Heideggers

I've been thinking about a recent post on the different Heideggers out there, and wondering which one is my own. I think I first read him in my sophomore year of college--a few essays in Basic Writings (intro to Being and Time, "Origin of the Work of Art," and, strangely, I remember reading "The End of Philosophy"). Then I got into philosophy of mind, which is what really led me to phenomenology. I then took a great course with Arthur Melnick on Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, and I think really started getting interested in him there. Melnick writes a lot on Kant, but he's into phenomenology, so I had a very good introduction. But, of course, Heidegger the first time through is never enough to get him: right now I think there are many, many things I don't get, and I never quite understand people who dismiss him quickly. He's not one of those writers you can get by just understanding a few "moves:" even though he'll get repetitive sometimes, what's at stake in the best works is certainly deep, rich thinking about all sorts of things that need in turn to be thought through more as problems than as indifferent content. Regardless, the year after college (having graduated early to save money) I reread Being and Time and that was when I really got some sense of it and moreover got really into it. Melnick had focused a lot on the second part of the book, actually, so I was in a good position to grasp a lot of that stuff. But I think at that time I also read the Introduction to Metaphysics, and for some reason (I think I was also reading Aristotle more seriously than I did in school, maybe that was why) that really got me going. I think I then reread the first part once more. Then I did some later things:  the writings on technics, the lectures on identity and time and being, but also the great books on Nietzsche, What Is Called Thinking… After that, I was on my way, picking up some of the earlier seminars as I went.

Reflecting on it, I don't quite know how to categorize this Heidegger. It is certainly not a theory-Heidegger. Though I've always been interested in Derrida, I was always more interested in him through the phenomenological tradition, I think, and I am only now actually figuring out how that has even given me quite a different Derrida than is usually found near literature departments (with some important exceptions like Spivak and Butler, who understand him to be much more political, like I do)--let alone Heidegger. With the latter, I've never really been into either his language for its own sake or his writings on art (or language--I'm actually only getting around to the stuff on language now), though I do think Derrida's attention to the actual language is great and useful. That attention alone is probably not a good way into Heidegger (certainly Derrida didn't just use that, though some of his lit-dept. buddies conveniently forget this fact), or is probably only a good way into several general issues (death, everydayness, dwellings) that end in an overpoliticized dismissal that makes Zizek's consideration seem quite thorough (though it isn't so bad). Then again, there are good considerations out there in less de Manian literary theoretical work (it isn't good to speak as if the majority of people involved in literary or critical theory in the US were deconstructionist--or even that the majority of people in literature departments even had or have theoretical interests).

If anything, I might have a more "American" sort of Heidegger. Certainly it isn't quite as "practice"-oriented as Dreyfus, though I don't at all understand the sort of anathema Dreyfus provokes in some people: except for the fact that he produces followers with very narrow conceptions of what might be going on in the works, I don't find anything really too egregious in his interpretation itself.  I shouldn't downplay the effect of the interpretation though: it's a real problem (as is clear if you have ever talked to a real follower of Dreyfus, as I did in college) given that the state of Heidegger scholarship in America was so sketchy for so long, and he and a few others were so dominant in it. But overall I find Dreyfus helpful, if you take his work as an interpretation and really set it beside the rest of Heidegger's stuff (starting with Division II of Being and Time). Furthermore I find it really helpful in countering some of that overzealousness (or whatever you want to call it) we find amongst some Heideggerians, who overestimate works like the Contributions to Philosophy (I love that Graham Harman continually insists that it's really not that great of a work--because it isn't).

Back to the point though, which was that I never quite went as far as Dreyfus myself, even though my Heidegger was more "American," partly because Melnick in particular really did approach Being and Time with Kantian questions in mind about space and time, translated into Husserlian concerns. My first view on the thing ended up having a weird sort of Husserlian flavor to it, then (even though I had read only a little Husserl and would only really read him after college--and still, like many many people, haven't done enough, though I like him a lot), and I think that's stuck with me. That's not entirely enough to get me near the base-line Continental reading, even--and there's no way that puts me in any position to even try and figure out the fourfold. But it has kept my mind open and I think makes me see what Dreyfus does as a very good and very patient illustration of Heidegger--along with a series of knockdown considerations of AI and a great opening up of cognitive questions and questions about motility which are still dear to me.

I'm still trying to think of someone's work with a Heidegger that is much closer to mine. I was tempted to cite Jonathan Lear's book on Radical Hope, which I think is just one of the most interesting, well-written, and fascinating pieces of philosophy that has been produced in recent years (it's a breeze to read, you should check it out if you haven't). Though my main concerns were never ethical (indeed I always try to avoid ethics whenever I can--except Lear's work is always so fascinating I had to pick this up), this appropriation of Heidegger is still interested in worldhood in a serious way. And even though Lear is concerned mostly about what gives practices their coherence, the main question of the book--what happens in when a culture is facing destruction and is destroyed--places this on a background that is still a bit more global than Dreyfus.

That's still not right though: these Division II issues aren't quite at all like the late stuff--there's something qualitatively different about a focus that remains on the latter (or really grasps the latter) and the one that sticks with the former, even though they are of course all related (I'm don't mean to give any significance to any "turn"). I can't think of other figures though without going too far the other way. I guess I can just conclude that at bottom my Heidegger is quite American, though not irredeemably so (I actually enjoy the Heidegger of someone like Bernard Stiegler too--I think it's the history of being that is probably where my focus lies, with my eye on practices). But then again this isn't entirely a fault--though it should indeed be accounted for. Indeed, the whole reason I brought this up was because the underlying point (Paul's underlying point, in the post that got me thinking about this stuff) is actually the most important thing: you'll get a different Heidegger depending on who you learned it from and how you studied him. There are a few very distinct Heideggers out there, and it is actually quite hard to get around any one take on him that you have inherited. This is partly because, of course, the material is difficult, and partly because of fashion. But mostly it is because Heidegger isn't just messing around: he's got a lot of very deep issues he's bringing up and you have to return to him again and again to work them out. Once you do, it's easy to coast. But what's really interesting is precisely then coming back and trying to work through those issues differently, and if you're more cognizant of what Heidegger you have, this will be easier and probably much more surprising, fascinating, enlightening.

Reading Heidegger

(See the very helpful response to this post by Paul Ennis. Everything Paul says I'd agree with: I even left a little comment in favor of "Heidegger-speak," which I oppose to the Heidegger jargon--empty parroting in order to keep agreeing with or defending Heidegger--that I mention below. Indeed, the whole post here owes a lot to Paul: it was a sort of meditation on what Paul meant when he talked about reading Hegel on his own terms. It also, of course, owes a lot to my discussions with Jethro Masís, who is thinking deeply about all that is involved in reading Heidegger.)

Reading Heidegger is always a remarkable experience. It can be, at times, absolutely exhilarating. Other times it is a real slog. What's remarkable, though, is that none of this occurs in the regular way: what's exhilarating isn't typically exhilarating, what's a slog isn't like your usual slog (if I can say such a thing).

That is, what's exhilarating isn't happening upon anything new--though of course the first time you read Heidegger it is (if not confusing) unbelievable. It is rather that the sort of steps that you make unfold something to you concretely, and in a way that is somewhat unexpected (even if you know Heidegger). This is why I wish certain parts of Being and Time were longer... even though rereading these parts, or looking in other passages in Heidegger, will do the job of explicating whatever is at issue (and giving you deeper, even different insight). The analysis of space and Ent-fernung is one of these places.

