Typewriter notes

I thought a typewriter would help me write, in that it would slow down my composition and make me think more about the irreversibility of my sentences (the ceaseless push onward, that can't really be erased like handwriting). Currently though the device is serving a different purpose: it has turned into a way for me to take notes.

I hate starting up a computer when I have something to write down. And I like seeing the words, fiddling with them like blocks. So prior to this I would simply use scraps of paper, or small notebooks. This blog I would reserve for lengthier thoughts, ones that had a series of ramifications or relationships to other thoughts--or, as was more often the case, simply needed to be spun out a little in order for them to really become clear. This back and forth has changed a bit since I got a big stack of 3x5 cards over the summer. The little thoughts were now all in one place, at least, stacked up. And so I could work a little more on them there than perhaps I was used to doing--if I ran off a card, I could just take the next one in the pile. Or I could jot something down quicker and know where it would end up. There didn't need to be any hunting down of napkins stuck in between editions of Coleridge or Pope, say, in order for them to be transcribed and collected together in an electronic file.

I knew, however, that if I kept this up, I'd end up in the crazy situation of Niklas Luhmann, who numbered and filed away all his little cards, such that his workspace basically became his externalized brain (Grant and Sand showed me this a while ago).

Now, I simply type whatever thoughts I have out on the typewriter, separating them with a slash mark. So the whole thing becomes a transcription, basically, of a day or two of thinking. Whenever a thought comes into my head, I just walk over to the typewriter and smack it a bit and walk away happy that the fragment is down there, in some basic form. This can become a bit more elaborate, however, than anything I normally scribble on a piece of paper, since the writing puts you in a rhythm and draws the thoughts out of you more than with a pen. Maybe the computer works this way for some people (perhaps older people, who have experienced the world before word processing), but not for me: the act of composition basically is caught up with your thoughts, so that you spend a lot more of your time rearranging things than working off of the device--the latter being for me what is ultimately essential. I don't want the technology to disappear: I like it when its relationship to me gets foregrounded a bit more. The typewriter in that moment provides a sort of gearing down, as it were, so that I have to work a bit more against the machine, exert a little more pressure upon it, in order for more to come out.

Regardless, I am happy to have discovered my ideal way to take notes--capitalizing on that easy slippage of the typewriter into stenography. While many of my friends have found much more sophisticated ways of computerizing their note-taking process, and while I remain still a little envious of them, this seems to me so much more... how to put it? Free, breezy, part of my everyday living. Turning on the computer means entering a space that seems both too ideal and too close to consciousness. With typewriter notes, I get to play with the letters and the words in a more tangible space, a more bodily space.

As more devices take over that bodily space, this difference becomes nil, of course. According to Grant, though (who was tweeting), Lev Manovich asked an amazing question at the recent Digital Arts and Culture conference about why ubiquitous computing has not happened yet--only mobile computers like the iPhone attached to the body. It is perhaps because the gap to be cleared is asymptotic, or can't be crossed merely by a simple notion of the "bodily," however reversible we might make the latter (Merleau-Ponty). There seems to be a difference between the bodily experience involved with the foregrounded device that works against me and the body covered with devices, however much they too try to resist us in new ways. Perhaps here is some sort of contradiction that remains to be negated...

Star Trek

So I finally saw the new Star Trek last night. For various reasons I just couldn't make it to the theater over the summer--though one of those reasons was that when I could, my ambivalence over the whole thing kept me from going. You see, I'm a bit of a devotee (i.e. fan!). TNG has always been my favorite series, since I prefer its more hard-sciencey sort of focus and the more thorough concentration on the issues of managing the flying space city that the Enterprise has become (a focus that we see throughout Galactica, for instance). It's space opera become a problem--I like that. Plus it makes social issues come into focus on a wider scale, and the encounter with "new life and new civilizations" much more representable (instead of just sticking in an alien here and there, as in Star Wars or, actually, in this new movie, you get a focus more on cultures, collectives). Of course, this was also possible because of the money pumped into its special effects, but the storytelling was also usually pitched at that level. Like any good science fiction program on TV, it tended to wobble away from that if a better, weirder, more thought-provoking situation came up and could be explored--in a way not unlike many of the original series episodes, which occasionally seem more like The Twilight Zone's great one-off thought-experiments. So while I liked TNG, the original series, was still great, since it had solid stories, solid characters, and was often true in spirit to the inventive, pulpy, and indeed literary mode American SF, even if it could only build its worlds on a smaller scale (the recent reissue of the original series, with its suped-up special effects [and wonderfully remastered sound] tries to undo this and wonderfully fails, though it allows us to focus away from what is most obtrusive and lends to parody--in a way that makes one realize, as we did in a negative way watching the horrible new Star Wars movies, that the stories are what produce the need for representation of this future reality).

So I had Trekkie issues. But it wasn't so much that I thought the old characters should be forbidden to be taken up again, or indeed the whole canon itself forbidden to be messed with, as much as I was worried about the remake becoming only what it indeed turned out to be: an action movie. Now, TOS was, let's be honest, not always the more cerebral political meditation that one found in TNG (best exemplified in the unbelievable episodes on torture) or Deep Space 9 (which, by the way, is underrated). And TNG (especially in the movies) certainly had its share of pure action. But maybe it'd be good to distinguish between action and adventure, and say that in the original series, regardless of all its fights, it remained closer to the latter. It never made that leap towards the pure action film without some serious loss: it never turned into, however thin the plot was, that typical action-movie form where story becomes merely an excuse tying together pure spectacle, choreography, or violence (which is why the fight scenes--the best being, of course, with the Gorn--are often laughable for their length more than their low quality).

