Here is a paper I recently wrote for a comparative literature class:
The
Infinity of Essences & the Problem of Similarity
I.
Introduction
When all possibility of identity has been discounted—and
discounted it has been—there must remain a category that could
explain, if nothing else, the appearance
of identity, or what is the
same thing, the appearance
of the dichotomy of essence and appearance. Even
setting aside questions
of the ontological status of identity versus non-identity,
one is confronted with the problem of objective appearance,
specifically and most problematically that of the much-derided
self-identity. In this paper,
I argue that “similarity” (and likewise “imitation” and
“likeness”) fulfills this cynical
role, offering the possibility of nuanced analyses for projects as
diverse as semiology, historical materialism, and even
post-phenomenological or post-deconstructive theory. Said
more concretely, similarity is the ontological precondition of both
identity and non-identity, and is the constitutive reality of
self-relation conceived as infinite.
Thus, I will unfold the concept of
similarity with respect to three thinkers: Walter Benjamin,
specifically looking at the primarily
distorting effects of
similarity; Roland Barthes, focusing on the problem of self-imitation
relating to photography but also to all types of image; and Jean-Luc
Nancy, who will feature
prominently in the discussions of the previous two thinkers, but who
will also be discussed on his own as a final clarification of what is
at stake in the problem of similarity.
II.
Walter Benjamin: Similarity as Distortion & The Copy
The
first modality of similarity I will examine is that of similarity qua
distortion in the work of Walter Benjamin. In perhaps the
paradigmatic example of this modality, Benjamin writes, “[Proust]
lay on his bed racked with homesickness, homesick for the world
distorted in the state of resemblance”
(Illuminations 205).
Proust's undoing, according to Benjamin, was his attachment to the
narrative structure of similarity, the contextualization that lends
all elements under a single historical heading (and indeed there only
ever tends to be one
such heading!), a unitary essence.
The apparent singularity of
the essence is deceiving, however, as this essence is inevitably the
barest universal abstraction which in the end can signify absolutely
nothing, as written in the official historiography of the
bourgeoisie. Proust's illness
here stands in for what may be considered the
bourgeois pathology, the class necessity of the myth of
progress. Resemblance is thus
that state of contextualized essentialism that reduces particularity
to abstract
universality. In this movement, according
to Benjamin, what is sheared
off is the real
context of the thing, in other words, its decontextualized, bare
particularity. Nothing less than true history is here at stake, the
logic
of things as they happen.
Perhaps better than
particularity, which has a long history of assimilation, and indeed
exists in discourse
as the subsumed element in the universal, we should say peculiarity.
Whereas particularity
designates, in Adorno for example, the element that is not taken up
into the universal, peculiarity will be used to designate the
singularity of essence.
No
discussion of similarity can do without the notion of copy, of
mimesis, and in the context of Benjamin's thought, of technical
reproducibility: “The
technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the
domain of tradition. By making many reproductions it substitutes a
plurality of copies for a unique existence” (Benjamin,
Illuminations 221). It
appears
that this phenomenon
is analogous to that of the destruction of peculiarity effected by
the narrative structure of bourgeois (or
orthodox Marxist)
understanding of reality.
There is here
a bizarre although unsurprising mimesis of mimesi, an
imitation of imitations, a
second-order movement and not
simply a horizontal chain. First
of all there is the destruction of difference, of particularity, and
then on top of this there exists the wholesale destruction of
peculiarity. We
shall return to this
in our discussion of Roland Barthes. For
now, though, it is sufficient to draw attention to the historical
connection, wherein photography appears as the perfect outgrowth of
the age: “Every
day the urge grows stronger to get hold of an object at very close
range by way of its likeness, its reproduction” (Benjamin,
Illuminations 223).
Benjamin here
presents
the paradoxical
insight that every separation
is a bringing-close, every separation into original and copy, whether
that original exists or not, is a touching,
a penetration. In other
words, there is always something different between a thing and its
copy
But
what exactly is lost in similarity? On
the one hand, peculiarity is dissolved,
that which
would be the singular essence of the thing. But
there is more than that, particularly when we take the subject of a
photographic portrait into account. Benjamin uses the metaphor
of the gaze to describe just
such a loss in the move
between thing and copy:
“...the
camera records our likeness without returning our gaze”
(Illuminations
188). A
similarity results, but something important is missing—this
lost element is nothing less than the
mutual recognition constitutive of self-consciousness
and thereby of the human.
