To Return

After a brief lapse into further writing and image making here is a snippet of some work in progress that may be of interest to Joychampians (?): since I took advised (!) redundancy from Coventry University I have been working almost non-stop on visual and scripted research and I should add the following: that I have found great warmth and generosity in several quarters of the Joycean Scholarly Community. Let's hope the Budapest Joyce Symposium is a great event this year. One thing perhaps among many others can be noted it seems to me and that is the idea that Joyce and Duchamp worked in an 'organic' fashion which by its nature refers to time-conscious processes or memory; that failures in their work (even when clearly artificial or mimed) show us how much Heidegger (as a conscious promoter of pedagogy-through-cognition-of-error as the enlightened way to learning) is key to further insights into JJ and MD's poetic and visual creativity, and beyond Heidegger to the work of Deleuze (for one): that Deleuze's Bergsonism shows how tortuous and expansive that philosopher's writing was, and how such insights on Bergson and Deleuze's work help us to refigure the work of Duchamp that likewise brings Joyce's "[...] socially organic entity of a millenary maritory monetary morphological circumformation" (FW.599.15-17) through time! into blurred focus. Forgive the problems that I see too in this text below: I will continue to add more from now on when I can. Thanks to Mary McClease, Dave and Noel Keith, and to Professor Sarat Maharaj for their written support, to Sam Slote for his quick and useful replies to daft questions, and Jean-Michel Rabaté for his past kindness and the Slought Foundation for just 'Being'. Reading the below again as it's being placed onto the web, it feels like those yellowing documents one keeps in the cupboard that had a life and relevance years ago. Having said that it seems to me that I now need someone - a 'Joychampian' - to look at some of this material (its grown considerably) and give me a critical view. The visual work proceeds now alongside the written material less like a commentary or 'illustration', but more, perhaps, as a means, a visual process that seeks out the limits of visual commentary. Minute particles of material exist in a conflation of responses to JJ & MD and commentators on both. I read some of this material out as a lecture at Coventry shortly after leaving that institution.

Notes for Visual Studies on Joyce and Duchamp
Students of the arts generally have trouble with direct associations made between artwork and techno-scientific advancements of the time. Saying that particular works of art were made because this or that scientific concept was discovered around the same time is not only thought problematic but often wrongheaded. Suggesting for example that an artistic movement towards “openness” as defined for instance by Umberto Eco is related to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, or that the general indeterminacy of the universe seems sensible, still leaves people troubled in seeing direct correlations. Likewise the same or similar ‘problem’ concerning the presences of literary figures for visual artists in their work, or the spectre of a composer like Wagner in the work of a writer like Joyce may seem inconsequential, but the fact remains that such apparent contingencies have actually belonged to mainstream Joycean scholarship for many years. Largely by means of puns and especially paronomasia (the use of words that sound similar to other words, but have different meanings) Joyce, in Finnegans Wake, was able to allude to scientific and technological innovations brought about in the 20th Century, a subject discussed in depth by Donald Theall in his James Joyce’s Techno-Poetics, where in a chapter called Electro-Mechanization, Communication, and the Poet as Engineer he writes:
“The new technological culture attracted Joyce’s artistic interest since it was the ground for interrelating various aspects of the everyday world in which he lived: his politics (a restrained socialist-anarchism); his social milieu, where the images of urbanization and internationalism fascinated him; his vision of a new Renaissance, with the artist as a modern Leonardo; his interest in the critique of psychoanalysis (that is, Freud’s dream-work and libidinal machines, such as Sacher-Masoch’s, which treat fantasy and desire as the work of mental engineering); and finally, the processes of mechanization and electrification, which appealed to the way that he found problems of technique to be central to poetic production. In the context of the contemporary world, his post-Nietzschean transformation of the Aristotelian conception of art as techne utilized techno-scientific processes, such as vivisection, microscopy, photolysis, and quantum mechanics”. (1)

Theall remarks that by embracing science, mathematics, technology and semiotics: “Joyce addressed the challenge posed to the book by technological modes of communication in the emergence of cyberculture” (2), and in his text he examines such motifs and themes as: “poetic engineering, poetry as cultural production, media and machines, theories of time and space, quantum mechanics, modern mathematics, telecommunications technology, and the art and science of colour and light”; but he also: “probes Joyce’s transformation in the new cultural production of such concepts as mimesis, memory, allegory, parody and satire, and the role of the poetic in the secularization of the sacred as the ‘auto-mobile’ apes the divine”. (3) Given the terms Theall employs it is not surprising that Duchamp is mentioned, but largely alongside other artists with inclinations towards science and technology. (4)

Louis Armand in his more recent book Techne: James Joyce, Hypertext & Technology, (2003) underlines the question of technology in its relation to the work of Joyce and specifically the concept of hypertext gleaned from his discreet probing of the language of Finnegans Wake which, he suggests, constitutes a non-sequential writing that deploys itself as a type of textual apparatus or machine and thus motivates a type of hypertextual genetics: “The question here centres on the notion of solicitation – the extent to which Joyce’s text can be said to both call for and motivate a hypertextuality irreducible to a stable field, or placement, whereby a text could be defined in relation to a structural episteme. At the same time solicitation is shown in Joyce’s text not to be merely an affect or even a strategy of writing, but rather as something inherent to language itself”. (5)

