A (NON) Essay

From Chelsea Wiki

Derrida famously said, ‘There is nothing outside the text’.

In this essay I want to hypothesise and to imagine that our world has been irrevocable consumed into the discursive realm of the novel. It is a proposition constructed with the purpose to be used as a lens to observe the world in making or the making world and to understand the philosophical implications of such a situation. I imagine that this was a silent and highly efficient putsch that happened within a blink of the eye and completely under the radar. It may have happened in 1844. The economic/historical/military/cultural power centres/structures around the world; Wall Street, the Politburo of the Peoples Republic of China, Google, MoMa, the Eiffel Tower; the archives/collective memories of the world have simultaneously fallen and have been assimilated into the realm of the novel. The novel in turn, has been transformed into a megalomaniac monster. Victorious and comprehensive in its consumption of the world, it has transmuted into a mongrelized form with an intensive dialogical core, a volatile zone of mass inter-subjectivities. It is a realm where everything is entirely mutable; it is a realm consisting of intersections and abstractions.

“To abstract is to express the virtuality of nature, to make known some instance of its manifold possibilities, to actualise a relation out of infinite relation, to manifest the manifold”

Time travel is now possible through the novel, an inconvenient paradox, which has sprung to life adding further complexity and chaos into space. Thus linear time as conception between the past, the contemporary present and the future has collapsed into itself in an entropic catastrophe. One time frame has enmeshed itself onto another, bounded and combined the other in dialogue splintering into all directions towards open-ended inconclusiveness and uncertainty. Merely thinking about the past can change the course of history and create new narratives/realities and parallel futures. By playing on the border intersections between past/present/future in the novelistic realm the reader/writer is able to stretch the notion of duration, opening up a rich and dynamic field of engagement with time. The dialogical use of the author/individual with the past constructs an ‘ideological bridge’ that intertwines and carries the individual into a ‘flickering’ relationship; a continuous oscillating movement of time travel between the rich past into the indeterminate plain of the future and back into the dynamic present. This very notion of time travel gives insight and the possibility to reality to a democratic engagement into the making of history and in turn to use this history as a trajectory into the future forms.

Space has been fragmented, the geospatial must be considered, dialogue is happening everywhere, simultaneously and all around spatial barriers are quickly diminishing; order/hierarchies/hermetic bubbles have been disrupted/tainted, have become problematic. The capitalistic drive of rationality and its compulsive logic of homogenisation and colonisation have been decentralized and dislocated down to a parallel entity. This is a new and highly potent virus that has spread and with deadly effect. It is an indiscriminate parasitic plague upon the objects, forms of representation, our cognitive emotions and thoughts.

The resulting world is a universe of chaos and barbarism. It is now not only a conflict zone as Habermas describes between the ‘system’ and the ‘life-world’; between the self as a unit, commodity, worker in relation to value, likes and dislikes, interests, belief. Within this dialogical realm of the novel, the ‘system world’ with its seemingly omnipotent and authoritarian control on thought and action suddenly becomes neutralised and diluted as another narrative/structure to contend with amongst a mass of relations.

All encompassing determining forces such as capitalism or the close-ended notion of ‘community’ and utopia become inadequate, impossible when in the novelistic realm everyone is a potential author of their own reality.

The epic historical wars of the past (the dominant vs. the marginalized) and the traditional power struggles of class have quickly become obsolete and superseded by a new type of warfare. In this new conflict zone the struggles manifest themselves in continuous small-scaled quickly mobilised skirmishes/protests/raids/proxy wars. They do battle in what Marshall Mcluhan as the ‘quest for identity’. However this not merely a quest of self-affirmation or validity but rather an ongoing ever-present engagement of articulation of ‘being’ or as Bakhtin describes as: The philosophy of event-being.

