Architecture of the Possible E-Book

Tristan Garcia

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Seitenzahl: 201

Beschreibung

As a philosopher and a novelist, Tristan Garcia inhabits two worlds, metaphysics and literary fiction, like an amphibious creature moving between the land and the sea, breathing in both air and water. He is drawn to metaphysics because, as he puts it, metaphysics is the edge of the abyss of thought, the unstable frontier of indeterminacy where thinking is no longer constrained by the principles of logic or the law of non-contradiction. Metaphysics seeks to describe the world from outside one's own point of view. It aims at an ecstatic reconstruction of what keeps us locked up in our conditions, in our time and place, here among the living, with our subjectivities and within our situations. It gives us an idea of all constraints from a point of view that posits the possible absence of the constraint of having a point of view. The ambition of this slender book - which is at the same time a concise introduction to Garcia's work and thought - is to help us grasp and transform the conditions of our existence by paying equal attention to what is ending and what is just beginning, to the dusk and to the dawn. Until we cannot hold our breath any longer.

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Language, Thought, and Fiction

Philosophical Feeling

Philosophical Orientation

Intensification, Extension, Breaking Point

Literature: Ideas in a Body

Models of Concision and Models of Profusion

Childhood and Irenicism

War

Finding a Viewpoint

Solitude

Activists

Nuanced Minds and Rough Minds

Radicalness

The Enemy

Friends

Progress and Movement

The World After

Thinking Saves

End User License Agreement

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Begin Reading

End User License Agreement

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Architecture of the Possible

Tristan Garciawith Jean-Marie Durand

Translated by Christopher RayAlexander, Abigail RayAlexander, and Jon Cogburn

polity

Originally published in French as L’architecture du possible © Presses universitaires de France/Humensis, 2021

This English edition © Polity Press, 2022

Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press111 River StreetHoboken, NJ 07030, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-5225-2

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022934666

The publisher has used its best endeavors to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.

Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.

For further information on Polity, visit our website:politybooks.com

LANGUAGE, THOUGHT, AND FICTION

Starting a conversation when you also want to avoid speaking in a way that’s too direct or brutal is not a straightforward affair. While trying to strike a balance between discretion and eagerness, I would like to begin by considering your recent writings and asking you to do something that might be impossible, namely, to describe your writing style and the way that you use language as a material to craft thought and fiction.

Are “philosopher” and “writer” the same thing? How are (de)constructing theories and inventing characters similar, and how are they different? Moreover, why do you feel the need to take up both of those pursuits at the same time?

Because I grew up in a family that had books, what I wanted to make and what I learned how to make were books. From an early age, my passion was centered on the written word, and I put my energy into trying to recreate those printed objects, those bound sheets of paper. They seemed to contain the whole world in miniature. The secret of the universe seemed to lie between their covers, which my mother and father would sometimes wrap in greaseproof butcher’s paper.

My environment is made of language in general and writing in particular. My personality took shape in these surroundings.

If I’d been raised in another environment, I might have had a similar character. I might have had the same worldview but expressed it in some other way. I don’t have many other skills, but it seems to me that whether I’m writing, thinking, cooking, or even playing sports, I have the same strengths and weaknesses. What if I were a professional sports player? What if I were a cook? Even if these counterfactual thought experiments are illusory, they allow me to imagine reasonably well the possibility of different ways of being that aren’t based on thinking of abstract concepts and characters or writing.

For me, philosophy and literature aren’t absolutes. They are the surroundings in which I grew up, the environment where my dispositions were developed to varying degrees, with my family’s encouragement and at school as well.

