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I've developed the opinion that reality is fiction, as opposed to actuality, which is that something else, the subreal. It is our intuition of the actuality that provokes our fear and loathing, our need to escape into elvis and gambling, diverting the colorado for fountains and golf courses...the aesthetics of brutality.
But nontheless, realities are actualities too. It's all part of nature, each representing different aspects, modes, scales, dimensions. Pasted below is an essay I'm leisurely working on along with Red Dust. I think you'll see where I'm going, you'll have heard it before, but I'm just laying everything out in as plain a language as I can muster. Trying to write off the top of my head as if I were sitting on your couch stoned out of mind, having perhaps snorted a line or two of cocaine and not being able to shut up. Hopefully it will prove a stimulating read to other writers. I anticipate it being dissed by academia since I refer to the likes of Fritjof Capra and Jim Nollman, or for using third hand information or discussing physics as if I had an inkling of what I were really talking about. I don't care about any of that. The only thing I care about is that I clarify some things with myself with regards to my own writing, allowing it to evolve and become ever wierder, more subreal, empathetically inhuman...all put down in a way an earnest undergrad could absorb if she so desired...This might be my personal "theory of everything."
I’ve decided to post it as a work in progress to stimulate discussion. After all, the gist of it is fluidity, evolution, revolution, etc. So why should you the reader only receive it in a static form?
Anyway, here it is (please feel free to offer feedback at chuckrichardson@wherestheomelet.com just put “blog in the subject line”):
Nature’s Ching &The Tao of Evolutionary Reading/Writing
Primary sources (so far) for this essay:
Psychoanalytic Criticism: Theory in Practice, by Elizabeth Wright, Methuen & Co. Ltd, New York/London, 1984.
The Pleasure of the Text, by Roland Barthes, Translated by Richard Miller, Hill and Wang, New York, 1975.
S/Z: An Essay, by Barthes, translator Miller, Hill and Wang, 1974.
The Web of Life: A New Scientific Understanding of Living Systems, by Fritjof Capra, Doubleday, New York, 1996.
The Tao of Physics, Capra, Bantam Books, New York, 1984.
Critifiction: Postmodern Essays, by Raymond Federman, SUNY Press, 1993.
The Science of the Mind, by Owen Flanagan, Jr., MIT Press, Cambridge, 1989.
Chaos: Making A New Science, by James Gleick, Penguin, New York, 1987.
Cultivating the Mind of Love: The Practice of Looking Deeply in the Mahayana Buddhist Tradition, by Thich Nhat Hanh, Parallax Press, Berkeley, 1996.
Valuing the Self: What we can learn from other cultures, by Dorothy Lee, Waveland Press, 1976.
Spiritual Ecology: A Guide to Reconnecting with Nature, by Jim Nollman, Bantam Books, New York, 1990.
The Maine Woods, by Henry David Thoreau, 1864.
Tao Te Ching, by Lao Tzu.
*****
I’ve had Elizabeth Wright’s Psychoanalytic Criticism: Theory in Practice in my possession for about 12 years, probably having stolen it somehow, I don’t remember exactly, from the Center for Psychological Study of the Arts at SUNY Buffalo. I can’t believe it took so long to get to, but now that I have I’ve found it very interesting and useful.
Although I had read individual essays by most of the theorists Wright discusses, I had never read anything that connected their dots like Theory in Practice. And what’s more, she connects these dots in a very similar and more concrete way than my own understanding and thoughts on the subject. In particular, her analyses of Freud, Derrida, Foucault, Barthes, and Deleuze and Guattari are analogous to my own ideas about the fictional processes of nature. The common ground among us, I think, is the perception that human reality is fiction since it is imagination which is most essential to the human mind’s adequate dealings with psychic reality and external actualities. In other words, if a human being is to exist in a world that makes sense, it must make something up that makes it make sense.
My ideas about nature’s fictional processes are a hodge-podge of evolution, string and chaos theories; quantum physics; cognitive science; linguistics; deep/spiritual ecology; existentialism; and Taoism. I’m by no means an expert on any of these subjects, nor am I an –ist to any of them. I’ve only been creatively titillated by a few books and some people, and the ideas I perceived imagining them. That’s all. I’m professing nothing but my own way of approaching fiction as I have perceived it at work in nature.
The ideas:
Evolution
The multidimensional grammar which, over time, evolves complex systems with a specific focus on the emergence and development of Life from the atom to the Eukaryote to Gaia this very minute. Evolution applies chaos theory to biology and studies the effectual narrative of randomness over time. There’s all kinds of competing theories, including Intelligent Design (which erroneously replaces randomness with God’s intent, which is analogous to a baby consciously “intending” the development of its genitalia or skin color), some of which are fascinating and others, well, less so. What the best have in common is the concept of cognitive (not necessarily conscious, yet communicative as in stimulus-response) equilibrium among autonomous functioning entities which are forming, and being formed by, the ecosystem over time. Life responds to systemic requirements, growing complexity and temporarily sustaining itself. Evolution tracks this process and its effected changes over that time. Literary texts, in that they are products of cognition, languaging being its most essential process, exist as manifestations of reading/writing and are not to be considered static as long as they are being written/read. While actively engaged by reader/writers, texts maintain a fluidity, serving as a “fluid” porous membrane between one consciousness and another, evolving a more complex we/oui—systemic cognition.