In his Preface Armand calls on Derrida and Heidegger as allies in a project that seeks to present Joyce’s writing as a model for: “rethinking the relationship between technology and ‘all forms of cultural production’”, and first cites Derrida who, in his essay Force and Signification, relates solicitation to lability:
“Structure is perceived through the incidence of menace, at the moment when imminent danger concentrates our vision on the keystone of an institution, the stone which encapsulates both the possibility and the fragility of its existence. Structure then can be methodically threatened in order to be comprehended more clearly and to reveal not only its supports but also that secret place in which it is neither construction nor ruin but lability. This operation is called (from the Latin) soliciting. In other words, shaking in a way related to the whole (from sollus, in archaic Latin ‘the whole’, and from citare, ‘to put in motion’). (6)

‘Lability’ through the aegis of ‘solicitation’ situates Joyce’s text as wholly open to question in the sense Heidegger thought of philosophical questioning which is opposed to what, for example, Babette Babich calls ‘calculative questioning’: “[…] the contemporary expression of technology condemns questioning to nothing more than a calculative convention (namely that of question and answer) rather than an open-ended or attentive project. Calculative questioning challenges and is content with nothing less than the satisfaction of the correct. It is the calculative character of the contemporary techno-scientific world which renders the questionable as such less and less question-worthy. Calculating technological questioning is revealed as a Ge-stell, hyphenated to emphasize the enframing of modern technology as a set-up. This framing set-up is the secret of technology (as the age of the world picture), the quantitative expression, that is the earmark of information-age technicism or what Heidegger called ‘Americanism’, i.e. ‘European’. Thus the achievements of modern technological advance depend upon calculable manipulation which in his day, Heidegger named ‘cybernetics’. The danger here is that ‘what can seemingly always be calculated completely, becomes, precisely through this, seemingly incalculable". (7)

Armand’s aim: “to elaborate on a number of implications for hypertext which touch upon our fundamental understanding of language”, (8) is based on Heidegger’s thought expressed in his essay The Question Concerning Technology in which he argues that the essence of technology is not itself anything technological but is, rather, an autonomous organizing activity within which humans themselves are organised. Heidegger’s intention is to think technology under the broader rubric of aletheia rather than its instrumental sense as ‘a means to ends’.

Aletheia is the term Heidegger substituted for the word ‘truth’, and it is applied to the “poetic revealing” of the world to which he appealed in his later writings. As Beniamino Soressi puts it: “Heidegger’s intuition was that the poet accomplishes in producing by metaphor an ‘ek-stasis’ of things that is the ‘analogon’ of technological production”: “The poet transforms man’s passive reception of things by a distinctive non-logical ‘thinking’. Technology appears as ‘a mode of revealing’ like poetry, but its ‘revelation’ is a transfiguration of things as they are by a self-assertive and calculating stance towards nature, and it is a sort of ‘over-revelation’ overwhelming every other possible revelation”. (9)

Gerald L. Bruns writes of Heidegger’s strange notion of truth as a-letheia, where a-letheia is no longer simply the old Greek word for unconcealment or disclosure but: “[…] is also a complex pun that preserves the darkness or otherness of truth, its strangeness or reserve, its self-refusal, its ‘un-truth’ […] his puns, for example, […] are not so funny as Joyce’s but just as crucial to the impossible task of writing darkly, hermetically, say in the manner of Heraclitus or Mallarmé”. (10)

“The occurrence of truth always means estrangement” writes Bruns, but: “The work of estrangement occurs when the work [of art, essentially poetry] comes so radically into its own – becomes so powerful and solitary – that ‘it seems to cut all ties to human beings’. It is so wholly other that we can see nothing in it; it mirrors nothing we can recognize. (One cannot help thinking here of the Mallarméan poem or a text like Finnegans Wake)”. (11)

Bruns’ study of Heidegger’s final text on language, The Way to Language, comes under the sub-title Signs in which Finnegans Wake frequently features as a kind of paradigm. Indeed, Bruns discusses Heidegger’s writing on language, art and technology: “the worlding of the world, is the event of language”, (12) in ways that seem to teem with allusions to Joyce’s language-use, structure and motif in Finnegans Wake, not merely because it cannot be called a reasoning of any sort (from the standpoint of progressive, systematic, calculative and ‘philosophical thinking’ it is “repetitious, opaque, pointless and unproductive”); (13)) but the work of the work of art, in Heidegger’s The Origin of the Work of Art, that is to say what happens with it, is in any case: “[…] explicated in terms of the doubleness of truth as disclosure and refusal or dissembling (Versagen and Verstellen). (13)

