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8/9/2019 Implications of Textuality
1/22
Implications of textuality
Timothy Morton
Today I'm going to talk about the ways in which writing can encode itself,
or imply itself, within itself. I'm using the word implicate to suggest this
reflexive operation, which I see a form of enfolding. Other scholars have
called it enactment, but there's a metaphysics in such a concept that I
suggest we drop. Enactment assumes that there is a reality definitely
distinct from writing which writing, under certain circumstances, can
embody directly, in a kind of short-circuiting immediacy.
I'm borrowing the notion of implication from David Bohm, Einstein's
student, a quantum physicist who argued that quantum mechanical
phenomena actually tell us something about the fabric of realityhis so-
called ontological interpretation. On his view, also expounded by Basil Hiley
and more recently by Anthony Valentini, the Universe is a Whiteheadian
process that Bohm calls the holomovement, that is, undivided wholeness
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in flowing movement. In other words, reality is a nonlocal, wavelike
movement that in some deep sense is unanalyzable and indivisible without
contradiction. We'll talk more specifically about matter in a while. But first,
poetry.
I'm interested in how this notion of enactment, promoted by the
Cambridge school of literary criticism such as F.R. Leavis and still alive
today, is very similar to cognitive theories of enaction posited by
Francisco Varela and others. While they dispense with the idea that the
mind has to contain representations of everything it does and perceives
(thus giving rise to an infinite regress), enactive theories of consciousness
do suffer from the same syndrome as literary critical enactmentthey
suppose an immediate creation of actor and acted-upon that already
presupposes the very world that enaction has created. I've talked about this
elsewhere (and if you want to see it there's a lecture on this on iTunes U).
Today I want to show how, if we go with a model that uses implication
rather than enaction, we can achieve a more subtle sense of how textuality
works, thus helping us to do better close readings.
One big reason why to do this is that I think scholarship hasn't yet
caught up with the great discovery of structuralist and poststructuralist
theory, the discovery called textuality. When you think about it, textuality
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becomes much stranger and far more profound a notion than is often
thought. Textuality is certainly a whole lot more interesting than just
another way of thinking about the aesthetic dimension, for instance.
Because textuality affects the way we think about meaning as such, it has
implications (there's that word again) for ontology as well as for aesthetics.
In particular, textuality is not a supersized version of allusion, in which all
signs point to all others. In some more drastic sense, textuality means that
all signs directly are all other signs, an indivisible unity that we could call a
unicityjust to make sure that we're not saying it's One as opposed to the
Other. It's a unicity the strong, Parmenidean sense that if you try to chop it
up, those pieces only make a very limited amount of sense, and the
chopping as such is in some sense impossible, as Zeno's paradoxes are
designed to demonstrate. This sort of unicity is what physicist Niels Bohr is
talking about when he says that determining the significance of quantum
phenomena makes no senseyou can't chop up the Universe like that
without getting involved in paradoxes. Plato thought that if you were skillful
enough you could indeed chop the Universe uphe uses the chopping
metaphor actually, talking about skillful versus unskillful butchers. What if
no kind of chopping, skillful or not, were ever going to work?
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The unchoppability may strike us as a scary form of holismbad,
bad, holism! Unicity is not the same as holism. Holism means that the parts
the whole are replaceable, since the whole is greater than them. In unicity,
if you have different elements, you have a totally different unicity. Yet some
problems remain for understanding unicity, even if we realize that it's
different from holism. Unicity is a very different view, seemingly, than the
one that emphasizes difference and diffrance, but I hope you will see the
connection. (In any case I've been called a deconstructor and I'm quite
happy with this label.) One way to misinterpret Derrida is to say that he's a
nihilist who is asserting that fundamentally nothing has any meaning. This is
far from the case. Derrida is claiming that precisely because of the play of
difference, things can have meaning. So yes, meaning and meaningfulness is
always a shifting, fluid target, but it would be a big mistake to say that this
shifting fluidity is nothingness. That's the beauty of textualityit causes us
to imagine something, even if it stretches our idea of what somethingness
might be. The flow of difference is the implicit structuring and destructuring
order that gives rise to meanings.