And then the parts you slog through aren't exactly boring or confusing or difficult. They're just gaps where Heidegger seems just to need to get to someplace. Now, I'm not talking about the regular big chunks that everybody says are typical overgeneralizations of Heidegger--the way he will push an interpretation of someone (Nietzsche, say) onto a certain track, and then unfold the argument predictably, according to the general "status" he confers upon that track. I don't think that's really a productive way to see Heidegger working--you end up thinking he's always saying the same thing, when, even if he is (and I'm not sure of that), there's actually a lot of weird and interesting stuff all over the place. No, what I'm talking about is much smaller, and ultimately much less significant. I'll give an example. Heidegger is talking about how sleeping is not the same as not-being-there, and not-being-there is not the same thing as being unconscious:

After all, what we generally know about things, we know in terms of an unambiguous either/or. Things are either at hand or not at hand. [...] Human beings have a consciousness, and something can be at hand in them on which they know nothing. In that case it is presumably at hand in them, but not at hand in their consciousness. A stone either has a property or does not have it. We, on the contrary, can have something and at the same time not have it, that is, not know of it. We speak, after all, of the unconscious. In one respect it is at hand, and yet in another respect it is not at hand, namely insofar as it arises from the possibility of being conscious of something unconscious. This distinction between not being there in the sense of the unconscious and being there in the sense of what is conscious also seems to be equivalent to what we have in mind by awakening, specifically by the awakening of whatever is sleeping. yet can we straightforwardly equate sleep with the absence of consciousness? After all, there is also absence of consciousness in being unconscious (which cannot be identified with sleep), and a fortiori in death. This concept of the nonconscious, therefore, is much to broad, irrespective of the question as to whether it is at all suitable. Furthermore, sleep is not simply an absence of consciousness. On the contrary, we know that a peculiar and in many cases extremely animated consciousness pertains precisely to sleep, namely that of dreams, so that her the possibility of characterizing something using hte distinction "conscious/unconscious" indeed breaks down. Waking and sleeping are not equivalent to consciousness and unconsciousness.
-Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics (GA 29/30), §16, p. 61 [91-3]

Now, everything is fine here--I'm not questioning Heidegger's point at all. But the "a fortiori in death" seems foreign to things, along with the fact that dreams, suddenly, are cases of "extremely animated consciousness." Where did this last point (that dreams are cases of consciousness) come from? It proves the point, yes, but where did Heidegger get it? I suddenly know I'll have to start hunting elsewhere for a better explanation, tying together the corpus. But, again, I'm not objecting, it all makes sense, I know why it is here: all this is here because the point we're getting to is the following:

To awaken an attunement cannot mean simply to make conscious and attunement which was previously unconscious. To awaken an attunement means, after all, to let it become and as such precisely to let it be. If, however, we make an attunement conscious, come to know of it and explicitly make the attunement itself into an object of knowledge, we achiever the contrary of an awakening. The attunement is precisely destroyed...
-Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics (GA 29/30), §16, p. 61 [91-3]

That is, we had to go through the rigmarole to get here. Thus, this doesn't make the points about consciousness and unconsciousness and sleep invalid--indeed they can be seen as essential. I refer to the way of taking Heidegger's writings as a way or path that confers on certain parts of the presentation (the text or, here, lecture) a significance insofar as they develop the question at issue. But on this path, there are certain foreign elements, that just seem pulled in from elsewhere, say, in order to keep us on the path--like how dreams are suddenly cases of extremely animated consciousness. To me, these bits make reading a slog (perhaps in lecture they were more interesting).

All this is leading to a sort of distinction I want to make, which involves not just this experience of reading but the appearance of what I'm here calling foreignness in Heidegger's texts (and which makes me feel like reading is ugh, not exhilarating at all). What do we do with those moments that seem on the way, but only on the way--or rather really somewhat off the way, not even on a Holzwege? How do we see what is not on the way? Heidegger himself points out how certain phrases, say, like "die Sprache als die Sprache zur Sprache bringen," can look differently when seen on the way (to language, here) and not (where they become formulaic). But where do we draw the line?

Another way to think about this is that it troubles the notion of "reading Heidegger on his own terms." This, of course, doesn't mean reading only to agree with Heidegger--the confusion of the two is often the fate of dogmatic Heideggerians (sticking with the jargon, etc., in a way eerily similar to the way Derridians stick to the jargon, etc.). But it might at times mean something like stepping off the path or the way. That is, isn't there a difference between following the way, the path, and reading someone on their own terms?

Coming up...

Better posts coming up, everyone, along with a better blog more generally. In the near future expect:

1) Posts on GA 29/30 (Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik)
2) Posts on The Pasteurization of France and Science in Action
3) Posts on The Country and the City
4) Posts on The Difference Engine
5) Posts on Locke's Essay

I'm also reading John Protevi's Political Physics. I'll say a little about some of the excellent ideas there soon. Prepare yourselves...

Problems

One interesting thing that I find deconstructionists do is reduce differance to an epistemological problem. This is so in both de Man and Spivak, though they both well know that this epistemological problem is also an ontological problem. Or rather, they know it isn't even that, since it is a pre- or post-ontological problem. In each case, we're trying to say that we've hit a sort of epistemological problem that is deeper than any epistemological problem, but actually can best be characterized or envisioned epistemologically, in an manner analogous to how we can deconstruct metaphysics by looking at philosophical texts--which at first sight looks absurd. Thus, it is the question of "epistemology," in quotes, or doubled, different. And in the case of texts, it is the question of how much, in each case, we are to provisionally generalize textuality. The latter question is the real one being interrogated, I think, in these issues regarding "epistemology," and insofar as it still remains interrogated, is not exactly a mistake or misinterpretation of Derrida. The real issue is whether transferring the problem of generalizing textuality--which I'll repeat, is the fundamental problem deconstruction faces--encourages us to dissolve the problem and presume it solved. (I'll mention that in my view de Man does indeed do this, to the extent that he almost does misinterpret Derrida by virtue of this alone, while Spivak doesn't.) Derrida often sticks to texts precisely for this reason. Whether his resulting insistence on the problems of textuality really does encounter that problem, well, that's a another (and indeed pressing) question. But unless one understands that this is what Derrida is up to, his reading of texts of philosophy will seem very odd, not unlike how Heidegger's reading of texts from the tradition (the most amazing of which is, of course, the book on Kant) will also seem odd. I think, however, a legitimate objection would be to why this process of reading went on so continually and so consistently, almost as if expanding the amount of reading in philosophy and its nearest neighbors would indeed insist on the problem of textuality (even though his claim is always that these texts are singular). In this case that other question I spoke of just now (the "pressing question" of how far an insistence on the problem of textuality encounters the problem, which is not unrelated to the problem of transferring the problem of textuality, as one can see in Spivak, who than rather going de Man's route does this), indeed arises.

Predicaments (and sophisms)

Last time, I said that de Man is not concerned with deconstruction. Rather, he is concerned with literature. Thus (using an excellent phrase from Frances Ferguson) de Man is not interested in engaging in deconstruction as much as he is interested in "verg[ing] on establishing a metaphysics of rhetoricity," (Solitude and the Sublime, 53, note 8; Rudolphe Gasché and John Guillory also make similar arguments).

Now, one could object: this is no mistake of de Man's. It is, in his view the task of criticism to set up a sort of metaphysics--which for him is a literary metaphysics, though a de Manian would contest this term, as we'll see--in which deconstruction can work. This is what de Man would be precisely getting at by saying, famously, that deconstruction is the grammatization of rhetoric--"criticism is the deconstruction of literature, the reduction to the rigors of grammar of rhetorical mystifications" (Allegories of Reading [AR], 17)--which enters into relationship with (or disrupts, or is disrupted by) a rhetorization of grammar (via its own blindness, deconstruction's displacement of what, precisely, "deconstruction was supposed to eliminate," AR, 17).

But to then claim that this produces deconstructive effects--that just doesn't seem to follow, or follows only through a series of sophisms. Don't get me wrong, it may produce "the systematic undoing of understanding" (AR, 301). And (as we just hinted a de Manian would say) it even might, thereby, merit being called something different than a metaphysics. But fundamentally, this undoing has no real connection to deconstruction. It just is pointlessly destructive.

One can then get de Man out of this predicament by saying that rhetoricity is understood as something extraliterary, and thus that de Man is actually closer to Derrida, or is deconstructing after all. In some sense it is a little naive to say that this is not at all what is involved in de Man's notion of rhetoric: tropes for him turn, materially, and thus never are able to be collected into a system (a system of tropes). In turn they disrupt language, insofar as this is considered a stable system of rhetoric.

But there are two reasons this doesn't quite work (Rudolph Gasché outlines them best, in that classic essay "Deconstruction as Criticism," once in Glyph, now in Inventions of Difference). First, if we accept this in full, it seems to undo the need for constructing a metaphysics, or some place for deconstruction. More significantly, this reading just isn't supported by what de Man says. The point is precisely that the outside of language here, the material here, is indeed linguistic, in that it can only be registered through language: as he famously says, "the resulting predicament is linguistic rather than ontological or hermeneutic" (AR, 300). Let's not read this too straightforwardly, now (even though the duplicities of de Man's writing encourage that we read it this way): the linguistic here is precisely what is "beyond" the ontological or hermeneutic, and therefore is really just a name for what is not yet determinately linguistic. But doesn't that precisely mean it is an ontological and/or hermeneutic problem? De Man treats it as if it is not so, and thereby gives linguistic contours to what really doesn't merit them.