String Theory
Recursive symmetry across scale, which is wonderfully represented by the arabesque, is this theory’s central image (at least in my mind). Basically, string theory suggests a common mechanism (a kind of coaxial esemplasy—see Barth, Further Fridays) is at work in each dimension allowing for an apparently coherent pattern to evolve that can be perceived by the human mind. For instance, consider climate. You have a global climate that seems to operate according to chaos theory, physics and thermodynamics, etc. It manifests itself in ever-changing weather patterns emerging via various feedback loops. Then you have hemispheric, regional, local on down to microclimates, manifested by various parts of your own yard, in which some parts are shaded more, others are lower and get more moisture, etc. Each dimension, or scale, has its own feedback loops functioning to maintain equilibrium amid the chaos, and there are also feedback loops across scale as illustrated by the “butterfly effect,” where changes in the conditions of a microclimate due to the shifting variables of a butterfly flapping its wings, to the hemispheric scale of hurricanes and the global scale of altered weather patterns, which in turn has effects that trickle down to the pricker bush behind your garage. In theory, this mechanism works in each dimension to the infinite macro and infinite micro scales. Supersymmetry is the grail of string theory, addressing this vision of multidimensional feedback loops that also include quantum mechanics. The “string” is the feedback loop, fascia, membrane stitching/joining these dimensions together as they flow through time (or as time flows through them). The ultimate particle has been replaced by the image of a vibrating string whose pitch varies and harmonizes with the pitch variances and harmonizations of other strings, which ravel together forming an infinitely large string and infinitely small string harmonizing one to the other. It’s the difference between music and noise, language and gibberish. It’s a unifying theory, a titillating big picture and useful fiction.
Chaos theory
Complex systems arise from a simple set of initial conditions (a continuous stream of incidents emerging from a few basic rules). Again, as in string theory, weather patterns are the best known example of chaos, but it’s much more than that. The best book for laymen like me on this subject is Chaos: Making A New Science by James Gleick. An amazing illustration of this theory is Michael Barnsley’s “chaos game,” which Gleick lays out in his book.
Gleick writes how Barnsley, when considering:
…the patterns generated by living organisms…turned to randomness as the basis for a new technique of modeling natural shapes…he called it “the global construction of fractals by means of iterated function systems.” When he talked about it, however, he called it the “chaos game.”
To play the chaos game…You choose a starting point somewhere on [a sheet of] paper. It does not matter where. You invent two rules, a heads rule and a tails rule. A rule tells you how to take one point to another: “Move two inches to the north-east [for heads],” or “Move 25 percent closer to the center [for tails].” Now you start flipping the coin and marking points, using the heads rule when the coin comes up heads and the tails rule when it comes up tails. If you throw away the first fifty points, like a blackjack dealer burying the first few cards in a new deal, you will find the chaos game producing not a random field of dots but a shape, revealed with greater and greater sharpness as the game goes on.
Barnsley’s essential insight was this: Julia sets and other fractal shapes, though properly viewed as the outcome of a deterministic process, had a second, equally valid existence as the limit of a random process. By analogy, he suggested, one could imagine a map of Great Britain drawn in chalk on the floor of a room. A surveyor with standard tools would find it complicated to measure the area of these awkward shapes, with fractal coastlines, after all. But suppose you throw grains of rice up into the air one by one, allowing them to fall randomly to the floor and counting the grains that land inside the map [think Gravity’s Rainbow, Jackson Pollack]. As time goes on, the result begins to approach the area of the shapes—as the limit of a random process. In dynamical terms, Barnsley’s shapes proved to be attractors (236-237).
When I played the game, if memory serves right, after the first dozen or so coin tosses on my sheet of paper a shape began to emerge, and then every time I did it, at about the 23rd toss, the shape was completed, the point didn’t move any more, as if it had entered a black hole and the shape was actually a two-dimensional representation of the game’s phase space trajectory through an event horizon. The number “23” became the symbolic enumerator for this particular system’s strange attractor. The shapes would vary, but they would all end their shaping at 23 coin tosses. A light bulb went on.
The point is you have the initial conditions, a two-sided coin and a toss, adding the element of chance or randomness. As the results are charted, you see a complex pattern leading to a singularity. This movement toward a singularity exemplifies entropy and the second law of thermodynamics. However, there is a phase in which the pattern appears to be growing more complex despite its movement toward singularity, and when you add the complexities of cognition to the picture, an equilibrium occurs for awhile before disintegrating into disequilibrium. The temporary equilibrium is maintained through feedback loops that emerge during the phase of rising complexity, when the various elements emerging from the initial conditions are interacting to form their patterns. The implications for reading/writing are that if one begins the process with a few basic rules for this “game” of random interaction in place, various meanings will arise from the text, increasing its complexity, until at some point meaning collapses into a singularity. The movement toward singularity, by the way, is provocatively called a “strange attraction,” which is analogous to black holes in the physical “dimension” and “death” within the organic aspect, which is opposed by the “life force” or desire/eros for a while, right here, right now…This strange attraction to a particular singularity is always ineffable.
Quantum physics
The particle-wavelength paradox and Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle are the key concepts here, at least for me. The paradox is, in my opinion, best illustrated by Thich Nhat Hanh, in Cultivating the Mind of Love: The Practice of Looking Deeply in the Mahayana Buddhist Tradition:
When we look at the vast ocean, we see many waves. We may describe them as high or low, big or small, vigorous or less vigorous, but these terms cannot be applied to water. From the standpoint of the wave, there is birth and there is death, but these are just signs. The wave is, at the same time, water. If we take away the water, the wave cannot be; and if we remove the waves, there will be no water. Wave is water and water is wave. They belong to different levels of being. We cannot compare the two. The words and concepts that are ascribed to the wave cannot be ascribed to the water. (110)
The ocean and the wave are of the same water, but one cannot say the wave is the ocean or the ocean the wave. The wave is the particular aspect of the ocean as it is perceived by the human mind in a particular place and time; whereas the ocean is that wave’s length and pattern as it actualizes itself across space-time. We perceive one or the other according to our mode of seeing. We essentially find what we’re looking for, and we can only look according to the parameters Nature has evolved for us to look with—our mechanisms of seeing. Yet despite the fact we find what we’re looking for and only what we’re capable of perceiving, randomness makes sure that no two things we perceive are exactly alike. They share recursive symmetries in their relationships with us, but they are autonomous objects and we can never be fully certain of anything about them. Often enough, we’ll set out looking for a “particle” and end up perceiving a “wavelength.” Nothing is certain, that is, we cannot permanently freeze the meanings of what we perceive and must avoid certainty at all costs.
