Language/Mind/Writing
Alan Davies’s text-based performance at 80 Langton Street, San Francisco (29 October 1982) is a verbal thought experiment that enacts the disparity between language—divided between speech and writing—and mind. Many of Davies’s key terms are charged with prior usages in philosophy, both Western and Eastern: German idealism, American pragmatism, existentialism, deconstruction, and Buddhism. Davies wants to show how the nonidentity of speech and writing, the cornerstone of deconstruction, may be reimagined by appealing to a notion of mind as both mediated by language and autonomous from it. Rather than referring to philosophical tradition, Davies performs the distinctions between his key terms in a work of art that demonstrates both unity of mind in the disparity of language and a dissociation of language from any prior unity. The resulting “act of mind in language” owes as much to Laura (Riding) Jackson’s performance of truth in The Telling and the errancies of Montaigne’s and Emerson’s essays as it does to Heidegger’s inquiry into language as “the house of being” or Derrida’s enactment of “the precedence of writing over speech.” Davies conveys to his audience the rigors of his theme in his style of performance: relentless, self-questioning, abstract, and demanding of a nearly impossible level of attention. His text is a unique account of the “turn to language” as a performance of philosophical inquiry.
[…] We project as language the interest of our minds in thought. The language is the peculiar function of the mind in which it immerses itself when it thinks, and in order to think. A language is any gesture which the mind repeats in order to understand itself. Later, in order to disseminate that understanding, in order to see it, the mind reduces a language to a speech, or to a writing. But the language is the mind in contact with itself and most particularly with its understanding of, that is, with its dealings with, itself, and its understanding with, and its dealings of, itself. Language marks the presence of our strange default in relation to life, that we think about it. It presents us to ourselves in view of our thought, as if we were life’s gimmick. This failure is our failure to penetrate language in thought, in life. This failure poses us abjectly at the edge of our imminent and delayed failure, our imminent but delayed future. We fail the language when we don’t permit it as its own mode of thought, as a mode of thought, when we as it were exact from it a penance for that its existence which we nevertheless encourage, and when we make it do the work for another mode of thought, or for no thought at all, for the very distinct presence of the absence of thought. A language is a tool of thought, the mind is the languages at work, and the difference between mind and thought is the difference between name and function. Language is a use we make of our time when we choose to live in it. In these ways, or for these reasons, we begin to treat the language as an encumbrance, an abuse, and we then so readily get to be the ones who abuse it. The language is one of the verbs for us that as we use it can justify its taking from us the unreliable place of the verb to be. We imagine what it would or could be like to be more spectral or more calm in the space of what can there be at best the vicinity of being, and there, then, is the region of the habitable uses of the language, in the space of the lifetime. We rush to find ourselves in the habitable regions of the language, and others rush to find themselves even near such places, for there the language touches the language, the uses for the language touch the uses of it, and the person is a whole entity at the end of the apt expression of the whole of a thought. The languages make possible for us the reasonings, the forms of reasoning, in the mind, and they make possible the unreasonable problems of frail, broken, incomplete, or otherwise damaged, thoughts, the lesions in thought. The language is, though, properly the excellent tool of excellence in the mind, in acts in the and of the mind, in the mind’s thoughts, in the mind’s actions in the other languages, the outer languages of the other world. The languages are within the mind a community of the uses of the mind, its efforts within itself and going beyond itself, perhaps leaving the mind but never the language behind. The language is that vehicle of which it is meant that it make for the mind a place in the world. To the extent that the world is a receptacle for language, it is the occasion for, the occasion of, the mind. To that extent to which the world receives the languages, to that extent exactly, the world is a book. Mind begins in language to constitute for itself an expression of itself, and in this way language began, and in this resides the completion of a thought, its excellence in complete articulation, its excellence an excellence in articulate completion, because the beginning of the language is also the completion, the beginning of the mind. It is difficult to think about the language objectively, with what in the language is called objectivity, because the language is the mode of thought among other things also of the language, the thought of language, also, and, also, the language of thought. We would have to say, attributing to ourselves the simplicity of the statement, that language is not separate from the mind, nor is the mind the sum of the languages, nor is it controlled by them. The language intercepts the mind. That is the notion of the language in the mind. The language does the work of thought as it enters itself or as it enters the world. Writing exemplifies language as it performs those works of thought which enter thought, and speeches are the form of the languages when they blatantly and, frankly, too frequently, enter the world. Nothing is fatal in the vicinity of language, mind, and