Playful Intelligence: Digitizing Tradition 9781472568823, 9781472568816, 9781472594464, 9781472568847

Table of contents :
Cover page
Halftitle page
Series page
Title page
Copyright page
Contents
Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction Convergence-Zone: Art, Theory, Therapy
1 Reading Kandinsky
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
2 From The Brothers K. to Joseph K.: The Digitization of Literature
1.
2.
3.
3 The Calculable, the Incalculable, and the Rest: Kafka’s Virtual Environment
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
4 Urban Introjections: Berlin Alexanderplatz
1. The City Speaks
2. Berlin on Line
3. Urbane Introject
4. Angel Eyes
5 Theory on the Fly: Critical Synthesis under Conditions of Material Pirating and Borrowed Time
1.
2.
3.
4.
6 Playful Healing: The Transitions of D. W. Winnicott
1.
2.
3.
4.
7 The Figure in the Network: Douglas Hofstadter and the Ethics of Intelligence
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8 The Phenomenology of Jetlag
1.
2.
3. United States of Jetlag
4. Ethics in Time
Afterword Healing, Systematically
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
Notes
Index

Citation preview

Playful Intelligence

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ALSO AVAILABLE FROM BLOOMSBURY Posthumanism, Stefan Herbrechter The Philosophy of Simondon, Pascal Chabot

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Playful Intelligence Digitizing Tradition

HENRY SUSSMAN

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Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

www.bloomsbury.com Bloomsbury is a registered trade mark of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2014 © Henry Sussman, 2014 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Henry Sussman has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury Academic or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: 978-1-47256-882-3 PB: 978-1-47256-881-6 ePDF: 978-1-47256-884-7 ePub: 978-1-47256-883-0 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk

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Contents List of Illustrations Acknowledgments

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Introduction—Convergence-Zone: Art, Theory, Therapy 1 1 Reading Kandinsky 37 2 From The Brothers K. to Joseph K.: The Digitization of Literature 83 3 The Calculable, the Incalculable, and the Rest: Kafka’s Virtual Environment 111 4 Urban Introjections: Berlin Alexanderplatz 137 5 Theory on the Fly: Critical Synthesis under Conditions of Material Pirating and Borrowed Time 167 6 Playful Healing: The Transitions of D. W. Winnicott 203 7 The Figure in the Network: Douglas Hofstadter and the Ethics of Intelligence 243 8 The Phenomenology of Jetlag 287 Afterword: Healing, Systematically 303 Notes 373 Index 397

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Cover Kandinsky, Wassily (1866–1944). “Lyrical” (“Lyrisches”), 1911.

Oil on canvas. 94 × 130 cm Museum Bojimans von Beuningen, Rotterdam, Netherlands 1.1 1.2

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Kandinsky, Wassily (1866–1944) © ARS, NY. “Picture with a Circle” (“Bild mit Kreis”), 1911 Kandinsky, Wassily (1866–1944) © ARS, NY. “Variation after Improvisation 21” (“Variation nach Improvisation 21”) (plate, folio 13) from Klänge (Sounds) by Vasily Kandinsky (1913). Woodcut from an illustrated book with fifty-six woodcuts, composition (irreg.): 45⁄8 × 5½ inches (11.7 × 14 cm); page: 111⁄6 × 107⁄8 inches (28.1 × 27.7 cm). Printer: Poeschel & Trepte, Leipzig. Publisher: R. Piper & Co., Munich Kandinsky, Wassily (1866–1944) © ARS, NY. “Improvisation 26 (Rowing/Rudern),” 1912 (Stätische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich, Gabriele Munter-Stiftung) Kandinsky, Wassily (1866–1944) © ARS, NY. “Black Lines” (“Schwarze Linien”), December 1913. Oil on canvas. 51 × 515⁄8 inches (129.4 × 131.1 cm). Solomon R. Guggenheim Founding Collection, by gift Kandinsky, Wassily (1866–1944) © ARS, NY. “Light Picture” (“Helles Bild”), December 1913. Oil and natural resin on canvas, 30¾ × 39½ inches (77.8 × 100.2 cm). Solomon R. Guggenheim Founding Collection, by gift Kandinsky, Wassily (1866–1944) © ARS, NY. “Red Oval” (“Krasny Oval”), 1920. Oil on canvas, 281⁄8 × 281⁄8 inches (71.5 × 71.2 cm). Kandinsky, Wassily (1866–1944) © ARS, NY. “Painting with a White Border” (“Bild mit weißem Rand [Moskau]”), May 1913. Oil on canvas. 55¼ × 787⁄8 inches (140.3 × 200.3 cm). Solomon R. Guggenheim Founding Collection, by gift

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Kandinsky, Wassily (1866–1944) © ARS, NY. “White Line” (“Bely Shtrikh”), 1920, Ludwig Museum, Cologne Kandinsky, Wassily (1866–1944) © ARS, NY. “Composition 8” (“Komposition 8”), July 1923. Oil on canvas. 551⁄8 × 791⁄8 inches (140 × 201 cm). Solomon R. Guggenheim Founding Collection, by gift Kandinsky, Wassily (1866–1944) © ARS, NY. “Yellow Accompaniment” (“Gelbe Begleitung”), February–March 1924. Oil on canvas, 391⁄8 × 383⁄8 inches (99.2 × 97.4 cm). Solomon R. Guggenheim Founding Collection, by gift Kandinsky, Wassily (1866–1944) © ARS, NY. “Three Sounds” (“Drei Klänge”), August 1926. Oil on canvas, 235⁄8 × 23½ inches (59.9 × 59.6 cm) Kandinsky, Wassily (1866–1944) © ARS, NY. “Yellow Painting” (“La Toile jaune”), July 1938. Oil and enamel on canvas, 457⁄8 × 35 inches (116.4 × 88.8 cm) Kandinsky, Wassily (1866–1944) © ARS, NY. “Various Parts” (“Partis diverses”), 1940, Stätische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich, Gabriele Munter-Stiftung Kandinsky, Wassily (1866–1944) © ARS, NY. “Around the Circle” (“Autour du circle”), May–August 1940. Oil and enamel on canvas, 381⁄8 × 57½ inches (96.8 × 146 cm) Oskar Schlemmer, “Triadic Ballet” Costumes, “Wieder Metropol” Review, Berlin, Metropol Theater, 1926 Kandinsky, Wassily (1866–1944) © ARS, NY. “Yellow-RedBlue” (“Gelb-Rot-Blau”), 1925. Oil on canvas, 128 × 201.5 cm. Inv. AM1976-856. Photo: Adam Rzepka Kandinsky, Wassily (1866–1944) © ARS, NY. “Dominant Curve” (“Courbe dominante”), April 1936. Oil on canvas. 507⁄8 × 76½ inches (129.2 × 194.3 cm). Solomon R. Guggenheim Founding Collection, by gift

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Acknowledgments T

he present book made its acquaintance to me during a blessed year of writing and consistently stimulating intellectual programming in 2010–2011 at the Internationales Kolleg, University of Cologne. As a Fellow at this remarkable Internationales Kolleg, I was afforded every possible form of intellectual and logistical support for my writing, not only by its visionary codirectors, Günter Blamberger and Dietrich Boschung, but by the consistently talented and versatile staff they have assembled. My fondest wish is for ongoing scholars and intellectuals from all corners of the world to be sustained and inspired as I was during the months in Cologne. Among the many associations I was fortunate to forge in conjunction with IKMorphomata was one with Liza Thompson of Bloomsbury, editor of the present volume. She, her close colleague Rachel Eisenhauer, who was also indefatigable in her support, and the remainder of her staff embody that rare combination of idealism and unrestrained devotion characteristic of all enterprises, academic schools and departments as well as publishers, in their ascendency. I’m honored to be part of a list that can only flourish as time goes on. This book is the outgrowth of courses that I was able to teach in particular concentration during the last decade in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at Yale University. In the intellectual creativity of its faculty, the overall cultural ambience that it consistently fosters, the inventiveness and dedication of its graduate students, the accelerated linguistic skill that it instills in Yale undergraduates, and its overall atmosphere of collegial sharing and support, the Department has been an ideal academic home. Particularly in the home-stretch of preparations, Marie Kessler and Igor Mitschka of the Department rendered indispensable service. Over the years of the planning and writing of this book, the Provost of Yale University has graciously provided me with research funds in support of crucial book-related equipment and travel. In the Spring of 2013, in my capacity as the Charlotte M. Craig Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Department of German, Russian, and East European Languages and Literatures at Rutgers University, I was treated to a very similar constellation of stimulating collegiality and receptivity on the part of my students. The change of scene was particularly welcome during the final stages of manuscript preparation.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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I am grateful to Professors Julia Weber and Dorit Müller of the Free University, Berlin, for an invitation to read sections of Chapter 3 there in May, 2011, at a conference on “Literary Studies and the Spatial Turn: Analytical Models for the Study of Kafka’s Story, ‘The Burrow’.” My intervention at the conference resulted in its publication in Räume der Literatur: Exemplarische Zugänge zu Kafkas Erzählung “Der Bau,” ed. Julia Weber and Dorit Müller (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013). A version of this chapter also appeared in Modern Language Notes, 127 (2012), as did a version of Chapter 8 (MLN, 124 [2009]). I am also grateful to Professors Jonathan Luftig of Morgan State University and Helmut Illbruck of Texas Christian University for their gracious invitation to participate in a Special Session, “Guilt and Debt in Literature,” of the 2011 Modern Language Association annual meeting. The presentation, which was then called “Citation: The Gift that Never Stops Giving,” resulted in Chapter 5 of the present volume. The utterly creative and indeed unforgettable editor of several of my prior critical studies, at the Fordham and Stanford University Presses, Helen Tartar, makes a walk-on appearance in Chapter 1. It remains shattering and utterly incomprehensible to me that the critical community could have lost her so suddenly and prematurely, on March 3, 2014. As ever, my critical interventions and creative explorations arise first and foremost in the context of my family, a constant and renewable source of inspiration, education, and joyous anticipation of the future.

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Introduction Convergence-Zone: Art, Theory, Therapy romethean spark. As a college senior in 1967, I was fortunate to take a seminar on mythology taught by two of Brandeis’s most esteemed professors, the poet Allen Grossman and the Romanticist Richard Onorato. Over the course of F ’67, these devoted scholars placed a wealth of erudition and sheer literary sensibility at the disposal of a total of four of us. The procedure of the course was as follows: each of us was to learn everything we could about a mythological figure assigned us at the outset, a mantra, as it were, to our self-guided explorations of the configuration, dissemination, variation, and mutation of various myths over a range of epochs, artifacts, and art forms. The figure assigned me by Allen Grossman was Prometheus, on no specific pretext that I could discern at the time. Over the following weeks, I pursued the footsteps of this tragic, titanic figure, from his trespass against Olympian order—bestowing fire, conveyed in a fennel stalk, upon mankind against the express injunction of Zeus—to his meteoric comeback, chez Percy Bysshe Shelley, as an icon of Romantic resistance to arbitrary order—or what is, within the framework of the following essays, termed “systems.” When I managed to concentrate during those turbulent days of political questioning and devising more fluid and responsive educational and social forms, I indeed learned many things that I could have never suspected: how minimal and dispersed the written record behind many a fabled mythological character; how arbitrary the primary sources and sites of narrative transmission (in the case of Prometheus, Hesiod, Diodorus Siculus, and Suetonius); the formats of the various data-bases dedicated to tracing out these lines of cultural invention and transmission. Our parallel immersion in various central Western myths was an inaugural exposure to the resolute investigative work at the core of all scholarship. For me, the seminar served as a boot-camp into the dogged persistence necessary to find just about anything out. It has taken me a long time to figure out that that the myth has much more to do with the spark that Prometheus conveyed in a plant-stalk than with the epic tale of transgression and punishment that captures center-stage in our

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attention. How, dramatically, can a particularly tenuous spark compete with the image of an epic hero’s liver being torn out and devoured on a daily basis by vulture-drones? As forbears to the Olympian gods and to the full-service civilization over which they presided in several senses, the Titans were calibrated in the form of oversized, dull-witted monstrosities or mutants, each uncannily invested with a particular special feature or skill. Prometheus bore the gift of foresight. The twin brother, Epimetheus, was a specialist, like most of us, in hindsight. The fact that what I now understand, so many years later, as the spark of fire, inseparable from the spark of intelligence, was introduced into the human domain by an earthy soul, in Kafka’s parlance a “Mann vom Lande,” affords unexpected opportunity for wonderment. It must mean that however ingeniously bureaucrats and administrators, among whom Zeus and Creon figure prominently, seize control of the institutional platform sustaining culture and civilization, intelligence, whatever it may be, is of an older provenance and an unattributed origin and ownership. Fire, as the medium of intelligence, something radiant, destructive, and indispensable to technology all at once, is poetically far richer and more suggestive than such distant descendants as Kantian “pure reason.” Yet even fire, for all its many figurative metamorphoses, is too fraught with political controversy to serve as a pretext for a discussion of intelligence. Whether figured by fire or not, whether trope or topos, intelligence remains the understated “unmoved mover” behind so much of what transpires in schools, culture, and art.

♠ Politically, the notion of intelligence is a hopeless disaster: it is disaster itself. Who will take on the onus of defining it, militating for it, basing allocations (and other procedures of bio-political impact) upon it? And yet, of course, the professional and writerly worlds of anyone who reads this particular study are permeated by constructs and standards of intelligence, however inchoate and poorly articulated. The pecking order of the institutions in which we teach and write is largely a function of the quality of the students that these schools can attract and retain. The (constitutionally) unwritten hierarchies of prestige attached to institutions, cadres of discourse, and even individual careers exercise tangible effects upon lives. Yet as we well know, these allocations are ultimately the affair of Luhmannian social systems; they are virtually free standing from what transpires in cognitive processing or on the page. University and departmental admissions is one of the social-selection processes most overtly tied to criteria of intelligence, whether defined as aptitude or demonstrated performance and however it is perceived across the gamut of disciplines and professions. At the same time that intelligence

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as selection criterion is a political hot potato, most of us are in default in acknowledging the full impact of intelligence-constructions upon our work, our interpersonal interactions, and our personal metaphysics. Intelligence becomes an explicit and implicit subtext to the following essays because its marshaling and deployment is nothing less than decisive to individuals’ recourse in addressing the systematic organizations that impact and impinge upon their cognitive processing and their lives. Intelligence attains centrality to the present study in part because it is a construct at once deeply embedded in the speculative tradition of Western philosophy and very much at play in the Prevailing Operating System of contemporary cybernetics, as in “Artificial Intelligence” and a plethora of related concepts and processes. For purposes of the present study, I will be working off the way that Douglas R. Hofstadter structures the working of “strange loops,” the decisive infrastructure of self-referential and hence metacritical cybernetic programs, according to functions of an intelligence defined by a marvelously creative flexibility in addressing, not containing or evading complexity. “Essential abilities” for intelligence include the following: to respond to situations very flexibly; to take advantage of fortuitous circumstances; to make sense out of ambiguous or contradictory messages . . . to synthesize new concepts by talking old concepts and putting them together in new ways; to come up with ideas that are novel.1 Hofstadter’s language here is not only marvelously lucid and suggestive in its own right. Even while acknowledging that some dimensions of complexity elude neat resolution, Hofstadter establishes a common cause between the growing complexities to which cybernetic software and hardware became responsive in their evolution and mutation and the subtlety and wonder achieved in such varied domains as musical notation, graphic design, spiritual contemplation, and narrative invention. In keeping with an aesthetic of critical bad taste that I have sustained going on half a century, I am raising the question of intelligence, particularly its nature, its status as a construct or figure, and its fostering in the young, precisely because in general we are too circumspect to “go there.” Again, nothing could be more double-edged or treacherous than a “politics of intelligence,” waged from whatever perspective or interest. At the same time, in the impromptu literature that coalesces in the following essays, one including but not limited to Lewis Carroll, Kafka, and Roberto Bolaño, accompanied by D. W. Winnicott, Anthony Wilden, and Hofstadter’s vivid appreciation of literary invention, a construct of intelligence is indispensable to defining whatever “margin” is available in the systematic

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negotiation of systematic organizations defining contemporary life and not that far removed from prior épistèmes, governments and regimes, and social operating systems.

♣ What is the interstice or margin where artistic improvisation and critical and therapeutic interventions address and redress the excesses regularly produced by systematic organizations? Does it make sense to place a series of re-mediations posited, respectively, by artistic creativity, theoretical circumspection, and clinical partnership on the same plane, at an interface where their very different stances and strategies communicate? Or is this asking for too much? Settling in fact for a gut-reaction common denominator, a leveler, a vehicle of resistance ultimately too vapid, in its breadth, to parse cultural artifacts in their complex specificities? If there is a zone where aesthetics, therapeutics, and theory join hands and establish common cause, is it, in contemporary parlance, “system,” “environment,” or somehow a hybrid of both? At what tipping point does aesthetics resign itself to public performance, stopping at suggestion before venturing enactment? Does theory eventuate at a limit where it relegates the thinking it has performed to speculation, precisely the non-instrumentality of open-ended deliberation? At what ceiling does therapeutic work confine itself strictly to the interest of self-help and “private practice?” Could the kinds of breakthroughs that we associate with clinical practice ever instigate movements of social resistance? Can artworks or their theory ever trigger clinical transformations? Can the impact of “flashbulb” moments of acuity2 on the philosophical or theoretical plane be as tangible and long-lasting, in their impact, as pivotal clinical realizations? The above questions are all ones of spatial mapping— superimposed upon the cat-and-mouse game of resistance to the systems that culture conjures up because it is culture. As in politics, whether at international, national, or local level, the geography of interfaces, interstices, and convergence zones results in tangible divisions and relations of power. The contractual constraints on academic disciplines, established art forms, and therapeutic practice restrict their respective communities from discerning their embedded common cause, dissuade these communities from ever forming a social class, from exercising any form of self-interest or power. Yet it may also prove true that resistance to systematic organization, momentum, and drift across a broad spectrum of discourses and practices is no more pervasive than systematic organizations have made themselves; that the resistance to systems must inure itself to its own versions of entropy: the inherent dysfunctions and inefficiencies over the long haul wearing systems down.

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In spite of a long, and I would add basically sound and healthy tradition, in the critical community, of extreme skepticism toward healing as a recuperation of lost equanimity, wholeness, integration, health, and so on, this book starts from the assumption that our inevitable encounters with systematic organizations create limit-conditions from which we, in some sense or another, need to regroup or recover. Furthermore, the very fashion in which systematic organizations are configured, the very terms in which they are couched or articulated, predicate the forms of re-mediation that their burntout or otherwise impacted participants require in order to regain working capability. “Working order,” in the present study, is the combination of cognitive focus and interactivity with the environment allowing for openended writing and thinking, specifically as characterized by contemporary critical theory, by the likes of Heidegger, Derrida, and Deleuze/Guattari, to transpire or resume. I readily acknowledge, from the outset of this study, that the construct, whether “systematic healing” or “healing, systematically,” is particularly fraught with the potential for its misprision. Neither we, in the non-negotiable conditions to which we are subject in our interactions with various prevailing systems, nor the systems themselves, have the capacity to be “healed,” corrected, or restored. By definition, systems operate by generalizing particulars, by totalizing terms and definitions, and by attaining some regularity in their output. A system that would be “healed” of this closure or impetus to abuse the conditional and contextual particularities of specific instances would not be a system any longer; it would be, rather, a text, a cultural constellation, or an installation. We, conversely, cannot be “healed” of the adverse impacts of our daily commerce with systems of education, justice, and propinquity as well as of communications and information, in the sense of being released from or cleansed of the residue of systematic thinking and operations that condition and program our ways of life and Being-in-the-world as well as our cognition. Our interaction with systems is reciprocal, supplemental, mutually prosthetic. The theoretical tradition considering these relations and dynamics in the greatest of circumspect goes back at least as far as Hegel. A study such as the following, that traces the feedback loop between ourselves as highly idiosyncratic and still-open self-systems interacting with much larger, more entrenched social and technoorganizations—with their own inbuilt potential for morphing, mutation, and transformation—is anything but a self-help book. It is, rather, an exercise in close reading attached to an analysis of cognition as it has been broken down into faculties linked by different configurations of irreducibly linguistic “wiring” over the past three centuries. The emphasis in this study is just as much on what we can learn from a dispassionate cultural psychoanalysis of how we have been programmed by the encompassing technologies and

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their supporting social systems in which we dwell as on requisite strategies of dismantling or deconstructing these very media and systems. It is hence incumbent on us to revisit and analyze the extreme whimsy and playfulness that the first-generation theorizers of cyberbetics and systems in general—from Gregory Bateson, Norbert Weiner, Ludwig von Bertalanffy, and Heinz von Foerster to Anthony Wilden and Douglas R. Hofstadter—were able to impart to the emergent communications and information networks defining the current age and lending it its Prevailing Operating System.3 It’s not by accident that Hofstadter sub-subtitles his Gödel, Escher, Bach, “A Metaphorical Fugue on Minds and Machines in the Spirit of Lewis Carroll.” Beginning with Wiener, Wilden, and Hofstadter, cybernetic systems and programs are invested with the radicality, self-referentiality, and morphogenic capability becoming part and parcel of contemporary critical theory’s upgrading the conceptual power of what had hitherto been thematic, philological, and comparative studies. In arranging what may seem like the “odd couple” consisting of philosophically driven Cultural Studies and the late-twentiethcentury literature of cybernetics and systems theory, the present study seeks to access that radical interface where the presumably incompatible loops structuring Proust’s A la Recherche du temps perdu, its Guermantes and Méséglise ways, finally converge. It is far more in the sense of the playfulness common to Carroll and dialogue in the interchapters between the momentous cybernetics lessons set out for the first time in Gödel, Escher, Bach than in the sense of any clinical abeyance or relief that the present study takes up the possibilities for “healing” under current conditions. In this sense, D. W. Winnicott’s intervention in a psychoanalytical tradition with little shortage of “top-down” thinking and procedure, sets the tone for the upbeat attitude toward critique, systems analysis, aesthetic invention, and therapies that remain, so far as I am concerned, the order of the day. In a therapeutic as well as expressive style that can only be characterized as low-key and modest, Winnicott effected two major sea-changes in the culture and history of psychoanalysis that can only be characterized as monumental: changing the dominant parental role embedded in psychodynamic psychotherapy from pronounced fathering (in the Freudian paradigm) to mothering; establishing play and playfulness as a prevalent culture and strategy within therapeutic transaction. In their fields and missions, D. W. Winnicott could not stand at a further remove from Douglas R. Hofstadter. Yet the sheer inventiveness of the latter’s invocations of Bach, Zen Buddhism, stereo equipment, ant colonies, and fanciful literature in orienting “advanced technological” society to the immanent onslaught of computers in all arenas of public and “personal” life carries with it a full measure of Winnicott’s atmospheric legacy. Within Gödel, Escher, Bach, the utterly charming interchanges between “Tortoise” (the Hofstadter surrogate),

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“Achilles,” and “Anteater” stave off the ominous, “Dr. Strangelove”-like premonitions of a completely computerized world long enough, and with enough distraction, to afford readers a personal stake in the creative, and indeed enchanting, facet of these innovations.

♥ Any study of contemporary systems, whether from the perspective of their pervasiveness or of their ultimate ineffectiveness and corruption, must perforce begin in an attitude of resolute skepticism. One not only questioning systems’ tangibility and viability as targets for suggestive discourse, but even their existence, their worldly effect. Nietzsche, during an age that witnessed a prodigious impact of public administration and bureaucracy, particularly upon countries and regions perpetuating such feudal traditions as government by local aristocracy and serfdom/peasantry, set a tone perforce extending even to status reports on systematic organization today: “I distrust all systematizers and avoid them. The will to a system shows a lack of honesty.”4 The target that Nietzsche holds here in his critical crosshairs is both the agents of politico-administrative force, who configure bureaucracy in the name of social control and efficiency, and the intellectual workers, mostly philosophers and social scientists, who process phenomena and data by means of systematic constructs and models, thereby claiming global confirmation of their grounding premises. While not necessarily a corrective, Nietzsche’s admonition here is a required ongoing counterpoint to the invocation of systems perforce coinciding with the enterprise of surveying and reporting their impact. Such a proliferation of governmental and commercial bureaucracy as Nietzsche witnessed during the rise of Bismarck’s Empire had its counterparts in Russia at roughly the same moment. Indeed, the normalization of the courts and education throughout that vast land comprises the nuts and bolts substratum to such a work as Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. (The spread of schools and courts in the novel may be regarded as the historico-quantitative prong to its embedded narrative “isomorphism.”) This novel and others of Dostoyevsky’s widely appreciated classics derives its status as a standby in the repository of great fiction from its rare confluence of humanistic wisdom (as embodied in the Brothers by the figure of Father Zosima) and narrative realism. It would hardly be excessive to characterize Dostoyevsky as a “technician” (let alone a master) of narrative simulation extending to setting, time, character, emotion, and dialogue—all attaining a virtuality of absorptiveness and a level of detail bursting at the seams. Franz Kafka, in such works as Amerika (Der Verschollene), assembling a canon of

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World Literature to be retrofitted to his particular moment of bureaucratic organization and its enabling technologies, heads straight for Dostoyevsky as a wisdom-source to be updated to the bureaucracy of the Austro-Hungarian Empire on the eve of its collapse and to the communications and informational specifications of the very first generation of electronic office equipment. It is no exaggeration to assert, as I do in Chapters 2 and 3 below, that among other of his favorite novelists, including Flaubert and Dickens, Kafka renders a digital makeover to Dostoyevsky’s bloated realism and its underlying, overwhelming detail. He is delicately attuned to the operating systems both of Dostoyevsky’s undying psychological insight and wisdom and his multiple techniques of narrative verisimilitude. Yet he literally strips away vast segments in the novel’s “analog” verification in the effort to lay bare the signifying “relational” program and configuration of its meta-fictional commentary and of its underlying ethical operating system. In relation to Dostoyevsky among others, Kafka instruments a cross-over to digital language and organization well in advance of the proliferation of digital hardware and applications defining our current cultural moment and determining its transactions, cognitive habits, and even its interpersonal relations. The logic of discerning the cyberneticosystematic configuration and drift underlying scientific crystallizations and cultural innovations in no way powered by cybernetic technology motivates Douglas R. Hofstadter’s most powerful invocations of Gödel, Escher, Bach in the prescient introductory textbook to the present age of that title. It was along the same thought-channel that in a volume exploratory to the present one, I treated the speculative systems whose respective blueprints appear in Kant’s First Critique and Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit as “computers without software.”5 Kafka’s move on Dostoyevsky to a large measure anticipates the thrust of the diverse essays making up the current inquiry. Kafka strips bare the proliferation of “analog” detail in Dostoyevsky to reveal a digital substratum discernible under the comprehensive cybernetic regime in which we strive, communicate, and address the telling questions of the moment. Pulled out from the baroque regulation and convention of the Victorian age, Kafka’s universe of digital attitudes and conditions is nauseatingly uncertain, unpredictable, and impersonal. Kafka was, even as he sickened toward death, an inveterate game player. One of his favorite tactics, in such works as “The Metamorphosis” and The Trial, is to reinsert outmoded detail that has already been expunged from the very analog-hostile narrative environment that he himself has configured. This is precisely the point of the bells and whistles on Mr. Samsa’s bank-guard uniform, once he has been roused out of his stupor and restored to his petty grandiosity by Gregor’s fatal metamorphosis, whether it be thought as a regression, a collapse, or a decisive dirty trick played against an impervious family system. In Chapter 2, I pause carefully

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over the coat-fleas and the beard-hairs that work to such powerful effect in the parable “Vor dem Gesetz” at the culmination of The Trial. These are specific details with very little place in the allegory that the novel constructs out of itself, its primary material being Joseph K.’s encounters with a justice system that can only articulate itself in double messages, aporias, “cloudly spots,”6 and unfathomable riddles, a justice system riddled, like Gödel’s theories, with “points of incompletion,” at least as Hofstadter parses them. Kafka inserts specific details of the Doorkeeper’s physical being into the novel’s “second-order” allegory, its allegory of linguistic indeterminacy, fragmentation, and impenetrability precisely because they are so out of place in this particular context: a digital recapitulation of what in less meta-critical fiction amounts to the foundations of analog representation. Elsewhere in his fiction, Kafka conjures up a hotel dominated by its elevator and telephonesystems (these were recent enough inventions in Kafka’s day); post-human court and Castle officials, inseparable from the functions they exercise, the directives that they implement. Gone from them is any veneer of “rounded” humanness in simulation. The following essays, taking a cue from an unavoidable contemporary move so uncannily anticipated by Kafka, pursue the digital lineaments of organization and thinking underlying a constellation of notable critical paradigms as well as of venerable cultural artifacts remembered precisely because of a tangible historico-cultural impact that they effected. There is absolutely nothing “ultimate” about digitally wired systems making them the indisputable “truth” of artists whose productions radiated inexhaustible aura well in advance of cybernetic technologies. But coming to terms both with the aftershocks and environmental impact of the technology and its underlying “Prevailing Operating System” is very much part of the task facing critics, thinkers, and intellectuals engaged in writing from the critical margin of the current historico-moment. If our critical investigations disclose a cybernetic pretext and configuration to works that we would have never remotely linked to the technology and its epistemology, this is in part because the technology needed to be in place to a certain degree, its regime established to a certain level, before such recognitions could have happened. Great cultural critics such as Gregory Bateson, Anthony Wilden, and Douglas R. Hofstadter were at the very avant-garde of the technology, its ideological underpinnings, and its aesthetics. In order to have discerned the gravitation of Gödel’s mathematical theorems to the “point of incompletion” in every problem they seem to resolve, in every numerical organization they seem to ground and enable, Hofstadter needed to be on familiar terms with parallel thresholds both of limit and possibility—both in cybernetic programs and in computer architecture. It is the very success and proliferation of the cybernetic épistème that allows us to realize how long it has been already—not merely

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in back-alleys populated by the mad scientists of past generations relegated to obscurity, but in such inexhaustible masterworks as Bach’s canons and fugues, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, Moby-Dick, and Escher’s perspectivally deviant graphics.

♦ A play of parameters. Among the first things that Paul Fry works out in a critical vehicle or property before including it in his renowned Critical Theory survey-course at Yale is the parameters on which that particular work of methodological modeling is arrayed.7 In introducing a widely diverse portfolio of exceptionally difficult materials through this course, Fry’s ongoing attentiveness to the parameters at play serves him as a view-finder affording his students a “fish-eye” panorama on critical interventions made under radically different moments, conditions, and scenes of inscription. A parametric survey of a study attempting to establish open communications between contemporary critical theory, the current cybernetic Prevailing Operating System, and the battery of current therapeutic re-mediations is a tall order at the very least. Yet the following essays are articulated and distributed along a set of recurrent parameters recombining themselves differently in the progression from topic to topic. Were the “deep-wired” parameters of articulation both bounding and placing the current study to be displayed in listformat, the assemblage of intersecting parameters would run as follows: —

Intelligence/Non-articulation

—

Information/Communications

—

Digital/Analog

—

Virtuality/Actuality (or Circumstance)

—

Absorption/Detachment

—

Allegorical/Symbolic

—

“Writing”/”Speech”

—

Performative/Constative

—

Theatrical/Polemical

—

Playful/Goal-oriented

—

Open System/Closed System

—

“Second Order”/’First Order”

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I would hope that the above Borgesian “Chinese encyclopedia”8 of what might be termed “continua of articulation” amounts to a reasonable simulacrum of the parameters that over the past half-century have attained centrality in theoretical modeling and debate. It is beyond the design of the current study to rehash the epochal upgrading to critical power that was facilitated by a rethinking of classical formats of representation, communication, information, etc., from the inscriptive point of view. The downbeats on writing (Derrida), allegory (de Man),9 performativity (Miller,10 Derrida on Searle11), and theatricality (Weber,12 Fried13) registered on the above “shortlist” all underscore a radical displacement in critical scrutiny away from the substance, contents, and motives framing cultural artifacts and toward their configuration, routing, and stratification as processes of inscription and articulation. In 2014, the community of diverse but interrelated phenomena of discourse that could have lent coherence to contemporary critical theory is hardly the latest news. Among the mutually communicating “scenes of rewriting and rethinking” that could be registered on such a compendium as the one immediately above are the following: Heidegger’s synthesis of a philosophical discourse performing the etymological transactions at the deep-roots of Western philology;14 the deconstructive appeal to the contradictory, accidental, even sub-semantic pretexts to the articulations that have been hammered into the master-discourse of Western thought as perpetuated through the canon of authoritative documents and works;15 invocations of allegory, “speech acts,” and performativity as modes of linguistic programming displaying and problematizing their embedded “operating systems” of representation and mediation. As we will have occasion to explore below in the Afterword, the marvelous exploration of speech acts and performatives initiated by Derrida in his critique of John Austin and John Searle and sustained by J. Hillis Miller over several major projects, amounts to contemporary critical theory’s steep inclination toward the isomorphic sector of language. To the degree that speech acts, in J. Hillis Miller’s words, “make things happen,” they tend unmistakably toward the interface at which computer programs also implement tasks.16 What organizes and configures speech acts is a parallel arrangement between a scale of values that is “inoperative” (the term is Jean-Luc Nancy’s;17 examples would be “love,” “intention,” “good will,” “aggression”) and a scale that is “operational” to the core: founding (as in institutions), legislating, declaring (as in marriage, war), annulling (as in marriage), blessing, curse. Spanning an at best treacherous divide—between sheer embroidery and an “operational reduction” in language itself—speech acts, in their basis and resolution, are anything but simple or definitive. Yet their serious philosophical and critical reception marks a notable graft at which the effective embedded critical bearing of our age joins up with its technoepistemological program. Speech acts are irreducibly isormorphic. Their study

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alone “raises the power” and relevance of critique, the operative cultural program for teasing out and circumventing the corporations and institutions of normality, regulation, and exclusion. If the author of the present study could wish for anything unanticipated to have drifted into the above compendium of contemporary critical attitudes, it would be this: a strong commonality of cause between contemporary critical theory’s major innovations of the past four decades and the series of meditations and models over the same time-span resulting in systems theory, cybernetics, and Cognitive Science. The separate strands of thinking and research along this divide have perforce undergone major displacements in thrust and direction and upgrades in their capacities for self-reference and meta-critique. It serves little purpose to pin the marvelously interactive and open-ended modules of reading and cultural processing that have emerged from rhetorical reading in Paul de Man’s rendition and deconstruction to a Procrustian backdrop of cybernetic devices that are, by virtue of such infrastructures as recursion and isomorphism, operational. At the same time, there could well be “analog” elements to what Derrida characterizes as “speech”—as Anthony Wilden extrapolates the analog/digital division of labor in the superb Chapter 7 of his System and Structure. (This particular line of argumentation will be detailed here in Chapters 2 and 3.) The digital functions and organizations that Wilden outlines in the same chapter of his book may well go a long way in characterizing Derridean “writing.” This dialogue between seemingly inimical disciplines and cognitive-epistemological organizations is not only incumbent on contemporary critique. Its rendering explicit is long overdue. In different ways, Wilden and Hofstadter emerge throughout the following essays as highly limber and inventive thinkers who brilliantly foresaw both the remarkable technological capacity of the present moment and some of its drawbacks—as much by dint of their having grown up without the technology as because of any uncanny “elective affinity” to it. Wilden, although his interests were amazingly polyglot, pursued an education at the epicenter of advanced literary and theoretical training in the 1960’s. He took a Ph.D. in French with René Girard at the Johns Hopkins University. We crossed paths there, albeit in revolving-door fashion, over the summer of 1968, as he finished up his doctorate and I arrived to undertake mine. His major inspirations, along with Girard, were on the one side Gregory Bateson, to whose analyses of symmetrical and complementary postures and of schizophrenic doublebinds he was receptive; to whose admonitions regarding ecological madness he was heedful. On a different, but not entirely incompatible flank of his work, Wilden was entirely sympathetic to the parcours de Freud, through which Lacan, since the mid-1950’s, had retrofitted Freudian agencies and levels of psychic processing into advanced versions of Kantian Vermögen (faculties)— all the while factoring in a full range of major post-Kantian philosophical

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interventions from Nietzsche and Bergson to Husserl and Heidegger. The editions of Lacan’s Discours de Rome and The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious that Wilden published with the Johns Hopkins University Press comprised Lacan’s initial English-language reception, establishing high standards indeed for editorial sophistication and erudition in this process.18 Wilden’s elaboration of analog and digital economies (for example, also of system/environment interchanges), whose linguistic, anthropological, and psychoanalytical implications he is in an unusual position to extrapolate, is therefore both recognizable and compelling to theoretically trained students from a broad range of Humanities and Social Sciences disciplines. Yet it is Wilden’s contemporary, Douglas R. Hofstadter, perhaps by dint of his life-long background and role as a “science geek” (also a musician and musicdévoté), who seizes the occasion to punctuate his introductory Computer Science textbook for the “advanced technological” public—Gödel, Escher, Bach—with a bewildering range of off-track literary allusions, parodies, and improvisations. It is as if the bearing of an eccentric scientist that Hofstadter cultivates cuts him a great deal more literary “slack” than Wilden’s trajectory: quickly leading from psychoanalytically oriented Romance Studies to information and communications theory at Simon Frasier University in British Columbia, where he spent the main part of his career. Hofstadter orchestrates a vertiginous cascade of unanticipated swerves (he would call them “strange loops”) from the number theory in the engineroom of computer operations into such domains as molecular biology, Zen Buddhism, and wildly improvisational literary dialogue après Lewis Carroll. What is striking from the perspective of the essays making up the present volume is the degree to which these wild transpositions are in accord with Wilden’s ability to track emergent cybernetic technology’s deep structures and organizations into a full panoply of discourses encompassed by the French sciences humaines in their heyday. In the course of completing Gödel, Escher, Bach and then moving forward to I Am a Strange Loop,19 Hofstadter is increasingly drawn to the German mathematician, Kurt Gödel, as a seminal “conscientious objector” to systematic totalities and totalistic conclusions. Hofstadter’s running account of Gödel’s unbroken attention to the inevitable systematic “points of incompletion,” of his uncanny acuity regarding the epiphenomena generated by self-quoting numerical strings and commands, is strongly reminiscent of the statutes of limitation that Jacques Derrida applied to the complacent idées recues emanating from the learned disciplines that he encountered. Through his unrelenting pursuit of différance and minute particulars of etymological provenance, wordplay, double-meaning, and context, Derrida seeded the field of cultural critique with a capacity—parallel to the cybernetic one traced by Hoftstadter through Gödel and other

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inspirations—to swerve from immanent analysis to theoretical circumspect, to tangibly upgrade the philosophical subtlety and power of its “output.” This study appears at a juncture of cultural inquiry when we are increasingly under the sway of cybernetic systems of administration, record-keeping, inscription, and creative improvisation and when the indispensability of the most rigorous and high-powered theoretical paradigms to cultural critique and empowerment is well-established. The current collection of interrelated essays of the past half-dozen years or so sets out noting a fateful (and contemporaneous) parallelism: between Hofstadter’s appeal to Gödel as the mathematician who marshaled numbers into a self-referential, ultimately morphogenic and autopoietic medium that ultimately became the operational basis for cybernetic machines and Derrida’s performative readings of key texts that “pushed and popped” the dimensional limitations of existing approaches including thematic, philological, and biographical criticism and the “History of Ideas.” It was Derrida’s great gift and ongoing contribution to situate reading on the tripwire between, on the one hand, a radical philology that by digging deep into often foreclosed etymologies opened up new possibilities, even for canonical texts and related artifacts; and, on the other hand, the treasury of idées recues, identified, for better or worse, as the enduring concepts (ideas, paradigms, épistèmes) configuring the Great Tradition. One of the hallmarks of deconstructive reading is, then, an isomorphism between prevailing conceptual systems and the singularity of signifiers as they are specifically deployed in particular cultural artifacts. In a remarkable array of philosophically driven readings of significant texts whose authors ranged from Plato, Kant, Hegel, and Heidegger to Mallarmé, Freud, Ponge, Kafka, and Joyce, Derrida evolved the uncanny double skill of radically dislocating the truisms into which scholarship inevitably devolves while, precisely through his appeal to philosophy as an evolving conceptual operating system at the horizon of rigor and disinterest, shaking loose embedded semantic possibilities to which the existing critical literature had been insensible. Precisely by dint of Derrida’s steadfastness to philosophy as the ongoing Western conceptual operating system of record (though inherent authority or authenticity can by no means be ascribed to it), deconstructive readings foregrounded with unmatched lucidity what I would call, in reference to Wilden’s decisive work of the 1960’s and 1970’s, the supplanting of analog paradigms of reading by digital ones. In the radical and hotly contested marketplace of theoretical paradigms, the discarded one is invariably rejected (in the dynamics of what I elsewhere called aesthetic contracts)20 because it retains too many analog features. The artifact under consideration is mired too tangibly in the most prominent themes (or references) making it up; in its author’s life and times, or in the constellation of conceptual, technological, theological, and so on, key terms prevalent when the author was alive. These

INTRODUCTION

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tangible factors inevitably assuming some form of exegetical dominance correspond, in the field of cultural reception, to what Wilden characterizes, in Chapter 7 of his System and Structure,21 a contribution appraised more than once in the following essays, as analog functions. In a dynamic brilliantly concretized and illuminated by Derrida, but by no means limited to deconstruction, what may be characterized as the new theoretical paradigm or modus operandi is invariably digital—in several crucial senses. It is digital in its wiring to conceptual paradigms and notations broader than any singular artifact at hand. The new theoretical paradigm prevails for what might be described as the term of its relevance and indispensability. It is, furthermore, digital in the isomorphism that it configures between the overarching generality of prevalent cultural concepts and the terms and tropes making up the specific artifacts under its purview. It thereby achieves a certain resonance between the prevailing conceptual system and the experiments and innovations under production, at least for a time, by artists and other cultural innovators. The new theoretical paradigm is invariably satisfying in multifaceted ways (this is a matter for aesthetics). One of the most crucial of these may be described as a short leash (or circuit) between its articulation and its performance or self-demonstration; its capacities to cite, in other respects stage, and to redirect or reconfigure the issues it has been facing, the strategies that were necessary for it to evolve. To thinkers such as Wilden and Hofstadter, these movements are irreducibly digital in their configuration. In the fields of philosophy and critical theory, we encounter discourse’s uncanny ability to raise itself to a new level of oversight and relevance by performing its core issues in a vast array of telling crystallizations.22 These range from the memorable Platonic swerves away from philosophical argumentation to virtual allegorical stagings of the concepts and terms in question; to the Hegelian dialectical infrastructure as the program as well as logic of philosophical argumentation and cultural evolution in general; to the organization of Nietzschean arguments and commentaries (in Also Sprach Zarathustra as well as in such works as Human All-too-Human, The Gay Science, and Beyond Good and Evil) into data-bases of thematically interrelated aphorisms. These “cover” their “subject matter” less through arguments than through unrelenting constellated (or pixilated) insight. It is with such observations and considerations as these that a cybernetic reprise of the History of Philosophy would surely set out. Amid the marketplace of theoretical paradigms and apposite postures of reading, philosophy justifiably lays claim to being the least tarnished foundation for cultural critique, the “truth” of elucidations elsewhere corrupted by such epiphenomena as aesthetic exaggeration or, in the case of the social sciences, by empirical data and experimental procedure overall. Philosophy and philosophically driven critics, when they assert this claim, in terms of the present study, are acknowledging philosophy’s digital bearing in rapport to more “analog”

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approaches (again, historicism, thematism, biography, the “History of Ideas”). And indeed, by scrupulously addressing an ongoing treasury and battery of key terms and the speculative and argumentative deployment of these terms, Western philosophy has indeed configured itself as a trans-historical “conceptual operating system” for pursuits and disciplines operating at lower levels of metacritical (or “transcendental,” as in Kant) scrutiny. Within the framework of the academic counting-house (or the “war between the faculties”), there is a perfectly understandable rationale as to why those appealing to philosophy, whether on the grounds of conceptual “purity,” “disinterest,” or plain rigor and coherence, would make this claim: a patent market logic. Yet in an age of “smart materials,” let alone number-strings, genomic readouts, and experiment-design paradigms in the social sciences with no small degree of critical capability embedded in themselves, the moment may have arrived to scale down any claims that philosophy has made for itself as the dominant master-discourse or conceptual operating system. If anything, in the post-World War II period, philosophy, in close parallel to linguistics, fulfilled its Kantian mission as a critical discourse of discourses only too well. Contemporary literary and cultural discourse would project little of their current vitality, diversity, and relevance had not Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, and J. Hillis Miller imported the bearing, style, and rigorous devotion to the enduring/evolving battery of Western concepts to an expanding matrix of cultural artifacts and phenomena. Yet under current conditions, at least some absolutely decisive critical reconfiguration and reprogramming at the level of the Prevailing Operating System transpires in sites and discourses elsewhere than philosophy. The present study, with all due respect for the lucidity and coherence that philosophy in large sums “lent” the Humanities in their decisive transformative phases, wishes to suggest how far afield the indispensable function that critically reconfigures and upgrades conceptual paradigms has drifted. This is a dissemination of intellectual programs’ capacity to raise themselves to “higher-power” functions and syntheses: it hardly marks philosophy’s failure. Yet contemporary cultural critics limit their outreach to students and colleagues if they do not acknowledge the systematic upgrading of critical capability also transpiring in such fields as Media Study, Cognitive Science, and even, in the wake of Hofstadter, Computer Science. Under such a configuration and in an age of infinitely expanding networks, whether rhizomatic or cybernetic, philosophy emerges as one discoursedisplay (or screen) among others. In which case, all the discursive displays at our disposal—philosophy among close reading, radical history and journalism, critique, verse, story-telling, dramatic script—would be characterized by different economies and ebbs and flows between analog and digital bearings, between argumentation and performance, between symbolism and allegory,

INTRODUCTION

17

between realism and fanciful embroidery. I have attempted to stage this dynamic elsewhere.23 For the purposes of the present study, philosophy’s eminent role in this proliferation of discourse displays is defined by its persistent gravitation toward the digital. Among more recent philosophers and theorists, from Bergson to Deleuze (who took so much inspiration from the former), including the Lacanian parcours de Freud, Foucault, and Badiou, there are surely crucial digital dimensions of argumentation, critical allegory, and cultural reception that demand to be addressed—as such figures as Wilden and Hofstadter set them out. Segments of the Afterword far below are dedicated to the virtual landscape of Marxian-Freudian assemblages to which Deleuze/Guattari lead us in Chapters 3 and 4 of their A Thousand Plateaus.24 The Foucauldian épistèmes, in The Order of Things25 and The Archaeology of Knowledge,26 are inherently self-performative and hence digital units of cultural transmission and history. The épistèmes suture the loop between the horizon of possible articulation and the battery of philosophic-scientific concepts operative, particularly at moments of major interdisciplinary integration. Jacques Rancière’s distinction between consensus and dissensus calibrates a modality of dissent inherently resistant and inimical to re-appropriation within the prevalent political order.27 From time immemorial as well as in the present cybernetic age, in its pre-technological dawning as well as its implementation as a facility, vibrant, etymologically inventive philosophical and theoretical discourse has hardly been inimical to its own embedded digital dimensions. Yet a special nod must still be accorded to Jacques Derrida’s contribution. In its system-wide apprehension of the fluctuations between relatively closed and open deployments of conceptual language, it orchestrates with a particularly stunning lucidity the transitions and hand-offs between analog and digital dimensions of critical elucidation.

♠ The virtual aesthetics of fascination. The deep surround to the cybertechnology that envelops and regulates us is a series of stunning revelations to the effect of how cybernetic, already attuned to digital organization and representation, we always were. While it may be true that the contemporary aesthetics of virtuality is grounded in certain specific technologies of simulation, as in the programs facilitating their operation, “virtuality” writ large, as it conditions states of mediated interaction, encompasses a full spectrum of values, many of venerable provenance. Contemporary virtualites—and the hold they exercise on all of us—are an inevitable Leitmotiv threading their way through the following essays. Their

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multidimensionality and ensuing ambiguity in no way exonerates us from factoring them into the current status report on systematic overreach and the persistent options for its evasion. The notion of virtuality is a particularly slippery fish, modulating a broad spectrum of contemporary cultural phenomena. At the “softer” end of what we associate with the construct is a pervasive mass cultural absorption in cybernetic simulations and displays. Such a phenomenon as VR or Virtual Reality is fortunate to have philosophers and cultural critics as acute and deliberate as Pierre Lévy28 and Michael Heim29 actively involved in their elucidation. Such a technological historian as Howard Rheingold30 manages to place the specific “special effects” produced by this signature technology of our day against the backdrop of innovations in the high-tech and entertainment industries—and the creative teams responsible for them—from the 1950’s onward. While the special effects allowing us to “penetrate” a scene whose verisimilitude escalates by virtue of its registering our own movements— eyeball, hand, ears, and limbs—are of recent historical vintage, the idea of entering enchanted “places apart” or of communing with auratic objects or entities that “gaze” or “regard” back in reciprocal hyper-attentiveness is venerable. It seems in retrospect that the Romantics demonstrated a special facility for prefiguring effects in conceptual-literary space, or at the level of the Lacanian Imaginary that can now be simulated “live” by Virtual Reality (VR) technology. Among the most striking virtual prefigurations extending from the specific aesthetic contracts spawned by Romanticism, a movement whose range and “catchment area” were vast, are the following: the intense reciprocal interchange (Gegenseitigkeit) that Hegel made an indispensable moment of dialectical process and knowledge;31 and such literary inventions as the captivating submarine “windows” to which the title-character is privy in Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué’s “Undine” or the shards of eyeglass that peddler Coppola unpacks in order to torment the hapless Nathanael of Hoffmann’s “Der Sandmann.” It is no accident that when the malevolent demon who has annihilated Nathanael’s father and destroyed his childhood equanimity reappears as the itinerant optician, Coppola, it is to open a visual window whose jangled fragmentation only adds to its fascination: But Coppola insistently put away his barometers and, thrusting his hands in his wide coat pockets, pulled out lorgnettes and eyeglasses and put them on the table. “So, glasses—put on nose, see! These are my eyes, nice-a eyes!” Saying this, he brought forth more and more eyeglasses from his pockets until the whole table began to gleam and sparkle (seltzam zu flimmern und zu funkeln begann). Myriad eyes peered and blinked and stared up at Nathanael (Tausend Augen blickten und zuckten krampfhaft und starrten auf zum Nathanael), who could not look away from the table,

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while Coppola continued putting down more and more eyeglasses; and flaming glances crisscrossed each other ever more wildly and shot their blood-red rays (schossen ihre brutrote Strahlen) into Nathanael’s breast. ( Tales of E.T.A. Hoffmann, 118)32 With the appearance of Coppola, a varied and fanciful tale stops dead in its tracks. Imaginative fancy has become conflated with enclosure in a scene characterized precisely by its visual resonance and interactivity. Even while clouding the possibility for perspectival lucidity in the tale, an incorporated display consisting of myriad dissonant angles and glimpses highlights the visual investment that has been made in the narrative. Such a mockingly dissonant field of vision is an apt logo for the uncontrollable loops between emotional stability and torment that Nathanael is fated to undergo throughout the story. Not only is Nathanael captivated by the display of lorgnettes and eyeglasses on Coppola’s table; he is caught up in a potentially endless reciprocal exchange of glances with them. Nathanael’s participation in the captivating visual panorama is, to its core, interactive. The above scene reiterates an ambiguity held over from the “primal” scene of the Sandman’s destruction of the paterfamilias: it is unclear whether the burning embers come from the eyes or are about to be poured into them. The tale, in its graphic images of horror, wires a smooth circuit between immanent and external destruction. While Nathanael is fascinated by the eyeglasses in the above passage, their energy, their “blood-red rays,” invade his chest. The fascination drawing Nathanael back to one of his known cabinets of horrors, his recollections of the Sandman, is not only a predominantly visual one; it establishes the reciprocal dynamics, the uncertainty as to whether the burning embers or grains of sand are internal or external, bespeaking a heightened interactivity. Nathanael’s vacillations between the fragmentations that he experiences both perceptually and cognitively are volatile and increasingly accelerated. Nathanael’s recurrent fantasies and emotional torments are recognizably tragic in large measure because of the virtual hold that they exert. As we now apply the term both to a host of cultural phenomena and to the cognitive condition we achieve in our interactivity with them, “virtuality” surely encompasses: (a) an attenuated level of verisimilitude in representation, demanding constant techno-programmatic updates; (b) a corresponding degree of rapt attentiveness on the part of participants, one affecting the qualities of perception and cognition including the basic phenomenological apprehensions of time and space; (c) in aesthetic terms, following Michael Fried, we then associate virtual states and conditions with the absorptiveness pertaining not only to certain literary works and their counterparts in the visual arts, but to the experience of being entranced by the performing arts, whether

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music, theater, or dance;33 (d) Virtual states are anything but the condition of stabilized meaning and the illusion of immediacy, invariably the primary inertia addressed by deconstructive approaches to culture—of the sort aspired to and promoted by the ideological wing of various social systems, including religions, nation-states, and ethnic confederations. Virtual states involve, if anything, heightened interactivity with the environment, ongoing and never fully resolved feedback or reciprocity with a scene of representation belonging equally to all participants who may be said to have eventuated upon its mediated compass or enclosure. (e) Virtuality is an intense process of interactivity that may or may not result in learning, heightened self- or critical awareness, greater “power” in articulation, discernment, dealings with the environment. Virtual interaction and transaction transpire as much in theaters, cinemas, and museums as in relation to computers and such phenomena as VR; the socio-cultural phenomenon of spectatorship34 may or may not incorporate a virtual dimension. This intensive interactivity is, however, by no means limited to structured cultural environments or to the particular media (text, “live” drama, painting, etc.) in turn programming them. In the broadest sense, the heightening of reciprocity and intimacy going hand in hand with virtuality extends as well, differently, to conversation, conviviality, “being under the influence” of various stimulants, aggressive trauma, and therapeutic healing. Absorption, relaxation of cognitive as well as social inhibitions, openended feedback with the welcoming surround, are features of interactive experiences we regularly seek, as of those that menacingly pursue us (as in Freudian trauma). It is, of course, of decisive import, psychologically as well as critically, whether the substrate of virtuality common to the traditions and programs of Western aesthetics and to the sector of experience attaining viscosity and resonance, results in meta-critical capability or “second-order processing” or not.35 Some encounters with artworks “leave us cold.” Others result in lifelong fascinations and revisiting. Out of the “scroll” of lived conversations and sexual interchanges emerge certain ones with tangible “second-order” potential and impact, in the wake of which feedback with humanity and participation in the great cycle of bio-reproduction will never be the same. The rhetoric of virtuality signals a viscosity of attention, cognitive processing, and absorption that may well comprise one of the signatures of our age. Because we are so fully acclimated to the conditions of virtuality prevailing between our minds and a computer screen, it may now be easier for us to acknowledge the virtual dimensions always embedded in a host of interactions seemingly far afield from technology. Extrapolating backward from the time we spend online, there are moments when our conversation, our sexual interchange, our physical exertion, our active or passive participation in musical or dramatic performance, our reading, our meditative or other

INTRODUCTION

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structured religious activities, collective or individual, and even our ingestion of food, acquires an all-absorbing quality that can only be characterized as virtual. These experiences are invariably interactive. Time does not stand still. We become caught up in a feedback loop of stimulation and cognitive reception so intense and self-reinforcing that little attention is left for anything else. Virtual immersion is tantamount to absorption in the feedback process. As suggested above, it is distinct from immediacy or time stopping still. Another way of characterizing the self-sustenance of virtual processes and conditions is addiction. Clinically, we define the various addictions by the substances or activities (heroin, alcohol, sex, gambling) prompting the individual to return again and again, in slavish fashion, to the absorptive state they have come to crave.36 Yet it may well be that virtuality, with its selfaffirming, self-sustaining absorption in a protective sphere of heightened sensibility, is the ur-instance and paradigm for dependencies whose broader significance we overlook by identifying them with the triggers of particular varieties of substance (or behavior) abuse. At the moment, I surmise, the collectivity of video game and email addicts far outnumbers alcoholics and drug addicts combined (as did, a generation ago, and possibly now still, the population of compulsive TV watchers), yet this sizeable subset of the overall population would never be branded with the stigma of addiction. Virtual addiction, or the addiction to the virtual states of everyday life, is the very platform for aesthetic, creative, intensively intellectual, religious, and, I would argue in this study, therapeutic experience. This has been the case throughout all epochs of human exploration and inquiry, and without respect to the specific underlying technological infrastructure or the prevailing media of communication. Addiction in this sense is by no means a lamentable or dangerous dependency to be avoided at all costs.37 It does not demand to be “addressed,” to be reprogrammed by twelve-step programs. Indeed, the addictive recursion to heightened states of attentiveness and creative interactivity is a cultural (and therefore societal) resource to be nurtured and fostered, in different ways, by education and critique. It is no accident that Walter Benjamin could place on one continuum the childhood experience of books and colors,38 the immersion, at that phase, into the byproducts of “adult” handicrafts and trades,39 and the “Crock Notes”40 he took of his own serious experimentation with hashish in restructuring his “personal” consciousness. Childhood was most precious to Benjamin (and hence its degradation and squandering most lamentable) as a systematically fluid incubator of critical sensibility. Benjamin only dabbled in drugs, more or less at a specific moment (the 1930’s) in his own engagement as a life-long learner. Yet in crucial senses, his vast critical legacy can only be seen as the byproduct of his virtual addictions—in both their readerly and writerly dimensions.

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The Romantics, in their collective effort to reset human faculties and capabilities in keeping with Enlightenment precepts, devoted considerable effort and language to a characterization of what we could now call virtual states and conditions. For purposes of the following essays, Romantic scenarios of enchantment, fascination, reciprocity, and enclosure in domains running counter to the customary may have as much to offer, with respect to technologically assisted states of virtual fascination, as the accounts by such cultural observers of far more recent vintage as Lévy, Heim, and Rheingold—as scrupulous as their inquiries have been. Virtuality, by the same logic according to which Hofstadter discerns profound cybernetic inventiveness in Bach’s music, Escher’s graphics, and Gödel’s strings of numbers, has a long and profound history preceding the availability of computers and other digital machines and instruments. Romantic virtuality is not a topic that gathers critical mass to any notable degree among the following essays. Yet I would be remiss in concluding this Introduction without opening one or two of the windows establishing its extreme relevance to a study directed toward the cybernetic configuration of contemporary culture and toward the “playful intelligence” through whose deployment the inbuilt slopes in the playing field may be leveled. What are Wordsworthian “spots of time” if not moments of experiential virtuality, that, when “recollected in tranquility” give rise to an intense poetic articulation of these standout experiences, a textual transcript deeply vested in critical and meta-critical capability? The Wordsworthian account of poetic synthesis thus “loops” personal susceptibility to wonder and trauma to a density of articulation (or programming) rising to capture and integrate these heightened experiential moments. The poetic composition both harbors these scenes of ecstasy and terror and incites the reader to their virtual invasion and penetration. Amid the most attenuated trappings of gothic horror and overblown romance, Fouqué’s “Undine” is, when all is said and done, a tale of overwhelming sexual fulfillment gone awry. The novella is neither the first nor the last to pursue the demise of all-encompassing passion on the part of sexually willing and able partners at the hands of the Luhmannian social system. Even a world constantly enervated by the appearance of malevolent ghosts and spirits of all stripes from demons to elves cannot ward off the social constraints of legitimacy, inheritance, and marriage as they eventually wreck a sexual partnership calibrated, in multiple ways by the text, to be “too good to be true.” With such overarching systematic constraints already in play, the knight fortuitously paired up with the “undine” of the novella’s title, a water-sprite doubling as a fetching, impetuous girl of impeccable instincts and sexual vitality, is fated to spurn her, even having married her, on the basis of her spontaneity and exceptionality. Not only is Undine unpredictable, fluctuating between the aquatic and human environments of the pastoral water-world that she shares with her aging parents; she may well be

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illegitimate. She has emerged out of nowhere just after her parents suffered the mysterious loss of their natural-born daughter. This latter character, Undine’s tenuous and uncanny sibling, eventually emerges from the local town where she has grown up to steal knight Huldebrand’s heart. Not only is Undine’s foundation in her remote community tangential and unstable; throughout the tale she is beset by ghastly creatures, always color-coded white, who do not wish her well. The most notable of these is her “uncle” Kühleborn, who will attempt, in a neighborhood known as the Black Mountains, to kill Huldebrand off by maddening his mount. Yet the narrative, as it establishes Undine’s tenuous circumstances and the utterly marginal counter-domain from which she hails, does so only in a way strikingly familiar to students of virtual states and technologies. Undine’s unpacking her singular provenance to Huldebrand is tantamount to capturing him in an expanding panorama of interlocked (or nested) fantastic realms. You must know my sweet darling . . . that the elements are full of creatures that look exactly like you but very seldom let you see them. Fire is the playground of strange, glittering creatures called Salamanders. Deep down in the earth live mischievous, wizened little things called Gnomes. Through the woods wander the wood-spirits (Waldleute), who belong to the element of air, and the lakes and streams and brooks are inhabited by innumerable water-spirits. It’s wonderful to live down there beneath echoing vaults of crystal, through which the sky looks in with the sun and all the stars. And one can wander about over the pure sea-sand, and over lovely shells of every color in the rainbow. And there are all the relics of the ancient world . . . There one can see tall and stately monuments glistening moss and clusters of reeds. The men and women who live there are very beautiful to look at—far more beautiful than most human beings. From time to time a fisherman is lucky enough to be within earshot (belauschen), when a delicate sea-maiden rises above the waves to sing. When this happens, the man is never tired of telling how beautiful she was, and so there are many stories about these strange women, who are commonly called undines. But you, at this moment, my dearest friend, are actually looking at an Undine. ( German Romantic Stories, 48)41 Much of what Undine relates regarding her heritage is indeed the stuff of Classical mythology. Her own mixed lineage places her in contact with all kinds of sprites and monsters of nature who are vestiges of prior generations of ontological dominance. These may be described as cross-elemental hybrids. They hail not only from a prior and irretrievably lost Golden Age; they are vestiges of an element-grounded epistemology crucial to Indian and Chinese civilizations, with a faint Western imprint surviving above all in folklore

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and medicine. It is crucial to Undine’s above disclosure that the Salamanders, Gnomes, and her fellow “undines” run the gamut of the elemental quartet permitted by Western civilization: earth, air, water, and fire. She and her fellow “impossible creatures” embody a radical elemental interactivity banished from the current “Age of Reason” (the culture-system is always guided by a prevalent Reason program). By virtue of the treasury of Western protocols of the fantastic already embedded in the passage, it is only de rigeur that Undine should encounter, in her native landscape, relics and “tall and stately monuments” of the Golden Age. Also, creatures, such as herself, of an impossible beauty, a beauty as remote as the Platonic forms. This passage is, however, an embodiment and expression of what was most on the Romantics’ minds. Undine’s inhuman attributes and her categorical impossibility configure the narrative as a virtual visual medium. Undine becomes in effect a “digital switch” between the “present” vantage point of realistic narration (there is one perforce) and fantastic domains appearing as “windows” within the narrative medium. In the above passage, it is access to the submarine “echoing vaults of crystal” that Undine, precisely in her protean impossibility, grants us. The novella, over its long haul, adjudicates between Undine’s status as a “medium enhancer,” that which makes it possible for narrative technology to switch on and off between multiple absorptive virtual environments, and her structurally enfeebled position as a social system component (as a woman of questionable heritage, status, and legitimacy). Her magic works primarily at the levels of sexual possibility and of an attendant potential promiscuity within the tale’s visual configuration. “Undine had raised herself slightly, and the moment he entered the leafy tent, she flung her arms around his neck (schlang nun in dem grünen Laubgezelte ihre Arme um seinen Nacken) and pulled him beside her. ’You shall tell me your story here, my handsome friend,’ she whispered” (German Romantic Stories, 27–8). Undine’s sexual forwardness is so striking for its cultural moment that it overshadows the fact, in this early snippet from the tale, that the character is also switching the narrative from her own characterization to Huldebrand’s prior adventures. The episodic spinoffs and traditional Western alternate worlds to which Undine grants access are the narrative equivalents to the virtual “special effects” that Goethe achieves, by means of stagecraft, in Faust. A Faustian geography (the Witches’ kitchen, Walpurgisnacht, and so on) surely undergirds the fantastic space to whose diverse mythological ecologies Undine gains us admittance. Fouqué is insistent (and successful) in orchestrating this virtual ecology’s narrative configuration. The pronounced visuality of the sequence of seemingly unrelated fantastic scenes, but ones sharing a virtual mix of detail and interactivity is, as suggested above, a predominant feature of what becomes a concerted, collective

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Romantic project. Undine’s truest perfection may well be her sympathy and generosity as a sexual partner, but this is quickly bypassed in the sequence of social constraints and chastisements to which she is subjected. Her brief sexual honeymoon with Huldebrand quickly over, she must contend with a double and rival far better schooled in the social trade-offs of connubial partnership. She suffers irreparable harm from her insistence on damming up a fountain at Huldebrand’s castle (to her, it is an active portal to all kinds of demonic forces). But even as the social system, on multiple pretexts and codes, filters her out, as an icon of Romantic virtual capability in representation, Undine shimmers inexhaustibly. Our last glimmer of her is as a captive of yet another visual window annexed by the tale. Huldebrand dreams her, having rejected her, “sitting beneath the bright crystal vaults. But she was weeping bitterly, and looking far more distressed than he had ever known her in those happy days” (German Romantic Stories, 83). From the Wordsworthian “spots of time” to the virtual windows that Fouqué’s narrative exalts in stringing together, the Romantic project marshals itself in the direction of narrative, poetic, and dramatic Virtual Reality, VR in words: words as the programminglanguage opening into dimensions of a more pressing vividness.

♣ Analog Escalation. Another strand running throughout the following essays, both making them possible and hopefully receiving the elucidation and updating that it commands is the interplay between analog and digital organizations and operations. This is an absolutely decisive theme and dynamic to such a status report as the current study. To put it bluntly, in our thinking, interpersonal relations, communications, and creative work, we “shoot the gap” between analog and digital organizations dozens of times each day. Some degree of awareness of what is implicated in these transpositions, amalgamations, and other accommodations is basic—to our empowerment and responsibility as full-service cultural programmers and to sustaining the fluidity of the “cultural psychoanalysis,” my term for the broadest thrust of education, in which we are perforce engaged. No primer into the architecture, functionality, grammar, and syntax of analog and digital organizations is more indispensable than the chapters of Anthony Wilden’s 1972 System and Structure explicitly and tangentially devoted to this topic (Chapters 7, 8, 12, and 13). They are distinguished by a systematic vision allowing them to trace out analog and digital bearings in a stunningly broad panorama of disciplinary “scenes of writing”. While retaining a lucidity and specificity in each sphere, they create a dynamic interface between the psychoanalysis, linguistics, formal logic, mathematics,

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anthropology, and critical theory of the structuralist/post-structuralist moment (the late 1950’s through the 1970’s)—reporting the impact of analog/digital interactions in each sphere Though not immediately apparent as such, Wilden’s early apprehensions of the digital “new world order” undergirding, organizing, and powering the “military-industrial complex” that brought us, among its other epiphenomena, the Vietnam War, serve, in the precision of their articulation, as an indispensable harbinger of current virtual states, above all in their significance for cultural analysis and systematic healing. Wilden is to be credited for an impeccable sense for “first-order” systems theory as it was emerging, from the 1950’s on, in the work of Bateson, Norbert Weiner, John Von Neumann, Ludwig von Bertalanffy, and others. He situated his own intellectual project squarely in the productive but daunting interface between this body of work, whose wider implications he captured early on, and the radical psychoanalytical updating, delivered in unstinting and precise steps by Jacques Lacan. Wilden’s instinctive drift toward the embedded communications and information theory in the Lacanian parcours enabled him, in System and Structure, to formulate the emergent interplay and interdependency between analog and digital organizations with a power and lucidity still retaining its vividness and sense of inevitability. The synthetic innovation and pertinence of these early formulations may have well proven elusive to later commentators on several grounds, if for no other reason than the subsequent accountability for a barrage of technological innovations and transformations, at the level of software and hardware, that did not concern Wilden at this point. Wilden’s work on analog and digital organizations in these early years preempted the technology, if not thinking, of virtual reality and artificial intelligence. But the inevitable incursions into digital language and its technological, cognitive, and sociological after-effects that he traced have everything to tell us about the virtual conditions persisting in contemporary technology and now impacting, both explicitly and immanently, on the very possibility of contemporary critique. The world that Wilden saw with such acuity emerging on the horizon fluctuates regularly, but sometimes without warning, between analog and digital displays and modes of organization, which remain nonetheless mutually indispensable. To establish that he is on solid ground in his insistence on this fluctuation and interdependency between analog and digital organizations, he draws reference to the tree that the Tsembaga of New Guinea “post” as a digital device to regulate the analog relationships of the biosocial system in which they live. The boundary between “not enough pigs” (to propitiate the ancestors) and “too many pigs” (for the local ecosystem to support) is

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indicated by the planting or the uprooting of a symbolic tree. The either/or status of the tree indicates . . . indicates that the relation between system (the Tsembaga) and the environment (nature, pigs, other local groups) is about to change. The system is complex, having to do with war and peace, ritual, and the amount of available protein (energy = pigs) in the system.42 Digital technology thus undergirds, in its “endless golden braid” of interactions with analog displays and thinking, cultures that for a variety of reasons have no use for or circumvent the concrete manifestations (or hardware) of cybernetic technology. The palpable swings between analog and digital displays and organizations is already wired, according to John von Neumann’s posthumous Silliman Lectures, to which Wilden also refers, into our deep neural networks. Von Neumann also points to a constant switching between the analog and the digital in the behavior of the message systems of the body at another level: a digital command releases a chemical compound which performs some analog function or another, this release or its result is in turn detected by the internal receptor neuron which sends a digital signal which commands to stop . . . Similarly, the genes are part of a digitally coded system, but depend on their effect on the formation of analogues (enzymes) specific to them.43 A relay between analog and digital messaging in the formation and arrangement of genetic materials thus undergirds the magisterial transfer of genetic information that Hofstadter subsumes under the architecture of isomorphism. In order to display what he has so acutely anticipated regarding the circuitry and organization of the emergent cybernetic order, Wilden, not unlike Deleuze/ Guattari, houses us in the virtual space constituted by analog/digital organization. His embodied narrative inserts us in the midst of the computer shell or casing within which micro-processing dwells. Our most basic epistemic recognition of the cognitive and creative conditions under which we monitor the flows of concepts and information and register our singular critical feedback entails our immersion in virtual representations of the technology both facilitating our initiatives and circumscribing our capability. Wilden, too, is a systematic avatar leading his audience into the depths of virtual assemblages and configurations: Since the analog computer employs continuous linear quantities to represent other quantities, there are no serious “gaps” in the system. Equally important, there is no zero (at “zero” the machine is “off”). All the quantities involved are positive; there are no minus quantities. The

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quantities represented are relatively imprecise. The digital computer, on the other hand, depends upon the combination of discrete elements made possible by on/off processes. Zero is essential to it, since its combinatorial possibilities depend only upon the PLACING and the ORDERING of its discrete elements, rather than upon their nature or their location as such, the digital computer can represent negative quantities. The analog computer maps continuums precisely whereas the digital computer can only be precise about boundaries. The units of communication or computation in the analog machine may in principle be repeatedly divided without losing their signification or use, whereas those in the digital computer cannot be divided below the level of the discrete unit on which it depends. (And the “gaps” cannot be divided at all.) The direct analog computer is an ICONIC representation of the behavior it maps; the digital computer is an entirely abstract, ARBITRARY, and more nearly linguistic representation. (It employs an artificial language.) (System and Structure, 161–2) What begs to be appreciated about this prophetic as well as definitive introduction of the general public to the epistemology of the cybernetic age is its success in immersing us in the very space of analog numbering, logic, representation, and cognition. Wilden’s prose here, in its utterly germane precision, performs the high fidelity that will be inextricably associated with the technologies coinciding in the achievement known as “virtual reality.” The prose performance anticipates the technology, pre-figuring it. The prose characterization is indeed the program for the cluster of technological advances drawing us in to virtual simulation. Wilden’s script tangibly inserts us into the analog-sphere in which continua and the scales that they map are perforce superimposed upon one another, and in which zero is not merely a forbidden zone but a representational impossibility. Zero is out of the question. We encounter face to face the icons that are both the population and the lingua franca of the analog sphere. While digitality is, in the broadest sense, the occultation and absolute relativity of analog similitudes, scales, and adaptations, Wilden is no less crafty in absorbing us in virtual digital space. This is a sphere of boundaries, distinctions, and differences verging on, and indeed implicating the negative. The relentless distinction-making and boundary-setting of digital phenomena predicate an open-ended and proliferating network. The limit to this orientation, but one always held in check by the analog, in its capacity as indispensable restraining-wall, is the compulsive generation of “differences which are not differences” ascribed by Hegel to the faculties of understanding (Verstand) in their untethered mode.44 Wilden prepares us for the onset of a cybernetic phenomenology whose lineaments he was able to discern at the far

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reaches of the Lacanian Symbolic, Imaginary, and Real by immersing us in its deep-structural organizational modalities. Cultural Studies, literary scholarship, critical theory, and speculative studies in the social sciences have surely eventuated at a juncture at which it behooves them to recalibrate what they know, and how they know it, in terms of the analog/digital architectures and modalities according to which their scholarly output is investigated, inscribed, and stored. In the rather wild and always contested commerce between models (or “operating systems”) that goes on in critical theory and in the disciplines impacted by it, for example, Wilden’s prescient analysis enables us to discern with clarity: the “new, improved” critical model, whether the Lacanian cognition-driven parcours de Freud or the full-fledged différance that post-structuralism took, circa 1967, with what Hegel might characterize as the schematisms of structuralism en fleur45—these seeming conceptual sea-changes in fact inevitably involve a gravitation from analog to digital reasoning. A “good enough” assimilation of the epistemology of the cybernetic age that Wilden has extrapolated enables us to grasp that “upward mobility” in speculative, and therefore perforce hierarchical systems of knowledge invariably involves the dynamic that Wilden describes in these chapters: a jettisoning, within a constantly recursive process, of analog representation and referentiality in favor of digital boundary-setting and selection, relationality, shorthand, and metadiscourse. The academy literally feeds off of the generational “methodological revolutions” proving that something far-reaching and essential is transpiring within the cloistered walls. Yet the current technological instrument to our investigations and findings is itself so conditioned, mathematically as well as linguistically, to sophisticated, fine-tuned processes of internal summation, self-reference, and meta-critique that the terms of engagement and argumentation at any moment are reducible to the dynamics by which digital oversight seems, at least for a moment, to gain the upper hand on the invariable analog “collapse into substance (or theme).” Even close reading, in many circles, the gold standard of contemporary cultural inscription, fluctuates between its analog and digital moments, as Wilden extrapolated them at the dawn of the current age. In its meticulous “processing” of telling “windows” within the artifacts to which it draws our attention, close reading is, at least to a significant extent, irrefutably analog. It has selected those telling passages. It refers back to them—indeed, the more insistent it is in extracting nuances from these powerful junctions with the textual, musical, or graphic artifacts it elucidates, the more powerful the commentary it renders. In the broader signification that close reading finds for the powerful exegetical service that it has rendered, close reading veers toward the meta-commentary that it is the unique privilege, according to Wilden and others, for digital epistemology to render.

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Wilden initiates the current cyber-epistemological age with the clear apprehension that analog and digital organizations are mutually interdependent and indispensable. In no way is digitality the end, goal, or fate, as Hegel might orchestrate such a progression, of the knowledge that analog correlations, parallels, and measurements render. At no point does the digital peel itself off, declaring its independence as a “master-discourse.” Relevant models characterizing the interface between analog and digital relations run from Gregory Bateson’s model of complementarity, as opposed to symmetry, to Derridean tropes of the supplement or the prosthesis. Derrida, unveiling in his 1967 Of Grammatology the figure of the hinge affording a brief glimpse of the Western metaphysical system from a distance before folding back inside that system, displays prescient insight into the dynamics between analog and digital organizations.46 Pervasive as these analog/digital shifts have become to our daily activity and understandings, the most basic circumspect demands that we begin factoring them into our invariably improvised systems of living and cultural participation.

♥ The extractive Self. Any study such as this one, that would aspire to interface widely diverse scenes of cultural inscription and re-mediation, situating them within a shared pretext of autopoietic self-reconfiguration, is bound to terminate in a trail of realizations as suggestive as they are conclusive or definitive. This is a study whose closing ellipses are already embedded in its ground-plan. Surely the most pressing of these inherently irresolvable meditations is the perennial one concerning selfhood: specifically, in an age defined preeminently by a cybernetic operating system whose very configuration is, at the same time, uncannily resonant with the most powerful, because linguistically rigorous and subtle, models of critical methodology currently available. At a moment when we no longer trust our “personal” memory-stores for an instant, when we can already imagine the nearmicroscopic brain implants that will reconfigure “personal” perception and cognition, augment and accelerate memory and retrieval, and modify even the most “immanent” cognitive displays, the classical Western formats for personal identity and agency seem particularly attenuated. Amid the cultural “play of forces,” the battle conditions in which dispassionate, frank, and wildly febrile cultural critique manages to be inscribed, the determinants of selfhood—career, institution, even one’s own prior interventions—comprise a distinct liability. The parameters of the extractive self end up restricting and inhibiting the free play of thinking and language as much as facilitating them. Along this trajectory, the institutions presumably convened in the name of

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creativity and radical innovation find themselves, through a logic of escalating positive feedback, dead set against the open-ended playfulness that is presumably their highest ideal. For perfectly understandable reasons, the institutions, schools, and departments deeply rooted in this doublebind have been wary about conducting impact studies that would calculate the cost of professionalization rooted in narrow-gauge academic sub-specializations, academic careers defined by achievement under these terms, and graduate and professional education dictated by social determinants (as produced by Luhmannian “social systems”) more than by exposure to paradigms and problems by their very nature inexhaustible and irresolvable. In fact, the contestation of selfhood, particularly as configured by Platonic souls, Aristotelian unities, and the “metaphysics of presence,”47 is also a deeply entrenched tradition in the West. Hindu and Buddhist strivings to achieve states somewhere between identity and its ecstatic/disconcerting dissolution address the limitations of selfhood at their word. In many instances, the resistance to the imperialisms of selfhood take the tangible forms of corporeal postures and modifications of breathing facilitating incursions into this interstitial zone. Hofstadter surely underscores the need for advanced Western technology to at least address, if not incorporate, Eastern statutes of limitation applied to selfhood and agency in his appeals, throughout Gödel, Escher, Bach, to Zen embroidery on logical absurdity. Western experimentation along this line—on the plane of speculative philosophy—has been no less earnest. In significant ways, the Spinozan monadology, the Kantian “unity of apperception,” and the Nietzschean figure of the Wanderer48 all comprise experiments, indeed rigorous ones, at reformatting entrenched Western traditions surrounding identity and selfhood, stretching, if not dissolving them. (Where the Kantian unity of apperception amounts to the hyper-Western focus that can be brought to bear on cognition, the Spinozan and Nietzschean experiments veer eccentrically off this track.) Efforts to articulate wider systematic parameters for the functions and achievements customarily assigned to identity, subjectivity, and self-assertion, are indeed symptomatic of a proto-cybernetic sensibility. Such thought experiments invariably point in the direction of an interface at which critique, aesthetic design, and the conceptual redress driving therapeutic intervention, whether at the personal or collective levels, converge, the very zone to which the following essays, in very different ways, are dedicated. It became absolutely incumbent upon the discourses of cybernetics and systems theory to address the architecture, functionality, and provenance of selfhood.49 This at least as much in selfhood’s role as an organization (or “subsystem”—Hofstadter) belonging to larger architectures of thinking and processing as in its traditional role as the indexical place-marker of agency, selfinterest, and perspectival unity. And if selfhood, under the auspices of cybernetic

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thinking and systematic oversight, faces any dead-end or planned obsolescence, this is because compared with other available organizations and media, it emerges as redundant, overly demanding, and excessively costly. The interests of selfhood, as they already registered themselves upon Gregory Bateson’s late environmental writings, and as they were subsequently factored into Anthony Wilden’s visionary extrapolations of analog and digital organization and potential, join an entire nexus of extractive thinking and planning that Bateson, already in the 1960’s and 1970’s, could discern as radically inimical to the well-being, “sanity,” and sustainability of the planetary eco-system. As Bateson’s social scientific interest in family and community as “schizophrenogenic” organizations—ones so inherently contradictory and unyielding as to predicate Hamlet-like conflict in their captives—widens into ecological concern, he holds true to his lifelong interests in “symmetrical” striving, outdoing one’s peers at all costs, and in the aporetic logic of the doublebind. The environment may offer Bateson an expanded arena for his critical investigation, but he stands by his unique insight into the folly of unmitigated human rigidity and unrestrained avarice. By the time of his 1970 “The Roots of Ecological Crisis,” presented to a subcommittee of the Hawaii State Senate on behalf of the University of Hawaii Committee on Ecology and Man, his admonitions and prescriptions regarding the environment have been honed into bullet points organized into a last-ditch argument. Bateson traces “the many current threats to man’s survival . . . to three root causes”: (a) technological progress (b) population increase (c) certain errors in the thinking and attitudes of Occidental culture.

Our “values” are wrong. (Bateson, 498) Under a further bullet-point in the same impacted balance-sheet, Bateson characterizes the pernicious interaction between “these fundamental factors”: The increase in population spurs technological progress and creates that anxiety which sets us against our environment as an enemy; while technology both facilitates increase of population and reinforces our arrogance, or “hubris,” vis-à-vis the natural environment. (Bateson, 498) As a visual aid to his scenario of mutually catalytic extractive bearings in advanced technological, “Occidental” society, Bateson attaches a chart

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looking a bit like a deranged movie projector. Its three “corners” are formed by overarching “self-promoting (or, as the scientists say, ’autocatalytic’” (Steps, 498) societal phenomena: population, technology, and hubris. “The bigger the population, the faster it grows; the more technology we have, the faster the rate of new invention; and the more we believe in our ’power’ over an enemy environment, the more ’power’ we seem to have and the more spiteful the environment seems to be” (Steps, 498). Visually as well as through a point-by-point typographical display, Bateson conjures up the picture of an ecological implosion powered by the mutual ratcheting up of unchecked expansive factors, demographic (population), technological, and ideological (“hubris”). It is hardly accidental that Wilden imports Bateson’s “visual” of “autocatalytic” ecological imperialism into Chapter 8, “Epistemology and Ecology,” of his System and Structure. Armed with a scenario of ecological short-sight and hostility as unrestrained competitive striving and avarice, Wilden carries both Bateson’s logic and his ethics into the interactive disciplinary feedback loops that were the distinction of the French sciences humaines. In cybernetic thinking, the present relationship of the industrial system and those who control it (state and private capitalism) to the biosocial environment (to me, to you, to nature, to its “resources”) is known as a positive feedback or runaway relationship; the more you have, the more you get. Unlike the primary control system of nature, negative feedback, which seeks out deviation and neutralizes or transforms it, positive feedback increases the deviations between input and output in the communication between the subsystems of the ecosystem. In the short run, this is fine for those who invest their money at compound interest or who draw their profits from undeveloped countries, but in nature, all runaway systems (such as a forest fire or a supernova) are inexorably controlled, in the long run, by negative feedback at a second level. Secondorder negative feedback always takes the form of the emergence of a metasystem (the elaboration of new structures, morphogenesis) or the destruction of the ecosystem involved. In social systems, the first of these responses to positive feedback is known as REVOLUTION. The second is EXTINCTION. (System and Structure, 208–9) We get a lucid and far-reaching glimpse, in this passage, of what Bateson’s anti-extractive ethics looks like when imported into the state-of-the-art viewfinder of its day incorporating cybernetics, systems theory, and speculative philosophical perspectives. Within this panorama, Bateson’s scenarios of

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unchecked competition and avarice become translated into the “runaway” dynamics common to industry and commerce, primarily in their catastrophic fluctuations between “boom” and “bust.” Already schooled in advanced dynamics of feedback and entropy, Wilden is enough the systems thinker to be able to link the endgames in finance, demographics, and critical resource shortages that he discerns in 1972 to such astronomical events, on a radically different scale, as supernovas. Wilden’s vision of the “metasystem” that will arise to correct, if possible, the environmental extinction threatened by “runaway,” is an advanced model of the multi-level “learning” in Bateson by which the blocked victims of families and communities, whether “schizophrenics” or substance-abusers, might manage to surmount their misprisions and derangements. Wilden’s scenario for what we might also call “burnout” is also in keeping with the scenarios for transpositions between “lower-level” and “higher-level” processing, for communications between “subsystems,” “translation systems,” and “operating systems” as mapped out by the leading computer scientists of the day, from H. Ross Ashby to Hofstadter. Wilden’s scenario of “runaways,” whether in investment, urban development, or astrophysics, is at an apex of dialectical sensibility. The catastrophe of unchecked extraction, whether by the Russian aristocracy or of global warming, leads either to systematic implosion (“extinction”) or to dramatic second-order correction (“revolution”). The schizoid alignment of these alternatives is stunning. The provenance of the negative feedback or the second-order meta-system that lending some margin for correction is ultimately Hegelian, a dialectical tension between hierarchical levels of processing or oversight, but one also presupposing a Kantian division of labor between set faculties or Vermögen. In articulating in Chapter 8 the transition between epistemology, in its Foucauldian sense as a prevailing order of knowledge, and ecology, Wilden not only evinces a deep penetration into the logic and metaphysics of computers; his follow-through of cybernetic logic and organization into adjacent systems and discourses is far-reaching to an astonishing degree. Conflating “prevailing epistemology” with “ideology,” he argues that it is at every level an epistemology which leads into positive feedback. It is an epistemology of biosocial imperialism. In Bateson’s terms, it is an epistemology of lineal causation of “force” or “power”. For the general systems theorist it involves the imposition of closed-systems thinking on those aspects of reality which are open systems; it denies the relationship between energy and information by splitting symbiotic wholes (ecosystems) into supposedly independent “things.” The same epistemological error obtains whatever the ecosystem or level of ecosystem we are concerned with: biological, psychological,

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socioeconomic. Deterministic thinking in biology, elitism in genetics and psychometrics, instincts and intrapsychic conflicts in psychology, the free competition of the rational subject in economics, and uncritical attempts to apply the experimental method in the social sciences are particularly obvious examples of the error. In its ideological manifestations (for every ideology is dependent on a theory of knowledge and vice versa) the same error feeds pollution, racism, alienation, exploitation, oppression, and ALL OTHER FORMS OF PATHOLOGICAL COMMUNICATION. (System and Structure, 210) Unchecked and self-aggrandizing extraction, in this sequel to our initial extended citation from Chapter 8 of System and Structure, invades and corrupts, virus-like, the dominant epistemological order of our (cybernetic) age. With stunning deftness, Wilden can discern the force as well as logic of “closed systems” in biology and microbiology (genetics), psychological testing, experiment design in the social sciences, and in what we now call microeconomics. In attributing these varied impositions of closed-system thinking on what might otherwise be open-ended inquiry, Wilden betrays, in the very best sense of the word, his formation and affiliations as a Lacanian. The inevitable imposition of cognitive closure, an eventuality whose inevitability holds much in common with “the return of the repressed,” is invariably a manifestation of “PATHOLOGICAL COMMUNICATION.” This sensibility to the centrality of dysfunctional (or blocked) communications in foreclosed thinking goes back equally to Bateson’s meticulous analyses of doublebind speech-acts (or situations) and to the Lacanian reconfiguration of the Freudian “intrapsychic agencies” as cognitive processors. (Recasting the Ego as the Symbolic, it becomes the linguistic faculty overall; by the same logic, the Superego’s preoccupation with the consequences of thoughts and acts transforms it, in a Lacanian parlance, into the faculty of visualization.) With such transpositions, as well as the systolic/diastolic rhythm by which open and closed systems alternate and morph into one another in the deep background of contemporary systems theory and cybernetics, it is not difficult to project why selfhood itself, as much as a culture as a construct or vehicle, has been impacted, has become dispensable. Our professional, not to mention our social and commercial lives are already driven by a technology that evolves and morphs, entertains its intrinsic “strange loops” and “sublations,” to higher levels, completely independently of our collaboration, consent, and even, in most cases, our awareness. The telling developments of our day and our culture are no longer taking place at the level of our minds, our distinct personalities, or of the personal histories and individual trajectories that have made us who we are. It behooves us at this point to figure out

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where it is that cultural reception and critique are taking place; in which zones open-ended thinking remains a solvent idiom and currency. It may well be that the academic departments, colloquia, and publications through which we have been inaugurated into the telling debates and conceptual deliberations of our lives are the very models for the new venues of the integrations and responses that were once attributed to identities and selves. It may well be that blogs and chat-rooms are the new homes to the transactions and deliberations of the self. But if this is emerging to be the case, we face a fundamental recalibration of the contracts—ideological, educational, social, personal—by which we couch and rejoin the processes of cultural participation, response, and critique. It is no accident, then, that Hofstadter appeals to Zen philosophy, as much as a medium for circumventing Western exigencies of the imperial self as an alternative model for cognitive processing, one with cybernetic resonance and application. I reserve an extended elaboration of this particular adaptation and transcription on Hofstadter’s part, among several highly inventive instances, for the Afterword. Hofstadter could have done just as well for his ground-breaking study had he pursued the rich repository of between-states— life/death, health/disease, wakefulness/oblivion—populating the canonical works of Indian civilization, from the Upanishads to the Buddhist Scriptures. At the outermost reaches of the present study is indeed the meditation concerning the liabilities with which maintenance of a self-construct—and its offshoots: career, ownership, legacy—possibly no longer sustainable—may well be fraught. It is indeed within a context of playful intelligence, in its ongoing resistance to systematic closure, whether ultimately successful or not, that the most extreme limit cases to conventional intellectual inquiry can be plausibly broached and undertaken.

1 Reading Kandinsky 1.

T

he paintings, designs, and drawings of Wasily Kandinsky have always exerted an auratic fascination on me. I cannot exactly say why. I hope never to be in the authoritative position fully to do so. Even as a high-school boy, encountering a few of his works in the Arensberg Collection at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, I was drawn by their mystique: the singularity of their coloring, the uncanny equilibrium prevailing between their splotchy (or geometrical) shapes, and the dynamic motion initiated by their lateral strokes and flows. Kandinsky’s paintings set off from the premise of the indefinite: in form and representation, hence surely in significance. But this in no way impedes their intrinsic composition, tone, mood, and drift or tendency from seizing their viewers, those who find themselves, crossing their visual plane, susceptible. An inexpensive reproduction of a Kandinsky oil painting, “Schweres Rot” (“In Dark Red”), adorned my college dormitory room, no doubt held up by cellophane tape. I return to Kandinsky on the far side of the sustained critical meditation that began in those days because his amazing productions materially aid and abet me in applying some fine points to my current thinking and writing about systems (not that I do this as a painter). Kandinsky’s power over me, the appeal of his visual style, vocabulary, grammar, and syntax, was a fait accompli, in place before it ever came under review or judgment. The aura of his compositions established itself to me with all the suddenness of recognition, as Hegel nurses this term in accounting for social relations and interactions.1 In literature, the fateful magic of recognitions is a key to the chemistry between literary surrogates from Goethe to Proust, with a special lay-over in the novels of Henry James. Our fate is reducible both to the staccato introjections that ricochet through our minds and to the series of recognitions that galvanize our lives; our most off-handed recognitions often become particularly fateful. What I have always found compelling about the constellation of compositional principles, colors, forms, and movements coinciding in Kandinsky’s visual productions now 37

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furnishes me with an occasion for thinking about what makes art, in whatever medium, so compelling. What is the satisfaction, the out, the relief that it freely offers—often, under the mystique of recognition, before the fact, before any fact? Can we conceptualize the tremendous affirmation and relief that the full panoply of art-forms has bestowed upon us—in narrative, pictorial, plastic, musical, and cinematographic media—in complete dissociation from the social institutions under whose auspices we encounter these artifacts in the first place? If not, as the case may well be, then accounting for art’s distinctive aftershock, whether as horror or enchantment, is indissolubly linked to an accident report or post-mortem on the critical mass, momentum, and gravitational pull impacting on artifacts within the compass of systematic organizations. At an age when I was still impressionable and unschooled in my tastes and interests, Kandinsky’s paintings marshaled me to an unaccustomed degree of attentiveness. Within the frames of the few works of his that I could physically encounter, I was jolted into a hyperawareness of color, line, mass, shape, and composition that I simply didn’t access during my saunters even down my most beloved downtown Philadelphia street, Walnut, and that could not be frozen, “etherized upon a table,” during the showings of the first-run international art-cinema classics I was fortunate to be viewing during those years. It is of course a concatenation of many factors—some personal, some historical, though of course mediated by specific educational and cultural conditions—that made me susceptible to Kandinsky and that made Kandinsky radiate so auratically in Philadelphia, USA, circa 1962. It has taken until now for it to dawn on me that the heightened attentiveness I experienced under the aura and with the connivance of Kandinsky might have had something to do with the sequence of haphazard encounters and choices resulting in my activities as a literary critic. Proust might well have called the interstitial zone between the Kandinskys and myself in the Philadelphia Museum of Art (like the one separating “Marcel” from Vermeer’s “View of Delft”2 and its "little patch of yellow wall”) a “magic circle.”3 This port or corridor of unfiltered attention became a place I needed to get back to, a home away from home in a lifestyle already congenitally transient. My encounters with Kandinsky were so crystallizing at the time that they “beamed me up,” as it registered in subsequent years, into the very engine room of critique. Critique, such as it outputs itself, can be nothing if not heightened attentiveness—to the prevailing systematic surround and to the view-finder and processes of seeing. This even if the amazing teachers I encountered afterwards, among them Jacques Derrida, J. Hillis Miller, Richard Macksey, and Allen Grossman, did everything they could to drum into me that attentiveness is not a matter of consciousness and its historico-metaphysical trappings: perception, understanding, insight. It is, rather, a writing-tablet or screen situated somewhere radically off to the side, in a back-up server.

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With my rear-view mirror a long stretch down the road, I can further recognize the rapt hyper-attention that Kandinsky awakened in me at the time as a virtual experience. In its visuality, the encounter with his canvasses foreshortened and underscored absorptive fascinations that I was experiencing at the time in text media as well, above all, in the stories and novels of such “standards” as Poe, Melville, Dostoyevsky, Kafka, and James; in the poetry, above all, of Stevens. It was indeed only for the “most special” writing projects—regarding these authors—and for college applications that I would trundle out the gigantic, already ancient Underwood upright we kept in storage. Even on the most sensitive touch-screens I persist in the laborious pecking I developed in those early official communications and literary mistakes. In view of the breath-taking sequence of technological innovations that my accessing of texts and data, as well as my “word-processing” would undergo, I find it unavoidable to render some account of the virtual states of the critical bearing initiated by my haphazard collision into Kandinsky. On so many registers do the digital transcription of languages and media of information impact on the encounter with culture, even on the possibilities for “perception” and “concentration” themselves, that the unavoidable residue deposited by these processes on our writerly output is best, and fully in keeping with our ongoing task and responsibilities, rendered explicit.

2. I’m strongly tempted here to establish a base-position in Kandinsky, to articulate sight-unseen, as it were, what is so fateful and inevitable about his long and varied project. Such a critical dry-run, as it were, would have the charm of arising in a vacuum or black-out area free from the weighty interventions of art history and philosophical aesthetics, oblivious even to Kandinsky’s own substantial writing on art in general and on his own specific practice. There is an obvious narrative appeal to an initial, putatively “naïve” take on an artist’s characteristic or signature productions. This scenario makes it possible to score upon the fictive virtual setting of critical phenomenology what has been disclosed or apprehended in the encounter with the artwork. By process of selection, this “discovery narrative” would then be in a position to go on to confirm which cultural materials (criticism, history, theory, philosophy) have been productive in the process of exegesis and elucidation and which have not. As Proust reminds us, through the irreversible shocks seeded throughout the nostalgic recollection of “Combray” and in the futile hopes for recuperation implied in the process—moments including Françoise’s butchering a chicken4 and the love scene at Montjouvain5—there is no going back to an interpretative

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scene prior to critical knowledge. Each paradigmatic or exegetical wrinkle that we learn through the life of reading remains with us, an indelible mark of Cain. At the age of fifteen, when I first encountered Kandinsky—1962 was a fateful year, it turns out, because I also saw Fellini’s “8 ½” and Orson Welles’s adaptation of The Trial at the time—I truly couldn’t account in any sustained intellectual way for my abrupt fascination with his canvasses. But this doesn’t mean that I wasn’t already intellectually complicit, say through the overall surround of modernism available in the Philadelphia art world, or the tremendous attention devoted to Freudian thought in the Saturday Review and patent in much “advanced” cinema of the early 1960’s. As Derrida would go on to establish with unrelenting readerly illumination and finitude in the pages of Of Grammatology, a watershed intellectual moment for me of a later provenance, no less devastating in the best senses of the word, there is no putatively pure critical or cultural innocence that can be imputed to a “prior,” whether of an individual or a society.6 Anything I would have to venture, then, about Kandinsky during a survey of some representative works encountered at an early stage of intellectual development, is unavoidably tinged by subsequent critical recognitions that transpired under far more formal conditions. What follows, a read-out of a handful of canvasses themselves strikingly indicative of certain key contractual clauses in Kandinsky’s long-standing visual engagement with culture, may not float free from the gravitational field exerted by the critical bearings and approaches that have been of greatest moment to me. But they nonetheless compose a preliminary sketch, the base-position to an understanding of how Kandinsky’s overall experiment constitutes in itself a response to certain defining features of systems, and hence to the experience of systems over the pivotal decades of Kandinsky’s training and “watch.” One preliminary way of defining Kandinsky’s achievement and ongoing import would be as a performance—above all, at the level of technical as well as aesthetic mastery, in color, form, composition, and their dynamics—so masterful as to suspend the constraints of those systems, as encompassing and overpowering as they were and remain. In this sense, I am arguing, Kandinsky’s achievement can be taken as a case study in the clinical relief and even healing from the damage and insult sustained—systematically—in the course of systematic experience, in relation to systematic organizations. Through an approach to color and form that can only be characterized as systematic, Kandinsky furnishes the uplifting and edifying instance of the suspension of systematic abuses and constraints. It is the programs of art that open up the battleground and interstitial space (abyss, kh¯ora) where the struggle between systematic abuses and their suspension takes place. It turns out that the great Kandinsky retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum of Art in New York City (October 25, 2008 to March 8, 2009)

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coincided with the finishing touches I was applying to my most recent book, Around the Book: Systems and Literacy (2011). That volume is the transcript of a shift of emphasis in my critical practice from figure to ground, from singular artifact to systematic surround. It moves from a cluster of subversive reading tactics at the level of immanent detail and anomaly within texts to surveying the encompassing architecture of the systems, of thought and social organization, within which the artifacts of improvisation at hand arose. (This move in no way exempts me or any other critic from excruciating attentiveness to the language, program, and coding constituting such compelling cultural products.) In ways beyond my initial grasp, the exhibition spoke illuminatingly to pointed questions that Helen Tartar, who edited that volume, was placing to me at that very juncture. These were largely with the purpose of getting me to specify with greater lucidity than I’d thus far managed the tensions, cross-over, and mutual influences between books, as I was rearticulating certain of the variables in their configuration, and those tenuous and hypothetical constructions known as systems. I was thus aided and abetted in my reprise of Kandinsky by the Guggenheim’s landmark exhibition.7 So striking was it to me on a first viewing that I returned to it on two other occasions. The current project sets off as an effort to answer Helen’s questions persisting from Around the Book, but also to shift the field of inquiry ever so slightly in a psychoanalytical and/or schizoanalytical direction. In this re-take, the constitution and program of systems serve as the very maquiladores of the restraints, dismissals, profiles, and eradications to which art and critique arise in desperate as well as conscientious gesture of remediation.

3. European cultural conditions conspired, in the interstice between 1908 and 1912, give or take a few months, to allow a disqualification of prevailing aesthetic contracts and sub-contracts in an astonishing range of media and art-forms: painting and sculpture; narrative, dramatic, poetic, and even discursive script; music and its sub-genres. In The Aesthetic Contract, a book I published in 1997, I elaborated a contractual understanding of cultural and aesthetic history. In the interstitial chapters of that work (5 and 6),8 I sketched out a multidimensional scenario of the dynamics, thresholds, conceptual hardware, and social constituencies involved in the process both of disqualifying and rendering obsolete prevailing assumptions and modes of operation and in setting in motion practices and conventions initially encountered perforce as singular, almost to the point of incomprehensibility, deviant, transgressive, and even antisocial. The dynamic of seismic shift in

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prevailing aesthetic contracts that I crystallized at that time was doubtlessly keyed to the programs of Western aesthetics. Within this overarching framework, however, the movement between contractual understandings and clauses in art was neither time-bound nor linked to national or regional languages or theaters of production. Cubism, a collective art-project arising in precisely the same timeframe serving as a springboard to the initial phase of Kandinsky’s radical experimentation, an enterprise linked in certain respects to his major improvisations but largely distinct from them, nonetheless figured prominently in that previous work as a test case for the emergence and progression of aesthetic contracts. In no schematic way, the thought-work that I performed in The Aesthetic Contract subtends the defile of Kandinsky’s interventions, projects, and invariably provisional strategies and solutions that I will be glossing. Kandinsky’s writings on art, but above all his evolving painterly output, clearly indicate that within species (genotype/phenotype), architectural, and storage limits, he strove to be as cognizant of his painterly practice, its process, and its stakes as it is possible for any artist or cultural programmer to be. His practice of painting transpired as fully on a meditative level, demanding cognitive visualization, as it did in the formulation, mixture, and application of color. Kandinsky’s written traces, not unlike Bertolt Brecht’s, give every indication that his artistic achievement, however divided between technical virtuosity and achievement in conceptualization and design, was a function of the openness, frankness, and consequentiality with which he was able to think. In Kandinsky’s case, his achievement and subsequent role in aesthetic and cultural history are a direct function of the flow, flex, and openness of his thought-process. His work is therefore a case study in the cognitive flex and openness, especially in the face of societal censure and resistance and in the face of one’s inevitable “inadmissible thoughts,” prerequisite to the fulfillment of creative and inventive possibility. The fluidity at play in creative artistic and cultural invention is of decisive moment in characterizing art’s role in relation to systems. If systematic selection, stricture and constriction, and repetitiveness play a disproportionate role in defining the qualities and coloration of systematic life, Kandinsky’s fluidity of thinking and painting constitute a particularly notable rejoinder and counterpoint. If art such as Kandinsky’s can furnish a rejoinder to systematic repression, closure, and the foreclosure of possibility, then it is possible for us to imagine certain cultural artifacts serving as a medium of therapy—if we begin to define the therapeutic as a redress to the systematic insults sustained in the course of lived experience. The end result of this therapeutic process might stop far short of healing as a decisive outcome. But it might, on the other hand, at least constitute the scrambling and evasion of systematic torque or momentum.

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4. Among many notable achievements in Kandinsky’s ouevre, 1911, one of modernism’s miraculous years, produced “Picture with a Circle” (“Bild mit Kreis,” Fig. 1.1). This painting is a riddle disguised as an incomprehensible muddle of non-signifying blobs, vaguely geometrical shapes, tending, as the

FIGURE 1.1 Kandinsky, Wassily (1866–1944) © ARS, NY. “Picture with a Circle” (“Bild mit Kreis”), 1911. Museum of Fine Arts of the Georgian S.S.R., Tibilisi, Georgia Photo Credit: Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY © 2014 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris

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title suggests, toward the circular, but also zig-zag, angular lines, beginning and ending nowhere, nonetheless opening depth into a canvas otherwise no deeper than the direct layering of its inchoate masses on top of one another. The painting’s consummate enigma is how it could perfectly operate within the conventional framework and rules of scale and perspective while at the same time running counter to its viewers’ impulse to establish, in an edifying way, meaning, coherence, message, and context. “Picture with a Circle” is resolute in its strategy to contain its semantics (meaning) and its syntax beneath the threshold of any discernible content or message. At the same time, Kandinsky deploys every trick in his bag to make this canvas alluring, to draw the viewer into its beauty and mystique, indeed to make this as beautiful a painting as has ever been produced in this medium’s venerable and storied Western history; also to mark its beauty as recognizable within this established tradition. For one, his palette of colors, even the yellows, are soft and muted, allowing us to dwell or sink within their masses (I think particularly of the red planetary shape, bisected by a white streak reminiscent of Saturn’s ring, in the upper left-hand corner). But the painting’s notable greens (in the large mass at the painting’s bottom border and in the cucumber-like shape, right-center) are every bit as restful and alluring. Kandinsky had been an alchemist in a Munich color-lab maintained by Marianne von Werefkin, his fellow-student of Anton Azhbe’s, at least since 1899.9 Kandinsky’s achievement in this piece is at least in part to demonstrate how delectable and all-absorbing color can be; to highlight the decisive centrality of this delectation to aesthetic desire, at least within its painterly theater. Yet coloration does not shoulder the burden of this painting’s doublebind alone (a modernistic counterpart to “La Jocanda’s” smile?). To buttress the enchantment of certain of the painting’s colors, Kandinsky softens the contours of the shapes and masses comprising the painting’s vaguely geometrical narrative. Kandinsky offers us geometry, but he makes the contours of the quasi-geometrical shapes permeable. These are individual masses that invite us in rather than repelling us (as in later, more formalistically geometrical work). The masses and streaks making up the painting caress one another with their fuzzy outlines and intermingle; in concert with a palette of pure delectability, they caress us as well, drawing us further into the painted depth. How could a canvas so resolutely non-representational—its flaunting any sub-contract of fidelity in depiction overshadows any geometry it offers in rendering it abstract—how could such a painting hold so resolutely to formal expectations regarding composition, perspective, and scale? Herein lie its by no means ethereal riddle and joke. Depth, in this painting, is not a function of representation but of layering, density of detail, and signage (say the red squiggle, left and center). Depth opens up in this composition from right to left and to a lesser degree, diagonally, from upper right to lower left. The

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painting’s upper left-hand corner is something like an outer-space background to, going down that margin, the red Saturn-like shape, the arc of a blue-yellow circle, and the continuation of the painting’s largest circle, in pink tones, subtending the entire painting at the bottom. In contrast to three descending circular shapes of different colors on the painting’s left margin, the dark background at the upper left-hand corner, with its dull tonality, ends the painting’s lateral development on an eerie astronomical, outer-space note. If the painting opens up, on a sublime and even extraterrestrial, scale from right to left and, slightly, from top to bottom, what do we find at its focal point, its punctum,10 in the upper right-hand corner? What I see, at least, are two transparent orbs enclosing a blue oval (in the corner) and a dark point surrounded by a pink, then a red ring (upper margin, center). Although this is a rigorously non-representational canvas, there is enough of an ocular echo to these two concentric ensembles to open up a dimension of faciality in this corner of the painting. If you follow the French philosophers, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, who develop this term at the beginning of their A Thousand Plateaus11 closely enough, it is possible for the overall geometry and physiognomic aura of faces to persist far outside the realm of figural depiction or interpersonal transaction. Faciality, as they develop it, is not limited to schematic representations such as the totem-poles of the indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest; built upon the practical necessity of headlamps, it finds a welcome home on the front end of all kinds of transportation vehicles, where it may, uncannily or not, at a far remove, lend them a “human” touch. If an identifiably facial configuration opens up in the upper right-hand corner, and if the painting’s composition moves in rigorous fashion from right to left, diagonally, from up to down, and from foreground to background, we can say that Kandinsky has furnished us with all the classical furnishings of a portrait in a painting resolutely opposed to representation and restricting itself to a vocabulary of abstract, at least quasi-geometrical, forms. The levity of this painterly joke, at the outset of a new bevy of aesthetic contracts in the visual arts, extends to the effigy of the facial in the upper right-hand corner. If any face-composition can be extrapolated from the two ocular ensembles, it is, to be sure, a “funny face,” with a flat black spot for a nose (tethered to another such spot below the right “eye”), and punctuated by whimsical black squiggles. The “cucumber” composition on the right margin might be a displaced mouth. But then, a rounded red heart-shape in the lower right-hand corner could serve this role as well. In spite of the distance that Kandinsky maintained to Cubism’s purely formal combination and multiplication, potential face-elements along the painting’s right-hand flank undergo transformations indissolubly related to Cubism as a fundamentally permutational collective art-experiment. Kandinsky’s gentle but palpable plays on faciality, portraiture, and painterly representation in general make this canvas not merely absorptive and

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enchanting, but also endearing. The figure in the upper right-hand corner can be taken as faciality’s icon or mascot. The embrace that this painting offers its viewers is, then, multidimensional: at the levels of color, form, outline, perspective, and design. It sets in play some but not all of the pieces in Kandinsky’s loving chess game with and against his primary (but by no means exclusive) medium.