I feel like I live and breathe language and the images and ideas that are formed out of words. Another person might find this view abstract or abstruse. But, for me, this is a primordial, enveloping condition, like an amniotic fluid made of signs. Social interactions aren’t always easy for me. I love meeting another person, a kindred spirit, and discussing things with them. However, in a group setting, I kind of switch off a bit. Sometimes, I have to push myself. I have to play a role, and that doesn’t come naturally to me. After a long period of careful existence in the social realm, the abstractness of words brings me back to a reassuring place where I can, as we say, gather my thoughts, and rediscover the center of who I am. There, within the abstract forms of thought and language, I can breathe easy, I can find my way around, and the world regains an order that comforts me. The chaos of the world’s sensations, desires, and contradictory forces isn’t altogether banished. Nevertheless, word by word, it becomes a little more livable. I’ve done the same ever since I was a child, going over lists in my mind and classifying things as a means of organizing what I’ve perceived, heard, felt, seen, and read. It’s like the experience of a child from the country who has to go to the big city every morning. There, the child is jolted by the sights and sounds and jostled by the rushing crowds. Then, when returning home and walking on a path deep in the woods, the child’s steps are more assured. Even though that path would surely frighten other children, for this child, it’s even and familiar. It’s a place to find one’s bearings, a place to breathe easy. This doesn’t mean that the child no longer wants to go back to the city to play with its friends and discover the wide urban world. It just means that the child still needs to return regularly to its home, a sort of forest within – the protected place where the child grew up. It’s there that it can stave off being spread too thin by necessities and obligations. That place also protects it from being dissolved within the infinite mass of all the things that remain to be discovered and explored. It’s a refuge from the loves and hates that threaten to tear the child apart. It’s a haven from both the intelligence and foolishness of its peers – and from the child’s own intelligence and foolishness as well.

Language, my language, has always had this effect on me.

I reflect and write so that I can return to that place as often as possible.

This place that you speak of, is it one uniform space?

Gradually, as I left childhood behind, that familiar place of language divided in two for me.

It split like a cleft tongue. It makes me think of those mythical peoples of long ago who were imagined by medieval troubadours to have spoken the “language of the birds” with their forked tongues. Whether it was naturally divided in two or had been cut that way during a ritual initiation, that tongue was supposed to allow them to speak two languages at once.

One part of my mind’s language remains attached to legendary stories and to fiction, to all of the tales that I told myself as a child, to all of the stories that were read to me before I went to sleep, and to a sort of lie as well, to illusions that – as I’ve since discovered – don’t exist in reality, and to imagination in general.

During my adolescence, another part of my language became more attached to ideas rather than to images. This part has a stronger connection to abstractions, general features, the laws of the world, and a kind of scientific approach.

The first language is childlike, and, in my opinion, it seems to speak to the whole world. It’s democratic. The second language developed during puberty and is shaped by scientific and political education, by the discovery of the real, by that which offers external resistance, by what there really is. This language enjoys disappointing rather than enchanting. It’s a more constrained and aristocratic language. It’s a language that’s subject to authorities. This language entails requirements governing its utterance, its rhetoric, and its truth. It has norms and laws. It’s the language of a young person who makes friends, who then belongs to a generation, and who wants to understand and change its world.

You mentioned understanding the world, but also changing it. Does each of these aspirations require a different kind of story?

The duality of the double language that developed within me became increasingly pronounced. When I began to publish, I thought it was important to respect the clear separation within this language and clearly separate my desire for stories from my desire for theory.

While growing up in France at the end of the twentieth century, I came to distrust heavily theoretical fiction and overly poeticized philosophy. Those combinations were very much in style at the time, but they no longer suited me. That space tied my forked tongue up in knots. During the 1990s, Heideggerian influence was still very strong in French philosophy for my professors and for the intellectuals of that period, in the same way that Blanchot had become the overpowering authority in literary studies. It was like one of Rousseau’s thoughts from Essay on the Origin of Languages that Derrida would later discuss: the philosopher was a poet, and the poet was a philosopher. Unfortunately, the philosopher was a failed poet, as we see in Nietzsche. Derrida and some of his disciples seemed to exist in a sort of muddled relationship with language, one that didn’t appeal to me. Double meanings, a charming insistence on the central and almost exclusive power of ambiguity in language, the constant evasive maneuvers (and the resulting impossibility of arguing a thesis), rhetorical cunning, the eclipsing of realia (real things) by dicta (spoken things), etc., all of that was very tedious for me. The world was no longer expressed or discussed. I tried to read Nancy, Lacoue-Labarthe (whom I preferred, because he truly was a poet), and even Stiegler, but I always came out at the other end feeling cheated. Questions of value were always eclipsed by questions of meaning, and problems concerning definition were constantly dodged thanks to the continuous slippage of signification. I had the feeling that I was watching the elite of the philosophical word who conserved their power through their seductive and sophomoric scholarly mastery, but who never really had anything much to say. Any call for precision caused them to flee. When the time came to make a decision and reach a conclusion, they would sit on the fence. However, what they wanted more than anything else was to keep possession of the word by constantly batting it back and forth amongst themselves.

