In Zettel §351 he remarks:

‘If human beings were not in general agreed about the colours of things, if undetermined cases were not exceptional, then our concept of colour could not exist.’ No: our concept would not exist.

It is in our lives with language that the concepts that we have are indeed the concepts that we have. There is nothing beyond this: our lives in language float free in empty space. We possess no firmer ground than this. One might say, as Zizek has it, that language maintains ‘an unnameable distance from the Real’. One might also say that what is being revealed here is the primordial character of the word. To repeat: discourse cannot say what is named by the name; there is no metalanguage. Something similar to the import of Wittgenstein’s vision is grasped by Agamben when he writes: ‘we finally find ourselves alone with our words; for the first time we are truly alone with language, abandoned without any final foundation. This is the Copernican revolution that the thought of our time inherits from nihilism: we are the first human beings who have become completely conscious of language’. To adapt a formulation of Zizek’s, the barrier separating language (the Symbolic) from the extra-linguistic (the Real), is impossible to trespass, since language (the Symbolic) is this very barrier. It is in this gap that Lacan locates the subject: the subject is in effect the ‘abyss that forever separates language from the substantial life-process’. [Cf Psycho: the impersonal abyss we confront when we are face-to-face with Norman’s gaze at the end of the film is ‘the very abyss of the subject not yet caught in the web of language—the unapproachable Thing which resists subjectivization, this point of failure of every identification, is ultimately the subject itself’’ (Zizek).]

It is in relation to this impossible gap separating the Symbolic from the Real that, in Agamben’s view, we may locate the voice. Insofar as the voice is conceived no longer as the experience of pure sound and not yet as the experience of a meaning, the thought of the voice alone leads to a dimension that indicates ‘the pure taking place of language without any determinate event of meaning’. It is this that shows, he contends, that ‘there is still a possibility of thought beyond meaningful propositions’. The dimension of at issue therefore is not that of meaningful speech but ‘of a voice that, without signifying anything, signifies signification itself’. An example of such a revelation of the voice is, I think, to be found in Joyce’s story, ‘An Encounter’. The story concerns the encounter between two boys playing truant from school and an older man in a park. As the man speaks to one of the boys, the narrator of the story, and reveals to him his fantasies of chastisement, his voice seems to become detached from him, and becomes repetitive, insistent:

He described to me how he would whip such a boy as if he were unfolding some elaborate mystery. He would love that, he said, better than anything in this world; and his voice, as he led me monotonously through the mystery, grew almost affectionate and seemed to plead with me that I should understand him.

As Luke Thurston has noted, in an admirable account of the story, the obscure libidinal traces, traces of an obscene jouissance, set down by the narrator—‘almost affectionate’, ‘seemed to plead’, ‘he would love that better than anything in this world’—form an essential part of the narrative mystery unfolded in ‘An Encounter’. There is, Thurston observes, ‘a crucial perception of something more, something in excess of the discourse uttered, a surplus that possibly indicates (and the element of doubt is precisely the point) the libidinal force or pressure of some hidden fantasmatic object’. In other passages, in which the man describes his fascination with ‘looking at a nice young girl, at her nice white hands and her soft beautiful hair’, it seems to the narrator as though the man were repeating something he had learned by heart, ‘or that, magnetised by some words of his own speech, his mind was slowly circling round and round in the same orbit’. As Thurston puts it, the speaker’s repetitive, insistent phrases point to an invisible centre, a fantasmatic black hole, at once restlessly motivating and always eluding his utterance. In the language of the man there is a split or antagonism between desire and drive. Inasmuch as this verbal jouissance is entirely circular, the man’s speech turns back on itself in masturbatory self-fulfilment, in what Thurston describes as ‘a kind of libidinal autism’. There is thus ‘a split between the chain of signifiers and the concrete utterance embodying it, which remains outside the signifying chain: the object voice, a raw pulsation of the real’. The voice is here identified as the objet a. In the graphs of desire, as Lacan sets them out, the voice occupies a place outside the signifying chain: the split between diacritical signifier and the singular condition of utterance is an inescapable and, so to speak, ‘transcendent’ condition of discourse.

I have been struck by something not unlike this in parts of Olson’s work. To bring this out, I propose to look at ‘In Cold Hell, In Thicket’. Whatever the argument, the discursive thrust, of the poem, the insistence of repetition, an insistence that constitutes one crucial mode of its unfolding, effects a shift from representation to something quite different—to a vision of the surface of language, to something not unlike the slimy and obscene utterance of the man in ‘An Encounter’.

In cold hell, in thicket, how
abstract (as high mind, as not lust, as love is) how
strong (as strut or wing, as polytope, as things are
constellated) how
strung, how cold
can a man stay (can men) confronted
thus?

Apart from alluding to the Inferno, what in this context might be signified by ‘cold hell’, by ‘thicket’? It is, I would say, the void around which the text, in the act of endeavouring to represent it, circulates. Even in the opening lines repetition of word and reiteration of syntactic structure are already strongly marked. The same pattern is evident elsewhere, for example see the indented section in Part 2, beginning ‘How can he change, his question is’. In connection with this poem, Robert von Hallberg quotes the following remark of Olson’s on his mode of writing (Olson is actually talking about ‘The Kingfishers’): ‘Each of these lines is a progressing of both the meaning and the breathing forward, and then a backing up, without a progress or any kind of movement outside the unit of time local to the idea’ (p145). The writing goes forward only to fold back on its own progress, in a circling movement around its own passing beyond itself. In an Escher-like topology, the writing describes a redoubled loop, in which the movement on and forward is twisted back into itself, disclosing within itself its own enunciation, which in turn stands beyond itself.

How shall he who is not happy, who has been so made unclear

In this line the second clause turns back on the first, in a movement one might see as anaphoric—even anamorphic. As one goes through the poem, the effect of this type of torsion is not so much to build to a conclusion or climax, as to create a sense of partial movement, first this, then that, an effect similar to that which Lacan calls démontage. I would see in this also a movement reminiscent of the game described by Freud, the fort-da, in which the constitution of child himself as subject is at stake.

Who am I but by a fix, and another,
a particle, and the congery of particles carefully picked by another...

As this section of the poem continues, the verb tenses set in the passive and active give way something more like that of the reflexive middle voice: ‘that they are, in hell or in happiness, merely/something to be wrought, to be shaped, to be carved, for use, for/others’. The reflexive voice effects a montage of the self and the other but as partial objects. One should note that Lacan’s grammar or formula for the drive is se faire, to make oneself. Outside the active and the passive voice, the drive aims to make itself be seen, be heard. As Mairie Jaanus has argued, it is a minimal way of making oneself exist: as she says, ‘it is matter of perpetuating our existence against what drives us towards non-being’. For Lacan, the fort-da game, with its throwing forth and pulling back of the cotton-reel, is not a game intended to master the mother’s disappearance. The reel is both the subject and its lost object—object a. What the child is aiming at, according to Lacan, is that which ‘essentially not there qua represented’. The repetition aims at something that is not there, and involves the ‘impossible to think’ and ‘the impossible to say’. It involves an encounter with the real ‘which is not situated at the level of thought, but at the level at which “oracular speech” yields non-sense, that which cannot be thought’ (Bruce Fink). ‘In Cold Hell’ does not end, it wavers, it gutters, to a finish, ‘precise as hell is, precise/as any words, or wagon/can be made’. In the later work also one can see the self-representation of a global ego with its geography doubled and disseminated by the colours of rhetoric and the insistent rhythms of repetition. The subject is able intermittently to escape the enclosure of an oppressive truth.

Were I to take this further, I would want to consider Eric Santner’s discussion in The Psychotheology of Everyday Life of Franz Rosenzweig’s understanding of singularity, which, as Santner presents it, draws crucially on a notion of drive not unlike the one sketched out here. What I have tried to suggest is that on occasion in Olson there is a struggle to affirm a strange temporality, which is by no means an apotheosis of the present, but of the singular. The writing exhibits the lack of a present, a non-self-presence that typifies the mode of its rhetoric. Something is revealed that is untranslatable, and not be appropriated: one apprehends, as Thurston has it, a metempsychotic rupture of the ‘I’. Evident in parts of Olson’s writing there is that which testifies to something like the very dimension out of which the writing speaks. There is in his texts a dimension of foreclosure, an opening onto what Lacan has called ‘the realm between two deaths’, the realm of a death-in-life that for a moment one is forced to live. I will end with a quote from Olson himself. On the page immediately following his account of ‘In Cold Hell’, von Hallberg quotes the opening lines of ‘Burnt Norton’ and then the comment Olson wrote on them in the margin of his copy of Eliot’s poetry. Olson says: ‘This is a beautiful passage, & does not contradict space. But at the heart of it, in the man, is a lack of the hole of space, & it is that lack that gives Eliot his minority’. Set in motion by the word ‘lack’, there is a play here around and between the objective and the subjective genitive, as in ‘lack of the hole of space’ (one might compare ‘season of no bungling’), a play that, together with an ambivalence attaching to the word ‘hole’, serves to expose the very act that supports and generates Olson’s note as the act of its own un-doing. The lack Olson denigrates in Eliot is a lack Olson’s text is traversed by also.

I have little doubt that all this will have seemed unrewarding and beside the point. All I can say is that I find the struggle for semantic mastery to be what it is only insofar as it disappoints the authority of its own rhetoric.

Note:

The following remark by J.L. Austin is to the point: ‘There is no need whatsoever for the words used in making a true statement to “mirror” in any way, however indirect, any feature whatsoever of the situation or event; a statement no more needs, in order to be true, to reproduce the “multiplicity,” say, or the “structure” or “form” of the reality, than a word needs to be echoic or writing pictographic. To suppose that it does, is to fall once again into the error of reading back into the world the features of language’. One might add that grammar/language is not responsible to reality; only some statements are. To turn the form of our thought into a content, a statement, is not an intelligible project.

ON WITTGENSTEIN AND LACAN: A FURTHER NOTE

2010-10-02T15:09:00.004+01:00

Writing on the Tractatus in Beyond the Limits of Thought [pp. 188-190], Graham Priest has made the following point concerning any claim to the effect that a fact or proposition (the considerations are the same) has a certain form. The form of a fact is not a component of a fact in the way that the objects that comprise it are. The form of a fact is the way the objects are structured, and this can no more be another object than the form of a house can be one of the bricks of which it is built. If the form of a fact were just another object, like the objects that comprise that fact, the fact would just be a heap of objects, not a unity. The form of a fact functions in a way that is quite different from the objects that comprise make it: the form is the way the objects are put together, the way they are structured. Hence a fact cannot be about its own form in the way it can be about its objects. If the form is not an object, then there are no facts about it, and therefore no proposition that expresses such facts.

Propositions cannot represent logical form: it is mirrored in them.
What finds its reflection in language, language cannot express. (4.121)

The nature of structure cannot be said. Any attempt to make claims concerning the nature of structure must produce a string of signs that fails to make sense. Such a string will be nonsense (Unsinn). Structural claims are beyond the expressible. What we encounter in TLP is not a language about nonsense but a language of nonsense. We shift, as it were from logic to rhetoric. This is what coming to ‘understand me’, the author of TLP, amounts to.

This is comparable to what Shoshana Felman has described in relation to Lacan as ‘the very torment which inhabits logic’ (Writing and Madness, 125). There is a radical dimension opened up by Wittgenstein, a radical dimension corresponding to that discerned by Lacan. What is involved is nothing other than the loss of the security of a metalanguage, the loss of a ‘claim to a position of exhaustiveness, which would, Felman asserts, be the claim of grammar. If we replace ‘grammar’ by ‘logic’ or ‘logical form’, the implications become clear. We are faced, in TLP as in the work of Lacan, by nothing less than a shift from logic to the inescapable dimension of rhetoric, a shift which Felman describes as follows:

that ‘stumbling block’ which forces discourse to discover that it can only define rhetoric rhetorically, by participating in it, i.e., by stumbling, by elaborating not a grammar of rhetoric but a rhetoric of rhetoric…. (127)

She goes on to cite Lacan: ‘Stumbling, faltering, splitting. In a spoken or written sentence something slips…. It’s there that something else is asking to be realized—something which appears as intentional, of course, but partaking of a strange temporality’ (Four Fundamental Concepts, 25). It is this ‘strange temporality’ that Wittgenstein elaborates in the distinction drawn in his later work between agreement in definition and agreement in judgment, which writers such as Affeldt, or Guetti and Read, have considered in detail. One may see why Wittgenstein thought philosophy should be done in the manner of poetry, and why one might say of TLP that, like the poetry of the moderns, it shows itself to be a ‘a literary thing’.

ON WITTGENSTEIN AND LACAN: A NOTE

2010-09-23T15:02:00.005+01:00

‘In the beginning was the deed’ (OC §402). With this famous citation from Goethe, Wittgenstein seems to signal a gap or rupture between letter and voice, between signifying act and bodily singularity. The sense of an utterance cannot be separated from the conditions of that utterance, conditions that are accidental, contingent. One can see here something of how meaning, the flat, denotative meaning of a written chain of words, is transformed into sense. As Zizek has it, this takes place ‘only when a nonsensical vocal dark spot which, in its very opaqueness functions as the stand-in for the subject is added to it’ (IR, 197). If objective-denotative meaning is to be transformed into subjective-expressive sense, one has to supplement it with a vocal stain, a stain that is without meaning: sense = meaning + nonsense. This transformation of the chain is effected, of course, retroactively. (See the graphs of desire.)

The presence of this impenetrable vocal supplement effectuates the magic transmutation of a written chain of signifiers into ‘subjectivized’ speech in which one can discern, beyond its denotative meaning, the reverberation of a subjective position of enunciation. (IR, 197)

Wittgenstein evokes some thing very similar to this when he refers what he calls ‘the context of significant use’ in the Tractatus, a crucial insight which he goes on to elaborate in his later work. (See James Conant on this.) The transmutation of meaning into sense is inseparable from the unpredictable singularity of a language event. (See the discussion of Guetti and Read elsewhere on this site.)

As an example of what I have in mind here, I cite the following remarks from Zettel, remarks in which Wittgenstein also brings out with astonishing clarity the lack of foundation of language, the lack which alone supports it, the nothing from which it comes, ex nihilo:

Even where the feeling that arouses joy is localised, joy is not: if for example we rejoice in the smell of a flower. – Joy is manifested in facial expression, in behaviour. (But we do not say that we are joyful in our faces.)
“But I do have a real feeling of joy!” Yes, when you are glad you really are glad. And of course joy is not joyful behaviour, nor yet a feeling around the corners of the mouth and the eyes.
“But surely joy designates an inward thing.” No. “Joy” designates nothing at all. Neither any inward or any outward thing. (Zettel §§486-87)

One might substitute jouissance for ‘joy’ and the point will, I think, remain. Our having the concept of joy that we do is part of our having that kind of complex life with language, its words, its grammar (in Wittgenstein’s sense) into which agreement—agreement in judgements, not just in definitions—enters in specific and often unforeseeable ways. In Zettel §351 he remarks:

‘If human beings were not in general agreed about the colours of things, if undetermined cases were not exceptional, then our concept of colour could not exist.’ No: our concept would not exist.

It is in our lives with language that the concepts that we have are indeed the concepts that we have. There is nothing beyond this: our lives in language float free in empty space. We possess no firm ground under our feet. One might say, with Zizek, that language maintains ‘an unnameable distance from the Real’. One might also say that what is being revealed here is the primordial character of the word. Just as there is no name for the name, so there is no metalanguage. The import of Wittgenstein’s vision is also grasped by Agamben when he writes: ‘we finally find ourselves alone with our words; for the first time we are truly alone with language, abandoned without any final foundation. This is the Copernican revolution that the thought of our time inherits from nihilism: we are the first human beings who have become completely conscious of language’ (Potentialities, 45). To adapt a formulation of Zizek’s, the barrier separating language (the Symbolic) from the extra-linguistic (the Real), is impossible to trespass, since language (the Symbolic) is this very barrier. It is in this gap that Lacan locates the subject: the subject is in effect the ‘abyss that forever separates language from the substantial life-process’.

One can see here what is involved in Lacan’s later considerations of the Borromean knot. In the seminar of 1975-76, devoted to a consideration of Joyce, the knot moves from being threefold to becoming fourfold, the fourth element being le sinthome, that which links the Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real together. This can be mapped—at the risk of gross oversimplification—onto the equation taken from Zizek that I gave above: sense (Imaginary), meaning (Symbolic and nonsense (Real). Le sinthome would then appear as a thread or line to be envisaged as looping around the three terms of the equation. The problem here of course is that the equation exists in the register of the symbolic, whereas the symbolic is only one element of the knot as it appears in Lacan’s presentation. What my suggestion does conform to, however, is Lacan’s insistence that the writing of the knot cannot be located ‘in symbolic structure, psychological meaning [‘sense’ in Zizek’s equation] or the mute insistence of the drive; in other words the knot itself is irreducible to the registers it inscribes’ (Luke Thurston, James Joyce and the Problem of Psychoanalysis, 195). The mute insistence of the drive is what turns around the black spot of the voice, object a. The topology of the split subject, barred S, in its circulation around the object is marked by Lacan in the matheme for fantasy as a diamond (the sign for ‘more than’ linked to the sign for ‘less than’): this dimension is to be located between ‘meaning’ and ‘nonsense’. The knot is thus a kind of letter, an asemic coincidence of linguistic substance and jouissance, and ‘it remains behind language as litter’ (Thurston, 196). According to Thurston, not only is the sinthome the non-metaphorical knot itself, but it appears in the knot and as its least stable element. (In my inscription of it onto the equation, it is not even ‘there’, but posited.) The sinthome is what reveals a singularity—what for Lacan is the untranslatable signature of a subject’s enjoyment.

On this showing, human subjectivity is not to be understood in terms of rules or laws of signification (as Wittgenstein had already shown): it is to be seen in terms of an act that is open to the void of creative jouissance-in-language. In Zettel we find the following remark: ‘Our language-game is an extension of primitive behaviour. (For our language-game is behaviour.) (Instinct.)’ The extension in question is the extension of a language-game, so that the ‘primitive behaviour’ referred to here is always already language: and the same holds for ‘instinct’. The language-game is there like our life; it is not based on anything, reasonable or unreasonable. It thus makes no sense to ask: ‘from what did language emerge?’ Language truly is a creation ex nihilo. In the light of this, one can perhaps come to see why Lacan finally understood language and the subject’s relation to it, not in terms of metaphor, the Name-of-the Father, but as bodying itself forth without reference to the Other. Just such a vision of language is manifest in Wittgenstein’s account of the experience of meaning, and of seeing aspects.

LACAN AND THE TRINITY

2010-07-27T16:31:00.002+01:00

Lacan considers the question of the Trinity in relation to Borromean rings or knots, and he takes the issue up in Seminar 23, Le sinthome (1975-1976). I propose to look at the account given of this seminar by Roberto Harari in How James Joyce Made His Name (trans. Luke Thurston, Other Press, New York, 2002). It will be remembered that rings of this kind had been used in the Middle Ages to symbolise the Trinity, though neither Lacan nor Harari refers to this fact. For Lacan, the rings serve to engage a certain relation between the Real, Symbolic and Imaginary (R. S. I). Roman Catholicism is, on this view, ‘the only true religion’ inasmuch as by proposing the order of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit it exemplifies the triadic order of R.S.I. Harari cites (pp. 92-94) relevant passages from Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and from Reinach’s Orpheus to justify the Catholic doctrine of the filioque, to which R.S.I. would seem to lend support. As Lacan presents the threefold ring, the third ring, which links the other two into a trinity, is identified with the Holy Spirit, which thus proceeds from the Father and the Son.

Lacan, however, does not remain with the threefold ring. He develops a ring of four elements (see Harari, Figure 11, p. 61), a quadruple Borromean ring, fuller details of which Harari sets out on page 61 and elsewhere. To develop such a ring, it is necessary to untie the original three rings, which had six crossing points, in order to include one more ring, which results in a figure with fourteen crossing points (as laid out on a flat surface like a page). If you want to retie you must first untie. This fourth ring, this fourth order, corresponds to the sinthome. According to Lacan, what Joyce achieved was, as Harari has it, ‘nothing less than a mise-en-scène of this quadruple knot’. The place, so to speak, of the sinthome is outside and yet within R.S.I., and it is from this position that R.S.I. may approached. That the manifestation of this position is what takes place in Joyce’s later writing is the thrust of Seminar 23 and of Harari’s book. I will do no more that suggest here that something not dissimilar may be found in the language of Wittgenstein’s considerations of aspect seeing and the experience of meaning. At the very least, it seems likely that an illuminating comparison may be drawn between these writers.

So far as the Trinity is concerned, on Lacan’s showing, this fourth order is exemplified by the figure of Mary, who appears as that to which the three rings refer themselves. It is though her intercession that one may approach the divine persons. However, a problem arises at this point, I believe. Mary, her blessedness and sanctity notwithstanding, is not divine. The fourth ring, however, is a ring like the other three: it has, so to speak, the same nature. There is, at any rate, nothing to distinguish it from the others, apart from the route it follows in relation to them. (In constructing such a figure, all one needs are four lengths of string which can come from the same ball.) In short, the fourth order, if there is to be a correlation with the Trinity, must also be divine, uncreated. This represents an impasse for Lacan’s argument, based as it is on Catholic doctrine. No such problem arises for the Orthodox tradition, however, despite the dismissal of it in Harari’s book. The fourth order is that of the uncreated grace which flows eternally from the Trinity, that which manifested itself on Mount Tabor, in the light of the Transfiguration. It was just such a theology of uncreated grace, of the uncreated energies, that Gregory Palamas developed in Constantinople after the schism. Palamite theology is taken by Orthodox theologians and by the Church itself as true to the Patristic experience: the Feast of Orthodoxy celebrated during Lent is a celebration of Palamas and his thought. An account of these matters is to be found in Vladimir Lossky, virtually passim, and in the work of Bishop Kallistos. (There are of course many other modern Orthodox theologians who have characterised the issues at stake.)

Lacan imposes on his rings a temporal succession. First, the Father (ring one), then the Son (ring two) and then the Holy Spirit (ring three), which holds the first two together and thus may be said to proceed from the Father and the Son. There is, of course, no doctrine of uncreated grace in Catholicism, hence the role of the Mother of God in explaining or parsing the fourfold set of rings. On the picture I am presenting (and it is a picture, no more), the fourfold set operates retroactively, a procedure that elsewhere is crucial to Lacan (see the graphs of desire, for example, or the discussion of logical time). It is possible to approach the Trinity, if ‘approach’ is the word I need, only by way of the uncreated grace of the Spirit: the Trinity is not accessible ‘in itself’. It is thus the fourth ring that constitutes the whole order of rings as fourfold. One conclusion to be drawn from this is that, if we stick with Lacan, the life of the Christian has more than a little in common with that of one who identifies with the sinthome, the holy man, Saint Thomas, etc. The sinthome is to be distinguished from the symptom, inasmuch as in it one achieves, or is seized by, an identification with one’s singularity: ‘what is in me more than I am myself’.

CHARLES OLSON AND THE ETHICS OF SINGULARITY

2010-06-25T21:58:00.004+01:00

Eric Santner has drawn attention to what he takes to be a crucial aspect of Franz Rosenzweig’s The Star of Redemption. For Rosenzweig, he argues, the elaboration of the predicative being of the Other, the ‘whatness’ of the Other, functions according to the pleasure principle: thus, in relation to the one loved, ‘each predicate “discharges” some of the tension sustaining my effort to locate the essence of the beloved’. However, at the heart of this effort ‘there is the “pulse” of an encounter with the Other in his or her sheer, “tautological” presence—his or her “ipseity”—beyond predicative being, beyond the “whatness” of essences’. (One may be reminded here of Wittgenstein’s discussion of games and the essence of language.) Freud calls this tautological ‘essence’ of the Other the Thing (das Ding). The Thing is not a thing as such, but a breach in the chain of being. Rosenzweig sees in the emergence of the Thing, thus understood, the birth of the metaethical self. This emergence is, for Santner, and other commentators, such as Slavoj Zizek and Kenneth Reinhard, correlative to what Freud understood as the emergence of Triebschicksal, the drive destiny that separates human existence from that of other creatures. We are the only creatures capable of reflecting on our deaths, and as a result we enjoy an excess beyond that of other creatures. Eagleton summarises Santner’s position as follows: ‘because this reflection intensifies our sense of mortality, we become more purely animal than [other creatures] are’.

Freud distinguishes between instinct and drive. The body of the instincts is a body of need, while the body of the drives is a body of want, lack, or requirement. Need refers to what is necessary for self-preservation. We need to eat and to breathe in order to survive. Requirement refers to a necessity that is not a matter of survival. The body of need and the body of drive are both real insofar as the source of them is in the body, but whereas need involves the inside of the body (stomach, lungs, intestines and so on) drive involves the surface of the body and its erogenous openings, its rims. The shift is from breath to voice.

My suggestion (and it is merely a suggestion, not a position, not a thesis) is that one can see, perhaps, this shift at work in some of Olson’s writing, a shift evident in a certain torsion of the text, of its syntax and predicative organisation. One may at times become aware of a stain or anamorphosis in the writing, a breach not infrequently inherent in, or arising from, repetition induced by a sense, not of place, but death. I would be inclined to say that at such moments of insistence something similar to Barthes’s punctum appears, or can be experienced, in the studium of Olson’s otherwise intelligible and differently explicable purposes. One is seized by a remainder or left-over that Rosenzweig called a surplus of the real within reality. It may be that one comes to find oneself in a realm between two deaths.

QUESTIONS OF ONTOLOGY

2009-11-12T15:58:00.006Z

I begin by referring to Alain Badiou, Infinite Thought, translated and edited by Oliver Feltham and Justin Clemens (Continuum, 2003), and in particular to pp 16-17 of the commentators’ Introduction. These pages bear on Being and Event, Meditation 3.

My question is: why should Badiou’s account of Frege’s understanding of the relation between ‘multiples and well-formed formulas’ be read as the editors and translators of Badiou’s text (and Badiou himself) would have us do?

To begin with, Frege’s definition of the relation is given by Feltham and Clemens as follows: ‘There exists a set b such that every term a which satisfies the formula F is an element of that set’. As they point out, such a reading leads to Russell’s Paradox. The paradox arises when the well-formed formula is ‘the set of all sets that which are not members of themselves’. If the set of elements which satisfies the formula belongs to itself, then by definition it does not do so, and if it does not belong to itself, then it does. In response to this, the axiom of separation was developed in ZF set theory so as to avoid Russell’s Paradox. Feltham and Clemens read it as: ‘If there exists a set a, then there exists a subset b of a, all of whose elements g satisfy the formula F’.

What is the point of this? Well, according to the editors, ‘the essential difference between Frege’s definition and the axiom of separation is that the former directly proposes an existence while the latter is conditional upon there already being a set in existence, a. The axiom of separation says that if there is a set already in existence, then one can separate out one of its subsets, b, whose elements validate the formula F’. They give the example in which F is the property ‘rotten’ and one wants to make the judgement ‘Some apples are rotten’. ‘Via the axiom of separation, from the supposed existence of the set of apples, one could separate out the subset of rotten apples.’ The significance of this is the bearing it has on the relationship between being and language: for Badiou, the axiom of separation stipulates that the existence of a multiple is no longer inferred on the basis of natural language (i.e. on the basis of confusions surrounding the use of the word ‘all’). It is rather the case that language separates out, within a supposed given existence (within some already presented multiple), the existence of a sub-multiple (BE 47). Badiou states: ‘Language cannot induce existence, solely a split within existence’ (BE 47). ‘The axiom re-establishes that it is solely within the presupposition of existence that language operates—separates…’ (BE 47). As the editors have it, ‘the very conditions of the inscription of existence in language require that existence be in excess of what the inscriptions define as existing’.

This last statement seems little more than a truism. Reality exists prior to and outside language. To call on set theory to establish or prove this bespeaks confusion. In any event, the point here is that neither the notation of Frege’s definition nor of the axiom of separation, need be read as Badiou and his commentators read them. One may simply invert the conditions of existence and conditionality as between the reading they give of Frege’s notation and the reading they give of the axiom of separation. In other words, it is possible to give Frege’s definition of the axiom in the following way: ‘If there exists a set b, such that for all a, a satisfies F, then a belongs to b’. Again, it is similarly possible to read the axiom of separation in a manner that differs from that of Badiou and his commentators: ‘For all a, there exists a set b, such that for all g, g belongs to a and g satisfies F and therefore g belongs to (is a member of) b’. And if the inversion goes through, then it would seem we are under no obligation to accept Badiou’s presentation/interpretation either of Frege’s logical definition or of the axiom of separation. As a result, we are not obliged to take Badiou’s account of the axiom of separation as any sort of justification for his account of the relations between language and being.

Not only that, but further inspection of set theory would appear to indicate that we are under no obligation to take the axiom of separation as the axiom that explicitly forbids x belonging to x, the condition that gives rise to Russell’s Paradox. Paul Cohen and Reuben Hersh, for example, give what they call the axiom of regularity as the axiom which serves that purpose. The formulation they present operates in terms of sets (or multiples) alone, and does not call upon the notion of a predicate, unlike the axiom of separation, as Badiou and his commentators present it. The formulation simply says that for all x, either x may be a set of elements that do not include x (x could be the set of whole numbers, say), or there is a y such that y belongs to x and for all z, if z belongs to x then no z belongs to y. Thus, the axiom of regularity, like the axiom of separation, precludes the possibility of x being a member of itself, although the two axioms can be seen to differ in other significant ways. Furthermore, it is by no means clear that the axiom of regularity can be used to muster support for Badiou’s notions concerning the relation between language and reality.

Part of Badiou’s purpose in all of this is to replace the ‘inadequacies’ of ordinary language with an ideal logical syntax. Now, the notion of an ideal logical syntax was subjected to critical scrutiny by the early Wittgenstein, as James Conant has made clear in a number of his readings of the Tractatus. This, then, raises a further question as to why we should take the notation that Badiou presents us with as requiring the prose interpretations that he ascribes to it. Logical propositions are senseless, and they are not to be confused with propositions which do have sense. The purpose and significance of logical notation is to be found in relation to what Wittgenstein calls ‘elucidations’. ‘In order to recognize the symbol in the sign we must consider the context of significant use’ (TLP 3.326), and it is central to the purpose of a logical notation to render perspicuous the mode of representation of intelligible propositions expressed in ordinary language where those propositions may be less than perspicuous, due to ambiguities or equivocations of one kind or another. But in logical propositions themselves, in tautologies (or contradictions), there is no symbol to be discovered in the sign. They have form, but no content.

It is precisely considerations of this order that Badiou is obliged to exclude from his enterprise. The assumptions underpinning his procedure require him to treat first order logical formulations, the predicate calculus in which the propositions of set theory are couched, as though they were propositions that do represent how things are, as though they were propositions that are as a matter of fact either true or false. One might wonder, therefore, if there is not, basic to Badiou’s approach, a confusion between sign and symbol of the kind that Wittgenstein in the Tractatus takes to be fundamental to what constitutes Scheinsätze, pseudo-propositions that generate an illusion of meaning. It is a confusion that stems from the projection of logic onto reality, a projection captured in the proposal that mathematics be taken as ontology.

References:

Cohen, Paul, and Reuben Hersh. ‘Non-Cantorian Set Theory’, Scientific American 217 (October 1967), 104-116.
Conant, James. ‘The Method of the Tractatus’, in From Frege to Wittgenstein, ed. Erich H. Rech (Oxford: OUP, 2002), 374-462.

ON ANTI-PHILOSOPHY

2009-11-06T11:52:00.005Z

The standard reading of the Tractatus presents its project in terms of the demarcation of the bounds of sense. It is argued that the text develops a general theory of language which is then used to fix the bounds of sense. Wittgenstein’s purpose, on this view, is to draw limits to meaningful discourse. However, it has been made clear, by commentators like Cora Diamond and James Conant, that the task of a ‘proper theory of symbolism’ is to self-destruct in a manner that shows all theories of symbolism to be superfluous. ‘Logic must take care of itself’ (TLP 5.473). When Wittgenstein claims that you cannot give a sign a wrong sense, his claim is that there is no such thing as infringing on the bounds of sense and therefore there are no bounds of the sort that, according to the standard view, he was seeking to demarcate.

As Conant indicates, ‘the difference between an ideal logical symbolism and ordinary language, for the Tractatus, is that in the former—unlike the latter—one is able to read the symbol directly off the sign. Logical syntax for the Tractatus is not a combinatorial theory (which demarcates legitimate from illegitimate sequences of signs or symbols) but a tool of elucidation (which allows us to recognize the logical contributions of the constituent parts of a Satz, and the absence of such a contribution on the part of the constituents of a Scheinsatz)’. Elucidation, or the transition from unclarity to clarity, is not effected through the transformation in the logical character of the propositions of ordinary language, but rather through a transformation in the view we hold of their logical character. In Conant’s words, ‘It is a matter of making explicit the logical structure that has been implicit in our Sätze all along (and if our Sätze are Unsinn [nonsense], it is a matter making explicit that there has, all along, been no implicit logical structure but only the appearance of such structure)’.

Conant’s argument is that in the Tractatus Wittgenstein wants to show how Frege’s theory of Begriffsschrift—his theory of a logically perfect language that excludes the possibility of the formation of illogical thought—is in fact the correct theory of language as such. ‘Language itself prevents the possibility of every logical mistake. Ordinary language is in this respect already a kind of Begriffsschrift. What for Frege is the structure of an ideal language is for early Wittgenstein the structure of all language.’ Denis McManus argues that Wittgenstein's early work can be seen ‘as attempting to defuse all efforts to draw the bounds of sense, as attempting to expose as illusions anything that would give logic an impossible reality’. ‘Theories which make a proposition of logic appear substantial are always false’ (TLP 6.111). As McManus has it, ‘Anything that would seem to set the bounds of sense, to give substance to the laws of logic, is an illusion.’

For Badiou, Wittgenstein is, along with Lacan, one of the most potent of modern anti-philosophers. This is how he characterises the procedures of the early Wittgenstein:

The antiphilosophical act consists in letting what there is be manifested, insofar as ‘what there is’ is precisely that which no true proposition can say. If Wittgenstein’s antiphilosophical act can legitimately be declared archi-aesthetic, it is because this ‘letting-be’ has the non-propositional form of a pure showing, of clarity, and because such clarity happens to the unsayable only in the form of a work without thought (the paradigm for such donation is certainly music for Wittgenstein). I say archi-aesthetic because it is not a question of substituting art for philosophy either. It is a question of bringing into the scientific and propositional activity the principle of a clarity whose (mystical) element is beyond this activity, and the real paradigm for which is art. It is thus a question of firmly establishing the laws of the sayable (of the thinkable), in order for the unsayable (the unthinkable, which is ultimately given only in the form of art) to be situated as the ‘upper limit’ of the sayable itself.

This is a restatement of the standard, ‘ineffable’ reading of the Tractatus. However, if Conant and McManus (amongst others) are right, it is this very reading that the Tractatus causes to self-destruct. In Philosophical Remarks we find the following:

Any kind of explanation of language presupposes a language already. And in a certain sense, the use of language is something that cannot be taught . . . I cannot use language to get outside language. (PR 54)

McManus points out that a similar thought can be found in an early Notebook entry:

How can I be told how the proposition represents? Or can this not be said at all? And if that is so can I ‘know’ it? If it was supposed to be said to me, then this would have to be done by means of a proposition; but the proposition could only show it.
What can be said can only be said by means of a proposition, and so nothing that is necessary for the understanding of all propositions can be said. (NB 25)

As McManus indicates, ‘all explanations of propositions terminate at some point in our simply seeing what a proposition shows, and that will be a matter of our already understanding the world in the terms in which that proposition represents it. The proposal that a proposition must simply “show its sense” (TLP 4.022) and, with it, the world it represents, thus emerges here out of a sense of confusion in the notion that one might be told how propositions represent’.

The limits of my language mean the limits of my world. (TLP 5.6)

This sentence, as it is set out here, relating, as it would seem to do, to the question of the conformity between my language and my world, is in fact a sentence to which we given no sense. We have simply mistaken a combination of signs without sense for a combination of symbols with sense. If utterances are meaningless, that is not because they are beyond sense, or possess some illogical sense. It is because we have, as yet, given no meaning to the signs that make them up.

It would seem, then, that Badiou is right when he says that what he calls the ‘act’ is central to Wittgenstein’s notion of philosophy as an activity. 'Philosophy is not a body of doctrine but an actvity' (TLP 4.112). As Conant has argued, the nonsensicality of a sentence like ‘Caesar is a prime number’ is to be traced, not to the logical structure of the sentence, but to our failure to mean something by it. For Wittgenstein, the source of the problem is to be located in our relation to the string, not in the linguistic string itself. We think we are confronting a logically impossible thought—and that this involves a kind of impossibility of a higher order than ordinary impossibility. The desire for meaning is displaced onto the words themselves: it is as if they are aspiring to say something they can never quite succeed in saying. It is in this, and nothing more mysterious than this, that the archi-aesthetic nature of what is situated beyond the sayable consists.

References:

Badiou, Alain. ‘Silence, solipsisme, sainteté: L’antiphilosophie de Wittgenstein’, BARCA! Poésie, Politique, psychanalyse, 3, (1994).
Bosteels, Bruno. ‘Radical Antiphilosophy’, Filozofski vestnik XXIX, 2 (2008): 155-187. The translation from Badiou is cited from Bosteels.
Conant, James. ‘The Method of the Tractatus’, in From Frege to Wittgenstein, ed. E.H. Reck (Oxford: OUP, 2002), 374-462.
McManus, Denis. The Enchantment of Words (Oxford: OUP, 2006).

OBJECT AND EVENT

2009-10-15T15:55:00.005+01:00

I want to suggest certain ways in which some reflections by P.M.S. Hacker on the distinction between object and event cast light on what it is that Badiou understands by the event. Obviously enough, Hacker, like Austin and Wittgenstein, is a philosopher of what Alain Badiou calls, dismissively, ‘the linguistic turn’. However, this point need not be taken too seriously. The issues Hacker raises concerning and object and event have a decided bearing on the relation between being and event.