5. Kandinsky’s all-out research and investigation into the line—its density, dimensions, tendency, drift, and implications for painted virtual reality—qualify him, within the theaters of his practiced media, as one of the twentiethcentury’s most graphic theoreticians of writing. His achievement in this arena is on a par with Kafka’s, Joyce’s, Beckett’s, Dufy’s, Klee’s, Grosz’s, Giacometti’s, Benjamin’s, Blanchot’s, Celan’s, Twombly’s, or Derrida’s. It is incumbent upon us to recognize the rigor and multidimensional disinterest prevailing within Kandinsky’s exploration of lines and linearity in spite of the myth and spirituality that he invoked in his own self-explanatory discourse. (As ever, terms and other elements of language cannot in themselves be dismissed as theoretically naïve or retrograde. All depends on their specific deployment. It turns out, as we shall see, that Kandinsky configured and militated for an aesthetics of expression, rigorous grammar, syntax, and contextual specificity; also improvisation with the intellectual as well as visual and artistic materials at hand. By dint of his broader cultural as well as personal formations, rhetorics of organic process and spiritual realization served him as the props and trappings for his theoretical propositions. They may mimic certain affective and cognitive experiences that he ascribes to visual artists, but they do not define his notions and implementation of painterly display and inscription.) Kandinsky’s descriptive rhetoric of organic process allows him, for one, to place linearity in a dynamic tension—on a continuum, not in polarity—with shapes and masses. The play of scoring against painted shapes alone moves his painterly practice into the realm (or scene) of writing, on a variety of whatever tabulas or surfaces that happen to be at hand. This hand-writing assumes many forms, from chaotic scratch-marks to abstract squiggles, to highly geometrical insignias, over the course of his painterly improvisation. They appear in every caliber of bandwidth from minute scratches to what would have to be described as linear bands. The writing that Kandinsky unleashes within the painted canvas is non-signifying in the sense that it does not communicate any prior or foregone message, any significance outside the frame. But this does not mean that its immediate context, its relation to form,

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FIGURE 1.2 Kandinsky, Wassily (1866–1944) © ARS, NY. “Variation after Improvisation 21” (“Variation nach Improvisation 21”) (plate, folio 13) from Klänge (Sounds) by Vasily Kandinsky (1913). Woodcut from an illustrated book with fifty-six woodcuts, composition (irreg.): 4 5/8 × 5½ inches (11.7 × 14 cm); page: 111/6 × 10 7/8 inches (28.1 × 27.7 cm). Printer: Poeschel & Trepte, Leipzig. Publisher: R. Piper & Co., Munich. Edition: Book: 300 (signed and numbered); 45 h.c. The Louis E. Stern Collection. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY. © 2014 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

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FIGURE 1.3 Kandinsky, Wassily (1866–1944) © ARS, NY. “Improvisation 26 (Rowing/Rudern),” 1912 (Stätische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich, Gabriele Munter-Stiftung). © 2014 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

color, composition, and movement, as well as its own configuration and properties, do not bestow upon it important significance and meaning. Line in Kandinsky’s works is a pivotal communicative medium that derives its thrust and message from the process of painting. The importance of squiggles, as we shall see in Chapter 6, as a mode of free-form playfulness, was not lost on D. W. Winnicott as a quintessential therapeutic tool—in communicating with his often very young patients and, based on these interactions, in extrapolating their troubles. The functional impact of Kandinsky’s line-work ranges from direct representation, the scoring of legible outlines (say, of animals or buildings) within the painted surface, to unmotivated filigree or ornamentation for its own sake. (Merely the presence of such superfluous decoration within an otherwise integral painting—more than any legerdemain the artist takes with

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FIGURE 1.4 Kandinsky, Wassily (1866–1944) © ARS, NY. “Black Lines” (“Schwarze Linien”), December 1913. Oil on canvas. 51 × 51 5/8 inches (129.4 × 131.1 cm). Solomon R. Guggenheim Founding Collection, by gift. The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY. Photo Credit: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation / Art Resource, NY. © 2014 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

content, delivery, or style, is often what makes an artwork scandalous. In his Truth in Painting, Jacques Derrida has meticulously extrapolated the doublebinds attending the ornamental in Western art,12 making a strategic interface between the ambivalence that ornament evokes and the overarching misgivings toward writing as a tele-technic medium in Western thought.) Line-work emerges early on in Kandinsky’s work as a prominent feature in the landscape, an X-factor to be taken into account on its own terms.

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A brief introductory case study of the line and its role in Kandinsky’s work can well pursue a series of works that he created pivoting around the figures of horses. To the extent that Kandinsky could be accused of programming any fixed iconography, horses, with their explosive energy and mythical flight and potential transcendence, would have to play a central role in it. We need to recall that the horse is the defining and enabling property, in several senses, of “The Blue Rider” (“Der blaue Reiter”), both a modernist icon and an artistic collective in Munich that Kandinsky was decisive in founding, guiding, and publicizing. (I regard the logistical as well as spiritual support that Kandinsky lent an ongoing sequence of artistic and political movements and institutions over the course of his production—from “Der blaue Reiter” to Narkompros [Moscow] to the Bauhaus—to be another manifestation of his aesthetic cognizance, a tight feedback loop between his creative and socio-political interventions. I will delve later into this indispensable link between aesthetic and trans-subjective sensibility in conceptual and inventive realization.) The horse and central figure of “Lyrical” (“Lyrisches,” early 1911, Cover) is already “abstract” in the sense of schematically spare. As the only representational figure in this painting, the horse is a line-drawing coursing down a white track between aquamarine and blue bands at the upper and lower margins of the painting. The track is itself a white field with yellow accents. The fact that the horse exists only as a line-drawing is accentuated by the fact that the yellowish-white field also gives the horse’s body its color and contour. There is the most minimal suggestion of a jockey, trailing a luscious green cape, heavily outlined, clinging to the horse. The horse’s head and lower torso are clearly (and gracefully) outlined. There are some random scratch-marks below the animal’s far-flung front hooves and toward the rear of its torso. Most interesting here is the mane, beginning as staccato strokes in black, before trailing off into a sandy tangerine. The horse’s mane is less an outline than the performance of the strokes necessary to give the impression of a mane. As the figments of a performance, these strokes belong to the image and its impression, but then they do not. They are also an element in a stroke-language, a letter in a potential alphabet (or ideographic system) of strokes. As a performative element, the strokes making up the mane are ready and free to travel, beyond the horse and this picture, beyond representational art and design altogether. And Kandinsky makes sure that they do. The three horses coursing in succession down the hillside of Kandinsky’s very indefinite “Romantic Landscape” (“Romantische Landschaft,” 1911) exhibit different states of being outlined, from the lead horse, a vague blue shape to the third, lime-colored, with a thick, clear blue outline. The canvas becomes an experiment in different degrees of definition within a world of color far more than of shape. By “Impression 5 (Park),” of the same year, two

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central horse figures, set against a bright background consisting only of rectangles and one triangle (a hill?), have been minimalized and schematized to the nth degree, existing as pinwheel or windmill-shaped reductions, the second, on the left-hand side, also with a curved tail (limited, precisely, to a single curve). Decisive totem as it is, then, the horse can exist in Kandinsky’s virtual world on multiple levels at the same time: as the very embodiment of the myth and all the religious and metaphysical aspirations packed within the myth; as the agent and exemplar of the subtraction and schematization down to the level of symbolization, iconography, and design; and, as the arbitrary and uncoded stroke of the mark itself, what Derrida, early on, embellished as the archi-trace. This rich, but interactive division of labor in the line’s deployment and play within painted space is not unlike a parallel division of labor that Kandinsky devised for the sub-genres of his work. Most tellingly, he established the thresholds of difference between his “Impressions,” “Improvisations,” and “Compositions” in terms of the degree and level of processing, cognitive as well as pictorial, that each of these groupings entailed. That Kandinsky calls the first draft or notebook for his elaborated compositions his “impressions” tips his hand toward Impressionism, from our point of view, the broad, late nineteenth-century aesthetic contract in which the realisms of the representational field took second place to the realisms of perception and cognitive processing as the fulcrum of painted virtual reality. My personal experience of his oeuvre confirms the appropriateness and rigor of this tripartite classification. We will go into it later on a more theoretical level. The equine evolution (or revolution) traced thus far in this section is decisive to Kandinsky’s line-work both as an element within drawing and representation and as a writing, whether subscript or hypertext, unleashed, staged, and left to find its significations within the virtual space of painting. A writing, in other words, spanning analog and digital organizations and communications systems. The relatively pointed experiments discussed thus far set the stage for the role of writing in such more fully elaborated works as “Improvisation 21” (1911, Fig. 1.2), “Improvisation 26 (Rowing/Rudern)” (1912, Fig. 1.3), and finally, in a canvas at the extreme of Kandinsky’s withdrawal from the representational domain, hence as fully “abstract” as possible, “Black Lines” (“Schwarze Linien”) (1913, Fig. 1.4). Kandinsky’s practice of deploying the figure of the horse as the schematic, a talisman or hippogryph, if you will, for the inscriptive scoring indispensable to painting’s display, is so entrenched by the making of the first artifact listed immediately above, that vital aspects of the centrality of writing to Kandinsky’s practice become quite explicit. The outline of a lateral horse head in this painting can serve both as the architectural foundation for a small city, painted with “magical realism,” and, going down the horse’s neck, as the

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display-surface for graffiti (or outline as script). This work makes graphically clear Kandinsky’s interest in writing, for its own sake, as a crucial element in painted virtual reality. This painting is a prelude to “Moscow I” (“Mockba I,” 1916), in which the referencing of urban space and architecture is subordinated to the painterly gains that can be extracted from this project: an exploration of grids or, say, using architectural fenestration as a pretext for painting colorscales and color-charts. In keeping with the “abstraction plank” in Kandinsky’s agenda, the exigencies of painting always win out over representation. The surprise of both canvases is not that cities have so much to say about Kandinsky’s Imaginary but that they are so fruitful in his progressive unpacking of a singular painterly agenda and practice. The written overlay to the equine torso assumes two forms: relatively even vertical squiggles suggestive of the upper outlines of city or domestic walls or fences; and samples of letters that can only be part of a handwriting exercise. The horse, vehicle or medium to aesthetic exploration, plays host to two very different displays of writing: the first as blueprint or schematic representation, the second as phonetic sign or script. How is it that these two very different media of writing can converge, almost indifferently, on the surface of the horse? Perhaps because from Kandinsky’s painterly point of view, these writing-media (and others that could be incorporated) both assume the job description assigned to outline: they mark, embellish, contain, restrain, illuminate, adumbrate, and furnish with a legend the surface of painting and the color-masses or shapes with which it has been overlaid. The role of outline as uncoded inscription immanent to the painterly display continues even when the writerly slashes or stokes have expanded to the gauge of the other shapes in the painting, but of pronounced linear elongation. This is where the demonstration of a particularly luscious surface, “Improvisation 26 (Rowing/Rudern)” (1912, Fig. 1.3), is headed. The expansive masses in the background are unusually soft and indistinct. Though he paints in oil, Kandinsky achieves the effect here of pastel watercolor. In contrast to the muted blue, yellow, and green masses in the background, two forms of inscription, as sketch or outline, mark the extended masses: an enchanting outline comprised of layers of red, pink, and purple, making something of a landscape-horizon near the top of the painting, a cloud on the lower right, and a sweeping partial ellipse in the lower center. This pink contour has the feel of a rich lipstick to it, and its luminous effect on the canvas can well be described as an extended kiss. But a more serious writing, in black ink as it were, also signs the painting. At the top it traces, among other things, a possible bird and tree (perhaps a palm). This writing develops into a partial fan of six very prominent black rays moving from below the pink “mountains” and the center of the pink ellipse into the painting’s lower left-hand corner. From these black lines the painting derives the referential part of its title, “Rowing,” and any

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lateral movement conferred by this imputed activity. Above all what these radii offer is balance and a sense of proportion: both to the vague shapes making up the lower portion of the painting and to the activity otherwise concentrated at the top (e.g. in the pink “mountain tops,” the other black shapes). Here the writing in the painted surface is a visual element in its own right; it may relinquish its function as insignia or meta-text, but it retains its centrality and power. In this brief period from 1911 to 1913, Kandinsky is not only exploring a breathtaking number of aesthetic sub-contracts or clauses to the premises of non-representation, “abstraction,” and fragmentation in painting; his particular visual experiments, following upon one another at a pace that very few practitioners could match (Picasso comes to mind as a fellow “prodigious son”), bespoke an unusual conceptual depth and deliberation in design. Having experimented broadly in the outline’s scale, texture, and movement, in its collaborative roles—as a boundary, a mass, and an insignia—by the end of this particularly rich and formative moment, Kandinsky lends central prominence and full play to the handwriting of lines and the graphology that it prompts. Marks, slashes, serpentine squiggles, and knots made of hairlike fissures take center stage in canvasses from very late 1913 such as “Light Picture” (“Helles Bild,” 1913, Fig. 1.5) and “Black Lines” (“Schwarze Linien,” Fig. 1.4). Although the two canvasses mentioned immediately above may be regarded as counter-experiments, the play of line, in unrestricted movement and shape, reigns supreme in both. With one notable exception in “Light Picture,” a blazing red streak, the line-work in both is black (also in “Light Picture” certain prominent black lines pick up a tinge or stain from the pastels behind them). The background of “Light Picture” is relatively harmonious, a vast yellow field tinged with red, blue, and bright yellow accents inside and bounded at two diagonal corners and on two opposing sides, respectively, by small blue and red masses. The “Black Lines” of the painting of that title play, on the other hand, against a background filled with brightly colored circular masses in red, blue, and green hues; also with different kinds of streaks along the right-hand border and on a diagonal from upper right to lower left. All but one of the brightly colored paint-circles has some sort of nucleus at its center (either dark or light; painted flatly or scored in hatch-marks). This centering—endowing with a circular center–of the pied round shapes gives them a distinctive floral feeling at the level of what I have elsewhere called, in relation to modernist/postmodern literature, “half-reference.” The free play of line in “Black Lines” thus takes place on two complementary levels. The first of these is a black pre-text or counter-text (musically, a counterpoint) overwriting and overriding the painting’s field of flowers. According to the thickness, density, and relative insistence of these lines, they change their

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mood and hence their “story,” from one climatic zone of the painting to the next. The second mode of inscription marking “Black Lines” is the elongated colored shapes, mostly on the right-hand margin and in the upper left-hand corner, furnishing a border to its field of what may or may not be flowers. A pictorially configured, arrayed, and signifying script or handwriting thus deposits its legend on the full gamut of Kandinsky’s visual weather-zones or environments. Both in the canvasses already under discussion and over the course of Kandinsky’s oeuvre, these painterly zones articulate themselves over a series of continuums. He explicitly articulates the continuity of the issues being sorted out in his painting in On the Spiritual in Art, where the very flow embedded into continuums is possessed of a special merit all of its own. As will become apparent as we survey a few more strings of paintings in his oeuvre, the continuums along which his painterly investigations and investments are distributed include the following: linearity/mass; black and white/coloration; discontinuity/flow; geometry/organicism; foreground/background; legibility (signification)/undecidability. To this list of gradients impacting on Kandinsky’s oeuvre almost from the start to the finish, I add one temperamental scale to the compendium of stylistic and technical ones: hard/ soft. I would argue that the thrust of Kandinsky’s oeuvre, as a credo of cultural intervention as well as a display-screen of aesthetic experimentation, gathers in an affirmation of softness over and against the stasis and rigidity of the hard. This is not to suggest that his paintings are in any way devoid of assertive, clear contours and vectors. The overall fate of hardness or intransience in his work, though, is to serve as a framework or view-finder for starkly contrasting phenomena: the palpable launch of geometry and primary color into motion; the dissolution of geometrical balance into organic flow. Kandinsky mobilizes a long and varied sequence of paintings highlighting softness, softness as an aesthetic value as much as an embedded motif or design-specification. We know as well, from his writings and the positions he took in arts education and administration, that softness was not only an aesthetic motif or trapping to him; it was a psychological/schizological bearing necessary for sustained creativity. In its very consistency and temperament, softness fostered the uncontained feedback between cognitive processing and aesthetic composition at the heart of a painting-process admitting of mood, climate, and the abrupt transitions within their domains. In terms of the system of coloration that Kandinsky devises in On the Spiritual in Art and related writings, it is by no means haphazard that the applied scriptural meta-text of “Light Picture” comes into play against a largely yellow background. Yellow occupies a special place and role in Kandinsky’s configuration, which, arranging the basic colors in yin/yang complementarities, is strongly reminiscent of a Chinese elemental system (as painstakingly elaborated, say, in Chinese medicine). To Kandinsky, yellow is endowed with a very special vibrant energy

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and tone. In his writings, Kandinsky often preferred characterizing painterly issues in musical rather than visual language. The highly varied handwriting of “Light Picture”—some streaky, some cilia-like; some forming a parabolic trajectory, some random and truncated; some following color-masses in the background, some fully unleashed—displays itself against Kandinsky’s most highly charged energy-field and cloud-chamber: yellow. This elaborate experimentation in line-work happens not so much in order to exhaust the possibilities surrounding one crucial element of painterly production as to establish painting, in this particular moment, whether defined aesthetically, technologically, or historically, as a scene of writing, as a space, abyss, screen, or display of inscription, in which a visual medium of articulation, phrasing, differentiation, and qualification takes and occupies place. The linework henceforth appearing, although in different gauges, densities, movements, and to varying effects, in every one of Kandinsky’s productions is at once one element among others in the display; self-generated signage indicating movement and dynamic interactions within the respective canvasses; and a meta-trace or critique at the extreme limit of painting’s expressive capability, even when it eschews direct depiction. In the event that my estimation of Kandinsky’s substantial investment in writing, inscription, vocabulary, grammar, and syntax seems exaggerated, one thing should be kept in mind. As of early 1914, Kandinsky still equates the palette or window on which inscription plays in a wide range of frequencies, bandwidths, and forms, with the extent of the canvas itself. At this point, he operates within a simple continuum of graphic scoring playing itself out over and against mass, shape, color, and flatness in an arena coinciding precisely with the dimensions of the painting. By 1916, in such a work as “Painting on Light Ground” (“Na Svetlom Fone”), he has thematized and hence subjected inscriptive process to an imminent visual meta-discourse or critique by framing and incorporating the writing-surface, the tablet, into the painting itself. He continues this painterly sub-contract in such works from 1919 to 1920 as “White Oval” (“Bely Oval”) and “Red Oval” (“Krasny Oval,” Fig. 1.6).

6. Surely the central player in the mystery of how Kandinsky entrances his viewers, how he configures his painted surfaces as self-contained virtual worlds in which his readers dwell, is color. Kandinsky himself is mystified enough by his uncanny powers in this domain to link his painting-practice, by association, with the mystical. We clearly recognize in hindsight that Kandinsky’s achievements in color, composition, and overarching aesthetic allure derive far more from his formal geometry, his chromatic intuition, and

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FIGURE 1.5 Kandinsky, Wassily (1866–1944) © ARS, NY. “Light Picture” (“Helles Bild”), December 1913. Oil and natural resin on canvas, 30¾ × 39½ inches (77.8 × 100.2 cm). Solomon R. Guggenheim Founding Collection, by gift. The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY. Photo credit: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation / Art Resource, NY. © 2014 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

his acuity as a theorist of inscription than from any revelations to which he attributes his breakthrough achievements. It is in keeping with an utterly uncanny feel or touch that the credo of chromatic value that Kandinsky unveils at the center of “On the Spiritual in Art” is both as systematic and as unsystematic, as indicative of what later systems thinkers including Gregory Bateson,13 Ludwig von Bertalanffy,14 and Anthony Wilden15 will characterize as “open systems,” as could be. Kandinsky somehow managed at once to be a rigorous theorist and a consummate craftsman who could with flair and precision translate his thinking into gestures of color and design. It is a tribute to this dual configuration of his thinking and making that he could program his chromatic values and the practice ensuing from it into a system, however much intuition the artist, first and foremost he himself, had to bring to bear in deploying its values and gradations.

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FIGURE 1.6 Kandinsky, Wassily (1866–1944) © ARS, NY. “Red Oval” (“Krasny Oval”), 1920. Oil on canvas, 28 1/8 × 28 1/8 inches (71.5 × 71.2 cm). The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY. Photo credit: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation / Art Resource, NY. © 2014 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

The thinking about color that Kandinsky extrapolates from the first dozen or so years of his painting practice is systematic in the sense that it assigns weights or valences to specific colors and predicts the values or outcomes of certain color combinations. In the most general terms, the warmth or coldness of a color is due to its inclination toward yellow or toward blue.16 Since both the colors that make up green are active and have movement within themselves, one can in fact establish their effect purely theoretically

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. . . In fact both the primary movement of yellow, striving toward the spectator, which can be raised to the level of importunity (by increasing the intensity of the yellow), and its secondary movement, which causes it to leap over its boundaries, dissipating its strength upon its surroundings— both resemble the properties of any material force that exerts itself unthinkingly upon its object and pours aimlessly in every direction. On the other hand, yellow, when directly observed (in some kind of geometrical form), is disquieting to the spectator, pricking him, stimulating him . . . The property of yellow, a color that inclines considerably toward the brighter tones, can be raised to a pitch of intensity unbearable to the eye and to the spirit. Upon such intensification, it affects us like the shrill sound of a trumpet being played louder and louder.17 The ideal balance of these two colors—diametrically opposed in every respect—produces green . . . Tranquility results . . . Absolute green is the most peaceful color there is . . . Thus, pure green is to the realm of color what the bourgeoisie is to human society: it is an immobile, complacent element, limited in every respect. The green is like a fat, extremely healthy cow, lying motionless, fit only for chewing the cud, regarding the world with stupid, lackluster eyes . . . If we disturb the balance of pure green, making it tend toward yellow, it becomes alive, full of joy and youth . . . If, however, blue predominates, the green becomes deeper, taking on a quite different sound: it becomes serious and, so to speak, pensive.18 As is evident from this medley extracted from the pivotal color-elucidation passage in On the Spiritual in Art, to the extent that Kandinsky regards color as the basic material out of which he fashions his work, he “knows his customers,” the various tints comprising the wheel of color, in an intimate and even empirical way. (As Kandinsky goes on to elucidate in the passage, if color is a material, in the sense of a building-block or basic element, it is the most volatile, “spiritual,” and even phonic “substance” in the universe.) Kandinsky’s familiarity with the characters in his play enables him to attribute enduring qualities to them and to assign them “roles” in an above all systematic way. Not only is yellow the trump-card or X-factor of the coloruniverse and blue the inward-tending principle of tranquility. The green resulting from the mixture of these primary elements reverberates with “joy and youth” when weighted toward its yellow component; the pensive seriousness that it radiates when it tends toward blue is “a quite different sound.” For all the spirituality (also: synesthetic nuance) with which Kandinsky imbues color (in today’s theoretical discourse, underscoring color’s immanence to painterly process), he establishes its variegated weights and values within

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a detached palette in which the colors, as well as their combinations, do not vary from one application to the next. Not only are the various colors, in combination with one another, known quantities; the factors impinging on their specific (i.e., contextual) tone and impact can be programmed into the color-system in an empirical way. Kandinsky does not neglect to calibrate his highly sensitive color-system with the following “divisions”: “warmth or coldness of a color;” “lightness or darkness;” and, with regard to movement, whether “toward or away from the spectator;” resistant to color (white) or non-resistant (black); and whether “eccentric” (exemplified by yellow in the above passages) or “concentric.”19 None of the above in any way disqualifies or neutralizes color’s volatility in establishing mood or emotional climate; the extreme sensitivity of its gradations (or intrinsic différance), its radicality on an overarching continuum of synesthetic articulation and possibility. Kandinsky writes with empirical detachment about color, but the values and emotional reactions emanating from this phenomenon are by all accounts the ones least susceptible to uniformity, regulation, predictability, and systematization in human knowledge and experience. It is precisely Kandinsky’s mindfulness to this irreducible aporia that allows him, in the citations above, to characterize yellow as a “material force that exerts itself unthinkingly upon its object and pours aimlessly in every direction;” also to resort to wildly metaphoric language as the only linguistic medium in which the colors are expressible. This is as true of “pure” green, “a fat, extremely healthy cow, lying motionless, fit only for chewing the cud, regarding the world with stupid, lackluster eyes,” as it is for the complementary primary colors making it up. If color is a system, it is akin to a Chinese elemental one. In this configuration, each major color is an element bearing multiple temperaments or qualities and feeding into axes or continuums of articulation. In this sense, the different colors are not only bandwidths of light but emotions, tones (this in a synesthetic sense, tending above all to the Klange or resonances of music, but with haptic implications as well), and energic inputs into palpable, but also fleeting ecologies or climates of composition and dwelling. In contrast to the manic importunities of yellow, blue moves and tends toward depth, the “infinite,” and the “supernatural.” It awakens in the spectator “a desire for the pure.”20 It so happens that these valuations, perhaps owing to the agency of such intercultural importers as Mme Blavatsky, accord well with the elemental division of labor in Chinese medicine. It is a deep foundation in analogical thinking that lends this system, and its correlatives in Indian civilization and indigenous communities its primary architectural support. “Fire” can betoken, for example, an organic sub-system (in this case, the heart in feedback relation to its yin partner, the small intestine), an emotional temperament (with

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far-reaching implications), a predisposition to certain ailments, a time of day, a season of life and an annual season, not to mention a color, red/orange. It turns out that Kandinsky’s valuations for yellow and blue as well as the interstitial tones colored by their mixture accord well with the analogies of Chinese medicine.21 Within this systematic panorama on the interactions between humans and animals and nature, yellow is the color code for the Wood-element or -phase. If any single emotional climate can be linked to this phase it is worldly striving, drive, and ambition. It falls in Chinese medicine for the organic sub-system comprised of the liver (yin) and the gall bladder (yang) to regulate the emotional epiphenomena of Wood-energy. In its imbalance, this particular energy tends both toward rage, and the unpredictable tirades through which it is expressed, and toward addiction, in all its manifestations. Blue, on the other hand, is the color code for the Water-element, whose emotional as well as corporeal circulation within the body is regulated by the kidneys (yin) and urinary bladder (yang). To the Chinese, Water serves as the elemental signature for philosophy, among other pursuits. In its withdrawal into itself and gravitation toward purity, as chronicled by Kandinsky, blue indeed lives up to its ages-old type-casting. The gradations of color make perfect sense within the formulations of Kandinsky’s quasi-system; even more importantly, these valuations are borne out by the canvasses in which the colors and the weightings are deployed, for lack of a better word, environmentally. Kandinsky has thus rendered a rigorous account for the deployment and epiphenomena of color within his immediate context, his local environment, one in keeping with elemental values of long standing and from far afield. Along with an unfailing attentiveness to geometrical form, it is Kandinsky’s systematic underpinnings to the deployment of color that anchor a prodigious sequence of paintings otherwise seeming to be utterly whimsical and chaotic. His militating for abstract representation is anything but a resignation to disorder and a hopeless capitulation to non-signification. If color in fact occupies a position in his painting-practice analogous to qi in Chinese medicine, then each composition is the climatic unfolding—in color—of an open-ended and unfolding sequence of changes in operating conditions. These conditions, their variations, and their interactions emerge from a bewildering range of factors: the national- and world-politics of the twentiethcentury’s first four decades; Kandinsky’s emerging understandings of and facility with form, color, and composition; Kandinsky’s interactions, whether cooperative or adversarial, with the artists and art-purveyors that he encountered; the vicissitudes of his personal life, including family and connubial relations. It is most instructive in this regard that Kandinsky did not categorize his output in terms of its stages, subject-matter, or media, but in terms of degrees, scales, and grains of representation, from “impressions” to “improvisations” and “compositions.” To the extent that they encompass

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ecological zones and processes of color, mood, and intensity, all of Kandinsky’s paintings may be accurately characterized as compositions in the broadest sense. This subject and trajectory of the present section will hopefully suggest some of the dimensions in which the emergence of the color-scale or colorchart as a rare set-feature or movable index in many of Kandinsky’s canvasses is a phenomenon not wisely or easily overlooked.

7. The motif of the color-scale or color-grid occasionally interjected in Kandinsky’s paintings calls out to be underscored as a particularly resonant allegorical figure. Even where seemingly invoked as a merely decorative element, incorporated color-scales demand the recognition of color as the as the pivotal and indispensable medium through which Kandinsky orchestrates articulation, boundary, music, mood, and climate in his painting. Not only do color-scales betray the side of the bread on which Kandinsky has spread a good share of his painterly butter; as scales or continuums, they serve as talismans for his sliding approach to the key factors intertwined both in painterly composition and visual beauty. I have suggested above the individual scales on which Kandinsky, over the course of a variegated and inventive career, articulates the terms of his evolving artistic projects (or aesthetic sub-contracts): linearity/ mass; hard/soft; black and white/coloration; discontinuity/flow; geometry/ organicism; foreground/background; legibility (signification)/undecidability. Each of these continuums constitutes a domain opening up a horizon of improvisation, allowing a panoply of inflections, variants, and exceptions. In combination with one another, these specific scales or ranges at the heart of Kandinsky’s unfolding project form a matrix of variation and possibility that was broad enough to keep Kandinsky actively engaged, present, and accounted for over the course of an amazingly productive painterly literature. The incorporated figure of the color-scale or color-grid betrays an engagement with Cubism’s sensibility, experiments, and primary aesthetic sub-contracts on a far more profound level than some of Kandinsky’s explicit distancings from it in On the Spiritual in Art on the grounds of its technological reductionism. For one, an incorporated color-scale or color-grid is the visual equivalent to a musical scale, the mathematical basis for a provisional phonic neighborhood highly specific to particular moods but of limited extent, relevance, and duration. Cubism, for Kandinsky, both claims its distinction and realizes its limits from the struggle that it stages between materiality and form. Picasso, as Kandinsky writes concurrently with some of the former’s breakthrough cubist compositions,

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seeks to achieve the constructive element through numerical relations. In his latest works [1911], he arrives at the destruction of the material object by a logical path, not by dissolving it but by breaking it up into its individual parts and scattering these parts in a constructive fashion over the canvas. In this process he seems, strangely enough, to wish to retain a semblance of the material object.22 Kandinsky is more than capable of discerning the constructive bearing and aftermath attending the analysis of the material world into its geometrical forms. He points out at the same time the impoverishment resulting from Picasso’s cubistic fascination with the triangle at the expense of all other geometrical forms. “Here, also, inertia quickly set in. Attention was concentrated especially upon this one particular form, henceforth leading again to an impoverishment of resources.”23 In spite of any reservations Kandinsky might have held regarding the major collaborative artistic mega-project coinciding with own, as his own painterly practice demonstrates, he could not be more in accord with an aesthetics of dispassionate visual analysis, relentless combination and then recombination of visual elements and resources, and compositional hyper-awareness. Kandinsky would only wish to spare Cubism a falling away from the passion in making that strikes a dominant chord in his early personal manifesto, On the Spiritual in Art. Even the theory of making must be tinged by an ecstatic bearing, he insists in this work. And art will fulfill its emotional potential through the meticulous attunement of multiple, mutually impacting scales, ones as much musical as visual (the latter as in color-scales): Since art affects the emotions, it can only exert its effect by means of the emotions. The right result, even given the most careful proportions, the finest weights and scales, can never be the result of mental calculation of deductive reasoning. These proportions cannot be calculated, nor these scales found ready-made. Proportions and scales are to be found not outside, but within the artist, they are what one might call a feeling for artistic limits, a sense of tact—qualities the artist is born with, which are heightened by enthusiasm so as to reveal genius. It is in this sense that Goethe’s prophesy of the possibility of a thorough-bass of painting is to be understood. This kind of grammar of painting can at the moment only be guessed at, and if it eventually comes about, it will be constructed not so much on the basis of physical laws (as has already been attempted, and is being attempted again today: Cubism), but rather upon the laws of internal necessity, which may quite correctly be described as spiritual.24 This is one of those anomalous, pivotal, and ultimately rewarding passages, setting seemingly antithetical forces against one another, one that will not be

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exhausted in a preliminary reading. It is indicative of the particularly radioactive cloud-chamber in which Kandinsky, as he set about composing a prospectus to his overarching aesthetic project, chose to situate himself. Two of Kandinsky’s understandings spelled out in it are particularly advanced for the moment: (1) painting as a field of flows and proportions, negotiated by the artist’s sensibility and choices (possibly: “selections”), making him or her a “flow-monitor” more than half a century before Deleuze and Guattari invent this function; (2) treating this scene of representation, at a moment just a few years after Ferdinand de Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics, as a domain, if not empire of signs, programmed, among other factors, by a grammar of colors, shapes, brush-stroke textures, and so on. The passage becomes one of those productive, if exasperating ciphers in an author’s writing when it factors in Kandinsky’s insistence on a decisive “spiritual” dimension to art and creativity. How can a painter and thinker so animated by what I have elsewhere described as modernism’s prophetic fascination for language as such and as the matrix out of which all possibility, knowledge, expression, and culture stems sink to vagaries and superstitions regarding the spiritual motivations of art? If we do not correct spirituality, as invoked by Kandinsky, to signal a distinctive immanence and exigency for its own sake to the artist’s “proportions” and “weights and scales” as activated by the passage, it will seem to be an oddball form of aesthetic arbitrariness thrown into a particularly haphazard Mulligan stew. Kandinsky’s insistence “On the Spritual in Art,” invoking such oddities as Mme Blavatsky’s appropriation of ayurvedic systems and principles for Western purposes, might seem an unnecessary but symptomatic indulgence on his part. (We remember, on the other hand, what a dispassionate observer and performer of radical modernist sensibility William Butler Yeats managed to be while also appealing to Mme Blavatsky and the thinking-systems that she purveyed.) Our passage on the “proportions and scales” of painterly creativity at Kandinsky’s moment of explicit engagement with and intervention in the art world activates, in a verbal and discursive medium, color-scales and color-grids that become vital elements in his visual iconography and its semantics. These figures determine one particularly indicative and resonant thread running through the different generations and series of his work, drawing his wildly divergent painterly experiments and styles into mutual communication and illumination. Internalized palettes of color are the more rounded, organic counterpart to graduated and rectangular color-grids. By mid-1913, in the hilltop architectural structures of “Small Pleasures” (“Kleine Freude”), we find a prototype to “Moscow I.” The latter is a canvas whose joyous energy is based on the same contrast between a variegated blue background and red highlights driving such a large proportion of, say, the action-comics literature. Above a modern building whose red fenestration establishes the structure of the color-scale or graduated

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grid, a rainbow delivers the spectrum of color. Both the realism-driven and “abstract” structures in the painting are made possible by a Dufy-like application of calligraphic outline. This painting, like its predecessor, “Small Pleasures,” is situated toward an extreme of Kandinsky’s painting-register at which an Impressionist analysis of light and a Fauvist application of paint combine. Colors tend to wash into one another in the absence of clear boundaries. Whatever articulation emerges is supplied by the above-mentioned calligraphic scoring. Another painting at the organic, Impressionism-inspired, blurry extreme of Kandinsky’s delivery nonetheless establishing both the color-spectrum as a method of analysis and the grid as an allegorical as well as substantive element is 1913’s “Painting with a White Border” (“Bild mit weißem Rand [Moskau],” Fig. 1.7). In the titling of this work, Kandinsky makes clear that what matters to him most are the formal and even technical painterly characteristics making the work possible as opposed to any composite theme or motif that can be applied to it. In this particular case, the convention of

FIGURE 1.7 Kandinsky, Wassily (1866–1944) © ARS, NY. “Painting with a White Border” (“Bild mit weißem Rand [Moskau]”), May 1913. Oil on canvas. 55¼ × 78 7/8 inches (140.3 × 200.3 cm). Solomon R. Guggenheim Founding Collection, by gift. The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY. Photo credit: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation / Art Resource, NY. © 2014 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

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titling a work allows Kandinsky to draw our attention to the seemingly nondescript flowing and rounded grayish border to the right-hand side of the painting, which, by contrast, renders the painting’s fetching work in blue-graybrown-yellow masses and red, brown, yellow and blue outlines and contours (some layered) all the more moving and effective. 1920’s “White Line” (“Bely Shtrikh,” Fig. 1.8) is another, but by no means solitary instance of Kandinsky’s naming a work after the telling anomalous detail (akin to the Lacanian “objet petit a”) making it possible rather than after some subject extrapolated from it by force and retrospectively appended to it.

FIGURE 1.8 Kandinsky, Wassily (1866–1944) © ARS, NY. “White Line” (“Bely Shtrikh”), 1920, Ludwig Museum, Cologne. Photo: © Rheinisches Bildarchiv Köln, rba_146138. © 2014 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

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“Painting with a White Border” is a prototype for an extensive sub-genre of Kandinsky’s work, in which there is a deliberate “mise en abyme” (or explicit internal framing) of the pivotal painterly improvisation. By having the painting’s absorptive and addictive “scene” of fanciful coloration and linear articulation not extend fully to the frame (being circumscribed at three corners and half its perimeter by the internalized “white border”), Kandinsky increases precisely by one full mathematical power the work’s theoretical capacity, its effectiveness in rendering critique, both to itself as a singular instance and to the field of visual representation that it joins and enlarges. Even with its theoretically astute manner of naming itself and its internalized scene of painting, “Painting with a White Border” remains recognizable within the first coherent stylistic constellation that Kandinsky configured for his abstract painting practice (as in “Picture with a Circle” and “Improvisation 26”): coloration is delicate and variegated; the grain of the brushwork is discernable to the eye; boundaries, though significant, are soft and often porous. Indeed, the entire field of the painting’s “active” painterly dance (as opposed to the more “passive” white border) assumes the shape (among other possibilities) of an oval palette. There are smaller oval “palettes” internal to this mass, whose focal point is nonetheless a pointed decidedly inorganic concentration of bounded primary colors to the left-center of the painting, three-quarters of the way to its left-hand margin. The odd confluence of sharp blotches in primary colors is this painting’s answer to a color-scale. A graduated grid of colors takes place against the oval roundness of a color-wheel. This painting renders homage to the palette of color as a cubist matrix of permutation and of multiple sliding scales of contrast and valuation. Major shifts in Kandinsky’s painterly practice have taken place by “Black Grid” (“Schwarzes Roster,” 1922), and by the time we encounter such works including “Composition 8” (“Komposition 8”, 1923, Fig. 1.9) and “One Center” (“Ein Centrum,” 1924), we are in a discernibly different universe. Yet the figure of the grid or Roster remains both a constant cipher of what is being negotiated here and a scale for registering advances in thinking and representation. Kandinsky literally composes “Black Grid” around precisely such a figure circumscribed in bold black outlines. Such weight does Kandinsky place on the allegorical power of the color-scale as an index to the multiple gradations of choice and resource allocation confronting painters and other visual programmers that he exercises the freedom to relieve the grid both of coloration (freeing it, in effect, from the economic and possibly debasing function of allocation) and of its geometrical regularity, proffering this figure as a source of exception as well as pattern. “Black Grid” thus raises this crucial switch or regulator of aesthetic improvisation and variation to the level of an icon. With the growing prominence of pure triangles and circular shapes approaching geometrical circles, this painting hints as well of a turn toward more rigorous mathematical exploration (although as a

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FIGURE 1.9 Kandinsky, Wassily (1866–1944) © ARS, NY. “Composition 8” (“Komposition 8”), July 1923. Oil on canvas. 55 1/8 × 79 1/8 inches (140 × 201 cm). Solomon R. Guggenheim Founding Collection, by gift. The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY. Photo credit: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation / Art Resource, NY. © 2014 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

counterweight, Kandinsky holds three distinctly non-geometrical staffs and crescents off to the left of the painting. These waves may in fact support two “ships” moving due “north” in the truncated blue triangle in the lower left-hand corner). With the exception of a curvilinear brown mass with parallel stripes in different shades in the upper-right corner (possibly a stage-curtain), the background to the play of geometrical and non-geometrical shapes around the grid takes the form of zones clearly demarcated from one another by sharply contrasting shades and by rigorously straight lines. In this sense, the painting marks a significant paradigm-shift in Kandinsky’s painting: away from the organic and toward the geometrical; away from Impressionist “softness” in the application and gradation of color and toward something harsher in delineation and contrast. Yet it is precisely within the compass of the color-scale that Kandinsky has raised to the level of an allegorical index or view-finder that these variations take place. These tendencies have only been entrenched and elaborated upon by the time of “Composition 8” (Fig. 1.9) and “One Center.” “Composition 8’s”

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answer to the discernible shapes that might afford it some representational subject is several color-grids (one in the left-center is more “architectural”; those on the right-hand border more geometrical). The primary tension lending the composition its coherence and “punch” is that between an “angry sun” in the upper left-hand corner and the dance of geometrical shapes over the predominance of the surface pinned, as it is, against a backdrop of cool bluegray atmosphere articulated only at one point by a more deeply blue triangle. This “sun” is in fact a perfectly geometrical purple core in the midst of an equally perfect black circle. This ensemble gains its astronomical quality from its surrounding transparent pink corona and from a more intense reddish round tangentially linked to it in its “southeastern” quadrant. The relation of this subsidiary shape to the “angry sun” is that of planet or satellite. Circles in different colors radiate throughout the blue-grayish field of sketching or composition, but they pale beside the intensity of this concentric composite shape. “Composition 8” dedicates its resources to the map of a universe that is both more rigorously geometrical and more astronomical than anything else that Kandinsky has done before. What holds this visual fabulation to the gravity-field familiar to Kandinsky and his audience is nothing other than the grids both anchoring the painting and establishing a trajectory (or comet’s trail) through Kandinsky’s oeuvre. A comet (or sperm) schematized in perfect trigonometric wave-gestalt is indeed the visual as well as focal center of “One Center.” Here, though, it is a literal color-scale into which this galactic figure collides, and which, conceptually as well as physically, contains it. Also in such contemporaneous pieces as “Yellow Accompaniment” (“Gelbe Begleitung,” 1924, Fig. 1.10), Kandinsky not only announces but performs a new geometrical precision within his work. He markedly shifts the field of his painterly practice in the direction of scientific calibration. Both “Yellow Accompaniment” and “One Center” are characterized by the concerted effort not only to make the telling masses and shapes perfectly geometrical, but also to subject them to gravity fields and waves moving in calculably astrophysical directions. We may or we may not ascribe this increasing dedication to geometry and the formal building-blocks from which it emerges to Kandinsky’s “Bauhaus period” or to the influence of Paul Klee, with whom he closely worked during his residence in Weimar. Yet the embedded figure of the multidimensional color-scale accompanies him even to his most Klee-like works, such as 1926’s “Three Sounds” (“Drei Klänge,” Fig. 1.11). It travels with him, a perfect accessory, on adventures far afield in his work and over its full trajectory, all the way to such pieces as “Yellow Painting” (“La Toile jaune,” 1938, Fig. 1.12), “Various Parts” (“Partis diverses,” 1940, Fig. 1.13), and “Around the Circle” (“Autour du circle,” 1940, Fig. 1.14).

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1.10 Kandinsky, Wassily (1866–1944) © ARS, NY. “Yellow Accompaniment” (“Gelbe Begleitung”), February–March 1924. Oil on canvas, 39 1/8 × 38 3/8 inches (99.2 × 97.4 cm). Solomon R. Guggenheim Founding Collection, by gift.

FIGURE

The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY. Photo credit: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation / Art Resource, NY. © 2014 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

“Yellow Painting” (Fig. 1.12) is both a rigorously abstract design and the anthropomorphic rendering of a dancer carrying flat rectangular objects. From its parabolic head to its splayed schematic legs at the bottom of the painting, this figure is identifiable as a Harlequin, in large measure owing to the colorscale serving as its upper torso. This dancer is emblematic of a highly distinctive and memorable Bauhaus project: the choreography in which the

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FIGURE 1.11 Kandinsky, Wassily (1866–1944) © ARS, NY. “Three Sounds” (“Drei Klänge”), August 1926. Oil on canvas, 23 5/8 × 23½ inches (59.9 × 59.6 cm). The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY. Photo credit: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation / Art Resource, NY. © 2014 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

dancers perform only as ciphers and composites of established geometrical forms. The anthropomorphic figure of “Yellow Painting” walks directly into the canvas from such theatrical productions as the “Triadic Ballet” (Metropol Theater, Berlin, 1926), for which Oskar Schlemmer designed the costumes (Fig. 1.15).25 Other possible inspirations culled from the photographic archive could well be from Bauhaus Dessau’s “Form Dance” and “Gesture Dance” of 1927.26 “Yellow Painting’s” relatively flat yellow-verging-on-chartreuse background gives the applied geometrical forms and segments a collage

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FIGURE 1.12 Kandinsky, Wassily (1866–1944) © ARS, NY. “Yellow Painting” (“La Toile jaune”), July 1938. Oil and enamel on canvas, 45 7/8 × 35 inches (116.4 × 88.8 cm). The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY. Photo credit: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation / Art Resource, NY. © 2014 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

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feeling, with the proviso that the intensity, outline, and balance of the squares and rectangles (with a few strategic shape-exceptions) is mathematically precise. As far a cry from Kandinsky’s Impressionist and Fauvist beginnings as this performance may be, its prevailing sensibility remains one of scale, balance, and variation. “Yellow Painting” bears witness to the rise of a decorative thrust in Kandinsky’s painting—dynamic shapes and calligraphic marks applied with maximum contrast to flat surfaces and panels—opening up, by the late 1930’s, a very different universe from work conducted under the Bauhaus aesthetic. There is a comic-grotesque feel to the busy, childlike shapes densely populating such works as “Various Parts” (Fig. 1.13) and “Around the Circle” (Fig. 1.14). Beginning with such a work from the mid-1930’s as “Relations,” Kandinsky increasingly fills his canvases with a filigree of whimsical shapes, sometimes forming wild anthropomorphic effigies. Annegret Hoberg, in the catalogue growing out of the retrospective exhibition of 2008–2009 at the Guggenheim, suggests possible sources for this

FIGURE 1.13 Kandinsky, Wassily (1866–1944) © ARS, NY. “Various Parts” (“Partis diverses”), 1940, Stätische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich, Gabriele Munter-Stiftung. © 2014 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

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FIGURE 1.14 Kandinsky, Wassily (1866–1944) © ARS, NY. “Around the Circle” (“Autour du circle”), May–August 1940. Oil and enamel on canvas, 38 1/8 × 57½ inches (96.8 × 146 cm). The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY. Photo credit: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation / Art Resource, NY. © 2014 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

increasingly pivotal style and climate within his work, ranging from the predictable to the most tenuous, from Juan Miro to Egyptian wall-painting beginning in the Middle Kingdom.27 As is typical of Kandinsky’s painterly practice, he displays this new figurative notation-script or in as many possible surrounds or graphic environments as possible. One of the most notable of these is indeed “Various Parts” (Fig. 1.13), in which the burlesque notation of shapes in whimsical curlicues, interspersed with playful pen-drawing and serious geometrical forms and figures, is applied to a background clearly divided into rectilinear, sharply contrasting (mostly) pastel compartments. There is indeed a formal vertical partition separating the left-hand wing of the painting, a deep tangerine whose inscription consists of proliferating doodles in black outline, from the remainder of the painting, divided as it is between pale green and pale gray rectangles (major) and purple, loud pink, and white ones (minor). We cannot but be party, on the one hand, to the open-ended play-space for wild graphic invention proliferating in different modes on all the pastel sectors save the smallest, in

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FIGURE 1.15 Oskar Schlemmer, “Triadic Ballet” Costumes, “Wieder Metropol” Review, Berlin, Metropol Theater, 1926. Credit line: Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin.

the lower right-hand corner. The “major” pale green domain (upper-center) is an environment allowing for the procreation of humorous anthropomorphic effigies interspersed with an upended Miro-like cow-creature plastered in fact against a green moon. The pink and purple zones on the right-hand and lower margins of the paintings, respectively, furnish space for a more fully “abstract” notation of playful “hieroglyphs.” A thin horizontal white band between the pale-green and purple zones promises a key to all this confusion, but in the end is no more tangibly translatable than the others. In a zone of artistic production far afield, the children’s book illustrator Jean de Brunoff derives considerable inspiration from these playful grotesque hieroglyphs emerging in the evolution from Miro to Kandinsky in the decorative moments of his “Babar” series (“Various Parts”). A small but perfectly discernible color-scale in the purple zone, in the exact center of the painting on its lower margin, reminds us that we have not left the sector of Kandinsky’s ongoing mathematical as well as aesthetic negotiations. And indeed, this entire painting comes down to mathematical reckoning. Much in the spirit of Klee’s “Equals Infinity,” there is an intense mathematical calculation at work here, lending, through the symbol of an “equals” sign, the

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two juxtaposed triangles of the smallest sector, in pale gray at the lower righthand corner, the same weight as the busy-work occupying the remaining approximately 85 percent of the painting. Mathematics speaks softly in this painting, through the agency of the ubiquitous color-scale and an “equals” sign, but powerfully as well, suggesting that in its aesthetic authenticity, even the most radical wing of modernist/postmodern improvisation must remain rooted in the formal proportions and features in effect since the inception of the visual arts. By appending such titles to his major works of this period as “Various Parts” and “Various Actions,” Kandinsky emphasizes the experiments and formal specifications making them possible rather than any identity or essence unique to their constitution. However “over the top” this increasingly “burlesque” style toward the end of Kandinsky’s inventive trajectory may be, an unflinchingly earnest undertone lends it its direction.

8. Even with all the considerations broached in the foregoing discussion, the sheer delight that Kandinsky’s artwork has given me over several decades has not been forgotten, obscured, elided, or exhausted; it has certainly not been fully dispatched. It is the arbitrary, irreducible, and unconditional precondition to this particular interlude in my own writing-practice. I could hardly claim that my own particular set of reactions and impulses in the face of Kandinsky’s invention is authoritative in any way. But I know that in turning toward Kandinsky, I have added the ecstatic pleasure of my writing, in a pitched effort to formulate, with enthusiasm and precision, what Kandinsky’s inventions have meant to my own evolving discernment, to the delight I have experienced in the encounter with the paintings themselves. My writing about Kandinsky at this point is, then, my absorption in the virtual scene of my “personal” cognitive processing prompted and programmed by having insinuated myself into certain, but not all, of the virtual scenes of Kandinsky’s artistic improvisation. It occurred to me only in the course of writing this current read-out that colorscales were a privileged figure and key, of allegorical status and import, to several distinctive stages in Kandinsky’s inventiveness. In spite of all my efforts to write vividly about Kandinsky’s artworks, certain tedium may creep into a critical accounting of the matrices of articulation, variation, and selection driving the artist onward. I can avoid this impediment no more than the bottleneck guitar player can avoid the occasional telltale squeaks of their fingers on the frets. Even with this limitation, writing precisely about complex visual artifacts, furnishing the most coherent and detail-specific account possible of their workings and cultural impact, is an entrancing, absorptive virtual pleasure driving me on in the vocation of rendering cultural critique.

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In this respect, paintings are no different from texts. Yes, the data and information gleaned from texts and paintings assume different forms. Yet the way in which one goes about accounting for paintings’ style, texture, composition, coloration, brushwork, etc., is no different from the way one processes the linguistic phrasings, stylistic specifications, and other nuances in literary artifacts. If there is anything different about the texts I have encountered as a literary critic and paintings, as I argued in The Task of the Critic, it is their constitution as displays. (Indeed, it is incumbent upon us to acknowledge the different genres of literature and discourse—poetry, drama, philosophical argumentation, and so forth—as different text-displays in themselves, each with crucial visual implications.28) In this sense, the dimension of Media Studies is unavoidably and quintessentially implicated in all cultural critique. Pursuing Kandinsky’s painterly trajectory is, then, in perfect consistency with having illuminated, to the best of one’s ability and with the fullest battery of resources in one’s grasp, a proliferating network of literary works. There are unavoidable liabilities incurred in the process of critical inscription. It so happens that getting something right in writing, in a wide range of formats and under a changing set of theoretical programs, to the best of my knowledge and sensibility (that is, approximately), always within the limitations of the optical illusion and even partial blindness that Kant, among others ascribed to speculative processes,29 is the preoccupation that has lent my own particular trajectory through this world whatever coherence it can claim. This, even when the inscriptive process has led me into the intransigencies or doldrums of writing. While the foregoing stops well shy of rationalizing or explaining my (or anybody’s) delight in Kandinsky, it does, hopefully, set some of the critical terms and considerations out onto the desktop. I have not even begun to account for the ways in which cultural encounters such as my own with Kandinsky’s artwork could be therapeutic or could initiate a healing process, particularly from the insults and damage inevitably incurred in the collisions and other transactions between people and systematic organizations. This investigation, inevitably provisional and incomplete as it must necessarily be, is the downbeat to whatever has thus far been initiated. I can approach the task only in a summation of what has been hopefully suggested thus far. As the medium of this particular writingproject is nothing other than critical elucidation, I can go on only by embroidering further artifacts. A shortlist of paintings culled from various stages and aesthetic subcontracts in Kandinsky’s career entrances, enmeshes, and uplifts me in different ways. I return to some of the compelling “scenes of crime” in the Kandinsky atlas as I invariably do to my favorite newfound “friends” at the end of a museum visit. Splotchy in their delivery as they to some degree are,

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“Picture with a Circle” (Fig. 1.1) and “Improvisation 26” (Fig. 1.3) still pull me toward their soft, welcoming surface of luscious if somewhat blurred colors. The articulation of zones and kinetic forces has sharpened up by “Painting with a White Border” (Fig. 1.7), but I can still lose myself, virtually, in the grand palette of color and intensity-negotiations set off against the border highlighted in the painting’s title. In the case of “Improvisation 28 (Second Version),” it is the stunning equilibrium that Kandinsky achieves between his color-field (in bold, mostly primary colors) and the black calligraphic overlay both highlighting and critically commenting upon the painting’s play of energic forces. Even within the oeuvre of a painter who offers his viewers astonishing visual cheer and encouragement during decades gathering toward totalitarian destruction on a unprecedented scale, “Moscow I,” swinging with particular vehemence between representation and non-representation, stands at a high-point in visual as well as temperamental exuberance. In very different ways, “Improvisation Gorge” (“Improvisation Klamm,” 1914), “Red Oval” (“Krasny Oval,” 1920, Fig. 1.6), “Yellow-Red-Blue” (“GelbRot-Blau,” 1925, Fig. 1.16), “Several Circles” (“Einige Kreise,” 1926), and “Dominant Curve” (“Courbe dominante,” 1936, Fig. 1.17) highlight the constellations and resources, conceptual as well as visual, that Kandinsky marshaled at the key, transitional moments of his long-term painterly intervention (one, by the way, indistinguishable from his critical and ethical interventions). What overwhelms us, as we enter the virtual painted landscape of “Improvisation Gorge,” a large canvas, is the utter thrownness (Geworfenheit)30 of our condition, the degree to which we are always already susceptible to its arbitrary and sudden shifts in climate, temperature, and intensity. At the same time that this is a large canvas, it is a highly detailed one. Although it errs on the side of the non-representational, it offers both inputs and outlets to its dynamic and variegated energy-field. It may be said of Kandinsky that he is already an ecological painter relatively early in his practice and well before his time. He is attuned to and guided as much by variations of intensity and transfers of power within and between energy-fields as he is by subject, theme, or even place. If the painting’s flow conducts largely downward, leading in from the ladder, top-center, and then exiting from three outputs on the bottom margin (waterfall to the right; gangplank or truncated roadway in the center; variegated light-beam toward the left), this energy runs a zig-zag gauntlet in the process, sifting diagonally in the painting’s vertical center. The painting orchestrates a counterpoint between circular eddies or concentrations of energy and movement (upper left, center, and center-right), and diagonal shifts, on the order of the chess-knight’s, sideways and ultimately downwards. In this painting, Kandinsky announces himself as a painter of climate and process.

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The painting’s division into diverse zones of intensity, color, and movement is redolent of Cubism’s analysis of the visual field and its contents into multiple and proliferating elements. But whereas there is something Cartesian in the uniformity of cubistic fragmentation, Kandinsky’s relentlessness in pursuing the full trajectory of energy-transfers and organic processes within a scene opens his canvases to a stunning variability in climate. Heeding Impressionism’s call, as articulated within the philosophical writings of Henri Bergson, to render homage to the moment at hand in all its registers and manifestations, Kandinsky opens his painting to the multiple processes and moments of an interrelated climatic zone. They are weather maps—but to processes and developments, historical and conceptual as well as aesthetic—projected onto a painterly screen. The ecology of a geophysical climate becomes indistinguishable from the energy and intensity-centers and force-transfers within a virtual painted domain. The same can be proffered in explanation of such contemporaneous and related works as “Little Painting with Yellow” (1914), “Painting with Red Spot” (“Bild mit rotem Fleck,”1914), “Improvisation 35” (1914), “Fugue” (1914), and the four panels he composed in the same year for Edwin. R. Campbell. These are all substantial canvases, bespeaking a feverish pace of creative energy and growth at this interval in Kandinsky’s life. Variegated as they are, both internally and in relation to one another, these works share one chief characteristic. On the map of Kandinsky’s creative process, they maximize an unfettered transfer and interplay between painted zones, their rhythms, moods, and intensities. These are free to radiate and interrelate relatively unencumbered by the calligraphic legend furnishing a tension and a side-commentary in several of Kandinsky’s other signature painterly ecologies and sub-contracts. In the particular series I am drawing attention to, the fundamentally ecological tracking of mood, intensity, and energy-transfer takes place within a painting style of relatively low-definition and only passing attention to formal geometry; the mandate to encompass and adumbrate zones of process, processing, and energy that Kandinsky assumes for painting here transfers beautifully, however, to stylistic environments and aesthetic projects far afield. Variegated as it is, the study in green comprising the background to the incorporated tablet, desktop, stage, or scene of painting and inscription in “Red Oval” (Fig. 1.6) is utterly entrancing. This green-belt or -zone, as it circulates around a scene of writing that it inspires and informs, becomes a temporary home, like the museum itself, from which it is palpably jarring to be dislodged. I simply want to dwell here. The green-zone plays Luhmannian environment to the faux-system comprised by the framed white tablet and its painterly fruits and products. Upon it is heaped, as in a still-life, painting’s familiar, everyday supplies, nutrients, and products: a psychedelic banana, a leaf, an unnaturally red egg (perhaps radioactive). The internalized zone of

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inscription (or production, or manufacture) may be systematic, but in no closed or restricted way. Fabric with multiple borders, a cubist instrument (maybe a flute), abstract lines hang over its side. The equally wild fabulation of one of “Red Oval’s” (Fig. 1.6) close companion-pieces also pivots around a minor (and exaggeratedly schematic) detail, its “White Line” (Fig. 1.8). This canvas may stage a far more somber system–environment interaction than its companion-piece, but this particular climate is offset, and a charming fluctuating equilibrium achieved through a strategic emergence of deep blue and through the magical punctuation of red hatches and spots. Even in stormy weather, Kandinsky outfits his telling scenes of painting so that they remain irresistible. The pronounced delight of virtual absorption in an ecological process both dynamic and open-ended continues even when Kandinsky demands much more definitive scoring from his lines and higher definition from the forms that he incorporates into the painted surface. The title of “Yellow-Red-Blue” (Fig. 1.16) emphasizes the dynamic (but by no means resolved) tension and reciprocal interplay between the canvas’s side-by-side yellow and blue zones.

FIGURE 1.16 Kandinsky, Wassily (1866–1944) © ARS, NY. “Yellow-Red-Blue” (“Gelb-Rot-Blau”), 1925. Oil on canvas, 128 × 201.5 cm. Inv. AM1976–856. Photo: Adam Rzepka. Musee National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France. © CNAC/MNAM/Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY. © 2014 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

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The fact that the geometry of circles, arcs, rectangles, and perfect triangles prominently enters the fray makes the composition no less ecological in its thrust and no more systematic and rigid than, say, “Improvisation Gorge.” The “yellow zone” on the left is anchored by a phosphorescent yellow partial rectangle allowed to radiate in its full luminescence; the complementary righthand “blue zone” is anchored by a deep-blue circle onto which other geometrical shapes and part of a prominent black squiggle have been superimposed. The light issuing from the left side of the painting shines in our faces, only to circle backwards and disappear into the depths of the painting’s right side. This multidimensional give-and-take is spared any stasis accruing from binary logic or bipolar mood by a playful overlay of geometrical ornaments (circles with coronas, a red oblique triangle, an equilateral blue one); also by black line-work in different gauges, all either straight or perfectly geometrical save the prominent meandering black squiggle mentioned above. In no less than three instances, and at different “depths” in the perspective projected by the composition, appear the color-scales whose appearance is, if I do not deceive myself, invariably emblematic and performative. The reading approach that I am taking to “Yellow-Red-Blue” would be of likely assistance to me in deciphering such companion-pieces as “Composition 8” (1923, Fig. 1.9) and “Yellow Accompaniment” (1924, Fig. 1.10). Kandinsky’s ability to absorb and fascinate us doesn’t diminish even when he dramatically increases the geometrical constraints on his compositions and turns his view-finder (now a telescope) on the non-populated zone of the nocturnal sky. It is above all color and the compositional equilibrium/motion prevailing between circles appearing to float in a surprisingly varied dark gray and black background that invites viewers to spend time in this distinctly outer-space of “Several Circles” (1926). The geometry of this painting is rigidly held to circles. This is not a painting that radiates warm and fuzzy affect, yet its central blue circle, partially eclipsed by a large black one and several translucent ones in different colors, was selected by the curators of the 2008– 2009 retrospective as the cover art for the catalogue and as an icon in the exhibition-signage. The Kandinsky imprimatur with which they hoped, by this selection, to leave viewers, was one of color-fascination combined with strict geometrical rigor and equilibrium. At least to the present critic, the decorative tone and delivery with which Kandinsky imbued his paintings toward the end of his production, whether this is characterized as “playful,” “burlesque,” or “grotesque,” marks a significant departure. While the avoidance of reducing aesthetic choices and turns to biographical happenstance has become, in theoretical circles, almost a reflex reaction, we cannot discount, in this case, that such a resolute playfulness on Kandinsky’s part is a response to the grim theaters of political and military violence unfolding at the time all over Europe and

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FIGURE 1.17 Kandinsky, Wassily (1866–1944) © ARS, NY. “Dominant Curve” (“Courbe dominante”), April 1936. Oil on canvas. 50 7/8 × 76½ inches (129.2 × 194.3 cm). Solomon R. Guggenheim Founding Collection, by gift. The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY. Photo credit: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation / Art Resource, NY. © 2014 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

beyond. Yet even such a splendid example of this move in Kandinsky’s oeuvre, “Dominant Curve” (Fig. 1.17), orchestrates process and ecology and highlights the generous proliferation of shapes, tones, and other inventions responding to the challenges posed by the composition’s premises. The painting indeed does draw us from a literal “sunrise” in the upper left-hand corner along the insinuations of its abstractly layered curve to two complementary “outlets” (sweeps toward the lower two corners). We have encountered this particular curve, possibly a question mark, possibly a sickle, elsewhere in Kandinsky’s work, for example in “Yellow-Red-Blue” (Fig. 1.16). In style and accoutrements, this painting may mimic the move toward “neo-classicism” in Igor Stravinsky’s musical compositions. As radical as its departures from other of Kandinsky’s projects may be, it is of a piece with his ongoing orchestration of magnetic virtual environments maintained in their delicate balances and thrusts, over the full course of their process and painterly outcome.

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*

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Even a preliminary account of Kandinsky’s ability to distract and fully absorb his viewers is implicated, then, by everything in our lives and various trainings, everything that has been learned in a wide range of disciplines ever since he added them to the docket of public deliberation. Evoke strong and direct emotional responses as his paintings may, there is no unfettered or naïve way of appreciating his work or of accounting for it. Kandinsky enchants as much by what he excludes: in representation, explicit information and detail, fully configured perspective—as by what he spells out. His paintings’ hovering at a minimal threshold or vanishing point of upper-level processing enables his colors to be all the more delicious and addictive; the ecological process followed through on canvas all the more edifying, the at most provisional equilibriums in geometry, mood, and color-intensity all the more striking. So alluring are the selections that Kandinsky consistently manages to make on multiple but intertwined continuums of articulation that his paintings lay claim—above all in their absorptiveness—to virtual simulation. This means that they are successful in their invitation for us, in our endemic cultural homelessness, to dwell in them a while. Also that we are only too willing, under their unique gravitational field—acted out in such a work as “Several Circles”—to throw over and leave behind, at least for a while, our conventional scales and perspectives of reference, meaning, sense, and signification. We are, while under their thrall, in an alternative domain of simulation. The attenuated relation to representation that Kandinsky sustains through all but his initial paintings is indicative of a strong turn toward the digital at the expense of the analog. The “information” that we pull out of a Kandinsky painting has far more often to do with the respective weightings and energies of different colors and the relations between them, the foundational role of different geometrical shapes in making painted simulation possible, than it does with a particular location or “subject.” What Kandinsky’s works offer us in their “read-out” is therefore much in accord with which such systemsthinkers as Gregory Bateson and Anthony Wilden have attributed to digital organization. Surely no dynamic has been more pivotal to the contemporary habits of and prospects for cognition, communications, education, and culture than the epoch-defining play between analog and digital configurations.

2 From The Brothers K. to Joseph K.: The Digitization of Literature

Over the many years, the man observes the doorkeeper almost incessantly. He forgets the other doorkeepers and this first one seems to him the only obstacle to his admittance to the Law. He curses his unhappy fate, loudly during the first years, later, as he grows older, only grumbling to himself. He turns childish, and since he has come to know even the fleas in the doorkeeper’s collar during his years of study (Studium des Türhüters), he asks the fleas too to help him change the doorkeeper’s mind. Finally his eyes grow dim and he no longer knows whether it’s really getting dark around him or if his eyes are merely deceiving (taüschen) him. And yet in the darkness he now sees a radiance (Glanz) that streams forth inextinguishably (unverlöschlich) from the Law. (THE TRIAL, 216)1

1. his chapter aims to situate, in Franz Kafka’s reading of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, particularly of the latter’s final novel, The Brothers Karamazov, a momentous sea-change—not only as European public administration adapted itself to modern mechanisms of jurisprudence and statistical analysis, but in the configuration of literature itself. Hoping to access in Kafka’s fiction a fissure at which the pronounced analogy undergirding all realistic narrative goes virally

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digital, I am relying on some of literary scholarship’s “tried and truest” formats: historical criticism and comparative trans-cultural literary reception. On other wavelengths, particularly when we question, meta-critically, how it is that we know what we know, our healthy skepticism toward these “ways of knowledge” needs to be unrelenting. The appreciation of Kafka’s uncanny premonition of the age of computers and statistics-based administration and public policy, and of the virtual worlds configured by digital thought-processes, nonetheless refers back, in recursive fashion, to his intensity as a reader of Dostoyevsky. A resonant irony that we cherish and wish not to dismiss under any circumstance is as follows: the most intuitive and conventional formats for thinking and research—otherwise put, the most time-honored means of storage and retrieval such as inter-cultural literary relations—could lead us back to the stress-factors and points of departure in narrative representation precisely of the most radical impact and consequence. Kafka indeed made no bones about his practice of making literature out of literature. From the recycling of mythological materials that is already a prominent feature of his earliest short-prose experiments to the virtual picaresque space of Amerika (Der Verschollene)—whose evocations of Exodus, “Cinderella,” Robinson Crusoe, Oliver Twist, and Das Kapital inscribe it in what may well be called a World Literature system.2 From the outset of his literary improvisation, Kafka operated out of an encompassing literary space in which the most memorable inventions deriving from distinct times, scenes of inscription, and discrete works interfaced and communicated with one another. Not only literature but sacred and philosophical texts comprised for Kafka a virtual domain that he, like any other reader, was free to trespass, exploit, retrofit, and reconfigure. But Kafka, intuiting the drift toward the digital reorganization of social and communications systems underlying the transformations in law, public administration, industry, and commerce to which he was party, can hardly be dismissed as “any other reader.” Kafka’s persistent retrofitting of memorable prior discursive as literary crystallizations, figures, and characters demonstrates several characteristic postures and attitudes. Among these: (a) a downplaying of realistic depiction and a corresponding highlighting of structural and metaliterary (or “allegorical”) features; (b) the miniaturization of what in their “native” literary contexts were extended and explicit elaborations; (c) the tendering of ominous ambiguity within memorable scenes solidly placed and “accounted for” within their literary “home environments,” whether the Bible, the Confucian Analects, fairy-tales, Defoe, Dickens, Flaubert, or in our own instance in the present chapter, Dostoyevsky. The decisive common element to Kafka’s varied strategies of retrofitting prior discourse and literature may well consist in stripping bare its substratum of analog functions in the effort of foregrounding the recursive, isomorphic, self-referential, autopoietic, and

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allegorical processes of signification entering the fray with the proliferation of digital organization and thinking. We set off on this brief historico-technological excursion in bemused incredulity at the Doorkeeper’s fur coat and the fleas animating it with subterranean life, at his “large, sharply pointed nose, his long, thin, black tartar’s beard” (Trial, 218).3 It is not merely that these details are vivid and precise. The narrative interjected them precisely in the pivotal “Parable of the Doorkeeper.” Like other notable parabolic constructions in the history of philosophy and literature, from Plato and Hegel to Cervantes, Sterne, and Dostoyevsky, this “second-order” or “meta-text” moves the novel away from depiction and drama and toward theoretical commentary on its own status and capabilities—within an expanding universe of linguistic rephrasing and reconfiguration (or in Thomas Bernhard’s term, “correction”). For many years I have been attentive to what might be characterized, precisely on the verge of Joseph K.’s sentencing and execution by a Court as effective as it may be amorphous and elusive, to the justly earmarked Parable’s allegorical thrust and function. In the extract at the head of this section, a quintessential Western tale of the quest for inclusion, coded as we shall see by a distinctly Judaic aesthetics, reaches a point at which it bifurcates and twists on itself, illustrating several characteristics of a fictive “strange loop.” Joseph K.’s “experience” in the novel has been anything but inclusive. He has wandered from one surreal outpost of the Court to another, from one eccentric explicator of the Law to the next (advocate Huld, the latter’s nurse, Leni, artist Titorelli, in the case of the Parable’s narration and analysis, a church priest) only to find himself mired deeper and deeper in a proceedings resulting from no discernible trespass or motive and with fewer and fewer points of egress or possibilities of escape. This inexplicable enclosure in a network if not system of interrelated dead ends would be enough, in the language of Gregory Bateson, to turn someone mad. This is precisely the direction that Bateson’s investigations take. Having inaugurated his work in an anthropologically grounded analysis of what makes societies either competitive and regimented (“symmetrical,” in his parlance) or more “open-ended” in its participants’ ability to switch off on roles and aspirations, he turns his attention, in the 1950’s and 1960’s, to the categories and protocols of Anglo-American psychiatry. His extrapolation both of schizophrenics’ experience and of the condition’s diagnosis and treatment as of this moment is nothing less than “radiant:” Bateson’s schizophrenic is the product of recurrent doublebind situations, ones by the way digitally structured (“damned if you do; damned if you don’t!”), from which the third avenue, the evasive possibility, has been extruded with particularly heartless systematic method. It is important to hear how Bateson articulates such impasses for one, because his formulations comprise a splendid social scientific “counter-display” to the

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underlying literary conditions prompting epiphenomena as diverse as Gregor’s metamorphosing himself into a gigantic dung-beetle or the Kantian antinomies underlying advocate Huld’s admonitions regarding the Law: The need of the [schizophrenogenic] mother to be wanted and loved also prevents the child from gaining support from some other person in the environment, a teacher, for example. A mother with these characteristics would feel threatened by any other attachment of the child and would break it up and bring the child back closer to her with consequent anxiety . . . By preventing the child from talking about the situation, the mother forbids him from using the metacommunicative level—the level we use to correct our perception of communicative behavior. ( Steps, 215)4 The double bind nature of the family situation of a schizophrenic results in placing the child in a position where, if he responds to his mother’s simulated affection, her anxiety will be aroused and she will punish him . . . Thus the child is blocked off from intimate and secure associations with his mother . . . In either case in a relationship, the most important in his life and the model for all others, he is punished if he indicates love and affection and punished if he does not; and his escape routes from the situation, such as gaining support from others, are cut off. This is the basic nature of the double bind relationship between mother and child. ( Steps, 216) With acuity and great empathy, Bateson chronicles the impact of the withdrawal of an individual’s escape routes, what Deleuze and Guattari characterize as her “lines of flight.” While for more than a generation, this phenomenological, if you will, approach to schizophrenia has been held in contempt by genetic approaches and under the administration of psychopharmacological treatment, a spate of recent work suggests that Bateson was not so far off the mark as he was taken to be. And even if we cede schizophrenia to a “diathesis-stress” model that can be grounded in certain of the pioneering twin-studies, notably those conducted in Denmark, the madness that Bateson so acutely discerns between the lines of recurrent double-bind situations (or in deconstruction-talk, aporias), is all the more relevant to depression’s ongoing abjection and to the current spike in bipolar diagnoses, particularly among children, the condition that used to be called manic-depression. Joseph K.’s experience in Der Process is both a model-case of the genesis of Batesonian madness and a showcase for the only liberation conceded by this particular novelistic system: the enhanced sensibility as an exegete that

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Joseph K. gains from his head on encounters with the Law, its anomalies and paradoxes, its stifling, anaerobic milieu, and its mad-hatter representatives, henchmen, and interpreters. By the time that Joseph K. hears the Parable of the Doorkeeper, whose central placement by commentators of all stripes can only be said to be just, he is already an accomplished reader. He has already put to good use the single supplement or X-factor that the schizophrenic surround of the Court has placed at his disposal: a vibrant sense of textual proliferation and permutation in keeping with emergent modernist aesthetics. As a coda or afterthought to Der Process, the Parable seems to render explicit an underlying wish-fantasy of Joseph K.’s, to be admitted into the splendor of the Law. This is indeed what will happen if we splice Joseph K., as a kind of legislative “rider,” onto the drama of the “Mann vom Lande.” But this is not the drift of Joseph K.’s encounters at all. He has been pursued and persecuted by the Law. He would like as little to do with the Law as possible. Anticipating Barnabas’s father’s endless wait by the gate in Das Schloß, in hope of being accorded familial recognition in the wake of Amalia’s feminist resistance, the Mann vom Lande’s vigil in the Parable evokes pathos, but this is not at all the intellectual or emotional tenor of what Joseph K. has already been through, which is far more a matter of persecution-anxiety, a heightened sense of the absurd, and in the perverse fashion that is sexuality, an odd sexual arousal. We can at best venture that the Parable of the Doorkeeper is a very distinct counter-narrative to the transcript of Joseph K.’s legal transactions, but one, like everything else in this meticulously crafted novel, serving a particular design. The collateral gain that we reap from suffering the Mann vom Lande’s pathos is precisely the expansive and proto-deconstructive panorama of exegesis—an authentic “scene of reading” if ever there was one—interacted by the Mann and the Priest in their theoretically prescient post-mortem to the Parable. The Parable, as allegory in the theoretically astute sense of this term, as Benjamin and de Man invoked it, is a theoretically charged performance of linguistic features and literary traits that we encounter in the “story proper” in the substantive trappings in its details. The exegetical review of the Parable conducted by the Mann and the Priest redirects such details of Joseph K.’s experience as his fainting-fit amid the closed and involuted architecture of the Court offices, or his discovery of a massive mound of discarded books in Advocate Huld’s apartment (on which Joseph K. and Leni toy with one another sexually) into precise and theoretical observations about how narratives and texts in general are organized and function. Kafka affords us a rare moment of readerly pleasure and revelation when we understand that not only do such phrases as “Those girls belong to the court as well . . . Everything belongs to the court” (Trial, 150) and “The commentators tell us: the correct understanding of a matter and misunderstanding the matter are not mutually exclusive” (Trial,

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219), pertain in a specific way to episodic moments we have encountered in the “body” of Der Process. The entire trappings of the Parable, its sublime backdrop of escalating gates, the equally uncanny “radiance” at once menacing and alluring in its lucidity, perform the theoretically resonant conditions encountered earlier at the level of circumstance or happenstance. Through this performance, the substance of the Court, its spatial layout, its procedures, its cast of characters, “loops over” into a higher level of processing power and meta-critical oversight, what current systems theorists dub “second-order processing.” For Wilden, this move is one away from analog “meaning” toward digital “signification.” Wilden’s knowing and multi-lateral dance and division of labor between analog and digital orders on the cusp of the cybernetic revolution is of telling consequence not merely to the Kafka segment of the current study but play in the background of its diverse “scenes of reading.” Such key formulations by Wilden as the following are decisive to any outreach on the part of contemporary critique to self-referential, selfcorrecting and programming, and “smart” systems, whether situated in technology, theoretical models, therapeutic intervention, or literary invention (as such they may appear more than once in this study): The analog computer maps continuums precisely whereas the digital computer can only be precise about boundaries. The units of communication or computation in the analog machine may in principle be repeatedly divided without necessarily losing their signification or use, whereas those in the digital computer cannot be divided below the level of the discrete unit on which it depends. ( System and Structure, 162)5 The analog computer is an icon or an image of something “real,” whereas the digital computer’s relation to “reality” is rudimentarily similar to language itself. ( System and Structure, 163) The analog is pregnant with MEANING whereas the digital domain of SIGNIFICATION is, relatively speaking, somewhat barren. It is almost impossible to translate the rich semantics of the analog into any digital form for communication to another organism . . . The digital . . . because it is concerned with boundaries and because it depends on arbitrary combination, has all the syntax to be precise and may be entirely unambiguous. Thus what the analog gains in semantics it loses in syntactics, and what the digital gains in syntactics it loses in semantics. ( System and Structure, 163)

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The digital mode of language is denotative; it may talk about anything and does so in the language of objects, facts, events, and the like . . . Its overall function is the transmission or sharing or reproduction of pattern and structures (information in the technical sense). The analog on the other hand talks only about relationships. In human communication there are often serious problems of translation between the two. ( System and Structure, 164) Some of the most horrific impressions to which The Trial, The Castle, and such grim parables as “The Knock at the Manor Gate” and “In the Penal Colony” give rise are more denotative—concerning details at which the narrative only obliquely hints—than anything else. The thrust of the current chapter is indeed to demonstrate that the shifting and always interactive border between analog and digital thinking is already inscribed throughout Kafka’s fiction as a decisive constitutive trait. The infrastructure of “strange loops” that Hofstadter elaborates with insistence and multidimensional richness also pertains to Kafka’s fictive invention: “not a physical circuit but an abstract loop in which, in the series of stages that constitute the cycling-around, there is a shift from one level of abstraction (or structure) to another, which feels like an upward movement in a hierarchy, and yet somehow the successive ’upward’ shifts turn out to give rise to a closed cycle” (I Am a Strange Loop, 101–2). Indeed, for all of its allegorical allure and performative power, the Parable of the Doorkeeper deposits us back in the very novel that gave rise to it; in this sense it closes a circle or completes its loop. But the rise in power implemented by the Parable, above all in theory-power, in a theory powered by the most intimate familiarities and engagements with words, with keywords in the lexicon of philosophy as well as of literature, is itself prodigious and uncanny. This is, for Kafka, what literary invention is all about. So the pivotal Parable of the Doorkeeper is of Der Process and about it. It is a miniaturization of the novel as a whole that highlights its working principles, in cyber-language, its operating system. Key elements in this operating system include: generating doublebinds, at the semantic level, out of doubleentendres, say between tauschen and täuschen; turning architectural scenery and internalized disputation into generators in a permutational aesthetics; heightening legal persecution and incarceration by means of closed architecture and spurious argumentation. In this respect, the Parable can be described as the most thoroughgoing instance of a digital organization within what also works vividly as an analog representational medium. The Parable, though, like the rest of the novel devised in the mid-teens of the twentieth century, is far from the initial instance of such a digital shift or swing in Kafka’s

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work. And, I would argue, it is precisely by means of this posture that Kafka defines a significant share of his relationship to the literature that most inspired and influenced him. In relation to the sordid details of metabolic “joining in the conversation” that are a just trademark of Flaubertian narrative technique, to the prodigious masses of precise detailing that to Dostoyevsky not only underwrite verisimilitude but also define his rapport to a quite specifically Russian readership, entire novels, and I think here more of Der Process and Das Schloß than of Amerika, entire novels relate to Kafkan World Literature much in the same way that the Parable both concretizes and ups the ante for Der Process. (I realize here that the form of this statement is a vast analogon. The smart money in cybernetics and systems theory realizes full well that the movement from analog to digital organizations is not linear or progressive. It is, rather, rather systole/diastole, rhythm/syncopation, the duplicity of the Derridean hinge, that may momentarily swing toward an “outside,” but that never closes.) At this point, I will do far better for my case by demonstrating than by continuing to argue. Though we think of The Brothers Karamazov as a great novel of familial love, discord, rage, and dissolution, as one of those uniquely Russian amalgams between story-telling and philosophizing, it, like Der Process, very much hinges on a trial, specifically the trial of Dmitri Karamazov, who, more by dint of a grandiose and belligerent social profile and bearing than by any hard evidence, emerges as the strongest suspect to have murdered his own rather intractable father. It is by no means excessive to argue that Der Process is the spontaneous digital afterimage of a vast Russian soap-opera pushing the very dimensions and possibilities of realistic detail in the novel to an extreme limit, one at which, by dint of the laws of entropy, it implodes. The fleas in the Doorkeeper’s coat and the individual hairs in his tartar’s beard (in the wake of a small digression, I rejoin if not close the “strange loop” animating this essay) are indeed ironic analog throwbacks within a novel that has seriously discredited the reliability of analog verisimilitude in story-telling. The telltale fleas, pointy nose, and facial hairs comprise the smallest instance of the detail that for Dostoyevsky makes novels welcoming and reliable virtual homes, Winnicottian holding environments (or “potential spaces”).6 It is only within such an open foyer that Dostoyevsky can assume the task of feeding Russian wisdom and humanism back to the Russian people. The extended, if not interminable trial scene in The Brothers Karamazov is not about the way the Law is constituted, or the manner in which narrative media are configured. It is a snapshot of Russian society and its institutional, particularly its legal and educational infrastructure, in the aftermath of (1) Romantic liberation movements; and (2) the dissemination of somewhat more modern techniques of social administration in provincial as well as urban Russia. This will hopefully

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serve as an apt build-up to a key early moment in the narration of the Dmitri Karamazov trial: And, first of all, before we enter the courtroom, I will mention something that surprised me that day. By the way, as it turned out later, it surprised not only me but everyone else as well. That is: everyone knew that this case interested a great many people, that everyone was burning with impatience for the trial to begin, that for the whole two months past there had been a great deal of discussion, supposition, exclamation, anticipation among our local society. Everyone also knew that the case had been publicized all over Russia, but even so they had never imagined that it had shaken all and sundry to such a burning, such an intense degree, not only among us but everywhere, as became clear at the trial that day. By that day visitors had come to us not only from the provincial capital but from several other Russian cities, and lastly from Moscow and Petersburg. Lawyers came. Several noble persons even came, and ladies as well. All the tickets were snapped up . . . There turned out to be an especially large number of ladies—our own and visitors—I would say even not less than half the entire public. The lawyers alone, who arrived from all over, turned out so numerous that no one knew where to put them, since the tickets had all been given out, begged, besought long ago. I myself saw a partition being temporarily and hastily set up at the end of the courtroom, behind the podium, where all these arriving lawyers were admitted, and they even considered themselves lucky to be able at least to stand there, because in order to make room, the chairs were removed from behind this partition, and the whole accumulated crowd stood through the whole “case” in a closely packed lump, shoulder to shoulder. Some of the ladies, especially among the visitors, appeared in the gallery of the courtroom extremely dressed up, but the majority of the ladies were not even thinking about dresses. Hysterical, greedy, almost morbid curiosity could be read on their faces. One of the most characteristic peculiarities of this whole society gathered in the courtroom, which must be pointed out, was that, as was later established by many observations, almost all the ladies, at least the great majority of them, favored Mitya and his acquittal. Mainly perhaps, because the idea had formed of him as a conqueror of women’s hearts. ( The Brothers Karamazov, 656–7)7 This passage exists at an extreme of narrative direct address to the readership in the novel. By rendering explicit what is on the narrator’s mind even before the courtroom comes into view—it is the epicenter for some time

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to come of the charged familial melodrama—the narrative goes to near-absurd lengths to ingratiate the readership, to establish, as might a courtroom attorney, its good faith, its unremitting commitment to tell the truth. And which truth is it that the Dostoyevskian voice is so keen to relate, refining and upgrading it to the last second? The only truth crucial to the narrator’s account is the status of the trial and the facts that it may well go on to establish as a social event, indeed as an incitement rendering an account of the current features of the Russian community. (Dostoyevsky takes pains to establish Dmitri’s trial as a happening whose repercussions reverberate back and forth between the local Skotoprigyonevsk district and the national scene.) Among the specifically and, I would argue, exclusively social facts regarding the trial that the narrative takes pains to establish are: the surprise on the part of its participants at its supercharged atmosphere; the composition of the audience (unusually heavy on out-of-town observers and “ladies”; unusually stacked in favor of legal professionals at the expense of local civilians); the seating arrangements for guests and professionals alike; the degree to which respective segments of the audience dress up or dress down; the emotional tenor of the scene, as inferred by the spectators’ facial expressions; and even the ticketing system that allowed visitors in the courtroom. The facts of the trial are only the social facts. The truth that the attenuated trial-narrative will establish is—exclusively—the social truth of the microcosm of Russian society activated by the trial. The narrative is explicit that “the peculiar characteristics of this whole society” coalesce in the courtroom. The trial is the synecdochical miniature of this entire community, above all its social truth. In a gesture to which Kafka, in such works as “A Hunger Artist” and “In the Penal Colony”, will explicitly react, the narrative camera in this scene dwells on the female spectators as the audiencecomponent, I would argue, that within the framework of nineteenth-century social clichés concentrates sociability, its values, and its conventions. The narrative camera zooms in on their costumes, on the by nature supercharged extremity of their facial grimaces. The moral imperative that impels the narrator to relate the significance of the trial even before the courtroom has come into view is “telling the whole truth” and not an iota less. This aesthetic of full disclosure seizes control of every new tangent the novel pursues on the way to the inevitable failure of this ethos: not even the most tangential narrative twist can be enunciated fully. Even as the narrative film twists from one discursive genre to another— homily in the case of Father Zosima’s written remains; prophetic allegory in “The Grand Inquisitor,” Ivan’s striving on the field of literary glory on behalf of the hapless Karamazov clan; melodrama in the tale of Ilyushechka’s vastly premature demise, itself proof of the fatality of severe social wounds—even as the novel expands toward multifaceted Menippean satire, the flood of

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detail inundates every plot-twist and scene. And Kafka, displaying the deepest attachment to the virtual Dostoyevskian domains as to the revelations of story-telling and insight housed there, achieves nothing less than a paradigmshift whose repercussions are as epistemological as they are literary as he strips these trappings bare, as he zig-zags from the hyperbole of analog plenitude to the understatement of digital miniaturization. Indeed, the innumerable trial scenes in literature may be regarded as interfaces at which the perspectives of the moral imperative and the transcendental oversight making the scene plausible enter the manifold of social relations as orchestrated by narrative, redefining and transforming them. Dmitri’s trial in The Brothers Karamazov is a social spectacle. By the narrative’s own account, it is a tickets-only affair, and it has lavished a field-day on the ticket scalpers. Within the overarching development of The Brothers Karamazov, the trial may be a crystallizing event, tying together the various strands of family strife, sexual competition, and the fluctuation between saintly devotion and moral depravity. Yet the excesses afforded by provincial Russian life as of the moment in question rebound over it. The extended trial is as much intensification of the anomic hodgepodge of values and transgressions giving rise to it, as it is a schematization. This is why the procedure’s highly questionable methods of testimony, legal representation, and judicial intervention are punctuated by such sordid episodes as Ivan Fyodorovich’s hapless effort to establish Smerdyakov’s guilt in the patriarch’s murder. This last-ditch effort ends in futility with Smerdyakov’s suicide. This rather telling event is never fully “processed” by Dmitri’s trial. And indeed, the narrative has taken pains to establish what might be called Dmitri’s social guilt (his gallivanting about, his sexual infidelity, his financial incontinence) irrespective of any judicial guilt that might be established by the legal proceedings. In a novel first and foremost of social relations and representation this would be, precisely, the point: a character’s guilt/innocence, their viability, is tantamount to their social value. Early on in the novel, Father Zossima, in a stirring speech concerning the disaster of self-deceit in moral and social affairs, establishes a high benchmark for an inimitably Russian, folk-articulation of the Kantian moral imperative (Brothers Karamazov, 44). Yet it is the central issue of the novel to wander farther and farther away from this founding flash of lucidity, into increasingly byzantine recursions of human perversity and intemperance, held in check only, and barely at that, by Alyosha’s spirituality. The passage from the novel I have extracted and highlighted is merely one of countless textual swatches with high literary interest and cultural resonance, yet it traces a long and varied swathe throughout Kafka’s literary Imaginary. And it may be taken as a central node in the critical narrative of Kafka’s digitization of literature.

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2. Kafka takes Kant at his word. It is to be borne in mind, first and foremost, that Kant designs the deliberations of The Critique of Pure Reason as a selfcorrecting tribunal of cognitive faculties themselves tantamount to human capability and potential. In many respects, this Critique is a stable prosemedium master-plan or schema of all the faculties involved in human achievement and their interconnectedness, or their interfaces. (Language and logic figure prominently among these connectors, which include, among others, representations, concepts, categories, and schemas.) Within this global picture of interactive faculties, some absorbed in the workings of the empirical world (perception, understanding), and limited conceptually by this situation, and others, like reason itself, negotiating the interplay between empirical data and “purely” intellectual processing, powered by transcendental apprehension, it falls to “pure reason” to furnish the adjustments by which a homeostatic system of intellectual oversight regularly updates itself. Now reason is the faculty that provides the principles of cognition a priori. Hence pure reason is that which contains the principles for cognizing something absolutely a priori. An organon of pure reason would be a sum total of those principles in accordance with which all pure a priori cognitions can be acquired and actually brought about. The exhaustive application of such an organon would create a system of pure reason . . . I call all cognition transcendental that is occupied not so much with objects but with our a priori concepts of objects in general. A system of such concepts would be called transcendental philosophy . . . This investigation, which we can properly call not doctrine but only transcendental critique, since it does not aim at the amplification of the concepts themselves but only at their correction, and is to supply the touchstone of the worth or worthlessness of all cognitions a priori, is that with which we are now concerned. Such a critique is accordingly a preparation, if possible, for an organon, and, if this cannot be accomplished, at least for a canon, in accordance with which the complete system of the philosophy of pure reason . . . can in any case at least some day be exhibited both analytically and synthetically. ( CPR , 133)8 Pure reason, in its intercalation of synthetic a priori knowledge with the results of lived experience, investigations of the empirical world, is alone in its capacity to evolve a “transcendental critique,” the “correction” that will keep the system of metaphysics philosophically solvent. The system of philosophy sustains its validity and renews its epistemological as well as metaphysical

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authority only by dint of this ongoing process of correction or self-critique. Only a few pages before the above passage, Kant has characterized the interactivity of this system. It “contains a truly articulated structure of members in which each thing is an organ, that is, in which everything is for the sake of each member, and each individual member is for the sake of all” (CPR, 120). Not only does this picture allow Kant to introduce the aesthetics as well as the ethos of organicism into speculative philosophy; it is the basis for his assertion of his self-critical system’s “unalterability” (CPR, 120). Kant has unknowingly invested his aspiration for a definitive, self-correcting system of deliberation in matters human powered by the operating system of disinterested and undistorted reason with the very homeostatic self-correction that Norbert Wiener had in mind when he assigned the name “cybernetics” (based on the Greek, kybern e¯ t¯es, pilot or governor)9 to the new, nested panorama of multi-level processing made possible both by twentieth-century electronics and by programs at least partially grounded on what Hofstadter called “typographical number theory.” Kafka may well, in the fantasmatic picture of a working Austro-Hungarian court taking up major sections of Der Process, do everything possible to derange, besmirch, and discredit the purity that Kant ascribes to his own (philosophical) system of deliberation and appeal. But the ironies with which the Court of the novel proliferates—the willfulness of its decisions, the perverse closure of its logic, the corruption of its officials, the utter lack of integrity common to its spaces, its division of labor among its employees, and its deliberations—depend in large measure for their effect on Kafka’s maintenance of the architecture, organization, and grandeur of the Kantian system. Joseph K.’s inculcation into the ways and impossibilities of the Law assumes the form of a progressive course of study. His interactions with his warders, Frl. Bürstner, Frau Grubach, Lawyer Huld, Leni, Artist Titorelli, and the church priest deliver, one after the next, new insights into the composition, organization, structure, and traditions of the Court and its deliberations. Much of what Joseph K. unearths in these interactions may involve human fecklessness and despair, bureaucratic corruption, and institutional chaos, but the narrative utterly depends on a strong systematic architecture in order to lurch, however haphazardly, toward the consummate allegory of exegetical complexity and incompletion embedded in the climactic Parable of the Doorkeeper. It is for this reason, among many, that the “Mann vom Lande” sustains his lifelong vigil to enter the domain of the transcendental, the Law, amid a sublime panorama of successive restrictive gateways. Kafka’s obsession in Der Process is the structure of the Law, its status as a meta-discourse, the architecture of its levels and agents of deliberation, the “flow-chart” of its decisions and related operations. These are precisely what come out, whether in Huld’s futile exhortations that Joseph K. manage his case

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as a social interaction or in Titorelli’s meticulous (aesthetic) extrapolations of the doublebind logic characteristic of each possible outcome to his case and of the aggregate of outcomes. As opposed to The Brothers Karamazov, Der Process is thunderously vague when it comes to the composition and dynamics of the social fabric of which it is an outgrowth. There is a concerted dearth of details that would locate the tawdry drama in Prague or even the Austro-Hungarian Empire at any moment that could be nailed down. When Joseph K., early in the novel, is ushered to an impromptu preliminary examination set in an out-of-theway banlieu of public housing, with all of its austerity, the galleries’ occupants are not miniatures of novelistic individuation, dressed this way or that, of this age or gender, as they are in Dostoyevsky, but they form forbiddingly impersonal classes, parties, or groups. Kafka has held over such significant details as the dress common to both antagonistic parties at the examination, “in black, in old, long, loosely hanging formal coats” (Trial, p. 42) from the political rally toward the end of Amerika/Der Verschollene, whose chaos befuddles Karl Rossmann as he observes it from his confinement to the balcony of Brunelda and Delamarche’s love-nest (Amerika, 166–73).10 The court of Der Process is as elusive, impenetrable, and often in disguise as the courtroom in Sktotoprigyonevsk is bursting with cloying detail. The narrative camera-lens peers into stairwells whose upper extremities remain opaque and invisible. This is where power resides and decisions are meted out, the narrative gives us to believe, but never gets around to showing us. It confronts us instead with passages such as the following: Directly across from the apartment door a narrow flight of wooden stairs led upward, probably to an attic area; they made a turn, so you couldn’t see where they ended. The student was carrying the woman up these stairs, very slowly now, and groaning, for he was weakened by his previous efforts. The woman waved down at K. (grüßte mit der Hand zu K. hinunter), and tried to show by a shrug of her shoulders that the abduction wasn’t her fault, but there wasn’t a great deal of regret in the gesture (Bewegung). K. looked at her without expression, like a stranger . . . The wooden steps explained nothing, no matter how long one stared at them. Then K. noticed a small sign beside the stairs, walked over, and read in a childish, awkward script: “Law Offices Upstairs” (Anfang zu den Gerichtskanzleien). So the law court offices were in the attic of this apartment building? This was an arrangement (Einrichtung) scarcely calculated to inspire much respect, and for a defendant it was reassuring to imagine what limited funds this court must have at its disposal if its offices were located where tenants who were themselves among the poorest of the poor tossed their useless trash. ( Trial, 64–5)11

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Our introduction to the court is mystifying, because aimlessly labyrinthine space coincides with the surreal interruption of K.’s encounter with the court usher’s wife. Drawn to K. by the aura of guilt in which he is surrounded, this woman is yet another of the female tutors in the ways of the Law, from Frl. Bürstner to Leni, the Advocate’s nurse, with which the narrative supplies him. Yet she surrenders to her fate indifferently: to be dragged upstairs toward the inaccessible innards of power, where she will service the sexual whims of the examining magistrate. The invisibility of this space is as powerful an image as is projected by the sordid student Bertold, with his “slightly crooked legs” and his “short, scraggly reddish beard” (Trial, 61), who transports her into a bureaucratic suite that has been embedded into residential architecture of the lowest standing. This passage is thus the vestibule to a spatial domain prevailing throughout the novel, one whose qualities and contents are implied through their absence, whose power and menace is only augmented by a blackout of “analog” accouterments. This is a far cry from the courtroom of The Brothers Karamazov. It is this same degraded space with little in the way of substance as well as amenities that Huld, K.’s legal representation, bemoans. His description of the Lawyer’s Room, with its low ceiling and poor light and ventilation, gives way to a characterization of court communications every bit as enigmatic and minimalistic: For over a year now—just to give one more example . . . there’s been a hole in the floor of the room, not large enough for a person to fall through, but big enough that one whole leg can sink in. The Lawyer’s Room is in the upper level of the attic, so that if someone slips through, his leg hangs down into the lower level, right into the hall (Gang) where the parties are waiting. It’s no exaggeration that such conditions are described in lawyers’ circles as scandalous . . . But there’s a reason they treat lawyers this way. They want to eliminate (auschalten) the defense as far as possible . . . For in general the proceedings are kept secret not only from the public but the accused as well. Only insofar as possible, of course, but to a very large extent it does prove possible. For even the accused has no access to the court records (Einblick in die Gerischtsschriften), and it’s very difficult to ascertain during the interrogations which documents are involved, particularly for the defendant, who after all is timid and disconcerted, and distracted by all sorts of cares. This is where the defense enters in. ( Trial, 114–15) The experience of the K. character, particularly in Der Process and Das Schloß, may be described, in a cybernetic age, as the progressive uncanny

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disclosure that matters have been taken under the control of a higher operating system. The agency of this invisible, but for this reason all the more pervasive master-system is, in the former novel, assigned to the Law, and in the latter the Castle bureaucracy.The rare and anomalous sightings of this catastrophically higher processor, in the form of student-procurers, juridical pornography, and deranged official portraits in Der Process, and rampant rumors of Klamm’s whereabouts in Das Schloß, are fully in keeping with the technological logic and momentum toward nano-miniaturization of electrical and electronic devices in the digital age. The relentless uncanniness of K.’s interactions with the world is to a large measure owing to the haphazardness of the disclosure or deconcealment of this alien processor as it takes control. More under the aesthetics of fantastic literature than of Kafkan surreal domestic travesty, Jorge Luis Borges will characterize this take-over as the “incursions” of “extreme idealism.”12 The fantastic as alien operating system in Kafka may not be fitted out with spaceships or the landscapes of extraterrestrial heavenly bodies, but it sings to us in a voice every bit as indecipherable and maddening: From the mouthpiece came a humming, the likes of which K. had never heard on the telephone before. It was as though the humming of countless children’s voices—but it wasn’t humming either, it was singing, the singing of the most distant, of the most utterly distant voices—as though a single, high-pitched yet strong voice had emerged (bilde) out of this humming in some quite impossible way and now drummed (schlug) against one’s ears as if demanding to penetrate more deeply into something other than one’s wretched (armselige) hearing.13 This music of a new administrative order already in place is all the more menacing by association with the innocence of children’s singing. The relative novelty of telephonic communications in the early 1920’s, when Kafka wrote this, does not begin to account for the sense of unmarked systematic usurpation by updates of still-unknown consequences that the passage conveys. The maddening secrecy of the procedures and hidden agendas swirling around K. in Der Process and of the bureaucratic machinations of Das Schloß are the artifact of a more powerful operating system in control of the local environment, one whose principles and programming have yet to be disclosed and mastered. The alien, “higher-level” program, whether the Law or the power of the Castle is both of K.’s onto-existential world and beyond it, indexing what the Gödel so decisive to Hofstadter would characterize as its “point of incompletion.” K.’s interactions with the arbitrary order common to the Law and Castle administration, whether his postures vacillate between incredulity, resistance, out and out contempt, or resignation, are thus set in

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the trajectory of Hofstadter’s “strange loop,” ultimately subsiding within the dimensionality of its “home system,” but having, along the way, served outside and beyond it. In place of functioning as a “full-service” operator of the higher processor, K. is exposed to a series of aphorisms and other pronouncements regarding the Law (or the Castle) whose overall effect may be fragmentary, but opening up a meta-critical or allegorical panorama. It is precisely this tissue of metacritical commentary that sets the boundaries that for Wilden are firmly of digital organization and cognition. Olga’s comment to the K. of Das Schloß is a classic in this regard: They’re very slow at the Castle and the terrible thing is that one can never know what this slowness means; it can mean that the official procedure has begun, but it can also mean that the official procedure has not yet even begun . . . There’s an expression (Redensart) here, perhaps you know it: “Official decisions are as shy as young girls.” ( The Castle, 173) This may seem merely a figurative and epigrammatic summation of official fickleness in the domain under Castle rule, but the dictum concerning official decisions goes deep to the heart of the social exclusion linking K. to the Barnabas family—in spite of K.’s constant misrecognition of Barnabas’s earnestness and competence. It is precisely because Amalia holds true to her warranted reserve as a “young girl,” refusing Sortini’s advances, that the family experience a precipitous transformation of its social status and possibilities. The compression of Castle operations to the unpredictability of young women’s responses to sexual byplay is an allegorical move on the part of the narrative. It marshals the play of seduction as an underlying format and explanation to an entire nexus of new bureaucratic procedures and underlying commands. The dictum, “Official decisions are as shy as young girls,” reduces an entire battery of events and details in the novel to a single concise, although figuratively rich, operating principle. In its swing between the existential circumstances that K. shares with the Barnabas family and the novelistic “operating system,” the statement is an allegorical formulation. In one fell swoop, it performs a large set of substantive (socio-political, sexual) conditions in a fashion that establishes boundaries and enunciates new operating principles. This dictum, as others throughout Kafka’s oeuvre, thus marks the spot at which the allegorical moments in fiction are at the service of the inherent digital programming built into all “smart” and self-referential fiction. Literary allegory, whether performed by Plato, Cervantes, Sterne, Flaubert, Kafka, or Woolf, signals literature’s capability to render a methodological or

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theoretical account of itself and to marshal itself toward and beyond its inbuilt “points of incompletion.” Literary allegory is invariably the announcement of digital processing and capability emerging from the inventive process. In Kafka’s case, there is a particularly knowing rapport between the ages-old tradition (or system) of allegorical World Folklore and Literature and emergent technologies of communications, statistics, and record-keeping (storage) in his day, eventually coalescing in the cybernetic revolution. The digital aspect of Kafka’s fictive invention articulates principles and establishes boundaries as much concerning the (dis)orders of literature as system as belonging to the particular fictive project at hand. It is in this sense that we can most fully appreciate the transformation of nineteenth-century social realism as exemplified by The Brothers Karamazov, but by no means limited to it, that Kafka implements. Kafka’s veering toward a digital organization that it will take the likes of Hofstadter and Wilden to adequately illuminate, explains many of the passages in his work duly recognized as his creative coups, even if they are also acknowledged in their impenetrability. Among these passages would surely number the “piecemeal system” with which the Chinese constructed the Great Wall; extended description of the tortureinstrument on the Penal Colony; the work of the information-givers in Amerika (Der Verschollene); also, in the same novel, the above-mentioned political rally with which the text leaves Karl Rossmann hanging (literally) in limbo; Barnabas’s work-station in the Castle, and the literary marvel with which this chapter began, the elucidation of the Parable of the Doorkeeper in Der Process “proper.” Each of these fictive nodes (or Lacanian “upholstery buttons”) summates and coalesces actions and details that have taken place in the events around them; moves the work in question beyond itself and toward a disclosure of the prevailing operating principles at play in narrative, fiction, the genre in question, or in literature itself; each crystallizes the principles at the heart of literary aesthetics and invention and establishes boundaries around literary performance itself. In this sense, each of these telling and transformative moments in Kafka’s literary inscription marshals allegory in the service of digital organization and processing. In concluding this segment of the demonstration, I’ll return to two of the moments enumerated just above, the description of the office to which Barnabas is granted access in Das Schloß and to the notorious Parable of Der Process, thus completing, in more senses than one, my own critical “strange loop.” He [Barnabas] is usually taken into a large office chamber, but it is not Klamm’s office, nor indeed that of any particular individual. Likewise the room is divided in two by a single high desk, which reaches from one side

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wall to the other, a narrow section in which two persons could hardly get past each other, that’s the space for officials, and a wide section, the space for the individual parties, the spectators, the servants, the messengers. Lying open on the desk are large books, one next to the other, with officials standing over most of them, reading. Yet they do not always stay at the same book, and they exchange not books, but places. Barnabas is most astonished by the way they must squeeze past one another while switching places owing to the tightness of the space. At the front near the high desk are tiny, low tables, where sit the copyists, who, if the officials so wish, write from their dictation . . . The official doesn’t give any explicit order, there’s no loud dictation to be heard, one barely notices that someone is dictating; on the contrary, the official seems to continue reading, only he begins to whisper and the copyist hears it. Often the official dictates so softly that the copyist cannot hear it sitting down, he must constantly jump up, catch the dictation, sit down and make a note of it, jump back up, and so on. It’s so strange! It’s almost incomprehensible. ( Castle, 178) In its very layout, the office-space to which Barnabas is granted occasional access is an artifact of the system in which the Castle, its officials, and its workings is the prevailing operating system of the village under its supervision, programming in a multifaceted way the possibilities of its inhabitants’ lives. The Castle office is itself structured by the boundary granting relatively open space to the shifting population of petitioners who seek it out and confining its own workers to the most compact or miniature workable space. The office houses a certain amount of the seemingly unmotivated frenetic activity that is a hallmark of superordinate organizations in Kafka’s work: the audience to K.’s preliminary hearing in Der Process, the Castle telephone system, and the Hotel Occidental information-givers (Amerika, 131–4). Yet it is the Castle workers’ activity, the specific fashion in which they relate to information, that interests us toward the end of the current exposition. This is the juncture to recall that Felice Bauer, Kafka’s on-again, off-again fiancée of 1913–1917 achieved executive rank, rare for a woman back in the day, at a Berlin company specializing in dictaphone equipment. The books that the Castle workers consult in fulfillment of their bureaucratic tasks are stationary, in a way that, many decades down the line, computer-terminals and electronic work-stations will be. The world of information and data-storage indeed remains bibliocentric in the early 1920’s, when Kafka is writing Das Schloß. But Kafka has discerned that this era is already on the wane. He imparts Chaplinesque physical comedy to a scene in which the workers elbow each other out of the way in order to consult immobile books; a setting in which it is already possible to imagine machines, however configured and powered, that perform the work of data

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storage and retrieval. It is these implied machines, embedded in the scene nonetheless, that make Kafka’s juxtaposition of a twentieth-century office and a medieval library/scriptorium in which books radiate immobile aura and authority, hilarious and absurd. In an immediate historical context in which Kafka’s ex-fiancée sold dictaphones, the fact that dictation assumes the form of interpersonal mumbling joins the anachronisms endowing the scene with its humor. Largely incomprehensible mumbling, humming, and singing is a trope at several junctures in Kafka’s writing for the encounter, usually sudden and unanticipated, with an alien language, one more compressed and powerful than the ordinary, the lingua franca of some striking other program. We invariably “tune in” to this indecipherable tongue as we encounter it in the virtual domain of Kafka’s fiction, precipitously, without warning. On one flank, this language is archaic, of a “prior” level of evolutionary development: the speech of the animal itself, as emitted by “Josephine, the Singer,” not of any identifiable species (despite Josephine’s mouse-lineage), but the voice of animality itself. The alien operational language encountered seemingly at every turn in Kafka’s fiction also veers in a “high-tech” direction, toward the “new technologies” bespeaking the “New World” of Amerika (elevators, telephones, information-givers at the Hotel Occidental) and powering the Castle bureaucracy. The (electronic) technology not yet quite available to play in this scene adds to the demarcation, the boundary-setting that we encounter as physical confinement in the form of the barrier keeping officials, of whatever rank, in and outsiders out. The barrier running the length of the Castle office in this scene is the physical demarcation of a marked difference in power, power articulated primarily in terms of processing-level and information access, storage, retrieval, and application. Toward the end of Der Process, the Priest’s recounting of the Parable of the Doorkeeper is, in its immediate context, an oblique update and summation of the predicament into which K. has, incrementally, backed himself. Uncannily “attracted” to the Parable, K. pronounces “at once” his first take on the state of affairs encompassed by the text. “ ‘So the doorkeeper deceived the man,’ K. said” (Trial, 217). The priest already has a rejoinder to this opinion: “ ‘Don’t be too hasty . . . He [the doorkeeper] wasn’t asked earlier [to admit the man into the Law] . . . and remember he was only a doorkeeper and as such fulfilled his duty’ ” (Trial, 217). Yet as the banter regarding the characters’ relative merits meanders, it undergoes a precipitous theoretical rise in its approach to the embedded folktale that Kafka invented for the occasion. Willy-nilly, it achieves an oversight at which it can begin to process narrative’s capability to spawn and sustain counter-versions (and hence counter-interpretations) of its own orchestrated happenstance. Through this precipitous and non-linear development, Kafka’s novel discloses its digital underpinnings, the indispensable

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supplement to the analog functions without which narratives couldn’t propose characters or incorporate and orchestrate events. The novel’s capability to perform an allegorical simulation of itself is a direct function of the degree to which it exploits its embedded digital organization, one, as Wilden illustrates with admirable subtlety, working hand in hand with its analog subtext of representation and meaning. “You don’t have sufficient respect for the text and are changing the story,” said the priest. “The story contains two important comments by the doorkeeper concerning admittance to the Law, one at the beginning and one at the end. The one passage says: ‘that he can’t grant him admittance now’ (nicht gewähren könne); and the other: ’this entrance was meant solely for you.’ If a contradiction existed between these two statements you would be right, and the doorkeeper would have deceived the man. But there is no contradiction. On the contrary, the first statement even implies the second (deutet sogar auf die zweite hin). One could almost argue that the doorkeeper exceeded his duty by holding out to the man the hope of a possible future entry.” ( Trial, 217–18) What becomes stunningly if not patently clear in the segment from Der Process cited immediately above is the following: what is at stake in the exchange between K. and the priest over the Parable and its plausible interpretation is not a means of edging K. out of his life as well as the story. The debate, rather, mobilizes the rules of engagement of literary invention itself. Kafka has invented a plot, characters, and circumstances successfully twisting themselves above the plane of fictive hypothesis and assertion enough in order to transcribe the very operating system of fictive invention itself. Among its elements, this operating system surely encompasses: linguistic ambiguity (polysemy), recursion in plot-development, strategic coincidences and concurrences in theme, atmosphere, and setting, and the open-ended multiplicity of plausible inferences (Wilden’s digital denotation) regarding the fictive events drawn within the work itself. As they mull over the Doorkeeper legend, priest and victim of the Law’s intractability touch upon these multiple dimensions of literary performance. The inferences they make regarding the Doorkeeper’s liability and the Mann vom Lande’s good sense are of consequence, in the immediate context, because they reflect upon K.’s conduct of his legal case (speaking out at the preliminary hearing, dismissing Advocate Huld, and so forth). Yet in even a broader sense, Kafka, by dint of his receptiveness to digital transformations in the world around him, manages to stretch a very particular story and set of characters and circumstances into a user’s guide to the practice of permutational, theoretically acute fiction, a fictive practice veering abruptly into the fantastic zone.

