(Local) landscape – (Global) displacement – Method and rambling (the global and the local) – Circumstances – Mingled place
(Local) landscape
And supposing paganism and polytheism assembled a ragged world in the same way the body is constructed, a bit at a time? As if the world did not differ ostensibly from the skin: a tatter-landscape dressing itself piece by piece. Vulgar here, magnificent there. The pagus, canton, department, partition of ground or space, is a piece of the country, an element of the countryside: a patch of lucerne, vineyard, plot of land, small meadow, neatish garden and its enclosure, village square, tree-lined walk. Held in tenure by the peasant, the pagus – his age-old noble lineage – is where rustic divinities dwell. Gods repose there: in the hollow of the hedge, in the shadow of the elm.
Peasants in their countryside element cohabit with their pagan gods.
The old language has retained memories of the pagan peasant; think of the old restanques, terraces that preceded the tangled surroundings; the enclosed fields that preceded urban planning, the checkerboard that you could never have called a panorama: the topology of a map made up of disparate, variously coloured, oddly interlocking slabs, a shabby cape made of vines, meadows, ploughed land, glades, localities, the ruins of polytheism wiped out as soon as the word was born. If you have seen Mother Earth’s harlequin costume, you have known Antiquity. It is gradually disappearing, becoming a white, virginal coat again, open fields where monotonous corn, disturbingly, occupies the space as far as the horizon, ugly and greenish. Language and monotheism homogenize the pagan tatter, technology tramples over the altars: the old gods of the byways destroyed, tenure and boundaries abolished. Empiricism respects and nourishes a hundred local divinities, and will even allow the adoration of the word. Monotheism makes global technical intervention possible: to create an isotropic space, it was first of all necessary to kill the idols. Nothing new under the sun across the Mid West. Peasants hounded out, the countryside destroyed. The body is made up of disparate limbs and organs, a garment is constructed from pieces and seams, should we also believe that the countryside clothes the body of Mother Earth, the demigods of the pagan pantheon pinning jewels here and there for her adornment? Does the peasant veil or violate this body? Stop asking how one sees a landscape. This is the question asked by spoilt children who have never worked. Seek to know rather how the gardener designed it; how the farmer, for thousands of years, has been slowly composing it for the painter who reveals it to the philosopher, in museums or books.
He composed it pagus by pagus. Now this same Latin word, from the old agrarian language, as well as the verb pango, dictate or give us ‘page’ – the one that I am ploughing with my style in regular furrows this morning, a small plot where the writer’s existence settles, puts down its roots and becomes established, where he sings of it. Meadow, hamlet, lucerne, garden or village, the locality where he works, good fortune and habitat; where he has never been able to live without the company of a god. Each page needs at least one god in order to exist, in order to help the person who is slowly creating it to exist: he never leaves a page without having fashioned there the secret sanctuary that he humbly requests the reader or passer-by to acknowledge by stopping for a moment. A god reposes here, hidden and invisible. The page where so much time is concentrated is covered with so much dense writing, with the sole aim of his coming and establishing there his dwelling and hearth. If you make the effort to look, you will find him. Pray to him for an instant, for yourself and for the peasant of the locality.
Like the peasant, the writer composes. Dwells for a considerable time on the page, or patch of land, honours the altar, works at the limits, up to the wall of the enclosed field which separates him from the neighbouring sanctuary, and sometimes meditates on the countryside, seen from a dip in the land: I must plant a poplar, cedar, yew, next year in the upper part of the coomb, between the cemetery and the pond, so that in thirty years’ time, there will be an additional note of perfection to enchant the absentminded passer-by, meditating on perception and nature. An obliquely placed god sometimes brings together in modest harmony twenty separate localities: the circumstantial coat is brought into being.
No countryside, work or history exists without singular accidents or events which spread their influence throughout the canton, an influence that is unexpected for those who come from the locality. The singularity of the accidents or events is difficult to relate to it. It takes work and time to trace the byways separating or linking, stitching together or mingling these neighbouring circumstances. Time flows on these roads. Let us say that circumstance is a state, or rather, a local equilibrium surrounded by an irregular or capricious zone of influence, a star with asymmetrical festoons or deviations, a spiny ball unnecessary in every respect. All over the surface of the circumstantial ball, others crowd, tangential and literally contingent: the latter word signifies that they touch each other individually, and as a whole, without any constraining law. Countryside, work of art and history partially integrate these contingent circumstances, creating a picture, park or garden, excerpt, period or interval. Global integration, a straight road going through the forest, calls for method or science.
A hamlet, houses clustered around the belltower, and a cemetery; a valley descending in a long line emphasized by hedges on the sides of the coomb; a lake crowned with concentric ridges; a wind-swept plateau going who knows where . . . a picture. The traveller describes in detail his breath-taking discoveries, rambles along country roads, quotes contingencies and percolates like time. The sailor is lost in the Bay of Kekova with its multiple inlets, rocky promontories, small islands, straits, outlets and narrow beaches, strange branchings, harbour basins and walls; all he sees of the bay are scenes, he can only comprehend it in its totality at the table of the watch and dreams of a great work, each book of which would describe or illustrate a total, beautiful and sufficient perspective of the bay, opening up and hiding the neighbouring vista, showing and covering its global geometry, longed for as a divine surprise or rejected as too great a task. But the constant level of the water condemns the sailor to rely on abstract thought or the stars, in order to see. He proceeds horizontally. The time of this great work, both unexpected and expected, percolates along the whole length of the navigation route or ramble, as it could be called, up and down, adventurous, but a knot in the volume of space, with repetitions, rediscoveries, novelties, and sudden grandiose visions.
What world is created by the rag stitched patiently from thousands of already ploughed pages and by the thousands we hope are ahead of us, what country is embellished by them, what land do they map, what body do they dress? The variegated, striped skin of the writer, banded with lines and letters, pieces of body, flakes of skin, fields from the countryside, pages of another desired earth, paradise.
How is this map to be stuck on to the countryside, to the ground of moving flesh, to erectile spring growth, in celebration of sensation, for it is thus that each page is erected. A work of art is dead without this conjunction, sterile without this bracketing together. Pages do not sleep in language, they draw their life from the pagi: from the countryside, the flesh and the world. When you meet the Harlequin costume of Mother Work, you know Antiquity: the stubborn return of paganism, of solitary peasant work constrained by its own contingencies, of the local countryside, patiently modelled – the attention to lawless neighbourhoods, reality which shines and overwhelms us at every stage of its germination, cries of life.
Creativity is as old as the landscape, lost Antiquity and the senses. Redeemed all at once and integrated through the word.
Do not seek to know how to look at a landscape – compose a garden instead. Learn the æsthetic error of submitting everything to a law: levelling the local event produces boredom and ugliness, a world without landscapes, books without pages, deserts. Take everything away and you will not see. To see space demands time, do not kill time. Avoid the symmetrical error of being satisfied with fragments. A lack of story is as tedious as a singular law, and produces even greater ugliness. Composition requires a tension between the local and the global, the nearby and the far-off, the story and the rule, the uniqueness of the word and the unanalysable pluralism of the senses, monotheism and paganism, the international expressway and remote villages, science and literature. Hold the bridle of the galloping horse firmly, keep a tight rein to prevent his shying, expect a long and steep path. Watch closely, anticipate. Philosophy sometimes requires syntheses. Go visiting.
Suddenly, at the same time, you see both miniature and panorama.
Can the page-units be fixed in time and place?
Take, for instance, the photograph of a beauty: in times gone by we would have called it her portrait, and more recently, her representation: full-length, naked, outlined, in various scalar dimensions. When enlarged to reveal the detail – the grain of the skin, the molecules of the grain, the atoms of the molecule – the beauty becomes an abstraction. Thus did Gulliver, in the course of his journeys into just such a representation, come unexpectedly upon the breast of the giant wet-nurse. Conversely, to carry this beauty easily with you on a journey, you can have her portrait miniaturized, making it smaller and smaller and scaling it down to the point where thousands of beauties can be fitted into a cherry pip. Thus did Gulliver see the Lilliputians, swarming around his stomach-mountain as clusters of angels or lilac, thus does the painter depict a crowd in miniature framed by a window behind two giant faces in prayer.1 Thus are we able to manufacture electronic chips. Miniature beauties are to be found everywhere.
Imagine stacking the representations on top of each other, enlargements on top of miniatures, larger and smaller than the average-sized original scaled portrait; the pile can reach to the moon or even to infinity since there are no limits to size in either direction, except practical ones. This scene displays a sort of prism or astronomically long cylinder, or immensely wide cone or pyramid. The card or photograph right in the middle reveals the full-length portrait of the young lady, the zone above increasingly refined close-ups; the zone below, increasingly distant bird’s eye views, leaving room for a growing crowd of beauties.
Imagine pathways going from one portrait to another within the pile, a set of transversal paths in the cone or prism, linking together the various dimensions of a particular place. Each set of tracks, the volume it defines and carves out in this infinite prism or cone, enters dimensions other than those of ordinary space. Dimension must be first of all understood in the sense of size, and then in the sense of a topological invariant defining a space in two or three dimensions, or in a fractional dimension. As a result, our vision is immediately transformed and turned upside down. The beauty lies next to her component parts: tissue, cells, large molecules, or otherwise in the middle of her tiny twin or cloned sisters. In the midst of her elemental composition and her possible reproductions.
Thus the mountain reposes amongst its rocks, the latter amidst their pebbles, the pebbles among molecules or debris, everything producing a vast mixture; the ocean sparkles inside and outside its seas, outside and inside its straits and breezes; the forest slumbers amidst its glades, the plain is next to the clearing; the variably sized pagus is composed into others, in spaces with different dimensions. This is what the countryside is, the moving totality of its real fragments, paved with hybrid pages. If you want to see this, draw one or more paths across its possible representations.
A great work, like a park, is composed of atoms and oceans, drops of water and mountains. The sailor observes the stars and dreams of the shore but he negotiates the wave that strikes the prow of the vessel, makes it disappear beneath the plumes of spray.
Wide pages and tenuous differentials.
Here. The countryside assembles places. A locality is drawn as a singular point surrounded by a neighbourhood: springs or wells, jagged capes jutting out from the shore, islands, a small lake, long braids of streams, narrow necks at the top of a mountain pass, the bank of the river eroding the foot of a hill, clearings, fords, harbours, topographical events, obstacles, limits or catastrophes; someone chooses to live near the singularity already there and endows it with his own. Who has not dreamt of stopping here, in the middle of a circus of arid mountains, in blazing sunlight, of pitching a tent and waiting for death? A habitat or niche, a place for the bed or table, around which footprints trace the countless festoons and garlands of everyday life. Here someone lives, eats, sleeps, keeps to his daily routines, loves, works, suffers and dies. The passerby knowing immediately that he is transiting through a place, stops on the site or in front of the stone identifying it: here lies the unknown person who made marks on the countryside and whose tombstone perpetuates his occupation of it. He has saturated this singular point with his smell, his rubbish, his excrement, his work, his tastes and colours, his corn and vine, buildings, descendants, then finally litters it with the ashes of his corpse, the engraved marble of his tomb. The passerby bows his head, visits the god of the place. Where are you going? To this place. Where do you come from? From my site. Which way are you going? On past here. To reply to each question you would have to tell an infinitely detailed story which would not fill the space, occupied by the tutelary deity of this place, its tones and balms, its tact and silence, its remaining traces that have no name in any language.
The outline of a garden miniaturizes the countryside, assembles places, sites, rooms or squares, composes the heres and nows. A mark facilitates the task of recognition: statuary indicates the singularity of the site. Whether island or cape, pass or lake, the braid of a river alongside a hill, sculpture can take over and assume the position of the local goddess, replacing the tombstone under which lies the founder, mythical or otherwise, of this niche, of this page of countryside.
If you are at all capable of writing you can design a garden.
The path passes through the countryside, strides over obstacles, catastrophes or limits. Pushes the gods of place aside, goes straight ahead. Overcomes obstructions.
Where are you running? Down there, where it is said that milk and honey flow. Where are you coming from? I have lost the original paradise, where the father lies beneath the earth, the road forks there, coming from further away. Which way are you going, where do you not stop? How can you know without signposting and, since the path is straight, without knowing how long it is? Here is the bust of Hermes, the term, the milestone. The walking or goat tracks in the mountains are dotted with cairns, hillocks, pyramids, tumuli . . . What vestal virgin or other victim lies underneath these stones?
Here are the places in the countryside, tombstones mark them.
Here are the sites of the garden, statues indicate them.
Here on the winding road are cairns or tumuli.
Here on the straight path are terms or milestones and busts of Hermes.
Points of accumulation endowed with neighbourhoods or metric reference points, or at the very least identifying stones for a well-established here and now.
Here: the singularity of the world where an individual persists in his tomb. Keep in mind here that the first theorem of measurement came into being in the shadow of the Egyptian pyramidal tomb, at the time of Thales. It is not known whether he compared the shadow of the tomb with his own: to do that he would have had to remain motionless like a statue, in the midday sun.
Can one see a totality-page?
Antique and pagan, the countryside precedes the new architectural language. The landscape artist stitches, juxtaposes, assembles and tries things out. The architect imagines a unitary synthesis: the rooms follow logically from the whole structure whereas gardens are induced from the page. A wall is the sum of stones, and the building is the mason’s Euclidian summation of its rooms, in three dimensions; whereas the tree goes from trunk to branches and radicles, ramifies from large to small and bushes out, fractally: and supposing every species of flora grew in its own dimension? This would certainly be in defiance of simple structures. Landscape artists have to deal with individuals and time, the architect rarely pays attention to localities, failing to give the variable pagus – pebble, dust or hill – its due. His global space slides into the same dimension as the localized rooms. Le Nôtre and Mansart do not inhabit the same space and do not conceive of the same big picture. And the time of conservation or of degradation has a different rhythm from that of life.
Although a creature of language, the writer does not easily free himself from paganism, subjugated as he is by the same local page and by the infinitesimal miniature of fragile intuition borne by mute sonority, an immense breath that inhabits him. The gardener, like him, sets out gods and statues, altars in each ocellus of the park, raises peacocks and cultivates orange trees, a bejewelled coat, luminous pupils. Two varieties of pagan peasant. The one God was never invoked as a fashioner of landscapes, but often evoked as the architect of the universe. The creator, like a master stonemason, creates a totality. The global design and conception is his alone, he plans and divides.
The gardener lets the multiple eyes of the countryside control his world. The multiplicity of what is seen itself has eyes.
Think of the immense amount of work done by the writer prophets of Israel to construct the Bible, a unique book, binding their pages into monotheism, struggling against an idolatrous people who would scatter them in all directions, making them into a landscape, lost garden or paradise, a land flowing with milk and honey, a promised land, and who, out of dread of the desert, abandon themselves to the world. The declaiming prophet and the chosen people pass for all eternity through the empty white plain between two landscapes, the age-old garden and the garden of hope, their life, that of the austere word that regrets or promises.
Think of the infinite work done by science to found a unitary system across the chaos of its pages, as numerous as grains of sand. Knowledge beats to a systolic, then diastolic rhythm, hesitates, balanced in time, passing from one phase to the other, between the hope of a universe and the irreducible pluralism of a world, between a systematic whole and the irrepressible growth of difference. As though it could not bring itself to leave the earth or garden, with its thousand species, for the lure of a desert.