Hacker points out that while objects occupy space, events occur in space, at a place: they do not fill or occupy space. He writes: ‘Two objects cannot occupy the same place at the same time, but two distinct events may occur simultaneously at the same place, as when an object in the fire simultaneously gets hotter and changes colour’. Events are unlike material objects in that they do not consist of matter. Not consisting of matter they have no size or texture, and they are neither solid nor not-solid. Since events do not occupy space as objects do, they are neither two- nor three-dimensional. While it is true that events need space in which to take place, they do not have dimensions. The component parts of an object are typically thought of as being spatial parts, and hence they are smaller than the whole of which they are parts. As Hacker indicates, the ‘analogue of part for an event is the notion of the phase’. As an object is made up of the sum of its parts, suitably ordered in space, an event is made up of the sum of its phases, appropriately ordered in time. But, as Hacker points out, ‘these “parts” of events are not … smaller than the event of which they are parts, but shorter (temporally) than it’.

If we take this distinction for what it is, a distinction in grammar (in both Wittgenstein’s and Austin’s senses of that term, which are not unrelated) between the spatial composition of objects into parts, and the temporal division of events into phases, then it makes no sense to say that an event is a multiple. That is, unlike an object, an event is not intelligibly to be understood as constituted in a way that lends itself to being described as a set, whether finite or infinite. Set theory is not designed to address that which is temporally constituted: an event, being thus temporally constituted, has no parts, and is thus not divisible into sets, subsets or power sets. Given that, for Badiou, mathematics (set theory) is ontology, it would thus seem that ontology has no significant bearing on the elucidation of what an event is. Now, Badiou allows for this: an event, after all, is a set that includes itself, a set that therefore violates one of the basic axioms of ZF set theory. To put this another way, it is a multiple that is indiscernible within the situation in which it occurs. An event is a generic set, a set which is not recognisable within the established parameters of knowledge as these are laid down by standard set theory, but nonetheless a set, albeit non-constructible.

That there is a difficulty in thus inscribing events among objects becomes clear if we think about how the attribution of perceptual qualities to events differs from the attribution of perceptual qualities to objects. As Hacker reminds us, one can watch the falling of leaves or the performance of a play. ‘But events have neither shape nor colour, just because they do not have spatial dimensions, do not fill space, and do not consist of stuff.’ How is it then that we can see events? To think of an event as a colourless and shapeless object is to think of what is an invisible object! However, events are not objects, and they are not amorphous or colourless. It simply makes no sense to attribute shape or colour to them. ‘A colourful event is not a multi-coloured event, but an event which consists in various transformations of vari-coloured objects or production of multi-coloured flashes, as in a firework display. To observe an event is to see something happening to certain material objects that are undergoing various changes. I may observe the event of the poker’s becoming hot. The poker changes from black to glowing red, but the event of its becoming red does not change from black to red, it is the change from black to red.’

In my previous entry on this matter, I drew attention to Peter Dews’ review of Badiou. Dews cites from Wittgenstein:

Even where the feeling that arouses joy is localised, joy is not: if for example we rejoice in the smell of a flower. – Joy is manifested in facial expression, in behaviour. (But we do not say that we are joyful in our faces.)

“But I do have a real feeling of joy!” Yes, when you are glad you really are glad. And of course joy is not joyful behaviour, nor yet a feeling around the corners of the mouth and the eyes.

“But surely joy designates an inward thing.” No. “Joy” designates nothing at all. Neither any inward or any outward thing. [Zettel §§486-87]

Dews remarks: ‘Like joy, the Badiouian event cannot be designated—and can be located neither in mental nor physical space. Indeed, one must surely conclude that joy is an event’. But in that case, events are very common: they ‘make up the very texture of the human world’, a point to which Hacker’s discussion gives full support.

A number of questions arise. To begin with, if joy is an event in Badiou’s sense (i.e. his account can be applied to it), then presumably the heating of the poker is also an event in Badiou’s sense, along with Hacker’s other examples (which include the French Revolution). How then can set theory, concerned as it is with multiples (sets and subsets, wholes and parts of wholes) illuminate the nature of an event, which, thus understood, is precisely not a multiple? That is, how would Badiou describe the kinds of event to which Dews and Hacker have given consideration? Again, on what principles are the events that Badiou privileges, Christ’s Resurrection, the French Revolution, the Cultural Revolution, for example, selected? Events are the stuff of life. Why should only these few, very rare, events be selected as events? Is it that fidelity is due to them? The suspicion must arise that the selection is the result of a certain political predetermination. Badiou’s ontology is static, the result of his set-theoretical parti pris. Once the original decision was made to cast ontology in mathematical form (Cantorian form), the event arises as that violates or ruptures the static nature of being as being. The event bears with it novelty, revolution. That there are problems with Badiou’s original decision is something that Peter Osborne has discussed, and I have referred to that discussion in an earlier entry. There is another worry that I have: in his book on St Paul, Badiou takes Christ’s Resurrection as exemplary of what an event is. And yet for him this event did not occur: it is, he says, ‘a fable’. In what sense is an event that has not occurred an event?

These are questions, not objections. It may be that Badiou’s achievement is to raise, in a mode not unlike that of Wittgenstein, problems that concern the foundations of philosophy. If one were to say of such an achievement that it is therapeutic, in the sense that Wittgenstein's philosophy is therapeutic, then one would also have to say that, if we are to understand Badiou himself, then that understanding is itself an event, the event of recognising his propositions for what they are, that is, nonsensical.

References:

Dews, Peter. A review of Being and Event, tr. Oliver Feltham (Continuum, 2006), in Notre Dame Philosophy Reviews 2008.02.18. [online]
Hacker, P.M.S. ‘Events and Objects in Space and Time’, Mind 91 (1982), 1-19.
Hacker, P.M.S. ‘Events, Ontology and Grammar’, Philosophy 57 (1982), 477-486.
Osborne, Peter. ‘Neo-classic: Alain Badou’s Being and Event’, Radical Philosophy, 142 (March/April 2007), 19-29.

ONTOLOGY AND THE EVENT

2009-10-11T20:35:00.005+01:00

I want to begin by making reference to a review by Peter Dews, published in 2008, of Badiou’s Being and Event. For Dews, Badiou’s philosophy derives from a tension between two basic propositions: mathematics is ontology and ontology is a situation. This means that ‘although ontology exhausts what there is, it cannot capture everything that occurs’. This division enlists Badiou in the tradition of anti-philosophy, despite his expressed opposition to it: what cannot be known is what it is most important to know, or, in a different version, what cannot be said is what must be said. Of course, for Badiou, ontology, the knowledge of being as being, is given to us by mathematics, and in particular by the set theory of Cantor. What exceeds the situation is the event and the event is that which cannot be known or said in that situation. An event is a multiple, but one that counts for nothing in the situation in which it takes place. If ‘the state of the situation’ is what is re-presented of what is presented (i.e. if it is the power set of the ‘original’ infinite set of multiples), then the event concerns those presented elements that are not re-presented in the state of the situation. An event is a multiplicity (a multiple of multiples) none of whose elements are re-presented in the state of the situation. As Dews notes, the event is what Badiou calls ‘totally abnormal’, which is to say that an event is a multiple comprised of those elements which were originally presented but not re-presented in the state of the situation. Such a multiple, an ‘evental site’, is ‘on the edge of the void’—in other words, it looks as though it does not exist, but this, it should be noted, is only how things appear from the point of view of someone within the situation. The event counts for nothing in the situation in which it emerges, or into which it erupts. Everything that exists in the situation is numbered or ‘counted for one’ in that situation. The event is thus said to be ‘supernumerary’. It is something that evades the count. To cite Peter Hallward, ‘As something that cannot be recognised as one in a situation, an event is the (necessarily ephemeral) presentation of inconsistency in the situation’. In Badiou’s book, the shift from being to event is the shift from Cantor to Cohen.

The emergence of the event is at the same time the emergence of the subject who recognises it, who nominates it as an event, an act which begins a process of fidelity to the event thus (retroactively) evoked. But, as Dews indicates, if we ask what exactly in the situation is being nominated, or what constitutes the evental site, all we seem to have is the multiplicity of elements from which the event emerged. As Badiou has it, the event consists of the elements belonging to the evental site, together with the event itself. Thus understood, the event can be seen as a set that belongs to itself (it thus violates one of the fundamental axioms of set theory—the axiom of foundation). Dews cites one of Badiou’s favourite examples, the French revolution, which is more than the innumerable (infinite?) list of doings that took place in France between 1789 and 1794. ‘It is rather something bound up in this assemblage, which the term “French Revolution” specifically names. But when we try to specify what this extra something is, we find ourselves again confronted only with the assemblage of happenings—plus that elusive addendum. The revolution is not simply the narrative of what occurred, but it cannot be filtered out from this narrative either.’

However, Dews goes on to argue that, given this way of defining them, events are far more widespread and common than Badiou allows for. He compares Badiou’s account of the event with the way Wittgenstein characterises the grammar of processes that have often been ascribed to a ‘mental’ domain. For example, expecting someone to arrive can consist of a wide range of different thoughts and activities. ‘There is no determinate set of thoughts and activities that can be said to be necessary and sufficient conditions of such expectation (and furthermore, activities which, in one context, are correctly taken as indicating expectation, may no longer have this meaning when transposed into a different context).’ We cannot therefore identify the event (of expecting someone to arrive) either with specific mental processes or with outward behaviour, or with a combination of both. Nonetheless, we cannot conclude that the event (of expectation) is something other than these processes and actions. Dews quotes the following imagined dialogue from Zettel:

Even where the feeling that arouses joy is localised, joy is not: if for example we rejoice in the smell of a flower. – Joy is manifested in facial expression, in behaviour. (But we do not say that we are joyful in our faces.)

“But I do have a real feeling of joy!” Yes, when you are glad you really are glad. And of course joy is not joyful behaviour, nor yet a feeling around the corners of the mouth and the eyes.

“But surely joy designates an inward thing.” No. “Joy” designates nothing at all. Neither any inward nor any outward thing. (§§486-87)

Like joy, as here characterised in Wittgenstein’s dialogue, Badiou’s event cannot be localised in either mental or physical space. For Dews, there is therefore no reason to think that joy, seen in this light, is anything other than an event, as Badiou is given to understand the term.

At this point, I would refer to two articles, published in 1982, by P.M.S. Hacker on the ontology of events and the relation of events to objects, articles that seem to owe as much, in their methods of analysis, to J.L. Austin as to Wittgenstein. In one article Hacker writes: ‘Events are neither substances nor indeed do they exist. Or, if one prefers the jargon, the “being” of events is to take place, happen, occur—but not to “exist”. Material objects do not take place and events do not exist. A volcano exists, but an eruption of a volcano cannot exist. It may have happened, be happening, or be about to happen. The death of Caesar never existed—it took place. Caesar existed and the event of his death was the termination of his existence. The termination of an object is not itself an “entity” which exists. It is an event’.

There is no immediate conclusion that I wish to draw from these reflections. However, I am certain that the matters here raised are of pertinence to a fitting acknowledgement of the power of Badiou’s thought. I would suggest that no just evaluation of that thought will be achieved without setting it in relation to the work of both Wittgenstein and Austin—the two of them representing positions Badiou has been deeply critical of.

References

Dews, Peter. A review of Being and Event, tr. Oliver Feltham (Continuum, 2006), in Notre Dame Philosophy Reviews 2008.02.18 [online]
Hacker, P.M.S. ‘Events and Objects in Space and Time’, Mind 91 (1982), 1-19.
Hacker, P.M.S. ‘Events, Ontology and Grammar’, Philosophy 57 (1982), 477-486.

A REMARK ON ALAIN BADIOU

2009-09-14T17:24:00.009+01:00

In an essay on Wittgenstein’s later philosophy, Stanley Cavell raises the question of what rule-following is for Wittgenstein. He notes, amongst other things, that in those activities which could be said to proceed according to rules the activity is not (could not be) ‘everywhere circumscribed by rules’ (PI, sec 68). As Espen Hammer puts the point, rules do not circumscribe every aspect of a meaningful activity or speech act. There must always be projections of words to which it is not clear whether rules apply or not. (Consider here, for example, Wittgenstein’s discussion of secondary sense and aspect seeing.) again, every rule-following activity takes place against the background of innumerable other activities. These include taking and giving directions, obeying orders, and so on. As Cavell makes clear, these considerations suffice to show that the concept of a rule does not exhaust the concepts of correctness or justification: indeed, the concept of a rule would have no meaning unless these other concepts were already in place, and were possessed of meaning.

More significantly, no specification of rules can ever explain what playing a game amounts to. Playing a game is ‘a part of our natural history’ (PI, sec 31), and until one has become an initiate of this form of life, this human form of activity, the citing of a rule can mean nothing. Many of our games can be learnt without ever learning or formulating rules, so that linguistic normativity does not involve the strong conception of inference and implication one finds in logical and mathematical systems. Again, language has no essence. There is nothing common to all games: they exhibit rather what Wittgenstein called family resemblances. For Wittgenstein, following a rule is just as much a practice as playing a game. Now, Cavell asks, what are its rules? There is typically no rule for following a rule. And yet following a rule can be done correctly or incorrectly. And that means that it can be done or not done. To follow a rule correctly is just to do it. To be an initiate of these practices is to be an initiate of a form of life. For Cavell, human speech and activity, sanity and community, rest upon nothing more, but nothing less than this. (Similar views may be found in such readers of Wittgenstein as Rush Rhees, Cora Diamond, James Conant, Rupert Read, James Guetti, Michael Kremer and Denis McManus, amongst a number of others.)

These considerations are of little significance to Badiou. He lists Wittgenstein high amongst the ‘sophists’ of the modern period, and in his fairly extensive writings on Wittgenstein he does not consider the kinds of question I raise here. (It is noteworthy that he does not refer to the work of Anglophone commentators on Wittgenstein; for instance, in his reading TLP he adheres to the traditional ‘ineffabilist’ account, and is oblivious to what may be called the ‘resolute’ reading of that text.) Badiou’s fundamental claim, that mathematics is ontology, aims precisely at the elimination of language from philosophy and at the overcoming of the ‘linguistic turn’. However, Cavell’s remarks on rule-following are not so easily dismissed, and any assessment of Badiou’s position (an assessment external to Badiou's own assessment of his achievement, that is) would need to consider them. The pertinence of Cavell's remarks may be seen when they are placed in relation to one of Zizek’s most telling criticisms of Badiou: ‘Against Badiou, one should insist that only to a mortal/finite being does the act (or Event) appear as a traumatic intrusion of the Real….Badiou remains blind to how the very space for the specific “immortality” in which human beings can participate in the Truth-Event is opened up by man’s unique relationship to his finitude and the possibility of death’. The implications of this last comment accord with what is already evident in Cavell's account of rule-following: the notion of a transcendent/ideal position such as that from which Badiou seeks to lay out an ontology is highly problematic. The elaboration of such a position is not to be characterised as an elaboration of the 'impossible': the idea is in fact nonsensical. (This, obviously enough, does not commit Cavell, or Wittgenstein, to relativism, post-modernism, or any of the other sins Badiou discerns in contemporary thought.) Hilary Putnam has written: 'There is always a cut between the observer's language and the totality of languages he generalizes over. The "God's-Eye View"--the view from which absolutely all languages are equally part of the totality being scrutinized--is forever inaccessible'.

Part of what I am saying can be placed in relation to what in Jean-Toussaint Desanti’s ‘remark’ on Badiou’s ‘intrinsic ontology’ touches on the question of the margin. Inasmuch as Badiou’s ontology is intrinsic, that is, concerned with being as being, it articulates itself in terms of ZF set theory. The margin is that which intrinsic ontology excludes by definition, and which it cannot recuperate. Desanti sees the margin as never silent. It is that which inscribes itself upon itself (marks itself), and is organised into a series of ‘writings’. The term has considerable resonance in French thought after Derrida, and Desanti draws on those connotations here: ‘I call writing anything which, as it is produced, leaves a trace’. He gives what he calls a ‘baroque’ list of examples, such as a falling leaf, a natural catastrophe, an utterance, an assassination, theft by a pickpocket, and so on. The obvious example he does not mention, that of a continuous line drawn between two points, but this is in effect the example that colours his discussion. Such a line is, obviously enough, the continuum, which cannot ultimately be defined by set theory.

The point of all this is to make it clear what Desanti means by a margin. He sees it as the writing of an excess (he italicises the word) which, he says, is not necessarily coordinated, though it is ‘susceptible to a localized coordination in the fragile wake left by some of its assemblages’. He gives no further clarification as to what he means, but perhaps one might think of the wreckage left behind in the wake of a hurricane. The fragile wreckage may be said to coordinate what has passed, in the sense that one can gauge the force of the passing of the storm from the detritus it has left behind. To draw on another idiom, though one not without relevance here, the margin is comparable, one might think, to the enunciation of the enounced, the uttering of the utterance. However, in set theory, which is itself a writing, the excess engendered by it must be recuperated back into the theory or else be excluded. Desanti concludes that ontological thought is therefore caught in the tension that binds these two writings together. Its task consists, he says, in trying to rewrite what is written in the margin and in capturing its excesses (an example being Cohen’s work on the continuum hypothesis). The margin can neither be abolished not excluded.

What this amounts to, I suggest, is a reworking in terms of ontology of what is given in Cavell’s account of rule-following. In other words, Cavell’s recognition of the relations between judgement and definition in the following of a rule, with its explicit recognition of what can only be called excess, is transposed here from what in Cavell’s case is a series of grammatical remarks into metaphysical statements, statements that purport to be true. A relevant example of this from Wittgenstein is the following: ‘The dangerous, deceptive thing about the idea: “the real numbers cannot be arranged in a series, or again “The set … is not denumerable” is that it makes the determination of a concept – concept formation – look like a fact of nature’ (RFM, II, sec 19, p.131). In a well-known study, Giorgio Agamben has gone to great lengths to recast the ontological/ontic distinction in terms of Benveniste’s distinction between enunciation and the enounced. The procedure there is the same: to recast what are distinctions in grammar as statements of fact, of a kind of hyper-fact.

Badiou does not seem to have escaped language. Mathematics—in his use of it—does not reach beyond language into a context free universe determined only by the offerings of ZF set theory (or now, under the influence of Desanti’s article, topos theory). What it would seem he has done is to transcode into the deliverances of set theory the structure of certain forms of language. So far from set theory escaping the toils of language, it would seem that it is to language that set theory has been brought to correspond. Language wears the trousers. Badiou would not of course deign to address any consideration of his position couched in these terms. But problems undoubtedly remain with the assumptions underpinning ontology as he presents it. (In this connection, an essay by Peter Osborne, in Radical Philosophy, 142 (March/April 2007), is to the point. I should note that objections to Osborne's position have been put by Oliver Feltham, especially in chapter 4 of his Alain Badiou: Live Theory (London, New York: Continuum, 2008). Feltham is critical of Osborne's suggestion that Badiou has transcoded certain linguistic concepts into set theory. He considers that this 'simply ignores the differences between mathematical and philosophical ideas' (p. 124). The point may rather be, however, that Badiou has simply blurred them.)

References:
Agamben, Giorgio. Language and Death, trans. Karen E. Pinkus with Michael Hardt (Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota, 1991).
Cavell, Stanley. Must We Mean What We Say? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
Desanti, Jean-Toussaint. 'Some Remarks on the Intrinsic Ontology of Alain Badiou', in Peter Hallward, ed., Think Again: Alain Badiou and the Future of Philosophy (London, New York: Continuum, 2007).
Hammer, Espen. Stanley Cavell (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002).

ON THE POETRY OF DONALD DAVIE

2009-07-26T20:19:00.003+01:00

These are some remarks on the poetry of Donald Davie, whose Collected Poems, edited by Neil Powell, were published by Carcanet in 2002.

In an essay of 1959 (reprinted in The Poet in the Imaginary Museum), Donald Davie presented himself, and those contemporaries associated with him in ‘The Movement’, in a light at once harsh and unforgiving. What underpinned his remarkably brutal self-exposure was the question of tone. The thing that stuck in his craw was what he came to see as the peculiarly deprecating and ingratiating mode of voice in which the poetry of the group had presented itself to the educated readers of its time. As Davie icily remarks, what in effect the poets of the Movement had succeeded in doing was to replace a poetry of self-expression (the poetry of Dylan Thomas and Edith Sitwell) with one no less egregious, namely, a poetry of ‘self-adjustment’—a poetry dedicated to getting on the right terms with the reader and to hitting off the right attitude towards him. Davie came to see the poetry he had written during the 1950s as an act of public and private therapy, in its own way another and no less contemptible mode of self-expression. His work, and that of those associated with him, was guilty of what during the 1960s and onwards he was to regard as the cardinal sin: the failure to respond creatively to the world as such. For the English poets of the 1950s, he believed, the world out there, in its quiddity, was accessible, if at all, only by way of an overweening irony, at once self-defensive and self-deprecating, which denied the world its integrity and otherness. Things in themselves were permitted no impact upon the poet unless submitted to categories and attitudes he himself had already imposed upon them. As Davie puts it: ‘This imperiousness towards the non-human goes along with excessive humility towards the human, represented by the reader’. To make the manipulation of ‘tone’ the central preoccupation of poetry was to deny the ontological in the interests of the social. The refusal, characteristic of English poetry from Yeats, Auden and Empson to the Movement, and on to Thom Gunn and others, to accept the reality of ‘alien modes of being’ was taken by Davie to be symptomatic of a deeper malaise: the catastrophic failure to acknowledge the reality of being as such. Awareness of this failure was to remain for Davie throughout his life a touchstone of what he saw as the peculiar deadness lying at the heart of English culture and mentality. Davie noted it especially in the willingness of modern English poets (including Hardy) to sell poetry short and in the diminished expectations and philistinism of the culture as a whole.

What Davie’s Collected Poems reveal is a constant struggle to overcome these failures, as he saw them, within himself.

Worry hedges my days
Like a roil of thick mist at the edge of a covert
Fringing a tufted meadow. In that field
Monuments of art and sanctity
Arise in turn before
The clouded glass of my eye.
Last year two churches of St Francis
Were piled up there, at the lowest verge of Assisi.

This poem, ‘On Not Deserving’, from Poems of 1962-1963, is suggestive in its ambiguities. There is in place a ‘roil’ of thick mist obscuring the edge of a covert which is compared to the ‘worry’ hedging the poet’s days. The first line implies that worry not only limits or sets bounds to the speaker’s days, it also allows him to hedge his bets and to trim, to hold to the middle course and avoid extremes. ‘Roil’, which as a verb means to rile, vex or annoy, or to make water muddy or unclear by stirring, has become a substantive, a displacement of use which effects precisely the blurring of boundaries essential to the poet’s strategy here. Furthermore, the boundary or edge in question is the edge of a covert, itself a hiding-place, a thicket hiding game. The field thus delimited by the poem is of uncertain definition. However, it is here that ‘Monuments of art and sanctity’, invoking the transcendence of Yeats’s ‘Monuments of unageing intellect’ and the humility of St Francis, are said to ‘arise’, and ‘arise in turn’. ‘Turn’ evokes ‘verse’ and ‘before’ points to what comes next, which is, as we pull over the line end: ‘The clouded glass of my eye’. Here, the poem is showing itself for what it is, a ‘turn’—a turn that clarifies what it clarifies with respect to an eye whose glass is ‘clouded’. To clarify is thus an obscuring. The opacity of the situation is marked in the last line by the spatial deictic ‘there’, suspended before the caesura and pointing back to the equally unfocussed temporal marker of the previous line—‘Last year’. Just as the poem seems poised to impose its images on the world, so, in the same gesture, the flat, almost paratactic phrasing seems on the ‘verge’ of withdrawing them, as too overweening an importunity. What is piled up is piled up at ‘the lowest verge of Assisi’, a phrase that fails to point to anything, except perhaps itself, engaged in the act of pointing. The speaker is not ‘deserving’, not worthy—of what, we don’t know—on the evidence of the very act he has just performed. He has accomplished his own failure, and, as it were, by pleading his innocence established his guilt. The poem’s lack is the possibility of its being.

‘The Hill Field’ (Events and Wisdoms (1964)) is a more extended and complex piece in the same vein:

Look here! What a wheaten
Half-loaf, halfway to bread,
A cornfield is, that is eaten
Away, and harvested.

How like a loaf, where the knife
Has cut and come again,
Jagged where the farmer’s wife
Has served the farmer’s men,

That steep field is, where the reaping
Has only just begun
On a wedge-shaped front, and the creeping
Steel edges glint in the sun.

See the cheese-like shape it is taking,
The sliced-off walls of the wheat
And the cheese-mite reapers making
Inroads there, in the heat?

It is Brueghel or Samuel Palmer,
Some painter, coming between
My eye and the truth of a farmer,
So massively sculpts the scene.

The sickles of poets dazzle
These eyes that were filmed from birth;
And the miller comes with an easel
To grind the fruits of earth.

This poem, like the first I quoted, refers to other writing. The reference here is to ‘The Solitary Reaper’. The poem also refers to itself, as the singular act of composition that it is. That is, in referring to itself, it simultaneously refers us to another writing. This is to stress, not intertextual reference in general, but rather the singularity of the act of referral itself. What Davie has here constructed is a poem that is open and closed at once. Because of the uncertainty of context this play of reference creates, an uncertainty concerning who is saying what to whom, the poem’s tone—its explicit ‘address’ to the reader—can no longer be understood as it was by Davie in 1959. That this is so can be seen at the beginning of the opening line. The imperative, ‘Look here’, serves to confirm the identity of this text (or, at any rate, of this phrase) by moving outside or beyond itself, in order to point to itself from the position of an other, the reader who is addressed by words that apparently refer only to the event of the poem itself—the event of the poem’s depicting what is depicted by it. (This ‘event’, it would seem, is the poem’s ‘wisdom’.) The phrase, ‘Look here’, can of course also be read as an expostulation. The status of the poem’s beginning is thus rendered immediately problematic.

This point may be made clearer with respect to the image of the field which is in play here, as in ‘On Not Deserving’, and which fulfils much the same role in this poem as it did in that. The image of the field is what the poem is in the process of constructing, and part of what the image is an image of is the process whereby it is being constructed. In effect, what the poem shows is itself as it emerges from, or is engendered by, the process of being said. As a critic, Davie had elaborated on this kind of symbolist configuration in essays on Eliot, Pound, Mallarmé and Pasternak, some of which were written prior to or during the composition of the poetry of this collection. Thus, in ‘The Hill Field’, as with many other poems he wrote during the same period, one can see the poet developing a complex modernist poetry based on that of the earlier masters, but as it were transposed into what looks like the minor key of a poet who also has his eye on Hardy, a poet who was, according to Davie, unlike Eliot and the other major modernists in that he failed to transform or displace ‘quantifiable reality or the reality of common sense’. In ‘The Hill Field’, symbolist techniques are present, and signalled as such. ‘Wheaten’ is reduced to ‘eaten’ as the ‘half-loaf’ of the field set up by the poem is reduced by the removal, or harvesting, of the letters ‘wh‘. In stanza three, ‘the wedge-shaped front’ is there on the page, shown in the shape constructed by the way the words ‘and creeping’ in line 3 protrude beyond the second and fourth lines. The apostrophe ‘how’, beginning at line 5, is only revealed to be an apostrophe, rather than a question, by the end of line 12. The opening ‘See’ of line 13 looks like another apostrophe, but by the end of line 16 it is seen in retrospect to be a question. The palpability of the words is further emphasised by sound: ‘ee’ provides a kind of basic pattern, through which other vowels intertwine in a series of complex variations.

More generally, the poem doubles back on itself, as though it were referring to itself referring to itself. It separates itself from itself and by so doing opens a gap within its structure across which reference can operate. This is signalled and effected by the temporal displacement at the opening, whereby the cornfield is presented as already the loaf it has not yet become, a loaf baked before the harvest is gathered in. It is in this temporal shifting that we see what gives rise to the various metaphors of violation carried by words like ‘knife’, ‘cut’, ‘cheese-mites’ and the ‘sickles’ (inevitably evoking ‘versicles’) that occur throughout the text. By means of a folding or turning back of time on itself, something that occurs only in the order of writing, the end is enabled to precede the beginning, and the beginning to come after the end. The device results in so profound a rupturing or undoing of intelligible order that, as Davie describes it, in an essay on syntax and music, there remains to the reader only one order of time which he can trust: ‘the one time the tales takes in the telling, the time which the poem takes to be spoken or read’. This foregrounding of the device, or ostranenie, is a procedure central to the poetry of Pasternak, as Davie’s essays and book on him make abundantly clear, and it is central also to his own:

Most poems, or the best,
Describe their own birth, and this
Is what they are – a space
Cleared to walk around in.
('Ars Poetica')

The ramifications of this reach very far. A word that has special privilege in Davie’s earlier poetry is ‘edge’, and there are others related to it, like ‘knife’, cut’, ‘sculpture’, ‘stone’ and words and names associated with art more generally. ‘Edge’ seems to have the same role here as ‘blanc’ in Mallarmé. Like Mallarmé’s writing (or Pasternak’s), Davie’s is a writing of spacing—in the sense that it foregrounds spatio-temporal differing—and words like ‘edge’ or ‘cut’ or their substitutes refer to the very spaces or cuts that make possible the series of which they are themselves members. (One may be inclined to see something paradoxical here, comparable to the problem arising when we consider the set of all sets that are not members of themselves. Is this set a member of itself? If it is then it is not. If it is not then it is.) The edge thus understood is what gives to the poem the conditions both of the possibility of meaning and of its impossibility. Thus, in ‘The Hill Field’, the names of the artists, Brueghel and Samuel Palmer, constitute a movement of undecidability: they mark what makes the poem possible and what stands outside, or transcends, that possibility, inasmuch as they mark what conditions it, ‘coming between/My eye and the truth of a farmer’. The final stanza takes this further: in acknowledging that the poet’s eyes were ‘filmed from birth’, a play is engendered on ‘from’ (inasmuch as ‘from’ may mean both ‘since that time’ and ‘due to’) that is repeated in the double genitive in the last line: ‘fruits of earth’ allows or constitutes a doubling which in turn allows (or calls forth) a play on ‘earth’ itself, a word resonant with implication and connotation. The complex play of meaning and counter-meaning at the end of the poem is thus shown to be an effect internal to the conditions of writing as such. For an instance of a poem that can be said to take this procedure to the limit, see the extraordinary ‘Bolyai, the Geometer’: it is a fully achieved symbolist poem in the mode of Pasternak.

And it is this excess, the excess of syntax over semantics, that Davie’s work continued to explore, throughout Events and Wisdoms and beyond. To align Davie in this way with an advanced modernism, may seem, despite Davie’s own critical clarification of these very modes of writing, perverse, wrong-headed. And yet, in ‘Sonnet’, a poem of the 1980s, Davie writes: ‘the scarp/Of language you would quarry, poet, whirls/Indeterminately shaped in/Helix on nebulous helix, not to be netted’. In ‘Thomas and Emma’, which, according to the editor, Neil Powell, is the last poem Davie wrote, in July 1995, two months before his death, he wrote:

Hyperbole, analogy, allusion
Build up what is no lie, although so wishful:
Conspiratorial, conjugal collusion.

The alliterations hark back to what ‘builds them up’ and suggest that the ‘collusion’, which is no lie, depends upon a poetic understanding of language that is hyperbolic, dependent upon analogy and allusive. I am not offering a modish characterisation or deconstruction of texts against the grain of an author who would have been resistant to readings of this kind. I am attempting rather to point to ways in which Davie came to see how the foundation of meaning in what is itself without meaning was inseparable from the vision his poetry gives us of what poetry, and so life, can or might be. It is here that his earlier self-castigation finds itself assuaged. In the enhanced sense his poetry shows of terms such as ‘between’, ‘before’, ‘after’, and so on, terms which resist being straightforwardly conceptualised or being turned into nouns, as well as in its sensitivity to the syntactic exploitation of the different values of words, a thematic or moral reading of the texts must give way to something else—something more ‘nebulous’, ‘not be netted’:

Moreover, space is encoded
to signify lapses of time.
(One verse-line under another;
this one after that one.)

The nearness of God is known as
an aching absence:
the room the reception-desk
cannot locate nor account for,

in a fictitious or
analogous space that does not
answer to or observe
the parameters of Newton,

any more than a page of verse does.

This, from a late poem, ‘Thou Art Near At Hand, O Lord’, is not an attempt to identify the language of modern poetry, with its predilection for negativity and a dialectic of lack, with that of negative theology. The lines serve only to suggest that the thematic or didactic, often seen as typical features of Davie’s poetry, may not be as easy to identify there as we might like to think. The play of wit and irony, the play, that is, of the sudden idea and its ironic realisation or separation out into paradox, allows Davie a writing at once playful and serious. Davie’s poetry is one of an interminable oscillation between meaning and the loss of it, between rapidity and the discursive. In this, Davie, the exponent of late Augustan order, is also the exponent of the romantic fragment, in which both creation and destruction are sustained. ‘He branches out, but only to collapse,/Imprisoned in his own unhappy knack,/Which, when unfailing, fails him most, perhaps’. Perhaps, for Davie, the truth of literature is captured in that ‘perhaps’.

SOME THOUGHTS ON DREYER

2009-06-10T13:41:00.002+01:00

During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries art reached an awareness of itself that developed contemporaneously with the need for a new kind of criticism, one requiring a judgement not simply as to whether a given work is deficient in this or that respect but as to whether the work in question is art at all. From the beginning of the nineteenth century, with the onset of Romanticism, art began to make the matter of its own status central to what constituted it, and by so doing incorporated the problematic and ambiguous into its very essence. One need look no further than the titles of the early masterpieces of European horror cinema, Nosferatu and Vampyr, or the American classics, Frankenstein and Dracula, to see that horror cinema is also a product of the Romantic movement. And it too confronts us with the question of its status: films were, and regularly still are, found to be offensive and trivial. Lacking the redemptive powers of art, they are thought especially worthy of censorship. Within this ethos, horror films are frequently linked with pornography, by critics and the censorious generally, as well as by the filmmmakers themselves, obvious examples being Franco and Buttgereit.

Condemned as trashily exploitative and sadistic, the films suffer as a consequence from mutilation, neglect and, what is worse, contempt. It is not to be denied that extreme violence, sexual degradation and grotesque forms of death are legion in the films of Argento, Cronenberg, Craven, Hooper, Fulci, Deodato, and many others, and yet I would argue that this is precisely the point: its confronting us with death presented in especially offensive and unacceptable ways, and its provoking of scandal and outrage, are what constitute the real significance of the horror film in our culture, and what of authentic value attaches to it attaches to these very images of death and dying.

*

Horror films have, on occasion at least, addressed themselves to the procedures and forms whereby they create what they create, and it is not too extravagant to suggest that films like Vampyr, Peeping Tom, Tenebrae and Dead Ringers exhibit an order of self-interrogation that has many features in common with the literature of modernism, features brought out by questions such as `why write all?' and `how can the act of writing be justified?' Within modernism, literature becomes literature only as it becomes a question as to what counts as literature, and in order to show something of the significance of this degree of self-questioning, both for literature and cinema, I want to begin by considering what I have already pointed to as one of the abiding preoccupations of Romantic and modern writing, the ground of representation itself.

To take a cinematic instance, the exploration of this issue is central to the project of Dreyer’s Vampyr. Aporia and contradiction are fundamental to it, and Dreyer accords them a particularly vivid and focused expression. The action of the film is situated ambiguously, in a world poised between life and death, in a landscape self-consciously created out of cinematic effects. For instance, Gray’s first walk to the mill is both a narrative event and at the same time a disruption of the logical sequence of that narrative event. The disruption of the intelligibility of the relations between the shadows, as the corporal’s shadow separates itself from his physical body, the sudden irruption of dance music and the appearance of what seem dancing cut-out figures, the commanding voice of the vampire, these and similar elements compromise the narrative order, rendering the narrative presentation suspect. This means that the narrative order of the film in its totality can no longer be trusted. The status of what we are seeing has become undecidable, and as a result the temporal progression of the events we see has also become uncertain, if not discredited. The only order of time that we can trust is the time it takes for the film to be seen, the time it takes for the reels of film to pass through the projector and to cast an image on the screen and to bring up sound through the speakers. It is in this sense that Vampyr can be said to resemble music. The action that is represented and the process of representing that action have been collapsed into one, so that the time it takes the events we see to elapse and the time it takes show us those events are the same. What Vampyr narrates, we might say, is the occurrence of the events that compose it, in the very instant that it is narrating the events themselves.

It is writing conceived of on the model of post-symbolist procedures that Vampyr most nearly answers to. It is when the events a poem narrates are the events that constitute its own unfolding that we are cast into what the French critic, Maurice Blanchot, has called a time before the world, before the beginning. In the symbolist poem, the work says what it says in the very gesture of saying what there is for it to say. The only happening in the poem is the happening of the poem itself: a world is described, and, in that same act of description or definition, created. Here, the act of creation turns back upon itself, becoming other than, and exterior to, itself. Hence it is possible neither to begin nor to end, since the words of the poem are already beyond themselves, elsewhere. As Eliot has it, in Burnt Norton: `the end precedes the beginning,/And the end and the beginning were always there/Before the beginning and after the end./And all is always now'. We cannot begin, since the beginning is always already begun, and we cannot come to an end, since the end is always already completed, in a time before the beginning. If, with Blanchot, we think of names on the Hegelian model, as effecting the murder or annihilation of the things they name, then the negation, by which the poem sustains itself and which in turn it sustains, must enter paradoxically into the poem, effecting its failure, and (in Blanchot's idiom) betraying the work of the poem to worklessness (désœuvrement). By this he means that the poem is split from itself, in a movement of double negation that turns it towards the outside, the exterior, beyond language and concept, where, as he puts it, there is no intimacy, no place to rest. The work says the nothing that is the condition of its simultaneous possibility and impossibility:

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images . . .