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In the passage immediately above from the cathedral scene toward the very end of Der Process, the disagreement between the priest and K. regarding the motivation and personal integrity of the two characters from the Parable morphs, seamlessly, into a deliberation on a markedly different level. As in a Vexierbild, and also the strange loop, a dimension of unanticipated depth arises from what might be supposed to be a patent and rather flat illustration grafted into the narrative. The topical discussion on the part of K. and the priest switches to the constitutive duplicity of all fictive texts whose dominant characters and images switch between multiple contexts. Perhaps to an unprecedented degree, Kafka’s fiction exposed itself to the workings and repercussions of chaos. The execution machine’s breakdown on the Penal Colony; a piecemeal construction-plan for the Great Wall of China that left the project, in all its daring and grandeur, incomplete; K.’s random discovery that the court runs on domestic pornography (Trial, 56–7); the misrouting of correspondence within the Castle bureaucracy resulting in K.’s botched appointment as land-surveyor (Castle, 62–3): all these accidental occurrences (and they are by no means alone) suggest that Kafka’s virtual fictive universe is the native land to “connoisseurs of chaos.”14 Yet as the above has hopefully established, Kafka’s writing—the short prose and Diaries as well as the fiction—is magnetically attuned to the operating system of literature, to the higher-level rules, principles, and aesthetic values out of which fiction generates its surprises and strategic “wrong” turns. It could indeed be argued that the operating system of literature, to the degree that one may be attributed to it, is an inchoate body of second-order determinations, prompts and commands; indeed, that what we call “literature” is what resides in the dissonance between all the embedded principles, rules, and values, in the manifest impossibility of complying with all of them. Treading water at all times while in the countercurrents between high-level processing and utter chaos, Kafka renders the digital underpinnings of literature explicit just at the moment when digital technology stands poised to overtake a digital capability within literary invention extending at least as far back as ancient and indigenous allegory—as it achieved distinction across the gamut of world cultures and civilizations.

3. Those irresistible women! I would be remiss in concluding this general overview of Kafka’s imparting a digital dimension to his conduct of fiction without circling back one last time to Dostoyevsky. This justly read and remembered giant of humanism as well as fiction remains an estimable resource and inspiration to Kafka—on many levels. A particularly resonant

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area of convergence between the writers registered in the courtroom scene of The Brothers Karamazov that has furnished us with a foothold in Dostoyevsky’s fictive practice is the play and narrative status of women as a species in their own right, a category. The treatment of women in this passage became a touchstone for adaptation and disfiguration that Kafka pursued insistently, in several of his early works. So noteworthy is Dmitri’s trial throughout the nation as well as regionally that “an especially large number of ladies” (Brothers Karamazov, 656) have helped pack the courtroom. Designating these female members of the species as “ladies” encodes both their superior social standing (by and large, peasants and even petite bourgeoisie would not be among these privileged spectators) and a frivolity that will be reinforced by further description. Kafka will pick up right where Dostoyevsky left off in characterizing his class of disfranchised bystanders to public events, in such texts as “The Hunger Artist” and “In the Penal Colony,” as “the ladies.” Dostoyevsky’s narrator demonstrates his own acuity and discretion in evaluating the phenomenon of females within the public sphere: “Some of the ladies, especially among the visitors, appeared in the gallery of the courtroom extremely dressed up, but the majority of the ladies were not even thinking about dresses” (Brothers Karamazov, 657). So astute is the narrator that even he is not misled by the conventional accouterments (dress, hair) by which women in patriarchal social orders make their presence and involvement known. The narrator, in accord with the women on the “ground,” is very much in keeping with the broader mission on which Dostoyevsky dispatches his novels. This may be characterized as the extrapolation of emergent social realities and the testing of the premises on which they are based. The narrator demonstrates no interest in the women’s appearance; on this score, he is simply not taken in. The passage in question appropriates the figure of women as a bellwether for the disturbing questions that Dmitri’s depicted acts and attitudes pose; also, as a talisman for the contrary, deep-seated emotions to which the case and the trial give rise. Within the narrative division of labor, it falls to the women to coalesce, signal, and convey the Russian attitudes and emotions that the trial has already evoked: “Hysterical, greedy, almost morbid curiosity could be read on their faces . . . Almost all the ladies, at least the great majority of them, favored Mitya and his acquittal. Mainly perhaps, because the idea had formed of him as a conqueror of women’s hearts” (Brothers Karamazov, 657). The function that women serve in this scene is, first and foremost, indexical. Among other things, the women’s “hysterical, greedy, and almost morbid” expressions signal a recent admission of love and passion—legacies of Romanticism—to the sphere of domestic mores and legal understanding. As would be the case throughout Europe in the novel’s historical timeframe,

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the women bear the onus of unregulated emotion (“hysterical”) in their bearing, but Dostoyevsky taps them for purposes of earmarking and shorthand as well. The women register the conflicting emotions set off by the trial: they concentrate and intensify the trial’s drama and its reception. In this role, the women serve as amplifiers to the trial’s underlying themes and the reactions in the Russian people whose explicit expression the trial instigates. I close on a footnote, really, on how far Kafka disfigured the women that Dostoyevsky highlights in this scene, on the degree of strangeness and defamiliarization that he succeeded in imparting to figures invoked largely to underscore their conventional marginality and irrelevance. Kafka indeed seizes on the resources for the depiction of women as a breed or class that Dostoyevsky liberates in such a scene as the introduction to the courtroom in The Brothers Karamazov. But Kafka will take the functions of summation, exemplification, and amplification that Dostoyevsky assigned to women far afield. Kafka’s composite “ladies,” in contrast to Dostoyevsky’s, are, by virtue of their sex, alien wielders and implementers of a power all the more pernicious by dint of its obscurity and occultation. Their customary attributes and wiles, social as well as physical, end up enforcing the strictures and regulations of the regime at hand with even greater brutality than patriarchal authority. It is in this spirit that Kafka delegates the forced termination, at forty days, of the Hunger Artist’s fasting performance to local debutantes who are only too happy for the recognition; and in “In the Penal Colony,” Kafka appropriates the ladies’ handkerchiefs, the very material of social manners, in order to sanitize the particularly vicious dismemberment that the condemned man is about to undergo (Complete Stories, 162).15 Kafka’s deployment of “the ladies” is far more perverse than Dostoyevsky’s. “Everything belongs to the court,” concludes Titorelli in Der Process. “Everything, especially the ladies, enforces the arbitrariness and hypocrisy of the prevailing social regime,” allows Kafka in the gender-dynamics of “The Hunger Artist” and “In the Penal Colony.” Within the overarching irony of this performance, the “soft traits” of conventional femininity—frills, deference, hyper-attentiveness to social conventions—morph instantaneously into the executioner’s song. So on the fortieth day the flower-bedecked cage was opened, enthusiastic spectators filled the hall, a military band played, two doctors entered the cage to measure the results of the fast which were announced through a megaphone, and finally two young ladies (Damen) appeared, blissful at having been selected for the honor, to help the hunger artist down the few small steps leading to a small table on which was spread a carefully chosen invalid repast. And at this very moment the artist always turned stubborn

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(wehrte sich der Hungerkünstler immer). True, he would entrust his bony arms to the outstretched arms of the ladies bending over him, but standing he would not. Why stop fasting at this particular moment, after forty days of it? . . . Why should he be cheated (berauben) of the fame he would get for fasting longer, for being not only the record hunger artist of all time, which presumably he was already, but for beating his record by a performance beyond all human imagination (übertreffen bis ins Unbegreifliche), since he felt that there were no limits to his capacity for fasting? His public pretended to admire him so much, why should it have so little patience with him . . . And now he was supposed to go down to a meal the very thought of which gave him nausea that only the presence of the ladies kept him from betraying. And he looked into the eyes of the ladies who were apparently so friendly and in reality so cruel (in Wirklichkeit so grausamen Damen), and shook his head, which felt too heavy on its strengthless neck. ( Complete Stories, 270–1) In a powerful sense, such early fictive triumphs including the short-short “First Sorrow,” “A Hunger Artist,” and “The Metamorphosis” are linked in a wide-ranging meditation on artistic performance: its dimensions, duration, scale, and limits; its enabling preconditions, its nemeses. If we accept “A Hunger Artist’s” premise that sustained fasting is a performative pursuit if not an out and out art-form, then the passage immediately above is a pivotal one in the title character’s compulsion to reach and even surpass the limits of his specialty. Kafka places Gregor Samsa of “The Metamorphosis” and the trapeze artist of “First Sorrow” alongside the Hunger Artist in the situation of being thwarted in their artistic practice before an audience maddeningly ambiguous in its response: at once coddling and indifferent. Within a framework of idealistic aesthetic striving, this is a tragic impasse. The artistfigure accepts a negative relationship to all of life’s appetites and strivings, only to find the public delivery of their art-forms sabotaged by indifference and their considerable sacrifice and dedication repudiated by an exceptionally fickle public. Even Gregor Samsa falls into this predicament, though nothing in his background bespeaks artistic training or striving. Transformed into an exceptional creature in every respect, he rejects with disgust the foods that used to please him most, and craves what he used to consider offal. Hanging from the ceiling of his old bedroom, a scene of enforced solitude, he mimics the posture of circus acrobats. The above, extended passage catches the Hunger Artist at the tripping point when he will no longer play ball with a public spectacle, replete with flowers, military band, and fetching female attendants, performance-conditions he had previously accepted. If the narrator is to be believed, the protagonist

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opts for the limit-suspending internal logic of his art-form at the expense of predetermined social conventions (the forty-day fast limit, and so on). And at the moment of his rebellion on the highest grounds, the principle of artistic integrity, he is defeated most disconcertingly by the feigned good cheer of the female hired hands. The lady attendants, “so friendly and in reality so cruel,” implement a compromise between the self-effacing artist and a public that “only pretended to admire him so much.” In the footsteps of Gregor, the Dostoyevskyan ladies have undergone a few transformations of their own: from passive mirrors of public opinion to agents of cultural mediocrity in charming disguise. Kafka’s ladies have graduated from analog indexicality to digital limit-setting and emitting negative, ironic signals. The systematic restraint that they enforce has become an invisible, because embedded, command. In fitting out twentieth-century literary performance with its digital specifications, Kafka has even updated romance, the most fundamental of all literary scenarios and attractions. He has ushered in the cooptation of sexual allure by the prevailing regime. Even the play of sexuality now “belongs” to Althusser’s Ideological State Apparatus (ISA), a term whose Kafkan twang must have been evident to its innovator.16 I stop in my tracks well before any overall cybernetic pronouncements regarding the sexual division of labor, or “love’s sweet melody.” Yet it may not be entirely accidental that Chinese metaphysics and medicine assign the yin characteristics of concealment and indirect (passive) desire and agency to the female energy, the one nonetheless co-present in males as well. Knowingly or not, Gregory Bateson subsumed the broad spectrum of yin attitudes and inclinations under the heading of the “complementary.”17 In the idiom of deconstruction, yin is the supplement to yang directness and explicitness. At the level of communications and representation, yang’s ingenuous transparency may well translate into analog attitudes: semantics, correlation, and connotation. Kafka’s ladies interject an uncanny digital attitude into the sexual byplay of seduction. In the end, the court of Der Process is not as ubiquitous as several of its characters claim. What is even more pervasive throughout Kafka’s conduct of fiction is story-telling’s swerve, via the figure of the strange loop, into allegory. More comprehensively than any other trope or infrastructure, allegory coalesces and mobilizes literature’s inbuilt potentials for autopoiesis, critique, and breakthrough to higher levels of synthesis and invention. The ubiquitous, but chaotic and unpredictable “allegorical turn” throughout Kafka’s writing—in the Diaries and fragments as well as the narratives—demarcates as well where Kafka has embedded digital capability. As Hofstadter indicates so inventively, Kafka is by no means the only artistic or scientific innovator who stumbled upon this interface before the widespread dissemination of digital technologies. In addition to Hofstadter’s beloved trio of Gödel, Escher,

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and Bach, Kafka is on this plane in the very best company: Plato, Descartes, Hegel, Sterne, Poe, Carroll, Apollinaire, Borges, and Calvino come immediately to mind. Yet Kafka brings such a degree of lucidity and intensity to the pursuit of allegorical performance—through its mutation and disfiguration as well as its consolidation—that he justly serves us as a first foothold in the study of literature’s cybernetic application.

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3 The Calculable, the Incalculable, and the Rest: Kafka’s Virtual Environment1 1.

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he fact that I am reverting, on the occasion of a major retrospective on Kafka and architecture, to Kafka’s late animal parable, “Der Bau” (“The Burrow”), a phenomenally suggestive text I read in a deconstructive light forty years ago, is itself something of a feedback loop. What will be “fed back” into this circuit of coding and decoding is precisely the differential of what was not there to be projected and articulated at the time. The world is of course much more stressed, in demographic and environmental terms, than it was at that time; much more prey to worldwide, globalized forms of commerce, communications, and control; much more committed, in its memory, communications, and even thinking, to virtual states, digital orders, and cybernetic technologies. There is no way that a ricorso back to a text by Franz Kafka that still both enervates and enchants us can possibly encompass the full brunt of these innovations, as uncannily prescient as Kafka was—whether of the politics that brought us horrendous war-machines, or of the technology to which we owe global telecommunications. The philosophical oeuvre of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari places “Der Bau” squarely in the mainstream (if we can speak of one) of schizo accompaniments to the telling “advances” of twentieth-century life. The “static” emitted by these developments, however deranged it may be, is a quintessentially literary screen or display to the underside of twentieth-century discoveries, inventions, and syntheses. Mirroring the predicament of the unidentified subterranean rodent who fills his “Bau” with the proliferating ruminations that he can neither master nor subordinate, Kafka’s text persists in emitting a noise that we somehow cannot manage to ignore even though we would better off if we did. 111

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If I gravitate toward filling in the steps between “Der Bau” and its anticipations of and implications for the regimes of digital languages, technologies, and virtual states under which we labor, love (in the sense of online websites for dating and other intimate arrangements), and spend our leisure time in such pursuits as video games, it is in several contexts and for multiple reasons. My wider grounds for believing that the making explicit of our investments in and commitments to digital technologies and their impact upon our cognitive processing is of crucial and unavoidable import to cultural critique have been elaborated at length in the introductory material to my most recent book, Around the Book: Systems and Literacy. It is highly advisable for those who engage in critical encounters with the broader cultural environment to access the “cybernetic unconscious” accruing from the countless hours they spend online, surfing the Web, and translating different databases into electronic impulses. These activities . . . are in themselves rich in theoretical apprehension and nuance. The rendering explicit of the conceptual operations we perform while working on computers is yet another challenge that cultural psychoanalysis, particularly as performed in universities, museums, and other public collections and archives, would do well to address.2

2. At the core of Kafka’s deconstructive construction, then, is not merely a Castle Keep, a command-post, a supply distribution center, an engine-room, but an isomorphic interface, extending like the two sides of a zipper, down two parallel sides of notation. In the subterranean environment of “Der Bau,” the two strings of notation whose parallelism and inter-translatability are, scene after scene, invoked, invariably arise out of the opposition whose expression is “différance/in-difference” or “articulation” (noise)/silence.” Line by line, this is what the novella is “really” about: the mini-climatic fluctuations from oblivion to sense/meaning/gradation, what Derrida means by écriture, placed in the “maw” of a hybrid human/animal surrogate standing in a limit-case of literary “characterization” in general. The movements or “developments” in this relentlessly experimental piece of writing (the “experimental” trenches that its protagonist builds late in the narrative are not for nothing) are nothing other than switches or transfers over from one iteration of the isomorphic interface (say, “noise/silence”) to the next (say “many little enemies/one big one”), in an unending, twisting scroll. The mascot-like protagonist may pride itself on its foray out of its burrow’s confinement, or the relief furnished by an occasional nap, but we, the reader, never emerge from the unordered sequence of

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fluctuations between the articulate and the inarticulate, between the agitated and the tranquillized, between the calculable and the incalculable that comprise the core experience of language and sensibility along the continuum of duration. It turns out that the fluctuation between the articulate and the differentiated and whatever its “Other” happens to be has a more prevalent and indeed decisive “application” as well. This non-literary instance of the steps taken by the “Bau” Creature at every turn is the very template of the interface allowing computers and other cybernetic technologies and devices to operate: to incorporate data from a vast diversity of inputs and to process them according to a range of procedures derived from the happy coordination between logic and number.

3. As characterized by Douglas R. Hofstadter in his both playful and magisterial Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, isomorphism marks the very spot (or is it rather line?) where strings of impulses, symbols, icons, and data deriving from a broad range of inputs, translated into and aligned with parallel sequences of numbers, become operational in the sense of procedures sponsored, performed, and regulated by cybernetic machines. The right column [of digits in operations determined both by mathematical and typographical rules] has a “dual nature”: it can be viewed either as a series of typographical operations changing one pattern of symbols into another, or as a series of arithmetical operations changing one magnitude into another. But there are powerful reasons for being more interested in the arithmetical version. Stepping out of one purely typographical system into another isomorphic typographical system is not an exciting thing to do: whereas stepping clear out of the typographical system into an isomorphic part of number theory has some kind of unexplored potential. It is as if somebody had known musical scores all his life, but purely visually—and then, all of a sudden, someone introduced him to the mapping between sounds and musical scores. What a rich, new world!3 The isomorphic calculability of hundreds of experiential inputs and dimensions, ranging from the sensory to the abstract, is by now an everyday feature of our lives. In Hofstadter’s generation, though, the inclusiveness and expansiveness of cybernetic process dawned with quasi-magical wonder. “What a revelation! The discovery of Gödel-numbering has been likened to the discovery, by Descartes, of the isomorphism of curves in a plane and equations in two variables: incredibly simple, once you see it, and opening onto a vast new world.”4

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The entire technology of the contemporary world, what I would call its Prevailing Operating System, with political, economic, psycho-social, even sexual repercussions as well, sets out from an interface, in machines, but also in language, at which the inchoate becomes operable, the random and nonsequential calculable. As linguistically and even mathematically innovative as Champollion had to be in order to decipher the parallel multi-linguistic texts on the Rosetta Stone, in terms of what powers cybernetic technologies onto their prodigious feats, this was merely, in Hofstadter’s terms, “stepping out of one purely typographical system into another isomorphic typographical system.” The cybernetic technologies of massive calculation and memory, virtual reality, autopoiesis, and artificial intelligence are founded, rather, on the interactivity between parallel strings of data emerging from radically different processes and sources. His example of a mind-blowing isomorphism is “the mapping between sounds and musical scores.” On one side of what becomes for Hofstadter the core interface, if not equation, at the crux of computer technology is always numbers, calculable in the binary notation whose format corresponds to the physics of on-and-off electronic impulses as engineered and directed by such semiconductors as computer chips. At the risk of adding “hopeless computer geek” to the multiple identities and personalities with which Franz Kafka has been saddled over the course of his serious elucidation, from lawyer, insurance adjustor, and scholar to political theorist, existentialist, and mystic, it is already not too soon to recall that the intermittent calculation of options, strategies, resources, and design-possibilities occupies a disproportionate share of what we might call the “Bau” Creature’s “on” mental time. These vary from speculation as to whether it contends with “many little” fellow residents of the deep, both his competition and food-supply, or with one overarching Enemy, inconceivable in its vengeance and destructive potential, to the distribution of the food-supply it has caught, to the optimal architectural renovations of the Burrow’s aging infrastructure. The numerical notation prevailing within the virtual domain of “The Burrow” is manifestly binary: it varies from the one, which can be multiplied, transposed, and factored in countless ways, the one of activity, effort, devising, invention, thinking itself, to the zero which is as much a relief, absence, or effaced entry as a number—the zero of sleep, silence, relaxation. This zero, like the possibility of absolute acquittal in Der Process, is as wishful, in this sense as mythical, as it is actual, but as construct it figures in the Creature’s calculations anyway. The Creature is as much of a writer as an architect, builder, or animal. This was the starting point of what I, under the aura of Jacques Derrida, wrote about the text forty years ago. It is, then, in the sense of the construction as a literary work, a cumulative corpus that its flaws are, according to the animal, inevitable: “It is always a

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fault to have only one piece (ein Exemplar) of anything” (Schocken, 330; Schillemeit, 584). Such a life’s work is, necessarily, a limited edition of one. Revising the construction likewise takes the form of proofreading: “I begin with the second passage and let it take me back to the Castle Keep, and now of course I have to begin at the second passage once more . . .” (Schocken, 342; Schillemeit, 604). When the monologue turns to the noise metamorphosed by the Creature into a verification of the existence of the malevolent Other—whose scheme is to bracket or circumscribe the Burrow (Schocken, 354–55; Schillemeit, 623–24)—the noise is described as an entry in an etymological dictionary, whose derivation (Ursprung, Schillemeit, 629) must be determined. There is no more prevalent hint of the textuality of the construction than the repeated use of the verb graben and its substantive forms to predicate the activity of digging. As will be elaborated below, this verb, in evidence both in the English grave and engrave, marks the coincidence between text and interment.5 The Creature may wistfully yearn for the “zero-points” of tranquility, silence, rest, and relief from multiple constantly impinging stimulations and worries (Sorgen). But it is precisely these annoyances, incongruities, goads to further calculation, reckoning, and worry that are the raw materials allowing the precarious balancing act of writing and revision to go on. The inputs that can be made operational through their parallel alignment with numerical strings are as diverse in Kafka’s virtual subterranean fictive environment as they are in Hofstadter’s marvelously playful quasi-linear, quasihorizontal “build-out” of computer technologies. In the case of the stimulations, agonizing and pleasant, that the Creature places alongside his ongoing calculations, these range, as we know, from sounds, smells, and senses of touch to relative levels of energy/exhaustion, moods, and what I would term “excursions of memory.” All of these, by virtue of parallel isomorphic arrangement with numerical notation, eventually become calculable, although to what degree and in what senses is a matter for intense theoretical scrutiny. We know, of course, from narratology, that flashbacks and other recalls posited by fictive constructs such as surrogates are inherently numerological in nature, as distinct from the mathematics of the “erlebte Rede” or “discours indirecte libre,” which transpires in an extended present whose input and output have been effaced or elided. When the “Bau” Creature, for example, invokes its experiences as an apprentice builder—here we encounter a strategic minimization of a parallel recall on the part of the narrator of “The Great Wall of China”—we are by implication on a sequential temporal axis or vector whose points, on and off and prior and future, are inherently calculable. As we carefully place ourselves in a position to gloss passages from “Der

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Bau” of both an exemplary and outstanding nature, we need to think of its narrative as a continuous loop or, in Hofstadter’s phrasing, “eternal golden braid” that pivots, in a conspicuously unmarked and unannounced way, from one sphere of isomorphic parallelism to the next—for example, from an anxiety arising from the speculation of countless enemies, in simultaneous attack on the Burrow, to, say, a recollective foray into the past and away from the undifferentiated state tending to prevail amid the Burrow’s relentless discursive prolongation and affective intensification.

4. Every passage of “The Burrow” is, then, a textual loop of unmarked and sudden transpositions between isomorphic strings, between unwieldy associative strands, on the one hand, and that which can be reckoned, between, in other words, the calculable and the incalculable. One example of this underlying isomorphic rift or zipper is, in a certain sense, as good as any other. Such is the configuration of “Der Bau” of itself as Stoff or textual fabric. But if we can speak of certain neighborhoods within “Der Bau’s” compass that intensify its isomorphic predilection and subtext, the following passage will do very well as an illustration of this very specific feature of its engineering: I listen now at the walls of the Castle Keep, and wherever I listen, high or low, at the roof or the floor, at the entrance or in the corners, everywhere, everywhere, I hear the same noise [an den Wänden oder am Boden, an den Eingängen oder im Innern, überall, überall das gleiche Geräusch]. And how much time, how much care must be wasted in listening to that noise, with all its little pauses. One can, if one wishes, find a tiny deceitful comfort in the fact that here in the Castle Keep, because of its vastness, one hears nothing at all, as distinguished from the passages, when one stands back from the walls. Simply as a rest and a means to gain my composure I often make this experiment, listen intently and am overjoyed when I hear nothing. But the question still remains, what can have happened? Confronted with this phenomenon, my original explanation completely falls to the ground. But I must also reject other explanations which present themselves to me. One could assume, for instance, that the noise I hear is simply that of the small fry (Kleinzeug) themselves at their work. But all my experience contradicts this; I cannot suddenly begin to hear now a thing that I have never heard before though it was always there. My sensitiveness to disturbances in the burrow has perhaps become greater with the years, yet my hearing has by no means become keener . . . But perhaps—this idea now insinuates itself—I am concerned with some animal unknown to

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me. That is possible. True, I have observed the life down here long and carefully enough, but the world is full of diversity and it is never wanting in painful surprises.6 This extended passage is not only structured by an overarching isomorphism suturing together extended chains of association from parallel notationsystems; it wanders from one zone of isomorphic parallelism to the next with the compulsive abandon with which the Creature explores every dimension and compartment of its environment, from outside as well as from within. The passage may begin with a noise seemingly distributed with perfect evenness and uniformity throughout the subterranean environment—the doubling of “überall” to qualify this seemingly perfectly even-handed intrusion hammers home the point. But like the architecture of the Burrow itself, this passage widens to incorporate every sort of difference and disturbance, each one distributed on both facets or flanks of isomorphism, therefore eventuating, on one side of the rift at least, in a quantitative reasoning. Those explanations or existential assessments attending the Creature’s sense of its unique topos or place extend to its “imaging” the causes of the disconcerting noise. Yet it cannot be a single animal, it must be a whole swarm that has suddenly fallen upon my domain [Aber es wäre nicht ein einzelnes Tier, es müßte eine grosse Herde sein, die plötzlich in mein Gebiet eingefallen wäre], a whole swarm of little creatures, which, as they are audible, must certainly be bigger than the small fry, but cannot be very much bigger, for the sound of their labors is very faint. It may be, then, a swarm of unknown creatures on their wanderings, who happen to be passing my way, who disturb me, but will presently cease to do so.7 To be sure, this extended passage literally pirouettes on the difference, “zum Unterschied,” that the Creature attempts to hear in the noise by stationing itself in different locations. The “leichtes Zischen” that it discerns a page or two later treads the ever so delicate boundary between “ein Nichts” and a “nicht Nichts” (Schillemeit, 615). The deepest significance of the noise, whether “in fact” uniform or uneven, is that it is itself an articulation, a différance, amid the putative silence or tranquility of the builder/writer’s refuge. But then, the inter-linguistic interface of isomorphism, once established in this passage, wanders from notation to notation, from site of signification to site of signification in “wiring” the underground Burrow as a virtual domain, a website of digital processing. The mathematical tendency of the present approach to a spatially involuted literary work, aligned as it is with Hofstadter’s TNT (or “typographical number theory”),8 calls, in response, more for a list or “read-out” than for a discursive paraphrase. My inventory of isomorphic

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interfaces and translations prevailing throughout “Der Bau” and not merely within the compass of this writing sample, runs as follows: 1

“Here in the Castle Keep, because of its vastness” [Größe des Hauptplatzes]: The architecture of the “Bau” is governed by a calculus, itself based on a zero-sum game. The central command-post grows only at the expense of the multiple “Gänge,” and vice versa. Each “Gang,” passageway, giving the construction the feeling of a text as well, has itself been placed strategically, its justification being its effectiveness as a hunting-ground for the “Kleinzeug.” From this perspective, the “Bau” becomes a mine, a major industrial work-site, at vastly reduced miniature scale, with something of the invisibility that has, since the outset of semi-conductors, augmented the senses of mystery and absolutism surrounding electronic technology.

2

“I listen now at the walls of the Castle Keep”: The tale emphasizes hearing, smell, and touch as the primary sources of sensory input. The marginalization of sight, which does come into play, but on a reduced level, especially when the creature makes its foray into the world outside the “Bau,” has the effect of short-circuiting vision-based models of perception and thinking. There is a close synergy between the input of the creature’s hearing, smell, and touch and the architecture of the “Bau” and its underlying strategies. This liberates the narrative to highlight the direct follow-through between perception and thinking. In this respect, “Der Bau” becomes an early text structured by cognitive processing. It is no exaggeration to claim both that the “Bau” is itself an imprint of the Creature’s cognition, or that the text is a cognitive map of the Creature, such as Kafka has programmed him, against the backdrop of Joseph K. of Der Process, K. of Das Schloß, the architect of “The Great Wall of China,” and the hybrid creature of “A Crossbreed” (“Eine Kreuzung”). What all these literary surrogates, among others, in Kafka’s fiction have in common is that they simulate cognitive processing as they desperately think their way out of systematic impasses, shut-downs, and doublebinds. In the case of Joseph, it is of course the unmotivated prosecution and the incongruous defensive activities demanded by the trial; of the kitten/lamb of “A Crossbreed,” it is the logical incongruities ensuing from the different genetic codes combining in its constitution. (As Hofstadter brilliantly demonstrates in Gödel, Escher, Bach, biological replication, too, is grounded in the transfer of vital information, in the form of amino-acid sequences, across an isomorphic arrangement of parallel chains.)

3

“Confronted with this phenomenon, my original explanation completely falls to the ground.” We can hardly accuse our friendly Creature or animal-

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mascot of cultural illiteracy. It places itself squarely in the crossfire between Erscheinung, a projective construct central to speculative and imaginative processing as articulated by German idealism, and Erklärung, the basic unit of Auferklärung: what for Kant, if not for Hegel, would serve as a counterweight to the optical illusions inevitably involved in Erscheinungen. It is, of course, a comical irony for us to imagine the Auferklärung (Enlightenment), with its jouissance in human progress and its celebration of scientific discovery, penetrating to the subterranean darkness of the “Bau,” littered throughout as it is with random carcasses. The Erscheinungen bringing the Creature to the point of despair are random and even, in certain ways, inchoate phenomena; his Erklärungen, by means of long-standing conventions of Geistesgeschichte, are subject to rigorous logical, quantitative, and methodological constraints. Even the animal epistemology prevailing with the underground territory of “Der Bau” resides between the interactive codes or notations of isomorphism. 4

“My sensitiveness to disturbances in the burrow has perhaps become greater with the years, yet my hearing has by no means become keener.” The creature lives in a world of perceptual constants or flat-lines: the sensations, whether of hearing, smell, or touch, remain, with possible declines, more or less the same over the years. But, precisely owing to the projective quality of thinking, its capacity for Versteigerung, its ability to grow on itself (computer scientists describe this as its possibility to chunk itself), the Creature’s Empfindlichkeit (touchiness) has increased in intensity over the time-span encompassed by the narrative. The result of unknown quantities, Xs creeping into the Creature’s primarily aural, haptic, and olfactory inputs is escalating Empfindlichkeit, possibly runaway sensitivity. Empfindlichkeit is itself a term encompassing double facets. Grounded in an empirical taking in of sensory data (finden) it exerts a tangible impact on the emotions. It is a receptive capacity that can, under the proper circumstances, radically aggravate such emotions as fear and foreboding. What few events “Der Bau” stages allowing it to be placed in the category of narrative, all turn out to be triggered by radical changes in the emotional climate: curiosity to experience the Bauresidence from the outside, frenetic efforts at architectural renovation. Emotion, a core attribute and process of literary surrogates since the outset of literary inscription, joins the other faculties—sensation, calculation, revision or autopoiesis—at play within the Creature’s virtual underground command-post. The isomorphic configuration of this domain in no way excludes the emotional component.

5

“But perhaps—this idea now insinuates itself—I am concerned with some animal unknown to me. That is possible, true, I have observed the

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life down here long and carefully enough, but the world is full of diversity and it is never wanting in painful surprises [an schlimmen Überraschungen].” The Creature is a stranger neither to his own thoughts [Gedanke] nor to the higher-level process of ruminating on, reviewing, and revising his own thoughts. The creature’s cognitive processing spans the full spectrum from primal fear and mental oblivion to superstition, evaluation, planning, and reflection. Granting credence to the story’s core premises (that there is such a creature, and so on), we would have to find, I believe, his understanding that a great many unknowns impinge on his prospects for peace, security, and happiness, a “realistic” one (in the sense that once we allow for the preconditions defining Gregor’s situation, in “The Metamorphosis,” Kafka’s projections of the circumstances that he faces are scrupulously realistic). The “Bau” Creature’s presumed persecution by “ein” (as opposed to many) “Tier” splices us directly into the blind projections of the Other at the heart of Niklas Luhmann’s understanding of interpersonal relations within the compass of social systems. Luhmann’s term for the Creature’s disquieting blindness in its estimation of the Others it contends with (whether single or multiple, whether benign or predatory) is “double contingency”: Knowing and calculating the behavior of one’s partner is replaced (because it is unattainable) by a concession of freedom, and one can then limit oneself to knowledge that contributes to handling contingency. This reduction is—and this is a theoretically central hypothesis of higher integrative power—bound to the experience of action and therefore steered by the concession of freedom . . . Each side can distinguish between its environment (or the world as such) and systems with environments in its environment. Thereby experience related to the environment, in addition to action, becomes relevant—because one can act with regard to another only if one knows how one is experienced in the other’s environment by the other [weil man auf den anderen hin nur handeln kann, wenn man weiß, wie man selbst in der Umwelt des anderen durch diesen erlebt wird ].9 The generalized result of constant operation under the condition of double contingency is finally the social dimension of all meaning.” It can be stated with full assurance that the “Bau” Creature stands in relation to his Other (or possible Others) under conditions of the social doubleblind imposed by Luhmannian double contingency. The grounding of the Creature’s calculations in double-blindness is an overall framework for

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the complexity that he encounters amid the proliferating chambers, doubts, and delusions of the “Bau.” “The world is full of diversity [mannigfaltig] and it is never wanting in painful surprises.” The encounter with complexity is for Hofstadter both the acid-test for intelligence and the primary motive for creating and programming machines that simulate the multiple levels and functions involved in cognitive processing. “Without doubt, Strange Loops involving rules that change themselves, directly or indirectly, are at the core of intelligence. Sometimes the complexity of our minds seems so overwhelming that one feels that there can be no solution to the problem of understanding intelligence, that it is wrong to think that rules of any sort govern a creature’s behavior.”10 If the accommodation to “Strange Loops” of inference and synthesis is a key feature of intelligence, then the “Bau” Creature is no stranger to these: “I begin once more to haul all my stores back from [the smaller chambers] to the Castle Keep” (Schocken, 330). A key element of my understanding of this singular text after recurring to it over many years, is that in the stark sparseness of its setting, physical details, and the conventional accouterments of narrative fiction, it foregrounds both the architecture of encompassing systems and the struggle of intelligence against the closure and repression that they operate and execute. In staging the sheer play of intelligence, as Hofstadter and cognitive scientists of his milieu conceptualize it, “Der Bau” has few equals in the vast literature of literature.

5. To “apply” cybernetics’ fundamentally recursive organization—its capacity to adjoin or “stack” seemingly endless numbers of qualifying or modifying phrases—to Kafka’s fictive prose necessarily involves a colossal temporal paradox or oversight. It would be far more appropriate to argue that Kafka bequeathed, in the monologic, monotone, run-on, in-different, in the fullest senses of the word, literary Stoff or material that he developed in his Schloß and animal parables, a stylistic prototype that would engage authors from Woolf and Beckett to Blanchot and Bernhard. It makes more sense to assert that Kafka’s prose, along with the artistic heritage appropriated by Hofstadter: the anomalies of two-dimensional space that Escher made the subject of his drawings and the “strange loopings” that organized certain of Bach’s fugues and canons, assisted computers in their in-built drive to absorb stacks and stacks of parallel variants, until some qualitative scrambling or reconfiguration resulted.

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When I first sought out and explored the larger neighborhood or “environment” (in this case, as opposed to “system”) that Kafka’s experimentation impacted, I found myself in a neighborhood of memorable post-modern productions, in which the modernist gravitation toward stunning discoveries and the lucidity of structural analyses and permutations had been substantially dimmed. The resulting aesthetic panorama emerged in tones at once murky and severe. The world into which the style developed for “Der Bau” and related texts emerged was one foregrounding language’s ability to string itself along endlessly in its self-qualification and correction. Progress in such artifacts, whether Joyce’s late fiction, or Beckett’s plays and novels, or in atonal music, or in the canvasses of Kandinsky, Albers, and Rothko, became far more difficult to gauge or track. But all along, in a highly indirect progression, the underlying dynamics of words, colors, and musical notes and tones laid themselves bare, in a way that carried with it hard-core philosophical authenticity. Long before I considered the cybernetic dimensions of Kafka’s stylistic innovations, I formulated the formidable toning down allowing literature and allied arts to engage the alterities of their own operating languages in the following terms: What happens when one crosses over to the counterdomain demarcated by Finnegans Wake, Beckett’s plays and novels, the fictive and discursive prose of Georges Bataille and Maurice Blanchot, and the theoretical writings of Jacques Derrida? Above all, there has to be a loss or relinquishing of a certain nostalgia, a weaning from the presumptions of total intimacy and possession. The Angel of History no longer stares longingly into the past. The past is no longer an origin, a time more authentic than others, because a greater degree of intimacy once prevailed there. It is, rather, a relative position along an indifferent continuum—one might say tedium— of time. Sexuality ceases to be an exclusive or privileged proving ground of Being but is one activity among others, something that people do . . . Sex means inherently nothing in its own right. The literary implications of this slight shift are multifaceted: In the conception of literary characters, the role of surrogation diminishes in favor of functionality. Characters do not so much embody subjects, real or imagined, as they perform functions . . . In his short prose, Kafka had already experimented with treating characters as the hypothetical agents of logical and mathematical word problems, a practice subsequently exploited above all by Italo Calvino.11 Not only did Kafka, at a moment when the realities of industrialization and global capitalism and their broader psycho-social impacts were becoming

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clear, exploit the recursive dimensions and potentials of fictive prose; he opened a virtual space for recursive composition, one with irreducible architectural features, that was in the fullest sense transferrable. Not only could Kafka’s readers go there and dwell; other writers could enter this world, refine it, and take it in slightly other directions. This is what Samuel Beckett is doing, consciously or not, in “The Lost Ones” (“Le dépeupleur”), whose dramatis personae live, in various vertical sectors of and with different degrees of urgency to escape, a vast subterranean cylinder. And as we shall see below, this is precisely the mission on which Thomas Bernhard launches his character Roithamer, when he sends him “genau in den Mittelpunkt des Kobernaußerwaldes”12 to engage in the planning, drafting, and building of a very particular virtual fictive space. This space, it emerges, is quite particular to its moment, its setting (Austria), and the cast of characters congregating there. But it is manifestly, in style as well as in the particular convergence of compulsive rumination, textual composition, and cognitive processing that defines the place, the architectural annex or extension of Kafka’s “Bau.” It was Kafka who placed this journey of exploration and discovery, not of outer-space but of cybernetic programming space in the hands (or is that paws?) of our underground burrowing Creature. It is precisely this capacity of readers and writers to enter, engage, and program a literary landscape or environment configured by another author, the loss, therefore, of any exclusive ownership or propriety that authors might claim over the fictive places that they “create,” that emerges in J. Hillis Miller’s formulation of literary virtuality: The world seems to be created by the words of the novel and therefore to be James’s invention. After we have entered it, however, this virtual reality seems to refer or correspond at a distance to a realm that has always been there already, waiting to be revealed, dis-covered, uncovered, by the novelist’s words. Within that virtual reality, the reader, after the first sentence, can now dwell through all the time it takes to the end of the novel’s last page and last sentence, Kate Croy’s “We shall never again be as we were.”13 At a moment of the 1970’s when the broader epistemological implications of cybernetic processing may well have been clearer to thinkers like Hofstadter and Anthony Wilden than they are today, when we are literally submerged in the technology, Hofstadter sequenced his book in progressive lessons, so that it could serve as a Computer Science textbook for a diverse audience. At the same time, he interspersed his elucidations of number theory, processing, computer languages, memory, and operating systems, with playful dialogues such as they would have been spoken by the characters in Lewis Carroll’s childhood literary classics. The appeal to Carroll, another

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mathematician with a literary imagination, is hardly a matter of chance. The playful digressions or divertimenti in which such characters as the Tortoise (a surrogate for Hofstadter himself), Achilles, the Crab, and the Anteater illustrate such computer-concepts as isomorphism, recursion, and chunking not only illustrate the interfaces that the new technology shared with, say, the arts and molecular biology (the latter because of its irreducibly isomorphic transfer of genetic information across protein strands and cell-membranes). Hofstadter’s Carrollian dialogues, his own literary moment, the telltale evidence of his own raids into the virtual space of Lewis Carroll’s imagination, also reveal a foundation of the soaring skyscraper of cybernetic technology extending deep into the classical repositories of culture. Hofstadter isolates the irreducibly cybernetic dimensions and implications of a broad range of artifacts ensuing from the histories of philosophy and science including (along with Bach’s canons and Escher’s drawings): Zeno’s paradoxes, Fibonacci’s numerical sequences, Zen ko¯ans, non-Euclidian geometry, and John Cage’s compositional principles. Hofstadter, when he accesses images illustrative of the computational processes that computers can perform, strives for physical concreteness, for descriptiveness with strong tangible elements. This may not be at such a far remove from the endlessly recursive textual inventions of Kafka, Beckett, and Bernhard as it may seem. It occurs to Hofstadter, for example, that the springmechanism allowing for immense numbers of trays to be gathered in his local cafeteria, may have something to say about how recursive interruptions (as in the proliferating phrases in the “Bau” Creature’s monologue) can be directed vertically, whether organized into logical files or moved to “higher” levels of processing. In the following passage, he manages two significant tasks in a single gesture: he graphically illustrates the endless horizontal digression and annexation inaugurated through recursion and he introduces certain of the irreducibly vertical metaphors (“popping,” “stacking”) central to our understanding of how particulars may be processed in a cybernetic way, of how computers evolve toward “higher,” in the senses of more meta-critical and autopoietic, cognitive accomplishments. This progression in the field of cybernetics is of crucial import to our ongoing investigations into “Der Bau,” for the question of which, if any, summative or meta-critical conclusions the “Bau” Creature’s experiences and meditations allow him, remains disturbingly open: In the preceding example [the case of a telephone conversation interrupted by endless incoming calls], I have introduced some basic terminology of recursion—at least as seen through the eyes of computer scientists. The terms are push, pop, and stack (or push-down stack, to be precise) and they are all related. They were introduced in the late 1950’s as part of IPL, one of the first languages for Artificial Intelligence . . . To push means to

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suspend operations on the task you’re currently working on, without forgetting where you are—and to take up a new task. The new task is usually said to be “on a lower level” than the earlier task. To pop is the reverse—it means to close operations on one level and to resume operations where you left off, one level higher. But how do you remember exactly where you were on each different level? The answer is, you store the information in a stack. So a stack is just a table telling you such things as 1) where you were in each unfinished task (jargon: the “return address”), where the relevant facts to know were at the points of interruption (jargon: the “variable bindings”). When you pop back up to resume some task, it is the stack which restores your context . . . By the way, the terms “push,” “pop,” and “stack” all come from the visual image of cafeteria trays in a stack. There is usually some sort of spring underneath, which tends to keep the topmost tray at a constant height, more or less. So when you push a tray onto a stack, it sinks a little— and when you remove a tray from the stack, the stack pops up a little.14 It turns out that the subterranean space of “Der Bau” manifests a cyber-like plasticity in its vast potential for horizontal expansion. The Creature has already constructed fifty-some compartments for the storage of its booty when the monologue takes off. He is getting a bit long in the teeth at the moment of fictive enunciation; he may be facing certain limits in his storage, but he can still add more compartments to these. One way of approaching the Creature’s runaway verbal style is as the performative expression of his unlimited horizontal sovereignty and Nachdenken. The only way in which he can project the aggressive designs of his enemy or enemies (and here we are in the midst of Carl Schmitt’s theory of the political foe) are as sanctions or limits imposed on his own horizontal movement and expansion. “I merely assume that the beast—and I make no claim whatever that it knows of my existence—is encircling me; it has probably made [gezogen] several circles around my burrow already.”15 Our most tangible image of his one enemy has this predator encapsulating the “Bau”—in this way, radically truncating the Creature’s recursive activity and suspending the construction’s capabilities for further qualifying, modifying, and programming itself. If the isomorphic infrastructure of cybernetic technologies, as Hofstadter characterizes it, activates a suture at which the data from an astonishing diversity of inputs and formatted in just as many ways becomes translatable into mathematical notations, his scenario of “stacking” sets into relief the juncture at which a linear accretion of experience or accumulation of data attains a higher level of signification, complexity in processing, or cognitive power. This strand of his elaboration is reminiscent of the momentous upheaval in the “Force and the Understanding” chapter of Hegel’s

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Phenomenology of Spirit, when a dialectically symmetrical “play of forces” in the empirical world is literally upended or turned on its side so that dialectics, in a vertical format, can distinguish between the lower level (facts, circumstances, materials) and the higher levels of reasoning (theories, laws, legal corpuses, whether of a civil or scientific nature). The faculty and figure for this translation of incremental accumulation into vertical uplift and back again is what Hegel terms Aufhebung. As we shall see below, the potential for Aufhebung that Hofstadter projects into cybernetic logic and technology, consists in certain programs’ capacity to “work within the system” and to “make statements about the system.” Literature, as Hofstadter would readily aver, is filled with moments of this seamless, sudden liftoff from a plane of linear accumulation and accretion into an auratic world of synthetic realizations, themselves organized according to strikingly different principles. It is always toward this higher wisdom or science that the “Bau” Creature is stumbling. Whether he ever arrives there is a momentous theoretical question-mark that the text appends to itself. My favorite instance of this rise to a new and radically different level of processing in a work of literature occurs when Lönnrot, the detective in Borges’s “Death and the Compass,” engages in Kabbalistic gematria in order to solve a geometrical series of murders set within a Buenos Aires many of whose compass-points correspond, rather, to Paris. Lönnrot’s crash-course in mystical numbers eventuates at a series of ciphers that have all acquired magical dimensions simply through the addition of one more, quite conventional, integer. Lönnrot resisted a smile. Suddenly turned bibliophile or Hebraist [Bruscamente bibliófilo o hebraísta], he ordered one of the officers to wrap up the dead man’s books, and he took them to his apartment. Then, indifferent to the police investigation, he set about studying them. One book, an octavo volume, revealed to him the teachings of Israel Baal Shem Tov, the founder of the sect of the Pious; another, the virtues and terrors of the Tetragrammaton, the ineffable name of God; yet another, the notion that God has a secret name, which (much like the crystal sphere attributed by the Persians to Alexander of Macedonia) contains His ninth attribute, the eternity—that is, immediate knowledge—of all things that shall be, are, and have been in the universe. Traditions reckons the names of God at ninety-nine; while Hebraists attribute that imperfect sum to the fear of even numbers, the Hasidim argue that the imperfect number points toward a hundredth name—the Absolute Name [ese hiato señala un centésimo nombre—el Nombre Absoluto].16 Not only is Kafka one of Borges’s most explicit and esteemed forerunners; Hofstadter, as physicist and Cognitive Scientist, would feel completely at

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home in this universe of sudden qualitative transformations, abrupt moves from one sphere of cognitive processing to the next, triggered by the addition of a single, seemingly random, digit. It remains an open question as to whether the “Bau” Creature remains party to such radical shifts in its thinking and articulation. No single window may open more graphically onto the endlessly recursive process of qualification and modification transpiring within the “Bau’s” virtual environment than the following: I have returned from a journey dog-tired with my wanderings . . . My first task is a very laborious one and requires all my attention; I mean getting spoil through the narrow and thin-walled passages of the labyrinth . . . I drag part of my flesh supply back again and push my way over it and through it; now I have only a portion of my spoil before me and it is easier to make progress; but my road is so blocked by all this flesh in these narrow passages, through which it is not always easy for me to make my way even when I am alone, that I could quite easily smother among my own stores; sometimes I can only rescue myself from their pressure by eating and drinking a clear space for myself. But the work of transport is successful, I finish it in quite a reasonable time, the labyrinth is behind me . . . Now I begin with the second passage, purposefully slow, now that I have seen the Castle keep I have endless time—for everything I do there is good and important and satisfies me somehow. I begin with the second passage but break off in the middle and turn into the third passage and let it take me back again to the Castle Keep [Ich beginne mit dem zweiten Gang, und breche die Revision in der Mitte ab und gehe zum dritten Gang über und lasse mich ihm von Burgplatz zurückführen], and now of course I have to begin at the second passage once more, and so I play with my task and lengthen it out and smile to myself and enjoy myself and become quite dazed with all the work in front of me, but never think of turning aside from it.17 Within the architecture of computers and other cybernetic devices, recursion exploits unprecedented computational and storage capacity in amassing so many variants, counter-instances, modifications, and qualifications that the calculable reaches its very limits; the calculable is pushed as far as it can go in the direction of the incalculable. There is an eventual impact of the sheer multiplicity of the mitigating conditions that recursion can assimilate and the processing power, the cognitive level, that the process of calculation, thinking, or writing can reach. A movement of this order transpires when the Creature enters one of its occasional manic states: “Then I rush, then fly, then I have no time for calculations” (Schocken, 329). Under these occasional conditions, it loses sight of how many Kleinzeug it has killed, where they are

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distributed, and how they may be best deployed. The key question for processes and texts with a strong recursive element is when they reach a higher level, at which point horizontal accumulation translates into a more powerful cognitive, conceptual, and methodological accomplishment. With regard to Kafka’s “Der Bau,” my overall feeling is that the text leaves this question tantalizingly open. There are indeed moments when, without transition or warning, the Creature segues into a different, potentially transformative relation to its world, as, at the very end of the long passage cited immediately above, it addresses the passageways and plazas of the construction to which it has devoted its productive years as its companions, its semblables, its peers. Through this unmarked apostrophic turn, it accomplishes many tasks: the “Bau” is now more of a Levinasian than a Hegelian Other; the Creature’s apprehension of its alterity is fused with recognition and the empathic interpersonal negotiations that would predicate any possible substitution. This turn, if the narrative “voice” of the tale is as much the voice of a text or writing as the voice of a fictional surrogate, brings the reader’s awareness of being in medias res within a self-evolving and hence meta-critical textual performance to a tangibly new and advanced level. It is through such developments, cached though they may be, that the case can be made for a “recursive style in the service of higher-level processing.” We see at the same time, though, in the above passage, in which the Creature frenetically shuttles from his revisions on one passage, Gang, to the next, the following characterization of the overall results: “Alles ist unverändert.” The Creature (or perhaps the “Bau” as autopoietic and self-programming literary construction) speaks in this aspect of itself as final, closed, unconditional. This notion is perfectly sustainable in an environment where rest, tranquility, peace, and even oblivion are conditions that the Creature yearns for, end-states that would bring it relief, whether of a psychological nature or from the frenetic activity of building or writing. But this immutable dimension of the “Bau” acquires a palpable downbeat when the Creature (or is it Franz Kafka?) ends this enigmatic text “Aber alles blieb unverändert, das” [But everything remained unchanged, the] (Schillemeit, 632; Schocken, 359). In this way the text achieves feedback and resonance in the register of inscription’s inevitable, fatal, and irresistible persistence and finality. In private conversation, Vivian Liska has suggested the sublime uncertainty that the text definitely opens simply in appending to itself this terminal “das.” I’ll attempt to address the unassimilated remains common to the Creature’s avarice and “Der Bau’s” compositional program in the final segment of this essay. That the Creature would observe the immutability of its construction in one of the textual sites most vividly indicative of its frenetic qualification and revision is highly striking. This odd contretemps or sudden directional shift betrays a pressing concern in the heart of the construction itself as to whether its downbeat falls on an open

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or a closed system. Writing, like Hofstadter, at the outset of the current regime of cybernetic relations and programming, Anthony Wilden achieves admirable lucidity regarding systematic organizations’ fluctuation between their relatively “open” and “closed” aspects: 3. Every system involving life or mind, or simulating life or mind, is an open system. 4. An open system is such that its relation to a supersystem (which may be referred to as its “environment”) is indispensable to its survival. There is an ongoing exchange of matter-energy and information between them. 9. Every open system (including the theory elaborated here) exists in a context of selection, survival, and adaptation. Every adaptation has at least a short-range survival value. All such systems are overdetermined, equifinal.18 Does “Der Bau” predicate an open system or a closed system, in Wilden’s terms? The answer, like so many features of this enigmatic text, especially the projected Foe or Adversary whose activity turns out to be uncannily similar to the Creature’s, or the effort both to dwell in the “Bau” and observe it at the same time, could well turn out to be double. We recall that the acid-test to literary virtuality supplied by J. Hillis Miller is that the constructed textual zone be open-access, not private; that an open constituency of readers and other textual programmers have free entry to the place, and even leave to reprogram it. There may well be no more suggestive, as well as digital, extension to the virtual domain of “Der Bau” than the cone that Thomas Bernhard has his surrogate, Roithamer, draft and construct in the dead center of the Austrian Kobernausser Forest. Not only is the style of Korrekur (and much of Bernhard’s fiction) a spinoff to the endlessly selfsustaining and self-qualifying monologue evident not only in “Der Bau” but also in telling works by Joyce, Stein, Beckett, Woolf, Faulkner, and many others. As in “Der Bau,” the motif of open-ended correction and revision in Korrektur is in the same instance architectural as well as editorial. Bernhard performs as well as elaborates the pivotal motif of Korrektur. It is the performative expression of the recursive processing allowing, in “Der Bau,” for the seemingly endless annexation of qualifications and variants. Bernhard has transformed the Creature’s endless self-questioning and dissatisfaction into the very dynamic through which artistic improvisation pushes forward into the Lichtung of Sein. To be sure, there is an undercurrent of self-destructive yearning, of which the Creature “himself” may not be fully “aware,” in Kafka’s version of the selfenclosed scene of writing: “It probably bores its snout into the earth with mighty push and tears out a great lump” (Schocken, 354). By the end of the

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revelatory passage immediately below, Bernhard transforms the self-destructive undercurrent in the Creature’s imaginings into something strikingly otherwise: the drive toward suicide as an eventuality embedded into the very logic of cultural striving and innovation in an Austrian context. Kafka’s virtual “Bau” undergoes unanticipated transformations as Bernhard transposes it into an Austrian cultural wilderness, but it remains virtually constant, ongoing in the cybernetic dimensions of its program, even if not exactly the same: Actually I’m shocked by everything I’ve just written, what if it was all quite different, I wonder, but I will not correct now what I’ve written, I’ll correct it all when the time for such correction has come and then I’ll correct the corrections and correct again the resulting corrections and so forth, so Roithamer [dann korrigiere ich und dann korrigiere ich das Korrigierte and das Korrigierte korrigiere ich dann wieder undsofort, so Roithamer]. We’re constantly correcting, and correcting ourselves, most rigorously, because we recognize at every moment that we did it all wrong (wrote it, thought it, made it all wrong), acted all wrong, how we acted all wrong, that everything to this point in time is a falsification, so we correct this falsification, and then we again correct the correction of this falsification and we correct the result of a correction of a correction and so forth, so Roithamer [die Korrektur dieser Fälschung korrigieren wir wieder und das Ergebnis dieser Korrektur der Korrektur korrigieren wir undsofort, so Roithamer]. But the ultimate correction is the one we keep delaying, the kind others have made without ado from one minute to the next, I think, so Roithamer, the kind they could make, by the time that no longer thought about it, because they were afraid even to think about it, but then they did correct themselves.19

6. Toward the end of my own looping back to a literary work that has not only captivated but also possessed me, the question of resolution emerges with particular urgency. What kind of resolution or payoff can a text whose basic compositional and cybernetic principles involve the interface between isomorphically juxtaposed code-chains and open-ended recursive addendums possibly reach? Is this in the realm of the “higher” realizations (as in “higher education”) achieved by an “alter” (although animal) “Baumeister” through a narrative conforming to the narrative format of the Bildungsroman? Or can we characterize this resolution cybernetically, as some form of “higher processing” that either we attain or the Creature reaches through the remorseless spinning out of its doubts, questions, inferences, and realizations?

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But as at least one of the strands of the Creature’s self-performative narrative runs, its environment, as its cognitive capabilities, “bleibt unverändert” remains unchanged. The question of irreversible progress, progression in processing, or realization is critical to a virtual approach to Kafka’s fiction, because its answer loops back to our own curiosity regarding the degree to which our own cybernetic activities, the instantaneous access that we regularly have, for example, to a memory-store unprecedented in its vastness and ongoing growth, represent a positive (as in the sense of positivism) step forward. And I will again consult the metaphorics emerging from a highly enlightened engagement with this technology, coinciding some thirty years ago with its immanent global dissemination and hegemony, in approaching the irresolvable question of the text’s irreversible progress. It is clear from the outset of Gödel, Escher, Bach that Hofstadter invests a great deal of his belief in the technology’s momentum toward higher processing levels, in the direction of Artificial Intelligence and of self-educating, self-programming operations in the ability of certain programs to function simultaneously on two distinct levels: both in doing the work of calculation, computation, and of such mathematical functions as logarithms, algorithms, and so on, and, for lack of a better term at the moment, in reflecting upon it, in preparing it for transactions of a metacritical, in this sense “higher” complexity. It is very important when studying formal systems to distinguish working within the system from making statements or observations about the system . . . Now I do not want to make it sound as if the two modes are entirely incompatible: I am sure that every human being is capable to some extent of working inside a system and simultaneously thinking about what he is doing. Actually, in human affairs, it is often next to impossible to break things neatly up into “inside the system” and “outside the system”; life is composed of so many interlocking and interwoven and often inconsistent “systems” that it may seem simplistic to think of things in these terms. But it is often important to formulate simple ideas very clearly so that one can use them as models in thinking about more complex ideas.20 In and about the system. We are on familiar, edifying ground when we move into this particular cyber-neighborhood that Hofstadter has opened up for us. If the truly notable cybernetic breakthroughs involve coordinating prodigious computational tasks with cognitive achievements—programs that can marshal the data in approaching questions of higher complexity—we are on high and venerated theoretical ground. If the most useful programs pivot on the hinge that swings back and forth between “inside the system” and “outside the system,” we are back, among other locations to the brisure of

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Derrida’s breathtaking early grammatological move. Derrida boldly opened Of Grammatology with the performative assertion that deconstructive reading, as it would become known, would create an ongoing lien or feedback loop between the systematic outside inside and outside, neither of which can be established or compartmentalized in purity. The only location in which the scene of deconstructive exegesis and inscription can transpire is the kho¯ra where writing “within the system” coincides with writing “about” it. We can still argue, as I did, that Kafka’s animal parable was custom-made for poststructural theoretical approaches: the Creature lingers both inside and outside the “Bau’s” entrance; the “Bau’s”construction is more like an immanent debunking or questioning than an architectural assertion; it makes a brief foray into the Umgebung beyond the “Bau” in order to re-familiarize itself with some of its infrastructural features and flaws; its physical exertions, akin to cybernetic arithmetical functions, which it describes as a literalized headwork, are simultaneous to its “higher” metaphysical, ontological, and existential ruminations. Given the developments in contemporary critical theory over the past four decades or so, Hofstadter’s originating the potential “lift-off” or autopoietic potential in certain programs’ inherent metacritical capability and operations seems reassuringly unproblematical. Yet as Hofstadter’s compilation and elucidation of the many conceptual steps involved in contemporary cybernetics, Cognitive Science, molecular biology, and so on continues, the account acquires a technological specificity that may or may not continue to be apropos of “Der Bau.” Is there any distinct progress that can emerge from lingering at the entrance of the Burrow, from worrying incessantly about the current readiness and plans of its putative enemies? Is this in any way like the overview and computational breakthrough that can be achieved through the cumulative generalization of chunking, one example of which is the chess grandmaster’s ability to assemble, almost instantaneously, entire batches of bad moves, to be studiously avoided if the player can remain at the level of good form? Put in their starkest terms his [psychologist Adriaan de Groot’s] results imply that chess masters perceive the distribution of pieces in chunks. This is a higher-level description of the board . . . Highly revealing was the fact that masters’ mistakes involved placing whole groups of pieces in the wrong place, which left the game strategically the same, but to the novice’s eyes, not at all the same . . . The master is sensitive. He thinks on a different level from the novice; his set of concepts is different. Nearly everyone is surprised to find out that in actual play, a master rarely looks ahead any further than a novice does—and moreover, a master usually examines only a handful of possible moves! The trick is that his mode of perceiving the board is like a filter; he literally does not see bad moves when he looks at

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a chess situation—no more than amateurs see illegal moves . . . Similarly, master-level players have built up higher levels of organization in the way they see the board; consequently, to them, bad moves are as unlikely to come to mind as illegal moves are, to most people. This might be called implicit pruning of the giant branching tree of possibilities.21 Coming upon a passage such as this one is on a par with learning about the communications networks prevailing in ant colonies from animal characters such as the Crab and the Anteater, whose physical movements mimic their thinking; it is of a piece with many of Gödel, Escher, Bach’s other unexpected revelations. This reader, who happens to be a miserable chess-player, was completely unprepared for, but just as completely taken by the above characterization of chess-mastery. This is a computational model, in which the excellent player’s intrinsic and evolving “chess program” assembles the batches of the moves to be avoided and the small aggregation of the most promising moves. In terms of the model of chess-mastery I carried with me through all the years of my bumbling inefficiency at the game, this understanding was completely counter-intuitive. Like many others, I assumed that the “good” move was somehow the one that prefigured a strong position on my part and disastrous miscalculation by my opponent. Like Kafka and Kafka’s Creature, I am a hopeless and unrepentant dweller in extended networks or rhizomes of signifiers that move, if at all, in inconsequential sidewards drifts, a bit like Hofstadter’s Crab. Hofstadter reassures me, when he links chess-mastery to batching, that my own unrepentant dwelling in rhizomatic networks of signs does not in itself destroy my good judgment in the game. Other factors were involved in this particular one of my intellectual disasters. Linear anticipation of moves, one’s own and the Other’s, isn’t as important as it seems. Maybe, in fact, some of the work I do as a philosophically driven close reader involves the process of batching that Hofstadter attributes to the masterful chess-player. Examples of this batching, on a level far higher than I myself have ever attained, would be the etymological constellation consisting of signifiers related to membranes, fabrics, and wings in Derrida’s contribution, in “La Double séance,” to the literature addressing Mallarmé’s poetics; or the similarly virtuoso feat, both of batching and inventive association, regarding the sub-syllable component gl in Glas. But does this endless, because open-ended, agglomerative feat of nuance and association necessarily lead to the cybernetic equivalents of Hegelian Aufhebung, to the breakthroughs to higher levels of processing and more subtle feats of Artificial Intelligence and autopoiesis such as Hofstadter characterizes them? From the outset of Derrida’s storied trajectory as a gifted reader, he couched his philosophical intervention in terms of the dislocations

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and other recasting to certain persistent metaphysical and ideological constructs that would be necessitated by the etymologically critical work at which he persisted on a seemingly “lower” level of processing. There may indeed be something computational, I am arguing, in Derrida’s assemblage of translucent fabrics, tissues, and appendages (voiles, ailes, étoffes, and tissus) in his reading of Mallarmé, something computational that can then morph, as in Hofstadter’s progressive accounts of cybernetics and molecular biology, into something of greater, qualitatively different, critical and interpretative power and depth. Back to the Creature’s hacienda, to the congenital subterranean blindness and submersion of Kafka’s “Der Bau,” we have to ask ourselves the same of the Creature. At the end of his lifelong, relentless, and sometimes thankless rumination, planning, building, revision, and Wiederaufbau, does he achieve a higher level and degree of building-mastery, of syntheses and interventions within multiple modalities of construction? I think at this point, we need to grant the Creature the right to speak and answer for itself: Between that day and this lie my years of maturity, but is it not as if there were no years of interval between them? . . . But on my side everything is worse prepared for than it was then; the great burrow stands defenseless, and I am no longer a young apprentice, but an old architect . . . For to be honest, I cannot endure the place. I rise up and rush, as if I had filled myself up there with anxieties instead of peace, down into the house again. What was the state of things the last time I was here? Had the whistling grown fainter? No, it had grown louder. I listen at ten places at random and clearly notice the deception; the whistling is just the same as ever, nothing has altered. Over here, there are no changes, there one is calm and not worried about time; but here every instant frets and gnaws at the listener [das Zischen ist gleich geblieben, nichts hat sich geändert. Dort drüben gehen keine Veränderungen vor sich, dort ist man ruhig und über die Zeit erhaben, hier aber rüttelt jeder Augenblick am Horcher]. I go once more the long road to the Castle Keep, all my surroundings seem filled with agitation, seem to be looking at me, and then look away again so as not to disturb me, yet cannot refrain the very next moment from trying to read the saving expression from my forehead. I shake my head, I have not yet found any solution. Nor do I go to the Castle Keep in pursuance of any plan.22 A passage such as this one may well represent the end-station, not only for the Creature but for the passengers on “the Kalda railroad,” those who have pursued Kafka’s notation through its full draft and drift. This is a domain with cybernetic features in many respects; it is virtual, in several senses that we have already explored. It tells us, as we prepare to leave it, that in radical

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senses it is both open and closed. It remains a site of ongoing articulation and inscription, a place whose incipient noises and other stimulations and questions never cease. The “Bau” could not be what it is without an impressive number of technical as well as cognitive achievements: of perception, understanding, and cognition; of architecture; of planning and communications. In these senses it has arrived at a persistence of thinking, information, expression, and communication that we would associate with a medium. The “Bau” is the inbuilt medium of Kafka’s written body; it is the medium of itself. The medium of “Der Bau” could not function without certain of the processing and organization that Hofstadter describes: calculation (or number theory), isomorphism, recursion, chunking, the feedback circuits structuring Virtual Reality technologies. Yet as the Creature confronts its built underground environment one last time toward the end of the tale, the “Bau,” as text, construction, and medium, is in a condition of steady state. Its adversary, now called the Graber, in this way associated as much with death and interment as engraving and Schrift, cohabits the depths with the “Bau” Creature in an ongoing, unsteady truce; neither side is ever going to gain a decisive upper hand, to annihilate the other. The entire rhetoric of this final retrospective glimpse of the construction is one of labored, persistent reciprocities and stand-offs. “But on my side everything is worse prepared for [weniger eingerichtet] than it was then.” “For to be honest I cannot endure the place.” “I listen at ten paces chosen at random and clearly notice the deception [und merke die Täuschung deutlich]; the whistling is just the same as ever.” Structured by cognitive processes and communicative loops that have become the distinguishing features of the particular technological regime under which we live and work, the “Bau” is nonetheless subject to certain limits. It is not, for example, going to evolve into a self-programming and regulating technology of the sort that Hofstadter projects, persisting and performing functions on its own. It is a medium that will continue to emit its noise. And this noise, it turns out, relates essentially to everything we understand about the persistence and exigencies of articulation, thinking, qualification, revision, editing, recasting, and rewriting. The “Bau”, in its delicate ecology of overlapping homeostatic reciprocities, feeds into a condition of steady state. While it is structured by an endless feedback between the notations on both sides of isomorphism’s double-entry system, in the end, the text belongs neither to the absolutely calculable nor to the absolutely incalculable. It resides, rather, along with the rations (Vorräte) that the Creature strews over the expanse of its residence, in the zone of the remainder, the left-over, the sum not accounted for when the meticulous division is over. The entire Entwurf or draft coalesces and miniaturizes itself in the “das” that Kafka left over as he completed the narrative in his notebook.

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Like the stray memo summoning K. to the Schloß in the novel of the same title long after his appointment has been rescinded, this “das” both completes the text and provides for its immediate—and unbounded—resumption. “Der Bau” is arguably one of Kafka’s most radical, sustained experimental texts. The swathe it cuts through subsequent science and technology as well as fiction is deep and undeniable, even if also indirect and intermittent. Its ultimate refrain is the persistence of its articulation and performance, outside of all bounds. The noise it emits, technological, systematic, and theoretical as well as literary, issues from the zone of the remainder, that place between the dual notations of isomorphism where the calculable and the incalculable don’t quite balance out, where différance never resolves with sameness, where articulation doesn’t vanish into silence, and where science and fiction, although in mutual admiration, part ways. “Der Bau” is merely one particularly compelling work in an entire library of texts illuminated by their isomorphic wiring, the interface and follow-through between their poetic condensation and their mathematical calculation. Emma Bovary’s impulsive expenditures are the direct expression of an overarching Romantic heritage, transmitted by her Catholic education as well as by her youthful readings. Every romantic impulse nurtured by this cultural backdrop (or Prevailing Operating System) becomes an entry on the tab of her erotic expense account, with its systematic overdrafts. From Balzac to Dostoyevsky, vivid scenarios of gambling have furnished literary invention with another of its most striking isomorphic backbones. Like a Borgesian library, the literature of cybernetic configuration, encompassing works both existing and emergent, is in a state of open-ended expansion. Borges scored the architecture even if he balked at punching in the numbers.

4 Urban Introjections: Berlin Alexanderplatz 1. The City Speaks o city in literature puts out a more ambiguous and qualified welcome mat—or is that welcome wagon?—for a protagonist, even if of dubious stripes, than does Berlin, on that fateful morning in Fall, 1927, when Franz Biberkopf, having served four years in Tegel prison for the brutal manslaughter of his live-in girlfriend Ida, is let out again to roam the streets. This is hardly Rastignac, gawking at the Parisian mayhem for the first time, or Carrie Meeber, better known as Sister Carrie, first set loose in Chicago. Nor is it the wizened Odysseus finally back in Ithaca, the paradigmatic sadder but wiser man after his epic wanderings and education. Biberkopf’s return to the streets of his native Berlin is a far more sordid affair. A former furniture-mover and cement worker, his Ausbildung in life’s university hasn’t been in the honors program. There are notable attempts on his part to achieve respectability and evidence a certain nobility, but the compelling facets of his character emerging from Alfred Döblin’s profound and masterful portrait, one of the roundest and most vivid in all literature, cluster around his animal vitality, his irresistible drive, his frontal embrace of reality often in the face of dispiriting and sometimes downright evil developments, the powerful stabilizers seeming to right his balance even after he’s taken the most devastating hits. Biberkopf is only returning to a home that got the best of him, that exposed his violent underpinnings, that built up and released his homicidal rage, yet the welcome that Berlin either stages for him or leaves tacit on that Fall morning of 1927 is one of the most fateful in the literature of cities. For the City, Berlin, but also The City of early twentieth-century urban acceleration, inflation and overall economic instability, pervasive national

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identity-crisis, early corporate entrenchment, massive unemployment and homelessness, heightening crime and prostitution, speaks with its own distinctive voice. It speaks to Biberkopf as one of its most sensitive and susceptible, if not gifted inhabitants; it speaks through Biberkopf, who manages to encounter, entertain, and encompass virtually every one of the fads, trends, epiphenomena, radical emergency-measures, and insanities, including Nazism itself, pursuing the downward vortex of the late Weimar government. The City speaks to us as its bystanders and potential inhabitants. It is no accident that the narrative, as Biberkopf, the descendent of Hamlet, slowly succumbs to the madness embedded in the impasses where his predicaments invariably lead (what Bateson called “double messages”). The narrative voice, if we want to invoke this animal, increasingly gives itself over to the grandiose pronouncements of Biblical prophets, above all Jeremiah, but also Job. It is, ultimately, the City, Berlin, who pronounces and declares—in the acts of love and violence, the sincere efforts at respectability, the participation in organized crime, and the inevitable but tragic betrayal at the heart of human interaction by one Franz Biberkopf. Biberkopf’s personal language and articulations, whether thought or articulated, are sometimes but not always indistinguishable from the narrator’s designs. As the most tenuous construct of narrative reportage, Biberkopf’s sensibility as the transcript of his cognitive processing, becomes a cloud-chamber, a panorama, a moving picture, above all, a virtual simulacrum of the City during these fateful years of development and decline. The character Biberkopf is the allegorical hostage to the playing out of this irreducibly Berliner urban history and scene. The City Berlin anoints Biberkopf as its larger-than-life, whether in exaltation or abjection, major prophet, even while we discover his fate to be defeat and madness. Biberkopf is the one with the sharpest hearing, the one most attentive to the City’s introjective moans, exaltations, exclamations, expletives, whatever introjections might be. (The term is explicable, warrants definition, from several theoretical points of view. Introjections may or may not be the expressions or extensions of consciousnesses or minds. We surely need to take up this term, and will.) Biberkopf is the not so secret agent of the introjections that the City emits as its irreducible and most persistent language. To the extent that introjection involves poetic compression and shorthand, the paradigmatic urban insider is its ultimate poet as well as its Biblical prophet. As one privy to the secret expression of the City to itself, Biberkopf is the prototype to the angels in Werner Herzog’s trend-setting full-length feature, “The Wings of Desire.” They, like the Biberkopf of the late Weimar period two generations before them, hear the outpourings of the urban denizen, hear the City speaking to itself. The City speaks, more powerfully in this novel than in any other I have ever read. It speaks through Biberkopf, but this does not perforce reduce him to a

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formal experiment, say the ultimate extension of the interior monologue, a narrative technique associated above all with James Joyce, or erlebte Rede. While Biberkopf is made possible by such literary experiments, he is by no means exclusively their creature. Berlin Alexanderplatz is indeed a narrative tour de force. Döblin achieves its stunning impact through vacillations between Biberkopf’s more adult or rational ruminations and the more introjective verbal sludge closer to his core linguistic processors, through fade-outs between the everyday business of narrative art, staging episodes and dialogue, moving characters in and out of the action as they develop, and the primal articulations and architraces to which language owes its very Being. Laudable and decisive to literary history though Joyce’s experiments, above all in Ulysses, in splicing narrative articulation back and forth, in unmarked fashion, between the apparatus of the novel and its telling characters may be, Döblin, in the novel under discussion, brings this play and peek under the chassis of narrative undecidability to new lengths and into new abysses. Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom, of Ulysses, are nothing if not genteel, anständige surrogates, even if Bloom plays the poet of everyday life to Dedalus’s high artiste. Their imagined and transcribed thoughts betray an irreducible aesthetic refinement as they collide into and converse with other characters. The dual main characters may exist at an extreme of cultural refinement, but their encounters, all the more so with the intuitive and free-associative Molly, end up affirming and entrenching the construct and traditions of “consciousness” itself. Biberkopf’s sensibility, plastered by Döblin over every page of Berlin Alexanderplatz, a file hacked, corrupted, and reformatted by every extreme— socio-political, cultural, aesthetic—of the twentieth century, is the limit-case and irreversible Untergang of “consciousness” or “mind.” It is on multiple levels that the biographical and literary lives of Joyce and Döblin are intertwined, if in no other way, in translation. Joyce’s Parisian intime and the earliest translator of segments of Finnegans Wake into French, Eugene Jolas, was also commissioned to translate Berlin Alexanderplatz into English. This alone is a remarkable feat on the part of a native Alsatian with a transAtlantic early life that shuttled between the United States (New York City, Pittsburgh) and France. All the more remarkable, then, that in addition, he was an esteemed overseas journalist and in 1927 founded transition, a modernist review noted for the pivotal texts it published in translation, which he also coedited over its significant run. Berlin Alexanderplatz in English, then, benefits not only from Jolas’s exemplary amalgam of linguistic competences, his ongoing work for the international desk of several publications, his many acquaintances in the hub of modernist improvisation, and his own literary invention in prose as well as poetry. Berlin Alexanderplatz in English is a poetic creation in its own right, residing in a universe parallel to that of its “original,” relating to it with the strangeness and alienation characteristic of Walter

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Benjamin’s theory of translation. Jolas expands upon, takes liberties with, the very liberties that Döblin exercises in order to liberate Joycean articulation from the bastions of high art, to displace peripatetic aesthetic discovery from the sedate boulevards and streets of Paris and Dublin to the mean streets of crime and political destabilization fueled by cynical, rampant polarization. As pivotal as Franz Biberkopf’s sensibility or cognitive processing may be to the novel, as its preeminent display, screen, manifold, or filter, the novel’s ultimate language or idiolect is that of the city itself, and by “City” I mean Berlin. The hand and task I’m dealing out to myself, then, in this essay, in the hope I can work through an arbitrary but intriguing set of narrative cards, includes the following elements: (1) Establishing that any memorable city or settlement speaks, with a characteristic idiom, dialect, patois, vocabulary, and diction, autonomous of any particular speakers or fictive constructs. Indeed, anything known about the city or settlement in question is transmitted far more by its collective local urban dialect than by such empirical features as its buildings, neighborhoods, industries, and so forth (even though Döblin is resolute in encompassing such features, even the numbers of different animals awaiting slaughter in its main abattoir, within his overall census of Berlin). (2) Proving the close proximity of the nexes of urban activity and commerce—industrial, financial, legitimate, marginal, and sexual—to the engine-room of hard-core urban articulation. The coincidence between the hubs of urban transaction and the engines of urban dialect bespeaks the close adjacency between linear stages of industrial production engineered within the nineteenth-century British factory. This acceleration of production by means of spatial telescoping was one of the capital—no pun intended— observations that Marx made regarding the emergent nineteenth-century factory-system. (3) Insisting on the introjective buzz, hum, beat of the urban articulation invading and virus-like taking over of Biberkopf’s staged cognitive processing at the crucial junctures of the novel: his release from prison, his first regaining his city-legs, and the defeat of his powerful predilections to equilibrium and equanimity in his dealings at the hands of his arational, unconditional, subliminally homosocial, boundless, and proliferating adversarial rivalry with Reinhold. A pivotal underlying theoretical issue here is whether the construct of introjections is irreversibly nuanced and corrupted by the structures, presumptions, and history of subjectivity, or whether something like the impersonal, unattributed, and collective introjections of a city, a system, an assemblage, or a machine is possible. The construct of introjections appeals to me in the context both of Berlin Alexanderplatz and the fashion that cities speak, even noting that its history derives from the object-relations and interpersonal schools of psychology and psychiatry, as articulated, for example, by Heinz Kohut and Otto Kernberg, for one overarching reason: the term

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straddles a certain primitive or archi-articulation and persistence in the psychological sphere and a compression, resonance, and color that can only be described as poetic. Introjections are where non-negotiable psychological trauma and pain become poetry. The narrative of Berlin Alexanderplatz is unique within the canon of literary modernism, to my knowledge, both in its highly striking reversions to medieval rhymed prose and in the fluidity with which it allows itself to be overtaken by Biblical, above all prophetic language. Poetry, with the most persistent and haunting tattoo or refrain, is Döblin’s weapon of choice to indicate when Biberkopf’s cognitive processing is shifting gears, is autopoietically adjusting to new turbulence. Introjection, in the full nuance of meaning that it sustains, may emerge as one of the best cards I have to play in responding to the heavily persistent, clipped, and lyrical language emerging in the narration as Biberkopf takes in the rapidly attenuating craziness of the novel’s time and place.

2. Berlin on Line Is this a distinctively Berliner concatenation of historical events, locations, expressions, perspectives, and outcomes that Döblin assembles for us in what might be titled, after the Brechtian style and with Brechtian detachment, “The Rise and Fall of Franz Biberkopf”? (Döblin’s prefacing each of the novel’s nine Books with an ironic caption highlighting Franz’s declining circumstances confirms this nod in the direction of Brechtian theatricality throughout the novel.) Gimme a break! A significant share of Döblin’s work on location and mood is directed specifically at conveying a Berliner ambiance. In no way above the nineteenth-century anthropological fascination of a Fontane or a Hardy, Döblin couches a more than symbolic portion of the dialogue in unmistakable local dialect, written out phonetically: hence a full complement of nischts, juts (gut), Jotts (Gott), keens (kein), oofs (auf), gloobens (glauben), and so forth. The Berliner patois reaches its crescendos during frequent barroom scenes at which Franz assists, during which Döblin takes on the Joycean challenge of making multiple-character dialogue pointed and believable, and in conversation between the novel’s leading ladies. Sexual relations, under Weimar economic conditions, amount to a volatile cloud-chamber of short-lived elective affinities motivated, significantly if not exclusively, by financial uncertainty and dependence. The attenuated Berlinese that Mietze and Eva speak as they negotiate Franz’s impregnating the latter (her partner, Herbert, has no desire

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to procreate) highlights the fact that improvised domestic arrangements are particularly strategic to working-class girls’ and boys’ getting ahead. Berlin is, then, within the confines of this particular mega- and metanarrative experiment, a particular Flache or extent, whose organized subsystems of trade, transportation, housing, nutrition, and even sexual commerce are all folded into Döblin’s overarching census or survey of urban life or flow. (As we shall see, the overview itself has far-reaching consequences for twentieth-century German culture, even beyond the cadre of literature. The quasi-scientific detachment of an urban census or survey in the background of the narrative strikingly sets off the violence and passion coloring a preponderant share of the novel’s human events.) As a spatial view-finder to the novel, the contiguous extent of Berlin functions as the hub or switch from which the ramifications of environment, social milieu, event, and dramatis personae set out. Hence Döblin’s fascination with the various trains and bus-lines of the public transportation system that he takes over from Joyce’s Ulysses. The centrality of Alexanderplatz, as a regional transportation hub as well the commercial district serving some of Berlin’s best known proletarian neighborhoods, only heightens the degree to which Berlin functions as a systemsnexus as well a particular urban environment and an atmospheric generator. Berlin is also, though, within the framework of the novel, a particular dialect of the German language, marked not only by a specific pronunciation and cadence but in its bearing, its pronounced earthiness and boldness in characterizing relations and transactions not of the most edifying or refined character. Berlin thus becomes an idiom of relationships, events, and the acceleration and violence with which they transpire as well as a specific patois of linguistic iterations. Berlin speaks to us, then, throughout the novel. Its signal varies from an upfront foregrounding of transportation, construction, and commercial projects transpiring in the interregnum between 1927 and 1929 to a subliminal background hum never allowing us to forget where we are and with whom, fictionally, we are dealing. Indeed, the novel, having established Franz’s persona, having gotten Franz on his feet so to speak, begins Book 2 with an extended Berlin gazetteer. After reproducing the graphic icons associated with the major Berlin municipal divisions, the narrative directly proceeds to survey the comings and goings and doings of Rosenthaler Platz, with detailed attention to its transportation service. Car No. 68 runs across Rosenthaler Platz, Wittenau, Nordbanhof, Heilanstalt, Weddingplatz, Stettiner Station, Rosenthaler Platz, Alexanderplatz, Straussberger Platz, Frankfurter Allee Station, Lichtenberg, Herzberge Insane Asylum. The three Berlin transport companies—streetcar, elevated and underground, omnibus—form a tariff-union. Fares for adults are 20

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pfennigs, for schoolchildren 10 pfennigs, reduced fares allowed for children up to the age of 14, apprentices and pupils, poor students, war cripples, persons physically unfit for working as certified by the district charity offices. Get to know about the lines. During the winter months the front entrance hall shall not be opened for passengers entering or leaving, 39 seating capacity, 5918, to alight from the car, warn the motorman in time, the motorman is forbidden to converse with passengers, getting off or on while the car is in motion may lead to fatal accidents.1 This passage may well be most striking in the comprehensiveness and exactitude of its descriptions, to whatever Berlin subject-matter they happen to apply. The passage progresses form the route of Car No. 68, to the fares for the various categories of passengers, to the rules pertaining to them, but also to the conductor.2 In each of these subject-areas, the constant is the obsession with detail, the marshaling of exactitude in order to create a sense of urban inhabitants’ intimate familiarity with their municipality. Döblin’s cue in such passages may again be Joyce, the scientific overviews of the Dublin water system and the global aquifer seeded within the question-and-answer format of Ulysses’ “Ithaca” episode. This omnibus passage is at the same time a Möbius strip of sharply different rhetorical modes, gliding seamlessly from objective description to admonition in keeping with the rules of proper behavior on public vehicles. In this and similar passages, particularly those presuming to know Berlin in its widest outreach and down to its smallest details, Döblin betrays his own formation as a medical practitioner with a neurological specialization. So prominently does the City of Berlin loom as the only character big enough to stand up to Franz that Döblin channels his considerable scientific expertise and orientation into a new science summoned into Being for purposes of fictive atmospherics and verisimilitude: the science of Berlinology, in which he happens to be the leading expert. By means of suggestion both subliminal and not at all so, Döblin inculcates the novel’s readers into this new field of knowledge. The passages fanning out from the initial close-up of Rosenthaler Platz include the following formulations: The wide Brunnenstrasse runs north from this square, the A.E.G. runs along its left side in front of the Humboldthain. The A.E.G. is an immense enterprise [ungeheures Unternehmen], which embraces, according to the 1928 telephone directory: Electric Light and Power Works, central Administration, NW 40, Friedrich-Karl Ufer 2-4, Local Call and Long Distance call office, North 4488, General Management, Janitor, Electric Securities Bank, Inc., Division for Lighting Fixtures, Division for Russia, Oberspree Metal Division, Treptow Apparatus Plant, Brunnenstrasse Plant,

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Henningsdorf Plant . . . Wilheminenhofstrasse Plant, Rummelsburger Chaussee, Turbine Plant NW, Huttenstrasse, 12–16.3 Doblin’s predilection for lists, his unique practice of citing a place, transforming a complex of buildings into what can only be described as a citation of an urban quarter, underpins the graphic imprint Berlin, and only Berlin, makes on this novel. If the narrative’s frequent recourse to angels and apocalyptic imagery from the Bible (notably the Whore of Babylon) signals impending catastrophe to the urban complex of Berlin, the meticulous, even somewhat obsessive notation of street-clusters, public transportation vehicle routes, and establishments on a certain street corner serves a complementary, but closely related function. Döblin commits the exhaustive lists in the novel to a fictive time-capsule of 1927–1929 that might possibly survive the immanent disaster even when buildings, locations, functions, and individual people may not. One of the fascinating urban rhythms that Döblin establishes particularly early in the novel is an abrupt cutting between the magisterial, quasi-scientific overviews sampled above and “slices of life” finding Berliners at work, play, and sometimes in sexual commerce. This is of course above all a cinematographic practice, redolent of the critical splicing through which Walter Benjamin strung together the diverse materials comprising the various Convolutes of his Arcades. The passage extending out from the survey of Rosenthaler Platz continues in this vein: From the south the Rosenthaler Platz runs into the square. Across the way Aschinger provides food as well as beer and drink, music, and wholesale bakery. Fish are numerous, some are happy when they have fish, and others are unable to eat it, eat more fish, the healthy slenderizing dish. Ladies’ stockings genuine artificial silk, here you have a fountain pen with a 14-carat gold point. On the Elsasser Strasse they have fenced in the whole street leaving only a narrow gangway. A power engine puffs behind the billboards. BeckerFiebig, Building Contracter Inc., Berlin W 38. There is a constant din [Es rumort], dump carts are lined up as far as the corner, on which stands the Commercial and Savings Bank, Deposit Branch L, Custody of Securities. Payment of Safety Deposits. Five men, workmen, kneel in front of the bank driving small stones in the ground. Four persons have just gotten on a No. 4 at Lothringer Strasse, two elderly women, a plain man with a worried look, and a boy with a cap and ear-muffs. The two women are together. They are Frau Plück and Frau Hoppe. They want to get an abdominal bandage for Frau Hoppe, the older woman, because she has a tendency to navel hernia.4

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This particular sequence, the final segment of the prose passage initiating Book 2 that I will cite, revels in the emergence of “real-life” people out of the complex and fast-paced montage of Berlin place-names, scenes, inscriptions, and facts out of which Döblin fashions the novel’s persistent cosmopolitan surround. The novel seems to be saying here: “I bet you thought we’d never get to the human dimensions of the wider flows and energies being played out here.” It is for each reader to determine Döblin’s success in synthesizing characters, transformations, and events in keeping with what has to count as the novelistic environment: Weimar Berlin. There is surely no more striking instance of the mutual synergy and accommodation between the city and the particular literary invention to which it gives rise than the detailed conjuration of the main Berlin slaughterhouse and the processes within it. The slaughterhouse is both just another housing and traffic hub in the metropolitan complex and a location of inexhaustible symbolic value. Its residents are nutritional animals, and the architectural corrals and passageways lead to their slaughter. At some point on the symbolic register, the cows, sheep, and pigs become the Berliners, not yet quite aware of the disaster they face. By the time Döblin takes on his slaughter scene, among the most vivid in the history of the novel, his narrative practice— implanting a human drama that in this case is just as much animal within a pronounced milieu of urban acceleration, hyper-stimulation, and empirical objectivity—has been well established. It comes as no surprise, then, to learn the exact location of the slaughterhouses (“from Eldenaer Strasse across Thaerstrasse across Landsberger Allee as far as Cotheniusstrasse along the Belt Line Railway”); or their extent (“47.88 hectares, equal to 118.31 acres”); or the initial construction costs (“27,083,492 marks were sunk into this construction, of which sum the cattle-yards cost 7,682,844 marks and the slaughter-house 19,410,648 marks”).5 The narration, as it introduces us to this most striking Berlin location, furnishes a comprehensive list of types of employee: “There are 258 employees in the organization: among them are veterinaries, inspectors, branders, assistant veterinaries, assistant inspectors, permanent employees and laborers.” It is, moreover, fully in keeping with Döblin’s will to leave us with a statistically accurate and comprehensive Berlin testament or transcript—even within the framework of a highly allegorical work of fiction—that he records the official census of the animals in the slaughterhouses: “Cattle-market supply: Hogs 11,543, Beef 2016, Calves 1920, Mutton 4450.”6 (Döblin’s utter comfort with statistics and the pictures they generate is yet another truly distinctive feature of Berlin Alexanderplatz.) But the full urban imprint of Berlin emerges from the trays of photographic developing chemicals only with Döblin’s vignette of a slaughtered calf. The pictorial vividness with which the image emerges enlists the tradition of the Flemish or Dutch still-life in service of an urban Real that Döblin and Joyce had

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few equals in accessing. Out of respect for the citational experiments that Döblin shared with the Benjamin of The Arcades Project, I will allow the passage to speak for itself: And now the animal lies alone, wretchedly on its side (jämmerlich auf der Seite), just the way he tied it. All over the hall there is gay noise, people are working, dragging things around, calling to each other. The severed head hangs frighteningly by the hide, between the two table-legs, running over with blood and saliva. [Schrecklich hängt der Kopf abgeklappt am Fell herunter, zwischen den beiden Tischbeinen, überlaufen von Blut und Geifer.] The tongue, thick-blue, is squeezed between the teeth. And terribly, terribly, the animal rattles and groans on the bench. The head quivers on the hide. The body on the bench becomes convulsive. [Und furchtbar, furchtbar rasselt und röchelt noch das Tier auf der Bank. Der Kopf zittert am Fell. Der Körper auf der Bank wirft sich.] The legs palpitate, jerk; childishly thin, knotty legs. But the eyes are quite fixed, blind. They are dead eyes. This is a dead animal.7

3. Urbane Introject The preeminent narrative technology of Berlin Alexanderplatz involves a freeze-frame or meltdown of first Franz Biberkopf’s and then other surrogates’ transcribed customarily rational ruminations into the grandiloquent, formulaic, lyrical discourse often associated with and deriving from such artifacts as the Bible (particularly the Prophets and such pointedly poetic books as Psalms and the Song of Solomon), classical epics (above all their recurrent epithets), and medieval and Renaissance spiritual allegories. Given Biberkopf’s status as a non-exceptional man, a child of his times, it is not clear what, if anything, is lost when the habitual verbal mapping of his cognitive processing slows down and morphs into simplistic verbal ejaculation and repetitive formula. The lapses, if they are such, into urgent, repetitive formula and simplification, do mark traumatic changes of status in Biberkopf’s living conditions—involuntary limitations on his capabilities to earn, losses and replacement of his domestic partners—and these, in turn, are keyed to certain pivotal socio-political events of the late-Weimar period. Before further pondering the highly distinctive literary phenomenon of a novelistic discourse designed with different ecologies or sub-climates the often unmarked transitions between which perform a particularly resonant

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character’s vicissitudes during unusually turbulent historical times and socio-political sea-changes, I want to furnish two particularly suggestive early examples—but among many possibilities—of what I am talking about. Note in advance, though, that the narrative dissolves or freezes that I am invoking beg to be characterized along several simultaneous modal continuums. We can think in the same instance of Franz’s discursive regressions as switches from prose to poetry, from open-ended narration in the hands of a character to formulaic closure and predictability, or, in psychoanalytical parlance, from free-association to persistent primitive introjections. Döblin’s innovation, then, does not merely involve a remarkably sustained synchrony between a turbulent historical moment and the stylistic palette of articulations set off in the simulated cognitive processes of a particularly appealing, even while morally repugnant character; it demarcates that sector of modernist fictive improvisation where relations between discourse design, narrative structure, and the psychological constitution of fictive surrogates enter an unavoidable feedback loop of coincidence and mutual concussion. Biberkopf’s persona is at once such a radical experiment in fictive narration, style, and psychological simulation that it calls off all bets on the novel as a set piece or known quantity. The narrative’s pronounced shuttling between differentiated climates, intensities, and sequential stages of articulation raises the most fundamental questions regarding the staging of monologue and dialogue in literary artifacts: (1) Is poetic shorthand and density the base-position for more attenuated modes and manifestations of expression? The fluctuation between prose and poetry is manifestly decisive to the structure as the characterization of this novel and likely in more fictive artifacts than we generally approach in this regard. Among many possible ways of characterizing this relationship, does poetic compression relate to prose in the manner of the system to its environment in the systematic elucidations and hypothesis of Anthony Wilden, Niklas Luhmann, and others? (2) Does customary, everyday expression, by all accounts manifestation and even hostage of the Symbolic domain, reach, whether backward or down, to a non-fungible stratum of the Real, still manifest only in language and hence also a neighboring linguistic program within the Symbolic? The invocation of these Lacanian categories apropos of the novel raises a much larger question: does the rhetoric of introjections or any construct deriving from the history and psychology of the subject retain anything indispensable to tell us, in an age of cybernetics and Cognitive Science, about literature and other cultural artifacts? (3) Is the sense, however fleeting, that can be made of a world, of a constellation of mutually referential artifacts and social configurations, itself invariably hostage to the less articulate throbs of the linguistic engine-room, the inchoate moans of the most persistent formations and exclamations, to which it is fated, like Biberkopf himself, to return and devolve?

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The first indication of introjective wiring in Biberkopf’s articulation apparatus even predates his reinstatement to the working-class Berlin community. It is an artifact of his bewilderment on being first released from prison. He has given himself over to some working-class traditional Jews, who have discovered him mumbling and singing in the inner court of a building. Their social marginality approximates his own. They in effect offer him a narrative halfway house, midway between prison and his customary Berliner existence. To distract him, Nachum, his host, tells him stories, notably of Stefan Zannovich, the Jewish arriviste from Albania, the toast of Vienna and Padua on his way to no good. The moral lesson here, about never becoming uppity, perhaps directed at another Stefan as well, Stefan Zweig, serves Biberkopf well while reinforcing a sense of expendability and caution in Nachum and his brother, Eliser, who share only one thing in addition to their religion: unceasing all-out sibling rivalry. Having been deposited in a living-room by Nahum, playing good Samaritan, let the following serve as a petri-dish to Franz’s earliest thoughts: The discharged convict was sitting alone. There comes a call like thunder’s peal, like billows’ roar and clash of steel. He was riding in the car, looking out the window, the red walls were visible between the trees, manycolored leaves were raining down. The walls stood before his eyes, he looked at them from the sofa, kept on looking at them. A fellow’s very lucky to live within these walls, he knows at least how the day starts and how it goes on. (Franz, you wouldn’t hide, I hope, four years you’ve been hidden, look around, this hiding will have to stop some time.) [Franz, du möchtest dich nicht verstecken, du hast dich schon die vier Jahre versteckt, habe Mut, blick um dich, einmal hat das Verstecken doch ein Ende.] All singing, whistling, and noise is prohibited. The prisoners must immediately rise in the morning at the signal to get up . . .8 It’s clear even from this brief extract that released from prison, Franz hasn’t regained his sea-legs; indeed, his condition in the passage illustrates Kafka’s phrase, “seasickness on land.”9 The chaotic and turbulent conditions, with the sudden onset and stark arbitrariness of the weather, that will color Franz’s experience and determine his vicissitudes, are earmarked from the outset of this significant introductory passage. Franz is sitting on a sofa in the temporary haven offered by the orthodox East European Jews, but he is also still riding on the No. 41 Streetcar on which he briefly reacquainted himself, à la Rip van Winkle, with the Berliner street-scene immediately upon departing prison. Not only is the framework or view-finder to what might be characterized, in Kantian terms, as Franz’s “unity of Apperception” characterized by turbulence and sudden, unannounced, and unmotivated shifts and changes of

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scene. As the passage is formulated, he is sitting on the Jews’ sofa and in the moving streetcar at the same time. He is passing by the trees along the street as they disencumber themselves of their fall foliage while he is sitting stockstill. Without break or articulation, he re-experiences the protocols and routines of Tegel prison while sitting in the living room. Not only is the lifelike recall of enclosure in the prison noteworthy in itself: Franz re-experiences the prison verbally. The specific phrasing of the prohibition against noise-making for one fleeting moment becomes the text of his mind, of his cognitive defile. Through this narrative phrasing, Franz already reveals himself as an encyclopedic garbage dump, an automobile graveyard, of pre-existing verbiage, from a vast range of sources. He will either recall, spit out, or sing elsewhere in the novel readymade formulations from the Bible, the national and Prussian civil and criminal legal codes, national anthems, war hymns, and popular songs, public relations enticements regarding Berlin, newspaper headlines, and pitches for odd commodities he’s selling. Written very much in prior knowledge, Berlin Alexanderplatz aspires to the encyclopedic grandeur we associate with works including Ulysses, A la Recherche du temps perdu, and Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften. There is an uncanny sustained coincidence and simultaneity between Franz’s “lived” experience and his mind as a perverse, everyman’s compendium of the texts comprising and constituting the worlds he inhabits: Berlin, the ex-con, unemployed populations, the sexual community of fast turnaround and occasional forays into prostitution and pimping. Berlin Alexanderplatz is a text very much written under the aura of twentieth-century fictive prose marked in its prolixity and elliptical wandering. Stylistically, it joins the above-mentioned novels, Das Schloß, Finnegans Wake, The Making of Americans, and Beckett’s Trilogy. The passage immediately above only initiates a remarkable duplicity sustained throughout the rambling novel. This fluctuation is between the classical presumption entertained by fictive simulation, to track and monitor experience, and the central character’s status as a virtual archive of his historical moment, something like a walking Benjaminian Arcades Project. By the end of the same early chapter in which Franz seeks shelter only to find that he remains imprisoned in his past, one of the novel’s defining characteristics and tendencies will have been introduced: a repetitive language of captions to the emergent events and contingencies, one both embroidering the action and stopping it dead in its tracks. The formulas often derive from the Bible. The meta-dramatic captions repeat with the persistence of introjections, in the psychoanalytical literature, a substratum of hard-core enunciations about the self and the world, fateful, because often self-fulfilling, a constellation of hard-wired predications. It turns out that the communal rabbi would rather that Franz not be on the premises:

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“Let him scream as much as he wants to. Let him do as he pleases. But not in my house. Open the door for him.” “What’s the matter, haven’t you got noise here anyway?” “Don’t bring people here who make a noise. The daughter’s children are sick . . . I got enough noise already.” . . . The redbeard grasped the man by the hands. Come along . . . We’ll go somewhere else.” . . . With sparkling eyes the old man looked at the strange man who was now pleading. Thus spake Jeremiah, we would have healed Babylon, but she is not healed, forsake her, and let us go everyone into his own country. A sword is upon the Chaldeans and upon the inhabitants of Babylon. [Mit funkelnden Augen betrachtete der Alte den fremden Mann, der bat. Sprach Jeremia, wir wollen Babylon heilen, aber es ließ sich nicht heilen. Verlaß es, wir wollen jeglicher nach seinem Lande ziehen. Das Schwert kommt über die Kaldäer, über die Bewohner Babylons.] “If he doesn’t keep still, send him away.” “All right, all right, we won’t make any noise. I’ll sit with him, you can depend on me.”10 This passage becomes prophetic for the entire novel, and not merely because of the reference to Jeremiah. In many respects Berlin, in the build-up to World War II at the end of the Weimar period, is a sister city to the Babylon of Prophets. Bedeviled by poverty, unemployment, overpopulation, and political instability, it also has an enormous amount in its favor: constant renovation and development; a diverse, urbane, witty, and enterprising population. Yet Berlin, like Biberkopf himself, is not in a strong position to reverse its fate, to stem the mounting tide of corruption, anarchy, and susceptibility to political extremism. If only by dint of its vibrant and ubiquitous skin-trade, Berlin is one of the Whore of Babylon’s regular haunts. It is perhaps fitting that a rhetoric of Babylon, spanning the novel, emerges during one of the few moments when Franz has appealed to the succor and hospitality of the Jews. But what is crucial, in this preliminary instance, is that the reference is seamlessly spliced into the action by the narrator. There is no question that phrases regarding Babylon mixed into a realistic scene of observation of an over-aged street-urchin by a rabbi are anomalous. And we know that the state of Biberkopf’s sensibility in this transitional moment is at best confused. But the unmarked and objective grafting of the verbiage regarding Babylon leaves us in the lurch. At this point it is by no means Biberkopf’s language, whether enunciated or thought. Yet the abrupt shift from the here-and-now in one of Berlin’s many possible margins (political, economic, sexual as well as Jewish), the cut to Babylon as doomed imperial capital, as city of unrestrained corruption and lust—as an act of weaving or montage— bespeaks the disbelief and discombobulation that are both Biberkopf’s starting point and his ongoing condition. Babylon is one of the novel’s privileged allusive

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signifiers. It, along with the grim reaper, Death, is on a short list of recurrent meta-dramatic icons or talismans announced in reiterated formulas or epithets. From its very first appearance, Babylon thus establishes ongoing uncertainty and even undecidability as to whether the narrative’s successive articulations and qualifications derive primarily from its dramatic situation and historical context or from the cognitive processing of one Franz Biberkopf. Biberkopf’s wonder, mystification, miscalculation, temperamental losses of self-control, confusion, bewilderment, and ultimate thwarting, become, in the broadest sense, a framework, or environment, if you will, for a broad, multifarious, and often conflicting input, the socio-political and cultural conditions of Weimar and its historical backdrop as encountered by a paradigmatic composite surrogate. Neither is the character Franz Biberkopf reducible to a set of associations and cultural allusions filtered through his purported sensibility; nor is the body of information necessary for decoding and monitoring the flows of Berlin in the years 1927–1929 reducible, in complexity or quantity, to the cognitive capability, intelligence, or intellectual background of Franz Biberkopf. The character and the information-flow channeled through his consciousness as a screen implanted in fictive surrogation are parallel universes, with an emphasis on the looseness of the parallelism. They exist in the same milieu. They relate, reciprocally, as system and environment to one another. The environment of the novel is free to channel through the at best loosely knit system of Franz’s simulated consciousness data of a complexity, erudition, and scope beyond that which would be comprehensible to the character, “Franz Biberkopf,” that we extrapolate from the circumstances of his training, career, and so forth from the circumstantial evidence. The counterpoint in the narrative between a somewhat loose accretion of experience by Franz Biberkopf and allied characters and an increasingly persistent refrain of stock citations and formulaic epithets creates a universe in which simulated consciousness and circumstance exist in relation to one another in the loose parallelism and open-ended feedback loops characteristic of “open” or autopoietic systems. In its narrative pyrotechnics, characterological vividness, and in the poignancy and relevance of its sustained allegories of socio-political life within its timeframe, Berlin Alexanderplatz belongs to a very small handful of the greatest novels of the twentieth century. If not broadly recognized as such, this may be due to the horrific nature of the times that it showcases; also possibly because it was written in German. (Were this the latter case, it would be, to say the least, a highly ironic outcome.) Extending outward from the brief but telling passages we have begun to examine, the novel is characterized by a powerful and striking reverberation between narrative surrogation and the archival accretion of documents, artifacts, historical events, and even striking cultural voices of its moment. The loose, but composed milieu (or “open” system) in which dramatic action and cultural artifacts resonate in counterpoint

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allows for some of the delightful and most outrageous experiments in the history of narrative. While it falls outside the scope of a brief study such as this one to exhaustively catalogue the occasions on which Döblin stretches narrative technology and possibility, certain of the novel’s discursive pièces de resistance cry out to be highlighted. The narrative may not shock us too much when it militates for and allays our fears regarding Cilly, one of the live-in companions Franz briefly takes over from Reinhold;11 or, with Franz’s demise settled, it opens a line of questioning to help facilitate our recall of his predicament.12 We can agree though, I hope, that Döblin approaches the Benjaminian threshold of establishing or dissolving a genre,13 with such improvisations as the following: (1) Conversation with a beer: the beverage Franz consumes before he disastrously joins the Pums gang in a break-in starts speaking back to him. (On the escape route, Franz loses his right arm, having been pushed out of the speeding getaway car in mid-traffic by Reinhold.) The first schooner says: I come from the cellar, from hops and malt. Now I am cool, what do I taste like? Franz says: Bitter, fine, cool. Yes, I cool you off, I cool all men off, then I make them warm and then I dispel their idle thoughts. Idle thoughts? Yes, the majority of all thoughts are idle. Aren’t they?—Maybe so, I leave you the last word. A small brandy stands before Franz with its bright yellow lights. Where did they pick you up?—They burnt me, man.—You certainly do bite, old fellow, you’ve got claws.—Goshalmighty, that’s why I’m a brandy. [Ein kleiner Schnaps steht hellgelb vor Franz. Wo haben sie dir geholt?— Gebrannt haben sie mich, Mensch.—Du beißt, Kerl, du hast Krallen.—Nanu, dafür bin ich dochn Schnaps.]14 (2) The words of five sparrows who, in the late passages when he is already a goner, hover over him on his way to Bayrischer Platz: One of them screams: There he walks. Look, he has a false arm, he hasn’t yet given up the game for lost, he does not want to be recognized. The second says: That fine gentleman has certainly done a lot of shady things. He is a dangerous criminal, they should put him in the bull-pen, he ought to get life. [Was hat der feine Herr schon alles aufgefressen. Das ist ein Schwerverbrecher, den müßten sie einlochen, dem gehört lebenslänglich.] Killing one woman and going around hooking things,

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burgling and then taking another woman, that’s another of his crimes. What does he want now, I ask you? The third: He’s puffing himself up. He’s playing the innocent. He’s aping an honest man. Look at the louse. When a bull comes along, let’s kick his hat off.15 (3) The creatures of the field, Franz’s final interlocutors, herald his fate and few remaining options: Franz’s soul has reached a deep stratum, and consciousness is present only at intervals. The grey mice who live up in the store-room understand him [Eine tiefe Stufe hat schon Franzens Seele erreicht, sein Bewußstsein ist nur manchmal da, da verstehen ihn die grauen Mäuse], so do the little squirrels and field-rabbits leaping outside . . . The mice invite Franz to join them at their meals and not to be sad. What is it makes him sad, they ask. Then it develops that it is not easy for him to talk. They urge him on. Why not make a complete end of it all? Man is a hideous beast: the enemy of enemies, the most loathsome creature on earth, far worse even than the cats.16 Certainly keying on the discursive wild west that Joyce sets into play in the “Nighttown” segment of Ulysses, with Bloom as the primary scout, Döblin stands guilty as charged in pushing even farther the raucous potential of the animate (as in animals) and the inanimate (as in beer and brandy) in novelistic dramatic situations. Indeed, the novel may not fully recover from the talking beverages, sparrows, and mice in the medley of extracts above until Haruki Marukami, in Kafka on the Shore, activates a character such as Nagata, who functions in the novel primarily as a cat-talker (if not whisperer).17 Franz’s rapport to his most outrageous interlocutors is complex, openended, and tenuous. His economic marginality, ill-chosen friends and associates, and the allegro tempo of his romantic life have so reduced him, the novel suggests—in the direction of what may be described as bare life in language—that his natural elective affinities are with the animal and the inanimate. To a certain degree, in the above passages, Franz can only experience what remains of his sense and volition through the cartoon-like, i.e., simplified sensibilities of the sparrows and mice. They may project what little remains of his voice, but they are not simple extensions of his persona. The chief characteristic of Franz’s strangest interlocutors, and the odd conversations in which they engage him, is that they are manifestly Franz and non-Franz at the same time They emerge from whatever capacity in his Imaginary remains, from his dream-world and image-world, but speak to him too from the far side both of the Lacanian Real and becoming-animal. This is

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all by way of suggesting again that the clipped lyrical, formulaic, and introjective counterpoint to the unfolding of events and circumstances in the narrative not only furnishes rhythm and episodic closure. It opens the novel to the contingency and undecidability of its own premises and key dramatic elements. The counterpoint guarantees that the novel will simulate the freefall of an open system, the irreducible contingency in which the Weimar government could have both set out and arrived at its premature ending. It remains for us to deliberate whether repetitive formulas, whose impact on narrative progression is pronounced, such as “There is a mower, Death yclept” (“Es ist ein Schnitter, der heiβt Tod”) or “See how the whore rejoices! The whore of Babylon” (“Sieh, wie die Hure schon frohlockt! Hure Babylon!”), function in an introjective manner; whether it is in any way worthwhile to ascribe “primary process” or introjection to the lyrical component of Döblin’s narrative. There, is, furthermore, a distinction between the onomatopoetic nonsense syllables accompanying Franz’s fluctuations between moods and levels of cognitive processing, as when, as his fate declines, he is interned in the “Buch Insane Asylum, Detention Ward,”18 and the Biblical and other formulas that repeat as if they are primitive, unmetabolized language, but are in fact citations from completely “mature” and in fact culturally enduring texts. There are indeed crucial differences between the childlike language of nonsense syllables and culturally marked formulas accruing from canonical texts, but in this novel, and of course elsewhere, they often coincide. It could be that the recursion to mesmerizing and formulaic language in the narrative is not a matter for the psychology or cognitive theory of primitive or core states but for the technology of citation, as Benjamin makes the central demonstration of The Arcades Project. As a node of cultural articulation emanating from a particular cultural configuration and moment, Franz is more a text-display or -screen than a literary surrogate. If we briefly reference the rich literature of psychoanalysis in search of what it has to say regarding—let’s put it in an odd way—the language of psychic and cognitive life, the language seeming to emanate from articulation’s most archaic and hence indelible developmental stages, this is less under the presumption of locating the definitive solution to the riddle of Franz than in the hope of mobilizing a rich and empowering theoretical rhetoric or tropology. The distinction between more and less modulated language, like that between more and less impulsive behavior, or between raw and processed sewage, goes back deep into the roots of psychoanalytical thought. Freud, unexpectedly invoking a death-drive to supplement the Lustprinzip and inborn aggression as basic instincts, rediscovers, in 1919–1920, when World War I battle fatigue and post-traumatic stress compel him to fashion Beyond the Pleasure Principle, his earlier distinction between the primary and secondary processing of the unconscious. This differentiation has been around at least

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since “the three books that one might call canonical with regard to the unconscious—the Traumdeutung, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, and Jokes (Witz) and their Relation to the Unconscious . . . but a web of examples whose development is described in formulas for connection and substitution.”19 A stratum of impulse or expression is primitive, for Freud, only because it demands direct and unproblematical realization. Secondary process is both the locus of the repression impeding the recognition of our own distressing, hence repressed thoughts and, in its critical capability, the best hope for undoing the blockages in thought and drive. In the long dream-work chapter of the Traumdeutung, the initial entry in Jacques Lacan’s above list, Freud characterizes the counterpoint between an unprocessed substratum of the unconscious and its secondary revision as follows: All that I insist upon is the idea that the activity of the first ψ-system is directed towards securing the free discharge of the quantities of excitation, while the second system, by means of the cathexes emanating from it, succeeds in inhibiting the discharge and in transforming the cathexis into a quiescent one, no doubt with a simultaneous raising of its potential. I presume, therefore, that under the domination of the second system the discharge of excitation is governed by quite different mechanical conditions from those in force under the domination of the first system.20 The first ψ-system is totally incapable of bringing anything disagreeable into the context of its thought. It is unable to do anything but wish.21 The primacy of any possible primary process is at this juncture of Freud’s oeuvre a simplicity of desire, an imperviousness of thought to critical inquiry, particularly of the sort that would weaken and loosen predetermined predilections and judgments. The Freudian imagery of the tension and checking between the outreach for unadulterated pleasure and a critical revision supplying both restraint and release is primarily mechanical and physical. The rhetoric of opposed forces and energy-fields in the psyche, quiescent and active, repressed and released, and, in perhaps Freud’s favorite iteration, bound and unbound, remains with him all the way to his in many respects consummate Beyond the Pleasure Principle: “This raises the question of whether feelings of pleasure and unpleasure can be produced equally from bound and from unbound excitatory processes. And there seems to be no doubt whatever that unbound or primary processes give rise to far more intense feelings in both directions than the bound or secondary ones.”22 The intriguing formulation, “primary process,” remains with us, though, and its suggestiveness in characterizing the persistent cognitive climate of individuals subjected to severe emotional letdowns and traumatized before

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the compensating mechanisms of rationality are fully structured and activated did not elude that generation of psychoanalytical theorists focusing their scrutiny on object-relations. Such practitioners and thinkers as Heinz Kohut and Otto Kernberg indeed made the link between the rawness or roughness they attributed to “primary process” and the formulaic quality of the client’s personal voice-over or running commentary, particularly during persistent moments of psychic turbulence, all the more so when things are going downhill on the interpersonal plane.23 I realize that such a definitive characterization regarding introjections as posited by Otto Kernberg in his “Structural Derivatives of Object Relations,” is relevant to a Weimar period literary surrogate such as Franz only in the most approximate and limited way, but I display it both as a useful way of talking about intrapsychic articulations, whether on the part of real people or literary simulations, and as an extension, in a very particular direction, of Freud’s approach to the riddle of different degrees of rawness, editing, and finitude in our mental processing and experience: Introjection is the earliest, most primitive and basic level in the organization of internalization processes. It is the reproduction and fixation of an interaction with the environment by means of an organized cluster of memory traces implying at least three components: (i) the image of an object, (ii) the image of the self in interaction with that object, (iii) the affective coloring of both the object-image and the self-image under the influence of the drive representative present. This process is a mechanism of growth of the psychic apparatus and it is also used for defensive purposes of the ego. Introjection, then, depends on perception and memory . . . but it transcends these not only by a complex and specific organization of perceptions and memory traces but also by linking “external” perception with the perception of primitive affect states representing drive derivatives.24 Kernberg’s rhetorical stance here, considering he is attempting to characterize and diagnose a highly controversial mindset and set of psychological and interpersonal traits, related to what has been diagnostically termed “personality disorders” is not only directed toward and perhaps even slightly overcommitted to the long-standing Freudian nomenclature; it is reminiscent of Freud’s own slightly defensive posture when he was compelled to present his own prurient interests and nothing if not controversial findings before the general medical community. Hence, the kind of cherry-picking of perceptions and memories that go into the introjective language of intrapsychic communications has to be grounded in “drive derivatives.” This phrase constitutes a clear claim that Kernberg’s commitment to pursuing his clients’

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“object relations” and the language and other personal and interpersonal manifestations (especially problematical) that their object relations have occasioned, is firmly grounded in what Lacan called “the Freudian thing.” And of course, this is the moment when I, in an edifying object-relations iteration of my own and in confirmation of my professionalism, as someone who has followed the progression from structuralism and the Frankfurter Schule into deconstruction, speech-act theory, and rhetorical reading, and who has also been aware of the Lacanian parcours for four decades or so need to ritually rap Kernberg’s knuckles for the theoretically naïve subject/object and inside/ outside boundaries serving as a template to his characterization of introjections. This task now complete, what remains vivid from the above strategic window into Kernberg’s project is the translation of intransigent memory and perception into introjections as a key language of the self; the persistence of introjections in intrapsychic experience and therapeutic intervention as a raw (or “primitive”) manifestation; and its dialectical complexity, akin to the gift trope that Derrida develops in “Plato’s Pharmacy” and elsewhere, as both a catalyst of growth and a restrictive agent of closure and defense. We need to remember that Kernberg, in his own parlance, is attempting here to characterize how people, above all the archivists of particularly traumatic conditions and events, communicate with themselves. The affective coloring of the introjections is an essential aspect of it and represents the active valence of the introjections . . . Thus, introjections taking place under the positive valence of libidinal instinctual gratification, as in loving mother–child contact, tend to fuse and become organized in what has been called somewhat loosely but pregnantly “the good internal object.” Introjections taking place under the negative valence of aggressive drive derivatives tend to fuse with similar valence introjections and become organized in the “bad internal objects.”25 Since introjections are, first and foremost, a mode of linguistic articulation, a style, tempo, and above all tone, Kernberg could have indeed, with the benefit of the Lacanian project, decoupled introjections from drives or “drive derivatives.” He would have recognized, in so doing, a fact of psychoanalytical life established at least since Lacan’s 1953 Discours de Rome that language, as the wiring of sensibility, needs no sub-subjective “derivatives,” whether “agencies,” “drives,” “instincts,” or “infantile stages” to motivate or articulate itself. Hence, the intricate task of correlation that Lacan performs, beginning early on in his work, between the Freudian unconscious and such processes and figures of speech as symbolization, metaphor, and metonymy as their analysis was proceeding through the linguistic theater of operations of the French sciences humaines.

