The book or article stands before me as an object. It is something there in the world like a chair, rock, or tree. As I regard the book, I intend it as something containing arguments, concepts, claims, and so on. That is, just as I attribute a certain mass to the rock, just as I treat this mass as a property of the rock, so too do I treat the book or article as possessing these arguments, claims, and concepts. Yet strangely, unlike the rock (though this is arguably true of the rock as well), the book cannot be encountered all at once. Where are these concepts, claims, and arguments? The book can only be read in time. It can only unfold in time. Even if I were to lay out all the pages side by side, I still could not encounter the book as a simultaneity. For the reader, the book can only be encountered as a process, as something that must unfold. And also, for the writer, the text must be produced. Neither the reader or writer can encounter the text all at once.
Perhaps there is a differential between the existence of the text and the process or erlebnis of the text. We might say that as an ex-istence, the text is a simultaneity that is all there at once, wrapped up within itself, complete. It is only in the lived time of presentation, the argument would run, in the lived time of reading, that the book would present itself under the aegis of being a fragment of the whole:
Husserl’s paradox: We intend the object as a unified whole but only ever encounter the object in partial profiles. From whence is the unity of the object constituted as a unified whole? How is it possible for the object to be “counted-as-one”, when it is nowhere presented as one?
As I read the book, I am perpetually conscious that there is a whole that lurks just over the horizon of the word, the sentence, the horizon. Each fragment somehow fits into that whole or is a part of that whole. Yet where is this whole? Between two covers? Perhaps. Yet even when I complete the book, the whole has evaded me and slips between my fingers even as I hold the book in my hands. I intend the book as being in the book, but I look in vain to find the book.
Like Carroll’s snark that never appears where you look for it, the book never seems to appear where it appears. Where is the book? Between the covers? In the authors mind? In the act of reading? There are occasions, upon returning to a beloved book, where I wonder whether the book hasn’t rewritten itself in the interval of my absence. How can this be? How does the book change so markedly?
Perhaps there is something about the sheer physicality of the book that generates the impression that the book is something. After all, we encounter the book as a thing or an object. It is there, right before us, between those two covers. And the book must therefore be in that physical object? What academic postures, attitudes, temperaments, might this paradox of the book produce? In the famous section on commodity fetishism in Capital, Marx writes:
The mysterious character of the commodity-form consists therefore simply in the fact that the commodity reflects the social characteristics of men’s own labour as objective characteristics of the products of labor themselves, as the socio-natural properties of these things. Hence it also reflects the social relations of the producers to the sum total of labour as a social relation between objects, a relation which exists apart from and outside the producers. Through this substitution, the products of labour become commodities, sensious things which are at the same time supra-sensible or social… In the act of seeing, of course, light is really transmitted from one thing, the external object, to another thing, the eye. It is a physical relation between physical things. As against this, the commodity-form, and the value relation of the products of labour within which it appears, have absolutely no connection with the physical nature of the commodity and the material relations arising out of this. It is nothing but the definite social relations between men themselves which assumes here, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between things. In order, therefore, to find an analogy we must take flight into the misty realm of religion. There the products of the human brain appear as autonomous figures endowed with a life of their own, which enter into relations both with each other and with the human race. (vol. 1, Fowkes trans., 164-5)
Marx remarks that we must mobilizes all the subtlety of theology and metaphysics to uncover the mystery of the commodity. The commodity presents itself as a physical object, as a thing, such that it is the object that we relate to, not other human beings. But in fact the commodity is a masked or clothed set of social relations. Is it not the same with the book? The book is there, between its covers, and the meaning is in it. Or this is how the book or article is intended anyway. The meaning is treated as something floating about, out there in the world, contained in the text… Belonging to it. But where could it possibly be? The book only unfolds in time, even if the pages are simultaneous in space. The space between the covers contain only ink. The text must actualize itself in a reading. Text is event. Not simply the event of inscription, but the necessary event of decryption, of a reading, that makes the text be again.