The Waste Land, exemplary in this regard, is nothing other than what it constitutes itself as, namely `this stony rubbish', and the reader, caught within the language of the poem, unable to move beyond it, is, at the same time, exterior to it as it narrates the passage of its own negation:

A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water.

Blanchot's prose, which often reads like a rhapsodic commentary on The Waste Land, says of this mode of writing: `The work declares being - and says choice, mastery, form - by announcing art which says the fatality of being, says passivity, and formless prolixity'. At the conclusion of Vampyr, the mechanism driving the mill wheels that are drowning the doctor in flour finally stops, under its own volition and without visible cause. The doctor has been assimilated to the whiteness of the flour, a whiteness which is finally inseparable from a whiteness that has come to dominate the balance of light and shadow across the whole film, a fact made evident in the penultimate sequence, when Gray and Gisèle move across the water into the light of the dawn sun. As they step out of their boat onto the river bank, they walk into, and are transfigured by, the intensifying rays of light streaming through the forest. Suffusing the mist rising around the branches, the light comes to acquire almost as palpable a material presence as the objects it illuminates. And at this juncture, we cut back to the mill. The whiteness of the flour has by this time so filled the projected image that there appears no discernible difference between it and the whiteness of the screen behind the image, and it is in this moment of assimilation of the image to its support that the movement of the mechanism comes to a halt. The seeming coincidence of the image and the screen behind it is doubled by the fact that the movement of the mill gears and that of the projector showing the film also appear to coincide. The two movements collapse into a single duration, as the teeth of the gears and the sprockets of the projector gears appear to mirror one another, in a concurrence that effectively links an action internal to the film with an action external to it. It is as though the film were being completed in a time that had already been superseded, inasmuch as it has been this same action, the action of the mechanisms of the projector, that began the film and that has continued to sustain it throughout the time of its showing.

SOME REMARKS ON LOGIC AND LANGUAGE

2009-04-28T13:12:00.004+01:00

I have suggested (on this site) that in TLP, so far as language and logic taken together are concerned, we are dealing with something that can be seen in terms of the Lacanian ‘il n’y a pas de rapport…’: what leads Lacan to the assertion that there is no sexual relation can also be taken to support the assertion that there is no relationship between language and logic. There is no meta-language enabling us to grasp the two levels of language and logic from the same neutral standpoint. They are inextricably intertwined. If the structure of such a relationship, of such an ‘impossible’ relationship, one might say, is to be represented, it is imperative that we look at a form favoured by Lacan, that of the Moebius strip: first, we move from language to its logical form, its logical infrastructure; then, we have to confront the irreducible dimension of language at the heart of logic itself. We derive the logical form of the proposition by means of what is called in TLP an operation, only to find that what constitutes an operation returns us, by virtue of what Lacan determines as the logic of the ‘not-all’ (pas-tout), to the context of significant use, to the specific occasion of an actual utterance. The attempt to step outside language, in order to say what it is that constitutes meaning as such, results in nonsense.

In The Parallax View (pp.37-40), Zizek has some comments that bear on the matter. He raises the question of how Lacan’s binary signifier, S1-S2, manifests itself in the context of the symbolic order. ‘What the symbolic order precludes is the full harmonious presence of the couple of Master-Signifiers, S1-S2 as yin-yang, or any other two symmetrical “fundamental principles”. The fact that “there is no sexual relationship” means precisely that the secondary signifier (that of the Woman) is “primordially repressed,” and what we get in place of this repression, what fills in its gap, is the multitude of “returns of the repressed,” the series of “ordinary” signifiers’. Zizek illustrates this by reference to Woody Allen, but so far as TLP is concerned we can see how the general form of the proposition marks the place of S1, inasmuch as it functions as the quilting point of the ‘multitude’ of empirical propositions (T/F).

This is not a binary logic, divided between the polar couple Masculine/Feminine (or logic/language). The split is not between the One and the Other, it is inherent in the One itself: the split comes between the One and its empty place of inscription (a theme made explicit by Wittgenstein in his presentation of the ‘operation’). In what looks like a critical aside aimed at Badiou, Zizek insists that the multiple is not ‘the primordial ontological fact’—an assumption that underpins Badiou’s system as a whole. The ‘transcendental’ genesis of the multiple, he argues, resides in the lack of the binary signifier: ‘the multiple emerges as the series of attempts to fill in the gap of the missing binary signifier’. What we are dealing with here is the minimal difference between a signifier and its place of inscription, between one and zero.

On the one hand, we have S1 as the empty signifier, together with S2 as the signifying chain in its incompleteness. It is in order to fill in this incompleteness that S1 intervenes, as the quilting point. This is the ‘masculine’ side, in which a multitude is organised into a totality, into an All, through the exception, S1, which fills in its void. On the other hand, the binary signifier, the symmetric counterpart of S1, is ‘primordially repressed’. It is in order to supplement the void of this repression that the chain of S2 emerges. Here, as Zizek has it, ‘the original fact is the couple of S1 and the Void at the place of its counterpart, and the chain of S2 is secondary’. It is in these terms that we may understand the ‘feminine’ non-All. It is the logic operative here that accounts for the emergence of the inconsistent multitude characteristic of the non-All: the emergence of the multitude must be seen in relation to the void or lack of the binary signifier.

In his later work, Wittgenstein elaborates his notion of ‘grammar’, and it becomes clear—from the perspective opened by Lacan—that such an idea can be seen in relation to the non-All. Wittgenstein writes, in Philosophical Remarks, as follows:

If I could describe the point of grammatical conventions by saying they are made necessary by certain properties of the colours (say), then that would make the conventions superfluous, since in that case I would be able to say precisely that which the conventions exclude my saying. Conversely, if the conventions were necessary, i.e. if certain combinations of words had to be excluded as nonsensical, then for that very reason I cannot cite a property of colours that makes the convention necessary, since it would then be conceivable that the colours should not have this property, and I could only express that by violating the conventions. [PR 53]

I do not call a rule of representation a convention if it can be justified in propositions: propositions describing what is represented and showing that the representation is adequate. Grammatical conventions cannot be justified by describing what is represented. Any such description already presupposes the grammatical rules. That is to say, if anything is to count as nonsense in the grammar which is to be justified, then it cannot at the same time pass for sense in the grammar of the propositions that justify it (etc.). [PR 55]

Rules of grammar, which he also calls grammatical conventions, cannot be justified by appeal to the supposed fact that they enable us to represent reality correctly. If it makes sense to say that an object cannot be reddish-green all over, then it must also make sense to say that it can be reddish-green all over. But then the grammatical convention is superfluous. Further, if one supposes that the colour word conventions are necessary, one could not say what property it is that makes them necessary, for then it would be conceivable that the colours might not have this property, and one could only express this fact by violating the very convention one was trying to justify. In effect, one has to say that there is no such thing as reddish-green, which means that the phrase ‘reddish-green’ is nonsensical, i.e. we have no use for it in making intelligible statements about how the colours are. (Analogously, there is no such thing as a double fault in chess, which is just to say that in chess there is no use for the phrase ‘double-fault’.) The nature of propositions of very many kinds can be elucidated by reference to the grammar they exhibit, but any attempt to impose a limit on grammar as such results in nonsense. This is part of the significance of the notion of a language-game: by means of it, language is exhibited in all its inconsistent and contingent multiplicity, and this in turn means that there is no point from which it can be surveyed in its totality. Language use is without justification, and language is without essence—a statement that is itself nonsensical.

One consequence of this view of grammar may seem paradoxical: it is that language is non-normative. Grammar is non-normative (a remark that flies in the face of most commentary on Wittgenstein). This is, however, a position that has been argued for by Stanley Cavell, and others, such as Steven Affeldt, James Guetti and Rupert Read. To see grammar in terms of the non-All is to see meaning in terms of the future. In this connection, Zizek cites a phrase of Brian Rotman’s: meaning is something which is always ‘borrowed from the future’, relying on its ever-postponed fulfilment to come [The Parallax View, p.51]. As Cavell has put it, ‘Is the issue one of a leap [not of faith, but, let us say, of reason] from a ground that is implied or defined by the leap? Or is the leap from grounds as such, to escape the wish for such definition [as if reason itself were a kind of faith]?’ Steven Affeldt glosses this by saying: ‘The idea is that to speak intelligibly is to define the ground from which you speak, it is to articulate the position that you are assuming and from which you speak’. To cite Zizek again: ‘subjects cut the impasse of the endless probing into “do we all mean the same thing by ‘bird’?” by simply taking for granted, presupposing, acting as if they do mean the same thing. There is no language without this “leap of faith”’ [p.54]. Guetti and Read have examined in close detail the operation of an example very similar to this—the use of the word ‘waxwing’ [I have discussed this elsewhere on this site].

Wittgenstein remarks: ‘If language is to be a means of communication there must be agreement not only in definitions but also (queer as this may sound) in judgments’ [PI sec.242]. Affeldt glosses the force of this remark by saying that our intelligibility for one another depends continuously, from moment to moment, and in each act of speech, upon precisely our agreement in judgment. ‘It is not that our shared language is the ground of our intelligibility. Our language is the vehicle through which, or the medium within which, we continuously undertake to make ourselves intelligible to one another by projecting the ground that we individually, at a given moment, occupy.’ One might reposition Zizek in these terms by saying that, for him, it is the status of such an agreement in judgment that it is not normative, nor could it be. It cuts across ‘the debilitating deadlock of language, its ultimate lack of guarantee, by presenting what we should strive for as already accomplished’ [p.52]. Language is a system that lives on credit it can never pay off.

NOTES:
Steven Affeldt, “The Ground of Mutuality: Criteria, Judgment and Intelligibility in Stephen Mulhall and Stanley Cavell”, European Journal of Philosophy 6:1 (April 1998): 1-31.

Stanley Cavell, “The Division of Talent”, Critical Inquiry 11:4 (1985).

James Guetti and Rupert Read, "Acting from Rules", International Studies in Philosophy 28:2 (1996): 43-62.

FROM NAME TO ASPECT

2009-03-25T15:06:00.004Z

The notion, shared by Blanchot, Bataille, Lacan and others drawing on the tradition of Hegel, that a conception of naming can provide a sound basis for the explanation of meaning in language is seriously flawed. The opening of Philosophical Investigations is aimed at precisely this question, and the implications of that opening are drawn out by G.E.M. Anscombe, in her essay ‘A Theory of Language?’, published in 1981 [see: I. Block, ed., Perspectives on the Philosophy of Wittgenstein (Oxford: Blackwell, 1981), pp. 148-158]. Professor Anscombe is concerned here with Wittgenstein’s remarks in the first section, about naming, and with subsequent remarks in sections 2 and following that make use of a primitive language whereby builders call out to each other for materials, such as slabs and beams. She summarises the main purpose of these opening sections as being ‘to persuade us not to look at the connection between a word and its meaning either as set up or explained (a) by ostensive definition, or (b) by association, or (c) by mental pictures, or (d) by experiences characteristic of meaning one thing rather than another, or (e) by a general relation of reference or naming or naming or designation which has (logically) different kinds of objects as its terms in different cases’ [p. 154]. In order to see what Wittgenstein was fundamentally about here Anscombe believes that we must turn our attention to what he means by ‘grammar’. It has been frequently urged by commentators that what for Wittgenstein belongs to grammar differs in significant ways from what grammarians would see as their field. Anscombe argues, on the contrary, that the difference in opinion about what belongs to grammar ‘arises from belief in and practice of a “formal” science of grammar on the one hand, and a study of what a given use of words amounts to or achieves or tells us on the other’ [p. 156]. This latter idea sees grammar as an expression of the roles words play in our lives, of the place our diverse concepts, of pain, colour, truth, doubt, fear, naming, and so on, have within our forms of life. Whereas the first idea of grammar results in an account of how rules operate to determine patterns and structures of language, an account given in terms of a purely linguistic structure, the second works rather differently. For example, in the latter case, Anscombe argues, one might consider contrasts between say ‘For how long did you forget that?’ and ‘For how long did you reflect on that?’, or between intermissions of intention and intermissions of attention. There is, she makes clear, nothing odd about applying the word ‘grammatical’ to the observation of the different temporalities involved in these different cases. Another example, addressed by Wittgenstein, is the difference between the first-person avowal of pain and the ascription of pain to others. There is similarly nothing strange about describing as ‘grammatical’ the very significant differences involved here. As Anscombe points out, this is not the kind of observation that we expect from traditional grammarians, whose attention is turned elsewhere, to the structures of language considered essentially on their own terms and for their own sake.

The nature of Wittgenstein’s interest can be seen from the following passage, cited by Anscombe from Philosophical Investigations, section 240:

The agreement, the harmony, between language and reality consists in this: if I say falsely that something red, then, after all, it isn’t red. And if I want to explain ‘red’ to someone in the statement that this is not red I do it by pointing to something red.

What is of immediate significance here is that ‘The harmony between language and reality is found in the false statement no less than the true. This false statement says (of what is) something that it is not — but something nevertheless, which is. Here we can point to that which the thing is not’ [pp. 156-7]. This, for Anscombe, shows how close Wittgenstein is to Plato on this issue, a point she clinches by citing Sophist (262-3B):

A statement does not consist of names spoken in succession or verbs apart from names . . . it does not merely name something, but gets you somewhere by weaving together verbs with names . . . those that fit together make a statement . . . stating something of something (of you, say) . . . the false statement stating of you, as being, things which are different from the things that are of you, and so things which are not, but all the same things which do exist.

The matter comes to a focus by way of Wittgenstein’s remark: ‘if I say something falsely that something red, then all the same it isn’t red’. If I am able to change a false statement to a true one by negating it or by negating a negation this is ‘because of the distinction of the different kinds of words which fit together to make descriptions’ [p. 157]. It is not merely experience of the colour that determines the grammar of ‘red’, but its place in our lives with language. Anscombe cites Wittgenstein once more:

If you trained someone to emit a particular sound at the sight of something red, another at the sight of something yellow, and so on for other colours, still he would not yet be describing objects by their colours. Though he might be a help to us in giving an description. A description is a representation of a distribution in a space (in that of time, for instance).
If I let my gaze wander round a room and suddenly it lights on an object of a striking colour, and I say “Red!” — that is not a description. (Philosophical Investigations, II, ix)

For Anscombe, to say of the object that it was red, or to say that my visual field was not suffused with (or that it did contain) red, would be to give ‘a representation of a distribution in a space’. What we can say is that the act of conferring or citing of names has meaning only within our grammar as a whole.

This suggests that notion of naming found in Blanchot and others, that is, the idea of the power of the word, the name, to found language by an act of negation, of ‘murder’, requires to be significantly redescribed in the light of Wittgenstein’s thought, who in the examples cited uses negation (the negated or false statement) to show how it is that meaning may not intelligibly be thought to derive from names. Names act as names only in the context of a statement, description or other kind of utterance: only in the context of the language-game, of our life with language, as a whole, do names have their part to play. That is, names function as names only insofar as they have a place within our grammar. Because names are simply part of our grammar, they are not privileged over other parts of that grammar, and hence it makes no sense to see them as the unique foundation of it. The same holds for negation: since negation is an operation within our use of language, any attempt to found language on it would require the removal of negation from language as such, in order to establish it outside language, as the condition of its possibility. To do so would result in negation acquiring a meaning other than the one under consideration, so that ‘negation’ would undergo an alteration such that, if it meant anything at all, it would no longer mean what it formerly meant. This latter point will become fundamental to the case I will seek to present later, concerning the seeing of aspects. Wittgenstein has himself addressed this area of thought, and it is a concern that continues to engage him from his earliest thought, in the Tractatus, to his last reflections, gathered together in On Certainty.

In order to draw out the implications of Wittgenstein’s earlier approach to language for my larger argument, I will now turn to the Tractatus. It would seem that, in the Tractatus, there is a decisive statement of what it is for language to have meaning based on the correlation of name and object. In giving his picture theory of the proposition, he gives an explanation of how propositions have sense, i.e. are true or false, which invokes ontological categories. ‘The possibility of propositions is based on the principle that objects have signs as their representatives’ (4.0312). Or again: ‘One name stands for one thing, another for another thing, and they are combined with one another. In this way the whole group — like a tableau vivant — presents a state of affairs’ (4.0311). A proposition or picture is the fact that its elements are combined in a certain way. In a proposition that has been fully analysed the elements are names. Their meaning (Bedeutung) is identical with the objects they stand for (vertreten). The proposition says something because the elements that are combined within it are correlated with objects in the world. Part of the significance of this for what Wittgenstein is interested in dealing with in the Tractatus has to do with the determinacy of sense. He writes in 2.0211 and 2.0212: ‘If the world had no substance, then whether or not a proposition had sense would depend on whether another proposition was true. In that case we could not sketch any picture of the world (true or false)’. If in the analysis of a proposition we could not finally reach rock-bottom, that is, symbols whose meaning is determined by their immediate relation to reality, the analysis would be interminable. Meaning would under these conditions be indeterminable, unfixed. As Wittgenstein puts it in 3.23: ‘The requirement that simple signs be possible is the requirement that sense be determinate’. What this approach seems to be presupposing is, then, according to Brian McGuinness, ‘a magazine of objects which form, in one sense, the realm of Bedeutung’ [see: ‘The So-called Realism of the Tractatus’, in I. Block, ed., Perspectives on the Philosophy of Wittgenstein (Oxford: Blackwell, 1981), pp. 61-62]. The objects being thus presupposed are described as being simple, in the sense that they cannot be further analysed. They belong to all possible worlds: they are, so to speak, the possibilities of the world. They form the substance of the world or the form of the world. McGuinness writes: ‘They are what is unalterable and persistent (bestehend), while the configuration of objects, the states of affairs, are what varies from one possible world to another. These configurations of objects, these states of affairs, give objects what material or external properties they have. Naturally, there is only one set of configurations that is actually realised, and this is what we call reality or the world. The internal properties of objects are their possibilities of combination with one another, and the possession of these properties is necessary, not a mere matter of fact’ [p. 62].

McGuinness then raises the question of what is meant by assuming a magazine of objects of this kind. It is not that something exists which might not have done: ‘All unrealised possibilities are simply dispositions of objects different from that which actually obtains’ [p. 62]. The objects themselves are, so to speak, prior to the possibilities within which they are disposed. This means that all questions of existence are questions about what dispositions of objects actually obtain. When Wittgenstein writes: ‘The world is a totality of facts, not of things’ (1.1), he is expressing this view. All existence is a matter of fact, a matter of what is in the world. This seems to result in an ontology. As McGuinness puts it, ‘the world or reality consists of facts, that is to say in the Bestehen (in one sense), the obtaining, of states of affairs. States of affairs themselves, on the other hand, are combinations of objects, which bestehen or exist (subsist) in another sense. Existence as normally spoken of is equivalent to the Bestehen in the first sense of a certain state of affairs’ [p. 62]. Now the attraction of these opening pages of the Tractatus seems to be that they derive certain metaphysical results on the basis of some simple and natural assumptions about propositions being true or false. Nonetheless, it is essential to see that Wittgenstein had no intention of building a system of metaphysics or ontology on logic or the nature of language. As with his later work, so here: he rejected the idea that there is something by which our grammar is determined, and he did not, at any juncture, attempt to infer features of the external world from that grammar. It may seem as though he argued that ‘propositions with sense are possible only because some more primitive operations are possible — notably the correlation of names with simple objects, and it may seem that he goes on to argue that these more primitive operations are possible only because the world possesses certain characteristics’ [pp. 62-63]. However, these are the kinds of idea to which Wittgenstein applies the term ‘nonsense’ (Unsinn).

So how are we to approach the ontological parts of the Tractatus? McGuinness cites 2.0121 as an example: ‘Logic deals with every possibility and all possibilities are its facts’. What we have here is a transferred and illegitimate use of the word ‘fact’, and one might say that the whole seeming enterprise of ontology in the Tractatus is a similarly illegitimate and transferred use of words like bestehen. In using language in this way, Wittgenstein is showing us the nature of language and its limits, and it is this that constitutes philosophy as a critique of language—it is the activity of making clear the limits of language, which are identical with the limits of thought. What philosophy is concerned with, then, cannot be said, stated directly, but it can be shown: ‘What philosophy tries to make clear is not sayable, but it is shown by ordinary propositions that can be true or false’ [p. 64]. Philosophy goes wrong when it tries to say what can only be shown. This indicates what the importance of logic is for this undertaking. Logical propositions say nothing but they do show something: they show ‘the formal – logical – properties of language and the world’ (6.12). Wittgenstein’s aim in the Tractatus is to bring out that ‘philosophy and logic have to do not with a special realm of objects but with the necessary features of language – that is to say of any language whatsoever. This happens most clearly in the case of logic. The propositions of logic, the tautologies, are by various devices shown to be inevitable offshoots or by-products of saying something true or false. As such they show us something about what it is to say something true or false’ [p. 64]. Tautologies and contradictions say nothing, being true or false in all circumstances, and as such are described by Wittgenstein as senseless (sinnlos), a condition he differentiates from the nonsensical (unsinnig) (4.461-4.4611). ‘They do not represent any possible situations’ the way propositions with sense (those of science, for instance) do (4.462). ‘Tautology and contradiction are the limiting cases—indeed the disintegration—of the combination of signs’ (4.466). They are not nonsense, however, for they are revelatory of the logical form that does allow intelligible propositions to picture possible situations in the world (4.611). Gordon Bearn has made the point clear: ‘“p or not-p” is a tautology that is clearly related to the law of the excluded middle [i.e. that any statement is either true or false], but it says nothing. Rather it is a condition of making sense at all that all sensible propositions say nothing when put into this schema. It is not the pure foundation of sense. It is the first glimpse of the opposite: senselessness. And that the opposite of sense is first glimpsed in this way makes manifest the limits of any world we might know or imagine, dream, or dread.’ [See: Gordon F.C. Bearn, Waking to Wonder: Wittgenstein’s Existential Investigations (Albany: SUNY, 1995), p. 58.]

Fundamental to this approach is Wittgenstein’s idea that, as McGuinness has it, ‘in order for there to be propositions that may be either true or false, but must be one of the two, there will have to be a possibility of expressing those propositions by means of signs which of themselves will serve to express a proposition independently of what is the case. A state of affairs cannot be designated independently of whether it exists or not unless signs can be used whose significance could be given and understood and determined without reference to the obtaining or non-obtaining of that state of affairs’ [McGuinness, ‘The So-called Realism of the Tractatus’, p. 64]. This means that, for Wittgenstein, as McGuinness reads him, it is possible to make statements knowing them to be either true or false whatever the state of the world is.

He therefore thought that we were committed to the possibility of those propositions being expressed in such a form that all the constituent signs used could function in that particular combination whatever the case in the world was. [McGuinness, p.65]

These signs (these supposedly possible signs, reached only by analysis) would therefore be ‘possible constituents in propositions or possible contributors to producing a true or false proposition, regardless of what was the case in the world’ [p. 65]. Here, then, we have reached what in Blanchot’s idiom might be called the impossible conditions of possibility, the impossible origin anterior to writing. Wittgenstein attempted to rephrase language in just such terms, using what he called the simple signs or names alone. These are names that could not lack a bearer, and, although no actual example can be given of such a name, McGuinness cites a hypothetic example from Hidé Ishiguro that suggests what Wittgenstein may have had in mind: ‘Let a be the centre of a circle . . .’. In the discussion that follows, the question of whether a exists cannot arise. The point, then, is to consider what it would be like for names of this sort to form the whole substructure of a language.

Every proposition we utter is either true or false, whatever the case may be in the world. This requires that every proposition be capable of analysis in just one form, irrespective of whether or not any such analysis has been reached. In Wittgenstein’s vision of things, at least as McGuinness presents it, ‘if we imagine the totality of all propositions, true and false, in their fully articulated, fully analysed form (a form that is possible in principle), then we know that every element in this articulation, every sign, every name, has meaning in the sense that it contributes to the truth-value (whatever it is) of any proposition in which it occurs’ [p. 69]. To understand these elements does not require any experience of what is the case, since the proposition is (by definition) fully analysed, and hence the objects exist independently of what is the case. In that case, how do we understand a proposition? To have in mind a structure conforming to that of a possible state of affairs is to understand the proposition. As McGuinness sums it up: ‘It will be seen at once that this amounts to saying that there is no proposition to be understood until there is an understanding of a proposition’ [p. 69]. Thus the question is: how do we understand a propositional sign?

We use the perceptible sign of a proposition (spoken or written, etc.) as a projection of a possible situation.
Thinking the sense of the proposition is the method of projection. (3.11)

For McGuinness, this means that ‘Thinking the sense into the proposition is nothing other than so using the words of the proposition that their logical behaviour is that of the desired proposition’ [p. 70]. He argues that for Wittgenstein the realm of reference is thus not some mysterious, infinitely extended magazine of things. There is already contained in language, as the Tractatus presents it, the possibility of all objects that are possible. Language is the site of its own (impossible) possibility. All logical forms are logically possible within language, within thought, or so McGuinness contends. ‘No separate investigation or exploration of ‘reality’ is conceivable’ [p. 70]. This leads him to insist that when the learner, the child, learns language he learns complete propositions or thoughts. He has to grasp these as a whole, and when he has done so he will have an understanding of the primitive signs contained within those propositions. The primitive element, the name, has its place in the proposition. ‘Only propositions have sense; only in the nexus of a proposition does a name have meaning’ (3.3). This remark follows another one (3.263), which prepares the way for it: ‘The meanings of primitive signs can be explained by means of elucidations. Elucidations are propositions that contain the primitive signs. So they can only be understood if the meanings of the signs are already known’. The point of this remark is made clear by Peter Winch: ‘one cannot learn the meanings of names separately from each other; to learn their meaning is to learn how they combine in sentences. In order to distinguish that, one has to be presented with sentences and learn to distinguish them from senseless strings of words. To have come to grasp the sense of a sentence is to have come to grasp the meanings of the names of which it is composed’ [Peter Winch, Trying to Make Sense (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987), p. 10]. Not only that, but grasping the sense of the one sentence also involves grasping the endless other combinations into which the name might enter: in other words, grasping something that comes only with the mastery of a whole calculus, a calculus it is one of the main concerns of the Tractatus to describe. (Logic exists only in its application. If there were no such thing as the application of logic there would be no such thing as logic. Another logic would be required to determine the correct application of the original logic.) Given this point of view, it becomes clear why McGuinness wants also to say that the processes of explaining the truth-conditions of a proposition and of determining the truth-value of a proposition cannot be broken down into any simpler operation than that of grasping the proposition or expressing the proposition. All these are operations possessed of the same degree of multiplicity or complexity. These considerations lead, finally, to the question as to what kind of object Wittgenstein’s simple objects are. The answer must be that they are not concrete objects at all, and that there is nothing intelligible to be said concerning their existence or non-existence. We can grasp only concatenations of objects, facts in the world. Hence, no example of such an object can, or could, logically speaking, be given.

Certainly our propositions in the last analysis are not about the workings of our own mind. What Wittgenstein is trying to convey is a point of view according to which what they are about is not in the world any more than it is in thought or in language. Objects are the form of all these realms, and our acquaintance with objects (our contact with them, to borrow a metaphor from Aristotle) is not an experience or knowledge of something over against which we stand. Thus it is not properly experience or knowledge at all. Objects are eti epekeina tes ousias (beyond being), and it is therefore misleading to regard Wittgenstein is a realist in respect of them. [McGuinness, ‘The So-called Realism of the Tractatus’, pp. 72-73]

The objects are beyond being and beyond non-being. The objects are outside of the world, and outside of the world there is nothing to be said. Bearn comes to the same conclusion:

So although the elementary propositions are introduced as pictures of simple objects, this is not something that—if we get the point of the Tractatus—we will find understandable, at all. . . . The book is metaphysical poison (nonsense/Unsinn) to end the explanatory metaphysical impulse. [Bearn, p.58]

The ‘metaphysical poison’ of which he speaks is that which Derrida has called the pharmakon, a drug that is both fatal and a cure. From this point of view, what Wittgenstein has brought to light is an object without object, a pure object where no object is and which no one could or ever will encounter. This strange quasi-object is what is to inaugurate language and to determine meaning, and yet it seems to resemble a fiction, something called up by the writing of the Tractatus and in the same gesture annulled, and it is to this impossible and undecidable object that the origin of meaning and language are to be referred.

There is a curious and uncanny logic at work here, one which it would seem to be a major purpose of the Tractatus to make clear: the things, the simple objects which the text appears to offer as the ultimate and originary foundations of sense, are in effect produced retroactively by the very process of symbolisation itself, by the process of making sense. The simple objects emerge only as a consequence of their loss. What the Tractatus brings us to see is that any attempt to conceive of the objects as having substantial being, or to think of them as ontologically prior to the states of affairs into which they enter, is to succumb to an illusion: the objects are a mirage of metaphysics, retroactively invoked by the propositions of the text, propositions which are nonsensical, and which are to be recognised as nonsensical. The significance of this for an understanding of language based on naming, or ostensive definition, has been made clear by McGuinness, in a second essay on the matter. As he argues, ‘TLP does not rest understanding of propositions on a process of ostensive definition. It does not suppose that the elementary propositions in which use is made of certain names are connected with reality by the correlation of those names with objects independently identifiable. This is because the notion of independent identification of objects in the TLP sense is an incoherent one. Only in a proposition does a name have meaning, so that there cannot be a pre-propositional act of giving meaning to a name by, for example, pointing to an object’ [McGuinness, ‘Language and Reality in the Tractatus’, Teoria 2 (1985): 136]. One can get at this another way, by saying that whereas in the ordinary world one can point to an object and give it a name this cannot be done for the objects of the Tractatus. To name an object requires the existence of that object as a matter of fact, but the objects of the Tractatus exist independently of what is the case in the world. As McGuinness points out, it is a crucial insistence of the book that the ‘experience’ necessary to understand language (the experience that there is a world) is very different from the experience of what there is in the world. ‘The former is not an experience of facts and confrontation with a concrete object is an experience of fact’ [‘Language and Reality’, 136]. What Wittgenstein is saying is thus to be seen as nonsensical. No meaning has been ascribed here to ‘object’ or to ‘experience’: language is, so to speak, outside or beyond itself, and to that extent beyond sense also.

This has the further consequence that, as McGuinness argues, mentalist accounts of meaning simply dissolve. We do not think sense into propositions by mentally associating the words (and so the elementary names that would occur if the proposition were to be fully analysed) with objects. To argue in this way is simply to return to notions of ostensive definition, but performed this time privately or internally. Wittgenstein makes the point explicitly in 3.11: Thinking the sense of a proposition is identical with the method of projection: ‘the use of the proposition is what gives meaning to its names, not some additional act of mental dubbing or intending’ [‘Language and Reality’, 137]. This is the point that the so-called picture theory of meaning is meant to elucidate. The picture-theory and the account of language associated with it is less a theory than an account of mental phenomena: no further mental power, the power of thinking, is required. One cannot explain what pictures are by introducing human agency. ‘Rather, you explain human agency by the notion of picturing. It is not man that makes pictures, so to speak, but pictures that make a man’ [‘Language and Reality’, 137]. Someone who learns a language is confronted by a whole language in use, a language consisting of propositional facts or pictures. Each one of these possesses a complexity, which, so the learner comes to understand, can have only one meaning, can only indicate or affirm one state of affairs. The point at issue here is clarified, McGuinness believes, by reference to one of Wittgenstein’s most subtle and important distinctions, that between showing and saying. According to 4.022, a proposition shows its sense, shows how things stand if it is true, and it says that they do so stand. The thought here is that the complexity or organisation of the proposition, once fully understood, shows what state of affairs is involved, what state of affairs either exists or does not exist: at the same time, a further function of sense must be understood within the proposition. In other words, sense here is to be understood as something like direction (a proposition is like an arrow, not a point): we have to understand what way the proposition is to be taken, in what direction it is aimed. Is it to say that p or that not-p? It must be determined which is the p that it states, and which is the not-p. Wittgenstein argues that, if we think only in terms of complexity or structure, p and not-p are equivalent. It is possible for p and not-p to say the same thing, so that what they each show is the same thing. For example, suppose a situation in which we communicate with one another by means of pictures. In that case, if we wish to say that the book is on the table, we hold up a picture of this state of affairs. But how do we communicate that the book is not on the table? We can hold up the same picture and then, say, turn it back to front. The picture and the same picture turned back to front have opposite senses, opposite directions, but which sense is which is given by the use of the proposition. If one has understood a proposition one has already discriminated all the facts necessary to understand its negation. McGuinness concludes from this that reference is a function of fact-stating, and not vice-versa. Reference is given retroactively, in the very act of formulation. The proposition itself shows us what fact it refers to (that is, what fact it states or misstates). There is no separate act of correlation between the language and reality: there is only the act of acquiring the language, i.e. of using pictures as they are used in the language. That facts are taken in such and such a way is thus something manifest within language. ‘The use of language shows that something is taken as a true elementary proposition, in that the other things that are then unhesitatingly said reflect its being so taken’ [‘Language and Reality’, 137]. For one thing, inferences are based on it.

But if this is so, facts drop out of the account. There are instead verification procedures, which correspond to the analysis of a proposition into elementary propositions, for which no examples can be given. This is to assert both the principle of bivalence, namely, that a proposition is either true or false, and that no grounds can be given for the principle. One might say that the principle and its lack of foundation are what is shown in the logical form of the proposition, a form which is both interior to the proposition (inasmuch as analysis leads back from the given proposition to the elementary propositions contained with in it and of which it is a truth function), and exterior to it (inasmuch as the proposition is connected to propositions outside or beyond it by similar relations of inference.) Every proposition contains, and is contained by, the whole of logical space, which is given immediately, in our grasping of the proposition. There is therefore an excess of syntax over semantics, in that logical form is always already beyond the proposition: the senseless, because tautological, propositions of logic do not coincide with the positions of sense, propositions that are either true or false, nor can the propositions of sense be reduced to, or expressed in terms of, the logical system. This is evident from the use Wittgenstein makes of the Sheffer stroke, and of recursion, in what he calls an operation, in order to show the general form of the proposition. At the time of writing the Tractatus, it had been shown that all the logical constants (negation, disjunction, implication, and so on) could be replaced by a single constant, the so-called Sheffer stroke, whereby p|q, for example, is equivalent to ‘neither p nor q’. Using this notation, one can eliminate all the constants, used in Principia Mathematica, for example, and bring them under a single form. Wittgenstein describes this at 5.1311: ‘When we infer q from p v q and ~p, the relation between the propositional forms of “p v q” and “~p” is masked, in this case, by our mode of signifying. But if instead of “p v q” we write, for example, “p|q.|.p|q” and instead of “~p”, “p|p” (p|q = neither p nor q) then the inner connection becomes obvious’. Further clarification is given by H.O. Mounce:

‘p v q’ and ‘~(~p.~q)’ can now be written in the form ‘p|q.|.p|q’. This means: neither, neither p nor q, nor, neither p nor q. It has to be written in this somewhat artificial way to preserve the neither . . . nor form. But all that is in fact happening is that one is ruling out the possibility of neither p nor q, which can be seen on reflection to be equivalent to asserting ‘p or q’ or ‘It is not the case that not p and not q’.

Since the logical constants can all be defined in terms of one another, there is one fundamental operation that underlies them all, an operation of iterated negation. It is the fundamental operation by which all propositions are produced out of elementary propositions and Wittgenstein calls it the general form of the proposition. To see exactly what Wittgenstein has in mind, we need to see more clearly just what he means by an operation:

5.2 The structures of propositions stand in internal relations to one another.
5.21 In order to give prominence to those internal relations we can adopt the following mode of expression: we can represent a proposition as a result of an operation that produces it out of other propositions (which are the bases of the operation).
5.22 An operation is the expression of a relation between the structure of its result and its bases.
5.23 The operation is what has to be done to the one proposition in order to make the other out of it.
5.24
As Mounce points out, an operation is performed on base proposition to produce a different proposition as a result. But what Wittgenstein has in mind is a particular model of the way this done. At 5.2521 he writes: ‘If an operation is applied repeatedly to its own results, I speak of successive applications of it (‘O’O’O’a’ is the result of three successive applications of the operation ‘O’ζ’ to ‘a’)’. And at 5.2523 he says ‘The concept of successive applications of an operation is equivalent to the concept “and so on”’. To apply O to a one gets Oa; repeat the operation, applying O to Oa, and one gets OOa; and so on. In other words, an operation, as it concerns Wittgenstein here, is a procedure that takes its own results as a base. An example is doubling: 2 doubled is 4; take the result and double again [H.O. Mounce, Wittgenstein’s Tractatus: An Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), p. 50]. The fundamental operation by which all propositions are generated from elementary propositions is an operation of this type. At proposition 6 and onwards, the general form of the proposition is represented in a way such that every proposition is to be seen as the result of successive applications to elementary propositions of an operation of negation (N). Any proposition whatever will be the result of the iterated application of this procedure. The negation in question is the operation of joint negation (neither . . . nor) represented by the Sheffer stroke. The successive applications of this operation of joint negation to the elementary propositions will produce all other propositions [Mounce, pp. 52-53]. As Mounce makes clear, this, then, is how the complex propositions of ordinary discourse are produced, and he gives as an example the way ‘p v q’ is produced from p, q, two elementary propositions. If we apply the operation of joint negation to p, q, we get N(p,q) – i.e. neither p nor q. Apply the operation that, and we get N(N(p,q)) – i.e. neither, neither p nor q, nor, neither p nor q, which is equivalent to ‘p v q’. Wittgenstein goes on to show how this same operation of joint negation can account, not only for the propositional calculus, but also the predicate calculus, the logic of generalisation, thereby opposing the accounts given of these matters by Frege and Russell, by proposing a logical operation that does not rely for its articulation on the use of metalanguage.