Further, this is the
production of the standing negation of the self as that which
experiences firsthand the absolutely negative both in near-death
experience and in the desiring of the other's desire.
Perhaps alarmingly, the
likeness produced by the camera is one that is lacking in both
its
recognition of the other and,
more imporantly, the other's recognition of it—it is lacking in
lack, its substance does not exteriorize itself but appears to sit
still. Thus
the gaze of the photographed subject is decidedly not
a human gaze, but rather the
countenance of the suffering that is separation, the tremendous pain
undergone in the offering of an unreturned humanity. This
return is more generally rendered impossible by the dissolving of all
stable substance that could go out of itself only to return unchanged
to its
point of origin, itself unchanging;
this restlessness is not
limited just to photography, and will be discussed below.
As
mentioned previously,
the image of the dream world
takes the role of the non-symbolic
in Benjamin, where the
symbolic structures (narrative consciousness) that dominate waking
life are absent: “The
similarity of one thing to another which we are used to, which
occupies us in a wakeful state, reflects only vaguely the deeper
resemblance of the dream world in which everything that happens
appears not in identical but in similar guise, opaquely similar one
to another” (Illuminations
204).
Distortion by similarity as
was effected by the waking
drive towards pompous historiography
is here contrasted with what is
dubbed a “deeper resemblance”.
Unfortunately, the
elaboration of this dream
world remains difficult, and even, as Benjamin himself admits,
“opaque”.
The suspension
of self-consciousness which
is instantaneously produced
by the click of the camera tears the viewer of the photograph from
the waking world and places him in the confused expanse of the dream
world wherein there is
nothing but the unwavering gaze of an infinity of eyes,
invoking an infinity of
associations none of which
give the promise of what can only be a reified fidelity. Thus
the absence of all
context as the real context
of a thing does not result in nothingness, as if that absence would
imply a void or lack of
manifestation. Rather, there
exists
what may be termed the
presence of that
contextual absence, the
Nancean
infinity of sense—the fundamental lack of a ground guaranteed to be
such by the restlessness of infinite self-relation. We
might say that manifestation would continue manifesting in the
absence of all context qua death of singular essence, as the pure
negativity of the infinite going-out-of-self. This would be the
unending upsurge of peculiarity. Perhaps
this is what Benjamin means when he writes, in “The Doctrine of the
Similar”, that “the perception of similarities thus seems to be
bound to a moment in time... it must be grasped in an instant”.
Thus, contra both Wittgenstein and Lacan, there is no limiting regime
such as nonsense or the Real which would be unsymbolizable due to its
definition as against what can be said, i.e., the symbolic. The dream
world (but also perhaps the gestus
or the surrealist montage) is not an attempt at the saying of the
unsayable, it is not even a frenzied but futile extension of the
finger towards unspeakable horror—or rather, it is both those
things brought to bear against the tangled mass of existence
which has always-already said the unsayable, and which has likewise
long since replaced the unsymbolizable with the
as-of-yet-unsymbolized, or even the
as-of-right-this-moment-unsymbolized.
Benjamin's
stripping of all context from the thing can be seen as the
prerequisite for the following arguments based on Barthes and Nancy.
In the next section, Barthes'
Camera Lucida—the
work is lucid only
as lucid dreaming—will
provide an indispensible view on the double-movement of
disappointment and necessity
inherent in self-imitation.
Following this,
Nancy's Hegel: The
Restlessness of the Negative
will open the way to understanding both the always-already of
self-imitation that nonetheless supercedes identity and the infinite
becoming of all things, which
things spiral through themselves and through their uncountable
offshoots in constantly splintering teleologies without reference to
an end-goal outside of that becoming.
It must, however,
be kept in mind that none of these developments are a proper
resolution of the
problem, as that problem's
core paradox is the impossibility of resolution into self.
Rather, the following developments should be thought of as different
modalities of the problem of similarity.
III.