Cognitive science
The evolution of feedback loops between autonomous objects that, over time, produce ever more complex systems from which eventually emerges cognition, then awareness, and perhaps eventually at least token sentience and, maybe even a general sentience, wherein Nature is aware of Itself becoming apparent in the processes of language. One must admit that if “we” seem to be conscious beings aware of each other as separate biological entities and that together “we” are functionaries cooperatively forming, via language, an ecosystem that, on the global scale we call Nature, then Nature is Itself composing Its own awareness. This is a psychic form of recursive symmetry across scale, functioning to maintain an equilibrium/meaning amidst the perceived chaos/confusion. What might begin in the center of the sun perhaps evolves randomly into a spark of consciousness as it is pulled through existence by some strange attraction (or, perhaps, existence lured through It). Either way, reading/writing, or languaging, the very processes of fiction, are essential parts of cognitive science.
In Closing the Genotype-Phenotype Gap: The New Argument, a section in a chapter called “Minds, Genes and Morals” in Owen Flanagan Jr.’s The Science of the Mind, the author describes Charles Lumsden and E.O. Wilson’s Genes, Mind and Culture: The Coevolutionary Process as claiming to be the “grail of a unifying theory of biology and the social sciences” that proposes “to close the genotype-phenotype gap by way of the mind.” Flanagan describes their argument this way:
1. Human culture is the interactive result of all the artifacts, behavior, institutions, and ideas mentally or physically deployed by some population.
2. The “perceivable features” of the integrated cultural system are called culturegens. For example, telephones, calculus, seventeenth-century English literature, Judaism, marriage, divorce, professional wrestling, international espionage, and the space program are all culturegens.
3. During socialization the culturegens are processed by what are “loosely labeled the epigenetic rules.”
4. These epigenetic rules are “the genetically determined procedures which direct the assembly of the mind.”
5. The epigenetic rules bias their owners to choose certain culturegens over others [Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle—the tension between psychic reality as fiction and external actuality].
6. Collective choices in behavior and cognition “create the culture and social fabric.”
7. “Genetic variation exists in the epigenetic rules, contributing to at least part of the variance of cognitive and behavioral traits within a population.”
8. Individuals whose choices enhance their inclusive genetic fitness transmit more genes to future generations, “and as a consequence the population as a whole tends to shift toward the epigenetic rules and the forms of cognition and behavior favored by the rules. The coevolutionary circuit [comprising the individual and culture] is thus completed.”
…together [Lumsden and Wilson] support the view of the mind as being comprised of a set of genetically determined rules that favor certain interpretations of the physical world and certain social and cultural choices over others.
…Primary epigenetic rules are “the more automatic processes that lead from sensory filtering to perception. Their consequences are the least subject to variation due to learning.” The secondary epigenetic rules meanwhile act on “all information displayed in the perceptual fields. They include the evaluation of perception through the process of memory, emotional response, and decision making through which individuals are predisposed to use certain culturegens instead of others.”
…The primary epigenetic rules are similar to Kant’s forms of sensibility; they are the ways we necessarily construct the sensible world. Furthermore, they constrain us as much as they liberate us. (264-271)
The coevolution of culture and biology is not mere fantasy. As Stephen Jay Gould points out: “We have no evidence for biological change in brain size or structure since Homo sapiens appeared in the fossil record some fifty thousand years ago…All that we have done since then—the greatest transformation in the shortest time that our planet has experienced since its crust solidified nearly four billion years ago—is the product of cultural evolution.”
To this add the Santiago theory of cognition as described by Fritjof Capra in The Web of Life: A New Scientific Understanding of Living Systems:
Since cognition traditionally is defined as the process of knowing, we must be able to describe it in terms of an organism’s interactions with its environment. Indeed, this is what the Santiago theory does. The specific phenomenon underlying the process of cognition is structural coupling [see coaxial esemplasy, John Barth, Further Fridays, discussing the arabesque]. As we have seen, an autopoietic system undergoes continual structural changes while preserving its weblike pattern of organization. It couples to its environment structurally, in other words, through recurrent interactions, each of which triggers structural changes in the system. The living system is autonomous, however. The environment only triggers the structural changes; it does not specify or direct them.
Now, the living system not only specifies these structural changes, it also specifies which perturbations from the environment trigger them. This is the key to the Santiago theory of cognition. By specifying which perturbations from the environment trigger its changes, the system “brings forth a world,” as Maturana and Varela put it. Cognition, then, is not a representation of an independently existing world, but rather a continual bringing forth of a world through the process of living. The interactions of a living system [a biological entity] with its environment are cognitive interactions, and the process of living itself is a process of cognition. In the words of Maturana and Varela, “To live is to know.” (267)
For myself, as wise and true as I find these words, I would substitute language for life in the above statement as an addendum or modification, not as a refutation. Therefore, I’d say grammar selects what is expressible and gives shape to the ineffable, or inexpressible, which is the experience of awareness. Cognition is the continuous bringing forth of awareness through the process of language. The cognitive interactions of a living system with its environment are linguistic interactions, and the process of languaging itself is a process of cognition. In other words, to language is to know.