This brings us to an issue crucial to Wittgenstein’s enterprise in the Tractatus, the nature of the text of the Tractatus itself. As we have seen, the operation must always be able to be applied to its own result. The iterability of this application to its own result is the principle of recursion, by which succession is presupposed. This is what operates the series, as we have seen, the ‘And so on’. To say, therefore, that one proposition is first or elementary (primordial) is to presuppose the temporal series of propositions of which this proposition presents itself as first. The implications of this are spelt out by Vincent Descombes, writing, not of Wittgenstein, but Derrida:

[I]t must be said that the first is not the first unless there is a second to follow. Consequently, the second is not that which merely arrives, like a latecomer, after the first, but that which permits the first to be the first. The first cannot be the first unaided, by its own properties alone: the second, with all the power of its delay, must come to the assistance of the first. It is through the second that the first is the first. The ‘second time’ thus has priority of a kind over the ‘first time’: it is present from the first time onwards as the prerequisite of the first’s priority without itself being a more primitive ‘first time’, of course; it follows that the ‘first time’ is in reality the ‘third time’. [Modern French Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 145]

Derrida’s ‘non-concept’ of différance, based on the iterability of the trait, has certain features in common with Wittgenstein’s account of the repeated operation of joint negation. One such point of comparison can be seen to emerge here: Descombes’ account of the ‘logic’ of originary delay, an idea of fundamental significance at least for Derrida’s earlier thought, also provides a way of drawing out the consequences of a tenet central to the Tractatus, that only in a proposition does a name have meaning. As the Tractatus presents logical form, the ineluctable temporality internal to that form and so to language means that no sense can be given to the idea of a primordial relation between language and reality, between names and simple objects, which language may be thought to originate from. For reasons such as those Descombes lays out, and those we have already seen McGuinness demonstrate in some detail, it is nonsensical to think to look outside language in order to give for language or for the truth and falsity of propositions any account (any theory) that depends on describable features of the world. The temporality of discourse, on Wittgenstein’s showing, means that the propositions formulating the general form of passage from one proposition to another are themselves subject to that same operation of passage, as is clear not only from the general form of the proposition but also from the following series: ‘the world is the totality of facts’ (1.1), ‘a picture is a fact’ (2.141), and ‘logical pictures can depict the world’ (2.19). To think of language as somehow able to reach outside itself and so to ground sense in anything other than the movement of its own operations is nonsensical (unsinnig). Not only this, but to pose the question of the logical form of the proposition is, at the same time, to pose the question of the status and meaning of the very text, the Tractatus, whose propositions we are in the process of trying to comprehend.

What Wittgenstein shows in the Tractatus is that sense does not need to be validated by logical theory. The intelligibility of the proposition is rather the primary datum on which the logical theory grows, by analysis. The network of necessary relationships between meaningful propositions is also the logical framework of the world. There are no intermediaries between the proposition and the represented state of affairs. As Alberto Emiliani has argued, in a commentary on McGuinness’s two articles, this is the crucial insight of what might be called the immediacy of semantic agreement. [See: Alberto Emiliani, ‘What Nonsense Might Be: The Metaphysical Eye Opens’, Philosophical Investigations 26:3 (July 2003): 205-229]. Language is fundamentally intentional: the proposition reaches right up to reality. In order to be able to represent a state of affairs a proposition must have something in common with it and that something is form—that is, the possibility that their elements combine in just that way. To make the point again, we don’t start in the Tractatus from features that symbols must have in order to combine with one another in meaningful propositions: we start from the propositions and proceed to the properties of the constituents. ‘An object can only be designated qua part of a state of affairs; a symbol only has meaning qua part of a proposition’, a point Emiliani makes in order to emphasise that the meanings a symbol can be assigned in such and such a combinatorial context are necessary and show a logical feature of the world [216]. If ‘a is red’ and ‘b is green’ are meaningful, then so is the combination ‘a is green’ meaningful. According to this view of the Tractatus, the articulation exhibited by a proposition is not reducibility to simpler and independent elements (the simple objects); it resides in the interchangeability without loss of meaning of its parts or constituents with the part of constituents of other propositions [216]. It is the network of these relations of interchangeability that is given by the general form of the proposition, the recursive operation of the iterated neither . . . nor. As Emiliani makes clear, similar remarks apply to the form of the world: objects, as presented by the Tractatus, are not determinate entities that, in addition to their peculiar or individual features, also possess combinatorial possibility (perhaps engendered by their individual features). ‘They are instead interchangeable parts of possibilities states of affairs, and so, their possibilities of occurring in states of affairs constitute them as objects’ [216-7]. The form of world of the world thus exhibits a mirror image of the form of the proposition, of the context principle mentioned earlier. A proposition is internally related to a (possible) state of affairs; it is this relation that makes it into a determinate proposition and thought. The radical nature of this thought is made explicit by Emiliani: ‘the possibility of a state of affairs is the possibility that the elements of a proposition meaningfully combine with one another. The form of language and the form of reality do not merely “match”, but they are one and the same. It is the form of reality that is present in language, by being mirrored in it (4.121). Logical form is shared by language and the world (it is what they have “in common”: cf. 4.12, 2.18)’ [220]. Emiliani concludes that, for the Tractatus, pictorial form just is the possibility that things are related to one another in the same way as the elements of the picture. A picture contains the possibility of the situation that it represents and so it contains the form of the very situation that is represented.

The possibility that a combines with b is not different from the fact that the proposition ‘ab’ is meaningful; the meaning of the proposition is not some other fact of a special kind. As Emiliani points out, the root of the issue is that the nexus between a and b cannot itself be a third constituent of the state of affairs: ‘the nexus, the combination, can only be presented by means of a nexus of symbols: this is the kernel of the insight that a proposition is a picture. Proposition and state of affairs share their connective structure, and this is why their relation is internal’ [221]. The nexus between a and b is shown by the proposition ‘ab’ having a sense, by the way the symbols hold together into a whole. There is no other ‘fact’ to be described. Emiliani again: ‘The possibility of the nexus of things is given in the meaningfulness of the nexus of symbols: there is not anything else which the nexus of things is in addition to that which is given in the meaningfulness of the nexus of symbols’ [221]. At this juncture it becomes possible to clarify the role of nonsense in the workings of the text of the Tractatus. So far as the text is concerned, there is no such thing as nonsensical propositions that can be used to aim at ineffable qualities of reality or language. There are no sentences that are nonsense on account of the peculiarly illegitimate kind of thing they try, but fail, to say. That is, there are no metaphysical truths that though they may not be stated may nonetheless be shown. There is no such thing as ‘expressive nonsense’. From the point of view of their construction, according to the Tractatus, all nonsensical propositions are equivalent. One or more expressions have not been assigned any meaning in a certain context (or any context). Emiliani gives as an example ‘ this notion is yellow’. In this case, ‘x is yellow’ only has a sense when a material object is substituted for x. Here, then, no meaning has been assigned to ‘notion’. Nonsense is nonsense; there is nothing it says. And yet, as Emiliani insists, this is not quite the end of the matter. It is true that ‘this notion is yellow’ does not communicate the true nature of colour in some hidden or mysterious way. However, we recognise it as nonsensical only insofar as we have a commanding view of the way the words are actually used. If we don’t have such a view, it may be that the nonsense ‘proposition’ will lead us to see things aright, and so in its effects be significant. To recognise nonsense requires more than the withdrawal of the incriminated sentences. ‘Whether a nonsensical proposition is plain, trivial nonsense or significant nonsense depends on us, on what we see clearly and what we do not. What is qualified as significant or trivial is not so much the nonsensical proposition itself – this distinction is not based upon any properties that are intrinsic to it. Such a qualification instead applies to our appraisal of it’ [224-225].

The propositions of the Tractatus are more complex than the example just considered, and yet there are some features that they have in common. One can see what is involved by returning to the basic insight of the immediacy of semantic agreement. Emiliani formulates the issue as follows: ‘the meaningful proposition is internally related to a state of affairs: it directly agrees with it, as a mask fits a face and does not fit another. The fitting is a matter of form – in order to be able to fit a determinate state of affairs, the proposition must have a form in common with it’ [225]. However, it must be noted that this form is not a physical form. It has to do with the way constituents of propositions link with each other in a certain structure (like the links of chain) and with the meaningful recombination and interchange between such constituents. But at this point the notion of form becomes questionable. No property of a material object is being referred to. The use of ‘form’ is not even metaphorical, since metaphors can be paraphrased. The same consideration applies to other notions in the Tractatus: ‘nexus, ‘links in the chain’, object’, and so on. One might call this use of words false metaphor: words are being used in contexts where they have been given no meaning. One might also say, in the idiom of Philosophical Investigations II, xi, that ‘form’ and words like it are being used in a secondary sense. To say, for example, that the vowel ‘e’ is yellow, or that the world is unreal, is to use ‘yellow’ and ‘unreal’ in secondary senses. The use of words in this way is closely allied to seeing aspects, as when one says that one sees the cruelty in a person’s smile, or a triangle as a wedge or an arrow. Transferred into the new context, where no meaning has been assigned to them, they are used as expressions of how things strike us, of how they appear to us. Something of this kind is at work here, in the way the text of the Tractatus leads us on: as we move from one formulation to another, it eventually becomes clear that any formulation is misleading, since they all presuppose that there is some thing we are talking about. Both the propositions of the Tractatus and the formulations of commentaries on it use constituents to refer to form, whereas the basic point is that form is not a constituent at all, but a nexus, a way of connection into a meaningful whole. To treat the nexus as a constituent of a state of affairs is to misrecognise the fact that it is a connection between elements: it is not an element, or what Emiliani calls ‘a mythological object’. And yet this very use of the word ‘connection’ is also misplaced: ‘if you have understood me, you recognise my use of “connection”, “form”, “internal relation between proposition and state of affairs”, “possibility of combination” etc. as nonsensical’ [226]. To recognise the nonsensical use of words such as ‘form’ in this context, and to be shown, to see, the ineffable nature of logical form, of the logical connection into a whole, are not, in the end, separate acts. It is one of the ways a proposition may illuminate by being recognised as nonsensical. Part of what is being shown here derives from what was referred to above as the temporality of discourse, whereby the propositions formulating the general form of passage from one proposition to another are themselves subject to that same operation of passage. Logical form structures the very propositions which are trying to give its nature. When employed in this way, words like ‘form’ and ‘connection’ are nonsensical, though when used within a proposition or set of propositions to describe some feature of the world, they are fully intelligible. This means that, for Emiliani, there are no dubious assumptions being made about how nonsense may communicate ineffable truth: nonsense communicates nothing. Nonetheless, the showing is in fact accomplished, though not by describing something that is not describable but by recognising a proposition as genuinely nonsensical. As Emiliani has it, ‘the mythological object disappears when form shows itself – form shows itself when the mythological object disappears’ [226].

What we can say, then, is that the Tractatus itself, as a whole, offers itself to be recognised as an expression of the urge to metaphysics. In that recognition the metaphysical idea, the idea that a complete analysis of logical form is possible, and that logical form so understood determines the limits of the application of signs, fades away. And as it fades away, so too does the similarly metaphysical requirement that sense be determinate. Statements about simple objects are nonsensical in exactly the way that statements about logical form are nonsensical. In effect, the work of the Tractatus is to bring about a change of aspect, so that how we see the text itself, and how we seek to understand the way language operates, undergo alteration. At 5.5423, Wittgenstein presents a clear instance of aspect change in relation to the complex form of a proposition: ‘To perceive a complex means to perceive that its constituents are related to one another in such and such a way’. He then draws a comparison between the complex form of a proposition and the form of a schematic cube: when one looks at such a figure, the front face seems to change places with the back face, and front and back flip flop back and forth, each replacing the other. This shifting of aspect, like that of the famous duck-rabbit of Philosophical Investigations, points to what occurs in the structure of the text of the Tractatus itself as we, its readers, engage with it. Under one aspect, the text makes sense, so that it is perfectly intelligible to argue that in the body of the Tractatus Wittgenstein elaborates a critique of, amongst other things, Russell’s theory of types and logical objects. On the other hand, this critique, deriving from and so dependent on the notion that logical form is what determines the limit of the application of signs, is nonsensical. The text is thus many-layered, and operates in different modes at different levels, and part of what it requires of its readers is that they be alert to the shifts of level possible at any point. This, it should be said, avoids the obvious absurdity that every line of the Tractatus is simply nonsense. It is clear that the account of the truth tables, of succession and recursion, as well as of the Sheffer stroke, is wholly intelligible. However, these reflections do not justify the belief that it makes to imagine there could be such a thing as a perspective from which one can survey how language represents the world: whether one takes language ‘internally’, with respect to the form of the proposition, or ‘externally’, with respect to language ‘as a whole’, the possibility of either an ‘internal’ or ‘external’ point of view on how language represents states of affairs is unintelligible.

In 6.54, when Wittgenstein writes: ‘My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognises them as [nonsense]’, it would seem that he is insisting that ‘thinking cannot be completely reduced to and be fully expressed by anything we are likely to be content to call a “logical system”. What is as a consequence nonsense is the assumption of logical analysis that all thinking, in order to be thought, must be captured by a propositional sign that on examination is found to be either sensical, senseless or nonsense’. [Rupert Read and Rob Deans, ‘“Nothing is Shown”: A “Resolute” Response to Mounce, Emiliani, Koethe and Vilhauer’, Philosophical Investigations 62:3 (July 2003): 254.] That is, the very distinction, between propositions that make sense, the senseless propositions of logic (the tautologies), and the nonsense propositions of the Tractatus, is itself a nonsensical distinction, based as it is on the desire to express thought in terms of the structures of a logical system (the general form of the proposition). What logical form shows is the impossibility of making fully explicit the nature of sense, of meaning. Always beyond itself, and always lacking the objects on which the determinacy of sense depends, the syntactical (the senseless) and the semantic (the sensical) cannot be brought into a one-to-one relation. The reader begins with the idea that a limit has to be established to thinking and to the expression of thought, and a distinction set up between sense and nonsense. It is here that the analysis of simple objects and logical form is addressed, but ‘[w]hat the reader is left with is the realisation that there is thinking going on as the propositions of the Tractatus are engaged with, but without thought in anything like the Fregean-Russellian sense. Logical analysis can neither fully capture nor fully specify just what it is to think. Thought and language cannot be “pinned-down” and the attempt to give a complete analysis breaks down; but not because it is impossible, for this suggests there is something here that cannot be done, but because the very idea of giving a complete analysis is unintelligible’ [Read and Deans: 258]. No sense can be given to the idea of a vantage-point from which we can survey language as a whole, or of getting beyond it and seeing it as it were laid out before us, open to inspection. This does not mean that there is no role for logical analysis, in showing how language is actually used, in inference or other forms of argument. It does mean that logical analysis cannot justify or found meaning: logic is derived from our use of words to say what we mean, and not the other way round. In 6.1203, Wittgenstein gives a procedure for producing a picture, a physical depiction or image, of a tautology (~(p.~p)). Given that a proposition with sense is a picture of a possible state of affairs, a tautology is a picture of nothing. A tautology has no truth conditions, since it is unconditionally true, and a contradiction is true under no conditions (4.461). Since all the propositions of logic are tautologies (6.126, 6.22), logic says nothing: it lacks sense. The tautology, then, is both a part of logic (e.g. p implies p) and logic as such. When Wittgenstein presents an image of a tautology, what he is giving is a representation of a representation of nothing. To make an image or picture of a certain tautology may, on the one hand, be merely a novel and clearer way of laying out the truth table for that tautology. But if, on the other hand, it is taken as an image of tautology as such, that is, of logic as such, of the sinnlos in itself, the image is nonsense. Removed from any context of use, it stands on its own, above logic and above sense. We are, so to speak, taken beyond the limits of the text into an image of language qua language, into a material depiction that in depicting the absence of depiction asserts its own material presence beyond the opposition between meaning and non-meaning. In representing its own failure to represent, the text produces a nonsensical image, the seeing of which is seeing the distinction between sense, the senseless and the nonsensical as itself nonsensical. The image of the doubling of the doubled brackets in 6.1203, the typographical reduplication within the text, effects a kind of folding back of the Tractatus on itself, in which the physical inscription of the writing interrupts and inhibits the distinction between meaning and non-meaning. When Wittgenstein insists (in 6.54) that whoever understands him will eventually recognise his propositions as nonsensical, the point is that the aspect of the text that will eventually force itself onto the reader will be that aspect which has already forced itself onto Wittgenstein himself, the text’s author. It is not man makes images, but rather images that make a man, and so with the text as a whole: it is the Tractatus that creates both its author and its reader. Wittgenstein and his reader stand on the hither side of the propositions that constitute it. The image the propositions create is that of a language spoken by no one.

In using words here like ‘text’ and ‘writing’ I have wished to evoke something of the idiom of Blanchot and Derrida. My purpose is not to assimilate ‘continental’ thought to that of Wittgenstein, or vice versa, but to suggest points of comparison. I have argued that, whereas Blanchot in particular bases his thought on a concept of naming that is untenable, in order to reach the impossible conditions that are the possibility of writing as such, Wittgenstein begins from the meaningful proposition. The Tractatus is thus not an attempt to establish how meaning is possible. Whereas Blanchot, and others in the tradition to which he belongs, use language in way that implies that there is a sense in talk about the impossibility of possibility, Wittgenstein’s approach would characterise such talk as nonsense. No meaning has been given to the words like ‘impossibility’ in the context in which Blanchot seeks to use them. Nonetheless, I want now to propose that, despite the unsatisfactory foundations of Blanchot’s thought, its final direction, towards an understanding of the language of literature, is pertinent to a reading of the Tractatus. When Wittgenstein writes, in the Tractatus (6.4311), that death is not an event in life, since we do not live to experience death, one cannot but be put in mind of Blanchot’s reflections on the impossibility of dying, a comparison that may be further reinforced by reference to Wittgenstein’s remark (also in 6.4311) that our life has no end in just the way in which our visual field has no limits. We are being taken by remarks of this order beyond the expressible, towards what Wittgenstein calls the mystical: ‘There is indeed the inexpressible. This shows itself; it is the mystical’ (6.522). So far as the Tractatus is concerned, the notion of the mystical has its source in the discussion we have already looked at, that concerning simple objects: ‘Objects can only be named. Signs are their representatives. I can only speak about them: I cannot put them into words. Propositions can only say how things are, not what they are’ (3.221). Mysticism is motivated, in part, by the fact that if we are to understand anything we have to be related to objects, things. But, as Gordon Bearn indicates [Waking to Wonder, p. 60], objects are the unchanging structures of logical space: this means that, since whatever we experience could be otherwise (5.634), there can be no experience of objects, a conclusion reached also by McGuinness, from the different starting point of the meaningful proposition. How then are we to understand the givenness of objects, the givenness of the world? It is an experience not of HOW the world is but THAT it is, at all (6.44).

The ‘experience’ that we need in order to understand logic is not that something or other is the case, but that something is: that, however, is not an experience.
Logic is prior to every experience—that something is so.
It is prior to the question ‘How?’, not prior to the question ‘What?’. (5.552)

Here again the language can be seen in the process of shifting its status, as the word ‘experience’ undergoes a self-cancelling alteration, from a primary to a secondary sense. Logic is before the how, not before the what. But how the world is, is what is the case. So the experience we need, as Bearn puts it, ‘if we are to understand logic is not an experience of what is the case, of what has happened in the world’ [p. 60].

To view the world sub specie aeterni is to view it as a whole—a limited whole.
Feeling the world as a limited whole—it is this that that is mystical. (6.45)

Mystical wonder is not wonder at the way things are, but wonder at the bare existence of things, that they are—the what not the how. This returns us to the point I have emphasised before: when we understand logic we understand that it is senseless. Other than world there is nothing, and it is nothing that logic treats of. Bearn has said that, for Wittgenstein, understanding something is to understand that something against the background of logic, against the background of nothing. Bearn here compares Wittgenstein with Heidegger:

In July 1929, Heidegger had tried to understand the deepest form of anxiety in terms of his belief that ‘human existence can relate to things only if it holds itself out into the nothing’. In December of that year Wittgenstein said, ‘To be sure, I can imagine what Heidegger means by being and anxiety’. [Bearn, p. 61]

A comparison with Levinas and the notion of the il y a is also pertinent. This line of argument also brings something to the fore, the structure of the Tractatus itself. It exhibits exactly the torsion, the twisting turn, which is not exactly a circle but more like a Moebius strip, whereby what is anterior reappears in what succeeds. We move from an ‘experience’ of what is prior to the world, an experience that is not an experience, to an experience that is also not an experience, the experience of the ‘there is’ of things. Torn from our everyday existence, from the world of how things are, it is as though existence emerged from behind the world. I am no longer related to this or that possibility, but to existence itself, an experience that (according to the Tractatus, as well as to Levinas and Blanchot) is internally related to the experience of nothing. In coming face to face with the bare existence of things, that they exist at all, we come face to face with ‘no-thing’ at all: ‘There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical’ (6.522).

The encounter with the il y a is an encounter with horror, as when for the insomniac things take on the terrible and dreadful aspect of the ‘other night’. To experience the ‘there is’ is to experience the void or absence in which the things of the everyday world, the world of ‘how’ things are, dissolve and disappear. In a classic essay first published in 1991, Cora Diamond has brought out something similar in the way Wittgenstein’s understanding of the mystical (and of nonsense) relates to his discussion of ethics and treatment of the question of evil. A crucial matter for her is the manner of reading the Tractatus requires of us: ‘if I understand Wittgenstein in the way that he asks to be understood, then I read the sentences in question twice: first, entering (wittingly or not) into the nonsense that they are about ethics; secondly, entering into the nonsense of the book as argument to a conclusion that those remarks are not “about ethics”, for nothing is a “remark about ethics”. There are no “ethical propositions”, and sentences in question have no more to with “ethics” than “piggly wiggly tiggle”. If I understand Wittgenstein, I enter the nonsense of reading the book as ethics and of reading the book in such a way that it leads me to self-consciousness about the activity of such reading’ [Cora Diamond, ‘Ethics, Imagination and the Tractatus’, in Alice Crary and Rupert Read, eds., The New Wittgenstein (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), p. 164]. The Tractatus requires a reading that at first takes us in, requiring us to take its propositions as making sense, as being about logic and so on, despite not being so. This is to take what Diamond calls the ‘austere view’ of nonsense, the view that all nonsense is just nonsense, that there is no such thing as articulating the meaning of a particular bit of nonsense, while at the same time acknowledging that there is such a thing as an imaginative activity of understanding someone who utters nonsense, of ‘letting oneself be taken in by the appearance of sense that some nonsense presents to us’ [Diamond, p. 165]. When I ascribe a belief or thought to someone, I must use an intelligible sentence of a language I understand. If I am to understand someone who utters nonsense, I have to participate imaginatively in what is said and see nonsense as sense. I become, as it were, the person who thinks he thinks it: ‘I treat that person’s nonsense in imagination as if I took it to be an intelligible sentence of a language I understand, something I find in myself the possibility of meaning’ [p. 165]. In other words, I am a participant in a change of aspect. Diamond’s point is similar to one I made above: when Wittgenstein says that whoever understands him will come to recognise his propositions as nonsensical, the point is that the aspect of the text that will eventually force itself onto the reader will be that aspect which has already forced itself onto Wittgenstein himself. Sense is seen as nonsense, nonsense as sense. This to see the Tractatus as uncanny.

There is a close connection in Wittgenstein’s thought, both in the earlier work and later, between logic and ethics. As we have seen above, logic is not for Wittgenstein a particular subject, with its own special truths, requiring some kind of scientific treatment, but something internal to all thought. Logic permeates our whole use of intelligible propositions in the course of our lives with language. Likewise, an ethical spirit, an attitude to the world and life, penetrates a whole way of living, and is manifest in how we talk and think. It is not the abstraction of a moral code, or a distinct set of rules. Ethics is a discourse turned towards everything there is or can be, the world as a whole. There is an important sense in which the ethical spirit for Wittgenstein involves an attitude towards the world ‘in terms of an acceptance of the independence of the world from one’s own will’ [Diamond, p. 154]. The ethical spirit, for him, Diamond believes, ‘is tied to living in acceptance of the fact that what happens, happens, that one’s willing this rather than that is merely another thing that happens and that one is in a sense “powerless” [p. 154]. It is in this connection that Wittgenstein speaks of two different attitudes to the world: the world of the happy man and the world of the unhappy man, though it is by no means clear how far these two attitudes can be kept separate. [Cf. Brian McGuinness, ‘The Mysticism of the Tractatus’, Philosophical Review 75 (1966): 316-317.] The happy man achieves a kind of piety in life, looking at the happenings of the world with clear eyes, whatever those happenings may be. Wittgenstein contrasts this with the state of mind of the suicide, for whom going on with life is made conditional on things being this way and not that. It is as though I were to reject the powerlessness fundamental to life, by willing to leave life if things do not go the way I want them. Diamond finds an example of such a refusal of powerlessness in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s story, 'The Birthmark', the main character of which, Aylmer, is ‘unhappy’ in Wittgenstein’s sense; the world does not meet the conditions he lays down. This spirit is evident in his response to the birthmark on his beautiful wife, and is further seen in his destructiveness of her life, goodness and beauty. There is, then, an analogy between the idea of understanding someone who utters nonsense and someone, whether oneself or someone else, to whom one ascribes an evil will, in the sense that one would be willing to ascribe such a will to a figure like Aylmer. A further example occurs in Wittgenstein’s remarks on Frazer’s account of the Beltane Fire Festival in eighteenth century Scotland. Wittgenstein says he has a sense of something terrible and sinister about the ritual games enacted in the festival, but what the source of that sense of the terrible is remains unspecified. On the surface there is nothing terrible, and even if one knows that there is a distant connection with human sacrifice this still does not account for the sense of the terrible that lies at the heart of the practices here, something terrible in the human heart itself. There is thus a tie here between something evil in a person’s will or in what people do, and an understanding of the person in which one sees him or her as willing something, but one specifies what is willed in words that have no content. In ascribing an evil will to someone, as with understanding someone who is the grip of an illusion—believing that what one utters is sense when it is nonsense—one must engage in a similar act of imaginative participation, giving ‘content’ where there is no content to give. Neither logical illusion nor the case of evil will is understandable. When one engages with what a person says who is in the grip of logical illusion (such as the illusion of the general form of the proposition) one is not inside that person’s thought as one is when he makes sense, because there is no thought to understand, there is no ‘inside’.

You are not inside, because there is as it were no inside; you cannot remain outside, because outside all you can see is someone inclined to put together words, to come out with them in certain circumstances, to associate them with images, feelings and so on; from the outside, there is nothing to be seen that could be called his being in the grip of an illusion that so-and-so, as opposed to his being inclined to come out with certain word-constructions. There is, as I said, no inside. But what it is to understand a person who utters nonsense is to go as far as one can with the idea that there is. [Diamond, art. cit., p. 157]

Diamond finds what she has in mind well put by Wilhelm Grimm, when he speaks of the evil in the tales he and his brother edited, not as something very bad which one could get accustomed to, but as something terrible, black and wholly alien that cannot even be approached. In Rumpelstiltskin, the miller who brags about his daughter and endangers her, and the avaricious king who sets the girl an impossible task, and threatens to kill her if she does not accomplish it, are far from being decent folk. But what is bad about these two is not of the order of the evil of which Grimm speaks, and to which what is dark and sinister in the human heart is able to respond, evil as terrible and unapproachable as that of Rumpelstiltskin. Unapproachable evil would once have been called supernatural or demonic, beyond the world, transcending it and irreducible to the deliverances of psychology or natural law. Rumpelstiltskin’s strength derives from his name being unknown to humans, and just as his name is unknown so his mode of being is ungraspable, and because of this the very eagerness of his demand for the girl’s first child brings it with a sense of horror inseparable from what he embodies of the dark and unappeased, a horror confirmed and augmented by the appalling death he undergoes at the tale’s end. The Tractatus succeeds, just as surely as the tales of the Brothers Grimm, in placing us outside the world, beyond the expressible, beyond the true and the false, an achievement whose power and profundity are for Wittgenstein inseparable from ‘ethics’.

The horror arising from this kind of exile is everywhere to be found in cinema. George Bailey’s expulsion from the world in It’s a Wonderful Life is an example whose effect is particularly shocking, given the context established by the film’s ease and comic precision of the importance of the quotidian to the progress and meaning of George’s life. The sudden access of darkness evoked at the moment of his mother’s repudiation of any knowledge of him, a repudiation by which he becomes as though he were no one, devoid of both identity and place, ruptures the film’s surface, and suspends us, for a moment, before the world even as it renders its reality unapproachable. While George Bailey is gathered back into the world, the protagonist of Witchfinder General, Matthew Hopkins, is a man whose evil excludes him from any relation to others except that of torture and sadism. Free of compassion or fellow feeling, driven by ambition and will to power, he seeks to mould the world to his own liking, by employing the theology of witchcraft and witch-hunting to place himself outside the world and subjugate it to his sovereignty. The ‘logic’ of ‘floating’, whereby witches are tested for guilt or innocence—if they drown they are innocent, if they float they are guilty—serves this purpose admirably. Whatever the result, death is the automatic consequence, and Hopkins’s judgement cannot be gainsaid. Hopkins’s sovereignty, dependent on a form of logical necessity over which he can have no control, is thus internally related to impotence, a fact made abundantly clear by the atrocious death he suffers, as the lover of the girl he has driven mad by torture quarters him and the witchfinder’s own excess devours both him and the man who dismembers him. In Day of Wrath Merete, the elderly mother of Absalon, an elderly priest, and the grandmother of Martin, is consumed with hatred for Anne, Absalon’s young wife, who is to fall in love with Martin, her stepson. The oppression and power of the church, represented by the keys that Merete carries with her wherever she goes, are finally turned against the girl, after Absalon’s death, when in a paroxysm of rage and loathing the old woman accuses her of witchcraft. It is easy to see in Anne a figure of life, of the natural expression of love and freedom, expelled from a world whose power and institutional terror base their legitimacy on the burning of witches. The film itself, however, does not permit this simple opposition: Merete is too powerful and impressive a figure to be reduced to what on that reading would be merely a representative role. Her hatred takes on a physical presence that goes beyond the demands of either narrative or psychology, and exceeds even the theological justifications that might be found for it. She is more than the world of the church and more than the world of love. She appears to serve a principle of expenditure and destruction that has no exact correlative in the film, and in relation to her Anne, who we might be initially inclined to think of as unambiguously sympathetic, takes on a demonic aspect. Dreyer films Anne, as she talks at night to Martin of her love, in a contrasting light that suggests the corruption and evil present in what she is doing, exactly as though we were being brought to see the relation between Anne and Martin as Merete would see it. Dreyer reveals here the cinema’s strange and unsettling relation to the power of the image, as Day of Wrath separates off from meaning only to re-inscribe itself in the anonymity of the text and choral rendition of the Dies Irae. The final image of the film is a cross not photographed but etched in white on a black ground, a cross with a sloping top to it reminiscent of the cross employed in the burning, under Absalon’s jurisdiction, of Marte, an old woman convicted of witchcraft, about halfway through the film. The cross, replete with the symbolism of Christianity, is at the same time an image of an image, an image of nothing.

The manifestation of which the Tractatus speaks, of what lies outside idealisation and the continued possibility of meaning, the manifestation of the ‘there is’, that things are, not how they are, is an irruption of otherness more radical than any that could be reached within language: ‘What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence’ (7). Silence in this context is not only the negation of language seen as a totality from a place beyond language; it is also an interval or interruption that ruptures language and disturbs and displaces the self. Whatever one thinks such a feeling to be, it is, for Blanchot at least, even in its excess and affliction, affirmative. As the narrator of Madness of the Day puts it: ‘I saw that even on the worst days, when I thought I was utterly and completely miserable, I was nevertheless, and nearly all the time, extremely happy’ [Madness of the Day, trans. Lydia Davis (New York: Station Hill Press, 1981), p. 7]. The narrator adds that the discovery was not a pleasant one. The world of the ‘happy’ man and that of the ‘unhappy’ cannot be kept separate one from the other. The event to which the Tractatus, like the work of Blanchot, seeks to open us is an event of no fixity, no determination. Even though we never stop making sense, of dwelling in a world made up of everything that is the case and represented by propositions that are true or false, we are always already impotent before the fascination of what lies beyond world and sense. ‘It makes what is ungraspable inescapable; it never lets me cease reaching what I cannot attain’ [The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln, London: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), p. 31]. The fascination is that inherent in the condition of writing, a condition the Tractatus attains to and is recognised as having when we recognise the text as nonsense. In the act of such recognition we are precipitated into logical impossibility: ‘Just as the only necessity that exists is logical necessity, so too the only impossibility that exists is logical impossibility’ (6.375). We find ourselves in that place whose existence is ruled out by the logical structure of language, just as the simultaneous presence of two colours at the same place in the visual field is logically impossible, ruled out by the logical structure of colour (6.3751). For Blanchot, to enter this nowhere, which he calls the ‘essence of solitude’, is to surrender to the fascination of time’s absence. Time’s absence is not purely negative: it is ‘a time without negation, without decision, when here is nowhere as well, and each thing sinks into its image while the “I” that we are recognizes itself by sinking into the neutrality of a featureless third person’ [The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln, London: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), p. 30]. The time of time’s absence has no present, no presence. Having no present, it has neither past nor future. What has no present has never happened, not even for a first time, and yet it starts again, over and over, forever re-begun, without beginning, without end. Wittgenstein writes: ‘If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present’ (6.4311). An eternity lived in the present is a time that is neither eternity nor the present—a time that is not time, an impossible time, excluded by the logical structure of time and so existing only in impossibility. This is the time internal to art, where images reveal that they do not reveal, and we, seeing them, are driven by the passive compulsion that fascination is into intensified states of excitation, as when in the cinema we are seduced ‘by masochistically exacerbating erotic tension, in an orgy of unproductive expenditure’. [Steven Shaviro, The Cinematic Body (Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), p. 57.] For this reason, horror films are revelatory of the nature of cinema in itself and of what constitutes our relations to it, especially insofar as we are complicit with the victimisation and driven quality of the monsters who inhabit them. Not driven by power but compelled by his vulnerability, Michael Myers is both child and rapacious killer, forced at the end into the position of accepting his own death at the hands of Dr Loomis, a death that can never come. The masochism, the impotence, evidenced in the spectacle of his ‘killing’ creates a space of excess, which is given in the film in repeated shots of the places where Michael has been but is no longer present, places which he yet inhabits (there where the film’s theme music, associated with his presence, puts him, there where he is not). Throughout Carpenter’s film, Michael has striven to repeat the move that constitutes his situation in the opening sequence, from being behind the image, behind the mask, to being seen full face, a move from first to third person. No sooner does he close in on the centre of the image, in what is the penultimate sequence, than Loomis ‘kills’ him, by expelling him from the screen. Michael becomes subsumed into an image, but an image of nothing and nowhere. He is no one.

ON THE QUESTION OF THE HORROR FILM

2009-02-11T15:00:00.010Z

The temptation to seek for a systematic explanation of how it is that horror films affect their viewers seems irresistible. Not only does Psycho, for example, combine to enduring effect the visceral destruction of the human body with a comedy of errors, it also succeeds in producing a sense of enigma such that the film may be found endlessly elusive and yet almost within reach. The paradoxical condition that is Norman’s self—Norman is the son of a mother he has both destroyed and become, a self created anew out of an origin he has himself engendered—seems to embody the dynamics of artistic creation as such. It is as though Hitchcock had found in him a figure through whom he could elaborate a dialectics of conflict which so shapes time that we can live—can participate in—the passage of the film’s elapsing, its duration, with unusual attention to the elaborate interweaving of its end and its beginning. Earl Wasserman has noted how, since the end of the eighteenth century, ‘the poet has been required to conceive his own structure of order, his own more-than-linguistic syntax, and so to engage that structure that the poetic act is creative both of a cosmic system and of the poems made possible by that system’ [Earl Wasserman, The Subtler Language (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1968), p.172]. On this view, poetry is addressed to the construction of the syntax that makes it possible, a process seen at its extreme in Mallarmé and T.S. Eliot. One might say that, whatever else may appear to engage the poem’s interest, its fundamental concern is with its own processes of coming into being. The crucial analogy is, of course, with music, a condition to which Psycho unquestionably aspires, an aspiration emphatically reinforced by Herrmann’s score. In other words, Psycho invites over-determination. Both its openness to a complex of literary traditions, and the obvious invitation posed by its title, encourage the search for some more abstract and unifying act of interpretation within which the film may be comprehended. However, such an act of interpretation is incorporated within the film itself, only to be dismissed in the moment of our encounter with the reality of what Mrs Bates actually is—an impossible being, whose mode of existence is that, not of a human psychology, but of cinema. It is as though Hitchcock were reminding us that the meaning of what takes place in Psycho is inherent within the totality of the film, and is not separable from it. It is the film itself which is constitutive of the myth that gives rise to it, and not an externally given system or a set of explanatory paradigms.