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It is above all as an interface that the mobilization of introjections in objectrelations theory interests us—the productive link between a stage of development, a density and grain of linguistic articulation, and the turbulent climates of emotion and mood. Since poems and novels take these factors seriously into account, even with the theoretical refinements that Kernberg could have added to his scenario, introjections, situated on the cusp between subjective simulation and poetics, emerge as a valuable way of analyzing the status of surrogates such as Franz. It can be no accident that Lacan, having brilliantly militated for the centrality of language as an autonomous energy field and communications system in the Discours, one assigning the major figures of classical rhetoric and modern linguistics decisive psychoanalytical import, chooses to end a communiqué whose strategic role in the politics of psychoanalysis he had calculated, with a cluster of exclamations from Brihadaranyaka Upanishad: That, continues the text, is what the divine voice conveys in the thunder: Submission, gift, grace. Da da da. For Prajapati replies to all: “You have heard me.”26 Alfred Döblin, in the poetics that he devises for Berlin Alexanderplatz, pushes, then, the potential that can be garnered from such variables as nonsense syllables, rhymed prose, and unmarked switches between perspectives and speakers, up to and beyond the known limits. His narratological practice, very specifically designed for this writing-project and its title-city, but conspicuously following in the wake of the Joycean improvisations for Ulysses, elicits the explanations for the clipped and boldface internal communications medium of the psyche deriving from several of the most theoretically far-reaching paradigms of psychoanalysis. In so doing, he sets into play a model of characterization more closely linked to indexicality and the practices and variables of citation than of socio-psychological simulation. It would take a full monograph to exhaustively catalogue his innovations in this domain. What remains possible within the compass of the present exploration is to tease out, in the interest of a fuller sampling, a few more of the variables that Döblin activated in a set of fictive experiments that ended up, in their exceptionality, tangibly simulating the political catastrophes around the novel, in apocalyptic tone as well as cataclysmic communal impact. A hurdy-gurdy grinds away in the courtyard: In Heidelberg town, I lost my heart. That’s for me. I’ve lost my heart, and now it’s gone blooey, and she moons into her lap; it’s gone, so I ain’t got any left; and what’ll I do about it, and if they drag me through the sewer, I can’t do nothin’ about it. [Hab ick ooch, hab mein Herz verloren, und jetzt ist futsch, und plärrt los über ihren

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Schoβ, det is hin, ich hab keens mehr, ick kann sehen wat ich mache, und wenn sie mir durch den Kakao ziehen, kann ich ooch nisht machen.] But my Franz don’t do that, he ain’t no Russian, to go about exchanging women, that’s all a lot of hooey. She stands at the open window in her bleu-checked dressing-gown and sings with the organ-grinder: in Heidelberg town I lost my heart (that’s a deceitful gang; he’s right to smoke ’em out); on a sweet and luscious summer night [Ich hab mein Herz in Heidelberg verloren [det ist eine falsche Gesellschaft, der hat reecht, daß er sie ausräuchert] in einer lauen Sommernacht) (when is he coming anyway; I’ll go meet him on the stairs), I had been hit by love’s old dart. (I won’t tell him a word; I won’t come to him with such mean stories, not a word, not a word. I love him so. Well, I guess I’ll put on my waist.) Her mouth laughed like a red rose bright. And as before the gates we had to part, the last kiss made me see it clear (and it’s true what Herbert and Eva say, they smell a rat, and they just want to find out from me if it’s true; they can listen a long time, they must think I’m a dumbbell, if they want to catch me nappin’!) In Heidelberg Town I lost my heart, it beats on the Neckar’s banks, not here.27 It may well be that Franz’s sensibility and processing comprise the primary display through which the social conflict and historical impacting on the fictive environment of the novel are registered. In the passage immediately above, though, the narrative transcribes Mietze’s thought and emotional climate as she edges toward her fatal excursion in the woods with Reinhold. To the degree that narration in this novel dovetails with cognitive transcription, this process is free to shift to such peripheral characters as Mietze and Reinhold, and it does. Indeed, Franz and Mietze are unidentifiably intertwined at the beginning of the passage, because the hurdy-gurdy man she hears singing in her courtyard is an echo of Franz upon his release from prison, when he could only wander from courtyard to courtyard singing. Mietze’s “interior monologue” affirms her loyalty and emotional attachment to her man. For Döblin as for Joyce, female monologues are powered by the same rhetorical and narratological software as male ones; they are only a bit lighter on internal logic and more trite in subject-matter and concern. The slightly facile but touching tone pervading the above thought-riff derives in large measure from the technique of splicing her reflections with the lyrics of the popular ballad, “Ich hab mein Herz in Heidelberg verloren.” Döblin may even derive more capital from “Ich hab mein Herz” than Joyce does from such standards as “Love’s Old Sweet Melody” populating the pages of Ulysses. He avails himself of the song-lyrics in the above passage as a scaffold for Mietze’s introjective exclamations (e.g., “they must think I’m a dumbbell, if they want to catch me nappin”’). Indeed, the lyrics serve her thought-process as a trellis as

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she progresses from dismissing Reinhold’s allegation that he earlier engaged in a mistress-exchange with Franz to her resolve to preempt Herbert and Eva from meddling in the relationship. Döblin casts Mietze as a naïve even while she turns tricks to support herself and Franz. The scene in which her steady gaze signals her resolute devotion to Franz precedes only by pages a jealous rage— witnessed by Reinhold28—in which the former bloodies her mouth and eyes. As a technology, though, the practice of advancing the story and its action through transcribed cognitive processing is by no means limited to shifts in narrative perspective or projections of specific thought-processes onto certain surrogates. Döblin can indeed be credited with striking, innovative narrative devices implementing the dissolve from conventional third-person storytelling into clipped, charged exclamations. Chief among these may well be the rhymed prose by which he subtly overwhelms and submerges the accretion of events and new “facts” into the backwater. Such a reversal, embellished with poetic legerdemain, transpires with Franz drowning in the truly deep water of the Buch Insane Asylum: When from prison walls returning, he came back, with outlawed feeling, things were now the same no longer, changed in dust they found him kneeling. [Als er aus des Kerkers Mauern wieder kam als fremder Wandrer, war die Welt nicht mehr dieselbe, und er selbst war auch ein anderer.] To the river’s bank he stumbled, but he found the bridge was sundered, sick at heart and full of loathing, back into the night he wandered. All refused to still his hunger (the chase, the chase, the damned chase), bitterness oppressed him starkly, then he yielded to his fury—“Guilty this time,” said Life darkly. (Guilty, guilty, guilty, ah, that’s it, you have to be, you had to be guilty, you ought to be guilty, a thousand times more!) [Schuldig, schuldig, schuldig, ah, das ist es, muß man warden, mußte man warden, müßte man noch tausendmal mehr schuldig warden.] Such a deed is punished harshly, custom, morals have this meaning, to a cell within the prison back he wandered, sadly keening. (Franz, hallelujah, you can hear it, doomed to be a thousand times more guilty, a thousand times more guilty.) Yes, once more a jump to freedom, murder, robbery, and plunder, and without the smallest pity, tear that Beast, Mankind, asunder!) He was gone, but soon in fetters he came back again. How fleeting was his final drunken revel! And Life was the judges’ greeting. (The chase, the chase, the damned chase, he was right; he did the right thing.) [Die Jagd, die Jag, die verfluchte Jagd, er hatte recht, das hat er recht gemacht.] Now he wailed no more for pity. Let them curse! It doesn’t matter!29 The collapse, the utter loss of resilience that threatens Franz the entire novel, in the end hunting him down and smoking him out, is above all a

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Zusammenbruch (breakdown) of modulation and tempo in his own language, not what we could call a nervous (or psychological) breakdown. Franz collapses under the sheer weight of the proliferation of his highly charged, raw, unprocessed reproaches. Döblin, with an even greater gift for equilibrium, for coming directly back from an exhausting expenditure of energy (in Döblin’s role, writerly energy) than his main character, marshals his prose—in phrase, rhythm, style, and tone—to perform this collapse in the mental asylum of Buch. In an exceptional feat of narrative poetry, he rouses his prose to an impossible enactment of the tangible, material, and Real conditions of language. In the wake of this consummate compositional performance, we awake to the singing of angels. Biberkopf’s culmination and fulfillment, which is also his earthly demise, conducts only to writing’s afterlife, the graveyard of its own invariably contingent and occasional articulations. We conclude our own unavoidably incomplete survey of Döblin’s urban introjections in Berlin Alexanderplatz accompanied by these angels. Why do the two angels walk beside Franz, and what child’s game is this, that angels should walk beside a man, two angels on Alexanderplatz in Berlin, in 1928, beside a former murderer, a burglar, and now a pimp? Yes, this tale of Franz Biberkopf, of his hard, true, and revealing existence, has now progressed thus far. Everything is growing clearer and clearer, the more Franz Biberkopf rears and rages. We are nearing the point where everything will become clear. [Ja, diese Geschichte von Franz Biberkopf, von seinem schweren, wahren und aufhellenden Dasein ist nun so weit vorgeschritten. Deutlicher und deutlicher, je mehr sich Franz Biberkopf bäumt und schäumt, wird alles. Es naht der Punkt, wo alles erhellt wird.] The angels talk beside him. Their names are Terah and Serug, and their conversation, while Franz is looking into Tietz’s show-window, runs as follows: “If we take this man away from the Present, and set him elsewhere, in another existence, will he have accomplished what he could have done in the Here and Now? For every thousand beings and their lives, you must know, there are seven hundred, nay, nine hundred, failures.” [Auf 1000 Wesen und Leben, mußt du schon wissen, kommen 700, nein 900 Verhinderungen.] “And what special reason is there, Terah, to protect this man, he is a commonplace man, I see no reason to protect him.” “Commonplace, uncommon—what are these? Is the beggar ‘commonplace’ and the rich man so exceptional? The rich man may be a beggar and the beggar rich tomorrow. [Gewöhnlich, ungewöhnlich, was ist das? Ist ein Bettler gewöhnlich und ein reicher ungewöhnlich? Der Reiche ist morgen ein Bettler und der Bettler morgen ein Reicher.] This man is on the brink of a vision. Many have reached that stage. But he is also on the point, I tell you, of becoming sentient.”30

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4. Angel Eyes We leave Franz Biberkopf in the hands of his apocryphal angels, Terah and Serug. Even they are fated to abandon him. Yet the story in which he looms centrally and large is of decisive import well beyond the late Weimar moment— to how Germans figure their traditional capital city and to what prospects they envision for themselves. Following the manner in which Ulysses encompasses and devours Dublin, Berlin Alexanderplatz, with Biberkopf as its pointer or main indexical sign, offers a bird’s eye, omnibus overview of the city, from Alexanderplatz itself in northeastern Berlin (also Prenzlauerberg in that sector, where the favored watering holes are located), to Schöneberg, in central West Berlin, a residential favorite (Herbert and Eva live here), to the Freienwald Forest in the outlying district to the far northeast, where Mietze meets her violent end and ironically, not far from Bernau, her birthplace. Among Döblin’s many aesthetic achievements in composing the novel is programming Berlin as a virtual space capable of answering to the accelerated social change, diverse economy and social tapestry, stark political polarization and complexity, and luminal lifestyle opportunities confronted both on the eve of World War II and in the Nachkriegszeit by its inhabitants and observers. The dramatic, narrative, demographic, and archival (i.e., allusive) dimensions that Doblin implants into the Berlin of this novel are so striking and resilient that they thrive amid translation into radically different media (notably film) and more than survive transplantation to new epochs and environments. This would be the obvious place to showcase and analyze the power of the two most striking film versions of the novel, Phil Jutzi’s 1931 screen adaptation and Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s magisterial 13-episode translation for TV. In spite of the unavoidable limitations of a feature-length treatment, early on in the age of talkies, Jutzi’s film, completed two years after the novel’s initial publication, succeeds well in evoking the mood of the city and its times. With its own carefully wrought design for fidelity to the novel, Fassbinder’s careful translation into a rendition satisfying both the specifications of TV serials and the standards of art-film, belies the hyperemotional and out-ofcontrol public image attached to this truly rigorous and innovative director, whether by design or not. For all the respect I hold for both of these media translations (despite Fassbinder’s sense that he was starting anew with his own rendition), this essay is not on a direct line to those particular analyses. The next time we encounter the angels who literalize the Biblical component of the introjective vocabulary with which Biberkopf has been programmed since the time of his release from Tegel prison, it is in a Berlin significantly

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delivered from its wartime devastation, distressed at and weary from its arbitrary political segmentation into “Communist” and “free” sectors, and aching to dig out from the apparently infinite and irreducible moral debt incurred by the Nazi regime in its devastating and far-reaching crimes against humanity, whose capital city happened to be Berlin. The angels, who serve as the internal audience to the human drama of Wim Wenders’ narratively and cinematographically innovative “Wings of Desire” (“Himmel über Berlin”), its reduced Greek chorus as it were, are no longer the apocalyptic Terah and Serug, who must abandon the composite child of his times, Biberkopf, to the historical hell and damnation dawning not only on him but on German society in general. These angels, Damiel, played by the ubiquitous Bruno Ganz, and Cassiel (Bruno Sander), are the guiding lights and benevolent spirits of a city ready for the first time to declare a public conscience restored to full working capacity. As odd as their assistance in and attendance to a vast array of domestic scenes and public events often seems to be, Damiel and Cassiel figure and embody the restoration of a transcendental—this in the full Kantian sense—sensibility and capacity to the world of Berlin. (The script is enhanced by some powerful childlike, in this sense introjective, lyrical poetry furnished by Peter Handke. This script-component poetically performs the transcendent sympathy and senses of justice and responsibility that recent history and a Berlin community relentlessly diverse, tolerant, and self-ironic and critical have decisively restarted.) In the background of this inauguration and restoration, two paradigmatic speech-acts, is the sober, relentless, and rigorous course of public acknowledgement of Nazi outrages that the Federal government has mandated, and that the population of Berlin, among other German communities, has pursued. Not only are the children of Berlin again free to gaze skyward up to their ideals and aspirations, where they may in fact catch sight of an angel or two. The heavens again exercise their full magnetism and hope for Berliners. The attraction or draw is reciprocal. There may be angels out there ready in short shrift to renounce their heavenly superiority and privileges if they can access mortals as fetching as Marion, played by Solveig Dommartin. Peter Falk, playing himself as an actor drawn to Berlin in order to act in a dramatic cinema retrieval of the military apocalypse in Berlin at the end of World War II, has renounced his angelic transcendence a generation before Damiel. By the logic of “it takes one . . .,” he immediately recognizes Damiel in his terrestrial emanation as a fallen angel. This irresistible attraction of the terrestrial over the transcendental, at least the draw of Berlin as an urban paradise that has divested itself of its hellish past, is what supplies dramatic tension and closure to a film otherwise devoting lengthy interludes to the angels’ wanderings through a host of onlytoo-human situations and settings. The fact that Marion is a trapeze artist, a

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figure that Wenders and Handke culled from Kafka,31 underscores her interstitial status and the attraction that heaven and Berlin exert over one another. Damiel’s early retirement from the heavenly host in order to get closer to her—Dommartin is an actress who learned her serious acrobatic maneuvers in short order through on-the-job training—is a no-brainer. As suggested, Damiel and Cassiel drift, Benjaminian flâneurs with new-age aspirations, through a full range of human follies and initiatives. Their mien is invariably beatific. They infuse the urban scenes of life at which they assist with infinite sympathy and good will. They sometimes lend a helping hand, but never in a way that reveals them or blows their cover. Their bearing is nothing if not passive, as in Ghandian passive resistance. They are unstated and unrecorded bystanders, unindicted co-conspirators, if you will, to human striving at the level of domestic comedy, not Nazi apocalypse. Nothing could possibly be said against them, could undermine their beatific bearing, except perhaps that Wenders insinuates them into so many scenes and locations, from the municipal library to underground freeform rock concerts, that they sometimes betray the unwelcome intrusiveness of off-duty police officers. But they never stray out of character. I invoke the indelible characters of the angels of “Himmel über Berlin” at the end of an odd excursis on the way the telling cities of our lives have spoken to each of us, regarding the diction of those urban conversations in which we too have participated, in indication of how persistent the urban Imaginary conjured by Alfred Döblin in the late 1920’s has been, how far and wide it’s travelled, in which foreign tongues and media it has spoken. What do Damiel and Cassiel hear as they circumnavigate and observe Berlin from many perches, including the top of the Gedächtniskirsche and the head of angelic Victory atop the columnar monument adorning the Tiergarten? They hear—literally—the internal voices, at introjective levels of emotional and figurative intensity, of the strangers they happen to encounter, children, prostitutes and addicts, retirees fending for themselves. It is Alfred Döblin who, more inventively than anyone else, through certain tricks and devices catalogued above, has programmed virtual fictive space into an echo-chamber for the voices and ejaculations of the surrogates populating its artificial domain. The voices and socio-political forces of Berlin are engaged, for Döblin, in a never-ending debate and cacophony. The voice soundtrack not only includes but is given its character by the introjective formulations of World Literature that have not died, that persist as the readymade captions to historical and political myopia. The compelling epithets and formulas of the Bible, Aeschylus’s Oresteia, and Grimmelshausen’s Simplicissmus, among other enduring works, wander through the introjective virtual space of Berlin Alexanderplatz with the full confidence of any of the surrogates, whether wheelwrights, locksmiths, prostitutes, angels, con-men,

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or burglars. Wenders may have done his part to relieve Berlin of its incredible historical burden in “Himmel über Berlin,” but he paid major and enduring tribute to the parameters and specifications for fictive virtual space and its programming that Alfred Döblin established and inaugurated in his own Berlin simulation, albeit in literary display and configuration. It could be argued, then, that Wenders’ occasionally far-fetched vision of a Berlin approaching full potential in its welcome, tolerance, and cultivated eccentricity, is as faithful to Berlin Alexanderplatz as the film artifacts that Jutzi and Fassbinder consecrated to its name, perhaps even more so. This raises the question of what a translation entails: is it the integrity of a work, the purity of a language or a dialect, the simulation of a moment or setting? Or is it, as I would prefer to think, a displacement or transition that happens at the level of the disparate operating systems of different media or social systems? “Himmel über Berlin” makes no overt reference to Berlin Alexanderplatz, yet it perpetrates while transfiguring its complex rhizome of auditory and vocal inputs and its abrupt landings in diverse locales throughout the heterotopic extent of Berlin. In this respect, Wenders’ reprogramming has carried the novel’s narrative and characterological innovations further, and into newer environments, than the explicitly dedicated adaptations. All this is of decisive import to a Comparative Literature discipline whose domains are now media operating systems rather than national languages, whose primary activities are translation and adaptation rather than anything so forced as comparison, and whose future, such as it exists, depends on autopoiesis and a productive engagement with turbulence rather than the entrenchment of new canons or the enshrinement of new master-figures.

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5 Theory on the Fly: Critical Synthesis under Conditions of Material Pirating and Borrowed Time 1. he figure of the flâneur, in large measure invented by Baudelaire, but elevated to its full notoriety in Benjamin’s writings on the French Second Empire, keeps circulating back in an endless recursive loop to the Parisian haunts of its fascination, inclination, or fatal attraction. My own swings in and out of the virtual environment of The Arcades Project (Das Passagen-Werk)1 over the past decade pursue a parallel cat-and-mouse dynamic. Benjamin rendered the account of modernization in Paris during the nineteenth century, an increasingly urgent preoccupation over the last thirteen years of his life, in snippets of historical documents and twentieth-century accounts, interspersed with his occasional critical syntheses. This is at once a magisterial historicocritical summation, archive, and accounting in its own right and a key instance of what I have elsewhere termed, in recent work, a “dissolving book,” a work that, in the tradition of the Bible itself, the Talmud, Don Quixote, Tristram Shandy, Finnegans Wake, Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach, and Derrida’s Glas, explodes the very formats and parameters indispensable for its legibility under the weight of its ramifications, marginalia, hypertexts, spinoffs, “strange loops,” and free associations.2 The point at which I repeatedly arrive in my gravitation to such expansive and rambling works, those frustrating any attempt to render an authoritative reading or critique of them, is the inescapable realization that they have been always already embedded with many of the key aspects that we attribute to self-referential and autopoietic programs and machines despite their preponderantly arising in an age prior to the hardware. It may be the fate of The Arcades Project to dissolve, having run its course

T

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through a sequence of Convolutes (Konvoluten) or chapters devoted to fashion, iron and glass construction, photography, prostitution and gambling, and Charles Baudelaire among other topoi. But this transpires not before it has embodied, simulated, and performed the full complexity of life, on sociocultural, economic, psycho-social, and even unconscious levels—collective as well as individual, amid extreme conditions of urban density, political theology, corporate hegemony, technocratic reproducibility and power. If The Arcades Project may be said to constitute the very Bible or operating system of industrial modernization, it simulates while it dissolves. It encompasses within its virtual “binding” a storehouse of the complexity embedded in the hypermodernity that it simulates. The Arcades Project is a superclimate of the many zones or neighborhoods making it up. This becomes explicit in Convolute D, juxtaposing Parisian moods with the obsession with the weather running a full gamut of contemporary accounts and signature artifacts of the Second Empire, including Meryon’s engravings, the Baudelairean Fleurs du mal, and Gustave Caillebotte’s signature canvas, “Rue de Paris; temps de pluie” (also known as “La Place de l’Europe,” 1877). Attenuated browsing through this archive and compendium produces a naval pilot’s familiarity with the currents, eddies, and mini-climates among and between the citations, the “information bits” largely composing it. These in turn form the environment in which some of Benjamin’s definitive formulations, on such tropes of modernity as collecting and allegory, the dialectical image, and “petrified unrest” arise. Indeed, within the “framework” of The Arcades Project, Benjamin’s memorable theoretical syntheses “happen” against the backdrop or manifold of the citations of others in a “figure–ground” relation. Within the compass of this enigmatic compilation, Benjamin’s culminating critical crystallizations have been written on borrowed time, under streetconditions simulating the totalitarian anomie that overtook Europe in the decades between the 1920’s and the 1940’s. There is no time in The Arcades Project to accord the overarching critical overview of an epoch, however incisive, the showcase it would ordinarily claim in an academic treatise, a work composed under “normalcy,” with a full measure of disciplinary and institutional stability (if not stasis). Not only was the Passagen-Werk written under conditions of what would now be called extreme precarity;3 the tenuousness of the socio-political as well as personal circumstances under which it was written extends systematically across its composition, progression, and stylistics. The Arcades Project furnishes us with a compelling panorama on the emergence of what I would term “theory on the ground” or “on the run” out of a seemingly chaotic agglomeration of archival materials, retrospective accounts, and critical observations—preponderantly of fragmentary scale and jarring impact. The overarching climate of this Werk is pure turbulence. Even

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approaching social and political catastrophe toward the end of his Parisian run, Benjamin has gathered the telling citations comprising most of The Arcades Project in the Bibliothèque Nationale and other Parisian archives with the same playful inquisitiveness with which the child (another central persona in his critical writings) collects its beloved “good objects,” such as the wastematerials of adult construction and craft, and with them improvises the discoveries of its virtual play-world. Indeed, the multidimensional playfulness of childhood has never abandoned either the figure of the irreducibly historicizing “Sammler” of Convolute I, nor his counterpart, the invariably quirky and even violent allegorist of the same pages, who somehow manages to torque historical reconstruction into full-fledged critique, in its fully radical and incommensurate prescription. The Arcades Project’s most telling “authority” consists in the materials and citations that it can gather and register on its display-screen in a hurry. It is, therefore, the work of philosophy synthesized and formulated under conditions of improvised fieldwork, of what in the social sciences would be termed “quasi-experimentation.”4 Its major theoretical inroads pursue a menagerie of arcane topics: iron and glass as the first inherently “smart” materials to have found widespread architectural and urban deployment; conditions under which a collective socio-cultural “awakening” might be conceivable; the fate of critical lucidity amid the dialectical “winds” of historical catastrophe. One has not “read” The Arcades Project until one has traced the metamorphosis of citational polyvocity and even randomness into stunning critical insight— one that, akin to the Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt (alienation effect), entraps us within the doublebinds of systematic closure, with insight and circumspect emerging only in borrowed time, “on the fly.” It is this crystallization to which the remainder of the essay will be dedicated: to how The Arcades Project, a work overwhelmed from the outset in literary and historical debt to the degree that it is composed preponderantly of citations, liberates itself from the constriction of precedence and predetermination, erupting into a poetics of insight and commitment to ongoing critical discernment and discrimination at all costs. And indeed, for Benjamin, as opposed to subsequent generations of academic professionals, this line of open-ended inquiry and inscription came at all costs: of his patrimony, his home, his library, everything. Benjamin’s radical insistence on allowing the surviving and contemporary materials of Parisian modernization under the Second Empire to speak for themselves may well constitute the defining watermark defining not only The Arcades Project but the entire genre of historical narratives and critical receptions crystallized through compilation and grafting rather than through rendering authoritative commentary. It is of course in the electronic media, under the guise of what we call topically configured websites, that Benjamin’s original genre of convolutes has consolidated itself definitively. In terms of

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contemporary cybernetics, The Arcades Project constitutes a network of textual materials configured under the politics of radical democracy: they have, to the same degree as Walter Benjamin, their “collector” and their “allegorist,” been empowered to speak on behalf of themselves and the perspectives from which they emanate; also among and between themselves. The materials, including the invariably occasional and offhand comments by Walter Benjamin, form the feedback loops and constitute the virtual domain of what Gregory Bateson,5 Anthony Wilden,6 and Douglas R. Hofstadter7 treat as an “open system,” my own term is, again, a “dissolving book.” The diverse materials of The Arcades Project may be also thought of as a climate-zone in which the textual extracts and fragments interrelate as much through the randomness of turbulence as through cumulative argumentation or topical coherence. My purpose in this chapter is to gain some traction on the play between the archival materials of The Arcades Project and the stunningly poetic and epigrammatic formulations (concentrated in Convolutes K–N but by no means limited to them) that were to constitute Benjamin’s consummate additions to the literature of critical theory. I am arguing that the very conditions of material destitution, statelessness, homelessness, and “borrowed time” under which Benjamin lived and labored particularly 1933–1940 played a constitutive role— not only in the formulations on historical epistemology and catastrophe abounding in Convolute N, but in the very possibility for theoretical deliberation and efficacy in the subsequent stages of the modernization whose emergence in nineteenth-century Paris he chronicled and, in keeping with allegory, performed. Without venturing into explicit detail regarding the “survival” of Benjamin’s sensibility as well as ouevre in the post World War II period, I cannot help but surmise the enduring impact of the script of “theory on the fly” upon such master-strokes of twentieth-century critical theory as the following: Jacques Lacan’s crystallizing for his Seminars a prose medium more redolent of the abrupt disruptions and digressions of an analytical session than of a Freudian case-study or “master-elucidation”;8 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s writing their “Capitalism and Schizophrenia” diptych from the perspective of what they term “the body without organs” and “smooth space” rather than from putative hierarchical (and institutional) academic authority;9 and Jacques Derrida’s highlighting, in the decisive allegorical works of his oeuvre—including “Tympan,” “Plato’s Pharmacy,” “The Double Session,” and Glas—the sub-semantic “noise” or static nonetheless of decisive significance both within the architecture and the dismantling of knowledge.10 These memorable critical artifacts, epitomizing the literature of contemporary critical theory, reside at a certain pitch of dramatic uncertainty. In multiple dimensions, they are themselves expressions of a quasi-theory or “theory on the fly,” one fully modulated by conditions of homelessness, transitory

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movement and temporality, and professional instability, that Walter Benjamin first submitted to a comprehensive test-trial or trial-run. What this demonstration presupposes, before it turns, inevitably, to chapter and verse, is a short list of propositions that have crystallized to me over years of deciphering The Arcades Project and encapsulating it for students: 1

Every convolute, that is, loosely thematically organized compartment of The Arcades Project, fluctuates between the materials that Benjamin has found most relevant and a theorization, often but not always bearing Benjamin’s signature, immanent to that particular collation of materials or mini-climate. In Convolute A, where Benjamin has defined the Parisian arcades and what transpired there, as well as introduced, always through the medium of citations, their thumbnail history, the emergent theoretical formulations concern such issues and phenomena as signage and naming itself. Only when Benjamin takes on, in Convolute I, the standardization and new emphasis placed on middle-class residential space—as always, with relevant first-hand accounts and twentiethcentury recapitulations as the intermediaries—does he hazard the theoretical personifications of the collector and the allegorist, both of whom, in different respects, embody the accumulation and display of consumer commodities within the post-Haussmannian apartment. This is to say that in certain designated eddies or back-alleys of The Arcades Project, theoretical formulations advanced initially in a purely local and topical setting, instances including the theory of fashion and the models of historical progression evolving from fashions, or the theory of supplementarity inextricably intertwined with the so-called “blackmarkets” in prostitution and gambling, increase in power or “chunk” themselves into formulations concerning knowledge or writing themselves. This is another way of saying that in certain sections, notably Convolutes K–N, the stage-by-stage theorization of the benchmarks of modernization covered by The Arcades Project loops back upon itself, attaining new levels of programmatic power. The autopoietically upgraded operating system of The Arcades Project turns outward—beyond both Paris and the parameters of its own investigation—toward the very configuration of critique amid conditions of historical catastrophe.

2

I’m implying here that The Arcades Project, not unlike Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, stages some process of increase, or sublimation in conceptual power. But the stages along this progressive realization are anything but the carefully orchestrated, sequentially planted, and dialectically mechanical developments that Hegel plots out for Geist in his Phänomenologie (and in other evolutionary treatises and schemata that it inspired). I will present the inevitable summary of the

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quantum leaps and other “strange loopings” (the term is Douglas Hofstadters’s)11 in theory-power in the course of The Arcades Project with the greatest compression and brevity that I can manage. Among the many wonders of The Arcades Project are the subjects and scenarios that Benjamin selected at the outset of the work as those indispensable to a retrospective processing of modernization in Paris under the Second Empire. How is it that Benjamin could deem the primary materials deployed in the city’s remaking, its subterranean zones, its weather, and even its emotional moods or climate as decisive factors in its modernization and in its enduring ethos and Gestalt? Wouldn’t that mean that materialist history, the account satisfying the Marxian imperative that the impact of labor and the material conditions of life be factored into all retrospective equations, is as much the history of the intangibles as the tangibles? 3

Just as Benjamin places his own comments in the same epigrammatic and fragmentary form as the citations that he has culled from hundreds of sources, there is never any compartmentalization, in The Arcades Project, between the facts and materials of history on the one hand, and meta-critique on the other. We are astonished on two levels that The Arcades Project, once the arcades’ basic historical initiation and the local patois of their signage and vocabulary have been set out in Convolute A, turns to an intense scrutiny of fashion in the nineteenth century, even though this sphere is almost defined by the arbitrary and non-linear stutter-steps between its generations. Not only does Benjamin gather materials on the rationale behind such extreme phenomena as the crinoline (also on its impact on street-traffic); fashion becomes a more compelling mechanism of historical change and development than, say, the history of technology or of war. What I’m suggesting here is that the entire ecology of Convolutes A–I vacillates at all times and in unpredictable ways between the materiality of Paris in the throes of its nineteenthcentury modernization and the near-simultaneous theorization of this process. The theoretical retrospect also amounts to an impact-study of critique in the decades and generations succeeding modernization. In its theoretical articulation, fashion becomes the very model for all culturally motivated historical evolution: “For the philosopher, the most interesting thing about fashion is its anticipations” (from B1a, 1). “To each generation [of fashions] the one immediately preceding it seems the most radical anti-aphrodisiac imaginable. In this judgment it is not so far wrong as might be supposed. Every fashion is to some extent a bitter satire on love” (from B1a, 4). Iron, steel, and glass, by the same token, are not only the underlying building materials facilitating the transformations imposed

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by large-scale industrialization, including the multiplication of the commodities produced and the acceleration of their transport and sale. These materials have, by Benjamin’s account, inverted the classical relationships between form and function in architectural aesthetics. Whether a structure houses machinery or residents, whether it shelters pedestrians or serves as a railroad terminal, means everything in the age of steel and glass. Embedded into the new materials is the intelligence to torque, grow, and evolve with industrialization: It is worth considering . . . whether, at an earlier period, technical necessities in architecture . . . determined the forms, the style, as thoroughly as they do today. With iron as a material, this is already clearly the case, and perhaps for the first time. Indeed the [now citing A. G. Meyer, Einbauten (Esslingen, 1927), p. 23]: “basic forms in which iron appears as a building material are . . . already themselves, as distinct syntheses, partly new. And their distinctiveness, in large measure, is the product and expression of the natural properties of the building material” (from F3a, 5). Even where Benjamin plays ventriloquist to A. G. Meyer, his designation of glass and steel as the “smart materials” of their age and its Prevailing Operating System, playing a role analogous to that of semiconductors in our own, is a profound, quintessentially theoretical formulation, but one imbricated within the very material substrate both of the moment and its critical reprise. So too with respect to the weather, another “X-factor” blowing in from the extremities of conceptual left field as a dynamic factor in the history of modernization. But as Benjamin powerfully demonstrates, climates, emotional and geophysical, are quintessential to theorizing the long-term effects—aesthetic, cognitive, and psycho-social as well as commercial and technological—established through the consolidation of the Second Empire’s radically different Prevailing Operating System: The mere narcotizing effect which cosmic forces have on a shallow and brittle personality is attested in the relation of such a person to one of the highest and most genial manifestations of these forces: the weather. Nothing is more characteristic than that precisely this most intimate and mysterious affair, the working of the weather on humans, should have become the theme of their emptiest chatter. Nothing bores the ordinary man more than the cosmos. Hence for him, the deepest connection between the weather and boredom (from D1, 3). 4

The above examples, culled from a cosmic field of textual cut-outs,

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illustrate the degree to which Convolutes A–I function as a climate or ecology in which the material remains, and hence brute materiality of history are on an interactive feedback loop with the theoretical crystallizations forming the very substance of critique. Benjamin keeps no cards up his sleeve in getting The Arcades Project on its feet. Convolutes A–I have been dealt a full hand, but the rhythms and traffic patterns they establish are simply not nearly as far as the work’s trajectory has to go. In its consummating moments, the work turns aside from its material groundings and addresses the status of theory in its moment, our ongoing age. And these are the conditions of “theory on the fly,” a nomadic, inconsequential draft or formulation, one bearing few ties to the institutions of homeostasis, which as Benjamin will go on to demonstrate, only join the unscrolling catastrophe, playing an integral role within its demonic status quo.

2. The middle point of my demonstration of how Benjamin, above all in Convolutes K–N, could distill a poetics and accompanying poetry of supersaturated critical insight and oversight out of the material textual remains of French modernization in the nineteenth century is, precisely, Convolute J. This is an illumination completely modulated by the immanence of historical happenstance. Convolute J is by far the longest convolute, dedicated less to Baudelaire, the historical man or poet, than as the overarching composite sensibility of his age. The materials non-sequentially arranged in the convolute, as ever interspersed only occasionally with Benjamin’s reflections on the matter, would be the basis of a two-semester course on “Baudelaire and his Times.” Having established both in the earlier convolutes and in the “Exposé” (in two versions, 1935 and 1939), the “substance” of the Parisian nineteenthcentury modernization, Benjamin goes on to chart Baudelaire’s role in redefining every topos and motif in play, even the most self-referential and interactive question of all: what is the interface at which the theorization of an age (or a formation, a configuration, or what I term a “Prevailing Operating System”) “loops” into its performance? Within the overall sequential development of The Arcades Project, Convolute J may be regarded as a comprehensive “rebooting” of the work. One after the next, every motif introduced by Benjamin in Convolutes A–I rejoins the fray, announcing itself “present and accounted for”: these include fashion, the weather, the emotional climate, the architecture, the cultural scene (as epitomized by the art salons that Baudelaire frequented and did so much to chronicle), and the Parisian underworld, both the subterranean zones

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of Convolute C and the undertow exerted by prostitution, gambling, hashish, and parallel pursuits. Across the breadth of the convolute dedicated to Baudelaire, the familiar denizens of nineteenth-century Parisian life re-emerge, pretty much as Benjamin has already introduced them. The telling difference this time around is that the scene, setting, topography, and demography of Paris appear to us through the “view-finder” of Baudelaire. By dint of this dislocation alone, the “freeform” theoretical formulations and introjections that Benjamin is able to introduce in this chapter are more daring, poetic, and powerful than what preceded them. It is as if Benjamin is telling us that the true significance of what we might call a “major literary property,” if not Baudelaire, Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, or Joyce, is the poetic radicality of the critical formulations to which he or she gives rise. There are serious academic and historical implications to the treatment that Benjamin affords Baudelaire in Convolute J. History is not so much an act of collection, preservation, or reconstitution by which an age, configuration, or state of affairs may be documented so much as the radical reconfiguration of the socio-cultural constellation, as centering in its quintessential thinkers and artproducers, under which the moment prevailed. Criticism has little to do with the comprehensiveness—biographical or exegetical—by which an accounting is rendered of an acknowledged thinker or thinkers. It is, rather, a conjuration of his or her sensibility by looking—in the fashion of Borges’s Pierre Menard— at the universe through his or her eyes: witnessing the drama, painting, theater, politics, journalism, and so forth, that he or she saw; experiencing the imbalance and turbulence that both crystallized and distorted the insights that he or she synthesized. It becomes perfectly comprehensible from this viewpoint and set of operating assumptions that Benjamin found it necessary to import such a sheer weight of supporting materials into all the convolutes. Baudelaire, in other words—in a “dissolving” chronicle of the age in which Benjamin also devotes vital attention to Victor Hugo and others—furnishes the singular and trenchant vision and sensibility increasing the daring, power, lucidity, and relevance of Benjamin’s interjections on the formative moment of modernization in the so-called “advanced” West. Theoretically, I am arguing, Benjamin radically “ups” the conceptual power of what he has to observe and pronounce by “hitching a ride” on the poetry, sensibility (including that of “mal”), critical judgment, and historical contingencies of Charles Baudelaire. Baudelaire himself becomes a decisive way-station in the transition from what has been termed in the crucial Convolute I, “collecting” to “allegory.” Oddly, it is the poetico-epistemological coherence crystallizing when Baudelaire enters the fray, redefining the dramatis personae of conditions, events, and phenomena to which The Arcades Project has already exposed us, that plays a decisive preparatory role to the intensely freeform theoretical assertions and crystallizations of Convolutes K–N.

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And indeed, Benjamin does not deprive us, in Convolute J, of the sort of Baudelaire that we would expect to find in a historical diorama, even if the objects surrounding the canonical figure are textual snippets rather his customary furnishings or bic-a-brac: It would be a big mistake to see in the theoretical positions on art taken by Baudelaire after 1852—positions which differ so markedly from those of the period around 1848—the fruits of a development [Entwicklung]. (There are not many artists whose work attests so little to a development as that of Baudelaire.) These positions represent theoretical extremes, of which the dialectical mediation is given by Baudelaire’s whole oeuvre, without being entirely present to his conscious reflection. The mediation resides in the destructive and purificatory character of the work. This art is useful insofar as it destroys. (from J.49, 1) From his seventeenth year, Baudelaire led the life of a “littérateur”. One cannot say that he ever thought of himself as an “intellectual” or engaged himself on behalf of the “life of the mind.” The registered trademark for intellectual production had not yet been invented. (In this situation, his imperious need to distinguish himself and withdraw worked to his advantage.) He refused to go along with the defamation of the bourgeois, under the banner of which was mobilized a solidarity of artists and men of letters that he considered suspect. Thus, in “Musée classique du Bazar Bonne-Nouvelle,” he writes: “The bourgeois, who has few scientific notions, goes where the loud voice of the bourgeois artist directs him.—If this voice were suppressed, the grocer would carry E. Delacroix around in triumph. The grocer is a great thing, a divine being whom it is necessary to respect, homo bono voluntatis!” (from J49a, 3) The epic theater of The Arcades Project is how far it could stray from the publically acknowledged and historically earmarked image of the decisive nineteenth-century culture-hero. In the initial comment immediately above, Benjamin hones into the theoretical problems posed by the impossibility of tracking any development in Baudelaire’s work, as if the poet emerged premade onto the public stage of art and politics in the nineteenth century, whose truisms and values he proceeded to scramble at every turn. In spite of the theoretical conundrum posed by an encompassing cultural figure whose fluctuations between bashing and “purification” impart some structure to his work, we manage to catch a glimpse of the “historical” Baudelaire,

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going in and out of the various art salons. The second comment above, by the same token, furnishes some sense of the poet’s dates, even if it ends with him in strident dismissal of everything that may be construed as bourgeois. What stuns in the pivotal Convolute J and indeed throughout The Arcades Project is how, amid its crowds and masses of citations, its internal simulation of the Parisian street populations that were the true protagonists of its nineteenth century, “Baudelaire” as an itinerant signifier could play within the camera-angles that Benjamin has established from the outset as the work’s perspectival constants. These of course include Paris’s commercial nexus, its architectural zones and strata, its streets, its skin-trade, its culture-scene, its industry and technology, its mass-media, its politics, and yes, the very theoretical framework it is necessary to construct, with the spontaneity of jazz-improvisation, to “take it in” with anything resembling rigor. History, for Benjamin, with its grounding in the shards of cultural existence, was at all times a “trickle up” phenomenon. “For the materialist historian,” writes Benjamin in the theoretically free-wheeling Convolute N, “every epoch with which he preoccupies himself is only prehistory for the epoch he himself must live in” (from N9a, 8). Taking his cue from a justly famous pronouncement ventured by Marx and Engels in their epochal “The German Ideology,” Benjamin orchestrates a sequence in which theory’s broadest pronouncements emanate from the “real conditions” of the found textual fragments of cultural life.12 It goes without saying that any account that Benjamin renders of Baudelaire takes in the disastrous economic fluctuations common to both his age and his personal circumstances. This is the context for a sequence from Convolute J in which formulations regarding allegory— remembering that this is the umbrella term for the strategies available to the observer who metamorphoses the mounting debris of history into critique— are interspersed with references to the economic climate of Baudelaire’s day. The sequence itself illustrates the galactic distances Benjamin can cover in an allegorical framework once he has established both Baudelaire’s terrain and the camera angles indispensable to tracking the improvisations that he initiated. Allegory views existence (Dasein), as it does art, under the sign of fragmentation and ruin. L’art pour l’art erects the kingdom of art outside profane existence. Common to both is the renunciation of the idea of harmonious totality in which—according to the doctrine of German Idealism no less than that of French eclecticism—art and profane existence are merged (durchdringen). (J56a, 6)

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The portrayal of the crowd in Poe shows that the description of confusion is not the same as a confused description (Schilderung). (J56a, 7) Flowers adorn the individual stations of this Calvary [of male sexuality]. They are flowers of evil. (J56a, 8) Les Fleurs du mal are the last book of poems to have had a European-wide reverberation (Wirkung). Before that: Ossian and Heine’s Buch der Lieder. (J56a, 9) The dialectic of commodity production in advanced capitalism: the novelty of products—as a stimulus to demand—is accorded an unprecedented importance. At the same time, “the eternal recurrence of the same” is manifest in mass production. (J56a, 10) In Blanqui’s cosmology, everything hinges on the stars, which Baudelaire banishes from his world. (J56a, 11) The renunciation of the magic of distance is a decisive moment in the lyric poetry of Baudelaire. It has found its sovereign formulation of “Le Voyage.” (J56a, 12) It belongs to the Via Dolorosa (Opfergang) of male sexuality that Baudelaire perceived pregnancy, in some degree, as unfair competition. (J57, 1) The passage in which Baudelaire speaks of his fascination with painted theatrical backdrops—where? Q4a, 4. (J57, 2) Baudelaire’s destructive impulse is nowhere concerned with the abolition of what falls to it. This is reflected in his allegory and is the condition of its regressive tendency. On the other hand, allegory has to do, precisely in its destructive furor, with dispelling the illusion that proceeds from all “given order,” whether of art or of life: the illusion of totality or of organic wholeness

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which transfigures that order and makes it seem endurable. And this is the progressive tendency of allegory. (J57, 3) What begins at this juncture is an absolutely remarkable “run,” hitherto unprecedented in the Passagen-Werk, of theoretical “bullet-points” in Benjamin’s voice and under his imprimatur. Having recalled many of the Passagen-Werk’s characteristic earlier investigations, on such topics as the urban landscape, the weather, and fashion but in a specifically Baudelairean context, Benjamin is content, roughly from (J55a, 1) to (J67, 2), a span of 33 pages in the German edition,13 to relinquish his characteristic posture of “self”-effacement, relegating his “own” writerly voice to the same status as his incorporated extracts. Whether the steps that Benjamin has retraced are those of Baudelaire’s sensibility and poetics or the stations of the cross of “impotence” in an age that has seen everything and is going nowhere, the earlier conduct of Convolute J has served as a cloud-chamber or “breeder” to allow the unleashing of Benjamin’s critical voice in a theoretical meditation that does not subside until it has connected and reconnected several of the most crucial of Benjamin’s “lines of (theoretical) thought.” My argument is that for Benjamin in this passage, this “stringing” of theoretical crystallizations, ones resonating or colliding obliquely off one another, is not merely “as close as he gets” to theoretical deliberation under conditions of historical catastrophe and anomie and of personal “precarity.” This mode of enunciation is theory such as it can be conducted under the socio-political, phenomenological, and epistemological conditions giving rise to it. Each such agglomeration of statements is an objet trouvé culled from the years and galaxies of Benjaminian reading. In producing such “runs,” Benjamin plays a “pick-up” game of transitory crystallizations and the contexts in which they make sense. The long sequence of formulations to which I am referring initiates other “runs” of theoretical articulation within the framework of the Passagen-Werk, most notably the scenario for a socio-political and cultural “awakening” that, at least at the outset of Convolute K, Benjamin still holds possible; and of course, the theoretical “motor” or “driver” of the Werk, Convolute N, on which there will be more to say below. Crucial to the long sequence of theoretical articulation I am introducing here is that it comes and goes unannounced, “in a flash;” there are no boundaries or parameters setting it off from what has established itself as the Passagen-Werk’s “conventional” modus operandi; it “flies by” in the tumult of traversing the Arcades—just as experience has been scrambled under conditions of war and the attending social upheaval. From within the implicit épistème under which Benjamin writes, this is theoretical deliberation under current conditions. Each time the

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“windows” of theoretical formulation that Benjamin allows himself are read, they will mean “differently”; the “environmental impact” they make will change. It is not, at least for the moment, the province of stately worldhistorical universities or of a philosophical discipline that husbands its longstanding terminologies jealously and with precision. In synthesizing long sequences of theoretical formulation and observation, Benjamin offers us theoretical “screens” of tenuous coherence and duration within the overall “scrolling” of the Arcades. In the wake of Convolute J, the Werk abounds in parallel instances of this extended theoretical “node” or “site”: locations where three or five major cultural figures (in this case Baudelaire, Poe, Marx, Nietzsche, and Blanqui) or critical motifs bob up for a brief coherent moment or “flash” and interact together before vanishing again in the textual “crowd.” From its outset, this initial sequence of unbounded theoretical formulation and reformulation in the Passagen-Werk, wrestles with the crippling paradox that Les Fleurs du mal was a rare (possibly the “last”) success in the commodity-market of lyrical poetry, while at the same time, by dint of its dissemination, it ushered in the cultural wasteland accruing to large-scale capitalism. The major symptom of this desolation is, precisely, the melancholic disposition of allegory—whether formulated as sexual and cultural impotence or as a hopeless sense of exile from one’s own world and time. Baudelaire “was perhaps the first to have had a market-oriented originality, which just for that reason was more important in his day than any other” (from J58, 4, p. 333). Les Fleurs’ untenable solvency as “cultural capital” places Baudelaire, by dint of his “historical experiences” in “the generation of Marx, whose principle work [Das Kapital] appeared in the year of his death” (J60a, 1, p. 337). What motivates the long passage in question is Benjamin’s quest for a Marxian articulation of the allegorical bearing indispensable to radical critique and traceable to Baudelaire. The extended arc of formulation that I am highlighting here traces some development in Benjamin’s key methodological trope for his own practice, “allegory”: at the beginning of the sequence it is the insignia of a world already dismembered into its fragments and waste materials, and by the end, it incorporates, through its game of “here-there” (“fort-da”) with organic wholeness, its own version of progression.14 This development is one that transpires, for purposes of the present chapter, “on the fly”; it “happens” in the immanent encounter with a disorderly mass of materials and pronouncements. Crucial to the overall sequence are two major developments, the conflation at (J60,a 1), of Marx and Baudelaire; and the emergence of coinage as a telling trope for the dialectical tension under which overstimulation (or allure, or “aura”) and exhaustion, impotence, or being jaded placed the Parisian nineteenth century. The figure of the “heads, you lose; tails, you lose” “coin

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of allegory, with the scythe-wielding skeleton on one side, and, on the obverse, the figure of Melancholy plunged in meditation” (J58a, 2, p. 334) rhetorically implements a decisive shift in Benjamin’s purview from open-ended cultural flânerie to a theoretical analytic manifestly powered by dialectical history and Marxian aesthetics. Full-throttled capitalism’s perverse coinage is embossed with the doublebinds rendering it a closed system, dooming efforts at escape or rescue (Convolute N) to failure. Precisely in this sense, Convolute J not only “rehearses” the consummate formulations regarding catastrophe, the dialectical image, and rescue in Convolute N but also traces the Werk of crystallizing radical critique, by now firmly ensconced in the corner of allegory, out of the “collected” detritus of cultural remains and prior articulation, even Benjamin’s own. (The “Angelus Novus” figure in Thesis 9 of “The Concept of History” embodies, in several senses, this turbulent passage from collected remains to striking, because shocking, critique.) It is indeed the figure of Baudelaire that prompts and motivates this major directional shift in the Arcades. The upgrade in theory-power that the Arcades attain in their attention to Baudelaire undergirds the further theoretical consolidations of Convolutes K, L, and N. Around the middle of the century, the conditions of artistic production underwent a change. This change consisted in the fact that for the first time the form of the commodity imposed itself directly on the work of art, and the form of the masses on the public. Particularly vulnerable to these developments, it can be seen now unmistakably in our century, was the lyric. It is the unique distinction of Les Fleurs du Mal that Baudelaire responded precisely to these altered conditions with a book of poems. It is the best example of heroic conduct to be found in his life. (J60, 6) The heroic bearing of Baudelaire is akin to Nietzsche. Though Baudelaire likes to appeal to Catholicism, his historical experience is nonetheless that which Nietzsche fixed in the phrase, “God is dead.” In Nietzsche’s case this experience is projected in the thesis that nothing new occurs any more. In Nietzsche the accent lies on eternal recurrence. (from J60, 7) In short shrift, this brief segment establishes Les Fleurs’ rearguard response to a cultural scene already savaged by capitalist commodification, a lyrical medium whose masterly deployment of rhyme and meter, as well as of the classical forms of versification ironically invokes a more gracious past whose primary characteristic is the shock of its disappearance. The beginning

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of (J60, 6) allows itself a tone of historical authority and consolidation rare in the Arcades. But the implication is clear: the reception of Les Fleurs was indelibly colored by Baudelaire’s strategy of playing a newly capitalized market in cultural commodities against itself. Baudelaire synthesized a medium of lyric utterance, replete with obscene gestures to overall decadence, demonic perversity, sexual insouciance, and alcoholic and chemical intoxication, both as a counter to such capital-driven phenomena as investment, Haussmannization, mass-marketing and as an auratic commodity in its own right, a fantasy-thing sent out to trump other commodities of far lower intellectual caliber. Particularly striking in the citation immediately above is how quickly Benjamin splices Nietzsche into the mix (in J60, 7), once having placed Baudelaire squarely in the historiographic train or progression of Marxian thought. Irrespective of Nietzsche’s politics, whether in the posture of critique or apathy, Nietzsche’s thinking, for Benjamin, is directly consequential to the dialectical history whose aporias are set in fullest relief in an age of large-scale capitalism. By means of this particular splice, Benjamin argues (through the logic of argument by display) that the Nietzschean slough of ewiger Wiederkehr is every bit as much an artifact of exhaustion and disruption under capitalism as Baudelaire’s lyrics. Aesthetics (whether of Nietzsche’s political alienation or of Baudelaire’s meta-ironic lyrics) trumps political affiliation in the synthesis of a Marxian critique of the always-unfolding catastrophe. Only after he has availed himself of the opportunity, in Convolute J, to take up Baudelaire as an exemplary “case-history” of aesthetic improvisation and thwarting under advanced capitalism (one among several), does Benjamin hazard what the modernity initiated in nineteenth-century Paris and similar locations might signify. With its “direct hookup” to antiquity, modernity is yet another instance of a double-edged sword (if not coin) in the Arcades. The overarching “transitoriness” of modern temporality resonates powerfully with antiquity’s vanishing. Love “at last sight,” the ethos of sexual cruising that Benjamin highlights in “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,”15 bespeaks a sense of evanescence “classical” to its very core. It is in its transitoriness that modernity shows itself to be ultimately and most intimately akin to antiquity. The uninterrupted resonance which Les Fleurs du mal has found up through the present day is linked to a certain aspect of the urban scene, one that came to light only with the city’s entry into poetry. It is the aspect least of all expected. What makes itself felt through the evocation of Paris in Baudelaire’s verse is the infirmity and decrepitude of a great city. Nowhere, perhaps, has this been given more perfect expression than in the poem “Crépuscule du matin,” which is the awakening sob of the sleeper, reproduced in the materials of urban life. This

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aspect, however, is more or less common to the whole cycle of “Tableaux parisiens”; it is present in the transparence of the city, as conjured by “Le Soleil,” no less than in the allegorical evocation of the Louvre in “Le Cygne.” (J57a, 3) Pivotal to this passage is Benjamin’s sense of a transvaluation of all prior values attached to the city and to urban life “with the city’s entry into poetry.” The view-finder afforded by poetic transcription calls off all prior bets. Not only does this poetic transformation turn Paris into a city of “infirmity and decrepitude” rather than a capital of historical eminence and power. It empowers Benjamin to render a systematically counter-intuitive reading of Baudelaire and accounting of the cultural capital that he set into play, the reading “least of all expected.” Benjamin’s Baudelaire is hardly the pornographer and avatar of sexual permissiveness that the literal reading of his Paris lyrics might well substantiate. He labors, rather, under the burden of impotence, of whose exhaustion and futility he becomes the allegorical emblem of his age. In the lines leading up to the figure introduced above, Baudelaire trod a “Golgotha-way” of impotence. “Only this would explain how it was that he drew, as travelling expenses along the way, a precious old coin from among the treasures of this society. It was the coin of allegory” (from J58a, 2, p. 334). For all of Baudelaire’s touting of female pheromes (e.g. “Parfum éxotique,” “La Chevelure”), the special allure of women in rags (“À une Mendiante rousse”), and the joys of prostitution (“Le Crépuscule du soir”), so Benjamin, his erotic anthems enunciate the death-sentence to the culture of erotic intimacy. His lyrics are an allegorical expression of this loss. They are minted in double-sided, self-ironic coinage. This is a coinage that won’t get anyone anywhere sexually, but as insignia as well as commodity of a coherence-starved age, it sells. Baudelaire not only bankrolls this age by circulating this poetic counterfeit; he is its preeminent allegorist. Baudelaire, having masterminded “the city’s entry into poetry,” becomes the anti-Baudelaire, the antithetical Baudelaire, Baudelaire’s dialectical opposite. Like the Parisian proletariat, forced to shuttle in and out of the city having been displaced to the “peripheral” banlieux, Baudelaire became radically displaced from himself. Seeming to personify Parisian culture (as did Frank Sinatra New York, in one of his oft-played “standards”), Baudelaire is in fact one of Paris’s most tenuous outsiders: No one ever felt less at home in Paris than Baudelaire. Every intimacy with things is akin to the allegorical intention. To touch on things, for it, means to violate them. To recognize things means, for it, to see through them. Wherever the allegorical intention prevails, no habits of any kind can be

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formed . . . Thing and situation become obsolete for allegory more quickly than a new pattern for the milliner. But to become obsolete means: to grow strange. Spleen lays down centuries between the present moment and the one just lived. It is spleen that tireless generates “antiquity.” And in fact, with Baudelaire, modernity is nothing but the “newest antiquity.” Modernity, for Baudelaire, is not solely and not primarily the object of his sensibility; it is the object of conquest. Modernity has, for its armature, the allegorical mode of vision. (J59a, 4) In exile at home in Paris, Baudelaire becomes the avatar of spleen as the disposition (mood, temperament) of allegory. Today we would say that the “allegorical intention” generates différance (spatial disruption, temporal disorder) where it would otherwise implement continuity and coherence. So radically does the allegorical disposition oppose habit and the complacency that habit bears that it discards its own crystallizations “more quickly than the new pattern for the milliner.” Allegory moves ages in its aggressive evanescence (hence its affinity to antiquity), yet it undermines order in accelerating cycles of disqualification and self-correction. No sympathy is lost by the allegorical sensibility to the regimes of custom, normalcy, and expectation that it is constantly undermining—by means of strategies with certain affinities to surrealism and certain to the Brechtian “alienation effect” (Verfremdungseffekt). It was Baudelaire’s distinction to have rendered himself susceptible to a homelessness and ongoing self-displacement and self-alienation precisely with no end in sight. Were there a single emblem for the predisposition to critique in Benjamin’s discourse it would surely be this susceptibility: a rendering vulnerable of sensibility to the turbulence and resultant chaos impacting, successively, on every parameter lending scale and measure to the cultural view-finder: from cognition and phenomenology to media, architecture, technology, fashion, and popular culture. Each one of these standards is eventually deranged by the allegorical violation of intimacy and the capitulation to disbelief charted in the passage immediately above. The allegorical predisposition that Benjamin pursues from the age of Baudelaire, with indispensable enrichment offered by Fourier, Balzac, Flaubert, Poe, Gautier, Guys, Hugo, Blanqui, and many others, into the twentieth century is an aesthetic of sustained deconstruction on a collision course with its eventual entropic burnout. As Benjamin synthesizes a new modality of theoretical oversight and inscription (in the current treatment, we are calling it “theory on the fly”), a critical bearing predicated on the unprecedented transformations of

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technology, social administration, warfare, and the media of information and communications in his day, Marxist historiography and aesthetics lend him the only persistent infrastructure conducive to his ongoing critical exposé. The critic “writes out” of the hegemonic aporias by which the capitalist and corporate world-orders invariably configure themselves. Not only the critic but also the revolutionary places his penchant for allegorical perception at the service of debunking the double messages by which extractive systems ground, sustain, and perpetuate themselves. Hence, it is crucial for Benjamin to seek out some Marxian “payoff” in the theory and rhetoric of allegory. And the Marxian dimension that Benjamin isolates in the critical tropology of allegory is the “semblance” and “appearance” on which the commodity bases its allure. Benjamin understands full well, in spite of Marx’s allergic reaction to the dialectic’s “top-down” thrust, the centrality of a semblance with a venerable philosophical provenance to the commodity’s “draw,” its allure, its auratic quality. Within the economy of The Critique of Pure Reason, Kant’s First Critique, Schein and the appearance to which it gives rise distorts and disguises the glimmerings of the transcendental.16 Within the progressive scenario of the Hegelian Phenomenology, semblance powers the upward projection of the “supersensible beyond,” the horizon for all subsequent scientific and philosophical speculation.17 Schein, under the purview of materialist history, becomes the allure driving the masses to the commodity; the fetishistic drive to consumption affording the dream of unabated accumulation to capital. Allegory, as critical tool and revolutionary strategy tracks the vicissitudes of Schein on an ongoing basis. The construct of Schein links the commodity fetish and the set of economic relationships configured around it to the longstanding philosophical tradition out of which it arises. Relation between commodity and allegory: “value,” as the natural burningglass of semblance in history, outshines “meaning.” Its luster is more difficult to dispel. It is, moreover, the very newest. In the Baroque age, the fetish character of commodity was still relatively undeveloped. And the commodity had not yet so deeply engraved its stigma—the proletarianization of the producers—on the process of production. Allegorical perception could thus constitute a style in the seventeenth century, in a way that it could no longer in the nineteenth. Baudelaire as allegorist was completely isolated. He sought to recall the experience of the commodity to an allegorical experience. In this, he was doomed to founder, and it became clear that the relentlessness of his initiative was exceeded by the relentlessness of reality. Hence a strain in his work that feels pathological or sadistic only because it missed out on reality—though just by a hair. (J67, 2)

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The implementation of continuity between Benjamin’s long-standing fascination with the rhetorical technology of allegory and the nineteenthcentury Paris that has become, by dint of multidimensional elective affinity, his virtual home, is a major act of synthesis, with profound implications for the retrospective reconsideration of his work. It is indeed incumbent upon Benjamin to illuminate allegory’s venerable impact within and upon European culture and the apotheosis it reaches in the person and the writings of Charles Baudelaire. The citation immediately above is tasked with performing this work. Benjamin’s response to the query that he has placed to himself is as follows: in the iconography and poetics, and in the architecture and other lifeforms of the seventeenth century, there could be some “objective correlative” to allegorical thinking, an option ruled out by the overwhelming industry and culture of commodification in the nineteenth century. Benjamin’s reference to the proletarianization of the commodity-culture bespeaks a Marxian panorama embracing the phenomenon’s repercussions on all the classes and constituencies implicated by it, from its “bankrollers” and executives to its “hands on” laborers to its “middlemen” in retailing. It is precisely Baudelaire’s remarkable facility with resonant emblems in an age when they have become incomprehensible as well as antiquated that destines him to the cultural equivalent of political exile in his own age and in his “home town.” In the end, the relentlessness of the realities imposed by mass-marketing, the assemblyline, the subjugation of human development and need to industrial and marketing cycles may outstrip Baudelaire’s arcane project, accounting for the perverse or sadistic “edge” of its tone, but not by much, Benjamin qualifies. It is thoroughly understandable that a twentieth-century critic could look back with undisguised sympathy on a prior sustained intellectual intervention that reached its limits. Baudelaire’s own multidimensional intervention, at the level of cultural critique as well as of “original composition” was destined, by the “relentlessness” of new cultural as well as industrial conditions, to its own impotence. Benjamin’s comments on the rat race between Schein as commodity-fetish and meaning in history come at the end of an extended “run” of trenchant if discontinuous articulations at the highest level of philosophical insight that he would not have allowed himself before immersing himself in the materials and rhetorical practices surrounding Baudelaire. This long theoretical excursis in the middle of Convolute J stages the very rawness and indeterminate directions of thinking itself, thinking conducted in a field of urban encounters and collisions and of rhizomatic intertextual associations as open and contingent as history itself; as Paris was during its whirlwind nineteenthcentury transformation and expansion. This sequence is, in other words, a textual window on a theoretical process operating much like a nuclear cloudchamber. There are multiple outcomes or resonations for each textual snippet.

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Each one deposits its residue within the overall accretion of both the cultural history of the age and its critical “read out,” but is also available for recycling in other scenes of articulation. Not only does this happen in the case of Baudelaire’s Europe-wide reception: the abortive inquiry into the role of theatrical backdrops has helped Benjamin—in a famous formulation regarding El Greco—articulate the centrality of the gesture to Kafka’s fiction in his definitive 1934 essay on this author.18 That the figure of Baudelaire can add so much to the fire (or processing) power of Benjamin’s theoretical formulations, even those detached from any particular literary instance and directed toward critical practice itself, is a clear indication that for Benjamin, as for Nietzsche and Derrida, there is no theory or philosophy detached from literary figuration; there is no “pure philosophy” or “just theory.” Philosophy’s very best hope for its own consummation, indeed its last hope, is through the contaminations that reach it through the standard distortion-effects of poetics and narration. It is in this context that Benjamin can unleash, just a page or two before our random exemplary selection, the self-contradictory construction “petrified unrest” both as an emblem of allegory and as a phenomenon of the big-scale capitalism consolidating itself under the Second Empire. Like the justly notorious figure of the “dialectical image” that Benjamin elucidates in Convolute N, “petrified unrest” is calibrated to stop us in our tracks, to “bump” our sequential reading to a higher power by trapping us into an aporia or systematic doublebind. The attention (Anziehung) which a few basic situations continually exerted on Baudelaire belongs to the complex of symptoms associated with melancholy. He appears to have been under the compulsion of returning at least once to each of his main motifs. (from J55a, 2) Baudelaire’s allegory bears traces of the violence that was necessary to demolish the harmonious façade of the world that surrounded him. (J55a, 3) In Blanqui’s view of the world, petrified unrest (erstarrte Unruhe) becomes the status of the cosmos itself. The course of the world appears, accordingly, as one great allegory. (J55a, 4) Petrified unrest is, moreover, the formula for Baudelaire’s life history, which knows no development. (J55a, 5)

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The state of tension subsisting between the most cultivated sensibility and the most intense contemplation is a mark of the Baudelairean. It is reflected theoretically in the doctrine of correspondences and in the predilection for allegory. Baudelaire never attempted to establish (herzustellen) any sort of relations between these. Nevertheless, such relations exist. (J55a, 6) “Petrified unrest,” in the context of the broadest possible reading and critique of Baudelaire, a strategically fractured misprision as well as reconstruction, is a striking emblematic outgrowth of the epiphenomena that beset him as a bellwether of French cultural currents, as well as personally: the melancholy that Benjamin attributes to him and through family upheaval. On the Marxian flank, “petrified unrest” bears something of the congealment of value that Marx traces to the commodity in Capital, I. Marx, adumbrating on the linen coat that becomes his prototype for a thing made under the regime of capital and labor, in the initial chapter that he dedicates to the commodity, puts it this way: “Every other physical commodity now becomes a mirror of the linen’s value. It is thus that this value first shows itself as being, in reality, a congealed quantity (Gallerte) of undifferentiated human labour. For the labour which creates it is now explicitly presented as labour which counts as the equal of every other sort of human labour.”19 The “petrified unrest” that Baudelaire encountered in every sector of the Prevailing Operating System regulating his age combines the brute equivalence linking both all labor and all material as collective entities and signifiers with the undercurrents of political unrest, more often explicit than not, running in tandem with the Second Empire. “Petrified unrest” is an apt, albeit highly poetic caption both for the remarkable acceleration and openness, on the one hand, with which Baudelaire was able to rampage through the prevalent idées reçues of French values, manners, and art, and for the impediments into which Baudelaire collided at every turn. Yet Convolutes K–N are populated by a host of such constructs, to some degree alienated from the immediate reading-contexts in which they were spawned. “Petrified unrest” thus rehearses an unprecedented liberty that Benjamin claims as much for his citations as for his own interjections in Convolutes K–N: this is the liberty of a pronouncement and theoretical synthesis as hurried, truncated, inconsequential, and severed from systematic comprehensiveness or culmination as the diverse narratives, transcripts, diagrams and other schematics, and accountings surviving from the tumultuous history of modernization in Paris. This is, literally as well as conceptually, as far as Benjamin’s thinking ever gets. And our ability to see this immense contribution for what it is, to accept its poetic, analytical, and even prophetic luminescence (prophetic in the sense in which Kafka sees the political eventualities of twentieth-century politics decades ahead of

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their impact); to appreciate this writerly “experience of the impossible,”20 as Derrida defines deconstruction, in the face of its congenital impotence and incompletion, is of enormous consequence to our own contemporary critical capability: to exploit the moment in which we write and to calibrate its limitations.

3. In the wake of the critically repetitive as well as innovative reprise of established motifs transpiring in Convolute J under the aura of Baudelaire, it is as if Benjamin’s theoretical discourse has emerged from a week-long practice at a Yoga retreat: it is more supple and, even where its subject-matter verges on the arcane, more confident to articulate at some remove from the material evidence and remains. Benjamin’s foundational work in Convolutes A–I has been formidable. After the work’s dominant motifs have been recalibrated in keeping with the life, times, and artistic milieu and production of Charles Baudelaire, Benjamin takes the liberty to pronounce on the most tenuous, but for this reason most intriguing spinoffs of modernization: the multidimensional “awakening” that will have to transpire if European civilization is to shake off the slumber of totalitarian rule and thinking. Also during this maiden flight—in Convolutes K and L—of his freeform theoretical articulation, that is, whose conceptual pretext is its own articulation rather than as a “read-out” of the materials, making it, within the panorama of The Arcades Project, “second-order”21 critique, Benjamin offers us a guided tour to the palaces of the collective dream—Parisian museums, libraries and other archives, even train stations—both fending off and facilitating the current backslide to barbarism. Awakening is a graduated (stufenweiser) process that goes on in the life of the individual as in the life of generations. Sleep its initial stage. A generation’s experience of youth has much in common with the experience of dreams. Its historical configuration is a dream configuration. Every epoch has such a side turned to dreams, the child’s side. For the previous century, this appears clearly in the arcades. But whereas the education of earlier generations explained these dreams for them in terms of tradition, of religious doctrine, present-day education simply amounts to the distraction of children. Proust could emerge as an unprecedented phenomenon only in a generation that had lost all bodily and natural aids to remembrance and that, poorer than before, was left to itself to take possession of the periods of childhood (der Kindheitwelten habhaft werden konnte) in merely an isolated, scattered, and pathological way. What follows

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here is an experiment in the technique of awakening. An attempt to become aware of the dialectical—the Copernican—turn of remembrance (Eingedenkens). (K1, 1) The nineteenth century a spacetime a dreamtime () in which the individual consciousness more and more secures itself in reflecting, while the collective consciousness sinks into ever deeper sleep. But just as the sleeper—in this respect like the madman— sets out on the macrocosmic journey through his own body, and the noises and feelings of his insides, such as blood pressure, intestinal churn, heartbeat, and muscle sensation . . . generate, in the heightened inner awareness of the sleeper, illusion (Wahnsinn) or dream imagery which translates and accounts for them, so likewise for the dreaming collective, which, through the arcades, communes with its own insides. We must follow in its wake so as to expound the nineteenth century—in fashion and in advertising, in buildings and politics—as the outcome of its dream visions. (from K1, 4) In the outlandish mosaic of his materials, Benjamin does not stop short of including sleep—and the cognitive processing that persists under somnolent conditions—among the consequential parameters of any given Prevailing Operating System. Even sleeping counts in the retrospective collation of telling cultural factors. And sleep under the Second Empire, Benjamin is arguing, is substantially different from sleep, or anxious insomnia, today. The arcades represent, not unlike contemporary Las Vegas, a persistent collective dream of the moment: in the case of the Second Empire as we have seen, a particularly ravenous, if unschooled stage of economic expansion and commercial acceleration. As the embedded composite narrative of this hyperactive moment emerges, the arcades serve as the prototype of a new commercial space doubling as a dream-space. It is no stretch at all for Benjamin to extrapolate the original arcades of the early decades of the nineteenth century—modest in scale and deliberate in their planning despite their revolutionary repercussions—into the grand steel-and-glass architectural monuments of the age, whether the central rail-terminals of the city, the grandiose department stores, or a new generation of comprehensive archives and museums. These become, in Benjamin’s terms, the “dream-houses” of nineteenth-century Paris. We need to process, as informed readers of The Arcades Project that with relish Benjamin documents the place and role of these consummate edifices within the collective panorama of modernization

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while at the same time, in the name of awakening, he dedicates the ambient theoretical practice emerging in the work to the very rupture and critical penetration of this dream. The strategy of these transitional convolutes, for “awakening,” makes Benjamin a strange bedfellow of contemporary “sexploitation” cinema—drawing on the cutting edge of cinematic verisimilitude to enhance the sexual allure of its mediated virtuality, while rendering moralistic judgment on its depicted transgression. In the passage immediately above, then, Benjamin generates a convincing pastiche—parroting the first pages of Du Côté de chez Swann—of Proust’s poetic eulogy of sleep as a surface-depth, figure-ground phenomenon. In the passage from Convolute L below, he furnishes a verbal companion-piece to a series of impressionist canvasses of Gare St-Lazare that Monet painted in the late 1870’s. These are notable for the dreamy quality of the smoke emanating from the railroad locomotives that we address head-on. Their vapor overwhelms the station-shed, partially obscuring it. The pervasive nineteenthcentury enchantment at steel-and-glass and steam technologies that The Arcades Project perforce records and documents in no way obliterates Benjamin’s strong sense that it is from this dream that history—somewhat urgently—needs to escape. Excavating a mythological substrate coinciding with the noir atmosphere of the Parisian underground (specifically addressed in Convolute C), Benjamin places his full credentials as a modernist on display. But even the classical underworld referenced by the station’s monumental statuary, its invocation of Orpheus, Eurydice, and Hermes, is a figment of a cultural Imaginary in need of awakening. We wander into museums—at least into those initiated under the Ideological State Apparatus of the Second Empire22—as well for a confirmation and celebration of our broader culture’s long-standing dreams. But as Benjamin will explicitly spell out in Convolute N, the tradition plays its own constitutive role in the catastrophe of encroaching barbarism: The Gare Saint-Lazare: a puffing, wheezing princess with the stare of a clock. “For our type of man,” says Jacques de Lacretelle, “train stations are truly factories of dreams” (“Le Rêveur Parisian,” Nouvelle Revue Française, 1927). To be sure: today, in the age of the automobile and airplane, it is only faint, atavistic terrors which still lurk within the blackened sheds; and that stale comedy of farewell and reunion, carried on before a background of Pullman cars, turns the railway platform into a provincial stage. Once again we see performed the timeworn Greek melodrama: Orpheus, Eurydice, Hermes at the station. Through the mountains of luggage surrounding the nymph, looms the steep and rocky path, the crypt into which she sinks when the Hermaic (hermetische) conductor with the signal disk, watching for the moist eye of Orpheus, gives the sign for departure. Scar of departure,

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which zigzags, like the crack on a Greek vase, across the painted (dargehaltenen) bodies of the gods. (L1, 4) Museums unquestionably belong to the dream houses of the collective. In considering them, we would want to emphasize the dialectic by which they come into contact (entgegenkommen), on the one hand, with scientific research and, on the other hand, with “the dreamy tide of bad taste.” “Nearly every epoch would appear, by virtue of its inner disposition, to be chiefly engaged in unfolding (entwickeln) a specific architectural problem: for the Gothic age, this is the cathedrals; for the Baroque, the palace; and for the early twentieth century, with its regressive tendency to allow itself to be saturated with the past: the museum” (Siegfried Giedion, Bauen in Frankreich, p. 36). The thirst for the past forms something like the principle object of my analysis—in light of which the inside of the museum appears as an interior magnified on a grand scale. In the years 1850–1890, exhibitions take the place of museums. Comparison between the ideological bases of the two. (L1a, 2) As the dream-palaces of the advanced capitalist world, museums, train stations, and department stores house its transitional spaces: sites where the public encounters and engages the transitional objects of the moment. These are play-spaces. In the free-wheeling convolutes preparatory to Convolute N, Benjamin is in a thoughtscape adjacent to the one out of which, on War’s outbreak, Johan Huizinga wrote Homo Ludens, in which homicidal annihilation and playful contest are not nearly as foreign to one another as might be supposed.23 The post-War, psychoanalytical reprise to this broad survey is D. W. Winnicott’s Playing and Reality.24 The psychoanalyst, having treated, at crucial junctures, the displaced children produced by the War, invokes and mobilizes playfulness—both as a store of untapped inner gumption and energy and as programmatic material for therapeutic healing. Constitutionally fragile and attenuated, even amid catastrophe, allegorico-materialist critique surveys the playing fields where untrammeled improvisation may again resume after the time-out declared in the name of barbarism.

4. With its stunning formulations on historical epistemology, the dialectical image as the pivotal trope of illumination amid conditions of historical

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catastrophe (a disarray that may in fact be solid-state), and “dialectics at a standstill,” Convolute N, placed neither at the beginning nor at the end of the work, nonetheless furnishes a certain theoretical denouement to the sporadic, if stunning episodes of meta-critical illumination that have preceded it. Like a secondary character in a novel, whose machinations turn-out, in an act of selfdisclosure usually reserved for late in the drama, to have been formative, Convolute N supplies decisive missing program and information. While the cultural labor of deciphering The Arcades Project might have been easier had these formulations been available from the start, say in the kind of introductory material now de rigeur in academic monographs, readers would not have lived the experience of nineteenth-century modernization in quite the same way. I would even go so far as to suggest that the stunning formulations of Convolute N hung at the Parisian horizon beyond Benjamin, until he himself had undergone the theoretical, meta-critical, and proto-cybernetic experiences of cobbling together Convolutes A–M. As I write this particular simulacrum of my own making sense of The Arcades Project as the quintessential “dissolving book” over the years, I of course open wide the question of the status of the thirty Convolutes succeeding what I am tagging as the decisively theoretical Convolute N. Do not these as well hold to the generic specifications of what I would characterize as a major, again proto-cybernetic addition to the full array of literary forms— i.e., the Convolute itself—on Benjamin’s part? This is indeed a legitimate question to pose. My irreducibly provisional answer runs as follows: with the exception of Convolutes O (labeled “Prostitution and Gambling” by the U.S. editors) and Y (“Photography”), the remaining Convolutes can be productively thought of as the “overflow stacks” within the Borgesian archive or library that the Passagen-Werk simulates. Without an exception, they introduce material and commentary relevant to the phenomenon of modernization under the Second Empire; Benjamin was nonetheless able to do without their interpellation in the sequence leading to Convolute N’s magisterial, but quintessentially sporadic and fragmentary theoretical asides. To the degree that the “Prostitution and Gambling” Convolute amounts to a brilliant staging of the supplemental economy to French national expansion in the nineteenth century, in which the “black markets” of gambling and the skin-trade themselves form a continuous Möbius strip, conspicuously “handing off” to one another at crucial junctures in the primary materials surviving from the day, Convolute N lets us down gently. Convolute O, it could be well argued, is a striking historico-material allegory of the theory of supplementarity, decades before Jacques Derrida coined the term and orchestrated this process as an ongoing philosophical infrastructure as well as a rhetorical trope.25 By the same token, Convolute Y introduces vital material that is new to The Arcades Project, above all expanding its “coverage” of image-reproduction and

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therefore deepening its theorization of modern media. And surely the work on “Literary History, Victor Hugo” in Convolute d is a viable companion to its counterpart on Baudelaire: its insertion anywhere in the aftermath of Convolute J justified. We may thus take the work’s theoretical apotheosis in Convolute N, neither at the outset, as things turned out, nor as a definitive downbeat, in several ways: first and foremost, in a work of near-global receptiveness to different art-forms and discursive media, as the inclusion of fragmentary, occasional theoretical “outtakes” as merely one format of articulation in a very wide spectrum that has included literary citations, first-person accounts, historical consolidations, and twentieth-century recapitulations in a variety of disciplines. A crucial Benjaminian lesson regarding the indispensable interplay and exchange between different discursive media in the synthesis of memorable criticism may well be embedded here. However intense the critical poetry that Benjamin managed to instill within the theoretical sequences “emerging suddenly, in a flash” in Convolute N, it may be by design that he placed this particular “scene of writing” among the others. And then, there is the “overflow” factor mentioned above: it could simply turn out that Benjamin, giving his work-in-progress a final sequencing before entering a completely transient existence, found Convolutes P–R ancillary to the traffic-patterns that I have been tracing, for better or worse. In whatever fashion contemporary and future critical reception resolve the issues posed by the Arcades Project’s sequencing, the arcs of meta-critical thinking emerging in Convolute N are among the most striking to have emerged in the history of fragmentary philosophical articulation—certainly also including early German Romanticism and Nietzsche, whether we take the “longest view” possible, factoring in Anaximander and Parmenides, or not.26 Whether by design or default, Convolute N becomes the theoretical engineroom of the time-capsule of modernization, with its ramifying conceptual and textual rhizome, that Benjamin bequeaths to European history in catastrophic times. Within the framework of the current writerly occasion, I have latitude to “process” at most two of the telling sequences from the Convolute, linked by a crucial inter-text, in which Benjamin characterizes his theoretical achievement as “dialectics at a standstill.” I’ve insisted on extracting the two sequences of entries from Convolute N in their “entirety,” though this notion is entirely up for grabs, as found objects, in other words, in their fully random and arbitrary “thrownness” (Geworfenheit).27 It is almost only by chance that these two sequences have come up on my personal critical “screen” as units of articulation claiming a certain degree of integrality. Within the radioactive cloud chamber of The Arcades Project, then, the two sequences “emerge in a flash,” they are purely immanent, but as allegorical scenes of theoretical illumination, they resonate to me as only very few others in the history of this art-form, at whatever length. Taking into account the chaotic conditions under

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which Benjamin synthesized his formulations, I am arguing, as theoretical “mini-treatises,” these panels of snippets from Convolute N of The Arcades Project may be placed alongside Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, Proust’s Recherche, Kafka’s Der Process, Joyce’s Ulysses, and the miniature fictions of Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino. The first such sequence from the The Arcades Project’s running account that I would clip out for my display is the following: This research—which deals fundamentally with the expressive character of the earliest industrial products, but also the earliest advertisements, department stores, and so on—thus becomes important for Marxism in two ways. First, it will demonstrate how the milieu (Umwelt) in which Marx’s doctrine arose affected that doctrine through its expressive character [Ausdruckscharakter] (which is to say, not only through causal connections); but second, it will also show in which respects Marxism, too, shares the expressive character of the material products contemporary with it. (N1a, 7) Method of this project: literary montage. I needn’t say anything. Merely show. I shall purloin (entwenden) no valuables, appropriate no ingenious formulations. But the rags, the refuse—these I will not inventory but allow, in the only way possible, to come into their own (zu ihrem Rechte kommen lassen): by making use of them (sie verwenden). (N1a, 8) Bear in mind that commentary on a reality (for it is a question here of commentary, of interpretation in detail), calls for a method completely different from that required by the commentary on a text. In the one case, the scientific mainstay (Grundwissenschaft) is theology; in the other case, philology. (N2, 1) It may be considered one of the methodological objectives of this work to demonstrate a historical materialism which has annihilated within itself the idea of progress. Just here, historical materialism has every reason to distinguish itself sharply from bourgeois habits of thought. Its founding concept is not progress but actualization. (N2, 2) Historical “understanding” is to be grasped, in principle, as an afterlife of that which is understood: and what has been recognized in the analysis of

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the “afterlife of works,” in the analysis of “fame,” is therefore to be considered (zu betrachten) the foundation of history in general. (N2, 3) How this work was written: rung by rung, according as chance would offer a narrow foothold (schmalen Stützpunkt), and always like someone who scales dangerous heights and never allows himself a moment to look around, for fear of becoming dizzy (but also because he would save for the end the full force of the panorama opening out to him). (N2, 4) Overcoming the concept of “progress” and overcoming the concept of “period of decline” (Verfallszeit) are two sides of one and the same thing. (N2, 5) This passage amounts to a lucid “tell-all,” implanted near the dead-center of the work’s vast archive of resources, of how Benjamin set about producing the work. “If I had only known beforehand,” we are so tempted to say. The “literary montage” not only characterizing the work’s collation of references and textual fragments but creating an inextricable affinity between this twentieth-century “dissolving book” and cinema takes place against a backdrop of Marxian expressiveness (N1a, 7). This may be characterized as the moment at which the materials and “material conditions” at the basis of the Marxist world-view begin to speak on their own and in their own terms; when the paradox of expressive matter, is kicked into action, an anomaly akin to the intelligence that Benjamin has located in modern steel and glass. The work of Passagen, in other words, passaging, will brook no rigid distinction between the things of culture—its fragments, its matériale, and its articulation, its rendition into sense. The fabric of Das Passagen-Werk is a mixed bag, semantic and ideational, on the one hand, and absolutely obtuse on the other. Citation is the gift that keeps on giving because it is the compositional process accessing and displaying, to a comprehensive degree, text’s dual status as information and as matter, material, stuff, German Stoff, hence woven or texted material, or colloquially, cultural dead meat. This material amalgam is the dialectical image par excellence, folded in on itself in its mutually neutralizing thingly and expressive functions. Yet it is precisely in deploying such an inchoate medium that Benjamin has managed, “rung by rung” to assemble a perversely systematic and asystematic simulacrum of nineteenthcentury modernization in “advanced” Europe. Hopelessly after the fact, Benjamin lifts the curtain concealing his method: one before the fact visual as well as verbal (“needn’t say anything, merely

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show”). This is a visual performativity on the page. The Convolutes, each configured to order, play or dance their points at least as much as they posit them. They tap a visual performative clearly tipping its hand toward the cinematography of splicing, editing, emerging, and disappearing within the visual manifold “in a flash.” Yet Benjamin keeps his cool within the volatile street-scene of “theory on the fly”—maintaining cool being the indispensable ur-principle to this particular modality of critical inscription. This is what would enable him, under full battle conditions, to place the commentary on a “reality,” i.e., a historic-epistemological configuration or state of affairs, under the overall aegis of theology (N2, 1); “in a flash,” in the same snippet, to understand that analysis setting out from the linguistic and media conditions of an artifact belongs to philology. I needn’t overstate the considerable exertions the critical theory of the post-War period went to in order to establish precisely this fact: the suspension of a priori moral, ethical, and logical premises in the analysis of artifacts whose constitution is irreducibly formal and linguistic. I underscore the dramatic epigrammatic compression attained by theory under the conditions of what may well turn out to be its definitive skirmishes. The critical argumentation crystallizing in these crisis-riddled sequences attains the miniaturization that already, not so long after the War, became the Grundprinzip of cybernetic information-systems and organizations. Such a modality of theoretical inscription, whether it attains permanent display in one culture memory-capsule or another or not, surely has a vested interest in stopping history in its tracks, in somehow, through sheer imagistic precipitousness and captivation, capturing the catastrophe in a freeze-frame. This may well be the unconscious wish underlying the dead halt, to which the imagistic flashes of insight sporadically exploding, with the help of Benjamin’s montage technique of materials, across the panorama of history, will bring systematic thinking. So nuanced, overdetermined, and on target is what Benjamin terms the dialectical image that it stops easy historical, theologically driven interpretation in its tracks even where the tragedy of history marches on. Perhaps the pivotal passage of Convolute N runs: Every present day is determined by the images that are synchronic with it: each “now” is the now of a particular recognizability (Erkennbarkeit). In it, truth is charged to the bursting point with time. This point of explosion, and nothing else, is the point of intentio, which thus coincides with the birth of authentic historical time, the time of truth. It is not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light on what is past: rather, image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash (blitzhaft) with the now to form a constellation. In other words: image is dialectics at a standstill (Dialiktik im Stillstand). For while the relation of the

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present to the past is purely temporal, the relation of what-has-been (Gewesenen) to the now is dialectical: not temporal in nature but figural . Only dialectical images are genuinely historical—that is, not archaic—images. The image that is read—which is to say, the image in the now of its recognizability—bears to the highest degree the imprint of the perilous critical moment on which all reading is founded. (from N3, 1) Once again, in a particularly resonant transitional passage between several of Convolute N’s telling extended riffs, Benjamin has prophetically anticipated the signature issues of post-War critical theory. He has seen them far out ahead of their explicit recognition, but has also compressed them, in the turbulent cloud-chamber of The Arcades Project, to the now of their recognizability. The striking images flashing up from the photographic plate of historical progression register on a recognizability already in place. They would otherwise remain illegible. There is some sort of cognitive silver nitrate at work allowing the image to register, and be registered, in the now. At great length Lacanian psychoanalysis characterizes the méconnaissances emerging from nothing more formidable than every child’s belated entry into the community of language-users. The distortion-effects prompted by the belatedness of linguistic signaling, reception, and comprehension become a mainstay of theoretical post-War models, from psychoanalysis to deconstruction. The dialectical image is truly shocking, in the sense of the spasmodic movement-style and urban concussions that Benjamin traced to “The Man of the Crowd” and its Baudelairean repercussions; but the timeframe in which it works to full effect is metaleptic and uncanny. What explodes in the machine-gun fire of nows each shocking in its impact is the broader cultural concept of intentio itself. From formalistic analysis to Barthesian semiotics and post-Structuralism, post-War theory devotes bookshelves to the debunking of intentionality in discourse as well as fiction. In the theoretical street-skirmishes of Convolute N, the shocking emergence of successive images in the now opens “authentic historical time,” whose truthful dimension is the affinity between its own thinking and writing-conditions and the catastrophic events in the world. Under such attenuated conditions of thinking and civilization itself, Benjamin invokes what he calls the dialectical image as the only intercession powerful and striking enough to reinstate thoughtful and critical deliberation through its initiation of a cease-fire or time-out in the endless defile of catastrophic spinoffs. The dialectical image, conjured into Being throughout the Convolute, is a crystallization so anomalous and striking in itself that it brings the distractions of history and the easy forward momentum of articulation to a dead halt. “Petrified unrest,” “dialectics at a

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standstill,” and indeed, Benjamin’s textual medium in itself, at once material in its sourcing and deployment but critical in its repercussions and in the illumination that it radiates, are all perfect instances of the dialectical image. Perhaps my favorite example of an elaborated figure bringing reading and thinking as well to a productive standstill, the Zen doublebind from which a leap of realization might emerge,28 is the falling star from Section 9 of “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” whose trajectory starts out as a wish-laden folkloric vehicle and ends up on the roulette table in the gaming sideshow to capitalist accumulation.29 How ironic that the last momentous critical passage from Convolute N that I invoke here unveils the intrinsically dialectical image of the sailboat. Temperamentally, perhaps, this image resides at a far cry from the aggravated conditions under which Benjamin synthesizes his critical caption for the historical movement arising in the arcades and first international expositions, and ending, for many beside himself, in twentieth-century totalitarianism. Sailing, as Norbert Wiener and other initiators of cybernetic discourse had noted clearly,30 involves a constant taking and correction of bearings amounting at least to the first stages of meta-critical revision and of the rise in processing power that it affords. The pilot’s skill as kybern et ¯ es ¯ is the ability to productively take stock, adjust, and reconfigure amid what we call “battle conditions,” precisely such catastrophic upheaval as Benjamin faced as he assembled the materials of the Passagen-Werk. Benjamin’s crystallization of the dialectical sailboat as the very medium for theoretically guided critique in times of accelerated turbulence and destruction extends beyond a vague, protocybernetic intuition, one in keeping with his pitched overall attention to twentieth-century media. It is, then, by design that the critical sailboat that Benjamin unveils in order to characterize the relation between concepts and historical turbulence, between the sedate and the violent conditions of writing, is hardly out for a smooth sail. Scientific method is distinguished by the fact that, leading to new objects, it develops new methods. Just as form in art is distinguished by the fact that, opening up new contents, it develops new forms. It is only from without that a work of art has one and only one form, that a treatise has one and only one method. (N9, 2) On the concept of “rescue”: the wind of the absolute in the sails of the concept. (The principle of the wind is the cyclical.) The trim of the sails (Segelstellung) is the relative. (N9, 3)

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What are phenomena rescued from? Not only, and in the main, from the discredit and the neglect (Verruf und Mißachtung) into which they have fallen, but from the catastrophe represented very often by a certain strain in their dissemination (wie eine bestimmte Art ihrer Überlieferung), their “enshrinement in heritage.”—They are saved through the exhibition of the fissure that is within them.—There is a tradition that is catastrophe. (N9, 4) It is the inherent tendency of dialectical experience to dissipate the semblance of eternal sameness, and even of repetition, in history. Authentic political experience is absolutely free of this semblance. (N9, 5) What matters for the dialectician is to have the wind of world history in his sails. Thinking means for him: setting the sails (Segel setzen). What is important is how they are set. Words are his sails. The way they are set makes them into concepts. (N9, 6) The dialectical image is an image that emerges suddenly, in a flash (ist ein aufblitzendes). What has been is to be held fast—as an image flashing up in the now of its recognizability. The rescue that is to be carried out by these means (dergestalt)—and only by these—can operate solely for the sake of what in the next moment is already irretrievably lost (unrettbar verlornen [sich] vollziehen). In this connection, see the metaphorical passage from my introduction to Jochmann, concerning the prophetic gaze (Seherblick) that catches fire from the summits of the past. (N9, 7) Being a dialectician means having the winds of history in one’s sails. The sails are the concepts. It is not enough, however, to have sails at one’s disposal. What is decisive is knowing the art of setting them (Die Kunst, sie setzen zu können, ist das Entschedende). (N9, 8) The concept of progress must be grounded in the idea of catastrophe. That things are “status quo” is the catastrophe. It is not an ever-present possibility but what in each case is given. Thus Strindberg (in To Damascus?): hell is not something that awaits us, but this life here and now. (N9a, 1)

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We need again to take up the marvelous shorthand of these messages scribbled out, crunched into a bottle, and then left for posterity with George Bataille. They may well comprise a secret code of what is left for us to accomplish as we adapt past traditions and conventions of scholarly publication to such media as Twitter and Facebook, as we ourselves count, for rescue, rescue from obscurity, from the “repressive tolerance” comprised of being fancy-free within, but quarantined on campus, by new media of script and social recognition. Do the trenchant and prophetic above formulations dodge the bullet of historical sensibility? Decidedly not! The formidable, exhausting labor of precipitating an ambient theory of the moment out of the detritus of the actual events and the cultural records anticipating them and left behind them has gone on since page 1 of Convolute A and continues through to the Werk’s last page. As much as Benjamin, we need to read everything. We need to “take no prisoners” in our openness to virtually all relevant data-bases, information-stores, and discursive media. Our professional dismissiveness and complacency are artifacts of a delusional stability and social consensus regarding what we do that had in a now-distant cultural scene already been terminally damaged by 1927, when Benjamin first set out on the sailboat ride that became The Arcades Project. Tradition, in the passage above, is as much the catastrophe as human barbarism and blindness. It remains incumbent upon us to do the reading, to process the manifold and unscrolling text, but then to infuse the findings into media that are still capable even now of being received. A formidable challenge, you say? Benjamin surely rose to it in the above passage, and for that reason it is still read, with open-ended amazement, today. Particularly in the meticulous attention that Benjamin paid to imagetransfer techniques and visual media in Convolute Y of The Arcades Project and elsewhere, he methodically took up this challenge. It is the nature of intellectual and cultural production that we always end up overstaying our time: the winds of history are too chaotic; the permutations that they mobilize too complex and multifaceted. Before I overstay the rhythm and span of the current study, I will limit any further comments to the figure of the dialectical sailboat and the rescue it might promise. Benjamin is, once again, as boggled as we are that anything as deliberate and orderly as a method could have emerged from his active engagement with as many strands as he could access of nineteenth-century modernization and its twentieth-century reception. The culmination of this adventure is the sailboat, a dialectical image—that is to say, a self-programming and redirecting vehicle of the second order, of his own methodological programming, even if explicit performatively and allegorically rather than discursively. Benjamin still—messianically31—affords himself the hope of cultural deliverance effected through some alignment between thinking and the vast energy-expenditure, or explosion, of catastrophe. In the literature of systems and chaos theory,

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beginning with Norbert Wiener’s 1954 The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society, sailing a boat (as riding a bicycle) is almost a stock figure for the correction of balance, direction, and other parameters of homeostasis by means of open-ended feedback with the environment. Early though this kick-off to the cybernetic age may seem to some, a good decade beforehand, Benjamin had launched interactive, autopoietic critical theory on its course with the more nuanced figure of the dialectical sailboat. It is within the framework of sailing, as Benjamin did in happier times with intellectual interlocutors and his lover Asja Lacis off Capri in 1924, that the cultural critic, even amid catastrophic winds, stays calmly at her post, “trimming,” then “setting,” her sails, so that they are propelled by the “wind of the absolute,” which is also the “wind of world history.” Set accurately, through all the “relative” modulations, the sails deliver the “concept,” changing over time, but at every juncture keeping the critic on track, even amid cultural turbulence deranging the bedrock institutions of society, say higher education, law, and journalism. Curiously, in this sequence, it is the “phenomena” needing to be rescued. Even under cultural anomie, one fueled as much by steady-state complacency as by draconian authoritarian insults, the thinker struggles to navigate their boat, to maintain its stability, in the hope that the concept distilled and periodically reconfigured through philosophical rigor is capable of rendering an adequate reading of the brutal facts. Accessing the concept, or we would now say, the theoretical program that can make sense of the facts, is the credo and vocation of the critic. Imagining the rapt attention that the critic, amid hurricane conditions, pays to minute differences in the sail-settings is an aporia, or systematic doublebind exhausting the fullest possible limberness and torque of the dialectical image. And the tool that the dialectical sailor has for making these adjustments is nothing more formidable than his words: “Thinking means for him: setting his sails. What is important is how they are set. Words are his sails. The way they are set makes them into concepts” (from N9, 6). The critic keeps writing. Writing is the only craft or exercise through which the writer maintains their tact at setting the sails of difference and modulated articulation, even if they already have tenure, even if writing further therefore represents an unnecessary risk or danger to the stability they have achieved. The critic keeps on writing, even as they have sustained their quixotic quest of reading, in Benjaminian fashion, everything. Does anything in this excursion along the shoals of critical contingency and chaotic immanence sound familiar? Even if our writing instruments have morphed into laptops and iPads? At the beginning of a fresh new solar cycle (2012), I wish all of you indulgent enough to lend these occasional scribbles some credence a year of exuberant writing ahead. I do not wish you staying out of trouble.

6 Playful Healing: The Transitions of D. W. Winnicott It is play that is the universal, and that belongs to health; playing facilitates growth and therefore health; playing leads into group relationships; playing can be a form of communication in psychotherapy; and, lastly, psychoanalysis has been developed as a highly specialized form of playing in the service of communication with oneself and others. The natural thing is playing, and the highly sophisticated twentieth-century phenomenon is psychoanalysis. It must be of value to the psychoanalyst to be constantly reminded not only of what is owed to Freud but also of what we owe to the natural and universal thing called playing. (PR, 41)1

1. mong the transformative shocks that we encounter in this life-long flânerie through a feedback loop of reading are those cultural artifacts, often plainly visible ones, that would have altered vast arcs of integration and bearing had they been encountered earlier, in prior stages of conceptual crystallization. The sense of belatedness accompanying these aha! or lightbulb recognitions is ameliorated by the relief of having accessed these standout generative works at all, before it was too late. This quickly receding window of lucidity, the moment of crystallization just before the writerly occasion is past, is the time-warp when a disproportionate share of telling exegesis makes itself available to its aspiring scribes.

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Over the course of my forty-year “beat” as a roving literary critic, there have been many occasions when I could have run headlong into D. W. Winnicott’s debriefings on his clinical psychiatric work with children and into the sheer wisdom with which he managed to infuse this experience. Indeed, in several of my capacities, as a graduate instructor who taught psychoanalysis from time to time and who was particularly taken with the reasonings of “object-relations” theory, particularly as one who edited a series in this area at a university press, my familiarity with Winnicott’s writings should have been vivid and minute, to the level of chapter and verse. Instead, I contented myself with a second-hand knowledge of his basic innovations, even if gleaned from impressive sources, whether the writings of Bernard Stiegler or Christopher Bollas or from a string of terrific psychoanalytical dissertations I read at the University at Buffalo. I had a somewhat informed image of what a “transitional object” might entail. What I could not fathom or glean from a familiarity with Winnicott best characterized as ambient were the transformations to the bearing, mood, and drift of psychoanalysis’s weighty tradition that his work effected through nothing more prodigious than play itself: also by means of play’s trappings, materials, occasions, and zones. By means of a basic therapeutic address: “connecting” with youthful clients through the impromptu and relatively unbounded parameters of play, Winnicott advocated mightily to dislocate psychoanalysis from a heritage arising in Kantian judgment, assuming foregone sequences of psychosexual development and outcomes, and configuring an explicit nosology of disorders and interventions. Playfulness, bound or unbound, games configured by rules (e.g. chess) or by squiggles, can in no way be constrained by a therapeutic technique, geared especially to children or adolescents, but of possible application to all therapeutic clients. Under Winnicott’s counsel, playfulness is the very tenor of therapeutic exploration, intellectual workingthrough, and all productive human interchange. Playfulness, as elaborated by Winnicott, is the strategic suspension of the moral judgment and prescription haunting all psychologies—in their basic configuration as well as their delivery and techniques of scientific exploration. The deep-seated disorders of the self in Winnicott’s parlance become games gone awry: inappropriate in their initiation, entrenched well beyond the zone of their relevance, insensate to their destructive environmental fallout. Wisdom and therapy both might restore the lightness, if not innocence, to games that have gotten dire. Destructiveness, far from an expression of human evil or perversity, plays an essential role on the Winnicottian playground. The overall ambience of play itself is sufficient to lift aggression above moral failure. At the point of development that is under survey the subject is creating the object in the sense of finding externality itself, and it has to be added that

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this experience depends on the object’s ability to survive . . . If it is an analysis that these matters are taking place, then the analyst, the analytic technique, and the analytic setting all come in as surviving or not surviving the patient’s destructive attacks. This destructive activity is the patient’s attempt to place the analyst outside the area of omnipotent control, that is, out in the world. Without the experience of maximum destructiveness (object not protected) the subject never places the object outside and therefore can never do more than experience a kind of self-analysis, using the analyst as a projection of a part of the self. ( PR , 91) Destruction, in the complex language-game of psychoanalysis, is a discursive positioning, the attempt to accord the interlocutor with distance and objectivity, and by means of them reciprocal vulnerability. Within this framework, survival is an affirmative act, an active endeavor, in several senses. It is at once affirmative of, resistant to, and prevalent over the patient’s traumatic suffering. It takes a D. W. Winnicott to literally put this destruction into play, to de-stigmatize it of its moralistic connotations by placing it within the interactive play of forces. De-stigmatizing therapeutic aggression of its moral condemnation, Winnicott lightens psychological scrutiny of its judgmental burden and procedure. Psychotherapy expands into an openended game, whose hopeful outcome he formulates in the following terms: “We all hope that our patients will finish with us and forget us, and that they will find living itself the therapy that makes sense” (PR, 87). As I grappled with different narcissisms in preparation of a 1993 volume I published under the title Psyche and Text, would that Winnicott’s resilience and affirmation had been at hand in my toolbox of conceptual and emotive resources.