I'm going to argue that textuality is implicative. In other words,
textuality is a process of enfolding and unfoldingan appropriate nod
perhaps to the paper medium in which writing has so often been inscribed,
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until recently, but it works as a way to think about other media too. Let's
consider an aspect of textuality, the aspect we think of as literature. There
is no need to think of literature as different from non-literature in this case.
I'm simply asking you to think about poems and narratives because they are
what most easily come to mind. There is not necessarily an intrinsic and
special thing that literature does, such as refer to itself, or perform
meaningfulness in a relatively non-pragmatic way. Still, it does seem to be
the case that many works we now think of as literary do talk about
themselves or perform meaningfulness non-pragmatically. And in particular,
there do appear to be some of these kinds of works that talk about their
implicative properties, as we shall see. Some of these might be literary.
Tempted as I am to think that literature is explicit about the implicit
textuality all texts, I'm not sure I can totally buy itthough I love Derrida's
image of the poem as a curled-up hedgehog.
In the implicative view, one relatively autonomous feature of the text
(say rhythm) can become a carrier for another feature (say the imagery or
perception level). One feature can enfold another feature. In this view no
metaphysical priority is given to any level. This may seem confusing at first,
but it's actually easier on the mind than enactive views, which presuppose
some metaphysical hierarchy between form and content, such that the form
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ultimately expresses the content by enacting itthus in the last instance,
despite the enactive view calling itself formalist, content is ontologically
prior to form (though on another level, it follows from it, as it's enacted by
it).
An implication of the implicate view is that all features of the text
may be enfolded in all featuresthat is, ultimately, the text is an undivided
whole. Notice here the difference between saying that the text is a sum of
its parts that is greater than themholism. Holism paradoxically implies
that at one level at least, there is fragmentation, because the whole is
definitively different from the parts. Parts are substitutable members of a
whole that transcends them. On the implicate view, this is impossible.
Although every relatively autonomous feature (I'm saying this instead of
part) may contain information about every other one, this is only a
hypothetical inference that may be strictly unthinkable or at least
unspeakable. Thus a single word found in a papyrus may or may not be part
of a poem. If you chop a Shakespeare sonnet down to a single line or to a
single word, at some point it ceases to be that sonnet. The sonnet is not
in the single word.
Nevertheless, the sonnet as a whole talks about itself, and to itself,
on and between various levels. The implicate view is a non-essentialist view.
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It is also non-ontological in some sense, since it does not presuppose a
world within which texts have meaning, and ontology requires worlds. The
implicate view is materialist, but of a very expanded, opened up sort that
views matter not as shiny ping-pong balls but as richly encoded and
ultimately nonlocal information. It's thus congruent with developments in
materialism such as relativity and quantum theory (in case you wanted to
know). Moreover, a view of textuality as implication fits more easily
graspable facts about our reality. Consider a TV signal for example: it's an
ensemble of electromagnetic waves in which television images are enfolded.
One kind of phenomenon can act as a carrier wave for another one. In the
same way, the rhythm of a text can tell us something about the imagery,
and so on.
First let's unpack some terms I've been using. First, relatively
autonomous feature. Texts seem to be made up of various features that
have a degree of autonomy from each other. For instance, the rhythm of a
poem is autonomous from its imagerythe imagery can vary at a different
rate from the rhythm, the rhythm could be hot (intense, highly repetitive)
while the imagery could be cool (one image in twenty lines of verse,
several vaguely differentiated images clustered together, and so on). In this
sense, as I always tell my beginning close reading students, a text is like a
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rainbowall the colors melt into one another but there are still distinct
colors. Thus we have structurethings to do with syntax, lineation, stanza
form, the general relationship between squiggles and blank space; texture
(rhythm and rhyme)the way the text organizes physical sensations such
as overwhelm (or underwhelm), grooviness (or the lack thereof), sonic
vibrations induced by vowels and consonants and so on; and perception
(imagery is the usual word for this but perception isn't vision-centric)
the world of tropes (which I call spin to my undergraduates) and other
figures of speech. Other features of the text include reference (I used to
call it content but this just gets confusing, especially since on my view
form is content, so there is no separation)what the text appears to be
talking about (one thing, many things, points of view, narration and so on);
and context (who wrote it, why they wrote it and so on).