Linguistics
First of all, I don’t think language is unique to humans. Linguistics as a field tends to focus almost solely on human communication. But what is communication, really? First and foremost, it’s a useful fiction, involving signifiers and signifieds, phenomena and symbols that represent them. Now let’s take something we don’t consider alive, like an electron. It’s an autonomous body that humans apply language to, one of its symbolic descriptors being a “negative charge.” It is called “negative” because of its perceived interaction with the contextualizing atom’s nucleus, which has a neutral but relatively “positive” charge. Of course, there are all kinds of other particles interacting to compose the particular atomic system composing our electron and nucleus. Scientists, in attempting to describe these interactions, to make sense of them and by extension themselves, apply language to what they perceive. The very fact that they’re applying language (see quantum physics) means that the atom will thus be perceived operating some kind of linguistic system to be itself, at least according to our best sense of it. Grammar is the imagined and thus usefully fictive communication rule book by which these systems maintain themselves, making their feedback loops possible. This understanding, or sensibility, however, only exists in the cognitive dimension, as one must be aware of the constant uncertainty regarding the adequacy of descriptions for what’s actually going on, as opposed to what’s really going on. What’s really going on is what we imagine, and what’s actually happening is beyond that. We evolve complex levels of diction within language by dealing with the repetitive situational randomness and complexity of our perceptions. In my opinion, the best understanding of human language is to understand its inadequacy while still appreciating the methods and dictions we develop and employ in our production of meaning, which is a recursive symmetrical part of the universal on this scale. The desire for meaning, or cognitive unity and autonomy, combined with the physical limitations of being biological entities create patterns in harmony within the universal arabesque, and the randomness involved with the perceptions of individual organisms within this context allows for fluidity and change over time…the evolution of meaning. The more that humans produce meaning in Nature by languaging, ever-honing more precise and complex descriptions of It, the more aware Nature will become of Itself, as the perception of humans communicating among humans can be imagined as Nature communicating with Itself. The deeper one’s understanding of human language, the more deeply one will understand Nature’s cognitive processes.
Deep/Spiritual Ecology
The belief that Earth is a living organism, that our deepest need as sentient biological entities is to cooperate with the system of Its living body, establishing feedback loops to maintain an equilibrium and context that enables opportunities for pleasurable existences from time to time. A result of our acting upon our deep-seeded desires for oneness—at-one-ment—with Nature, is an increased awareness of ourselves as natural beings, and thus Nature becomes conscious of itself, at least partly, in a human way. The apparently clear separation between humankind and Nature is made ambiguous by the randomness of individual perception, each being in reality, again, each being a useful fiction, a wet surfable wave to catch on the ocean. To perceive this, to evolve a language that allows one a complex enough sensibility to rub up against the membrane…if that ain’t “spiritual” folks, I don’t know what is, and It’s all thanks to the Earthling, Gaia…that ineffable Thing.
Consider this from Jim Nollman’s Spiritual Ecology: A Guide to Reconnecting with Nature:
"Our artists seem to have become as disaffected as the rest of us, yet they could be trying harder to reconnect [to Nature] than they are. After all, the aboriginal idea that culture is one vast poetic construct suspended in space and time, and incorporating all aspects of life within it, may still be radical to the sciences and social sciences, but not to the arts.
"We need a new aesthetic of natural interconnectedness that is able to swallow up every one of us. Yet any aesthetic that actually succeeds at connecting humans to nature is going to be resisted because its driving metaphor is participation by every faction, nation and species. Thus, it must also be compelling, engaging, incredibly unifying, and gentle all at the same time—it must noster. I am you. They are us.
"As noster biology may be defined as the study of interconnecting to nature, nosterart may be understood as the art of interconnecting to nature. It is an art that depicts a nature that we exist inside of, and that is simultaneously inside of us. Nosterart functions as a promotional message, an advertisement as it were, for the seventh generation. (200-201)"
But there’s also a darker side. Nollman’s an angel, at least in his writing. The fact is nostering with nature can be terrifying, it’s not all a bug free picnic with your lover in the meadow. Imagination being a prerequisite for the human mind to adequately compose and confront reality necessitates the possibility that one’s perception of nature will be founded on one’s state of mind. That perception can indeed be terrifying, as the actuality of Nature as a whole is an inhuman thing, existing prior to humans and extending way beyond us in space-time. Thoreau knew this all too well: “Generally speaking a howling wilderness does not howl: it is the imagination of the traveler that does the howling” (Maine Woods, 288).
Existentialism
The emotional fallout and alienation resulting from the individual human being’s cognitive confrontation with modern and, even more specifically, postmodern civilization. It’s the “nausea” of one who has derived deep meaning from Nature via a complex understanding of language confronted by the asininities of those in political-economic power, who seem to be forces of entropy, agents of that strange attraction toward death. It is the feeling of being Eros in an age of Thanatos. It is the human mind expressing itself… “I can’t go on, I’ll go on”…understanding that now it is up to the individual human mind, that peculiar psyche’s singular responsibility, to construct meaning from the absurd spectacle of chaotic phenomena it’s perceiving. It is the life force rubbing its queer shoulder against the forces of oppression…It’s being aware that you are alone amid all the togetherness, longing for the true togetherness of alone…It is the autonomous sensitivity of interrelatedness…a longing for the “return of the repressed.”
Taoism
Insist on nothing. There is the true way, the universal flow, which is described by Dharma, the grammar of the way, or Tao.
The primary text of Taoism is Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching, according to which following the Way, or Tao, is like “going on a cosmic trek” (Huston Smith, 132). The Way is the eternal and immanent, fluid autonomous unity of the universe from which everything emerges and eventually dissolves back into. “Te” means integrity, which signifies the quality of traits of an individual organism as it relates to the system as a whole. Te concerns itself with how well an individual is functioning within the inhuman system, whether it is aiding or hampering the system’s operation. “Ching” means scripture, or in my view, the text. Its essence is that of a texture/membrane/interstice warped by cognitive feedback loops, in which the ideas of transacting, experiencing and passing through occur. Ching also signifies the threads or “strings” that hold manuscripts and pages together in a subjective intertextuality. The Sanskrit word for Ching is “sutra,” which literally means “thread,” from which the English “suture,” “stitch” and “interstice” are derived.
Among my favorite lines of the Tao Te Ching are:
"The Way gives birth to them and integrity nurtures them/Matter forms them and function completes them./
For this reason,/The myriad creatures respect the Way and esteem integrity./Respect for the Way and esteem for integrity/are by no means conferred upon them/but always occur naturally.
"The Way gives birth to them,/nurtures them,/rears them,/follows them,/shelters them,/toughens them,/sustains them,/protects them.