Ultimately, a lot of this revolves around what, exactly, de Man understands "deconstruction" to mean. If this is an old question, I don't apologize for asking it again. I ask it again not because it is important to "get" deconstruction or anything, and separate the wheat from the chaff, thinking from sophism, important as these tasks are. It is rather because it is too easy to weigh de Man's destructiveness: when we begin to open up the de Man phenomenon into the cause of all of literary theory's problems--which we have been doing for a while now--we lose the sense of the limited nature of his proposals. Because they are so general, and polemical (and those, like Marc Redfield, who would chide critics of de Man for being too polemical fail to grasp just how polemical his own writing actually is: I would say it is fundamentally polemical, or more polemical than theoretical) we begin to believe that his theory's power is precisely what he says it is. We somehow think that, even though we think he's a sophist, certain concepts of his will, if they don't undo understanding, will use this process to undo all sorts of other things (Gerald Graff makes this mistake, I think, despite his cautious approach). In short, we don't see how puny such a destructive discourse really is. More pertinent to our issue here, we also don't see how little it had to do with deconstruction, in the end: granting it the power to inflect our understandings of decon, as Gasché famously does, is probably granting it too much. Thus, when I ask what deconstruction meant for de Man, I'm already presupposing that it is a misunderstanding, or (since I'm not even really concerned with a proper understanding of Derrida) a skewed take on it, a miniature version, or projection of what it is. And it is in this sense that we must again ask the question.

The answer is somewhat familiar, and yet, framed this way, also takes a new turn. Look at the quote above, from "Semiology and Rhetoric," that says deconstruction is "supposed to eliminate." What's not important is that this is a common misreading of deconstruction as destruction (which is itself a misread distinction when it is said to articulate a distinction between Derrida and Heidegger: Heidegger is, actually, mostly on the side of deconstruction). What's important is that "elimination" is a complicated process for de Man, involving many things--most notably, the process by which rhetoric is made into a grammar. This process has its own contours, distinct from any ideas that Derrida has. It involves, for example, a sort of unending effort. As a process, in other words, it seeks out every remaining bit of rhetoric and grammatizes it. It is in this way that it eliminates.

Considered as deconstruction, then, it says less about how de Man misread Derrida than what de Man thinks a process of grammatization involves. It is on these terms that de Man is mistaken, or at least singular enough that we can begin to judge the effects of his conceptions. For when he, at the same time, imputes to this continual, unending process the effects of Derridian deconstruction, like resisting metaphysics (see above, when we were pressured to take back our language about a "metaphysics of rhetoricity"), we can see just how huge the leap he makes actually is--in other words, we can understand just how much his terms are, at bottom, quite indistinct. More importantly, we understand more precisely how huge a leap someone who follows de Man, who thinks de Man is producing deconstructive effects, actually makes. This insight is not an insight into pedagogy or anything, but rather an insight into the nature of what a de Manian actually believes about literature, literary criticism, language, etc. etc.

Heidegger and printing

An unbelievable moment in "On the Way to Language:" Heidegger's footnote saying his quotations from Humboldt,

derive from the anastatic reprint of von Humboldt's text, edited by E. Wasmuch. [Die folgenden Textstellen sind nach dem von E. Wasmuth herausgegebenen anastatischen Neudruck (Berlin 1955) angefuhrt.]

It is not insignificant that Heidegger quotes from a version that uses this method of printing, where the traces of the previous work are preserved on a zinc plate--and then these remnants or cinders used to print the new version. I'll quote the encyclopedia entry for a full definition of the process:

Anastatic printing is a mode of obtaining facsimile impressions of any printed page or engraving by transferring it to a plate of zinc, which, on being subjected to the action of an acid, is etched or eaten away with the exception of the parts covered with the ink, which parts, being thus protected from the action of the acid, are left in relief so that they can readily be printed from.

Not just a facimilie--but what survives after the remnants of the original are done away with in order to copy it. This, as the citational basis for Heidegger's nuanced and ambivalent (that is, careful) reading of Humboldt, which will condemn his reliance on Idealism's spirit, but also say that his formulations regarding the need for a transformation of language are exemplary. And all this having to do with Heidegger's position towards language, which says it involves (in his language) the tracing or outlining of the clearing of being in (the) saying... It isn't clear to me how exactly this all fits together, but it is certainly relevant somehow.

Heidegger on information

Language, which speaks by saying, is concerned that our speech, heeding the unspoken, corresponds to what language says. Hence silence too, which one would dearly like to subtend to speech as its origin [as was suggested in Being and Time], is already a corresponding. Silence [indeed] corresponds to the noiseless ringing of a stillness, the stillness of the saying that enowns and shows. The saying that rests on enowning is, as showing, the ownmost mode of enowning. Enowning is telling [sagend]. Accordingly, language speaks after the manner of the given mode in which enowning reveals itself as such or withdraws. A thinking that thinks back to enowning can just barely surmise it, and yet can already experience it in the essence of modern technics, an essence given in the still odd-sounding name en-framing [Ge-Stell]. The enframing, because it sets upon human beings--that is, challenges them--to order everything that comes to presence into a technical inventory, unfolds essentially after the mode of enowning; at the same time, it distorts enowning, inasmuch as all ordering sees itself committed to calculative thinking and so speaks the language of enframing. Speech [thus] is challenged to correspond to the ubiquitous orderability of what is present.

Speech, when posed in this fashion, becomes information. It informs itself concerning itself, in order to establish securely, by means of information theories, its own procedure.
-"The Way to Language," in Basic Writings, 420-21, translated by David Farrell Krell (modified).

Heidegger on the transformation of language

In order to think back to the essence of language, in order to reiterate what is its own, we need a transformation of language, a transformation we can neither compel nor concoct. The transformation does not result from the fabrication of neologisms and novel phrases. The transformation touches on our relation to language. That relation is determined in accordance with the sending that determines whether and in what way we are embraced in propriation by the essence of language, which is the original pronouncement of propriation. For propriation--owning, holding, keeping to itself--is the relation of all relations.
-"The Way to Language," in Basic Writings, 424-5

Um dem Sprachwesen nachzudenken, ihm das Seine nachzusagen, braucht es einen Wandel der Sprache, den wir weder erzwingen noch erfinden konnen. Der Wandel ergibt sich nicht durch die Beschaffung neu gebildeter Worter und Wortreihen. Der Wandel rührt an unser Verhaltnis zur Sprache. Dieses bestimmt sich nach dem Geschick, ob und wie wir vom Sprachwesen als der Ur-Kunde des Ereignisses in dieses einbehalten werden. Denn das Ereignis ist, eignend-haltend-ansichhaltend, das Verhaltnis aller Verhaltnisse.
-"Der Weg zur Sprache," in Unterwegs zur Sprache (Gesamtausgabe 12), 255-6

Look at the German, which is much clearer. For essential reasons, however, this lack of clarity isn't really the fault of David Farrell Krell--from whose version of "Der Weg zur Sprache" I quote. The 1959 lecture is too condensed, too compact, and at the same time too lacking in concision, in the controlled, step by step unfolding of thought that Heidegger elsewhere deploys. The lack of clarity, in other words, is there no matter what you really do to it. And this is for equally essential reasons: the essay is not so much an effort to be clear about what constitutes language as one of the most concentrated attempts to bring about the "transformation" (der Wandel) of language that Heidegger here talks about.

I say "most," only because this is the task behind many of Heidegger's other writings. The task in many of them is never really an exposition of what the thing under consideration (here, one would be tempted to say language) should act and function like, or, even more prevalent in most philosophical writings, how the thing poses a particular type of problem. Rather, Heidegger's aim (this is the most modest way of putting it, for it isn't simply an aim or goal) remains a transformation of our language--that is, if one understands language here properly. By this I mean that the transformation (der Wandel) of our language is not just some transposition (eine Verlagerung) or substitution of equally valid or even clearer language, a mere displacement--indeed it "does not result from the fabrication of neologisms and novel phrases," ergibt sich nicht durch die Beschaffung neu gebildeter Worter und Wortreihen. Transforming our language is not stating the problem in different and perhaps better ways, displacing it--which might suffice for most philosophers (and indeed rightly so: I'd consider that as my goal, certainly). Rather, transforming our language is... something that occurs in the light of what is brought to language in this lecture (and many other ventures of Heidegger) concerning language. In other words, transforming out language is something that this lecture itself takes as its theme, and in doing so (in fact, insofar as it takes this as its theme) also attempts to bring the transformation about.

So, what is brought to language concerning (another inadequate word) language? Speaking much too loosely, that language allows the proper in general (again, too loose, too generic) to be brought to light. This means, then, that the transformation in language is what allows us to hear (in language) that our language allows the proper in general into language. Or, to put it differently, to displace it (again, that's a task more than sufficient for me) the transformation in language is the process of understanding and responding to how, through language itself, the language that we have used and are using not only allows things to be designated (sign as reference), but also brings them and ourselves into relation to what, with respect to each, remains proper (sign as showing--and remains is a word I use carefully: it means that what remains proper is not simply proper).