2. In the course of his long clinical practice, as summated in his Playing and Reality and elsewhere, it was Winnicott who accomplished more than any other to analyze the players and to program the transitional space in which systematic healing might arise. Under the aura and illumination of his wisdom, one distilled from clinical experience in the field, playfulness emerges as the indispensable ethos, bearing, and sensibility in the protracted labor of accessing openings and “give” in otherwise intractable psycho-social impasses, that R. D. Laing, for one, termed “knots.”2 Out of his lifelong alliance with the child, a trajectory traced with particular verve and relevance by Adam Phillips in his Winnicott,3 emerges a theoretical alliance with playfulness at the crux of any future liberal systems-analysis that might transpire, whether

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explicitly in such discourses as philosophy, contemporary critical theory, or computer science, or implicitly, throughout the manifold of aesthetic and cultural inventions. With the possible exception of Harry Stack Sullivan,4 Winnicott, more than any other, effected a mood-change in the tenor of classical psychoanalysis. As is well known, Freud collated his powerful new battery of diagnostic and therapeutic tools both from the grim corridors of eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury European mental hygiene, with Paris’s La Salpetrière as a central depot, and from the “absences” through which the early twentieth-century Viennese bourgeoisie demonstrated its out-of-touchness with its compelling drives, desires, and fantasies. From Studies on Hysteria on, breaching—by means of insight extracted from rigorous analysis—the hitherto unknown, because repressed, restraining walls of scruple, inhibition, and compensatory delusion, is a flashbulb event, capable of dispatching entire complexes of symptoms in one fell realization. A tragic history lurks in the backdrop to this scenario, however: the years of lost time and opportunity for fulfillment squandered forever under repression’s despotic regime—in Wallace Stevens’s words, “death’s ironic scraping.” The Leitmotif of the early Freudian casehistories might well have been volatile and endless stores of subliminal Angst, but this powerful energy-field, so recent in its systematic diagnosis and taxonomy, erupted against a backdrop of low-energy frustration and thwarting. Winnicott’s signal legacy to the protocols of psychoanalytical treatment as to the analysis of culture inheres in the centrality that he accorded playfulness in its polymorphic configuration and after-effect. In its developmental aspect, playfulness is a “universal” of animal as well as human behavior. Its specific repercussions extend well beyond the early stages of life and transcribe themselves into multiple collaborative spheres and endeavors of cultural striving and production. Clinically, play became for Winnicott a royal road that granted him access even to the most traumatized and introverted members of his World War II child-psychiatry clientele. We should not overlook the core linguistic facility—it is in this sense that I place him alongside Harry Stack Sullivan—that enabled Winnicott to derive and extrapolate the often occulted rules and grammar of the games his diminutive clients imported into the transitional space of his therapeutic cabinet. In this sense, he belongs to that cadre of psychoanalytical theorists and practitioners whose enduring contribution inhered, at least in part, in the acute sensitivity of their ear, their ability to pick up and decode the very faintest signals giving onto, however tenuously, the operative language of the trauma, injury, and insult that resulted in the symptoms and their case. (In very different ways, Sullivan, Jacques Lacan, Gregory Bateson, R. D. Laing, and Deleuze and Guattari belong to this inchoate coterie of uncanny listeners with special attunement to the voice of

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Otherness itself.) Winnicott’s isolation of playfulness as an interstitial zone of psychoanalytical intervention serves as an attitudinal bulwark to the client’s formidable archival and cognitive task of attaining perestroika with his demons, of opening “lines of flight” beyond the restricted airspace of systematic thwarting. Playfulness also emerges as a vital modality of therapy itself. It plays a disproportionate role in the dawning of a brighter intensity in the interpersonal psychodynamic sphere. Close to Winnicott’s British home, this is a tonality playing an increasing role in the writings of peers including John Bowlby and R. W. D. Fairbairn. But U.S. object-relations theory, taking a strong cue from Heinz Kohut, also gains vital momentum in this direction from Winnicott’s modal amelioration, or perhaps, “diminution.” As has already been intimated in the Introduction and in Chapter 1, and as will be brought home in Chapter 9, playfulness is a dimension in which creativity applies torque to the rigidities of “learned helplessness.” Only within the wider surround (or environment) of playfulness can the cultural citizen and participant be galvanized to the intensively mindful and dense poetic articulation (Heidegger) that ushers Being into the Lichtung or opening. Winnicott follows, in this sense, the tradition, from Rousseau and Wordsworth through Benjamin, placing the child in the position of nascent or proto-critic. The alliance with childhood, affirmed culturally with toys, games, and children’s literature, and clinically through play-therapy, is tantamount to a strategic alliance with the cultural future, a learned susceptibility to the surprise that is the occasion for any palpable cultural event. Only by dint of such unanticipated crystallizations, so sudden in their emergence that they impose themselves in the sense of a social importunity, can paradigms shift and radical reconfigurations emerge within the Lichtung. Playfulness transgresses the temporal and developmental boundaries of childhood proper; also the established institutions, media, and accouterments of childhood. In a highly vivid way, distinct from other scenarios, it begins to explain the way that people, as their relationships with one another wax, wane, dissolve, and morph, relate to one another (as “transitional objects” in Winnicott-talk). Painful a recognition though it may be, we enter people’s lives, sometimes leaving a lasting imprint, having initially played with them (as social, interlocutory, erotic “objects”); they having to the same degree played with us. Out of the presupposition and admission that our interpersonal relationships derive their imprint from the mutually playful interchanges between psycho-social agents emerges a highly distinctive rhetoric of the interpersonal field. The downbeat is less on interpersonal aggression and stalemate and more on the strategies and “uses” sustaining interactions while they remain tenable. As a modality of interpersonal interaction, play gives symbolic networks the prompting, strength, and eventual fading of others in our private symbolic languages and displays—the account stressed

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by Douglas Hofstadter in his recent accounts of mind and interpersonal relations—a good run for their money. As remote from the games of childhood as the academy may seem, Winnicottian playfulness, and particularly the “transitional objects” through which it is expressed, does much to explain the powerful draw that theoretical paradigms, along with “lifetime books” exert over those of us for whom studiousness has emerged not merely as a pastime but as a critical lifestrategy. It becomes enormously productive to approach the methodological frameworks under whose gravitational fields we successively dwell with an intensity similar to the cataclysm worked on our minds and lives by those absolutely decisive works of poetry and fiction and other cultural artifacts because they are, in the very best sense, traumatic.They end up reprogramming our minds and lives. For a certain time, one underscored by its intensity, we understand and “read out” everything in the terms that the “new” theoretical format imports. Unless we bail out of this successive process of theoretical encounters and ongoing secondary revisions—this because we “fix” the process somewhere along the line having taken up the cudgel of “true believers”—theoretical paradigms play much the same role in our intellectual development as “lifetime” cultural artifacts: they are Winnicottian “transitional objects,” testing-grounds and straw men for the “deep structures” claiming centrality to our transitory investigations and syntheses. We come at these “theoretical transitional objects” without warning and anything like “full explanation,” as Winnicott’s childlike clients come to grab their indispensable teddies and blankets; and we tend to dispense with them every bit as unceremoniously when our life-long inquiries radically shift scenes and fields. During our productive engagement with these “theoretical transitional objects,” we hold onto them for dear life, as intensely as we clutch the lifeline to sanity and equanimity that a viable therapeutic process can sometimes offer us. Indeed, the obsessional but also lucid (possibly virtual) thought-world that the likes of an Aristotle, Hegel, Benjamin, or Derrida can open up for us is extremely similar to the gravitational field one enters under the sway of a particular psychoanalytical theory, whether as deliberated in the course of a psychotherapeutic alliance or not. (I speak from personal experience in this suggestion, having as a therapeutic patient often engaged in a succession between “transitional theoretical homes” simultaneous to my methodological evolution as a literary and cultural critic.) It becomes difficult in this context to overestimate the value of playfulness, particularly as crystallized by Winnicott, whether in child-rearing and education (the latter even at the most “advanced” levels), the rough-and-tumble of interpersonal interactions, or in “creative” endeavor and aesthetic production. Even (or perhaps particularly) in untimely times for rejoicing, at moments of the most menacing turbulence, playfulness is absolutely indispensable to

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the Lichtung or ouverture without which operating systems of culture (or the Prevailing Operating System – the POS – itself) remain impervious to the potentials for autopoiesis and creative reprogramming. (It becomes even more imperative for educators in hard times to tease out and sustain the playfulness of their students.) It is in this sense that a small study such as this one, taking as its critical occasion the platform shared by aesthetic creativity, critical penetration, and therapeutic healing, must fold into its account, only in quasiserious fashion, the utter playfulness evident in different ways in the painting of Kandinsky, the philosophically driven critique of Benjamin and Derrida, the fanciful fiction of Laurence Sterne, Lewis Carroll, and Jorge Luis Borges, and in the epochal Computer Science of Hofstadter and Wilden. As a writer, Winnicott refused to express himself in long or involuted sentences. He was suspicious toward any thought that couldn’t articulate itself in a lucid sentence. More acutely than any other social analyst and theorist, however, Winnicott configured the still-operative program legislating the centrality of play to any inquiry encompassing creativity, artistic production, or theoretical methodology.

3. Light Passage. How is it, within the framework of Western institutions placing immoderate stress on relations of exclusivity and permanence, institutions grounded in the varieties of idealism entertained in different crystallizations of Western thought, that Winnicott can manage to reorient therapeutic healing to the dynamics of change and transition? In posing such a question, I wish to underscore here the emphasis on transformation, change, and motion in Winnicott’s thinking and reorientation of psychiatry. The justly famous “transitional object” may, in some of its emanations, be a thing, a material target and incitement for the expression and channeling of “private language,” that is, the signifiers or symbols of psychic life, nuanced, as they’ve been, by personal experience and local (i.e., familial, communal) usage. A downbeat on “thingness” or concrete substantiality begs to be read out of such a term as “transitional object.” In tapping Winnicott’s writing as a major resource in extrapolating the overarching healing effect embedded in resonant cultural artifacts and works of theory/philosophy in addition to “therapies,” I wish to restore the downbeat to the “transition”—the movement, transformation, passage, and irreducible volatility—subtending whatever “object” may be in play. And I do this in full appreciation for the specificity in understanding child development and interpersonal relations that Winnicott was able to extract through minute attention to things, among them ragged blankets and no longer recognizable stuffed animals, whose primary characteristic inheres, precisely, in their eventual discarding. “We all hope that our patients will finish

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with us and forget us, and that they will find living itself the therapy that makes sense” (PR, 87). Playing and Reality is itself a hybrid text. Grounded in some of Winnicott’s telling (or should we say transitional?) case-histories, it is not exactly a clinical memoir or reprise. A late-in-career retrospective, it offers an overview of some of the decisive dynamics and thresholds encountered in psychotherapeutic settings, yet the volume is not a methodological summation or clarification. Some of the book’s decisive formulations—“Adults are needed if adolescents are to have life and liveliness. Confrontation belongs to containment that is non-retaliatory, without vindictiveness, but having its own strength” (PR, 150)—are positively oracular and would be impossible without a full prior career of vivid observation and engagement. The volume hovers between clinical recall and theoretical meditation; it opens a feedback loop between these pivotal bearings in psychoanalytical process. The work undertaken by this particular volume is often, but not always, the opening and surveying of the parameters of pivotal developmental thresholds and therapeutic activity as experienced by the “patient” or “subject.” In its implicit cartography, Playing and Reality renders a map of the different conflict zones, organized by dialectical forces, we pass through, whether in or out of therapy, in the process of maturation. Among these are the infant’s capacity to cope with a disillusionment eventually tempering his fantasies of omnipotent control over the mothering parent; and the unavoidable dimension of destructiveness (aggression, exploitation) amid the overall nurturing dynamics of parenting and mentoring. The preeminent feature of Winnicott’s summative formulations may well be their grounding in the specifics of infantile and childhood bonding, separation, and play. The infant’s nascent manipulations involve very particular limbs and organs and assume specific activities, among them the following: (ii) somehow or other the bit of cloth is held and sucked, or not actually

sucked; the objects used naturally include napkins and (later) handkerchiefs, and this depends on what is readily and reliably available; or (iii) the baby starts from early months to pluck wool and to collect it and to use it for the caressing part of the activity; less commonly, the wool is swallowed, even causing trouble; or (iv) mouthing occurs . . . (PR, 3–4) In his own contribution to developmental psychology, Winnicott implies that the coordination and relations to objects or things evidenced in early infancy are crucial indeed. The items cited immediately above form the heart of a list of what Winnicott calls “transitional phenomena.” These elements,

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including “perhaps a bundle of wood or the corner of a blanket or eiderdown, or a word or tune, or a mannerism,” become the child’s very first implements, its interface or mediation to the world. Winnicott’s deliberately hesitant style in this passage (“perhaps . . . or . . . or”) suggests the wide range of materials and their sources that can be deployed as first implements. Winnicott introduces into the field of transitional objects and interactions a broad range of substitutability, much akin, say, to linguistic synonymy or homonymy. For these transitional phenomena indeed serve tangible purposes, “vitally important . . . for use at the time of going to sleep and [a]s a defence against anxiety, particularly anxiety of the depressive type.” While the transitional object may be fashioned of materials with which the infant has regular contact, not every product of its thing-world qualifies as a transitional object. Indeed, it is surrounded in “special qualities”: 1

2 3 4 5

6

7

The infant assumes rights over the object, and we agree to this assumption. Nevertheless, some abrogation of omnipotence from the start. The object is affectionately cuddled as well as excitedly loved and mutilated. It must never change, unless changed by the infant. It must survive instinctual loving, and also hating and, if it be a feature, pure aggression. Yet it must also seem to the infant to give warmth, or to move, or to have texture, or to do something that seems to show it has vitality or reality of its own. It comes from without from our point of view, but not so from the point of view of the baby. Neither does it come from within; it is not a hallucination. Its fate is to be gradually allowed to be decathected, so that in the course of years it becomes not so much forgotten as relegated to limbo. ( PR , 5)

Not merely a prototypical implement or interface to the world, the transitional object, as catalogued in the marvelously terse inventory directly above, is a dialectical engine in its own right. With precision as well as economy, it serves as microcosm and template of interactive complexities persisting well beyond infancy and childhood. In its odd particularity it becomes a primary target of irreducible ambivalence, a prototype of persisting, even thriving in the face of pitched aggression, a generator of unmotivated benevolence and vitality. It plies the insane-making threshold of uncertainty between illusion and actuality. Perhaps most strikingly, it is possessed of “texture”: it encompasses the fibrous depth sustaining networks of signifiers

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and all the recursions and other strange loopings that can transpire within the domains of communications, fabulation, and programming. Not only does the transitional object survive its paradoxical fate—to be cherished and annihilated at the same time, to assert itself and with equal vehemence not exist, to be lovingly grasped precisely in order to be abandoned—it is tangibly fashioned out of these self-negating materials. The inventory of features surrounding the transitional object is striking in the precision with which it recalls some of the most striking creations of children’s literature, from A. A. Milne’s “Pooh” stories to Margery Williams’s The Velveteen Rabbit (illustrated by Harold Nicholson). The title stuffed animal of the latter tale serves its child-master as a full-fledged Winnicottian transitional object ever since it replaces a lost china dog among its owner’s prized possessions. The wrenching crisis of the story occurs when the boy contracts scarlet fever and the Velveteen Rabbit must be discarded. What gives this book a special place in the children’s object-relations literature is its explicit rhetoric of the “realness” attained by the special things invested with transitional object-status as catalogued by Winnicott. The Rabbit’s sudden fall from being “real” to being lost and forgotten is nothing less than a tragic event, at least from its point of view. Williams’s narrating the parable of a boy and a toy from the thing’s point of view bespeaks a fundamentally projective capability for empathy that for Hofstadter and philosophers of mind engaged in the debates regarding consciousness and subjectivity link closely to the phenomenon of intelligence itself. (It would not be far-fetched to see the reader’s sympathy for the fate of the Velveteen Rabbit as a variant of the identification prompting Hofstadter, in I Am a Strange Loop, to become vegetarian.) For all that Winnicott takes the transitional object’s thingliness in earnest, with full attention to its tangible qualities and “feel,” the primary function that he assigns it is as an arbiter “between what is objectively perceived and what is subjectively conceived of” (PR, 11). Even in the initial chapter of a work with a strong downbeat on its hindsight and clearly gauged as a compilation volume, the emphasis on the transitional object quickly shifts from its substantial qualities to the intermediary spaces and states of mind that it opens up. Its own position, between a Freudian pursuit of the emergence of the “reality principle” in individual development, and the Lacanian designation of the Real as a zone and modality of psychic processing, Winnicott’s invention of the transitional object is interstitial. The fate of the transitional object is inextricably intertwined with a reality-testing beginning, so far as Winnicott is concerned, at birth. Successful mothering, from the very outset of infancy, is a tightrope walk between the illusions unwittingly created in her effectiveness and timeliness as a nurturer—here Winicott relies heavily on the pioneering work of Melanie Klein5—and a necessary accommodation to the disillusionment

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crucial to coping in a patently imperfect world. “The mother’s main task (next to providing opportunity for illusion) is disillusionment” (PR, 13). In cybernetic terms, the transitional object functions as a switch allowing the mother’s inevitable limitations to be reconciled to her illusory perfection and its equally imaginary subjection to the infant’s control. A successful transition through infancy is one in which the infant is tempered to phase-appropriate absence, delay, and fending for itself, all the while receiving the full array of attentions and services, at a sufficient level to sustain basic “equanimity of Being.” The transitional object becomes a key tool in the process of mediating between infantile hallucinations surrounding the mothering figure, disillusionment crucial to the infant’s psychological development, and “good enough” standards of basic support and care. Prognosticating beyond infancy, Winnicott earmarks the arts and other cultural forms of “makebelieve,” religion, and overall intellectual creativity as the future to the reality-testing arbitrated by mothering figures and “operated” by means of transitional objects. Transitional objects and transitional phenomena belong to the realm of illusion, which is at the basis of initiation of experience. This early stage in development is made possible by the mother’s special capacity for making adaptation to the needs of her infant, thus allowing the infant the illusion that what the infant creates really exists. This intermediate area of experience, unchallenged in respect of its belonging to inner or external (shared) reality, constitutes the greater part of the infant’s experience, and throughout life is retained in the intense experiencing that belongs to the arts and to religion and to imaginative living, and to creative scientific work. ( PR , 14) Introduced as a palpable thing, an object with recognizable parameters, the therapeutic incitation to transition and variation quickly becomes an experience, interactive and open-ended. The terms that Winnicott accesses here for the experience of playful hovering on the threshold of discovery are precious, in the best sense of the word: “intense experiencing,” “imaginative living.” There is of course a downside to the illusion whose alternation between aura and debunking gives the transitional object its very form: while also linked in a preliminary passage to art and religion, it “yet becomes the hallmark of madness when an adult puts too powerful a claim on the credulity of others, forcing them to acknowledge a sharing of illusion that is not their own” (PR, 3). As history has taught us time and time again, “imaginative living,” especially stylized and promulgated by forced conformity, can issue forth in its own highly disruptive insanity.

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As suggested above, in a study such as this one, in which the means for therapeutic remediation set out by Winnicott are tied to the possibilities for ouverture, “give,” and creative appropriation within the gravitational fields of overarching systems, the zone of transition, its space and features, are as decisive as the object and elements at play. The intermediate area to which I am referring is the area that is allowed to the infant between primary creativity and objective perception based on reality-testing. The transitional phenomena represent the early stages of the use of illusion, without which there is no meaning for the human being in the idea of a relationship with an object that is perceived by others as external to that being. ( PR , 11) The primacy in reality-testing and in the establishment of ontological equanimity that Winnicott accords to the between, the most tenuous location and state because it is neither here nor there, is a distinctive feature of his thinking. Winnicott allows us to think this “intermediate space” both as the playroom between infant and mother (the latter as agent of social support and control in general) and as the therapeutic cabinet to which the client repairs for the adjudication of imbalances sustained in prior developmental configurations. He returns to this zone toward the end of the book, elaborating its utter decisiveness to the vicissitudes of adult lives, whether productive and creative on the one hand or stunted on the other: The special feature of this place where play and cultural experience have a position is that it depends for its existence on living experiences, not on inherited tendencies. One baby is given sensitive management here where the mother is separating out from the baby so that the area for play is immense; and the next baby has so poor an experience at this phase of his or her development that there is but little opportunity for development except in terms of introversion or extraversion. The potential space, in the latter case, has no significance, because there was never a built-up sense of trust matched with reliability, and therefore there was no relaxed self-realization. ( PR , 108) This play-space is defined by its dynamic vitality, its foundation in “living experience.” Its potential after-effects are multiple. If it turns out to have situated “sensitive management . . . where the mother is separating out from the baby,” the child is, in more senses than one, set for life. Winnicott has described this zone, a few lines above, as “a potential space,” “where there is

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trust and reliability” (PR, 108). Also, as we’ve seen, “where the area for play is immense.” “Poor experience” in this location, on the other hand, predicates a full range of impairments at the levels of autonomy, intellectual curiosity and testing, and social bonding. Winnicott’s meticulous attention to a transactional space, an interface, where so much in creative potential and ontological equanimity remains to be decided, is disproportionately important to any current effort to align and mobilize available cultural and critical resources that address what I have hitherto termed “systematic insult.” In techno-cultural hindsight, Winnicott’s “intermediate space” is quintessentially interactive. When optimally configured, it is virtual in the sense of fostering the intense absorption in experience and its parameters (thingly, conceptual, interpersonal, interspecies) most conducive to play, experimentation, and other forms of environmental testing. The drift of Winnicott’s intervention is forward-looking not only in moving ahead from Freudian “intrapsychic agencies” toward Lacanian cognitive processors. (Winnicott makes provision for the “realness” with which the transitional object is endowed by its child-“master”; the configuration of symbols, at different degrees of vividness, into networks; and for an imaginary activity that he calls “fantasying.” More on this below.) Winnicott’s terms and practices remain crucial to any critical practice updated to the processes of contemporary cybernetics and Cognitive Science because of the interactivity, virtual absorption, and the autopoietic potential embedded in creative reprogramming and in the transitional spaces where such playfulness transpires. Winnicott’s clinical illustration to the initial chapter of Playing and Reality, the one in which he sets out the multiple features and potentials of the transitional object, is a seven-year-old boy who has been separated from his mother at crucial junctures of early childhood. The mother suffers from ongoing depression. She has cared for the boy into his fourth year (three years three months, to be exact), at which point there are several untimely separations: for the laying-in upon the birth of his younger sister; at three years eleven months, when his mother needs surgery; and at four years nine months for a psychiatric hospitalization. His symptomatic behaviors include a “compulsion to lick things and people”, “compulsive throat noises”, and anxiety regarding “his elder sister’s mental defect” (PR, 18). What is stunning about Winnicott’s treatment of this case is both the playful “intermediate space” that he installs into the therapeutic regimen and the irreducibly virtual dimensions of the child’s symptoms and their remediation. The case serves Winnicott as an occasion for recalling the “game of squiggles” that he had devised as a means of “drawing out” his younger patients, a “drawstring,” if you will, of data and associations out of individuals whose verbal skills are at most nascent. The instance that Winnicott recalls here has something of a public demonstration about it (in addition to doctor and

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client, two psychiatric social workers and two other “visitors” are present). Elsewhere Winnicott describes the squiggle-exchange as “the game with no rules” (PR, 121). The boy did not immediately give an abnormal impression and he quickly entered into a squiggle game with me. (In this squiggle game I make some kind of an impulsive line-drawing and invite the child whom I am interviewing to turn it into something, and then he makes a squiggle for me to turn into something in my turn.) The squiggle game in this particular case led to a curious result. The boy’s laziness immediately became evident, and also nearly everything I did was translated by him into something associated with string. ( PR , 16) By absorbing his youthful client in an impromptu duet (or duel) of squiggles, the therapist can gather an unguarded picture of what is on the client’s mind. The method is in complete keeping with Freud’s early call for complete spontaneity in the patient’s thought-processes (it was to this end that he and Breuer, early on, devised a technique of squeezing the patient’s forehead at crucial junctures of the unfolding narrative).6 Also with the tangles of associations, at the conclusion of Studies on Hysteria, drawn through a “narrow cleft” onto what I would call the “cutting floor” of psychoanalysis for the purpose of illustrative “splicing together.” Therapist and youthful client, in their virtually absorptive “game without rules,” translate and transcribe their mutually spontaneous responsive squiggles into something more meaningful, that is, messages taking shape as both drift and context of the communication emerge. In a language-game never fully divesting itself of its provisional nature, therapist and client engage in a mutually transcriptive feedback. Any “higher” synthesis, whether on the part of patient or therapist, as to what is going on, as to what needs to be inferred and expressed, emerges from a set of horizontal exchanges transpiring along a linear “string” of phrases and responses. As Douglas Hofstadter sets about explaining to the broader public how cybernetic programs and machines build in their power and capacity, he invokes precisely this model of data accruing in linear fashion until, through strategic recursion, self-reference, and citation (“quining”), it projects “higher” levels of processing and such “autopoietic” features as self-correction and Artificial Intelligence. Reminiscent of the drawings that Kafka left behind, the seven-year-old boy’s ten drawings include a lasso, a whip, two crops, a knot, and a yo-yo string. Completely attuned to the significance of strings and the knots they assume in psychoanalysis, Winnicott inquires of the boy’s parents as to “the boy’s preoccupation with string”:

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They said that the boy has become obsessed with everything to do with string, and in fact whenever they went into a room they were liable to find that he had joined together chairs and tables; and they might find a cushion, for instance, with a string joining it to the fireplace. They said that the boy’s preoccupation with string was gradually developing a new feature, one that had worried them instead of causing them ordinary concern. He had recently tied a string around his sister’s neck (the sister whose birth provided the first separation of this boy from his mother). ( PR , 17) Within the framework of psychotherapeutic healing, the string with which the boy is obsessed becomes the basic medium and line of relation, a life-line to the world even in the bizarre case when it is employed in a strangle-hold on his younger sister. The string links objects of vastly different configuration, scale, texture, and deployment. It is the telegraphic cable within the world of things. It is but the shortest stretch (Kurzstrecke) between a string and what Hofstadter means by a “strange loop.” To the boy, strings are the lines of connectedness in a world that has fallen apart through his mother’s physical and psychological absences. Within the cybernetically configured realm of cognitive psychology that Winnicott is playing a significant part to usher in, strings are tantamount to phrases of data. In a cybernetically configured world, information-bits are strung on lines that can then be folded, doubled, paired, and run in circuits, all to differing effects. Information of radically divergent sorts and imports can be strung: genetic coding, musical phrases, numerical patterns in accordance with various axioms. Quoted, strings of information can make programs self-referential and capable of evolving (and mutating) themselves. Placed in parallel, strings of different data engage in mutual translation and transcription. If one of the strands is quantitative, the isomorphic track or ladder becomes operative. Whereas isomorphic parallelism between strings of very similar data is not very exciting, Hofstadter argues, similar to moving back and forth between closely cognate national languages, all kinds of magic breaks loose when isomorphism bridges hitherto unrelated worlds. Stepping out of one purely typographical system into another isomorphic typographical system is not a very exciting thing to do; whereas stepping clear out of the typographical domain into an isomorphic part of number theory has some kind of unexplored potential . . . It is as if somebody had been familiar with string figures all his life, but purely as string figures, devoid of all meaning—and then, all of a sudden, someone introduced him to the mapping between stories and things. What a revelation!7

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While the downbeat here is on the radical potential shaken loose by interfacing the most uncommon denominators (musical scores and musical sounds; strings and narratives), we need to bear in mind that the internal language common to psychoanalysis and computers is at all times a stringstory. The information crucial to written artifacts, biological replication, and Cognitive Science is arranged on strings. It is strung-out. Hofstadter’s universe expands along lines familiar to readers of Borges, Kafka, Proust, and Joyce. At all times it is undergirded, wired, and programmed by string-theory. The point at which thinking and vibrant writing dovetail with the operations that can be performed with strings is foundational and utterly decisive to the current Prevailing Operating System (POS), all the while Hofstadter plainly demonstrates that this confluence played a role before—as discernable in the major quantum leaps during the history of number theory, in Escher’s graphics, and in Bach’s canons and fugues. TNT, “Typographical Number Theory,” is Hofstadter’s term for the advances in mathematics allowing numbers to be operational in a cybernetic sense. The term refers to quantification conducive to typographical representation and notation (in its graphic manifestation, it gets to drive machines and devices). The term is his home-grown replacement to the stately objectivity and rigidity that he attributes to Russell and Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica, taken as the crowning architecture of these scientific values. As he narrates the breakthroughs by Kurt Gödel that by means of TNT launched the cybernetic age, Hofstadter’s imagery increasingly revolves around the figure of strings: There are strings of TNT which can be interpreted as speaking about other strings of TNT; in short . . . TNT as a language, is capable of “introspection,” or self-scrutiny. This is what comes from Gödel-numbering. The second key idea [here] is that the property of self-scrutiny can be entirely concentrated into a single string; thus that string’s sole focus of attention is itself. This “focusing trick is traceable, in essence, to the Cantor diagonal method.”8 Hofstadter invokes Gödel and secondarily Cantor in narrating what might be described as “the birth of smart strings out of the stasis of classical mathematics.” The key implication here is that strings of numbers sequenced according to procedures devised by an exceptionally far-seeing and intuitive mathematician alone are sufficient to produce the effects that drive cybernetic devices, configuring the cybernetic age. Gödel performed the basic theoretical reconfiguration at the basis of these contributions. As a theoretician of numbers, he did this by isolating strings of numbers that performed selfscrutiny and were self-referential, allowing a breakthrough—within this sphere alone—to more advanced levels of calculation. He thus created a purely numerical “computer without hardware.” His “introspective and self-

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scrutinizing” strings of TNT form, in the domain of numbers, the theoretically activated script or écriture whose performance and signification collapse together. In the verbal domain, this script that mutated into the medium as well as the project of contemporary critical theory. Indeed, the intersection between Gödelian strings and deconstructive traces may well mark the characteristic crossroads of our age. And these prodigious leaps of theoretical discernment, simulation, and processing power evolved from something so basic and disarming as a child’s play with string. Winnicott was not only at the forefront of the turn to cognitive processing in psychoanalysis. He rendered his practice open to the playful and virtual dimensions of therapeutic redress, whose program he rendered in his own distinctive clinical notation. Were the present study a work of criticism designed as a self-fulfilling readout of terms culled from some master-text (or operating system), this would hardly be the place to insert a post-scriptum on the literary sub-genre organized and motivated by “strings.” And yet I make precisely this swerve in the effort of consolidating insights within a project growing as much by resonance as by argumentation. Everything about this study should suggest that the precipitous rise in observational power that may transpire within a trajectory of writing is by no means an orderly or linear process. It could be argued, I think, that the monologic literature of self-sustaining embellishment and qualification that I have elsewhere associated with the aesthetic of postmodernism is also, from a contemporary perspective, a literature of “stringing” powered by its implicit literary correlative to a “string theory.”9 This vast project of articulation extends from the “poetic stuff” of Pound’s Cantos and a discourse of disaffected rumination that Beckett could cull from the late Kafka as well as Joyce, by way of the Latin-American “boom” of the 1960’s–1980’s, all the way to Thomas Bernhard’s hybrid rants (they work just as well as critique as fiction), perhaps qualifying him as one of the “masterstringers” in the history of writing. More recently, this synthetic process (more than a “model’) has animated the polymorphously experimental work of W. G. Sebald and Roberto Bolaño (see Chapter 8 below). The decisive trait of this synthetic process—a disfiguration indeed rising in response to high modernism’s marked historicism and aesthetic of perspectivism and permutation—is the process’s persistence, past all points of absurdity, of a linear accretion of formulation until, by dint of its intrinsic “chunking,” it begins to “loop strangely” on itself: it “bubbles” into its performative and metacritical dimensions. This vast rise in cognitive and critical power transpires, in Bernhard and Bolaño as much as in Beckett, by dint of nothing more formidable than a resolute, possibly obsessive, accretion of “strings of articulation.” The phrases, like the thatch in a wasp’s nest, simply add up until they become something multidimensional and indeed inexhaustible. This would be the thumbnail sketch of the “literature of

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stringing,” if we were to posit one. And in testing the hypothesis, submitting it to its “trials,” we would enlist Bernhard’s irascible Reger (of Old Masters) as an exemplary literary “stringer,” within a literary tradition long antedating the scientific attestations, whether in mathematics or physics, of “string theory.” In the following passage, pressed into service here as the microcosmic sample of a vast, even “global” literature, autobiographical reminiscence swerves into Reger’s account of himself as a “critical artist” (his career has been one of a musical stringer for the feuilleton of The London Times). Any self-promotion to the level of “critical artist” arises as much through Reger’s rhetorical practice of endlessly strung phrases as through powers of insight or recollection: In the end it was actually music that vivified me, he [Reger] said yesterday. But of course I did not wish, nor was I able, to be a creative or even a performing artist, but only a critical one. I am a critical artist, he said, I have been a critical artist all my life. Even in childhood I was a critical artist, he said, the circumstances of my childhood made me a critical artist in an entirely natural way. I certainly regard myself as an artist, that is as a critical artist, and as a critical artist I am of course also creative, that is obvious, hence a performing and creative critical artist, he said. What is more, a creative and performing artist of The Times, he said. I certainly regard my brief reports for The Times as works of art, and I think that as the author of these works of art I am in one person and simultaneously a painter and a musician and a writer in one, that is my greatest delight. I am not, therefore, as the painters are, only a painter, and I am not, as the musicians are, only a musician, and I am not, as the writers are, only a writer, and you must understand that I am a painter and a musician and a writer all in one. That is what I perceive to be the greatest happiness, he said, to be an artist in all the arts and yet reside in one of them. It is possible, he said, that the critical artist is the one who practices his art in all the arts and is aware of it, utterly and totally aware of it. This awareness makes me happy. ( OM , 52)10 This revelatory passage is as much “the stuff” of Reger’s trite complacency, self-justification, and remonstration, against targets ranging in scale from Stifter and Heidegger to Austrian society as a whole, as any in this decidedly monologic novel. Yet, in keeping both with Hofstadter’s accounts of “strange loops” and “points of incompletion” in cybernetics and with critical theory’s multiple allegorical turns (whether by Benjamin, Derrida, or de Man), the passage lifts (or “chunks”) itself toward a theory of hybridity in postmodern critical inscription. It thus performs the radical expansion of two-dimensional strings of articulation into a multidimensional space of feedback and meta-commentary.

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4. Playful Alliance. Play is absolutely decisive to Winnicott’s psychology. Within his parlance as well as his clinical practice, play remains far more than a pastime, a distraction, a diversion from ponderous, strategic matters, a way of “killing” time. It is, rather, the positive expression of the human and environmental reactions to programmed systematic conditions of constraint, shortage, and exploitation. Play is, if you will, the mobilization of the unnecessary, the uneventful, the unconditional. It resides at a tangent from the linear operations of determination and necessity. It is the “strangeness” of the strange loop and the strange attractor. The mystery shrouding play will always be whether it transpires, “plays itself out,” simply for its own sake, in the name of its own “discharge,” expression, or exhaustion; or whether, at some point, it succumbs to goal-orientation, “purposiveness” (Kant), selfinterest of one sort or another. Otherwise put: whether the “strangeness of the strange loop,” as this figure will be elaborated in the following chapter on the work of Douglas Hofstadter, ends up in the service of operational systems or not. As suggested above, no writer writes more compellingly of the doublebinds with which the dynamic of play is constitutionally fraught, especially with regard to its goal-orientation or open-endedness, than Jacques Rancière, in his pivotal distinction between the consensual and dissensual dimensions of political intervention. Within the transitional space of Winnicottian psychology, playfulness not only guards a resolutely “open” margin for interaction and remediation; it is invested with a characteristic intimacy whose didactic thrust is decidedly in the direction of support and healing. It is in the infant’s interactions with the mothering figure as currently understood—independent of any specific gender determination—that the initial environmental proclivities and prospects for intimacy come out. It is a distinctive feature of Winnicott’s world that the mothering-figure’s capacity for rendering “good enough” service is closely bound up with his talent for play. (This of course alongside such other characteristics as alert responsiveness and the ability to promote tolerance for frustration.) The mothering figure, in Winnicott, is to no small extent a coplayer in open-ended games of invention, communicational feedback, realitychecking, and limit-testing. Both in terms of inventiveness and intimacy, successful mothering inheres in successful playing. Therapeutic intervention addresses itself to the full panoply of wounds and insults with painful cognitive and painful aftershocks that have accrued in the course of experience. One of the remarkable features about Winnicott’s therapeutic zone is the degree to which the therapist takes over from the mothering figure. The therapist steps in by reinstating both a holding environment of intimacy that has been shattered and a rhythm of play that has

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come to a nerve-grating halt. In restoring the equanimity and stability essential to a zone of unfettered playfulness, Winnicott and those practitioners following in his wake radically renegotiate the compact of therapeutic alliances and protocols as Freud initially formulated it. (Of course, the Freudian conventions regarding the transference and the constraints surrounding psychoanalytical practice themselves involved a paraphrase of prevalent scientific and medical norms.) The remainder of this section will be devoted to the maternal heritage of playfulness and intimacy in “good enough” child-rearing and within its irreducibly critical replay in the bearing of therapeutic healing. This is at all times a strategic posture managing to effect a synergy between nurturing and critical acuity. We have already stumbled upon the mother’s decisive transitional role and facilitation in Winnicott’s parlance. It would not be too strong to dub the Winnicottian mother (his term) the “mother of illusion.” Her crucial nurturing power consists not only in giving rise to the infantile illusion of grandiosity, but also in dispelling this dangerous myth. The mother, at the beginning, by an almost 100 per cent adaptation affords the infant the opportunity for the illusion that her breast is part of the infant. It is, as it were, under the baby’s magical control . . . Omnipotence is nearly a fact of experience . . . In another language, the breast is created by the infant over and over again out of the infant’s capacity to love or (one can say) out of need. A subjective phenomenon develops in the baby, which we call the mother’s breast. ( PR , 11) The mother, in Winnicott’s scenario for parenting, is the illusion-engendering, illusion-debunking founder of transitional space. The child’s future capability to draw upon the imaginative and creative power situated in this space is to a large degree incumbent on the mother’s humane programming of its illusory dimension. Among the most striking conditions postulated in the sentences immediately above is that the sense of infantile grandiosity is, at least for a while, not so much an invention as a fact of life. Perhaps even more stunning: that the breast, on the other hand, is as much the infant’s recurrent creation as it is a strategic element in the maternal anatomy. The breast is, if we follow the logic through, the joint production of mother and child, by the partners in nurturing. Not only do future creativity but interpersonal collaboration and intimacy hang in the outcome of the mother’s “illusory” balancing act, her arbitrating between “necessary” fiction and “unavoidable” reality. In a chart fashioned out of Winnicott’s own provisional “squiggles” (PR, 12), the transitional object literally stands in for—supplants—the febrile illusion arising when mother and child are a composite Being, when the breast is as

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much its creation as the mother’s body. The capacity for illusion, mapped out very precisely by Lacan and situated in the Imaginary, is the progenitor to creativity, adaptiveness, what Hofstadter will characterize as intelligence’s extensibility, in subsequent stages in development. “The mother’s adaptation to the infant’s needs, when good enough, gives the infant the illusion that there is an external reality that corresponds to the infant’s own capacity to create. In other words, there is an overlap between what the mother supplies and what the child might conceive of” (PR, 12). The overlap that Winnicott elaborates here is decisive to the playfulness at the core of the images and fictions to which culture returns again and again in its self-definition and revision. The mother is a double-agent, promulgating, through illusion, a reality false at least in its initial emergence; then training her progeny to do even that reality one better by means of invention and cunning. The mother may well serve as a subversive agent of illusion and adaptation to it, in Winnicott’s implicit model of childhood development, but she will return in the figure of the therapist herself in order to redress any undue damage she has allowed in her illusion-mongering. When Winnicott designates play as the enterprise as well as the zone for improvisatory adaptation and compensation, the figure of the good enough mothering figure is not far behind. It is the maternal service as the facilitator and coach of child’s play that is, in Winnicott’s world, the earliest emanation of the good enough psychotherapist. When it comes time for Winnicott to hazard a “Theory of Play,” the scenario is somewhat familiar from what has been set out above, but the therapeutic payoff of cognizant mothering is all but explicit. Once again, a symbiotic merger between mother and child prevails. “The object is repudiated, re-accepted, and perceived objectively” (PR, 47); that is, the infant’s emergent confidence in this nurturing rapport, even in the omnipotence that it in certain respects reinforces, allows for a nuanced relationship to the “transitional object.” In the state of confidence that grows up when a mother can do this difficult thing well (not if she is unable to do it), the baby begins to enjoy experiences based on a “marriage” of the omnipotence of intrapsychic processes with the baby’s control of the actual. Confidence in the mother makes an intermediate playground here, where the idea of magic originates, since the baby does to some extent experience omnipotence . . . Play is immensely exciting. It is exciting not primarily because the instincts are involved, be it understood! The thing about playing is always the precariousness of the interplay of personal psychic reality and the experience of control of actual objects. This is the precariousness of magic itself, magic that arises in intimacy, in a relationship that is found to be reliable. To be reliable the relationship is necessarily motivated by mother’s

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love, or her love-hate, or her object-relating, not by reaction formations. When a patient cannot play the therapist must attend to this major symptom before interpreting fragments of behavior. C. The next stage is being alone in the presence of someone. ( PR , 47) This is an exemplary “transitional passage” within the virtual domain of Winnicott’s retrospective annotation. It begins in the maternal domain, fraught with all its closeness and its ambiguity, a zone in which “confidence,” a basic sense of reliance in interpersonal interactions, somehow arises out of what we might call “reasonable illusion-management.” The ability to play, at first attended and then unattended, is the byproduct of this eccentric combination of fragile magic and basic dependability. By the end of this passage, though, the persistent inability to play, the outgrowth of severe impediment either on the imaginary or the interpersonal platform of play, or on both, has morphed into a clinical condition, one in Winnicott’s nosology particularly demanding of attention. In the course of a single paragraph, albeit a particularly pregnant or “transitional” one, play has gravitated from the close maternal circle to center-stage in psychotherapy’s minimalist drama. In the dramatis personae, the good enough mother—and we need to keep in mind how much sheer invention and creativity Winnicott invests in this most everyday and even, in certain respects “universal” function, significantly “upgrading” it—trades places with the psychotherapist. This latter agent of redress and remediation intervenes precisely where the complex of factors conducive to the child’s ability to play has not adequately coalesced and functioned. Henceforth, at least within the compass of Playing and Reality, the psychotherapist incites, channels, restores, promotes, and legitimates play. As exemplified by the “game of squiggles,” play becomes the very first foothold in the rapport between therapist and child. It is the traits and reactions of the “good enough mother,” so often mobilized in child-rearing with hardly a thought, that become the therapist’s indispensable primer and manual in devising his interventions. As we shall explore in detail below, this tack in the conceptualization of culture as well as in the practice of psychotherapy is a radical departure from the “mainstream” of clinical protocols, at least as devised by Freud and reinforced by his followers. When Winnicott specifies, at the outset of the citation immediately above, that play is decisive because of the creative and interpersonal potential that it mobilizes, “not primarily because the instincts are involved,” he kicks back at the “drive-structure model” discernable over the course of Freud’s writing: above all in the dynamic tension between the sexual, aggressive, and (later) death drives and the pleasure and reality “principles.”

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Another role assumed by the mother as the avatar of her child’s future occupational and psychological equanimity is acclimating it to the “rough and tumble of human life,” inuring it to a human environment in which attacks and hostile takeover moves are a prominent feature of the landscape. In the Winnicottian universe, it is the mother, prior to and more so than the football coach, who underwrites the often abrupt sea-changes between support and aggression in the human climate. In teasing out the deep object-relations conducive to survival itself, Winnicott again rises to the dialectical complexity of a world, like Hegel’s, in which the outcome of reciprocal relations is contingent on mutual felicity and achievement. It is no good saying that a baby of a few days old envies the breast. It is legitimate, however, to say that at whatever age the baby begins to allow the breast an external projection . . . This means that destruction of the breast has become a feature. I mean the actual impulse to destroy. It is an important feature of what a mother does, to be the first person to take the baby through this version of the many that will be encountered, of attack that is survived. This is the right moment in the child’s development, because of the child’s feebleness, so that destruction can fairly easily be survived. However, even so it is a tricky matter . . . It will be seen, that, although destruction is the word I am using, this actual destruction belongs to the object’s failure to survive. Without this failure, destruction remains potential. The word “destruction” is needed, not because of the baby’s impulse to destroy, but because of the object’s liability not to survive, which means to suffer change in quality, in attitude. This way of looking at things . . . makes possible a new approach to the whole subject of the roots of aggression. ( PR , 92–3) This is a world in which the child’s resilience, his ability to survive periodic attacks and takeover attempts erupting within the encompassing social system, is contingent on the “object’s” (the mother’s) survival. The child’s rapport to the life-sustaining breast is, incontrovertibly, part-negative. The child’s ability to persist in an environment with significant predatory features, even at a tender age vulnerable in many respects, is a function of the breast’s not being destroyed. Once again, Winnicott, in treating destructiveness as a pervasive environmental element rather than as a deep-seated drive (one with long-standing demonic associations throughout cultural history), eschews the instinctive determinism at the core of the Freudian developmental psychology. By way of multiple transpositions, the intricate dialectics of the breast in the above passage rehearses the final exhortation that Winnicott issues to his readers at the end of his retrospective volume: to persist in the postures of

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parenting and authority even in the face of the most pitched challenges by adolescents: Society needs to be shaken by the aspirations of those who are not responsible. If the adults abdicate, the adolescent becomes, prematurely, and by false process, adult. Advice to society could be: for the sake of adolescents, and of their immaturity, do not allow them to step up and attain a false maturity by handing over to them responsibility that is not theirs, even though they may fight for it. ( PR , 146) The good enough mother, not only by allowing attacks on her nurturing protectiveness as on her person, but by channeling this aggression creatively, tonifies her infant’s predilections to survival, sharpens and reinforces survival skills. So will the Winnicottian therapist, in a subsequent developmental state of affairs, fortify her clients, whose resilience as well as whose playfulness and interpersonal equanimity may be impaired, to the ambient aggression and destructiveness of the highly variegated human surround. Even if Winnicott’s obsession with the subtlest interactions of early infancy seems excessive—the pyrotechnics surrounding the breast, its “creation” and other imaginary conditions, the confusing mélange of loving and aggressive impulses at play even this early in life—the capable psychotherapist is a direct extension of the adequately mothering figure. Indeed, the mother has rehearsed and either satisfied or not satisfied the psychotherapeutic qualifications assembled in the long catalogue of sensibilities, postures, and interventions emerging in the course of Playing and Reality. Therapeutic healing is a daunting and multifaceted calling in its Winnicottian parlance. Its constructive delivery extends in this domain all the way from establishing a secure and intimate deep-ontological base of operations, hence making “relaxation possible” (PR, 55), to the establishment of a transitional therapeutic play-space on the basis of empathic projection and feedback, to the reclaiming for productive deliberation the “split-off” elements of personality (PR, 72–9), to the reinforcement of a particularly upbeat and worldly notion of “using” the world (PR, 135–6) in order to more productively deploy its multifaceted materials. By rising to this unapologetic extraction of ambient intellectual and interpersonal resources in the environment, the patient opens himself to transitional conditions of creativity and remediation. The analyst, as important as anything else she may accomplish, survives the “destructiveness” of these crucial transitions (PR, 137). The shared therapeutic drift, grounded in playfulness, intimate familiarity, and mutual “close reading,” toward distinctly non-linear creative and developmental breakthroughs, is what aligns the

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Winnicottian therapist with the cultural critic. In the sense that it forms a strange loop, this gravitation, in Hofstadter’s zone, allies the therapist with the full-service cybernetic citizen of her age. In Playing and Reality, the degree to which therapy’s delicate footholds and consolidations emerge from Winnicott’s intense observation of mothering is nothing less than striking. How, one may ask, does separation of subject and object, of baby and mother, seem in fact to happen, and to happen with profit to all concerned, and in the vast majority of cases? And this in spite of the impossibility of separation? . . . The answer can be that in the baby’s experience of life, actually in relation to the mother or mother-figure, there usually develops a degree of confidence in the mother’s reliability; or (in another language belonging to psychotherapy) the patient begins to sense that the therapist’s concern arises not out of a need for a dependant, but out of a capacity in the therapist to identify with the patient out of a feeling “if I were in your shoes . . .” In other words, the mother’s or therapist’s love does not only mean meeting dependency’s needs, but it comes to mean affording the opportunity for this baby or this patient to move from dependence to autonomy. A baby can be fed without love, but loveless or impersonal management cannot succeed in producing a new autonomous human child. Here where there is trust and reliability, there is a potential space, one that can become an infinite area of separation, which the baby, child, adolescent, adult may creatively fill with playing, which in time becomes the enjoyment of the cultural heritage. The special feature of this place where play and cultural experience have a position is that it depends for existence on living experience, not on inherited tendencies. ( PR , 108) Like few others in Playing and Reality, this passage highlights the direct templating of mothering onto the therapeutic drama. This occurs graphically in the first full paragraph of the citation immediately above. In this paragraph, the child’s growing confidence in the mothering figure’s reliability, a decisive precondition to the miracle of separation, directly morphs into the viable treatment of the client not as an extension of the therapist’s needs (“for a dependant”), but as an autonomous agent whose current needs claim primary importance in the process. The camera angle switches back and forth between hypothetical mother and hypothetical therapist in this paragraph. As in the writings of Heinz Kohut no doubt inspired by these pages, the empathy achieved by the therapist in this exchange (“if I were in your shoes . . .”) is a technical posture of psychotherapy and a precondition for further collaborative

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work.11 It is not the warhorse of moral rectitude passed down to us by the Abrahamic tradition and rightly excoriated by Nietzsche and other discerning critical philosophers. The therapeutic operating posture of empathy, runs the logic here, is the base-position for therapeutic progress as much as maternal readiness is the indispensable precondition for separation and its attendant maturational achievements. At its core, the productive therapeutic bearing is a maternal one. Subsequently, in the passage immediately above, Winnicott’s visual imaginary figures the overlapping interpersonal achievements of mothering and therapy (respectively, resilience in separation and empathy as the other of narcissistic appropriation) as a space, specifically the space of transitional negotiation and development. For obvious reasons, along with Lacan, Winnicott surely numbers among the most spatially and architecturally acute theorists of psychoanalysis. And it can hardly surprise us that this “potential space” is at once a zone of daunting separation, but also play, intellectual growth, experimentation, and, sooner before later, the encounter with cultural traditions and forms. I close this telling window on the intense collaboration between mothering, therapy, and critique in the preparation of fully empowered cultural citizens just at the point at which Winnicott emphasizes the primacy of “living experience,” that is ambient, contingent interactions in potential space at the expense of inheritance, whether cultural, socio-economic, or genetic. “Sensitive management,” whether by the mothering figure or her therapeutic replacement, is all in determining whether “the area for play is immense” or “there is but little opportunity for development except in terms of introversion or extroversion” (PR, 108). Such are the tremendous resources for therapeutic remediation culled by Winnicott from the primordial intimacy and proximity between mothering figure and child, as well as from such allied themes and variations as ontological reassurance, the absorption and survival of destructive energy, empathic support, and unconstrained playfulness. As the “mother of play,” the mothering figure sets the stage for the decisive intellectual achievements ahead of her child. A crucial one of these, as collaborative psychotherapy goes about redressing impairments that have emerged in the spheres of play, intellectual attainment, and love is the reclamation of sectors of consciousness so fraught with violence, deficiency, and pain that they have “gone underground,” have become, in the parlance of subsequent object-relations theory as well as of Winnicott, “split-off.” Psychotherapy takes place in the overlap of two areas of playing, that of the patient and that of the therapist. Psychotherapy has to do with two people playing together. The corollary of this is that where playing is not possible

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then the work done by the therapist is directed towards bringing the patient from a state of not being able to play into a state of being able to play. ( PR , 38) It is in playing and only in playing that the individual child or adult is able to be creative and to use the whole personality, and it is only in being creative that the individual discovers the self. ( PR , 54) The drift of both of these memorable passages, situated as they are on the interface where playfulness becomes an indispensable element of critical sensibility and therapeutic innovation and development, is toward therapeutic interactivity. Writing two decades or so before cybernetic rhetoric attained mainstream familiarity, Winnicott couched the therapeutic alliance in terms of game-theory. Although from two very different vantage-points, analyst and client share in a game with a common set of principles and rules. Their interactivity is defined by their play. The very nature of the gains to be won from the process, including first positioning the client so that he is capable of playing, are all interactive ones. The creativity both demanded and raised by playing the game, whose trajectory is “smart” feedback along a strange loop, draws upon the “whole personality.” There is a palpable integrative thrust to the dedicated interplay of psychotherapy. We are not speaking here of “integration” as some unattainable Platonic wholeness and purity of soul; nor as a perfect Kantian attunement and “checks and balances” between the cognitive faculties. Integration, in a context of meticulous and acute interaction, sometimes in the form of games, between therapist and patient can only characterize enhancements of speed and connectivity within the sphere of communications. If the “individual child or adult” is rendered capable of deploying his “whole personality” by means of the therapeutic alliance, this is by dint of achievements made within his personal “intraconnectivity,” because his symbolic network and repertoire vis-à-vis work and others is in a better state of repair than previously. (We will have occasion below to revisit the centrality of symbolic networks to Douglas Hofstadter’s scenarios for cognition and intelligence.) The patient successful in his appeal to the mothering-power in the very engine-room of Winnicottian psychotherapy emerges from the process “better wired,” and only in this sense more “whole.” One of the absolutely critical interfaces whose installation by means of psychotherapy Winnicott chronicles leads to the “split-off” sector, the domains of identification and thinking so inimical to the client’s lifestyle and public social identity that their acknowledgment is best left completely to the side. What the above two citations allow us to note clearly is that in Winnicott’s

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potential space, the double-sided game of psychotherapy is so intense and absorptive that it mobilizes the “split-off” sector. In its intrinsic interconnectivity, the therapeutic drama instigates the emergence of values and identifications gone subterranean by dint of deficits in resilience and mirroring on the part of the client’s significant others. It should be noted here that for all the “split-off sector,” in its inaccessibility and its intransigence, is strongly reminiscent of Freud’s definitive formulations regarding the unconscious, the take on “splitting” on the part of Winnicott and his fellow object-relations theorists bears markedly different emphases. Where Freud monitors the epistemological crisis at the deep-roots of psychosomatic as well as psychological symptoms, Winnicott and his colleagues track radical discrepancies (as in différance) in temperament, mood, and social bearing ultimately traceable to the “dumping” of experiential data and irreconcilable values. The thrust of Winnicottian “excavation,” if this is indeed part of his game, is so that the patient will find “a way to exist as oneself, and to relate to objects as oneself, and to have a self in which to retreat for relaxation” (PR, 117; we will return to these phrases). When he writes the material collected in Playing and Reality, submerged bisexual and homosexual identifications claim a disproportionate share of what Winnicott means by the phrase “split-off segment.” By dint of his clinical acuity, Winnicott, during the 1950’s and 1960’s, already performs an assessment of the damage wrought in his patients by their unacknowledged bisexual and same-sex tendencies and values. On the cultural front, Winnicott thus ushered in the decades ahead of pitched sexual liberation and struggle—on multiple fronts and issues. As apt as detached, unacknowledged sexual identifications and yearnings may be as instances of splitting, the sexual sphere, with all its ramifications, does not begin to exhaust the climate-zone and repercussions of this pivotal psycho-social phenomenon. It remains instructive to pause over Winnicott’s phraseology as he formulates this particular achievement of therapeutic intervention, like all others made possible by a securing of Being, reliance, intimacy, and playfulness traceable to the mothering dimensions of child-rearing and interpersonal Sorge in general. “No attempt will be made here to trace the steps by which an analysis comes to this kind of material” (PR, 72), comments Winnicott with regard to the long-standing psychopanalytical “idea that men and women have a ‘pronounced predisposition towards bisexuality’ . . . The slowness of the analytic process is a manifestation of a defence the analyst must respect, as we respect all defences” (PR, 72). Even in a therapeutic milieu of meticulous empathy and dedication to the minute review of personal experience and heavily nuanced personal dialect, the approach to “split-off” identifications and self-fragments is slow and demanding work, fraught with obstacles and resistance all the way. In his clinical notes to the “illustrative case” of a married, middle-aged man, Winnicott wrote,

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In the present case of this analysis something has been reached which is new for me. It has to do with the non-masculine element in his personality . . . On this particular occasion I said to him: ‘I am listening to a girl. I know perfectly well that you are a man, but I am listening to a girl, and I am talking to a girl. I am telling this girl: “You are talking about penis envy.’ ” I wish to emphasize that this has nothing to do with homosexuality. ( PR , 73) Striking in these clinical notes is how “new” and difficult the emergence of the patient’s detached and submerged sexual identification is for the therapist, let alone for the patient, then currently residing amid a social surround of particular incredulity and intolerance toward his “all-too-human” sexual constitution. Precisely where Winnicott concedes how widespread the “predisposition toward bisexuality” is among men and women, he suggests “that creativity is one of the common denominators of men and women” (PR, 72). The therapeutic trade-off, in the dangerous and disconcerting reclamation of “splitoff” identification, aspiration, and yearning, is creativity in the place of denial, dissimulation, and choreographed unconsciousness. The patient may emerge from the clinical cabinet with shocking revelations, again, by no means exclusively of a sexual nature, but his “secondary gain” is undoubtedly the creativity that it has demanded to reclaim the “split-off sectors,” and this creativity is the return on a capital investment. The improvisatory approach to the world, its limitations and its problems stays behind, activated and ready, even when the therapeutic sessions are past. In multiple respects, then, Winnicott couches the “therapeutic alliance” first and foremost as a creative collaboration, even as an artistic one. What matters foremost to Winnicott is the playful and creative “means of production” to emerge from therapeutic intervention to the client’s ongoing benefit, with its indissociable critical twist. Classical Freudian psychoanalysis is every bit as drawn out and circuitous an affair. Freud went to great lengths to assure the open-endedness and free-form of therapeutic dialogue as the process detailed by Winnicott. Yet when it comes to setting out the ground-rules of psychoanalysis to a more than skeptical public, the stress within the etiquette of the transference is on restraint. The founding conventions and protocols of psychoanalysis are indeed in a cat-and-mouse-game with the playful alliance at the heart of Winnicott’s scenario. Here, as we have seen, the intuitive delicacies and ironies of viable child-rearing are redeployed in the service of therapeutic remediation—the redress of insults inevitably sustained in contact with entrenched social (and other) systems. No aspect of Freud’s founding an institution as well as clinic of psychoanalysis was more strategic than his formulating the protocols of transference. Transference itself may be characterized as a “state of exception” within the

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medical and interpersonal realms. It takes off from a franchise and directness of expression and disclosure beyond the normal expectations even of conjugal and familial relationships. By dint of transference’s exceptional configuration at every level, every possible abuse of a confidential clinical relation might potentially ensue under its purview. Anything from sexual misconduct rendered monstrous in an overall surround of intimate disclosure to breaches of confidentiality and their implications for all parties involved, to the manipulation of extra-therapeutic relations and conditions by the therapist. It is no accident, then, that as Freud, based on his early neurological studies and his open-ended explorations of psychosomatic conditions, jokes, dreams, parapraxes, and other manifestations, began to consolidate psychoanalysis as an institution as well as a practice, he imposed great weight and rigor on transference, its regulation, and its guidelines. The conventions surrounding transference amount to the self-binding social contract that psychoanalysis pre-emptively issues to a late-Victorian social surround dead-set against it in multiple respects. In its subject-matter, psychoanalysis broaches conditions and issues that have developed for decades under a gag-order of secrecy. In its procedures and overarching milieu, psychoanalysis demands explicitness at least as objectionable as its sordid subject-matter. Transference, as well as the “therapeutic alliance” structured by its conventions, are, from early on in the history of psychoanalysis, under the sway of profound ambivalence and marked double messages. Characterizing, in “Recollection, Repetition, and Working Through” (1914), the analyst’s need to apply some linear momentum to the analysand’s otherwise completely non-sequential narrative, Freud figures the transference as a “playground” in language that Winnicott could fully subscribe to. One could easily view the main motifs of Playing and Reality as a direct extension of this strand of Freudian thought: The main instrument, however, for curbing the patient’s compulsion to repeat . . . lies in the handling of the transference. We render the compulsion harmless, and even make use of it, by giving it the right to assert itself in a definite field. We admit it into the transference as a playground, in which it is allowed to expand in almost complete freedom and is expected to display to us everything in the way of pathogenic instincts that is hidden in the depths of the patient’s mind. Provided only that the patient shows compliance enough . . . we regularly succeed in giving all the symptoms of the illness a new transference meaning and in replacing his ordinary neurosis by a “transference-neurosis” of which he can be cured by the therapeutic work. The transference thus creates an intermediary region between illness and real life, through which the transition from the one to the other is made. The new condition has taken over all the features of the

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illness; but it represents an artificial illness which is at every point accessible to our intervention. It is a piece of real experience, but one which has been made possible by especially favourable conditions, and it is of a provisional nature.12 Freud’s thinking of transference, in this passage, as a “playground,” in which the patient’s running account of his history, personal symbolism, and free associations is accorded “almost complete freedom,” even to repeat on itself, and in which the “transference-neurosis,” a clinically viable simulacrum of the precipitating discomfiture is an “intermediate realm,” strikes out, at least in terms of its imagery, is a strongly proto-Winnicottian direction. Freud, at the moment of the theoretical reprise and consolidation he undertakes in the “Papers on Metapsychology,” before launching into such definitive, publicly oriented statements as the Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, couches the transference as an interstitial zone strongly anticipatory of Winnicottian transitional space. Everything hinges, though, in the above paragraph, on how open-ended the negotiations of transference is fact are. Not only does Freud betray, in the above phrasings, his confident control over what enters into the conversation and what does not (“we render the compulsion harmless,” referring to repetitive autobiographical material, “we admit it into the transference”). Brilliant though it may well be, the scenario of a “transferenceneurosis,” a simulacrum-illness to the one that has manifested itself out of the patient’s true-life battle-conditions—a clinically manageable double because it is defined and conditioned by terms and interactions of the therapeutic collaboration, also points to the unresolved conflict between random articulation and clinical control and direction dominant at this phase in psychoanalysis’s development. The above citation, in other words, resides at the tipping-point characteristic of the several “Papers on Metapsychology”: between, on the one hand, the etiquettes of scientific rigor and objectivity and of self-regulation against liability that psychoanalysis must protest in its drive for social legitimacy. And, on the other, its foundation in full and uncensored personal disclosure and articulation—at least along the vector leading from the client to the psychoanalyst. Particularly with regard to the imperatives underlying psychoanalysis’s selfestablishment as a clinic as well as an academy and an institution, the Freudian duplicity involving the invocation of authority and control over a discursive unscrolling that will admit neither of these positions, is central. So polymorphous are Freud’s attestations to the control that the analyst has attained via his own prior analytical exposure that their pervasiveness is often masked; their iterations occasionally transparent and comic. A subliminal hilarity attends the scenario of the psychoanalyst as systematic control-freak, but this is a far cry from the open-ended play-partnership that Winnicott goes on to choreograph.

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The analyst’s power over the symptoms of the disease may thus be compared to male sexual potency. A man can, it is true, beget a whole child, but even the strongest man cannot create in the female organism a head alone or an arm or a leg; he cannot even prescribe the child’s sex. He, too, only sets in motion a highly complicated process, determined by events in the remote past, which ends with the severance of the child from its mother. A neurosis as well has the character of an organism.13 Not only is the rapport between therapist and patient gender-coded even before its outset, with the therapist a male and the client a fecund as well as impressionable female. The male analyst is firmly in control. This configuration persists in the obstetric monstrosities and other complications registered at the level of subliminal imagery (e.g. partial births) in the above passage. Psychoanalysis may result in certain productive mutations, but its grounding configuration in set rules, that is, bounded games, between individuals in compliance with pre-existing roles, persists in the face of all potential contingencies. From one dimension of treatment to another (the scheduling of sessions, billing arrangements, the physical placement of the participants), the male analyst not only sets down but also monitors and enforces the rules of engagement. This includes certain of the discursive boundaries of the therapeutic dialogue as well: psychoanalytical protocol thus supplies the rules to a back-and-forth configured as a “complex” Wittgensteinian languagegame.14 The presumption of authority and control on the analyst’s part continues even in spite of the potential limitations to paternity (partial births, unforeseen complications) figuratively underscored in the passage above. It is in this context, for example, that psychoanalytical time, the time for transferential interaction, is implanted into the customary duration of living with surgical precision. In regard to time, I adhere rigidly to the principle of leasing a definite hour. Each patient is allotted a particular hour of my available working day; it belongs to him and he is liable for it, even if he does not make use of it. This arrangement . . . may perhaps seem too rigorous in a doctor, or even unworthy of his profession. There will be an inclination to point to the many accidents which may prevent the patient from attending every day at the same time . . . But my answer is: no other way is practicable.15 “I work with my patients every day, except Sundays and public holidays— that is, as a rule, six days a week. For slight cases, or the continuation of a treatment which is already well advanced, three days a week will suffice. Otherwise restriction of the time expended brings no advantage to physician or patient.”16 The discipline to which psychoanalytical practitioners and patients

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alike subscribe is a rigorous one, in full keeping with the “Protestant ethic” so suggestively teased out by Max Weber. The psychoanalytical work-week is modeled after the industrial one, stringently allowing only for public and religious holidays. The process does not merely look askance at “absences” and other irregularities in “attendance”: they are on the patient’s tab. They furthermore constitute prime “grist” for the mill of analytic discussion. Because classical psychoanalysis is attached to a particular epoch in the patient’s life, and to the degree that the collaborative “excavation” and sifting and sorting of psychoanalytical disclosure is an intensive process, reducing the number of weekly sessions, except in rare cases, is to no productive end. Financial arrangements also belong to the free-wheeling conversation of psychotherapy; but the Freudian propriety and foregone certainty attending them are every bit as structured as the psychoanalytical time-clock. An analyst does not dispute that money is to be regarded in the first instance as a medium for self-preservation and for obtaining power, but he maintains that, besides this, powerful sexual factors are involved in the value set upon it. He can point out that money matters are treated in the same way by civilized people as in the same way as sexual matters—with the same inconsistency, prudishness, and hypocrisy. The analyst is therefore determined from the first not to fall in with this attitude, but in his dealings with patients to treat of money matters with the same matter-of-course frankness to which he wishes to educate them in things relating to sexual life. He shows them that he himself has cast off false shame on these topics, by voluntarily telling them the price at which he values his time. Ordinary good sense cautions him, furthermore, not to allow large sums to accumulate, but to ask for payment at fairly short regular intervals—monthly perhaps. (It is a familiar fact that the value of the treatment is not enhanced in the patient’s eyes if a very low fee is asked.)17 Money does indeed matter in the therapeutic transactions of psychoanalysis. Freud brilliantly goes on to elaborate the rich and profound psychological nuances of money, even during the so-called anal phase stage of infantile development, in his notable “Wolf Man” case-history (“The History of an Infantile Neurosis”,1918). Money, like many of the Leitmotive in psychoanalysis’s symbolism, straddles the border between a practical substrate to the process, enabling it to happen, and a highly volatile catalyst to related memories and issues, some undoubtedly far afield. This inbuilt capacity for the emerging psychoanalytical disclosure to shuttle between thematic and meta-critical organization and circumspect is indeed among the most creative features that Freud, beginning with the 1890’s on, implanted into the therapeutic transaction. This double-edged approach to the tangible infrastructure of everyday life, also

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with regard to such considerations as scheduling and even (below) the cabinet’s floor-plan, reinforces the irreducibly critical thrust of psychoanalytical sifting and sorting. Yet precisely because of the hypocrisy and duplicity that financial arrangements exacerbate, money matters, as graphically illustrated in the citation directly above, elicit hard talk from the law-giver of psychoanalysis: financial explicitness is the order of the day; bills will not mount up. As Freud sets out the psychoanalysis modus operandi in preparation for writing his more “mainstream” manuals, it is the unwavering exigency of money and its flow that occupies center-stage. There are, by the same token, understandable and even laudable reasons for Freud’s specifications regarding what might be called the visual programming of the clinical office. What really matters, when Freud specifies the furniture-arrangement in the much photographed analytical holy of holies, is the angles of sight that it engineers. (Eventually justifying, by the way, Lacan’s meticulous schematics of the visual angles involved in anamorphosis and other potential “misrecognitions.”) The patient’s posture, involuntary gestures, and movements could indeed comprise, from the therapeutic point of view, a vital superscript to the patient’s evolving disclosure. At the same time, it demonstrates acute circumspection on Freud’s part to exclude, within the limits of practicality, feedback arising from his own voice, gestures, facial expression, and so on from the patient’s “burden of consideration.” I must say a word about a certain ceremonial which concerns the position in which the treatment is carried out. I hold to the plan of getting the patient to lie on a sofa while I sit behind him out of his sight. This arrangement has an historic basis; it is the remnant of the hypnotic method out of which psycho-analysis was evolved. But it deserves to be maintained for many reasons. The first is a personal motive . . . I cannot put up with being stared at by other people for eight hours a day (or more). Since, while I am listening to the patient, I, too, give myself over to the current of my unconscious thoughts, I do not wish my expressions of face to give the patient material for interpretations or to influence him in what he tells me. The patient usually regards being made to adopt this position as a hardship and rebels against it, especially if the instinct for looking (scopophilia) plays an important part in his neurosis. I insist on this procedure, however, for its purpose and result are to prevent the transference from mingling with the patient’s associations imperceptibly, to isolate the transference and to allow it to come forward in due course and sharply defined as a resistance.18 What is striking about these formulations, despite the extreme circumspection on which they are founded, is the force of necessity behind their justification.

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Freud “adheres firmly” to his ground-plan for psychoanalysis’s “physical plant.” It is as if the entire force and history of psychoanalysis inhere in these furniture-arrangements that have, indeed, proven salutary to Freud’s private practice. The entire weight of the psychoanalytic institution is behind these specifications; their ground is to some degree visceral: Freud cannot bear being on display for the duration of the industrial work-schedule that he has elsewhere set out in “On Beginning the Treatment.” The object-relations predicated in the office-décor on which Freud insists are not necessarily conducive to the reciprocal gaze and sizing-up that would launch the Winnicottian scenario of therapy as hard-won trust and play. It is admirable indeed that Winnicott’s practice, taking off, as we have seen, from certain of the aporias and other ambiguities attending the classical psychoanalytical transference, could be a direct outgrowth of Freud’s; that psychoanalysis, partially through some of its notorious bitter intramural disputes, became a broad enough spectrum to absorb such variations as those offered by Melanie Klein, D. W. Winnicott, Heinz Kohut, and Alice Miller. But the transition between the rather strict encomia of the 1910’s to psychoanalysis’s more interactive and playful variations is steep and abrupt. Historical considerations of institutional legitimation mentioned above may indeed play a role in Freud’s forbidding discursive tone. Psychoanalysis’s full complexity, however—whether perceived as a transaction, transference, or a game—comes to full fruition only when it has been scripted as a romance or love story. In Freud’s scenario, psychoanalysis’s embedded romantic cat-and-mouse game is what might be called an embedded “deep structure” of the process. It is an inherent subtext of psychoanalysis itself, regardless of the specific participants. The love-drama subtending and coloring the transference is there. We already know from the very first citation of Freud in this section how the romantic facet of the transference is programmed. The analyst is gender-coded male. This places the patient, regardless of sex, in the posture of the daughter who must eventually work through an incestuous game she plays with the fathering therapist. (He is a father-simulacrum in precisely the sense that the “transference-neurosis” is the clinically manageable—because therapeutically tagged and qualified—“double” of the patient’s psychological and psychosomatic symptoms “in the field.”) To the amorous patient’s “complicated” motives belong the patient’s efforts “to assure herself of her irresistibility, to destroy the physician’s authority by bringing him down to the level of a lover and to gain all the other promised advantages incidental to the satisfaction of love.”19 The therapist-father rightly cherishes the transference-love offered by his patient, as he does all manifestations of the transference. These are, after all, both a confirmation of psychoanalysis’s premises and indispensable resources for further therapeutic working through. On the most basic level, the love

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offered by the patient to her therapist reifies and intensifies the test-case that psychoanalysis as a whole is undergoing in the first decades of its institutional operation. The phenomenon of the transference-love is a social and even legal disaster just waiting to happen. If Freud underplays the seductiveness and temptation with which the therapeutic encounter is fraught, he risks leaving the practice and institution to which he has devoted his professional life dangerously vulnerable to its intrinsic (sexual) tensions. A stern, manly voice of admonition, is, in fact, a worthwhile tool to possess when addressing the dangers posed by transference-love. This striking phenomenon of intimate collaboration under an ethos of full disclosure is at the same time, too valuable a focal point and topos of deliberation, signaling as it does the patient’s overall romantic tendencies and proclivities, to be banished from the process by dint of over-zealous disapproval. Transference-love is one of psychoanalysis’s most alluring babies, a love-child to be sure, but not at any cost to be thrown out with the bath water. The phenomenon of the transference-love thus poses a classical doublebind to all participants in the process: the psychoanalyst, who struggles to appropriate and deploy it even while stringently limiting its potential havoc; the female patient who offers it, and “we,” the readers, the vicarious public and audience of psychoanalysis. In terms later evolved by Gregory Bateson in conjunction with schizophrenia and alcoholism, the doublebind tendered by the transference love is “schizophrenogenic.” On one flank of this massively discomfiting state of affairs, it is the most complex and dangerous of games. In this respect, it is an announcement of the playdimension of psychoanalytical working through to which Winnicott will give explicit and detailed enunciation. Yet precisely by virtue of the disaster waiting in the wings of this playful hovering, the transference-love gives rise to some of the most pitched and unwavering pronouncements in the voice of psychoanalytical authority. This irreducibly fraught doublebind, in other words, is the microcosm of the massive paradox engulfing Freudian enunciation at this point and always: the most somber and unyielding social framework imaginable to a clinical interchange cast specifically in terms of its amorphous, autopoietic open-endedness. As marvelously intricate and multifaceted as the response that the phenomenon of the transference-love elicits from psychoanalysis, I would argue, in its thrust, the Freudian bearing is inimical to the playfulness that Winnicott designates as the modality as well as the tenor of psychotherapeutic working through. Two passages from “Observations on Transference-Love (Further Recommendations in the Technique of Psycho-Analysis III) (1915 [1914])” should clarify, although in miniature, the massive complexity to which psychoanalysis’s embedded romantic melodrama gives rise and expression. Considering one of the three alternatives to which the very fact of the patient’s romantic infatuation with the psychoanalyst gives rise, Freud allows:

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After the patient has fallen in love with the physician, they part; the treatment is given up. But soon the patient’s condition necessitates her making a second attempt at analysis, with another doctor. The next thing that happens is that she feels that she has fallen in love with this second doctor too; and that if she breaks off with him and begins yet again, the same thing will happen with the third doctor, and so on. This phenomenon, which occurs without fail and which is one of the foundations of psycho-analytical theory, may be evaluated from two points of view, that of the physician who is carrying out the analysis and that of the patient in need of it.20 The love-relationship of psychoanalysis is by its very nature delusional and abortive. In its implicit non-consummation, it initiates, on the part of the patient, a string of what we now call recursive interruptions and partrelationships. In slapdash fashion, the (female) patient proceeds from one (male) doctor to the next, her immediate needs never satisfied, her underlying history and discomfiture in the world never addressed. The non-resolution of the transference-love is every bit as disastrous as the acting out of the sexual tension in the relationship would inevitably turn out to be. It turns the patient into a serial “authority-figure slayer,” with nothing in the way of psychological insight or learning to show for the lurid transgression to which she succumbs. Of course the explicit couching of this one potential wrinkle in psychoanalysis’s surround of sexual tension is itself revealing and in no small measure jejune: this is a boy/girl romance in which the patient plays the untested maiden. When the Freudian narrator “looks into the situation more closely,” he discovers hitherto unsuspected complexities, but ones of tremendous potential use to the process itself, its deepening and intensification. I have already let it be understood that analytic technique requires of the physician that he should deny to the patient who is craving for love the satisfaction she demands. The treatment must be carried through in abstinence; by this I do not mean physical abstinence alone, nor yet the deprivation of everything that the patient desires, for perhaps no sick person could tolerate this. Instead, I shall state it as a fundamental principle that the patient’s need and longing should be allowed to persist in her, in order to serve as forces impelling her to do work and make changes, and we must beware of appeasing these forces by means of surrogates. And what we could offer would never be anything else but a surrogate, for the patient’s condition is such that, until her repressions are removed, she is incapable of getting real satisfaction . . . What would happen if the doctor were to behave differently, and, supposing both parties were free, if he were to avail himself of that freedom in order to return the patient’s love and to still her need for affection?21

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The statute of therapeutic abstinence is a precondition to further therapeutic work to which Freud gives unqualified and appropriately deadpan expression. Yet sexuality, a pivotal domain of striving and potential fulfillment, as well as a rich subtext to therapeutic intimacy, is too strategic a dimension to be completely extruded from the practice. Vis-à-vis sexuality, psychoanalysis can live neither with it nor without it: this doublebind is the very paradigm of compromise. “It is, therefore, just as disastrous for the analysis if the patient’s craving for love is gratified as if it suppressed.”22 The transference, as has been suggested above, is not merely a disease-simulacrum. It functions as a sexual surrogate; it is as far in the direction of sexual expression that psychoanalysis will venture. In its very particular gruff way, psychoanalysis, gendered male, holds to itself the sexual obsession that it has also pushed away from itself. Winnicott, on the other hand, will narrate psychoanalysis’s “bitter mystery” from the side of the mothering nurturer. Even as Freud fully tallies and cherishes the intense ironies to which the psychoanalytical theater, as a surrogate to lived life itself, gives rise, he does not open the transaction to shared play. It has taken the birth-pangs of Freudian psychoanalysis and not one, but two World Wars, for this highly philosophical and theoretically nuanced transactional and trans-individual process to mutate, under the auspices of D. W. Winnicott, into its full playfulness. The therapeutic alliance is less a Faustian pact in the name of the inadmissible and the inexpressible and more of an adventure and ecstasies of discovery. All this is embedded in the stuff that psychoanalytical discourse is made of: This glimpse of the baby’s and the child’s seeing the self in the mother’s face and afterwards in a mirror, gives a way of looking at analysis and the psychotherapeutic task. Psychotherapy is not making clever and apt interpretations; by and large it is a long-term giving the patient back what the patient brings. It is a complex derivative of the face that reflects what is there to be seen. I like to think of my work this way, and to think that if I do this well enough the patient will find his or her self, and will be able to exist and feel real. Feeling real is more than existing; it is finding a way to exist as oneself, and to relate to objects as oneself, and to have a self in which to retreat for relaxation. But I would not like to give the impression that I think this task of reflecting what the patient brings is easy. It is not easy, and it is emotionally exhausting. But we get our rewards. Even when our patients do not get cured, they are grateful to us for seeing them as they are, and this gives us a satisfaction of a deep kind. This to which I have referred in terms of the mother’s role of giving back to the baby the baby’s own self continues to have importance in terms of the child and the family. ( PR , 117–18)

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Psychoanalysis, in a Winnicottian idiom and, historically, on the verge of the radical innovation shared by cybernetics and deconstruction, transpires in an ontological Open or Lichtung. It is transacted in the open mutual gaze between faces in mutual regard. By the time Winnicott scores the lines in this most suggestive passage, he has familiarized himself with the pyrotechnics of, and some of the philosophy undergirding, the Lacanian mirror-phase. But the mirroring regard suffusing the trans-individual relationship in Winnicottian psychoanalysis is a model of productive give-and-take more than an artifact of the metaphysics and long tradition of reflexivity and self-reflection. What is being transacted in the passage immediately above is what the analyst and patient bring to the practice, what they put on the table. The field for the analytical transaction is not “clever and apt interpretations,” but rather depth psychology. The source of the empathic therapeutic intervention that succeeds in “giving the patient back what the patient brings” is the maternal gaze in which the child first sees itself. Winnicott once again specifies clearly that mothering, more than predetermined paternal exigency, is the basis for psychoanalytic feedback and restoration. The open analytic face reflects back to a patient disfigured in the minefield that the world often emulates nonmetaphorically; it effects giving the patient “back what the patient brings.” This phrasing suggests how often, out in the “field,” and under how many circumstances, the patient’s basic properties, “what the patient brings,” is liable to appropriation and dispossession. Psychoanalysis, as good enough mothering, transpires under the auspices and aura of “a complex derivative of the face.” Restoring to the patient what he “brings” restores to the patient any face lost in society’s (or community’s) hostile takeovers and its unprovoked attacks. “Face” is both the modality of gaze and regard allowing for empathic intervention in psychotherapy and what needs to be returned to its owner, the patient. Psychoanalysis in this vein is a public tribunal of peace and reconciliation transpiring in the maternal field-hospital of post-traumatic healing established only after the war. It is by no means accidental that youthful war-victims made up a disproportionate share of Winnicott’s patient-base in the years during and subsequent to World War II. Winnicott freely acknowledges that this remediational healing is “emotionally demanding.” His phrasing for what he could at most accomplish is telling, above all, to assist his therapeutic partner to “find his or her self” and to be “able to exist and feel real.” The utter simplicity in which these therapeutic aims are couched betrays the extreme difficulty, in terms of discretion, creativity, and patience, of bringing them about. “Finding the self” and “feeling real” betoken arriving at some sort of Being or ontological essence or fundament here far less than entering into a bearing of intimacy with one’s social environment and within one’s immanent symbolic networks and communications loops. “Having a self” is tantamount

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to reaching some basic equanimity in one’s intrapsychic experience and as “mirrored back” by one’s pervasive social surroundings. A third basic outcome that Winnicott places before his therapeutic task is particularly resonant. Not only will Winnicott’s therapeutic partners “find” their selves and “feel real”: they will “retreat” into those selves “for relaxation.” Through therapeutic working though notably playful in its gravity and a vertiginous sequence of mutations, the holding environment that the mother establishes and the “intermediate space” that she secures, for encounters with the transitional object, morph into a retreat where the individual can at last relax. This intrapsychic cocoon, this home within the self, may well constitute the most dramatic achievement of Winnicott’s manifestly playful psychotherapeutic alliance.

7 The Figure in the Network: Douglas Hofstadter and the Ethics of Intelligence 1. ny occasions for celebration that have been secured by the foregoing chapters, however transient, have coincided with moments of relaxation, ouverture, or clearing (Lichtung), emerging within the overbearing epistemic and social systems of homogeneity, compliance, and control. The long-term prospects for evading and resisting the gravitations to systematic consolidation, proliferation, and self-occultation in our day are far from promising. Prevalent corporate organization is the operational correlative to the complexity, selfcorrection, and adaptability that contemporary systems have achieved. It is in the vastness of the data that corporations can monitor and store, combined with the specificity of the interactions and interventions that they can engineer that their power, socio-political and socio-biological as well as intellectual, can be spelled out. Advanced corporations, in their operational particularity as well as their archival and numerical grandeur, routinely (but not invariably) nudge governments aside as the nodes of ecological and diplomatic intelligence, communications, political administration and control, and resource appropriation. The multinational mega-corporation is merely the instrument embodying and enforcing the parameters that systems have, in their organization, operating programs, and underlying mathematics, already attained. Contemporary systems, as their history and organization have been retraced by the likes of Anthony Wilden, Douglas Hofstadter, and James Gleick, have acquired this power, versatility, and self-adaptation through nothing more formidable than the extrapolations eventually reached by obsessive mathematicians, the paradigm-shifts discerned by the quirkiest empirical researchers, and the most playful fabulations entertained by poets,

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composers, graphic artists, and story-tellers. Within the design of intellectual schemata and programs, in other words, there is a point—a point of no return—at which playful improvisation becomes dead-serious, at which loopiness for its own sake crystallizes into the blunt will and exercise of power. The only way to access the give or play in the system is to know the system excruciatingly. To know it in its make-up and materials; in its overarching architecture and design; in its constitutive elements and their interactions; in its underlying logic and articulation; in its operating languages and their idioms, morphing as they constantly do between their long-term indexicality (Saussurian langue) and their throw-away resonance or slang (parole); in its inputs and its outputs; in its environmental impact, both short-term and longterm; in the windows and other public sites where it makes a display of itself, to stave off, if for no other reason, its vanishing. In each stage of its perdurance, the Prevailing Operating System challenges all the faculties and disciplines configured by the academies whose explicit mission is the monitoring, recording, and where possible modification of itself. (It is in this sense that Kant discerned that an age of Enlightenment demanded at least the semblance of mutual cooperation and constraint between these diverse disciplines and their faculties, toward their balance of power.) The POS is powered by its internal power-sources and momentum. It evolves according to its own DNA. It is responsible to no individual or agency. It is more akin to the impersonal collective (“a secret benevolent society”) that Jorge Luis Borges mobilizes “to invent a country.”1 That domain, Tlön, with its allied spinoffs, turns out to be the deconstructive counterdomain to the POS, Western metaphysics, whose remorseless momentum incited its invention.

2. Strings Less Travelled. It utterly boggles my mind that toward the end of a lifetime dedicated to tracking linguistic recalcitrance in the face of systematic organization, coercion, and insult, I have finally accessed some of my mathematical and scientific teachers and compeers in this endeavor. My seemingly congenital weakness in coping with the precision of mathematical metrics and the linearity common to geometrical proof and biochemical transformation (e.g. photosynthesis) was an early-onset phenomenon. It was in an exquisite Shakespearean lament at human suffering and unrequited desire (“Lear” or “Hamlet”), in one of those dungeons of despair and perversity unmistakably Poe’s, or in one of Wallace Stevens’s early anthems to luminescence and cool (say “Sunday Morning”) that I first encountered feedback to my social and familial impasses that spoke to me. I was tracked in

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a recursive loop of word-processing almost before the fact. Save with respect to my physique, I was never to enjoy an extended respite of being “wellrounded”—in my skills and predilections. Theory and philosophy emerged to me, in the wake of a strong undergraduate exposure to words and images— first and foremost as ways of writing with particular emphasis and drift, whose excesses and biases in design were as exciting and transgressive as the methods they might otherwise have seemed to implement. It remains unclear to me whether my recalcitrance in the face of mathematical notation and reasoning was constitutional or by design. In either event, some of the absolutely pivotal decisions regarding my conceptual predilections and dimensions and media of intervention had the unmistakable feeling of having been made before the fact. Progressive reasoning, the ability to work simultaneously in several registers of symbolic abbreviation, the reduction of multi-factor processes and interactions to tight proofs—these were capabilities and proclivities somehow belonging to other people. There would never be commerce between us. It was owing to a “conjunction”2 between the soaring conceptual architecture (and its underlying software) in Hegel’s Phänomenology des Geistes and a reading of Jorge Borges’s Ficciones that I encountered early in my graduate studies the uncanny correspondence—endemic to all memorable inscription—between scientific rigor and open-ended playful improvisation. In their style and delivery, the writings of Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, and Maurice Blanchot became utterly foundational and decisive to my broader project of channeling literary ambition into critical commentary, this by dint of their ongoing proclivity for saying impossible things—in spite of multiple constraints and against all odds.3 On top of this, by a non-linear trajectory and logic, the utter outrageousness of such a formulation: “Art then is the becoming and happening of truth” (Heidegger)4 or: “The problem of language has never been simply one problem among others” (Derrida)5 implacably led to a “higher” (or more germane) truth-value than the historical or thematic elucidation I was encountering within the framework of late-1960’s English scholarship in the U.S. Long before I encountered first the devices and then the discourse of cybernetics, the experiences of running head-on (and with little prior philosophical training) into Hegel’s most magisterial and tenuous treatise and assimilating, in my own way, the diverse outbreak of intellectual creativity in post-War Paris (the writings of Lacan, Lévi-Strauss, Barthes, Althusser, and Foucault as well as by Blanchot and Derrida) convinced me that I was party to an event of decisive paradigm-shift and radical intellectual reprogramming. These “conjunctions” of my intellectual youth, whether by chance or strung together by some subliminal logic, convinced me, in my very first graduate seminars, to steer away from an exclusively literary immersion in whatever

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period or genre I was addressing. However ill-prepared I was to invoke their reasonings and contributions, Kant and Hegel were hard-wired into my first Romantics seminars, seminars also incorporating the likes of Goethe, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, the Shelleys, and Melville. My exposure to the Parisian intellectual scene of the early 1970’s helped me to understand, from the outset of my serious teaching, that by very different means (what I later came to understand as “displays”), a magisterial poem such as P. B. Shelley’s “Mont Blanc” could register many of the key intellectual concerns and ambient imagery illuminating, say, the inquest into “transcendental” registers of knowledge and thinking conducted in a radically different idiom in the Hegelian Phänomenologie and in the Kantian Critiques. The feedback between wildly inventive speculative and experimental discourse of the RomanticoModern moment and the literary experimentation of that age was not an “optional” feature that I had somehow added to a “solid disciplinary grounding.” It was indispensable to anything that any such cultural space-travel could access and formulate. The very exigency of literary study, whether under the rubric of an evolving seminar on Romanticism or in a string of courses on the twentieth-century sea-changes between an aesthetic of exuberant permutational fabulation and one of subdued monologic obsession, became defined in terms of literature’s capacity, fueled by contemporaneous work at the level of the philosophical operating system, to open dimensions of expansion. Literature, in this scenario, could be plainly discerned at the service and as a medium of increasing complexity (logical, epistemological, spatiotemporal) and of “higher-level” cognitive realization and intellectual processing. My early and instinctive arrangement, on the occasion of Romanticism, of a productive “battle of the discursive displays” between more-or-less simultaneous philosophical crystallizations and literary innovations was to serve me over decades of course-preparation and occasional dispatches from the critical field. The proto-cybernetic sensibility of the Romantics astounds me, as I’ve noted above in the Introduction, even today. If literary and other cultural artifacts were at all times beholden to the efforts at conceptual systematization under which they transpired, then there was something in the very logic of ongoing theoretical scrutiny militating for the theorization of every advanced intellectual paradigm, of every “new” cluster of updated and hence “more powerful” critical terms. At some point over the years, most likely in the early 1990’s, when I only began contemplating the vast array of cognitive, communicative, informational, bureaucratic, and even behavioral changes that were being implemented, willy-nilly, by cybernetic technologies, my interest shifted. It only slightly but tellingly shifted itself from the interplay between cultural artifacts and prevailing conceptual paradigms to the very constitution, architecture, and “programming” of the systematic organizations undergirding intellectual production and research as well evolving technologies.

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Those highly inventive as well as rigorous German idealist systems that could inform Romantic literature, all the way to the “American Renaissance” so well, increasingly occupied center stage in my courses and scholarly period studies, while my prized literary investigations of systematic possibility and expansion—in writers as diverse as Mary Shelley, Poe, Melville, Kafka, Joyce, Stein, Proust, Woolf, Borges, Calvino, Cortázar—held their position. As had generously “contemporary critical theory” done before it, the rubric of “systems theory” opened a welcoming and most welcome “scene of writing” for these deliberations. Having set off on my intellectual path as a pronounced math-science slacker, the discovery and excitement that I was able to garner from my progressive encounters with Anthony Wilden, Gregory Bateson, Niklas Luhmann, James Gleick, Fritjof Capra, and Bruce Clarke—and by means of their explorations with innovators John von Neumann, Benoît Mandelbrod, Ilya Prigogine, Umberto Maturano, Francisco Varela, and Heinz von Foerster— was a completely unanticipated and transformative surprise. The circuit setting out with my earliest intellectual limitations and bracketing a substantial body of intense aesthetic and philosophical encounters over the years came full close when I finally took a first printing of Douglas R. Hoftsadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach out of the bookcase for a serious reading. This was thirty years after I had received it as a prescient gift from my wife. While I cringe at the belated encounter and the energic torpor that it may imply, I wonder if at an earlier juncture I’d have been fully prepared for the resolute playfulness, the solidarity with its public, and its unwavering devotion to intelligence itself as the telling factor in human potential and achievement that it pursues. All the while that it sets out, on multiple levels of notation and cultural achievement, the deep and horizontal roots and outreach of the cybernetic age and world-order.

3. The writings and “mind” of Douglas R. Hofstadter present us with an exemplary case-study and progress report as this investigation into current prospects for healing of several sorts amid prevalent systematic configurations draws to a close. Not only did his prodigious intelligence and acuity enable him, from an early age, to transcribe what he derived from mathematics into registers and idioms both closely affiliated and remote: into the discourses, practices, and traditions of physics, cybernetics, molecular biology, information theory, and music, to name only the most obvious. Of particular interest to a critic such as myself, who communicates most cogently out of intense familiarity and in dialogue with specific authors and “artifacts,” is the obvious literary flair supplementing, in a crucial way, Hofstadter’s facilities in mathematical and scientific reasoning. Narrative and poetic wit, indeed, furnish

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Hofstadter with his primary medium for performing the drift, contingency, and build-up of conceptual power through polysemy and strategic self-reference. As Hofstadter sets about unpacking the logic and configuration of emergent cyber-technology and culture to a literate audience, performativity—graphic as well as semiotic, poetic, dramatic, and narrative—becomes an indispensable dimension to his elucidation. This is plain to anyone who encountered, at any juncture, the “Little Harmonic Labyrinth” and “Ant Fugue” interludes to Gödel, Escher, Bach. Even as a newly minted Ph.D., Hofstadter was intensely aware of the intimate feedback and follow-through between the volatility and incompletion of diverse mathematical and scientific phenomena and the writerly medium serving as the channel to his audience. It may be said of Gödel, Escher, Bach that Hofstadter undertook this magisterial project in the role of a double-agent. He humanized the emergent world-order of cybernetics by paralleling its in some respects forbidding developments to some of art’s most captivating—and already familiar— improvisations. The strategic reversals and inversions that Hofstadter tracks in the compositions of Johann Sebastian Bach may well furnish the privileged instance of self-referential cybernetic Artificial Intelligence and autopoiesis already deep-wired in the canon of Western artistic alchemy. But in the tradition of the Kantian elucidation of a priori synthetic knowledge in the First Critique and of Freud’s “proof” of the Unconscious in Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, Hofstadter pursues, if you will, “the cybernetic unconscious” in such additional artifacts as those involuted graphics by M. C. Escher that verge on their “point of incompletion” in the third dimension, not to mention the Zen ko¯an that manages to propel its adept beyond her current paralytic impasse precisely by throwing her into it. Hofstadter managed to fulfill the public works project of Gödel, Escher, Bach—an orientation of the broader public to the configuration, exigencies, and possibilities of the cybernetic order—by balancing his role as potentially terrifying “original genius” of the New Age against a far more familiar and disarming one, as avatar of the arts and purveyor, through the figure of the record-player and the ironies of the Zen ko¯ans, of the “technologies of everyday life.” Indeed, the splice in his own persona that Hofstadter implements in Gödel, Escher, Bach, between pan-scientific genius and spacey polyglot of the moment, is itself nothing other than an isomorphism, a key element of cybernetic architecture enabling parallel but very different strings of information and logic to become operational through their very interpenetration and transcription. In the years since Gödel, Escher, Bach, a third party (or secret sharer) has intervened into the double agency between the “hard” sciences and the more accessible arts that made the inaugural volume’s elucidations possible. This is the discourse of philosophy itself. In Hofstadter’s case, it is the subdiscipline known as the “philosophy of mind,” with its strong links, through

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figures such as Daniel Dennett, to Cognitive Science, that has served well as an arena for some of the broader issues opened and entertained by contemporary cybernetics and its allied sciences. The philosophy of mind, in its affiliations to “analytic philosophy,” may seem completely alien to the succession of schools and movements that launched deconstruction and post-structuralism (my own formation). It is crucial to note, however, that it is to philosophy, whichever branch, as the discursive display most conducive to operating languages of culture in their most rigorous deployment, that Hofstadter appeals in his efforts, post Gödel, Escher, Bach, to place his lifelong insights regarding recursion, isomorphism, citation, self-reference, and autopoiesis in their broader context. Pursuant to the philosophy of mind, Hofstadter inquires, in his 2007 I Am a Strange Loop into the very nature of our status as symbols in each other’s minds. He firmly situates his more speculative inquiries into mind, identity, and interpersonal relations in this latter volume within the symbolic networks and networking that are the primary attribute common to human beings and cybernetic programs and devices. Gödel, Escher, Bach more than fulfilled itself in a pan-scientific and multimedia explanation and demonstration of the structure, constitution, and process common to such cybernetic and protocybernetic phenomena as DNA, ant colonies, fugal inversions in music, electronic sound-systems, Zen ko¯ans, computer programming, and computer architecture. Hofstadter’s account of the revolutionary impact of computing did not limit itself to the technology and its obvious outcroppings: in communications, information technology, “smart” programs, Artificial Intelligence, virtual reality, and so forth. It solicited a radical reconsideration of traditional pursuits (music, graphic design, socio-biology, the literature of fables and dialogues, to name several) in terms of the emergent épistème or POS. On the variegated and often mind-boggling map of the transcriptive survey performed by Gödel, Escher, Bach, such programmatic (and irreducibly semiotic) movements as recursion, isomorphism, chunking, quotation (as in “quining”), and the precipitation out of “higher” and “lower” levels of processing, were absolutely pivotal. These and related processes became the “constants” or denominators common to the parallelism between human minds and number- (or device-) assisted cognition that Hofstadter was meticulously drawing. There was plenty of room for symbols and the networks they form in Gödel, Escher, Bach. Within this work, indeed, the “self” became the very most complex symbol in a model of consciousness defined by the symbolic constellations that it encompasses. There are potentially not only an infinite number of pathways in a brain, but also an infinite number of symbols . . . New concepts can always be formed out of old ones, and one could argue that the symbols that represent such

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new concepts are merely dormant symbols in each individual, waiting to be awakened. They may never get awakened in the person’s lifetime, but it could be claimed that those symbols are nonetheless always there, just waiting for the right circumstances to trigger their synthesis. ( GEB , 384)6 Consciousness is that property of a system that arises whenever there exist symbols in the system which obey triggering patterns somewhat like the ones described in the past several sections. ( GEB , 385)7 These citations derive precisely from that interface in Gödel, Escher, Bach where Hofstadter arrives at the extreme relevance of brains and symbolic (or semiotic) networks to one another. What is striking about the preliminary crystallization here, and Hofstadter takes up the issue at far greater length in I Am a Strange Loop, is that “consciousness,” the indispensable starting-point in so many Western metaphysical accounts of human nature and spiritual/ intellectual capability, is in these formulations at best a side-effect or derivative of a play of signifiers in process both prior to and autonomous of the division of labor seeming to make it intuitive and “natural.” (This as the cognitive faculty of an a priori subjectivity modeled after the Western divinity.) The persistence of long-standing Western speculative terms for characterizing consciousness, in the truncated extract immediately above “concepts,” “symbols,” and “system,” even as Hofstadter applies them to a recent technology-enabled épistème, should be clear. These terms, along with others entering Hofstadter’s parlance, among them representations, images, and categories, have assisted a bevy of prior Western thinkers, among them Spinoza, Locke, Hume, Kant, and Hegel, in their parallel investigations. Hofstadter will circle back to the highly contentious notion that consciousness and thinking can be conceptualized without the “je ne sais quoi” of a transcendental self in I Am a Strange Loop. A “deduction” of consciousness or selfhood from autonomous, free-functioning signification networks is controversial to participants in various Western belief-communities as to scientific observers. As he develops this line of reasoning further in Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hofstadter takes on the problem of personality, how it is that each of us, within a common processing platform, could sustain multiple interests, loyalties, and even conflicting opinions. It turns out, very much like a computer “mainframe,” that the “self” as symbolic network, can very well sustain multiple “subsystems,” even if these are not always coordinated or in accord. The symbol for the self is probably the most complex of all the symbols in the brain. For this reason, I choose to put it on a new level of hierarchy and

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call it a subsystem rather than a symbol. To be precise, by “subsystem,” I mean a constellation of symbols, each of which can be separately activated under the control of the subsystem itself. The image I wish to convey of a subsystem is that it functions almost as an independent “subbrain,” equipped with its own repertoire of symbols which can trigger each other internally. Of course, there is also much communication between the subsystem and the “outside” world . . . The interesting thing about a subsystem is that, once activated and left to its own devices, it can work on its own. Thus, two or more subsystems of the brain can operate simultaneously. I have noticed this happening occasionally in my own brain: sometimes I become aware that two different melodies are running through my mind, competing for “my” attention . . . Each of the systems responsible for drawing a melody out of my brain is presumably activating a number of symbols, one after the other, completely oblivious to the other system doing the same thing. Then they both attempt to communicate with a third subsystem of my brain, my self-symbol—and it is at this point that the “I” inside my brain gets wind of what’s going on; in other words, it starts picking up a chunked description of the activities of those two subsystems. ( GEB , 385)8 Not only is the “I” of selfhood a derivative of free-wheeling semiotic networks and processes; it stands by as its more or less coherent subelements (the “firewalls” between them can hardly be “watertight”) act out on their own. In the citation immediately above, the “I” is largely out to lunch while the brain whistles variations on “Dixie.” We have traveled, in this characterization of our mental life, far afield from the scandal of “splitting” or “split consciousness” that, according to Freud, and within certain other schools of psychoanalysis, triggers the formation of neurotic symptoms and other “unconscious” manifestations. (Even Winnicott, as upbeat as he is in allying therapeutic remediation with play, characterizes a significant phase of the process as the patient’s opening lines of communication with the “split off” material, those once unbearable recognitions, say of an unacknowledged sexual proclivity, that had been termed “incompatible thoughts” by Freud.) As symbolic network, and at a remove from the judgmental apparatus with which a transcendental self is embedded, the “I” of Gödel, Escher, Bach draws comfort and even inspiration from the diversity of its capabilities, activities, and even moods and inclinations. The build-up of the various capabilities and processes inherent to selfreferential symbolic systems, self-correcting computer programs, and isomorphic lines of communication (in ant colonies as well as in DNA) is so stunning and vertiginous in Gödel, Escher, Bach that a full environmental impact study of this thinking is unavoidably beyond its scope. The other

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occasion to which it is left is I Am a Strange Loop. I read this splendidly meditative volume not merely as an extension of some of Hofstadter’s longstanding interests and concerns but as a crucial status report on the options open to us as we negotiate a cybernetic world-order whose impact has been anything but established. The juries remain palpably “out” on such wider implications of the technology itself as the following: (1) the redefinitions of subjective and socio-political agency and jurisdiction the technologies carry with them; (2) phenomenological repercussions, such as the way in which we experience time, space, and simulation itself; (3) cognitive implications, such as how perception, reading, and interpretation are reconfigured by electronic media themselves and by their variance from more “analog” databases, archives, and communications media; (4) social interaction and “object relations.” Nothing speaks more directly to the fashion in which our social participation and interaction have been rechanneled by cybernetic technology than “social networking software.” Yet again, what untenable “traditional” constraints and expectations have been swept away, and what has arisen in their place? I read I Am a Strange Loop as nothing less than the current user’s manual for homo cyberneticus as he (and his counterparts of various genders) weigh their socio-political, ideological, technological, cultural, and communal options. This is in a sense the “natural” place at which to end the current survey of possibilities and options for amelioration, remediation, reduction, and relief from foregone and unconditional constraints emanating from the full gamut of prevalent empowered social systems. Douglas Hofstadter may be characterized as a rigorous and eloquent scene of writing and thinking at which to suspend the current interrogation because his work has been a generative microcosm of the options and limitations that we all face in coping with a panoply of closed systems in a bewildering variety of idioms, dialects, media, and technologies. Among these surely number the systems of law, national immigration and naturalization, finance, healthcare, domesticity (regulating marriage and child-rearing), education, and communications. For better or worse, to our edification or not, we intersect on a daily basis with institutions and regulations growing out of these systems. Hofstadter, in his own intellectual receptivity, curiosity, and polymathic range of interests, has worked particularly hard and inventively on the interfaces linking, say, number theory, biological replication, and communications, or, in a different sector of his thought, juxtaposing cybernetics and processing in the brain. With particular intensity, in I Am a Strange Loop, he places intelligence, psychology, and ethics in an exceptionally intense feedback environment, and then records the resonation. I am both a lifelong reader of Proust and a child of Hofstadter’s particular biographical and cultural generations. To discover that along with my amazing teacher Jacques Derrida and my fellow deconstructionists, Hofstadter and his

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milieu had to contend with grave skepticism and misgivings arising because symbolic networks might not be fitted out with egos or souls; to learn, under his tutelage, that the bearing to Principia Mathematica as a culture of mathematical positivism and “pure” objectivity assumed by Gödel in order to infuse mathematics with incompletion and self-reference was a quintessentially deconstructive one: these realizations were as momentous to me as “Marcel’s” discovery, as A la recherche du temps perdu runs itself out, that the presumably separate Guermantes and Méséglise circuits were in fact part and parcel of the same loop, a “strange” one to be sure.

4. By its Very Name. Under certain light-conditions, it is very odd indeed that as members of intellectual communities and as instructors in educational institutions, we rarely couch our capabilities and strivings, the political stakes of our work, or the values we instill in our students, as intelligence. (There, I’ve said—at least written—the term!). There is something satisfyingly refreshing, from the outset of his writings, enabling Hofstadter to align himself and his work with this phenomenon. His disciplinary allegiances, of course, to cybernetics, the Physics flank of the physical sciences, and especially to the philosophical arm of the overall cognitive sciences, endow his intelligencepreoccupations with a disarming aura of objectivity. (Intelligence tests, for example, were among the early clinical trials devised by “scientific psychology.”) There is a certain liability when scholars of literature, art, and culture invoke intelligence in their judgments and elucidations. Intelligence joins beauty as a criterion that would require at least one Kantian Critique in order for its configuration, distribution, communication, and public reception to be adjudicated in a conceptually rigorous manner. Is Shelley a more intelligent poet than Wordsworth because he places the ambient philosophical issues of the moment under a more direct illumination? Is Cézanne a more intelligent impressionist than Monet? Are Carroll’s pedagogically explicit children’s tales more intelligent than E. T. A. Hoffmann’s grotesque ones? The Humanities are broad enough to delineate between intelligence as an aegis for intellectual development and processing, on the one hand, and as a judgmental criterion of achievement and mind, on the other. In its work as a standard and determinant of achievement and distinction, intelligence functions as a Luhmannian social system: it effects selections and furnishes the basis for system–environment (a.k.a. figure–ground) interactions and economies. Directly and indirectly, intelligence also predicates the social conditions for the public reception and institutionalization (archiving, distribution, instruction) of cultural artifacts and other intellectual achievements.

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Yet the Humanities, and those of us who militate for them, can enhance our cultural mission and derive tremendous affirmation from Hofstadter’s use and elaboration of “intelligence”—from his side of the aisle. At the outset of Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hofstadter offers us a brief catalogue of “smart-thinking” traits characterizing both the cognitive characteristics most conducive to scientific and aesthetic creativity and the “higher” potentials and achievements of machines: to respond to situations very flexibly; to take advantage of fortuitous circumstances; to make sense out of ambiguous or contradictory messages; to recognize the relative importance of different elements of a situation; to draw distinctions between situations despite similarities which may link them; to synthesize new concepts by taking old concepts and putting them together in a new way; to come up with ideas which are novel. ( GEB , 26) The catchwords and primary activities of intelligence, as they can be glossed from Hofstadter’s disarmingly neutral program, are flexibility, tolerance for contingency, complexity, pattern-recognition, and combinatorial acuity and flair. It is through a rigorous coordination of these activities that cybernetics, in its technological innovations as well as its thinking, came into being and widespread deployment. The passage may also be read as a basic menu for innovative achievement across the gamut of art-forms and cultural arenas. If there is any downbeat to this “boilerplate” to the engine of creative improvisation, it is on “flexibility” itself: The flexibility of intelligence comes from the enormous number of different rules, and levels of rules. The reason that so many rules exist on so many levels is that in life, a creature is faced with millions of situations of completely different types . . . Some situations are mixtures of stereotyped situations—thus they require rules for deciding which of the “just plain” rules to apply. Some situations cannot be classified . . . Without doubt, strange loops involving rules that change themselves, directly or indirectly, are at the core of intelligence. ( GEB , 27) The visual panorama of intelligence that Hofstadter traces out here is a vast multitude of environmental interactions in which an individual (as self-system) is involved. The intelligent negotiation of an environment itself in constant flux

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involves the application of different types of rules to situations of varying complexity, broken down into different logical categories. Briefly put, the intelligent operator in a milieu approaches complexity with the utmost spontaneity and flexibility. Intelligence faces an unending, rapid-fire sequence of adjustments issuing from the environment: it negotiates these on an ongoing basis. Loops emerge as Hofstadter’s favored graphic figure for intelligence for two reasons: because of the non-linear progression of an experience impacted by such contingency and demanding such a multiplicity of responses and rules; and by dint of the bizarre (“strange”) solutions improvised in negotiating such a complex, volatile environment. Intelligence characteristically entertains strange loops of negotiation in which the rules morph before the situation in question has been resolved. This is what lends the Queen of Hearts’ rule its patent absurdity in Lewis Carroll’s classic children’s tales. It is not by accident that the dialogic interludes to Gödel, Escher, Bach are animated by Wonderland’s absurdist mood and features. By the moment of I Am a Strange Loop, this figure (the loop) has expanded in scope from the stringing of radically discrete encounters in an unpredictable environment to the very contours of selfhood itself: selfhood as an evolving network of symbols themselves waxing and waning in clarity, “strength,” and significance. I Am a Strange Loop is an extended footnote to Gödel, Escher, Bach. It extrapolates key argumentation in the prior book and effects decisive changes in emphasis. But it remains fully within the province of Hofstadter’s account, in Gödel, Escher, Bach, of the transformative, operative, mutational, selfcritical, and autopoietic capability that develops along multiple strings of articulation, including computer programs, musical scores, and strands of DNA. Within the framework of Gödel, Escher, Bach, such devices as the playful dialogic interludes and period-pieces devoted to Eastern Philosophy, stereo equipment, and even drug culture serve the purpose both of blunting and humanizing the seemingly alien (as in outer-space) crystallizations in mathematics, physics, and molecular biology responsible, in different ways, for autopoietic computer programs. As it in succession elaborates the quantum-leaps in number theory, symbolic logic, linguistics, engineering, and cognitive science that give rise to operational computing devices, Gödel, Escher, Bach holds true to its mission to serve a broad public as a rigorous and in many senses exhaustive primer to the cybernetic age. But even as Hofstadter issues this amazingly interdisciplinary textbook, he softens its impact and broadens its “catchment area” by demonstrating the relevance of its transformations to all sorts of “peripherals,” ones particularly recognizable from the prevalent ambient culture. Humanization and diffusion, in I Am a Strange Loop, take the form of redirecting scrutiny from the operative transformations themselves (e.g.