Roland Barthes: The Image as Imitation
The second modality of similarity I will examine is that of the
image and imitation in Roland Barthes, particularly the
self-imitation forced upon the subject of photography by the
technical conditions of the medium. This self-imitation takes form as
the result of a misidentification, or rather of a confusion of
peculiarity for any and all presentation or self-externalization
whatsoever. Describing the ordeal of self-diremption effected by
being photographed, Barthes writes
In front of the lens, I am at the
same time: the one I think I am, the one I want other to think I am,
the one the photographer thinks I am, and the one he makes use of to
exhibit is art. In other words, a strange action: I do not stop
imitating myself, and because of this, each time I am (or let myself
be) photographed, I invariably suffer from a sensation of
inauthenticity, sometimes of imposture (comparable
to certain nightmares). (Camera
Lucida 13)
What is immediately striking is the
profusion of
similarities, of likenesses,
of “selves”
one must imitate. Whatever else
it may be, it
seems that imitation is not
gentle, and in fact is likened to a “micro-version
of death” (Barthes, Camera
Lucida 14). The
image, and not only the photographic image, is the locus of a
self-differentiation, which differentiation is
a dreamlike echo of the
problem of essence and appearance, given
in technological form: “Ultimately
a photograph looks like anyone except the person it represents. For
resemblance refers to the subject's identity, an absurd, purely
legal, even penal affair...” (Barthes,
Camera Lucida 102).
The absurd
legal affair Barthes speaks
of is the paucity of the
photographed individual, who is
“...neither subject nor
object but a subject who feels like he is becoming an object...”
(Camera Lucida 14).
This becoming of an object is
inseparable from the act of self-externalization, from the very
production of the image. There can be no externalization, however,
with the complementary notion of the internal:
“...depth is inseparable from the strength to externalize oneself”
(Adorno 106-107).
By this (through
the lens of my own interpretation)
is meant
two things: self-externalization
is the projection of the image, the positing
of the self (this will be
important) from which true
depth is produced, in which
what may be termed the appearance
of essence and appearance finds its basis;
and the perhaps paradoxical
truth that before the
projection of the image one is not identical to oneself, insofar as
identity is nothing but its
own positing, it's own
(problematic) presupposition.
Speaking of an
old picture of his mother,
Barthes writes, “She did
not struggle with her image, as I do with mine: she did not suppose
herself” (Camera
Lucida 67). To suppose the
self—this is the sin against the peculiar, but perhaps piety is not
as easily attained as Barthes might have us believe. The very notion
that some picture is a picture of me
already implies the violence
of the entire symbolic
universe. This violence is
the dissociation of peculiarity, of consciousness as
absolute negativity and hence as freedom,
from the given determinations
of the individual symbolic subject:
“For the photograph is the
advent of myself as other: a cunning dissociation of consciousness
from identity” (Barthes,
Camera Lucida 12).
This self-as-other, it is
absolutely crucial to keep in mind, is the
identification
of the object
(the “externalization”) with the subject (the “internal”),
appearing
in this context as a
misidentification that has always-already been made. The
immense power of photography in this regard was thus its ability to
capture people.
Besides
this violent difference-and-identification—which must of course go
together on the structuralist model—there is the question of the
dream world, of that
which would overflow all context, all narrative, and in Barthes' case
also all myth.
Here
is what Barthes has to say about the similarity of the dream world:
“The
almost:
love's dreadful regime, but also the dream's disappointing
status—which is why I hate dreams” (Camera
Lucida 66).
There
is always
a double-movement with photography, that of identification of subject
and image-object on the one hand, and on the other the struggle of
the
almost,
a catastrophic
undoing of that identification. Furthermore,
the subject-becoming-object
in a photograph is the timeless guarantee of failure in the great
labor of externalizing the self.
Returning
to dreams, Barthes has this to say about his mother: “I
dream about
her, I do not dream her”
(Camera
Lucida 66).
