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.
Friday, 25 June 2010
Thursday, 12 November 2009
QUESTIONS OF ONTOLOGY
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.
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.
Friday, 6 November 2009
ON ANTI-PHILOSOPHY
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).
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).
Thursday, 15 October 2009
OBJECT AND EVENT
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.
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.
Sunday, 11 October 2009
ONTOLOGY AND THE EVENT
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.
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.
Monday, 14 September 2009
A REMARK ON ALAIN BADIOU
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).
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).
Sunday, 26 July 2009
ON THE POETRY OF DONALD DAVIE
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’.
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’.
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