This has huge ramifications, I think, when it comes to the representation of space itself, as we'll see in a moment, but adventure turning into action was what I feared and what the movie actually did. Maybe another turn of the screw is appropriate, though: what we found in the new movie was not action purely, but adventure, become action, now trying to become adventure again. So it's not a pure opposition, but something like the the action movie trying to regain its roots (something that happens--with typical nostalgia for WWII times--in Indiana Jones, say).

It's sad, though, to see that this effort has so limited the resources with which such a revival could be accomplished to the postmodern high formalism J.J. Abrams lives and breathes (there's certainly another sort of postmodern content--anxiety about recursiveness and hallucination as such, which we find in the new excellent remake of The Prisoner--a content that, to defend it, is much more rich... but this is always less appealing to Abrams, unless it is the effect of a formal problem). For it's this formalism that we find, I think, in the old characters themselves: not so much a pleasure in their new content as some sense that their slots have been filled--or the fetishization of the fact that they can be filled at all and their story can be different. I'll get to Spock in a second (perhaps the only exception to this--but even then this is only accomplished through the most bare formal pressures), but you see that indeed this logic is so impoverished it actually has to take the most expansive form of the clunky plot itself, with its time travel and alternate universe production. Never mind the fact that it tries to push the burden of its clunkiness on the ties of the series to science in the first place, in the overcomplicated explanation future Spock (Nimoy) gives to Kirk in an ice cave--which I think just amounts to an insult, playing off notions that the series, because it just was SF in general, was therefore overcomplex and intellectual (early in the movie, Kirk's use of the word "syntax" is depressingly used as a code for deep learning). Never mind that: what's disturbing is that this also makes the whole movie into an allegory for the marketing-like dilemma the re-creators faced in the first place (and which some of them obviously didn't sweat about so much that it would prevent them from shoving a Nokia phone into the beginning): can we make anything different than the original, with these poor characters and this overburdened series, when the original is actually still doing so well? The dilemma becomes one of rebranding when it's not even necessary. Now, it's not that I don't like anything different done with the characters--though that's precisely the insulting sort of false-problem the movie produces for Trekkies and which it would love them to fume over (while they document each new technical change made to their beloved universe) while it rolls in the cash (Why don't you want anything different done? You were supposed to love these characters! You just don't want them shared with anyone other than yourselves!--suchlike phrases/overtones even became a way to market the film... and I think the anger of Trekkies is usually about this having nothing to say back to this more than anything). No, that's not my problem. It's that, when this inversion is transferred to the level of the plot itself, the movie ends up evacuating itself of anything different it really could have done, difference now simply having become newness and vice versa (a problem Jameson rightly sees as central to postmodernism). This is what makes me happy they are doing another movie, where the question of difference can actually be pursued in terms of a less-formal and auto-referential plot (getting its motivation not even from the bad guy, whose superfluity is so extreme that I think he becomes relevant again, in that he gets stuck in there precisely to draw our focus away from the real center--the time-travel dilemma--and its turning in place). Though this is exactly the minimal affirmation, minimal hope, such an empty formal work desires to produce.

Form become content, then, our attention is shifted back to the cinematic medium itself--which indeed has been filled with all sorts of thickness that the plot and the characters (again excepting Spock--but actually I think he's just a form too, as we'll see at the end) are lacking. Here, indeed, is something genuinely fascinating and which strikes out in a genuinely new direction. The profusion of light in the movie, that complete inversion of noir which is so striking when it comes to the bridge of the Enterprise, when projected onto space turns it into another animal altogether. While on the Enterprise, indeed, it remains a great homage to the smallness of the original show: light comes in to delete the space of all those old props, and represent the expansiveness of the original vision which it couldn't actually pull off with its gray cardboard-like consoles and bleep-bloop blinking computer buttons (which again, I think, represents another moment where SF ties to technology get seen as over-intellectual, doomed to become obsolete [not in function but in representation, in look, not feel--but that's a difference symptomatically passed over here], and therefore able to be eliminated altogether--along with their ties to futurity itself and its even more futuristic afterlife, which, let us remember, is again what the whole "plot" is meant to accomplish!). Where there is finally some representation of this old hulking ship, the great tubes, canisters, vats code it wonderfully (and comically) as steampunk--what happens when SF meets pastness itself. This is welcome, but besides the tubes (which crisscross in a weirdly unsmooth fashion that jars a bit with the rest of the movie sleek surfaces--though because these surfaces are ultimately thick and fleshy, as I'll show in a moment) this like the light takes a form subtracted from the visual by its addition, which is that of the wonderful static, crackling sound of transportation (the single best thing in the film, I thought) and the pop of warp speed. All this produces an unbelievable non-nostalgia for 60s-ness (or even late-50s-ness): in the space of the 60s (which, reaching its climax in in Kubrick was full of light--and remember 2001 was hugely ripped off by the first Star Trek movie), it gives us some other feel (non-Kubricky), which is welcome because makes us think hard about what it could be at the same time as it allows us to understand the 60s-feel as such differently, perhaps more thoroughly. Since the association of Star Trek with this old technological code is what the film is perhaps most intent on preventing (another purely negative goal--accomplished by so much being left out and only the crudest associations with primitive elemental forces [water, metal, electricity] put back in), or because this non-nostalgia is so pervasive, the movie doesn't push far in the latter direction.