"It gives birth but does not possess,/acts but does not presume,/rears but does not control.That is what is called “mysterious integrity.” (20)
What it comes down to, at least for me, is that Taoism is a cognitive tool that can provide someone with an existential sensibility a means to continue surviving without “committing suicide.” I look at it as philosophical and spiritual judo against ignorance and spiritual death, allowing for a little jouissance along the trajectory of my life.
So…Taoism is my philosophy and art is my religion. That is I think I should insist on nothing, which includes insisting on not insisting. I also feel God is best experienced in the creative process (God being Life, or more specifically, Universal Cognition).
That said, let’s take a look at Freud, Barthes, Derrida, Foucault and Deleuze and Guattari as presented by Wright in Psychoanalytic Criticism: Theory in Practice, and see how closely they match up with some of my previously formed ideas.
Sigmund Freud
Freud, to my reading, seems to have believed the methods and mechanisms of the human psyche also function as the apparatus of language, allowing for new meanings to emerge in accordance with the ever-shifting energies and modalities of subconscious desire.
Novel writing (in every sense of the word “novel”) operates as a type of wish fulfillment, personifying the author’s dream in the fictional form of the protagonist by a series of displacements, evolving a child’s projections in the act of play into the writer’s processes and methodology.
Fiction, however, transcends mere childish wish-fulfillment and daydreaming. Freud believed the fictionist relates fantasy to time by using “an occasion in the present to construct, on the pattern of the past, a picture of the future…pleasure…[is] connected with the dynamics of the work of art” (27-8). While the daydreamer’s fantasy succumbs to egocentric opposition, the fictionist devises strategies to transcend mere ego through writing by using the same methods the subconscious uses to subvert egoistic intent.
After Freud, who focused mostly on the idea of the writer as analysand, or patient, ego-psychological criticism shifted attention or energy to the reader, or analyst’s processes and function in what has been termed the “Personally Desiring and Aspiring Reader” (62). However, here the author’s desire for wish-fulfillment is not ignored, but shared with the reader, with whom the author “colludes” to disguise the fantasy in the text’s formal properties as a kind of foreplay to overcome any shared resistance to the textures joining them.
Form as foreplay works in three ways:
*According to the id so guilt and anxiety can be assuaged.
*According to ego, allowing the I/eye to perceive things and thus repress what it deems unseemly.
*According to superego, allowing for the emergence of common perceivable forms that can be shared between the reader and writer, conjoining them as an abstract autonomous entity via the text as reader/writers. Freud would have used the verb “mediate” instead of the post-Freudian “conjoin.”
“The uncanny” is one of the central idea’s of Freud’s approach to literature, stressing “the power of the writer to control the return of the repressed and demonstrat[ing], albeit unconsciously, how it is done: in foregrounding the uncanny effects…” (35) So, by writing/imagining a text in a manner intended to mediate between the subconscious and conscious minds, by nurturing the emergence of a text that serves as a feedback loop esemplasizing the functions of unconscious and conscious into a single entity—much like the post-Freudian ego-psychologists merging of the reader/writer—the writer allows formation of new meanings by making previously unconscious content perceivable. It is the text’s “strangeness” that attracts the reader/writer and brings them together.
An interesting way of conceiving new meanings from Freud’s texts is to read them by his own methods of analysis, as many post-Freudians have done, looking for the ways “his writing reveals or conceals [his] unconscious intention” (137).
According to Wright, one could summarize Freud’s contribution to literary theory by viewing “id-psychology as focusing on the return of the repressed, ego-psychology on the return of repression, and object-relations theory as uneasily trying to reconcile the two” (138). He also influenced the ideas of Jacques Derrida, Jakob Deleuze and Felix Guattari, whose deconstructive readings of Freud try to show the contradictions and instigated anxieties (i.e.: cognitive dissonances) that disturb the ego’s sensibility and the way it logically categorizes the data it perceives.
One important distinction between Freudian lit theory and that which followed is the way Freud categorized the data he perceived, which reveal:
…a series of hierarchical oppositions: normal/pathological, sanity/insanity, real/imaginary, experience/dream, conscious/unconscious, life/death. In each case the first term was conceived as prior, a plenitude of which the second is a negation or complication. Situated on the margin of the first term, the second term designates an undesirable, dispensable deviation. Freud’s investigations deconstruct these oppositions by identifying what is at stake in our desire to repress the second term and showing that in fact each first term can be seen as a special case of the fundamentals designated by the second term, which in this process is transformed. Understanding the marginal deviant term becomes a condition of understanding the supposed prior term…These deconstructive reversals, which give pride of place to what had been thought marginal, are responsible for much of the revolutionary impact of Freudian Theory. (Culler 1983, pp. 160-161)[137-138].
Harold Bloom postulates that Freud’s writing reveals “a catastrophe theory” of the imagination by way of “The Sublime”—conquering death by being born into it. Bloom believes Freud’s texts on literature describe what occurs when a “poet/self” is born and discovers his function already filled, “the poem already written” (153). The poet/self can thus only become functional by transcending the situation to become, in and of itself, a particular aspect of the poem, adding to it rather than being redundant.
According to my reading of Wright’s reading of Bloom’s reading of Freud’s writing in Beyond the Pleasure Principle: “The Sublime” isn’t a product of sublimation, as one might think, but of repression, since sexual energies, or the libido (in the sense of a polymorphic sexuality rather than pantheistic one, as some apparently read Freud’s primary focus on sexuality), has not lost its wishful aspects by being sated. Rather, the canny (i.e.: conscious) imagination is what makes poems. Repression is essential to writing poetry because it sets the initial conditions by which it occurs. These initial conditions, of course, are rules that take the form of “rhetorical strategies.” For the poet, writing poems is a means to relive the primal anxiety of birth, the initial unpleasure of our firs incident. This anxiety, in turn, leads to useful or what Bloom calls “enabling fictions” that result in “analysis terminable and interminable.” It is through these processes of writing and analysis that Freud overcomes the “catastrophe” of the human being’s apparent strange attraction to what it perceives as death (153-4).
