In the silence you don't know
The estimable Dominic Fox responds with typical brilliance to my post on Beckett. He acutely notes that the ecstatic moment in which desire becomes drive presents itself as an experience of subjective destitution, and further draws from this the consequential conclusion that authentic judgement must proceed according to a standard of failure, as opposed to a standard of success.
The full radicalism of this point cannot be underestimated, since nothing less than knowledge itself is founded upon it. In the final analysis, knowledge is nothing less than the integral symptom of failure, born from the root error and madness that is called life on this planet.
Knowledge itself has never tired of repeating this point, but has rarely been heard. Failure folds back upon itself, rendering itself in the process impossible. Failure, then a failure to communicate this failure, and then a failure to communicate even that... In this way, the history of the world presents itself as an vast and inexorable accumulation of shit.
Knee-deep in filth and stained with blood, sick with nausea and recognizing itself as such, materialist philosophy, the purest and most perverse expression of this world, makes a simple wager: that there is a hidden affinity between the future and the past, such that the problem, which is never the same, is really always the same - like music.
The full radicalism of this point cannot be underestimated, since nothing less than knowledge itself is founded upon it. In the final analysis, knowledge is nothing less than the integral symptom of failure, born from the root error and madness that is called life on this planet.
Knowledge itself has never tired of repeating this point, but has rarely been heard. Failure folds back upon itself, rendering itself in the process impossible. Failure, then a failure to communicate this failure, and then a failure to communicate even that... In this way, the history of the world presents itself as an vast and inexorable accumulation of shit.
Knee-deep in filth and stained with blood, sick with nausea and recognizing itself as such, materialist philosophy, the purest and most perverse expression of this world, makes a simple wager: that there is a hidden affinity between the future and the past, such that the problem, which is never the same, is really always the same - like music.
8 Comments:
Daniel,
I agree with you that Dominic's points are 'acute.' This being the case, do you also agree with him that the model of writing that you set out is motivated by a 'pathological immodesty.' I may be wrong, but I read this as a polite term for arrogance.
Sure, why not.
A case in point?
Once again, you have confused me. What are you driving at?
I'm not driving at anything, only asking a question which was motivated by some surpise at your enthusiastic reading of the post on Poetix. I may have read it incorrectly, but this post seems to take issue with your position. While you praise the post in your latest interpretation, you don't address these tensions. I was trying to prompt you to do so, but you don't seem to think it's necessary. Not a big deal.
Personally, I didn't detect a reproach in Fox's response, since his pathological immodesty position was also the one which I wished to express in my original post. Clearly, I failed to express it clearly enough, but this is now irrelevent. You raise an important point, more radical perhaps than at first it appears, concerning desire in general, and the desire to write in particular.
In fact, I do not want to take the position that this desire equates at the outset to pathological immodesty, for the reason that this definition already mobilizes both psychology and morality beneath the presiding rubric of an idealist subject blithely considered to innately incarnate these two different registers, as a matter of irrevocable course. Rather, I would prefer to state that writing amounts to a far more radical practice, both less and more, a becoming-expression of inherent ontological imbalance. Psychoanalysis calls this imbalance drive, concept without object, perpetually thirsting for solid explicatory ground. The registers of psychology and morality provide two such possible grounds, but are not themselves radical, rather equating to symptomatic declensions, born out of frustration, in the face of what cannot be either said or named - the impossible, the infinite - which persists in reality in the form of a stain, and as such gives implacable motive to the movement of reality as such.
In this way, it is not that pathological immodesty represents the real and secret truth of writing. Rather, it is instead the case that at a certain point in writing - the point at which a writing subject, a writer, emerges from writing itself - writing appears as such. This is: appears as such in the eyes of the writer, the writer whose own birth is being announced by this, sickly and sweetly, out of the nausea of noise.
I’m not sure about the question of a reproach. I think that it depends on what you find offensive. As I said, I interpreted 'pathological immodesty' as a polite term for arrogance, which is different to an arrogant reproach for arrogance. In my view, the polite critique would be the attempt to split the one who’s critiqued from the thing that they’re critiqued for, seeing in this other something more than that which is reproached.
That’s how I read Poetix’s post. I read it as a reading of your writing which is also a rewriting, allowing your writing to become something other than itself. It finds the moments when your writing of writing as drive trawls its own limits. In showing how these limits open into some other reality, it's the means to allowing the text no longer end in itself. Rather, it allows writing as drive to deconstruct itself.
Deconstruction is suspicious of any ‘stable explicatory ground’ not because it forecloses on explanation, but because it concurs with the skeptical tenet that any knowledge can only be explanatory insofar as it’s unstable. The moment when the means of producing some knowledge of reality also protect its content from the openness of a question is also the moment when this knowledge begins to lose explanatory potential.
This isn’t a ‘genuflection before language’, in that it hysterically removes representation from reality. Rather, deconstruction finds the means that a text uses to protect itself, and in uncovering these finds real knowledge behind this prohibitive veneer. Far from abolishing reality, making it the thing that can never come, like psychoanalysis deconstruction seeks the reality that’s beyond the one that’s spoken of.
At the same time, though this resembles the psychoanalytic method, it isn’t a question of drive. Rather, as you point out, the means of drive, including those of writing as drive, seek the object that might fulfill a conceptual object of desire. Even if this secondary object emerges from the original mythical one, drive is the perpetual attempt to produce it. Desire becomes drive only with the pathological production of an object.
This isn’t the case for deconstruction, or for deconstructive writing. For deconstruction, the moment when some real object emerges in writing is also the moment when this object is exposed to something other than itself. Because the conceptual, real object can’t survive its own writing, the text can never be the real object’s production. Rather, when the object is written it’s displaced as itself, emerging as something else.
For deconstruction writing is neither the abolition of the real, nor its production. Rather, the text's rewriting allows its means to no longer end in its representation as it is. Writing displaces some reality by opening its means to some other reality. Writing isn’t a means to ending the real, but because writing always displaces the real, it never make it come. Rather, like everything beautiful, writing is reality’s seduction.
In the last sentence of the fifth paragraph of the above, the final 'only' should be erased.
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