The Infinity of Essences & the Problem of Similarity

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.