Think of the impossible work done by the philosopher – caught in architectural, logical, desert systems – in resuscitating the body of the countryside and the countryside of the body vitrified beneath language, so as to create a world from the explosion of fragments. Happiness requires the landscape to hold its own beneath the pale ochre of the desert, as the body holds out against the machine, or the young girl against the grey-beard; stubborn grass grows under the cracks in the expressway, myriad angels flinch at times under the domination of the architect God of the universe but drown him in the garden of their eye-spangled wings; the pleasures of the multi-coloured banquet hold their own against the grey cameo of the abstract word. Empiricism carries the unforgettable memory of gardens. Where God himself moves freely amongst the species.
The architect inhabits synthesis; the philosopher seeks it even when he postpones it for a long time, passing lingeringly through empiricism and science to delay it even further, and keeping closer to the landscape artist in order to learn from him, to invent, practise, project with him a concept more elastic than totality, less complete than synthesis, more fluid than addition, looser than integration, more alive than the system, more changing than the concept itself . . . the edifice makes a totality, like the concept, word, scientific law; the countryside assembles: sketch or pattern, for local gods are strongly resistant to federative efforts; sets, groupings, collections, regroupings, bundles, re-memberings remaining more apposite names for a process that commemorates Eurydice’s body and the interminable time necessary to emerge from the infernal shadows. The fields depict limbs that stitch and tie themselves together, confluences that flow into each other like the tributaries of a stream. Fluid slip-knots like those of a loose shawl which takes on the movement of the body and gives it a subtle, ethereal grace: the dynamic, instantaneous unity that we call elegance.
When the sciences of life talk of systems, they borrow their terms from other fields of knowledge – music, mechanics or astronomy – which have never understood time, whereas they have before them a countryside to re-member, pieces stuck together with crossed strips of sticking plaster, knots in a shawl. They should seek, as we do here, subtotals, dynamic confluences. But they imagine a soft object in hard terms. The architect conceptualizes hardness, the landscape artist re-members the softness of living matter.
The landscape expresses the page of pages quite precisely, by doubling or exponentially increasing the pagi. A book can be shut, completed, a labyrinth, well or prison; the landscape page of pages, always open, displayed, free, readable, stretched out, unfolded, uncovered, manifest and obvious, never hides one page with another. This fragile book is the one we should pursue. The earth’s adornment does not lie.
Pango, I write on the page, pango, I sing, the hymn begins with a pagan confession, pange, lingua, gloriosi corporis mysterium, sing, o tongue, the mystery of the glorious body, sanguinisque preciosi, and of the precious blood, a dead body and blood shed for the redemption of the world, in mundi pretium. The medieval hymn puts pange at the very top of the page, thus putting paganism before language, before the word, its sovereign. The word gives its body and blood as payment for the world; language buys the world for the price of body and blood.
Nobis datus, nobis natus: the world no longer gives us the given, we receive the word as given, language gives it to us, sparso verbi semine, it sows its seed in the world. The flesh is made word, the word is made flesh.
Suddenly the word has redeemed the pitiful dismembering of ground, world and body, tendering for every page. You will no longer find the tiniest corner, stray bush, stone, insect or marshland not covered by its categories. The word has recovered every page, whatever its size, from the largest to the smallest, from the most to the least complete. The countryside recedes to a place before language and its glory: pange, lingua, gloriosi . . .
Paganism is reduced to an old map, antiquum documentum, an ancient document; an illegible, unwritten scrawl; an archaic lesson, example, instruction, education in ruins; transmitted imperfectly, or not at all, through lack of written or spoken language: an aptly prehistoric document leaving room for the new rite. Language is novelty, this instruction dates from Antiquity.
The present volume reveals that antique document, page by page, seeking out its ancient lesson beneath all the so-called new archives of the word. The senses, caught out, are defective, sensuum defectui. The tongue sings of the senses in order to enunciate their mistakes. They are in error, not only in relation to the word, but in particular in relation to the body of the word, its flesh and blood. Language finds the senses defective in the body itself. The ancient document falls apart. And philosophy, when it seeks to teach or educate, begins its first lesson by catching the senses red-handed at the very places in which they are making mistakes.
Faith in the word papers over the gaps, makes up for the failings. The word re-members them again, since it is body and blood.
The victory of language over an empiricism which is always in ruins retells the story of new rites which are in a way quite old . . .
O for the time when the ear could hear and the eye could see that the worshipper in his temple, the ploughman toiling on his clay soil, the writer on his page, were working in the same places.
This place dates from such a remote time that even in Antiquity it was called ancient.
The only news we ever announce is news of the word: Advent, coming, baptism, Epiphany, parables, Passion and Resurrection. We have shaped our culture so that it will resound at the birth or rebirths of a language, in whichever language they take place: Greek, Hebrew, Latin, Romance and then Anglo-Saxon languages. Each takes over from the preceding one and resounds again, convinced that it has invented the world. Every tongue believes itself to be the fulfilment of language just as every ethnic group at some moment in history is certain that it is the fullest expression of humanity.
Each tongue celebrates the birth of language in the idiom of its background world. It announces the logos, like a mathematician or metaphysician, voice, law and relationship dictated accordingly in a space drawn, ruled, calculated, measured, known and embellished by that world . . . It speaks the ruagh, spirit, wind, breath, voice moving over the waters before the first day of Genesis, the preliminary to creation. It affirms that in the beginning was the word . . . It describes language positively, logically, empirically, or scientifically using algorithms, equations, codes, formulae – in any case it excludes from philosophy everything not related to language . . . The same good news still thrills us, the logos orders and circumscribes, the breath hovers over the primordial waters, the word arrives to redeem and renew, language replaces the given. Pre-Socratic sayings, prophets, priests, scholars, recent philosophers all fall into line behind the same announcement, depending on the mode in which they function (religious, metaphysical, ontological, positive-historical, logical, formal and even mechanistic), they never tire of announcing that they are writing or speaking, that the kingdom of language is at last amongst us. Our Western culture reiterates this fact, is shaped by it, entering into resonance or harmonics with it alone, and dwelling in it. Today we take an active interest in this constant law because today we are beginning to lose it. We are witnessing the last reverberation of the centuries-old shock which caused us to be born at the same time as language: we are witnessing it in its death-throes. Our culture, born of language, modelled by it, vibrant in it and with it, could only rejoice in this ground-breaking emergence and still proclaims the good news in every language: mythic or pious, abstract or scholarly. We could not get over it, we are beginning to emerge from it this morning.
Beneath this ongoing newness that sums up and is celebrated by our culture, Antiquity shows its face. True, not the Antiquity recounted in history books, immersed as they are in the novelty of the word, whatever period or interval they report, but that of the body and countryside, pages composed of dead ocelli and seen by blinded eyes. Great antiquity, engulfed and flooded by the word, lies underneath its clear, transparent covering. Can one uncover a single site beneath this occupation, any dis-occupied flesh? Was there a countryside before the circular rite of newness, before the great liturgical cycle of philosophy, which comes and goes leaving nothing but advents?
Cultivated land displays high or secret places, immediately visible as stations. Equilibrium reigns here. Let us stop, pitch our tent, build walls, wait peacefully for the fatal hour, obviously less harsh in this setting. This is the place to posit my thesis, the Greek word for what Latin calls a statue. In this place a window appears to open, from which light falls, spreading tranquillity. At such stopping points, the countryside creates pathways, dotted with cradles, halts, long pauses, tombs or ports, studded with stone altars. Around these navels or buds, folds or singularities, the habitable locality projects arms, rays or tracks for irrigation, thus festooning the site with local tracks, with pathways sprouting from it and leading back to it, a constellation of senses, a small interchanger. To define place, one usually speaks of its borders, but in fact place is organized like a tied or untied knot, like a star or a living body. As animals that live in houses, we do not position or build them just anywhere, but only here, in these surroundings where the gods sleep and from where they shine, hospitably, from one place to the next, forbidding and incomparable, although close by. Our peculiar body, supplied with a capricious locality that defends and feeds us, like a porous breast-plate that can also stifle us, adapts willingly or blissfully to a local here, similar to this. Place, house and body form analogous nuclei and pseudopods – the existence and ascendancy of the local divinity, a home similar to an animal’s kennel. And the countryside re-members or consolidates sites into their surroundings, defended or heralded by a voice like a nightingale’s nocturnal song. Language, like a chorus of cries, rises from the mottled countryside roughly outlining these places with their irregularly-shaped localities, varying sometimes in width according to the carrying power of the vocal organ. Brilliance, clouds of odours, sound, or a crown of thorns radiate from the individual points. The five senses compete at the contours of the habitat, locality and body itself. Similarly, the latter stinks, cries, scratches and shines in order to define itself, or, welcoming, it caresses, smells good, delights and illuminates. Likewise the body of Mother Earth flashes, sparkles, glistens and dazzles. Consolidated into landscapes, seeds, navels, sites and neighbourhoods, she took shape gradually after emerging from underground Hells, in the geological period when pangea had no eye to see her, her body emerging from the waters, wrinkled, jostled, smashed, raised, covered, eroded, a prey to ice and the depredations of the sea, overrun by changing and adaptable flora, unrecognizable in her new clothes, soon to be overrun by living, seeing beings. The great antiquity of the pagan countryside, shaped countless times by inert forces, cultivated since time immemorial by her peasants, watches us watching her in formidable silence.
The countryside concludes our variations on the theme of variety: thick or thin, light or heavy, inert, living, sensitive, social, touching at the shared or separate edges of air or underground, neighbouring zones made up of collectives or of comfortable individuals, whether remote or in the vicinity, a manifoldly contingent variety in this sense, the countryside keeps numerous astronomical, physical, natural history and human constraints in equilibrium, balancing each sub-total at its origin, in an extraordinarily individual picture, from which in turn byways radiate. We inhabit an interesting place in this variety, an uneven layer that takes a long time to form, that is easily torn and nearly always tattered: a countryside almost as rare as a totally constructed body. We often sleep in its lacks or absences.
The countryside begins when each exact or human science falls silent.
The fractal face of the earth reveals itself as fragile, often ravaged. The earth turns its ravaged visage towards the sky; all manner of populations, armies, industry, tourism and invasions, have changed it into a valley of tears. Pillaged by those who pass but do not stay, its ruins are all we see. All we have before us are the remnants of a waste land, we live amongst memories.
Like the body, the skin, the senses or empiricism, the landscape is clothed in a patchwork of tatters. As frail as paradise itself, lost as often and for as long, it is found or revealed in fragments. Bits from the here and now, the detritus of places. Paradise becomes green like a landscaped garden.
In a certain dead language so closely related that it is still alive in ours, devastation and ravage are expressed by the word population. What earth are we soon going to see as a result of the immense growth of populations? The populating of the countryside is a delicate enterprise. What havoc is in store for us from methods that bulldoze their way through, without heeding places, or localities or elegantly knotted pathways now made straight?
Pity the frail earth, torn, or covered in violent remains and unspeakable garbage.
The word discovery is used in mining terminology to describe the pushing back and then removal of the plant or animal humus, the sand and rocks, the more or less thick coat that lies on top of the sand, stone, metal, diamond or ore to be exploited.
Nothing seems more humble than the earth; when language wanted to express humility it chose humus, compost, the face of the landscape that we never see when we pass by or remain there, occupied as we are with our passions and business. Grass, hedges, forest and flowers hide the earth’s face from the most perceptive, and they who pay attention to deep things remove it to reach the copper or gold. It goes to ground under floral phenomena, it melts into language, underlying reality eliminates it. Our greatest philosophies do not pay humility its due.
It is rediscovered by the attention and also the nostalgia inspired by blind lives which skim over the world, our only possession: just as when flying over Siberia on a clear night we see no lights. Lucidity comes, nonetheless, as if a door were suddenly opening, as though rebirth were channelled by humility.
. . . In Brazil, on the heights of Congonhas; in Turkey, in the ruins of Pinara; and in the middle of the Entre-deux-Mers region . . .
The vineyard was bathed in the first light of September, the glory of August was coming to an end. We enter the gentle hills as if into another world; an intense silence reigns; sounds carry in the still, clear air. Hard scales fall from our eyes; the earth in all its density rises up, everything goes upwards towards the sun which floods everything with tranquillity. We are seeing blue and green, a grape-vine, for the first time, the visible is embodied there, peaceful and serene, tangible and tacit, spiritual and perfumed. The paths running along the rows go nowhere, they are a part of the garden, like garlands. Without shadows, the brown earth, warm vine-stocks, black, sweet-smelling grapes, low sheds, local stones, odd trees, all the small, particular, familiar or unrecognizable details rise gently with us, towards the sky, as on the day before our baptism.
The levitating countryside, our nascent bodies, discover each other in that place; the joint creation of visionary and winemaker who for a thousand years have been preparing what we see here, a paradise between two rivers.
In front of the window the sun twinkles with a hundred sparkling stars through the moving branches of the wind-tossed apple tree – blond, tawny, copper, golden, straw-yellow, orange, ochre, sand or tan, multiplying the straight, centred, short rays, piercing and sharp like the trill of a bird; the Indian summer has erased the palette of greens: no more lime, almond, emerald, celadon, apple, bottle, olive, those restful shades of the hot August summer; the foliage of the maples is blotched with madder, carmine, cinnabar, coral, scarlet and poppy, brick and dark-red, tangerine, maroon, crimson, blood and ruby; this weathering, with its wealth of reds, garnets, purples and vermilions, glazes the world in a rosy hue beneath the supernaturally blue sky in which the dry wind whistles like a blade, making the branches twist in the solar light that they diffuse in dancing fragments, a bath of intoxicating violence; are there any ideas or words to describe this moment of bedazzlement?
Brutally reduced to primary colours – the yellow dwarf of the sun, the blazing trees, the perfect blue sky – space sinks into oppressively fundamental beauty, as in Greece or Provence. Deprived of all its subtlety, the body, blinded, flees towards the abstract, in painting or in geometry. It invents black and white graphics, colourless and formless concepts, consciousness or demonstration, it escapes into inner worlds.
A child of the South, although carrying the abstract baggage of my distant youth, I have learned to prefer Flanders or the north of France, the mysteries of misty seas, places where light disappears beneath low-lying vapours and absent stars; a grey, hazy plain, the black texture of sparse tree-trunks, where a sudden ray of light, as though trapped, lights up an odd area, works its enchantment on some specific place, a clearing or kitchen, not merely defining it, but rather by suspending objects in a bath of delicate brilliance: an evanescent pinkish-grey pearl or chaste emerald, cushioned on velvet, cherries and melons mounted like beryls or jade on platters of soft silver, lengths of dress material with colours melting into the fabric, so-called still lifes on the verge of movement, portraits in which the eyes are turned away, the spectator being subjected to the lucidity of a jewelled eye, tones broken up into tiny ocelli, azure, lavender, indigo, blue, turquoise, periwinkle, forget-me-not, navy-blue, ultramarine. Few languages have an equivalent word for vergogne, a form of modesty, it takes Aquitanian tenderness and shades of reticence to coax things into existence.
Twenty years ago deep sea fishermen were required to present for inspection a complete set of sea charts and their navigation instruments in good working order. Does this requirement, a matter of insurance and safety, still exist? Or is it accompanied now by a multitude of irritating procedures, administrative parasitism having spread like the plague?