I encounter books as artifacts. They are things that populate the world, like tables and rocks. Do I therefore approach or intend books and articles in the way I intend tables and rocks? Do I encounter them as substances? When I look at the academic postures of those that traffic only in books and articles, who only communicate with other academics through the medium of the book, I sometimes get this sense. The text is treated as a thing, possessing a meaning. This can readily be seen at conferences. Someone in the audience asks a question. A look of disdain crosses the face of the author. Obviously this fellow must be a dolt. He missed the entire point of the paper. He missed the substance of the paper! Since sense or meaning is taken as being a property of the text, as being thing-like, a difference can only indicate a failure to understand or a misinterpretation on the part of the reader. For here the text is not a process or an event, but a substance that underlies the script.
In blogging a different relation to text seems to emerge. Following the arguments of Walter Ong and Friedrich Kittler, the medium of the blogosphere is not simply an alternative space in which to convey ideas, but also has an impact on how thought unfolds and the nature of social relations. In the case of books and articles, the author is generally absent. The author is on the horizon, but as a shadowy, generally idealized, operator of the text. The text has a thing-like character and is treated as a substance. Yet in blog writing, the text is encountered far more as process, in its unfolding, in all its hesitations, false trails, divergences and so on. On those blogs where comments are open, readers post responses. The author very quickly discovers that the reader is not a dolt, but rather that, as Lacan said, all communication is miscommunication. There is a powerless or inability to master the word, such that the sentence is like a floating blog, pervaded by all sorts of relations, which is plugged into all sorts of assemblages quite different from that where it first exploded into the world. Here it becomes clear that meaning is not a substance beneath the graphe, but a perpetually displaced entering-into-relation, event, or encounter. At the conference, the academic individuated in an ecology of books and articles, encounters the rude and belligerent questioner as a jerk who is just being difficult and who has failed to behave reasonably. Yet in the blogosphere one discovers that the reasonable is a sort of transcendental illusion or fetish, borne of those who spend their time silently with the non-responsive book or article, seldom encountering the passions that haunt real and regular encounters with others. Does not this space of the encounter call for a rethinking of meaning, text, and above all reason? Does it not call for a new model of what it is to think?
January 27, 2008 at 8:55 am
Obviously the only proper response is “of course.” But I have a comment that is nevertheless a question. Actually, several questions.
Any chance you’d care to elaborate on the text as event? Event in what sense? “The text must actualize itself in a reading. Text is event. Not simply the event of inscription, but the necessary event of decryption, of a reading, that makes the text be again.” Given the use of “actualize” here I’m guessing this is Deleuzianally inflected. But it is interesting to think of decryption as actualization in that it gets away from the idea of interpretation as a representation of some ideal or original textual meaning. On the other hand, I can’t really come up with terms to describe one’s reception of text as event. Would the actualization of a text be something like, rewriting with a difference? This doesn’t seem to capture the “eventual” nature of a text. And if text is event, can it also be, as you say above, encountered as a process? Is an event processual, even for Deleuze?
Not sure I’m asking “the right” or even coherent questions, but the phenomenology of reading holds no end of interest, and I’m always looking for new vocabulary to mine.
January 27, 2008 at 11:59 pm
Va, I don’t have good language to capture what it is I’m trying to get at either. When I evoke the term “event”, I do not have in mind something as grand as Badiou’s events. Rather, I’m thinking of events in the much more mundane sense of what takes place in time. Thus, on the one hand, I’m trying not to fall into the trap of treating text as a substance that abides as self-identical in time or beneath accidents. At the risk of making generalizations, I think that phenomenologically we (or I) do tend to posit a sort of “Platonic text” behind the text as a self-identical substance that is the meaning of the text. What I’m trying to suggest is that the text only is in being read and written, and that there is no self-subsistent text over and above these activities. In this connection I very much like your formulation as “rewriting with a difference”. Perhaps the term “event” here is misleading, although both Deleuze and Whitehead do conceive events as processes. I’m not sure if this is any clearer.