But back to space, where the payoffs, I said, were the greatest. Space in the movie becomes thick, fleshy, multilayered: the Enterprise itself must keep floating through debris, being shrouded in the light of the warp speed (like on the poster), or emerging out of the bath of Titan's atmosphere (which is dwelt upon almost too long, so that we even feel something like the touch of space, its caress, and everything becomes vaguely sexual). No longer is space a void, an emptiness, a vast beyond: rather it envelops us. We are all Star Children, but precisely because space isn't black anymore: it's yellow, green, blue, anything but that stark black or the hardly different purple--which, represented in the new film, takes on associations with bruises before it seems like any cloud of space-dust. The most striking shot of the film brings this home (you can find some of it here): the Enterprise blasting itself out of the black hole by dropping the warp core (old trick, I think used once in TNG), being chased for a moment by an expanding cell membrane made of blue light which comes to push it on and or absorb it... this shows us the camera has become a microscope and we have completely passed into the realm of biology, of Innerspace, rather than the physics space of old. Space is body in this film, embodied, and while it'd be relevant here to bring up Fredric Jameson's discussion of the body as the real horizon of postmodern thought, I'll do that more in detail at a later time. Needless to say this applies here: we wonder at our bodies in this movie and their disintegration, not at space in any classic sense, and while this might represent something of a progression, something that makes space something closer to the more pliable realm SF has always seen it as (and the physical universe in general, nature itself), because it is a device for producing that reinvestment of action with adventure (and not the other way around) it seems to me a bit regressive. I'll be more specific: physics-space causes wonder, while the biology space of this movie is still sheer spectacle, since space is evacuated of its limitlessness, or made (however wide the shot) only so big, while none of the problems of this swath of light's management (what makes it alien, hard to deal with) emerge (we find in it only sheer enjoyment, or sheer terror). Moreover, given this body, it isn't filled with anything, anything like people, ships, space stations and devices or what have you, despite the appearance of one in the beginning. This space isn't the space of technology and people, of possible civilization, but something like weak nature, which peoples you more than you people it. Again, maybe that's an advance: it's certainly an aesthetic advance, mirrored more on the most unbelievable pictures we get from the Hubble or the orbiters of Mars, and makes possible a new representation of futurity as full of wild being, as it once was called by Merleau-Ponty, full of light and warmth, half-glimpses of stars and worlds (which could be interesting if it were pushed back into technology: we would get less of an on-board experience of journeying--and we don't really get this 19th century naval experience here, which is so prevalent in TNG--and the man-made would flit by with a less visible, though light-filled, tactile pressure and pull than the current visual explosiveness, tending towards the anarchy of Transformers or the obsessively over-detailed Star Wars, that we sometimes still see here and which still relies on simple equivalence between personal perception and the third person objective camera). But, put to the ends of this movie, it all tends to merely mirror our act of gazing at our (nonalien) bodies more than it does any sort of encounter with nature itself (which is why at the end, all the rest of the universe can just be gone through in a series--star system after star system impeccably modeled and chaotic rolling by merely with the credits), and make humanity less of a blip in the cosmos as the natural inhabitant of the universe (space merely as atmosphere)--taking it over without thinking (it's interesting how quickly Starfleet itself is coded as a military organization--like the Air Force, to keep going with the space-to-atmosphere reduction--more than an interstellar forum for diplomacy with an academic institution as its training academy: and while Kirk's final exam has always been seen as a sort of daring mixed with smartness, here the movie tries to code it as the lower class breaking a big bureaucratic intellectual institution through--not even cockiness, but pure assholery [the sign that it'd rather not represent lower class intellect at all, or see it merely as the frat-boy behavior it isn't]).

It's interesting on this point that the movie is so casual with things like planets and civilizations themselves, despite the use of Saturn: no fundamental break is seen between humanity on Earth and humanity in space, between the stars. And this brings me, finally, to Spock and black holes themselves--the real enemy of the movie. These puncture space and take away representation (though they also weirdly--because the plot needs to begin--seem to allow passage from the alternate Trek universe... such clunkily inconsistent physics doesn't even pose a problem for the movie but seems all the more to tie things together without really doing so--the typical formal postmodernist move), and they only work if space has become so very thick and bodily such that we can see this as threatening, sad, or profound. So back on the level of content (that is, form), within the plot, this is precisely what gives Spock himself something new, something only somewhat interesting: trauma. While this makes Spock into a different character altogether, this seems to me to be the most hackneyed way of doing so, since the non-representation of the death of of six billion people and their entire civilization in all its rich complexity seems more a formal requirement of the film--given its pure aim to be different--than anything really thought-provoking for either the character or us. Or maybe it provokes some thought, but this thought is about representation itself rather than any of the more substantial things (legacy, memory, social structure, the alien--remember, Vulcan was the first alien contact humans had, according to the canon) that might appear in further movies (and again, this minimal affirmation is all that the movie is after here). Here, they seek to give new meaning to the old Vulcan dilemma itself, as if it weren't rich enough (with all its racial overtones) beforehand, and this makes such a complex exploration of what this all means take the mere form of yet another prelude to action (big statues, once signifying something, are more interesting because they come crashing down on a poor figure as Spock rescues the Vulcan High Council).