One day back then, the equipment seemed to the inspector to be in too good a state of repair. The unmarked, new, white charts were superbly arranged in a large, painted chest of drawers the key of which, at first difficult to find, was then hard to turn because of excessive rust. The required technique had disappeared beneath the paint. It all seemed a bit artificial. The whole company had gotten ready for the fray and responded to the caprices of the law, rather as one runs a standard up the masthead, so that it will be seen. That is the flag’s only purpose.
‘You never use these things!’ exclaimed the inspector in a surly tone. The mariner was crestfallen, he shuffled nervously. The inspector chose to smile, he wanted to know and he promised not to report him. So how do you go about finding Murmansk or Newfoundland in both cod-fishing seasons? The answer took some time; they had to sit down, uncork an aged bottle, arrange the glasses, chat for a long time about their children. Vessels of the high seas do not surrender immediately. There must always be conversation before the speaking begins. So, how do you get there?
You have to imagine the countryside without signposts. What peasant would lose his way when going to a neighbouring farm? He turns left at the end of the evergreen shrubbery, goes straight to the walnut tree, then down along the stone wall, and from there he glimpses the neighbour’s red roof, at the bottom of the valley behind the cedars. You don’t ask those questions. You learn the answers at the same time as you learn to walk, speak or see.
That is how one used to go to Saint-Pierre: sail towards the setting sun until you see a particular kind of seaweed, veer slightly left, when the sea becomes an intense blue; you cannot mistake it, the preferred haunts of porpoises are there, there are other spots where a strong, constant current carries you north, others still where the dominant wind blows in low, small gusts and where there is always a low swell; then comes the immense, grey expanse, and after that you cross the route that the large packets follow, and after you’ve seen them, that’s where the first bank is, leeward. Sometimes furrowed by the white choppiness of the river.
The captain went on and on, he would have kept on talking, revealing everything, until nightfall. And what he was describing, what he had seen from the time of his adolescence, the changes he had observed during his travels, he had never really been told by anyone, since his two successive masters would not utter a word all day long, but would point out on occasion, when they were changing direction or speed, all the things that he was blurting out now, at the table with its rum-stained lace tablecloth: the watered-silk surface of the sea, this complex surface as differentiated as our age-old landscapes, with their squares of lucerne, their glades, marshlands, rows of vines beneath pear trees. He described everything in precise detail – the colours, fish, wind, sky, the constant surge of the sea – exactly recreating this ancient document, an encyclopædia, sunken like the great cathedral. That day, a body of knowledge died, empiricism gave up the ghost. Let us listen now to its sound rising above the waters.
Where the old scholar could only see monotony, the master obviously saw a streaked, colour-blended, tiger or zebra-striped, marled, precisely differentiated body, a surface on which he identified local regions, where the boat’s position, at every moment and even in a fog, had already been plotted; where the old scholar only saw instability, the master perceived a space which changed little.
But why was one body of knowledge inspecting and monitoring the other that day. Did it have the power to administer sanctions, to command obedience? In the oldest dialogue in modern philosophy, that of reason and the senses – no matter what it is called – reason inspects the oldest knowledge in the world and torpedoes it. The day of these last confessions heralded the ethnology of the conquered. Now it is of no more use, except as the subject of a popular novel or of a fashionable university humanities course, where one goes to learn about the vernacular of savages.
We learn from earliest childhood that science can make the invisible visible. And, in fact, the sea chart does indicate depths, the distance of a rock hidden by fog. The instruments inspected by the official are even more effective, they give warning of the coast, map the bottom of the sea and, if required, calculate a location automatically. We all bow to such efficiency, but we are obliged to bow to the inspector also. Why is reason alone not enough, why does it choose to impose itself through force? Conversely, and more importantly, how does it make the visible invisible? This watered-silk body, as stable and changeable as a mountain meadow in springtime, this recognizable and mingled space, disappears. Yes, the surface of oceans and their landscapes are swallowed up and disappear.
We learn from earliest childhood that the senses deceive us. No-one says whose senses. The inspector sees nothing on the high meadows where the frigates graze, reason perceives only monotony on the surface of the sea, the master, on the other hand, sees clearly, precisely and in detail. The senses rarely deceive when they are used, reason is often wrong when it has not been trained. These principles, the same in both cases, must judge in the same way everywhere.
The senses do not deceive. The palate of the discriminating taster makes more precise judgements than a thousand machines, the most sophisticated machine is made from the flesh of a living being, the only failing of artificial intelligence is its lack of a body; a given organ, insect or snake perceives mixtures at the molecular level. We only ever judge empiricism scientifically; now, suppose we began to judge rationalism empirically? Descartes’ methodical doubt is not reducible to a schoolchild’s exercise, nor to solitary ascesis. Once again, force was intimately involved in that immense historical turning-point. The visible disappeared, faded into the invisible. Qualities were despised. Another invisible swam into view. No-one saw the watered silk of the sea any more, everyone looked for the distant and the deep and made them into objects of the senses. We might say that what was immediate and close by was erased. And the cod fisherman had nothing to say. The sea became a blank page.
Thus the makers of maps could say that they had discovered America, convince others and take credit for it, when countless fishermen, following the paths traced across the watered silk, had already reached it without proclaiming it loudly as historical fact. The triumph of the written word resulted in a catastrophe of perception. The age of science created new iconoclasts, this time of the senses, and totally destroyed a prodigious body of knowledge in the realm of the perceived. All we have preserved are ruins, remains, fossils.
Our reasoning and sciences have become sufficiently refined for us to understand at last the extent to which the senses are capable of subtle kinds of knowledge. After centuries of simple maps, those of the inspector; or violent maps that wipe out the fisherman’s differential perceptions, substituting for them a blank sheet of paper covered in sporadic figures. Let us draw the immediate map of those senses that have been called the practices of place, let us map the surface scenography of the seas: blended colours, striped, marled, damask.
I had never seen the sea before that night in La Rochelle, when, after spending hours listening to the old cod fisherman, we left the smoky saloon untidy, and the lace tablecloth spangled with ashes, stains and splashes.
My region remained until quite recently tightly planted with vines in rows, nonetheless far enough apart for corn or wheat to be planted between them, depending on the years. Alongside the vines, alternating fruit trees – plums mostly, yellow or white peaches and cherries, in counterpoint to the rows of grape vines. The wine sometimes retained the flavour of the two different peaches or the smell of the cherries, the cattle found shade in which to protect themselves from work and flies, the herdsman would already be sleeping there, stretched out with his hat over his face and his legs crossed. I don’t know whose invisible hand tore up the immense garden thirty or forty years ago; now children do not know how the plain of the Garonne was a patchwork of squares. It looked like a complex, variegated carpet; now the corn, its hundreds of hectares watered by revolving water jets, makes it look as though it is imitating the American Mid West. A hundred peasants used to live where now only the odd driver passes, sitting astride his hundred-horsepower engine, a primary producer, as he is called in the papers, preferably of one thing only and only ever unprocessed at that. Between monoculture and economics on the one hand and the two last wars on the other, peasants have been eliminated and the countryside wiped out.
They have been subject to the same attacks and assaults as our towns and language. Like Haussmann, urban planners have created straight boulevards by destroying, not far from the Seine, dozens of Gothic chapels and Renaissance mansions: troops charge unhindered and cannon fire is more effective. Linnaeus uses one Greek or Latin word to express three hundred vernacular names for a plant or animal. Vernacular: a scientific term to designate the people, declared thus to be uneducated; note here the word verna, a slave born at home, ignorant, vulgar, speaking the local farm dialect poorly. When a scientific term becomes fashionable or commonly used, who counts the words, patiently developed by the people over time, that it destroys as it replaces them on the page? An avenue of meaning covering the countryside in a straight line. We never say of a countryside that it has had a change of scenery or lost its bearings: yet it could be said about nearly the whole earth. How can we likewise describe our languages and towns?
A complex tangle of dark, twisting streets; languages, names changing from one village to the next, a multi-coloured atlas; vines in rows with changing notes of fruit trees, forming a spectrum or musical score: the age-old obstructions of empiricism, cleverly opposing the global abstract, posing local circumstances.
In this green desert the driver, alone in a monoculture, has only one job and one idea.
They began with the most difficult, subtle and fragile things: with patently non-linear problems – those with a thousand limitations and a hundred unknowns. Ten varieties of fruit, vegetables and animals, a grape vine and a trellis with white grapes, geese and their livers, a squawking guinea fowl sleeping amid branches, techniques born of the inert (ground and weather), the living (flora and fauna), the social (work, family, with its festivals and rituals, and in addition hunting, love, mushrooms) – a hundred occupations, a thousand ideas, twenty gods, as well as awkward gaps in knowledge, pain, stupidity: a mixed, multi-coloured, bedizened world, in the mind as well as on earth; a culture amazingly like that of the Essais: the random, felicitous juxtaposition of large or small fields, like the chapters where Montaigne speaks of Hesiod or quince trees, Virgil or hazel trees; odd, artistic proximities which inject a bitter, dry, astringent note into boringly smooth monotony. The intellect is in its element when detecting variety. Let us cultivate the varied so that the intellect remains alive and active. Everything flashes and changes beneath a cloud-covered sun in the voluble April sky; God disappears somewhat behind all those saints and angels. Polyculture, polytheism.
Monoculture. Nothing new under the solitary sun. Never-ending, homogeneous rows prevent or efface the watered-silk effect; the isotrope excludes the unexpected; agronomy replaces agriculture; a small number of laws replace tiny, incremental, pointillist permutations. In the place of culture, chemistry, administration, profit and writing hold sway. A rational or abstract panorama expels the combinatory spectra of a thousand landscapes.
Beneath our gaze two visions of reason or intelligence put on their performance.
Non-linear difficulties subject to a thousand constraints soon collapse in the face of the long, simple, easy chains of wheat and maize. The single takes the place of the multiple. And pure disorder, faced with the order of homogeneity, drives out refined mixtures. By this chaos I mean the industrial solution, that of movement or heat. What engines require of molecular disorder is that the bird’s-eye view of the world be one of singular order. Here we have two kinds of facility: the fragile lace maintained at the cost of great discernment and many men, moves left to right, from the varied to the unitary, and from front to back, from the variable to the disordered. Twice over it goes from one extreme to the other. The difficult, mixed landscape lies between these limits.
Are we now reaching a third era when we will dine at the marriage of the global and the local, without ejecting from the nuptial feast those who were once despised, according to the norms of the day, as being empirical or abstract? We are contemplating specifically the segment going from chaos to unitary or monochrome order and passing through an infinite number of intermediary multiplicities. Why would we consider boundaries separately from what they encompass? We have forged the intellectual and practical means to choose with ease the appropriate solution, the place in the segment adapted to our constraints and needs. Sometimes we use a combinatory spectrum and sometimes a universal one, we prefer to travel on the abstract expressway, the global boulevard and the formal concept, along the homogeneous rows of maize whizzing by, but we also like to dawdle along twisting back roads, to lose ourselves in the countryside, in order to understand and to know. Why not become rational and intelligent, knowledgeable and cultured, variable and wise, all at the same time? In many cases peace is only achieved by the one God, in just as many cases angels are better. One-track reason has its place in the countryside; irony of ironies, non-linear thought tolerates linear thought as an individual case.
(Global) displacement
Who am I when the aeroplane descends slowly into a voluble landscape of turbulent clouds or a deadening mist, a tropical cyclone, or a blizzard where the snow scuds along the ground, or into the middle of a dry furnace, when an indifferent, disembodied voice announces Atlanta, Christchurch, Shanghai, Copenhagen or Dakar? What displaced wanderer today – exile, migrant or citizen of the world swept up in wind and weather – could ask himself the Cartesian question without anxiety?
Descartes, a minor nobleman, therefore a peasant, a soldier posted a few leagues away from the German border, sitting inside his blue ceramic stove, protected from the winter; motionless, seeking a fixed point, only losing his bearings in a dream about swimming,2 locating himself in space and time, the centrepoint of these coordinates, before God, enjoys bringing into being the word and the subject which is an off-shoot of this stable situation. He will die as the result of a voyage to Sweden.
Our unstable lives suffer at least three displacements after encountering three difficult forks in our road. We had to leave our birthplace, swapping red tiles for black slate and grey zinc; one language and its accent for another with a different word for yes. Born in the heartland of legitimate French, Descartes’ idiom never changed and he never had in himself that double voice which always makes one prone to doubt. We then had to move briefly away from the French centre itself: after three wars with millions of dead we learned to love the Po, the Spree and the Thames as much as the Garonne and the Seine; and then the Saint Lawrence, the Amazon, the Congo and the Huanghe. Other languages enter the body and make the head vibrate differently when one’s eyes gaze on fields of snow or rice. We no longer remember the lost happiness of being: being here, stable and constant in familiar surroundings in the countryside, age-old communities and trades, the river’s edge, gravel, reeds, floods, patches of cress, willows and poplars, convolvulus, vipers, sing-song dialects, sweet proper names, usages and customs – the speechless delight of being me. Displaced twice, by having moved from one countryside to another and then by wandering in numerous countries, continual emigrants or homeless fires, we are unmoored now and it is a matter of painful indifference to us whether we inhabit the pack ice or the Pacific, an island or a desert, provided that every morning we are at the service of the page.
This fire, flying, lost, wandering, wild, unstable, frantic, rapid and anxious, with its rubbed, worn, threadbare, shabby soul reduced to nothing, its names progressively obliterated by the pronunciations of foreign throats, reduced to nemo, no-one, and with an almost transparent body, looked at and through so many times, with gestures made fluid through adaptation to a thousand habits, this inexistent, dancing fire occupies its place, and the page, not the stove, is its most recent landscape.
The true displacement, the third kind, now concerns humanity. It is losing its place and its self, like me, detached from its countries and the whole earth. Not only because of its fluctuating movements and its chance felicitous mixtures, begun before the Neolithic age, but because of its new global emigration from space to signs, from the countryside to the image, from languages to codes and from cultures to science. It leaves behind places of work – mines, quarries, rivers, building sites, grassland, ploughed fields – for interiors without windows; sitting and counting, it transforms its muscular body and its numb, callused fingers into a nervous system which fails to recognize any physical relationship with the space outside. Soon it will no longer inhabit anything but schemas, messages and numbers, all digital. The new humanity without earth, blind now to what we called the real – drugged or lucid, who can tell? A new earth, without landscapes, without bearings?
Are we now entering the universal, having lived and thought through three similar displacements, and seen a hundred countrysides displaced one after the other? Do we inhabit it through our wanderings across the terraqueous globe, or as we engrave a valid page for every piece of world?
Once mathematics alone was able to provide us with universals. Yet it has been teaching us for at least a century that the global is merely the local puffed up. Hence new kinds of prudence: he who claims to be universal hides the fact that he won the last war, through language or force, the singular becoming widespread, an individual expanding the channels of publicity through his voice. Nothing new under the sun: King Solomon’s so-called wise pronouncement celebrates the victory of a star preventing any change within its barren space that would put it in the shade. But the sun, a small yellow dwarf, drawing close to its deadly supernova, borders on a thousand similar, diverse and even strange stars. The utterance of a minor king.
Wandering takes you from one landscape to another, the pages make headway. What great truth is obstructed by long chains of reasoning, lines on the page, wheat or vines on the face of the earth? What rapid lightning flashes or world-shattering messages do expressways, airlines and communication satellites compete with, all under the control of a relatively small number of men? What gracious confessions of love? What equitable sharing of power?
We had already become familiar with such abuse of power for the sake of the idea or name of man, reduced to a singularity proposed as a model because it had been victorious in abominable battles and blocked all other languages or notions. The exact and the human sciences agree for once about these abuses.