Now some phenomena such as irony act as wild cards that kind of
play between all the levels. Irony strictly is the aesthetic exploitation of a
gap or contradiction between 1+n levels of significationI'm sorry, there's
no really elegant way to describe it, although in one recent class we came
up with gapsploitation, which I like very much. The way in which irony
plays between all the levels should alert us to the basically undivided
wholeness of the text as suchand again, let me be very clear and reassert
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that I'm not dealing with holism here, but possibly with a strictly
unspeakable, even nonconceptual lack of division.
Irony works, of course, because all features of the text interact
deeply, in the sense that they are all manifestations of textualitynot of the
text as a closed bounded work but as manifestations of an open-ended
flowing movement of signification. The major discovery of poststructuralism
and deconstruction (which takes the discovery to its logical non-essentialist
conclusion) is this phenomenon Barthes and others call textuality. The deep
interactivity of features of texts should remind us that the features we have
isolated by naming are only relatively autonomous, just as the color blue in
a rainbow is really inseparable from magenta and green, and inseparable
from our human eyes perceiving it from a certain location. So for instance I
now tell my undergraduates that they'll get a B+ if they talk accurately and
well about the first three features of the text in isolationI make them
study structure, texture and perception because their minds tend to speed
up when they examine reference and they start saying all kinds of free-
associative things like Twinkle is a depressing word so Twinkle Twinkle
Little Star is a poem about depression. But, I say, they will get A- if they
explore how one feature of the text talks to another feature. If they do
this lots of times about lots of features they will get an A. If they do this at
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an even higher level they will get an A+: for instance they might discuss
how one conversation between features contradicts another
conversation. I used to think that anything above B+ was vague and
impressionistically to do with inspiration, which it is, of course, but I was
able to make what I wanted much more explicit once I had figured out that
for me, texts are implicate forms that enfold significance on as many levels
as possible.
All this then implies that there are some kinds of text that talk
explicitly about what they are implicitly. A great example would be this one
by Gerard Manley Hopkins, nice and relevant for me because it does so by
talking about rainbows.
It was a hard thing to undo this knot.
The rainbow shines but only in the thought
Of him that looks. Yet not in that alone,
For who makes rainbows by invention?
And many standing round a waterfall
See one bow each, yet not the same to all,
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Open unto the fields, and to the sky;
All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.
Never did sun more beautifully steep
In his first splendor, valley, rock, or hill;
Neer saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!
The river glideth at his own sweet will:
Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;
And all that mighty heart is lying still!
Leavis argues that the eyes have to expand, that our reading has to lie
open, to take in the unconventional enjambment at lines 67: the fact is
made present as a realized state in the reader's consciousness by an
expressive use of the carry-over (the lying open is enacted) (The Living
Principle, 118). It's a striking argument, though Leavis himself doesn't do
much with beyond using it as evidence of Wordsworth's overall badness
compared with Donne and Shakespeare. It is made more striking by a
certain enactive recursiveness in Leavis's own prose. The sentence in
which lie / Open is embedded also lies open thanks to the judicious
typography (see presentation).
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The poem enacts its environment, including the contact, in this case,
the blank paper surrounding the text. This lying open reproduces at the
level of form what the narrator says about London at the level of content.
In taking in the domes and spires from the bridge, the narrator widens our
view to include sky, valley, rock and hill. We are being asked to see more,
to become more aware. This heightened awareness is the real substance of
the poem.
Now an implicate reading of this poem could indeed account for
what happens in the lines containing the phrase lie / Open (67). But the
implicate reading would not assume in advance that this was because there
existed some reality outside the text that really was that way. The enactive
reading on the other hand always collapses in the last instance into nave
mimeticism, the sort of thing that lets you hear, as it were, the clash of the
rapiers in line 7 (as Eagleton puts it) because of all the /c/ sounds. We are
then left with a basically Platonic view where words represent things, and
thus the potential for an infinite regress, for what thing does the word
word represent? (This is the third man way of taking issue with Plato. If
chairs are copies of ideal chairs, then of what is the concept idea a copy?