The
individual in all her peculiarity is only pointed to even in the
dream—a
bigger failure could not be imagined. Even stripped of all context,
even placed gently down into the dream world by the unconscious,
Barthes cannot recreate her presence, her peculiarity. The problem
lies in the botched transplantation between the waking and dream
worlds. First, the sharedness of the world and of sense demands that
the subject in reality be a “we”. So it is not as if Barthes
cannot dream his mother because there is an uncrossable gulf between
people. Second, the dream-image of Barthes' mother could never give
off the peculiarity that his real living mother did because it is the
nature of peculiarity to be singular, and the identification of the
dream-figure with his mother was false by and through that very
identification. While Barthes was with his living mother, her
presence was externalized and sense was shared between them in their
peculiar contact with one another—in death, there was only the
dream-image, no better than the photograph; both images are false by
their overbearing demand for the conformity of the other, for
immediate and total subjugation of the living other to that other's
own voiceless echo.
In
“The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason Since
Freud”, Jacques Lacan famously claimed that “the unconscious is
structured like a language”. The
unconscious activity of the dream world, however, is decidedly not a
language, or rather it is a language that has gone out into its other
so completely that the deferral of signifiers to their others for the
sought-after meaning happens at one single instant, a static shock
exploding out from the darkened void, coursing through the edgeless
emptiness, and dissipating into a new zero-point of relations. The
dream world may not be coterminous with dreams commonly
understood—all the better! The infinity of sense is not something
to imagine anyway. Instead, it is a physical contact between bodies,
the sharing of peculiarity between them (essence is necessary as the
internal precondition of the manifestations that touch one another).
Returning to Barthes'
distress over his dream-mother,
we may say that even
the divine gaze able to hold the entirety of all semiological signs
simultaneously in view could not produce one
single ounce
of what is peculiar. For this, the reality of manifestation is
needed, a self-differentiation and subsequent identification that
does dance garishly on the false surface of the sign. There must
be
a vertical movement, even if in the end that movement was only the
false appearance thereof.
Barthes'
cynicism regarding the emancipatory possibility of the similarity of
the dream world would seem thus to be the outcome of a (largely
correct, I believe) ascription
of imperialistic would-be
hegemony to the symbolic order, to the always-already invoked
sign-chains
analyzed so virtuosically
in Mythologies.
There
is, indeed, no such thing as a meta-language, even as there is the
movement towards such a structure. It
was in this sense that I spoke of the
mimesis of mimesi in the previous section—we are now in a position
to deal with this concept more thoroughly. Previously,
we noted that there was a mimesis, a striving for identity, between
the mimesis of bourgeois historiography and the mimesis of the
photographic image/copy. That
earlier statement, that flawed sureness that the self-understanding
of the bourgeoisie was the essence or base of which the cultural (or
even technological!) superstructure
was
a mimetic appearance, brings us
to a declaration:
the
striving-each-into-the-other
of meta-language and language (or
of essence and appearance).
This
imaginary limit, this locus at which identity
would finally be self-identical,
is the mimesis of all
mimesi, a
universal identification of identifications, but
on that account also its own undoing.
That which imitates imitation is not on that account less
successful, as if there were a ground at which imitation could be
definitively
separated from meta-imitation. Rather, the
success of imitation heightens to the extent that peculiarity and
particularity are successively
made to disappear.
So
there is a tendency within
things to approach self-identity, which is however negated in the
activity of Spirit
or thought as separation, or in the supremely powerful act of
touching—the
more abstract a relation becomes, the more peculiarity is sheared
away, but the act of thought or Spirit that bursts forth cleaving
substance in two is always the guarantee of symbolic distance, which
distance is, paradoxically, closeness and even penetration conceived
in terms of sense;
the
promise of concretion and manifestation is always-already made, and
this suffices to unsettle substance for all eternity.
Strictly
speaking, it
is actually
quite
impossible to move from infinite relationality to the lack of all
relation which
is the One—identity
cannot exist for two reasons: it cannot be at the beginning because
there can be no beginning (see following
section on restlessness),
everything
having already begun;
and it cannot be at some
end because all identity is constituted only as similarity or
likeness, of which the prerequisite is self-diremption.
Thus,
what
yet
remains the problem
of similarity is
however through the preceding analysis clarified—similarity
is the problem of depth expressed
with a slightly different focus and entry-point.
The
movement constitutive of depth
is,
to speak clearly, that whereby an essence becomes appearance through
self-manifestation (which however does not leave it unchanged). That
new appearance soon becomes the essence of a further movement of
depth, and so on; the movement by which essence and appearance shift
themselves about and flip over each other may be produced by temporal
change or by relational
changes.