If you have never spent harsh April nights on the Garonne as its waters swell terrifyingly, how can you understand the Chinese anxiety about the flooding and destruction that the Huanghe wreaks on the loess plain; how can you speak to the Bambaras, the peasant boat-men in the loop of the Niger, if you are not familiar with the close association between river and bank from the landscapes of your own childhood and work; how would sailors recognize the Saint Lawrence, in spite of its cover of collapsing ice making it difficult for them to adapt . . . experience means that localities visited are added to the places where one has lived, whereas the universal passes by, retaining from all these places nothing but the universal, such a local global that all the other places are forgotten: grand principles locked into their wish for power. The body hybridizes, slowly accumulating the gestures necessary to live on the Huanghe, the Niger or the Saint Lawrence. The wanderer, the exile, adapting to and travelling across all manner of waters, with so little identity that he recognizes that his name is no-one, accumulates in his body passages, landscapes, customs, languages and mixes them: mulatto, quadroon, hybrid, cross-bred, octoroon . . . the mingled waters of all the rivers of the world beating in his arteries.
The hideous, deadly passion for belonging, responsible for just about all the crimes in history, has never been an object of study, since even those who study need to belong to a sect, jargon, party or scientific discipline, in short a pressure group, in order to hold ground that is immune to all possible criticism. Likewise corporeal mixture and mixture in general are foreign to philosophy which is a discourse promoting separation and purity, enveloped by a hideous and mortal passion for belonging.
Who am I? No-one. Who am I, again? A hybrid or octoroon, a mixture as precise and refined as bar codes specifying things in a combined spectrum of bands and numbers. Displacements, confusing allegiances bringing together and totalizing ancient, retained, local experience, have turned my visible fluctuating body into a long, striped, banded, many-toned, shimmering, multi-hued, marled, damask spectre, through the subtle accumulation of a thousand operations; it must be possible to represent my blood by a similar code. This brightly-coloured tissue, curiously enough, is used by Plato as an ironic metaphor to define and mock democracy in the eighth book of his Republic. A gaily-coloured mish-mash of others is not a being. Who am I? This many-toned, brightly-coloured thing. So something always makes me resemble a man: a gesture or colour; ritual and smile; a way of navigating or my relation to the earth; usage and work. We lack a fully developed philosophy of mixture and hybridization, or of identity as the sum or combination of varieties of otherness: discourse and abstraction lag behind the body which knows how to act and practises what the mouth cannot say. Who am I? What does this curious word mean for the displaced, mixed, hybridized person, for the wanderer who tries to fit in? What can it mean besides fateful belonging?
The philosophy that will come from mixture connects the global and the local irenically, and presupposes a different ontology.
Method and rambling (the global and the local)
The countryside brings together places, a page of pages. The desert, with neither hearth nor home, tends towards the global, nothing new ever appearing in its homogeneous space. Method crosses the desert easily but is hindered by the countryside, every place is an obstacle. A walk through the countryside is called a ramble.
In the old French hunting lexicon, courir à randon meant to force the game: for example, to ride in pursuit of a deer following its movements from the beginning of the chase to the kill. Rapid and impetuous, the animal must often have changed direction, attempting to throw the pack off the scent with sudden, unpredictable leaps. The dogs, however, brought things back on track: the music, riders and the whole din of the hunt. Randon, in equilibrium in the middle of the English Channel or the Saint Lawrence River, is equally divided between the French and English languages. In French, randonnée ended up meaning a quite long and difficult walk. In English, in memory of the irregular and unexpected course of the quarry, random means chance. I should like to use randonnée in a sense close to its origin, but inflected here and there, as chance would have it, according to the direction I take and how long I ramble. Weather conditions, difficult terrain and wayward currents often turn the Odyssey into a randonnée. Ulysses eschews the best way because of a combination of circumstances.
A method traces a route, a way, a path. Where are we going, where do we come from and which way are we going, questions that must be asked if we are to know and live, in theory and in practice, in tribulations and in love. Why hurry, trying to use or use up time? But we do not master it all the time.
Here, first of all, are the straight paths. The one that most expeditiously delivers the fearful traveller from the forest, the one taken by weightless, blinding light – the Cartesian path. A succession of links in a chain, a sequence or series of proportions, an algebra structured by the relationship of order. A straight path means a maximally efficient one, under the rules of the Method superlatives hold sway. First, not to include anything other . . . than that which presents itself so clearly and distinctly to my mind that I have no reason to doubt it. Secondly, to divide each of the difficulties into as many parts as possible and as would be required to resolve them. Thirdly, to follow the order from the simplest to the most complex. Finally, to make everywhere such general and complete reviews and lists that I can be sure I omit nothing. This certainly looks like a function serving as a criterion, maximized by constraints. Leibniz was right in deriding such an accumulated litany of requirements, but was nevertheless wrong in failing to discern here a design, the laws of which he had already attempted to formulate. For to pile up in this way superlatives upon comparatives is to propose an extremal strategy. It is to minimize the constraints dictated by doubt, difficulty, composition and omission in order to trace the optimal path, the Leibnizian path par excellence, de maximis et minimis. Descartes, who did not like the infinitesimal, reduces the minimum to nothing: no opportunity, omit nothing, if he cannot with good reason make something out of the maximum. And this is how light travels, so as metaphorically to flood intuition with clarity, taking the best path, and this is how the lost traveller emerges from the wood, taking the shortest, straightest path. It is in this way, Leibniz will say, that the world comes into existence, just as bodies fall. Arriving at the best result with the least effort: managing one’s heritage like a good paterfamilias, earning the maximum by paying the minimum. The economy of the laws of nature, or the supposedly natural laws of economics. The classical age has triumphed here; this most direct strategy, which has become reason, is the only one we know. Whether we travel by land, sea or air, learn mathematics, with its axioms and deductions, make the most of our own time or that of others, engage in conflict or war, we always apply the tactics of the extrema, thereby priding ourselves on optimizing our practices. Reason, efficiency, investment, violence together underpin this economic law – by economy I mean this strategic relationship of extremum-optimum. This economy becomes our norm: when morals become knowledge, the traditional set of paths that determine our rationality and rectitude. In a way, we reduce to nothing any disturbance or fluctuation that would make us stray to any extent from this path which our culture as a whole tells us is necessary.
This is the talweg of our rationalist culture. But we have also inherited non-economic paths that are not concerned with this equilibrium between extremes. It could be said that Ulysses was a Cartesian before his time. That as soon as he set sail, and once Troy had been taken, destroyed and pillaged, he thought of taking the shortest route to Ithaca, his heart’s desire; and that he had decided and planned his return journey with this in mind. It would probably not have followed a straight line, a thousand constraints preventing and hindering such a path. But a skilled sailor was also responsible for optimizing the journey: following this coast, then avoiding that area, taking advantage of this regular wind, entering that strait at a different point, calmly dropping anchor further off according to the season, and so forth, finessing with the constraints. Hence a winding route, admittedly, but one chosen cunningly from amongst the possible twists and turns, a route where obstacles define the choices made. But in another way they don’t. The Odyssey traces pathways outside this order, wasteful paths. The ship approaches Penelope and likewise moves away from her, sometimes it is on track but just as often it strays from the beaten path. The scalloped arc of its navigation goes beyond the boundaries of the normal path. It is a path enabling the discovery of unknown lands, inventing when cunning fails.
Method clearly traces a journey, a pathway through a space. Knows where it comes from and where it is going. Running between both these situations, the methodical line passes through the middle and is defined, and of course constrained, in terms of these extremes. The Odyssean path never, or at least rarely, thinks of itself as being methodical in the sense canonized before the classical age in the philosophy of Plato, in which dichotomy also passes through the middle and where articulation seeks economy. The Odyssean path is an exodus rather than a method. An exodus in the sense that the path deviates from the path and the track goes off track. Where the route taken and followed locally, even if not chosen, is an exception to the predetermined choice. The Mosaic exodus marks a different outside: Moses leaves Egypt with his people; subjected to the constraints of the desert, he never reaches the promised land. So that the path itself, whatever its nature, remains outside both his departure and arrival: open to the possibilities inherent in its endpoints. Ulysses makes his exodus differently, he leaves Troy and returns to Ithaca, he goes home, resumes his royal rights, and closes the circle. The exodus and deviations inflect the path itself, not the stable places on the route. When you have a method, you say: a methodical approach – a tautology. But when you are speaking about an exodus, you can say: a discourse of exodus – equivalence. The discourse deviates in relation to the path travelled, just as the exodus moves away from the middle, from equilibrium and from the extremity of method.
Ulysses thus submits to fluctuations: those of the sea and wind, fluctuations of the waves. His boat subjected to moments of calm, tornadoes and the whirlpools of Scylla and Charybdis. Off the beaten track, he is immobilized, becalmed or trapped in other forms of stability. As if there existed some form of stability off the beaten track which is itself stable and well-defined in its course. As if a river, diverted from its customary bed, were to meet a plateau and form a lake, remaining there for a certain time before returning to its preordained course. As if there existed an order outside order, original or singular equilibria outside the well-balanced middle road. Strange attractors. As if there existed types of order, unpredictable in relation to the normal laws of equilibrium, to the ordinary laws of order. As if chance fluctuation, unexpected storms or atmospheric disturbances, spread stochastically through the space of the high seas, suddenly led to (the formation of) a temporarily stable locality, an island where another time would come into being, a local time forgetting the past, the ordinary and the time of the journey. Remote in relation to the methodical path, these islands create order through fluctuation, a different order that could well be called exodic. You will never find these islands with a methodical approach. Exodic, exotic, ergodic, they lie outside the global equilibria of the episteme. Method minimizes constraints and cancels them out; exodus throws itself into their disorder.
I am no longer seeking to entertain you with the story of an old man, or even worse, of an old blind man. My discourse is scientific and at odds with epistemology; it breaks with two millennia of method. Or rather, this old fiction is saturated with a different, incredible kind of knowledge. New knowledge. It is not fiction and not a true story I seek, but the exodic discourse or, more exactly, the entertainment, the diverting, diversionary path of most cunning Ulysses who had in his baggage all of the twists and turns of the new science, the theory of blind knowledge, obscure evidence, evidence hidden by several centuries of method. By millennia of useless method. Useless with respect to the new.
Ulysses has an interesting relationship with the strange attractors dotted along his pseudo-path. He attempts to avoid the sonorous seductions of the Sirens, is frightened by the deep whirlpools of Scylla and Charybdis; he passes them by, seeking to move in a straight line. But throws himself, is thrown, at the feet of Nausicaa, the girl with the ball. Seductive, so they say, and certainly cunning, Ulysses is never anything other than seduced or indefinitely seducible, by Circe or others – seduced, that is, led outside his normal orbit, the straight, normal or ordered path. And, because he knows this, he sometimes blocks his ears. Because he knows that at the fork in the road he takes the wrong branch, fascinated and disoriented by it.
It is said that Hercules always chooses the right branch, virtue and not vice. Consequently vice always has the face of Ulysses or cunning, and virtue that of strength. Hercules, a virtuous, powerful, strong, heroic, classical god uses his paths to their best advantage, as do our sciences, practices and morals. And if he goes so far as to divert a river from its normal course, he has good reason for doing so, namely to clean out the piles of manure in the filthy stables. Always the good, invariably successful strategy. But, it must be remembered, he kills: kills the lion, wild boar, bull, birds. Kills the living and dies on the funeral pyre, amidst the twin flames of the wood and his poison tunic. Hercules, the perfect soldier, always uses the correct method and has the best strategy, making the right choice at the fork in the road. He is thus the strongest and is always right; he wins, conquers, kills, the optimal method of maximal violence, a balanced path towards death. I suspect Ulysses, on the other hand, of postponing his return to Ithaca where bloody carnage awaits him beside the conjugal bed, and of postponing by choosing, nolens volens, a path other than the optimal one when faced with the choice, by discovering forms of stability other than general equilibrium. Knowledge tricks death, its exodus forms a set of anabases: leaving the coast, avoiding the talweg, going against the flow, deviating as much as one can from the shortest path. Thereby not negating the effect of fluctuations. Life trusts in chance which loathes reason.
The story of the Odyssey, a discourse on exodus, then becomes an encyclopædia of knowledge. Greek children learned from it their culture and techniques, from cooking to the repairing of ships, their history, myths and geography. Greek children: Plato as a child, Theodorus and Eudoxus as children. They read in it the inventive dynamism of the anabasis. Not, as we believe it to be, an archaic and savage science, but highly refined knowledge, of which we are only beginning to conceive. Not a method using the shortest route, but a long, winding, intricate, brightly-coloured path. In that way they were getting ready to demonstrate the rationality of the irrational, for example, or to map unknown lands.
I regret, as soon as I’ve said it, the term encyclopædia, which is not a concept formulated by the Greeks. Had they thought so for a moment, they would have told us if knowledge traced a cycle within a circle, if pedagogy closed a cycle of cycles, believing as they did that the circle was the optimal figure. But they did not, by virtue of the Homeric exodus. The encyclopædic schema can be applied, on this point, to the paths taken by methods. It takes the shortest path, as does the extremal cycle or circle which contains the largest surface with the smallest curve. Stock and capital, or accumulation of knowledge, follow the same laws as the encyclopædia, the same economic laws. In this sense, all encyclopædias remains methodical, and these notions are both maximal. The discourse of the first exodus of Greek knowledge is not economical, but chooses long, interesting paths, insofar as interest supposes an interval, a distance, a gap that is not cancelled out; it chooses intersections and conjunctions. Here knowledge is dispersed and distributed, but not integrated into a totality, nor conceived under the category of the optimal figure. Always deviating from itself. As soon as knowledge can be equated with method and the encyclopædia, with straight lines and circles, it is immediately overwhelmed by redundancy: repetitive, ordered, normalized. It attracts local laws of decreasing output. The Odyssey does not therefore represent an encyclopædia, but rather a scalenopædia. Scalene, as one says of a scalene triangle, rather than an isosceles, right-angled or equilateral triangle. Unbalanced in parts, scalene signifies lameness, like Hephaistos, an inventor and the husband of Aphrodite, lame like several relatives of Œdipus, with sore feet, like him; scalene describes an oblique, twisting, complicated path. Baroque, just like the period in which the encyclopædia was conceived but not yet realized. Ulysses takes scalene routes and thus discovers and invents, routes of Greekness, those of non-redundant cultures. Cultures with history. Non-recycled history, not recyclable into a balanced or preconceived model, into a model in the two senses of the word, both theoretical and optimal. The first words of history are an exodus. There are cultures in which that history forms a scenario rehearsing legislation or structures, self-evidently present, or buried and yet to be revealed, a characteristic scenario, a methodical journey. We are beginning to know how to construct them, these schemas are no longer unfamiliar to us. One or two cultures came along in which history freed itself from this equilibrium, and began to fluctuate outside the cycles, to branch outside repetitive schemas, to abandon itself to scalene paths. Ulysses navigating without a care in the world leaves behind closed knowledge and histories constrained by structures, he invents inventive knowledge and open history, a new time.
Smaller expanses of water do not require the same kinds of sailors as large oceans. The former force Ulysses to maintain a level of vigilance and skill in handling his vessel unknown to Christopher Columbus, an astronomer. The Odyssey provides lessons despised and forgotten by the Renaissance, as it sets sail beyond the Pillars of Hercules in caravels.