The third man problem also affects Whiteheadian materialism, from which
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I'd like to distinguish the view I offer here, though perhaps for reasons that
can only for the sake of time, remain, ahem, implicit.)
The implicate reading on the other hand would explain the phrase
lie / Open by talking about how the lineation becomes a kind of carrier
wave for the paper around and within the printed text, so that the
lineation starts to include another levelthe paper on which the text is
printed. This level is then seen to include a perception level in which the
domes and theaters and so on appear to open to the fields and sky; an
image that also enfolds human perception into itself, since the opening is
also the widening of a gaze from some more focused attention to a more
floodlight-like condition. Notice that in the implicate reading, no feature has
ontological priority over another. They are all enfolded together, so that at
this level of interpretation at any rate, it becomes undecidable which one
comes first. There is a kind of cognitive chiasmus here that enfolds the
reader together with the narrator: just as I am standing on this bridge
opening my gaze, so you are reading these lines opening your gaze to the
poem. It becomes chicken-and-eggy to figure out which one of these
events, the one on the bridge or the one on the page, came first.
The temptation, then, would be to use this chiasmus as the basis for
an ideology of being embedded in a world that is always already significant.
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Indeed, Merleau-Ponty calls this kind of embeddedness the chiasm.
Phenomenology, from which derives this ideology, wants to see meaning
emerging within a horizon of meaningfulness. What can this consist of, in a
situation such as textuality, where outside and inside (hence horizons) are
precisely not rigidly there? Phenomenology opens up thinking in one way
only to close it down in another. And this phenomenological impulse is
where I think the enactive theory comes from. In the enactive theory, parts
of the text that enact their meanings are more powerful, more real even,
than others. Thus Leavisite criticism treasures them as examples of robust,
muscular language that's really getting to grips with things and giving you
something substantial to chew.
The implicate view, on the other hand, states that this kind of effect
is really happening all the time: the rhyme is always talking to the syntax,
and so on. It's just that there are moments at which so many features are
implicated together that it becomes obvious. There really is a deep
connection, then, between enactive poetics and enactive cognitive science.
Both come to the exciting yet oft-repeated conclusion that we produce the
world in which we already find ourselves. There is, finally, a world, and
some poems are better than others at evoking it. There thus appear
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pathological deviations from some normative, healthy way of doing poetry,
involving the kind of police work for which Leavis and others are famous.
The implicative view can do everything that the enactive view can,
without the metaphysical baggage, and it can do more, since it broadens the
idea that one feature of a text can bear information about something else.
In implicate poetics there is no hierarchy (say between form and content)
because there are no reified entities such as form as such or content as
such. If everything could act as a kind of carrier wave for everything else,
nothing is prior to anything else.
Now let's return to our Hopkins poem, and read it as an implicate
order. I like the way in which the rhythm implies the thinking, the hard or
impossible thinking that could unweave the rainbow. The rhythm implies it
via omission, for instance the first verse:
It was a hard thing to undo this knot.
The rainbow shines but only in the thought
Of him that looks. Yet not in that alone,
For who makes rainbows by invention?
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some deeper level they enfold each other. It might also follow that the
mind functions in this way because reality as such is structured this way.
It certainly follows from our exploration that textuality functions this
way. Textuality can't be categorized as a thing with a boundary, since it is
precisely the way in which no sign or sign system has a rigid thin boundary.
Concepts such as form and content, then, however modulated, are really
just abstractions that appear falsely as immediacies. It's common sense
that rhythm is form, isn't it? I want to trouble this kind of common sense.
We are living through a moment at which common sense is indeed being
troubled on a global scale, let alone quantum theory, by massively
distributed phenomena such as global warming. The chewy muscularity that
appears in enactment theory is really just an abstraction appearing as a false
immediacy, in this precise sense.