In the end, if you think that this overcomplication does indeed invest the movie with some less formal content, you might be right. It certainly ends up, through all these maneuvers used to extricate itself without extricating itself from the canon and series, as perhaps a more complex meditation on revisiting older aspects of franchises than some of the more recent comic book restart movie-epics. But then again, it also doesn't, in some sense, since this is again all tied up much too neatly: one has to ask whether one wants this affirmation to be so minimally and formally represented--and there only by absence--rather than played out in a richer plot integrating the achievements at the level of the medium itself. And this not in a future film, but in the future of this present one.

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.

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...”

Why phenomenology? (part 1)

I have been trying to think of my fond relationship with phenomenology. What, over the years, has brought me so close to it? Or, what uses--to put it a more practical way--have I been able to make out of it? And where do I stand with relationship to its particular problems? And which practitioner of phenomenology do I find most productive for me?
I first came to phenomenology through work on philosophy of mind--the mind body-problem specifically. What intrigued me most here, though, was more the misfires of the mind when it has input from the body than the more traditional (and difficult) problem of establishing the fact of this input. Perception occurred for me pretty unproblematically. Thus the qualia problem never really interested me (though you might expect that it would). I felt it was just a problem about how we talk about what is represented to us: it was still too connected with problems of establishing that perception occured. I still think that what interests people about qualia is not the qualia themselves, but what it does to a theory of mind. However, what intrigued me at the time was precisely this--what was perceived, the actual forms perceptions themselves took. So the way into this was looking at the stuff we could perceive that was not so cleanly perceived. Definite perceptions, definite input from the body to the mind, but not so definite in terms of its content--not because it remains irreducible to a theory of perception (in positive terms, completely full of qualitative content) but because the content itself is one of discrepancy between the perception and how perception usually works.
So you can see an interest in the anticipatory powers of the bodily schema coming into play--the eventual form that this interest would take. This I picked up in full force with the help of one of my professors, Arthur Melnick, who pursues his Kantian problems with the aid of phenomenology--especially Merleau-Ponty, whose conception of phenomenology remains closest to me, even now, and whose work (I should just note this) colors pretty much everything I will say on the subject here, even when (as I will) I go and look at Husserl. But what is important is that here, in the transit between this initial interest and the eventual fully-fledged phenomenological form of my study, was the first use of phenomenology that I really discerned: it is a sort of thing that can fill out what a language focused roughly on the general form of perception (whether this articulates itself in terms of mind-body input, or, as was the case for Melnick, in terms of Kantian intuition) with more specific concerns about what happens when this general schema can't account for something. To put it a better way, phenomenology picks up this moment in the failure of a general account of mental life not as a "problem," as the phil-mind people take it up, but as the starting point of its analysis. More simply put, failures in perception are precisely indicators as to the fullness of experience itself for phenomenology, because phenomenology is focused on the content of experiences not as just a general stuffing for form, but as distinct instances that have the power to make the usual working of perception take a singular detour. The most extreme way of putting this (and I do so by using all these terms less technically) would be to say that, to a degree, phenomenology allows for experiential content to make the form of its own perception. Or, in even more plain and less burdened language: phenomenology allows for something in experience to cohere such that it generates thereby the terms of its own coherence. (This is largely because what I am describing here is simply the reduction: to take up, theoretically, a "failure" is the beginning of a suspension of the natural attitude.)
However I explain this, what's clear is that this quality makes phenomenology fall into places where more formal theories of perception just don't have anything to say--or, quite frankly, don't want to say anything. Though its aims are much more lofty (and problematic, as its goal is nothing less than the complete reappropriation of this sphere to philosophy), this often makes it work a bit a posteriori, almost a bit empirically, without being beholden to the oppositions these two terms usually enter into. There is a story that someone came up to Sartre who was eating something like an ice cream, and told him with phenomenology he could describe the ice cream--this is what got him exited about it. For me it was very similar, though without the more militant desire to oppose this sort of everyday reality to the high philosophies. If one goes too far with this way of looking at it, one easily makes the mistake (and it is often made by those who don't know phenomenology but want to criticize it) of thinking that phenomenology is a going back to the self-evident, the common sense, the ordinary, when (see Husserl, Ideas I §32) what is at stake is the making-scientific or theoretical of the assumption of self-evidence, an estrangement that brings something like the eating of the ice cream into the theoretical. So, without this militant edge, for me, what is important is the more basic fact that phenomenology can begin to rigorously investigate as completely normal what other theories consider aberrant.
As I said, I took up interest in the body, and this was mostly because that is where a lot of these "aberrations" in perceived or experienced content took place: the double-touch, tricks of perspective due to one's bodily stance, afterimages and the structure of the eye etc. etc. But as you can see, the interest began to take the form of wondering what was special about the phenomenon that it could fall into this particular place all the time--as I said, what was special to me was the forming power of the phenomenological content, or its sort of self-generating coherence, even if it is an aberrant perception. I'll pick this up next time as it took the form of a meditation on finitude, helped by Heidegger (then on to non-phenomena, like writing). This will lead us to another use of phenomenology, one that will emerge from what I am talking about here, which is essentially what Husserl calls "immanence," and moving towards the being of the phenomenon itself--the fact that (and this is really what "immanence" is about for Husserl) its own limit is its condition for emergence.

