An out of control reply

This post was started as a reply to Sinthome, Ibitsu and Laura's comments on my previous post, 'a punishing faith', as well as to ibitsu's latest post and the various paragraphs posted by Sinthome on his blog lately. But the more I wrote the more the ideas evolved, until I could no longer contain them or make any sense of them whatsoever. I therefore apologise in advance for the rickety nature of this post. It is intended as pure, unrestrained speculation, and if anyone is reading this at all I would appreciate any bit of advice or criticism you may have to offer in trying to make sense of these ideas.

First, I’d like to try and explain my understanding of faith in relation to failure in reply to Sinthome and Ibitsu's comments.

They make some interesting points, and I guess I'm just not sure where the "I" stops and the 'it' begins. They very experience of the 'it' in Blanchot (if we can call it an experience), appears to be not so much a complete dissolution of the "I", as some suggest, but more a blurring of the lines. As far as the matter of faith is concerned, it's become harder for me to talk about it lately, as the more I think about it the more confused I become about - as Larval Subjects says in a post - precisely "what is to be explained. I am confused as to what is to be changed. I am confused as to how change takes place. I am confused even as to the questions I am asking. I am confused about my confusion". I'm tempted to say that the idea of faith is inextricable from the notion of failure, and that both are inextricable from the process of writing, whether as "I" or as "it". But this is still too vague. I guess what I'm trying to say is that we can still say that it is "I" to whom faith and failure occur here, at least in the sense that before one's self dissolves as he 'enters' the space of literature there is a kind of promise being made which makes us sit down and write anything at all. Perhaps we can all identify with a kind of tickling sensation or an itch begging to be scratched, which causes us to act at all. I mean, surely the "it", or 'space of literature', is not something which 'occurs' in parallel with the actual act of writing, rather it comes about as a distraction which occurs as we write, when we have lost ourselves in writing, so to speak. It's only through distraction that one truly 'writes', in the Blanchotian sense. As Blanchot says, one hasn't the power to control the hand that writes, but he can use the other hand to stop himself from writing. This suggests to me that the "I" is still present to such moments in some sense, albeit in a detached and powerless capacity, the role of an observer alone. Powerless to summon the "it" yet capable of banishing it. As such, I would say faith is not a matter of choice, but more of a recurring event necessary for the moment of writing. Perhaps writing can be thought of as this continual play of forces between faith and failure. i.e. each time I set down to write something it is because of a rekindling of faith in me, faith in the possibility of being able to say something tangible through writing. This faith is not a willing of any sort, but something which overtakes us and makes us forget about the world, with its notions of practicality and ends. As I see it then, the "I" is sent on this senseless search for the source of a trace, each time thinking he can see a different part of the source, perhaps even catch a glimpse of the source itself, as if there was such a source. Inevitably, however, the writer's faith can never be strong enough to last forever, and it ends up burning itself out in another moment of despair at not having achieved anything at all. Doesn't the same go for us, who believe there's nothing at the end of the tunnel yet keep going nontheless in the belief that something can be said? Writing is thus the eternal return of the rekindling of faith and of failure. We talked about the story of Moses the other day and decided that he was the writer par excellence. Recall that Moses, after having led the Hebrews through the desert for 40 years in search of the promised land with unquestioning devotion, was eventually denied entry to Cna'an as punishment for a momentary lapse in faith. Moses begged God to allow him to enter, even as a bird or any kind of animal, but God refused. For his lack of faith Moses would never come to see the promised land.
Doesn't writing follow the same 'principles'? There's always a promised land that demand pure faith, yet no person can ever live up fully to the demand of writing. As Derrida would say, something is 'produced', something occurs, only insofar as it is attempting to attain an impossible future. This future being also 'barely possible', as it may occur as a singular event, outside all intent and calculation. Failure, however, must consist not only in never being able to achieve an end in writing, but also in not being able to stop myself from trying to reach that end time and time again. Each time it is an exhausting and ‘meaningless’ endeavour, never quite satisfying, yet strangely enticing.

I hope I've somewhat explained what I mean by the relationship between faith and failure, it still feels vague so please let me know if I haven't made sense. I have a nasty habit of saying things without really explaining what I mean by them because they make some sense in my head.

Laura, I think you’re absolutely right in what you say and it fits pretty well with what we’ve been talking about on the blog lately. There is this inevitable frustration involved in never being able to precisely reproduce (if we can even say that) any emotion or idea that seems to occur to us. As to what it is that causes this frustration and where it occurs, well, that’s the million dollar question. The brain? I would never dispute that it must play its part, but any such arguments seem to always lead us to a fatalistic determinism. One of the reasons I love Blanchot, Levinas and Derrida so much is that they’ve problematised the question of free-will beyond recognition, so that it’s no longer a question of determinism or randomness, but something which appears forever suspended between the two, or even beyond them. I can’t go into it in much detail at the moment as it would warrant a full-sized essay, but the moment of decision would always have to be, ‘essentially’, a moment of madness, outside memory and cognition. A time of time’s absence and the dissolution of the “I”, as we keep saying here, yet also beyond determinism, for it lies beyond any notions of originary movers, an original spark or big bang which is needed to set everything in motion. But I’m just making superficial descriptions now.