Textuality is not an object in a Newtonian sense, singular, solid,
permanent, occupying a specific region of time and space. Textuality is
more like a field of forces, in the Einsteinian sensea way of looking at the
world with which we haven't yet caught up, so it's rather hard to grasp. An
Einsteinian Universe is more like a flowing network of what Minkowski calls
world tubes. It only makes a kind of relative sense to differentiate one
text from another, so that the significance of a text changes depending
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upon circumstances. This is much more strange than saying that you can
read a text any way you like. You can walk around a single, solid-seeming
object and view it how you like. Textuality is not just a kind of
perspectivism.
What textuality is even more like, however, is the turbulent vortices
of probabilities that constitute a quantum mechanical Universe. It becomes
very hard to visualize or grasp conceptually what these vortices may be like,
since our way of seeing and thinking are part of the Universe that function
in quantum mechanical ways, so that what you are seeing and the fact of
your seeing it are implicated in one another. There's the problem: our
seeing is implicated in what we are seeing. This is even more drastic than
the problem posed by relativity. In some deep sense, there really is no
boundary, not even the relative sort of one between vortices in a stream.
Since there is no time and space at some quantum levelsince these are
generalizations about what is the case that work only up to a certain
pointevery text is, in some sense, literally every other text, as absurd and
as difficult as that sounds. It would then be a mistake to shut the discipline
of textual studies and literary theory off from other disciplines such as
sciences and philosophy, since, if we are to take textuality seriously, these
differences are only relatively autonomous arbitrary boundaries.
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Textuality means that we have to get serious about what we're doing
in literature departments. The fields of biology and physics, for instance,
appear to have been arguing for forms of nonessentialism that are deeply
congruent with textuality. Just read Darwin. The whole point ofThe Origin
of Species is that the word origin should really have been in quotation
marks with some kind of winking emoticon next to it. Darwinism discovers
that life is just like textuality: an indivisible, flowing whole that you can't
chop up into species, variant, monstrosity, class, genus, kingdomyou
name it. Of course we see all kinds of highly differentiated species scuttling
around. Yet these are phenotypical expressions of an implicate, mutating
process (the genotype, such as DNA and RNA) that unfolds with a high
degree of order, that is, seemingly at random, and with scant regard for
skin, cell walls, or other seeming biospheric obstructions. At the DNA
level, there is no rigid, thin boundary between life forms. There's not quite
enough time to go into all this today so you're just going to have to read
my bookThe Ecological Thought.
The kind of interconnectedness the textuality talks about is even
more evident in physics. A stronger and stronger case is being made in
physics that some kind of ontological interpretation of quantum mechanics
is in orderif ontological means anything at this level. (Probably not,
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since ontology implies a world in which meaning emerges, and the quantum
level does not constitute a world in a meaningful sense.) How else are you
going to explain the well-documented phenomenon of nonlocality? If
biology discovers how entangled life forms are, quantum entanglement
which is why your flash drive worksbrings a whole new level of
interconnectedness to the table.
It has been well established that you can entangle two particles (or
more) such that you can tell one particle some information (make it spin a
certain way), and the other one will instantaneously appear to have
received the same information. This works no matter what the distance
no matter what rigorously means two yards, or two miles, or on the
other side of the galaxy. (They get away with saying these things in physics
departments.) The information sharing is instantaneous. Now you could get
rid of the speed of light but this sounds very dodgy to most physicists. Or
you could say that the two particles are not really two particles. They
appear to be two to us, but in some other deeper sense they are the same
thingexactly the same thing. This sounds mad but the other option is
genuinely madderit involves time travel and telepathy and all kinds of
woo woo stuff, so if you have trouble with nonlocality, you may find that
the alternative is a lot worse.
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To say the very least, nonlocality seriously forces us to rewrite our
ideas of matter and of materialism. Since my view is that we should be
reading texts in a materialist way, literary criticism should be taking account
of nonlocality. At any rate, we all need some remedial math and science.
Textuality claims that signification is nonlocal in almost exactly the same
sense as quantum nonlocality. Indeed, nonlocality is precisely a theory of
textuality at the quantum level, in which information is dispersed among
particles seemingly occupying different regions of spacetime. Literary
textuality is not simply like physical nonlocalityin some sense, it directly is
it. If there are any Alain Sokals in the audience, you may laugh now.
The University of California, Davis