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isomorphism, Gödelian incompletion, genetic replication) to their wider metaphysical implications: the status of identity, spirituality, interpersonal interaction. This is a rhetorical gesture with many implications, some of which I will continue to tease out. But it may well be possible to trace Hofstadter’s “turn” to the broadest and most persistent metaphysical questions to a tradition going back at least as far as Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and Mary Shelley: an act of contrition on science’s part for the other-worldly distance and disinterest at the core of its earth-shaking intuitions. Hofstadter is as lucid in this endeavor—tracing out the cybernetic implications for “soul,” “ego,” and wrenching life-experiences such as the loss of our loved ones—as he was in Gödel, Escher, Bach in tracing out the lines from Euclid, Fibonacci, Fermat, Cantor, and Gödel to functioning computers. Indeed, Hofstadter’s utter openness in launching this wider discussion, even at the risk of intermittent losses in what I would call his theoretical concentration, is why I Am a Strange Loop is such a strategic way-station in the present study. This latter work leaves, if you will, a “footprint” of the broader theoretical issues that we face, in discourses as far afield from Computer Science as critical theory and Cultural Studies, emanating not only from the yet unresolved Faustian pact that we’ve made with the technology but from such peripheral factors as multi-national corporatization and an increasingly frequent strand of catastrophes breaking out in the natural environment. In I Am a Strange Loop, Hofstadter hazards as one major hypothesis that empathy is the affective correlative to intelligence. Empathy is a projective, in the end visual, capacity (Lacan would link it to the Imaginary) enabling us to see and experience the world from the perspective of certain key elements in our symbolic networks. The ability to experience the injustice visited on a relative or friend when they die, or the horror of a slaughtered pig, picks up from those limber adjustments to reality and the adaptations of rules that Hofstadter, within the framework of Gödel, Escher, Bach, equates with intellection itself. In I Am a Strange Loop Hofstadter ushers in an age of empathic intelligence. This is to serve as the presiding ethical bearing of the cybernetic age. This turn in his thinking opens up far-reaching theoretical questions, deliberations on which may not always turn out in Hofstadter’s favor. I suspect, for example, that Hofstadter’s construct of empathy is at core a technical one, with certain affinities to the fashion in which Heinz Kohut applied this term to psychoanalysis. When empathy veers into a spiritual value or moral imperative, it is fraught with serious negative sectarian and ideological repercussions—as Friedrich Nietzsche and Jacque Derrida, among others, pointed out in meticulous detail. I will devote more time to this topic below. The construct of empathic intelligence, as a bearing emerging from a consciousness assuming the form of a symbolic network, interfaces the vital intellectual capabilities, discourses, and technological as well as socio-political

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interests at stake in the POS that we have, as a post-global tele-technic civilization, configured. Whatever the results of the meticulous critical scrutiny that empathic intelligence merits, in its irreducible interactivity it is a bellwether for the prospects facing such enterprises as culture and education in the contemporary world. It is as symbols, albeit complex ones, arranged in highly individualized configurations and constellations of other symbols, that “To varying degrees, we human beings live inside other human beings already, even in a totally nontechnological world. The interpenetration of souls is an inevitable consequence of the power of the representationally universal machines that our brains are. That is the true meaning of the word ‘empathy’ ” (ISL, 266). It is a distinctive feature of this brief snippet, characteristic of the entire volume from which it derives, that Hofstadter seeks systematic cognitive terms for extremely subjective phenomena. In the formulation immediately above, he figures empathy, that variety of compassion oriented toward the Other’s point of view, as an overlap (perhaps as in a Venn diagram), between two complex symbols, between the contours that the symbols, on a symbolic map, take up. In this very specific sense, with its deep substrate of sexual figuration, empathy is tantamount to interpenetration. The ground (as in figure–ground) for this visually as well as emotionally poignant bearing is as significant as the rapport between symbols—in Hofstadter’s parlance, simmballs—themselves (ISL, 45–50). Consciousness is the dance of symbols inside the cranium. Or to make it even more pithy, consciousness is thinking. As Descartes said, Cogito ergo sum. Most of the time, any given symbol in our brain is dormant, like a book sitting inertly in the remote stacks of a huge library. Every so often, some event will trigger the retrieval of this book from the stacks, and it will be opened and its pages will come alive for some reader. In an analogous way, inside a human brain, perceived external events are continually the highly selective retrieval of symbols from dormancy, and causing them to come alive in all sorts of unanticipated, unprecedented configurations. The dance of symbols in the brain is what consciousness is. (It is also what thinking is.) ( ISL , 276) As a metaphor for the activation (or prompting) of any particular symbol in each complex brain’s repository, Hofstadter offers us imagery strikingly reminiscent of the “Library of Babel” in Borges’s unforgettable ficción. The metaphor for consciousness and thinking is of the archive, an image central to Derrida. From the outset of his work, he transcribes the Freudian metaphysics as well as psychology of the unconscious into the scene of the archive and

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into the medium of encrypting/decrypting. Thinking, in Hofstadter’s account, is less a progression through and between a succession of immutable, possibly universal ideas, and more an ongoing activation of symbols whose centrality, prominence, and strength fluctuate both in time and in relation to one another. While the symbols whose activation and discarding is the preeminent feature of conscious are characterized as the stacks in a library, or the vocabulary in a “real time” lexicon, in relation to the brain and the higher-order sentient being that possesses it, they “dance.” The figure that Hofstadter selects for the activity of symbols within consciousness and among themselves combines aesthetic considerations of beauty with the transience of constant fluctuation and permutation. Hofstadter choreographs a dance of meaning-bearing elements within a network in which their significance and interrelation is always in flux. It remains a decisive ongoing concern to Hofstadter’s cybernetics and to the Cognitive Science with which he is in constant dialogue to elaborate and map the categories of the various symbols and the degrees of their logical order; the schemata in which they are arranged and the lines and networks of communication between them. This particular world-picture is at the heart of his project to furnish an interdisciplinary primer of cybernetic thinking and organization, at the levels of “deep structure” and output, at the “higher” and “lower” levels of conceptualization and processing.

5. The Epistemic Network. Several strands of thinking and research conducted over many years coalesce in Hofstadter’s overall vision of a consciousness scrolling downward as a “dance of symbols”: of selfhood as a constellation of symbols, some imposed by culture and personal history, others literally “lit up” by preference, passion, and joy; and of interpersonal transactions negotiated through the overlap or antagonism between personal symbolic networks, at the symbolic level and in the symbolic sphere. In this latter scenario, “self” or “identity” is not a given, a transcendental spiritual entity, so much as a derivative, even an afterthought, of symbolic process and networking. Subjectivity, in this world-view, is invested with the same tenuousness and volatility as the derivatives currently fabricated and transacted in the financial markets. As suggested above, the state of affairs set out by Hofstadter gains its cachet not merely in its situation on the interstice between cognitive psychology and cybernetics, but as a snapshot of the compelling theoretical and socio-cultural issues we face as citizens of this age, as subjects of its distinctive POS. It is therefore worthwhile to address this network in keeping with several of the dimensions with which Hofstadter has configured it.

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In the end, we self-perceiving, self-inventing, locked-in mirages are little miracles of self-reference. We believe in marbles that disintegrate when we search for them but as are as real as any genuine marble when we’re not looking for them. Our very nature is such as to prevent us from fully understanding its very nature. Poised midway between the unvisualizable cosmic vastness of curved spacetime and the dubious, shadowy flickering of charged quanta, we human beings, more like rainbows and mirages than like raindrops or boulders, are unpredictable self-writing poems—vague, metaphorical, ambiguous, and sometimes exceedingly beautiful. To see ourselves this way is probably not as comforting as believing in ineffable other-worldly wisps endowed with eternal existence, but has its compensations . . . As Kurt Gödel with his unexpected strange loops gave us a deeper and subtler vision of what mathematics is all about, so the strangeloop characterization of our essences gives us a deeper and subtler vision of what it means to be human. And to my mind, the loss is worth the gain. ( ISL , 363) Literally as well as figuratively, these are Hofstadter’s culminating words in I Am a Strange Loop. To fast-forward to them is shorthand for the body-English with which Hofstadter wants to leave this, his broader work. Above all, Hofstadter ends this project in a sense of absolutely palpable illusions, ones that, nevertheless, are utterly decisive to further advances in technological and theoretical work. These illusions arise out of no clear etiology at the start, and demand eccentric, non-linear thinking in order to be grasped and factored in to the known and established scientific protocol. Hofstadter ends his work in a rhythm of figurative illusions, eventually dissolving into nothingness, nevertheless, at key junctures, indispensable to science and collective human awareness, in its developmental capability and consolidation. In his final snapshot for I Am a Strange Loop, science goes in and out of these illusions, incurring and paying off its debt to them, in a vast cultural game of fort-da. Hofstadter’s broader point is that science, in order to consummate itself and work to the end of even ballpark humane values, has to maintain a certain offcenteredness and out-of-kilter in order to recognize these completely implausible epiphenomena when they appear in the view-finder (objective) or Petri dish, and in order to capitalize on their repercussions. I Am a Strange Loop’s final flourish is a casting aside of this utterly indispensable figuration, much in the sense of the ladder that Wittgenstein pushes away at the end of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: a shove more in the interest of epistemological distance and lucidity than in a decisive gesture of repudiation. Hofstadter’s exemplary illusion in the above citation is one that has been of great moment to his ongoing ambulatory meditation as well as to his scientific

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career. It is the “strange marble” that his fingers, exploring a box-full of envelopes, unmistakably feel—but that vanishes the instant any explanatory investigation (e.g., emptying the contents) is undertaken (ISL, 92–6). Eventually, through observations and inferences no less serious than the ones he lavishes on isomorphic structures and recursive processes, Hofstadter is in a position to dispatch the “strange marble” as “the precise alignment of a hundred triple layers of paper and a hundred layers of glue” (ISL, 95). But in the process of explaining the marble, he has come face to face with the epiphenomenon itself—and the tolerance for complexity, incompletion, and non-linearity that its productive encounter encompasses. The “strange marble” has served as “a large scale illusion created by the collision of many small and indisputably non-illusory events” (ISL, 93). The encounter with one “strange marble” after the next, whether in Escher’s “impossible” graphics or the senses of incompletion and eccentricity to which Gödel accorded a central role in mathematics, has furnished Hofstadter’s retrospective book-project with a motive and its “thesis . . . that in a non-embryonic, non-human brain, there is a special type of abstract structure or pattern that plays the same role as does that precise alignment of layers of papers and glue—an abstract pattern that feels like a self” (ISL, 95). Hofstadter’s broader metaphysics in this volume—the nature of selfhood, identity, interpersonal interactions, the status of “others” in the “self”, and so on—arises precisely from this “special type of abstract structure or pattern” eventually corresponding to an explanation “strange” in its implausible sequence and outcome, “loopy” in its recursive and non-linear path. In this respect, the cast of metaphysical “characters” (selfhood, identity, and so on) affording us our base-level of assurance and comfort in the world are themselves illusions, whose most productive figural correlative is the “strange loop” (Hofstadter has already inveighed on how much our understanding of the envelope box epiphenomenon hinges on his descriptive word-choice, “marble”—ISL, 95). He queries whether strange loops aren’t “always just illusions that merely graze paradox, always just bewitching bubbles that inevitably pop when approached too closely?” (ISL, 103). In elucidating the bizarre concatenation of overlaps and collusions that have resulted in the contemporary world, its technological underpinnings, and its POS, Hofstadter orchestrates a context-specific give-and-take embracing scientific observation and experimentation, mathematical calculation, the obsession with patterns common to both spheres, linguistic indeterminacy, and poetic invention! All these factors must be at play and taken account of in any explanatory discourse that can rise to the level of technological complexity and cultural responsiveness to which contemporary civilization has risen. It is this complexity to which Hofstadter’s account of symbolic networks on which images and memories are arranged, networks simulating and predicating

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mental activity and interpersonal behavior, is dedicated. In the remainder of this section, I will trace out the progression leading from Hofstadter’s basic definitions of symbolic networks through the various fashions in which they template such mega-phenomena as consciousness and selfhood. There are a number of reasons why Hofstadter favors perception as the stage of cognitive processing most resonant with the interface between cybernetics and subjectivity that he is exploring. More than the parallel moments of understanding and reason also decisive to the metaphysical and speculative world-pictures of philosophers ranging from Spinoza and Descartes to Kant and Hegel, perception maintains a vibrant hook-up to information and its input, hence to communications as well. When Hegel aligns perception in the vast arc starting with “sensible certitude” (sinnliche Gewißheit) to Absolute Knowing, he is able to typecast perception as what we would today call a “smart sensation,” a processing of the sensuous manifold with some basic cognitive (and critical) parameters. Settling on perception as his favored stage of cognitive development also enables Hofstadter to delineate it from a manifestly uncritical “reception,” or intake faculty. This is the wider backdrop against which he introduces what Hegel might call the “play of symbols” within the field of perception: Perception takes as its starting point some kind of input (possibly but not necessarily a two-dimensional image) composed of a vast number of tiny signals, but then it goes much further, eventually winding up in the selective triggering of a small subset of a large repertoire of dormant symbols— discrete structures that have representational quality. That is to say, a symbol inside a cranium, just like a simmball in the hypothetical careenium, should be thought of as a triggerable physical structure that constitutes the brain’s way of implementing a particular category or concept. ( ISL , 75) This passage, in which Hofstadter introduces his discourse of symbols in a serious way, is notable for its emphasis on their movement and dynamics more than on their location. In the citation immediately above, he devotes his attention to the reduction of a vast number of signals to a manageable set of significant symbols; also to the triggering mechanism prevailing between these two mental manifolds or multiplicities. In deference to the complexities that he negotiates, Hofstadter has already, in Chapter 2, characterized mental space as a “careenium,” a raucous environment in which “simmballs” take the impact and collect the torque of the most microscopic fragments of meaning. (“In my mind’s eye, I often see simms acting like the silver marbles in a pinball machine, with the simmballs acting like the ‘pins’—that is, the larger stationary cylindrical objects which the marbles strike and ricochet off

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of as they roll down the sloped board of play,” ISL, 48.) Already discernable in a passage in which he delineates the mental environment of symbolic processing for the first time is his central interest: how they are mobilized, activated, “triggered”—far more than in their stable “map” or configuration. Any “mapping” that Hofstadter performs in the Cognitive Science dimension of his demonstration is, then, more a mapping in time, at least on the interstice where spacetime is continuous. In this volatile zone, the radical careening and triggering of symbols transpires in nanoseconds, in “intervals” so brief as to preempt stable schematization. In characterizing the precipitation of a network of symbols, itself in constant flux, out of a vast aggregation of signals (or “simms”), Hofstadter focuses on the relays by which this “funneling” (focus, concentration) is effected. The passage leading from vast numbers of received signals to a handful of triggered symbols is a kind of funneling process in which initial input signals are manipulated or “massaged,” the results of which selectively trigger further (i.e., more “internal”) signals, and so forth. The baton-passing by squads of symbols traces out an ever-narrowing pathway in the brain, which winds up triggering a small set of symbols whose identities are of course a subtle function of the original input signals. ( ISL , 76) Where Hofstadter is ultimately headed in this universal account is that “each of us is a bundle of fragments of other people’s souls” (ISL, 252), intersecting through mental environments where “people, no less than objects, are represented by symbols in the brain” (ISL, 248). He is reaching in this extract toward an account of interpersonal relations in which symbolic networks, that is, the cybernetic organization of subjectivity, arbitrate how each of us is evaluated, situated, and remembered within the communities of our affiliation. It is a case, at first glance, of symbolic networks, imbued with the impersonality of language as treated throughout twentieth-century linguistics and philosophy, supplanting the metaphysics of traditional Western subjects or subject-elements. Although at the head of this paragraph, Hofstadter designates “souls” as the collectors or vehicles for people’s symbolically arbitrated uniqueness, he elsewhere strenuously questions the attribution of metaphysical constructs to what may well be cognitive activity of which animals, at least certain ones, and cybernetic devices may also be capable. “A far better metaphor for an ‘I,”’ argues “SL #641” in “A Courteous Crossing of Words” (Chapter 20), “is the structure of self-referring categories that Gödel found in the barren seeming world of PM . . . [Principia Mathematica] . . . What you call ‘I’ is an outcome, not a starting point. You coalesced in an

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unplanned fashion, not in a flash” (ISL, 283–4). In order to underscore the basic humanism of his stance as a public scientist and to heighten the poignancy of some of his reflections, Hofstadter may invoke souls in certain of his characterizations of thinking and interpersonal relations. But any “Capitalized Essence” that Hofstadter would appeal to (ISL, 327–8), whether a soul or some parallel spiritual agency, is at most the byproduct of a symbolic and proto-cybernetic process already at play in the mind. On first glance, thinking of ourselves as elements in each other’s symbolic networks could not be further removed from the Freudian fundaments of psychoanalysis. Or, we might venture, the reduction from signals to symbols by means of relays in the second segment of the passage immediately above was well-rehearsed by Freud, as he set about delineating between the components of our conscious existence and the submerged shoals of inaccessible material. Indeed, in the above passage, the signals not deployed in the relays of symbols are fated to oblivion with strong unconscious overtones. Indeed, as we shall see, by insisting on the underlying physical substrate of symbols and the processes of their activation, routing, and retention/erasure, Hofstadter engages in a debunking of long-standing Western myths of subjectivity and experience with close parallels in deconstructive post-structuralism, Cultural Studies, and systems theory concurrent with his work. It is in the effort of de-spiritualizing as well as depersonalizing the processes of mental life that Hofstadter remains rooted, as his “scene of cognitive processing,” in perception. Each of these examples of symbol-triggering constitutes an act of perception, as opposed to the mere reception of a gigantic number of microscopic signals arriving from some source, like a million raindrops on a roof. In the interests of clarity, I have painted too simple a picture of the process of perception, for in reality, there is a great deal of two-way flow. Signals don’t propagate solely from the outside inward, towards symbols; expectations from past experiences simultaneously give rise to signals propagating outwards from certain symbols. There takes place a kind of negotiation between inward-bound and outward-bound symbols, and the result is the locking in of a pathway connecting raw input to symbolic interpretation. This mixture of different directions of flow in the brain makes perception a truly complex process. In summary, the missing ingredient in a video system, no matter how high its visual fidelity, is a repertoire of symbols that can be selectively triggered. ( ISL , 76–7)

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Perception emerges, as Hofstadter manages to put more of his methodological and theoretical cards on the table, as an indispensable, highly productive cat-and-mouse game of symbolism. Issuing both from “internal” stores of memory and emotion and “external” sources, symbols (or is that “simmballs”?) emulate the rough and tumble of the “careenium.” As they assume configurations, though symbols at the same time furnish relatively stable reference points for the even more chaotic flow of signals. As repertoire, filtering and sorting out some “grist for the mill” from other input, Hofstadter’s cognitive symbols emulate some of the activity that Luhmann ascribes to social systems: above all in the selections that they facilitate. It is precisely the context-setting and ensuing interpretative capability facilitated by a symbolic repertoire that is missing from a video recording device, no matter how high its visual “fidelity.” To the limited extent that Hofstadter is willing to claim special privilege either for “humanness” or “soul” as the je ne sais quoi of consciousness, he remains cognizant of the contingency factors impacting upon this decisive “repertoire of symbols” at all times. As we have seen, ongoing flexibility is one of the fundaments of his model of intelligent interfacing with the world. Within Hofstadter’s overall rhetoric for the productive accommodation and assimilation of contingency, extensibility assumes a privileged role. What would make a human brain a candidate for housing a loop of selfrepresentation? Why would a fly brain or a mosquito brain be just as valid a candidate? . . . The answer should be clear. A human brain is a representational system that knows no bounds in terms of the extensibility or flexibility of its categories. A mosquito brain, by contrast, is a tiny representational system that contains practically no categories at all, never mind being flexible and extensible. Very small representational systems, such as those of bacteria, ova, sperms, plants, thermostats, so forth, do not enjoy the luxury of self-representation. And a tomato and a pencil are not representational systems at all . . . So a human brain is a strong candidate for having the potential of rich perceptual feedback, and thus rich self-representation. But what kinds of perceptual cycles do we get involved in? We begin life with the most elementary sorts of feedback about ourselves, which stimulate us to formulate categories for our most obvious body parts, and building on the basic proposal, we soon develop a sense of our bodies as flexible physical objects. In the meantime, as we receive rewards for various actions and punishments for others, we begin to develop a more abstract sense of “good” and “bad,” as well as notions of guilt and pride, and our sense of ourselves as abstract entities. ( ISL , 182–3)

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Two important propositions regarding the decisive role of representation in cybernetic organizations and systems coincide in this passage. It is important to delineate between them in spite of the obvious parallelism of their drift. To state that “a human brain is a representational system” is very much in accord with the decisiveness that language and its communications attained, say, in the Paris of the 1960’s through the 1990’s—over the full panoply of disciplines and intellectual traditions. In Hofstadter’s formulation, the brain becomes a communications network overseeing the distribution, interaction, and storage/ erasure of its contents, whether semantic or imagistic, far more than a cognitive organ at the service of an identity or self-system. Such factors as the multiplicity of the representations and richness of the symbol-repertoire furnish the cut-off points between “higher” organisms, such as men and women, and some of the obvious “lower” ones, not only mosquitoes, but following the drift of inventive thought-experiments in the philosophy of mind, “inanimate” objects including tomatoes. The relative complexity of brains as representational systems thus plays a definitive role in the exercise and acuity of empathic intelligence. Our relative comfort with the consumption or destruction of various animals is based on our ability to identify with their representational capability, and hence with their suffering (ISL, 16–22). Hofstadter rigorously eschews moralizing in establishing a range of tolerancelevels when it comes to diet. At the same time, the only credence that he holds out to cognitive “X-factors” such as souls is as sites of the empathic projection that would stop somewhere along the continuum of animals marked for destruction, whether for consumption or on some other ground (e.g., pleasure, population control). To add that a human brain functions as an arena for feedback, above all in the form of self-representation, draws of course on the primacy of representation to cognition, but moves in different propositional directions. “Self-representation” is a subcategory of representation, crucial even in its subordination. To claim that a brain is complex enough for self-representation is implicitly to argue that the self has joined its repertoire of active symbols. Otherwise put, the self-system has achieved an upgrade precisely through its symbolic processing and deployment of itself. Cybernetic programs, by the same token, attain their upgrades by undergoing parallel loops of self-reference. They quote themselves—quining is one particular instance of this. In their selfreferential looping, cybernetic programs playfully reverse themselves (as was rehearsed in Bach’s fugues and canons); or, as in certain of Escher’s more mystifying graphics, by clever optical illusion, they encompass dimensions of three-dimensionality forbidden to two-dimensional representations. Once the dynamics of self-reference have been harnessed and deployed, there is, hypothetically, no limit to the upgrades available to the computers, programs, brains, and artworks that have been encrypted with this capability.

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It is by dint of a highly distinctive “extensibility” in the above passage, a “give” encompassing both limberness and room for expansion, that a subtext of general representability in the brain extends to the breakthroughs and upgrades of self-representation, self-reference, and autopoiesis. Extensibility is a feature common to human intelligence and “smart” (also “second-order”) cybernetic programs and the devices that run on them. In its extensibility, its ability to expand, edit, and adapt itself, a “personal” repertoire of symbols keeps up with the shifting tides of our existential actuality and our interpersonal relations. In the world of living things, the magic threshold of representational universality is crossed whenever a system’s repertoire of symbols becomes extensible without any obvious limit. This threshold was crossed on the species level somewhere on the way from earlier primates to ourselves. Systems above this counterpart to the Gödel-Turning threshold—let’s call them “beings,” for short—have the capacity to model inside themselves other beings that they run into—to slap together quick-and-dirty models of beings they run into only briefly, to refine such coarse models over time, even to invent imaginary beings from whole cloth . . . Once beyond the magic threshold, universal beings seem inevitably to become ravenously thirsty for tastes of the interiority of other universal beings. This is why we have movies, soap operas, television news, blogs, webcams, gossip columnists . . . Although I have been depicting it somewhat cynically, representational universality and the nearly insatiable hunger that creates for vicarious experience is but a stone’s throw away from empathy, which I see as the most admirable quality of humanity. ( ISL , 246) This passage frames an utterly decisive transition between Hofstadter’s mapping the brain and cognition as symbolic networks and his sociology and ethics of empathic intelligence. “Personal” symbolic networks, it turns out, are “extensible” not only in their ongoing torsion and flux; they are transferrable. They can be appropriated and “beamed,” as it were, into the “universal” cognitive space of others. This process is a key element in our learning. Not only do we know one another by projecting ourselves into their symbolism and by extrapolating their telling images and symbols; “we” extend and persist “in” others in the form of the symbols (and associations) that we trigger. Hofstadter labors concertedly throughout this volume to fend off essentialist metaphysics from this process. “We” and “others” derive our status from a vast vocabulary of shared symbols distributed throughout virtual (another word for “universal”) cognitive space. We do not derive that status

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from a spiritual substance “private” or unique to ourselves. Intimacy, in Hofstadter’s cybernetically configured psycho-social world, is tantamount to the fluidity with which associates raid and appropriate each other’s symbolic repertoires and networks. Within this scenario, “each of us is a bundle of fragments of other people’s souls, simply put together in a new way” (ISL, 252). The very communality of the space in which we loop and fluctuate in the symbolism of our interlocutors while they perform analogously in ours drastically qualifies our “private ownership” of what we construe to be “ourselves” and our thinking. This is a serious blow to the branch of “intellectual property law” seeming to guarantee and protect the uniqueness of our personalities. “We are all copycats,” writes Hofstadter, characterizing the widespread sharing of what start out as highly personal improvisations and “touches.” “We involuntarily and automatically incorporate into our repertoire all kinds of behavior-fragments of other people” (ISL, 250). This is an apt context for appreciating, in the Recherche, the Proustian panorama for the circulation of attitudes, phrasings, and even highly idiosyncratic mannerisms throughout social milieus such as the one over which the imperious Mme Verdurin presides. What is striking about Hofstadter’s above formulation is the reflex-action (and speed) with which these “intellectual property thefts of everyday life,” at the symbolic level, take place. In more respects than one, we meld indistinguishably into one another, we exchange thoughts with one another, we become one another before the fact. It may well be, in this scenario, that the originals among us, those who attain social credit and recognition for their thoughts, performances, and artifacts, do so primarily through their adeptness at branding and merchandizing. The degree to which any of our productions is original, in “universal” virtual cognitive space, has been sharply qualified. There is indeed something cannibalistic about this hunger we have for one another as we feed off of each other’s singularities, inventions, and most vivid images. How paradoxical, but also challenging, that the virtual zone in which we project, extrapolate, reroute, and recycle each other’s telling symbols is also, at the end of the above extract, the proving-ground for empathy—for Hofstadter (as, in different ways, to Winnicott, Harry Stack Sullivan, and Heinz Kohut) the very highest ethical manifestation of intelligence. The ethical application of the diverse strands of scientific inquiry to which Hofstadter has devoted himself by means of empathy is such a glorious outcome that it diverts him from taking up the disastrous social and interpersonal consequences that can result from an utterly cynical engagement in and deployment of shared symbolism. So powerful is Hofstadter’s account of symbolism and its fluctuations, whether or not by design, that it surely extends, in a markedly different dimension, to Iago’s utter trashing of the Desdemona-symbol in Othello’s “mind,” or to the scenarios of power and

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courtliness traced out by the likes of Machiavelli and Castiglione. Empathy is not only an inherently humane projection and extrapolation of others’ strengths, weaknesses, and needs. It is also a potential outcome, among others, of social and interpersonal interactions. So focused is Hofstadter on the potentially redemptive repercussions of the empathy that goes hand in hand with facility in symbolic processes that he leaves the grimmer flank of dedicated symbolic manipulation and disparagement to the classics of literature—and to their readers. With concerted efforts on the part of fully conscious human beings to skew, scramble, and otherwise manipulate symbols already distributed in virtual cognitive space, we enter a far cloudier ethical climate. We will have occasion to return to this point. The domain of interpersonal relations is impacted, through and through, by the virtual process of symbol-sharing. Within this domain, “A person is a point of view” (ISL, 234). Social bonds reflect shared symbols and their ramifications far more than the arbitrary relations of kinship, ethnicity, and community bringing us together in the first place. In this respect, the interactions between intimes is not that different from those prevailing, say, between computers with serious overlap in their software and their databases. Hofstadter’s meditation on the commonalities of point of view that most accurately and significantly characterize the Mitsein of interpersonal relationships is fraught with personal meaning: it results from his and his immediate family’s working through the untimely loss of their wife and mother, Carol, in 1993: At our times of greatest closeness, I was a “fluent be-er” of my wife. I shared so many of her memories, both from our joint times and from times before we ever met, I knew so many of the people who had formed her, I loved so many of the same pieces of music, movies, books, friends, jokes, I shared so many of her most intimate desires and hopes. So her point of view, her interiority, her self, which had originally been instantiated in just one brain, came to have a second instantiation, although that one was far less complete and intricate than the original one . . . Needless to say, Carol’s point of view was always by far most strongly instantiated in her brain. ( ISL , 234–5) What really matters for mutual understanding of two people are such things as having similar responses to music (not just shared likes but also shared dislikes), having shared responses to people (again, I mean both likes and dislikes), having similar degrees of empathy, honesty, patience, sentimentality, audacity, ambition, competitiveness, and so on. These

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central building blocks of personality, character, and temperament are decisive in mutual understanding. ( ISL , 235) The second segment of the above extract offers us a concrete picture of how close interpersonal relationships work out in a world in which symbols and their connections and prompting are the driving force in a mental life that is, to a certain extent and within limits, transferrable. Shared perspectives and attitudes, negative as well as positive, correlate to the commonalities of close relationships, to what those relationships have at stake. This is a universe in which personal identity, and any spiritual “drivers” such as souls that might be attributed to them, are derivatives of shared imagery and symbolism and their intrinsic “wiring.” The scenario of substantial shared data-bases of memories, symbols, attitudes, and experiences explains in a way both poignant and scientifically rigorous the disruption and pain occasioned by the loss of a beloved relative or friend. The paragraph is subtended by one (above, from ISL, 234–5) in which Hofstadter flashes some of his underlying theoretical cards at the same time that he formulates, in terms of symbolic networking, his deep and abiding affinities to Carol. In these terms, the music, movies, friends, jokes, and other experiential components meaning so much to her comprised her “interiority.” In a universe in which virtual states (of absorption, fascination, etc.) are, to some degree transferrable, in what exactly does this interiority consist? Is it the hidden part of Carol? Are the components nonetheless “proper” to her in some special way? Carol’s brain was the locus of the “instantiation” of this network of experiences, memories, attachments indeed accruing from her life, and hence of course in certain respects unique to her. But is her “instant” relationship to this material, the fabric of her mental life, like the “interiority” of its location within her, not a callback to the pure immanence of the souls and other spiritual essences whose primacy Hofstadter is otherwise sidetracking in his overall appeal to cognitive networks? Later in his performance Hofstadter will concede that his attachment to the soul, at least as traditionally calibrated, is at best tenuous: I have to admit that I have a rather feeble imagination for Capitalized Essences. In trying to picture in my mind a physical object imbued with a nonphysical essence (such as Leafpilishness or élan mental), I inadvertently fall back on imagery derived from the purely physical world. Thus for me the attempt to imagine a “dollop of Consciousness” or a “nonphysical soul” inevitably brings to mind a translucent, glowing swirl of haze floating within and perhaps a little bit around the physical object that it inhabits. ( ISL , 327)

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“Interiority,” in Hofstadter’s picture of what we most share with others and most miss when they are gone, may well comprise a subliminal last-ditch and knee-jerk appeal to transcendental spiritual essences otherwise and already accounted for. None of these qualifications, however, accruing from the decisive linguistic organization and intransigence that Hofstadter accords to symbolic networks, can detract from the poignancy of human loss. Its intensity and pain do not diminish when we realize that it is registered on a network of symbols residing in a virtual space. Our pressing current need to recalibrate epistemology, psychology, and ontology in accordance with the proliferating cybernetic dimensions of our everyday experience does not obliterate our fundamental capacities for pain, suffering, and empathy. Hofstadter’s formulations to this point are particularly powerful and speak for themselves: When someone dies, they leave a glowing corona behind them, an afterglow in the souls who were close to them. Inevitably, as time passes, the afterglow fades and finally goes out, but it takes many years for that to happen. When, eventually, all of those close ones have died as well, then all the embers will have gone cool, and at that point, it’s “ashes to ashes and dust to dust.” ( ISL , 258)

6. Virtual Deconstruction? How utterly enchanting and disquieting, in the very best sense of the word, for me to have discovered, late in a far-reaching and non-linear critical stake-out, but not too late, that the string less traveled— because of my deep-seated mathematical ineptitude—and my literary investigations eventually hooked up somewhere within the dicey conceptual terrain demanded by twentieth-century turbulence; to learn, in a powerful dialectical flash, that interconnectivity prevailed between them! And that the development of contemporary cybernetics and allied technologies, in spite of the aura of techno-scientific objectivity in which they were couched and heralded, were on a parallel course to the irreducibly eccentric and ecstatic deconstructive dismantling that had become the very bearing for generative cultural critique. Hofstadter himself discovers, rather far out on his own looping trajectory, that his own atelier, in spite of its placement on the “hard science” flank of the campus, is engaged in an inquiry with striking affinities to the clamor that those flaky humanists are making about deconstructing things. His own

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surrogate, “SL #641,” in “A Courteous Crossing of Words,” strategically named after a prime number and a successor to the deliberate but invariably lucid Tortoise in thinking “consciousness,” with all its metaphysical props and appurtenances, as irreducibly “physical collisions,” avers that rethinking the “I” as a derivative is not the most pressing concern faced by the man in the street: The “I” myth is infinitely more central to our belief systems than is the “sun circling the earth” myth . . . any scientific alternative to it is far subtler and more disorienting than the shift to heliocentrism was . . . Deconstructing the “I” holds about as much appeal for a typical adult as deconstructing Santa Claus would hold for a typical toddler . . . If you recall, symbols are simply large phenomena made out of nonsymbolic neural activity, so you can shift viewpoint and get rid of the language of symbols entirely, in which case the “I” disintegrates. It just poofs out of existence, so there’s no room left for downward causality . . . In the new picture there are no desires, beliefs, character traits, senses of humor, ideas, memories, or anything mentalistic; just itty-bitty physical events (particle collisions, in essence) are left. ( ISL , 294–5) The audacity of thinking “consciousness” as a physical event, as a cloudchamber of collisions between particles only eventually producing meaning, is no less earth-shattering, in Hofstadter’s parlance, than the Copernican shift to a heliocentric universe. (In keeping with Hofstadter’s literary gift, again, no small measure of his “delivery,” the ego-displacement carried out by a universe no longer revolving around Terra is a precise analogy to the marginalization of the “I”). By the moment of I Am a Strange Loop, Hofstadter is plainly aware that his life-project, presenting cybernetics, writ large, to the public in cybernetic terms, and couched in cybernetic performance, inevitably engages deconstructive bearings and moves. He makes this explicit even with a rhetoric of “souls” in the background of I Am a Strange Loop as the most poignant vestige of metaphysical tradition that we might, in radically reconfigured format, be able to retain. In the above passage, Hofstadter explicitly acknowledges a crucial elective affinity to the work of the epochmaking French philosopher, Jacques Derrida, even if he does not spell out the degree of his involvement with the often endlessly self-qualifying and in this sense recursive and charmingly irreverent and subversive performances that the French philosopher committed to text. In this passage, Hofstadter recognizes fully and explicitly the deconstructive torque embedded in thinking “consciousness,” with all its metaphysical props

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and appurtenances, as irreducibly “physical collisions.” Throughout the depth and breadth of I Am a Strange Loop, he has extrapolated the devastating impact of such a world-picture on constructs including souls or unique a priori spiritually conferred identities. In Gödel, Escher, Bach, as in I Am a Strange Loop, Hofstadter has plumbed the histories of mathematics and natural science for the “back story” to this deconstructive state of affairs encompassed by the basic platforms of self-referential and “autopoietic” cybernetic programs, devices, and systems. By the end of I Am a Strange Loop, the mathematics of Kurt Gödel has claimed a special place as a workshop, or Derridean “scene of writing,” where the telling transformation was effected: from mathematics as the numerical compendium of the truth concerning the physical world to the very script or medium of that truth’s inevitable mutations, revisions, and paradigm-shifts. Once Hofstadter “breaks through” to the intense parallelism linking his own complex genealogy of the cybernetic universe to an irreducibly heteroclite set of deconstructive bearings and readings, it is impossible to read his own major inspirations, from Bach and Escher to Cantor and Gödel, in an other-than-deconstructive light. Hofstadter ends the passage we have begun to parse in the condition of complete indeterminacy and undecidability prevailing between egocentric and deconstructive world-views: One can do likewise in the careenium, where you can shift points of view, either looking at things at the level of simmballs or looking at things at the level of simms. At the former level, the simms are totally unseen, and at the latter level, the simmballs are totally unseen. These rival viewpoints really are extreme opposites, like the heliocentric and geocentric views. ( ISL , 295) In Hofstadter’s purely physical cranium (or “careenium”), an irresolvable alternation prevails: either the open-ended play of symbols is lost to meaning and identity (“simms”), or identity and its epiphenomena fall out “at the level of simmballs.” Not at all unlike the swings along the brisure or hinge both in and outside the purview of Western metaphysics—already launched by Derrida in Of Grammatology—the vertiginous shifting between the perspectives of simms and simmballs is what marks the cybernetic universe as irreducibly deconstructive. As Hofstadter stages with admirable clarity in I Am a Strange Loop, Gödel had first to confront the pretensions to objectivity and truth deep-wired within the edifice of the Principia Mathematica until he was in a position to adapt its acute mathematical sensibility in the service of incompletion. The lucidity that Hofstadter is able to impart to Gödel’s intervention in I Am a Strange Loop retrospectively spells out the deconstructive torque characterizing all of the major cultural precedents claimed by cybernetics in Gödel, Escher, Bach,

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including of course Bach’s musical inversions and reversals, Escher’s drawing toward the dimensional point of incompletion, and the radical undecidability common to Zen ko¯ans and the Japanese game of Go. The backdrop to Godel’s breakthrough, to which Hofstadter accords primary importance among the several crucial paradigm shifts resulting in cybernetics, is the traumatic crise de conscience that Bertrand Russell went through when he encountered self-contradictory sets in set theory. Just when he thought he was within sight of his goal [grounding “mathematics in the theory of sets”], he unexpectedly discovered a terrible loophole in set theory. This loophole (the word fits perfectly here) was based on “the set of all sets that don’t contain themselves,” a notion that was legitimate in set theory, but that turned out to be self-contradictory . . . When set theory turned out to allow self-contradictory entities like this, Russell’s dream of solidly grounding mathematics came crashing down on him. This trauma instilled in him a terror of theories that permitted loops of self-containment or self-reference, since he attributed the intellectual devastation he had experienced to loopiness and to loopiness alone . . . In trying to recover, then, Russell, working with his old mentor and new colleague Whitehead, invented a novel kind of set theory in which a definition of a set could never include that set, and, moreover, in which a strict linguistic hierarchy was set up, rigidly preventing any sentence from referring to itself. In Principia Mathematica, there was to be no twistingback of sets on themselves, no turning-back of language on itself. If some formal language had a word like “word,” that word could not refer to or apply to itself, but only to entities on the levels below itself. Through the intervention of Gödel, the impasse reached by Russell became monumentally important not only to the emergence of cybernetics, “secondorder” processing, and the POS updated in order to accommodate the farreaching epistemic changes coinciding with the cybernetic regime, but also to the breakthroughs at the heart of Hofstadter’s theoretical development. The devastating shock experienced by Russell in the passage immediately above is the realization that the world of numbers and their theory, as a “representational medium,” a language, harbors the very intractability against which it was marshaled into service. Russell happens upon, and abruptly withdraws from a language-against-language situation not entirely unfamiliar to anyone who has ever learned from Derrida’s trend-setting deconstructions or Paul de Man’s meticulous close readings, both performances cutting language surgically “against its grain.” Hofstadter will indeed have Gödel discovering “that the positive integers, though they might superficially seem to be very austere and isolated, in fact constitute a very rich representational

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medium” (ISL, 161). Hofstadter’s Russell, in retreat and denial at the irreducible self-referentiality embedded as much in the script of integers as of words, is in a situation not that remote from Derrida’s Plato, whose idealization-critical POS can’t quite handle the multiple and self-counteracting nuances of pharmakon; or his Rousseau, who reverts to genealogical history despite his apprehension that civilization is a language-based, synchronic format; or his Heidegger, who sanctifies his own formulations with an immanence already disqualified by their own radical poetics. Hofstadter’s Russell, in other words, is in the position of the authors of many a memorable and eminent edifice: whose substantial contribution nevertheless betrays the instrumental strongarming and reduction of a few keywords on which they are founded. “What happens inside mathematicians’ heads when they do their most creative work? Is it always just a rule-bound symbol manipulation, deriving theorems from a fixed set of axioms? . . . Could creativity ever emerge from a set of rigid rules governing miniscule objects or patterns of numbers? Could a rule-governed machine be as creative as humans?” (ISL, 110). The above are among the far-ranging questions occurring to Kurt Gödel and proceeding from his inquiry once he opens the “harsh and forbidding British citadel” of the Principia Mathematica (ISL, 104) to its intrinsic paradoxes, which happen to be Gödel’s personal penchant. Whereas Russell and Whitehead in the Principia Mathematica tended to “shunt” or squelch symbols (ISL, 132), Gödel, around 1930–1931, succeeded in quantifying the complex grammar by which mathematical formulas are interrelated. This grammar includes the very relations of self-reference and paradox that Russell and Whitehead had labored to expunge from their monumental compendium. Through a highly inventive quantitative intervention, as Hofstadter traces it out, Gödel achieved an isomorphic parallelism between mathematical calculation and symbolization. Why did this kind of isomorphism first come up when somebody was carefully scrutinizing Principia Mathematica? Why hadn’t anybody thought of such a thing before Gödel came along? It cropped up because Principia Mathematica is in essence about the natural numbers, and what Gödel saw was that the world of natural numbers is so rich that, given any pattern involving objects of any type, a set of numbers can be found that will be isomorphic to it—in other words, there are numbers that will perfectly mirror the objects and their pattern, numbers that will dance in just the same way the objects in the pattern dance. Dancing the same dance is the key . . . The bottom line, then, is that the unanticipated self-referential twist that Gödel found lurking inside the Principia Mathematica was a natural and inevitable outcome of the deep representational power of whole numbers. ( ISL , 160–1)

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The very signature of whole numbers’ “deep representational power,” their operation as a language, with grammatical, syntactic, and semantic dimensions, is the “unanticipated self-referential twist” that is the prototype for strange loops. These enigmatic figures, whether emerging in patterns of numbers, in thought-processes in the mind, or in mathematical theorems and cybernetic programming, are what structure the sudden rises in cognitive power at the heart of scientific and creative breakthroughs, Artificial Intelligence, and autopoiesis. It is significant that in the above passage, Hofstadter places Gödel’s epoch-changing advance in the broader context of mathematicians’ uncanny ability to discern and explain patterns (ISL, 115–18). As the seminal mathematician of the technological age, Gödel watches the numbers dance in the patterns that he has ascribed to them. Hofstadter will go on to affirm, “This dance of symbols in the brain is what consciousness is” (ISL, 276): consciousness is this invariably fleeting play of symbols—in their emergence from even more scattered, random signals and on their way to higher-level modes of organization and processing. In stressing the ongoing sifting and sorting between a vast repertoire of symbols in consciousness, Hofstadter underscores the provisional nature of selves and identities extrapolated from this fluctuation. In the aftermath of the decisive isomorphic seam isolated in the above passage, as we have seen, numbers are better able to fulfill their sweep and complexity as a language. It is precisely the amplified linguistic dimension of mathematics that enables its notations, particularly as arranged in isomorphic tandem, to become operational (as in machines). The trajectory taken by calculations and programs acknowledging the self-referentiality of propositions and strings will continue to be the strange loops encountered at various points in the history of mathematics. Gödel will have assumed a lion’s share in the reconfiguration of mathematical script or discourse as the flexible, looping band common both to computers (programs and systems) and to improvisational art’s “eternal golden braid.”9 In Hofstadter’s phrasing, Gödel had found a way to replace any given formula of PM [the broader culture and ethos of Principia Mathematica] by an equivalent number (which other people soon would dub its Gödel number). He then extended this idea of “arithmetization” to cover arbitrary sequences of formulas, since proofs in PM are sequences of formulas, and he wanted to be able to deal with proofs, not just isolated formulas. Thus an arbitrarily long sequence of formulas could be converted into one large integer via essentially the same technique, using primes and exponents. You can imagine that we’re talking really big numbers here. ( ISL , 132)

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In effect Gödel, in this passage, holds true to the “deep structure” of numbers as a language, even if this means that he runs up figures that are vast and even monstrous. Holding tight to the iterations of numbers, as a close reader would, he eschews the metaphysics of numerical discreteness and non selfreferentiality that Russell and Whitehead imposed on PM. Gödel was then able to upgrade the significance of the formulas under his purview. Through a series of techniques steeped in mathematical history, including Fibonacci numbers, he was able to hone in on “special sets of integers,” such as wff numbers, representing “ ‘well-formed’ or ‘meaningful’ formulas of PM,” as opposed to “meaningless or ungrammatical strings” (ISL, 132). Through these adjustments, Gödel upgraded both the specificity and the fluency of the mathematical notation now responsive to anomalous relations prevailing within and between sets and proofs. The limberness that he imparts to numerical strings and formulas goes hand in hand with the linguistic complexity and interconnectedness prevailing within the quantitative domain. This step was perhaps the deepest of Gödel’s insights—namely that once strings of symbols had been “arithmetized” (given numerical counterparts), then any kind of rule-based typographical shunting around of strings on paper could be perfectly paralleled by some kind of purely mathematical calculation involving their numerical proxies—which were huge numbers, to be sure, but still just numbers. What to Russell and Whitehead looked like elaborate symbol-shunting looked like a lot of number-crunching to Kurt Gödel (although of course he didn’t use that colorful modern term, since this was all taking place back in the prehistoric days when computers didn’t exist). ( ISL , 133) The alchemical transformation of numbers into language, into full-service language, with double-entendres, synonyms, homonyms, and other slippages, already encompasses the span between isomorphic registers. Superb deconstructionist that he was, at least in Hofstadter’s account of him, Gödel extracted the seeds for this “linguistic turn” in numbers, surely a strange loop, from the environment most resolutely hostile to it—the closed architecture and reasoning of PM. Gödel’s was not the first stunning mind in the histories of mathematics and culture to have encountered and marshaled strange loops, but he was their liberator within a scientific sphere unavoidably impacted by twentieth-century developments in critical theory and the philosophy of language. It is almost impossible to overestimate the decisive role played by the meta-figure of the strange loop both to the calibration of Hofstadter’s overall intervention and to the happening of twentieth-century breakthroughs ranging from media and cybernetics to biotechnology. As

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Hofstadter qualifies their activity and impact, strange loops emerge as the closest conceivable approximation of deconstructive reading that could be coalesced into a figure (even an “impossible” one): What I mean by a “strange loop” is . . . not a physical circuit but an abstract loop in which, in the series of stages that constitute the cycling-around, there is a shift from one level of abstraction (or structure) to another, which feels like an upward movement in a hierarchy, and yet somehow the successive “upward” shifts give rise to a closed cycle. That is, despite one’s sense of departing even further from one’s origin, one winds up, to one’s shock, exactly where one had started out. In short, a strange loop is a paradoxical level-crossing feedback loop. ( ISL , 101–2) In one uncanny twist, strange loops combine unanticipated rises of power along lines of development and accumulation with cyclical recursion and with the déjà-vu of not having moved at all. My own lifetime reading has taught me that strange loops could structure works as ornate and elliptical as Proust’s Recherche (the final twist interfacing the côtes de Guermantes and Méséglise); as well as ones as spare as Borges’s ficciónes (the opening of a Talmudic space, regulated by gematria, for the murders of “Death and the Compass”). No work illustrates strange loops more graphically in Hofstadter’s parlance than M. C. Escher’s lithograph, “Drawing Hands.” This is the highly realistic rendition of two hands rising above the surface of a paper tacked to a drawingboard, in order to render one another. Indeed, the “moment” of the lithograph is when the hands, arranged in a circular configuration, having themselves achieved the simulated three-dimensionality of masses rendered in detail, simultaneously draw at each other’s cuffs. The cuffs and wrists of the counterpoised hands have been left in the two-dimensional state of linedrawings. Hofstadter’s broad definition of strange loops applies rigorously to this artifact, as does his extended elaboration: Here, the abstract shift in levels would be the upward leap from drawn to drawer (or equally, from image to artist), the latter level being intuitive “above” the former, in more senses than one. To begin with, the drawer is always a sentient, mobile being, whereas a drawn is a frozen, immobile image (possibly of an inanimate object, possibly of an animate entity, but in any case motionless). Secondly, whereas a drawer is three-dimensional, a drawn is two-dimensional. And thirdly, a drawer chooses what to draw, whereas a drawn has no say in the matter. In at least these three senses, then, the leap from a drawer to a drawn always has an “upwards” feel to it.

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As we’ve just stated, there is by definition a sharp, clear upwards jump from any drawn image to its drawer—and yet in Drawing Hands, this rule of upwardness has been sharply and cleanly violated, for each of the hands is hierarchically “above” the other! How is that possible? Well, the answer is obvious: the whole thing is merely a drawn image, merely a fantasy. But because it looks so real, because it sucks us so effectively into its paradoxical world, it fools us, at least briefly, into believing in its reality. And moreover, we delight in being taken in by the hoax . . . The abstract structure in Drawing Hands would constitute a perfect example of a genuine strange loop, were it not for that one little defect— what we think we see is not genuine; it’s fake! ( ISL , 102–3) Nowhere better than in this vignette is the conflation between a crisis in signification—arguably the theoretical bottom-line to several decisive late twentieth-century reconfigurations of the Humanities, including deconstruction, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and rhetorical reading—and the radically looping meta-figures allowing computer programs to upgrade themselves and Artificial Intelligence to “teach” itself—more apparent. Hofstadter attributes the shift or rise of levels in Escher’s drawing to a core ambiguity in the relation between drawer and drawn. It is because drawer and drawn have conflated themselves in the drawing that it cannot only simulate two hands in a circular configuration but perform the optical illusion at the crux of a visual allegory of infinite regression in representation. Hofstadter cites the smooth continuum between schematic line-drawing and hyper-realistic rendition as the basis for the illusion that could allow each hand to “pop” out of inert flatness in order to “create” its counterpart. This open-ended play of levels is what enables the drawing, even though it is illusory, to simulate the configuration and process of strange loops, which Hofstadter, as a public homme de science (more on this below), would insist are real. There is one major attribute in Hofstadter’s reading of the lithograph that anyone party to the ornate string of modernist/post-modern literary innovations from Proust, Kafka, Joyce, Woolf, and Stein to Beckett, Borges, Calvino, Bernhard, and Cortázar or conversant in the critical wars sweeping through the arts as well as the academies from the late 1960’s into the present century cannot help but noticing. The ambiguity between drawer and drawn at the heart of Hofstadter’s gloss on Escher’s artifact is but one instance of an overall confusion between the signifier and signified in representation that arose like a tornado in the linguistics (Saussure) and philosophy (Husserl, Wittgenstein) of the early twentieth century to condition virtually every art-form as well as academic discipline in its wake. This includes drama and music as well as fiction and painting.

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Hofstadter’s strange loop is a meta-trope or Benjaminian thought-image (Denkbild) giving active expression to the paradoxes in meaning, motion, and abstract reasoning liberated by systematic slippage between signifier and signified. It was precisely this congenital slippage that went into effect when the focus or object of representation and thought shifted from the world to the codes encrypted in the world’s expressions. It may seem incredible to those of us whose writing techniques developed through encounters with such eccentric text-displays as philosophy and literature, but as Hofstadter painstakingly establishes, the strange loop is a complex poetic and rhetorical figure nonetheless fully operational within the technological sphere. This particular follow-through is simply counterintuitive to those who have devoted their lives to linguistic intransigence in multiple genres and dimensions. In the figure of the strange loop, Benjamin’s dialectical image joins up with the Derridean pharmakon, supplement, and kho¯ra in an asystematic compendium of linguistic “strange attractors,” but ones with cybernetic applications and virtual dimensions. What we have lost in the intervening years since Derrida synthesized his intervention and since Anthony Wilden joined Hofstadter in meticulously gauging the impact of emergent cybernetic technologies, is our ability to apprehend the arbitrary wonder of the state of affairs powered by the figures in the network, the meta-tropes allowing for these transformative upheavals. We stumble from prevailing system to system in our lives oblivious to their full repercussions of their current cybernetic configuration, a technology in turn grounded in textual apprehensions and capabilities that have become submerged in their encryption. Our obliviousness to our collective cybernetic unconscious is thus as egregious as the sexual ignorance that so benighted and demonized Freud’s patients, sparking bizarre manifestations of which they hadn’t the foggiest idea. Freud engaged his patients’ jokes, dreams, conscious fantasies, and unconscious slips in the process of forging a narrative interface to their submerged levels of processing. In today’s world, close reading, whether of data-bases and new media or texts in their historical genres and variety, remains our only access to this rapidly mutating unconscious, a hegemony all the more debilitating in its capacity to expunge its own traces. This is a close reading that must be capable, like content subjected to intermedial transcription, of spanning disjunctive art-forms and media. It must be able to pursue its “usual suspects,” the repository of myths, plots, arguments, and poetic devices passed down by civilization through a bewildering array of transformations effected by different art-forms, media, and technologies. But the grain of this encounter with cultural artifacts, regardless of their technical configuration, must remain fine; the level of its interpretative processing high; the quarters of textual decoding close; the field for the mixing and application of the results open.

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7. Contortions of Posture. What is surely the closest equivalent to the strange loop assumed by the human body is the full-blown asana that comes to us by way of Ayurvedic medicine and Yoga practice. Such poses as the triangle and the spinal twist, involving stretch, tension, torsion, and protracted equilibrium, may get us nowhere fast but over their duration set the stage for a cognitive uplift equally grounded in balance and relaxation. The isomorphic parallelism and intense interactivity between mind and body is one of the major Grundprinzipe of Indian religions. As it forms certain of the major Yogic asanas, the body itself becomes the strange loop of its intensifying cognitivephysiological sensibility. It places itself at the service of potential breakthroughs in the spheres of body-awareness and of mind-awareness, configured in ongoing feedback and intense interactivity with one another. Posture plays a decisive role in the strange loop, in the unraveling golden braid of writing as well. The pose in and from which one writes will exert a formidable if not determinant torque upon the synthetic process and outcome. Whether one writes out of the provisional and unbounded play of poetic improvisation or in the authoritative stance of scientific or disciplinary mastery will affect every dimension of textual processing. Both in Gödel, Escher, Bach and in I Am a Strange Loop, Hofstadter writes out of a posture distinctive both in its longevity, going back at least to Foucault’s “classical” épistème of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and in its sharp ambiguities. For perfectly legitimate reasons (his remarkable multifaceted gifts, his education and exposure to science, his early experience), Hofstadter writes both as a scientist and as a public representative of science. His forbears in this discourse-design of course include Newton, Rousseau, Diderot, Goethe, Alexander von Humboldt, Einstein, and Heisenberg. Hofstadter speaks science and he speaks for science. Within the scenario for a priori synthetic knowledge established by Kant in his Critiques of Pure Reason and Judgment, as an intuitive scientist of uncanny insight, Hofstadter has journeyed to the outlying districts of the paradigms he has delved in and been thunderstruck by the magical/intractable unknown (or rather yetinarticulate) awaiting at their margins. By dint of extraordinary intuition, he has discerned the strange loops common to Bach’s canons, Gödel’s incompletion theorem, the configuration of DNA, and the workings of contemporary computers. In keeping with the dramaturgy of the transcendental that Kant sets out in his Critique of Pure Reason, Hofstadter has also been shaken by the counterintuitive interfaces that he has synthesized. In the tradition of the mad scientists who also take their cues from Kant’s stately map of the faculties and the “checks and balances” prevailing between them, Hofstadter has been as much pursued and cannibalized by some of his stunning

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crystallizations—say the symbolic configuration of the mind or the in-built cybernetic features of mathematical number theory—as he might well have, early in his life, set out in pursuit of them. Some years and books ago, I described Hofstadter’s broader position, in a highly speculative way, against the backdrop of German idealist philosophy: Holding to the anthropocentric bias of his age, Kant pursues human thinking from its bases in sensation and intuition out toward the conceptual limits of the universe, pictured in a visual way. He applies the gaze of human reason to successfully more sublime objects of scrutiny until the process itself has arrived at the Transcendental, at which point the horizon of abstraction begins to stare back at the human investigators in a distinctly uncanny way. The “spaced-out” canvases of painters as varied as Caspar David Friedrich and J. M. W. Turner may be understood as illustrations of the uncanny gaze cast by the Transcendental itself back upon the empirical world from which its exploration and investigation emanated. The plot of the “monster story,” whether in literature or film, pursues the trajectory of the Kantian inquiry. The investigators’ pursuit of “The (uncanny) Thing” describes only one half of the story: the dénouement inevitably dramatizes the aroused monster’s counterpursuit of its seekers. The monster’s shattered visage is, in a KantianLacanian sense, the very eye of the Transcendental, gazing back into an empirical world of human endeavor and folly that it can now freely terrorize.10 Hofstadter, in his rare literary gifts as well as in the exegetical acumen he demonstrates in his readouts of the script (and strings) of numbers, axioms, propositions, and proofs—discerning the stately and abrupt historical progression between prevailing scientific paradigms by means of this acuity— is a strong candidate for inclusion into a select subcategory of original thinkers as qualified by Kant. What I have in mind, of course, is those at home on the bourn of the Transcendental, somehow on the cusp of a priori synthetic knowledge. By dint of predilection, training, and his own concerted, dedicated thought-work, Hofstadter has penetrated to the rarified zone at which the fate of paradigms and conceptual operating systems is decided. No one could have been more liberal, empathic, forthcoming, and democratic with the rare privilege implicit in this status than Hofstadter. This emerges throughout his writing in his humor and fanciful narration-techniques, his gravitation to examples from everyday life, and above all, in his relentless efforts to translate the developments in the fields of number theory, physics, and the philosophy of mind at the heart of cybernetics into a dialect comprehensible even to such math-dummies as the present writer. The position of the epochal avatar of science at the same time directs, at least to a certain degree, the scope and purview of Hofstadter’s discourse. He

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has re-entered the public sphere from the rarified extreme of epistemological programming at the paradigmatic level, thereby rendering his rhetorical position complex and even, in certain respects, self-contradictory. In one respect, as the author of the definitive broad-based cybernetics primer of his day, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hofstadter reconciles the public to the incoming technology and POS that he has also labored mightily to explain. Anyone who takes Hofstadter at his word regarding the qualities and processes of symbolic networks not contingent on “Capitalized Essences” knows that, within his implicit history of science and technology, new paradigms will crystallize, develop, mutate, and infiltrate and usurp existing disciplinary, cultural, and educational organizations on their own, through their intrinsic momentum. In keeping with this palpable, if not always explicit tele-technic determinism on Hofstadter’s part, the reconciliation with the cybernetic order that he effects, is also inextricably tied to an apology. Again, in no tangible way does the author of Gödel, Escher, Bach and I Am a Strange Loop have anything to apologize for. Yet Hofstadter has survived his wife, Carol. His mourning for her loss has constituted a breakthrough in his apprehension of what might be called “the symbolic networking of everyday life.” He has been witness and party to negotiations at the paradigmatic and cybernetic limits of the current POS, whose full impacts and implications, as suggested above—on cognitive capability, psychological tendencies, social relations, and even socio-political rights and empowerment—are far from an inclusive inventory. Whatever “survivor’s guilt” attaches to one who with full cognizance has contributed to these deliberations and survived them, surely pertains to Hofstadter. It is precisely Hofstadter’s orientation and allegiance to the thinking, configurations, traditions, and self-regulated objectivity-measures of science— even when he aligns his work with some of science’s subversive, protodeconstructive tropes and undercurrents—that would allow his purview to gloss over, among several tangents, the seamy underside of symbolic networking. To trace out, as so much fiction does, even a predominant share, the socio-political and cultural collateral and damage wrought by the interestdirected manipulation of symbols belongs, simply, to a discursive sphere different from Hofstadter’s. From Hofstadter’s stance as a public avatar, impresario, and apologist for science, the entire nexus of symbolic manipulation—in manifestations raging from advertisements and political propaganda to gossip and social maneuvering—amounts to a domestic matter, although he would surely acknowledge its significance. The brunt of Hofstadter’s demonstration is to establish the intense parallelism between minds, cybernetic devices, genetic replication, and some social networks (e.g., ant colonies in Gödel, Escher, Bach) by dint of the utter centrality of symbolic distribution, activation, storage, and mutation. The particular repercussions of this decisive fact of life for the epistemic and tele-technic

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world-orders, Hofstadter leaves, for perfectly understandable reasons, to other discourses and forums. The qualification I am trying to make here might attain particular clarity with respect to psychology. The parameters of Hofstadter’s discourse-design make the particulars of symbolic triggering and deactivation in the mind, as well as questions relating to symbols’ grain, prominence, strength, and duration of central concern to his evolving inquiry. The socio-psychological damage/advantage accruing to groups/individuals through the sociology of symbolic manipulation is left, on the other hand, to a configuration of allied discourses and disciplines: with social psychology, sociology, ethics, Cultural Studies, literature, and Law prominent among them. Indeed, the story of technological makeovers and spinoffs, mathematical and mental games, methodological rebooting, socio-psychological adaptations, and environmental repercussions that Hofstadter relates is one very much still in process. Its outcomes remain both hopefully and disconcertingly open. We humans remain central but by no means exclusive players in its ongoing developments and always-tentative resolution. Within the purview of I Am a Strange Loop, by teasing out, in broad strokes, the wider socio-cultural and interpersonal implications of the universe structured by recursion and isomorphism first launched in Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hofstadter offers the public the terms and standards by which it may critically evaluate its escalating, often invisible stakes in this nexus and its ideological surround. Does it facilitate a more empathic view of the environment if we rethink ourselves (and our self-interest) as derivatives of our networked experience rather than as our hard cores or as what Hofstadter terms “Capitalized Essences”? This could indeed be the case. Can we be more generous and affirmative members of our respective communities if we forthrightly acknowledge that we copy one another all the time, crib off of each other’s “intellectual property,” all on the road to configuring a network of signifiers, interests, obsessions, and values unique to “ourselves,” this even while our relatively “private” networks remain under constant revision and transvaluation? This is the universe to which Hofstadter habituates us under the aura of I Am a Strange Loop. It is indeed a forgiving and highly socially interactive spinoff of the processes including recursion, chunking, popping, stacking, quining, and higher-/lower-level processing meticulously set out to the public in Gödel, Escher, Bach. It is one possible sequel to that earlier basic primer, whose guiding ethos lay more in the direction of creative and playful improvisation than social relations. It remains open and possible to couch the cybernetic POS under which we currently live in terms of other overarching social and ideological values than simulation and networking. In the interim since I Am a Strange Loop, social networking programs such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn have become an even more prominent

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feature on the virtual landscape and within our personal time-clocks. In a very tangible sense, nothing could constitute a more overwhelming affirmation of Hofstadter’s picture of society as a vast agglomeration of personalized symbolic inventories and networks than social networking software. It and the interactions that it engineers and facilitates may well be taken, then, as the objective correlative to an épistème whose dominant features include symbolic constellations, productive recursions, and sudden rises or “pops” in theoretical power. As skeptical to material proof or affirmation as those of us who have labored decades in the field of contemporary critical theory may be, it could well be possible to trace, in the cybernetic universe, vital ex-tensions, if not apps, of such deconstructive infrastructures as the trace itself, the supplement, and the pharmakon. Hofstadter has indeed brought us this far. It is, as suggested above, deliriously gratifying to access “clearings” in one’s work in which diverse pathways undertaken in the momentum of their individual fascination arrive at some—however imperfect and incomplete—integration. It is “service” well beyond the call of duty when intuitive systematic minds of the order of Derrida’s, Hofstadter’s, and Wilden’s also fit us out with the terms and postures for critiquing the very epochs that they inaugurate. This particular strange loop leads back, more ricorso, to that grand chestnut of the German curriculum and stage, Faust. In full keeping with the electronic acceleration at the core of our age’s cybernetic operating system, our Faustian pact with the technology, as with its cognitive and socio-psychological repercussions, has transpired far more quickly than its rigorous impact-study. Our current position in the history of technology bears striking similarities to where European civilization stood two decades after Gutenberg integrated the multiple crafts involved in movabletype printing. In countless disciplines, professions, and social settings, the “jury is out,” and will be. The time-lag between transformation at the level of the POS and within the socio-cultural environment is endemic to history. In the meantime, if I may, as I close this status report on contemporary cultural conditions, written unavoidably and constitutionally “on the fly,” suggest one single remediation, as the aftershock “settles” (our techtonic-cultural plate/ platform is always trembling, and the seismic disruption in an ambiguous condition of settlement). And this “soporific” is: close reading. Detailed, meticulous exegesis across the full panoply of displays, media, and scripts or discourse-designs. Interpretative engagement prevailing within an abyss (or on a desk or drawing-board, or in a work-station) of virtual absorption, with all its cognitive and spatio-temporal implications. Close reading, taunting us in the direction of our own inscriptive “readout,” idiosyncratic in many dimensions and senses, but also nuanced by a constellation of culturally brokered aesthetic encounters and theoretical formats. Any countermeasures

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that we improvise, environmental interventions that we undertake, can only emerge from this. As the full implications of the cybernetic world-order make themselves known, let us return to our writing, our core programming, in the transformative concentration that it demands, and to the extent of the playful and openended improvisation that it allows. Whether in the end its demands, dynamics, and results conform to the prevailing media and technologies of representation and communications or not. To writing as consummately practiced by the generative practitioners who have defined our global and post-global cultural heritage: it will illuminate whatever margin we have left and test under whichever POS we have organized our business. It is the thread meandering toward whatever options for systematic healing that remain.

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A common experience, resulting in a common confusion. A. has to transact important business with B. in H. He goes to H. for a preliminary interview, accomplishes the journey there in ten minutes and the journey back in the same time, and on returning boasts to his family of his expedition. Next day he goes again to H., this time to settle his business finally. As that by all appearances will require several hours, A. leaves very early in the morning. But although all the surrounding circumstances, at least in A.’s estimation, are exactly the same as the day before, this time it takes him ten hours to reach H. When he arrives there quite exhausted in the evening he is informed that B., annoyed at his absence, had left an hour before to go to A.’s village and that they must have passed each other on the road. FRANZ KAFKA, “An Everyday Confusion” (“Eine alltägliche Verwirrung”)1

Just as the now continuously grades off into the ever more distant past, so the intuitive consciousness of time also continuously grades off. On the other hand, we are not speaking here of a continuous transition of perception to phantasy, of impression to reproduction. The latter distinction is a separate one. We must say therefore that what we term originary consciousness, impression, or perception is an act which is continuously gradated. Every concrete perception implies a whole continuum of such gradations. Reproduction, phantasy-consciousness, also requires exactly the same gradations, although only

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reproductively modified. On both sides, it belongs to the essence of lived experiences that they must be extended in this fashion. EDMUND HUSSERL, The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness2

1. t may well be that Franz Kafka, in naming one of K.’s bumbling, slapstick assistants of Das Schloβ Jeremiah, obliquely assumes responsibility for his own role as an uncanny prophet of postmodern, virtual, tele-technic, and terrestrial eventualities. Among Kafka’s most jaw-dropping guesses regarding the waves of the future are the telephonic networks installed into Amerika’s Hotel Occidental and the Castle bureaucracy; the programmable and therefore partly cybernetic execution-machine “In the Penal Colony,” a grim counterpart to the hilarious feeding-machine tested at the outset of Charlie Chaplin’s “Modern Times”; the superhighway equipped with prison watchtowers on the way to Ramses, also in Amerika; and in no way last, the “good” concentration camp in Oklahoma at the end of the same novel. The K. of The Castle, a scofflaw to the delicate social convention prevailing throughout the novel’s absurdly rustic global village of the modern world, brutalizes and eventually brusquely dismisses the assistants who have been assigned to him. Jeremiah, the prophetic or forward-looking one, eventually takes possession of K.’s former fiancée Frieda, whom he has dumped just as unceremoniously after liberating her from the clutches of Castle superbureaucrat Klamm. A vaguely emancipatory lawsuit, one loosely translatable into a discourse of civil rights, a claim to assume his rightful position of village Land-Surveyor, motivates K.’s often aimless meanderings and interactions through this global village. In addition to retracing the absurd errors in communication resulting in his initial appointment and summons to the village and pressing his claim with such public figures as the Mayor and Schoolmaster, K. becomes party to the woeful tale of exclusionary small-town bigotries as they have been experienced by the Barnabas family. K. travels in circles and feedback loops of revision and consolidation rather than in any linear or evolutionary path of progression. What would be the culmination of any conventional or respectable novel is at the end of Das Schloβ a guided tour of its misguided communications, an extended scene of writing as the only home-base the novel can claim. It is as part of these concluding deliberations that we find K., who has become increasingly sleepdeprived as his interactions have become more random and as the novelistic

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chapters become more rambling and less conclusive, finally in the presence of Bürgel, of whom he was not previously aware, the single Castle functionary who comprehends his situation and can render assistance. Indeed, by the time this never-ending novel reaches its arbitrary terminus, the last word of the material that Kafka composed toward it, K. finds himself in a warren of rooms in the bowels of the Herrenhof, the motel where Castle officials conduct all kinds of intercourse with the village commoners. In this discursive, as well as phenomenological and juridico-existential twilight zone, one interview morphs into a second, with yet another indistinguishable Castle bureaucrat. K.’s entire store of recent memory (he’s only been in the village a week or so) loops around in a Möbius strip to haunt him. It is in this phenomenologically as well as dramatically programmed zone that such a conversation between K. and Bürgel, the bureaucrat charged with reviewing the Land-Surveyor’s appointment and summons to the village, can transpire. Bürgel is himself so overloaded with data and responsibilities that he finds interviews with supplicants just like K. a convenient setting for catching up with his sleep: “I am very tired,” said K., who on receiving the invitation had instantly, rudely, without respect, sat down on the bed and leaned against the post. “Of course,” said Bürgel, laughing, “everybody is tired here . . . I should go to sleep now, but if this utterly improbable thing should happen after all and I should go to sleep while you are still here, then please stay quiet and don’t open the door either . . . The way it is with me is that probably because I am so very used to dealing with applicants I do actually find it easiest to go to sleep when I have company.”3 During late-night overtime, in the commercial swing-space for bureaucratic business not confined to official offices or the customary work-day, the dissociative state of massive sleep-deprivation approaches the symptoms of jetlag, even if in the novelistic situation at hand travel is absolutely out of the question. The vast proliferation of bureaucratic transactions and paper work, to which Kafka was party not only in the offices of the multi-national insurance companies that employed him, but in the industrial installations where he investigated workmen’s compensation cases, is even more absurd, within the framework of Das Schloß, recast within the local squalor of a businessman’s lodge. “Go along, what are you still doing here?,” admonishes Bürgel. No, you don’t need to apologize for being sleepy, why should you? One’s physical energies last only to a certain limit. Who can help the fact that precisely this limit is significant in other ways too? . . . That is how the world itself corrects the deviations in its course and maintains the balance.

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This is indeed an excellent, time and time again unimaginably excellent arrangement, even if in other respects dismal and cheerless. Well, go along, I don’t know why you look at me like that. If you delay much longer, Erlanger will be down on me . . . Go along now. Who knows what awaits you over there? Everything here is full of opportunities, after all.4 The phrase, “Go along now,” a rare instance of a redundant refrain in Kafka’s prose, enunciatively mimics the droning quality of chronic fatigue. This last passage may well be situated at the culmination of the novel’s internal phenomenological investigation. Bureaucrat Bürgel forgives and even excuses the finitudes and retreats of attentiveness occasioned by non-stop bureaucratic deliberation. He not only forgives K.’s lapses in full effectiveness, having already excused his own; he places the unavoidable lapses in consciousness within a cosmology of salutary equilibrium. Indeed, systemic equilibrium or homeostasis of operational social institutions is the nirvana of all bureaucrats. What is most crucial about this passage, as one screen or display among others of temporal thinking going on at this historical moment, is its decisive comprehension, on several levels, of how much is at stake in investigations into the duration, limits, and mechanisms of memory-stores in relation to the perceptions to which they may be, in no simple way, related. While its seriousness may be dissimulated as code, the passage is unambiguous in marking phenomenological investigation as a big-ticket cultural item. This is the point where Kafka’s whimsical vignette of bureaucratic incompetence, even within the rustic confines of the village, joins hands with Edmund Husserl’s anything but simplified scenarios of the perception, recall, retention, and anticipation of lived experience. Oddly enough, Husserl too, even while accounting with exquisite specificity for such phenomena as the causation, retention, and decay of memory, will insist on an overarching equilibrium in the experience of time, one no doubt descended from the Kantian unity of apperception. Nothing less than time itself has run into a massive overdrive at a moment when business and public administration are already stretching toward a sublime output of work and intensities of acceleration that will— eventually—demand the invention and multifaceted deployment of computers to keep the situation within limits.

2. It was not long after the invention of aviation, surely by the 1920’s, that accelerated transportation first made jetlag possible. How do we characterize this term and the distortions emanating from it? First and foremost, the disruption and dissociation, in Jacques Derrida’s terms deferral, to one’s

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biological clock, i.e., the customary temporal attunement between body and place, resulting from accelerated, long-range displacement to a locale situated in a substantially different time-zone. It is at least a double-whammy that makes jetlag so jarring: on the foundation of a distant journey whose endurance even in an ultra-quick vehicle is exhausting, the passenger, a term replete with builtin passivity and possible abjection, becomes subject to substantially new temporal coordinates and a tangibly adjusted rhythm of socio-corporeal arrangements—related, for instance, to eating, sleeping, social interaction, etc. Under conditions of jetlag, the mind–body discontinuum is partially elsewhere; the body attuned to a different rhythm of sleep, wakefulness, nutrition, excretion, than prevails in the zone of presence or what Husserl calls “presencing”; the mind caught unawares, like a trapped nocturnal rodent, in a timeframe indifferent to its cycles of wakefulness and rest, fade-in and fade-out, concerted expenditure and passive recovery, whether in the form of sleep, dream, or oblivious wakefulness or daydreaming. Under the regime of jetlag, both active partners in the mind–body conspiracy have been pushed too far. Attentiveness has been suspended beyond its customary duration by the non-negotiable demands of vehicular enclosure and movement. The familiar corporeal repercussions to this overload through overextension follow only too directly. Or perhaps better, the recovering victim of a significant act of spatiotemporal dislocation and abuse, otherwise known as jetlag, is, unwittingly, subject to two sets of spatio-temporal parameters. There is the explicit one, clearly prevalent at the point of disembarkation in the form of the very loose etiquette defining the business day, customary periods for dining and rest, and other conventional interactions; and then, there is the holdover protocol of what Proust would call habit still operative in the zone of embarkation. It is surely in the most jarring and subliminal manner, Freud would call it unconscious and Proust involuntary, that the recalcitrant regime operative at the journey-origins asserts itself in such forms as sudden involuntary waking in a hyper-attentive state or equally abrupt onsets of fatigue at the least felicitous moments of the active day. We associate the sudden-onset phenomena of gradually self-rectifying jetlag with dysfunctionality, yet in a different virtual world, say Proust’s, it is sudden-onset phenomena of depth or unforeseen complexity that definitively establish the activity and output of the parallel and embedded universe of aesthetic sensibility. Via this particular circuit of modernist invention we come to learn that K.’s pronounced episodes of jetlag toward the end of Das Schloβ, of a jetlag before the fact, belong to his own heavily disguised apprenticeship as a performance artist. And it can come as no surprise to us that speculative philosophy, in its playful as well as deep ontological bearings, precisely as Kafka is gathering the motifs and figures that will distinguish Das Schloβ, is pondering parallel issues to the sustained wakefulness across multiple days bookmarking K.’s

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later experience in the village. In this parallelism of inquiry, defining the ontological and epistemological investigations of a moment, philosophy serves as an alternative display or screen to literature. It is not literature’s truth, principle, logic, essence, or master-system, implicit or explicit. It is an alternate display of cultural programming or inscription with its own history and battery of formal and discursive contracts, just as philosophy, somehow imagined as a separate institution, is replete with its own. One of the hardestcore elements in Jacques Derrida’s too fresh legacy, one also defining the openness of its persistent panorama, is the volatile, and indeed illimitable interface, fully already mobilized in the Platonic dialogues, between literature and philosophy. The endlessly resonant—as in Glas—interstitial zone that Derrida opens up here, in the fact that the most persistent improvised tropes or infrastructures function perfectly both as philosophical constructs and literary tropes, discredits and disqualifies any of our efforts to instantiate or inaugurate, academically, institutionally, or discursively, philosophy as a pure theoretical zone. Such effort would surely be a regressive one, directed toward the purism that is the effective limit-condition of the Kantian system. It is, then, within a shared but alternative framework and inquiry that Husserl, in The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness, can enter into a meticulous articulation of time’s progressions, folds, recursions, and what we now call feedback loops, one merging no less than three undercurrents: Henri Bergson’s philosophical tribute to the moment and momentary impressions on our highest apprehensions and sensibilities of lived experience; Hegel’s consummate philosophical running commentary or play-by-play on Geist’s incremental uploads of speculative power in his own Phänomenologie, from whence a major segment of the Husserlian project derives its title or caption; and, an uncanny Husserlian acuteness to the accidents and drifts of philosophical language, a tangent with a good claim to being the cornerstone of deconstructive exegesis. It is hopefully not too horrendous an oversimplification to suggest that Husserl, taking over directly from Bergson, in his scenario of memory as presentification, in his calculus of our different rapports to perceptual input and memory-traces based on them, his sequence of retentions, and in his dramaturgy of interactions between temporally complex subjects and timeobjects, anticipates the anomalies and imponderables of jetlag. It is above all to Bergson that Husserl circles back, along with the likes of Zeno and Aristotle, even while validating a Hegelian tradition of a philosophical legend or Untertitel consecutive to the unfolding of experience. Bergson’s accounts of a doubled memory-source, the interaction between whose elements is captured magnificently by the Proustian eruption of involuntary memory into the wellordered economy of habitual psychological steady-state; of memory circling back by circuits devious as well as direct, to the perceptual image with its material grounding, become a framework, already poetic and receptive to the

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signature of an instant, for Husserl’s even more open-throttled and ultimately tenuous improvisations on the nature and effects of time. The immediate moment to which Husserl recurs in his temporal analysis is one in which Proust’s singular and hybrid novel can serve as a literary display-case for a philosophy marshaling itself in the complex thought-game of impressionism. To both empirical and dogmatic accounts of experience, its intuitions, its structures and dynamics of perception, memory, and cognition—approaches with more in common than they might acknowledge—Bergson holds up the possibility of pure duration, in a nutshell life lived to the fullest second by second, a thoughtful immersion in the flux of cognitive states and processing. The freedom opened by an immersion into pure duration is in no small measure a release from closed and structured thinking, whether imposed by social convention, scientific protocol, or other manifestations of the uncritical routine grouped in the Proustian universe under the heading of “habit.” Release into pure duration is our most attainable portal to freedom, as Bergson understands this concept. And yet his characterization of this state is not indifferent to the overlapping of temporal timeframes that is part and parcel of the phenomenon we now know as jetlag Freedom is not hereby, as has been asserted, reduced to sensible spontaneity. At most, this would be the case in the animal, of which the psychical life is mainly affective. But, in man, the thinking being, the free act may be termed a synthesis of feelings and ideas and the evolution which leads to it a reasonable evolution . . . The duration wherein we see ourselves acting, and in which it is useful that we should see ourselves, is a duration whose elements are dissociated and juxtaposed. The duration wherein we act is a duration wherein our states melt into one another. It is within this that we should try to replace ourselves with thought.5 Pure duration is a highly charged state, the one most fully disposed to creative reprogramming, in which our thoughtful or critical action and our imaging of this action coincide and merge together. The discourse of freedom, and implicitly creativity, seeded into this passage is unavoidably one of liminal thresholds and boundaries, as Bergson’s unsuccessful attempt in the passage immediately above to distinguish between human and animal spontaneity attests. The “melting into one another” of our mental states is tantamount to living in multiple time-zones all at once. Once again, as in Kafka or Proust, the liminal tripping point for creative synthesis, a melting and merging point for diverse cognitive states, is hardly distinguishable from exhaustion, disorientation, aggravated mental meltdown. Bergsonian pure duration as the breeding ground for acts of unanticipated, uncalculated acts of creativity serves us as an instance of jetlag—always before the fact—projected positively.

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It is only too understandable that Husserl, given his aspiration toward a comprehensive science of lived experience, would correct Bergson’s tributes to the momentary as a basis and object for philosophical oversight for their lyricism and tendencies toward uncontained exuberance. Yet even where striving for a much more precise, rigorous, and in his own terms graduated account of the mind’s labor in its acts of cognitive processing, extending from raw sensation to the most subtle scientific and aesthetic syntheses, Husserl retains Bergson’s scenario of a bewildering diversity of states and processes kept in communication with one another within a mental life characterized as much by its disjunction, dissociation, and deferral as by its unity or cohesion. Processing, retaining mind is always already, for Husserl, in the condition of jetlag: Flowing in absolute transition, the first primal sensation changes into a retention of itself, this retention into a retention of this retention, and so on. Conjointly with the first retention, however, a new “now,” a new primal sensation, is present and is joined continuously but momentarily with the first retention, so that the second phase of the flux is a primal sensation of the new now and a retention of the earlier one. The third phase, again, is a new primal sensation with retention of the second primal sensation and a retention of the retention of the first, and so on. Here we must take into account that retention of a retention has intentionality not only with reference to what is retained in the retaining of the second level and finally with reference to the primal datum, which is here thoroughly Objectified. Analogous to this is the way in which presentification of the appearance of a thing has intention not only with reference to this appearance but also with reference to the appearing thing itself.6 This passage, with its concatenation of retentions, is built around a fundamental duplicity. A retention, what Cognitive Science now calls a visual or acoustic image, can both derive from a more primal sensation and serve as the new primal sensation for further derivatives or generations of retention. Husserl here demonstrates a fundamental feedback process among the loops and layers of memory. Consciousness is so much what Deleuze/Guattari will call a rhizome of spinoffs to primal experiences that past a certain point, it becomes useless and quixotic to determine what the truly original, or Real, stratum of experience was. Husserl’s demonstration here could surely serve as a backdrop to Derrida’s masterful deconstruction, in Of Grammatology, to constructs of the origin as imputed to language by Rousseau in his Essay on the Origin of Languages.7 Derrida is particularly vivid in teasing out the fantasies of spontaneous fraternity and conditions of immediate social communication decisively disrupted and terminated through the inauguration of a linguistically motivated regime of articulation and dissention.

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Consciousness itself is splayed across a hopeless number of bands, call them time-zones, of originality or derivation, so many that the degrees of authenticity or simulation cannot be mediated or adjudicated. They are fated, in a virtual version of bare essential life, merely to coexist.

3. United States of Jetlag We of course begin with the premise that it is in no way more virtuous to dwell in merely one time-zone than in two or several. At least in the case of jetlag, we can quickly dispense with the body-English or torsion that would be exerted by the code of monogamy in every other relevant sphere of Western life. Yet we can observe dispassionately that the transitional state of jetlag makes our bodies an even more dysfunctional outpost of rationality and control than they ordinarily are. The incursions of jetlag—as the state gradually disperses and exhausts itself—are even more sudden, totalizing, and disconcerting than the usual daily assaults made to and upon us by our bodies, whether in inconvenient excretory urges, unanticipated gastric sufflosions, or unbelievable sudden check-ins of the sexual urge. Jetlag, whether in the form of palpitating attentiveness, disabling feebleness, or low-grade residual perspiration and indigestion, takes us over by an alien force, illustrated so well, among many cinematic examples, by “Invasion of the Body-Snatchers.” Jetlag is a state. It is the disorientation encountered by our running through too many national and local states too quickly. It is the juncture or interface between nation-states and states of attention, Being, cognition, and communications and media. We need to acknowledge and reconcile ourselves to the fact that we fall as much under the governance of states as ever. But the executive power in our lives is exercised far more by states of Being, cognition, and writing than by governmental agencies. The virtual world we inhabit during encroaching segments of our days and nights is surely a state of Being, knowledge, language, and communication even while it is not, by its very definition, reducible to any locality or specific agency of power. Disciplined knowledge has only begun to fathom what changes that have been willy-nilly and without fanfare initiated within our thinking, communications, socialization, and way of life most broadly put, as we, out of utility and volition as much as necessity, place ourselves under the administrative care of the cybernetic regime for increasing segments of our lived experience. Cybernetics is an indispensable source of the processing and mindset that our theoretical work needs to adapt and render increasingly explicit as we elaborate and critique the modalities, possibilities, and limitations of our own thinking. We need to install

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more and more of the mindset and language of computers into our intellectual work. This is one of the greatest potentials that contemporary systems-theory retains within its grasp. Yet we need as well to monitor the flow and drift assumed by the cybernetic network within and over our lived experience. Jetlag, as the cognitive-corporeal state arising in and from multiple states of time, awareness, and organic energy (as in Qi or élan vital), is an indispensable threshold to our 24/7 vicarious existence in all time-zones, precisely by dint of its simultaneous electronic ubiquity. Even casual ongoing connection to the Worldwide Web places us in a condition of virtual or electronic jetlag. Cybernetic technology gives Rousseau’s snapshot of minimal social participation and obligation, the social contract, a rather rude wake-up call. We are, electronically, citizens of all forty time-zones at once, all the time. One way of approaching such experiences as sleep and unavoidable, life-saving surgery is as unfortunate disruptions to the moral imperative of our unbroken electronic vigilance. Moral responsibility, vicarious involvement, and critical detachment or complicity accrue to us from the full panoply of human and animal events, whether the Mianyang earthquake in China, the meltdown of a sector of the polar icecap, a drought in Africa, or a seemingly decisive victory by the Sinhalese in Sri Lanka. Our interconnectedness to our and related species is nothing less than revelatory. The input of new and potential Sorge is, however, staggering; the output of terrestrial crisis and catastrophe more than any one person can bear. In human affairs, the transition from snail-mail and first-generation telecommunications to e-mail, texting, and twitter accelerates not only the immediacy of news and information, but also the turn-around in felicitous social exchanges, those in which the partners satisfy the threshold conditions of agreed-upon responsiveness and responsibility. The acceleration in communications, in other words, steeply ramps up the scale and intensity of our social participation. Entire days go by where we at best fulfill this baseline management of our interactions with the organizations, institutions, and relationships—professional, familial, friendly, and sexual— comprising the social fabric of our lives. And more of these days, devoted to bare sluggish life within the electronic nexus, are piling up, even while we still end up dropping the majority of our e-messages.

4. Ethics in Time One of the most stunning developments, a truly acrobatic reversal, to take place in my long association with Jacques Derrida and invariably delayed

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pursuit of his thinking and writing, was discovering in his affirmative work on James Joyce his embrace of philosophico-literary institutions, whether of the academy or the archive, under whose aegis cultural inscription transpires. By means of this gesture, Derrida hints at a rupture in, if not definitive end to the tradition of the singular, misunderstood artist, in a flow that may well extend from his announcement, in Of Grammatology, of the end of the traditions as much as the actuality of the Book. The reconciliation between writing and institutions that Derrida orchestrates in “Ulysses Grammophone”8 and allied writings may derive from several motives: gratitude for the support and forum for his thinking and commentary furnished by any number of institutions, including the École Normale Supérieure, the French ministry and national system of which it forms a distinguished part, Harvard University, where he was a Junior Fellow, and so on; also from the unavoidable recognition that deconstruction, precisely as a radical intervention, whose penetration or demolition is accompanied by tremendous potential for generative reprogramming and upgrading on the part of the related disciplines and professions, was itself assuming certain of the dimensions and dynamics accompanying, say, psychoanalysis or Joyce studies. The surprising acknowledgement of the institutional underpinnings of deconstructive labor in Derrida’s own Joyce studies forced us all to confront rather than to deny the institutionality of our critical script as well as of our teaching and activity in professional associations. My long-time friend, Michael Rosenthal, who for many years operated the Modern Times book collective in San Francisco’s Mission district, employed a rhetoric of delighted shock to describe his initial encounter with Roberto Bolaño, a Chilean poet and in the end novelist who like Derrida left us far too early. In giving me first notice of the existence of Bolaño’s works, Rosenthal said that he had never expected to encounter a writer of Joyce’s stature and accomplishment during his own lifetime. But for Bolaño, according to Rosenthal, it isn’t nearly settled that radical, paradigm-shifting writing meshes so easily into the context and formats of institutions. The five sub-novels comprising 2666, Bolaño’s massive and rambling final work,9 interlock in a manifestly rhizomatic development, at all times pivoting around two phenomena, the unprecedented outbreak of slayings of women in the Sonoran north of Mexico during the mid-1990’s and the solitary random roving, with its unique susceptibility to contingency, that is the base condition, the compost, to all serious thinking and writing. Even if the mega-novel begins with the hyper-academic pursuit on the part of a cadre of totally recognizable literary scholars on the trail of an invented German novelist named Archimboldi, it colors, in new and expansive ways, the writer’s displacement, homelessness, vulnerability to chance, and deep alienation from institutional settings in each of its aimlessly ramifying episodes. As the evidence of 2666 attests, Bolaño

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approaches the happy possibility of institutional support for truly avant-garde thinking and writing with the same skepticism that Anthony Wilden, a contemporary of Derrida’s and reader, above all, of Gregory Bateson and Jacques Lacan, directed toward organic and social systems: “Organisms are goalseeking, or telenomic, but what they seek is stability, not change; what they reproduce is themselves, not novelties. The increase in levels of complexity in natural evolution seems pretty clearly to be the product of random variation and chance events.”10 In such language Wilden accounts for the fashion in which institutions, even ones putatively dedicated to the spawning and dissemination of creativity and innovation, effectively muzzle and quell the systemic noise and static to which paradigm-shifting science as well as art intimately attend. It would be facile for anyone, Bolaño included, to imagine that he produced his literary oeuvre outside the institutional framework of production and reception. It is of some interest to contemplate, however, that The Savage Detectives11 and 2666 could have been written under the presumption of a decisive sundering of institutional constraints. Another one of Michael Rosenthal’s insights that has been key to my initial encounter with Bolaño has been with respect to the latter’s literary rapport with Jorge Luis Borges. Bolaño, according to Rosenthal, has paid ample dues to the Argentinian’s ground-breaking formats of literary expansion, whether through the multiplication of possible narrative outcomes, the appeal to chance and randomness as compositional principles as well as themes, or the notion of time itself as a matrix fitted out with minute gradations of tense and development. Bolaño, according to Rosenthal, manages to graft characters and motives of genuine human provenance on top of fabulations which, in their Borgesian performance (say, in “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” or “The Library of Babel”),12 are endowed with a distinctively schematic quality. Rosenthal credits Bolaño with nothing less than adding flesh, usually fueled by alcohol and sex and sometimes by drugs, to Borges’s skeletal blueprint for aesthetic expansion. The characters wander through a labyrinthine Borgesian landscape, now fitted out with the appurtenances of contemporary globalist exploitation, while in their human depths they experience desire, rage, desolation, and despair generally occluded from Borges’s fictive zone. When in its characteristic randomness the narrative of 2666 finally hazards a brief meditation on jetlag, Bolaño’s joke on the phenomenon goes directly back to Borges’s virtuoso encyclopedia of different models (or “schools”) of time prevailing on “Tlön,” which I have elsewhere characterized as a universe or zone existing in a condition of a priori deconstruction.13 The comment on jetlag is made by Amalfitano, the only Archimboldi scholar we encounter in the initial mini-novel of 2666 affiliated with a university in Northern Mexico. (It is well known that Santa Theresa, site of the disturbing murders and location for much of the novel, is modeled on Ciudad Juarez; that is, it is a ramshackle hub

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of late-capitalist production, assembly, and distribution, a burgeoning border town directly on a corridor of sublime U.S.–Mexican mutual development, exploitation, and flow. Its underlying economic violence produces little in the way of cultural amenities; it caters to its workers and bosses with a vast network of bars and clubs.) Amalfitano is a transplant from Barcelona. He is the only one in a quartet of major Archimboldi scholars in the novel (the others are all Europe-based) who himself bespeaks anything of an expansive Borgesian imagination. He is also the only one of the surrogate academics in the novel who attains anything approaching psychological depth. And his “rather idiosyncratic ideas about jet lag” are as follows: They weren’t constant, so it might be an exaggeration to call them ideas. They were feelings. Make-believe ideas. As if he were looking outside the window and forcing himself to see an extraterrestrial landscape. He believed (or liked to think he believed) that when a person was in Barcelona, the people living and present in Buenos Aires and Mexico City didn’t exist. The time difference only masked their nonexistence. And so if you suddenly traveled to cities that, according to this theory, didn’t exist or hadn’t yet had time to put themselves together, the result was the phenomenon known as jet lag, which arose not from your exhaustion but from the exhaustion of the people who would have been asleep if you hadn’t travelled.14 Amalfitano’s twist on the conventional notion of jetlag, not that it is a condition of dissociation and wooziness on the part of the traveler, but rather a collective disorientation accruing to those who have stayed still, is a tremendously inventive fabulation. It suggests, not unlike the implications of Husserlian primal stimuli, retentions, and protentions, that in a world of highspeed, accelerated displacement, jetlag characterizes the steady-state of consciousness. In this minor phantasmagoria, Bolaño bookmarks his relation to Borges, and in so doing annotates a drift or deviation that has taken place since the mega-aesthetic contracts of modernism, reveling in the pure joy of thematic variance and permutation. Indeed, Amalfitano’s musings on jetlag correspond to one of five or six concurrent “schools of time” prevailing on Borges’s Tlön, that implicitly deconstructive zone whose achievement is in part to celebrate the discrepancy between wildly dissonant models for conceptualizing time. “The exhaustion of the people who would have been asleep if you hadn’t travelled” corresponds, at least roughly, to the Tlönic model “that while we sleep here, we are awake somewhere else, so that every man is in fact two men.”15 Among the other temporal modalities that Tlön at least entertains include “that all time has already happened, so that our life is but the crepuscular memory, or crepuscular reflection,

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doubtlessly distorted and mutilated, of an irrecoverable process.”16 But Amalfitano, who experiences this revelation in process of grafting his own bizarre maps of intellectual predecessors onto the schemata derived by mathematician Raphael Dieste, author of “Testamento geometrico, published by Ediciones del Castro in La Coruña, in 1975,”17 manages to muddle or stain the relatively pure Borgesian fictive speculations, those mobilizing the takeover of reality by “extreme idealism,” with the sweaty embarrassments resulting from long-distance jet travel. Indeed, the attentiveness and corrections necessitated by the condition of jetlag underscore the centrality of time to ethical sensibility. It is no accident that our own tentative investigation into jetlag as the current prevailing model for time-consciousness leads us back into the fictive zone configured with breathtaking singularity by Jorge Luis Borges. Borges clearly understood the decisiveness of time not only to narrative variation in works acknowledging the relativity of plot and event but also in the heightened ethical awareness of action in a proliferating universe. Even though Yu Tsun, a Chinese agent in the employ of the Germans in World War I, in Borges’s mini-spy-thriller “The Garden of Forking Paths,” gains the upper hand over Stephen Albert, a Briton whose appreciation of the richness of the Chinese imagination exceeds his own, whose name by chance is strategically important to a particular German campaign in France, the latter knows, “Time forks, perpetually, into countless futures. In one of them, I am your enemy.”18 With the possible exception of Italo Calvino, no other twentieth-century author is as acute as Borges to the turbulence, the “butterfly effect,” set into play by a single fork in the road or deviation. In the vertiginous, because rigorously comprehensive deconstructive atmosphere of Tlön, Husserl’s meticulous calculus of primal sensations, transformable both into retentions and protentions, receives its parodic fictive adaptation. The units of derivation and reproduction on Tlön are called the hrönir, with a heavy emphasis on the umlaut. So fluid is the continuity between the Real and the Imaginary on Tlön that hrönir have even been produced mentally, in systematic psychological experiments. The derivation or descent of hrönir from one another from one generation to the next is by no means linear or orderly: “those of the ninth [remove] can be confused with those of the second; and those of the eleventh exhibit a purity of line that even the originals do not exhibit.”19 This fanciful fictive construct bears all the rigor that Husserl imports into the cognitive apparatus of sensory input and its retentive/ protentive processing. Time more than space, then, is the dimension of heightened ethical sensibility. It is no accident that in a series of 1946–1947 lectures by Emmanuel Levinas, time is the panorama for the authentic encounter with the Other.20 In his 1968 “Substitution,” recurrence is the retentive process in which all identity, and all action ascribable to identity, is at stake.21 Space is the

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dimension of paths, furrows, strata, and rifts. Space is the notebook allowing writing both its shocking excesses and its ethical precisions. Time, in a progression extending from Husserl and Heidegger to Proust and Borges, is both a medium of recuperation and gathering, out of which any cohesions attributable to selfhood are formed, and of divagations and selections putting ethical deliberation to its conceptual as well as practical test. The question is not whether we are congenitally jetlagged, which we are, or not whether jetlag is the prevailing condition of time-consciousness, which it is, but whether under its disorientation and grogginess we rise to such challenges as the Levinasian address of the otherness of the Other or the Derridean call to responsiveness and responsibility. I leave the tentative answer to this query to the Levinasian scenario of substitution, and, once again, it has been registered amid the proliferation of time-zones and jarring alternatives making it the earmark of recurrent personal jetlag: Recurrence becomes identity in breaking up the limits of identity, breaking up the principle of being in me, the intolerable rest in itself characteristic of definition. The self is on the hither side of rest; it is the impossibility of coming back from all things. It is to hold onto oneself while gnawing away at oneself . . . This anarchy in the recurrence to oneself is beyond the normal play of action and passion in which the identity of a being is maintained, in which it is. It is on the hither side of the limits of identity . . . What can it be but a substitution of me for the others?22

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Psychotherapy takes place in the overlap of two areas of playing, that of the patient and that of the therapist. Psychotherapy has to do with two people playing together. The corollary of this is that where playing is not possible then the work done by the therapist is directed towards bringing the patient from a state of not being able to play into a state of being able to play.1

1. hat does it mean if, after trying in a concerted way, bringing both my decades-old fascination with Kandinsky’s work and, in condensed form, everything I’ve learned since my initial encounter to bear on my tentative analysis, his artwork remains inexhaustible and unabated in its mystique to me? Is Kandinsky’s work some sort of psychological symptom of my maladjustment warranting immediate clinical attention? Or is there some deeply affirmative lesson to be drawn from the fact that an irreducible aura still sets in when I encounter some of his work in a museum? Is “Kandinsky,” in my own parlance, a “private” morphome2 rendered objective and accountable through my documented encounter with frameworks including German idealist philosophy, psychoanalysis, semiotics, structuralism, close reading, and deconstruction? Is “Kandinsky” part of my own very personal disease or part of the cure, something that has remained vibrant to me through the unending sequences to theories of and approaches to culture, through the inevitable brushes with history, whether writ magiscule or miniscule, through the every bit as predetermined defile of life-events? If I am not being facile in affirming that there is something deeply compelling about Kandinsky’s ongoing appeal to me, what are the broader life-strategies to be inferred from the inexhaustible affirmation that a single lifetime

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intervention on the part of a quirky Russian artist who spent most of his productive life living elsewhere could offer me? This latter one is a question that each of my readers could pose with regard to those magical, inexhaustible, and in important senses intransigent artists and/or artworks of multiple genres and media whose allure has at once persistently enchanted and troubled them. In terms of some of my own ongoing inquiries, as I have attempted to establish in the previous chapter, Kandinsky’s work comprises a singular intervention generated in line with a coherent aesthetic contract and its reasonable corollaries. Toward the end of a long nomadic critical stroll3 from one theoretical paradigm and from one auratic aesthetic property to the next—in which every cultural artifact under scrutiny and every contextualizing conceptual model may have served as “transitional objects”4 as the parlance defines them—I am asking, as I know is apparent to my readers, what the broader draw, payoff, recompense, or reward of these sequential fascinations is. As in the case of simply putting on the table what has enlivened me every time I’ve encountered Kandinsky’s paintings in a museum, the attempt to answer this broader question regarding the allure of cultural artifacts is fraught with complexities. The answer to the question is as meandering, indirect, and inchoate as the cultural trajectory that produced it. It unavoidably involves a meditative susceptibility to the gravity-fields and climates generated by multiple centers of production and scenes of writing and articulation.

2. I would hope that the overall drift of this study would be to replace the idea of the inevitable “narcissistic wound” in the object-relations camp of psychoanalysis with the notion of equally unavoidable “systematic wounds” or insults. By this I mean nothing more profound or complex than that systematic organizations, in their homeostasis, repetitiveness, and impersonality invariably prove themselves, at some point or another, impervious and obtuse to our personal needs, best interests, and singular private languages, whether “we” function as individuals or classes. The lifesystems to which we belong, whether language, the family, the community, various levels of government, professional organizations, the environment, or life itself, in their entropy or their vitality, will invariably “cut” us, regardless of how tuned in we are to their operations and to our own predilections and private idioms. (This ongoing vacillation between the experiential [“external,” “empirical”] and psychological scenes of apprehension and processing at multiple levels, has been marked, since the outset of dialectical movement in

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Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, as the basic modality and unit of ongoing human processing and interaction with the environment.) The fact that the systems themselves produce their own “noise” or “static,” that they themselves are beset by their own infelicities, inconsistencies, short-circuits, and other outright malfunctions, is of little recompense to us as we suffer their rigidities, double messages, and the no-win, or “tragic,” impasses in which they place us. Even those blessed souls among us, those master accommodators who seem to have adapted to all the skewed messages radiating from their worlds with elegance and even pleasure, have been limited in their options and prospects by systematic insult and obtuseness. To whatever degree they know or acknowledge this or not. Indeed, their imperviousness to the systematic conditions in which they have become imbricated and restrained makes them most susceptible to replicate in their interpersonal relations the untenable vagaries issuing from the engine-rooms or command-posts of their particular systematic surrounds. Let the above serve as a brief position-paper for the inevitable stricture and obtuseness emanating from conceptual as well as social systems in their accumulative and homeostatic thrusts (in Chinese thought, this would be their yang aspect). If I am positing an inevitable systems-alienation here, it in no way precludes other epiphenomena arising in the centuries during which we have been toying with systems and machines: the fact that over generations of tinkering, we have produced “smart” systems as well as machines, ones learning from themselves, producing and distributing their own knowledge, programming themselves, and even making inventive use of their own untoward by-products: static, noise, “trash.”5 It is this intense (dare I say, allegorical?, performative?) feedback loop between mind and machine that prompts us to evolve and adumbrate a critical language of “smart,” autopoietic, or “second-order” systems and machines. One clear implication of this evolutionary trajectory is that the systems and machines that we have produced and programmed have learned so much from us that we can now, if we can only marshal the proper respect and receptiveness, learn a great deal from them. We can take the openness that can be programmed and activated in systems and machines as a model for our own learning curve and margin of improvisation in our roles as cultural decoders and critics. By the bearings and drifts that can be culled from a wide range of models and scenes of inscription—deconstruction, schizoanalysis, contemporary systems theory prominent among them—this is an inevitable and compelling meditation for commentators writing within a vast constellation of disciplines and interests to take up and to practice, with mindfulness and dedication. What impetus can our own articulations gather from autopoietic and artificial intelligence capabilities already programmed into our most trustworthy machines and theoretical models? This is a question whose relevance and

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urgency grow with each technological and corresponding epistemological threshold that contemporary culture reaches and surpasses. Even with the interactive parity and partnership that we have achieved with our most indispensable prostheses and discourse-generators, we are not, unfortunately, exonerated from the insult and injury that systems—inevitably and systematically—also deliver. Systems produce strictures and incursions, which they enforce by constitutionally violent measures, at the same time that they sustain processes and open certain horizons, under felicitous circumstances and bad, under enlightened leaders and under merciless despots. The very codes defining the mediations that they negotiate and the homeostases—logical, programmatic, biological, legal, cybernetic, linguistic—that they sustain demarcate the membranes of their closure and enforced limitation, the point at which their “selections” and other forms of filtration and enforcement become nonnegotiable. As we know, the aspiration to systematic organization and sublimation (in human affairs, toward the level of “principle”) reaches back historically, in the West, a long way. The literature of the West, along with the canonical sources it has appropriated (e.g., the Egyptian “Tale of the Eloquent Peasant,” the Sumerian Gilgamesh epic), invariably marks, in one plain or another, even at the level of the spacing of poetic phrases on whichever tablet, the spot at which systematic organization, whether the family, government, the sentence and its grammar, or cyborgs, have become untenable. Among its several portfolios, literature bears witness and gives articulation to systematic architecture, process, and limit. Like its history, literature’s catalogue of systematically delivered punishments and insults—ranging from cave-burials of the living to the domestic wastelands of Flaubert, Tolstoy, and Ibsen, to the Orwellian Room 101—is long. The reading-list is inexhaustible, and much of the available scholarship excellent. And it does not take systematic philosophy very long after its inception—already Aristotle takes this up through the construct of catharsis—to address literature’s stake in the modes of suffering that it reduces and distils into so many different-flavored syrups, many but not all bitter. Catharsis—ecstatic but rigorously explicit ex-pression—is merely one particular sub-category of the healing from systematic insult and injury that in significantly different ways literature, art, therapy, and critique deliver. Healing, just for starters, is never cure, restitution, compensation, “making good,” undoing, “going back in time” or “to square one” in order to reverse the damage, to “disappear” the wound through plastic surgery. Any satisfaction from systematic abuse that literature, art, therapy, and critique deliver is at best temporary shelter thrown together on a field of différance, improvisation, invention on the fly, what Lévi-Strauss was getting at when he invoked, in his readings of indigenous cultures, bricolage. The healing

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that cultural improvisation (or morphomatic transcription) effects is no more than a temporary stay in an inevitable execution, an immoderate parenthesis in a perfectly grammatical sentence, the noise or feedback in a sound-system persisting even after the musical score has risen to its grand finale. The opening or stop-gap measure that cultural improvisation stages on the borders and margins of systematic totalization and inevitability is nothing less than the range of possibility, the extent of the give still within the reach of figuration, performance, and allegory. Only in this respect can these different registers of play and inscription (art, for instance) be said to heal, and this, as suggested above, only with the finality of the always-provisional. I indeed placed a tall order on the writing-tablet that evolved into the present book: to justify therapies in a list of measures also including literature, art, and critique. It is precisely this uphill sort of challenge that serves as the best provocation or goad to persist at writing’s open-ended bicycle-ride. Therapeutic initiatives and strategies, like paintings, poems, and critical commentaries, therapeutic initiatives and strategies are interventions. Their immediate motive is to embroider, adumbrate, elucidate, enlarge, and modify or correct a configuration or state of affairs that has persisted and persists. Although the psychoanalytical client, to invoke merely one instance, needs to do her own thinking, and although the circuits of our day-to-day interchanges with the environment, the feedback loop prompting our corrections and changes of course as well as habitual patterns rely on our personal resource and private articulations, both as accrued and assimilated on an hour-to-hour basis, therapeutic measures are invariably undertaken inter- and transsubjectively. They involve mutual understandings, whether with relations, mentors, friends, or poets and sculptors thousands of miles and years away. The drift of therapeutic measures is invariably toward the untoward opening of a configuration proving repressive and stultifying if for no other reason than because it persists and, by dint of this insistence, prevails. In order for an intervention to achieve significance—remembering that signification is squarely on the side of digital organization and relations—it arises on the purposeful reader’s part, in collaboration with his or her partners in intervention, whether on hand or absent, whether known through personal acquaintance or not. Close reading, a dedicated sizing up of existing literatures and contexts of potential inscription, is as indispensable a preparation to artists, “creative” writers, and therapeutic partners as it is to those who render cultural critique. The degree to which an intervention is prompted, commissioned, or remunerated by an other, its ability to bring about systematic reconfiguration, opening, and release is foreclosed. Anthony Wilden, among others, has argued that the thrust of positive feedback as delivered by institutions and

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other “goalseeking” organisms “is stability, not change; what they seek to reproduce is themselves, not novelties.”6 A therapeutic course is an openended series of recognitions and the adjustments or slippages in knowledge and strategy in interaction with the environment that they occasion. The course of therapy has been undertaken for its intrinsic and hence indeterminate value, whose products are in this sense unsolicited and unremunerated. The artist, writer, or “creative team” has by its own initiative made itself susceptible to the recognitions, many of which may be “incompatible.”7 The visual arts, as criticism, remain most telling and memorable precisely where their motivation remains inexplicit and inchoate. What I will argue about therapies of many formats is that they are a conversation or feedback loop within a virtual scene or setting making its participants susceptible to the same sorts of indirections, “knight’s-moves,” quantum leaps, and other crystallizing but dislocating inferences endowing memorable artistic interventions with their singularity and inexhaustible variation, nuance, and shading.