Roland Barthes
Language as membrane: The reader/writer affect
Linguistic mechanisms of desire affect reader and writer alike, according to Barthes, who sees reader cooperating with writer to produce textual meaning. What were once considered two disconnected entities are conjoined into a single reader/writer. The writer reads the text as he writes it; the reader writes as she reads. Therefore, the reader/writer is transformed into the “site of meaning,” where the two modes of the single entity work together to produce meaning from the tangled, contextualizing web/membrane/matrix of signs, which is no longer some static truth frozen into the text but a dynamic, fluid construct evolving over space-time in the thinking mind of the reader/writer (123)[think of procreative fucking—man and woman joined as one in the flesh creating new life…the most sacred aspect of traditional marriage…holy union…I am the word]. The reader/writer, as the site of meaning, functions as a linguistic membrane, or feedback loop, whereby meaning stabilizes form without freezing it, thus making pleasure possible…first comes love, then comes marriage, then comes signifier in the baby carriage…
Richard Howard, in his introduction to The Pleasure of the Text, describes Barthes as outlining “an erotic poetics of reading” that examines what it is exactly that we enjoy in a text, how to speak that pleasure, that Being=Orgasm and therefore jouissance must be the pleasure of the text.
Consider Barthes himself on the essence of textual pleasure, jouissance, organic bliss:
"Sade: the pleasure of reading him clearly proceeds from certain breaks (or certain collisions): antipathetic codes (the noble and the trivial, for example) come into contact; pompous and ridiculous neologisms are created; pornographic messages are embodied in sentences so pure they might be used as grammatical models. As textual theory has it: the language is redistributed. Now, such redistribution is always achieved by cutting. Two edges are created: an obedient, conformist, plagiarizing edge (the language is to be copied in its canonical state, as it has been established by schooling, good usage, literature, culture), and another edge, mobile, blank (ready to assume any contours), which is never anything but the site of its effect: the place where the death of language is glimpsed. These two edges, the compromise they bring about, are necessary. Neither culture nor its destruction is erotic; it is the seam between them, the fault, the flaw, which becomes so. The pleasure of the text is like that untenable, impossible, purely novelistic instant so relished by Sade’s libertine when he manages to be hanged and then to cut the rope at the very moment of his orgasm, his bliss." (Pleasure, 6-7)
In S/Z, Barthes implicates himself with Balzac’s Sarrasine by revealing that reading, writing and criticism are all part of the same continuum, scale or dimension. The first part of the book-length “essay,” which is really more of a novel, a form of what Federman calls “critifiction,” a self-reflexive, self-conscious, self-analyzing neurosis focusing on the absented mother, the blank page being an empty womb, the words appearing there being a voice in the closet imagining Balzac’s Sarrasine, and how to read and write and seduce her.
Having recently returned to this book after some years away, I noticed on the inner title page, scribbled in my own hand writing under S/Z, the first sentence written in red ink, the second in black: “Nature is, in fact, culture. And both Nature and culture, are thus absurd.” What did I mean by this and how did S/Z bring it about? What is it about the pleasure I derived from reading/writing the text that led me to the Nature/Culture:Reader/Writer construct? And, of course, what was absurd about that pleasure?
Consider the connotations of this:
Structurally, the existence of two supposedly different systems—denotation and connotation—enables the text to operate like a game, each system referring to the other according to the requirements of a certain illusion. Ideologically, finally, this game has the advantage of affording the classic text a certain innocence: of the two systems, denotative and connotative, one turns back on itself and indicates its own existence: the system of denotation; denotation is not the first meaning, but pretends to be so, under this illusion it is ultimately no more than the last of the connotations (the one that seems both to establish and close the reading), the superior myth by which the text pretends to return to the nature of language, to language as nature: doesn’t a sentence, whatever meaning it releases, subsequent to its utterance, it would seem, appear to be telling us something simple, literal, primitive: something true, in relation to which all the rest (which comes afterwards, on top) is literature? This is why, if we want to go along with the classic text, we must keep denotation, the old deity, watchful, cunning, theatrical, foreordained to represent the collective innocence of language. (S/Z, 9)
S/Z’s narrator—the “I” of the text—personifies Barthes’ attempt to sensitize the reader/writer to the composition of cultural influences going into producing the text’s meaning. He’s particularly interested in the societal inventions he views as traps for passionate beings.
For Barthes, all love exhibits psychic transference on at least three levels: the imaginary where the lover deals with the missing mother, which Barthes views as a form of healthy play in which the player play’s out his lack before language restricts the possibility; the symbolic level where language castrates the lover by making his love socially acceptable and, by extension, turns the entire text into a fetish made ready for “jouissance,” or organic bliss; the critic composes the third level of transference, both as patient and analyst.
At the critical level of transference, the reader/writer’s love of the text can deform or distort the text’s possible “meaning” while the unsuspecting “self” is caught up in a chain of signifiers. The writer’s game is to unconsciously entrap the narcissistic reader in a form of collusion that actively sets out to disturb the unsuspecting reader/writer’s transference into writer/reader, allowing meaning to flow beyond ideology rather than settling back into it.
Jacques Derrida
Post-structural psychoanalysis: text as psyche/scene of writing
Many people who consider themselves “westerners,” that is they live in Europe or the Americas and adhere to a monotheistic sky god mythology that is staunchly democratic/capitalist, are ideologues whether they know it or not, are being written by the very text they think they’re reading, according to Derrida, who then goes about examining the ways they’re being composed by external power structures via deconstruction.
Derrida believes the primary cause of this miscomposure [sic] is Western philosophy, which is merely an explanation or grammar for our culture’s dualistic metaphysical tradition, which devalues writing. HOW?
Writing, which Derrida relates to “trace,” “differance” and “dissemination,” is a function that reveals how the text being composed subverts itself because it’s the unconscious (not language as Lacan would have it) that is the very condition or situation of language. The unconscious, being a texture of unmodified traces present in every word, actively produces meaning through memory by erasing the sign and producing differance, which in turn postpones any temporary obsession with meaning allowing for the fluidity of evolutionary processes.