Given this order of subtlety, it is hardly surprising that Psycho should have drawn so forcibly to it writers whose conceptual structures were built on Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis. The complex of attraction and repulsion embodied in Norman can be mapped onto the dialectic arising out of the nightmare’s expression of incestuous desire. Similarly, Norman’s mode of being, that of the ‘ne-uter’, his being neither woman ‘nor man’, can be re-described in terms of the objet petit a and the algorithms of fantasy, or the function of lack engendering desire. Norman, one might say, is differánce incarnate. Or, in another idiom, he just is the divided subject. A recent example of the assimilation of Psycho to psychoanalysis is Laura Mulvey’s attempt to locate it in relation to the death drive. She speaks of how the film moves towards death, as it ‘reaches towards stillness and then towards the dead: Mother’s skull appears superimposed briefly on Norman’s features and they merge’ [“Death Drives: Hitchcock’s Psycho”, Film Studies 2 (Spring 2002): 8]. There is, according to Mulvey, a homology connecting terms like ‘stillness’, ‘death’ and ‘ending’, as applied to cinematic narrative, which takes the cinema back to its own secret stillness and the death inherent within it. She would seem to be saying that the achievement of Psycho is to have made this ‘homology’ explicit, inasmuch as it has found for it what Eliot called ‘an objective correlative’—the Bates’ mansion, reverberating with archaic and gothic echoes of the House of Usher and other unheimlich dwellings of the Romantic imagination. However, if one responds in this way to the aesthetic achievement of the film, the claims of the psychoanalytic reading to explain that achievement dissolve. This emerges in relation to the Freudian account of the uncanny. Here, the persuasiveness of the notion, as Freud describes it, derives, not from Freud’s account of incest or the theory of castration, but from the power invested in the tearing out of eyes and sexual ambivalence by the achievement of Hoffmann’s story, ‘The Sandman’. If conviction does result from Freud’s analysis, it arises out of the effective and compelling realisation of the horror of the Sandman in the story itself, a power Freud appropriates as evidence for his explanation of it. In other words, it is Hoffmann’s story which constitutes the imaginative potency of the notion of the uncanny, and so the meaning of its psychic reality, not the Freudian exegesis. So with Mulvey’s essay: the theoretical body of her reading is parasitic on the film, and it is Psycho itself that gives life and illumination to her concepts. It would seem, then, that so far as aesthetic appreciation is concerned, psychoanalytic explanation cannot give us what we are looking for—what we need. This is not only a matter of reductionism, or of confusing a causal explanation with giving reasons for responding as one does. The point is that only for someone who has responded to the aesthetic life of the work do psychoanalytic explanations of that life have pertinence. Psychoanalytic readings presuppose what it is they seek to explain, and they do so by projecting their methods of explanation onto the objects they address. Just as Freud projects onto ‘The Sandman’ a reading whose plausibility the story has already established, a manoeuvre he achieves by re-describing the actions of the Sandman as those of the ‘castrating father’, so Mulvey projects onto Psycho a dynamic that is already internal to the film’s organisation—a drive towards death. The result is not in any sense an explanation of the film, but an attempt to construct what might be called an immanent experience of it. The idiom of psychoanalysis is deployed in a ‘creative’ recounting of the film that seems intended to suggest an empathic fusion between the director’s consciousness and that of the critic.

*

An approach I find exemplary for a clarification of what is involved in the critical appreciation of art is Wittgenstein’s response to the account in The Golden Bough of the Beltane fire festivals in eighteenth century Scotland. His comments come in the latter part of his Remarks on Frazer’s 'Golden Bough', and were probably written around 1948. The Remarks were not intended for publication, and they should not be read as though they made up a systematically revised body of work. Nonetheless, they are of great interest, especially for their treatment of a theme that is also crucial to Frazer, that of religion’s deep roots in human nature.

The pagan Celtic year was divided into two periods, with the new year celebrated at the beginning of November, at the festival of Samhain, or Hallowe’en. The second festival took place six months later, on May Day, or Beltane. They signal changes in the weather, Samhain preceding winter and Beltane the return of summer. Frazer was interested in the Beltane festivals in Scotland, particularly the lighting of huge fires, which took place on this day. He cites a description given by John Ramsey, laird of Ochtertyre, near Crieff, the patron of Burns and friend of Sir Walter Scott:

Towards the close of the entertainment, the person who officiated as master of the feast produced a large cake baked with eggs and scalloped round the edge, called am bonnach beal-tine—i.e. the Beltane cake. It was divided into a number of pieces, and distributed in great form to the company. There was one particular piece which whoever got was called cailleach beal-tine—i.e., the Beltane carline, a term of great reproach. Upon his being known, part of the company laid hold of him and made a show of putting him into the fire; but the majority interposing, he was rescued. And in some places they laid him flat on the ground, making as if they would quarter him. Afterwards, he was pelted with egg-shells, and retained the odious appellation during the whole year. And while the feast was fresh in people’s memory, they affected to speak of the cailleach beal-tine as dead. [J.G. Frazer, The Golden Bough (London: Macmillan, 1992), p. 618]

Frazer sees the festivals as rituals of purification: the fires, he believes, were thought to burn up and destroy all malign influences, the chief evil being that of witches:

Again and again we are told that the fires are intended to burn up or repel the witches; and the intention is sometimes graphically expressed by the burning of an effigy of a witch in the fire. [Frazer, op. cit., p. 648]

Thus the pretence of throwing someone into the fire, or the burning of an effigy, are traces of something darker. As Brian Clack puts it, ‘previously human beings thought to be witches, or else representing evil forces, were really burned in the flames’ [Wittgenstein, Frazer and Religion (London: Macmillan, 1999), p. 139]. For Frazer, what remained of the Beltane festival in the eighteenth century was a survival of an earlier practice of sacrificing human beings regarded as witches in the fires.

Wittgenstein does not dismiss Frazer’s views, nor does he dismiss the worth of historical enquiry. As he says: ‘It is now clear that what gives this practice depth is its connection with the burning of a man’ [Philosophical Occasions 1912-1951, ed. James Klagge and Alfred Nordmann (Indianapolis and Cambrdige: Hackett, 1993), p. 143]. Were it the custom at some festival for men to ride one another, we might see nothing in this but a harmless game reminding us of men riding horses. But if we were to be told that in the past it had been the custom to use slaves in this way, we should then see in the harmless practice of our own times something deeper and more sinister. In other words, historical investigation may reveal sinister antecedents for what survive as apparently simple and homely customs. These antecedents may in turn colour our sense of the customs and make them appear darker and more sinister in the present. However, while this is so, it is nonetheless the case that, as Brian Clack points out, ‘what is crucial for Wittgenstein is that no historical research is required to show that the Beltane festival is sinister’ [Clack, op. cit., p. 142]. For Wittgenstein, what is at stake is the impression made by one specific festival—the Beltane festival—and beyond that impression no further justification for seeing it as sinister is required:

The question is: does the sinister, as we may call it, attach to the practice of the Beltane Fire Festival in itself, as it was carried out one hundred years ago, or is the Festival sinister only if the hypothesis of its origin turns out to be true? I believe it is clearly the inner nature of the modern practice which seems sinister to us, and the familiar facts of human sacrifice only indicate the lines along which we should view the practice. [Philosophical Occasions, pp, 143-145]

The Beltane Festival is a practice exhibiting what Frank Cioffi has called ‘a physiognomy of terror’ [Wittgenstein on Freud and Frazer (Cambrdige: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 87], and its meaning is revealed through that same physiognomy. Its ‘inner nature’ is such that the festival simply strikes us as having to do with human sacrifice, whether or not it actually originated there. Clack remarks: ‘the Highland custom strikes us as being like human sacrifice, and it is this which imbues it with its sinister atmosphere’ [Clack, p. cit., p. 144]. The aspect under which we see it just is that of human sacrifice. And this of itself impresses us, because what I see impresses me directly, without the intervention of a hypothesis: ‘If I see someone being killed,—is what makes an impression on me simply what I see, or is it only the hypothesis that here a man is being killed?’ [Philosophical Occasions, p. 149]

Wittgenstein compares the enactment of the festival with a play, since the Beltane festivities have something in common with a piece of theatre. Yet, despite the similarities, the events of the festivals are infused with a mood or state of mind that differs from that of a theatrical performance. Even were the festival performed in the manner of a play, we would still want to ask: what is the meaning of this performance? And irrespective of any interpretation we might give of it, our unease would not be wholly assuaged. The impact of the Beltane festival is not expressible solely in terms of an aesthetic appreciation. There remains inherent in the proceedings a strange meaninglessness (Sinnlosigkeit)—a queer pointlessness. The festival seems to embody an excess or expenditure that eludes conceptual grasp, and to this extent it strikes us as being in some way uncanny (unheimlich) or weird. Cioffi seems to have this in mind when he speaks of how the festival brings about an ‘eruption of the demonic into the quotidian’ (Cioffi, op. cit., p. 92). Clack elucidates Cioffi’s point by reference to two facets of the Beltane rite: the use of a cake to select a victim, and the carnival atmosphere that pervades the event. Wittgenstein finds the manner of drawing lots especially chilling:

The fact that the lots are drawn by the use of a cake is particularly horrible (almost like betrayal by a kiss), and that it strikes us this way is again of fundamental importance for the investigation of such practices. [Philosophical Occasions p. 147]

Something that has homely and convivial characteristics is being used in a new and threatening context. It is not surprising that the familiar takes on a sinister aspect. Similarly, as Clack suggests, ‘the uneasy balance between violence and merriment’ is also what ‘impresses us here, and it comes to the fore in certain accounts of actual human sacrifice’ [Clack, op. cit., p. 146]. He notes, in this connection, accounts of the gaiety of the crowds attending the sacrifice of human beings in Mesopotamia and Mexico, a point reinforced by Wittgenstein:

The concept of a ‘festivity’. We connect it with merrymaking; in another age it may have been connected with fear and dread. [Clack, op. cit., p.147. Cited from Culture and Value (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980), p. 78]

Beyond these two points, there is a further aspect of the Highland festivals, having to do with the nature of those who participate in them. To get a sense of the horror of human sacrifice, one has to recognise the kind of creatures human beings are. Wittgenstein asserts that ‘what I see in these stories is nevertheless acquired through the evidence, including such evidence as does not appear to be directly connected with them,—through the thoughts of man and his past, through all the strange things I see, and have seen and heard about, in myself and others’ [Philosophical Occasions, p. 151]. The rites of Beltane are not isolated or idiosyncratic actions of a remote group of people in a distant age. Those who performed them reveal tendencies within ourselves, and their propensities are ones we also share. Clack compares Wittgenstein’s perception here with that found in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, a novel in which two men of high civilisation, Marlow and Kurtz, experience the awakening of brutal and forgotten instincts.

To give a more general characterisation of Wittgenstein’s discussion of Frazer and the fire festivals, one might say that what he is considering is the seeing or dawning of aspects. At one point, Frazer describes how the participants in the Beltane festival divide a cake into as many portions as there are people present. One of these portions is daubed in black, and all the bits of cake are placed in a bonnet. Everyone, now blindfold, draws out a portion, and whoever draws out the black piece is the devoted person, to be sacrificed to Baal. Wittgenstein remarks of this account that there is ‘something here that looks like the last vestige of drawing lots. And, through this aspect, it suddenly gains depth’ [Philosophical Occasions, p. 145]. Again, after comparing the drawing of lots to betrayal by a kiss, he says:

When I see such a practice, or hear of it, it is like seeing a man speaking harshly to someone else over a trivial matter, and noticing from his tone of voice and facial expression that this man can on occasion be terrible. The impression I receive here can be very deep and extraordinarily serious. [Philosophical Occasions, p. 147]

Rush Rhees has noted a connection between remarks of this kind and Wittgenstein’s discussion of aspects in Philosophical Investigations II, xi, where he speaks of ways in which ‘thought’ and ‘seeing’ run together, ‘not as components of a complex have to be thought of together, but as concepts may “run together”, and what we should mean by “seeing” is also what we should mean by “thinking” here’ [Rush Rhees, “Wittgenstein on Language and Ritual”, in Wittgenstein and his Times, ed. Brian McGuinness (Oxford: Blackwell, 1982), pp. 101-102]. The further significance of Wittgenstein’s position on aspect dawning has been drawn out by Avner Baz:

The most important thing about the aspect is that there is a sense in which it isn’t really there and a sense in which it is very much there; a sense in which to speak about ‘truth’ and ‘falsity’ with respect to it is to miss its point and yet another sense in which in seeing it and in giving it expression you are truer to the object than if you stick to objective terms – the terms, that is, of what Wittgenstein calls ‘the language-game of reporting’, or ‘the language-game of information’. [Avner Baz, “What’s the point of seeing aspects?”, Philosophical Investigations 23:2 (April 2000): 106]

The seeing involved in aspect seeing is not seeing in general, but seeing (the emphasis is one Wittgenstein employs throughout his discussion). The ordinary sense of ‘seeing’ goes hand in hand with ‘knowing’ and is to be distinguished from aspect seeing. This is clear from the fact that aspects do not teach us anything about the external world, if ‘teaching about the external world’ is understood on the model of giving objective information. To see an aspect is not see a property of an object, and so the expression of a change of aspect (as in what is perhaps an over-worked example, from duck to rabbit or back again), while it may have the form of a report of a new perception, is not quite such a report. As Baz indicates, Wittgenstein also says that the criterion for what you see, when ‘seeing’ in the sense of seeing aspects is involved, is your representation of what is seen. Thus, when Wittgenstein tells us that he sees a resemblance between the drawing of lots by using pieces of cake and a harsh manner of speech he could be lying, but he could not be mistaken. In this respect, then, the expression of the seeing of an aspect is not a report on objective fact: it is an Äusserung, an avowal.

As Baz notes, there are connections with the Kantian account of aesthetic judgement, and, more specifically, with Cavell’s reworking of that account: ‘Aspects, like beauty, hang somewhere between the object and the subject, and that position is constituted by the expectation, the demand, from our partner to see what we see, in spite of the fact that we have no way of making him realize that he should’ [Baz, art. cit.: 107. The reference to Cavell is: Stanley Cavell, “Aesthetic Problems of Modern Philosophy”, Must We Mean What We Say? (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1969), p. 89, footnote]. Though the expression we give to the seeing or dawning of aspects may look like giving a report, it is not used for that purpose. Rather, its aim is the seeking of intimacy. This is not the intimacy in which one reveals something about one’s heart or inner feelings; in giving expression to the seeing of aspects we seek intimacy with someone else by trying to reveal, to bring out, something about the object [Baz, art. cit.: 108]. When we say ‘It’s running!’ in front of a painting of a running horse we are not doing so in order to inform other people: it is a reaction in which people are in touch with one another. It is intimacy in this sense that characterises the predominant tone of Wittgenstein’s remarks on Frazer, many of which are cast in the form of avowals. The idea of intimacy hangs together with two further points, both of which have relevance to Wittgenstein’s discussion. The first is that aspects are subject to the will. The second is that an aspect is something that strikes us. Dependency on the will means that it makes sense to say: ‘Now see the figure like this’. In real life situations, it makes sense for me to ask you to see, or at least try to see, the resemblance between two faces that has struck me, and it makes sense for Wittgenstein to ask his readers to see the resemblance between the drawing of lots and a manner of speaking. Thus, if there is an air of paradox attaching to the dawning of an aspect, it derives from the fact that the aspect ‘appears over there, in the object, and yet we know we must have had something to do with that appearance’ [Baz, art. cit.: 110]. We know that what has so radically changed, now that we have seen or been struck by the aspect, has in another sense not changed at all. It is as though we were bringing a concept to bear on the object, which is why, as Baz points out, ‘the aspect cannot be our (or the) usual, obvious way of seeing the object, but rather has to be new to us’ [Baz, art. cit.: 111]. The aspect is not obviously there, as a property might be, but neither have we placed it there by a pure act of the imagination. Baz writes:

It is this peculiarity of the aspect – its being something that fits the object, and at the same time something that we bring to the object; its being a way of seeing something anew while remaining faithful to it – that gives expressing it its point in ordinary contexts. [Baz, art. cit.: 111]

It is precisely this dynamic that Wittgenstein respects in his account how he stands towards the fire festivals. His consideration of them is subtly balanced, between the ‘inner nature’ or physiognomy of the rites themselves, and the character of the people who celebrated them. It is for this reason that the festivals can only be understood in a certain spirit, one which we impute to those who performed them from an experience in ourselves.

*

The pertinence of the discussion thus far to the manner of our response to horror cinema may, I think, be established by reference to the work of Jean Louis Schefer. Schefer writes:

It’s true that we – all of us – go to the cinema to see simulations that are terrible to one degree or another, and we don’t go to partake of a dream. Rather for a share of terror, for a share of the unknown, things like that. . . . . Which is to say that, at bottom, the cinema is an abattoir. People go to the abattoir, not to see images coming one after the other. Something else happens inside them: a structure that is otherwise acquired, otherwise possible, painful in other ways, and which is perhaps tied inside us to the necessity of producing meaning and language. [The Enigmatic Body, ed. and trans. Paul Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 120]

Cinema appears, for Schefer, to be less an art-form than a kind of public spectacle of death and deformation—an abattoir, or perhaps a freak-show, or even an execution. An instance of his approach is his discussion of Tod Browning’s Freaks. It is a film that puts before us the tantrums, pain and anger of dwarfs, their emotions expressed in high pitched voices, and reduced, as Schefer puts it, to tiny clenched fists and minuscule tears. And because of the reduction in scale of the persons who suffer, there is invoked in us a sense of revulsion. Our bodies are not like theirs, and the pain of their unrequited love ‘is for us nothing more than the fate of painfully small dolls’ [The Enigmatic Body, p. 121]. This he condemns as frightening—the worst kind of butchery. In the cruelty of our sarcasm, we look down on them, and it seems that there is no way for the small protagonist, a being in the process of discovering the world’s bitterness, to escape his fate, when he can’t even reach the door handle. The meaning of the scene dawns on us only later, ‘in the wake of the emotional instability of such tiny bodies. It arrives when we begin to ask, “Why is our hell so small?’ [The Enigmatic Body, p. 121].

These comments read like a gloss on a remark Schefer makes elsewhere: ‘The image can only be seen by way of what it lacks’ [The Enigmatic Body, p. 120], in which he seems to be giving voice to an idea not unlike Wittgenstein’s, concerning what it is to be struck by an image. For Wittgenstein, there is a kind of double movement, whereby we bring a concept to what we see, so that seeing an aspect might be likened to an echo of a thought in sight or a palpable reverberation of such a thought. And so it is in the case of Freaks, where, according to Schefer, we come to see the film later, as though our thought were echoing from it back towards us. In a subtle and intricate passage, Schefer develops this idea, suggesting that there is a mystery attaching to the meaning we add to an image, which is linked to something we can never be sure about: what we are adding to the image may simply be ‘ourselves’. There is meaning in what in what’s projected, a meaning that is not simply an extension of ourselves, and yet we recognise ourselves in it. Schefer wants to say that words like ‘guilty’, ‘criminal’ and ‘sin’ attach themselves to our involvement in this spectacle:

Crime isn’t the act of extortion in the world. It designates a man tied by signs to the limits of his universe, and this man, guilty even before infringing any laws, is guilty because he reveals himself as a subject in this universe, and because within him there is the consciousness of this world without freedom to which he himself is the link. [The Enigmatic Body, p. 130]

The guilt here is that of an ‘original sin’, arising from the primordial separation that makes meaning possible: guilt is inherent in the very fact of signification. It is this truth that the monsters and freaks of cinema embody. They exist frequently as impossible figures outside conventional meaning who return us to what Schefer calls ‘the interior body’, the enigmatic uniqueness of the individual existence of each one of us that is essentially paradoxical, a grounding of our being outside the law in what is ungraspable. It is this, the being of my being, that the freaks Schefer discusses make me aware of. Dudley Andrew has argued that Schefer ‘lodges the dialectic at the very heart of this primary fact of viewing: at the cinema we are both ourselves and the representation built for us’ [Concepts in Film Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 189]. We are, so to speak, subject to the representation and yet at the same time have dominion over it. Hence, the viewing experience is, as Schefer presents it, an interminable repetition of the dawning of aspects, inasmuch as it involves a developing interplay between the confined and the excessive, the doxical and the paradoxical. It is to explore this that he turns to concrete instances, in the manner of the later Barthes, eschewing the systematic structures of explanation to be found in Metz and other film theorists of a similar psychoanalytic persuasion. Again like Barthes, he is prepared to give himself over to the fascination of the image, a memorable example of which is the section entitled The Sausage, another consideration of a moment from Freaks.

A white man, in medium shot, on the right of the frame, stands casually, addressing a black man lying on a table. His right hand is extended, having just placed a cigarette in the black man’s mouth. The figure on the table lacks arms and legs, and is dressed in a white woollen sweater, with a darker woollen strip like a cummerbund around his waist. The sausage man has just lit the cigarette, using only his mouth to strike a match from a box placed on a small plinth in front of him. Schefer asks: ‘Is this still a man, or a monster? Is it a man other than in the face, where he can seem indifferently sublime or horrible?’ [The Enigmatic Body, p. 123] Then something strikes him. The figure, reduced to a single swaddled member, suddenly evokes the idea of the Husserlian reduction, or bracketing, of phenomena, that allows us to get at essences. This avowal is then developed further, into a series of more disquieting questions. ‘What does such a sausage do, not about his desires or about sleeping, but what does he do with his excrement?’ [The Enigmatic Body, p. 123] Do we not feel our own arms stuck to our sides as his are? Could it be that we too are that larva, without arms or legs? Could it be that maybe what we see here in this primordial form is a being that is also profoundly ours? Perhaps the cigarette stuck in his mouth is meant to prevent him speaking to that part of ourselves that is indeed that. Did this man ever know the pangs of love? It may be, says Schefer, that a monster is nothing other than a perpetual suffering of love, and its animal lament.

This account of The Sausage corresponds very precisely to Dudley Andrew’s description of how Schefer’s writing ‘answers to the call expressed by the text in the aspirations and gutturals of its voice. To utter an expression is more than to designate a meaning; it is to respond to a situation with a certain cry’ [Concepts in Film Theory, p. 190]. There is evident in Schefer’s avowals an expressive and unhesitating response which is inseparable from being struck by an aspect of something, and it is equally clear that his basic response is one of horror. According to the tradition within which Schefer situates himself, a tradition deriving from Hegel, and whose literary exemplars include Mallarmé, Valéry and Ponge, the act of writing is inseparable from death—the death of things as things. The act of naming, of substituting a word for a thing or sensation, delivers things to us, but only at the cost of subordinating them to concepts and so depriving them of their being. To write is therefore to murder, and every poem is—as T.S. Eliot has it—an epitaph. Maurice Blanchot has made the position clear:

For me to be able to say, “This woman” I must somehow take her flesh and blood reality away from her, cause her to be absent, annihilate her. The word gives me the being, but it gives it to me deprived of being. The word is the absence of that being, its nothingness, what is left of it when it has lost its being─the very fact that it does not exist. [Maurice Blanchot, The Gaze of Orpheus, trans. Lydia Davis (New York: Station Hill, 1981), p. 2]

Tzvetan Todorov takes a similar view. He argues that literature cannot be simply a tracing or image of reality, of what is not itself. Words do not have their life in relation to the things to which they refer; for writing to be possible it must be born out of the death of what it is speaking about. And yet this death makes writing impossible, since there is no longer anything for writing to engage with.

Literature can become possible only insofar as it makes itself impossible. Either what we say is actually here, in which case there is no room for literature; or else there is room for literature, in which case there is no longer anything to say. [The Fantastic, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Cornell University Press, 1975), p. 175]

The conclusion is inescapable: for writing to be literature it must be literature, and, at the same time and in the same sense, not literature. It seems obvious enough that a statement of this kind amounts to a violation of the law of non-contradiction, that is, that a proposition and its negation cannot both be true. Todorov would thus seem to have committed himself to a genuine contradiction, saying of the same thing that it exists and does not exist. It is, however, a contradiction that is more apparent than real. The position derives from an identification of a Kantian concern for the possibility of meaning with the ‘transcendence’ of meaning, with that which is taken to lie beyond meaning. It is an identification—or slippage—that serves to locate the possibility of meaning in its impossibility, and the resulting equivocation, while important for Todorov’s critical endeavour concerning the modern fantastic, is no less fundamental to Blanchot, especially in relation to his exploration of romantic, symbolist and post-symbolist poetry, a poetry he encounters crucially in the work of Hölderlin, Mallarmé and Rilke. What contradiction amounts to here is the proposal that within the actual practice of specific poets a set of conflicting assertions is put into play, and the resulting self-conscious juxtaposition of different perspectives on what is represented calls the status of literature into question. Hence, the modern fantastic does not induce hesitation concerning what it represents; it stands in a hesitant relation to itself. It is an art based on equivocation and ambivalence, and like the poetry of symbolism it attends above all to the process of its own coming into being. In this sense, it may be said to articulate its own impossibility. As Rosemary Jackson has noted, the fantastic understood in this way is based on a split between things that have no names (It, The Thing, and so on) and empty signs, which are devoid of meaning (names such as Lovecraft’s ‘Cthulhu’ or ‘Nyarlathotep’, or Poe’s ‘bobok’), and whose only reality derives from their own palpability as words [Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy:The Literature of Subversion (London: Methuen, 1981), pp. 38-40]. Jackson quotes Sartre, who considers the modern fantastic, as exemplified by Blanchot’s Kafka-like récit, Aminadab, to be a language of non-signifying signs, which lead nowhere. They are means without ends, which appear full and yet are capable of achieving only a terrible emptiness. In Sartre's words:

The law of the fantastic condemns it to encounter instruments only. These instruments are not…meant to serve men, but rather to manifest unremittingly an evasive, preposterous finality. This accounts for the labyrinth of corridors, doors and staircases that lead to nothing, the innumerable signs that line the road and that mean nothing. In the ‘topsy-turvy’ world, the means is isolated and is posed for its own sake. [[Jackson, op. cit., p. 41. Cited from Situations 1 (Paris: Gallimard, 1947), 130]

As with the Beltane Fire Festivals, we experience a mode of uncanny meaninglessness, an experience part of whose horror lies in its lack of purpose.

*

I will seek to bring the themes of this essay together by reference to two films, Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and Carl-Theodor Dreyer’s masterpiece of 1943, Day of Wrath. Hooper’s film contains in its last reel a scene of extraordinary ferocity and madness, in which Sally Hardesty, the one person left alive after the depredations of Leatherface, is subjected to a horrifying ordeal by the crazed family whose captive she is. The living members of the family would seem made up of a grandfather and three grandsons, the old man having worked in his younger days killing cattle in the slaughterhouses of Texas. The grandsons urge him on to repeat his exploits by killing Sally in the same fashion, by hitting her on the head so hard that she drops dead. The old man is too feeble, however, and the hammer falls nervelessly from his withered hand, clattering into a tin bucket, above which Sally is held by the brothers. Her screams are piercing and interminable, driven as she is to unmitigated dementia by fear and horror. The power of the scene derives in part from its combination of the domestic—the brothers are sitting down to a dinner of meat cooked by Leatherface, who takes on the role of mother—and utter derangement. It is quite possible see the film against the background of the Western, and to contrast the heroics of Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking with the abject degeneration of Leatherface. [Compare Horror, ed. Phil Hardy (London: Aurum Press, 1985), p. 298.] One might also contrast the themes of wilderness and civilisation, in order to suggest how the degeneracy of the family involves a confusion of that opposition. Degenerate descendants of the pioneers though they may be, they also represent the values of business (the older brother complains bitterly about the power of big government and the burdens of taxation) which have destroyed the wilderness the pioneers opened up. Nonetheless, the film reaches beyond these possibilities of interpretation and meaning, into a weird carnival of human destruction. The scene is protracted beyond the needs of the narrative, until the exuberance and jubilation of the family and the monotonous screaming of the girl combine to create an effect of suspension. The film seems to fold back on itself, as its kinetic energy slows down in response to the repeated actions of the family and the unvarying agony of the girl. An uncanny meaninglessness attaches to what takes place, and the viewer is brought—as in Schefer’s tableau of the abattoir—not to see images following one after the other, in narrative order, but to share in the unknown, and to sense something of what exists there. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre creates a parodic vision of tribal transgression, in which, for the duration of the festivities, the forbidden becomes the norm and the appeasement of the divine urge to ruin and destroy becomes the ground of action. The sublimity of so outrageous a pretension is acknowledged in the film’s final image, as Leatherface swings his chainsaw in great sweeping arcs above his head in salutation to the rising sun.

Dreyer’s Day of Wrath, made during the Nazi occupation of Denmark, is set in 1623. Witchcraft and the burning of witches are central to it, an issue that ultimately focuses on the figure of Anne. She is the young wife of an elderly priest, Absalon, living in his house with him and his mother, Merete. The first part of the film lays out the indictment for witchcraft of an old woman, Herlofs Marte, and her subsequent capture, trial by torture and burning. Absalon plays a crucial role in this, authorising the indictment, overseeing her trial and signing her death warrant. Following the old woman’s death, the second section of the film centres on the love between Anne and Martin, Absalon’s son, concluding with Absalon’s death. In the final sequence of the film, Anne, Martin, Merete and the elders of the church are gathered around Absalon’s coffin. It is here that Anne is accused of the murder of her husband by witchcraft, and the bewitchment of Martin. The accuser is Merete, the priest’s mother. On hearing the denunciation, Martin abandons Anne, moving around his father’s coffin to stand alongside his grandmother. Anne herself has been a figure of ambivalence throughout the film: there has been a consistent hesitation in the manner of her presentation, and we are never certain as to whether or not she is possessed of demonic powers. In effect, the film offers in Anne a clear focus for what Todorov defines as the classic dynamic of the fantastic—we hesitate between a natural explanation for her actions and a supernatural one. This same hesitation continues now, as she confesses to the crime, a confession that must send her to the stake. The motivation for the confession remains unclear and Dreyer does nothing to establish it more certainly. At the very end, Anne raises her eyes from her dead husband, lying before her, and looks off-screen, an act David Bordwell reads as follows: ‘The look, at nothing, breaking once and for all from the gazes of the social and natural worlds, defines her entry into a new realm’ [The Films of Carl-Theodor Dreyer (Berkeley: University of califormia Press, 1981), p. 139]. Bordwell takes this view to be supported by the film’s transition at this point to the Dies Irae scroll, which intervenes finally to break off the narrative in a moment of abrupt intervention, as the words of the scroll move up the screen, accompanied by images and music. Bordwell contends that the image supplementing the first verse, showing souls being transported to heaven, and that supplementing the second verse, of men and women kneeling at the foot of the cross, is an implicit act of absolution. Anne is absolved in this way of whatever she has done, and the film’s hesitations about her motives are negated by fiat [The Films of Carl-Theodor Dreyer, p. 140]. However, the final image of the film is of the black cross superimposed over the scroll. The cross remains after the scroll has left the screen, placed on a white ground (in a manner reminiscent of the ending of Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest). As we watch this final image, two diagonal pieces appear at its top, pointing downward, a witch emblem, evoking the cross present at the immolation of Herlofs Marte. The cross signals to us that Anne has similarly been burnt alive in the name of the cross. The question of absolution remains as uncertain as the question of Anne’s spiritual powers, and the juxtaposition of these images in no way resolves it.

Day of Wrath points in exactly the same direction as do the descriptions of the Beltane Fire Festivals. What is deep and sinister in Dreyer’s film arises from the eruption of the demonic into a world that is recognisable in its stability or order, while in the people themselves there is something that induces an impression of terror and sense of dread. The awfulness of the solemnity with which the torture of an old woman is conducted, the fact that when she is burnt her immolation is accompanied by a choir of young boys, the grave hypocrisy of Absalon’s piety, the implacable hatred visible in Merete’s face whenever she sees or speaks to Anne, the failure of Martin to support the woman whom he has assured of his love when confronted by Merete’s denunciation—these confirm one’s sense of how human beings are, ‘of what I have seen and heard about, in myself and others’. The meaninglessness of what we see, and the lack of redemptive significance in it, return us to the darkness within ourselves. In other words, Day of Wrath betrays itself to its own undoing. The film is split from itself, in a movement of double negation that turns it towards the outside, the exterior, beyond language and concept, where there is no intimacy, no place to rest. The work says the nothing that is the condition of its simultaneous possibility and impossibility. And this nothing is made palpable in the final image of the cross. Here, too, we may be struck by the pertinence of Freud’s discussion of the uncanny: das Unheimliche, in art as in life, is the occurrence of a consciousness that is attenuated, incapable of mastery over its own negativity. Like the narrator of Poe’s 'The Premature Burial' or the protagonist of Dreyer’s Vampyr, it is as though in certain horror films we were solicited by images from which we cannot escape, and which condemn us to the ultimate horror—that of the impossibility of dying.

CLINT EASTWOOD: AVATAR OF THE UNDEAD

2009-02-08T22:45:00.003Z

Clint Eastwood has entered into the pantheon of great American directors, a director of Westerns and thrillers, though not only of them. The reputation for Westerns derives, of course, from his collaboration with Sergio Leone, for thrillers from his work with Don Siegel. Eastwood also has a reputation that is well established in the university. A significant number of books on him have emerged over the last few years, considering variously his role as a Hollywood author, his place in the history of the Western and the significance for gender and identity politics of the image of masculinity evident in his films. There is, however, another aspect to his work which, to my knowledge at least, has not been much commented on, and that is the importance to certain of his films of a motif more usually to be found in the cinema of horror. The motif I am referring to has to do with the un-dead, those who are between death and life, who are neither living nor dead: vampires, zombies, the resuscitated. There is an interval beyond or outside the normal world, the world of ‘reality’. It is an interval between life and death, in which the living are not the living, and the dead not the dead. This interval is an imaginative in-between, a space constitutive of the fictional worlds of many of the greatest works of horror, whether in literature or film. I want to say, not that Eastwood is making a surreptitious kind of horror film, unrecognised by his devotees, but that to see certain of his films in relation to this kind of interval is to bring out something of great pertinence to them.

What I have in mind is borne out by one of his more schematic films, High Plains Drifter (1973). The opening of the film is a very long shot of mountains and desert, both shimmering in a heat haze. A figure appears out of the wavering and uncertain outlines of the haze, until a man in a dark hat and a long brown duster becomes clearly visible, riding towards the camera. This figure, played by Eastwood, is that of The Stranger, and as he enters the small lakeside town of Lago the camera remains with him.

There follows in the next ten to fifteen minutes a true carnival of violence, in which he guns down three of the town’s thugs, and rapes a woman who dares to challenge him and his methods. Following this, it gradually becomes clear during the next half-hour or so of the film that the stranger was once marshall of Lago and that he was bull-whipped to death by three killers, led by the brutal and sadistic Stacey Bridges (Geoffrey Lewis). The killing took place on the orders of the town council, who wished to hide the fact that their gold-mining operation was sited illegally on government land, a fact the marshall, Joe Duncan, was ready to report to the authorities.

After the killing, the council had the killers arrested and confined to the State Penitentiary. The stranger’s return coincides with the killers’ release from prison. They have vowed to take their revenge on the good people of Lago. The council members hire the stranger to defend the town, which he agrees to do. The result is a total upsetting of the town’s civic, financial and legal structure. In the outcome, having had the town painted red and its name altered from Lago to ‘Hell’, the stranger appears to abandon the place and its inhabitants to the mercies of the vengeful killers who are about to descend upon it. Ultimately, the stranger does indeed kill the three men who killed him, and as he kills Stacey the killer looks at him in bewilderment: ‘who are you?’, he asks, a refrain taken over from the Leone Westerns. The stranger leaves the town, his name now inscribed by his one friend, Mordecai, on his tombstone. He rides off into the haze from which he came. The stranger’s identity has been established, and yet the means by which this has come about call into question the very notion of identity.

It is here that a comparison with the horror film is pertinent. The stranger has returned from the dead. Although he is not a vampire, he shares with the vampire one fundamental characteristic: he is one of the un-dead, an impossible figure, whom none of the townspeople recognise, and yet he walks among them and they knew him well during his life. The stranger is beyond death, in that he has risen again, and he is at the same time not yet dead, in that his ultimate death will come only after his name has been written on his tombstone. He is, one might say, between two deaths. He is in the world, but not of it. He is obedient to a law which is not that of the world, and despite the dangers he confronts he cannot be destroyed by those who want his death. Indeed, he is referred to at various times by one or other of the townsfolk as a devil or a demon, a point of view he himself seems to reinforce by re-naming the town Hell.

In effect, Eastwood has created here an inverted world, a ‘topsy-turvy’ world, in which the ethical devolves not upon the living, but the dead—despite the violence, and violation, that attends the actions of the dead. The conventions of the Western are retained, but at the same time they are curiously distorted. It is as though the film were addressing not so much the appearance of the Western, but an idea of it. The film incites the viewer to ask what is beyond. It leads us not to ‘see’, but to ‘look’. The effect of showing us something, an image of the West, of American greed and capital, that is so clearly marked as unreal, is to bring home to us that the world in which we think we are at home, the world of the Western as traditionally understood, is itself no less unreal. The reality we take for granted is itself already an inverted image, and in this world also we have no home.

I said earlier that High Plains Drifter is a schematic film. By this I mean that in it Eastwood shifts our way of looking at the Western as such, and by so doing tries to re-envisage the myths that underpin it, the myths of American expansion, individualism and the unquestioned benefits of the creation of wealth. What becomes visible as a result of this is an ideology that is itself in the service of death. The horror of America, its exploitations and exterminations, not to mention genocide and slavery, is seen to be internal to the action, as though it were an unspoken assumption of the film’s fictional world. The procedures of High Plains Drifter are revisited in Pale Rider (1985). The pale rider is Death, the fourth horseman of the Apocalypse, and he is summoned up in answer to the prayer of a young girl, Megan, one of a group of traditional panhandling gold-miners whose family and livelihoods are threatened by the new corporate capitalism and industrialised mining methods of the LaHood Corporation, run and owned by the ruthless Coy LaHood (Richard Dysart). The film refers explicitly to High Plains Drifter, both by way of its central character, a stranger who is already dead, a figure known only as The Preacher (played by Eastwood), and with respect to elements of the plot-line, which reprise those of the earlier film. Not only that, but the theme or motif of the man who is already dead is here doubled. At one point, The Preacher strips down to take a bath, and we see him from the back. A number of scars left by bullets are visible, and it is obvious that the bullets must have passed through his heart and lungs. The significance of this emerges during the final shoot-out between The Preacher and the brutal Marshall, Stockburn (an admirable performance by John Russell), and his deputies, who LaHood has sent for. At the climax of the gunfight, Stockburn sees that the man who is approaching him is a man whom he has previously killed, and who has now returned for him. The Preacher shoots Stockburn in precisely the same places on the body as he himself was shot by Stockburn. A shot of Stockburn from behind as the bullets pass through him puts great emphasis on this. Stockburn sinks to his knees in his final agony, and looking directly up at The Preacher, who is standing over him, gasps out in amazement and wonder: ‘You!’ Without replying, The Preacher finishes him off with a bullet between the eyes, in the manner prescribed for zombies in Night of the Living Dead. By dying at the hands of a man whom he has already killed, Stockburn can be seen, in retrospect, to have been himself already dead from the time of that first killing. Like the father in the dream recounted by one of Freud’s patients, he was dead, but he did not know it. It is part of the excellence of John Russell’s performance that he able to intimate the extent to which Stockburn is subject to impending death without being conscious of what is awaiting him. Stockburn’s every gesture, the heaviness in his tone of voice, the very movement of his eyes, are all expressive of a mortification that seems in the throes of congealing around him.