3. Therapy as Utility and Medium. The present study started out with what was hopefully a healthy sense of the catastrophe in which any notion of and aspiration toward healing is surrounded. The critical tradition out of which I write is nowhere more skeptical than toward the obvious spinoffs attending this term and its close cognates: wholeness, health, affirmation (as in “healing”). It is among the most distinguished achievements of this tradition to cast the bleakest aspersions on any thinking or formulation, whether in a textual or existential domain, that would promulgate restoration (of health, stability, possession, meaning), recompense (to loss, injury, insult), recovery (as fully unimpeded survival of an attack or crisis). The very most to which healing in a systematic context could aspire is to a certain annotation and its attendant recourse. The most that a healinginteraction, not only with a therapist, physician, mentor, or guide, but also in a theater or concert-hall or with a poem or a friend, could aspire to bringing about is a provisional re-mediation, amelioration, or accommodation. All in the process of generating a new reading, whose fate it is to go the way of all other “takes” or sketches. Such adjustments are inherently temporary, subject to revision within the course of cultural encounter and decoding. Within the framework of the current exploration, these must constitute a technical vocabulary within the horizon of healing: editing, annotation, remediation, accommodation, amelioration, recourse—all pointing toward the ethical deliberation of rereading.

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In this update on the current capability across a wide spectrum of therapeutic interventions, it seems most apposite to deploy the signifier “therapies” in the plural. It may not at first seem terribly edifying to treat therapeutic process as a collective noun, something like “water” or “meat”; to approach it as a utility, arranging it alongside “gas,” “electricity,” or again, “the water works.” The history of psychoanalysis, for example (as one workshop, if not atelier of healingoriented mutual feedback), is fraught with the most pitched sectarian disputes, at times to the point of violence, in the evolution and distribution, across a scale, of its theoretical refinements and interventions. Are the drives or the cognitive faculties the most fundamental sub-components of subjectivity? Is the field of social interactions or the domain of individual psychological manifestations the most authentic scope or cloud-chamber of a person’s mental state? Or possibly the subject’s individual configuration of individual instincts or predilections? Is the intense oversight demanded by self-scrutiny a lifetime resource and preoccupation, or is it best confined to a particular developmental phase dedicated (and henceforth strongly tinged) by this process? Vast amounts of time, deliberately structured intervention, debate, and in many cases experimental design and meticulous data-analysis have been devoted to the deliberation of these and related issues. The arguments, down to the fundamental nature, parameters, and dimensions of mental life have careened across the gamut of psychological approaches, from Freudianism, Jung’s appeal to “archetypes,” and behaviorism to interpersonal psychiatry, “object-relations,” Lacanianism, cognitive therapy, “humanistic” psychology, and back again. The packages for therapeutic delivery range from the multiyear “sentence” of a rigid regimen of multiple weekly sessions prescribed by Freud to a potentially “interminable” lighter (also revisable, interruptible) psychotherapeutic diet, to current “short-term” interventions as short as a week or two or three encounters. In view of this rich, persistent tradition of particularism in psychotherapeutic bearings, models, and modes of delivery, how can I be so obtuse and insensitive as to “chunk” it down into a single conglomerate, an inchoate mass, a blob of protoplasm? My aim here is not to situate therapeutic efficacy or authenticity within a particular attitude or set of questions and approaches. Vast psychoanalytical and experimental literatures, filled with notably creative solutions, have been dedicated to this vital enterprise. My attempt here, in keeping with the purview of systems-analysis developed throughout the present study, is to distil the workings and effects of therapeutic healing in such a way allowing them to be accessed and used (in D. W. Winnicott’s sense) in contexts, settings, and milieus far afield from the “medical arts buildings” and laboratories where they are conventionally developed and dispensed. Therapies can in no way install or recreate an imagined state of wholeness, health, or optimality. In this sense, they cannot “heal.” They cannot bring back

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some sort of balance, efficiency, or salutary state imagined retrospectively. Healing is at most the reprise of the cognitive synthesis and the measured articulation disrupted through the application of totalistic and unresponsive constraints. Healing is at most the resumption of a critical reception and a cultural articulation that has been cut off in the coincidence of a concatenation of factors, among them overstimulation, distraction, co-option, and burnout. What has been healed has not been rendered “whole” in any holistic sense. It has not been “cured.” It has not achieved definitive insulation from or detoxification of prior traumas, stressors, and debilitating accidents. What has been healed can at most think again, can again distil cogent sentences out of multiple inputs, all chaotic, none marked or organized in a way that would institute environmental coherence. What has been healed can rejoin the play of writing, invariably deferred, can resume articulation’s intricate thread. Of no great consequence, this healing, but indispensable to ongoing cultural empowerment: to cultural feedback and critique. It is only in the sense of orchestrating the resumption of articulation and programming inevitably distracted and cut off that therapies can “heal” and that art can open windows within the architectures of closed systems. Let us start from the presupposition that therapeutic “healing” is a medium rather than a conceptual model, technique, practice, or school. Therapeutic “healing” in this sense is a process of re-mediation. Its parameters as such are features including intensity, duration, grain, absorptiveness, verisimilitude, simulation, addictiveness, feedback, entropy, meta-critique, autopoiesis, and mutation. In the sense of its configuration and constitution as a medium, therapeutic re-mediation is free to transpire in books, art museums, theaters, cinemas, music and dance halls—indeed, in the street—as well as in the “official” consulting office or laboratory. A notion of therapeutic intervention grounded in such values as “absorptiveness” and “mutation” leaves such conventional values promulgated in the long-standing intramural struggles over methodological dominance as “truth,” “theoretical rigor,” and “clinical efficacy” temporarily (as in Hofstadter’s telephonic image for recursion) “on hold.” As a medium, therapeutic redress opens up its multiple and interactive dimensions; it occupies its characteristic spaces (again, the resonant book, concert-hall, or other performance-space as much as the clinical cabinet); it concentrates itself in identifiable nodes, whose circuitry (interferences as well as flows) can be mapped; once in process, it establishes interfaces between a multiplicity of inputs relevant to and impacting upon the healing process. We will be circling back, later in this chapter, to the prospects for the therapeutic remediation of systematic insults as they emerge within a viewfinder of current overarching relations and constraints, operative within the

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POS. At this juncture we can already characterize this battery of interventions as the invariably provisional redressing of systematic insult in the process of rendering explicit conditions of thwarting and unconditional closure, and opening alternate circuitry to jammed messages and shorted-out initiatives to performance. Once under way, the therapeutic intervention, prepossessing to the point of virtual absorptiveness and verisimilitude, attains a momentum and force-field intrinsic to its own process. Systematic “healing” is by its very nature polymorphous, and once in process can be stimulated/diverted by multiple inputs. Seeing and hearing an opera can exert a profound catalytic effect upon a conventional (i.e., trans-subjective, theoretically coherent) formal therapeutic process already under way. Conversations with “civilians” (i.e., non-clinicians), reading books, or pondering theoretical paradigms can consolidate or divert the remediation: both when a formal program of therapy persists and when it has been “terminated”/temporarily suspended. We are concerned here as much with the ambient circumstances and intrusions of “healing from systematic insult”—the impact of strangers, books, other aesthetic and conceptual experiences, and conversation, encountered randomly—as we are with the no doubt informative and edifying history of spiritual dysfunction and its inventive remediation. The downbeat in the configuration of theoretical backdrops as I am here assembling it is far more on the posture, drift, and variegated circuitry of therapeutic remediation (and on the switch-offs between circuits) than it is on its nature, sources, authenticity, and ultimate results of the quest for “wholeness” or the cessation of pain.

4. I would hardly be the first reader ever to have observed that every extended project of thinking rigorous and coherent enough to have become a “philosophy” also generates its distinctive therapeutic program, whether explicit or implicit, in part to counter the very strictures it has initiated and opposed. While these rigorously conceived and constructed thinking-models are often stored in the cultural repository of “philosophy,” no single historical discipline, whether it or “psychiatry,” lays inherent claim to all thoughtprograms deliberate enough to effect therapeutic re-mediation. (There’s no reason why a long-term model of thinking that, autopoietically, reorients, restructures, and recodes itself, effecting therapeutic restructuring, could not be extrapolated from and attributed to Shakespeare, Goethe, Melville, or Joyce.) The suggestion to which I am building here is that that any writer or other cultural programmer whose thinking-model simultaneously encompasses and coherently—that is, rigorously—addresses the prevailing

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epistemological, metaphysical, ontological, ethical, and aesthetic constellation of her moment has already hung a therapeutic plaque at the door to her office. Therapy, like art, “happens” in a virtual space. Any crystallizing reprogramming that therapy brings about it does so, at least in part, because of the absorption and heightened sensibility and simulation prevailing in virtual environments. A very distinctive aura or allure prevails within the therapeutic setting (that may be an art museum or movie-house as well as a clinical cabinet); in the case of a direct interpersonal mode of therapy (the Freudian “talking cure”), the conversation is itself, at least in certain dimensions, virtual. This would mean by the same token (and it does), that there is a virtual dimension to all transformative trans- or inter-subjective experiences, including sexual transaction—when it is successful, i.e., absorptive (if you’re having sex with someone and they don’t notice it, it probably isn’t sex). Virtual dimensions, whether of conversation, sexuality, goal-oriented social activity (meetings, classrooms, political rallies, religious precincts), all contain the potential to become addictive to those who enter them. Indeed, one way of defining the woman or the man, of extracting or precipitating out her “character,” is to extrapolate the cluster of virtual spaces that she inhabits, between which she transitions. Once you graph the overall trajectory, location, balance, sequence, and rhythm of these transitions, you capture a great deal more about the person than you knew before. One unlikely inference emerging from these considerations is that the particular ideation or conceptual vocabulary determining a regimen of therapy is far less significant than the coherent architecture and the resilience of the framework within which the therapy transpires. What matters far more than Freud’s focus on intrapsychic agencies and the division of labor between levels of consciousness, each with its inbuilt logic and temporality, or Lacan’s cognitive rewiring of these agencies and his pursuit of the signifier in mental and cultural life is the fact that both thinkers, through many iterations and many different experiments in writing style and composition, arrive at an overview of our psycho-semiotic lives manifestly systematic in nature. It’s the coherence and resilience of the ethos under which the therapy takes place, not the specific materials or idioms of the paradigm, that facilitate the always limited but by the same token transformative results of the therapy transpiring under its aegis. If we hold firm to the premise that therapeutic healing is a trans- or intersubjective transaction transpiring in virtual space, it becomes possible to imagine multiple cultural and institutional histories that could have eventuated at the enhanced cognitive fluidity and psychosocial empowerment associated with therapy: this as the alternative history to the narrative attributing psychotherapy, as its institutional delivery-system: alternative to the insights, syntheses, and initiatives of one Sigmund Freud. It might be useful, I am

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arguing, for us to project, merely for speculative purposes, a history of psychotherapeutic healing as a multi-franchise operation, not as a top-down, “striated,” multinational corporation headquartered in a single “profit center”: ultimately, an extended project of exegesis or critique conducted under trans- or interpersonal conditions (hence public, even if at the minimum threshold). The project of psychoanalysis persists for purposes of rendering explicit, subjecting to intellectual critique, bearing witness to and redressing, reversing, and where necessary effacing violent and repressive aftermaths of systematic organizations. Such a line of reasoning opens a network of far-flung and not always predictable “branch offices” to the corporate edifice of psychoanalysis. These are in turn receptive to the “secret sharers” in the history of therapeutic healing and even more importantly, to the rhetorical turns, and untoward metaphorics liberated, in these minority reports, for our understanding of the wider nature and role of therapeutic healing in the apprehension, articulation, extrapolation, critique, and remediation of the prevailing systematic organizations at any moment, under any configuration of technological, political, military, administrative, economic, industrial, and communicative power. From the point of view that I am promoting here, the history of psychoanalysis in its broadest purview is merely one, but a singularly distinctive, instance of productive response, responsibility, and intervention within an even more overarching defile and recycling of systems: their configuration, mechanisms and domains of control, and critique. Psychoanalysis, even when it has morphed into schizoanalysis, is perforce, and first and foremost, systemscritique. Not only has Plato, via the variegated but consistent inquiry into the nature, parameters, location, and liabilities of idealization running through the Dialogues—parallel to an every bit as serious and consequential exploration of different rhetorical formats for philosophical disputation as a medium— nominated himself to the psychoanalytical Hall of Fame. The strain of oversight pertaining to the self-system and the factors impinging on it that Plato infuses into speculative Western thought at its outset is nothing less than prodigious in its acuity. So much so that the edifice of Freudian psychoanalysis, at least as it addresses those conditions ensuing from impairments and insults to the idealizing function, whether directed to “self” or “objects,” is an extended footnote to the Platonic speculations, updated and emended, of course, in crucial ways.8 In view of the decisive role played by the idealizing function—its relative health or debility—within the Western languages and core-concepts of spirituality, the contention that there could just as well be an edifice of Platonic psychotherapy, with its training institutes, accreditation, nosology, and regimens of diagnosis and remediation, is hardly controversial. If a cadre of Platonic psychotherapists has not yet declared, registered, and institutionalized

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itself both within such organizations as the American Psychological Association and for purposes of third-party health insurance reimbursement, this is merely an oversight. I would argue that an entire host of potential therapeutic schools waits in the wings, each because of fostering recognition, redress, and adaptation within a virtual conversation and setting, a setting programmed with far-reaching systematic coherence and consistency, is capable of significant therapeutic impact. There are more of these potential therapeutic healing-systems than I could name; indeed, many of them already exist. I could well imagine a school of Kantian therapy, lending exquisite attentiveness, first and foremost, to the subtle interaction and equilibrium between the institutions, faculties (both psychic and social), and relations in which we are implicated and between which we shuttle in the course of our customary lives. (Such a thought was surely not too remote from Jacques Lacan’s thinking when he luxuriated in the ironic elective affinities of “Kant avec Sade.”) Just as effective, however, would be a Wittgensteinian branch of psychotherapy, in which the downbeat and meticulous attentiveness would be accorded to the logic and linguistic felicity of the formulations into which the reportage of psycho-social life are translated. As opposed to Kantian psychotherapy, the Hegelian school would hone into the thresholds, preconditions, preparations for, and aftermaths of the significant stages and transitions in our cognitive capability and our psycho-social relations. To the degree that Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari import a comprehensive philosophical training and familiarity with Western intellectual history into their contribution to this field (“Imaginary Psychotherapy”), they offer us “schizoanalysis,” a therapeutic regimen keyed to the doublebinds and disconnects specific to the systematic reprogramming of economic, social, and cultural relations under late-Capitalism. With schizoanalysis, of course, we have moved from the domain of nonexistent but potential psychotherapeutic schools, into one whose program has already been written. With my schizoanalyst, I would be working through my regressions and swings, facilitated in turn by unmetabolized prior experience, jetlag, sleep-deprivation, sex, alcohol, and chemical substances, toward what Freud might call the “primary-process” experience of my body, of social constraint and order as they impinge upon me during my recurrent states of psycho-social disintegration. In keeping with Deleuze/Guattari’s command of the overarching epoch of Western philosophy, recursions to the states of schizophrenic global connectedness or the “Body without Organs” are not a universal condition, transpiring throughout history. Deleuze/Guattari endow this regression or dissolve with epistemological specificity; they regard it as an inevitable function and way-station within the regimes of large-scale capitalism such as it has been programmed since the formation of industrybased production, distribution, and commerce in nineteeenth-century Europe.

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The schizoanalytic argument is simple: desire is a machine, a synthesis of machines, a machinic arrangement—desiring-machines. The order of desire is the order of production; all production is at once desiring production and social production. We therefore reproach psychoanalysis for having stifled the order of production, for having shunted it into representation.9 The paradigmatic subject that their theory necessarily generates as well as predicates has been automated (“unconsciously,” within the patois of classical psychoanalysis) by the machines and systems of production and desire. From the unavoidably eccentric perspective of these mechanisms, the Oedipal family (as well as the classical psychoanalytical theories and regimens emanating out of it) is a hopelessly belated and last-ditch ideological ploy to furnish a framework, setting, and language for the cognitive derangement that late-Capitalism systematically produces. Oedipus gathers up everything, everything is found again in Oedipus, which is indeed the result of universal history, but in the singular sense in which capital is already this result. Fetishes, idols, images and simulacra— here we have the whole series: territorial fetishes, despotic idols or symbols, then everything is recapitulated in the images of capitalism, which shapes and reduces them to the Oedipal simulacrum.10 The ideology and not only the myth of the Oedipal family thus joins such constructs of Gramsci’s (as well as Laclau’s) notions of hegemony and Althusser’s “Ideological State Apparatus” as a site at which the constraints of the Prevailing Operating System filter, under camouflage, into the institutions and parlance of lifestyle or “way of life.” Even the bizarre therapeutic practice that we might imagine emanating from the immediately above presuppositions, I am arguing—one grounded in a recapitulation and making explicit of the steps by which desire, fetishism/ commodification, and the aporias of freedom and restraint under current regimes of power make us mad—even such a program, applied rigorously and ethically, can free us up, teach us to negotiate the most egregious impasses in the system. Whereas “psychiatrists and psychoanalysts . . . redeploy under open conditions the order of an extended family,”11 one fitted out with all the historico-mythological appurtenances of Oedipus The schizoanalyst is not an interpreter, even less a theater director; he is a mechanic, a micromechanic. There are no excavations to be undertaken, no statues in the unconscious: there are only stones to be sucked à la Beckett . . . The task of schizoanalysis is that of learning what a subject’s desiringmachines are, how they work, with what syntheses, what bursts of energy

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in the machine, what constituent misfires, with what flows, what chains, and what becomings in each case.12 Deleuze/Guattari do indeed launch the therapeutic subject, the consumer of therapies, onto an uncannily bleak and inhospitable plane of circumspection and meta-critique, one populated by “machinic assemblages” and sublime, impersonal flows of capital and goods. This is in stark contrast to the significant others and decisive past experiences, which, according to the screenplay of “classical” psychoanalysis, are the stock-characters projected onto the screen of its “archeological” remake. Deleuze/Guattari relocate psychoanalysis, with its persistent aspirations to recovery, reconciliation, and forgiveness, to the industrial landscape of Antonioni’s “Red Desert.” The work of schizoanalysis, as they set it forth, is nothing less than grim: and yet—performed with rigor and the “ethics of reading,” schizoanalysis may well be a particularly relevant measure in a variegated, collective project of installing openings into systematic blind-alleys, of attaining therapeutic remediation somewhere along this trajectory.

5. Therapeutic Virtuality. As has been broached above in the Introduction, in an age dominated by technologies miniaturized to the point of invisibility, digital languages, cybernetic memory-stores, and constant breakthroughs in the verisimilitude of representation and simulation, whether of voice, the image, or the body, it is incumbent on cultural critique to factor in, on an ongoing basis, the impact of virtuality. At one extreme of the rhetoric of virtuality is a cluster of attributes so constant to the discourse deploying the term as to have attained quasi-objective status: simulation, hyperrealism, selfreferentiality, autopoietic modification prominent among them. Yet at the other extreme of the discourse in which the experience of the virtual may be couched, virtuality, like the experience of pain explored so poignantly while rigorously by Wittgenstein in his Blue Book, is a personal experience, in certain key respects non-communicable or non-translatable. It is a state of cognition, interaction, and processing as much as a demarcated technological domain. On certain registers of our contemporary interactivity with the world, we know when we are there. At one end of the age or time-span of virtuality is the long tradition of mimesis itself, with its emblematic scenes of writing and representation (the underworld, oracles, magical armor) and sequestered precincts (temples, theaters), in which the distortion-effects of over-determined simulation are afforded full exposure. In this broader sense, such traditions as ancient Greek

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drama and its, say, Japanese correlatives (no¯h, kabuki), may already be regarded as theaters of virtuality as well as performance-sites. The tension along the linear development of poems and narrative cycles designated as “epic” between background material and scenes utterly captivating in their elation, horror, or both is a major stock-in-trade of the genre. Precisely in this fashion, by carefully nursing the tension between the conventional formulas and trappings of narrative and bounded scenarios riveting, revelatory of the machinery in the belief- and social-systems situated in the narrative surround, and in these senses virtual, the literature of epic customarily illustrates relations of crucial ongoing import to cultural citizens negotiating a cybernetic landscape. As it vacillates between the circumstances and settings defining its pivotal issues (e.g., the afterlife, heroism, justice) and the telling sites where they will be worked out, the epic tradition encrypts vital data regarding virtual states themselves and the interplay between such interactive parameters as system and environment and figure and ground. The intense conceptual and aesthetic exploration of the image—in its spatio-temporal dimensions, intensities, and textures—coinciding with the overall Enlightenment-Romantic encounter with freedom in the West necessarily afforded unprecedented conceptual rigor and specificity to the implicit virtual dimensions and specifications to the tradition of imaging itself. In this sense, the collaborative investigation into the image conducted by a cast of cultural programmers including, among others, Goethe, Kant, Hegel, the Schlegels, Novalis, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Kierkegaard, Melville, and Freud, perforce refined and updated the virtual understanding of its qualities and power. At the other extreme of the image’s long theatrical run, far closer to home, are the technological and theoretical developments resulting in cybernetics as a prevailing technology and in the virtual simulation specific to its epistemological environment. Coherent philosophical reprogrammings of the field of knowledge are virtual to the same degree as the imaginary landscapes conjured up by literary artists as showcases for the prevailing possibilities for language, communications, social interaction, surrogation, and story-telling. Nietzsche’s Zarathustra not only embodies a range of characteristics and strategies that will rewrite the dominant story of Western philosophy from its underside, in terms of its “minority report.” He traverses a virtual landscape whose physical characteristics (of terrain, vegetation, even demographics) are the literalization of philosophical conditions and operations. Contemporary critical theory, as we will see in fuller detail below, from Deleuze/Guattari’s “machinic assemblages” to Derrida’s “kho¯ra,” has furnished its readers not only with a battery of reading strategies counter to the dominant thrusts of the History of Ideas but has relocated them to the virtual margin, in several configurations, from which the work of cultural deconstruction may proceed.

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For purposes of the present impact study on contemporary systematic experience, on the occasional assaults and insults that accompany its intricate organization, comprehensive data, and many dramatic empowerments and conveniences, virtual states have been subtended, not exclusively, though, by digital organization, from which they derive their characteristic wiring. The theoretical underpinnings of virtual states are, then, not limited to the history of “second-order systems theory.” This extremely compelling historical narrative is encapsulated in a current reader, Emergence and Embodiment: New Essays on Second-Order Systems Theory, edited by Bruce Clarke and Mark B. N. Hansen.13 Wide-ranging contributions intervene against a backdrop encompassing social systems, as submitted to Niklas Luhmann’s comprehensive relatively recent overhaul; scenarios of autopoiesis as developed (contrapuntally) by Heinz von Foerster on the one hand, and Francisco Varela and Humberto Maturana on the other; and the entire spectrum of human/biospheric interactivity and feedback under the aegis of the Gaia effect, as initially proposed by James Lovelock and subsequently adumbrated by the likes of Lynn Margulis, Dorion Sagan, and Eileen Christ. Familiarity with this chain of developments and the understandings and articulations it predicates is required reading on the part of anyone presuming to contemporary cultural critique under current Prevailing Operating Systems. Clarke and Hansen have rendered inestimable service both to this chain of advances and to the cadre of cultural programmers synthesizing their work under its sway by tracing and inflecting it in their current reader. “Second-Order Systems Theory” has everything to do with viable understandings of virtual states. At the same time, notable contributions emanating from diverse coordinates of the field demarcated by contemporary critical theory formed the surround or environment of legibility without which the history of second-order systems, autopoiesis, and virtual states could not have been received or deployed. At the widest horizon of this current theoretical paradigm of relations and programming in the cybernetic age are the environmental and ecological considerations that Gregory Bateson undertook toward the end of his writings; these could not have been other than decisive to the scenario of system–environment relations developed by Luhmann. Also, the irreversible cognitive drift that the discourse of psychoanalysis undertook when Jacques Lacan rewired such Kantian-Freudian faculties as conscious and unconscious, id, ego, and superego, into two primary orders of processing and programming, the Symbolic (language) and the Imaginary (the visual). The universe of Lacanian apprehensions, innovations, and possibilities has been blessed by a cadre of scholars and a literature precisely and creatively marking the implications of Lacan’s turn to a cognitive, rather than spiritual (or psychic) sphere of human (and also animal) transactions with the natural,

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interpersonal, and cultural environments, relations we would now characterize as of programming rather than of “understanding,” “insight,” or “realization.” Anything I could do here to retrace these steps would not only be belated; it would be schematic in relation to what has already been established, by a sequence of remarkable readers beginning with Anthony Wilden and Jacques Derrida, and including, among many others, Samuel Weber,14 Slavoj Žižek,15 and Joan Copjec.16 With respect to Gregory Bateson’s impact on subsequent systems theory, in philosophy as well as in environmental and cultural studies, I traced a skein of affiliations that have come in and out of focus over the years in the epilogue to my recent Around the Book: Systems and Literacy.17 Within the parameters of my own expanding reading-rhizome: Jacques Derrida’s astonishing writing-journey, from its outset, issued from such zones as “scenes of writing,” “abysses,” and the kho¯ra, whose constitution, in major respects, is nothing other than virtual. The deconstructive bearing prevailing in these sites, both etymologically and ideologically against the grain of inherited Western ontological, metaphysical, ethical, and theological traditions, perforce mobilizes simultaneous loops of logical, semantic, and grammatical feedback. It repeatedly crosses and recrosses the boundary between the constative and the performative: text synthesized under the aura of deconstruction both means and displays itself. Deconstructive reading, in remaining immanent to the specific texts and other cultural artifacts under its purview, offers no edifying up or out from this processing. In this sense, the exegesis it performs is unidirectionally absorptive. From the time I began to compose my exegeses, in 1970, with greater and less degrees of success, in the deconstructive atelier that Derrida had, with such generosity opened to all, I recognized an interactivity in my own writing-process, as it accrued progressively and in its fluctuations between “target texts” and commentary that I can now characterize as unmistakably virtual. The strand of Derrida’s writing perhaps setting out in Freud’s “scene of writing” and progressing/digressing, among other works, to The Truth in Painting, “Kho¯ra,”18 and Typewriter Ribbon,19 has had a decisive impact on further investigations of the media and their configuration, from Bernard Stiegler’s explorations of transindivduality20 to J. Hillis Miller’s study of telepathy in the nineteenth century,21 to Tom Cohen’s elucidations of Hitchcock’s cinematic inscription.22 My receptiveness to cybernetic Prevailing Operating Systems as well as to ideological, aesthetic, and formal ones has also been primed by the joint effort by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari to reconfigure the philosophical textmedium in a radical and far-reaching way. In such works as their “Capitalism and Schizophrenia” diptych, they charge philosophy as much with registering and simultaneously performing the derangement, dysfunction, and inarticulateness issuing from the late-Capitalistic global order as with rendering a master-narrative of prevailing conditions in their conceptual inflection. The

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philosophical landscape that they conjure up for their readers, populated by vast, overarching “assemblages” articulated by “parastrata” and “epistrata,” constructions asserting power and control in the absence of any discernible content or sense, is virtual to the fullest extent, as is the “discontinuity of being” and inarticulation channeled through the “Body without Organs.” For all the pharmacological humor and whimsicality that they import into philosophical disputation, Deleuze/Guattari achieve systematic rigor in their recasting Western experience from the point of view of the always incipient derangement that it barely keeps in abeyance, a medium with nothing less than incendiary effects as it courses over and through the disarticulated body, whose intensities, flows, and discharges are constitutionally inimical to “higher-level processing.” The reader of Deleuze/Guattari’s apocalyptic minority report on the prospects for business as usual in the West—in its speculative, psychological, and socio-economic dimensions—collides into virtual environments and conditions at every turn. In three successive early chapters of A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Deleuze/Guattari move toward a build-out of the Prevailing Operating System, in its capitalistic, linguistic, and deep-structural dimensions. If the thrust of this overall build-out may be termed reconstructive, its method is hardly historical. In each of the three early chapters (3–5), Deleuze/Guattari extract what they can from the epistemological constellation prevailing at a certain geophysical as well as cultural moment and add it to the development culminating in our current globalized, digital, late-Capitalistic predicament. Where I am heading in this elaboration is that in each of the epistemo-structural moments constituting their backdrop to the current moment, they appeal to sites where the matérial for future development has been assembled and configured in a virtual display; their particular Marx-driven mega- and metastructural analysis of contemporary society, culture, and power is indistinguishable from the virtual spaces whose configuration their critique demands. The worldpicture (with its underlying ontology) that they draw is thus fully digitized even where cybernetic technologies fall mainly outside their purview. Deleuze/Guattari’s historiography (not unlike Chinese history) is one in which no core-structure or formation, even biological and geological ones prevailing from human prehistory, ever definitively disappears or is eradicated. What might be termed a law “of conservation of signifying configurations and formations” prevails over their panoramic tracking of terrestrial developments over time. A vital corollary of this law is that any formation from the past, regardless of how antiquated, dysfunctional, out and out barbaric, or out of contemporary context, is poised, under the right conditions, to reassert itself. This is a spinoff, of course, of Nietzsche’s ewige Widerkehr, but under the hefty sway of structural analysis and linguistics, Marxist theory, liberation psychoanalysis, and post-structuralism.

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It is in keeping with the playfulness of Deleuze/Guattari’s project that the epochal time-markers at which they situate key deep-structural add-ons culminating in the current mega-configuration are: 10,000 BC, a moment of great geophysical stress but entirely predating the human imprint on the global environment; November 20, 1923, the post-World War I moment, when, according to John Kenneth Galbraith, rampant inflation unhinged all equivalencies and expected outcomes in global economics;23 and 70 BC to 586 AD, dates crucial to the emergence of the law and other forms of social administration, bracketing as they do, the destruction of the temples in Jerusalem, entrenching the logic and metaphysics of monotheistic religions, with their in-built diasporic longevity. When Deleuze/Guattari trouble themselves to invoke history, it is a wildly non-linear one. But then, there is a “logic of sense” by which each one of these historical bookmarks could conspire, each in its own sequence, toward the rampant flows of capital and goods and the flawed and increasingly attenuated geophysical climate—all tracked and administered to the best degree possible by cybernetic technologies—under which we currently live and labor. The great revelation of situating a relevant time-marker to the current mélange in 10,000 BC is, of course, that there could be data and structure still relevant to our lives and thinking, at the level of territoriality, inclusion/ exclusion, and articulation, hailing from that geo-historical configuration. Appealing to the time-lapse historiography of writers with a wide-angle, comparative lens, social scientists including André Leroi-Gourhan, Georges Dumézil, and Marcel Detienne, Deleuze/Guattari ground their mega- and meta-structural account of global regimes at a moment when the human footprint on the environment remains faint. “10,000 BC” recapitulates a moment when human habitation makes the shallowest scratches on the Umwelt, when the momentous Ereignisse or events involve moves within and through territory: unilateral nomadic moves, displacements or deterritorializations motivated by ecological catastrophes as well as by aggression. The great revelation even at this point is how much signification and structural fabulation is to be read between the lines of negotiations and adaptations to the world barely still discernible. What Deleuze/Guattari conjure up at the point of “10,000 BC” is a bare human habitation, a virtual environment whose sole features are the outlying dimensions of Spinozan speculation: When the seas dried, the primitive Fish left its associated milieu to explore land, “forced to stand on its two legs,” now carrying water only on the inside, in the amniotic membranes protecting the embryo. In one way or the other, the animal is more like a fleer than a fighter, but its flights are also conquests, creations. Territorialities, then, are shot through with lines of flight testifying to the presence within them of movements of

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deterritorialization and reterritorialization. In a certain sense, they are secondary. They would be nothing without these movements that deposit them. In short, the epistrata and parastrata are continually moving, sliding, shifting, and changing on the Ecumenon or unity of composition of a stratum; some are swept away by lines of flight and movements of deterritorialization; others by processes of decoding or drift, but they all communicate at the intersection of the milieus. The strata are continually being shaken by phenomena of cracking and rupture, either at the level of the substrata that furnish the materials (a prebiotic soup, a prechemical soup . . .), at the level of the accumulating epistrata, or at the level of the abutting parastrata: everywhere there arise simultaneous accelerations and blockages, comparative speeds, differences in deterritorialization creating relative fields of reterritorialization.24 What is most striking about the passage immediately above is the clear and dominant contours that the archaeology of knowledge and articulation assume, even displaced to a remotely pre-historical past. The passage describes an architecture of vertical strata, whose relation to space Deleuze/ Guattari will also characterize as “striated,” sustaining a horizontal outreach to the world already segmented through the selections of inclusion and exclusion. This oddly specific and arbitrary spatial configuration is also responsive and resilient to the contingencies of its surrounding environment. This “loose structure” for extracting sustenance from the world and assimilating knowledge is already in place under conditions of nomadic migration and Neolithic technology. Where Derrida discerns the work of infrastructural units of language such as the archi-trace at work in cultures even before they generate the vestiges of recognizable formal linguistic artifacts, Deleuze/ Guattari project the architecture of enduring loose-structural substrates. These persist into presumably “more civilized” formations, such as feudal hierarchy and constitutional monarchy: the flows, flights, deterritorializations and reterritorializations that they stage become an entrenched climate even while their epistemological construction and terminologies fluctuate over time. Human life sustains itself, prior to the emergence of “full-service” civilizations, through a flexibility and adaptability prevailing both under conditions of migration and settlement. The notion of an overarching pre-civilizational “Ecumenon,” such appointments to this assemblage as “parastrata” and “epistrata,” are odd and arbitrary in a calculated way. Their labored singularity performs for Deleuze/Guattari’s collaborative, improvisational discourse the full arbitrariness of a psychotic language, “word-salad,” the daunting unfamiliarity of l’art brut.25 This radical unfamiliarity extends to such of their other characteristic terms as “Bodies without Organs,” “lines of flight,” and the “War Machine.” In this fashion, Deleuze/Guattari impart to their readers

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the experience of the underside of such sedate Western values as reason, sanity, and integrity. The exaggerated vividness of an architecture whose existence can in no way be attested or documented endows its elements with a pronounced virtual dimension. We might well not recognize an assemblage, with or without parastrata and epistrata, or, for that matter, an Ecumenon, if we collided into one, but dwell within these constructions amid Deleuze/ Guattari’s represented universe we most certainly do. If Deleuze/Guattari situate the fourth chapter of their non-linear account of the evolution of still-contemporary Prevailing Operating Systems at an economic tripping-point, a crisis of value and worth rendering rational European economics impossible, they in no way proceed to a further material history of the twentieth century. At the level of a signifying regime, which is what their discourse invariably pursues, the rampant inflations of the 1920’s occasion both a crisis and several revolutions in linguistics, as the discourse is synthesized by the likes of Mikhail Bakhtin and Louis Hjelmslev. Modern linguistics becomes a cloud-chamber through which it is possible to discern the lineaments of the assemblage, an interconnected machinery of production that Marx situated in the factory but exploited by Deleuze/Guattari, in keeping with Marxian linguistics, for its signifying implications. Assemblages, particularly as Deleuze/Guattari literalize them, grant them diagrammatic credence, clamor toward a Virtual Reality: We are not suggesting evolutionism, we are not even doing history. Semiotic systems depend on assemblages, and it is the assemblages that determine that a given people, period, or language, and even a given style, fashion, pathology or miniscule event in a limited situation, can assure the predominance of one semiotic or another. We are trying to make maps of regimes of signs; we can turn them around or retain selected coordinates or dimensions, and depending on the case we will be dealing with a social formation, a pathological delusion (délire), a historical event. We will see this on another occasion when we deal with a dated social system, “courtly love,” and then switch to a private enterprise called “masochism.”26 The discursive function of “mapping,” what Deleuze/Guattari elsewhere term “monitoring the flows,” continues even after the lineaments of their project have undergone a discernible “linguistic turn.” The “extreme” architecture of assemblages houses the interactions and processes of signs just as it staged the deterritorializations and reterritorializations of nomadic prehistory. For Deleuze/Guattari, there is a direct follow-through from “regimes of signs” to regimes of power. The far end or drift of this mapping resembles nothing so much as the charts teachers of philosophy and theory take such

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pleasure in scrawling on a blackboard or projecting in PowerPoint. Even semiotically sensitive flow-charts draw us into a virtual environment: The signifying regime is not simply faced with the task of organizing into circles signs emitted from every direction; it must constantly assure the expansion of the circles or spiral, it must provide the center with more signifiers to overcome the entropy inherent in the system and to make new circles blossom or replenish the old. Thus a secondary mechanism in the service of significance is necessary: interpretance or interpretation. This time the signifier assumes a new figure: it is no longer the amorphous continuum that is given without being known and across which the network of signs is strung. A portion of the signified is made to correspond to a sign or group of signs for which that signified has been deemed suitable, thus making it knowable. To the syntagmatic axis of the sign referring to other signs is added a paradigmatic axis on which the sign, thus formalized, fashions for itself a suitable signified (once again, there is abstraction of the content, but in a new way). The interpretive priest, the seer, is one of the despot-god’s bureaucrats. A new aspect of deception arises, the deception of the priest: interpretation is carried to infinity and never encounters anything to interpret that is not already itself an interpretation. The signified constantly reimparts signifier, recharges it or produces more of it. The form always comes from the signifier.27 Redolent of Kafka’s “Parable of the Doorkeeper,” the passage immediately above situates the priest in the interpretative miasma that reigns in the oracular void between the “despot-god” and the community. The explicative function with which the priest is invested endows him with distinctive, perhaps excessive power. All the priest encounters in the telling betweenspace that he inhabits is “already an interpretation.” Deleuze/Guattari subsume their readers in a literal linguistic landscape: the oracle of proliferating interpretations arises, in language’s semantic dimension, at the junction of its syntagmatic and paradigmatic axes.

6. Movement and Melancholia. The most visceral and indispensable virtual window or clearing for healing that I could invoke is movement itself, particularly over and against the stasis ensuing from subjection to multiple gravity-sinks of rigidity, from thwarting, writ or delivered systematically. The history in which melancholy, for one condition, is inextricably bound up with inertia, with a seemingly irreversible break in momentum, is a particularly long and rich one.

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How ironic it may seem that one dramatic spinoff to this long and varied tradition of phlegmatic melancholic self-absorption, stasis, and run-on rumination, possibly to no good end, transpired in an animal laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania, where a researcher named Bernard Seligman produced depression in dogs by strategically imposing a lid on a wooden box between whose partitions the animals had been allowed to jump freely. The laboratory conditions of the experiment, the scientific protocols under which it was carried out, allowed of course for the conditions, both of the free circulation between wooden compartments and its withdrawal, to be carefully calibrated and monitored. The scientific presupposition of the project articulated itself in the following way: the rigors specifically built into the experiment-design would allow for a no less objective, methodical, and repeatable parsing and interpretation of the behavioral implications, including the temperamental or modal dimension, than the careful orchestration of the conditions under which free circulation between compartments was permitted and barred. The condition that the arbitrary foreclosure of initiative produced on the dogs was called “learned helplessness” (erlernte Hilflosigkeit). Seligman’s learned helplessness experiments achieved canonical status in the empirical literature of clinical psychology not only because of what they added to knowledge regarding the etiology, diagnosis, and treatment of one of the major spectrum-conditions under psychology’s purview. Their cult status, a major step toward the evolution of cognitive psychotherapies, it turns out, also arose because the clinical project affirmed the relevance and indeed indispensability of laboratory trials, above all, the principled acceptance or rejection of wisdom also available from non-experimental sources (e.g. clinical case-studies, intuition, philosophical speculation, data and analyses gathered under the aegis of the “soft” social sciences, notably social psychology and anthropology). In the language of laboratory experimentation, the “learned helplessness” findings confirmed what had been expressed over so many centuries in radically different textual displays: When an experimentally naïve dog receives an escape avoidance training in a shuttle box, it usually responds in this way: at the onset of the first traumatic electric shock, the dog runs frantically about until it accidentally scrambles over the barrier and escapes the shock. On the next trial, the dog, running and howling, crosses the barrier more quickly than before. Eventually, the dog learns to avoid shock altogether . . . In dramatic contrast to a native dog, a dog that has experienced uncontrollable shocks before avoidance training usually stops running and sits and lies, quietly whining, until shock terminates. The dog does not cross the barrier and escape from shock. Rather, it seems to give up resisting and to passively accept the

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shock. On succeeding trials, the dog continues to fail to make escape movements and it accepts as much shock as the experimenter chooses to give. Dogs that have first experienced inescapable shock demonstrate another particular characteristic. They occasionally jump the barrier early in training and escape, but then they revert to taking the shock; they appear to learn nothing by jumping the barrier and avoiding the shock. In naïve dogs a successful escape response is a reliable predicator of future successful escape responses.28 It is only too tempting for us ensconced in literature and the arts to dismiss the production of depression in another species of mammals, in an experimental environment, as everything that Swift was aiming at in his rendition of the British Academy in the third Book of Gulliver’s Travels: as what common sense and basic human recognition have taught us about melancholy, displaced to the quaint trappings of laboratories and the terminologies of science-babble. Nothing that we can glean from Seligman et al.’s recapitulation of the dogs’ experiences has not been stated more eloquently, and perhaps on a higher conceptual level than the memorable and habitually consulted avatars in this history of melancholy, from Theophrastus to Burton. A memorable recent addition to this list is Gregory Bateson,29 in his compelling account of familial and mental doublebinds. For those dogs entering the zone of unmotivated trauma with operative coping mechanisms, the pain and suffering will be occasional, and the transition back to more salutary conditions relatively smooth and unencumbered. Dogs systematically deprived of the means and strategies of avoidance will eventually relinquish, even if not at first, the disposition toward the pursuit of a pleasurable existence. The experimental protocols producing this narrative may at first seem overworked and labored to humanists; the advances in diagnosis, treatment, prevention, and community health that they then placed on a plane of objectivity surely do not. Transcribed to the human environment, what the researchers ascertained regarding post-traumatic dogs articulates itself as follows: We believe what . . . lies at the heart of depression is this: the depressed patient has learned or believes that he cannot control those elements of his life that relieve suffering or bring him gratification. In short, he believes that he is helpless. Consider a few of the common precipitating events of his life. What is the meaning of job failure or incompetence at school? Frequently it means that all of a person’s efforts have been in vain, his responses have failed to bring about the gratification he desires; he cannot find responses that control reinforcement. When a person is rejected by someone he loves, he can no longer control this significant source of

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gratification and support. When a parent or a lover dies, the bereaved person is powerless to produce or influence love from the dead person. Physical disease and growing old are obvious helplessness experiences. In these conditions, the person’s own responses are ineffective and he must rely on the care of others. So we would predict that it is not life events per se that produce depression, but uncontrollable life-events.30 Depression in these lines is the human twilight to the closed system rendered in laboratory materials for the dogs. It is the emotional climate that we would expect to ensue from the catastrophe orchestrated by Kleist in his “Earthquake in Chile.” It is a measure of Kleist’s perverse irony that for his protagonists’ sake, he can appropriate the sudden-onset melancholy ensuing from the disaster. He refits it into an improbable escape-hatch from their arbitrarily dead-end predicament. Gregor Samsa’s own particular transformation, from travelling salesman into “giant vermin,” preempts him from seeking out therapeutic intervention. But the only drift of his frenetic initial efforts to adapt and the negative reinforcement proceeding from all family members save his sister Grete is further toward “learned helplessness.” Traumatic catastrophes, the more devastating the better, make for the most vivid imaginative literature. In human terms, especially when all escape routes are barred, as in Bateson’s compelling account of the doublebind and its familial home, they spawn the full spectrum of depressive conditions. It is in the scene, kho¯ra, and the theatrical orchestra of melancholy and depression that the most compelling motive arises for tribute to Terpsichore, the muse of dance. Classical tragedy, even as the schematic blueprint of systematic closure at the deep strata of family kinship, and community, opens the scene where the elements of the tragedy receive their choreographic expression, where they move. Immoderate desire, obdurate taboo, power, memory, political affiliation and interest, revenge: all these find expression, in character, on the tragic stage, which registers the traces of their movement. Tragic catharsis, therefore, consists as much in the sheer dynamics of representational space as in the specific negotiations of nobility, trespass, necessity, and communal memory adjudicated by the play. The tragic stage becomes the template, the writing-block, for the movement that literature choreographs, in prose as well as poetry, wherever it prevails. The open-ended poetic screen that Stéphane Mallarmé devised for lyrical expression as lateCapitalism and its technologies dawned, a display that could be folded in several directions and could be made to mirror itself, as well as the dancepatterns that Samuel Beckett staged in his video productions, are merely the limit-cases to the movement that literature invariably initiates and sustains, even where its subject-matter veers into the systematic blind-alleys conducive to “learned helplessness.”

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Embedded into literature’s secret treasury of cultural resources, then, is a gymnasium, a dimension of physical expenditure and exercise. Through no small measure of this exertion, literature moves language, in processes of improvisation and synthesis, through a virtual panorama of difference. When it comes to the recourse and deliverance negotiable through inscription itself, articulation and difference count far more than roller-coaster rides or polevaults. Writing is the thoughtfully emergent manifold or screen of difference. Différance looks promising from the melancholic slough of “learned helplessness.” Writing’s compositional specifications vary from one scene and display of cultural improvisation and exegesis to the next. The movement it initiates varies in pace, rhythm, intensity, acceleration, suppleness, and continuity—from one language and medium of cultural intervention to the next. It is by no means a fruitless or trivial exercise to formulate, as precisely as possible, what movement mobilizes and signifies to the respective screens of cultural inscription, within which it plays or opens play—to painting, say, or the deliberate composition of prose or poetry, or within the framework of drama and cinema. Of writing in general I would say that it constantly demands the coordination between two registers of movement: the horizontal addition of words and the vertical (a) negotiation of preexistent grammatical and syntactic structures; and (b) a search-function for needed signifiers fluctuating between memorystores arrayed at different depths. Definitively checking effortless fluidity in either its horizontal or vertical ranges of movement, writing, under these conditions, staggers forward. Under optimal conditions of relaxation and attentiveness, it may be said to dance, but never effortlessly. Any palliation emerging in the course of cultural composition arises from positive reinforcement in the feedback loop between the compositional search for words, also their felicitous arrangement, and the tentative, emergent worked object. Within the limits of sustainability, the more deliberate and absorbing the compositional session, and the more apt and fluent the emergent text or display, the greater the healing-effect the process can deliver. Nothing, to be sure, is more whimsical and subjective than the writer’s assessment of the composition process’s emergent felicity; but then again, a text is in process of its appearance on whichever tablet or screen is in play. Against this text the writer measures the design and expression parameters with which they initiated the compositional process. Writing is, then, the impossible choreography between grammatical and syntactic structures and constraints and semantic possibility. As fitful as any overall movement internal to its process and along its overall arc may be, this dynamic, with its irreversible movement, invariably feels better than “learned helplessness.” It is replete with regenerative power, if we can wean ourselves from banking on restorative wholeness or full restitution. What we may well

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regenerate, if we can break our various inertias and move, above all, along the panorama of annotation and composition, is mutations, hydra-heads, “probeheads.” It is an aria of exhortation, a rallying cry to resume motion at any cost, a movement foreclosed in various fashions, along the lateral passageways of semiosis, polysemy, and homonymy, that mathematics sings, in full-throated resonance, to the altar-boys/girls of culture, when the latter have been reduced to ineffectiveness through their archival and institutional scruples. The expanding thresholds of mathematics are arranged in steps, it is true, but the defile that these breakthroughs assume is by no means linear when mathematics is on task, working through relations that are meaningful. It is the devil’s pact that mathematics has closed with movement per se that enables me to implicate Zen ko¯ans, as we shall see, with an irreducible mathematical dimension. Poetry as well pays considerable taxes and impots along the horizontal axis of its articulatory baseline, its grounding in grammar and logic. But then, “Buddhist monk or terrorist?” that it is, poetry disguises the time-bomb that it is carrying, the visual resources and tricks that it has enlisted. When I am synthesizing a poem, certain of the continuities or consequential constraints entering my discursive prose under the formats of grammar and syntax are waived or suspended by the visual resources intrinsic to poetic space. It is these visual features that assure poetic stuff a palpable dimension of virtuality. Specific aesthetic criteria apply to my poem both as a visual artifact and as a semantic composition. The aesthetics of composition is the dynamic zone or kho¯ra where the non-linearity common to poems, Zen ko¯ans, and inventive mathematics proffer limited healing and recourse to discourse rendered immobile by the erosion to its very grooves. To return, though, to my unabated and hence symptomatic fascination with Kandinsky’s painting, no small measure of the uplift it affords me emanates from the movement it initiates within its framework, an open range of possibility (in scanning, possibility, pleasure) that it transfers over to me. In view of the systematic rationales for his practice that Kandinsky proffered in On the Spiritual in Art, odd though it may seem, it is to mathematics and Zen meditation on ko¯ans that I turn as particularly telling instances of movement as a healing initiative in cultural inscription. And if I appeal to mathematics in this demonstration, it is as one who, back in the day of primary learning, was utterly daunted and humiliated by its unforgiving demand for linear attentiveness. The mathematics with which I have made my peace as a failed acolyte is the expanding matrix of possibility whose experience can be conveyed either by a master-narrator (Jorge Luis Borges) or even by an enlightened physicist and computer scientist (Douglas R. Hofstadter). As we have had occasion to observe, the latter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid succeeds, on purely literary and theoretical grounds if on no others, as one of the consummate works of interdisciplinarity and

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intertextuality of the twentieth century. Hofstadter’s strategically meandering narrative betrays the meticulous planning of a master-teacher; also an uncanny instinct for revelatory examples, woven in their full complexity into the braid. Building up with linear meticulousness the logical and numerical steps accounting for cybernetic architecture as processing, Hofstadter nonetheless choreographs, in a constant feedback loop, three simultaneous and mutually referential panoramas for scientific discovery and improvisation: mathematics’ unavoidable recursion to doublebinds (Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem), variation and fugue in music (Bach), and “impossible” figuration in graphic art (Escher). The dance between these seemingly inimical fields is as breathtaking as the pedagogical virtuosity by which Hofstadter can “make sense” of computers and the mathematics, physics, and engineering out of which they arise. Hofstadter’s master-introduction to Computer Science slowly unfolds through sequentially arranged “lessons,” elaborated in discursive prose, in which he takes leave, as the occasion demands, to segue in crablike fashion over to Gödel, Escher, or Bach, or to any of the subsidiary interests their inventions implicate. These core-lessons in mathematical and scientific thinking fluctuate, systematically in fact, with fanciful dialogues, after the manner of Lewis Carroll’s fiction, in which such characters as Achilles, the Tortoise, and the Crab invoke a common set of terms and cultural materials as they dramatize alternate explanations to the by no means intuitive account of computers, their functions, and their correlatives. I will let the sentences immediately above stand as my “first take” on Gödel, Escher, Bach except to add that at crucial transitional moments in this book, Hofstadter invokes Zen culture and ko¯ans as instances of a radically discontinuous thinking that is nevertheless completely at home in the stringing and chunking that computers must customarily perform; in the non-linear leaps between levels of processing that is a basic feature of their architecture and capability. “Ko¯ans are supposed to be ’triggers’ which, though they do not contain enough information in themselves to import enlightenment, may possibly be sufficient to unlock the mechanisms inside one’s mind that lead to enlightenment.”31 In this sentence, Zen ko¯ans help Hofstadter reference a function in a computer that may trigger a higher level of processing while not itself encompassing or embodying that higher level. The sentence occurs at the head of a chapter that has been prefaced by “A Mu Offering,” a Carrollian dialogue in which the “Tortoise and Achilles have just been to hear a lecture on the origins of the Genetic Code, and are now drinking some tea at Achilles’ home.”32 “Mu” is an exclamation uttered in Zen practice to invoke and perform the nothingness in all things on whose apprehension and experience enlightenment is contingent; and Hofstadter has invoked it early on in the elucidation of computers’ mathematical skeleton in his “MIU-system,” a numerical stringing process indicating the

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complexity of the rules necessary for deriving the string MU alone from the set of quantities MIU. It is with a stunning lightheartedness that Hofstadter can attribute the constructed arbitrariness of mathematical rules, ones that could prefigure unexpected discoveries, to the MU serving as the bottom-line (or LCD) of Buddhist mindfulness. I am arguing here that there is something of a progression both within and between Kandinsky’s paintings that is strongly redolent of the movement that becomes possible in such cultural manifestations as mathematics and Zen meditation. In the odd couple constituted by Zen and mathematics, as in that literature remaining resiliently memorable, there is movement along a linear axial until something completely unexpected, irrational, revelatory, and radically expansive occurs, an opening whose happening has somehow been, genetically, alphabetically, coded and embedded in the linear steps all along.

7. Zen Annotation. The briefest of bookmarks to reiterate that the ko¯ans, compiled in such collections as Mumonkan and Hekiganroku are arranged in a progressive order—one simulating the movement toward realization or enlightenment which is the aim of the composite aesthetic and politicaltheological complex of which they comprise part. In their arrangement itself, there is an embedded movement or progression, but in no way a logical or linear one. It is a fundament of Zen discipline that the cues and encounters most material to enlightenment may well emanate from the most peripheral outlying areas of thought and purpose. In this sense, the untoward steps by which the Mumonkan, say, leads toward its end, is a performance of, an allegory, in Walter Benjamin’s sense of the early-modern Trauerspiel tradition in European drama, of what we would now call higher-level processing or thought. In preemptive fashion, the overall movement between ko¯ans performs its very end or culmination—a facility for improvisational thinking grounded in discontinuous logic, tenuous inferences, and wild associative leaps. Not only do the ko¯ans consistently import and activate stunning poetic freshness of figuration into their reduced scale and minimal stage-trappings; the time-lag between their logico-semantic drift, import, or meaning and their performative thrust, the virtual illustration that they deliver, is non-existent, or at least radically curtailed. It is surely this speed and parsimony of feedback— within an overall architecture of astonishing, historically momentous insight that inspires Hofstadter to wire the ko¯ans within his “eternal golden braid.” This is, generally speaking, the celebration of intelligence and complexity and the capacity for synthetic and by no means intuitive thought-processes that meander, indirectly but smoothly, in and out, in a short-circuit of ongoing

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mutual interactivity, between the traditional scenes of writing for scientific, logical, graphic, musical, and poetic inscription. It is, then, a particular possibility for motion in the generation of différance that we can trace in the progression from one ko¯an to the next, between all ko¯ans. It is on nothing less than a daunting level of Zen-sensibility (or Zensibility) that the Mumonkan sets off: to an unspecified monk’s query as to whether Buddha-nature extends to dogs, Jo¯shu¯ interjects the Mu-syllable, a shifter in the direction of the emptiness underlying all Being in Zen philosophy. Often the final syllable in communal chanting, “Mu” is accentuated by a collective exhalation. The collapse of the lungs after such a concerted, voluntary outward breath corporeally illustrates “Mu.” One could well argue that the very first ko¯an in the Mumonkan cycle is in fact the last. There is no question more fundamental and far-reaching than whether the Buddha-nature, whose discovery is the ultimate task of Buddhist meditation and practice, extends to “sentient beings” other than humans. This is, rather, a mystery that would be opened, if at all, to a Zen-practitioner as the culmination of a lifetime in practice, not as the base position or first stone in a game of Go¯. Mumon lulls us into a state of false confidence, alone capable of derailing our meditative aspirations, by placing the ultimate mystery in the position of ko¯an #1. Its acceptable answer will under no circumstances be achieved by a neophyte. Formally, however, this ko¯an is the most elementary one possible: it is in the form of a simple question. Although it involves fictive surrogates, Jo¯shu¯ and his fellow monk and unidentified interrogator, any narrative complexity or action that the ko¯an could initiate is nipped in the bud. As a unit of narration and elocution, “Jo¯shu¯’s ‘Mu”’ is truly the most elementary, clipped, and parsimonious one that could possibly be formulated. In this sense alone, all the narratives of striving, questioning, encounter, thwarting, mastery, and enlightenment orchestrated in the other ko¯ans are indeed advances, elaborations, and ramifications “beyond” it. It is only within the framework of aesthetic and indeed literary sensibilities that “Jo¯shu¯’s “Mu”’ can be placed at the head of the Mumonkan. It should be noted that the core text of each ko¯an, the situation-based anomaly or discovery both registering and prompting what we would now call cognitive (or mathematical) “popping,” is indeed the tersely worded enigma that the ko¯ans are known to be. Yet Mumon, compiler and editor of the Mumonkan, saw fit to supply the text of every ko¯an with a commentary in the form of a lyric poem even terser and more enigmatic, if that were possible, than the narrative vignette in which each emergent enigma is choreographed. The irony of this “explanatory” lyric (its poetic format is already suspicious) is that it is just as sublimely arbitrary and mysterious as the situation that provoked it. Many editions of the ko¯ans supply supplemental notes, to Mumon’s lyrics as to the stories themselves, thus transforming each “unit”

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into a scene of interpretation replete with an “ur-text,” a “canonical” exegesis, and “hypertext” in the form of footnotes. The canon of structured but nonlinear meditations known as the ko¯ans sets out as the embodiment and illustration of emptiness underlying all knowledge and social systems; it quickly eventuates, however, into an expansive generator of textual and exegetical possibility. The ko¯ans are themselves fated to reside on the “jewelhinged jaw”33 between austere parsimony and exhilarating expansive movement. This double-agency in processes of stark miniaturization and sublime multiplication is precisely what draws Hofstadter to the coreachievements in mathematics and physics that find instantiation in the bodies and circuitry of modern computers. Zen meditation and practice becomes, in the purview of Gödel, Escher, Bach, another receptive scene of inscription and cultural production indelibly scored by the “eternal golden braid.” It does not take many of the other ko¯ans in the Mumonkan to illustrate the possibilities for complexity and enlargement beyond the base-position established in “Jo¯shu¯’s ‘Mu.” Because Hofstadter selected his illustrations for Gödel, Escher, Bach with exquisite pedagogical acuity, I will stick in my own build-out of this progression (and movement) with examples that he happened to deploy. But a host of Mumon’s other ko¯ans would serve this purpose just as well. The narrative and communicative accouterments to an allegory of enlightenment as non-linear realization have already reached a prodigious level of complexity by the third ko¯an in the Mumonkan, “Gutei Raises a Finger”: Whenever Gutei Osho¯ was asked about Zen, he simply raised his finger. Once a visitor asked Gutei’s boy attendant, “What does your master teach?” The boy too raised his finger. Hearing of this, Gutei cut off the boy’s finger with a knife. The boy, screaming with pain, began to run away. Gutei called to him, and when he turned around, Gutei raised his finger. The boy suddenly became enlightened. When Gutei was about to pass away, he said to his assembled monks, “I obtained a one-finger Zen from Tenryu¯ and used it all my life but still did not exhaust it.” When he had finished saying this, he entered into eternal Nirvana.34 This ko¯an and everything that it implicates, turns on the sublime riddle: what could “one-finger Zen” be; how could it persist in its inexhaustibility, even in the hands of an acknowledged master? The coincidence in this vignette of two sub-narratives, concerning the teacher and his pupil and the deathscene at which his lifetime wisdom can be displayed and tested, adds all the complexity needed to frame the enigma of pointing fingers, the lessons they indicate, and the difference between tangible and absent (“explicit” and “implicit”) ones. On the one hand, the ko¯an acknowledges that at least to one

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master, all the Zen necessary for eternal enlightenment could be reducible to an act and sign (the finger) of pure indication, indication devoid of content and direction, signals, intimation—gesticulation for its own sake. This is what a master could possibly know, but never his juvenile retainer. When the boy attendant presumes to mimic Gutei’s wisdom, but without an inkling of understanding, having never processed it, the master deprives the pupil of the offending digit. Painful and austere punishment, but the loss of the appendage is not life-threatening. Since the full wisdom of “one-finger Zen” inheres in the gesture of indication itself, a speech-act of “pure” indication, the adherent is amply rewarded for this severe discipline in the exchange: loss of finger/ sudden enlightenment. What has been transacted when the master shows his finger to the pupil, the pupil whose corresponding digit has been cut off is, precisely, the transmission of “one-finger Zen.” What is most recognizably “ko¯an-like” in this meditative stepping-stone is the extreme compression enacted by the coincidence between the reduction (or consolidation) in the boy’s instrumental digits, and the precipitous, vast augmentation in processing capability signaled by sudden enlightenment. From a Western perspective, we may be tempted to import all the dialectics (and sexual, familial baggage) triggered by Freudian castration into the reception of this scene. Far more relevant here, it seems, both in terms of Zen philosophy and the systems theory underlying cybernetic technology, is the way that the terrain of relation and relationality itself is mobilized by the figure of the teaching-finger (or the corporeal embodiment of the teacher’s pointer). This has a lot to do, I think, with Hofstadter’s most productive soldering of Zen into the circuitry of “the eternal golden braid.” “Gutei Raises a Finger” is, then, digital in multiple senses of the word, whether the incriminating finger happens to be absent or present. Its “way” (or drift) points in the direction of enlightenment, among other things, as an apprehension of “pure” relationality, unfettered by baggage from multiple existential domains, which is a dominant feature of digital organization and operation. Surely the possession of a finger is a characteristic deeply rooted in the world of analog relations: there is an implicit “one-on-one” between my sense or interest and what I am pointing to. But the way of enlightenment intimated by “Gutei Raises a Finger” is toward the pure relationality that Anthony Wilden, already in 1972, perhaps with greater lucidity than anyone else, recognized as a telling feature of the rapidly emerging regime of digital communications and information: The analog computer is an icon or an image of something “real,” whereas the digital computer’s relation to “reality” is rudimentarily similar to language itself . . . The analog is pregnant with MEANING whereas the digital domain of signification is, relatively speaking, somewhat barren. It is

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almost impossible to translate the rich semantics of the analog into any digital form for communication to another organism . . . The digital, on the other hand, because it is concerned with boundaries and because it depends upon arbitrary combination, has all the syntax to be precise and be entirely unambiguous. Thus what the analog gains in semantics it loses in syntactics, and what the digital gains in syntactics it loses in semantics. Thus it is that because the analog does not possess the syntax necessary to say “No” or to say anything involving “not,” one can REFUSE or REJECT in the analog, but one cannot DENY or NEGATE.35 Enlightenment, in terms of “Gutei Raises a Finger,” is nothing less than “popping” out of the analog, but in no definitive way. If Gutei’s young assistant achieves instantaneous enlightenment upon Gutei’s displaying the finger that the boy no longer possesses, this may be understood, among other possibilities as an opening up to him of the domain of digital relationality. Backed by Gutei’s coming to terms with “one-finger Zen,” the finger that he points toward his pupil is a digital digit. It alone is the transition between analog naming, comparison, mapping, division, and distribution, and digital synthesis and programming. We mustn’t forget that Mumon applies his own exegetical “body English” to the ko¯an in the form of the lyrical amendment that he appends to it. We should also bear in mind that a Buddhist monk, directing interpretation’s traffic flow, is no less susceptible than the rest of us, to injecting his own values. What Mumon stresses in his lyrical follow-up to the “case” is how Gutei, by means of his very least concerted digital gesture, one-ups his master, Tenryu¯, in the precipitous chasm that he cleaves through worldly banality. Gutei made a fool of old Tenryu¯, Emancipating the boy with a single slice, Just as Kyorei cleaved Mount Kasan To let the Yellow River run through.36 Enlightenment, the free-flowing feedback loop between the analog and digital, is nothing less than an indispensable force of nature. Buddhist practice is the mindful demolition restoring the freedom of the flow. In its pronounced nonviolence “one-finger Zen” activates the force that will allow water to master earth, the Yellow River to truncate Mount Kasan. A minimal work of narrative art, “Gutei Raises a Finger” activates a full range of motifs and scales of articulation calling out for further elaboration. Among these are surely: mind (enlightenment)/body (finger), mastery/ ignorance, mental force (meditation)/physical force, age/youth, death/life, enlightenment/logic, digital/analog. Such complexity stands to be scored

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along these continuums that the results of the deliberation can only be inconsequential—in terms of instrumental standards or action-language. If we take this “case” or ko¯an as a single flagstone in a Japanese garden of meditation, progressing “beyond” it would not so much involve a definitive proof or inference as much as a sideways step to a neighboring narrative environment in which parallel dynamics achieve different weightings, emphases, and outcomes. The meditation or movement is anything but progressive; it sets out, rather, in a philosophical milieu in which the direct application of torque is doomed to inconsequentiality. Each ko¯an, then, by dint of its multiple resonances, leads to an unlimited set of other ko¯ans, indeed, to ones that may not yet have been devised. It is only in this sense that we can turn to Case 5, “Kyo¯gen’s ’Man up in a Tree”’ as an ex-tension of “Gutei Raises a Finger”: Kyo¯gen Osho¯ said, “It is like a man up in a tree hanging from a branch with his mouth; his hands clasp no bough, his feet rest on no limb. Someone appears under the tree and asks him, “What is the meaning of Bodhidharma’s coming from the West?” If he does not answer, he fails to respond to the question. If he does answer, he will lose his life. What would you do in such a situation?37 As opposed to “Gutei Raises a Finger,” whose sudden and unanticipated realization is a matter of delight, even if accompanied by pointed physical suffering, this ko¯an leads right into the heart of a dead-end. In this respect, the ko¯an has much in common with “Ganto’s Ax,” a text Hofstadter makes much of. The tree-man’s choice, between dying in observance of his meditative practice and in effect “killing” his practice (at least putting it on serious hold), is the “doublebind” situation whose elaboration by Gregory Bateson shed such illumination on the mental world of schizos, substance-abusers, and the impacted family systems that produce such outcroppings. The discourse of deconstruction will come up with a term perhaps more philosophically respectable, “aporia,” for this kind of a situation. The cleaner term from the Greek enacts deconstruction’s overall turn toward the etymological subtext and network self-sufficient in itself for programming social possibility and outcomes; a vector leaving tangible actors, historical circumstances, and the metaphysically grounded constructs prevalent in philosophy and the social sciences behind. This divestiture of circumstantial factors in theoretical elaboration is a paradigmatic digital posture. The aftermath of the particular “step” taken by “Kyo¯gen’s ‘Man up in a Tree’” in the Japanese garden is to imprison its taker in the starkest impasse, one whose only “escape” is enlightenment itself, an enlightenment, as we already know, that can ensue only from the offhand gesture, a chance misstep, the

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most random and minor detail on which the dream, according to Freud, pivots, the Lacanian “objet petit a.” It is no accident that the incriminating question in this “case” mobilizes the unboundedness of a directional coordinate, the West. From a Japanese perspective, it is indeed out of the West, India, that Buddhist philosophy first made its sweep, in the eighth and ninth centuries, via China. It is within a ko¯an’s capability to sharply curtail motion, action, and consequence, even while contributing to the cognitive stretching, limbering, and de-contracting that is the ongoing thrust of meditation. Interestingly, the supplemental “Comment” and “Verse” by Mumon can only reiterate the doublebind into whose crux the ko¯an leads us. “Mumon’s Comment” tells us that figuring the tree-man’s predicament out will be tantamount to giving “life to the way that has been dead until this moment and destroy the way that has been alive up to now.” If meditative practice can for some reason not come up with the vivifying insight, it will be necessary to await the Maitreya Buddha for a resolution to the quandary. “Mumon’s Verse,” though, can only castigate Kyo¯gen for foisting on Zen an irredeemably deadly meditation. Both as narrative engines and as cognitive maps, in their reduced scale and minimal accouterments, the ko¯ans open vast domains of meditative possibility; in their poetic compression, they clear away morasses of thematic and logical obstruction. They slide jarringly, but also tellingly, into one another. Their interaction produces change both along the vertical axis, in sudden “pops” and leaps in higher-level processing capability; but also along the horizontal panorama of “chunking,” permutation, and combination—of theme, parameter, and scale of discrimination. Any composite “map” to the ko¯ans would be a rhizomatic affair, careening randomly and even dramatically from one sector to the next, in one geographical coordinate or another, but moving incessantly.

8. It is to Hofstadter’s enormous credit, in such a work as Gödel, Escher, Bach, that he was not only capable of isolating, explicating, and orchestrating the underlying processes of structural fabulation, coding, programming, and replication common to a bewildering array of scientific and cultural breakthroughs: among these, Baroque fugues and canons, two-dimensional graphics, as practiced by Escher, with “impossible” three-dimensional features, fanciful literary embroideries on mathematical concepts, such as Lewis Carroll placed in the mouths of his characters, the conceptual steps and transpositions that enabled Watson, Crick, and their colleagues to “break” the genetic code. To these must surely be added the mathematical representation of bubbles and other anomalies in the domain of numbers that were ultimately

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to translate into cybernetic capacities for leapfrogging back and forth between different levels of generality, languages, and operating systems. Not only could Hofstadter penetrate the particularity of the inventions and transpositions necessary for the signature crystallizations in these fields; he fashioned the resonant feedback loop, or, if you will, the cognitive DNA, allowing these syntheses and advances in very different fields, scored in different typefaces on very different pages or screens, to be, if not exactly perfectly continuous with one another, to engage in productive mutual conversation by means of shared tropes, figures, and dynamics. Such vibrant synthesis did not take place in splendid isolation from the boisterous world of the political developments, trends, fads, and technology of the 1970’s and 1980’s, which is when Hofstadter did much of the work reflected in his breakthrough volume. It is further indication of the exuberance and resilience of Hofstadter’s mind that he made inventive use of such cultural aberrations of the moment as the widespread fascination with stereo equipment, Eastern philosophy, and endless board games, whether of chess or Go¯. The transition in Gödel, Escher, Bach away from a phonographic metaphor for reproduction, coding, error, and non-linear leaps to new levels of processing that he has carefully nursed since the outset of the book and toward the image of the tape-recorder marks, in fact, a major transition in the work. Zen ko¯ans, as suggested above, not only furnish Hofstadter with an instance of non-linear, non-dualistic thinking and the sudden translation of horizontal progress into “higher-level” realization: they are an interstitial processing, quantifiable on one flank (“From Mumon to the MU-puzzle”), but also communicating directly with the most cogent crystallizations that literature and philosophy, East and West, have managed to come up with. Our debt to Hofstadter is monumental for the lucidity and sanity, already at the outset of the cybernetic age, that he contributed in the medium of his panoramic view of: (1) the decisive centrality of the underlying codes and languages of science and of the communications between them, and (2) his activation of the transcriptions between them already constituting the very possibility for the emergent interactive technologies and disciplines. So inventive are the textual features that he installed into Gödel, Escher, Bach, among them an ongoing alternation and “dialogue” between more-or-less didactic “lessons” leading to an understanding of contemporary Computer Science and its mathematical, logical, systematic, architectural, and aesthetic components, and the fanciful fictive encounters, à la Lewis Carroll, “illustrating” the most salient principles and points, that the work warrants a full-fledged literary analysis of its own. I’ll do my best to supply this, however fragmentarily, in the following pages. But in addressing the edifying aspects of this book, the ways in which it fortified its readers, when it first appeared and now, for a tsunami of changes emerging not only in the informational and communicative

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spheres but in social relations, professional life, and even in customary cognitive processing, we’ll first be considering the potentials and modalities for movement built into it. The “moving parts” I am speaking of are not merely a vital component of a print-medium textbook or primer, but with key autopoietic and interactive features. The movement that Hofstadter launches and marshals to multiple effects in this work is in itself a rejoinder to the melancholic “learned helplessness” that an age first deploying multiple new technologies, each intimidating in its complexity and with side-effects just as daunting, could well engender. I am arguing here that fanciful and inventive movement, such as Hofstadter has harnessed from fields including number, logic, music, graphics, Zen, and engineering, is itself redress and recompense in the face of increasingly expansive, encompassing, intrusive, and extractive systematic architectures. Within the framework of Gödel, Escher, Bach, “movement” is by no means a generic noun. It extends itself, at different tempos and intensities, into different directions and parameters. Hofstadter’s culminating his vertically arranged “lessons” with the whimsical exchanges between such characters as Tortoise, Achilles, Crab, and Anteater are instances of digressions of the most lateral sort. But then, recursive reciprocity and annexation characterize the “braiding” that Hofstadter weaves between unexpectedly divergent “scenes” of cultural inscription, the different programs eventuating in Bach’s fugues, Escher’s engravings, DNA, and Gödel’s theorems. The book as a whole moves forward in an overarching cumulative elucidation and reconciliation with complexity. The complexity itself divides down into parallel tracks: complexity in logic, transcription, processing, systematic architecture, technologies. But surrounding and between each forward step in all these spheres are interruptions, side- and missteps, conundrums, anomalies, distractions. In dragging his readers along through such a varied and unpredictable range of motions, many abrupt and discontinuous, Hofstadter teaches them how tonic it can be to persist and evolve as a moving target. A notable taking-off point for the work’s relentless, polymorphous motion is the plasticity that Hofstadter ascribes to intelligence itself. Among the de facto “rules of intelligence” that Hofstadter posits are the abilities “to respond to situations very flexibly,” “to make sense out of ambiguous or contradictory messages,” and “to synthesize new concepts by taking old concepts and putting them together in new ways.”38 Chief among the intelligent attributes that he dwells on is the processing of rules in general: What sorts of “rules” could possibly capture all of what we think of as intelligent behavior, however? Certainly there must be rules on all sorts of different levels. There must be many “just plain” rules. There must be “metarules” to modify the “just plain” rules; then “metametarules” to

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modify the metarules, and so on. The flexibility of intelligence comes from the enormous number of different rules, and levels of rules. The reason that so many on so many levels must exist is that in life, a creature is faced with millions of situations of many different types . . . Some situations are mixtures of stereotyped situations—thus they require rules for deciding which of the “just plain” rules to apply. Some situations cannot be classified—thus there must exist rules for inventing new rules . . . Strange Loops involving rules that change themselves, directly or indirectly, are at the core of intelligence. Sometimes the complexity of our minds seems so overwhelming that one feels that there can be no solution to the problem of understanding intelligence.39 Among the most endearing of many of Gödel, Escher, Bach’s performancefeatures is its ongoing celebration of human intelligence and its non-species specific outcroppings. In significant respects, Gödel, Escher, Bach is an extended hymn to the blessings and remaining potentials of intelligence. It is no exaggeration to say that intelligence is the prima mobile of the work; that it articulates and diversifies itself on many different levels, assuming formats and processes no less specialized and diverse. Not only does intelligence address an astonishingly broad set of challenges and limits, often determining the degree of satisfaction and felicity in any historicoepistemological configuration that will be achieved. Its preeminent characteristic as outlined in the citation immediately above, is maintaining its flexibility in the processing of a bewilderingly daunting manifold of rules, rules whose interactions—mutual attenuation, or exacerbation, or suspension—are often more daunting than their specific strictures. It could well be argued that the trajectory of Gödel, Escher, Bach is to track the vicissitudes and transformations of intelligence as it addresses major conundrums in a range of sciences and arts, tackles technological challenges in different spheres (sound-reproduction, cybernetics), and accommodates itself to unprecedented media. Hofstadter, in a fashion that Kant would not repudiate, declares intelligence a faculty of rules. The facility and flex that intelligence maintains in relation to rules, in the passage immediately above, is figured logically: intelligence generates the metarules (rules of rules) that investigation and orderly thinking demand; it can keep the levels of generalization (or programmatic power) distinct from one another. Reminiscent of Geist’s astonishing acceleration in “Force and Understanding,” the third chapter of Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Spirit, intelligence maintains its equilibrium and capacity for unexpected problem-resolution even as the lift in operational levels (the generation of metametarules) indicates no end in sight. It cannot be said, however, that the logical escalation that Hofstadter attributes to intelligence is particularly

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dynamic: it “comes from the enormous number of different rules, and levels of rules.” Already intelligence, just a few lines below the close of the above citation, figuratively demonstrates that it is physical as well as progressive; boisterous as well as orderly. Intelligence evolves in these lines into an operative capacity very much at home in the architecture of contemporary computers, in the wild transpositions of structure and information mobilized by DNA and its genetic coding. Thus we are left with two basic problems in the unraveling of thought processes, as they take place in the brain. One is to explain how the lowlevel traffic of neuron firings gives rise to the high-level traffic of symbol activation in its own terms—to make a theory which does not talk about the low-level neural events. If this is possible—and it is a key assumption at the basis of all present research into Artificial Intelligence—then intelligence can be realized in other types of hardware than brains. Then intelligence will have been shown to be a property that can be “lifted” right out of the hardware in which it resides—or, in other words, intelligence will be a software property.40 Symbolic processes remain hostage to neural “firings.” Intelligence, as it morphs from hardware to software, a most inventive suggestion on Hofstadter’s part to the effect that it ceases being the attribute or “property” of a subject or species and becomes, rather, a utility of processing (or “program” itself),41 becomes more dynamic in a physical sense. In the course of Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hofstadter assembles and coordinates a vast series of breakthroughs and applications whose preeminent characteristics include nonlinear progressions and sudden transformations of quantitative accumulation into qualitative rupture. Among the dynamics that Hofstadter elaborates in order to figure this abrupt movement that is crucial to intelligence and the breakthroughs that it makes possible are the sublime reciprocities of isomorphism and abrupt accretions in processing power made possible by the “strange” loops of self-reference. Such picturesque disruptions as “pushing,” “popping,” and “chunking” are not limited processing on the part of cybernetic machines. They also characterize operations underlying, prevalent within a vast range of human achievements including Gödel’s mathematical theorems, Bach’s canons, Escher’s “impossible” graphics, and the information-transfer responsible as much for the behavior of ant colonies as for genetic replication. As we have seen, this ability to dislodge stasis, melancholy, or sedateness into spirited motion is the secret logic networking if not sequentially harnessing the Zen ko¯ans. Intelligence, a generation and processing of rules broad enough to incorporate complexity, undecidability, incompletion, and self-reference, is the ultimate format for the sudden and discontinuous movement that is

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tantamount to responsiveness itself, whether at the level of the individual, the species, or the system. Conceptually breathtaking though its products may be, intelligence moves in physical ways. In the preceding example [the case of a telephone conversation interrupted by endless incoming calls], I have introduced some basic terminology of recursion—at least as seen through the eyes of computer scientists. The terms are push, pop, and stack (or push-down stack, to be precise) and they are all related. They were introduced in the late 1950’s as part of IPL, one of the first languages for Artificial Intelligence . . . To push means to suspend operations on the task you’re currently working on, without forgetting where you are—and to take up a new task. The new task is usually said to be “on a lower level” than the earlier task. To pop is the reverse—it means to close operations on one level and to resume operations where you left off, one level higher. But how do you remember exactly where you were on each different level? The answer is, you store the information in a stack. So a stack is just a table telling you such things as 1) where you were in each unfinished task (jargon: the “return address”), where the relevant facts to know were at the points of interruption (jargon: the “variable bindings”). When you pop back up to resume some task, it is the stack which restores your context . . . By the way, the terms “push,” “pop,” and “stack” all come from the visual image of cafeteria trays in a stack. There is usually some sort of spring underneath, which tends to keep the topmost tray at a constant height, more or less. So when you push a tray onto a stack, it sinks a little— and when you remove a tray from the stack, the stack pops up a little.42 This is the crucial moment in the evolution and consolidation of a vivid action-language in Gödel, Escher, Bach. It is indicative of Hofstadter’s gift both to “see” and couch complex, open-ended interactions both in their concrete elements and processes and in their most abstruse projections and implications. Given the multiple levels of rules that Hofstadter has to hold together in seeing (and writing), say, the sequential architecture of computers and the informational transpositions underlying genetic replication, the passage immediately above is a vivid instance of what he means by intelligence. In it, he illustrates the “pushing, popping, and chunking” that are the core operations in computer operating systems by means of the spring-mechanism that he encounters in the unadorned cafeteria where he takes his midday meal. We shall see, not too many paragraphs ahead, that the highly suggestive fusion of runaway abstraction with concrete mechanics and its components, a gravitation for which Kafka’s fiction, in particular, is famed, is itself grounded, throughout Gödel, Escher, Bach, at the level of linguistic coding.

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It is precisely at this juncture that an uncanny parallelism between the two signature intellectual inquiries of our age intercedes in our discussion. What Hofstadter manages to isolate, in the number theory of Kurt Gödel, if nothing else, is a purely mathematical basis for the organizations (isomorphism, recursion) and processes (looping, “quining”) allowing for cybernetic programs, as patterned strings of numbers, to become operational, to switch from mere articulation and elaboration into process or action. Precisely over the same years, Jacques Derrida places his remarkable senses of linguistic derivation and resonance and his uncanny instinct for conceptual homology at the service of a contingent, trope-oriented critique applicable across the full palette of textual media and cultural artifacts (the spectrum, at least, from analytical philosophy to lyrical poetry or abstract painting). Derrida sets further philosophical investigation and rigorous cultural critique on a daunting course: the isolation of the often intricate underlying tropes and figures not only organizing memorable artifacts in hitherto unsuspected ways, but “blowing the cover” on the systematic doublebinds (Derrida refers to them as aporias), to which any non-linguistically critical exercise of analysis or scholarship invariably gives rise. It is precisely to unthought doublebinds implemented by venerable core-concepts (e.g., “presence,” “purity”) from Plato through Kant and Hegel and into Freud and Heidegger that such memorable Derridean infrastructures or tropes—themselves an action-language—as the pharmakon in “Plato’s Pharmacy,”43 the heliotrope in “White Mythology,”44 and the rotating wheel in Rogues45 give the lie. Derrida devotes exquisite attention to the technological facet of language from the outset of deconstruction’s storied career. Already in “Freud and the Scene of Writing,” his inaugural publication on psychoanalysis, the unconscious holds in reserve far more interest and significance as an archive, a data-base, than as an “intra-psychic agency.” By the mid-1970’s, he has already accessed John Austin’s construct of speech acts as an indispensable node at which the incompatible notions of physis (nature) and techne¯ collide. His “Limited Inc.: abc . . .”46 is an extended refutation of one analytical philosopher’s attempt, John Searle’s, in Speech Acts, to codify the deployment and meanings of specific speech acts with excessive rigidity. Many of Derrida’s early studies were in fact devoted to a comprehensive rejoinder to the multiple “briefs” in Western civilization against all de-theologized and a-spiritual facets of linguistic media, and especially against any “purely” technological or “ornamental” modes of inscription and communication. Derrida’s uncanny ability to hone into this deeply engrained Western predisposition against language denuded of spiritual compensation or edification across an astonishing range of “sources” and cultural institutions is the indelible signature of his inaugural investigations. He tracks this particular bias from the deep ambivalence surrounding the Platonic pharmakon to Rousseau’s yearning for a time “before

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the origin” of language47 into Heidegger’s inability, in Being and Time and elsewhere, to “shake” an irreducibly spiritualized construct of presence— even while designating Dasein as a language-immanent modality of authentic human intervention in the world.48 It did not take long, then, for the deconstructive project to gravitate toward speech acts as linguistic usage on the cusp between articulation and operation, between meaning and action, between poetics (or aesthetics in general) and technology. Within the framework of the current study, the isolation of speech acts as instances of language with full deconstructive potential is inseparable from the isomorphic infrastructure enfranchising them fully, before the fact, in the cybernetic universe. Speech acts, as Derrida gravitated to them at the outset of the deconstructive reconfiguration of the Humanities and as J. Hillis Miller traced their imprint and resonance to an astonishing array of masterworks in simulation and telling nodes of critical disputation, may be regarded as the operational boundary or edge of linguistic programming and deployment.49 This cutting edge is irreducibly isomorphic, also in the full cognitive and cybernetic senses of the term. It is at the meta-interface comprised by the infrastructure of isomorphism and the practice of speech acts that a “strange loop” long seeming to demarcate an irreconcilable cultural divide finally completes itself. It may be a matter of some solace in a technologically overinvested age that at one contour in the topography, the “Guermantes Way” of speech acts (and before them the long history of rhetorical tropes), might finally meet up with the “Méséglise Way” of contemporary systems and their embedded cybernetic technology. Hofstadter seeks out, as he goes about introducing the wider public to the basic architecture of cybernetic systems, the interface from which a full range of computer functions, at the levels of hardware and software, emanate. These encompass all operations of encryption, programming, and storage, the implementation and filtration of commands, and the breakthrough to new levels of systematic organization. The very nature of this interface is isomorphic: it is where typographical shorthands of many kinds receive a numerical transcription enabling them to become operational. This translation is at the heart of everything that Hofstadter has to tell us about “TNT” (Typographical Number Theory), the contribution to this long mathematical tradition that he personally improvises. It affords Hofstadter no small measure of pleasure to illustrate certain of intelligence’s decisive contemporary sleights of hand— processes of playful association, reversal, and looping—with everyday equipment such as record players and tape-recorders. The mechanics of these machines are in turn outgrowths of the notorious spring-operated cafeteria trays. In more senses than one, the motion—cognitive as well as physical— that such mechanisms generate comprises intelligence’s intervention within a panorama of successively closed and entrenched systems.

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Put in their starkest terms his [psychologist Adriaan de Groot’s] results imply that chess masters perceive the distribution of pieces in chunks. This is a higher-level description of the board than the straightforward “white pawn on K 5, black rook on Q 6” type of description, and the master somehow produces such a mental picture of the board . . . Highly revealing was the fact that masters’ mistakes involved placing whole groups of pieces in the wrong place, which left the game strategically the same, but to the novice’s eyes, not at all the same . . . The master is sensitive. He thinks on a different level from the novice; his set of concepts is different. Nearly everyone is surprised to find out that in actual play, a master rarely looks ahead any further than a novice does—and moreover, a master usually examines only a handful of possible moves! The trick is that his mode of perceiving the board is like a filter; he literally does not see bad moves when he looks at a chess situation—no more than amateurs see illegal moves . . . Similarly, master-level players have built up higher levels of organization in the way they see the board; consequently, to them, bad moves are as unlikely to come to mind as illegal moves are, to most people. This might be called implicit pruning of the giant branching tree of possibilities.50 In the same gesture in which Hofstadter formulates the chess grand master’s virtuosity as a working instance of a “play of rules” transpiring on many levels and in several different “chunks” or banks of commands, he demystifies this achievement as well. Viewed operationally, world-class chess play is a function of seeing different batches of potential chess moves than those entertained by run-of-the mill, ordinary players. The grand master’s intelligence intervenes at levels of organization more conducive to the systematic organization of the game. The grand master is just as constrained to perform the systematic function of filtration or selection51 as the ordinary player; it’s just that his selections, as “instinctive” to him as what he “sees,” are on a level closer to what decides winning configurations of pieces and hence outcomes than the operating level on which the vast majority of his opponents play. World-class chess play is supple. It dances ahead and retrospectively behind itself with greater flex and flair than pedestrian play. It is more at ease on “higher levels of organization.” Yet lateral dexterity is just as crucial to intelligence and its achievements as acrobatic somersaults between levels. The lateral flex that Hofstadter traces out in such processes as isomorphic parings of entire chains of progression, recursive deferrals and reiterations, and the “strange” loopings of self-citation and reference enables intelligence to discern the parallel underlying structures, elements, and processes at work in domains of articulation and production seemingly at a vast remove from one another. Creativity in any particular

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single sphere of endeavor is often contingent both on the isolation of telling metatropes or infrastructures in a tangential enterprise and sphere and on their transcription and transposition to the endeavor in question. The transposition enabling Bach’s compositional organizations and practices to surface in Escher’s engravings, having of course been adapted to the specifications of a different medium, thus grafts with resonance within the “smooth space” of Hofstadter’s “eternal golden braid.” The menagerie of allegorical totems that Hofstadter conjures up in the fanciful dramatic “illustrations”52 to his sequential elucidation of the stages of cognitive complexity include not only the Tortoise, modeled on himself, a slower and more skeptical thinker than Achilles perhaps, but capable of truly inventive syntheses, but also the Crab, a sideways-mover if ever there was one. The Anteater thrives on, literally consumes, multiplicity. It is under the lateral dexterity embodied by the Crab that the intricacies of mental processes could migrate, first to the internal communications within an ant-colony; then to the templates and recordings involved in genetic coding and replication: Crab: Definitely. Take the neurons in Achilles’ brain, for example. Each neuron receives signals from neurons attached to its input lines, and if the sum total of inputs at any moment exceeds critical threshold, then the neuron will fire and send its own output pulse rushing off to other neurons, which may in turn fire—and down the line it goes. The neural flash swoops relentlessly in its Achillean path, in shapes stranger than the dash of a gnathungry swallow; every twist, every turn foreordained by the neural structure in Achilles’ brain, until sensory input messages interfere. Achilles: Normally, I think I’M in control of what I think—but the way you put it turns it all inside out, so that it sounds as though “I” am just what comes out of all this neural structure, and natural law. It makes what I consider my SELF sound at best like a by-product of an organism governed by natural law, and at worst an artificial notion produced by my distorted perspective. In other words, you make me feel like I don’t know who—or what—I am, if anything.53 With palpable flair, the mascot known as the Crab disabuses Achilles of his apparent cognitive mastery and self-control. Achilles has lived up to his own heroic fame in his patience, as a methodical, even quick, but in no way creative scientist, with being one-upped by his more illustrious colleagues. Nothing less than Achilles’ sense of identity is at stake in his intuitive sense of the orderly process of his thinking, of his easy input and effect on the outcome of his mental processing. Let’s give Hofstadter’s Achilles the benefit of the

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doubt. Perhaps the Crab’s lesson regarding the successive thresholds of neuronal firing and its decisive effect on the sequence and power of his thinking can be drummed into him. Achilles, as Hofstadter programs him, remains completely unprepared for the jarring external shift of the neurological architecture to an ant-colony, specifically one in process of forming its own “living bridge”: Achilles: I see. I assume these “teams” are one of the levels of structure falling somewhere between the single-ant level and the colony level. Anteater: Precisely. There exists a special kind of team, which I call a “signal”—and all the higher levels of structure are based on signals. In fact, all of the higher entities are collections of signals acting in concert. There are teams on higher levels whose members are not ants, but teams on lower levels. Eventually, you reach the lowest-level teams—which is to say, signals—and below them, ants. Achilles: Why do signals deserve their suggestive name? Anteater: It comes from their function. The effect of signals is to transport ants of various specializations to appropriate parts of the colony. So the typical story of a signal is this: it comes into existence by exceeding the threshold needed for survival, then it migrates for some distance through the colony, and at some point it disintegrates into its individual members, leaving them on their own. Achilles: It sounds like a wave, carrying sand-dollars and seaweed from afar, and leaving them strewn, high and dry, on the shore.54 It is left to the Anteater, the monitor and devourer of ants, not as individual organisms, each with its own claim on subjectivity and “personality,” to extrapolate their overall interrelation, Zusammenhang, collective Gestalt. The Anteater tracks the signals that galvanize the community (or colony) of ants, that organizes them into “waves” of what Deleuze/Guattari, pretty much at the same interval, are calling territorialization/deterritorialization. The Anteater, for one, is capable of delineating the level of organization formed by ants from that formed by teams of ants. The Anteater, Hofstadter’s own inhuman surrogate, monitor of cognitive processing from a nonhumanistic, ananthropocentric point of view, is already a systematic thinker and programmer. S/he discerns the wider systematic parameters of which the individual ants form part. Achilles, on the other hand, journeyman scientist or critical theorist that he remains, can only register their patterns, the sinewaves that they have formed, whether by chance or design.

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9. Within the domains of numbers, words, charts, and other graphic designs, then, as within the architecture of systems and information-communication machines that grow out of systems, Hofstadter is a supple, lithe, and unpredictable mover. The dimensions into which his moves and movements reach—upward, outwards, sideways; in ninety-degree turns, circles, spirals— are the very domains of creativity, intelligence, and the redress of arbitrary limit. His writing moves as well, in generic and stylistic make-overs and disguises. Yet there is a rigor and logical parsimony at the core of the whimsical and outward-spinning dance. As suggested above, the nonlinear, vertiginous expansions and dislocations of Gödel, Escher, Bach pirouette around a specific interface, where typographical symbols derived from a host of inputs and media translate into a numerical language proving to be, in whatever technology, operational. Gödel, Escher, Bach never gets over its wonder at this operationality managing to emerge from the domains of numbers, letters, symbols, and icons through such processes as stringing, chunking, nesting, recursion, self-referential citation, and “popping.” All these operations, whose implications and outcomes are quite material, extend outward from the translation and transcription occurring at the core-interface—between notational languages (numbers, symbols, letters, etc.) and operational ones that can program machines and simulate excruciatingly complex biological replication. It is in the nature of this core-interface that as the very nexus of intelligence, it too can move, mutate, diversify and elaborate itself, and undergo autopoiesis. Its situation, isolation, elucidation, ongoing tracking and monitoring, reformatting, and translation into accessible terminologies remain a constant within Gödel, Escher, Bach quickly shifting and expanding the field of attentiveness. Hofstadter’s considerable skill as a writer attains even new peaks of rigor and inventiveness as he tracks this crucial interface through a bewildering multiplicity of environments and contexts. “Seeing Things both Typographically and Arithmetically” is the title of a section in Chapter IX, “Mumon [Japanese Zen sage of the thirteenth century, compiler of the ko¯ans in the Mumonkan] and Gödel.” The section in question explores the convergence of typographical and arithmetical notations and rules in the parallel configuration that Hofstadter characterizes as “isomorphism.” Hofstadter describes the isomorphism between strings of typographical and arithmetical rules as follows: The right column [of digits in operations determined both by mathematical and typographical rules] has a “dual nature”: it can be viewed either as a series of typographical operations changing one pattern of symbols into

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another, or as a series of arithmetical operations changing one magnitude into another. But there are powerful reasons for being more interested in the arithmetical version. Stepping out of one purely typographical system into another isomorphic typographical system is not an exciting thing to do: whereas stepping clear out of the typographical system into an isomorphic part of number theory has some kind of unexplored potential. It is as if somebody had known musical scores all his life, but purely visually—and then, all of a sudden, someone introduced him to the mapping between sounds and musical scores. What a rich, new world! Then again, it is as if somebody had been familiar with string figures all his life, but purely as string figures, devoid of meaning—and then, all of a sudden, somebody introduced him to the mapping between stories and strings. What a revelation! The discovery of Gödel-numbering has been likened to the discovery, by Descartes, of the isomorphism of curves in a plane and equations in two variables: incredibly simple, once you see it, and opening onto a vast new world.55 Typographically, this paragraph is as unassuming as any of the discursive prose passages making up the “didactic” chapters (as opposed to the interstitial dialogues involving fanciful mythological and animal mascots). Unmarked though this passage may be, it is the engine-room and wagon turntable in the railroad roundhouse of a wildly recursive book. The passage is not only about the possibilities, at the levels of computing and its multitudinous applications, in the domains of hardware and software, opened up by the fusion of typographical and arithmetic notations. It is about the sudden escalations of theoretical and even aesthetic power achieved through the configuration of isomorphisms between wildly disparate systems, ordered domains of operation seeming, at least on first glance, to have little in common. Hofstadter’s figures for the reciprocity and parallelism of the dissimilar at play in the most productive isomorphisms issue, by reflex reaction, it seems, from synaesthesia, the fusion of markedly different sense-elements. He likens the striking systematic expansion afforded by the mutual splicing together of typographical with arithmetical notations to the sudden realization that musical scores, initially experienced only visually, also impact tangibly upon the aural surround. The literal image here is “hearing the music for the first time.” It is under the aura of a similar synaesthetic fusion that conceptually astute and rigorous thinkers can discern the thrust and structure of narrative in mathematical strings, whether of numbers, rules, or commands. The units of Hofstadter’s own narrative are scientific and technological revolutions that were made possible by sudden, palpable systematic expansions. The expansions themselves, he argues in this absolutely strategic passage, ensued from the coordination and transcription

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between strikingly different languages and systematic architectures. A parallel from the world of genetics would be the salutary effect on the gene pool in a species (such as humans) when a pattern of enforced inbreeding is disrupted by crossbreeding. Hofstadter patterns Gödel, Escher, Bach in such a way that we run into this pivotal interface between different typographies and numbers, that is, between a wide variety of inputs and operational machine-languages over and over again, in a broad range of contexts and applications. The mathematician Kurt Gödel earns his esteemed role in the treatise as mathematics’ headline performer, personifying the uncanny numerical acuity whose parallels are Bach’s fugues and Escher’s unsettling visual inventions, primarily on the basis of his having devised a new mathematical notation. And how does Hofstadter characterize this souped-up mathematical script? “In the Gödel Code . . . numbers are made to stand for symbols and sequences of symbols. That way, each statement of number theory, being a sequence of specialized symbols, acquires a Gödel number, something like a telephone number or a license plate, by which it can be referred to. And this coding trick enables statements of number theory to be understood on two different levels: as statements of number theory and as statements about statements of number theory.”56 Hofstadter casts Gödel as the mathematical engineer of the symbolicnumerical transcription making a vertiginous series of systematic expansions possible. It is in fact not terribly material whether these expansions take place on paper or in a cybernetic device. In a gesture similar to a move in Hegel’s “Force and the Understanding” that has intrigued me for years, Hofstadter’s Gödel manages to redirect a laterally figured transcription or interface between symbolic and numerical notations into a metacritical overview (“statements about statements”) whose implicit configuration can only be vertical. No small part of the contribution that Hofstadter attributes to Gödel is in fact a dialectical one. Under Hofstadter’s scrutiny, Gödel becomes the magician who endowed numbers with self-consciousness and metacritical capability. It may not seem all that extraordinary for strings of numbers, which after all can form phrases and other units of articulation and narration, to rise to these levels of deployment. But when they do, again, the functions of grammar, citation, generalization, introspection, self-critique, and autopoiesis with which they have been endowed by their creative programmers (i.e., mathematicians) become operational. Cybernetic machines can act on them. A transition has been achieved to the cybernetic age in which we live, whose full cognitive, motor, and psycho-social implications have yet, by a long shot, to be “fully” extrapolated and understood. Within the domain of mathematical notation and articulation, by Hofstadter’s account, it was Gödel who infused into numbers the linguistic and critical dimensions within the devices of cybernetic

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technology that have, however indirectly, endowed our age with its distinctive stamp. There are strings of TNT [Typographical Number Theory] that can be interpreted as speaking about other strings of TNT; in short, that TNT, as a language, is capable of “introspection,” or self-scrutiny. This is what comes from Gödel-numbering. The second key idea is that the property of selfscrutiny can be concentrated into a single string; thus that string’s sole focus of attention is itself. This “focusing trick” is traceable, in essence, to the Cantor diagonal method. In my opinion, if one is interested in understanding Gödel’s proof in a deep way, then one must recognize that the proof, in its essence, consists of a fusion of these two ideas. Each of them alone is a master-stroke; to put them together took an act of genius. If I were to choose, however, which of the two ideas is deeper, I would unhesitatingly pick the first one—the idea of Gödel-numbering, for that idea is related to the whole notion of what meaning and reference are, in symbol-manipulating systems.57 Hofstadter, situating himself between a rock and a hard place in finally assessing Gödel’s achievement, opts for the typographical contribution, the one that facilitated transcription between concepts and grammar on the one hand, and operating quantitative languages on the other. Since the happening or event of sudden systematic expansion is what endows Gödel, Escher, Bach with its distinctive literary attributes, its “surprise endings” and sudden, wide narrative swerves, we note in passing the vital link between achievements in coding, decoding, and transcription and the very configuration, architecture, immanent processing within, and prospects for systems. Gödel, Escher, Bach is, in these respects, an impact report and white paper for the prospects of systematic organization and experience in our age. Symbols, to shift to a terrain that Hofstadter would consider advantageously far afield from number theory, function both mathematically and semantically; words and numbers can both serve as symbols. But Hofstadter goes on also to treat them as units of neuroscience. They are activated or not, as the case may be, by neuron-firings. The very versatility of symbols, the elements of language, prompts Hofstadter to inquire, in a section of Chapter 11 (“Brains and Thoughts”), “Symbols—Software or Hardware?”: “Do symbols more pertinently belong to the architecture of the brain or to brain-language? It may be that in order to distinguish one symbol’s activation from that of another symbol, a process must be carried out which involves not only locating the neurons which are firing, but also identifying the very precise details of the firing of those neurons. That is, which neuron preceded which other neuron, and by how much? How many times a second was a particular

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neuron firing? Thus perhaps several symbols can coexist in the same set of neurons by having different characteristic neural firing patterns.”58Treating consciousness as a function of symbol-activations prompts inquiry into the sequence and configuration of the neurons, into the structure of the network they form. At a scale both far more microscopic and universal than brain physiology, typography and its capacity for transcription into operating languages can still play a decisive role. As a scientist in his own right, Hofstadter is attentive enough to empirical field-conditions to inquire into the “discrepancy between Typogenetics and true genetics.”59 In the field of microbiology, Hofstadter is willing to entertain the limits of typographical notations in representing and predicating conditions in the field. “Whereas in Typogenetics, each component amino acid of an enzyme is responsible for some specific ‘piece of the action,’ in real enzymes, individual amino acids cannot be assigned such clear roles. It is the tertiary structure as a whole which determines the mode in which an enzyme will function.”60 Hofstadter has already reached the realization, in his “Ant Fugue,” that within the overarching climate as well as architecture of systems, processes facilitated by transcriptions between divergent notations may not resolve themselves precisely (or perhaps better, mathematically). By dint of the complex processing encompassed within their parameters, systems, whether of numbers, computers, or genetics, allow a certain amount of “give” in their recordings and replications of information. This “give,” however, does not negate the systematic organization of the spheres in which the information plays such a decisive role, or the basis of such organizations in transcription. The stately, self-referential overview allowing for the discernment of the inexactitudes nonetheless transpiring in transcription-grounded systems Hofstadter orchestrates, in his “Ant Fugue,” as the dialectic between “holism and reductionism.” He performs the sinuous fluctuation occasioned by this perspectival shift not only in the playful banter between Achilles, the Tortoise, the Crab, and the Anteater,61 but in a self-devised chart, akin to Guillaume Apollinaire’s calligrammes, in which antlike letters form both of the words “whole” and “reduction,” in turn joined “at the tail” by “ism” as they meander all over the page.62 His chief instance of the holism that could galvanize a horde of living creatures as well as different neuronal networks in a brain is, of course, an ant colony. Not surprisingly, he relates the holism by which the behavior of ants in their colony can be understood in its widest framework to the sudden enlightenment not only allowed by, but to some degree orchestrated by, the Zen ko¯an. The citation with which we began this section, then, perhaps Hofstadter’s pivotal characterization of the transcriptive interface in the operating system of every distinctive systematic organization of our age, finds itself “hard-wired” across the full gamut of his panoramic (even psychedelic)

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exposition. Coded into this interface are the vicissitudes of the systems that they power and facilitate. If typography, by the same token, becomes the preeminent display for data gathered by a whole host of inputs, say verbal, arithmetical, photographic, phonographic, video, and cinematographic ones, data that can then be transcribed into operative quantitative languages, then the interface synthesized by transcription raises a host of questions and considerations regarding the nature and constitution of systematic screens or displays.