These are now battles for autonomy, against repressions of difference and the close-ended bias of homogenous group formations. So the battles are not only being assembled and executed on the plain levels of the physical but also include the transitory engagements of daily practical communication with one another in conversations, even in insignificant verbal exchanges, and the articulation of a chain of thoughts. Rather than a temporal notion of battle as stated by German strategist Carl von Clausewitz as "the employment of battles to gain the end of war", which in other words would be resolved with close-ended validations, conclusions, assimilation, a domination or victory of a particular ideology. The battle in the novelistic realm is infinite as the continual formation of ‘event in being’. It is a polyphonic zone of intensive conflict of narratives/realities intertwine with meta/parallel narratives/realities, where interactions of ideologies and narratives pit and forge against one another in unremitting conflict. The ideologies/narratives in themselves do not in the intrinsic sense carry a ‘ready made’ finality or as ‘present-on-hand’ entities. The language within in the ideology/narrative contains a subjective evaluative attitude towards an object, which in doing so triggers a motion that is yet to be determined about it. The ideology is under a constant flux of metamorphosis. It ‘turns into a constituent moment of the living, ongoing event’.

‘This form comes about in the borderline area where the individual struggles with the other, so as to subject her/him to what he/she deems to be her/his being’

For the individual author the new discursive and volatile novelistic world would be akin to the situation of the Wild West around the 19th century. In this analysis the individual author finds himself in perpetual transactions and dialectical engagements with the subjectivities/narratives/structures and ideologies of the other. There is no prevalent or universal doctrine, the author/individual is entirely alone in the Wild West, and he/she is a Casper Friedrich figure searching in the abyss for the unknown. In environment of multiple authors of realities a new political sphere can develop, what Isis Marion Young describes as the ‘politics of difference’.

The proliferation of multiple discursive sites and fictional structures gives rise to the possibility of a new consciousness granted by a greater “individual mobility” within the novelistic realm. The failed utopias of the past and its valorised ideals of tradition/goodness that once acted as the unifying unequivocal bond for the individual to the other, has left an alienated and disjointed space of engagement.

This impossibility for ‘total consolidation’, utopian ideals of wholeness, and unity becomes the new problems/challenges for the novelistic realm. This requires a major re-conceptualisation of living models and alternative frameworks of collectivity to deal and embrace the notion of plurality and indeterminacy.

Jean Luc Nancy provides a method, which we can use as an aid to grasp and undertake such a challenge:

“There is no communion, there is no common being, but there is being in common”. “The question should be the community of being and not the being of community”

This is a simultaneous quest of existentiality and meaning in which the methods and insights of the other can enrich and inter-illuminate ones own thoughts and methods in a continuous and reciprocal process. The mobility of the novelistic author comes with the fluidity of subjectivity, identity forged together by chance and encounters and circumstances. These are platforms, which have long been suppressed and denied access by the traditional orthodoxies of the epic past. Thus movement was restricted and prescribed and assigned in a strict order of hierarchy. In the new hybrid novelistic realm the author/individual is not place bounded, and becomes the ‘rhyzomatic nomad’ of Deleuze and Guattari. This status does not necessarily bestow the author/individual free rein to construct and interact a reality indiscriminately and unhindered as he/she is constantly having to contend with the other. This does however give new implications to the rise of a new type of consciousness, being that is made possible that Bakhtin calls ‘over existence’ (and Deleuze calls ‘extra-being). This is ‘over existence’ is only made possible within the sphere of ‘Dialogism’ which is the governing force of the novelistic realm. For Bakhtin this consciousness comes from an almost neurotic awareness and capability to ‘critique’ language simultaneously during its use and execution. As we negotiate with language we are constantly negotiating with the language of a particular culture and its means of expression at the particular moment in time.