Derrida asks “what makes a text?” in order to subvert its power over subjects:
…the subject is the subject of writing, both its product (as already written) and its producer (as rewriting the written). In describing the perceptual apparatus in terms which illustrate this double movement, “Freud performs for us the scene of writing” (Derrida 1978, p. 229)
…we proceed toward a configuration of traces which can no longer be presented except by the structure and functioning of writing. (p. 200)
Since the unconscious is actively producing the signifying system, or language, he believes the effects of history on experience must lead the reader/writer’s investigation outside “narrowly physicalist psychology” in recognition of the psyche as a “writing machine” (Wright, 136).
Derrida’s reading of Franz Kafka’s parable Before the Law sees the law as the written text, as the writing of the text and its reading all wound into a single complex within the protagonist’s mind, who fails to exert his freedom through the law, through language, through reading/writing, through the text despite it’s being there for him. And the movement of meaning in the opposite direction suggests the protagonist is existing at a moment just previous to language, or prior to law, and hasn’t the freedom to act, pass the guardian and go through the door, simply because the actual law has yet to occur to him. He’s something of an anxious, primordial Adam.
Derrida, I think, views Kafka’s parable as tragic, revealing the necessity to resist logical fixations upon signifieds. In other words, a picture of an apple is not an apple, but how many otherwise alert people when asked what it is you’re showing them when you hold up the picture will say “an apple?” By perceiving only what the signifier is signifying and not the signifier, the perceiver ignores the power structure mediating between the subject and object in the given situation. The audience forgets the photograph of the apple is mediated by the photographer, unless the photographer’s an artist and distorts the apple signifier in some way. I digress a bit, but Kafka’s protagonist perceived the gatekeeper and doorway as the law, as the text, rather than mere signifiers of the law and text. What was there to aid hindered because of the protagonist’s crisis of perception. It is this system of signifiers, these doorways and guards, that Derrida wants to discharge of their ideological power via deconstruction. He doesn’t want anyone to be Kafka’s hapless outlander before the law, but to recognize these illusions for the maya they are.
Writing’s movement in this process is two-fold and oppositional, since it is the primary mode of repression but also the method by which the symbolic is subverted. Literature, that realm in which the symbolic is transformed into metaphor, where literal speech becomes figurative, is a powerful weapon against authority when wielded deconstructively against the smorgasbord of canonical texts whose meanings are presumed fixed by the culture.
Reading/writing establishes the oppressed reader/writer’s means of channeling desire in terms of Freud’s polymorphic sexuality, which is really a will to power via conquest, which might be considered the theme, method and content of Derrida’s deconstruction: It is the reader/writer’s attempt to harness reality for the Self. (133-137)
Therefore, text is psyche—the scene of reader/writing…literature is being.
Michel Foucault
Psychoanalysis as a discourse: sexuality and power
According to Foucault, a type of “cultural unconscious” is subject to continuous instability and alteration, to discontinuity rather than permanence, and therefore serves as something of an unconscious archive of exclusionary rules, or grammars. This set of linguistic practices generates social and cultural activity, governed by rules that are unformulated and characteristically unrecognized by the speakers concerned. From this view, “history [is] a discourse” (Wright, 159).
Foucault believes the fluidity of knowledge is motivated by a “will to power” (curiously, no one ever seems to mention Adler, only his “idea”) in the historical, public sphere. Recognizing the unavoidability of the given culture’s power matrix, Foucault analyzes how the strategies of social and political-economic power have a double effect by leading to strategies of evasion and subversion. Domination necessarily evolves the means for insurrection:
“…there is no relationship of power without the means of escape and possible flight.’ (Foucault 1982, p.225)
As a “discourse of power,” psychoanalysis reveals sexuality’s central importance in Western culture since the Renaissance of the sixteenth century, when with the codes of chivalry sexuality and gender became increasingly the ego’s sole signifier, and the key element to personal identity. Foucault believes sexuality has not only dominated our historical discourse of the last five centuries, but has evolved over time to dominate our institutions and customs.
The era of psychoanalysis brought about what Foucault calls the “surveillance” of the body, a textualization of confessions and self-revelations of analysts and patients alike. From all this new data emerged new understandings of the power relations between the individual psyche and the external world it’s perceiving, how the body enables a sensualization of power.
Foucault knows the power of witnessing a taboo being broken, the pleasure that creates in the voyeur. Literature, he believes, bears witness to the “productiveness” of this type of jouissance, this perverse pleasure, because it is only the power structures that make the taboo, make the breaking of it and the reader’s voyeurism perverse, and that the act of witnessing, of reading/writing, subverts power, dilutes it, and disassembles its structure.
Most interesting, perhaps, is that Foucault, like Freud, “located sex as a strategy of power and knowledge…sexuality has become the secret which leads to the truth of man’s being, a truth not on the side of freedom, but on that of power, the authority installed in the psyche…” (159-162)
So it seems “love,” or the socially acceptable forms of it in the West, according to Freud and Foucault, is an apparatus of slavery, because the power structure defines what forms of love are acceptable.
Jacob Deleuze and Felix Guattari
Schizoanalysis and Kafka
By providing a method that zeroes in on images and motifs, situating the author as a function relating to the literary discourse system as a whole, Deleuze and Guattari, in Wright’s terms, “explod[ed] the whole oedipal apparatus” that Freud constructed, offering what they called the “schizoanalysis” of texts (162).
As in Kafka’s Before the Law, some of us believe what the law, the linguistic power the law tells them that they will not marry their mother or kill their father, and think that’s what they must really have wanted [sic] if there’s a law against it. Language has made them docile.