The Concorde flies across the water in two hours; from Cape Canaveral or Kourou, rockets blast off towards space, the sun or Venus, leaving behind earthly gravity. We see a different space through the window of any vehicle. Is our knowledge changing?
The Atlantic swell flattens out sufficiently to contain any vessel in its wave length; however high the breakers, they are spaced far enough apart for boats or liners, aircraft carriers or frigates, cargo-ships, to nestle and sleep in a sort of cradle. Even when it is wild, the ocean is easy to handle. Narrow seas with a short swell, the Irish, Ægean and Iroise, cruelly endanger ships of any size, caiques or coastal steamers: the keel scrapes against reefs of pebbles. The spatial element changes, the hollows are not bordered by the same walls.
Odyssean rambling within sight of land requires neither the same strength or patience nor the same talents as the route to India or the American adventure. By dint of long days over immense stretches of water with a gentle swell, travel in a straight line remains mandatory and possible. Ulysses tries and yields, takes a turn and abandons it, runs under the wind from the shelter of this headland towards some unprotected port, takes a hundred constraints into account, must use cunning. If he goes in a straight line, he will wreck his ship. As late as the beginning of the last century, Chateaubriand, consumed with rage against his patron, was obliged to spend months getting to Tunis from Egypt; he often had to leave in a hurry and seek refuge. Thirty years ago, in the same vicinity, despite its thousands of horses, my disoriented boat was likewise at the mercy of the winds. Seen from an aeroplane, the ocean appears simple, wrinkled and striped with a broad brush; the Iroise or Ægean Sea, in a gale, appear misty, tiger-striped, ocellated in parts, disrupted – a horrible mixture. Ulysses embarks in this mingled body with its many variables, Columbus carves out his route in the simplicity of the high seas: a long chain of easy reasons, a thousand short detours around difficult ruses.
When a constraint or variable is so much more significant than all others that they seem negligible by comparison, a straight line or simple curve appears and everything becomes clear. Take away everything so that only one thing is visible; what is neglected falls by the wayside as though a mere detail. On the other hand, one can be obliged or wish to take account of a hundred constraints, but their net seizes or binds us; the knitted fabric with its threads running in many directions represents a place in the sea, bound in the swell, a turbulence of competing winds, a circumstantial cell with as many dimensions; in this singularity, Ulysses loses his linear head.
Did he ever have it? Descartes and Bacon, after Columbus, gave it to us, but we are losing it today. Or rather, without losing it we are taking on a second one causing us to embrace Ulysses again, willingly. We consider the linear head a little stiff and lacking in subtlety, effective and optimal in days gone by, but rather old-fashioned today.
Ulysses, a peasant or sailor with his oar or grain shovel, is involved in non-linear industry subject to the multiple constraints of necessity; intelligence with its many twists and turns – skill in manoeuvring, the rapid and energetic invention of expedients adapted to the circumstances that crowd and batter it – is born of the Ægean Sea, as it is of other small expanses of water; or from the agrarian landscape with its individual allotments, checkerboard or mosaic of places modelled by the breeze, jumping suddenly from one to another; from capricious currents and threads of breakers, mermaids and weather. These monsters rule localities as hammadryads do the trees. Circumstances make places; they require an intelligence, which inhabits the places and populates them with gods who preside over the circumstances.
The necessity of the peasants and sailors of Antiquity – by Antiquity we mean the age in the course of which humanity drew its subsistence from just such a set of non-standard cells, an age which has been drawing to an end in certain parts of France since the Second World War, but which may subsist elsewhere today – a variable necessity, multiple rather than massive, local rather than global, imposing itself through a mixture of current laws and chance blows of fate; it uncannily resembles the odd character of women, or the social behaviour in certain towns: the moods of the weather, the impulses of tyrants, political shenanigans . . . Bays, glades, caves and beaches submit themselves to the fluctuating, colourful caprices of enticing, but terrifying heroines. The landscape displays the same complexity as the famous North-West passage, and for the same reasons: nature and culture are displayed there in the same structure. You need to manipulate the current as you do a woman, to duck and weave when the wind gusts or when the king disowns you, to become multiple when faced with a hydra-headed crowd or hurricane, or to be no-one in order better to resist fate. When it has a thousand faces or variables, it can appear behind the mask of a goddess, a natural or political law or temperament, its multiplicity, rather than its appearance, being the essential element. Multiple twists and turns on the path, appearances under many guises, innumerable places on earth and sea, a thousand cunning ruses.
Classical mastery of the world and things selects a single constraint or variable and ignores all others. Sheer force of will steers a straight course, crosses the ocean by means of rhumb lines or the arc of the great circle, and goes through the forest in a straight line – nothing distinguishes the local from the global. The age of the great voyages implies monotheism, the dissolution of the countryside, the drawing of immense maps, stubborn disregard for circumstances, and the supremacy of the will over intelligence. The scholar, sailor, philosopher or traveller gets carried away with linearity and confuses it with reason. Forced simplicity, fine victories; non-linear, unexpected or unrecognizable necessity, with its hundred faces and thousand detours, is forgotten, together with its corresponding intelligence and the antique and polytheistic world. It has to be said that on the Atlantic, in the season of the trade winds, anyone at all, with twelve metres of wood and a tailwind can travel west effortlessly and runs the risk of confusing the stable regime of a single variable with the mastery and possession of compliant nature. His resolve and stubbornness are to be applauded more than his adaptability. But beware of the return journey.
Who in Antiquity would have believed in the existence of a universal law, when no olive tree twisted in the same way as another and no gust of wind resembled that of the previous day? Before imagining such a possibility Plato had to conceive of a smooth, colourless, invisible, insensible space. Before being converted to its existence, the Hebrew people journeyed through the invariant, isotropic and homogeneous space of the desert. Mathematics is born in the shadow of the pyramids, the solitary sun marking the smooth sand with the trace of death, or the other world. Intuition is obliged to see without accidents. A single God again brings about the birth of knowledge.
The eye sees countryside or space: perceives one and forgets the other. The cartography of Antiquity expresses the danger of the journey, the multitude of obstacles, the difficulty of seeing globally when one finds oneself deep in a varied countryside. The Cartesian forest, on the other hand, becomes a totality where the direct path of the traveller ignores species and varieties: the traveller no longer bows down before the golden bough. One does not record the coordinates of every wave. Sometimes it takes centuries, a few geniuses and the so-called crises of history to cross the border of a local area, or the limits or catastrophe of the clearing in which the whole group believes itself to be imprisoned.
Could we not say that what we call understanding and sensibility, and even reason, those secret compartments in the subject of knowing, the existence and location of which has never been demonstrated (but in which, according to manuals and treatises, operations take place which change detail into synthesis or processes of subsumption), are simply layers or strata of memory, memories of past cultures lost by history? We can see the Atlantic by means of a sextant or with the practised gaze of an old sea salt, nothing obliges us to call ourselves empirical or abstract in either case. Does the blindness preventing us from reading accurately the breeze printed on the page of the sea come from our failure to conceive fractal turbulence, or from our insensitivity to the minor buffeting within the gusts of a downpour? It has long been said that vision is the model for knowledge and all our languages still express this idea, but supposing vision carried with it its memory and its forgetting?
We are entering a third state that destabilizes both of the others: the countryside can pass for an abstract, formal model on the same basis as the uniform space of classical geometry or mechanics, the abstraction of which strikes us as being somewhat hasty and rough and of which the practical and concrete virtues in particular impress us. Euclid comes from the same direction as the mason and Lagrange from that of the engineer. Local, singular vision is revealed not to be an accidental detail to dismiss – global vision is not alone in imposing law. We would no longer understand why the first belongs to the order of the sensible: abstraction has its subtleties; in opposition to the other, situated on the side of understanding: the concrete has its geometry. Both seem to our eyes to be as concrete or abstract as data can possibly be. The distribution of digital, homogeneous or diverse multiplicities triumphs over the distinction between the felt and the conceived, or tends to erase it, making us all believe that everything is played out at the level of language.
Now that we can go around the world in a few hours and travel to certain heavenly bodies more rapidly than we could to distant islands a hundred years ago, we tend to think that a detailed journey around a vegetable garden can offer us information that is just as surprising. When the universe widens, the countryside returns. We maintain a better balance between world and place now, whereas Antiquity or what I call thus, stifled by the local, could not aspire to the global; whereas the modern age wilfully despised all local obstruction to global laws. As a result, we are re-establishing an equilibrium between what our predecessors called the empirical and the abstract, the sensible and the intellectual, data and synthesis. We will probably have to redefine quickly the abstract thus, carefully distinguishing it from its seamless counterpart.
Besides, every great change in knowledge, intuition or our relationship to the world, corresponds to a crisis over the concept or reality of necessity, that formidable bit-player in our age-old struggles. It no longer crushes us with its universal law or with its continued buffeting, be it unexpected or foreseeable. It left the battle, after the fifties, right in the middle of the century, and the combat ceased without our having really been aware of it. Many still lash out at empty space and arm themselves to the teeth for the last war. It will no longer take place. Yes, we have won. Let us not overstep victory. The old need for mastery now returns as though it were in a feedback loop with our definitively acquired mastery. We have transformed things, so we must understand them, or rather: we understood things in order to possess and transform them as we wished, we have to understand them in order to protect them. To pass through the forest without considering the trees, without seeing what we are doing to the trees through the very fact of our passing, appears to us today uneducated and impolite. We encounter the local again through the necessity we impose on it. Our ancient adversity has changed camp: it is now embodied in our politicians. We have to regulate the law of our collective wishes which have become as global and incomprehensible as the laws of the world once were.
From there we can re-evaluate Ulysses and Columbus with new eyes, the ancient and the modern, the fathers of this new third state.
Ulysses must have had a thousand tricks in his bag, to cope with the unexpected and the unscripted; you have to make do with forethought, if you are not good at making predictions. Prediction assumes the predictability of a global, homogeneous space on which the law can be written; forethought involves the countryside, the intuition of a historiated space with circumstantial cells, a set of localities: the person with foresight does not know what the neighbouring cell has in store for him tomorrow, hence this bag of a hundred tricks, at his side or in his head. Now it so happens that Ulysses is caught short by events, an unusual set of circumstances leaving him ill-prepared and helpless – he is short of a trick. Does he deviate from the designated route? No, this route would have to be drawn like a law on smooth, global space, a straight line in the forest or rhumb line across the ocean. No, Ulysses adds braids or loops to his route, which will count as a new trick in his bag and will add a new element to the countryside. The itinerary is scalloped with as many twists and turns as the sailor winds loops of cable around his duffle-bag, as his memory mulls over grievances, as space is enriched with unexpected places, as the pantheon burgeons with gods, as the story branches into episodes. The word polymechanistic accurately describes circumnavigation, or the quality of intelligence, or the drift of a poem: the vision of a space and its fabrication. On the balance-sheet of life, Ulysses wins and loses, trying his luck, but not always effectively, taking each thing as it comes, picking this fork or that one, throwing dice at the cross-roads. Scallops and bushes: countryside. Twists and turns and branchings: limits and summits of cells of circumstances. Ulysses follows exactly the geodesics of his space, his place in the countryside, his non-linear head is drawn thus. The gods come together thus.
Bacon, Descartes, Columbus leave the bag of tricks: no cleverness or cunning. Reason favours will over intelligence. The non-linear cultures and peoples of the Mediterranean give way to the new Atlantic and linearity. Method passes through the forest considering the trees of no account; it crosses the wide sea. Thus the farmer ploughs the field to kill all plants and roots and to coax it so that a single plant may flourish without rivals; he despises as a savage the woodsman who is expert in trees and vines, in the places and times of each, finding his way in the forest with no paths or compass, by means of markers so ingrained that they become instinctive. Taking the straight path out of the woods without seeing anything is equivalent to liberating oneself from savagery or wilderness. These two relationships to places and space are still the distinguishing mark today of the distance between the man of science and the man who is called, disparagingly, a literary man or poet – wild – the distance between the landscape and the panorama.
Let us design a polytropic, polymechanistic ramble with a thousand twists, turns and connections, Ulysses’ bag of tricks. It resembles a labyrinth, as if the Cretan hero had traced on the sea the maze of the land. The direct method, impatient with roundabout ways of doing things, preferring optimum or best practice, crosses through and upsets this tangled web. The Odyssean journey, the ramble, becomes obsolete, adaptive or empirical, while method claims to be intentional and abstract: one follows the path of rectitude, the other is crooked and skewed.
What justification is there for favouring one side of the body when judging what is the most direct path? In the name of what outlandish underlying values does one condemn the variable, and what is related to it as being a deviation or gauche, belonging to the left hand; and a constant direction as right, or adroit? The latter, misnamed, never goes right.
So the Odyssean journey or rambling now looks like an electronic chip with portals and pathways, or one of those circuits that we manufacture today to enhance our calculations and formal strategies. The new industry, Cartesian of course but also Odyssean, brings together practice and abstraction in that the computer can be described as a universal tool: a constructed instrument, concrete to the touch, but of open and indefinite application like a theorem. Will the circuit replace the straight line in our methodical paradise? Rambling also like one of those (universal?) curves passing through all points on a plane, on which every conceivable curve can be defined as a local sample? Introduce into it a few chance happenings, the term rambling will be even more appropriate.
Let us design an interesting itinerary, one that leaves its optimal talweg and begins to explore a place: one which does not reach a foreseeable resolution, but searches; seems to wander; not deliberate or sure of itself, but rather anxious, off balance and relentless; questing, on the watch, it moves over the whole space, probes, checks things out, reconnoitres, beats about the bush, skips all over the place; few things in the space escape its sweep; whoever follows or invents this itinerary runs the risk of losing everything or inventing; if he makes discoveries, it will be said of his route that he has left the talweg to follow strange attractors.
If you happen upon a fertile method, forge straight ahead with it. It will be productive. You will soon have a notion of the sort of questions it resolves. Then stop because you are heading rapidly towards boredom, rigidity, old age and idiocy. To be sure, repetition and results, canonizing a place, give it the aura of what one knows: money, power, knowledge, things already accomplished. Dead, imitable, desirable. In the beginning, however, the wondrous idea promised life.
Leap sideways. Keep the recognizable method or methods in reserve, in case of illness, misery, fatigue; go rambling again. Explore space, a flying insect, a stag at bay, a stroller always chased off his habitual path by guard dogs growling around familiar places. Observe your own electroencephalogram jumping all over the place and sweeping across the page. Wander as free as a cloud, cast your gaze in every direction, improvise. Improvisation is a source of wonder for the eye. Think of anxiety as good fortune, self-assurance as poverty. Lose your balance, leave the beaten track, chase birds out of the hedges. Débrouillez-vous, muddle through, a perfect popular expression meaning literally to unscramble yourself. It supposes a tangled skein, a certain disorder and that vital confidence in the impromptu event that characterizes healthy innocents, lovers, æsthetes and the lonely.
This research regimen distinguishes us from machines and brings us close to what the body is capable of. It is the latter, more than the mind that separates us from artifice.
On Sundays method rests; rambling saves lives every day. If what you need is victory, everything in its place, battles, banks or institutions, go by way of the first. The other is there for time and intelligence, the well-being of thought, freedom, peace: the creation of unexpected places.
But take both paths, condemn neither; those who love the countryside sometimes need expressways. So leave outlandish thought which, with no good reason, privileged the straight and narrow. Those who would orient themselves intellectually have to head east.