These winding movements produce the appearance of a meta-language at
given moments in time (when a snapshot is taken or when certain
behaviors are carried out as
if
there were a meta-language—this last possibility of existing
falsity deserves a paper of its own), or due to the all-too-common
artificial restriction of the field over
which manifestation is to be experienced or things are to be thought.
These
considerations, as noted, open the possibility of treating
language
and meta-language
as vertically-structured,
separate
modalities of being which
demand
of themselves
their
special treatment.
As might already be apparent, such a separation is in fact
impossible, made
painful by its failure, even
as it
is absolutely necessary: “The separation that is in itself
manifestation is each time a singular ordeal. As such, it is pain”
(Nancy 41).
Mimesis
as that which, forever
unheeding,
gathers all
mimesis
unto itself, positing itself as the similarity
of all similarities
in an endless deferral towards the very
locus of similarity,
that
hidden
thing that finally is
self-identical,
the
ground or essence behind manifestation which however cannot
exist—this rather
dense formulation
brings the paradox of similarity to an intensity at
which the contemporary French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy absolutely
thrives; it is to him that we now turn.
IV.
Jean-Luc Nancy: Self-Similarity & Iterative Manifestation
Nancy's thought is marked by several recurring motifs which have
special significance for the critique of similarity undertaken here:
sense, self, and trembling. Most of these concepts were touched on in
the previous sections, however this final section will generalize
several of the previously-derived results and thereby provide a
somewhat more rigorous justification for the earlier employment of
Nancean concepts.
Sense is the term for that unmistakable phenomenon, that everything
we come into contact with always-already makes sense. This
making-sense is immanent, in that it references nothing pure or
constitutive of that making-sense outside of itself, outside of its
own self-reference. This reflexivity is a groundlessness, a
restlessness which makes up the infinity of sense and causes problems
for the interpretation of Nancy as holding either a philosophy of
immanence or one of transcendence. Sense is infinite as described by
Hegel's doctrine of true infinity, that infinity which is such
in its boundless and limitless self-reference, and not in its
constant deferral-onto-other, where that other (and therefore that
spurious infinity!) would end up encompassing everything in its own
self-identification. Rather, Nancy's infinity of sense exists not in
a positive or identifying self-relation, but in a negative
self-relation which is the precondition of its own groundlessness.
Summarizing restlessness, Nancy writes, “The restlessness of
thought first means that everything has already begun”. Refering to
the problem of the always-already, the structured temporalization
that accompanies all thinking of manifestation, Nancy seems at first
pass to side with Barthes in his disdain of depth (we will see that
this is not exactly the case). Restlessness means above all that one
cannot “go back” to the beginning in thought. In other words,
there is no such thing as immediacy—A thing is not given but
posited, that is, mediated from the very “first” moment, which
moment in fact effaces itself of itself in its unfolding.
The concept of self present in Nancy's work is a peculiar one, and
this without accident: “Self
is selfsame: the position of this sameness engages that of a
difference, whose movement alone posits sameness. Self
is as itself... self
must be self as such: and it must be so in taking distance from
itself in order to posit something like what it is” (Nancy
43). This is, in so many
words, the fundamental
problem of identity and difference, compressed into the reflexivity
of the speculative remark which is, alone among all the possible
configurations of language, gentle enough to preserve something as
fragile as the truth. What
Nancy means here is that there is an imperative, a (cosmo)logical
necessity that each thing come into its own, unfold itself in the
expression of its essence. However, this teleology would not be that
of appearance-as-manifestation versus
essence-as-transcendent-unmanifest. To the contrary, “Neither
purely present (and thus evansecent) presence, nor purely absent (and
thus imposing) absence, but the absolute of presentation” (Nancy
23). In other words, not everything is manifest, but all is
manifesting. There is,
it must be stressed, no ground of that which appears if that ground
would itself be taken as unable to appear—there is an endless
deferral of essence, wherein each thing takes up the thankless task
of being an essence,
which of course is a burden that absolutely cannot be shouldered, and
thereafter the burden is passed on to the next generation, the next
iteration of self-induced manifestation. The self, the paradigmatic
example of the strive to be essence, must paradoxically posit
itself as its own innermost
essence, and it is only in this self-positing that the self becomes
itself. In the same founding
motion the self both posits something and mimetically identifies with
that thing, thereby becoming itself.