This pattern is repeated in Unforgiven (1992). Although William Munney (Eastwood) is not physically dead, at the start of the film he is morally dead to his former life, of whiskey, gun-fighting and killing. He is re-born into his former condition, at the end, when he confronts and annihilates the sheriff of the town of Big Whiskey, Little Bill (Gene Hackman). The conclusion of Unforgiven is shot in a mode that differs markedly from the rest of the film. The darkness, the emphasis on rain and shadow, and the sepia tone given to the image, all suggest a shift in register, from the narrative of the earlier part to a kind of suspension or stasis in which dying and the moment of death are fore-grounded. The film is ambiguous and complex, and much of its subtlety derives from how it makes present the problematic and uncertain nature of its fictional world. The "unforgiven" of Unforgiven is one who is neither forgiven nor not forgiven. He is, he has his being, in the meanwhile, the interval. He is a man missing from his presence, just as he is missing from his place. To invoke Blanchot, one might say that the man with no name is a man whose name is a name for the nameless, one to whom is attached the murmur of the il y a, the place without place.

In these three Westerns at least, Clint Eastwood has achieved an art that comes to us from outside, that engages with the very ground of representation itself.

THE LETTER OF LORD CHANDOS

2009-01-13T15:07:00.006Z

In 1901, the Austrian writer Hugo von Hofmannsthal wrote two works of prose, ‘Colours’ and ‘The Letter of Lord Chandos’. In ‘Colours’, Hofmannsthal sets out what he calls ‘the crisis of an inner disposition’, a ‘crisis’ which takes the form of an almost indescribable experience of what he calls ‘Next-to-Nothing’:

But how enumerate these occasional attacks of a Next-to-Nothing? . . . Now and again in the morning it happened, in these German hotel rooms, that the jug and wash-basin—or a corner of the room with the table and the clothes-rack—appeared to me so nonreal, despite their indescribable banality so utterly not real, ghostly as it were, and at the same time ephemeral, waiting, so to speak temporarily, to take the place of the real jug, the real wash-basin filled with water. . . . it was like a momentary floating above the abyss, the eternal void. . . . such an indescribable wafting of the eternal Nothing, the eternal Nowhere, a breath not of death but of Not-Life, indescribable. . . . all in all [things] took on an aspect, a peculiar ambiguous air so filled with inner uncertainty, malicious unreality: so transitory it lay there—with such ghostlike transitoriness. [Selected Prose, (New York: Pantheon, 1952), pp. 142-44.]

While in this state, the narrator enters by chance an art gallery, where he sees some paintings by Van Gogh. As he stares intently at the paintings, his earlier sense of the ghostlike quality of reality seems taken over, as it were, by the paintings themselves, in an oddly displaced experience exposing the narrator to the sheer existence of things, an experience made all the more curious by the fact that the substantial and voluptuous quality—the sensuous presence—of the things depicted seems, in some way, withdrawn from them:

And this innermost life was there, tree and stone and wall and gorge gave of themselves their innermost, almost casting it at me—not, however, the voluptuousness and harmony of their lovely inanimate lives, as sometimes, in days gone by, like a magic atmosphere it had flowed towards me from old paintings: no, only the impact of its existence, the ferocious wonder of its existence surrounded by incredibility, made a dead set at my soul. [Selected Prose, p.147.)

The experience is one of something taking place that is impersonal, neutral: the ‘loveliness’ of the old days gives way to what is quite other, whereby ‘ferocious wonder’ replaces the familiar and magic atmosphere flowing forth from older paintings with ‘an existence surrounded by incredibility’. In the narrator’s experience of the art of Van Gogh, the familiarity of the object disappears under the impact of its existence, and with that disappearance there emerges something that is there but not visible—the presence of an absence, the density of a void.

What Hofmannsthal undergoes in his engagement with Van Gogh’s art, as he describes the matter, is an experience of fascination or captivation. Emmanuel Levinas has contrasted this with ‘being-in-the world’, a life lived with concepts. A concept is the object grasped; the object becomes intelligible by way of the concept. In our actions, in our lives with words, we maintain a living relation with objects; we hold and understand them. However, ‘the most elementary procedure of art consists in substituting for the object its image. Its image, and not its concept’ [Collected Philosophical Papers, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998), p. 3]. Art implies a blindness to concepts, inasmuch as art does not engender them. The image is not a concept; it takes hold over us, and instead of us grasping it, as with a concept, the image effects a reversal of intention and grasps us, thereby inducing in us a fundamental passivity. For this reason, Levinas regards the image as musical: possessed, ‘inspired’, when we hearken to music, ‘we become’, as T.S. Eliot puts it, ‘the music while the music lasts’. The passivity of our possession is made visible in the very magic, music and song that possess us.

This is the captivation of poetry and music. It is a mode of being to which applies neither the form of consciousness, since the I is there stripped of its prerogative of assumption, of its power, nor the form of the unconscious, since the whole situation and all its articulations are in a dark light, present. [Op. cit., p. 4]

To be confronted by an image, by the ferocious wonder of its existence, is to be no longer a being-in-the-world. It is to exist in a waking dream, in whose light habit, reflex and instinct operate no longer.

In ‘The Letter of Lord Chandos’, Hofmannsthal describes a similar standstill or fascination with respect to language, in which words are immobilised, thought and concept banished. The text purports to be a letter written to Francis Bacon by an Elizabethan nobleman, explaining why the writer has renounced all literary endeavour.

At first I grew by degrees incapable of discussing a loftier or more general subject in terms of which everyone, fluently and without hesitation, is wont to avail himself. I experienced an inexplicable distaste for so much as uttering the words spirit, soul, or body . . . the abstract terms of which the tongue must avail itself as a matter of course in order to voice a judgement—these terms crumbled in my mouth like mouldy fungi. [Selected Prose, pp. 133-34]

The distaste for abstract terms, for concepts, comes to a climax when Chandos, trying to reprove his daughter for lying, finds himself incapable of distinguishing between—or at any rate of communicating the distinction between—truth and falsehood. Gradually, these attacks spread ‘like corroding rust’, until familiar and humdrum conversation seems to him ‘ as indemonstrable, as mendacious and hollow as could be’. He is on longer capable of comprehending things with the simplifying eye of habit:

For me everything disintegrated into parts, those parts again into parts; no longer would anything let itself be encompassed by one idea. Single words floated round me; they congealed into eyes which stared at me and into which I was forced to stare back—whirlpools which gave me vertigo and, reeling incessantly, led into the void. [Ibid]

Chandos comes into contact with a fundamental passivity, wherein language is no longer the expression of a subjectivity, but a reversal of that, whereby he is exposed to language in its exteriority. The words that confront him are no longer words as signs or symbols but words in their existence as words, without meaning, on the hither side of signification. He seeks to rescue himself from his plight by seeking refuge in the Ancients, not in Plato, but in Seneca and Cicero, writers notable for ‘the harmony of their clearly defined and orderly ideas’. But to no avail.

These ideas, I understood them well: I saw their wonderful interplay rise before me like magnificent fountains upon which played golden balls. I could hover around them and watch how they played, one with each other; but they were concerned only with each other, and the most profound, most personal quality of my thinking remained excluded from this magic circle. [Ibid]

A terrible solitude afflicts him, as though he were locked in a garden surrounded by eyeless statues. As Donald Davie has noted, what Chandos goes through is a loss of faith in language as an instrument of articulation, as an instrument able to establish and sustain relationships. In effect, he has lost his faith in syntax: ‘[t]he only language he can trust is a language broken down into units of isolated words, a language which abandons any attempt at articulation, because that articulation seems to take place only inside a closed system—“they were concerned only with each other”’. [Articulate Energy, (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1955), p. 4.]

At the same time, Lord Chandos describes another aspect of this transformation: as words lose their coherence, and objects become useless, he is drawn outside language into a new intimacy with things in themselves, with things in their existence. Maurice Blanchot puts it in the following terms:

a new contact forms with things’ intimacy, a presentiment of unknown relations, of another language, capable of expressing the infinite acceptance which the poet is when he becomes the refusal to choose—capable also of enclosing the silence that lies in the deepest recess of things. [The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), p. 183]

Hofmannsthal in this way accedes to the demand or exigency of writing itself: it is a demand that ‘assigns to the artist—to the most irresponsible of men—the responsibility for what he cannot accomplish, and makes him guilty for what he cannot say, for what cannot be said’ [ibid]. Hofmannsthal himself writes:

I felt, with a certainty not entirely bereft of sorrow, that neither in the coming year nor in the following nor in all the years of this my life shall I write a book, whether in English or in Latin: and this for an odd and embarrassing reason. . . . [T]he language in which I might be able not only to write but to think is neither Latin nor English, neither Italian nor Spanish, but a language none of whose words is known to me, a language in which inanimate things speak to me and wherein I may one day have to justify myself before an unknown judge. [Selected Prose, pp. 140-1]

It is not surprising that, as Blanchot remarks, Kafka felt ‘The Letter of Lord Chandos’ to be kindred text. Kafka also, when he wrote, ‘felt judged from deep down in his words by that unknown tongue of which he was not the master, but for which he was responsible, and which, with torments and preposterous accusations, removed him more and more from the authority to write . . . and condemned him to a language whose understanding was refused him but whose justification was required of him’ [The Space of Literature, pp. 183-84]. The writer is drawn, by too strong a movement, into a space where truth is lacking, where limits and boundaries have disappeared, and where he is handed over to the immeasurable and the illimitable.

The exigencies to which Hofmannsthal, and Blanchot after him, attend, are complex and difficult to characterise. To make a beginning, I turn to a book by Levinas, Existence and Existents, published in 1947, which exercised a considerable influence over Blanchot in his earlier criticism, and which has features in common with his early novels, such as Thomas the Obscure (1941). Levinas asks us to imagine an event which is, we may believe, unimaginable. Let us imagine, he says, all things, being and persons, reverting to nothingness. There would be an experience, but not the experience of something. It would be an experience of the nothingness that remains, the silence of night and of nothingness, what Levinas calls the experience of the ‘il y a’, the ‘there is’. The ‘there is’ is like the third person pronoun in the impersonal form of the verb—‘it rains’, ‘it is night’—and it designates not the unknown author of an action, but characterises that action itself, which has no author. Levinas speaks of the ‘impersonal, anonymous, yet inextinguishable “consummation” of being, which murmurs in the depths of nothingness itself’ and which ‘we shall designate by the term there is. The there is, inasmuch as it resists a personal form, is “being in general”’ [Existence and Existents, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press), p 52]. The there is derives neither from the exterior nor the inner world, or from any ‘being’ whatsoever. It transcends the inner and the outer, and makes the very distinction impossible. It is here, perhaps, that we may locate Hofmannsthal’s experience of inanimate things, as they speak to him, in an unknown and anonymous ‘language’.

One might be inclined to take the experience of the there is to be an experience of the night, but if it is it is not an experience of night as opposed to day. The night in question is what Blanchot has called ‘the other night’: in their common usage, day and the night that belongs to it are part of the world within which communication, meaning and understanding have their places, whereas the night of which Blanchot speaks, the night of the there is, is what emerges as an elsewhere, as a radical otherness, as a neutrality that is the realm neither of things not of concepts. When the forms of things are dissolved in the other night, the darkness of that night, a darkness which is neither an object nor has the quality of an object, becomes a kind of invading presence. The notion of experience is not, however, applicable in the context of this presence, since, according to Levinas, the darkness of the night excludes all that might present itself to mind or body. It is a darkness beyond or other than anything that might be possible; in the night, we are not confronted by anything that might, or might not, be. The darkness is the darkness of a nothing. And yet it is not a nothing to be identified with an idea of pure or transcendental nothingness. The place of which Levinas speaks is a place where there is no longer ‘this’ or ‘that’—there is no longer ‘something’—but nonetheless the nothing, the darkness, is in its turn a presence, an utterly unavoidable presence. It is not a presence that can take its place in a dialectic relation with absence, nor can it be grasped by thought. It is simply there, beyond mediation, beyond language. ‘Nothing responds to us but this silence; the voice of this silence is understood and frightens like the silence of those infinite spaces Pascal speaks of. There is, in general, without it mattering what there is, without our being able to fix a substantive to this term. There is is an impersonal form, like it rains, or it is warm. Its anonymity is essential’ [op. cit., pp. 52-53]. The well-worn opposition between the inner and the outer, the world of objects and the world of subjectivity, is thereby rendered irrelevant. The mind no longer faces an exterior world, since no such world exists. The self, the I, is submerged by the night, invaded and depersonalised by it. All things disappear and the I with them, leaving behind what cannot disappear, ‘the sheer fact of being in which one participates, whether one wants to or not, without having taken the initiative, anonymously’ [op. cit., p. 53].

The experience is one of horror and menace. Nothing approaches, nothing comes, nothing threatens; and yet this silence, this void empty of sensation, constitutes a mute and absolutely indeterminate menace. As Lord Chandos found, in the deepest recess of things, there is here, in this nowhere, an ambiguity and indeterminateness, where one thing can count as another. As things in their being are delivered over to us, so we are delivered over to things, and are exposed to them. The darkness does not simply change the way things appear to us: it reduces them to undetermined, anonymous being; and it so reduces us. Things strike us ‘as though they no longer composed a world, and were swimming in the chaos of their existence’ [op.cit., p. 54]. Levinas cites as examples the ‘hallucinatory’ poetry of Rimbaud, or the calm and smiling horror of de Maupassant’s tales, in which beings and things collapse into their materiality, whereby a terrifying presence accrues to their density, their weight and shape. For Levinas, it makes things appear to us in a night, ‘like the monotonous presence that bears down on us in insomnia’ [op cit., p. 55]. This is the ‘rustling’ of the il y a, and it is horror. Horror is in no sense an anxiety about death. The subject is stripped of its subjectivity, and in being so stripped loses the power to have a private existence: the self, the I, is depersonalised. Horror is this turning of the subjectivity of the subject, its particularity qua entity, inside out. Levinas describes the process as ‘a participation in the there is, in the there is which returns in the heart of every negation, in the there is that has “no exits.” It is . . . the impossibility of death, the universality of existence even in its annihilation’ [op. cit., p. 56]. The point Levinas is making here is crucial: to kill someone else, or to seek to die oneself, by risking one’s life, or by attempting suicide, is to seek an escape from being, to enter a realm in which negation and freedom can operate. Negation, by denying the world, allows us mastery over it, and hence freedom. As Simon Critcheley has noted, ‘[t]he work of negation, whereby the in-itself becomes transformed into the for-itself and the immediate mediated, is likened by Hegel to death. . . . the Subject produces itself through a relation with death; the life of the Spirit endures death and maintains itself in death’ [Very Little…Almost Nothing (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 53]. For Levinas, then, to experience horror is to experience, at the very heart of the negation that founds and sustains the world, a return of being, an event that makes it seem as though that negation had not taken place. The world—founded on negation—is itself in turn negated. For Levinas, as for Blanchot, the corpse is an especially pertinent icon of what is at stake: the corpse, the very embodiment of death’s negation, already bears within itself its own phantom; it presages its return. ‘The haunting spectre, the phantom, constitutes the very element of horror’ [Existence and Existents, p. 56].

Levinas finds in Shakespeare a potent exemplar of this position. It is the return of presence in negation, the impossibility of evading anonymous and incorruptible existence, that for Levinas constitutes the final depth of the tragedies, in which ‘[t]he fatality of the tragedy of antiquity becomes the fatality of irremissible being’ [op. cit., p. 57]. The spectres, ghosts and witches of the plays are not simply elements deriving from the folklore and shared iconography of the late sixteenth or early seventeenth centuries, or from the original material the dramas are derived from; they are what allow Shakespeare to move towards the limit between being and nothingness, where being insinuates itself even in nothingness. Hamlet recoils before the ‘not to be’, because he has a premonition of the return of being (‘to dye, to sleepe, perchance to Dreame’). Macbeth comes to experience in the apparition of Banquo’s ghost, of ‘its phantom return through the fissures through which one had driven it’ [ibid.], the impossibility of escape from existence. ‘The times have been/That, when the brains were out, the man would die,/And there an end; but now they rise again,/. . . And push us from our stools: this is more strange/Than such a murder is’ (III, iv, 78-83). The horror for Macbeth derives, not from fear, but from the shadow of being, ‘the profile of being [as it] takes form in nothingness’ [ibid]. What emerges from these considerations, Levinas wants to insist, is that the horror of the night, as an experience of the there is, neither reveals, nor derives from, the danger of death or pain. Nor does the pure nothingness revealed by Heidegger’s analyses of anxiety in Being and Time constitute the there is.

There is horror of being and not anxiety over nothingness, fear of being and not fear for being; there is being prey to, delivered over to something that is not a ‘something.’. . . . Horror carries out the condemnation to perpetual reality, to existence with ‘no exits’. [Existence and Existents, pp. 57-58]

Here, Levinas refuses the ontology of Heidegger, and, indeed, epistemology in general. The horror of the night, ‘the silence and horror of the shades’, is simply opposed to Heideggerian anxiety, the fear of being to the fear of nothingness. Anxiety, in Heidegger, is concerned with ‘being towards death’, in which death is somehow grasped and understood, mastered, while, for Levinas, the horror of the night is the horror of the impossibility of dying. There is no exit from the horror of the night, and the unavoidable demands of existence make no answer. Horror is the horror of immortality, the perpetuity of the drama of existence, the necessity of forever taking up its burden.

At this point, Levinas refers, in a footnote, to Blanchot’s novel, Thomas the Obscure, a text which, he insists, captures precisely that ‘presence of absence’, that negativity of ‘the other night’, and the dissolution of the self, the subject, in the night, which constitute the il y a. What is crucial is the sense the novel gives of the horror of being, of what Levinas calls the return of being at the heart of negation, the reality of irreality.

Soon the night seemed gloomier and more terrible to him than any night, as if it had in fact issued from a wound of thought which had ceased to think, of thought taken ironically as object by something other than thought. It was night itself. Images which constituted its darkness inundated him. He saw nothing, and, far from being distressed, he made this absence of vision the culmination of his sight. [Thomas the Obscure, trans. Robert Lamberton (New York: David Lewis, 1973), pp. 14-15]

This is fascination, or ecstasy, in the sense that the subject is evacuated, standing out beyond itself. And across the void thus opening up, sight and the object of sight mingle themselves together. What is seen imposes itself upon the gaze, and the eye’s own glance enters it as an image, as though the gaze were its own object. In this torsion of the subject, a torsion which is fascination, everything is withdrawn from the world, including the powers of language. ‘What fascinates us robs us of our power to give sense. It abandons its “sensory” nature, abandons the world, draws back from the world, and draws us along. It no longer reveals itself to us, yet it affirms itself in a presence foreign to the temporal present and to presence in space’ [The Space of Literature, p. 32]. Fascination is not a cognitive relation. As Gerald Bruns points out, ‘it deprives us of our concepts and leaves us powerless to grasp what we see. It is our seeing which is grasped and held: neutralized’. [See: Maurice Blanchot: The Refusal of Philosophy (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins, 1997), p. 60]. It is ‘solitude’s gaze’ and to enter into this gaze is to enter the impersonal and neutral space of the il y a. Writing is a movement into this space, since to write is to allow fascination to rule language, and the space of writing is that of the impossibility of dying. Thomas the Obscure is a shade, doomed not to rest but to wander through the pages of the text in a caricature of immortality. He cannot die. Thomas digs his own grave and hangs a stone about his neck as if to obliterate himself in the earth, and to become his own corpse, yet he continues to ‘exist’, to stand outside himself until the end. The condition is like that of a man who is hanging himself: after kicking away the stool on which he stood, he feels, instead of the leap into the void, only the rope which holds him around his neck, so that he is bound more than ever, bound as he had never been before, to the existence he had sought to leave. So Thomas ‘felt himself, at the moment he knew himself to be dead, absent, completely absent from his death’ [Thomas the Obscure, p. 36]. He was indeed dead, and yet rejected from the reality of death, and as he leaned over the void, he saw his image in the total absence of images. He saw the fascination of the il y a, and like a man waking up alive in his coffin (a theme familiar from Poe) he saw the impalpable air where he floated transformed into an air without air, ‘filled with smells of the earth, of rotten wood, of damp cloth’ [op. cit., p. 37]. Like Lazarus, he comes forth from the tomb, not resurrected, not risen, but dead, taken at once from life and from death. He walks, a painted mummy, in whom death itself has been resurrected.

This condition Levinas sees as characteristic of modern art, as is clear from his account of cubist painting:

The breakup of continuity even on the surface of things, the preference for broken lines, the scorning of perspective and of the “real” proportions between things, indicate a revolt against the continuity of curves. From a space without horizons, things break away and are cast towards us like chunks that have weight in themselves, blocks, cubes, planes, triangles, without transitions between them. They are naked elements, simple and absolute, swellings or abcesses of being. In this falling of things down on us, objects attest their power as material objects, even reach a paroxysm of materiality. Despite the rationality and luminosity of these forms when taken in themselves, a painting makes them exist in themselves, brings about an absolute existence in the very fact there is something which is not in its turn an object or a name, which is unnameable and can only appear in poetry. [Existence and Existents, p. 51]

The materiality in question here is not that of classical materialism, or of scientific determinism. What Levinas is pointing to is matter in its coarsenss, thickness, massiveness, wretchedness. He is concerned with the brute and implacable presence of things, with what is humble, bare and ugly. Matter in this sense is the very fact of the il y a. Hence, as Bruns notes, it is important not to miss the import of Levinas’s remark: ‘there is something which is not . . . an object or a name, which is unnameable and can only appear in poetry’. This ‘something’ is what lies at the heart of Blanchot’s concerns also. ‘Blanchot’s question is what sort of thing poetry would have to be in order to be that (and only that) in which this materiality of being, this anonymous, oppressive, invasive power of existence, this implacable density of the il y a, can appear’ [Maurice Blanchot: The Refusal of Philosophy, p. 61]. In The Space of Literature, Blanchot says that the writer ‘belongs to a language no one speaks, which is addressed to no one, which has no center, and which reveals nothing’ [The Space of Literature, p. 26]. But the question then arises as to what is it to belong to such a language, a language that is no longer a language, no longer used for expression or to make statements, no longer the language of negation or assertion. As Bruns remarks, this is ‘[a] language not for use: a language that can only be described by a kind of topology, not by grammar and rules’ [Maurice Blanchot: The Refusal of Philosophy, p. 62]. Though poetry may be made out of words, it is not a use of them. To belong to language understood in this way means to lose one’s subjectivity. To belong is not to belong, to belong nowhere, and to lose what we understand by position, and so to be deprived of perspective or standpoint. One is not free of the world, but deprived of it.

Kafka’s novels, and in particular The Castle, exemplify for Blanchot the exigency or demand of writing, thus conceived. A similar exigency or demand is manifest also in The Waste Land. Eliot places at the beginning of the poem an epigraph, from the Satyricon, that is very pertinent to the issues at stake here. Trimalchio claims to have seen the Sibyl hanging up in a bottle at Cumae (in a condition similar to the protagonist’s, in Beckett’s The Unnamable). Apollo had granted her request to live for as many years as there were grains of dust in her hand (‘I will show you fear in a handful of dust’), but she forgot to ask the god for eternal youth. Her one wish now is to die, and yet this is impossible. Trimalchio reports her state thus: ‘For I with these my own eyes have seen the Cumean Sibyl hanging in a jar; and when the boys said, ‘What do you want, Sibyl?’, she answered, ‘I want to die’. Hugh Kenner has noted that the passage from the Satyricon is given in ‘macaronic Latin, posterior to the best age, pungently sauced with Greek’ (the boys’ questions and the Sybil’s answer are in Greek [The Invisible Poet: T.S. Eliot (London: Methuen, 1965), p. 136]. He has also suggested that she is a figure of shifting identity, who functions much as the consciousness of the writer, and is to be associated with the fragmentary, the sibylline leaves. The Waste Land is, one might say, prefaced by a figure embodying the aesthetic of the poem to come, and it is an aesthetic of horror. The impossibility of dying is an extreme limit, as it were between life and death, an experience of the interminability of existence: here I lose the ability to die and the dead rise up from their graves. This condition is, for Blanchot, the condition of writing, and one may perceive a most powerful instance of it in The Waste Land. The experience is related, as we have seen, to the experience of the il y a, in which one experiences the horror of the absence of the world, of an absence of meaning in which I can no longer act or say, and where I myself disappear in the passivity of dying. Heidegger’s conception of the authentic death, as the origin of my knowledge, is changed into something quite other, into the experience of the impossibility of dying, an experience inseparable from the experience of the loss of subjectivity and so of the impossibility turning the world into a place of meaning. This is the space of non-origin, where I have lost the right to my own death, ‘that unique event which answers Rilke’s prayer: “O Lord, grant to each his own death”.’ [Quoted in The Space of Literature, p. 241.] What I find is that death exposes me to an anonymity in which it is not ‘I’ but ‘they’ who die. Men die always as other than themselves, at the level of the neutrality and impersonality of the They.

They die: he who dies is anonymous, and anonymity is the guise in which the ungraspable, the unlimited, the unsituated is most dangerously affirmed amongst us. Whoever experiences this suffers an anonymous, impersonal force, the force of an event which, being the dissolution of every event, is starting over not only now, but was in its very beginning a beginning again. And in its domain everything that happens happens over. From the instant “they die,” the instant is revoked. When someone dies, “when” designates not a particular date but no matter what date. Likewise there is a level of this experience at which death reveals its nature by appearing no longer as the demise of a particular person, or as death in general, but in this neutral form: someone or other’s death. Death is always nondescript. [Ibid]

‘I’ may hope that my death will prove the moment of my greatest authenticity, the moment towards which ‘I’ propel myself as towards the possibility that is my own-most, as to what is most proper to me, and which will secure me in the solitude of what I am, of the pure ‘I’. But the anonymity of death refuses this accomplishment: dying is intransitive and interminable, where what is intelligible is translated into something unspeakable and alien, and where the law has become absence or impossibility as such. Levinas writes: ‘The time of dying itself cannot give itself the other shore. In dying, the horizon of the future is given, but the future as the promise of a new present is refused: one is in the interval, forever an interval’ [Collected Philosophical Papers, p. 11]. It is as though death were never dead enough, as though it were prolonged in the horror of the interval, as in the horror of being buried alive. This is the experience of certain of Poe’s characters, and it is that of the Sybil.

It is the Sybil’s experience, the horror of her being unable to die, which informs the poem throughout its movement. We remember that Eliot had proposed initially to begin his text with a citation from Heart of Darkness, concerning the death of Kurtz, which makes explicit the connection between the poem’s writing and the sense of horror: ‘Did he live his life again in every detail of desire, temptation, and surrender during that supreme moment of complete knowledge? He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision,—he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath—“The horror! The horror!”.’ Like the Sybil, Kurtz experiences that interval, in which knowledge, the ‘supreme moment of complete knowledge’, is transformed by a slippage of language into ‘some image’, the very image of fascination itself, which works on him its effect of horror. By placing these two citations together, we may perhaps glimpse something of the strategy of the poem—to explore the dread of being held to existence without an exit. True horror arises from an ineluctable awareness of the irremissibility of existence, of immortality within life, from the dread of existence itself. The Sybil is the locus of that mode of consciousness which is appropriate to this space or region of language, where subjectivity is lost.

The Sybil is a prophet, as is Kurtz, in his own way, and Tiresias, that figure inseparable from the poem of whom Eliot writes in a note: ‘Tiresias, although a mere spectator and not indeed a ‘character’, is yet the most important personage in the poem, uniting all the rest. Just as the one-eyed merchant, seller of currants, melts into the Phoenician Sailor, and the latter is not wholly distinct from Ferdinand prince of Naples, so all the women are one woman, and the two sexes meet in Tiresias. What Tiresias sees, in fact, is the substance of the poem’ [The Waste Land: a facsimile and transcript, ed. Valerie Eliot (London: Faber and Faber, 1998), p. 148, n. 218]. In Eliot’s poem, the cognitive or expressive subject is dispersed in a fission of its inwardness, as though it were possessed, speaking, in the manner of a prophet, under inspiration, its breath taken from it. This is the condition of the ‘I’ of writing in The Waste Land, where what Tiresias sees is the condition of the poem’s existence, and, as it were, of his own existence in it. The consciousness constituted within and without Eliot’s text is the consciousness of an elsewhere, where that elsewhere is not a private, interior, subjective space; nor is it an imaginary space, the space of aesthetic differentiation. It is the space opened up by writing. One may set against the background of these claims Eliot’s citation in the Notes of Bradley’s remark, from Appearance and Reality, to the effect that ‘regarded as an existence which appears in a soul, the whole world for each is peculiar and private to that soul’ [op. cit., p. 149, n. 411]. The interior, private space of Bradley’s self is turned inside out, through the effect of iteration, in the very note that cites it. For the whole world to be peculiar and private to each soul that apprehends it would require that language similarly be private. For Bradley to say what he wants to say is therefore impossible, since the notion of a private language is unintelligible, as the fact of iteration, here instantiated, makes evident. We are, so to speak, required to understand what is not intelligible and to see sense in nonsense and vice versa. The inner world and the outer are thereby troubled in their relations, each undecidably moving through and beyond the other, in a play of uncertainty that affects in like fashion the relations between the Notes to the poem and the poem itself. Does The Waste Land comprise the ‘poetry’ and the Notes, added at publication to make up the book’s length, or not? The Notes are both internal to the poem (they are inside the book’s covers), and external to it, inasmuch as they stand apart from it and comment explicitly on it, from a point beyond it, while at the same time they also contain poetry, as does the ‘poem’ itself. The world of The Waste Land is the world of the non-identical: suspended between what is and what is not, it is linked to what is outside the world, to the ‘Unreal’ city and to that place where ‘We who were living are now dying/With a little patience’. The poem expresses ‘the profundity of this outside bereft of intimacy and repose—this outside that appears when even with ourselves, even with our death, we no longer have relations of possibility’. The Waste Land, with its multiple voices and persons, sets out the situation of one who has lost himself, ‘who can no longer say “me,” who in the same movement has lost the world, the truth of the world, and belongs to exile, to the time of distress when, as Hölderlin says, the gods are no longer and are not yet. This does not mean that art affirms another world, at least not if it is true that art has its origin, not in another world, but in the other of all worlds’ [The Space of Literature, p. 75]. It is rather that The Waste Land brings about a confrontation with the process from which all poems derive, with what Blanchot calls ‘the original point at which the work is inevitably lost, that always destroys the work, recreates endless idleness in the work, but with which too, if anything is to come of it, an ever more primal relationship has to be established’ [The Gaze of Orpheus, trans. Lydia David (New York: Station Hill, 19810, p. 195).

The ‘time of distress’ is precisely what Eliot invokes at the end of the poem, by way of juxtaposed fragments of literature and the Upanishads. The last words of the poem are ‘Shantih shantih shantih’ (a formal ending to an Upanishad, according to Eliot's note) and, as the text shifts from ‘Shantih shantih shantih’ to the gloss offered there (‘“The Peace which passeth understanding” is a feeble translation of this word [shantih]’), we can hardly fail to hear at the same time the word ‘shanty'—or rather, two words, one originating in nineteenth century French (chantez,) the other in nineteenth century North American (perhaps also in the Irish sean tig (toig) ‘old house’)—in which song and shack are combined. The text, like an old house, haunted and uncanny, opens a space of echo and redoubling, where it is not someone, some one person, but rather the unknown space itself which speaks, that speaks without speaking. It is as though the voice itself spoke, in the manner Conrad ascribes to the voice of Kurtz: ‘A voice! A voice! It was grave, profound, vibrating, while the man did not seem capable of a whisper’. ‘Shantih’ contrasts with the ‘feeble translation’, as the voice contrasts with the feeble whispers of the dying man. In this way, the text seems to turn back on itself, even as it withdraws from itself, inscribing itself as an interminable torsion, without beginning or end, or rather, as a torsion like that of the Moebius strip, whose end precedes its beginning and whose beginning comes after its end. This self-surpassing operation can be found throughout the poem, as its principle of movement, a principle that the last forty lines or so bring to the fore. Of these lines, beginning after ‘Then a damp gust/Bringing rain’, Kenner has remarked, in The Invsible Poet, that they recapitulate the poem in terms of the most ancient wisdom accessible to the West.

Then spoke the thunder
DA
Datta: what have we given?
My friend, blood shaking my heart
The awful daring of a moment’s surrender
Which an age of prudence can never retract
By this, and this only, we have existed

An ancient wisdom is evident and at the same time troubled somewhat here: the lines give not only a reminder of sexual surrender, or of the greater spiritual surrender attendant upon ascesis and self-abandonment, they give the very movement by which they are the lines, the writing, they are. Surrender and retraction open up the space in which to inscribe the limits of the human, a limit we can respond to only by forsaking the selves in terms of which response is possible. The existence of which the poem speaks is thus an existence exiled from itself: we are not there, we are elsewhere, and we never cease to be there. The present does not flee into the past, but remains open, an unfinished present, as if not part of a sequence.

By this, and this only, we have existed
Which is not to be found in our obituaries
Or in memories draped by the beneficent spider
Or under seals broken by the lean solicitor
In our empty rooms

Eliot evokes here an entrance into the passivity of time, outside the possibility of narrative, ‘disappearing through the lack of mediation between past and future when time is prolonged, incomplete and unceasing’ [Maurice Blanchot: The Refusal of Philosophy, p. 68]. Eliot’s invocation of the founding language of Europe, given as ‘DA’, the word prior to all words, and spoken by the thunder, bringing rain, is no less and no more than the other words and languages of the poem, the language of exile. As Blanchot says of Saint-John Perse (a translation of whose Anabasis Eliot first published in 1931), ‘[w]hen Saint-John Perse named one of his poems Exile, he named the poetic condition as well. The poet is in exile; …. The poem is exile, and the poet who belongs to it belongs to the dissatisfaction of exile. He is lost always to himself, outside, far from home; he belongs to the foreign, to the outside which knows no intimacy or limit’ [The Space of Literature, p. 237]. Exile thus characterised is inseparable from what Blanchot calls the experience of the passivity of dying, an experience ascribed in the poem to the Sybil, as well as to Tiresias, the experience of an afterlife lived in time. This between-time is the time of a neutrality, which Tiresias, ‘throbbing between two lives/Old man with wrinkled female breasts’, is the embodiment of: it is the time which the prophet, though blind, can see, the time of the ‘violet hour, the evening hour that strives/Homeward and brings the sailor home from sea’, lines that enact a syntactic displacement in which and by means of which the ‘hour’ comes to be, a time in and of language. It is this order of time that emerges at the moment when Orpheus turns to look at Eurydice, a moment alluded to in the line Eliot cites from de Nerval: ‘Le Prince d’Aquitaine à la tour abolie’. The speaker of El Desdichado assumes multiple personae, in the manner of the speaker of The Waste Land, and as Orpheus enters the shades to call back his love. The task of Orpheus here, as in the myth, is to bring Eurydice into the light, and his work is the production of beauty. As Simon Critchley puts it: ‘Orpheus must submit to the law of the underworld in order to produce the artwork. Thus, the presentation or unconcealment of the beautiful form in the daylight—what one can call, with Heidegger, ‘world’—can only be achieved by submitting to the prohibition against looking Eurydice in the face, by recognising that she can only be approached by turning away’ [Very Little….Almost Nothing, p. 42]. But in Blanchot’s reading of the myth, what is crucial is Orpheus’ gaze, the moment of his turning back to see Eurydice in the night, the transgression of that prohibition. Orpheus desires to see Eurydice in her concealment, as the darkness, as the essence of the night, the other night. As Critchley describes Blanchot’s account, Orpheus does not desire to make the invisible visible; he desires the impossible, ‘to see the invisible as invisible’ [op. cit., p. 43]. And it is this desire, which destroys his art, losing him Eurydice, that is also the source of his art. This act, the act of inspiration, is at once the ruination of the work and its impossible origin. Blanchot writes:

Does this mean that inspiration changes the beauty of the night into the unreality of the void, makes Eurydice into a shade and Orpheus into someone infinitely dead? Does it mean that inspiration is therefore that problematic moment when the essence of the night becomes something inessential and the welcoming intimacy of the first night becomes the deceptive trap of the other night? That is exactly the way it is. [The Gaze of Orpheus, p. 102]

Inspiration leads to the other night, in which one can neither sleep nor die: this night is the night of The Waste Land.

The issues at stake in this kind of writing may be illuminated by consideration of the poem’s temporality. It is when the events a poem narrates are the events that constitute its own unfolding that we are cast into what Blanchot calls a time before the world, before the beginning. A later poem, East Coker, opens with the words `In my beginning is my end', and it concludes: ‘In my end is my beginning’. Here, the work says what it says in the very gesture of saying what there is for it to say. The only happening in the poem is the happening of the poem itself: a world is described, and, in that same act of description or definition, created. Here, the act of creation turns back upon itself, becoming other than, and exterior to, itself. Hence it is possible neither to begin nor to end, since the words of the poem are already beyond themselves, elsewhere. As Eliot has it, in Burnt Norton: ‘the end precedes the beginning,/And the end and the beginning were always there/Before the beginning and after the end./And all is always now’. We cannot begin, since the beginning is always already begun, and we cannot come to an end, since the end is always already completed, in a time before the beginning. If, with Blanchot, we think of names on the Hegelian model, as effecting the murder or annihilation of the things they name, then the negation, by which the poem sustains itself and which in turn it sustains, must enter paradoxically into the poem, effecting its failure, and (in Blanchot's idiom) betraying the work of the poem to worklessness (désœuvrement). By this he means that the poem is split from itself, in a movement of double negation that turns it towards the outside, the exterior, beyond language and concept, where, as he puts it, there is no intimacy, no place to rest. `The work says the word beginning from a starting point - art - which is complicit with the futility of starting over', and so, like a tautology, the work says the nothing that is the condition of its simultaneous possibility and impossibility:

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images . . .