I won't get into what all that means: I'm not trying to talk about how propriation works with repect to language, but merely am trying to hint at all that is involved in what Heidegger here brings to language. I want instead to focus on the following: if this sort of transformation what Heidegger does not only in most of his work--as I'm proposing--but also most concentratedly here, in "The Way to Language," how does he do it?

Here he allows you to hear a "formula" (eine Formel), a phrase, properly. That phrase outlines the task (Heidegger calls it the "risk") of the essay, or as I said the theme that it must also bring about--the results of which we have just outlined. This phrase, in other words, remains the "guideline" (der Leitfaden) on the way to language (398). And it is, quite simply, "To bring language to language as language," die Sprache als die Sprache zur Sprache bringen.

One could then say that this phrase begins to be heard differently (that is, not yet properly), through the use of different ways of talking about language. Heidegger makes several journeys into other thinkers of language, including Humboldt and Aristotle, citing also medieval thought. What is talked about then becomes differentiated from what is not talked about, for example in the following, which constitutes a small but interesting point Heidegger makes about counting:

In the essence of language a multiplicity of elements and relations shows itself. We enumerated these, but did not put them in proper sequence. In running through them--which is to say, in original counting, which is not a reckoning in numbers--a certain coherence announced itself. Counting is a recounting. It previews the unifying power in cohesion, but cannot yet bring it to the fore.
-"The Way to Language," 407

Im Sprachwesen zeigt sich eine Mannigfaltigkeit von Elementen und Bezügen. Sie wurden aufgezählt und gleichwohl nieht aneinandergereiht. Im Durchgehen, d. h. im ursprünglichen Zählen, das noch nicht mit Zahlen rechnet, ergab sich die Bekundung eines Zusammengehörens. Das Zählen ist ein Erzählen, das auf das Einigende im Zusammengehören vorblickt und es gleichwohl nieht zum Vorschein bringen kann.
-"Der Weg zur Sprache," 240

"Reckoning in numbers," mit Zahlen rechnet, parrots a common conception of counting. The alternative, "recounting," Erzählen (also telling, relating), states this conception differently, to the extent that you cannot even say that it is an identical conception. And any reader of Heidegger will tell you that this second alternative, in all its simplicity ("counting is a recounting," das Zählen is ein Erzählen, compared to "a reckoning in numbers," mit Zählen rechnet), will be the one which is kept, which is pursued.

The possibility opens, however, of claiming that this is merely a sort of rhetorical operation, indeed with much attention to the work of metaphor. The complexity of the first conception, together with the simplicity of the second, does more than just specify a difference between thoughts: it also shows that one sentence has a certain attitude towards counting and, behind it, language in general--an attitude that needlessly complicates it. How? Metaphor comes in, in that Heidegger understands not only the thought underlying what the first sentence says, but also the vehicle (as we like to call it) from which reckoning is derived: recounting, recalling, which itself involves seeing (previewing, bringing to the fore). In other words, one might say that this is the key operation that allows Heidegger to make us hear something differently: people complain that Heidegger is too complex and gnomic, which means usually that he speaks too metaphorically about the issue, but what Heidegger is doing is actually showing you that, on the contrary, the rest of philosophy is only a set of different, less simple, metaphors.

So eventually in the course of thinking language, in the middle of the essay we begin to hear not only certain references to reckoning differently, but also hear our phrase differently. Indeed, we hear it not as "bring language to language as language," but as "bring the essence of language as the saying to the resounding word" (as this is translated).

So at a certain point Heidegger says the following:

Such way-making brings language (the essence of language) as language (the saying) to language (to the resounding word). Our talk concerning the way to language no longer means exclusively or even preeminently the course of our thought on the trail of language. While under way, the way to language has transformed itself. It has transposed itself from being some deed of ours to the propriated essence of language.
-"The Way to Language," 418-9

Die Be-wegung bringt die Sprache (das Sprachwesen) als die Sprache (die Sage) zur Sprache (zum verlautenden Wort). Die Rede vom Weg zur Sprache meint jetzt nicht mehr nur und nicht mehr im Vorrang den Gang unseres Denkens, das der Sprache nachsinnt. Der Weg zur Sprache hat sich unterwegs gewandelt. Er hat sich aus unserem Tun in das ereignete Sprachwesen verlagert.
-"Der Weg zur Sprache," 250

The formula that acted as a guideline now is different. In fact, it is not only different--Heidegger also says that it is proper. In this respect, it is not merely a metaphorical operation, as we said someone could claim. But how can Heidegger say this? How is the new way of hearing this phrase not only different but also more proper? The last sentence offers a hint, if we recall the distinction between transformation and transposition: rhetoric would be a mere transposition, a different ordering of the words. A transformation, which does not just differentiate, but allows access to the proper, is accomplished when this transposition occurs by the language itself: indeed, as Heidegger says, "it has transposed itself," er hat sich verlagert.

So the issue is not whether Heidegger actually used any rhetoric or not, or indeed differentiated anything or not, since these operations are in fact not opposed to allowing the sentence to be heard properly, not opposed to transformation. The issue, instead, is how can we be sure that the phrase "has transposed itself," thereby transforming itself: how the rhetoric, in other words, is also derived from transformation. This is what Heidegger then pursues--and I will let him speak for himself: I have only been trying to get us to this general point. The formula has transposed itself, he says,

except that the transformation of the way to language looks likes a transposition that has just now been effected only for us, only with respect to us. In truth, the way to language has its sole place always already in the essence of language itself. However, this suggests at the same time that the way to language as we first intended it is not superfluous; it is simply that it becomes possible and necessary only by virtue of the way proper, the way-making movement of propriation and usage. Because the essence of language, as the saying that shows, rests on the propriation that delivers us human beings over to releasement towards unconstrained hearing, the saying's way-making movement toward speech first opens up the path on which we can follow the trail of the proper way to language.

Allein, die Wandlung des Weges zur Sprache sieht nur für uns in der Rücksicht auf uns wie eine jetzt erst erfolgte Verlagerung aus. In Wahrheit hat der Weg zur Sprache schon immer seine einzige Ortschaft im Sprachwesen selbst. Dies heiBt jedoch zugleich: Der zunachst gemeinte Weg zur Sprache wird nicht hinfallig, sondern erst durch den eigentlichen Weg, die er-eignend-brauchende Be-wegung, moglich und notig. Weil namlich das Sprachwesen als die zeigende Sage im Ereignis beruht, das uns Menschen der Gelassenheit zum freien Horen iibereignet, offnet die Be-wegung der Sage zum Sprechen uns erst die pfade, auf denen wir dem eigentlichen Weg zur Sprache nachsinnen.

[He then doubles back to explain this.]

Our path's formula--to bring language as language to language--no longer merely encapsulates a directive for us who ponder over language. Rather, it betells the forma, the configuration of the well-enjoined structure within which the essence of language, which rests on propriation, makes its way.

If we do not think about it, but merely string along with the string of words, then the formula expresses a weft of relations in which language simply entangles itself. It seems as though every attempt to represent language needs the learned knack of dialectic in order to master the tangle. However, such a procedure, which the formula formidably provokes, bypasses the possibility that by remaining on the trail--that is to say, by letting ourselves be guided expressly into the way-making movement--we may yet catch a glimpse of the essence of language in all its simplicity, instead of wanting to represent language.

What looks more like a tangle than a weft loosens when viewed in terms of the way-making movement. It resolves into the liberating motion that the way-making movement exhibits when propriated in the saying. It unbinds the saying for speech.
-"The Way to Language," 418-9.

Die Wegformel: die Sprache als die Sprache zur Sprache bringen, enthalt nicht mehr nur eine Anweisung für uns, die wir die Sprache bedenken, sondern sie sagt die forma, die Gestalt des Gefüges, worin das im Ereignis beruhende Sprachwesen sich be-wegt.

Unbedacht, nur nach dem bloßen Wortlaut angehort, spricht die Formel ein Geflecht von Beziehungen aus, in das sich die Sprache verwickelt. Es scheint, als bedürfe jeder Versuch; die Sprache vorzustellen, der dialektischen Kunstgriffe, um diese Verwickelung zu meistern. Ein solches Verfahren, zu dem die Formel formlich reizt, versaumt jedoch die Moglichkeit, sinnend, d. h. in die Be-wegung sich eigens einlassend, das Einfache des Sprachwesens zu erblicken, statt die Sprache vorsteIlen zu wollen.