Even space ships do not follow a simple, straight, monotonous, Cartesian path. They do not travel towards the Moon, Mars, Venus or Halley’s Comet along the paths of method, like the lost traveller hastening to escape from the forest as quickly as possible, proceeding straight ahead in a constant direction. A battery of computers ceaselessly oversees, controls, corrects their direction in real time, with the result that their pathway is quite irregular in its detail. If they always kept to the same direction, they would diverge, and get lost among the stars. The dialogue of computers, on earth and in flight, leaves long tables of numbers in the archives.
Remember Jules Verne. On the whole, that old dreamer was not often mistaken. He goes to the heart of the enterprise, calculates precisely the point of departure, locates in advance the splashdown; certainly naive, but never ridiculous; his comical social analysis remains true however: the astronautical project is of too much importance to be left to any but military men; the Baltimore Gun Club resembles a club of elderly hunters. Jules Verne was wrong on one point, the straight line; let us emphasize his memorable, canonical error. The Columbiad, dedicated to Christopher Columbus, a monstrous medieval bombard dug into the earth like a well, loaded with tons of guncotton, shoots straight, straight into the system, straight into the image, but misses the real.
The spaceships of the present often change direction while heading towards their goal. Forget about the initial explosion and the ship’s separation into stages to stop it from melting before it even lifts off, we are only concerned with the course. Shells make straight for their target, ships negotiate, hesitate, falter. Bombs are confident, gliding speedily along in a smooth system, with no interest in the local state, like the lost, frightened traveller who has no interest in the rich medley of colours in the countryside through which he passes. More aware, spaceships observe their positions: we observe them, we do not allow them to fly alone. We do not know how to plot their course with precision at the moment of their departure, we fear that they will go wildly off course if we let them continue on their initial trajectory. We distrust memory and complex systems.
In other words, Verne’s shell, because of a slight error in aim, will not go around the Moon, it is more probable that it will depart on an erratic and ornamental path: which is what happens to any lost traveller who persists in walking straight ahead in the middle of the forest following the precept of method – he diverges and deviates to an increasing degree. Just as the shell, fired according to a simple system and travelling in a theoretical straight line is sure to go astray, whereas our prudent, meticulous spaceships are oriented directly in and by the phenomenon of which they are a part. The tables of numbers recorded here resemble the old Alphonsine and Toledan tables of observations, judged by the laws of modern astronomy to be highly empirical.
For once calculation falls on the same side as phenomenon and practice, and all three deviate from the simple, stable system of principles and general laws. If the computer were to plot, as we know it can, the landscape implied by the tables of numbers and criss-crossed by spaceships, one would see a mingled, marled, striped, striated, damask body, so different from the abstract void rejected by the canonical vector. The countryside returns unexpectedly, to the void or system, like a rainbow in a meadow. The spaceship travels from one locality to the next as if it were encountering twists and turns rather than straightforwardness. Who would have thought that geography was so close to mechanics?
The object of geography is the countryside. It is said that the countryside hides and displays physics: geography would therefore have decoration as its only object. Ashamed of its indefinite status, it attempts to give itself a basis by penetrating the earth’s entrails in order to find, in the black box, the measurable depths and the simplicity of geology, then geophysics: sciences that become increasingly exact the deeper one descends and that one can only finally perceive by using instruments. In addition, it prefers the invisible to the visible and the large fault between the Atlantic plates to the tortured earth of Iceland, the former explaining the latter; rising towards the visible – the lacy coastline or rock chiselled by squalls or waves – it turns again towards the contingency of localities, without always seeing that they carry as many powerful, abstract concepts as the simple: general and hidden. Just as we are identified by our thumbprint, the earth’s identity card, a veritable map of the world, can become the model for highly formal meditations. Once again, we find that æsthetics constitutes a body of knowledge, in this case topological, without always having to invoke the reality to which it refers. A necessary invocation, to be sure, but not a sufficient one. If we find the countryside in the system of the three bodies and in relation to its unintegratable equations, we no longer have to believe that a single system exhausts our reading of it. Nothing as deep as the countryside, face or skin.
This is the exact site of the countryside or work of the geographer, on a new map on which are drawn the vast ocean of the exact sciences, and physics: systems, experiments and laws, an immense sea in the vast plain of water, and geophysics, a middle-sized sea in the heart of immensity . . . there, palæomagnetism amid the theory of fields, here, ecology in the theory of living beings . . . as one carves out more precise subsets in larger ones, neglecting neither overlaps, nor interference producing more complicated distinctions, the exact sciences slowly fade into the human sciences . . . living beings work and change the inert; collectives fashion and transform the inert and living environments that they inhabit, or through which they pass . . . ecology, rural sociology . . . straits and gulfs carved out by new seas, and seas belonging once again to the great ocean of the ‘soft’ sciences – we have just crossed the bar with geography. If it is defined as the intersection of ten or twenty fields of knowledge, we can say of it what all sciences say about themselves, that its singularity has not been defined. It transports us, in fact, from one major body of knowledge to the opposite one through the North-West passage. In geography, the carillon of the hard sciences finally falls silent, when that of the human sciences is barely beginning. In this almost silent space lies the landscape.
An intermediary state from which originate on the one hand estimations and measurements, and on the other stories and history, both feeding ultimately into wide encyclopædic seas; a mixed state, the countryside is immediate and fragile, the foundation of our knowledge, both theoretical and practical. Since it feeds us and gives us pleasure, Pomona and Flora, we had not the slightest suspicion that it was transcendental; and since we can destroy it, it did not occur to us that it was fundamental. A mix of contingent localities where scientific knowledges blend and fall silent by reciprocal disposition; concrete, abstract, whatever you will, it provides the model for models: what schema is not reducible to a simplified cross-section of the countryside? As if the most immediate concreteness were to be found in the greatest abstraction, as if the purest abstraction were immediately readable.
Which goes to prove that this new map of knowledge reproduces the old world map, or a present-day view of the North-West passage: great oceans invaginated into seas, then straits and gulfs or bays, scattered archipelagos and islands redrawing immensity on a small scale; ice flows, variable through freezing and melting, projecting into time the complexities of space, overlaps and dead-ends, reliable passages and obstacles, a mixed landscape in a fluctuating state, an intermediate and complex state between two plains of water on which constant, methodical routes are ensured.
The Beaufort Sea or Davis Strait can be approached from afar using a rhumb line or the arc of the great circle, but between these two places rambling is the order of the day. The countryside can be approached from the point of view of physics, or in local detail using sociology or history, but once you have arrived there rambling is the order of the day. Now meditate on this model of simple, easy methods, suddenly connected to a tangled web.
The name geographer is given to those who write about the earth: for peasants are the only ones who really write on it. It would be better to call geography the writing of the earth about itself. For things – resistant, hard, sharp, elastic, loose – mark, hollow each other out and wear each other away. Our exceptional style makes use of this general property. What the earth reveals results from what should be called the reciprocal marquetry of things.
Carried away by torrents and their own weight, halted by obstacles or their own shape, stones descend and break, carve into the talweg the long path of their fall or movement. Masses of sand, driven by the wind, file away at the mountain. Ice cracks and breaks stones and trees, cliffs and the earth on the plain, as does drought. Who is writing? Water, snow, the return to gentler weather, ophite, granite, equilibrium, density, energy, sun, flora and fauna. This covers, that stains. On what do they write? On snow and water, on fauna or flora, on marble or ice. What the earth displays results from the wrinkles it gives itself. A page.
What we reveal to others is a consequence of the erosion that others and things leave on our faces and skin, or from the shrinking of the harder skeleton, a worn-out frame on the edge of ruin. Whether we write, or are written on, our case is no different from the everyday concerns of geography. The constituent parts of flesh wear each other out: biography.
Talwegs, erosion, wrinkles, these reciprocal scarifications create a clock. The countryside, mapped, marked by the wear and tear that each thing imposes on, and in turn receives from, the things around it and its environment, is studded and cluttered with memories, a collection of remains, monuments, memory. Every place can be dated by this mutual hollowing, and by these ruins, literally by these details: what remains from the cutting and slicing. The antiquity of the countryside comes from the fact that it bears, exhibits and retains the beat of time past, the clock of wear and tear and of durable, hard things cutting each other – duration. Thus geography, the writing of earth on itself, precedes history and all imaginable prehistory, it determines it here and now, accessing the fundamental time of things, marked by the trace of each thing on the others and of several others on each thing, and shortly afterwards by the trace of men, furrows, dredging and style.
The relationship of the word to the world leaves less trace than the lightest touch. The soft does not affect the hard, it leaves it intact. Naming makes no mark, sets no seal on the named. Baptismal water, the chrism of anointing, mime the gentle caress of the conferring of a name, whereas circumcision mimes the harsh bite of biography, the latter on the side of things, the former on the side of the word, one definitive like a feature in the antique countryside, the others labile and temporary like contracts. Hard, durable things engrave each other and this relationship brings about their duration. The soft, in relation to things, ignores duration, which explains why we are always announcing the novelty of the word.
Geography, a hard science of hard things, is related to duration; history, coming later, new and light, follows the word. It begins with writing, the engraving of the soft on the hard: a new, unwritten time.
Ulysses and Columbus, Bougainville or Cook share, together with all sea populations, the rare chance of inhabiting and travelling simultaneously.
No-one knows a place until he has built on it with hard materials, dug his grave there, for the wall is supported in the foundation trench, that of fertility, treasure and the grave. First surround trenches with chairs, and you have a cathedral; and leave your sweat, the skin of your hands, your time, a memory in lime and sand, and the porch curved hollow like your anxiety. The house, at first a fleshless skeleton, then dressed and decorated, consolidates its motionless body supported by your corpse and your exhaustion, looks at the landscape from its immense bay windows; likewise in certain cemeteries the grave stones are decorated with small houses, behind the windows of which bouquets of flowers decay. A stable body attached to an earthly place, as if to flesh. The former will never know whether it was built in honour of a local god or whether it yielded to the ridiculous ambition of a modest apotheosis.
To build, then to inhabit, teaches one that the sphere of influence of the constructed goes from the stand of chestnut trees – white on the left, looking towards the stream, and pink on the right, beyond which the land falls away, steeply sloping – into foreign, almost untouchable places. We do not go there out of respect for the neighbouring gods. A bestial, pagan and vital topology of the immediate and the mediate, in which the locality of the locality quickly appears as strange as the immensely far distant. The homebody or peasant that the creole tongue graces with the name of inhabitant is as much, or as ill at ease on the borders of his commune or parish as at the outer limits of the universe. He lives on a large, gaudy spot, the contours of which closely follow the uneven contours of the ground and the circumstances of history, surrounded, at a short distance, by a thin, homogeneous, geometric crown, where the distance separating Australia from the White Sea rapidly approaches zero. Then again he may become, from the moment he leaves his region, an intrepid traveller, not caring whether he establishes himself near Seattle, Manila or Timbuctoo. For the inhabitant of the house rooted in divine death and giving its tonality to the locality, as for his twin wandering from one airport to another, everything lies equidistant from paradise, where deviations vanish.
The mason’s Euclidean space is grounded in the topological space of the inhabitant. Or: surrounding the Epicurean sphere of the garden and as soon as one leaves through the exit porch, begins the crown or torus of the Stoic universe of isotropic causes or harmonic series, the site of communication. Or: the dense ball of concreteness where the habitat touches its localities and where the constructed measures out its dividing lines, surpasses life in its superabundant detail, whereas one can understand in three minutes the laws that govern the remaining space. Or even: the individual gaudy paving-stone of a site punctuates an empty, infinite, simple, boring volume, criss-crossed by the vectorial arrows of journeys. Better still: the countryside through which the rambling takes place along scalloped paths, braids, loops and detours, regrouping paving stones and balls; the extreme ways of method traverse the homogeneous universe of communication. Best of all: why on earth should one world exclude the other?
Question: where are we? Ubi? We, the stable inhabitants, Latin statues, Greek theses, logical positions, situations, affirmations. Answer: in the garden, a circumstantial cell in the countryside. No, I, a redundant element in the universe, see only desert, through which I pass. Where are we? Here, in a place. Individual, surrounded by neighbourhoods, a locality scalloped with foliations. We come from such a place, we remember it; our body, like an animal’s, experiences this memory, we go towards it, our bodies quiver with this hope, even if we cross a smooth, vectorially naked space, even if we take the expressway cutting through places strewn with refuse.
The claim of the double body, of the motionless and moving animal, with its complex, varied, unstable, agitated, inert, lively, verbal niche concerns the passage from the local to the global. It wants to run and to rest at the same time. It wants to navigate.
I sing of the happiness given by a boat calling in at ports after having planed the knotted plank of the ocean, the delightful pleasure of going to sleep amidst familiar things, but in the vicinity of strangeness. China, pack-ice, tropics, visited in one’s own habitat. No, sailors do not travel now; in the age of the great discoveries they alone risked life and limb. They return every evening to the same bolthole and the same hammock, what ignorant person would have the effrontery to contrast life at sea and peasant stability, as wandering and immobility? A boat: a small hamlet with several hearths in a fragile shell. Welded to the helm, the mariner does not move, incorporated in the vessel, his nose the prow, his back the stern, moustache wrapped around the stem, hair streaming at the masthead. His village moves. It seems to travel across a strange space, but the agrarian vessel also is immersed in a hazy halo. Mooring his vessel securely on a fine evening, the sailor goes ashore just as the farmer goes hunting, secure in the knowledge that he will soon return to sup from the same warm dish, that he will come home to the same smells and familiar gangways. A stay-at-home sailor.
Voyaging begins when one burns one’s boats, adventures begin with a shipwreck. Only then do the gods foresake the sailor who has abandoned them, then he smashes his hut twenty thousand leagues from his home just as the conscripted peasant leaves the farm for war. In God’s hands. But before that, he saw without expending himself. As at the theatre or cinema or in a picture book. Comfortably seated in the pitching, curled up in the tossing, rocked by the maternal waters, behind the wave-washed scuttle, he observes, safe. He will tell the story.
In the Euclidian sea or sky he takes with him his topological and voluble niche.
We become attached to the odorous, flavoursome, colourful place, we establish our dwelling there, but together they form only our half-niche, like a sort of dead land, dotted with tombs, criss-crossed with foundations. We free ourselves and arrive at the other limitless half-niche, on the other side of the borders; it has no limits. Kernel, ribbons. On the road we sleep just as well, exhilarated about leaving the equilibrium of being a statue, about abandoning the thesis, in order to embrace deviation. Leaving your house behind is the beginning of metaphysics – what exists beyond; but as fear takes hold of him, the adventurer builds a boat. He will not leave behind his cradle. The first truly metaphysical object holds the promise of elsewhere without leaving the here and now. Invents a moving equilibrium, stability around its fluctuations, but also movement into the open half-niche from the half-closed niche, a kind of fixed agitation. As long as the caravel moves beneath his feet, his self-confidence is intact. The beyond is revealed when you consign your shoes to the flames, with your clothes and habits, the beams of the old cart and the shepherd’s hut. You will find it if, and only if, you do not turn back towards the statue of the old philosophy.
