Notes from the Underground

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I tolerate this century, but I don't enjoy it.

All of the ephemera that is far too trivial to be bothered with elsewhere on this site or, depending on your point of view, a meta-commentary on it. This ephemera includes, but is not limited to art, music and literature. Most of the content here will be discussed in terms that are as abstract as possible, reality being a singularly overrated concept.

Tuesday, December 13, 2005

 
Via the Valve, a critical discussion of Maurice Blanchot's views on reading:

"For Blanchot, the good reader would not be what he terms the critical reader but the literary reader. Rather than interrogating “the work in order to know how it was fashioned” (SL 203), which is to say, rather than subordinating the openness of reading to an active means of elucidating the value and meaning of the work (and, by proxy, the value of reading itself), all of which Blanchot identifies with critical reading, the literary reader or what Blanchot refers to as “the true reader” (SL 203) passively collapses before the work, giving “the work back to itself: back to its anonymous presence, to the impersonal affirmation that it is” (SL 193). The work says nothing and of the work, therefore, there is nothing to say. If the work is to remain communicable at all, this is what it is necessary to say, always again, always badly, and always for the first time. As such, the task of the good reader is not to say the work but rather to procure a space in which the work can continue not to say itself..."


I'm not convinced. I certainly feel that there is a point where thinking analytically about much literature becomes futile; for instance, what happened in the Marabar caves, the source of Hamlet's hesitations or what Josef K was charged with. The figures in these particular carpets must of necessity remain hidden and we can indeed only give such works back to themselves. On the other hand, reading seems to me intrinsically analytical; we read with a horizon of expectations which we constantly re-evaluate in the light of new information or new thoughts. This is something that one of the comments at the Valve notes, citing how Bakhtin views works as structuring themselves in anticipation of a response and requires the reader to provide it. It's this which makes reading a dialogic process of engaging with the text; something that seems an infinitely preferable idea of reading to me.

My own relationship to the school of school of language inhabited by the likes of Blanchot and Derrida is a somewhat oblique; while I agree with the criticism of the 'metaphysics of presence' the notion of there being nothing outside the text seems to confer a form of metaphysical status on the text (Blanchot's romantic idea of desoeuvrement being emblematic here). Language ceases to be social category and becomes something quasi mystical and transcendent, apparently detached from the phenomenal. Thus the waspish comment from Habermas that Derrida was a 'jewish mystic.' It's difficult not to feel sympathetic to the Searlian complaint that the idea of language as a system of differences is precisely a system of presences and absences and accordingly rather failed to live up to the claims Derrida made for it. Inevitably, I grew to prefer Mikhail Baktin's concepts of polyphony and heteroglossia, which proceed from the same criticism of metaphysics but instead relates hermeneutics to the social and political.

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posted by Richard 7:29 pm