Language, art and technology are movement and adjustment shot through with dissimulation. We can’t move to a place in which we know language as other than self-concealing, “in which”, writes Bruns: “concealment, lethe belongs to a-letheia, not just as an addition, not as shadow to light, but rather as the heart of aletheia” (14): “Here is where the question of poetry’s truth comes back into play, but in order to get into this play one has to go through the looking glass of délire heideggerienne where philosophy no longer resembles itself, nor does poetry, (which is no longer the art of writing verses, no longer poiesis or Poesie but Dichten [writing]). In this strange region, where the concealment of being (Verborgenheit), or ‘untruth proper’, is said to be older than truth in ways we are at a loss to explain, it should not surprise us to find that poetry’s truth implicates us in its darkness, its reserve or resistance to our efforts to lay bare such things as ‘textual logic’. That is, poetry’s truth emerges in the way it comports itself, not within the framework of representation and calculation, but toward the concealment of beings, or toward what Heidegger calls ‘mystery’. (15)

Armand’s Techne moves toward Heideggerian notions of language and technology almost, one feels, as a response to Theall not having dealt with them but also to continue the train of thought on Joyce’s writing and technology that Theall first put in place. Armand writes that he sees Joyce within the context of Mallarmé, Apollinaire, Cendrars, and Marinetti, who can be bound up with communications technologies and with the impact this evolution has had upon language in general. It is at this point that my own discussion of Duchamp’s work in relation to Joyce’s begins since not only do I consider Joyce’s Wake a literary but also a ‘visual’ manifestation of linking technology to Dichten and Dichtung: “’All art, Heidegger says, ‘is essentially poetry’ (Poetry 72). ‘Poetry" here is Dichtung rather than Poesie; that is, it is a primordial naming rather than the art of making verses.

"The poet names the gods and names all things in that which they are. This naming does not consist in merely something already known being supplied with a name; it is rather that when the poet speaks the essential word, the existent is by this naming nominated as what it is. So it becomes known as existent. Poetry is the establishing of being by means of the word". (Existence 281) "Poetry here is a sort of world-making. The poet is an Orphic singer who brings things into being for the first time. However, the poet bears an ambiguous relation to the world that poetry establishes. The brightness of being, Heidegger says, "drives the poet into the dark" (Existence 285). There is no place for the poet in the world; the poet always dwells apart. In his later writings, Heidegger becomes increasingly absorbed in the nature of this "apartness" (Abgeschiedenheit). (16)

Hyper-consciousness of the techno-scientific culture of his age places Duchamp with Joyce as an artist whose interference with language and play on previous art is based on techne, demonstrably well beyond the work of the artists to whom Armand refers and as established, among many others, by Linda D. Henderson in her book Duchamp in Context: Science and Technology in the Large Glass and Related Works. The ironies that Duchamp entertains in his Glass and other works concerning art, language, and technology, appear to have been overlooked even by those Joyceans whose interests turn on hypertextuality. Darren Tofts, however, whose essay Addressing the Green Box Ulysses: Prolegomena to Joycean Hypertextuality, provides an informative gloss on Joyce and Duchamp ‘connections’ and ‘correspondences’.

It is not enough to discuss Duchamp without considering his use of language, writing, and interviews. The highly complex, enigmatic, and intentionally obscure character of the objects and texts he produced, however, lead us to situate his art within a debate concerning literature, poetry, philosophy and exegesis. Duchamp’s art like Joyce’s brings out the best in exegetical analyses that seem naturally to engage researchers in cross-referencing various fields of enquiry among which we must keep in mind, if not forefront, philosophy and poetry. In Dichten Duchamp and Joyce may be aligned with Heidegger’s later thought where he wandered from Being and Time to poetry.

Notes

(1) Donald Theall. James Joyce’s Techno-Poetics. University of Toronto Press. 1997. p.33.
(2) Ibid. pp. ix-x.
(3) Ibid. p. xvi.
(4) In his Introduction Theall notes Duchamp’s ‘fascination’ with Riemannian geometry and later equates “Joyce’s complex literary machine” with contemporary projects “like those of Duchamp, Léger, the Dadaists, and the Futurists”. As Theall points out, Riemann’s n-dimensional geometry was “fundamental to the treatment of space and time in Einstein’s general theory of relativity and in quantum theory”. (p.131).
(5) Louis Armand. Techne: James Joyce, Hypertext and Technology. p.xi.
(6) Ibid. Derrida, cited on p.xii.
(7) Babette Babich. The Essence of Questioning After Technology: Techne as Constraint and the Saving of Power. British Journal of Phenomenology. 30th January 1999. pp.106-124.
Referring to Plato’s notion of ‘truth-as-supremacy’ Richard Rorty notes that Heidegger wants to direct our attention to the difference between inquiry and poetry, between struggling for power and accepting contingency.
(8) Armand. p.xii.
(9) Beniamino Soressi. Heidegger on Poetry and Technology: Towards a New Dispute over Ancient and Modern Gods. Article.
(10) Gerald L. Bruns. Heidegger’s Estrangements. Yale University Press. 1981. p.45.
(11) Ibid.
(12) Ibid.p.150.
(13) Ibid. p.10.
(14) Ibid. pp.10-11.
(15) Ibid. p.10.
(16) Gerald L. Bruns. The John Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory & Criticism. (Internet Site) 1997.