Thus the earth displays the collective traces of this ‘niche’-totality with its kernels or heads from which threads radiate. We cannot do without gardens and journeys, tempering the sometimes desperate austerity of the latter with the delights of the former, or the tediousness of plants by jumping over the garden wall. Wandering is part of the human landscape; history forms the boat’s stable hull, the pitch of the vessel and the metaphysical adventure. Peasants who stay put want to forget the long period of emigration of their forebears, always from somewhere else; voyagers want to remember their forefathers rooted in the glebe. The complete niche of human collectives – earth, water, terraqueous globe – adds gardens to exoduses, mixes circumnavigations with islands, extends edenic or hellish valleys into endless pathways, expels apple thieves, turning them into runners. From the park, endless pathways burst forth in a scalene star – the former probably accumulating energies, memories, fauna, flora and Pomona, all of which come from the latter. Space, considered lucidly, bears a striking resemblance to a medium for thought, studded with narrow, dense cells with fringed markings and endowed with gigantic, threadlike axons which extend and connect it with what is near and far. There is nothing in the intellect that you cannot see in the world: disciplinary places which often result from atypical wandering and from which those who wish to resume the methodic or exodic road are excluded. The same drawings, similar fates; toss a coin to decide where the concrete or abstract is.
Universe and place are connected in a knot as difficult to form as to imagine. On the one hand, the local sees obstructions on its borders, causing neighbouring areas to be inaccessible; the extremal path on the other hand knows no obstacle and recognizes no place. The countryside assembles pagi, the universe sends vectors through it, the real difficulty being to stitch the local peculiarities onto the global pathway, or to trace convenient paths in the landscape. Whence the temptation to dip into one culture or another: a multiplicity of stories, meanings and hamlets; a scholarly, formal, rapid, transversal uniqueness – taking one to be ancient and the other modern.
The Greek adjective catholic means universal, but those who use it mostly ignore this sense and speak of a religion with rites and saints, virgins and martyrs – a figurative monotheism in a sea of angels. The memory of its linguistic origin combines with its current meaning to display a rare and delicate synthesis – a source of beauty and art – between absent unity, with which to open a dialogue or relationship of submissive love, and the pagan countryside, resurfacing and dotted with localities, statues, stopping places, altars and localities, slightly skewed by the unitary field; between the local and the global, existence and law, the one God and one’s neighbour. This difficult union or communion, in which tolerance protects polytheism, exposes Catholicism to the sight of itself constantly torn between the exclusive monotheism of the desert, the universe of empty space whose name it bears – nothing new under such a sun – and the proliferation of pagan odds and ends, small leafy rites in a variable spring, such that it must work ceaselessly, heroically, in a climate of general incomprehension, at the paradoxical – and suddenly highly contemporary – knot of the infinitely far and near: the love of God and of one’s neighbour.
I now contemplate the double commandment of the Christian religion and the double person that it requires us to love. To love both the absent universal and our individual neighbour. The proximity of one’s neighbour tempers the savagery of monotheism, that radical violence that empties space so that a single law prospers. The unexpected set of connections between proximities repopulates this space with colourful individualities. I contemplate the wholly reasonable asymmetry of the law of reason and the surrounding circumstances, for every instance of the given.
An unequal balance, with its sloping beam: justice does not separate here the true from the false, the just from the unjust, reason from unreason. Dualism and the dual have faded away. The balance swings towards peace. I love the absence of him who alone has been invested with power and glory, which here are tantamount to crime, and to crime alone. I love the immediate presence of him who is in possession of no space other than that in which I exist. Peace descends, twice. The universal and the singular with whom I communicate are dual but do not oppose each other. Is God to be found in the incremental extensions of our neighbour? What is the latter’s relationship with God?
I contemplate the strange prescience of what our sciences are beginning to understand: the ancient figure of a new reason, called good news in Antiquity. Universal reason is tempered under pressure from local knowledge. Topology, fluctuations, small deviations and circumstances, mixtures, singularities again crowd into the empty, monotonous space of law. Yet we cannot, indeed must not, dismiss pure reason, rigour, nor exactitude. We must welcome this overpopulated place. This is reason reconciled: God and one’s neighbour, pure and perfect reason as well as local singularities. The world is made of systems and mixtures.
Who would have believed that reason and pathos together would lead us today to this asymmetry, a lesson from the old Christian commandment?
Now is the time to revise, or revisit the connection between the global and the local. Method passes through the panorama, a uniform universe. Rambling travels across places, landscapes.
Here we have a ball with fuzzy outlines, a singular event, turbulence or whirlpool. A starburst of methodical pathways, transformed into a complexity of lanes because of the contours they must cross, converges on or diverges from this place.
We shall call these circumstances, and the connecting points exchangers or interchanges.
Circumstances
The shade of a tree; for all things, their shadow is a function of the sun, clouds, wind; the height of a tree and its form depending in turn on its shadows. A tangle of overlapping footprints around a water source, layers of the past, the meeting place of the lost. The border of a well and its position on a plain where it draws herds of animals and their keepers. The surroundings of the building, access paths to the bridge. The hedges on the embankment, with or without a row of shrubs, surrounding an enclosed field. Marches protecting the kingdom. Sounds announcing something important: the followers of the powerful man intercept news. Glacis. The square of the gentiles, where Notre-Dame presents its face to the world. A district, suburb or ancient meeting place, on the outskirts of towns. Thresholds where intimacies are hidden. Areolæ. Reflections, dullness, brilliance; sounds; suffocating heat from a place of flame or ice, coolness; fragrant perfumes. Follow tracks of game animals, discover the island before seeing it, guess from the changing marks around it. Intuitions that latch on to ill-defined surroundings. The garden of the dead next to the walls of the church, with vacancies. The crowd milling around the gates of the stadium in the evening. Clamour. Tidal land on the flat coast, a space shared by earth and water, according to the phases of the moon, the breeze, the season and the syzygies. The sun so brilliant that we are living inside the star and not at an immense distance from unattainable borders. The halo around the moon, the Rings of Saturn. An aqueous coating, gas like hair surrounding certain celestial objects, a tail of comet dust. Glory preceding the body, nude, saints, stars, face, eye, skin, thought; glory using new words that knock your socks off. The great power of hate, on the ground and in history, the dense odour of resentment. One sex beseeching the other, attraction to the maelstrom, voices around the Sirens. Belts. Wayward and swift-flowing water upstream of small waterfalls, stretches of turbulence downstream. Our fragility is defended by a double or triple invisible skin, a breastplate repulsing even the gentlest aggressor. Far-reaching intoxication projected by productive intelligence, a work of art, charm. Vertigo. Corolli that fall from the lips of she who will say yes. Emotion and silence that follow and precede the event. Snow flakes blowing about, flights of archangels before God, petals floating down in the shade of the tree.
Bark, membranes, porous walls, skins, crowns, hues, haloes, in space, time, force fields, phases, causes, pretexts, conditions . . . surroundings, deviations, indecisiveness, areas neighbouring what is more strictly defined: places through which sense messages pass, circumstances.
Logic. – The principle of reason acknowledges some existing thing by affirming that it exists more than it doesn’t exist. And as a singular entity, rather than as nothing. Now it could be said that existing, more or less, is a redundancy and repeats, using a verb and adverb, a discrepancy or excess, a deviation from a state of equilibrium. Existence expresses this deviation, since the radical expresses the static, and more or less vaguely quantifies the counterweight. As if the beam of the balance were not quite level. Existence indicates a state outside the zero state, or better still, a state outside states. On the other hand, Greek science, named episteme since its beginnings, expresses equilibrium through this word, a sort of state above a state. The word system roughly expresses the same thing. The traditional opposition, the relative strangeness of existence and the episteme, become clearly legible. The general something or other is a deviation that science reduces to zero. Rigorous or precise knowledge fashions the scales of existence. Or its state. Its reduction to equilibrium. Its abolition. Science considers existence as a counterweight, a defect. A balance between accuracy and justice, between equilibrium and moral and mortal politics. Existence then functions in a different mode to that of science.
I think, therefore I exist, a contradiction in terms. I think: I weigh, I press down on a plinth, base, seat – I am immobile and fixed, at rest; I exist, here I am pulled off balance, off-balance in relation to rest, almost mobile and literally disquieted. In other words, a tautology: I weigh therefore the needle of the balance moves.
Aristotle posits the identity principle as the founding necessity of science. From its first formulation, this principle is defined in relation to contradiction. It is impossible for the same attribute to belong and not to belong at the same time to the same subject, in the same relationship, without prejudicing all the other determinations which can be added to deal with the other logical difficulties. Let us forget for a moment the attributive character of the Aristotelian definition and say with Leibniz, for example, what is A cannot be non-A, at the same time and in the same relationship etc. Always the double negation, identity as the impossible contemporaneity of itself and its contrary, or else its contradictory. We can observe in passing that the Greek term for determinations that can be casually added, διορισμσί, evidently designates something like a limit. The meeting of A and non-A is carefully described using a set of identities: at the same time, in the same relationship, in general, conditioned by the same determinations. A curious necessity that can only be imposed in a universe made up entirely of conditions. The identity principle comes into play if, and only if, other identities – time, relationship, determinations in general – are observed. A curious definition because it requires as a condition the very thing defined. Could the first principle be merely a begging of the question? A circular identity?
Thus we can go back to Aristotle and Leibniz again by saying: in the same circumstances, it is impossible for A to be non-A. It can immediately be observed that the famous principle, the universality or supposed necessity of which is eroded under the pressure of conditions, borders on another more familiar one, that of determinism: in the same circumstances the same causes produce the same effects. Now, as no-one knows the status of causes and effects, as the philosophy of causality can just as easily be put aside as the attributive logic discussed above, it remains that: in the same circumstances, the same x produces the same y. Or rather: through the identity of the circumstances, there is identity, or stability of experience, the possibility of repeating it at will. Or: through identical allocations, experiments are invariant. Thus in both cases, physical here and metaphysical there, the formal identity of any A, or factual or phenomenal identity, or that of experience, only take place under the express condition of reducing the set, or a set of what surrounds them, to the identical. In both cases, the identity of the circumstances is a primary consideration or condition, in theory as in practice. Without it, no logic, no manipulation or philosophy.
Philosophy has worked to cancel out, deflect or overturn this condition. The history of philosophy or science causes us to forget it in order to maintain the independence and isolation of the universality of these necessary principles. Leibniz, therefore, follows Aristotle and first of all redefines factual truths and those of reason. Among the latter, the primitive truths of reason merely repeat the same thing, without teaching us anything. Either affirmative: A is A; or negative: what is A cannot be non-A, for the same proposition. Having said this, it remains to carry out experiments. In the field of logic and algebra – pure discourses, as we say – the functioning of these principles remains clear and distinct, on condition, of course, that there is no variation in the propositions, which is precisely identity of circumstance, in any language. But everything changes very rapidly, even without going outside mathematics: it is sufficient to immerse discourse in space and time, geometry and mechanics. And the rest follows from there. Let us suppose, he said, that there exists a multiplicity of states of things, and that these states do not include anything opposed to them: it can then be said that they exist simultaneously. For Aristotle, contradiction or identity can only be defined with the minimal condition of simultaneity at the same time. Leibniz reverses Aristotle’s contention and defines the simultaneous as a state of things in which contradiction is neither present nor included. This reversal would appear to be conclusive.
It allows space and time to be defined. Not as conditions for these principles, but, on the contrary, as things produced by them. Space becomes the order of coexistences, the order of simultaneities, or the order of non-contradictories since they could not exist simultaneously. Conversely, time becomes the order of non-simultaneous things, which can therefore be contradictory. Those that were produced last year contain or imply opposite states of the same thing, in relation to those that are produced this year. It is sufficient to reverse the condition in order to produce it by the thing conditioned. There can only be contradiction if there is simultaneity. If there is no simultaneity then a contradiction may exist. Then time, the order of the successive, enters the implied order of the contradictory. Reverse the proposition again and you have: if there is a contradictory, then there is time. This is Hegel – who forgets in passing that the object can imply a contradictory, in time. It passes from the possible to the necessary and sufficient. And the dialectic begins to produce history. On the cheap.
The double reversal of the condition of these principles launches a one-track time where the object never remains the same. Thus the doubling of the negation does not necessarily return to the same point. The process of negation transforms the essence of A. The old language with two values then moves down into living or historic objects. It produces them. And the real is rational, the rational real.
All the conditions of the principle have been repressed by this clever trick. It has chosen one, time, and uses it to hide the others from view. Through a subtle reversal, the principles produce time or history. So history produces itself in and through the principles and, consequently, abolishes the other conditions. There is no longer even a relationship, nor the other determinations, nor the set of circumstances: falling back on time, they are produced, in turn, by the functioning of the contradictory and identity. Everything disappears in the machinery of disjunctive or binary logic. From the angle of time and history – gone from being the condition to the thing conditioned, as they have gone from being the possible to the necessary – reason produces fact. Reason is identical to existence, and produces it dynamically. The imperialism of the rational absorbs into the logos the deviations from the equilibrium of existence.
Now the real surpasses through the rational. Through the remnants of chance, about which I have no information and never will: the unknown, profusion, noise, proliferation and difference.
Given this, it remains true that there is not, and that no-one can conceive of, identity or contradiction except in specific circumstances of place, time, position, site, relationship, without prejudging the other innumerable determinations or limits. That the philosophy of circumstances conditions the first principles without which no-one can think, speak or transform the world. That only errors of logic, begging the question, and hypocrisy induced by the instinct for power have managed to reverse this condition and cause it to be produced by the rational principles conditioned by it. Existence is not deduced from identity, as modal logics are not produced by a logic of double values.
Quite the contrary. Existence, a deviation from equilibrium, refers to circumstances. The circumstance creates the total set – without the possibility of a balance sheet or accounting – of existences themselves, of deviations, imbalances; the total set of the ‘somewhats’, as the principle of reason states, or of what remains a state outside states.
This vast set, real and intimation of the real, surrounds the highest point of a singular mountain pass, like contour lines, far removed or in closest proximity. At this quite exceptional point are to be found balance, equality, congruence, parallelism or countless things of the same kind – that is, identity. A=A or A≡A. A rare case of stability at the top of the pass, surrounded by circumstances. Identity and contradiction, rarely to be found, are exceptional, ultrastructural singularities on the infinite variety of deviations, discrepancies, imbalances and so on – existences and circumstances. Philosophy has only ever taken note, or wished to see these crests, making the flood-tide of terror rise to drown the contours of the land. Those who drag themselves on to these islands say that they have control over the fury of the waves, poor shipwrecked creatures that they are.
Institutional language, logic and science – improbable archipelagos or miracles on the manifold deviations from equilibrium or the rule, on the polymorphy of circumstances – produce nothing, but are on the contrary conditioned. Not by another rule but by its absence. Whether you say infrastructure or superstructure, it always comes down to an ultra-structure. Maxima or minima are equivalent to extrema. Passes, peaks and islands.
The countryside, pages surrounded by rambling paths, becomes a logical model, and logic, conversely, redraws the landscape.
Grammar. – Classical grammars distinguished, in their syntax, between subordinate substantival or noun phrases and circumstantial or adverbial ones. The first posit a direct link from the subject to the object or the converse, focused on one or the other, or on both. Action, passivity, discourse or thought: the whole programme of the philosophy class. The so-called secondary adverbial propositions shift this focus and describe time, place, condition, consequence, the concessive, either comparable or causal and so on. As soon as he saw a rose he thought that spring had returned; the river had swollen to such an extent that one could no longer ford it; I could if I wished, or when and because I should like to, or at the place I choose. The world plus several emotions return in force to crowd around the austere, meagre substantival axis. This multiple is abolished if reduced to identity or repetition: in the same circumstances, the same . . . complete the sentence yourself.