writing. And it is also too commonly felt that either might be fatal, to itself, to the self, to the social self, or to thought. The language is not precious, or sacred, or a vessel. It exemplifies a mind in the world. The language is the pact that the mind keeps with itself, and when the mind keeps a pact with the world, it engages a language with which to do it. If the beauty of the mind is something which engages thought, then the language, a language, is the, is an, example of that. It appears to us that the language is the end of everything and the beginning of anything. If there is a reason for forgetting it is the language and not the future, and certainly not the completely imaginary past, and the language is the instrument of forgetting, its implement. There is no need to understand the beginning or the beginnings of language, because the beginning, the beginnings, of language, constitute the origin of the completion of the mind as an object, its initiation as a tool, and the language was something which was there as either of these other things happened, or were happening, to complete themselves. Perhaps some things are more perfect than the language and perhaps something is more perfect than the mind, but gradually we begin to doubt ourselves, each doubts each, and the assertion closes on itself, the pariah of speech. It is not the style of language to exclude itself from thought, and that is the definition of style. The language is a special and perfectible thing, special because we know it, because we know in it, and perfectible because we come close to it, and, over it, and, pass it with the language as that excellent weapon of lazy self, in the teeth. The language is not sentimental, or it is the excelsior of sentiment, when it lives. The language is the present without qualifiers. The language does not qualify anything until it is forced to by some idiocy within the world. Released to be itself, that is, being what it would be without that release the need for which we demand for it by our lazy and insistent ways, being there separate from stupidity, and articulate about it, the language makes the nouns live with the verbs, that is all it does, and it does that very well. When we wish to know something about the language we use it, and our use of it tells us more than we had thought we would be asking, because our asking is full of the faults, and language is full with the excellences of its use, that excellence which permits it to be of use. We too often manage to make the language work because we are inattentive to anything else, to everything, else. But the language is a special tool, and, one which does not specialize, and its perfection is always its solidity within, whichever is most immediate of its own gestures, and its gestures make us used to it.
We would not say that the mind is the same as or that it is different from the language, or a language, or the many languages. Languages are the evident portions of minds. The mind is the favored location of the languages when the languages are preferred to be doing their favored, their best, work. The mind is the site of the language when it is most perfectibly the language, the place where a language most and most explicitly perfects itself, and you don’t work in the mind without breaking the mind into thoughts, and thought is the explicit early action of a language, but the mind will not relent. The most resilient of factors is the fact of the mind. The mind is the legacy of the acts of the languages, but it is also and, incidentally, more interestingly, the locus of the languages in labor. The mind is the instructing within a life. With memory it is the instructions, and with life it is the simple, temporary, solid, and solitary, construction of the instructions in the life. The language is the presences of the vocabularies and the grammars and the mind is the sentences in the sense of the carrying out of the instructions implicit in the presence of the active vocabulary, the acting grammar, and the instrumentation of each by, and in relation to, each. The mind is the actions in thought of a life, and if memory is its periphery then in those places the mind is a center, an activity which, at its best, diminishes into itself, a soft sharp point of moving focus, without exaggeration, without extension, and if interior to anything, interior to it only in default. The language does not ever use the language as a vehicle for trading out of itself. The language is occasionally or perhaps frequently made to do that work, that sort of work, but by persons living entirely then exterior to the mind, their own mind. The mind is the focus of a life in the world. The language is the light of the mind, the point of its pointed focus in the world. Mind is that device of perpetual motion the existence of which death exists to reinforce if not to prove. The mind in the pursuit of mind, or, mind in pursuit of the mind, these are among the strongest urges which fasten upon a life, or upon which any life fastens. The mind is the evidence of forms, it is their making evident and, making them evident, in order to make them evident, it forms the languages in the worlds of the lives of the humans. It is simple to rest in consideration of other things but all considerations rest, in the end, within the mind as their origin, and in the mind as their conclusion. The mind tolerates no illusion and so the language has about it no illusions, such that where the language exemplifies illusion it evaporates the mind. When we think about the mind, the mind talks, and when we write about the mind it is the mind that writes, and if we talk about the mind it is, then, the mind which talks. It is in these ways, and in those other ways of which it may be said that this way of the mind represents them, in which we come to recognize that the worlds reside in the mind, and that the mind