I would have to wait until I discovered Wittgenstein and the so-called Anglo-Saxon analytic tradition to find a philosophical language that had been freed from this poetic fixation. Quine was very important for me, as well as some of Austin’s short essays and the metaphysics of Lewis, Armstrong, and Plantinga. I never joined that movement or its approach to metaphysics, but it helped me to move past French post-Heideggerian language.

Alongside your distrust of dominant philosophy, what position did you adopt regarding the literary tradition?

In an almost symmetrical way, what I disliked in literature was that constellation of authors that gravitated around autofiction. Instead of manifesting the full power of imagination, autofiction plays a game of hide-and-seek with the true self, meaning one’s family history, biography, one’s individual self-expression, etc.

I didn’t want to take the imagination-motivated part of my language and turn it around on myself, to reach into my self and the experiences that I’d already lived in order to find the fabric for a literary kind of truth. I wanted to use language to be someone else, come to know other lives, take on other bodies, and disembody and reincarnate myself. More than anything else, I wanted to imprint those other lives within myself rather than externalize and express myself through others.

I was looking for a language that would separate me from my voice and that, above all, would not speak my truth.

For as long as possible, I’ve told myself that I would write books in a way that maintained a careful separation between my persona as a novelist and my persona as a philosopher.

This careful distinction between the novelist and the philosopher sounds like walking a tightrope. Was it easy to maintain?

The whole system is definitely a bit complicated, but I’m sure that we all construct ourselves in a similar way. There is within us something like a little system of weights, counterweights, and pulleys. Even if it happens unconsciously or implicitly, we imagine what we are and what we do with this kind of living machinery. We use that machinery to avoid having a lifeless conception of ourselves.

In order to feel alive, I need this balance or, better yet, this permanent imbalance, between my passion for stories and images on the one hand and my passion for ideas and theory on the other. When I try to describe or justify this situation, I ask myself this question: why do I so persistently run away from any confusion of or convergence between my two intellectual activities?

I remember that, in my youth, I detested the idea of self-certainty. I loathed those who seemed self-satisfied. I hated self-promoters whose every act and idea served to champion their own lives, which were spent with the primary aim of honing their self-image. That was one of those youthful fits of rage, the kind that usually stems from a fear of actually being one of those people that we reject and would like to banish as far away as possible from the core of our personality. I had an exaggerated disgust for any philosopher whose entire system seemed to me to be nothing more than a way to legitimize their own opinions, tastes, and ways of doing things. Such systems seemed to lend a universal form to a philosopher’s unique and contingent personality and, above all, to their particular social class. I had no desire for a philosophy that would only serve to reassure me and tell me how right I was, and I had no interest in a literature that would only reflect my own ideas.

So, what could I do?

The problem went even deeper. I wanted to make works that mattered without mattering myself. I wanted to remove myself from the matter, to always be someone else and disperse myself as far and wide as my curiosity, discoveries, and efforts could reach.

I didn’t want what I was thinking or writing to reinforce who I was. I almost wanted it to weaken me or tear me apart. Most importantly, I didn’t want it to make me yet another strong individual among all the others. I hated that long period of the neoliberal demand upon individuals of my generation to “be yourself!” This was simultaneously an advertising slogan, a piece of self-help advice, and a moral imperative. I had absolutely no desire to be myself. What good would it do me? That’s what I already was. Facing myself was really a matter for other people, since it was in their eyes that I was able to perceive what I was becoming. My role was instead to become attached to others, to everything except myself. And yet, that discourse about individual accomplishments and success was still there, telling me to become someone. That, I think, was what really filled me with dread: I definitely haven’t ever wanted to become someone. I felt like I was experiencing something similar to the nightmares that Kafka sometimes mentioned in his Diaries. It was like I was being forced back into myself, as if I were an already-rigid corpse being stuffed into an old potato sack.

Is your attempt at maintaining a division in your writing something that your readers and the academic world understand?

My reluctance to present myself as an undivided, unified intellectual in a way that would make my novels, essays, and persona into a readily identifiable whole was a little tricky. No one could really understand where I was trying to go, the message that I wanted to convey, or what I was supposed to represent.