"I don't believe that there is any perception"

The following--from a discussion at Johns Hopkins during the great structuralism conference in 1966 (!) that took place right after Derrida delivered his "Structure, Sign, and Play" lecture--might help out some of my phenomenologist friends trying to wrap their heads around Derrida. Doubrovsky's great question at least allows you to approach the more structuralist and semiological mode of that essay's articulation:

SERGE DOUBROVSKY: You always speak of a non-center. How can you, within your own perspective, explain or at least understand what a perception is? For a perception is precisely the manner in which the world appears centered to me. And language you represent as flat or level. Now language is something else again. It is, as Merleau-Ponty said, a corporeal intentionality. And starting from this utilization of language, in as much as there is an intention of language, I inevitably find a center again. For it is not "one" who speaks, but "I." And even if you reduce the I, you are obliged to come across once again the concept of intentionality, which I believe is at the base of a whole thought, which, moreover, you do not deny. Therefore I ask how you reconcile it with your present attempts?

DERRIDA: First of all, I didn't say that there was no center, that we could get along without the center. I believe that the center is a function, not a being--a reality, but a function. And this function is absolutely indispensable. The subject is absolutely indispensable. I don't destroy the subject; I situate it. That is to say, I believe that at a certain level both of experience and of philosophical and scientific discourse one cannot get along without the notion of subject. It is a question of knowing where it comes from and how it functions. Therefore I keep the concept of center, which I explained was indispensable, as well as that of subject, and the whole system of concepts to which you have referred.
Since you mentioned intentionality, I simply try to see those who are founding the movement of intentionality--which cannot be conceived in the term intentionality. As to perception, I should say that once I recognized it as a necessary conservation. I was extremely conservative. Now I don't know what perception and I don't believe that anything like perception exists. Perception is precisely a concept, a concept of an intuition or of a given originating from the thing itself, present itself in its meaning, independently from language, from the system of reference. And I believe that perception is interdependent with the concept of origin and of center and consequently whatever strikes at the metaphysics of which I have spoken strikes also at the very concept of perception. I don't believe that there is any perception.
-From The Structuralist Controversy, Discussion of "Structure, Sign, and Play," 271-2

Translating Husserl into the language of structuralism and specifically semiology was primarily the work of Merleau-Ponty (good friend of Lévi-Strauss), and if one reads certain remarks of his from the late 50's you can get a good sense of what that work of translation entails--you can piece together the puzzle that semiology poses to the phenomenologist of the non-French tradition, and begin to read, because all of a sudden you are launched into the types of conversations that were held after his classes there. Suddenly, this more formalized remark of Derrida's--no less extreme in its conclusions--from 1959 might also help, because one understands that it basically says the same thing in a less semiological language:

The question of the possibility of the transcendental reduction cannot expect an answer. It is the question of the possibility of the question, opening itself, the gap, on whose basis the transcendental I, which Husserl was tempted to call "eternal" (which in his thought, in any event, means neither infinite nor ahistorical, quite the contrary) is called upon to ask itself about everything, and particularly about the possibility of the unformed and naked factuality of the nonmeaning, in the case at hand, for example, of its own death.
-"'Genesis and Structure' in Husserl's Phenomenology," in Writing and Difference, 167-8

All this is evidence of the benefits of a historically minded approach to philosophy, which doesn't so much focus on the appropriations and misappropriations of particular philosophers (Husserl or Heidegger), but tries to reconstruct the discourse in which those appropriations are happening. It is also helpful in discussions of Kant, say (who is dealing with the British empiricists and materialists, like Priestley), and Descartes.

Derrida, Merleau-Ponty, depth, and the body, concluded

I ended my last post by saying that Merleau-Ponty, in his working notes, outlines two notions of the invisible in order to clarify its relationship to the visible. The invisible, which we tried phenomenologically to specify as that sort of reversibility of the seeing-seen relationship, or touching-touched relationship (when I touch my hand touching something, as Husserl said, suddenly I feel the hand that is touching something reverse itself into a hand that is being touched), this invisible reversibility needs to subtend the visible as what makes it possible. It needs to do this in such a way that the invisible itself can only remain purely this reversal. But if this is so, how can it have some relationship to the visible at all? With these questions in mind, I propose recalling the two notions of the invisible he outlines, before ending this paper (which does not totally come to a real conclusion):

But instead of quoting them directly, let us use Derrida’s summary of them, which takes place as he specifies what we now understand to be that crucial aspect of drawing he calls the aperspective of the graphic act—the fact that the point where the line is put down cannot be seen. This aperspective is crucial to us now because we understand that, due to the failure of vision in front of the drawn line via the withdrawal of the trait and its rhetoric or re-inscription—a failure we know Merleau-Ponty resists by bringing the line under the sway of painterly depth—we ourselves become the draftsman in front of the drawing. In other words, we always have to fall back upon the aperspective of the graphic act, because we always have to redraw the line in our trying to see the line. In failing to see the line and re-inscribing it, however, we also inhabit the blindness that this aperspective constitutes (thus, again, every drawing is a self-portrait of the blind), and in two ways that reflect these two ways the aperspective is inhabited (that is, in ways that mirror those of the withdrawal of the trait and its rhetoric). These two blindnesses within the aperspective of the graphic act are precisely visible invisibility and the absolutely invisible.
Indeed, the point under the pencil in which the inscription of the inscribable takes place “escapes the field of vision” for two reasons: “not only because it is not yet visible, but because it does not belong to the realm of the spectacle, of spectacular objectivity” (MB, 45). In other words, it is either merely hidden from view (potentially visible, “visible invisible”), as a point that will be drawn once the pencil moves past where it has contacted the paper; or it is radically different than the visible, completely of another order than the visible, never to become visible precisely because it is the point that gets carried along with the point of the pencil when it puts down the line (its invisibility would therefore be absolute). Or, as Derrida puts it, the invisibility can be interpreted

either as the eve or the memory of the day, that is as a reserve of visibility (the draftsman does not presently see but he has seen and will see again: the aperspective as the anticipating perspective or the anamnesic retrospective), or else as radically and definitively foreign to the phenomenality of the day. This heterogeneity of the invisible to the visible can haunt the visible as its very possibility (MB, 45).