Was wie ein wirres Geflecht aussieht, lost sich, aus der Be-wegung erblickt, in das Befreiende, das die in der Sage ereignete Be-wegung erbringt. Sie entbindet die Sage zum Sprechen.
-"Der Weg zur Sprache," 250-1

The incorporeal invisible

I just attended the last of this year's Gauss Seminars in Criticism, where Eleanor Kaufman was giving a amazing series of lectures on "The Incorporeal in French Phenomenology." Her task was to think the being of objects or things, but without projecting thought or intention upon the thing (to speak loosely). In other words, she wanted to think being without thought as it takes place in objects, in the sense that being has always (especially in Heidegger, though he also does the most to expose this dependence and criticize it) been what thought can grasp, despite the fact that there were many objects having their being (like the whole cosmos) before thought. In doing so, she returns to the phenomenology of Sartre, in an amazing work of recuperation that sees his phenomenological experiments--especially his work of constructing unbelievably brilliant examples, which rightly are famous--as different at times from his existential philosophy.
She also handily opposes Sartre to Merleau-Ponty, and teases her idea of what thing-being is from this resistance of Sartre to Merleau-Pontian concepts, specifically, the flesh. The being of objects does not participate in the flesh. However, interestingly, it has its being in a way that is very like the Merleau-Pontean chiasmus, as sketched in The Visible and the Invisible: that is, the reversibility of the visible. Kaufman reads, I think, the chiasmus, which is invisible, into Sartre--though in such a way that its ties to Merleau-Ponty are cut because we enter such a different conceptual framework, and are therefore able to be developed in interesting ways that Merleau-Ponty wouldn't be able to think.
One of these ways is towards the incorporeal in Deleuze: Sartre thinks the incorporeal, in other words. This I think is interesting, though, for what it says about Merleau-Ponty: that if thought through correctly, and perhaps a little more rigorously than Merleau-Ponty himself was able to think about it (though it seems that right before his death he was working in this area) the invisible, as it functions in the chaismus, is incorporeal. And this is entirely what I tried to say, in a long paper put up below in several posts called "Derrida, Merleau-Ponty, Depth and the Body," that Derrida saw in Merleau-Ponty a while ago: that the invisible exists in two registers, one which has it participate in the flesh insofar as it resists the fleshly, one which is completely other to the flesh. Derrida pulls the second, which is more incorporeal, out of the first, and I think this is an invaluable move, one which would further allow us to follow Kaufman's amazing analysis as it proceeds.

Rationality

It strikes me, reading Habermas, that his achievement is (among many, many things) not so much the linkage of critical thought to empirical inquiry, nor the theorization of a rich notion of communication, but the recuperation of a field of rationality that remains less decidable than many thinkers (postmodern especially) would like to believe. Or rather, he understands that if you take their word for it, rationality (in its Enlightenment form) is so overarching, so massive in its effects, and so singularly responsible for the worst fictions about acting subjects and their world that one would think real discerning, responsible uses of it are few, or at least very hard to find--and affirms that this is the case. In other words, Habermas on a certain level restores meaning to reason by affirming what anti-Enlightenment thinkers say about reason: that a genuine use of it is very hard to find, even though it is everywhere. He then allows one to say that what we need is not to focus on how reason is ubiquitous and responsible for all atrocities, but on what a real genuinely responsible use of reason might actually look like.
It's not that we should brush off the effects of rationality. It's that, after reading something like Dialectic of Enlightenment, or Heidegger's accounts of reason, you lose all sense of the specificity of reason, and therefore any way (rational or irrational) of turning reason back towards the cultivation of a responsible function. As should be clear from my hesitant parenthesis here, this view also trades in a not unwarrented concern that any correction of reason will itself have to be rational--Freud in particular helped us see (and still helps us see) just how hard it is to think of something truly beyond reason, or that won't use reason against itself precisely in the effort to think reason's limits.
For me, Habermas gets a little too odd when he begins to say that the relative invisibility of genuine acts of reason means, not that they are rare, but that they are indeed everywhere: that certain aspects of practical action are themselves expressions of a certain form of rationality. This leads him to start to outline the amazing notions of the public sphere and discourse ethics. But I would rather he deemphasized the rationality of practical action and thought it more purely as mere action which may occasionally have a rational dimension. This would stay truer to the insight I'm outlining above: that reason is not as ubiquitous as we might think it is. This of course precisely means that reason isn't elevated into any particular good in itself, but that it remains just like any other specific (that is, not practical or pragmatic, as in Habermas) form of action that we engage in. It has its own specificity, and its own determinate or (at least) determinable force.
But in the end what we see is that there is a realm which thinking that is anti-Enlightenment and anti-reason overlooks when it understands rationality in its particular sense: the realm in which the extension of reason, its genuine deployment, remains undecidable as to its effects (Derrida, for his part, will theorize precisely this undecidability of reason, and it is in this that he is most powerful, I think--attempting as he is the project of Freud sketched above, but with greater rigor). In the anti-rationality model, it could either prop up various forms of technical and political domination, or it could allow liberation. What Habermas continually emphasizes (and Heidegger does this too, to his great merit, though with different motivations) is that the either/or here is way too rigid and is itself an effect of the ideology of those dominant forces, as well as the aspects of the liberatory forces which counter-productively rely on their opposition to the dominant. Rationality is only operative in the space at which it is extending itself or distributing itself further and further, such that it can be appropriated by both sides. This means that the use of reason isn't inherently, just because it is reason, going to fall into the hands of either. Again, I don't think that this space is as sustained in forms of practical and pragmatic action as Habermas does (I think it takes place in smaller spheres, like the classroom), but I do think he's right when he says that the cultivation of a sort of mastery of--or at bottom at least some ability to redirect--this space is what is crucial, and is what is left out in many accounts of reason. If one understands reason like Habermas does, one can begin to think about what its place should be--which is more than any mere denunciation of it (or an account of it that merely adds up to a denunciation of it) can really do.

The New Critics and feeling

While Sianne Ngai's Ugly Feelings is a truly, truly unbelievable and refreshing work, I'm disturbed a bit by the bashing that some the New Critics, and particularly Richards, take in the chapter on tone. Ngai wants to see tone as the following:

something much more holistic and explicitly affective than the narrow concept employed by Richards in Practical Criticism--namely, a speaker's attitude to his listener.
-Ugly Feelings, 41

She goes on to say that the New Critics following Richards on tone

notably muted, and in some cases took pains to avoid, the affective dimensions of the problem. This de-emotionalizing tendency is already apparent in the way Richards [in Practical Criticism] separates "Tone" from "Feeling."
-Ugly Feelings, 41

So the New Critics de-emotionalize tone. Okay, I'll bite. But it isn't clear that Ngai herself doesn't really get at tone either. She re-emotionalizes tone, perhaps, but in doing this is so much more concerned with things like mood and atmosphere that it isn't clear to me whether she is just making up something wholly new and just then calling it "tone." Making up something is okay, but I don't see why she would need to then act as if she is tying it back into a tradition of theorizing on tone, except to just bash away:

It should be clear that by "tone" I mean less the dramatic "attitude" adumbrated by the New Critics than a global and hyper-relational concept of feeling that encompasses attitude: a literary text's affective bearing, orientation, or "set toward" its audience and world. In other words I mean the formal aspect of a work that has made it possible for critics of all affiliations... to describe a work or class of works as "paranoid" [...] "euphoric" [...] or "melancholic."
-Ugly Feelings, 44-45

But I'll take what she's saying as if she is indeed picking a fight with Richards rather than just dealing with a straw man. In saying what she says about Richards, she acts as if an entire theory of communication (as it is represented in only one book--Practical Criticism--out of the many in which Richards elaborated and refined this theory) which is precisely constructed in order to account for affect in language would, by virtue of precisely this constructedness (the mere fact they tried to do it at all), exclude real affect. And while she has a very rich concept of what real affect is (though I'm not too sure what "global" and "hyper-relational" mean), it doesn't mean that Richards especially, and even some of the New Critics (as well as some of the philosophers she cites), haven't stumbled upon it before.
This however is the problem with studies giving pride of place to affect more generally: they merely invert the dominant paradigm, and in doing so, denigrate or keep virginal what they champion. Affect has to be overlooked in order to be celebrated. And while Ngai is better than everyone else who is concerned with the subject (by far), she here falls prey to this tendency. Obviously the New Critics didn't give pride of place to affect--I think that's true. But--like with Kant and Hegel and all the others she cites--that doesn't mean that they weren't some of the people that in fact were really trying to account for it and even combatting those (like scientists: see Richards' Science and Poetry and a lot of the work of Leavis) who denigrated it.
There is a weird progressivism at work here--which is otherwise generally merited because Ngai's work is really so new.
Even weirder is the picking of someone out of that tradition--Heidegger, whose theory of mood she champions--and using him as if he were more conscious than the rest of what real feeling is about. Frankly, it isn't really clear to me that Heidegger is the best choice, either. I think someone like Hume might actually be better. Heidegger's theory of mood is so emptied out of the ontic that mood merely stands in for facticity. And who is to say that facticity is the same thing as real feeling? Yet Ngai thinks with Heidegger that there's no incompatability between them--in fact, that facticity and feeling are more compatible than something like Richards' attitudes and feeling. Perhaps she's right on the first point (the compatibility): I doubt that she is on the second (the incompatibility of Richards' attitudes and feeling).
The bigger point, however, is this: why read Heidegger favorably and then turn on all the others? Why not read the others as favorably, and reconstitute a whole history of the theories of real feeling? It seems that Ngai has a pretty concrete sense of what real feeling is, and sees a lot of people excluding that over the years. Heidegger is more open to it. But who is to say that other thinkers of feeling and affect haven't just been mischaracterizing a little what Ngai is getting at--as Heidegger himself thought and in fact tried to demonstrate at length? Why assert that they have the entirely wrong phenomenon in view in the first place (and not just its ontic aspects)--as Ngai seems to do? It just seems like more bashing of the New Critics to me, combined with a sense that they in fact came a little too close to theorizing affect in literature in the way Ngai does. And it doesn't seem clear to me that a reconsideration of "tone"--as opposed to something else--is really what makes this possible.

