Subject: The Tragedy of Lost Space
Date: Tue, 10 Mar 1998 14:25:35 PST


The refusal of dialectic is the refusal to desire Things -- even labor.  
And the "labor" is always, for humans, the task or movement of 
_learning_ -- that is, of gaining knowledge of and through things that 
have already been posit(ion)ed in the world.  The desire to enter the 
'family', in more than just name or position (through birth, or 
emergence, into the world of beings), is what separates the speaking 
human from the animal.  And this desire to enter something from which 
the individual had never really felt apart, but rather had always 
existed _around_ or in the vicinity of, arises from a loss of the 
private independent world or realm of his/her own.  When the "completely 
interior and spontaneous products" (Derrida, _Glas_: University of 
Nebraska 1986, p. 119) of a private language are violently corrected by 
an external being -- even a sister -- dwelling within the 'interstices' 
of a multiplicity of worlds, there occurs the "negation and the 
posit(ion)ing of theoretical consciousness" (ibid., p. 120), which 
produces the first stirrings of desire in the individual; after the 
attack or criticism of the private realm, once thought perfect in its 
solitude, that realm is 'discovered' by the individual to be "inadequate 
to the universal genus" (ibid., p. 116), i.e., the 'family'.

"Now it was no longer something of my own: it was part of a reality that 
was the language of my brothers, my sister, and my parents.  It had 
changed from something belonging to me into something communal and open" 
(Leiris, _Scratches_: tr. Lydia Davis 1991, p. 5).

It then becomes necessary to revise one's private world, until it fits 
in, unobtrusively, with the world of others.

This dialectic, which is responsible for the building of one's 
personality -- a task, like learning, that is never completed -- is one 
of adequation rather than synthesis.  The tragedy of being is that the 
individual will struggle (some more successfully than others) to 
preserve that original autonomy of thought which was attacked and driven 
into the dark recesses of an anterior space of thought, of "pure memory" 
opening the doors of dusty closets, bungalow houses and derelict 
factories, where there is no longer anywhere to go, anything to do, or 
anyone to know (see Ligotti, 'The Bungalow House' 1996), will struggle 
to preserve the ancient autonomy against the pull of a world that 
demands practicality, dedication to its principals, and simplicity of 
expression -- in short, a world which demands that one either find a 
practical and productive place within it, or get out of the way.  The 
original desire to enter the world, the 'family', now realized through 
appropriation, the "passage from desire to labor" (Derrida, p. 120), 
dissolves into a nostalgia for what went before, for what preceded that 
animating desire itself.  'What went before', the ideal world uf 
unsustained memory, is the very ground upon which the newly appropriated 
individual builds his/her realm of adequation; and the 'lost' primal 
world continues to exist, although almost wholly unknown to the 
individual, within the interstices of his/her 'worldly' language and 
thought.

The 'retrieval' of this world, through the medium of a language that has 
no real existence outside the individual who 'owns' it (for the private 
language can operate only within and through the external language of 
the 'family'), was one of the tasks of the Surrealist endeavor.  
Automatism, however, being a controlled act, carried out within certain 
boundaries, mechanistically, functionally, was and is not up to the task 
of retrieving this 'dormant' language.  What is needed, perhaps, is a 
new style of writing and speaking that will display, through an 
unheard-of degree of RELAXATION, the chaotic drift of a self deprived of 
a primal autonomy.

Just a thought.




Edward

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