This last point is the most crucial for Derrida, and reveals why he only quotes Merleau-Ponty while trying to specify absolute invisibility. For we can now ask: precisely what invisibility constitutes the reversibility that supports the flesh, the intertwining of vision and the visible? While he specified both types, Merleau-Ponty never could concretely state on which model the invisible is itself constituted. Thus, he was not able to think, like Derrida, that it might be precisely the difference or heterogeneity between them as that ideal that would sustain or subtend the flesh. Derrida thus only takes Merleau-Ponty’s speculations on absolute invisibility, working out visible invisibility with the help of Baudelaire, and thinking the difference between them on his own.
No doubt Merleau-Ponty could not think this heterogeneity because it has the effect of completely reversing all his thought. For if Merleau-Ponty were to call not one or the other but the difference between the two the invisibility or reversibility of the senses, he would be saying, like Derrida, that the type of invisibility that subtends the vision and the visible would have to be vision and the visible: it would have to be so indeterminable in not being either one of these two that it would be indistinguishable from vision itself; being identical with the possibility, within visibility, of invisibility. Suddenly what Merleau-Ponty is trying to specify as the invisible has become precisely vision and the visible itself, while, for Derrida, what he called vision and the visible is now merely that withdrawing and retracing of the line—mere representation, flat upon the paper. Where has the body, the visible and vision—the whole presence of the flesh to itself—where has this all this gone?
We can only suggest the ways that this question already returns us to the relation of sight and secrecy. For Derrida, depth is completely gone—or rather, it is only surface: if it is achieved, it is through the invisibility that is vision, the heterogeneity between both modes of invisibility that itself constitutes seeing. What this means is that depth is always only a possibility achieved in a surface: as such, there is no flesh, no continuity between vision and the visible that could be determined without being blind to this very continuity. If the body is still there in the sense that Merleau-Ponty specifies it, it could not be seen or seen out of in the sense that he specifies it, since it would precisely only appear when the vision and the visible was indistinguishable from invisibility. This is all to say that where Merleau-Ponty holds out the possibility that vision can see itself seeing, Derrida says that this possibility is only possible on the condition that, when it was achieved, we would be blind.
The body and secrecy, therefore: both seem incompossible in Derrida, but we see that there is a possibility that this incompossibility or non-coincidence, in preserving itself, would keep the blindness (to which it is blind) to itself. This—we can only sketch this here—might be secrecy, and it thus could only be achieved by a body, a body with the reverse structure of Merleau-Ponty—that is, a body that did not see itself seeing but was precisely blind to the fact that it was a body.

This body—this is what I was hastening towards as the paper became too long already!—would of course have to be a technical body, a body of surfaces and not of depths. We could look, for an example of precisely this type of depth in a surface, not to either paintings or drawings, but to the photograph—which in Memoirs of the Blind seems to accommodate itself to the model of drawing Derrida there outlines. The photo would then perhaps preserve, by a technical supplement, the body qua Derridian body—and our bodies would already in a sense be photos, in a sense. This means that the act of responsibility could be achieved not through something like Merleau-Ponty’s painting, but in an act that accommodated photography, seen as the technical supplement of natural experience (Merleau-Ponty in “Eye and Mind” has much to say against photography because it eliminates flesh). The photo, like the drawing, would be that in which we see in secret—and our photographic body would therefore in a sense always be responsible (but—as The Gift of Death says, also never responsible enough). This is the sense in which the sacrifices “are not even invisible:” our vision is this invisibility that we need to dedicate to secrecy more and more… The End

Reading Heidegger's language

A few days ago I got an email from someone reading the blog here. It asked some general questions about reading Heidegger's "The Thing," saying the following:

I am a little handicapped with Heidegger (I think) because I do not speak German. "The Thing" is probably the easiest Heidegger essay to parody, especially since one spends so much time reading about the thingliness of the thing and the thing's thingness. So - here's what I am wondering. What are the connotations and the denotations to the words Heidegger uses in this essay in German? I am assuming that Heidegger is using "Sache" for "thing" as this is the most direct translation. But I wonder if Heidegger is using other words for "thing" in this essay that I don't know of because of my language barrier. FYI - I am reading the Albert Hofstadter translation in Poetry, Language, Thought.

