Chapter 76 - DaodejingMen are born soft and supple;
dead, they are stiff and hard.
Plants are born tender and pliant;
dead, they are brittle and dry.
Thus whoever is stiff and inflexible
is a disciple of death.
Whoever is soft and yielding
is a disciple of life.
The hard and stiff will be broken.
The soft and supple will prevail.
Let’s do things with words. Let’s begin a blog. The words themselves bring the blog into being – one needn’t have an inaugural post... or perhaps one must, by necessity, as something must be first; yet the content needn't deal with its own beginning (though it can, as it does here) – it just begins. Indeed, one cannot have an inaugural post as a naming or christening: the very thing which is brought forth into being (the blog) is the vehicle of its own realisation. Is this possible? To call this post inaugural would only serve to water “inaugural” down to a sense of being first, losing its hints of ritual, active creation, portent (but is this important?)... What is in a name, or, so we don’t shake the spear too much (lest it lead to sabre rattling), what does naming achieve? Is there something achieved? Surely so. But isn’t the inauguration, the creation, actually empty? Is it not only God who creates stuff merely by uttering the words themselves; but, then again, are we not made in His image (was this image a grapheme? Was it a visual image? A visual image of a sound? Wasn’t it uttered though? Isn’t it a phoneme? What image then? Shall I invoke Imagi:Nations? I already did...)?
What then creates the blog (let alone my blog)? Is it not the words, the words in this context (that is, encoded onto this website, into these boxes, under these headings)? This issue of genesis resounds very much with Derrida’s critique of Husserl and related questions which may be reapplied here... Is it my intention then which created this blog? My singular idea to “begin a blog”?
At the risk of becoming too dry I will move on hastily. I don’t wish the point to be laboured, only born (in a minimal sense). Having determined to begin, I must ask: what am I beginning? With what stuff shall I fill the act or action (upon what am I acting, in any case)? What to perform? I now stand wondering just as Prufrock intones “And how should I begin?” (and, importantly, this is a repeat). The beginning, as a kind of proof-rock (that indelible thing from which Arthur pulled the sword, inaugurating his kingship... an oracle too?), must have an immutable presence yet simultaneously move into the background as the journey progresses. Paradoxically, the beginning of the work risks overshadowing the work itself, thus leaving it in a pre-commenced state, if it is not prepared to exit the stage when the time is right. Simultaneously, however, the beginning defines the entire process to come after it (inauguration as naming has returned, and this can stretch to theoretical physics and the “knob” settings “prior” to the Big Bang). We also see here Prue’s frock, the vestment of prudence, a kind of armour against hubris in all its epic and heroic proportions (but don’t we need the hero and the myth? Do we need to live it?). Ponder: why would prudence need armour? To protect itself against hubris? Or is hubris there beneath the armour, clad so to avoid its own reflection? Or is the armour the very reflective surface in which hubris will find itself (hiding)? Is there hubris in beginning at all (or delaying it to the extent I now have)? It’s with these notions that I might colour my brush before I paint. “Let’s start again, let’s start again.”
Let me find my voice. Its resonance chamber is composed of Derrida’s Sec (Signature, Event, Context) and Limited Inc. I won’t venture a summation of them here but rather treat in a few minor peripheral outcroppings. They grow out of puns found in the titles of the two works: “Sec” is French for dry and “Limited Inc” is a play on the idea of limited ink, or limitations of con-text. As to arbitrary limitations, Derrida asks “what about the ink remaining on my typewriter ribbon?” (p. 45*; interestingly, this pun is lacking in the French title and is therefore largely a construct of the translation).
Let’s begin our wanderings in the desert. “Sec” means dry in French (I have said as much already) and Derrida himself picks up on this in the first footnote of the body of Limited Inc (though he probably doesn’t pick it up as such; he was the author and therefore had been holding it since its inception). The dryness is of concern if only because it belies a commitment “to a Cartesian or Logocentric or Foundationalist or Essentialist dream of perfect purity.” (p. 18**) Yes, the movement is a destabilising one, but mustn’t the exorcist believe in the ghosts he seeks to vanquish? There is a sense that the discourses “run to and fro (discurrere), in between the dead ends of the man-made theological ruts which they try to wipe out.” (p. 97***) Derrida then must remain mindful to not allow the limited ink of his fountain/pen to dry up (yes, I know; he’s dead). It is the bane of the arrogant parasite which assumes to feed off its host at no expense to itself without realising that its host is feeding it. Just as the parasite might enter the host (shall we say through the mouth, the voice, the dry throat?) so too does the host enter and influence the parasite’s form as foodstuff (or source of foodstuff). As if it were all give and no take (or is that all take and no give?) wherever parasitism is present! Is this behind the push to the dry; the attempt to make this place as inhospitable to the parasite as possible? Give it no fluid! The functions of sucking, leeching, absorbing, etc. all require liquid to be performed properly. Yet in this flight from water (to save ourselves from parasites of our own creation) we would do well to remember that we too are merely plankton in a boom phase and that if we stray too far from the Source, the bust may be fatal (in a penultimate sense, for there is no ultimate fatality). And is it not the parasite, in any event, which has placed us now in the dryness of the desert? Have “[t]he deconstructive intellectual games reach there a point of absolute stasis, a point of meaninglessness from which one can only return empty-handed”? (p. 94***) These “contemporary critical discourses which, by challenging the voice, seem to dry up the throat” (p. 97***) but do they endanger Life?