Best of... Derrida and Heidegger

I have a quite a few posts on Derrida and Heidegger here: I thought that I might want to highlight some of the more important ones for anyone who wants to understand what the two are up to. I don't mean to sound like an expert, but I do want to provide material for anyone who might find some particular formulation here helpful.

First, Heidegger:
"Negativity, Repetition, and das Geschehen das Daseins:" what was for me (in writing it) an enlightening analysis of what Heidegger means by historicity and that enigmatic word in Being and Time, "repetition." I try to show that repetition here differs from the operation of the Aufhebung of Hegel.
"Building, dwelling, thinking...:" a close analysis of what is going on in "Building, Dwelling, Thinking," so we can understand the sort of linguistic work that is going on in Heidegger--what drives him to compose the way he does.

Then, three between Heidegger and Derrida:
"Time and Derrida:" a pretty clear distinction between time in Derrida and time in Heidegger (which can be calculated only non-properly or inauthentically). In Derrida we have a time that is to be calculated, but also flows confusedly (backwards as well, which, I maintain, is an unthinkable thought). This makes history seem very different.
"Derrida, Heidegger, Nietzsche, Sex," which looks at Heidegger and Derrida and their very different Nietzsches.
"Derrida on Heidegger and technics:" I read a little piece Derrida wrote on Heidegger, outlining one of his reservations in terms of Heidegger's conception of technics: Derrida thinks there need to be some changes in order for the technical and for the machine to be thought--despite the power and innovation behind one of Heidegger's most unique analyses.

Last, Derrida:
"'By specifying 'If there is one,' recurrently:'" where I relate what Derrida is saying to Heidegger's economy of the same and Ereignis (enowning)--I recommend to anyone wanting to connect the two this way, by the way, that they read the little essay "Identity and Difference," in the small volume of the same name. Much will become clear. (One word of warning, though: this is not the only way to read Derrida.)
"Reading like Derrida, continued:" useful for the list at the bottom on what the text "is." I was trying to resist the notion that Derrida just close reads texts of philosophy.
"A few thoughts on 'Circumfession:'" I outline pretty clearly the problem of testimony in Derrida, illuminating perhaps how he conceives topics we would subsume under the name "ethical."
"Hesitancies:" My criticisms of Spivak's Derrida. I'd let up now a bit on the use of phase "desire for presence:" I do think Spivak misunderstands this phase, but I now see more of the necessity behind Derrida's use of it.
"Derridian dialectic:" I attempt to show that Derrida doesn't strictly oppose the dialectic. I would say now that he precisely tries to make it possible (which means making it impossible as such).

(I might also note that in "Criticizing (unlike) Derrida," I have what I think is a helpful formulation regarding Derrida and Foucault: it might be possible to see Derrida, not Foucault, as a thinker of institutions, and Foucault as a thinker of writing and texts. I don't really believe that wholly, but I think it's a neat way to begin to articulate reservations about Derrida, as well as begin to appreciate the strategic quality of his work: most notably the immense privileges that he bestows upon certain institutions and the immense criticisms that he levies upon others--though they are often also the same institution. Examples: psychoanalysis on the one hand, Marxism on the other. Derrida truly believes that psychoanalysis as an institution has a huge potential. Why? Because it is, as an institution, one of those that most tries to account for the violence involved in institution in the first place. This is why he will be fed up with those who take the institution of psychoanalysis--the notion that it exists or everybody knows what they mean by it and, most significantly, by its concepts--for granted: these people are erasing the instability, the ambiguity of its work of institution--what makes it, as an institution, radically resist being done with the problems of instituting or establishing itself. Marxism: here is an institution that also has a similar potential for radical resistance. However, it is also, more than psychoanalysis, taken for granted. The difference between how Derrida treats psychoanalysis--which, make no mistake, is very congenial--and Marxism--which is more reserved, more critical--indicates what are strategic decisions on his part and constitute his effort to be a thinker of institutions.)

Structuralism and finitude

A good understanding of structuralism is something I think we are regaining in the United States, after our flings with certain "post-structuralist" modes of understanding things: there is a return to structuralism that is going on.

That is, unless it is a discovery of structuralism, a return to something that was never really understood well in the first place.

I add this because if you look back at the old journals, you can't help but feel that there was a sort of odd reception of structuralism in the US, one that really missed a lot of its points. Mostly (I think) this was because of the work that people who had the French connections were trying to connect it to discourses that were active in the US that looked like structuralism (in the positive sense that we will develop below). So Geoffrey Hartman, for one (and he was not the only one to do this), would try and explain the structuralist project alongside Northrop Frye's work. This is a good start, but it betrays the fact that there was a certain hermeneutic tradition that was lacking in the US that perhaps was there in France, and allowed a purer understanding of the structuralist approach to take place. And then there was the approach, right after--or, more accurately, right in the middle of the structuralist reception--of certain "post-structuralist" discourses: this perhaps closed the era of structuralism in the US before it really could begin. It isn't an accident that Lacan, Derrida, and others introduced these new notions in a conference meant to consolidate the structuralist influence, in 1966 at Johns Hopkins--introducing and destroying it at the same time for people.

Before outlining what distinguishes this purer understanding, I'll name what I think is the tradition: Heideggerian phenomenology.

Some might be tempted to say: Saussure. But as important as Saussure was in France, Heidegger and phenomenology remain the wider background against which the key notion of structuralism can really be grasped. This notion, which will lead us to the distinguishing characteristic of a solid understanding of structure, is the effectivity of the structure, the way the structure determines its elements.

Now, this effectivity is often explained still in Saussurian terms, around the discovery of the arbitrariness of the signifier: it has to do with the bonds forged horizontally, as it were, between the chain of signifiers, rather than vertically, or through reference to the signified. So where we have a group of signifiers, it is not the downward movement of each signifier's reference that matters,


but rather its ability to juxtapose itself beside other signifiers,


and bring about signification that way. This is a stronger claim, essentially, than "reference only occurs in a context." No: what this claims is that reference occurs only through context, such that 1) the context is what "in the last instance" does the work of reference, not the signifier's relationship to the signified (i.e. the context takes over for the arbitrariness), and 2) the context itself becomes wider than a mere "context:" it is not reducible to anything like order, syntax, or exchange which may locally bring about the juxtaposition. The context becomes a structure, nothing that is still dependent upon the downward work.

So, what do we end up with? The effectivity of the structure on its elements is one that holds it together in the absence of any specific (i.e. non-arbitrary) determination of its elements. The structure's effectivity is what allows meaning (or rather, the function of meaning) to take place and be understood despite the ultimate arbitrariness of meaning.

But this is what I will call only a positive definition of the effectivity involved. It is a rich, full concept of what it is for a structure to have the function of meaning. To this day, it is how we in the US are often taught the concept of structure.

What is more interesting, however, is the corresponding negative phenomenon, that which the positive definition implies. And phenomenology gives you a richer sense of this negative thing at work: it makes what is negative from the Saussurian perspective also positive. If the structure holds its elements together despite any local determination of those elements, what we have is a structure that is or exists only insofar as its elements exist. In other words, the limits of the structure are also defined here, such that we understand that while the structure is transcendental (it governs all the elements despite their determination), it is also finite (its governance does not bear upon anything other than what makes it up).