Now, this I think is a series of great questions. Moreover the way they are asked outlines a particular orientation towards Heidegger that many people, I think, have (I certainly did): it is the orientation that prescribes really wondering what is going on with the words Heidegger is using and why they are so funny, in a way--one could generally say the "style" (but of course this is not how Heidegger would exactly put it), or perhaps the "approach" of Heidegger. Why is it so hard to make sense of? And--and here is the crucial question--does going back to the particular valences of the words he is using help? My answer was no: one really has to try and see the phenomenon Heidegger is getting at before one tries to look at the twists and turns of the language, and especially before one looks at connotations. This risks making a totally denotative Heidegger (I'd say Dreyfus is a bit too far in this direction, at least in his thinking and teaching Heidegger--not so much in his writing), but I would say that this is more profitable than a connotative Heidegger at the stage when you are getting to be familiar with him (reading texts for the first or second time), because the phenomenon is brought to light (especially in its structure) that way. Now, this does not mean the phenomenon is separable--by any means--from the words and their connotations: what usually happens is that there is a path of thought being pushed through by each sentence and word, and one has to respond by altering the phenomenon accordingly to bring it further and further to light.
The example of the jug in "The Thing" is a good one. Think of the jug first. Then bring it out bit by bit following the path of the words and their interrelation. Now, this does not mean "picture" a jug, and alter the picture. It means intending towards it, feeling yourself as you would feel about the jug if you were attending to it, that is, attuning oneself to the attending to the jug, and then look at the words and how they reflect this attending and bring out or separate the intention from it. "Reflect," here, of course, is the key word here: it is what makes this an approach focused more on denotation. One has to, in a sense, reduce Heidegger's language to reflection or mere representation of the phenomenon. That is, one has to reduce Heidegger's language to a discourse about the phenomenon. He warns against this himself in What is Called Thinking? where thinking itself is the phenomenon:

The question "What is called thinking?" can never be answered by proposing a definition of the concept thinking, and then diligently explaining what is contained in that definition. In what follows, we shall not think about what thinking is. We remain outside that mere reflection which makes thinking its object. Great thinkers, first Kant and and then Hegel, have understood the fruitlessness of such reflection. That is why they had to attempt to reflect their way out of such reflection.
-What is Called Thinking?, 21

I am recommending this against Heidegger, then. But I am also convinced that one can then correct this reduction of the language precisely by resubmerging it back into the path of thinking that the phenomenology (the alteration of the phenomenon in its exposition, from what is formally indicated to what is essential) demands. This, at least, is a good way to begin to approach Heidegger, I think, even though it risks setting up a dialectic of sorts. But I think it stays true to what Heidegger has to say about the path of thought:

When thinking attempts to go after a matter that has claimed it, it may happen that on the way it undergoes a wandering. It is advisable, therefore, in what follows to mind the path of thought rather than its content. To dwell properly upon the content would simply block the going-forward of the talk.
-"The Principle of Identity," in Identity and Difference, 23, translation heavily modified

In short, this means thinking on the "matter" (Sache) that gives thought. One can see that looking for connotations here doesn't and wouldn't add anything unless this is done beforehand. This was what I was trying to get at in my (impromptu) response, below: what "Sache" means and why it is what, in the thing, requires or asks for thinking. Here is what Heidegger has to say about this Sache in "The Onto-theo-logical Constitution of Metaphysics:"

This seminar [which this essay concluded] made an attempt to begin a conversation with Hegel. A conversation with a thinker can be concerned only with the matter of thinking. [...] The matter of thinking presses upon thinking in such a way that only thus does it bring thinking to the heart of the matter and from there to thinking itself.
-"The Onto-theo-logical Constitution of Metaphysics," (in the same volume as above), 42

The German is more interesting and more elucidating. Stambaugh, however, precisely because she thinks connotations mean too much here, does not translate the whole of it in the above passage (she thinks these connotations are untranslatable):

Dieses Seminar versuchte, ein Gespräch mit Hegel zu beginnen. Das Gespräch mit einem Denker kann nur von der Sache des Denkens handeln. "Sache" meint nach der gegebenen Bestimmung den Streitfall, das Strittige, das einzig für das Denken der Fall ist, der das Denken angeht. Der Streit aber dieses Strittigen wird keineswegs erst durch das Denken gleichsam vom Zaun gebrochen. Die sache des Denkens ist das in such Strittige eines Streites. Unser Word Streit (ahd. strit) meint vornehmlich nicht die Zwietracht sondern die Bedrängnis. Die Sache des Denkens bedrängt des Denken in der Weise, daß sie das Denken erst zu seiner Sache und von dieser her zu ihm selbst bringt.
-"Die Onto-theo-logische Verfassung der Metaphysik," 107

I'll see what I can do here to resist Stambaugh and bring it out, as it bears upon precisely what we mean by "matter:"

This seminar sought to begin a conversation with Hegel. A conversation with a thinker can be concerned only with the matter of thinking. "Matter" means according to the given determination of the point of contention--that contention that alone is, for thinking, the point that thinking tackles. The contending or contention however is not by any means only broken into by thinking, as it were, like picking a fight. The matter of thinking is the contention in a point of contention. Our word contending [Streit] (Old High German strit) means primarily not a confrontation [between two things] but a conflict. The matter of thinking makes thinking conflict in such a way that only thus does it bring thinking to the matter and from there to thinking itself.