This put me in an awkward position during the 1990s and early 2000s, a moment when late capitalism still seemed triumphant. Whether through coaxing or as an authoritarian injunction, an individual was faced with the same demand: sculpt your own statue. Plotinus’ old ideal had been taken up and industrialized. After all, as carefully maintained profiles on social media and dating sites indicate, everyone now knows all too well what they’re supposed to do. They must be careful about how they present themselves to others, and they also have to become real entrepreneurs of the self by promoting their persona and what they do. In this way, each person becomes their own lifelong publicist. The language is familiar to us all: “That is so me”; “Thanks to so and so for their kind mention of me”; “At the heart of my work is my concern for …” Social networks have contributed significantly to creating this situation, but they didn’t act alone. Since the 1970s, job availability has been decreasing in Western countries. This trend has resulted in a surging demand for individuals who wish to be competitive on the job market to spend all their energy not on working, but rather on selling themselves.

This is less a critique than a question of character. I never had a taste for the “game,” for competitions where one had to show their worth and establish themselves by going up against and defeating others. Neither the literary “game” nor the philosophical “game” has ever been of any interest to me. I don’t like playing any game that would require me to elbow my way in and present the most efficient version of myself to others.

Why do you think it is that you have no interest in such “games”?

It seems to me that building your own statue also means digging your own grave. By trying to win out over others in order to become someone, people end up working toward their own death. They end up building the tallest and most beautiful monument in preparation for their own tomb.

I’ve always thought that it’s up to someone else to make me into someone. For a long time, I was paralyzed by the forms of self-presentation (like the very one in which I’m currently engaging!) to which one must become accustomed in scholarly and entrepreneurial circles. To present yourself, sell yourself, and find your place in the job market, you have to endlessly fine-tune your CV. During the years when I was searching for a university-level job, I failed again and again due to my clumsy self-presentation. My interviews were well known for being catastrophic. Even those who liked me would often sigh and tell me, “For crying out loud! You’ve got to work harder on your presentation.” I was devastated by my total lack of ability. But still, in a very juvenile way, I felt like I was doomed before I’d even begun. They wanted me to define myself, and that would be the end of me.

It’s very beautiful to never allow yourself to be defined and never be fixed in one form, leaving room for all future possibilities. Nevertheless, might you still be able to define yourself a little by fleshing out the meaning behind that total refusal of attribution?

How to remain a possibility? That was my obsession.

However, that’s probably why I’ve wavered for so long between literary and philosophical writing. Maintaining my indecisiveness in this way let me also maintain the possibility and hope of remaining plural.

Whether I’m writing books, novels, or even essays, I know that I want to become different with each work, by any means necessary. I don’t care much about making sure that my works have an overarching coherence. It often happens that people who’ve read and liked one of my books are bewildered or disappointed by something else that I’ve written. I’m now well accustomed to such disappointment, but it can still be a little concerning. People generally think of an author’s work as monolithic. I certainly don’t make things easy on my readers in that regard. Instead of feeding off of each other, my books are more like a litter of unruly puppies nipping at each other.

* * *

Because I’ve written and published considerably, I’ve thought about the possibility of using pseudonyms a number of times. I find that possibility appealing, but it also seems to me that maintaining multiple identities online is difficult, although I’m probably wrong about that.

I think that the authors from the Italian collective Wu Ming (which means “nobody” in Mandarin) have done a great job of creating a collective authorial figure through their novels. No one really knows which of them does what, and this allows them to reestablish a connection between their anonymized, collective creation and literature’s oral origins. They reconnect with the Italian autonomous and Operaist (or Workerist) tradition’s powerful political ideal of becoming “anybody” in order to evade the police, avoid being assigned an identity, thwart the state apparatus, etc. The same idea is also important for Agamben, and it also features prominently on the website for the publishing house Quodlibet (which means “whatever you like”).

I didn’t want to become “whomever you like.” What I wanted was to be able to be a hundred people, each one of them different from the others.

In fact, every time that I had to promote one of my books, I felt a strong desire to disassociate myself from the very work that I was supposed to embody. I’d written the book in order to let it out, but in those moments, it felt like it was being forced back into the womb.

So I suppose that I was writing, and that I had chosen to write, books that varied so much in terms of subject matter, style, and genre that they didn’t seem to have much of anything in common. I’ve written science fiction and sociological novels as well as books about ontology, identity politics, animal ethics, sports, TV shows, and formal logic, all in the hope of multiplying and losing myself.

* * *

Nevertheless, I gradually came to see that the naïve desire to not be somebody was close to a second desire that that period urged people to adopt. This desire was another liberal dream that took on the more ephemeral form of existing in a somewhat nomadic state, without attachments or origins. Anti-liberal reactionaries were quick to seize upon this idea. Philippe Muray critiqued this amorphous, virtual idea of a person in his articles