does not only represent them. When the mind is charged with the task of representing a world, then the world is in default of its own presence to the mind. The mind is the function of the mind, etcetera, and the etcetera is the usual failure of the world to account for the presence of the equatabilities within the mind. The world is usually not up to that. This is because the mind is the pure function of function, as we experience it, because its function is purified in the actions of its functioning, and because its exemplification is its loss in the streets of the usual minds of the world. There is no excuse that the mind ever makes in the world, and that is because the mind does not ever touch the world, and that is because of the space between the spaces that habitually touch the world. The world derives its strength from the mind, and that is the simple fact of the human presence in the world, and without it, the mind would derive its strength solely from the mind because of the absence of the human in the worlds. There is no reason to equate anything else, but the mind’s constant equatability with the mind belies the presence of anything else within the world. The world equals the world, etc., but the actions of equatability occur and then exist within the mind. The mind is the locus of all the human action of the world. It moves the material of the world, and is itself only material if it is dead. The mind is the world’s volution, or the world is its circumference. The mind is a still point amidst the horizons of the world, because thought is vertical, and the verticalization of language in writing its nascent nadir, as object. The mind is the workplace of the living. Only the dead work only in the world. The differences between the languages has only small recourse to a mind, which uses them as extents of its resources, and makes of any one of them, in its use of that one, one equatable with the others, lost there, and, of no more importance than that, its use, and the occasion of its use. The mind is the occasion of its use. Otherwise there is no mind. There are no mistakes made by the mind because everything that the mind does is its work and in that it is not mistaken. There are, however, frequent mistakes made in the mind by the life which surrounds it, by a life which surrounds it, by the or a world, by thought without thought as its object, or by a language in the hands of something other than of a mind. The details of the mind, inside of the mind, are perfect, its actions are perfect, and these are the sorts of things meant by perfection. The intrusions of the worlds are the origin of any faulting in, in any faulting of, the mind. But a mind which has first strengthened itself with its own devices and its own acts, and, where necessary, been absorbed quite totally in and by them, might become and be a mind capable of thought, capable of habitation by languages, or capable of writing, without repeating and thereby inspiring the furtherance of the faults of the worlds without minds. It is the fault of the world that the mind fails, and the strength of the mind that it comes to know that. It is by a kind of isolation from the world which is yet entirely attentive to it, that the mind does perfectly the work of the mind, discerning in itself the longest reaches of its actions, and outside of itself the short appurtenances which can encumber it with hesitations. Outside of the mind exist for example those mistakes of the language, which we have mentioned, and which are in fact the mistakes in contacts between the mind and the world. It is necessary for the mind to remember its place in the mind before the life takes the mind to its place in the world. The mind is the world before the internal mistakes of the world, and with them the mind is the locus of the functioning of the languages of the world. Each person lives in a space bounded by thought. Each thought is bounded by language, or, more accurately in the realms of action, it is the languages that mediate between the points of the person and the layer of thought. And writing is itself not beyond language, within this present thought in metaphor. Writing is the point of mind reaching through thoughts to languages, or, writing is the point of mind living itself, as explicitly and distantly as possible, through the languages to the goal of some anticipated and then manufactured thought. The mind is the use of every thing, without metaphors or distances, although it is through the sharpened, acute, perpendicular distancing of its uses from itself, that it achieves those clear notions of things as they are, and which make it of use to thoughts, to languages, and to the perpendicular distributions of writings upon the flat and blatant horizons of the world. […]
PUBLICATION: Excerpted from Poetry and Philosophy (1983), 3:46–54.
KEYWORDS: language; philosophy; performance; writing.
LINKS: Alan Davies, “Close Reading Close Reading” (PJ 2), “Motor Mouth” (PJ 5), “Or How Shall We Yet Catch Each Unmindful Eye Awake” (PJ 9), “Strong Language” (PJ 7); Pierre Alferi, “Seeking a Sentence” (Guide; PJ 10); Mike Anderson, “Framing the Construals” (PJ 5); Bill Berkson, “Stick” (PJ 7); Abigail Child and Sally Silvers, “Rewire// Speak in Disagreement” (PJ 4); Paul A. Green, “Elsewhere” (PJ 8); Carla Harryman, “What in Fact Was Originally Improvised” (PJ 2); Jackson Mac Low, “Pieces o’ Six—XII and XXIII” (PJ 6); Delphine Perret, “Irony” (PJ 3).
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY: Abuttal (New York: Casement, 1982); Signage (New York: Roof, 1987); Split Thighs (Boston: Other Publications, 1976); a an av es (Needham, Mass.: Potes & Poets, 1981); Active 24 Hours (New York: Roof, 1982); Mnemonotechnics (Hartford: Potes & Poets, 1982); Name (Berkeley: This, 1986); Candor (Berkeley: O Books, 1990); Rave (New York: Roof, 1994); Odes (Cambridge, Mass.: Faux Press, 2008).