Better translations are very possible. Bedrängnis is tough for me here and so I decided to play with the word "conflict" as both a noun and a verb (thus the "makes" in the last sentence--though that is way too causal for Heidegger): I hoped it thereby retains some of its affinity with "affliction." Regardless, the point (which I hope to be proving by example) is that if you got the phenomenon here, then the "play" on the words, their connotations, is more of the matter for the translator than the person who is thinking through and with Heidegger. And that the "Sache" itself is what is important: as this passage makes clear, it is what is at the essence of a point, what besets thinking and calls out for it (the Latin root of contention is contestare: to call out for a witness to testimony). It is that which does not make thinking stand over and against what is to be thought (another thinker's thought, for example), as if to confront it and struggle with it that way. It is that which is singular or one in any such engagement with what is to be thought: that which brings thinking to other thinking, that in which both have their being such that any confrontation between them is only possible in this one essential conflict. Insofar as language enters into this, it will be only to open up that essential conflict. That means that one doesn't really dispute with another thinker, for example, by quibbling over connotations--or at least this only happens after the essential has been touched.
In the end, it was interesting to even think again about the difference between Sache and Ding: I think if you were too immersed with Heidegger you wouldn't even think again about the fact that the two have serious affinity connotatively in German. I certainly was too immersed here--a bit too dogmatic as I say at the end. But you see that language here is precisely coming in for me when I already think I have a clear sense of the phenomenon. I guess this means that, in short, language in Heidegger should, ideally, act more as a corrective to the phenomenology than as something that communicates it. This would be true, then, for both newcomers and those to whom Heidegger is familiar. Anyway, here is the response:

To my knowledge, the word Heidegger is usually using is "das Ding" for thing, not "Sache." You're not wrong though: in German one can use either word for "thing." But for Heidegger, the reason it's not the latter is because "Sache" ususally means "the matter" or "the issue," not something more like an object, a stuff, an item, which is closer to what Ding means. Heidegger generally seperates the two because the first, in its more broad scope, is closer to what phenomenology tries to get at: "die Sachen selbst" is what Husserl says one has to go towards when looking at the phenomenon. In this sense, "Sachen" here means not what it is usually translated as ("the things themselves"), but something closer to "the matter at hand" or "for thought"--in short, and in Husserlian terms, the essence of whatever is concerning the phenomenologist, what it is as it is, that is, what it means for whatever to be what it is as such. This is different from it being a Ding--so different, in fact, that what Heidegger is doing in "The Thing" is precisely looking at das Ding so as to discern what about it makes it a Sachen for thinking, a matter for thinking or thought, that is, his type of phenomenology (different, of course, from Husserl's). In this sense, what is the Sachen here about the Ding is precisely its "thingliness," that is, what makes it, as a thing, be a thing--what makes it a thing as such. The odd words here--"thinghood" "thingliness"--are trying to refer to the thing in its being, that is, the thing in what makes it what it is, its as such, its essence (although one has to understand essence differently than with Husserl--but that's another issue somewhat).
The only other word Heidegger will be using repeatedly here for "thing" is Objekt: but this will only be translated as "object," never as "thing," precisely because, as you know, the essay is trying to get at the bottom of the difference between Ding and Objekt, and see the thing underneath, as it were, the object--the object being an ob-ject, what stands-apart-or-against us, as Heidegger says (taking ob- as the latin prefix for "standing-apart"). The point is to see the table, for example, or the jug, as something I can pick up and use, not as a set of points in Cartesian space--as I'm sure you know.
All this said, I don't think hunting around in the German is really worth your time: Hoftstader is usually pretty good at translating and Heidegger himself isn't usually trying to deceive you or play on words in a way that would repay this. What he does when he plays on words is groups together cognates, so as to show you an affinity between them: thus he'll gather together a whole bunch of words that start with über- or Ab-, or have -schick- in them (a word in itself meaning something, for Heidegger, like destination, which, if you grant Heidegger the affinities he is trying to piece together, makes up Geschehen, history, and Schicksal, fate, etc.)--but all of this is trying to work out the phenomenon, to show you certain things are part of its structure and are so because they are related to how we attend to them and other phenomena (which we might not expect the same attention to reside within). And if you haven't got a sense of this (for example, in "The Thing," the sense of a negative space inside the jug, that at once is and isn't space because it is meant only to contain, to lack, to hold in, and never to push out, like a wall would), you're going to be lost no matter how much German you look at. Frankly, my German isn't that good. You just pick up on the crucial distinctions (like that between Sache and Ding for Heidegger) by reading enough Heidegger--glancing at the German only occasionally when Heidegger draws attention to it or uses a phrase continually ("proximally and for the most part," for example, in Being and Time: the only reason I know the German is cause I got curious and was like, I wonder what the hell that phrase is after all! and looked it up.).
And, one more thing: Heidegger will always be easy to parody. Only when you got a sense of what he's getting at under his funny language does the drive to imitate him get serious--and often then, you're probably too serious about whatever Heidegger is talking about. If you want to look at the origin of that language and the necessity for its use, you really have to just ground Heidegger back in phenomenology. Otherwise he just looks ridiculous and obsessed with certain "intrinsic" aspects of German. And while this latter thing might be true, insisting on it doesn't get you anywhere when you are trying to understand him: it is said that Merleau-Ponty remarked that he didn't like the later Heidegger precisely because of this linguistic factor or obsession, and focused on his early work only for this reason. While Merleau-Ponty is on some level right (the workings of the language are a layer to phenomenality that is not exactly obvious or by any means traditional--though Husserl himself, it can be argued, insisted on similar things), it shouldn't just make you put down a bunch of the work: you have to keep yourself from doing that. I would say, though, that it is a healthy impulse, and it shouldn't be gotten rid of in principle: it's surprising how far Heidegger can take you away from what you are familiar with, even if you aren't suspecting him of anything, and you actually do feel repulsed at particular points by whatever he is saying. Keep that up: without it, you end up a little too dogmatic and you end up not understanding, I think, the operations of uncovering that Heidegger is really getting at.