“Only in the dialogical sphere can there be affirmation – the emotional – volitional tonality that transforms the empty possibility of language or the sign into an affirmation of meaning”

For Bakhtin the contact levels of language can be divided up into three components:

• As the neutral word of language which belongs to no one
• As the word of the other belonging to the others
• And as the word of the self that the self has appropriated – forced to become its own word – by means of capture of a foreign word

It is in contact zone of appropriation and at the border at the interstice where the author is able to critically collaborate/appropriate and makes an evaluative response in a dialogic relationship to the language of the other in order to create his/her narrative. This remarkable form of transcendence of the self onto the plain of the dialogic sphere can also be used for the author to view from the outside inside to reflect and engage/confront the fictional structures of the authors self. The new mode enables the author to view the world and the reality of the self with the eyes and sensibilities of the ‘others’. From the point of view or platform of a potentially different language/reality. This dialectical tension with the immaterial with the physicality of reality adds to the dynamism of the novelistic realm.

For Bakhtin the most interesting and essential narrative device of the dialogic world is the ‘parodic-travestying’ form. To embrace the dynamic creative potential of the novelistic realm Bakhtin places great importance for the need to create diverse structures/engagement to ridicule and to counter the straightforward, serious generic forms of language and the need for devices to critique a close-ended and passive engagement with language by directly dealing with open-endness and indeterminacy. Bakhtin’s ideology of the parodic-travestying form is a highly varied method of critique, and not exhausted to parody and travesty in the strict sense of the word. Bakhtin views the ‘parodic-travestying form’ as a fertile and accessible contact point from which one can easily mobilise and use as a counter narrative/critique to the close-end ‘serious finality’ of another particular language structures/ideology. It is a transgression to fracture the dominant assumption of a language; the parodic-travestying form serves as a comic-ironic double. The fracture opens up the language for further scrutiny and dialogue. ‘They liberated the object from the power of language in which it had become entangled as if in a net; they destroyed the homogenizing power of the myth over language; they freed consciousness from the power of the direct word, destroyed the thick walls that had imprisoned consciousness within its own discourse, within its own language’

Bakhtin describes the ‘parodic-travestying’ form as a direct appropriation of the language of the other, which is then bounded in dialogue with the author who speaks an ironic and critical meta-narrative from within the structure. For Bakhtin to parody was to question and confront the power of the direct word, explore and probe inwards in search for its absurd sides, exploring and pushing the meaning beyond the limit.

The novelistic realm’s consumption of our world has irreversibly transformed language from the absolute dogma it had been within the close-ended framework of the impermeable and authoritative hermetic world of the epic world of the past into a ‘working hypothesis’ for comprehending and expressing reality.

If indeed the world has been consumed into the novelistic discourse then the challenge for the authors is to continuously engage in a critical mediation with the languages and structures in order to free us from the tyranny of own (and the others) languages and structures. Only in this way are we able to navigate the way to new ideological heights.

“Familiarization of the world is extremely important and indispensable step in making possible free, scientifically knowable and artically realistic creativity in European civalisation” M M B

“ecstatic truth. I've always tried to strive for a much deeper truth in the images, in cinema, in storytelling, on a screen, so whether I've achieved it or not remains to be seen. . . . There are short fleeting moments when I know that I have achieved it. And to work for that and to strive for it and to try, gives at least some dignity and some meaning to my existence.” Werner Herzog Bibilography

Bibliography/List of Information

• The Dialogic Imagination – M.M. Bakhtin – 1981 University of Texas Press
• The Films of Werner Herzog – Timothy Corrigan - Francis Books Ltd (December 1986), Herzog on Herzog, Aguirre Wrath of God, In the Land of Silence and Darkness
• Dialogism and Polyphony – Maurizzo Lazzarato – No Ghost Just A Shell – Konig Books, Zidane, Anri Sala show
• The Archive – Documents of Contemporary Art Charles Merewether- Whitechapel Books
• Liam Gillick – Proxemics: Selected Writings, Erasmus is Late, Discussion Island
• One Place After Another – Site Specificity and Locational Identity – Miwon Kwon
• Art or Barbarism – Dave Beech – Art Monthly Sept 2007