I’d like to try and touch on something which seems to be bothering Sinthome at the moment, and which has been on both my mind and Ibitsu’s of late. How do social networks come about? How does striation occur, and what is it that striation is attempting to subdue? The following section will deal with something for which I have neither an adequate vocabulary nor a clear idea of what it is I’m trying to express, so please excuse me if this sounds even more vague than usual. This is also highly speculative, far more so than anything we’d ever be allowed in an academic essay, as I haven’t read half as much as I should do before going on to talk about such matters. I’m still nothing more than a novice when it comes to Blanchot, Levinas and Derrida, and virtually a foetus where Deleuze is concerned.


Ibitsu asks – are we always talking about the same thing? Are we bringing back a trace of the space of literature? A trace of the impossible? I’m not sure. I’ve always been tempted to think of differance in terms of a pool of infinite potential, giving birth to finite identities. This pool, however, - and we shouldn’t even call it that – surely cannot be said to be some-thing to which all writing or language refers, for to assume so is to go back to an essentialist notion of Being, a la Heidegger. As both Derrida and Deleuze explain to us, nothing can be said to be genuinely referred to in writing, as that ‘thing’ itself never remains the same, is never present to itself, is never itself. ‘It’, this infinite potential, can only be given expression to by means of finitude. These finite words and concepts, while appearing to point at something stable or present, only do so retrospectively, after the act, deductively. Maybe some deeply ingained human tendency to make sense of things, similar to the tendency to see things in terms of causality, which Nietzsche so aptly critiques in the Genealogy of Morals. But here I seem to be suggesting a fundamental human nature, so I will move away from this point as I don’t wish to be sucked into this argument right now. Perhaps in this sense we can say that every being or identity carries with it a trace of infinity, or is even founded on an infinite nothingness. I believe Levinas says the same thing, and Thomas Wall does a much finer job at explaining this. I wonder, however, whether Derrida and Blanchot don’t make the same mistake as Heidegger by prioritising chaos over stability or striation. As Ibitsu pointed out, the question of which came first, the chicken or the egg. Sinthome points out that the laws of physics needn’t necessarily constitute an absolute logos, but a plethora of logoi that are always open to change. This reminds me of Hume’s argument that one can never be sure that the sun will rise tomorrow simply because I see it rise every other day. Such laws as deduced from empirical observation are exactly that – deductive. It’s possible, then, that I will wake up tomorrow to find that the familiar logos has changed, or been replaced entirely by a new logos where the planets no longer move in the same manner. Nevertheless, it seems that the stability of any particular logos (be it the laws of physics, human nature, language or whatever) isn’t simply shaken arbitrarily from one moment to the next. Stability appears to prevail for long periods of time, even when it’s not absolute stability and small micro-changes occur within a logos almost unnoticed. I’m also aware that any such assumption of the stability of any logos is purely deductive and that I’m in danger of contradicting myself. But if we do accept that stability is maintained, to a degree, for long periods of time even as it is has the potential to collapse, then perhaps we may suggest that it is not difference or chaos which gives birth to stability, but rather that identity is always born out of friction between the two, as Ibitsu mentioned earlier. To use a Derridian way of talking about this, we may say that there is no absolute chaos or stability, only degrees. So, whereas many of us have become accustomed to taking Nietzsche at his word when he says that all is becoming, we may want to consider a new alternative: everything is not strictly becoming, but an endless struggle between becoming and being. Perhaps any identity is thus the result of a collision between the two, being neither entirely chaotic (i.e. constant becoming) nor absolutely stable (i.e. being), but rather constantly carrying a trace of the two. I’m not sure how to talk about this struggle. Is it a struggle between two forces, two wills? This sounds too crass and even idiotic. But I’m nevertheless convinced that there is something in this idea which warrants further contemplation.