Schizoanalysis rejects the Oedipus complex since it does not recognize the self as being a singular or decent thing. “The unconscious is an orphan,” say D/G, emergent from physical processes that are inescapable from Nature’s processes, indeed, are part of Nature’s processes, needing other bodies the way other bodies need them. Desire is a “flow” of libido before language, prior to the law. Seeing that libido is fluid and able to direct itself into everchanging modes of movement, D/G focused on the general liberation of desire by constructing an unconscious using schizoanalytic methods, reconstructing a self deformed by Freudian psychoanalysis, which had characterized desire as a want or lacking of something, a “capitalist ploy” that profited from the deficiency and need of its subjects.
Freud’s unconscious, according to D/G, is an ideological structure, an internalized set of power-relations being the effect of a psychic subjugation fabricated for capitalism by good old fashioned family values, and is, therefore, something to rebel against. The psychic or mental revolution begins with their idea of the subconscious being a part of the volatility that escapes language’s power constructs. It is a textured current that organic systems continuously bifurcate into objective phenomena.
Literature, like schizophrenia, frees itself from the normative grammars adhering to language’s power structures, which are also referred to here as the “law.” Thus D/G say a “desire-liberating reader, a schizoanalyst, whose task it is to convert the text into a desiring-machine, or better still, into a revolutionary machine,” is necessary for oppression to be overcome and true autonomy, the liberation of desire, to be attained. Since marginal literature must always be composed using the language of the majority marginalizing it, D/G rebuff the dominion over “subjugated” and/or marginalized groups via a group–dream, national mythology and patriotic propaganda of all kinds, what Guy DeBord called “the spectacle.”
D/G theorize that desire exists coincidentally in two forms: a “paranoiac transcendental law” signified by the oedipal system; and an “immanent schizo-law” shaping subconscious desire that ends up revealing the ineffable. In every situation the schizo-law is taking apart and subverting the paranoiac law, its method of writing deconstructing the systems of language, the universal control compositions.
D/G long to evoke the pre-linguistic incident when one’s subconscious speculations on sights and sounds and smells and tastes and touching all aroused one’s opposition to repression in favor of the liberation of one’s desire. D/G reveal the ways that one’s narrow, oedipal investments of desire are transcended by unconscious investment in the social field of so-called “higher intensities.” Desire is essentially and primarily a social production.
They too see Kafka’s work as being utterly revolutionary, since their schizoanalysis reveals Kafka’s subconscious libidinous ventures as more powerful than those provoked by the state-system. In schizoanalysis, aspiration does not link itself with token symbols of power. Desire repudiates its concluding epithet in some exacting power-machine, composed by some ideological apparatus. Eros will always find a way out. Kafka’s way out was to write.
D/G’s work is “an attempt to make reading into a revolutionary political activity,” says Wright, “discovering omissions, non-sequiturs, mismatch[es] between style and purpose in texts and patients…The revolutionary writer/reader conducts experiments, trying to find a way out of the given representation…” (162-171) ... to freedom and greater autonomy, toward the absolute liberation of desire, libido, sexuality.
Connecting the Dots: Recursive Symmetries Across Texts/Fleshing Out the Feedback Loops
Nature’s Ching & The Tao of Evolutionary Reading/Writing
Taoism is my philosophy and art is my religion. That is I think I should insist on nothing, which includes not insisting. I feel God is best experienced in the creative process (God being Life, or more specifically, Universal Cognition). How does this fit in with the literary views of Freud, Barthes, Derrida, Foucault and Deleuze and Guattari?
NOTES
SECONDARY SOURCES/FURTHER READING
THIS IS A WORK IN PROGRESS, WILL FILL IN BLANKS LATER, FOLKS…
AUGUST
28
Art is the process by which one objectifies the emotional fallout of human existence in a subjective (ie: personal) form.
Criticism is the process by which one subjectifies (ie: personalizes) art in the form of objective (ie: as in “I object,” “material,” “factual”) blowback.
Why “blowback?” Signifies breath, fire, conflict, struggle…the attempted “murder” of the “author” via reading.
Writing a novel as a reader-writer is both art and criticism. The “author” is objectified and commodified. To know/slay the “author” with its own language is the reader’s intent. To mystify/revive the reader is this writer’s hope.
Thus, if criticism is the best form of autobiography [Wilde], then autobiography is the best form of attempted murder. Attempted murder of whom? One’s self through the “murder” of others.
What do I mean by “murder?” To “know” someone is to objectify them, rob them of their subjectivity, their private interior reality. When one claims to “know” something, one ceases to experience it, and if it can no longer experience anything from another biological entity it has psychologically killed it. The subject is dead.
What do I mean by “self?” That emergent sentience from an autonomous biological entity that contains its experience and sense of being alive as distinguished from other autonomous, sentient biological entities. The subject.
What, then, is “suicide?” Well, its autobiography, and it’s not something to do, really, until you’re ready to kill your career or that old self. Again, not talking in literal terms, but of a willful changing of one’s private identity to better adapt to an always changing environment. One must not cling to who one was yesterday, but kill it off and become something new today. Of course, there’s a lot of overlap, and I’m not suggesting the annihilation of memory, just an unsentimental fluidity and willingness to experience life as it is happening.
What do I mean by “autobiography?” The attempted freezing, or making static, of a former fluid in the effort to squeeze private meaning about one’s self that will be objective, long-lasting and true. It is the effort to objectify past experiences to freeze one’s self long enough for a snapshot understanding. A waste of time if you ask me.
What’s the point of today’s entry? That an exercise in ironic absurdity can be meaningless and ambiguous, yet fun; pleasure is the only excuse one needs for such activity.
A way to pass the time in one’s mind, tickling…
24
SADE: A CHIMP AMONG BONOBOS?
What’s wrong with Sade?
A pathological lack of compassion (as differentiated from empathy and sympathy), meaning an utter lack of any sense of shared suffering, with too much emphasis and faith in ego and a failure to recognize the expanded implications of his espoused libertine philosophy—that the human being is an [autonomous organism/functioning organ] in a living system that is itself an organism/organ and autonomous functionary.
Sade never considers what proper roles the sentient human being might play within Nature’s ever-evolving cognitive system. If man is not separate from Nature, but of Nature, what is man’s natural role in the