The Waste Land, exemplary in this regard, is nothing other than what it constitutes itself as, namely `this stony rubbish', and the reader, caught within the language of the poem, unable to move beyond it, is, at the same time, exterior to it as it narrates the passage of its own negation:

A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water.

Blanchot's prose, which often reads like a rhapsodic commentary on The Waste Land, says of this mode of writing: ‘The work declares being - and says choice, mastery, form - by announcing art which says the fatality of being, says passivity, and formless prolixity’ [The Space of Literature, p. 244].

. . . I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding to meet you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

The poem comes, not to an end, but upon a series of fragments: `These fragments I have shored against my ruins'. These ruins are the ruins of the kingdom, the wreck of its earlier kings, on whose fortunes I have pondered, `Musing upon the king my brother's wreck/And on the king my father's wreck before him'. The fragments I have shored against my ruins are in effect those very ruins themselves. They are the ruins of a realm in which, except for ruin, there is nothing sure. As Blanchot has appositely put it, ‘By turning itself into an inability to reveal anything, literature is attempting to become the revelation of what revelation destroys’ [The Gaze of Orpheus, p. 47].

In The Waste Land, conditions of possibility and impossibility are registered in successive reversals of syntax, which occur as the poem unfolds in the time of reading:

Under the firelight, under the brush, her hair
Spread out in fiery points
Glowed into words, then would be savagely still.

As we first approach them, coming around the end of the preceding line, the words ‘Spread out’ have the force of a verb, a past indicative; but, after we have reached ‘Glowed’ in the next line, they retroactively become a past participle, governed by ‘hair’. However, there is no question of deciding which reading is correct: the phrase has to be taken as both things at once--verb as we approach it, participle as we look back to it--in what is a sustained and ambiguous suspension that leaves us interminably divided between the two. Again, in the last line, ‘would’ hovers ambiguously between being a transitive verb, expressing the desire or wish that the hair be `savagely still', and an auxiliary, expressing a conditional statement, saying how the hair would be if such and such were the case. What this condition is or might have been or might yet be is not specified. What we can say is, with its language organised in this manner, the poem will never have completed its passage into the future; impotent to situate itself securely in time, it will exist in a quasi-eternal moment, unable to go beyond itself, unable to pass on. The opening section of Burnt Norton exemplifies this exactly, as it narrates the passage from past to future, and so back into the past, of the words that occur in it. This is to sustain a present in which the future is imminent, but never realised, a present stripped of what makes it the present, its passing. The linguistic events of the poem are the only happenings there are.

Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.

Something has disappeared, as the writing, seeking to register what comes before, makes of it what comes after, undermining our usual understanding of temporal succession, and dispossessing words of the power to name, or state. Nonetheless, words may take from this dispossession a power of their own, an obscure power almost that of incantation, so that things become really other than they are. Words become ‘one moment in the universal anonymity, a bald statement, the stupor of a confrontation in the depths of obscurity’, and through the action of language itself, it becomes possible to achieve a passage beyond language and to enter upon the presence of things before the world exists, in what Blanchot calls ‘the lucidity of the depths of torpor’ [The Gaze of Orpheus, p. 47].

If we are to accord this way of thinking its due weight and seriousness, then we must recognize that Blanchot and Levinas have come upon states of mind and modes of experience that are accessible only by virtue of a specific employment of language, that typified by what is, in effect, post-symbolist poetry. And what this kind of experience gives onto, for Levinas, is the true horror, the horror of the uncanny and the fantastic. It is the return of being in negation, the impossibility of death, the universality of existence even in its annihilation. It appears to us in the obsessions and insomnias of the night, and it is fear of being, not fear for being, fear of death. In Levinas's words, ‘it is a density of the void, like a murmur of silence’, and it is beyond contradiction [Existence and Existents, pp. 63-64]. It is the condition described by Eliot in ‘The Hollow Men’: ‘Shape without form, shade without colour,/Paralysed force, gesture without motion’. And we find it also explored in Lucio Fulci's horror film, The Beyond.

Released by Fulvia Film (Rome) in 1981, the film takes up the motif of the gateway to hell from The Sentinel (Michael Winner, 1976) and living dead imagery based on Romero's first two zombie films. The story opens in Louisiana, 1927. A posse, bearing torches, rifles and chains, is rowing across a lake towards an isolated hotel. Inside the hotel, Schweik, an artist, is completing an indistinct landscape, littered with grey shapes, perhaps corpses. The men burst into the hotel and seize him, the leader of the group accusing him of being a warlock, or satanist, and beating him mercilessly across the face with a heavy chain. Ignoring his warnings, the men carry him to the hotel's cellar, crucify him, and throw acid over his head, watching him as he dissolves in agony. As this is happening, a young woman, Emily, is elsewhere in the hotel, reading from the book of Eibon, which contains ancient prophecies concerning the seven sacred gateways into hell. Schweik is then walled up. In 1981, Liza Merril arrives from New York to claim the hotel which she has inherited. Assisted by Martin Avery, she decides on its renovation. On a long causeway, resembling that between the Florida Keys, Liza meets Emily, who now is blind. Emily takes Liza to the house where she lives, and warns her to leave immediately. At the same time, Martha, the hotel's Mrs Danvers-like housekeeper, guides Joe, a local plumber, towards the far end of the hotel's cellar, which is flooding, to find out where the water is coming from. He knocks down the wall entombing Schweik's body, and is killed by a hand that reaches out and seizes him. Subsequently, two corpses are discovered. Mary Ann, Joe's wife, goes to the hospital mortuary to prepare her husband for his funeral, when she too is killed. She falls, and lies unconscious at the foot of a cupboard, on which stands a large bottle of acid. The bottle falls forward, spilling its contents over her head, which dissolves into a sea of bloody foam. Her daughter watches in fascinated horror, as the foam creeps towards her. Martin Avery dies in the town library. When he comes upon the original plans for the hotel, he falls from a high ladder, and is bitten to death by giant spiders. During his death agonies, the plans, of a vast and elaborate building, dissolve into the whiteness of the page. John McCabe, a doctor, who has become friendly with Liza, is increasingly puzzled by what is happening, and is especially perturbed by the fact that he has never heard of Emily, despite living many years in the town. He goes to her house, only to find it abandoned and in ruins. Here he discovers the book of Eibon and reads in it that the hotel stands on one of the seven gates to hell. In the hotel, Martha is cleaning the bathroom of room 39, Schweik's former room. She puts her hand into a bath of foul black water, and frees the plughole. As the water drains away, Joe arises from the water, rather as Schweik had done earlier in the cellar, after Joe's death. He drives Martha before him, until the back of her head is impaled on a large nail sticking out of the wall, a nail similar to those used in Schweik's crucifixion. She will join the undead. Schweik appears before Emily, summoning her back with him, presumably to hell, a summons she passionately refuses to obey. Her guide dog turns on her, and tears out her throat. Liza is set on by the dead in her hotel, and is rescued by McCabe. Together, they flee to the hospital, which they find strangely empty and unreal. They are pursued by `living' corpses from the morgue. They escape down to the basement, only to find that they are back in the cellar of the hotel. They pass through the holes in the walls, into a landscape that seems everywhere the same. It is the landscape of the painting Schweik completed at the time of his destruction, and it is the site of hell. Liza and McCabe appear to merge into the landscape, and the painting comes to dominate the screen.

As this summary should indicate, the plot is anything but concisely organised. Elements are pulled in from many sources, and strung together in a series of set-pieces, involving various degrees of violence and bodily mutilation. Of these, the opening sequences are the most striking, as Schweik is crucified by the posse and dissolved in acid. The score, by Fabio Frizzi, dominates the sound track, carrying over to the reading by Emily from the book of Eibon. The same musical motif recurs throughout, especially at moments of violent death, such as Mary Ann's and Martha's. The music, rather than the narrative, is the cohesive force in the film, through its repetitious insistence drawing the disparate narrative events together, and emphasising pace and rhythm at the expense of motivation or psychological insight. The effect is of visuals and music seeming to cohere in a unified sound-image. This is brought home at the end of the film, when Schweik's painting has come to fill the screen, accompanied by the throbbing musical score. It is precisely at this point that Liza and McCabe are recognised as having become part of Schweik's landscape, which he completed as the film began, a painting which does not simply depict hell, but is it. The film's end is established at a point prior to its beginning, and the organisation of its temporal development identified with that of a painting internal to it. The role of music and rhythm in achieving this effect of reversal, whereby the end becomes the beginning, and the exterior the interior, is similar to the role of rhythm in The Waste Land, where, as we have seen, words impose themselves on us, disengaging themselves from reality, and (we may want to say) making us part of them. For Levinas, rhythm understood in these terms is what constitutes the duration of the interval. Words in poetry impose themselves on us without us assuming them:

Or rather, our consenting to them is inverted into a participation. Their entry into us is one with our entry into them. Rhythm represents a unique situation where we cannot speak of consent, assumption, initiative or freedom, because the subject is caught up and carried away by it. [The Levinas Reader, p 132]

Levinas is speaking here as we saw Blanchot do earlier. He believes that in poetry the subject enters into its own representation, so that the self exists no longer, having become an anonymous or impersonal shadow of what it formerly was. What this means becomes clear if we think of the way the reader is captured by the incantatory movement of Eliot's writing: ‘. . .you are the music/While the music lasts’. Our consenting to the music, or the poetry, is inverted into a participation, in which initiative and freedom are lost. The condition is that of a waking dream. As Blanchot insists, this is a mode of being which is neither that of consciousness, since the self is stripped of the ability to assume its powers, nor that of unconsciousness, since the whole situation is there, in what Levinas calls a dark light, present. Blanchot identifies this condition with that of hell, though not the hell of traditional Christian torment. He makes this clear by citing a passage from Gershom Scholem's Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism on Kabbalistic speculation. Scholem argues that, after the Expulsion from Spain, religious thought attempted to overcome exile by pushing it to its limit, ‘enhancing its torments’ and ‘savoring its bitterness to the utmost’:

The horrors of Exile were mirrored in the Kabbalistic doctrine of metempsychosis, which now won immense popularity by stressing the various stages of the soul's exile. The most fearful fate the could befall any soul--far more ghastly than the torments of hell--was to be “outcast” or “naked”, a state precluding either rebirth or even admission to hell. . . . Absolute homelessness was the sinister symbol of absolute Godlessness, of utter moral and spiritual deprivation. [Cited in The Space of Literature, p. 70, from G.G. Scholem, The Major Trends of Jewish Mysticism (New York: Schocken Books, 1978), p.250]

Such absolute homelessness was, for the Kabbalists, the worst nightmare of the soul. Liza and McCabe are submitted to this fate, not in punishment of their sins, but by virtue of their being what they are, creations of the film. Fulci's hell is a revelation of the fact that art ‘describes the situation of one who has lost himself, who can no longer say “me”, who in the same movement has lost the world, the truth of the world, and belongs to exile’ [The Space of Literature, p. 75].

The disruption of tenses in a symbolist poem disrupts and discredits retrospectively the whole tense sequence of the poem, so that the reader has nothing to fall back on except the duration the poem takes in the reading. The symbolist poem is `a falling movement on the hither side of time, into fate' [Existence and Existents, p. 139]. A disruption of comparable order takes place in The Beyond, but it does so at the level of the image, not the word, when image and what is imaged become one, as the film concentrates at the end on Schweik's painting. This echoes a point basic to Levinas' conception of art. For him, the most elementary procedure of art is to substitute an image for an object. And an image is not a concept. `A concept is the object grasped, the intelligible object. Already by action we maintain a living relationship with a real object; we grasp it, we conceive it. The image neutralizes this real relationship' [The Levinas Reader, p. 132]. Like the Hegelian name, the image neutralises, annihilates, the object. The effect of Schweik's painting is to incorporate into the film the symbolist logic of the word, discrediting the narrative, and revealing its bondage to the inexorable duration of the interval. Seen in retrospect, the elaboration and spectacle of the film's many deaths reveal the film's fixity and subordination to a time impotent to go anywhere except interminably back to its beginning. A corpse rises from the foul water of the bath, in an obvious reminiscence of Clouzot's Les Diaboliques, and Martha steps back before a horror she is unable to escape. She is held by the fact of its presence, by the fact that it is dead and yet before her: confronting it `alive', she confronts a death that is not dead enough. For the viewer, this effect is reinforced by the Clouzot reference, inasmuch as the corpse seems summoned forth, not so much by the powers of hell or Schweik, as by the cinema itself. Death has become a sound-image, composed of elements we have seen or heard before, including the nails, the corpse rising from the black water, the music, the violation of the head, the moaning, as well as elements deriving from other films. These are the plastic elements which fix and immobilise the characters in time. The death we see is a death effected, not by motive or significant action, but by the image understood as Levinas and Blanchot understand it, as the site of a repetition, which the characters in the film and we, the viewers of the film, are equally impotent to resist. The housekeeper takes her place among the undead. Emily refuses the summons of her fate, and her death, her throat torn open by her guide dog, is the repetition of a similar episode in Suspiria.

Films of this type disengage us from the world, not in order to go beyond it, since this requires meaning, and the complexities of human action, but so that we may enter an interruption of time, similar to that effected in Eliot's poetry, where a quasi-eternal instant is created, aside from time, offering the horizon of a future which will never come. `Words, after speech, reach/Into the silence.' In this realm, the priority of the concept is displaced, and we find ourselves submitted to fate. This is not the fate of rational law or universal necessity, but of a present, where `all is always now', constituted by the eternally suspended future of poetic rhythm and the image. Fate has no place in life. The fate of art is that of the statue, suspended in an immobile instant, where, according to Levinas, `the power of freedom congeals into impotence. And here too we should compare art with dreams: the instant of the statue is a nightmare' [The Levinas Reader, p. 139]. The fate of art is also that of the narrative. The being of a character is immobilised in it, committing characters in novels and films alike to the infinite repetition of the same acts and experiences. Nothing in the narrative initiates life, and in The Beyond Fulci acknowledges the fact, immobilising death and forming it into a series. Death subordinate to repetition is impossible, and just as Liza and McCabe are fated to wander endlessly through the world of Schweik's hell so under Fulci's direction freedom congeals into impotence. The characters of The Beyond are fated to a death that is always the same, suspended in the fixity of the film, not only because the film can be seen over and over, but because they each experience in their dying the nightmare of the interval. The Beyond does not reproduce time; it has its own time, a time of fixity. Time cannot shatter this fixity, despite the fact that cinema unrolls in time, since it is the fixity of the interval, and the interval stands aside from time. In The Beyond, the work is lost; going beyond itself it unites with its origin, establishing itself in impossibility. Fulci has created a cinema out of an image of writing. He has taken narrative beyond itself, as a condition of its existing, and it is only because the being of the characters can be doubled into the beyond that he finds their actions worth narrating at all.

Seen in this light, the film is nothing other than a catalogue of notations of its own aesthetic, and it exhibits them everywhere, in the blind yet seeing eyes of Emily, the appearance and disappearance of the hotel plans, the hotel itself, the undead, and, most significantly, Schweik's painting. The characters become elements of its plastic composition, in a transformation that defines the aesthetic undertaking of the whole film. Characters constantly die into the beyond constituted by their images, a doubling we first see in the death of Schweik himself, who returns from the dead, still in the atrocious condition in which he died. Like the Lazarus of Blanchot, he is not resurrected into the sunlight; he remains in the tomb, and of the tomb, and is evil, lost. Similarly with the hotel: putrescence and rot pervade it, and the dead dwell there. As with the `old houses' in Suspiria and Inferno, the hotel exists suspended in the empty place between life and death, inseparable from an image of itself that has disappeared, and ultimately no character is possessed of the power to escape it. The degradation of the world represented in Fulci's film is in effect a degradation marking the reversal by which reality is removed, and replaced by the shadow of the image. All darkens into the shadow of the beyond, and this peculiar death of the shadow serves in Fulci's hands to undo the narrative from within, inverting it into what is at once an image of death and a dead image. This view of the film is supported by the longest Italian version of the film's title: ...E Tu Vivrai Nel Terrore! L'Aldilà. Reading this as `...And you shall live in terror! The beyond', it points towards the notion of a future conditional on the past, a terror beyond, beyond the grave, beyond the end and before the beginning, in which you shall live. This is the threat that for Levinas appears in the approach of the interval; there can be no retreat from it, but the approach never ends.

The Beyond has been seen as in many ways a failure, or so its detractors have been quick to insist, remarking on its haphazard and derivative narrative, and its often crude effects; however, I would argue that its concluding sequence acknowledges it to be a failure in a more profound and far-reaching sense. Liza and McCabe are lost in a place where to go forward is to go back, and where every beginning is simply a repeated end. `If all time is eternally present/All time is unredeemable': Eliot's words are an exact definition of Fulci's hell. And yet the film at its end pulls back, with a crane shot, away from the place of darkness, which the voice of Eibon tells us we are condemned forever to explore, into the painting, and finally away from that also. Here is the final ambiguity, that to dwell beyond, in the place outside, in the impossibility of the possible, is possible only at the cost of the impossible: to achieve this final ambiguity, for Fulci, as for a post-symbolist like Eliot, would be to achieve a condition of `complete simplicity/(Costing not less than everything)'.

THE BEYOND OF LANGUAGE

2008-12-19T15:52:00.008Z

‘It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists’ (Tractatus, 6.44). Some of what Wittgenstein says about the mystical is very like what he says about the logical: to understand logic we need a certain ‘experience’ not of how things stand in the world, how things are, but of the existence of something:

The ‘experience’ that we need in order to understand logic is not that something or other is that state of things, but that something is: that, however, is not an experience.

Logic is prior to every experience—that something is so.
It is prior to the question ‘How?’, not prior to the question ‘What?’ (5.552)

It was central to Wittgenstein’s thought, both in the Tractatus and later, that logic exists only in its application. This is the point of the question raised in the next section, 5.5521: ‘if there would be a logic if there were no world, how then could there be a logic given that that there is a world?’. If there were such a thing as logic independent of its application (of the world) there would be no logic, since a further logic would be required to ensure the correct application of the first logic. Logic is prior to the world (how things are), to all that is the case. If what is the case might not have been, then what is logically prior to the world is logic itself: logic is concerned with possibilities, with what might have been or might not have been. The study of logic is the study of what is prior to fact, though logic itself is not composed of facts that are beyond or prior to the world. Logical form is the logical scaffolding, the logical background, of the world, concerned with the possibilities of combination of simple objects in what the Tractatus calls ‘states of affairs’. If whether one thing could combine with another in a state of affairs were a fact, this fact would in turn require the existence of a further state of affairs, a condition leading to an interminable regress. This is the point of 5.552 and 5.5521, with their insistence that logic is before the How, not before the What. How the world is is what is the case, so that what we need to experience, if we are to understand logic, is not what is the case, is not a situation in the world:

To view the world sub specie aeterni is to view it as a whole—a limited whole.
Feeling the world as a limited whole—it is this that is mystical. (6.45)

The usual way of looking at things is to see objects from amongst them, but the mystical view, the view sub specie aeterni, is to see them from outside. The mystical wonder at the bare existence of things, at their being there, is the experience we need in order to understand logic.

What we understand when we understand logic is that it is senseless (sinnlos). The propositions of logic do not treat of what is the case, but of what might have been or might not have been the case; they represent in this way the scaffolding of the world. Hence logic is not a field in which we express what we want to say with the help of signs, but rather one in which signs that are absolutely necessary speak for themselves (6.124). Being tautologies, they have no subject matter, and so what they treat of is the nothing, which is all that lies outside the world, the world being what is the case. The senseless is thus the pre-condition of making sense at all, and what we know and understand of the world can therefore only be known and understood against the background of logic, of nothing. The simple objects, which were intended to ground sense in the names that meant those objects, are beyond being and non-being, rather as Plato describes the Good in the Timaeus. We cannot say what objects are because objects, understood in this way, are what allow us to say anything. Nothing makes sense unless in the last analysis—the last analysis as proposed by the Tractatus—it involves the names of objects; we cannot, therefore, say that this and this simple object are in the world, but not that and that. We cannot say what is not a possible state of affairs, what is not in logical space. The general form of the proposition, as given by the successive application of joint negation to elementary propositions, can give us all possible forms of elementary propositions and molecular propositions; it will not tell us what application these forms will have nor which will be the elementary propositions. This follows from the fact that we cannot experience what elementary propositions there are, since every experience must be the experience that some possibility is realised. This is the same point that emerged in the previous chapter; it is not possible to establish the foundations of sense. The attempt to do so must end in nonsense (Unsinn). This is why Wittgenstein refused to give a justification for logic in terms of the derivation of theorems from a basis of fundamental axioms; logical systems are not to be understood in these terms. The question of how logical propositions can be justified, of why we must obey them, cannot be answered; the question itself must be put to rest. Logical form is shown in the fact that some combinations of signs make sense, and others do not. In relation to this last point, ‘What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence’ (7) would thus appear to be not only the last but also the fundamental proposition of the Tractatus.

The propositions of the Tractatus as a whole are at once elucidations and nonsense. The elucidations centre on the ‘say-show’ distinction, whereby the nature of logical form and its role in how we use propositions to say what we do is made clear. One result of this is that how sense is determined cannot in the end be said, and no complete analysis of propositions in terms of logical form can given. Just as the attempt to characterise the internal structures of language turns out to be unintelligible, that is, nonsensical, so the attempt to move beyond language, to the foundations of sense, the simple objects, also ends in nonsense. To understand the elucidations is to understand them as nonsense, while to understand that the text is nonsense is to understand the elucidations. The one is the other of the other. That is, the distinction between saying and showing, on which the whole analysis depends, means that the ineffability of nonsense and the effability of sense are both called into question. As Read and Deans have it, ‘What the reader is left with is the realisation that there is thinking going on as the propositions of the Tractatus are engaged with, but without thought in anything like the Fregean-Russellian sense. Logical analysis can neither fully capture nor fully specify just what it is to think. Thought and language cannot be “pinned down” and the attempt to give a complete analysis breaks down; but not because it is impossible, for this suggests that there is something here that cannot be done, but because the very notion of giving a complete analysis is unintelligible. There is nothing that amounts to anything in the notion of a vantage-point wherefrom we can survey thinking, where we can get beyond it and see it laid out neatly before us’ [‘“Nothing is Shown”’, Philosophical Investigations 26:3 (July 2003), 258].
Thinking is always ahead of us, always on the move, thwarting and escaping any attempt to circumscribe its boundaries. Any attempt to do so ends in nonsense. There is an interminable antagonism between the dimensions of the constative and the performative, inasmuch as what can be said is always exceeded by the saying of what is said, an excess shown in the iterated negations of logical form, which undo the primacy of propositional content by affirming and negating its terms in succession. The writing of the Tractatus is thus to be seen as a ceaselessly self-differing relation between what is said and what is shown. The writing, the event of the text, one might say, stands on neither side of this relation, and any attempt to characterise logic in terms of, say, the theory of types must sooner or later come to be recognised as unintelligible. Given that this so, the comment of Read and Deans, to the effect that there is thinking going on in the propositions of the Tractatus, though without thought in the Frege-Russellian sense, touches on something fundamental to Wittgenstein’s enterprise here, namely, the manner in which it compels a reversal of intentionality. The intention in question is that of the author, such that what one sees in the Tractatus is a process whereby the work changes from being a correlate of the author’s own intentional act to being instead the site of its own emerging exigencies. The shift in aspect is that indicated in 6.54: ‘My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them—as steps—to climb up beyond them’. Logical form, as Wittgenstein presents it, does not, as it does in Russell, attempt to stand outside itself, and report on itself. It is not the account of an event; it is that event itself, at once imminent and the site where it will occur. It produces itself as its own object and is the process of that production. And yet even that seems not quite right: logical form is rather an endless dependence of the one on the other, a relation or process that can never be finished, that can never come to a point of final analysis. What is impossible here is not some task that might, were things different, be done, but the logically impossible. The idea of a final analysis is unintelligible. To see this is to see why it is that the Tractatus as a whole is unintelligible, and why, as the last proposition (7) has it: ‘What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence’. One implication of this must be that, while we cannot speak, the text may nonetheless affirm itself. The work may effect its being, not as the creation of an author, but through the writer: insofar as the Tracatus effects just this mode of coming to be its effecting it is the overcoming of the search for foundations that is also the overcoming of philosophy itself. The text exists free of author and of things, cancelling them both in the exigency of its coming-to-be. To see the Tractatus under this aspect is also to see, with James Guetti, that ‘an abstract scrutiny of non-functioning grammatical forms – of concepts disengaged from actual use – inevitably results metaphysical attitudes and assertions’ [James Guetti, ‘Idling Rules’, Philosophical Investigations 16:3 (July 1993),].

It is now possible to develop the argument further in relation to Wittgenstein’s later work, in order to clarify the nature of aspect seeing and to understand its pertinence to a grasp of Blanchot’s work. The crucial distinction here is that made in Philosophical Investigations between working concepts and idling ones, between language in use and language abstracted from its applications. So far as the early Wittgenstein is concerned, if we are to speak of ‘showing’, we must not allow ourselves the confusion of thinking that what can be shown can also be said (whether by indirection, gestures or raising language to a ‘higher level’). There is no such thing as an outside to the ‘limits’ of language from which language can be surveyed as a whole. In the ordinary use of language we hear what others say and find a sense in it. It is very rarely that we find what they say nonsensical, and even then not because what is said breaks grammatical rules. On this, the Tractatus is clear: ‘all the propositions of our everyday language, just as they stand, are in prefect logical order’ (5.5563). The same point holds for Wittgenstein’s later thought as well: so far as our customary practices with language are concerned, when words are being used to say something, they are perfectly transparent and nothing at all is meant by them except in the actual situation of their employment in a sentence. Use and context are paramount. In Part I of Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein contests the view that logical or grammatical forms are necessary, and necessarily prior, for us to be able to apply them. He does not accept that the rule must be there in advance of its application in order for us to perform what we call ‘applying the rule’. The gist of the matter is given by Guetti: ‘[Wittgenstein] shows again and again that the necessity of grammatical rules is neither a property of them before the fact of application nor an infallible determinant of the meaning of that application, but is constituted in our actively employing certain expressions or language games as rules’ [Guetti, art. cit., 190-191]. What this means, as Guetti sees it, is that if rules as singular collections of possible applications are ‘there in advance’ of any actual applications, ‘there’ only means in the language that we know. To use a word as a word is to use it to say something, to carry out a linguistic act, to make a move in the language-game. What we mean by rules, conventions, grammar, and so on, is already dependent on our existing practices. It is the use of words that teaches us their meaning. There is no independently existing meaning attaching to a word that in some way determines or lays down its use in advance. The rule is what is explained, not what does the explaining. Obeying a rule is a practice: giving reasons is not enough, for sooner or later my reasons will give out, and then I just act, without reasons. ‘“How am I to obey a rule?” – if this is not a question about causes, then it is about the justification for my following the rule the way I do. If I have exhausted the justifications I have reached bedrock, and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say: “This is simply what I do”’ (Philosophical Investigations, §217).

One might put all this by saying, with Stanley Cavell, that the ground or rule from which one leaps, or steps, in speaking ‘is itself implied or defined by the leap’ [Quoted by Steven G. Affeldt, ‘The Grounds of Mutuality: Criteria, Judgment and Intelligibility in Stephen Mulhall and Stanley Cavell’, European Journal of Philosophy 6:1 (April 1998), 22. Mulhall replies in the same issue of the journal, pages 32-44]. For Cavell, as Steven Affeldt reminds us, it is not that in order to speak intelligibly I must locate myself on some given ground of the possibilities of sense. ‘To speak intelligibly is to define the ground from which you speak, it is to articulate the position that you are assuming and from which you speak’ [Affeldt, 22]. The significance of the argument is made clear by Wittgenstein:

I see that it is red—but how does that help me if I do not know what I have to say or how, in some way or other, to give expression to my knowledge? For sooner or later I must make the transition to expression. And at this transition all rules leave me in the lurch. For now they all really hang in the air. All good advice is no help to me, for in the end I must make a leap. I must say ‘That is red’ or act in some way, which amounts to the same thing. [Cited by James Guetti and Rupert Read, ‘Acting from Rules’, International Studies in Philosophy 28:2 (1996),46.]

My position or point in speaking, what it is I mean to say, and so the ground of my intelligibility, is neither carried by nor insured by any mediating structure. (This insight was already central to the Tractatus.) If I am to be understood by someone else, I must articulate what I mean to say; I must draw a connection between what I say and what concerns me. The normativity of what I say or how I act does not depend on some underling structure of rules or grammar: it is in what I say and do. It is there that my agreement and that of others in judgement and form of life is expressed. There is no previously agreed-upon structure the speakers of a language refer to, and yet the speakers of that language are, for the most part, from moment to moment agreed in their use of that language. This being so, the idea that context determines what is worth saying will not do: ‘our grasp of a context and of what someone is saying emerge together, wax and wane together’ [Affeldt, 19]. All that is required for us to find what someone says comprehensible and what he does intelligible is to find some reason for or point in what he is saying or doing. This is why Cavell insists that what is said is inseparable from the point of saying it: ‘We can understand what the words mean apart from understanding why you say them: but apart from understanding the point of your saying them we cannot understand what you mean’ [Cavell, The Claim of Reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 206].To speak is to say what counts, what matters. In speaking I project before me and behind me the ground of my intelligibility:

In saying, asking, objecting, denying, accepting this now and in this tone of voice, I reveal how I am taking an exchange and the point I take it to have reached. My remarks reveal what I take to be the past of the exchange and project what I take to be its (or one possible) future. [Affeldt, 22-23.]

As this indicates, time cannot be excluded from discourse. There is a temporal shift, manifest in our actually doing something with words, in our actually using them to say something, whereby judgement, the application of a rule or definition, is anterior to the definition it is the application of. This applies not only to the application of a given rule, such as ‘+2’, discussed at length in Part I of Philosophical Investigations, but also sequential movements from utterance to utterance. As utterance gives way to utterance, the passage onward from one to the other reveals meaning to be constituted locally and dynamically within ‘an actual set of living circumstances such that the “use” of words often exceeds their “correct” and even their quite specifically defined senses’ [Rupert Read and James Guetti, ‘Meaningful Consequences’, The Philosophical Forum 30:4 (December 1999), 298].

‘It is only in the give and take of language, the relation between what one person says and what others say, that you see the kind of public character that different concepts in it have’ [Cora Diamond, ‘Rules: Looking in the Right Place’, in Wittgenstein: Attention to Particulars, ed. D.Z. Phillips and Peter Winch (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989), p. 24]. This remark of Cora Diamond’s points to the essentially dialogic character of the meaningful use of language, something essentially bound up with temporality. The way concepts matter in our lives and the difference that the meaningful use of them makes to how we go on may in a sense be discovered in how people subsequently respond to what they and others have said. However, the temporal aspect of language that Diamond brings out in relation to what occurs with one’s expressions can also be seen in relation to what occurs within them. It is this latter point that Read and Guetti develop in responding to Wittgenstein’s idea that the meaning of a word is its use ‘in the language’: ‘we take him to be pointing away both from standing grammatical considerations and from any merely pragmatic utility to which meaningful expressions might after the fact be put; and toward what actually happens to meaningful expressions in their dialogic and sequential development’ [Read and Guetti, 301]. What is in question here is a sense of meaningfulness, of ‘use’, which is immanent to language in action as it is interwoven with non-linguistic action and with the world. It may be easy to see the changes wrought by performative or imperative utterances, but in the case of descriptive statements what is effected may not be so obvious. So, in order to clarify this point, we need to see that, when Wittgenstein says that ‘What we call “descriptions” are instruments for particular purposes’ (Philosophical Investigations, §291), the emphasis falls on ‘for particular cases’ rather than ‘in particular cases’. ‘A meaningful description is one that has a capacity for a particular use; and this particular capacity must somehow have been achieved just in the development of the description itself’ [ibid., 302]. That is to say, it must have been achieved in the course of some linguistic sequence, a sequence that may most easily be envisaged as a dialogue. Read and Guetti give the following example: someone comes into a house after a walk, and says to a friend ‘The leaves have begun to change’. This remark would most probably count as an empirical statement, and it marks a difference, a difference from what one did or might have said earlier about the leaves. The friend may respond verbally, by saying something, or non-verbally, by looking out of the window, going for a walk, and so on. These responses could amount to a test of what has been said, a kind of check on the truth of the ‘empirical proposition’. What the responses also do is allow for further description. The first speaker could now add ‘The maples, especially on the high ground, are changing more than the oaks’. This could have been said from the outset, but he would have done so with less chance of being understood, at least without pause or surprise. The point here is that that the first empirical statement—‘the leaves have begun to change’—may come to function in relation to the expressions that follow it as a grammatical stipulation. Expressions can change their status from being descriptive and ‘referential’, to functioning retroactively as a grammatical background against which further testable observational statements may be made. As Read and Guetti have it: ‘Expressions that serve initially as descriptions of fact are transformed, evidently just by the onward sequencing of the discourses in which they occur, into presumptions that make the next description assertable; and each presumption amounts to a further determination of the grammatical rules of the sequence, a determination of the logical “range” appropriate for subsequent empirical expression, and hence a modification of the grammar of the entire discourse to that point’[ibid., 303]. This is a dynamic conception of grammar, such that the grammatical, or normative, status of expressions in a sequence is being generated as one goes along, so that a speaker’s responsive linguistic reaction towards a previous speaker is not determined or arbitrary, but interwoven, ‘interleaved, in a less or more seamless fashion’, whereby the status of expressions alters retroactively in time. This is to describe a dynamic of otherness internal to the active use of language, in which the iterability of identical sentences operates in such a way that these sentences come to play very different roles within the developing sequence of expression, a play of difference within language deriving from what Derrida would see (in Limited Inc., for example) as the repeated inscription and erasure of the trace. In effect, we speak the language we use only to the extent that we are spoken by it. This is one further reason for insisting that rules do not contain their application, that the relation of rule and application is not internal, and that, ‘whatever grammatical relations may be held to be in force at any time, an application of that grammar must consist in something other than those relations, something beyond or in addition to them, a further step’ (or leap) [Guetti and Rupert Read, ‘Acting from Rules’, International Studies in Philosophy 28:2 (1996), 46]. When Wittgenstein writes, in On Certainty, ‘the same proposition may get treated at one time as something to test by experience, at another as a rule of testing’, [On Certainty (Oxford: Blackwell, 1979), §98] this may be read as addressing changes, not only occurring across the historical development of a language, but also within ordinary, particular verbal sequences, where the sequential progression from ‘one time’ to ‘another’ produces of itself alterations in linguistic status between the empirical and the normative. What is at work here is a continual change in grammar, so that, when Wittgenstein insists that meaningful statements must make a ‘difference’, this ‘difference’ can be understood as a matter of ‘the development of our empirical assertions into local and timely presumptions that enable further assertion. The consequences that meaningful developments have—which no “process” could have because, be it as “dynamic” as one cares, still it cannot process” its own rules as language-in-action continually does—are in this sense well described as grammatical consequences’[Read and Guetti, ‘Meaningful Consequences’, 305]. The active application of rules thus differs profoundly from the idle contemplation of them: the presumption of a rule and expressly conceiving it are two logically exclusive things. Considered grammatically, Guetti and Read argue, in the sense of grammar just elaborated, a rule in action must be ‘invisible’, just by virtue of the fact that, to be taken as a rule, to be something we can act upon, it must be un-expressed and un-exposed. The very leap away from or beyond it renders it retroactively the rule we follow and at the same time inexpressible. It is in this sense that we may speak of the language of statement or representation as ‘invisible’: not because it is in some way ‘transparent’ to or mimetic of the world, but because grammar is transformed, in the act of stepping—or leaping—‘beyond’ it, to presumptive status.

This line of thought may seem far removed from cinema, but it is not so. For instance, Vertigo depends on just such a shift between the empirical and normative, inasmuch as Scottie’s initial understanding of the facts concerning Madeleine’s death takes on the presumptive force of a paradigm which is to structure his very experience in the second part of the film. (The name Madeleine can hardly fail to evoke that of Madeleine Usher, buried alive by her brother.) His attempt to recreate the lost Madeleine by means of the transformation of Judy is not a consequence of the effects on him of fetishism or the ‘male gaze’; it is an attempt to create a world whose norms derive from a retroactive presumption of the events, empirically given, in his earlier investigation of, and love for, Madeleine/Carlotta. When finally he realises that he has misunderstood these events, having been duped by Gavin Elster, with Judy’s assistance, his expulsion from the world he was trying to create is an expulsion into a kind of nowhere, as he confronts death—not his own, of course, but Judy’s. The famous final scene in the tower consists in part of Scottie’s rehearsal of how he was duped by Elster, who trained or directed Judy so as to trap him in the toils of his own fear, his vertigo. The last image, of Scottie looking down from the top of the bell-tower at Judy’s body below, is an image of empty transcendence, as we look down in turn on Scottie, below whom an abyss has opened, of a world that has fallen from him. In this same image, Hitchcock presents us with an image of cinema, an image of death. The death is Judy’s but it is also Scottie’s: he is beyond meaning and outside time, caught in the eternal present of the impossibility of dying. He is no-one, an effect only of the image, which now creates him. So at the end of Psycho, a similar image of death arises at the end, ‘of’ here being meant in both objective and subjective senses of the word. As Norman’s face is replaced by the superimposition of his mother’s head, her skull, we have an image of his death, of the final death of his personality and his possession by his mother. At the same time, we have an image of an image of death: it is the image itself which negates him, in the sequence of its transformation, as one image is placed upon another. At this point, there is a dissolve, as Marion’s car is pulled up towards us from the swamp, and the film closes on a shot of the trunk of her car, inside which her body lies, rotting. We have an image of resurrection reminiscent of that in which Blanchot evokes Lazarus in the tomb, not resurrected into the light, but evil and smelling bad, in order to evoke in that image the ‘beyond’ on to which writing gives. As such an image of what writing effects, Lazarus is neither dead nor alive, and Marion, too, may be taken as not only an image of what this particular film has made of her, but of film as such. Film is the realm of the living dead.