10. Among the many allegorical animals, unindicted co-conspirators in a glittering string of lessons, that Hofstadter didn’t name, is the Snake. The diverse systems whose internal logic and programming Hofstadter adumbrates are invariably molting their skins. Each in its own right, the systems of numbers, of cybernetic devices, music, graphic display, and biological reproduction, reaches a point at which it becomes too big for its own skin, even if that happens to be a plastic case or a pair of pants. “Whether we humans can ever jump out of ourselves—or whether computer programs can jump out of themselves”63 becomes an ongoing and overriding focal point of the work. Early on in Gödel, Escher, Bach, in a section of Chapter 1 called “Jumping out of the System,” Hofstadter takes up the intriguing rapport between intelligence and the possibilities of exceeding the limits of systematic experience: Now I said that an intelligence can jump out of its task, but that does not mean that it always will. However, a little prompting will often suffice. For example, a human being who is reading a book is just as likely to put the book aside and turn off the light. He has “stepped out of the system” and yet it seems the most natural thing in the world to do . . . How well have computers been taught to jump out of the system? I will cite one example which surprised some observers. In a computer chess tournament not long ago in Canada, one program—the weakest of all the competing ones—had the unusual feature of quitting before the game was over. It was not a very good player, but at least it had the redeeming quality of being able to spot a hopeless position, and to resign then and there instead of waiting for the other program to go through the boring ritual of check mating. Although it lost every game it played, it did it in style. A lot of local chess experts were impressed. Thus, if you define “the system” as “making moves in a chess game,” it is clear that this program had a sophisticated, preprogrammed ability to exit from the system. On the other hand, if you think of the system as being “whatever the computer had

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been programmed to do,” then there is no doubt that the computer had no ability whatsoever to exit from that system. It is very important when studying formal systems to distinguish working within the system from making statements or observations about the system . . . Now I do not want to make it sound as if the two modes are entirely incompatible: I am sure that every human being is capable to some extent of working inside a system and simultaneously thinking about what he is doing. Actually, in human affairs, it is often next to impossible to break things neatly up into “inside the system” and “outside the system”; life is composed of so many interlocking and interwoven and often inconsistent “systems” that it may seem simplistic to think of things in these terms. But it is often important to formulate simple ideas very clearly so that one can use them as models in thinking about more complex ideas.64 Much to his credit, Hofstadter pauses, along with Derrida, at the very outset of his lifelong enterprise, at the vertiginous hinge separating the intrinsic logic, necessity, and wiring of any epistemological configuration or technology and its imaginable “outside.” Much in accord with Derrida’s reasonings on this highly contested terrain, Hofstadter will concede its ultimate elusiveness, as a point of departure, a destination, or as a stable perch for critical intervention. Systematic organization, as Hofstadter calibrates it for Gödel, Escher, Bach’s entire trajectory, configures itself in a sequence of discontinuous sideways leaps and sudden expansions toward an “outside.” But the organization of the systems is so involuted and intertwined, that even the definition of the “outside” is contextual and functional, as the passage immediately above takes care to specify. At the heart of systems’ irresistible gravitation toward their intrinsic limits spelled out in the last paragraph of the extended citation immediately above is the distinction between “working within the system [and] making statements or observations about the system.” There is, in other words, a critical correlative to such operational processes as “chunking” and “popping”: the ability, whether of an entire system or a subcomponent, both to continue operating in a functional fashion and to remark, assess, evaluate, take stock of the ongoing procedures and results. Whether in a mind or in a machine, the simultaneity of effective functioning on disparate processing levels is a tricky operation. It may demand as much in the way of violence as in the attainment of a distinctive concentration or stability. Immanent systems-critique, as characterized by Hofstadter in the above passage, is not merely conducive to accurate and effective computation; it is a precondition for the evolution of higher processing out of any given systematic organization. This is a moment both to pause and revel at the centrality, power, and simplicity of the core rhetorico-linguistic figures that power and motivate

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Hofstadter’s “golden eternal braid.” As vast as the sweep of Hofstadter’s programming argosy becomes, capturing music, graphic art, sound technology, computer games, and Zen ko¯ans in its sway, it remains structured and calibrated by a repository consisting in not so many of these decisive figures. Surely a most critical one of these, no pun intended, well-illustrated in the passage immediately above, is an irreducibly metacritical splay between divergent levels of generality and processing. To this must surely be added: (1) the parallel arrangements and horizontal reciprocities between notations and scales categorized under the term isomorphisms; (2) the open-ended annexation of terms and data, again in a horizontal plane, an additive process that can, however, always be closed off or bracketed, known as recursion; (3) sudden bursts or uplifts in programming power made possible through the application of logical and mathematical pruning (or in my terminology, filtration) to sets of rules and commands. The new level of operative efficiency has been generated by the program’s intrinsic rules and commands (Hofstadter’s label for the process is chunking). The new vantage point remains at the disposal of the system that generated it. Minds and machines achieve through chunking a certain operational ease and oversight. This is, however, akin to the cohesion that societies and communities enforce by means of systematic exclusion (Niklas Luhmann’s term). We need to recognize a fundamental tension or contretemps between the exclusion by which chunking attains to higher levels of generality and computing power and the flex that Hofstadter underscores as the most redeeming feature of intelligence and of the very “smartest” programs. This may well be an unavoidable aporia in the metacritical encounter with cognitive and cybernetic processing for which critical readers need to continue to correct; (4) the undecidability often emerging from the interplay between figure and ground, leaving relations of causality and determination open not only to interpretation but to innovative deployment within the domains of social systems as well as machines. This is similar, in decisive respects, to the interplay between system and environment that Luhmann extracts from the work of Parsons, Shils, and Bateson; (5) the augmentation in the complexity of operation resulting from the shift from additive accumulation to citation, or what Hofstadter terms “self-reference.” His model for longer and longer strands of programmatic self-reference, producing more elaborate prompts and commands, is “quining” or “the Quine sentence.”65 There is a clear and overarching parallelism in Hofstadter’s vast panorama of processing as it transpires in minds as well as in machines (including living cells) between the complexity of the sentences, commands, and grammatical operations that can be assimilated and the difficulty of the tasks that can be accomplished. As Hofstadter explicitly suggests, systematic organization characterizes the mind as much as it does the cybernetic simulators of its processes. The

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overarching articulations of systematic organizations—the multiple levels on which they are arranged, their functional division of labor between hardware and software, whether their architecture is “top-down” or “bottom-up”—all factor in to the cat-and-mouse game that systems play with their putative “outsides.” A fundamental and irreducible restlessness pervades systems as Hofstadter pursues their material components, their locations (from the brain to cell-nuclei, to ant-colonies), and their respective architectures and wiring. They are indebted to recursions, isomorphisms, “pops,” and chunkings for their very constitution; once in motion, they careen toward their limits, toward the margins that may well untrack and disable them. But this very unrest is part and parcel of the productive surprises and breakthroughs of which they have proven themselves, over and over, capable of delivering. No matter how a program twists and turns to get out of itself, it is still following the rules inherent in itself. It is no more possible for it to escape than it is for a human being to decide voluntarily not to obey the laws of physics. Physics is an overriding system, from which there can be no escape. However, there is a lesser ambition which it is possible to achieve. One can step out of ruts on occasion. This is still due to the interaction of various subsystems of one’s brain, but it can feel very much like stepping entirely out of oneself. Similarly, it is entirely conceivable that a partial ability “to step outside of itself” could be embodied in a computer program.66 The optimal instability of systems becomes a signature feature that Hofstadter embellishes through a barrage of referential domains, graphic displays, and literary styles and genres. Each of Hofstadter’s demonstrations in this regard illuminates new factors at play in the architecture and function of systems at the same time that it revels in the complexities ensuing from these developments. This is how Hofstadter adumbrates the multi-tiered structure that systems with metacritical capability invariably develop: There is another place where many levels of description exist for a single system, and where all the levels are conceptually close to one another. I am referring to computer systems. When a computer program is running, it can be viewed on a number of levels. On each level, the description is given in the language of computer science, which makes all the descriptions in some ways similar to each other—yet there are extremely important differences between the views one gets on the different levels. At the lowest level, the description can be so complicated that it is like the dotdescription of a television picture. For some purposes, however, this is by

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far the most important view. At the highest level, the description is greatly chunked, and takes on a completely different feel, despite the fact that many of the same concepts appear on the lowest and highest levels. The chunks on the high-level description are like the chess expert’s chunks, and like the chunked description of the image on the screen; they summarize in capsule form a number of things which on lower levels are seen as separate.67 As this passage indicates, Hofstadter’s fundamental loyalty is to the full integrity that any particular systematic organization can claim. In the passage immediately above, as in the one on the distinction between systems establishing stability from the top down and ones in an ongoing state of integrative tension ensuing from developments on the ground-level, Hofstadter imputes as much importance to the basic processes facilitated by computer programs as to their highest results. He is, in this respect, far more a Tortoise or a Crab than a Hegelian narrator, a boisterous cheer-leader not only for highend accomplishments but ultimately, for a series of breakthroughs and revelations to come. Hofstadter’s inspiration under the insignia of the Tortoise and the Crab allows him to pause and take stock of glaringly evident phenomena, such as, in the passage above, the multi-tiered architecture characteristic of systems notable for their output—simply for their own sake. He can acknowledge that for some purposes, a program breaking up a video image at the level of its pixels, is just the ticket called for, even if the same scanning process, in a different phase, is organized for chunking: the categorization enabling the chess master to filter out, in a fell swoop, whole categories of the bad moves spelling the demise for chess-mortals. Hofstadter has immersed himself in the vortex of flows making systems both possible and vulnerable. The great work of appreciation, in many senses, that he achieves, has been instrumented by the flex that he incorporates into his writing medium and by a very low tolerance for foregone categorical exclusion or profiling (this as distinct from the operational “pruning” taking place, at specific levels of processing, as sets of rules and options are “chunked”). It is the susceptibility that Hofstadter is willing to assume as a writer that enables him not only to discern the interplay of high-level and lowlevel processing in notably productive systems, but to accord full value to the articulation taking place on a more fundamental level: There is an important division between two types of system built up from many parts. There are those systems where the behavior of some parts tends to cancel out the behavior of other parts, with the result that it does not matter too much what happens on the low level, because most anything will yield similar high-level behavior. An example of this kind of

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system is a container of gas, where all the molecules bump and bang against each other . . . but the total outcome . . . is a very calm, stable system with a certain temperature, pressure, and volume. Then there are systems where the effect of a single low-level event may get magnified into an enormous high-level consequence. Such a system is a pinball machine . . . A computer is an elaborate combination of these two types of system . . . Systems which are made up of “reliable” subsystems only—that is, subsystems whose behavior can be reliably predicted from chunked descriptions—play inestimably important roles in our daily lives, because they are pillars of stability. We can rely on walls not to fall down, on sidewalks to go where they went yesterday, on the sun to shine . . . Of course, the other kind of system which plays a very large role in our lives is a system that has variable behavior which depends on internal microscopic parameters—often a very large number of them, moreover—which we cannot directly observe. Our chunked model of such a system is necessary in terms of the “space” of operation, and involves probabilistic estimates of landing in different regions of that space.68 Hofstadter is capable of appreciating the utility of a simple gas-canister or the stability of a building as a significant systematic achievement; also, of seeing the prodigious cybernetic capability built into a pinball machine, for mass consumption, even one with certain crucial “analog” elements in its design and construction. He would not attribute this to any generosity of spirit or unique aesthetic achievement on his part. For him, the analysis, interpretation, and critique of systems in the full spectrum of their organization, underlying program, and output goes part and parcel along with science itself, a disarming suppleness and openness to contingency tethered to a relentless curiosity. Hofstadter would rightly insist, then, on the irreducible scientific thrust and import of such of his improvisations for Gödel, Escher, Bach as “Contracrostipunctus,” “Ant Fugue,” and “The Magnificrab, Indeed.” As characterized in the passage immediately above, memorable systems, systems notable for their resilience and productivity, generate the optimal supplements to their own components (or subsystems). They persist in salutary (but possibly draining) tension, irreducibly critical in thrust, with themselves. They nurture, side by side, both their conservative tendencies and their susceptibility to reconfiguring input they encounter on the street. As suggested above, these systems are invariably, at core, typewriters or writing machines. Their impact on the world is effectuated by the coordination and interface between program and motor activity in their innards. As the consummate writer of science that he is, Hofstadter is as much drawn to the nuts and bolts of the hardware as to the refinements, embellishments, and constant updates of the program:

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What is this proverbial distinction between hardware and software? It is the distinction between programs and machines—between long complicated sequences of instructions, and the physical machines which carry them out. I like to think of software as “anything which you could send over telephone lines,” and hardware is “anything else.” A piano is hardware, but printed music is software . . . We humans also have “hardware” and “software” aspects, and the difference is second nature to us. We are used to the rigidity of physiology . . . We can, however, “reprogram” our minds so that we operate in new conceptual frameworks. The amazing flexibility of our minds seems nearly irreconcilable with the notion that our brains must be made out of fixed-rule hardware, which cannot be reprogrammed. We cannot rewire our brains, we cannot redesign the interior of a neuron . . . But there clearly are aspects of thought which are beyond our control. We cannot make ourselves smarter by an act of will; we cannot learn a new language as fast as we want; we cannot make ourselves think faster than we do; we cannot make ourselves think about several things at once, and so on. This is a kind of primordial self-knowledge which is so obvious that it is hard to see it at all . . . We never really bother to think about what might cause these “defects” of our minds: namely the organization of our brains. To suggest ways of reconciling the software of mind with the hardware of brain is a main goal of this book.69 This is a passage eventuating at the overarching isomorphism of Gödel, Escher, Bach, that prevailing between “the software of mind” and “the hardware of brain” by way of frank acknowledgment of the limits we face in all the available media and approaches for reprogramming our minds. In this passage, Hofstadter achieves a characteristically intimate and accelerated feedback between the cognitive networks and processes of the mind and the architecture, levels of processing, and communications within cybernetic machines and devices. The distinction between hardware and software, architecture and program, proves decisive to wiring the interface between mind and computer. It proves phenomenally interesting and productive for Hofstadter to redirect what he has learned about the iterations and recursions of programming and about the interaction between levels of processing back to the most prevalent operating system of all, the mind. The pivotal interface between our current understandings regarding cognitive and cybernetic processing and the mind is precisely the point at which systems analysis, in the rendition given it by Hofstadter, von Foerster, and the theorists of second-order autopoiesis, has enormous import for cultural psychoanalysis and the current prospects for therapeutic healing. The rigor with which Hofstadter situates and embroiders

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the metacritical capabilities installed into certain theorems, programs, and processing levels is symptomatic of an overarching ethos of critical sensibility and intervention in the absence of which neither mind nor machines will operate at full potential. It is the critical dimensions of the most widely prevalent operating systems that have the most to suggest regarding the evolving stances and possibilities of therapy as it, in turn, absorbs, takes stock of, practically as well as theoretically, the cognitive and behavioral modifications wrought by cybernetic technologies and virtual states. If the remarkable panoply of operations that computers sustain ultimately refers back to the interface at which input from many sources transcribe or translate into operative quantitative languages, then the parallel isomorphism in the mind, as Hofstadter articulates it in Gödel, Escher, Bach, is between symbolic vocabularies and the mental components founded upon them and processing them. Mind, from an advanced computer and cognitive science point of view, is a pluralism of autonomous subsystems—with multidimensional links between them—each emerging from a different world of reference, value, meaning, and implication. Symbol is to mind what number is to cybernetic devices and culture: the script instrumenting further mental processing and in which input of wildly divergent natures—from information and memory to mood and emotion—has been embedded. The parallel circuitry between two interfaces, themselves irreducibly isomorphic in structure, between quantitative languages in computers and symbolic ones in the mind, is enormously suggestive with regard to the thorough updating of therapeutic assumptions, prospects and interventions needing to transpire under contemporary conditions. Hofstadter’s treatment of mind is an extension of pathways and associations that he has mapped in the context of number theory, the propositional calculus, and their cybernetic applications. Within this framework, mind is first and foremost a processor of symbols, whose number is as infinite as the “pathways in a brain.”70 From Hofstadter’s perspective, subjectivity or individuality is a derivative of the symbolic processing already programmed into the mind, not the reverse. “Consciousness is that property of a system that arises whenever there exist symbols in the system which obey triggering patterns somewhat like the ones”71 prevailing in an integral culture and mobilized, say, by projects of translation. Rather than being the origin or sine qua non of symbolic manipulation, consciousness is the derivative of a symbolic process already underway. (This logic is fully in accord with Lacan’s scenario of each child’s initiation, at the mirror-stage, into a system of symbolic equivalencies and values operative in advance of his entry into the familycommunity. Each family and community member is, then, perhaps forever, engaged in a “catch-up” game to recapture a “full” symbolic and cultural competence constitutionally beyond its grasp.) The “I,” in Hofstadter’s implicit

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psychology, is one symbol among others, even if a particularly fraught and contested one. The symbol for the self is probably the most complex of all the symbols in the brain. For this reason, I choose to put it on a new level of the hierarchy and call it a subsystem, rather than a symbol. To be precise, by “subsystem,” I mean a constellation of symbols, each of which can be separately activated under the control of the subsystem itself. The image I wish to convey of a subsystem is that it functions almost as an independent “subbrain,” equipped with its own repertoire of symbols which can trigger each other internally.72 Even “I,” my identity, has a role in an overarching processing of symbols underway before “I” am. This conceptual downbeat in the approach to identity and personal psychology enables subjectivity to be conceptualized as a plurality of simultaneously operating symbolic subsystems. The operating subsystems are free to process different inputs (say works and musical melodies) according to different rules and networks. The notion of mind as a confederation of diverse symbolic subsystems removes the stigma from “divided states” of consciousness, which for Freud played such a decisive role in the formation of hysteria and paranoia, and from the skewed “self fragments” similarly bedeviling object-relations theorists. Mind emerges from Hofstadter’s pursuit of intelligence in its multiple zones, modalities, and configurations of processing as a tolerant and still expandable environment of processing. Each subsystem pirouettes around, derives meaning and significance from, and enlarges and embroiders a “constellation of symbols.” Hofstadter’s grouping the telling components of our cognitive and psychosocial divisions into constellations is tremendously suggestive to those who engage in cultural elucidation and who compose texts. We need at this point to factor in the capability of “symbols” to serve as an umbrella for the many rhetorical and literary tropes, among them allegory, différance, supplementarity, catachresis, and metalepsis, whose fuller philosophical and theoretical implications have been worked out in detail and with such care by a particularly gifted and still productive recent critical generation. “Symbolism,” for Hofstadter, defines the substance and sphere of processing in which mind engages as it sets about the task of thinking; it is not a rhetorical selection or statute of limitation. It is the very networks (or rhizomes) of the signifiers we process that give our activities and profiles in different sectors (say friendship, work, estimation, exegesis) their particular cast and prospects. Going along part and parcel with the powerful pedagogical sub-component in Hofstadter’s cultural performance is his evoking a particularly vivid limitcase in illustration of subsystems in their interplay:

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The interesting thing about a subsystem is that, once activated and left to its own devices, it can work on its own. Thus, two or more subsystems of the brain of an individual may operate simultaneously. I have noticed this happening on occasion in my own brain; sometimes I become aware that two different melodies are running through my mind, competing for “my” attention. Somehow, each melody is being manufactured, or “played,” in a separate compartment of my brain. Each of the systems responsible for drawing a melody out of my brain is presumably activating a number of symbols, one after another, completely oblivious to the other system doing the same thing. Then they both attempt to communicate with a third subsystem of my brain—my self-symbol—and it is at this point that the “I” inside my brain gets wind of what’s going on; in other words, it starts picking up a chunked description of the activities of those two subsystems.73 Crucial to this illuminating passage is the image of different sectors of symbolic processing, exigencies of “selfhood” or identity only one among them, “competing for ‘my’ attention.” The idea that I could simultaneously be “playing” two completely different melodies in my brain is, in certain respects, even more interesting than the scenario in which I am visiting a museum and humming a tune at the same time. “Running” those competing musical compositions is simply the more daunting task of mental prestidigitation. If “me,” the “I” that in collusion with a lot of inherited data and familial baggage I “operate” as my social place-holder, has a role in this theater of processing, it is at most keeping tabs, to the best of its ability, on the activities of the diverse subsystems. It is similar in this regard to a Deleuzian “flow-monitor.” “I” is not in control. Its “character” is not stamped on every zone of processing. Its own interests and concerns are at most another sector in a diverse workshop (akin to a Marxian factory) of processing. The respective configurations and mutual communication between the subsystems dramatized in the above passage are far more decisive and suggestive than the territorial claims, in terms of hierarchical priority, activity, domain, or outcome asserted by any one of them. What Hofstadter, having pursued intelligence through a number of its most pressing challenges, has established for mind is its quintessential openness and diversity as an environment for processing, decoding, and improvisation on many levels, in many spheres, and with a remarkable number of different configurations. Needless to say, this particular phase of Hofstadter’s “eternal golden braid,” which has careened both wildly and suggestively between strikingly diverse zones of cognitive and cultural improvisation is enormously suggestive of the current prospects for therapeutic healing. What we can extrapolate from his treatment of selfhood or identity as a byproduct of processing activities already underway is a therapeutic approach giving minute attention to features of

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systematic experience and mental life that are both impersonal and painfully intimate. Inherent to such a procedural and configurational stock-taking of ourselves is de-stigmatizing the guilt and shame at the core of so many of our most prevalent ailments. We need to remember that for Hofstadter, the motive underlying this process of metacritical self-scrutiny is embedded in all theorems, programs, and levels of processing that are both of themselves and about themselves. This degree of self-reference and metacritique is not virtuous; it is not mandated by any overarching ethics or morality; it is not altruistic to the least degree. It is, rather, the feature of all organizations and components of organizations that will go on to enlarge upon, expand, diversify, improve, and extend themselves. It is a function of all organizations and entities that mobilize and marshal themselves in accordance with their own intelligence. This section began with the residual discomfort of systems in their very skins, with their intrinsic logic and processes. This quintessentially productive restlessness, it turns out, is not limited to minds viewed (and mapped) as cognitive processors and to “smart machines.” “In Zen too, we can see this preoccupation with transcending the system . . . A Zen person is always trying to understand more deeply what he is, by stepping more and more out of what he sees himself to be, by breaking every rule and convention which he sees himself to be chained by—needless to say, including those of Zen itself.”74 Zen’s pre-eminent significance to Gödel, Escher, Bach is as the most rigorous counterprogram to unquestioned systematic hierarchies, dualisms, and continuities, and momentums of thought possible. Zen is an integral way of life arising out of a collective initiative to install multiple release-valves in architectures of thinking and processing that have proven inimical to their own inbuilt potentials for resilience and plasticity. Yet Hofstadter cannot remain oblivious to the fact that for all its discontinuities and potentials for surprise, Zen is a system itself. His allegiance to his scientific calling will not allow him to imagine Zen as a definitive or categorical “out,” however an inventive one. Zen is as exemplary as a system can be in outfitting itself against its own predilections to entropy and complacency. In this sense, it is the prototype for what Hofstadter himself would call a metacritical system, a system grounded in its own productive critique and active self-rewiring. Relentless systems-analyst that he is, systems analyst with scientific rigor and dedication, Zen remains, in the end, another system to Hofstadter, one conditioned by the liability attending other systematic organizations: There is always further to go: enlightenment is not the end-all of Zen. And there is no recipe which tells us how to transcend Zen; the only thing that one can rely on for sure is that Buddha is not the way. Zen is a system and cannot be its own metasystem; there is always something outside of Zen, which cannot be fully understood or described within Zen.75

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11. The Structured Conversation? This study ends, then, in a meditation on the healing power of conversation. If it is indeed the virtual state we enter in intimate exchange with a trusted interlocutor that makes it possible at least to begin to redress the insults of systematic high-handedness, under what conditions could this healing interchange be airlifted outside the franchised precincts of psychoanalysis? Could it be at all? Whatever grudges subsequent intellectual history and liberation movements were to nurse against Freud, he cannot be accused of negligence in establishing stringent standards and modi operandi of impartiality, discretion, restraint, and overall professionalism that he attached to the psychoanalytical bearing or role. Freud’s own experience, personal, theoretical, and institutional, led him to an extreme skepticism with respect to the possibility that the phenomenon that he identified as transference could be managed outside the designated zone of therapeutic interchange. Freud was acutely aware that in what we might call “natural speech situations,” the conversation-partners are too vested in their own motives and interests, many unconscious, in order to perform the neutralization (or detoxification) of emotional reactions requisite to therapeutic impartiality, and hence to open-ended, empathic mutual receptiveness and guidance. The unwavering integrity and discretion that Freud demanded from psychoanalysts, preconditions to this counter-transference, amount, then, to an application of Kantian disinterest within a clinical milieu.76 For reasons that Freud evolved over a long career in the laboratory and in his own mind as well as in the analytical cabinet, he was understandably skeptical that the work of psychoanalysis could persist outside its sanctioned scene. If we take the salutary therapeutic conspiracy (known literarily as a Faustian pact) out of its closet as much as its cabinet, what persists? What remains for our creative recycling and reconfiguration—in the spirit of the child’s play that Benjamin so magnificently choreographs in his One-Way Street? What are the residues or hold-overs from therapeutic healing that persist when the field of intervention shifts toward the public sphere? Toward that foyer allowing expression of the inexpressible, and in this fashion bringing, if not full satisfaction, at least the relief of public (that is, interpersonal, transpersonal) testimony and attestation? At the same time that the criteria for professional disinterest and discretion that Freud established for the analytical interchange set the bar high indeed, there is any number of relationships outside the cabinet serving as scenes of virtual intimacy between consenting interlocutors—between teachers and students, mentors (religious, professional, and so on) and initiates—with transferential dimensions and at least the potential for healing effects. Under what conditions can friendship, or interpersonal association, be placed among these?

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I am asking whether it is not possible to hold over, in the sense of the Hegelian Aufhebung, the radical elements persisting undiminished over the history of therapies, until they meet up, join hands with public deliberation, from which, as clinical interventions, they are systematically excluded; until they unmask their inherently aesthetic and critical elements. If such a dialogue were authentically structured, as it is in the ur-therapeutic conventions elaborated by Freud, could it prevail between individuals interacting outside the parameters of the therapeutic contract? Could friends undertake a structured conversation, vowing never to violate its bonded/bounded conventions of confidentiality and disinterest, meaning that at no time would the disclosures made in the course of the conversation be put to any advantage or tangible use by either party in the transaction? In these terms, the structured conversation would constitute a severe test and stress for a friendship. To me it is quite unclear from the outset whether under these discursive conditions such a “conversation” could hold to its parameters or if such a friendship would remain a friendship. But from a very different angle, perhaps the structured conversation is little other than what we mean by professional interaction. We live in an age when Marx’s vast social classes of marked and even belligerent common interest have shriveled to the conventions of professions and even more tellingly, sub-professions (orthopedists, Film Studies specialists)—each of which speaks the same dialect and protects the same rules of conduct, this always in the name of mutual advancement and enrichment. (The blanket term that I would apply to this phenomenon is “professional” and “sub-professional” contracts, the latter a term I once applied to major “schools” of artistic and interpretative innovation).77 So compulsive is the drive for professional selfprotection and advancement that there is hardly any time for unstructured interaction (whether pleasant or unpleasant) hors profession. This in spite of the veritable arsenal of communications instruments and programs we deploy on an hourly basis. Is there a structured conversation that can work to radical effects of intimacy, discovery (Heideggerian de-concealment),78 and liberation that can both (1) carry over the formats invented over the history and course of therapies, and (2) withstand the conventionality and stupefying self-interest now indelibly embossed on professional advancement? This is the question I would like to address as I complete the overview of the strange but mutually indispensable partners—art, critique, and therapies—that the essays making up this book endeavor to interface at some viable level of theoretical rigor. Let us assume that such a conversation, if ever planned and initiated by consenting adults, would inevitably result in interpersonal and ethical disaster, as the foundational texts of classical psychoanalysis and its rigorous offshoots warn us. I am arguing that even under these conditions, it serves us well, as a

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cognitive and theoretical exercise, to imagine (visualize) this conversation, if for no other reason than to correlate it with what is involved in aesthetic improvisation and with critical autopoiesis. Among Freudian psychoanalysis’s enduring legacies are the stringency and rigor that Freud applied to phenomena of transference and countertransference. Already in his earliest formulations with respect to these clinical phenomena, violation of the parameters of conversation, hence of the very ethics of conversation as inaugurated by psychoanalysis, is tantamount to the foreclosure of any healing effect, any symptomatic disruption by means of rendering explicit. Some of Freud’s most powerful formulations regarding the ethics of clinical conduct and the management of the counter-transference appear in his retrospective Outline of Psycho-Analysis (1940):79 With the neurotics, then, we make our pact: complete candour on the one side and strict discretion on the other. This looks as though we were only aiming at the post of a secular father confessor. But there is a great difference, for what we want to hear from our patient is not only what he knows and conceals from other people; he is to tell us too what he does not know. With this end in view we give him a more detailed definition of what we mean by candour. We pledge him to obey the fundamental rule of psychoanalysis, which is henceforward to govern his behaviour to us. He is to tell us not only what he can say intentionally and willingly, what will give him relief like a confession, but everything else that his self observation yields him, everything that comes into his head, even if it is disagreeable for him to say it, even if it seems to him unimportant or actually nonsensical. If he can succeed after this injunction in putting his self-criticism out of action, he will present us with a mass of material—thoughts, ideas, recollections—which are already subject to the influence of the unconscious, which are often its direct derivatives, and which thus put us in a direct position to conjecture his repressed unconscious material and to extend, by the information we give him, his ego’s knowledge of his unconscious. ( Outline of Psycho-Analysis, 51–2) Posterity cannot err very far by earmarking the above passage as the statement of record regarding the patient’s adherence, in classical psychoanalysis, to a regimen of open disclosure—in the face of its obvious liabilities (embarrassment, shame, self-effacement, and so forth). Freud is himself explicit regarding the contractual nature of this “pact”: “complete candour” in exchange for “strict discretion.” Psychoanalysis’s implicit superego is nothing if not vigorous. It will demonstrate itself to be fully up to the task of keeping to its side of the bargain: discretion, restraint, the excision of personal

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“acting out” at the highest levels that analytical self-scrutiny will allow. Yet there is a dialectical paradox to this side of the analytical contract that surely did not escape Freud. Rhetorically, it involves unrestricted self-disclosure (and exposure) as a constraint, an imperative. Under psychoanalytical convention, the client learns that no detail (of a dream, a phrase) is too small, no involuntary slip devoid of meaning. Yet the training in this technique of psychology-driven close reading, one involving tremendous exegetical limberness and spontaneity, transpires by contract, with multiple behavioral as well as intellectual “strings attached.” The reading of the psychological underpinnings of everyday life that comes part and parcel with psychoanalytical treatment is surely, in certain of its dimensions, playful. But as has been suggested above in Chapter 6, regarding Winnicott’s psychoanalytical bearing, if it is under constraint, a practice of free association and disclosure may not be tantamount to play. Yet Winnicott’s clinical bearing is surely as ethically mindful, session for session and minute by minute, as Freud’s. Such a statement as the one immediately below is indicative of the self-scrutiny and its attendant constraints that Freud attaches to the analyst: However much the analyst may be tempted to become a teacher, model and ideal for other people and to create men in his own image, he should not forget that that is not his task in the analytic relationship, and indeed that he will be disloyal to his task if he allows himself to be led on by his inclinations. If he does, he will only be repeating a mistake of the parents who crushed their child’s independence by their influence, and he will only be replacing the patient’s earlier dependence by a new one. In all his attempts at improving and educating the patient the analyst should accept his individuality. The amount of influence which he may legitimately allow himself will be determined by the degree of developmental inhibition present in the patient. Some patients have remained so infantile that in analysis too they can only be treated as children. Another advantage of the transference, too, is that in it the patient produces before us with plastic clarity an important part of his life-story, of which he would have probably only given us an insufficient account. He acts it before us, as it were, instead of reporting it to us. And now for the other side of the situation. Since the transference reproduces the patient’s relation with his parents, it takes over the ambivalence of that relation as well. It almost invariably happens that one day his positive attitude towards the analyst changes over into the negative, hostile one. This too is as a rule a repetition of the past. ( Outline of Psycho-Analysis, 53–4)

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The constraints upon the clinical conversation are even ratcheted up when the elucidation of the psychoanalytical contract turns to the statutes of limitation applying to the analyst. What Freud makes clear in the above passage is the possible disastrous consequences of the most instinctive beneficent impulses and the deepest ingrained Western values: the analyst must apply to themself a rigorous and unstinting resistance to “what would come most naturally”—supplying lessons, goals, models of an edifying nature. Not only does the skepticism here toward the role of mainstream Western values (e.g., altruism) betray a significant Freudian inclination toward key Nietzschean meditations; so does the deep sensibility to temporality underlying the “recurrence of the selfsame”80 in the cycle, “moral edification-psychological disintegration”: “He [the analyst] will only be repeating the mistake of the parents who crushed the child’s independence by their influence.” The Freudian project, in these respects, is nothing less than installing a free-form interactive process within the social system of medical delivery and care as the format for a collaborative redress of what I have called, throughout the present study, “systematic insult.” Also in terms of what has been asserted thus far, the intimacy that the conversation perforce attains lends the transaction virtual values of intensity and absorption. Freud cannot be faulted for any letdown in his apprehension of the extremely rigorous constraints pertaining to what might be called “a designed speech situation” (or field). The constraints apply not only to the speech generated by the analyst during the regimen’s “contact hours” (its rhetoric, its proportion of the conversation, the relative timbre of its assertion, and its moral drift), but to such tangential considerations as off-site physical and social contact with the analysand as well as the billing and even the office furniture-arrangements. The overarching impulse behind the psychoanalytical conversation is the freeform cognitive association and expression that will allow the thinking of the hitherto unthinkable; the expression of the most “incompatible” thoughts—all in expanding the range of integration. Yet as a creative improviser and, in key respects, social outsider, Freud understood the significant build-out of infrastructure within the social system requisite to sustaining this open-ended interaction in the sense of rendering it socially acceptable. It is in the interest of this social acceptability, not to mention in the name of therapeutic palliation, that a substantial battery of immanent self-referential and meta-critical constraints upon the open-ended conversation emerges perforce. Approaching psychoanalysis as a conversation of a “second-order” process, repeatedly looping toward and beyond its own “points of incompletion,” goes a long way toward explaining why its trajectory and training are so elaborate and time-consuming. The process involves the analytical prospect’s personal “turn toward psychotherapy,” seminars dedicated to different stages and

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features of psychoanalysis, and a meticulous “training analysis,” furnishing oversight to a number of initial cases and over a significant period of time. One could hardly expect less given the demanding pyrotechnics involved in the assimilation of the overall psychoanalytical world-view, in the recognition and management of transference and counter-transference, and in mastering the delivery of psychoanalysis’s striking vacillation between the application and relaxation of constraint. Even when a Winnicottian counterpoint of “playful therapy” supplants the rather severe Freudian torque on therapeutic delivery, the multiple and demanding design-features giving psychoanalysis its distinctive “feel” do not disappear. The tradition of psychoanalytical intervention, along its length and breadth, is notable for the intensity of its self-scrutiny and its flex in its adaptation. The pervasive sense of the analyst’s responsibility has not diminished by the time of Winnicott’s post-World War II case studies of youthful refugees and others. The downbeat that he places on the play of therapeutic transaction does augment the tradition’s outreach, particularly on its flank with artistic and intellectual creativity. Here in this area of overlap between the playing of the child and the playing of the other person there is a chance to introduce enrichments. The teacher aims at enrichment. By contrast, the therapist is concerned specifically with the child’s own growth processes, and with the removal of blocks to development that may have become evident. It is psychoanalytical theory that has made for an understanding of these blocks . . . It is good to remember always that playing is itself a therapy. To arrange for children to be able to play is itself a psychotherapy that has immediate and universal application, and it includes the establishment of a positive social attitude towards playing. This attitude must include recognition that playing is always liable to become frightening. Games and their organization must be looked at as part of an attempt to forestall the frightening aspect of playing. Responsible persons must be available when children play; but this does not mean the responsible person need enter into the children’s playing. When an organizer must be involved in a managerial position then the implication is that the child or the children are unable to play in the creative sense of my meaning . . . The essential feature of my communication is this, that playing is always an experience, a creative experience, and it is an experience in the space– time continuum, a basic form of living. The precariousness of playing belongs to the fact that it is always on the theoretical line between the subjective and that which is objectively perceived. ( PR , 50)

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Even as psychoanalysis achieves its extreme articulation as game, not regimen, the statutes of limitation on the health-care provider, as on the accrediting body, do not diminish: not to invade the play-zone, not to interfere in the playful tenor or modality of interactivity (in Winnicott’s terms, the infant or child’s experience); not to terminate play through its administration. In articulating psychoanalytical intervention as playful intelligence, Winnicott interfaces the practice with a string of creative manifestations encountered elsewhere in this study, from Kandinsky’s seemingly amorphous but also composed canvases, to Kafka’s highly paradoxical adaptation of Dostoyevsky, to Hofstadter’s appeal to Zen ko¯ans and stereophonic equipment. This leaves us, then, at best with a variegated answer to the query with regard to the structured conversation: whether its constraints, its virtual interactivity, and its healing ouverture, can be conveyed beyond the clinical cabinet. At face value, this is an impossible undertaking. Who among us would wish to go to the effort, either with intimates or with associates to whom we impute an extraordinary degree of integrity and reliability, of drawing up the rules pertaining to our conversations, such that in attaining structure they would also gain palliative capability? No doubt a demanding and a tedious task in a world in which spontaneous, intense interaction is already in short supply. Yet in a world in which third-party reimbursement for such interventions as psychoanalysis and psychodynamic psychotherapy is also in short supply, perhaps such an effort, for some at least, would be well worth the effort. Of course the textbook for the “structured conversation” already exists. It is, precisely, the luminous passages pertaining to transference, countertransference, therapeutic technique, and the obligations and rights pertaining to patients as well as health-care deliverers throughout the literature of psychoanalysis. While some of the most striking and persistent of these formulations were crystallized by Sigmund Freud, it is by no means the case that they all were. Freud, anticipates, for example, in the second passage from An Outline of Psycho-Analysis immediately above, the debate surrounding “educationalism” in long-term psychotherapy that was to engage, and result in thoughtful retrospection by Heinz Kohut and Otto Kernberg, among the more fertile minds of recent object-relations theory. The debate between these two utterly committed psychoanalysts precisely draws out the inherent liabilities of “educating” clients engaged in open-ended circumspection;81 but it also specifies those clinical manifestations and conditions under which the complete unavailability of indispensable feedback-data may be tantamount to foreclosing the therapeutic process. The delicate line between therapeutic “burnout” by dint of excessive or of inadequate positive feedback is excruciatingly difficult to negotiate, yet the psychoanalytical literature has already taken its intangibles into account. Hence, a textbook or “user’s guide” for “civilian” interlocutors (non-professionals) who would wish to intensify, for

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ameliorative purposes, some of the virtual dimensions embedded in certain carefully selected interactions, need only be written. It already exists in its virtual space and form And yet, it could be argued, the “structured conversation” is as actual as potential. It prevails in certain milieus. We veer in and out of it on a regular basis. Our conversation attains the “second-order” dimension of methodological perspicuity and theoretical oversight when, with our relatives, we reach some agreement as to how the family really operated; with our friends, we arrive at both the enabling legislation and the limit-cases of friendship; with our mentors and students, we grasp what’s at play in the initiation-process beyond the subject-matter and the data at hand. Engaging the structured conversation as a medium for systematic measure and breakthrough is, then, as much a matter of recognition as active implementation. The “structured conversation” is merely one of the venues touched upon by the preceding in which systematic constraints, dimensions, and potential transformations are broached and negotiated. The other such environments surely include books, museums, theaters, movie-houses, cyberspace, and other media and public spaces in which the encounter with cultural artifacts takes place. The foregoing has been dedicated to a rendering explicit of the terms, limitations, and possibilities under which contemporary systematic experience transpires. In closing this study, we could only wish for readers, frequenters of museums, theaters, movie houses, and other designated zones of cultural interactivity, as well as for participants in therapy, to whatever degree structured and however calibrated, to find their own “weapons.” This in the sense of the very last phrase of Kafka’s Diaries, “You too have weapons” (Auch du hast Waffen).82 Systematic healing, as it has been broached in the foregoing, is very much a matter of our collective deployment of whatever weapons we can muster in critique’s struggle against a priori selection and high-handed foreclosure. As Winnicott chronicles this process, in his casestudy of “A Woman Aged Forty Years, Unmarried” (PR, 131), this deconstructive arming may even involve cultivating a bit of ruthlessness. In keeping with Winnicott’s splendidly patient-centered practice of working-through the doublebinds and dead ends with which his patients were regularly beset, of the belligerent as well as hopeful attitude with which he released his clients back to the stream of life, I happily accord him the final word: In this session there could be seen the process of the development of a capacity for projective identification, this new capacity bringing with it a new type of relationship of a kind that this patient had not been able to achieve in her life. Along with this came a realization of what the absence of this has meant in terms of the impoverishment of her relation to the

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world and of the world to her, especially in respect of inter-communication. It should be added that along with this new capacity for empathy there had arrived in the transference a new ruthlessness and a capacity to make big demands on the analyst, the assumption being that the analyst, now as an external or separate phenomenon, would look after himself. She felt that the analyst would be glad when she would be able to achieve greed, which is in an important sense equivalent to love. The analyst’s function is survival. There was a change in this patient. ( PR , 136)

Notes Introduction 1 Douglas R. Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), p. 26. 2 I am referring, of course, to the notion of “flashbulb memory” developed in cognitive psychology as a term for particularly vivid occurrences whose precise times, locations, and circumstances are also recalled. See Ulrich Neisser and Ira E. Hyman, Jr., eds., Observing Memory: Remembering in Natural Contexts (New York: Worth Publishing, 2000), pp. 3–18, 50–65, 68–89. 3 The respective generations of cybernetic thinking and their impact on the modeling of systematic capability is masterfully sequenced and configured by N. Katherine Hayles in How We Became Posthuman (Chicago, IL: U of Chicago P, 1999), pp. 50–84, 88–112, 140–58, 222–46. 4 Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols/The Anti-Christ, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Penguin, 1990), p. 35. 5 Henry Sussman, “Systems, Games, and the Player: Did We Manage to Become Human?,” in Around the Book: Systems and Literacy (New York: Fordham UP, 2011), pp. 194–217. 6 This is a term that Walter Benjamin applied to a hiatus surfacing between the running narrative and a tacked-on ending to all three of Kafka’s novels. See Walter Benjamin, “Franz Kafka,” in Selected Writings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP 1999), II, p. 802. 7 See Paul Fry, Theory of Literature, Open Yale Courses (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2012). 8 Jorges Luis Borges, “John Wilkins’ Analytical Language,” in Selected NonFictions, trans. Eliot Weinberger (New York: Viking, 1999), pp. 229–32. 9 Paul de Man, “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” in Blindness and Insight (Minneapolis, MN: U of Minnesota P, 1983), pp. 191–3, 206–8, 218–23, 225–8. 10 See J. Hillis Miller, Speech Acts in Literature (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2001); Literature as Conduct (New York: Fordham UP, 2005). 11 Jacques Derrida: Limited Inc.: abc . . . (Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 1987). 12 Samuel Weber, Theatricality as Medium (New York: Fordham UP, 2004). 13 Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Chicago, IL: U of Chicago P, 1980). 373

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14 The concise expression of Heidegger’s overall philosophical intervention is, precisely, the synthesis of a discursive medium performing the very adjustments and interventions it is positing. Among numerous instances of this meta-critical Heideggerian textual allegory, none may be more striking than his elaboration, in “The Origin of the Work of Art,” of the Riβ or rift both as rootedness in the Earth and the proto-inscription enabled by this authentic cognizance of cultural and material preconditions. See Martin Heidegger, Holzwege (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1972), pp. 51–2, 58; Poetry, Language Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), pp. 63–4, 70. 15 Though there are no doubt comparable instances, Jacques Derrida’s most memorable etymological embroidery on a term otherwise seemingly lacking in any depth or resonance may well be his treatment of the term glas (funeral knell, in French) in his book of the same title, a book choreographing a complex pas de deux between legitimacy and transgression as these constructs ricochet between Hegel on the one hand, and Genet on the other. See Jacques Derrida, Glas, trans. John P. Leavey, Jr. and Richard Rand (Lincoln, NB: U of Nebraska P, 1980), pp. 111, 119–24, 142–9, 158–65, 180, 233–8. 16 J. Hillis Miller initiated his own investigation into the cybernetic dimensions of literature with his ground-breaking “Fractal Proust” in his Black Holes, with Manuel Asensi (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1999), pp. 313–434. Subsequent studies saw additional attention to speech acts rather than further attention to the linguistic parameters of cybernetic functions. Through his magisterial rereading of Henry James in Literature as Conduct: Speech Acts in Henry James (New York: Fordham UP, 2005), pp. 10, 12, Miller pursued with particular force speech acts’ tangible outcome. This is of course merely one strand of Miller’s sustained and unprecedented critical “beat.” His forthcoming Communities in Fiction (New York: Fordham UP, 2014) affords this particular technology of linguistic practice and fictive usage a new and remarkable breadth. 17 See Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community (Minneapolis, MN: U of Minnesota Press, 1991), pp. 1–42. 18 See Jacques Lacan, The Language of the Self: The Function of Language in Psychoanalysis, trans. Anthony Wilden (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1968). 19 Douglas Hofstadter, I am a Strange Loop (New York: Basic Books, 2007). 20 Henry Sussman, The Aesthetic Contract: Statutes of Art and Intellectual Work in Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1997), pp. 165–205. 21 Anthony Wilden, System and Structure (London: Tavistock, 1972). 22 Hofstadter, in his demonstrations of computer programs’ capabilities to cite themselves and refer back to themselves in order to augment the level and power of their logic, commands, and processes, gains considerable momentum from the philosopher W. V. Quine, whose logic explored the properties of propositions that cited and transposed themselves. This segment of the work in Gödel, Escher, Bach is particularly strategic to appreciating Hofstadter’s designation of Gödel as a mathematician whose

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positioning, in relation to Russell and Whitehead, anticipated Derrida’s bearing to the philosophical establishment of his day. One of the most playful interchapters interspersed throughout the book, “Airs on G’s String,” illustrates the parallelism between what came to be called cybernetic autopoiesis and performative critique, particularly as practiced by Derrida. Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach, pp. 181–97, 431–7. 23 Henry Sussman, The Task of the Critic (New York: Fordham UP, 2005), pp. 1–36. 24 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (Minneapolis, MN: U of Minnesota P, 1987). 25 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Vintage, 1973). 26 Michael Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon, 1972). 27 Jacques Rancière, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics (New York: Continuum, 2010), pp. 36–40, 42, 138–42. 28 In such works as Becoming Virtual: Reality in the Digital Age (New York: Plenum Trade, 1998) and Cyberculture (Minneapolis, MN: U of Minnesota P, 2001), Lévy makes an impressive attempt to calibrate such advances as VR with his immediate context in French theory and cultural studies, notably with such philosophers as Deleuze/Guattari and Derrida. Lévy takes philosophical argumentation involving such terms as actuality and virtuality seriously; he is attuned to distortion effects entering philosophical discourse via linguistic phenomena of representation. A characteristic statement of his approach to virtuality is to be culled from the pages of Cyberculture: The word “virtual” has at least three meanings: a technical meaning associated with information technology; a contemporary meaning, and a philosophical meaning. Our fascination with virtual reality is based in large part on a confusion of these three meanings. In its philosophical sense, the virtual is that which exists potentially rather than actually, the field of forces and problems that is resolved through actualization. The virtual process precedes its effective or formal concretization (the tree is virtually present in its seed). Philosophically speaking, the virtual is obviously a very important dimension of reality. But as it is currently employed, the word “virtual” often signifies unreality, “reality” here implying some material embodiment, a tangible presence. The word “virtual reality” sounds like an oxymoron, some mysterious sleight of hand. We generally assume that something is either real or virtual, and that it cannot possess both qualities at once. For the philosopher, however, the virtual stands in opposition not to the real but the actual, virtuality and actuality being nothing more than two different modes of reality. Although the seed’s essence is the production of a tree, the tree’s virtuality is quite real (without yet being actual). Any entity is virtual if it is “deterritorialized,” capable of engendering several concrete manifestations at different times and places, without being attached to any particular place or time. (Cyberculture, 29)

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Lévy, in characterizing the virtual in relation to the actual and real, reaches back to the figure of the genetic imprinting (or representation) of the tree in the seed, a figure that Hegel, in the famous Preface to The Phenomenology of Spirit, deployed as a figure for the organically “grown” and proliferating science of another dawning age. 29 See Michael Heim, The Metaphysics of Virtual Reality (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993). It is already two decades since Heim managed to involve his readers in some of the deliberations and decisions that the theoreticians and designers of cybernetic technology were facing as they were constructing it. He therefore imparted a wonderful degree of freewheeling speculation and authenticity to his formulations. A characteristic passage from this volume runs as follows: When designing virtual worlds, we face a series of reality questions. How, for instance, should users appear to themselves in a virtual world? Should they appear to themselves in cyberspace as one set of objects among others, as third-person bodies that users can inspect with detachment? Or should users feel themselves to be headless fields of awareness, similar to our phenomenological experience? Should causality underpin the cyberworld so that an injury inflicted on the user’s cyberbody likewise somehow damages the user’s physical body? And who should make the ongoing design decisions? If the people who make simulations inevitably incorporate their own perceptions and beliefs, loading cyberspace with their own prejudices as well as their insights, who should build the cyberworld? Should multiple users at any point be free to shape the qualities and dimensions of cyber entities? Would artistic users roam freely, programming and directing their own unique cyber cinemas that provide escape from the mundane world? Or does fantasy cease where the economics of the virtual workplace begins? But why be satisfied with a single virtual world? Why not several? Must we pledge allegiance to a single reality? Perhaps worlds should be layered like onion skins, realities within realities, or be loosely linked like neighborhoods, permitting free aesthetic pleasure to coexist with the task-oriented business world. Does the meaning of “reality”— and the keen existential edge of experience—weaken as it stretches over many virtual worlds? Important as these questions are, they do not address the ontology of cyberspace itself, the question of what it means to be in a virtual world, whether one’s own or another’s world. (Metaphysics of Virtual Reality, 83–4) Heim’s insistence on extrapolating the conditions of virtuality from the perspective of those immersed in virtual worlds is redolent of the projective empathy which for Hofstadter is the cornerstone of what might be called his “cybernetic ethics.” 30 In Virtual Reality (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991), Rheingold takes his theoretical impetus from Theodore Nelson, who, in “Interactive Systems and the Design of Virtuality” (1980) wrote: “An interactive computer system is a series of presentations intended to affect the mind in a certain way, just like a

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movie. This is not a casual analogy; this is a central issue. I use the term ‘virtual’ in its traditional sense, as the opposite of ‘real’ ” (cited in Virtual Reality, p. 177). In keeping with this particular technology, Rheingold narrates the history of VR from within the space of its technological evolution. His story is a fascinating one, tracking this recent cybernetic capability from the perspective of the technological advances necessary for its realization. He is at all times cognizant of the specific research teams and industrial enterprises that facilitated the implementation of technological advances in devices that could be produced for a mass audience. The system that was running at Utah in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s consisted of six interconnected subsystems Sutherland and his colleagues had invented previously in Massachusetts: a clipping divider, a matrix multiplier, a vector generator, a headset, a head position sensor, and a general purpose computer constituted the world’s first reality machine. These components were the first specific machines for creating a virtual reality—the software cyberdozers that laid out the landscape of the virtual world. The system that constituted the MIT-Utah HMD was another inflection point in the history of VR: Using binocular displays to create a three-dimensional visual perspective is one distinct element of VR; using computers to create the graphics that are seen in 3D is another distinct element; tracking the user’s direction of gaze to immerse the user in the virtual world is yet another distinct but essential element. Putting the elements together into an integrated system that enabled the user to walk around inside a computer was Sutherland’s brilliant contribution to the birth of VR, and not his only one. Knowing what these devices might be used for, and how they might affect everybody’s life when the technology matures, were also crucial insights Sutherland communicated early in his research. (Virtual Reality, 106–7) 31 For an account of the reciprocal interactivity that may well constitute philosophical dialectics’ breaking point and turning point toward a higher level of systematic oversight, see my The Hegelian Aftermath: Readings in Hegel, Kierkegaard, Freud, Proust, and James (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1982), pp. 27–56. 32 E. T. A. Hoffmann, Tales of E. T. A. Hoffmann, trans. Leonard J. Knight and Elizabeth C. Knight (Chicago, IL: U of Chicago P, 1974), p. 112. 33 With scant mention in Absorption and Theatricality itself (main reference, p. 30), Fried’s trope of absorptiveness in art was to have profound repercussions in the theoretical and art-historical discourses of the late twentieth century. To the point where Charles Bernstein takes the term as the impetus for his splendid critical essay in verse, “Artifice of Absorption,” Paper Air (1987), rpt. in Bernstein, A Poetics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1992), pp. 9–89. 34 See Jacques Rancière, “The Emancipated Spectator,” Artforum, 2007 (3), 271–81. Rancière militates, in this highly innovative inquiry, for a recasting in which the spectator emancipates themself through their active role in redistributing intelligence and the sensible. Much goes by the board in this

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argument: liberation aesthetics (even by the likes of Artaud or Brecht), in which the audience nonetheless defers to a specific directorial vision; pedagogical mastery, if it discounts student experiences and perspectives. Even in this admirable attempt to recalibrate contemporary cultural participation in terms of Marxist aesthetics, the space in front of the stage or the installation remains a particularly intense and interactive one: But in a theater, or in front of a performance, just as in a museum, at a school, or on the street, there are only individuals, weaving their own way through the forest of words, acts, and things that stand in front of them or around them. The collective power that is common to these spectators is not the status of members in a collective body. Nor is it a particular kind of interactivity. It is the power to translate in their own way what they are looking at. It is the power to connect it with the intellectual adventure that makes any of them similar to any other insofar as his or her path looks unlike any other. The common power is the power of the equality of intelligences. (“The Emancipated Spectator,” 278) 35 The text of record exploring the distinctions between “first-order” and “second-order” processing and autopoiesis—thereby retracing and bringing to fuller completion the cybernetic history traced by N. Katherine Hayles as cited above—remains Bruce Clarke and Mark B. N. Hansen, eds., Emergence and Embodiment: New Essays on Second-Order Systems Theory (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2009). 36 Gregory Bateson’s account of addiction as a perfectly plausible outcome of growing up in a home environment characterized by intractable doublebinds is a most compelling one. See his Steps to an Ecology of Mind (Chicago, IL: U of Chicago P, 2000), pp. 309–37. 37 Of all of us, it is Avital Ronell who has written with greatest sensitivity as well as theoretical acuity regarding the stigmatization of addictions and the substances putatively triggering them. See her Crack Wars: Literature, Addiction, Mania (Lincoln, NB: U of Nebraska P, 2004). 38 See Walter Benjamin, “A Child’s View of Color,” in Selected Writings, I, pp. 50–1; “Old Forgotten Children’s Books,” Selected Writings, I, pp. 406–13; “A Glimpse into the World of Children’s Books,” Selected Writings, I, pp. 435–43. 39 In One-Way Street, Benjamin writes compellingly of children’s natural affinity to “waste products,” how they are “irresistibly drawn by the detritus generated by building, gardening, housework, tailoring, or carpentry,” Selected Writings, I, pp. 449–50. 40 See Benjamin, “Crock Notes,” in On Hashish (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2006), pp. 81–5. 41 Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué, “Undine,” in German Romantic Stories, ed. Frank Ryder, The German Library (New York: Continuum, 2001), p. 48. 42 Wilden, System and Structure, pp. 159–60. 43 Wilden, System and Structure, p. 158.

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44 The inevitable limitation that Hegel ascribes to Understanding (Verstand)— nevertheless a stage of cognitive development that he finds absolutely crucial—is the wholesale generation of distinctions for their own sake, what we might now characterize as “the narcissism of small differences.” See G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1970), pp. 99–103. 45 It may well be worthwhile considering the possible analogy between Hegel’s pushback against Kant’s purported “formalism,” in the Preface to The Phenomenology of Mind, and Derrida’s critique of the structuralists who dominated the French intellectual scene at the moment of his début. Derrida may specifically address Claude Lévi-Strauss in Of Grammatology, yet his blistering divergence from the anthropologist applies to an entire intellectual school. See Hegel, Phenomenology, pp. 8–9, 23, 27–35. For Derrida’s reaction to Lévi-Strauss, see Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1977), pp. 101–40. 46 For Derrida’s deployment of the hinge as a trope indicative of the rapport between deconstructive critique and the overarching constraints of Western logic and metaphysics, see Of Grammatology, pp. 65–6, 69, 279. 47 For example, Derrida, Of Grammatology, pp. 8, 12, 28, 23, 144–5, 167. 48 Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986), pp. 301–95. 49 Although well-rehearsed at certain key moments of Gödel, Escher, Bach, the question concerning the constitution and activity of a self redefined as a network of symbols becomes the overarching issue treated in Hofstadter’s sequel to his inaugural masterwork, I Am a Strange Loop (New York: Basic Books, 2007). With a combination of his characteristic wit and an excruciating sensitivity in part occasioned by the untimely loss of his wife, Hofstadter explores in the later volume not only selfhood, but a significant bundle of its offshoots: friendship, memory, “taking over” preferences and traits from our loved ones as opposed to “being original.” For this strand of its argumentation, see I Am a Strange Loop, pp. 73–86, 177–206, 227–74.

1 Reading Kandinsky 1 “Recognition” is one of the several cognitive capabilities that come into play through the aggravated situation of parity or standoff between counterpoised proto-subjects that is the starting point for the famous “Master-Bondsman” parable in The Phenomenology of Spirit. See G. F. W. Hegel, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1977), p. 112. 2 Within the framework of In Remembrance of Things Past, Proust concentrates a significant portion of his observations regarding the spectatorship of paintings around this particular painting and its “little patch of yellow wall.” Proust contrasts the intensive interaction with an auratic painting with the experience of being detached or absent from its virtual scene. Interestingly, the explanation of Bergotte’s fascination with Vermeer’s “View of Delft”

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coincides with the narration of his death, his absenting himself from society and indeed life. In Proust’s microcosm of French cultural life at the end of the nineteenth century, Bergotte is his composite (impressionist) novelist. See Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin (New York: Vintage, 1982), II, 544; III, 184–6. 3 The phrase refers to Proust’s unforgettable formulation, at the outset of “Swann’s Way,” “When a man is asleep, he has in a circle around him the chain of the hours, the sequence of the years, the order of the heavenly host.” Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, I, p. 5. 4 Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, I, p. 132. 5 Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, I, pp. 173–80. 6 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1976), pp. 242–68. 7 The exhibition resulted in a splendid catalogue, which has proven an indispensable sourcebook for my current reprise of Kandinsky. See Kandinsky, ed. Vivian Endicott Barnett and others (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 2009). 8 Henry Sussman, The Aesthetic Contract: Statutes of Art and Intellectual Work in Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1997), pp. 165–205. 9 Annegret Hoberg, “Vasily Kandinsky: Abstract, Absolute, Concrete,” in Kandinsky, p. 25. 10 Here I am referring to Roland Barthes’s interplay, in Camera Lucida, between the punctum and the studium as the axes of attentiveness organizing our decoding of photographs. The inevitable vacillation between the punctum, as the center of attention, and the broader studium is not unlike the interplay between system and environment as characterized by the likes of Gregory Bateson, Anthony Wilden, and Niklas Luhmann. See Barthes, Camera Lucida, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill & Wang, 1981), pp. 26–7, 32, 42–5, 55–9. 11 On the notion of faciality, see Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis, MN: U of Minnesota P, 1989), pp. 62–3, 115–17, 168–70, 181–91, 301. 12 Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago, IL: U of Chicago P, 1987), pp. 53–9. 13 Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (Chicago, IL: U of Chicago P, 1980), pp. 75–9, 86–7, 179–93, 303–6, 505–13. 14 See Ludwig von Bertalanffy, General System Theory: Foundations, Development, Applications (New York: George Braziller, 1969), pp. 139–54. 15 See Anthony Wilden, System and Structure (London: Tavistock, 1972), pp. 202–10, 357–67. 16 Wassily Kandinsky, Kandinsky: Complete Writings on Art, ed. Kenneth C. Lindsay and Peter Vergo (New York: Da Capo, 1994), p. 179. 17 Kandinsky, Kandinsky: Complete Writings on Art, pp. 180–1. 18 Kandinsky, Kandinsky: Complete Writings on Art, pp. 182–3,

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19 Kandinsky, Kandinsky: Complete Writings on Art, pp. 177–9. 20 Kandinsky, Kandinsky: Complete Writings on Art, p. 181. 21 My favorite overview of this particular system, as it was discovered by the first generation of Americans permitted to learn the rudiments of acupuncture and other phases of Chinese medicine in China, is Harriet Beinfield and Efrem Korngold, Between Heaven and Earth (New York: Ballantine, 1991), pp. 29–48, 85–127. 22 Kandinsky, Kandinsky: Complete Writings on Art, p. 152. 23 Kandinsky, Kandinsky: Complete Writings on Art, p. 195. 24 Kandinsky, Kandinsky: Complete Writings on Art, p. 176. 25 The “Triadic Ballet” was a number in the 1926 “Wieder Metropol” musical review staged at the Metropol Theater, Berlin. For a photograph of Schlemmer’s geometrical costumes, see Magdalena Droste, Bauhaus: 1919–33 (Cologne: Taschen, 2010), p. 102. 26 See “Theatre at the Dessau Bauhaus,” in Droste, Bauhaus: 1919–33, pp. 158–62. 27 Hoberg, “Vasily Kandinsky: Abstract, Absolute, Concrete,” pp. 47–9. 28 Henry Sussman, The Task of the Critic (New York: Fordham UP, 2005), pp. 1–36. 29 The most striking instance of this unavoidable speculative blindness or delusion in Kant is the “transcendental illusion” by which reason literally gets away from itself—its structures as well as its strictures—demonstrating the exigencies of a “critical philosophy.” See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul Geyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998), pp. 384–93. 30 For example, see Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Maquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), pp. 174, 264–5, 271, 276–8.

2 From The Brothers K. to Joseph K. 1 Franz Kafka, The Trial, trans. Breon Mitchell (New York: Schocken Books, 1998). 2 Years ago, when I set about a first take on Amerika (Der Verschollene), I could not help but be struck by the exuberant diversity of the World Literature backdrop that Kafka assembled for the novel. See my Franz Kafka: Geometrician of Metaphor (Madison, WI: Coda Press, Inc., 1979), pp. 74–82. 3 Kafka, The Trial, p. 218. 4 Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (Chicago, IL: U of Chicago P, 2000). 5 Anthony Wilden, System and Structure (London: Tavistock, 1972). 6 See D. W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality (New York: Routledge, 1971), pp. 104–10, 129–31. 7 Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2002).

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8 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul Geyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998). 9 Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1954), p. 15. 10 Franz Kafka, Amerika, trans. Michael Hofmann (New York: New Directions, 2002). 11 Kafka, The Trial, pp. 64–5. 12 Jorge Luis Borges, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” in Collected Fictions, trans. Andrew Hurley (New York: Viking, 1998), pp. 174, 179–80. 13 Franz Kafka, The Castle, trans. Mark Harman (New York: Schocken Books, 1998), p. 20. 14 This marvelous phrase doubles as the name of one of Wallace Stevens’s most memorable poems. See Wallace Stevens, The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems and a Play, ed. Holly Stevens (New York: Vintage Books, 1967), pp. 166–8. 15 Franz Kafka, The Complete Stories, ed. Nahum N. Glatzer (New York: Schocken Books, 1971). 16 Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), pp. 140–7, 160–7. 17 Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind, pp. 67–71, 97–9, 104–6, 109–10, 323–36, 329, 333–6.

3 The Calculable, the Incalculable, and the Rest 1 My sincere gratitude to the editors of MLN for their patient guidance in preparing the English-language version of this essay. The text was originally produced, in the Winter of 2010–2011, under exemplary work and human conditions afforded by the Internationales Kolleg Morphomata, University of Cologne. 2 Henry Sussman, Around the Book: Systems and Literacy (New York: Fordham UP, 2111), p. xx. 3 Douglas R. Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (New York: Vintage Books, 1980), pp. 262–3. 4 Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach, p. 263. 5 Henry Sussman, Franz Kafka: Geometrician of Metaphor (Madison, WI: Coda Press, Inc., 1978), pp. 151–2. 6 Franz Kafka, “The Burrow,” in The Complete Stories, ed. Nahum N. Glatzer (New York: Schocken Books, 1971), p. 347. German citations derive from Franz Kafka, Nachgelassene Schriften und Fragmente, ed. Jost Schillemeit (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 1992), II. I frequently refer to this edition as “Schillemeit.” 7 Kafka, “The Burrow,” pp. 347–8.

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8 It is within the framework of “typographical number theory” (TNT) that Hofstadter can calibrate and articulate the grammar of the numerical strings (or sentences) constituting isomorphism’s operational facet. See Gödel Escher, Bach, pp. 204–15. 9 Niklas Luhmann, Social Systems, trans. John Bednarz, Jr. with Dirk Becker (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1995), pp. 112–13. 10 Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach, p. 27. 11 Henry Sussman, Afterimages of Modernity (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1989), pp. 177–8. 12 Thomas Bernhard, Correction, trans. Sophie Wilkins (New York: Vintage Books, 1983), pp. 12–13. 13 J. Hillis Miller, Literature as Conduct: Speech Acts in Henry James (New York: Fordham UP, 2005), p. 169. 14 Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach, p. 128. 15 Kafka, “The Burrow,” p. 354. 16 Jorge Luis Borges, “Death and the Compass,” in Collected Fictions, trans. Andrew Hurley (New York: Viking, 1998), p. 149. 17 Kafka, “The Burrow,” pp. 341–2. 18 Anthony Wilden, System and Structure (London: Tavistock Press, 1972), p. 203. 19 Bernhard, Correction, pp. 242–3. 20 Hofstadter, Gödel Escher, Bach, pp. 37–8. 21 Hofstadter, Gödel Escher, Bach, p. 286. 22 Kafka, “The Burrow,” p. 357.

4 Urban Introjections 1 Alfred Döblin, Berlin Alexanderplatz: The Story of Franz Biberkopf, trans. Eugene Jolas (New York: Continuum, 2004), p. 32. Interspersed phrases from the German original refer to Berlin Alexanderplatz (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1996). 2 See James Joyce, Ulysses, the Corrected Edition, ed. Hans Walter Gabler (New York: Random House, 1986), p. 96 (beginning, “Aeolus” episode): “Before Nelson’s pillar trains slowed, shunted, changed trolley, started for Blackrock, Kingstown and Dalkey, Clonskea, Rathgar, and Terenure, Palmerston Park and upper Rathmines, Sandymount Green, Rathmines, Ringsend and Sandymount Tower, Harold’s Cross. The hoarse Dublin United Tramway Company’s timekeeper bawled them off.” Also note the detailed, quasi-scientific overview afforded the regional transportation system much later, in the dialogic “Ithaca” episode, p. 591. 3 Döblin, Berlin Alexanderplatz, p. 33. 4 Döblin, Berlin Alexanderplatz, pp. 33–4.

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5 All three of the brief extracts in this paragraph derive from Döblin, Berlin Alexanderplatz, p. 103. 6 Döblin, Berlin Alexanderplatz, p. 113. 7 Döblin, Berlin Alexanderplatz, p. 114. 8 Döblin, Berlin Alexanderplatz, p. 7. 9 Franz Kafka, “Description of a Struggle,” in The Complete Stories, ed. Nahum N. Glatzer (New York: Schocken Books, 1970), p. 33. 10 Döblin, Berlin Alexanderplatz, p. 8. 11 Döblin, Berlin Alexanderplatz, p. 176: “Some of my readers are worried about Cilly. What’s to become of the girl now Franz isn’t there, when Franz isn’t alive, is dead, and simply isn’t there. Oh, she’ll manage somehow, don’t you worry, needn’t get yourself worked up about her, that kind always falls on her feet.” 12 Döblin, Berlin Alexanderplatz, p. 329: “Who is it standing in Alexanderplatz, very slowly moving one leg after the other? It’s Franz Biberkopf. What’s he done? Well, you know all that, don’t you? A pimp, a hardened criminal, a poor fool, he’s been beaten, and how—he’s in for it now. That cursed fist that beat him. The terrible fist that gripped him. The other fists hammered at him, but he escaped.” Not only has the narrative, with its question, grabbed the reader; it immediately “lets go,” fuguing, as if it were the deranged party, on the word “fist” (Faust). 13 See Walter Benjamin, “On the Image of Proust,” in Selected Writings, ed. Rodney Livingstone and Others (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1999), II, p. 237. 14 Döblin, Berlin Alexanderplatz, p. 192. 15 Döblin, Berlin Alexanderplatz, p. 319. 16 Döblin, Berlin Alexanderplatz, p. 355. 17 Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore, trans. Philip Gabriel (New York: Vintage Books, 2005), pp. 46–7, 49, 76–85, 212–13, 215. 18 The narrative simulation of Franz’s cognitive state at this moment runs in part as follows: Boom, zoom, the wind stretches his chest, draws in his mouth, then he exhales as if he were a barrel, heavy as a mountain, the mountain approaches, and crash—it rolls against the house. Rumbling of basses. Boom, zoom, the trees sway, they can’t keep time, they’re swaying right, they’re swaying left, and now he knocks them down. Falling weights, hammering air, a rattle and a roar, and a crash, boom, zoom. I’m yourn, come on, we’ll soon be there, boom, night, night. (Berlin Alexanderplatz, trans. Jolas, p. 347) [Wumm, wumm, der Wind macht seine Brust weit, er zieht den Atem ein, dann haucht er aus wie ein Faß, jeder Atem schwer wie ein Berg, der Berg kommt an, krach, rollt er gegen das Haus; rollt der Baß. Wumm wumm, die Bäume schwingen, können nicht Takt halten, es geht nach rechts, sie schwingen noch links, nun knackt er sie über.

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Stürzende Gewichte, hämmernde Luft, Knackern, Knistern, Krache, wumm wumm, Nacht, Nacht. (Berlin Alexanderplatz, p. 378)] The power of this and similar passages builds in part through the combined mutual intensification and underscoring of the nonsense-words (wumm, wumm) in combination with an action-language of impact and noise (Knackern, Knistern, Krache). An added irony of this particular passage is that the mental hospital in which he’s been committed is named Buch (book), reinforcing the decisive dynamic feedback loop between textual display and psychological simulation in the novel. 19 Jacques Lacan, “The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious,” in Ecrits, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004), p. 161. 20 Sigmund Freud, “The Interpretation of Dreams,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Writings of Sigmund Freud (London: Hogarth Press, 1954–1973), VII, p. 638. 21 Sigmund Freud, Standard Edition, VII, p. 639. 22 Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. James Strachey (New York: Liveright, 1970), p. 57. 23 See Otto Kernberg, Borderline Conditions and Pathological Narcissism (New York: Jason Aronson, 1983), pp. 24–5. 24 Otto Kernberg, “Structural Derivatives of Object Relations,” in Essential Papers on Object Relations, ed. Peter Buckley, M.D. (New York: New York UP, 1986), p. 360. 25 Kernberg, “Structural Derivatives of Object Relations,” pp. 360–1. 26 Lacan, “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis,” in Ecrits, p. 104. 27 Döblin, Berlin Alexanderplatz, p. 270. 28 There can be no episode more symptomatic of the homo-social bond between Franz and Reinhold on which Werner Rainer Fassbinder focused his film adaptation of the novel than the scene in which Franz invites Reinhold to his apartment so that he can, undetected, observe Mietze, as his upstanding new partner, a true “keeper.” The episode is indeed reminiscent of a fable of tested fidelity from the pages of Boccaccio or Chaucer. It ends with Franz forgetting that Reinhold is his “audience,” and beating his girlfriend almost senseless. 29 Döblin, Berlin Alexanderplatz, pp. 332–3. 30 Döblin, Berlin Alexanderplatz, p. 326. 31 Kafka, “First Sorrow” (“Erstes Leid”), in The Complete Stories, pp. 446–8.

5 Theory on the Fly 1 Citations in this essay derive from Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP,

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1999). Benjamin’s technique of numbering each extract in this encyclopedic and thematically organized collection of primary sources mixed with his own pointed commentary spares me the need for page references to this work. This measure also allows readers of The Arcades Project in “foreign” languages, notably in the German original, to follow along. 2 In recent writing, I’ve attempted to characterize these and other “dissolving” works as sites of production where the book medium tests its conceptual and physical bindings as it moves toward the ouverture of “open systems.” See my Around the Book: Systems and Literacy (New York: Fordham UP, 2011), pp. xi–xxi, 1–22, 134–7. 3 I’m considerably indebted to the Whitney Humanities Center Working Group in Theory at Yale and to its guiding lights, Kirk Wetters, Joshua Alvizu, Jason Kavett, and Andrew Kirwin, for introducing me to this highly suggestive term and its literature. Highly recommended basic reading on precarity would include Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Precarious Rhapsody: Semiocapitalism and the Pathologies of the Post-Alpha Generation (London: Minor Compositions, 2009) and Open, 17 (2009): A Precarious Existence: Vulnerability in the Public Domain (New York: NAI010 Publishers). 4 In the social sciences, Thomas D. Cook and Donald T. Campbell made a major impact with their overview of the objectivity and critical detachment that could be imported to experiments conducted à l’improviste and under field (as opposed to laboratory) conditions. Their position-paper on the exigencies pertaining to rigorous thinking and reality-testing conducted, in terms of the present chapter, “on the fly,” is their Quasi-Experimentation: Design and Analysis Issues for Field Settings (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1979). 5 Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2000), pp. 315–17, 446–53, 490–5, 498–501, 504–11. 6 Anthony Wilden, System and Structure (London: Tavistock Press, 1972), pp. 203–5, 356–67, 373–7. 7 Douglas R. Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (New York: Basic Books, 1979), pp. 36–8, 85–7, 97–9, 115–16, 191–4. 8 For merely one instance of this discursive modality, see Lacan’s comments on Freud’s personal “Dream of Irma’s Injection,” which he subjected to selfanalysis in The Interpretation of Dreams. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, I: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954–55, trans. Sylvana Tomaselli (New York: W. W. Norton, 1988), pp. 146–71. 9 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis, MN: U of Minnesota P, 1987), pp. 43, 149–66, 474–88. 10 For an aggravated instance of sub-syllabic semantic drift or glide in Derrida’s readings, see Glas, trans. John P. Leavy, Jr. and Richard Rand (Lincoln, NB: U of Nebraska P, 1986), pp. 119–22, 139–42, 235–7. Derrida’s fragment, “Tympan,” inaugurates his Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago, IL: U of Chicago P, 1972), pp. ix–xxix. 11 For “strange loopings” in Hofstadter, see Gödel, Escher, Bach, pp. 15, 21, 149–51.

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12 This is of course the pronouncement, “In direct contrast to German philosophy which descends from heaven to earth, here we ascend from earth to heaven. That is to say, we do not set out from what men say, imagine, conceive, nor from men as narrated, thought of, imagined, conceived, in order to arrive at men in the flesh. We set out from real, active men, and on the basis of their real life-process we demonstrate the development of the ideological reflexes and echoes of this life-process. The phantoms formed in the human brain are also, necessarily, sublimates of their material life-process, which is bound to material premises.” Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, ed. C. J. Arthur (New York: International Publishers, Co., 1970), p. 47. 13 Walter Benjamin, Das Passagen Werk, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1983), Vols. V and VI of the Gesammelte Schriften. 14 “Gone-there” (fort-da) is the term that Freud applies to his infant grandson’s repetitive play with a spool on a string. Freud develops the construct into an explanation—the repetition-compulsion (Wiederholungszwang)—by which trauma victims could keep returning to the (mental) scenes of their worst memories and nightmares. See Sigmund Freud, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Writings of Sigmund Freud (London: Hogarth Press, 1953), XVIII, pp. 14–17. 15 Walter Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” in Selected Writings, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2003), IV, p. 324. 16 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999), pp. 115–16, 190–1, 384–7, 439–44. 17 G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1977), pp. 88–91. 18 Walter Benjamin, “Franz Kafka,” in Selected Writings, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1999), II, p. 802: “Like El Greco, Kafka tears open the sky behind every gesture; but as with El Greco—who was the patron saint of the Expressionists—the gesture remains the decisive thing, the center of the event.” 19 Karl Marx, Capital (New York: Penguin Books, 1990), I, p. 155. 20 Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), pp. 35, 87–92. 21 Within the discourse of contemporary systems theory, “second-order” is the register at which cybernetic and other isomorphic programs become selfadaptive and “autopoietic,” at which they “learn,” when their activity is not only intra-systematic but meta-systematic. The current primer to processes and capabilities at the second order is Emergence and Embodiment: New Essays on Second-Order Systems Theory, ed. Bruce Clarke and Bruce N. Hansen (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2009). 22 For Louis Althusser’s pivotal construct, the Ideological State Apparatus (ISA), see his Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), pp. 142–7, 150–1, 166–7, 181–6.

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23 Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens (Boston, MA: The Beacon Press, 1955), pp. 40–1, 49–53, 58–65. 24 D. W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality (London: Tavistock/Routledge, 1991), pp. 38, 40–52, 108–9, 121. 25 See, for example, Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1976), pp. 144–57, 163–4, 262–8, 313–16; Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago, IL: U of Chicago P, 1981), pp. 99–102, 108–12, 202–3, 208. 26 I recall here the well-established argument that Romantics from Wordsworth and Blake to their German counterparts including Goethe and the Athenaeum group elaborated and refined fragmentation as they deployed it on multiple fronts in resisting the claims to systematic comprehensiveness and totality of their day. Along with the image, the idea, and criticism, fragmentation played a prominent role in Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy’s interstitial overview, on the interface between literary invention and philosophy, in Romanticism, in The Literary Absolute, trans. Philip Bernard and Cheryl Lester (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1988), pp. 39–58. 27 For the key Heideggerian notion of thrownness (Geworfenheit), see Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Maquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1960), pp. 134–8, 174, 219–24, 235, 264–5, 294–5, 434–6. 28 Hofstadter, in setting out the broadest possible primer of emergent cybernetic culture and technology in 1979 for a literate public, includes Zen ko¯ans (along with Bach’s canons, Escher’s impossible perspectives, Gödelian incompleteness, and the biochemically transmitted codes of genetics) as a phenomenon expanding its programmatic possibility through its gravitation toward stark doublebinds. He views the capacity to “break” doublebinds through non-linear transformations (mutations, in the case of genetics; mystical realizations in Zen meditation) as a feature of all “self-referential,” autopoietic, or “second-order” systems. See his Gödel, Escher, Bach, pp. 189–90, 231–65. 29 Benjamin, Selected Writings, IV, pp. 330–1. 30 Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1954), pp. 15, 61, 152, 178. 31 In his Messianic Reduction: Walter Benjamin and the Shape of Time (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2011), Peter Fenves compellingly updates the prospects for Benjamin’s messianism, particularly with respect to the various temporalities that it implicates and informs.

6 Playful Healing 1 D. W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality (New York: Routledge, 1991), henceforth abbreviated “PR.” 2 R. D. Laing’s Knots is a remarkable text, even for a quirky liberation psychiatrist. This work is a series of articulations (for performance) of

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“universal” psychological impasses in the form of what we now call “concrete poetry.” (The poems are repetitive, incantatory. They circle back—in compressed, repetitive lines—to the ur-senses of anger, aggression, thwarting, betrayal, and so on consuming a vast share of our psychological lives.) Laing’s choice of Knots as the title for these expressions is not accidental. Anticipating Hofstadter’s appreciation of Escher’s graphics, these ejaculatory texts, in their repetition and in the introjective simplicity of their phrasing (see Chapter 4), achieve “lift-off” into higher dimensions of critical insight and processing. See Laing’s Knots (London: Tavistock, 1970). 3 See Adam Phillips, Winnicott (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1988), pp. 36, 43, 87–90, 114–21, 137–48. 4 See Harry Stack Sullivan, The Interpersonal Theory of Psychiatry (New York: W. W. Norton, 1953), pp. 31–45, 158–71. 5 See Melanie Klein, “A Contribution to the Psycho-Genesis of Depression,” in Essential Papers on Object Relations, ed. Peter Buckley (New York: New York UP, 1986), pp. 40–70. 6 Freud had developed, prior to the revelation of the sufficiency of the “talking cure” (Fräulein Anna O.’s own term, in the pivotal early case-history bearing her name) of exerting hand-pressure on the client’s head at junctures in the therapeutic monologue deemed to be pivotal. As Freud discerns in his early psychoanalytical practice that a sustained discursive “strange loop” or a self-extending discursive “string” is sufficient for obtaining cathartic or healing effects, he abandons hypnosis as a cognitive supplement to therapy along with digital pressure on the skull. See Sigmund Freud, “Studies in Hysteria,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (London: Hogarth Press, 1955), II, pp. 28–38, 268–76, rpt. as Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud, Studies on Hysteria (New York: Basic Books, 1975). 7 Douglas R. Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach (New York: Vintage Books, 1980), p. 263. 8 Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach, p. 438. 9 With regard to the consistency of Pound’s Cantos as “poetic stuff,” see Henry Sussman, High Resolution: Critical Theory and the Problem of Literacy (New York: Oxford UP, 1989), pp. 128–31. With respect to postmodern discourse, as practiced variously by Joyce, Beckett, Adorno, and Bernhard, see Sussman, Afterimages of Modernity (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1990), pp. 161–205. 10 Thomas Bernhard, Old Masters: A Comedy, trans. Ewald Osers (Chicago, IL: U of Chicago P, 1992). 11 See Heinz Kohut, The Analysis of the Self (Madison, CT: International Universities P, 1971), pp. 300–3. 12 Sigmund Freud, “Recollection, Repetition, and Working Through (Further Recommendations in the Technique of Psycho-Analysis II) (1914),” Standard Edition, XII, p. 154. 13 Freud, “On Beginning the Treatment (Further Recommendations in the Technique of Psycho-Analysis I) (1913),” Standard Edition, XII, p. 130.

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14 See Freud, “On Beginning the Treatment,” pp. 134–5: “One more thing before you start,” counsels Freud, in a hypothetical communication, at the outset of treatment. “What you tell me must differ in one respect from an ordinary conversation. Ordinarily you rightly try to keep a connecting thread running through your remarks and you exclude any intrusive ideas that may occur to you and any side-issues, so as not to wander too far from the point. But in this case you must proceed differently. You will notice that as you relate things various thoughts will occur to you which you would like to put aside on the ground of certain criticisms and objections . . . Never give in to these criticisms . . . Say it in spite of them—indeed, you must say it precisely because you feel an aversion to doing so. Later on you will find out and learn to understand the reason for this injunction, which is really the only one you have to follow.” There is a notable paradox here: the thrust of these remarks comes as strict rules applying to conversational interlocution, even though the therapeutic exchange is by its nature rigorously inclusive. 15 Freud, “On Beginning the Treatment,” pp. 126–7. 16 Freud, “On Beginning the Treatment,” p. 127. 17 Freud, “On Beginning the Treatment,” p. 131. 18 Freud, “On Beginning the Treatment,” pp. 133–4. 19 Freud, “Observations on Transference-Love (Further Recommendations in the Technique of Psycho-Analysis III) (1915 [1914]),” Standard Edition, XII, p. 163. 20 Freud, “Observations on Transference-Love,” p. 160. 21 Freud, “Observations on Transference-Love,” pp. 164–5. 22 Freud, “Observations on Transference-Love,” p. 166.

7 The Figure in the Network 1 Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions, trans. Andrew Hurley (New York: Viking, 1996), pp. 78–9. 2 Borges, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,“ in Collected Fictions, p. 68. 3 Derrida would go on to thematize the very deliberate outlandishness of his writing-design by declaring deconstruction “the experience of the impossible.” See his Specters of Marx (New York: Routledge, 1994), pp. 35, 88–9. 4 Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper, 1975), p. 71. 5 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1976), p. 6. 6 Douglar R. Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (New York: Vintage, 1979), p. 384. 7 Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach, p. 385. 8 Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach, p. 385. 9 This is, of course, the subtitle to Gödel, Escher, Bach.

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10 Henry Sussman, The Aesthetic Contract: Statutes of Art and Intellectual Work in the Broader Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1997), p. 143.

8 The Phenomenology of Jetlag 1 Franz Kafka, The Complete Stories, ed. Nahum N. Glatzer (New York: Schocken, 1970), p. 429. 2 Edmund Husserl, The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness, trans. James S. Churchill (Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1964), p. 70. 3 Franz Kafka, The Castle, trans. Edwin and Willa Muir (New York: Schocken, 1968), p. 335. 4 Franz Kafka, The Castle, p. 351. 5 Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. N. M. Paul and W. S. Palmer (New York: Zone Books, 1991), p. 186. 6 Edmund Husserl, The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness, pp. 107–8. 7 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1976), pp. 165–268. 8 In Jacques Derrida, Acts of Literature, trans. Derek Attridge (New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 253–309. 9 Roberto Bolaño, 2666, trans. Natasha Wimmer (New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 2008). 10 Anthony Wilden, System and Structure (London: Tavistock Press, 1972), p. 363. 11 Roberto Bolaño, The Savage Detectives, trans. Natasha Wimmer (New York: Picador/Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 2007). 12 Respectively, these two ficciones appear in Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions, trans. Anthony Lane (New York: Penguin Books, 1998), pp. 68–81 and 112–18. 13 See Henry Sussman, “Kafka in the Twentieth Century: An Approach to Borges,” in Afterimages of Modernity (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1990), pp. 13–60. See also, “The Writing of the System: Borges and Calvino,” in Literary Philosophers, ed. Jorge Gracia, Carolyn Korsmeyer, Rodolphe Gasché (New York: Routledge, 2002), pp. 149–64. 14 Bolaño, 2666, pp. 188–9. 15 Borges, Collected Fictions, p. 74. 16 Borges, Collected Fictions, p. 74. 17 Bolaño, 2666, p. 185. 18 Borges, Collected Fictions, p. 127. 19 Borges, Collected Fictions, p. 78. 20 Emmanuel Levinas, The Levinas Reader, ed. Seán Hand (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), pp. 37–58.

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21 Levinas, The Levinas Reader, pp. 88–125. 22 Levinas, The Levinas Reader, p. 104.

Afterword 1 D. W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality (New York: Tavistock/Routledge, 1991), p. 38. 2 Morphomata, as units of cultural transmission and intermedial transcription, are the incitation to collaborative research at the Institute for Advanced Study, University of Cologne, Germany, where, as indicated above, over the course of 2010–2011, the basic groundwork for the current study was done. Brainchildren of a team of thinkers at Cologne, morphomata are broad, enduring, and multi-cultural formats for cultural striving and invention. Recent conferences and publications devoted to astro-culture, the seasons, diagrams, and fluid bodies highlight multiple bases for the isolation and exploration of morphomata, research topoi with their own virtual potential. 3 The recent work of Jason Groves, notably his splendid 2012 doctoral thesis on walking and stumbling in modern German literature and contemporary critical theory, serves as inspiration and affirmation of this particular metaphor. More recently, Groves traces out the implications of the aimless wandering motif, particularly as it emerges in modernism, for the extractive logic and environmental impact embedded in full-throttle late-Capitalism. 4 This is of course the paradigm that Winnicott invented for the site and output for all questing, inquisitive, inventive, and “creative” striving, including that involved in therapeutic reprogramming. The transitional object will re-emerge in segments of the present writerly occasion affording a more head-on encounter with therapeutic healing as Winnicott recharged it. See especially Chapter 5. 5 See Rem Koolhaas, “Junkspace,” in October, 100 (2008). 6 Anthony Wilden, System and Structure (London: Tavistock Press, 1972), p. 363. 7 “Incompatibility” may well be the primary feature of the ideation that, according to Freud, eludes conscious recognition. Such epiphenomena as jokes and dreams become, within this framework, delivery-systems making such unpleasant recognitions tolerable, precisely in a limited sense. 8 Among numerous possibilities, my long-held top candidate for the most intrinsically psychoanalytical spiritual allegory in the Platonic Dialogues is the strife within a chariot team as well as within the soul at 250d–255b of Phaedrus. See Plato: The Collected Dialogues, Bollingen Series LXXI (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1973), pp. 497–501. 9 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis, MN: U of Minnesota P, 1983), p. 296. 10 Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, p. 267. 11 Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, p. 359.

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12 Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, p. 338. 13 Bruce Clarke and Mark B. N. Hansen, eds., Emergence and Embodiment: New Essays on Second-Order Systems Theory (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2009). 14 See Samuel Weber, Return to Freud: Jacques Lacan’s Dislocation of Psychoanalysis, trans. Michael Levine (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991). 15 Among many possibilities, two volumes in which Slavoj Žižek most compellingly writes in this vein are the following: The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989) and The Ticklish Subject: An Essay in Political Ontology (New York: Verso, 1999). 16 See Joan Copjec, Read My Desire: Lacan against the Historicists (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994). 17 Henry Sussman, “Thinking Flat Out: Back to Bateson,” in Around the Book: Systems and Literacy (New York: Fordham UP, 2011), pp. 244–76. 18 In Jacques Derrida, On the Name, trans. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1995), pp. 89–130. 19 In Jacques Derrida, Without Alibi, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2002), pp. 71–160. 20 In Bernard Stiegler, Ce qui fait que la vie vaut le coup d’être vécue: Pharmacologies de l’esprit, du nihilism, du capital et la question (Paris: Flammarion, 2001), pp. 11–16, 62–5. 21 See J. Hillis Miller, The Medium is the Maker (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2009). 22 The very model for how theoretically driven close reading might impact the exegesis of cinema is Tom Cohen’s Hitchcock’s Cryptonomies (Minneapolis, MN: U of Minnesota P, 2005). 23 John Kenneth Galbraith, Money (Boston, MA: Houghton-Mifflin, 1975), pp. 159–61 (as cited by Deleuze/Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus). 24 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis, MN: U of Minnesota P, 1987), p. 55. 25 In post-war France, Jean Dubuffet is credited with playing a disproportionate role in the l’art brut movement, one recognizing the full cultural capital in the long-standing aesthetic contract with primitivism and strong repetitive pattern among its dominant features, some of whose outstanding artifacts were produced in mental institutions in Europe and elsewhere. The Collection de l’Art Brut in Lausanne, in whose founding Dubuffet was instrumental, is a dynamic storehouse of this body of work. For a most useful introduction to it, its artists, and its aesthetics, see Lucienne Peiry, Art Brut: The Origins of Outsider Art, trans. James Frank (Paris: Flammarion, 2001). 26 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 119. 27 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 114. 28 William R. Miller, Robert A. Rosellini, and Martin E. P. Seligman, “Learned Helplessness and Depression,” in Essential Papers on Depression, ed. James C. Coyne (New York: New York UP, 1985), pp. 183–4.

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29 Bateson, Steps, pp. 310–31. 30 Martin E. P. Seligman et al., “Learned Helplessness and Depression,” p. 203. 31 Douglas R. Hofstadter, Gödel Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), p. 246. 32 Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach, p. 231. 33 This terse and powerful phrase also happens to be the title of a theoretical study by the contemporary science fiction giant, Samuel R. Delany. See his The Jewel-Hinged Jaw: Notes on the Language of Science Fiction (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 2009). 34 Katsuki Sekida, Two Zen Classics (New York: Weatherhill, 2000), p. 34. 35 Wilden, System and Structure, p. 163. 36 Sekida, Two Zen Classics, p. 35. 37 Sekida, Two Zen Classics, p. 38. 38 Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach, p. 26. 39 Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach, pp. 26–7. 40 Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach, p. 358. 41 This moment, at which intelligence becomes the operating language of “higher” cognitive processing as well as aesthetic-scientific crystallizations, may be considered as another of those junctures at which Hofstadter’s hybrid prose medium attains rapprochement with those contemporary theoretical interventions—from deconstruction to Lacanian psychoanalysis and Deleuze and Guattari’s phantasmatic systems—highlighting the linguistic constitution, coding, and liabilities of ideological and scientific paradigms. In the end, it is true, Hofstadter essentializes a few processes, such as analogy, isomorphism, and recursion, as the “hard core” of thinking and processing. But the “open” reading of Hofstadter that his work warrants in view of the exemplary intellectual and scientific generosity accompanying the jazz-like improvisation lifting Gödel, Escher, Bach to the level of speculative fiction would approach his constructs of recursion and analogy as protean metatropes and infrastructures eschewing their own closed type-casting. 42 Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach, p. 128. 43 Jacques Derrida, “Plato’s Pharmacy,” in Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago, IL: U of Chicago P, 1981), pp. 95–105, 108–12, 124–7, 134–42. 44 Jacques Derrida, “White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy,” in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago, IL: U of Chicago P, 1982), pp. 245–57. 45 Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2005), pp. 7–10, 13, 17–21, 24, 34. 46 Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc.: abc . . . (Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 1987). 47 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1976), pp. 242–55, 313–16. 48 Jacques Derrida, “Ousia and Grammé” in Margins of Philosophy, pp. 31–57.

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49 Among the high points in Miller’s truly inventive and multidimensional interrogation of speech acts are his Speech Acts in Literature (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2001), Literature as Conduct: Speech Acts in Henry James (New York: Fordham UP, 2005), and The Conflagration of Community: Fiction before and after Auschwitz (Chicago, IL: U of Chicago P, 2011). 50 Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach, p. 286. 51 Hofstadter is in healthy anticipation, as of this point, of Niklas Luhmann’s designation of “selection” as one of the indispensable processes by which social systems are configured. See his Social Systems, trans. John Bednarz, Jr. (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1995), pp. 27, 32, 67–8, 112–13, 134–6, 154. 52 While it may be an illustrative pretext that draws these whimsical, but knowing dialogues out, they are marvelous texts in their own right, and every bit as strategic to Hofstadter’s theoretical leitmotivs as the presumably “straighter” “lessons.” 53 Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach, pp. 316–17. 54 Hofstadter, Gödel Escher, Bach, p. 320. 55 Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach, pp. 262–3. 56 Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach, p. 18. 57 Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach, p. 438. 58 Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach, p. 357. 59 Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach, p. 520. 60 Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach, p. 520. 61 Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach, pp. 310–13, 316–17, 319–20. 62 Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach, p. 310, Fig. 60. 63 Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach, p. 477. 64 Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach, pp. 37–8. 65 Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach, pp. 495–501. 66 Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach, pp. 477. 67 Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach, pp. 287–8. 68 Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach, p. 307. 69 Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach, pp. 301–2. 70 Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach, p. 384. 71 Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach, p. 385. 72 Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach, p. 385. 73 Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach, p. 385. 74 Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach, p. 479. 75 Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach, p. 255. 76 With regard to the notion of disinterest (ohne alles Interesse), see Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgment, trans. J. H. Bernard (New York: Macmillan, 1951), pp. 17–24, 45.

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77 In Henry Sussman, The Aesthetic Contract: Statutes of Art and Intellectual Work in the Broader Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1997), pp. 1–33, 165–205. 78 See Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper, 1975), pp. 53–6, 60–1. 79 Sigmund Freud, An Outline of Psycho-Analysis, trans. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989). 80 Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Penguin, 1969), pp. 232–8, 244–7, 329–33; The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kauffman and R. J. Hollingsale (New York: Vintage, 1968), pp. 224, 330–1, 536–7, 545–50. 81 With respect to the debate concerning educationalism in the delivery of psychotherapy, see Heinz Kohut, The Analysis of the Self (Madison, CT: International Universities Press, 1971), p. 178; Otto Kernberg, “Further Considerations to the Treatment of Narcissistic Personalities,” in Andrew P. Morrison, ed., Essential Papers on Narcissism (New York: New York UP, 1986), pp. 251–3, 264–9; Kernberg, Severe Personality Disorders (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1984), pp. 182–9; Henry Sussman, Psyche and Text: The Sublime and the Grandiose in Literature, Psychopathology, and Culture (Albany, NY: SUNY P, 1993), pp. 60, 87, 187, 218n. 82 Franz Kafka, Diaries: 1914–23, ed. Max Brod (New York: Schocken, 1965), p. 233; Tagebücher: 1910–23 (New York: Schocken, 1949), p. 421.

Index addiction, 21, 34, 182 Aligheri, Dante, 175 allegory, 9–11, 15–16, 66–7, 84, 87, 89, 95, 99–100, 109, 138, 145, 170, 177–8, 180–1, 183–7, 193–5, 307, 346 Althusser, Louis, 108, 191, 245, 253, 315 analog display, organization, 8, 10, 12, 14–16, 25–30, 51, 82, 88, 97, 102, 108, 271 Antonioni, Michelangelo, 316 aporias, 31, Appolinaire, Guillaume, 109, 352 Aristotle, 208, 292, 305–6 art brut, 393n25 Austin, John, 11, 343 autopoiesis, 14, 84, 114, 119, 128, 133, 141, 202, 215–6, 238, 248, 275, 305, 318, 365 Bach, Johan Sebastian, 248, 265, 272–3, 280, 350 Badiou, Alain, 17 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 323 Balzac, Honoré de, 136, 184 Barthes, Roland, 45, 245 Beckett, Samuel, 46, 121–3, 129, 149, 219, 278, 315 Bataille, Georges, 122, 200 Bateson, Gregory, 6, 9, 12, 26, 32, 34, 56, 82, 85, 108, 198, 206, 238, 298, 318–19, 326, 336, 355 Baudelaire, Charles, 167–8, 174–8, 180–9, 194, 198 Beinfeld, Harriet, 381n21 Benjamin, Walter, 21, 46, 144, 149, 154, 164, 167–77, 178–9, 201–2, 220, 279, 331, 364, 378n38, 387n18

Bergson, Henri, 13, 292–3, 300 Bernhard, Thomas, 85, 121, 123, 129–30, 219–20, 278 Bernstein, Charles, 377n33 Blanchot, Maurice, 16, 46, 121–2, 245 Blanqui, Auguste, 180, 184, 187 Bolaño, Roberto, 219, 297–301 Borges, Jorge Luis, 3, 98, 109, 126, 136, 175, 209, 244–5, 247, 257, 276, 298–301 Bowlby, John, 207 Brecht, Bertolt, 42, 141, 184 burnout (also see entropy), 34, 184, 310, 370 Caillebotte, Gustave, 168 Calvino, Italo, 122, 247, 278 Cantor, Georg, 218, 256, 272, 351 Capitalism, late-Capitalism, 122, 182–3, 186–7, 314–15, 319–21 Capra, Fritjof, 247 Carroll, Lewis, 3, 13, 209, 253, 255, 330, 337 Castiglione, Baldassare, 268 catastrophe, 169, 179, 201, 296, 308 Celan, Paul, 46 Cervantes, Miguel de, 85, 167 Cézanne, Paul, 253 chaos, 104 chunking, 251, 283, 309, 330, 337, 348, 354–8 Clarke, Bruce, 247, 318 climate, 174 close reading, 279, 284, 307 Cognitive Science, 12, 126, 147, 215, 217, 219, 258, 262 Cohen, Tom, 319 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 246, 317 complexity, 3, 125, 168, 237–8, 246, 260 339 397

398

INDEX

consciousness, 212, 250, 271, 274–5, 295, 299, 351 Copjec, Joan, 317 Cortázar, Julio, 247, 278 creativity, 4, 27, 78, 222, 229–31, 241, 253, 274–5, 293, 345, 347, 368–9 critique, 11, 15–16, 20, 29, 39, 55, 75, 132, 177, 189, 193, 195, 202, 219, 231, 295, 306, 308, 310, 313, 315–16, 354, 363–4, 368 cybernetics, 3, 6, 9–11, 14–16, 28, 34, 88, 95, 113–14, 124, 128, 131, 168, 170, 197, 216, 228, 240, 245–8, 252, 256–62, 265, 270, 275, 278–84, 288–90, 295–6, 317, 319–21, 337, 344, 350, 353, 359–60 deconstruction, 11, 14–15, 17, 191, 216–18, 240, 244, 263, 270–4, 276–7, 282, 282, 299–300, 305, 319 Defoe, Daniel, 84 Deleuze (Gilles)/Guattari (Félix), 111, 170, 206, 294, 314–17, 319–24, 347, 362 de Man, Paul, 11–12, 16, 87, 220, 273 Denkbild (Benjaminian thoughtimage), 279 Dennett, Daniel, 249 Derrida, Jacques, 5, 11, 13–17, 30, 38, 40, 46, 49, 51, 114, 131–3, 167, 170, 185, 189, 193, 218, 220, 245, 252, 256, 271–4, 279, 290, 292, 294, 296–8, 301, 317, 321, 354, 368, 374n15, 379n45, 390n3 Descartes, René, 109, 113, 261, 349 dialectics, 15, 34–5, 169, 180–1, 183, 200–1, 350, 366 dialectical image (Benjamin), 168, 181, 192, 196, 198–9, 200–2, 279 Dickens, Charles, 8, 84 Diderot, Denis, 280 digital (display, organization), 8, 12, 14–17, 25–30, 51, 82, 88–9, 93, 100, 102–4, 108, 307, 317, 320, 333–6

displays (visual), 76, 111, 182, 246, 319, 352 Döblin, Alfred, 137, 139–47, 158–61, 164–5, 384n11n12, 384–5n18 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 7–8, 39, 83–4, 90–3, 96, 100, 105–6, 136, 169 doublebinds, doublebind theory, 187, 238–9, 326–7, 330, 336 double messages, 138, 185, 305, 309 Dufy, Raoul, 46, 64 Einstein, Albert, 280 empathy, 228, 230, 241, 256–7, 265–70, 281, 364, 371 entropy (also see burnout), 4, 184, 304 environment, 4, 9, 13, 24, 26, 32–3, 61, 77–81, 84, 122, 132, 151, 156, 168, 180, 225–6, 253, 283, 310, 317, 322, 361–3 Escher, M.C., 8, 10, 121, 248, 260, 265, 272–3, 277–78, 350 Euclid, 256 experience, 293–4 faciality, 45, 241 Fairbairn, R. W. D., 207 fashion, 172–3, 184 Fassbinder, Rainer Werner, 162 Faulkner, William, 129 feedback, feedback loops, 132, 135, 151, 202–3, 210, 216, 229, 305, 308, 310, 329–30, 334–5, 370 Fellini, Federico, 40 Fenves, Peter, 388n31 Fermat, Pierre de, 256 Fibonacci (Leonardo of Pisa), 124 figure-ground relations, 253, 257, 317, 355 Flaubert, Gustave, 8, 84, 99, 136, 184, 306 flexibility, 3, 254 Fourier, Charles, 184 Foucault, Michel, 245, 280 Fouquet, Friedrich de la Motte, 18, 22–5 fragmentation, 19, 153, 168, 388n26

INDEX

Freud, Sigmund, 6, 14, 17, 28, 40, 154–5, 206, 212, 215–16, 229, 232–7, 248, 251, 263, 279, 291–3, 312, 317, 363, 367–8, 370, 387n14, 389n6, 390n14 Fried, Michael, 11, 19 Friedrich, Caspar David, 281 Fry, Paul, 10 games, 8, 132–3, 204–5, 228, 234, 237, 273, 345, 353–4, 364 Gautier, Théophile, 184 Giacometti, Alberto, 46 Girard, René, 12 Gleick, James, 243, 247 Gödel, Kurt, 9, 13–14, 22, 98, 113, 218, 253, 255, 259–60, 272–3, 275–6, 280, 350 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 24, 37, 175, 246, 280, 311, 317 Gramsci, Antonio, 315 Grossman, Allen, 1, 38 Grosz, Georg, 46 Groves, Jason, 392n3 Guys, Constantin, 184 Handke, Peter, 163 Hansen, Mark, B.N., 318, 378n35 Hayles, N. Katherine, 378n35 healing, 5–6, 41, 76, 205, 213, 285, 306–11, 328–9, 359, 362, 371 Hegel, Georg Friedrich Wilhelm, 8, 14–15, 18, 28, 37, 85, 109, 125–6, 171, 185, 208, 245–6, 292, 314, 317, 350, 357, 364 ––The Phenomenology of Spirit, 8, 125, 171, 185, 245, 292 Heidegger, Martin, 5, 11, 13–14, 207, 220, 245, 301, 365, 374n14 ––Lichtung (clearing, opening), 207, 209, 240, 243, 284, 324 ––Geworfenheit (thrownness), 77 Heim, Michael, 18, 22, 376n29 Heisenberg, Werner, 280 Hjelmslev, Louis, 323 Hoberg, Annegret, 72, 380n9 Hoffmann, E. T. A., 18–19, 253 Hofstadter, Douglas R., 3, 6, 8–9, 12–13, 31, 34, 36, 89, 98, 100,

399

113–14, 124, 126, 129, 131–3, 167, 209, 212, 216–18, 221, 247–8, 257–85, 329–30, 336–42, 344–62, 397n49, 388n28, 394n44 ––Gödel, Escher, Bach, 6, 8, 13, 31, 131–2, 167, 217–19, 218–19, 247–9, 282–3, 336–42, 348–9, 354, 358–60 ––I Am a Strange Loop, 13, 89, 212, 249–50, 259–60, 283 Hugo, Victor, 175, 184 Huizinga, Johan, 192 Humboldt, Alexander von, 280 Hume, David, 250 Husserl, Edmund, 13, 278, 287–8, 290, 292–4, 299–301 Ibsen, Henrik, 306 Impressionism, 293 institutions, institutionalization, 2, 30, 296–7, 307, 313, 315, 328 integration, 229 intelligence, 1–3, 10, 22, 121, 196, 212, 223, 229, 243, 247, 252–6, 264–7, 331, 339, 344, 347, 353, 362 Intelligence, Artificial, 3, 16, 124, 131, 133, 216, 248, 275, 278, 305 interactivity, 228–9, 319, 371 interfaces, interfacing, 118, 157, 174, 211, 215, 252, 279, 292 intervention, 307, 310, 368 introjections, 138, 140–1, 154, 156–8, 162–3 isomorphism, 217, 248–49, 251, 255, 260, 274–6, 280, 283, 342, 344–5, 348, 354–55, 359–60 James, Henry, 37, 39 Jolas, Eugene, 139–40 Joyce, James, 14, 46, 122, 129, 139–40, 145–6, 149, 159, 162, 167, 176, 218–19, 278, 297, 311, 383n2 Jung, Carl, 309 Jutzi, Phil, 162

400

INDEX

Kafka, Franz, 216, 218, 247, 278, 291, 293, 324, 369, 371 ––Amerika, 7, 83, 90, 96, 101–2, 288 “The Burrow” (Der Bau), 111–30, 132–6 ––The Castle (Das Schloß), 90, 97, 99–1/2, 121, 288–9 ––“The Metamorphosis” (Die Verwandlung), 8, 107, 120 ––The Trial (Der Process), 8, 83, 85, 87–90, 118 Kandinsky, Wassily, 37–82, 122, 209, 303–4, 330, 369 Kant, Immanuel, 2, 8, 10, 12, 14, 16, 31, 34, 94–5, 119, 148, 185, 221, 246, 248, 250, 253, 280–1, 290, 294, 314, 317 Kernberg, Otto, 140, 156–8, 370 Kierkegaard, Søren, 317 Klee, Paul, 46, 68, 74 Klein, Melanie, 212, 236 Kleist, Heinrich von, 327 koans, ¯ Zen, 248–9, 273, 329–37, 352, 354, 368–9, 388n28 Kohut, Heinz, 140, 156, 207, 227, 236, 256, 267, 370 Lacan, Jacques, 12–13, 16–17, 26, 28–9, 147, 153, 156–8, 170, 206, 212, 215, 222, 227, 240, 278, 281, 298, 309, 312, 318, 386n8 ––The Imaginary, 28, 222, 227, 300, 318 ––The Real, 28, 145, 153, 161, 212, 240–1, 278, 300 ––The Symbolic, 28, 147, 318 “learned helplessness,” 207, 325–7, 338 Levinas, Emmanuel, 300–1 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 245, 306 Lévy, Pierre, 18, 22, 375n28 Liang, R. D., 205–6, 388–9n2 Liska, Vivian, 128 literature, 6, 83–4, 99, 111, 119, 128, 246, 305–6, 326 Locke, John, 250 Lovelock, James, 318 Luhmann, Niklas, 2, 22, 31, 120, 147, 247, 253, 264, 318, 355

Machiavelli, Nicoló, 268 Macksey, Richard, 38 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 14, 133, 327 Marukami, Haruki, 153, 384n17 Marx, Karl, 17, 84, 172, 177, 180, 185–6, 188, 195–6, 320, 323, 362, 365, 387n12 Margulis, Lynn, 318 Maturana, Umberto, 247, 318 Melville, Herman, 246, 311, 317 memory, 290, 292 Miller, Alice, 236 Miller, J. Hillis, 11, 16, 38, 123, 129, 344, 374n16 Milne, A. A., 212 mind, 35, 259–61, 361 miniaturization, 84, 93, 101, 115, 197, 316 Miró, Juan, 73–4 Monet, Claude, 191, 253 mother, “good enough” (Winnicott), 213, 221–8, 241 Musil, Robert, 149 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 11 narrative, 23, 91–2, 115, 141–2, 145, 159–60, 247, 349, 351 Newton, Sir Isaac, 280 Nicholson, Harold, 212 Nelson, Theodore, 376–7n30 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 7, 13, 15, 31, 180, 185, 194, 227, 256, 317, 320, 367 object-relations theory, therapy, 156–7, 228–9 operationality, 113, 342, 344, 347–50 patterns, 66, 260, 347 perception, 30, 51, 264, 361, 363 performativity, 248, 305, 307, 319 Philips, Adam, 205 philosophy, 14–17, 33, 39, 94, 185, 187, 246, 262, 297 Picasso, Pablo, 61–2 Plato, 14–15, 24, 31, 85, 99, 109, 274, 292, 313 play, playfulness, 10, 22, 30, 80, 169, 192, 204–8, 213–16, 220–4,

INDEX

226–8, 238–41, 243–4, 247, 275, 320, 367–9 Poe, Edgar Allan, 38, 180, 184, 244 Ponge, Francis, 14 popping, 14, 124, 283, 332, 335, 337, 354–5 Prevailing Operating System (POS), 3, 6, 9–10, 16, 101, 114, 136, 173–4, 188, 190, 218, 244, 249, 256, 258, 260, 273–4, 282–5, 310, 319, 323 Prigogine, Ilya, 247 processing (higher-lower-level), 131–2, 216, 246, 249, 258, 279, 283, 293, 330, 340, 345, 356–60, 361–3 Proust, Marcel, 3, 10, 26, 34, 37–9, 149, 192, 218, 247, 252–3, 267, 276, 291–3, 379–80n2 psychoanalysis, 5–6, 13, 23, 41, 158, 191–2, 221–2, 231–7, 256, 263, 278, 303–4, 307, 309, 313, 320, 359, 365–71 psychology, 220, 253, 283, 299–300, 325, 366 pushing, 14 quasi-experimentation, 386n4 Quine, V. W., 374n22 quining, 265, 283, 342, 345 Rancière, Jacques, 17, 221, 377–8n34 Rheingold, Howard, 18, 22, 376–7n30 recursion, 84, 127–8, 135, 216, 238, 245, 249, 260, 283, 292, 330, 348, 355 remediation, 228, 231, 241, 308, 311 Romanticism, 22, 25, 90, 136, 194, 246–7 Ronell, Avital, 378n77 Rosenthal, Michael, 297–8 Rothko, Mark, 122 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 207, 274, 280, 294, 296 Russell, Bertrand, and Whitehead, Alfred North, 25, 218, 353, 262, 273–6, 374–5n22 Sagan, Dorion, 318 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 63, 278

401

schizoanalysis, 41, 313–16 schizophrenia, 32, 34, 85–7, 238, 305 Schlemmer, Oskar, 70 Schmitt, Carl, 125 Searle, John, 11 Sebald, W. G., 219 self-reference, 6, 14, 28, 84, 258, 273–6, 348, 355, 368 Seligman, Bernard, 324–26 Shakespeare, William, 244, 267, 311 Shelley, Mary, 246–7 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 1, 246 signification, 88, 125, 307 speech-acts, 11, 343 Spinoza, Baruch, 31, 250, 261, 321 splitting (psychological), 228–31, 251 stacking, 124–5, 279, 283 Stein, Gertrude, 247, 278 Sterne, Laurence, 85, 99, 109, 149, 167, 209 Stevens, Wallace, 38, 206, 244 Stiegler, Bernard, 204 Stravinsky, Igor, 82 Stifter, Adalbert, 220 “strange attractors,” 279 “strange loops,” 3, 13, 35, 89–90, 99–100, 104, 121, 167, 172, 216–17, 219–21, 227, 252–5, 260, 275–9, 284, 342, 345 string, stringing, string theory, 116, 179, 216–20, 244, 255, 330, 349–50 “structured conversation,” the, 363–5, 370–1 subjectivity, 5, 30–1, 35–6, 147, 212, 222, 258, 260, 262–3, 315, 360–2 sub-systems, 59–60, 360–2 Sussman, Henry, 41–2, 76, 205, 381n2, 389n9 Swift, Jonathan, 326 symbols, symbolism, 249–52, 256–8, 260–4, 266–71, 274, 279, 283–4, 348, 351, 360 symbolic networks, 250, 258, 260–6, 269, 279, 282–4 systematic wounds, insults, 304–7, 311, 368

402

INDEX

systems, 3–5, 7–10, 13, 18, 27–7, 30, 34, 42, 54, 56–7, 59, 86, 94, 98–9, 128–9, 131–2, 158, 185, 197, 202, 243–4, 247, 252–3, 279, 298, 310–16, 324, 336, 344–5, 347, 353, 355–8, 363–4, 368, 371 ––“open” and “closed,” 85–6, 89, 121, 128–9, 151, 170, 205, 231, 252, 264, 310, 327, 344 systems, social, 22, 24–5, 31, 252–3, 264, 305, 355, 368 systems theory, 6, 26, 31, 205, 263, 296, 334 Tartar, Helen, 41 theoretical paradigms as transitional objects, 208 therapy, 4, 6, 41, 48, 76, 205, 224, 228, 230–1, 234, 237, 240–1, 306–15, 325, 359, 362, 364, 368–9, 371 Tolstoy, Lev, 306 transcription, 159, 216, 351–2 transference, 122, 231–7, 365–8, 370 transitional objects, 192, 204, 207–8, 210–15, 222–3, 241, 304 transitional phenomena, 192, 205, 208, 210, 213–15, 222, 228 Turner, J. M. W., 281 Twombly, Cy, 46 undecidability, 54, 341

Varela, Francisco, 247, 318 virtual reality (VR), 18, 20, 25–6, 52, 135, 249 virtuality, 10, 17, 19–20, 22, 24, 27, 77–9, 81–2, 123, 129, 208, 215, 219, 224, 266–8, 270, 288, 308, 312, 316–21, 323, 327, 329, 331, 364, 368, 370, 375n28 von Bertalanffy, Ludwig, 6, 26, 56 von Foerster, Heinz, 6, 247, 318, 359 von Neumann, John, 247 Weber, Max, 234 Weber, Samuel, 11, 318 Welles, Orson, 40 Wenders, Wim, 163, 165 Wilden, Anthony, 3, 6, 9, 12–15, 17, 25–6, 28–9, 31, 33, 35, 56, 82, 88–9, 99–100, 103, 123, 145, 209, 243, 247, 279, 298, 307, 318 Wiener, Norbert, 6, 26, 95, 199, 202 Williams, Margery, 212 Winnicott, D. W., 3, 6, 48, 90, 192, 203–17, 220–33, 236, 238–9, 251, 267, 303, 309, 367, 369, 371 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 234, 259, 278, 314, 316 Woolf, Virginia, 99, 121, 247, 278 Wordsworth, William, 22, 253, 317 Zeno of Elea, 292 Žižek, Slavoj, 318 Zweig, Stefan, 148

403

404

405

406