As someone whose eccentric use of philosophical language is sometimes criticized, I was delighted to come across this passage in Stengers Thinking With Whitehead. Stengers writes,
Bergson names and describes duration, but his text induces the experience of it, induces the trust that transforms experience into experimentation on duration. And it is precisely at this point that he coincides with Whitehead, for the concept of nature also depends on a “literary” apparatus liable to induce a perception of what we are aware of in the mode that this concept has the task of exhibiting.
The purpose of a discussion of such factors may be described as being to make obvious things look odd. We cannot envisage them unless we manage to invest them with some of the freshness which is due to strangeness. (Whitehead, The Concept of Nature, 107 – 108)
One of the ways of conferring a bizarre appearance upon any kind of experience, without recourse to the particular experience provided by hashish, listening to music, hypnotic induction, or the philosopher’s meticulous description, is to call attention to the “constant factors,” those we neglect because they inevitably belong to all experience, but which no experience exhibits in particular. The point is thus to create a contrast between what I say I perceive and what is always exhibited by what I am aware of. (62 – 63)
There is a poetics of philosophy that is like a use of language against language. It is this poetics that we perpetually complain about when reading philosophers and bemoaning their difficulty. Philosophy renders what is familiar strange. Yet this practice of rendering the familiar strange is not done out of any sort of perversity, but is rather undertaken precisely to bring forward that which withdraws. Stengers will write that “[w]hat is required by our instinctive knowledge, far from leading to a foundation of knowledge, as conditions would do, instead refers each mode of knowledge to its operations, its choices, its ambitions, and priorities. Without a beyond. At its own risk” (49). The poetics of philosophy is a sort of choice, a selection, exercised at the heart of being, bringing that which, due to its ubiquity, was before invisible. Yet to exercise such a selection language must lose its familiarity so that the possibility of a manifestation might become available for thought.
Larval Subjects . 
May 30, 2011 at 9:11 pm
Levi you’ve just described why I like to read poetry: because it performs philosophy on as yet unthinkable things, philosophy by another means.
May 31, 2011 at 6:00 am
For some reason this post gets me thinking about Rorty. I remember reading Rorty at 20 and thinking for the first time that if all philosophical confrontations are games of action persuasion by means of “vocabulary”, then all sorts of philosophical language and thinking (and therefore wisdoms) become possible.
Of course, many people criticized Rorty for amplifying in America a supposed decadence of reasoning that Foucault and Derrida (and Nietzsche before them) got started elsewhere, with questions about the generation of discourses, the structural relations of meaning and meta-practice, but I only ever read those folks as calling attention to the inherently contrived nature of all speech-acts.
All authentic philosophical thought (which is different than scholarly thought but not necessarily opposed to it) only ever comes after the realization and acceptance of the limitations of conceptual thinking and expression. Language is inherently incomplete because we are inherently bounded entities, with circumspect expressive capacities.
And through poetry and creative linguistic projections we can consciously make hominid thought itself an art-form and cultivate its spectacular range of significances and intelligences.
May 31, 2011 at 8:03 am
and don’t forget yous all Stengers more recent:
‘Capitalist Sorcery: breaking the spell’ more of the beatnik brotherhood’.
May 31, 2011 at 12:57 pm
@michael, I have been raising Rorty’s kuhnian reading of Davidson on metaphors in relation to Jeff Bell’s historical ontology, just as I have raised Stengers here in relation to aspect-seeing. The quest of folks like Kierkegaard to write texts that give the reader the kind of virtual existential experience that would reorient/convert them to not just having new data/info but new cares/affordances. I think that this is why writers like Emerson, Nietzsche, and Deleuze have all worked against institutionalized academic philosophy in search of something trans formative.
Click to access Stengers157.pdf
May 31, 2011 at 6:03 pm
“The poetics of philosophy is a sort of choice, a selection, exercised at the heart of being, bringing that which, due to its ubiquity, was before invisible. Yet to exercise such a selection language must lose its familiarity so that the possibility of a manifestation might become available for thought.”
Hot stuff! I connect language’s loss of familiarity also to the “necessity to create desire” you discussed in the Figure Ground interview. After I read that interview and Joseph C. Goodson’s passing fancy proposal for Delinquent Objects in the comments to your Rogue Objects post, I picked up Philip Roth’s The Professor of Desire (I can dig out Roth’s passage on delinquency later if anyone’s interested) because I couldn’t remember how it ended. It ends with Kepesh suckling (sans leche) the very bosomy Claire Ovington (a larval name if ever there was one) arousing her from the depths of slumber with a moan even as he is aware of his fading desire for her, fading literally from familiarity (the visits with the father, the ex-wife, her sister.)
You know how Aristotle in “Essential procedures in converting a plot into a play” in the Poetics says in parentheses: “(Hence the composition of poetry is an affair of either the well-endowed or the manic individual; for of these two types the ones are impressionable while the others are liable to be “possessed” from time to time.) The final image in Roth’s book reads almost like an inspired ideogram of Aristotle’s assertion.
And I read this post–like the Cubist image accompanying it, which responded to the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist movements that preceded it–as an explicating response to Aristotle in that it points to why the impressionable and possessed thinker who wishes to share and induce thought with and in others reaches, must reach out, to commune with the muse in the first place. Where else can the courage to be “eccentric” come from?
June 1, 2011 at 3:57 pm
Reading Whitehead’s Process and Reality really does induce a trance that transmits Whitehead’s construction of spacetime epochs. You can start to feel a layering and a tectonic rapidity to your own apperception of pattern embedded in the text. Grammar and semantics are fused in the structure of more advanced epochs of the superject. Since the superject Whitehead inscribes the ground floor facts of the text, unpacking his paragraphs is also climbing his ladder of epochs. It happens in actu, like the great Theban plays in medias res.
June 1, 2011 at 4:08 pm
This ‘tectonic rapidity’, associated, I suggest, with understanding Whitehead, is precisely the transmission of a Whiteheadish World. In this regard Whitehead ushers in a bizarre beyond-Cubist earth-swarming ‘epoch of Whitehead’. It hasn’t ceased to influence our societies of societies of societies, as evidenced by his increasing influence on the Continent.
Anyone who continues with optimism for American academic philosophy can look forward to Whitehead’s role in the redemption of academic philosophy. Prashant Parikh is my latest hope, with his Equilibrium Semantics offering initial nods toward unifying Whitehead’s staunch logic, earth-wise decision making and the visceral curiosity for adumbrating an enhanced philosophy of organism.
June 2, 2011 at 5:27 am
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