What a concept might be, and how we might grasp it, apart from its use, is, for the first part of the Philosophical Investigations, a secondary consideration. In Part II, however, Wittgenstein turns his attention to the question of how one might characterise and locate inactive concepts, that is, how we might grasp a concept apart from a use immanent to language in action, as it is interwoven with non-linguistic action and with the world, with our forms of life, to serve some purpose:

When I pronounce this word while reading with expression, it is completely filled with its meaning. – ‘How can this be, if meaning is the use of the word?’ (Philosophical Investigations, p. 215)

Wittgenstein goes on to say that the first use of the term ‘meaning’, in the sense in which a word may seem to be ‘filled with its meaning’, is ‘figurative’, or as he is later to put it, ‘meaning’ is here being used in a ‘secondary sense’. However, as Guetti indicates, he never anywhere suggests that calling this kind of apprehension ‘understanding’ is to employ a figurative or secondary expression; instead he says that is simply one of the uses that make up the concept of understanding (Philosophical Investigations, §532). At other times, the immediate awareness that a word is full of the meaning is described almost paradoxically, as a ‘seeming’ and ‘no such marvel’:

But if a sentence can strike me as like a painting in words, then it is no such marvel that a word uttered in isolation and without purpose can seem to carry a meaning in itself. (Philosophical Investigations, p. 215)

As Guetti notes, here ‘two of the very conditions that [Wittgenstein] so often suggests would disallow meaning – syntactic isolation and purposelessness – do not compromise the word’s seeming to carry meaning in itself’ [James Guetti, ‘Idling Rules’ Philosophical Investigations 16:3 (July 19930, 185]. It would seem clear, then, that meaningful verbal practices, the use of words to say something, is to be thought of very differently from language that seems, in itself and unexercised, to be ‘full of meaning’. In this latter case, words are inactive, or idling, and yet their suspended uses, which seem to fill them with possible meanings, give them a life, a life which is very different from that of words in actual employment. Words that take on this quality seem suspended, out of time, as though the temporal relation between definition and judgement, rule and application, had gone into reverse, or flipped over: now the definition does seem to contain its possible applications, and to have become anterior to its application. The comparison here is between words seen in this way and the seeing of figures with aspects, such as the ‘double cross’ and the triangle, or indeed the duck-rabbit. These simple figures may be taken as models for isolated words, inasmuch as a schematic figure like a triangle can appear limitless in the possibilities of interpretation it lays itself open to.

In Seven Types of Ambiguity, William Empson displays and discusses many words that seem ‘full of meaning’. Here is an example of the fifth type of ambiguity, which occurs when a writer is discovering his idea in the act of writing:

Our natures do pursue
Like Rats that ravyn downe their proper bane
A thirsty evil, and when we drinke we die.
(Measure for Measure, I, ii)

The first idea would seem to have been that lust was the poison, but the word ‘proper’, introduced, so Empson argues, as meaning ‘suitable for rats’, and baring with it the suggestion of ‘right and natural’, together with memories of poisons designed to keep rats from dying in the wainscot, ‘produced the grander and less usual image, in which eating the poison corresponds to the Fall of Man, and it is drinking water, a healthful and natural human function, which it is intolerable to avoid, and which brings death’ [William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), p. 184]. ‘Proper bane’ becomes ambiguous, since it applies to nothing in particular, but lies between different things, rats and men, seemingly suspended between them. This is an example of the way language—or a phrase set in isolation—can, as it were, organise its own applications, while at the same time retaining its singularity. Guetti notes this particularly: ‘it is the combination of singular “form” and multiple aspects in such figures [as the triangle and double cross] and such words that we find so strange. And that aspects can only be worked out one at a time, even while we “know” of the others that are possible, may generate the feeling that the actual, sequential realizations of aspects are somehow insufficient when weighed against the figure that enables them. . . . The figure conceived apart from its meaningful employments, the word apart from its meaningful employments, is a mysterious thing; it presents a singularity that we can see together with a variable potential that we know but cannot see’ [Guetti, ‘Idling Rules’, 186-87]. This is unquestionably one of the sources of metaphysics, as we imagine a separation between the figure and its aspects, the word and its realisable meanings. It is precisely in this way that a word like ‘object’ operates in the Tractatus, as it draws us on to imagine what it might rally be, behind its possibilities of combination, behind or beyond being and non-being. The question concerning the Tractarian object can be put this way: ‘how can I see this [], of which I can see so many aspects, apart from these aspects?’ As this example should serve to remind us, we are here entering upon the field of nonsense, where words have been given no meaning. This leads on to Guetti’s general point, that ‘when a rule is so thoroughly suspended from its applications that any one of them may be imagined, and no choice among them more appropriate than any other, it is utterly idle. In its illimitable multiplicity it is . . . a blank, but an extremely potent sort of “blank” that seems fully to “contain” all of its possibilities, the “blank” of a blank check’ [ibid., 193]. This means that the practices, techniques and actions of meaningful language use become, when regarded grammatically, linguistic possibilities: so one cannot imagine a word apart from language, language apart from language. And because language cannot be imagined away, because it is always grammatically present to use, we can and do isolate it from actual use. There is, as I suggested earlier, a temporal reversal, in which what was anterior, the judgement, the application, precedes that which came after it, the definition, the rule. Language, we might say, takes on a presence in its own right, independent of application and use. The sample, it would seem, now is at once sample and application.

A concept (or sample) abstracted in that way may not be a rule at all. In its limitless interpretability it may have nothing to do with rules in their actual applications. As Guetti has it, it may not even be a ‘sign’, depending on how we interpret that word; but it is symbol, and indeed the best definition of a symbol may be as a ‘concept in isolation’, an idle concepts, surrounded by what Wittgenstein calls ‘lightly indicated’ possible meanings. Wittgenstein gives a compelling example of this notion of ‘symbol’ in Philosophical Investigations:

The machine as symbolizing its action: the action of a machine – I might say at first – seems to be there in it from the start. What does that mean? – if we know the machine, everything else, that is its movement, seems to be already completely determined.
We talk as if these parts could only move in this way, as if they could not do anything else. How is this – do we forget the possibilities of their bending, breaking off, melting, and so on? Yes; in many cases we don’t think of that at all. . . .
But when we reflect that the machine could also have moved differently it may look as if the way it moves must be contained in the machine-as-symbol far more determinately than in the actual machine. As if it were not enough for the movements in question to be empirically determined in advance, but they had to be really – in a mysterious sense – already present. And it is quite true: the movement of the machine-as-symbol is predetermined in a different sense from that in which the movement of any given actual machine is predetermined.
When does one have the thought: the possible movements of a machine are already there in some mysterious way? – Well, when one is doing philosophy. . . . What is this possibility of movement? It is not the movement, but it does not seem to be the mere physical conditions for moving either. . . . The possibility of movement is, rather, supposed to be like a shadow of the movement itself. But do you know of such a shadow? (Philosophical Investigations, §§193-194)

In one sense of ‘know’, the one considered in Part I of the Philosophical Investigations, we do not know any such ‘shadow’ at all. The possibility of movement cannot be observed as the movement can (and, as we saw above, rules are invisible, in the actual use of language). But in another sense—as the consideration of aspects and figures shows us—we know of this shadow as we know of language. ‘The machine-as-symbol is the grammatical conception of the machine, the idling “image” that is as separate from the machine at work as rules in their grammatical condition are separate from their functioning applications. So long as we are thinking of rules at work, their possibilities are perhaps not even so much as “shadows”. But these possibilities spring to life, and over-shadow both the work and what we could understand from it, when rules are idling’ [Guetti, ‘Idling Rules’, 194-95]. What we have here, perhaps, is ‘a powerful illusion of singular presence, with an elusive multiplicity that yields no singular representation’ [Ibid., 197].

Seen from this perspective, Blanchot’s fundamental insights into the nature of writing the ‘mystery’ of literature are, in effect, versions of what Wittgenstein gives a condensed account of in terms of the ‘symbol’. This holds particularly for Blanchot’s notion of the work and the work’s undoing or un-working: when the possibilities of words spring to life, they over-shadow the work they compose, and open it to what lies beyond it. Idling rules, such as are exposed in poetry, lead beyond what is said, or meant, into regions constituted by singularity and the fascination it attracts. This is ‘the step not beyond’, into the exile of the ‘neuter’, of alterity and the ‘other night’. Blanchot captures the particularity of his vision in some remarks on the fragment, where he insists on the fragment as what expresses itself in a language which does not recognise it:

Fragmentary: meaning neither the fragment, part of a whole, nor the fragmentary in itself. The aphorism, the proverb, maxim, citation, thoughts, themes—verbal cells in being further removed than the infinitely continuous discourse whose content ‘is its own continuity’, continuity that is assured of itself only in giving itself as circular and, by this turn, submitting itself to the preliminary of a return whose law is outside, which outside is outside the law. [Ibid., 197]

The fragment is language that does not recognise itself as language, and ‘whose law is outside, which outside is outside the law’. It seems clear that Blanchot’s thought on writing may more satisfactorily be understood in these terms than in those deriving from a questionable account of naming, based on a concept of the word as ‘murderer’ of the thing. For Wittgenstein, the quest for some foundation of language, in naming, ostensive definition or other procedure, is unintelligible. ‘Propositions do not follow from one another as such; they simply are what they are. We can only prepare language for its [use]; we can only describe it as long as we do not regard it as language. The rules prepare for the game which may afterwards be used as language’ [Wittgenstein’s Lectures, 1930-1932, ed. Desmond Lee (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 57. Cited by James Guetti and Rupert Read, ‘Acting from Rules’, International Studies in Philosophy 28:2 (1996), 53. Guetti and Read substitute ‘use’ for ‘usage’ in their citation from Lee’s transcription of Wittgenstein’s lecture.]. In other words, ‘language’ cannot be considered to be language until it is used. Whatever grammatical considerations there may be anterior to their employment, whatever rules we take to be in place prior to their application, we do not so much as regard these as language until they are used. It is only in their active employment that names have a role to play in language; it makes no sense to think of them as founding, or as prior to, that role. The notion of the fragment, however, does derive from the abstract or isolated scrutiny of non-functioning grammatical forms, of concepts disengaged from actual use. Clearly, the actual use of words must occur first, before we can ‘experience’ the meaning of a word. We have to learn the use of the word ‘apex’ before we can use it to express our seeing an aspect of say, a triangle, as an apex. ‘More generally, we must master the techniques of language before we can experience several techniques as the “static” aspects of a given object’ [Guetti, ‘Idling Rules, 189]. ‘Clearly the words “Now I am seeing this as the apex”’ of the triangle ‘cannot mean anything to a learner who has only just met the concepts of apex, base, and so on’; ‘it is only if someone can do, has learnt, is master of such-and-such, that it makes sense to say he has had this experience’; ‘we talk, we utter words, and only later get a picture of their life’ (Philosophical Investigations, pp. 208-209). [Cited by Guetti, ‘Idling Rules’, 189-190.] The retroactive temporality, or deferred action, of language that Wittgenstein points to in the last quote is complex: on the one hand, it is as though language were, in the seeing of aspects at any rate, constitutive of experience (‘it is only if someone . . . is master of such-and-such, that it makes sense to say he has had this experience’), while, on the other, it is only later that we step back from this into the realm of grammatical possibility. There is a temptation to say that, in stepping back, it is as though we stepping back into a realm of possibility (or impossibility) from which all kinds of grammatical forms may be realised. It is as though we were privy to come kind of ‘beyond of possibility’ (or ‘impossibility’, in Blanchot’s idiom), which governs and, so to speak, is the source of the possibilities attaching to an isolated word.

That this approach is not unjust to Blanchot’s vision of language, as revealed by writing, can be seen from his discussion of the récit, where we find a view of language and literature indebted profoundly to the poetry of Mallarmé (a view that in many respects is similar to that of Derrida). One respect in which Mallarmé is crucial to him is that his texts break free from the constraints of representation. ‘The essential nature of language, rather than being harnessed to mimetic or cognitive ends, was set free to effect itself in its own textual space. Once representation is eschewed, the order of the text need no longer submit to the sequentiality of time’ [Timothy Clark, Derrida, Heidegger and Blanchot (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 82]. It is this notion of time that is central to the récit: to enter the space of literature, its own textual space, requires a break with the supposed linearity of quotidian time (certainly the linearity of narrative, as ‘traditionally’ conceived) and with notions of beginning, middle and end. The same goes for space: the récit is the creation of something that could never have had a physical existence. Poetry, for Mallarmé and Blanchot, says nothing beyond itself. Timothy Clark summarises the position:

The word no longer refers to an object in the concrete world; its reference survives only for its evocative qualities and the contribution the word makes by its semantic resonance and formal properties. The word is inscribed in an open context where it plays or, in a loose sense, rhymes in many directions at once. [Clark, op. cit., p. 82.]

This is to describe the perception of concepts that are inactive, idling, whose suspended uses seem to fill them with possibilities of a life very different from that achieved by signs in actual use. The Mallarméan conception of poetry, espoused by Blanchot, aims to create that space, the space of literature, in which words and concepts are isolated in their singularity. The effect is to pass beyond language, the language of actual use, into an elsewhere, where meaning is suspended. A récit, as Blanchot defines it, concerns a single event, that may seem, on the surface at least, to conform to the conventional narrative pattern. However, the event in question is usually ‘marvellous, in the sense of approaching an experience that takes consciousness and language to their limits, an encounter, according to Clark, ‘either sexual or traumatic, which is too immediate to be mediated by language and thus remains heterogeneous to the very narratives it sets in motion’ [Clark, op. cit., p. 85]. Examples from Kafka abound, such as ‘Metamorphosis’, ‘The Hunter Gracchus’ or The Castle. The temporal structure is comparable to that of a topological figure such as the Moebius strip, in which the relating of the récit and the events related, genesis and result, seem endless to merge with one another and yet equally endlessly fail to do so. This endless, asymptotic turning is a movement towards a ‘neutral’ point that is opened up by the language it renders possible. The idea is to incorporate into the text an impossible point of origin, which is always already yet to come, whereby language, cut off from its meaningful employment, is set to achieve a mysterious potential:

The relation of the récit and its event involves a transformation of language akin to that described by Heidegger in terms of a ‘step back’ from representationalist language. The domain into which the step directs itself does not . . . pre-exist that very movement; it is no more than the transformation wrought in the language that performs the step. [Clark, op. cit., p. 86.]

For Blanchot, the movement of narration (récit) is towards a point that has no prior existence apart from this movement, and yet the narration cannot begin until it has reached this point, the point the narration itself is to open up: ‘it is only the narration, and the unpredictable movement of the narration which provide the space where this point becomes real, powerful and appealing’ [Blanchot, The Siren’s Song, trans. Sacha Rabinovitch (Brighton: Harvester, 1982), p. 62]. The power of this view, and it is powerful, arises in part from taking what are grammatical possibilities for perceptible properties of language that might be described as though they were facts.

It is as though one could isolate a space prior to narration, which is both the ‘impossible’ source of it and the magnetic point whose power enables the narration to happen. (Such a structure has already been seen in the Tractatus, in the general form of the proposition, as that is shown in recursive iteration of joint negation.) To find a compelling example of this same topology in English poetry I will look to a poem by Donald Davie, who as a critic has done as much as Blanchot himself to clarify the nature of symbolist writing, in essays on Mallarmé, Eliot and Pasternak.

Look here! What a wheaten
Half-loaf, halfway to bread,
A cornfield is, that is eaten
Away, and harvested.

How like a loaf, where the knife
Has cut and come again,
Jagged where the farmer’s wife
Has served the farmer’s men,

That steep field is, where the reaping
Has only just begun
On a wedge-shaped front, and the creeping
Steel edges glint in the sun.

See the cheese-like shape it is taking,
The sliced-off walls of the wheat
And the cheese-mite reapers making
Inroads there, in the heat?

It is Brueghel or Samuel Palmer,
Some painter, coming between
My eye and the truth of a farmer,
So massively sculpts the scene.

The sickles of poets dazzle
These eyes that were filmed from birth;
And the miller comes with an easel
To grind the fruits of earth.

[Donald Davie, Collected Poems (Manchester: Carcanet, 2002), p. 147.]

This poem, ‘The Hill Field’, published in 1964 in a collected entitled Events and Wisdoms, refers to other writing, in this case to eighteenth century landscape poetry and Wordsworth’s ‘The Solitary Reaper’, as well as to Robert Duncan’s ‘The Opening of the Field’ (1960), a poem which addresses explicitly the then new aesthetic of composition by field, or projective verse, developed during the 1950s by the American modernists associated with Black Mountain College, under the aegis of Charles Olson. The poem also manages to place, in a complex balancing act, Pasternak in relation to Hardy: ‘The Hill Field’ shares with other poems Davie wrote during the same period a complex modernist aesthetic based on that of earlier and contemporary masters, but as it were transposed into what looks like the minor key of a poet who was, according to Davie, unlike Eliot and the other major modernists in that he failed to transform or displace ‘quantifiable reality or the reality of common sense’ [Thomas Hardy and British Poetry (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973), p. 62]. The poem in the texture of its writing refers to itself, as the singular act of composition that it is, but in referring to itself, it must inevitably, as we have just seen, refer us to other writing, and by so doing refer again, not only to intertextual reference in general, but also to the singularity of this act of referral in itself. Because of the uncertainty of context these interrelationships of reference create, an uncertainty concerning who is saying what to whom, the poem’s tone—its explicit ‘address’ to the reader—cannot be taken simply as the expression of an originating authorial voice. This is clear at the very start, where the imperative, ‘Look here’, serves to confirm the identity of this text (or, at any rate, of this phrase) rather than this author, by moving outside or beyond itself, in order to point to itself from the position of an other, the reader who is addressed by words that apparently refer only to the event of the poem itself—the event of the poem’s depicting what is depicted by it. ‘Look here’ is not only an imperative but also an expostulation, but an expostulation uttered by no one.

An image of a field is what the poem is in the process of constructing, and part of what the image is an image of is the process whereby it is being constructed. In effect, what the poem shows is itself as it emerges from, or is engendered by, the process of being said. The hill field is the space of literature, and the poem makes, in Blanchot’s words, ‘what is ungraspable inescapable; it never lets me cease reaching what I cannot attain’ [Blanchot, The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), p. 31]. The poem exhibits the topology of turning syntax characteristic of the récit. One of Davie’s major contributions as a critic was to elaborate on this kind of symbolist configuration in essays on Eliot, Pound, Mallarmé and Pasternak, some of which were written prior to or during the composition of the poetry of this collection. In ‘The Hill Field’, symbolist techniques are present, and signalled as such. ‘Wheaten’ is reduced to ‘eaten’ as the ‘half-loaf’ of the field set up by the poem is reduced by the removal, or harvesting, of the letters ‘wh‘. In stanza three, ‘the wedge-shaped front’ is there on the page, shown in the shape constructed by the way the words ‘and creeping’ in line 3 protrude beyond the second and fourth lines. The apostrophe ‘how’, beginning at line 5, is only revealed to be an apostrophe, rather than an interrogative, by the end of line 12. The opening ‘See’ of line 13 looks like another apostrophe (in the eighteenth century manner), but by the end of line 16 it is seen in retrospect to be a question. The palpability of the words is further emphasised by sound: ‘ee’ provides a kind of basic pattern, through which other vowels intertwine in a series of complex variations. Like Mallarmé and Eliot, Davie evokes linearity so as to undercut it and in order to do so he accords new significance to the layout of the stanzas, the spacing between them, the organisation of line-ends, the placing of punctuation, and so on.

The poem demonstrates a mode of self-alienation that separates it from itself, so that it doubles back on itself, opening a gap within its structure across which reference can operate. In this sense, ‘The Hill Field’ may be said to refer to itself referring to itself, an effect signalled and realised by the temporal displacement at the opening, whereby the cornfield is presented as already the loaf it has not yet become, a loaf baked before the harvest is gathered in. It is a violation of temporal linearity that various metaphors of rupture and incision arise from, carried by words like ‘knife’, ‘cut’, ‘cheese-mites’ and the ‘sickles’ (inevitably evoking ‘versicles’) that occur throughout the text. By means of a folding or turning back of time on itself, something that occurs only in the order of writing, the récit, the end is enabled to precede the beginning, and the beginning to come after the end. The device results in an undoing of linear order such that there remains to the reader only one movement or trajectory of time, a movement in which the passage of the poem counts for more than any point of rest. This substitution for received syntactic relationships of an intransitive mode that refuses any obvious decipherment to its images results in a flight or negation in which images and metaphors succeed each other in such a way as to prevent them being read as picturing states of affairs. The poem achieves an inertia, which may be described as the work’s starting point, ‘the point anterior to all starting points, from which nothing ever begins, the empty profundity of being’s inertia, that region without issue and without reserve, in which the work through the artist, becomes the concern, the endless search for its origin’ [Blanchot, op. cit., p. 44].

Most poems, or the best,
Describe their own birth, and this
Is what they are – a space
Cleared to walk around in.
('Ars Poetica')

[Davie, Collected Poems, p. 336.]

The ramifications of this reach very far. A word that has special privilege in Davie’s earlier poetry is ‘edge’, and there are others related to it, like ‘knife’, cut’, ‘sculpture’, ‘stone’ and words and names associated with art more generally. ‘Edge’ seems to have the same role here as ‘blanc’ in Mallarmé, whose writing, like Davie’s, is a writing of spacing—in the sense that it foregrounds spatio-temporal differing—in which words like ‘blanc’ and ‘éspace’, or in Davie’s case, ‘edge’, ‘cut’, ‘sickles’ and similar variations, refer to the very whiteness of separation, the spaces, cuts or divisions that make possible the series of which they are themselves members. The edge thus understood is what gives to the poem both the possibility and the impossibility of meaning, inasmuch as it is part of and beyond the series of which it is the progenitor. Just as ‘The Hill Field’ is as title of the poem above the text and yet is the poem, is part of the text to which it is ostensibly external, so the names of the artists, Brueghel and Samuel Palmer, constitute similar traits of undecidability, or, as Derrida would have it, supplementarity: they mark what makes the poem possible and what stands outside, or transcends, that possibility, inasmuch as they mark what conditions it, ‘coming between/My eye and the truth of a farmer’. The final stanza takes the image of the eye further: in the phrase acknowledging that the poet’s eyes were ‘filmed from birth’, the preposition engenders multiple possibilities which are repeated in the double genitive in the last line, ‘fruits of earth’, a second doubling which calls forth yet further multiplicities in relation to ‘earth’, a word already resonant with implication and connotation. The poem is an impossible experience of a desire to see, a desire which can never be fulfilled. The vision of the poet, irreplaceable in its singularity, and yet filmed from birth (the cinematic pun is unavoidable) and so ineluctably alien to itself, is precisely what, in its irreplaceable singularity, the poem shows to be replaceable, a point driven home by the fact that ‘Breughel or Samuel Palmer,/Some painter’ substitutes for the poet, a substitution in turn replaced by one who ‘massively sculpts’. The ‘sickles’ of poets and the miller’s ‘easel’ complete the list of artistic forms and names of artists displacing the uniqueness of the poet’s act, names and forms evoked and effectively constructed in the formal configuration that is the expression of that very act. Breaking with the logic of circularity and exchange, signalled by the first words of the first stanza: ‘Look here!’, the poem effects a complex suspension of grammar beyond or behind the application of that grammar, in that way opening upon a condition anterior to both subject and object, and so anterior to writing itself.

The temporality of Vertigo is so organised that the viewer is exposed to what must appear an impossible state of affairs. At the end of the film, in the final shot, as Scottie looks down from a tower painted and superimposed onto an original image at the body of Judy on the tiles below, we confront a repetition. Madeleine has already died in just this way, at just this spot, the Madeleine who from Scottie’s point of view at that time was the woman he had fallen in love with. The result of this death was his own death, as in the dreams of his madness (again a special effect created in the post-production process) he fell into her grave, uniting with her in death. This first ‘death’ he outlives, as Judy outlives it also: her death, her second death, thus places Scottie in the position of the impossible. He must now outlive his own death, a death he can never attain and which he has always already stepped beyond by virtue of the film’s suspension of him above her body. He will never be other than the image in which the film holds him, and it is in the realm of the image, not the concept, not meaning, that the film concludes—a conclusion, it must be said, that is no conclusion. Vertigo effects an encounter with imaginary space as the being of cinema: in accordance with Blanchot’s account of literature, we can call this cinematic spacing. Blanchot’s account of Proust’s consciousness is especially pertinent to the movement of spacing that affirms itself here:

the metamorphosis of time into an imaginary space (the space peculiar to images) and an ever-changing absence uncluttered by events, unobstructed by presences, an incessantly reborn vacuum: that remoteness and distance which are the space and origin of metamorphosis: the place where psychology is redundant because here there is no psyche, where that which is inner becomes outer, becomes image. [The Sirens’ Song, trans. Sacha Rabinovitch (Brighton: The Harvester Press, 1982), pp. 68-69. Cited by Clark, op. cit., p. 89.]

Scottie does not die as a result of an event within the narrative; he does not plunge off the ‘tower’ to join Judy in death. His death is a death he lives through, and he lives through it in the image. In other words, his death is a death of the image, and the dread it induces is not dread in the face of death, Judy’s death, for instance, or his own, but dread in the face of existence itself, dread at being riveted to existence, dread induced by the impossibility of dying. For Scottie, there is no exit and no escape, only the irremissibility of an existence he is unable to leave. This sense of the role of the image works though the film. For example, the necklace which Scottie recognises as having belonged to Madeleine is actually one that belonged to Carlotta Valdez, the ‘sad, mad Carlotta’, whose picture hangs in the San Francisco Art Gallery, and on whose neck the jewel is clearly marked as the object of Scottie’s gaze, as he follows Madeleine Elster (Judy) around the city. Seeing this necklace—‘the souvenir of a murder’—around Judy’s neck as the two of them prepare to go out to Ernie’s, to what is intended to be a lovers’ dinner, Scottie realises what Gavin Elster had planned and how he was the lynch-pin of the plan, because Elster made him into the dupe of a woman Elster had transformed into an image of an absent, and now dead, wife. The act of recognition is given in a series of ever-closer shots of the necklace, isolating it in the mirror as Judy, unawares, looks at herself wearing it. The shots of the necklace are followed by a cut away to the picture of Carlotta, which focuses on her neck. The necklace reveals itself as revelatory of the truth only insofar as it resembles itself, is its own image. In the same way, Judy becomes the image of herself, as she emerges from the bathroom, as the image of Madeleine, finally recreated in realisation of Scottie’s paradigm. We see her come through the door as an image, ghostly, inexpressive, and invested with a pervasive green light, an uncanny presence troubling the security of the distinction between presence and absence. Theirs is a relation of proximity and distance, both spatial and temporal, the horizons of which are captured in the 360 degree tracking shot around the two of them, as they embrace, the room changing into the stables at the church and back again, and in the music, evoking the passionate embrace on the beach, after the visit to the sequoia: it is a relation whose transformations are thus undergone as transformations of cinema. Thus, while Vertigo undoubtedly follows linear form in its unfolding, the shifts in time between what is before and what comes after, and the insistence of the use of repetition, make of it an instance of skewed temporality. In the image of vertiginous depth that opens beneath the protagonist at the beginning, only to return to him, transformed as he is transformed, at the film’s end, one may see that ‘limit experience’ in which the very narrative it sets in motion is transgressed.

To see Psycho is to surrender to the fascination of time’s absence. ‘The time of time’s absence has no present, no presence. . . . The irremediable character of what has no present, of what is not even there as having been once there, says: it never happened, never for a first time, and yet it starts over, again, again, infinitely. It is without end, without beginning. It is without a future’ [Blanchot, The Space of Literature, p. 30]. The surrender is retroactive. As the film ends, and Norman is possessed by his mother, we see that the essential interest of the film has been, not with Marion or the search by her lover and her sister for her killer, but with the relation between Mrs Bates and her son—a point, it may be said, that fascinates the sequels. As Derrida has noted in considering Romeo and Juliet, it is in the nature of true love that the lovers outlive each other. Such is certainly the case here: Norman and his mother outlive each other. Norman outlives the mother he has done for with strychnine, but she also outlives him; she annihilates him as he sits staring at the camera, and as he dies into her, her voice speaking for him, her dead face appears in triumph, superimposed on his. This is in fact simply a manifestation of a state of affairs that was already in place: as Dr Richmond, the psychiatrist, puts it, Norman was never wholly Norman, but he was sometimes all mother. This is a time that is always and forever past, so that the relation between mother and son exists in an empty, dead time, which is nonetheless a real time in which death is present; indeed, we see it become present, as Marion’s car, bearing her rotting cadaver, is withdrawn from the swamp—a resurrection of the dead. Norman, in solitude, wrapped in a blanket, is not alone, for he is not there, and nor is his mother; no one is there, and the possibility of personal relation has long since dissolved, transformed into what is neither real nor unreal. Earlier in the film, Norman insists that ‘This place is my home. . . . this place happens to be my only world. . . . My mother and I were more than happy’. As the last sentence implies, Norman’s world is not the world of reality, but something more compelling, more disturbing, more absolute, than that, something closer to what Blanchot has called ‘the indeterminate milieu of fascination’. We get a first intimation of what this might mean when we watch Norman stare through the peephole at Marion undressing for the shower. Contrary to many readings of the film, not to mention the remake, I would wish to contend that this is not the occasion of a voyeuristic thrill, for us or for him, and to that extent it does not exemplify the male gaze of spectatorship. The issue here is not one of psychology, of fetishism and voyeurism, but of fascination, a realm of experience ‘where objects sink away when they depart from their sense, when they collapse into their image’ [Blanchot, The Space of Literature, p. 32]. As Norman stares at Marion, his gaze coagulates into light, and he does not see what he sees. He is, as Dr Richmond has it, ‘touched’ by her. Marion touches him in an immediate proximity; what he sees seizes and draws him close, even though it leaves him absolutely at a distance, a nearness and distance whose contradictory energies are resolved only insofar as he can ‘become’ mother. When Norman insists that he had a very happy childhood, we may believe him: childhood is the moment of fascination, is itself fascinated:

This gold age [childhood] seems bathed in a light which is splendid because unrevealed. But it is only that this light is foreign to revelation, has nothing to reveal, is pure reflection, a ray which is still only the gleam of an image. Perhaps the force of the maternal figure receives its intensity from the very force of fascination, and one might say then, that if the mother exerts this fascinating attraction it is because, appearing when the child lives altogether in fascination’s gaze, she concentrates in herself all the powers of enchantment. It is because the child is fascinated that the mother is fascinating, and that is also why all the impressions of early childhood have a kind of fixity which comes from fascination. [Blanchot, The Space of Literature, p. 33].

Norman’s condition of fascination is evident in his bedroom, which Leila visits, finding there the broken-eared rabbit, the wind-up gramophone with the 78 disc of the Eroica Symphony, and the book, whose pages we never see. The usual assumption is that the pages are covered with pornographic pictures, but one might just as plausibly think of them as schematic figures, like the duck-rabbit, triangles and cubes, or maps or other images out of childhood. What threatens this golden age must be excised, cut off, whether it be the young girls whom Norman is ‘touched’ by or Mrs Bates and her lover, whose ‘touch’ Mother has had to endure. Mrs Bates is not Mother: Mother is the figure of fascination, who concentrates in herself all the powers of enchantment, and it is this figure who returns eternally, in the time of the absence of time, and whom Norman loves, even as he hates her.

Psycho, like Vertigo, is an exploration of love, or rather the transformations of love, in the course of which the moving picture is itself transformed, into an image, suspended, beyond relation, whereby Norman, Mother and Marion, an unholy trinity each person of which is dead in his or her own way, and alive in his or her own way too, are given up to our fascinated contemplation. There is a pattern of doubling and repetition across the two films that serves to connect them both to the uncanny and the death drive. Judy doubles as Madeline who doubles as Carlotta; Norman is doubled by Mother and Mother by Norman; the plot divides in both films, in Vertigo at what Scottie takes to be Madeleine’s death, followed by own ‘death’, and then again as Judy reveals all in voice-over when Scottie has found her the second time, and in Psycho at Marion’s death in the shower. Not only is there doubling and repetition at the level of narrative structure, but the films present patterns of repetition in imagery and in narrative event. This is especially marked in Psycho at the occurrence of the dead face, the face of the cadaver. After Marion’s murder in the shower the camera closes in on the plug-hole where Marion’s blood is flowing away; it then pulls back from a similar black point, which turns out to be the pupil of her dead eye. As the camera moves back from her dead face, the film induces an uncertainty: are we seeing Janet Leigh remaining remarkably still, or are we looking at a photograph of the actress? A drip of water runs down her face, thus seeming to confirm the matter—we are watching an event in real time played out before the camera. But are we? The face of the dead woman seems unnaturally still, despite the movement of the water drop, and the status of the image remains as it was before, uncertain. [Laura Mulvey has discussed this issue in her essay ‘Death Drives: Hitchcock’s Psycho’, Film Studies: an international review 2 (Spring 2000), 5-14. She also raises the issue of the Freudian uncanny and the death drive in relation to the film.] There is no way of deciding whether the face we are seeing is dead (a photograph) or alive (an actress in front of the camera). This image of the dead face and its shifting status returns in the face of Mother, as Leila disturbs her in the cellar, and she turns, on what is clearly a motorised chair, to face Leila and the camera, her eyes alight and vitalised by the illumination generated by the swinging of the light bulb Leila has struck in her instinctive reaction of terror. Here the role of the cinema is made even more obvious: the face is animated by the on and off movement of the light source, and by the screeching violins, its life an effect of the editing of the visual and sound tracks. The effect in both these cases is uncanny: the certainties on which we base our discriminations between appearance and reality are made to tremble, are solicited (as Derrida would have it), as each occasion removes itself from the world of intelligible reality and plunges us into an impossible arena, of life in death, and death in life. Repetition is essential to the removal from the world of quotidian reality: as with language, where, as Wittgenstein points out in Philosophical Investigations II, xi, a word repeated often enough changes its aspect, becoming a nonsensical sound or written image without meaning. Repetition effects an intrusion of what lies beyond the order of significant discourse: language, transformed into something empty and opaque, becomes as it were an opening, onto what is there when the world is there no longer and onto what is there before the world is. Freud saw this as the realm of the death drive, Blanchot the field of the neuter, the formless presence of an absence, where one is brought, an impersonal and anonymous no one, to the ‘experience’ of the impossibility of dying.

It may be that one of the most exact embodiments of this state of affairs is to be found in the zombies of George Romero. This, at least, is the view of Steven Shaviro, who sees in these figures a ‘weird attractiveness. . . a perverse, insidious fascination that undermines our nominal involvement with the films’ active protagonists’ [Shaviro, op. cit., p. 96]. The uncanny power of Romero’s films, for Shaviro, lies in the fact that the relations of contiguity, attraction and imitation, that hold intradiegetically between the zombies and their victims, are the same processes as those that serve to bind viewers to the events on screen. The power of the ‘living dead’ trilogy, he considers, is inseparable from ‘an overwhelming affective ambivalence’, achieved in part by going beyond the conventional mechanisms of identification and spectatorial engagement with character and situation. Something odd seems to happen to perception, inasmuch as it itself becomes infected, being ‘transformed into a kind of magical, contagious contact’ [Shaviro, op. cit., p. 96]. What this means in effect is that the films tend to break up the onward movement of the narrative in a way that emphasises at once our inability to identify with the zombies and our being seduced by them, our being drawn into proximity with them. They represent what Georges Bataille has called an ‘inexplicable acuity of horror’, and for him ‘extreme seductiveness is probably at the border of terror’. The reason for the power and fascination of the zombie figures lies perhaps most critically in the curious passivity inflecting their movements, as they approach the house in Night of the Living Dead, for example, or in the opening sequence of Day of the Dead, as they emerge from the side streets and doorways of the infested townscape in Florida, in both cases moaning and pressing inexorably towards the camera. Shaviro notes the way in which ‘Living action is subverted by the passivity of waiting for death; indecision debilitates the self-conscious assertion of the will’. These moments of slowed down perception recur throughout the films and what make them what they are. As I watch the zombies approach, ‘I am uncannily solicited and invested by the vision of something that I endlessly anticipate, but that I cannot yet see’ [Shaviro, op.cit., 98]. The night of the living dead is what Blanchot would call the night of insomnia, where the viewer is caught, as are the protagonists (consider, for example, Mrs Cooper’s death, as she abandons herself to the hands of her daughter, newly risen from the dead), in a paralysed lucidity, which is that of the ‘other night’, that night from which there is no escape, no exit, and where everything has become image. The living dead are neither dead not alive; they are images, from which death and life have withdrawn, leaving nothing but the resemblance of resembling, the resemblance of no one. At the end of Day of the Dead the zombies are left wandering the corridors and caves of the military installation, holding dominion over all, and yet unable to escape the underground bunker or to die. The film begins with Sarah’s dream, in which she is filling in a calendar without dates or months; as she does so, zombie hands push through the wall and grab her around the throat, pulling her tight against the wall. In the very final shots of the film, when she is sitting on the beach of an idyllic looking island, she is filling in the same calendar. There is the obvious implication, at least at first sight of the calendar, that this is a second dream, and that the zombies are about to reappear. What is clear is that the time of the film is one that doubles back on itself, where what comes after is anterior to what comes before: just as the zombies exist in a time that is the absence of time, so, like the main protagonist, does the viewer. This is the time of the dream, and the time of the zombies, a time which expels us from the world into an outside where night holds sway.