How can we think this in terms of discourse? Sinthome makes reference to the idea of resonance. If I understood Sinthome correctly, we seem to be returning to the idea that one thing is apparently being alluded to by different individuals, something in the air. This is where my thought process becomes really flimsy, so in the next few paragraphs I only wish to throw some ideas into the air without them being taken as statements of any sort.
George Orwell says in 1984 that the best books are the ones that tell us what we already know in a manner we could never express. This sentence has stuck with me ever since, and I suspect it is because it, too, told me something I already thought of in one way or another. This experience is not limited to myself; every single person I’ve spoken to can relate to the frustration of reading one of ‘your own’ ideas in somebody else’s book. What does this tell us? Surely, if everything was governed by pure chaos, then members of the same society would have an infinite amount of different incommensurable ideas that seem to come out of nowhere. Yet what makes a society? I don’t want to answer that here, it’s far too troublesome a word. Suffice to say, for now, that a prerequisite would have to be a certain shared environment or conditions within which all members of society have developed and existed for the majority of their lives. We may think of the Heideggerian idea of ‘world’, which must, to an extent, be shared by various Dasein at once. The problem with Heidegger, as far as I could understand him, is that he conceives of ‘world’ as something under which lies Being. Being always being the same ‘thing’ which gives birth to truth only through the creation of a ‘world’, thereby concealing something of itself at the same time. ‘World’, then, may be seen in this sense as a kind of trace of Being. A similar thing appears to happen in his later conception of the setting-to-work of truth in the work of art, where ‘earth’ gives birth to ‘world’. However, an interesting turn occurs in his conception of the work of art: ‘earth’ is no longer that which gives birth to truth via the medium of ‘world’. Instead, truth is the result of a ceaseless conflict between ‘earth’ and ‘world’. This is how I like to think of the idea of constant conflict between chaos and stability, Being and Becoming, so that nothing is ever either this or that, but only a degree. In that sense everything is indeed always becoming, but only insofar as it is also always stable. Now, let us recall Sinthome’s pointing out that there mustn’t necessarily be one absolute logos, but a multitude of logoi. If that the case, perhaps we can assume that each logoi may spend itself after an unfixed and unpredictable period of time, just like the idea of drops creating waves in a pool. Perhaps we can think of the instant a drop clashes with the pool as an instant of conflict between ‘earth’ and ‘world’, chaos and stability. The resulting ripples would then be a new logoi or ‘truth’ in a Heideggerian sense. Thus, what we’re envisioning here is not an essential notion of Being, but a continual and infinite rekindling of new kinds of being or different logoi. Nevertheless, I find it too simplistic to think about logoi in terms of emergence and dying out. I mean, I don’t believe clear-cut transitions are made from one paradigm or episteme to another. Rather, change must occur continuously on a micro-level. So that ripples and waves in the pool collide and merge with each other infinitely. What is it that allows the introduction of a microchange to an existing discourse in the Foucauldian sense, for example? I like Sinthome’s reference to resonance. Could we now say that, after everything we’ve said above, these ripples or waves, these temporary logoi, affect all members of a particular discourse? Meaning, a human being can only have any ideas insofar as he’s in relation to other human beings. This is not to suggest a kind of Habermasian shared basis, but a shared basis nonetheless. This shared basis would be fragile, with pockets of infinite possibility permeating it throughout. This is not too far from Deleuze, I guess. There appears to be a kind of zeitgeist, then, albeit never a tangible one. Or, more appropriately, a kind of echo of being which seems to resonate. Discourse, as such, can be thought of not as something stable or an asolute shared basis, but a kind of echo which seems to resonate. Would it be too much to assume, then, that as human beings exist and grow-up exposed to the same echo or resonance, they will tend to produce similar thoughts? Surely this isn’t too far fetched, particularly is we no longer tend to think of thought as something summoned by us, but as something which occurs to us.

Now, assuming that language never constitutes a direct representation of reality, we may say that language acts as a kind of echo or resonance. Meaning, communication is only made possible by way of hinting. Even in everyday conversations we don’t talk directly of things, because our own words do not represent anything directly or tangibly. We speak in approximation, which, upon being heard by a fellow interlocutor, appears to resonate with him. There is, therefore, a kind of “hinting” occurring continuously within any discourse or paradigm. So, when a musician comes out and does something which appears completely new, or when a philosopher expresses a new idea, it is embraced precisely because it resonates in some way. I realise that we’re still left with the problem of determinism versus randomness, but I would still like to try and think of this as something beyond randomness and determinism, or at least something which is forever suspended between the two. Not an either/or, but a degree. A constant play of forces between being and becoming. This is the only way in which a discourse may allow the introduction of new aspects – by making sure that they are never entirely foreign, never purely outside.

As a final point, I would like to pose one more question: I tend to agree with Sinthome that there is no absolute logos, only different logoi. But then I find myself asking why it is that logoi must emerge at all, and what it is that governs the emergence of logoi in the first place. Is the emergence of logoi dependent on the existence of a more fundamental law? Similar to the question of dark matter. If dark matter is to an extent that which gives birth to space and matter, what space does dark matter ‘exist’ in? can it occur outside any notions of space or occurrence? It’s tempting to simply say ‘the time of time’s absence’ and leave it at that, but I just can’t stop thinking about it.

Also, as an aside, perhaps we can say that in writing or speech we are never referring to differance as such, but merely to the disguise differance ordains at that particular point in time. This, however, would suggest a Heideggerian essential Being underlying all disguises. but what if this differance, or whatever you'd like to call it, only exists as disguise, never present to itself.

I'm not sure whether at the end of this post I've managed to say anything at all or just make a greater mess of things, so again, any comments would be most welcome. Help. Please.