However, this becoming-self is also a becoming-other due to the
impossibility of self-identity before the always-already
restless—with no posited essence, there was also no thing which
might have been self-identical. Finally,
and perhaps most importantly, the self is anything but a subject all
too itself. Rather, this self-positing and therefore self-imitation,
by the logic of the previous section, is the very process undergone
by the world itself: “It is because the world undergoes itself as a
world of separation that its experience takes the form of the 'self'”
(Nancy 4). It is easy to see why this is the case, given
restlessness.
In
this originary self-positing, all positive ground or substance plays
no role whatsoever. Briefly
quoting Hegel, Nancy writes,
“In
its very first figure, this relation to the other, and, more
precisely, this being-self-through-the-other, gives itself as that by
which 'substance... is made to tremble'” (Nancy
43). To tremble, that is
truly a
powerful thing: it
is the penetration of the absolute negativity of death into the slave
that lies defeated at the feet of the master in
Hegel; in Nancy, it is the self penetrated by its own taking leave of
itself. Further,
“trembling is the act of being-affected”, a paradoxically-stated
passive-yet-active happening
that is akin to the asymmetrical mediation encountered in thinkers
such as Adorno and Benjamin, albeit without the backdrop of the
Kantian subject.
In Nancy, the ineffable dream world is transformed into the
always-already that refuses to posit a realm of the “unsymbolizable”
in opposition to the “symbolic” (this would, in the way we have
been speaking, reinstate reified depth), but rather collapses
that distinction and posits (a significantly revised version of
Hegelian) Spirit in its stead: “Spirit is not something separate...
because it itself is nothing other than separation. It is separation
as the opening of relation” (Nancy 19). This infinite self-relation
of the world, of separation and diremption and of similarity, is
nothing but the consequence of the lack of all ground, the lack of
any unchanging identity which a thing could aspire to be. Needless to
say, the lack of ground, the constant turnover of essences, is the
very paragon of the production of peculiarities, avoiding all
problems of identification brought up Benjamin in his critique of
historiography. So important and fundamental is the peculiar that,
ethically speaking, in a Nancean world the squandering of choice on
the chimera of self-identity is nothing short of the gravest evil.
Thus
the problem of similarity, which is in any case the concept of
identity problematized for a brutally
cynical world, is seen to be approachable from three entry points:
first, that of Walter Benjamin's drive towards the destruction of
narrative and the elevation of the fragmentary, exemplified in the
decontextualized world of dream logic in which resemblances are of an
almost mystical, ineffable character; second, that of Roland Barthes'
distress over the loss of his mother even in dreams, and the
second-order imitation of all imitations
which iteratively produced its own falsity through
self-identifications that necessarily became less and less concrete
and therefore less and less real; third, Jean-Luc Nancy's infinity of
sense, seen
to be
the infinite self-relation of totality and thus
the prerequisite of both identity and difference.
Works Cited
Adorno, Theodor W.
Lectures on Negative Dialectics: Fragments of a Lecture Course
1965/1966. Trans. Rodney
Livingstone. Cambridge:
Polity, 2008. Print.
Barthes, Roland. Camera
Lucida : Reflections on Photography. Trans.
Richard Howard. New York:
Hill and Wang, 1982. Print.
Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. Trans. Annette Lavers.
New York: The Noonday Press, 1989. Print.
Benjamin,
Walter. Illuminations.
Trans.
Harry Zohn.
New York: Schocken Books, 2007. Print.
Benjamin, Walter. “Doctrine of the Similar.” New German
Critique, No. 17 (Spring 1979): 65- 69. Web. 12 Feb. 2013.
Hegel, G. W. F. The Phenomenology of Mind.
Trans. J. B. Baillie. New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1967. Print.
Lacan,
Jacques. "The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or
Reason Since Freud" in Écrits: A Selection.
Trans. Bruce Fink. New York and London: W. W. Norton, 2002. Print.
Nancy,
Jean-Luc. Hegel: The Restlessness of the Negative. Trans.
Jason Smith & Steven Miller. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2002. Print.