I will come back to this last word--finitude--in a moment, for it is precisely the distinguishing criterion of a purer understanding of structuralism that I am talking about. But it should already be clear from my vocabulary here (transcendental, finite) that these are phenomenological and specifically Heideggerian concerns. The effectivity we are talking about here is precisely the ontological one that Heidegger brings about in his laying out of Dasein: Dasein is made up of all sorts of specific elements, it is dispersed in these ways, but it holds itself together because the inner tendency (or necessity) of these elements is not to be without a determination (or rather, a determining) that is larger than them, as it were--something that makes of them a whole, but which is not merely a summation of them or even of the nature of an organic, part-whole relationship. Heidegger precisely describes this as the transcending (and not transcendental) essence of Dasein (or, more often, just Dasein's transcendence), which is quite accurate, because as we see, the ontological dimension which holds these elements together is only made up of these elements, and thus cannot be effective upon everything, universally: it is therefore a type of transcendence that goes against the very definition of the transcendental (it is finite), so another name must be sought out. Merleau-Ponty says that this transcendence or transcending is the "lining" of the elements like the lining of a jacket: it determines the contours of the elements but does not remain outside them, independently of them (he also calls it "the invisible"). Regardless, this transcending is the flip side, the negative of the determination of the arbitrary elements: it is the negative of a rich concept of structural signification which determines this signification as only existing insofar as its elements exist--and which is needed to bring this notion of signification really into its own.

Perhaps one of the best people to explain this is Louis Althusser, in Reading Capital. One can see there that, liberated from the Saussurian framework we can still have a structuralist analysis, because this negative phenomenon is thoroughly grasped. In this case it is Marxism that is grasped structurally--despite the fact that we lack any reference to signifiers and signifieds, or arbitrariness more generally: the mode of production there is the global structure that determines all the rest of Marxist phenomena (culture, ideology, relations of production, etc.). But the important thing is the structure's remaining a process of transcendence and not a universal transcendental status: in other words, its effectivity will not be able to be separated from the phenomena that make it up: it will not be anything apart from these, its (here, economic) expressions or effects:

The structure is not an essence outside the economic phenomena which comes and alters their aspect, forms and relations and which is effective on them as an absent cause, absent because it is outside them. The absence of the cause in the structure's "metonymic causality" on its effects is not the fault of the exteriorly of the structure with respect to the economic phenomena; on the contrary, it is the very form of the interiority of the structure, as a structure, in its effects. This implies therefore that the effects are not outside the structure, are not a preexisting object, element or space in which the structure arrives to imprint its mark: on the contrary, it implies that the structure is immanent in its effects, a cause immanent in its effects in the Spinozist sense of the term [that Althusser developed earlier], that the whole existence of the structure consists of its effects, in short that the structure, which is merely a specific combination of its peculiar elements, is nothing outside its effects.
-"Marx's Immense Theoretical Revolution," 188-89 (I've removed Althusser's italics and added my own--he significantly adds a footnote to the phrase "metonymic causality," which attributes it to Jacques-Alain Miller, who tries to characterize the causality Lacan recognizes in Freud.)

The phenomena which the structure structures precisely make up the structure: their existence is the condition of the structure's existence.

As I said, this is essentially the finitude of the transcendence of the structure that is involved. In Heidegger, the transcendence is precisely a function of the finitude of the phenomenon, as we saw but characterized only in a privative way by speaking of its non-universality. But more richly considered now, the this finitude is what makes determines the structure ultimately: the structure doesn't extend on and on in an infinite chain (the moving chain of signifiers in Lacan thus resists the structuralist mode of thinking the structure: the function of the Real is precisely developed to destroy the implications of this finitude), but remains a distinct entity which can be viewed, which can be seen existing, and which can therefore have limits insofar as the instances in which it makes its appearance or expresses itself are limited.

And it is this sense of finitude that is lacking in all the old talk about structuralism in the US. The idea came about that the structure lacked this finitude, and was therefore very ahistorical and all encompassing. And while this is true from a certain standpoint--insofar as the structure is considered finite and as something that exists--which is the standpoint precisely of the critiques of structuralism in France, in the US, without a sense of the finitude of the structure, this criticism seems to be more empty: it sounds like a criticism that can be levied against any method, which is that it pretends to a more universal or total set of ramifications, a universality or totality, than is always useful or safe. This also makes the post-structuralists just seem like a set of people reacting against structuralism (i.e., "post-structuralists," which is a uniquely Anglo-American name used to understand these people: they did not think of themselves as post-structuralists, as after anything). In other words, it inscribes structuralism into a uniquely Anglo-American progressivist timeline, one that allows people to talk about it as if it were yet another event in the history of ideas--and not a set of theoretical and methodological propositions which need to be dismantled from the inside. This would also explain the odd staying-power of structuralism: it would have staying-power insofar as these labels and names, these horribly inadequate (and usually pretentious) ways of thinking of ideas, would not have actually touched that to which they claim to refer.

In the end, the more and more this aspect of finitude gets recognized and developed now in the US (which I think it is), the richer and richer the understanding of structuralism becomes.

Building, dwelling, thinking...

A reading of "Bauen, Wohnen, Denken," which proceeds roughly along the path of the introduction and first part of the essay, with general comments meant to make Heidegger a bit more accessible interpolated. Thanks to my friend and colleague Emily for giving me the opportunity of writing this finally! I hope it is a little bit helpful:

Building (Bauen: constructing, structuring, to house something) and dwelling (Wohnen: residing, living, to stay with somebody) are the terms of the question. The question focuses upon building. It asks: If our inquiry "traces building back" into the place where we can see it working in the way that is most proper to it qua building, if we trace the way it looks like it works back into this "domain" (Bereich), then does this place, this domain, this original coherence of the phenomenon of building have anything to do with another sort of place that we call a dwelling? Looking into the way building is properly building, which means looking at the way it is building (that is, looking at it ontologically, in its be-ing building), does this resonate with how dwelling is properly dwelling? Does this building be-ing building resonate with dwelling being dwelling?
To understand this, we will ask 1) What is it to dwell, or how does dwelling be? and 2) How does building resonate with [gehört] or belong with dwelling?
To put it in more simple terms, Heidegger looks at a phenomenon: as Merleau-Ponty would describe it, the way that something coheres as it appears to us, its structured appearance to our lives (so like, a room appears to us as a usable space before it appears as a rectangle we inhabit, to the extent that the space of the room warps around the objects in it. Sartre said once a room taken phenomenologically is a lot more like how a blind person "sees" it: the room is a set of objects for him to use--the fact that it has corners is really irrelevant because they're hard to touch, nothing he needs is there, etc.). Thus what will follow is a phenomenology of building or construction. But his phenomenologies are phenomenological ontologies: they look at the coherence of something appearing precisely as how it exists, in its being (taken intransitively, as be-ing or is-ing: Levinas said helpfully once that Heidegger's contribution to philosophy is in restoring an intransitive character to being). So the being of building is a sort of coherence, its remaining proper to itself as a phenomenon--but doing so not in the aspect of how it looks or feels, say, but in how it exists, how it just remains there in its activity as an activity, how it "just works" as we like to say, implying some process but at the same time implying that it just does this process in being typically itself. So he's looking at the way building is properly being building. This is why he contrasts what he's doing to some aesthetic, architectural treatise on construction to giving rules or architectural ideas: this couldn't be further from looking at the being of building (for him--for me, this move in Heidegger is always suspect, because its dickish, as if his way of doing things is the only real way). He's also going to do this phenomenological ontology with dwelling, or, translated a little less pompously, "living in" something (his translators are also pompous sometimes). In fact, he's going to look at this first, to try and see if living in something is going to end up having any relation to constructing something. This makes sense because, of course, we live in the things we build. But the uniqueness of Heidegger is to pose this banality in ontological terms.
Part I:
At first it looks to us like we can only reach (gelangen, get to, as in: get to that place where there is)--it looks like we can only get to dwelling, or what dwelling is, through building, by means of building, or what building is. This is why we asked what dwelling is first--to try and work against the way things seem when we don't see them as structured appearances or as phenomena (and chiefly when we don't see them as appearances structured by their being, as ontological phenomena). In fact, we work against this because the mode of our presentation of building looks like it informs our way of considering it. That is, if we do look at things in this mistaken way, we'll think that dwelling is merely an end of building. This makes dwelling look like it is just having shelter in something, in being located inside a place that is reserved by building for this purpose. But this is not right: just because we fulfill the purpose of something doesn't mean that we are properly dwelling, that we are, in our being, in our remaining what we are, dwelling. In fact, I can dwell by precisely not fulfilling the purpose of something. To look at building as a means, and dwelling as an end--and thus to look at dwelling through building--is to avoid the question. We'll come to this below in how the question about housing problems is brought up.
For Heidegger, thinking about a dwelling in terms of its ability for us just to be located within it is, like thinking about the room as a rectangular box in space, to miss the phenomenon, is to miss how it is structured. It's no mistake that this is how science, in the use of physics in engineering and architecture, thinks about a dwelling (according to Heidegger). What's interesting is that for him this is reflected in how the problem of living-in something or dwelling in it is usually approached. His resistance to this approach will govern the structure of the rest of the essay: it especially governs what will happen next--his turning to language. When Heidegger does this, he supposes several things that are a bit farfetched and which I tried to bring out below: 1) that language itself can give us the phenomena if we hear it right, 2) the right language in which we hear this is German (here he is in serious danger of becoming a Black-forest patriot and/or Nazi) and that this is the case because, 3) like Hegel, he believes that German has a relationship to the way that the Greeks, the proper thinkers, thought (also a Nazi conception, but again, Hegel thought it too, so what this means is, on a certain level, tough to say). What he is trying to do, though, is significant: he's trying to think of construction or building not as a means, which means thinking of it not as something involving machines and technology. So he tries to pull that back out of the language. What he's claiming though is pretty profound: because we think of a dwelling through construction, this means of presenting it itself makes construction a means. In other words, the way of presenting the problem duplicates the way we consider the terms of the problem.
However, if we look at language, the German language, the language proper to thinking and in which nothing less than the spirit of the West, as it was handed down from the Greeks, is preserved as such, then to build, bauen, is already to dwell: that is, dwelling has a relationship to building that is not of a means-end nature. For building, in German, in this proper language, especially if we go back and look at its older meanings, in fact looks a lot like it simply means being, which is preserved in the German word for "am:" bin. When I say I am (ich bin), I mean "the way in which... I am." That is, I mean: I have cultivated myself, constructed myself, taken care of myself in this particular way. I have precisely not *made* myself or manufactured myself, as if I were a performance. "Here building, in contrast with cultivating, is a constructing." Cultivation is an art, but is not something technical: it is closer to the art of trimming vines and shaping a plant. In short, building itself is not properly something technical, precisely because--for reasons we state most clearly in "The Question Concerning Technology" but which we'll get to below--the technical is not technical: the technical is much closer to this cultivation, to this taking-care-of, to this sort of protection, which we'll come back to. Building is not properly manufacturing, it is cultivating.
We have not yet answered how this cultivating is dwelling, but we can see that this view of building as a sort of manufacturing is precisely what the means-end view of building and dwelling has done to our thought. It has turned us away from all that in building already could mean something else. (This means that, in truth, it has turned us away from Germany, from German language.) It has turned us away from how building and constructing can mean something like cultivating, and cultivating in a pure, proper, German sense: that is, without recourse to an idea of cultivation as performance, as fakery, as tricks, as technique and art that is a technology in the vulgar sense. To think of cultivating as something other than a manufacturing, to hear it even in our language itself: this is what being attentive to the phenomenon, rather than reducing it to a means-end relationship, had allowed us.
So perhaps we can look at our German language again, this time precisely at dwelling, and see whether it too could mean something like cultivation. Then there would be a relationship that would not be one of means-end. It would remain then for us to inquire into what the nature of this other relationship would be. But first let's get to dwelling now without building, without going through building: which we now know means, without seeing building as something that has an end.
We don't hear that wohnen, dwelling, means cultivating directly. That is, we have to take a detour in order to hear cultivation in dwelling. (It will take us to what we will call the fourfold.) For like building, it means remaining as something, but it means this more immediately, in terms of preserving and guarding, not cultivating. In fact, it means something closer to freeing-up. When I say I dwell, what I really mean is that I am free to do whatever. It does not mean, like cultivating, a sort of gathering together and holding together as protection, but a setting loose, a sort of freeing up. So we have gathering on the one hand and a setting free on the other—but we will come back to this opposition.
What we should note now is that if dwelling means being free, a dwelling would therefore be something like an object that is set free so that it can exist within this type of freedom. In fact, this freeing up of the thing is a lot like saving it from becoming a mere end, something that is just an object located within a techno-scientific or objectivized space. It is, as we will see, to really treat it as a thing, before it becomes an object, a point in space. This is not just a change in terminology that will oppose something good (a thing) to something bad (an object), although we will indeed exploit this opposition. What we are getting at is more fundamental: a dwelling is a freed object, or a thing that is more originary, more proper than an object because it is free. When something is left to its own, it is dwelling: “to dwell means… to remain at peace within the free sphere that safeguards each thing in its essence,” that is, to its being properly itself.
To clarify: what Heidegger is doing is distinguishing something that is objectivised and scientific from something that, he says, is more basic, more properly itself. To call the dwelling a thing here means the same as regarding the room not as a rectangle but as a livable space. This will come back more explicitly in the second part. But this distinction allows him to launch himself into a meditation on how the world looks when it is full of things, not objects, and how the dwelling fits into this world made up of these things.
Put differently, dwelling is when something’s thingness takes precedence before its objecthood because, as we said, dwelling is precisely this freeing. A dwelling is only a concatenation of dwelling itself, therefore, which is a setting free, a making free, an allowing of what surrounds me to come before me unburdened by how it logically is supposed to fit into my business. Dwelling is more free than the space in which I carry out my business. In fact, it fits into a whole world that is more properly itself than the space of my business, the space of technical and scientific objecthood. In this non-technical world, the dwelling is on top of the earth, before this earth is considered a set of resources, a set of minerals. It is also under the sky, before it is considered the space of physics. It is on top and below these, in this world, which also remains in front of gods and the holiness that pervades the phenomenality of things as such. And in this world are mortals, who is capable of being properly himself in his being-towards-death, in his dying qua dying, as we explained in Being and Time.
Each of these obscure terms—earth, sky, mortals, gods—all these are essentially what we see around us considered phenomenologically: that is, with concern for their being properly themselves, grounded or structured by their being. They are not just the things that we see but the larger “regions,” as Heidegger occasionally will call it, in which more specific things can appear. They are like the ur-phenomena, in which the things appear. Something coming out of the sky will appear to us as a sort of sky-phenomena: for Heidegger the phenomena of the sky include the length of the day and time, basically time-management. Something from the earth appears to us as an earth-phenomenon: it is that out of which we create things and make things. The gods or divinities are the realm in which we try and relate to both earth- and sky-phenomena as such: something from this region appears to us as our expectation about a thing. The sphere of mortals or men is where we live out our lives, where the phenomena like the continuity of one’s self-history appears. This continuity is ensured by death—but that is an issue I can’t get into here because it takes too much time: one has to summarize a lot of Being and Time, in which it is first fleshed out. Regardless, you see what is going on. What is being explained here by looking at the regions in which phenomena appear is that the coherence of the world, which is the world being properly itself as a world, and which he in a vatic manner describes as its oneness—this coherence is only possible if man dwells in it, in the sense of dwelling that this essay is pursuing. For dwelling will fit together these ur-phenomena or regions. That means that man takes up the earth, the sky, the holiness of the world as well as his own mortality, and makes them actively fit together, gain the structuredness that is proper to them as phenomena, through his own dwelling. The world could indeed take up space without man, but only man can give it the significance of a phenomenon: that is, an appearance that is structured and meaningful insofar as it is.
Each of these four aspects or regions of the world fits together, to borrow a metaphor we used in Basic Concepts. But this fitting together, this oneness of the four, can only take place if there is dwelling, and if man, the mortal, is the one who does this. How is this possible? Well, it is possible in that the fitting-together is precisely what is allowed by a sort of setting-free of the things within these regions. If you set something free, it is set free so that it can find its proper place, so that it can find where it can most be itself, so that it can fit together with its most proper situation. This, we know, is precisely what dwelling does: it sets a thing free.
So we now understand the ramifications of this setting-free of the thing. To set a thing free, to keep its freedom, is to allow it and other things to find their proper situation. This situation is one that occurs within one aspect of the fourfold. And insofar as it is free, it allows the fourfold to fit together, to become one or have a oneness—a oneness that simply is the world being properly the world. But we also understand how dwelling is cultivation, as building is. For to allow all these regions, all these fourfold, to fit together, is to care for the whole world through the setting free of the things. Indeed, dwelling might deal immediately with things, with the setting free of things—but this setting free is a way to ultimately cultivate the world as such, to preserve and save and nurture the world as its proper self. And insofar as this is so, we understand how Dwelling is building: “dwelling, insofar as it keeps or secures the fourfold in things”—that is, sees things as part of the fourfold, of the world itself—“insofar as it keeps or secures the fourfold in things, is, as this keeping, a building...”