January 28, 2008 at 6:22 pm
http://parodycentrum.wordpress.com/2008/01/28/theyre-heeeeeeeeeeereeeeeeee-part-4/
January 28, 2008 at 8:13 pm
Dr Sinthome, isn’t ”the event” here contained in the text’s EMBODIMENT – for example, in blog comments, or in the visceral effects of a mobile camera in CLOVERFIELD, to name the most recent example where cinema ”materializes” as it were?
January 28, 2008 at 8:20 pm
I see the comments not only as meconaissance *in the Lacanian sense, but I see them as sort of turning your post into a living and breathing organism.
January 28, 2008 at 8:56 pm
Dejan, I’m inclined to say that these aren’t so much embodiments of events, but rather traces of events. These traces can in turn be reactualized in other processes producing yet other traces.
January 28, 2008 at 9:18 pm
, but rather traces of events.
I’m not sure I follow you (I assume the ”events” come from Badiou – I never read anything from him?) but what I meant is that regardless of whether or not the comments actually communicate anything, irrespective of their ”meaning”, they give the text a mobile body; this is the ”embodiment” I speak of. As a result the text becomes a living organism , it is ”animated” as it were. K-punk once wrote that blogging produces a third entity, and I noticed this myself when I catch myself, in real time, feeling like an amalgam of ”I” and all the people I communicate with through the blog. I am one of my own blog’s assemblages, one of its bodies. Therefore, the text materializes… this happens with conventional books as well, but not DIRECTLY like this, because conventional books don’t have the interactivity.
January 28, 2008 at 9:27 pm
sorry I overlooked your previous comment in which you already said it wasn;t about Badiou’s events, and you also said
is that the text only is in being read and written, and that there is no self-subsistent text over and above these activities.
and this is exactly what I’m suggesting, this text-process is like an animated body, it works directly through its movement rather than through ”hidden meaning”
January 30, 2008 at 5:05 pm
Just a quick thought. It seems to me what you’ve outlined is two ways to read Husserl’s notion of “reactivation.” For Husserl, the reactivation of meaning actively reproduces the primordial evidence, there is what Derrida calls in the _Husserl’s Origin of Geometry_ and “essence of the first time,” an inaugural signification that is always able to be reproduced. Phenomenological questioning (Ruckfrage) is supposed to lead us to the “meaning of the first time.” If we take this from the vantage point of the study of texts, it means such study vis a vis questioning should lead us to the originary meaning of words. So study is nothing less than repetition and rediscovery, always seeking to expose the “lost” and underlying substance of meaning.
Such is the view of the jerk off conference presenter.
However, on the other hand, there is questioning that never seeks to uncover this originary meaning, e.g. a movement that is not regressive. It seems to me what you’re gesturing towards is a different understanding of reactivation, in which reactivation would awakens the creative force of interpretation so that what is reactivated is not meaning but the very power of the word/the event to signify over and over again and beyond.
January 30, 2008 at 6:00 pm
Shaher, Thanks for this, it is really excellent. It’s been a while since I spent any significant time with Husserl, so I had forgetting about his discussions of reactivation. I think what I’m getting at is something close to Derrida’s argument of an a priori repetition in Speech and Phenomena, where all givenness implies a repetition without a first unrepeated term functioning as the origin of the repetition. Lurking behind all of this is my position that all beings are or exist only in relation, such that it is differential and relational fields that make the being what it is. If this is the case, a number of things need to be rethought in terms of how they take on their valence in terms of the relational field in which they’re submerged. I don’t like making this connection, but Gadamer, perhaps, is arguing something similar when he talks about the productive role that prejudice plays in our relationship to texts. That is, texts come to differ from themselves as a function of the differential fields into which they fall, now signifying that way, now signifying this way. The move to be avoided would be the thesis that there’s a context in itself or a text in itself that trumps all these other fields that punctuate the destiny of a text as it wanders through the world.