There appear to be two different sides to the coin that is deconstruction: the dry (as canvassed above) and the hitherto overlooked wet. (p. 22**) A prime example of this wetter style is Derrida’s Glas, which is one of “the most authentic presentations of his critique of the dream of authenticity. Were it possible, they might be authentically inauthentic; they are, perhaps, beyond authenticity and inauthenticity.” (p. 23**) This text deals, in part, with the distinction between (masculine) Hegelian philosophy (http://mason.gmu.edu/~bhawk/bystory/hegel.html) and (feminine) Genet and Literature (http://mason.gmu.edu/~bhawk/bystory/genet.html). [It is perhaps opportune at this point to also highlight – this is, after all, the opening post and as such should reflect the character of the blog(ger) generally – http://mason.gmu.edu/~bhawk/bystory/horus.html, the (hyper)links this has to Hegel, many conspiracy theories, Plato, and the mason in the URL.] All of this is to say, in effect, that in finding my voice (or did I always have it and was my throat only too dry to sound?) I should hear Derrida’s glas (a Slavic word for “voice”) in all its authentic wetness. This would no doubt mitigate my insistence on his dryness; after all, is it not only my own dryness which has made my thirst for water a journey across the desert (that is where we started...)?
The final juncture here is the distinction between the masculine and the feminine. Carrera’s ‘The Fertile Mystical Maze’*** deals with Cixous and her resonance with certain Christian mystical traditions, focusing specifically (as if this were to be a surprise!) on gender and discourse. This work is commendable not only for its scope of content and capacity to aid understanding, but also in the further questions it raises and alludes to. Is this whole business of written language (and even language as such!) a primarily masculine affair? There is a sense in which Cixous (resonating with Teresa of Avila and other “feminine” mystics) does not see the analysis of (past) language – and by extension its patriarchs of literature (Genet) and philosophy (Hegel) – as yielding anything particularly useful. Rather, women should forge ahead and write their own stories and grammars. Here is another warning to not become overly dry, overly focused on the mark (though it is said one should always keep one’s eagle/Hegel/hawk eye on the mark). As Derrida does in his discussion of iteration (iteralinga carries both of these meanings) – a featureless mound (a gramme?). The resonance with semiotics is marked. Beyond this, Shiva, as the deity of change and destruction (in a very broad sense) is closely linked to the mind and intellect (the cranial buzzing hum of the final sound of AUM, ॐ, belongs to Shiva). While it is clearly distinct from the linga(m) as penis, and although probably not etymologically sound, there is an interesting linkage here between linga as mark/sign/primordial grapheme, penis/masculine, and lingua as language (and, to a less remarkable extent, tongue). Again one must wonder if this (masculine?) fixation on signs, signifiers and signifieds, and ultimately language itself is creative of and for life or destructive and/or parasitic (but hadn’t we decided it was a false distinction? And isn’t it called deconstruction? But is construction even an organic life-process? Mustn’t it be? Or do we deconstruct to allow life to again grow?). being Sanskrit for “other”), I too shall allow myself a reference to Sanskrit. The Linga of Shiva, generally manifested as a very smooth oval stone or pillar, is the primordial mark or sign (indeed, the word
We end then, finally, with life. The fixation upon grammatology may, even when wet, overlook life and living. “Like Teresa [of Avila], Cixous uses her writing to defend the ‘knowledge of how to live’, in contrast to a ‘scholarly knowledge’.” (p. 105***; tellingly, Derrida’s final interview is entitled “Learning to Live Finally” and, again, I should read this work, hear his glas...) Is grammatology simply another aspect of this problematic scholarly knowledge, albeit one which moves against it? Are these dichotomies of the wet and dry, the masculine and feminine, death and life useful to examine in and of themselves, that is, in any essential sense? Or are they simply tools which should be used and/or discarded as the projections of desire/fiction/love/life (or any other “telos”) dictate? To learn how to live, I must learn how to swim. I should take the plunge and cease focusing on the dry, walking on the dry land, the desert. Shall I submerge myself in the ocean? Life is not only wet but wetness, fluid. We are all already submerged in the ocean and must learn how to swim in it. It really isn’t a matter of choice, yet to undertake this work is also the definitive manifestation of Free Will. Ink is fluid, in a state of flux. It solidifies, becomes fixed, dries. Its nature is changed; it is no longer that which it was but rather the very shape and image which is has formed. Is this death, though? Doesn’t the grapheme, the word, the voice, sprout new life? Don’t meanings (at least) grow off it? Dryness is not then an essential property of a given object (as if an object could be contained or specified in the first place!) but rather a way of being in, relating to, and perceiving the surrounding world. The mark can still be as malleable and organic as the liquid from which it came. In this sense the transient fluid movement of possibilities – that is, life – is never exhausted completely and the ink is found to be, in fact, unlimited. All that is alive (and that, then, must surely be everything at all!) is fluid, moving, changing, and liquid. All that is liquid is liquid. All liquid is liquid!
*Limited Inc, Northwestern University Press; 1st edition.
** ‘Derrida Dry: Iterating Iterability Analytically’, Gordon C F Bearn in Diacritics, Vol. 25, No. 3 (Autumn, 1995), pp. 2-25.
*** Ch. 5 ‘The Fertile Mystical Maze: from Derrida’s Dry Theological Gorge to Cixous Dialogic Disgorging’, Elena Carrera in Trajectories of Mysticism in Theory and Literature, ed Philip Leonard. Accessed here: http://books.google.com.au/books?id=USwsZ9Q2VcMC&pg=PA94&lpg=PA94&dq=derrida+dry&source=bl&ots=OeNDBCipuK&sig=sgOqAuUQvjhzrAN4FDRl5wS6siM&hl=en&ei=wZP_TMrbEZC-vgPu9dyOBw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=2&sqi=2&ved=0CBwQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q&f=false
And just to do current news (concerning Arbib’s relationship with the U.S.) justice, a blast from the (recent) past:
And to reiterate prophecy and the augur (note the reptilian features, eyes especially):
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