In the usual morphology of these grammars, neither adjectives nor adverbs have a very good reputation. Less is more, one used to say. Always God, never the angels – a circumstance of angels, said Tertullien; get to the point, don’t dilly dally. Style and philosophy in black and white – morning coat and dicky – thought, action, science and transformation of the world: we have not a minute to lose. Adjectives throw us sideways, off-course – seductive, bifurcating, diverted. Literally parasitic,3 like static: surplus noise, beside the master devouring the substantive master’s share; blood-sucker. Adverbs cause action to deviate, to lose its balance. Both denote circumstances, limit and bring the act, person or thing into existence. A small deviation begins with corners, moments, qualities or restrictions, weather conditions; why don’t we take our time? So rare and precious, often enslaved, miraculously freed, superb, ecstatic, never monotonous, beside us, far away, secret, available, rich, full, tasty, free, mixed.
Like adverbs or adjectives, adverbial phrases add a leafy, sensual and sensible dimension to the ascetic, puritanical or austere meaning of the sensate. If you wish to make an honest statement about the sensible, an epithet of Colette’s is better than ten statements by a logician; as is a visit to, or better still the creation in detail of, a garden.
Academic philosophies fail to say this in their substantival or attributive alignment, through their exclusive use of verbs and nouns: of the abominable verb to be, unknown or invasive, of motionless predication, of predication with its horns of dilemma . . . how boring the rhyming dualist results: realism-idealism, empiricism-formalism, dialectic-analytic . . . the rigidity of nouns: ontology, phenomenology, epistemology, molo, nolo, tolo, internal rhymes, can thought ring true in such ugly writing? I plead guilty.
Visit the environment. Traverse circumstances floating like crowns around the instance or substance, around the axis of the act. Make use of what is cast aside. Describe the parasites in signals, the collective or the living: it is always to be found eating right next to you. Study neighbourhoods, travel along country roads which surround and give shape to the countryside. Consider the fluctuations, deviations or inclinations, in the estimations or concepts of science. Atoms are sometimes cast aside. Do not despise conjunctions or passages. Hermes often veers off as he goes along. And detaches himself. Observe the mingled flows and the places of exchange and you will understand time better. Hermes gradually finds his language and his messages, sounds and music, landscapes and paths, knowledge and wisdom. He leaps sideways, to the places where the senses murmur and tremble, the neighbouring turbulence of bodies – sensation. He loves and knows the spot where place deviates from place and leads to the universe, where the latter deviates from the law to invaginate into singularity: circumstance.
Static. – A statue is set on a pedestal and does not move from it. Immobility, rest, fixity: thesis.
A balance comes to rest through a relationship of equality or exchange between its arms, trays and weights. It cancels out the virtual movement of each one by compensating it with that of the other: equilibrium.
A spinning top, a miniature planetary globe, remains upright, a vibrating statue, a whirling balance, because of its rapid rotation, and the earth, stars, the whole solar system remain constant in the composite periodicity of their variations. The word system is generally used when a complex moving set is ordered around an invariant.
Statue or thesis: singular; equilibrium: duality; system: plurality.
Zero movement, movement around a position: rotation, trajectory, orbit, vibrations, rhythms, diverse compositions.
Reversible time.
We think in theses, affirmations, equilibria, systems, thinking or pondering means quite literally weighing, weighing up. I think therefore a balance exists. I could not think without it. There exists a statue or system. A thesis, an antithesis, a point around which the beam of the balance resolves their exchange or agreement or does not resolve their inequalities. If it wobbles or hesitates, am I still thinking? If it lacks constancy, fluctuates, if it keeps on deviating from stability . . . Montaigne expresses excellently the locality of non-thought by the double balancing act of doubt and the eternal wobble of the world in its course. I cannot think without referring to stability in general. The affirmation of the ‘I think’ and its requirement of constancy in the subject is translated into the reality of things by the principle of equilibrium. Subject, object, I don’t know; I know in any case that language always says the same thing, we know nothing more. I affirm – that statement remains firm on its base, be it thesis or statue, thought, table or basin. I think – I weigh, on that base. Who, I? It is of no importance.
The work of thought or history advances on a stable front into fields where at first glance it has no place or time. The unthinkable equals the unstable. The unknowable is equivalent to fluctuation. Identity remains the explicit or implicit condition of science. We must be able to repeat what is said, find the statue again in the same place, recognize the thesis, solid, affirmed, unchanged, repeat the experiment – determined, determinist, as stable as a terminus.
That being the case, the said work consists in recognizing the stable in the unstable, equilibrium in movement, the spinning top upright as it whirls around, the system stable even when it is animated by a variety of irregular rhythms – the invariant in variation.
I think if and only if I take my disquiet into places where ponderation brings with it risks.
In the heat which stirs up the smallest elements; among the insubstantial fluids and turbulence; on the inclination of atoms; in the midst of the atmospheric disturbance; in qualities belonging entirely to the senses; among mixtures and landscapes; in the human sciences and history. The programme of conceptual work to be done follows the infamous North-West Passage. A ramble rather than a method. Wanderings, journeys, dangers.
The example of the river is appealing to us: flowing from one source or several, it descends the talweg towards the sea or lake, it looks at first glance as though it runs, turbulent or calm, towards its equilibrium; true for each drop of water, is this affirmation true for the river? It moves of course; but stable, it lies in repose in its aptly named bed. It appears to run, but sleeps after a fashion. If some Hercules should pass by, if some civil engineering project should for whatever reason change its course, the river will return to it. The river hollows out an overall stability, from its source to its mouth. Homeorrhesis. Do we follow the course of a river as we do the formation of the embryo, from fertilization to birth, and the river bed in the same way, until the hour of its death?
One illustrious example among many, for the progress of thought: we ought to direct our restlessness, the deviation from rest, towards obviously restless things, the equilibrium of which seems unthinkable. Chance often lies in wait for us there, opposing its disorder to our identity: with reason or without, who can tell? Who can guess, without thinking, without believing oneself to be God, that the real is rational and vice versa? Thinking doubtless consists in wandering, restlessly, in a place where this principle has not yet been enunciated.
The Seine and the Garonne display homeorrhesis; there is no sign of it in either the Yukon or the Mackenzie. The latter deviate incessantly from their equilibrium. Sometimes they flow with a hundred arms, sometimes not at all, frozen, blocked, barred by obstacles and gravel, have one bed at dawn, ten at midday, twenty at another moment and at the same spot, or at another spot at the same moment. Do they march to the rhythm of a different drum? It could be said that they write on the earth or countryside the whole programme of their circumstances: constancy, instability, consistencies, inconsistencies, circumstances.
What order is carried away by their fluctuations? The effort of thought must be directed towards these latitudes: fixed paths in a random environment or random paths in a determined place. Time no longer flows like water but percolates like it.
Celestial mechanics. – Laplace deduces the celestial movements from Newton’s law and thus makes the world into a system. He needs no other hypothesis. And yet an idea other than attraction dominates his argument. Everyone remembers the famous passage in the Republic where Plato describes a spinning top. It remains in equilibrium on its base, but moves in respect to all points not on this axis. Plato finds this inseparability of movement and repose contradictory. He does not say that the base can move, move forward, backward, that the axis can nutate, etc. This contradiction, in the eyes of modern mechanists, defines a new equilibrium, constancy through movement, invariance through variations, immobility through mobility. In the preface to the second part of his Celestial Mechanics, Laplace indulges in a hundred linguistic variations on the pair in question: celestial objects display oscillations, librations, nutations, vibrations, periods – annual inequalities, one or many centuries old, going up to nine hundred years etc. – around equilibrium.
The system of the world can be named thus not only because the totality of appearances are deduced from one law – the word phenomenology has its origin in astronomical observations – but because of its stability. A large number of objects remain together in equilibrium. They move (‘and yet it moves’).4 Indeed – but all apparent anomalies, nutations or librations, return to their point of repose, all variations are restored over time. Constancy. World harmony comes from the composition of vibratory movements; a set of tops in periodic equilibrium. A sound, after all, certainly indicates a constant for the complex movements of a string, plate or column of air.
On the other hand celestial objects do not present themselves in a homogeneous manner; the earth has a solid core, covered in places by a liquid magnifying glass – oceans and seas – enveloped entirely in a gaseous mass, the atmosphere; three states which make it somewhat viscous. Plato’s top moves in the same way, solid at every point. The mantle of the seas can slide, take on its own rhythmic movements which, in return, can influence the rhythms of the moving solid. The atmospheric envelope is traversed by vibrations also, the periodicity of which we have not yet discovered, if it exists.
The question of movement gives rise to the law of constancy.
That of composition gives rise to the concept of consistency.
Consistency is a characteristic of the solid, but also of rigorous deductive reasoning: non-contradiction within a system. In celestial mechanics, as practised by Laplace, mathematics corresponds to the world: two consistent systems. But when it comes to the solid, we hesitate and vacillate. Solid mechanics gives enough guarantees; for the aqueous mantle, we can go on to a theory of tides: we’ll leave aside weather, fire and air. Too complex to fit into the system.
But carrying with it the framework of its formation. Following its usual regime, with which we are familiar, the world obeys reversible time, that of the pendulum: nothing in either our equations or rhythmic phenomena would change if time were counted backwards. A new question: how was this system formed, how did it arrive at this regime of equilibrium through its movements? Laplace moves from cosmology to cosmogony in Note VII, attached to his Exposition of the System of the World. Observe language just as Laplace observes the planets: ‘exposing’ pulls off balance the set of things that are positioned there – the ‘system’ or composition. The astronomer reasons and begins a new topic; Auguste Comte,5 following Laplace, says that five general circumstances characterize the constitution of the solar system; circulation, rotation and satellites all move from West to East, never the other way round, they are quite literally oriented; all orbits display eccentricity, although it is very slight, in planes which deviate from each other ever so slightly.
It is indeed a question of circumstances: phenomena not included in the strict definition of the system, not deducible from the general equilibrium, apart. No balance compensates for the general directions of movements I would call ‘occidented’, nor deviations from equilibrium, excentricities or inclinations, by symmetrical obliquities. Reversible time does not integrate these exceptions into a rhythmic totality. Lucretius’ clinamen returns, in gigantic dimensions. He projects us into the irreversible time of genesis, the time of fire: in cosmogony, the sun abandons its role as central mass in order to become again a source of heat. The spatial or temporal distance that separates us from it, the original nebula, is not counted in terms of forces, but in terms of the cooling process. Hence the linear history in which the circular system will function: the said circumstances, fossils of the rotating hot nebula, initial conditions in both senses of the expression – mathematically, when it comes to equations, and in terms of mechanical systems, when it comes to evolution – surround many constancies or equilibria with their given disequilibrium, with their lack of consistency. In cooling, the system becomes harder, less viscous. Irreversible history and time send their roots deep into strange substances. They are born from circumstances.
Thermodynamics. – Carnot distinguishes between machines dependent on fire and those whose movement is not produced by heat. Error: men and beasts of burden, waterfalls and draughts of air always draw their strength from heat and ultimately from the sun. Mechanical theory studies the latter cases and explains them, says Carnot, by general principles applicable in all circumstances.
Such a complete theory, both global and local, is lacking for machines dependent on fire. They have not yet found their Lagrange for the system, or their Belidor for manufacturing principles. To arrive at a desirable level of generality, the principles must be independent of the mechanism concerned. Lagrange does not speak of Belidor. Carnot says nothing about applications or circumstances.
He reasons for every possible machine using fire, whatever the substance brought into play, whatever the manner it is acted upon. Substance is no longer important.
‘The production of movement in steam engines is always accompanied by a circumstance on which we should fix our attention.’ Accompanied: he who accompanies travels beside; of no real importance, he defers to the instance, which is the principal traveller. It could be said: movement and its production would continue if this companion were removed. Hence the name circumstance: it stands about in the surrounding area. But the text had said that it would avoid such circumstances, and in spite of that, here we have one.
It is a question of ‘restoring calorific equilibrium, that is its passage from one body where the temperature is more or less high, to another where it is lower’. Here Carnot posits the two sources, hot and cold, and the transfer of heat from one to the other. Motive power is produced by this transfer, being equivalent to the restoration of equilibrium between the two sources, an equilibrium supposedly interrupted by combustion or any other action. The term circumstance describes the process with splendid accuracy.
Here we have two bodies in equilibrium, not according to their mass or weight, but in the new relationship of heat. As nothing in the world can be said to be neutral in relation to heat, this quality can be said to be universal. First state: stability, thesis or stance. When one of the bodies or substances begins to combust, it consequently deviates from the state of equilibrium. Instability. One hardly dares say that the two sources, confronting each other, hot and cold, and deviating for this reason, are antithetical to each other. If stability or synthesis is to return, a transfer must take place from one body or source to the other, in this case transfer of heat, like that of water or air, or tare elsewhere. It takes place; it produces movement. Now combustion continues in the warm body, the deviation from equilibrium is again produced, the transfer is perpetuated. We all recognize a familiar cycle, that we will accurately call circumstance. A given equilibrium, upset, then restored – cyclically so.
Circumstance becomes the whole motor. Substance is no longer important: it is burnt in the fire.
But it doubly expresses a cycle or circle: not only that of the breaking and resumption of stability, but the definition or closure of the process. For the second principle, also discovered by Carnot in this context, precludes any kind of dialectic, the latter being reduced to an absurd or trivial perpetual motion, or worse still, to a faulty connection between the global and the local. With little effort it becomes universal. Meditating a century later on the two sources, equilibrium and movement, or dynamism, Bergson, like all scholars who preceded and followed him, stumbles across the conditioning question of the open and closed. Carnot’s description, his cycle of equilibria, interruptions or circumstance applies to a closed system – closed by a frame, inside which in fact another equilibrium is forming. The enclosure could also be called circumstance, for this reason. The question, neglected by Bergson and taken up again recently in the sciences as well as here, is how to connect the closed and the open, the local and another local, or the beginning of a global; is how to extend the equilibria over deviations or precarities, by crossing the threshold of the wall of circumstance. What happens there, by which I mean on the other side?
Circumstance is a splendid description of the productive work of the local and its temporary movement, space and time; plus the periphery which encloses it and inside which an equilibrium is at last established and holds sway; plus the set of fluctuations surrounding the open windows in the membrane or skin or frontier or wall or enclosure. What is exchanged there, by which I mean in the vicinity of this aperture?
You can be sure that the sun always manages to filter through a hole somewhere . . .
Circumstance enters science just as it was being eliminated from it; it enters philosophy as a topical question; and here we find it in the realm of the senses: does it define that too?
Seeing: from the open or closed, from the local or global, from islands or access pathways, from mixtures . . . Seeing: from an open or closed eye, an island-eye and pathway-aperture, a local organ or general perception, fabrics or veils through which photons, enzymes and other elements pass and are exchanged.
Zoology. – Vertebrates have eyes. Those of the mole are very small, hardly apparent. The aspalax, a Persian mole, has none, neither does the olm, a small aquatic reptile living in deep, underground waters. Vertebrates have teeth: but not the whale or the ant-eater; birds have horny beaks. Without exception all vertebrates have ears. That can be explained: sound is propagated universally, unlike light: sight is local and hearing is global. Lamarck wrote a memoir dealing with sound and its vibrations. We will come back to the banquet of the birds.
Life displays an overall plan, says Lamarck, composed, perfected or complicated progressively, by and over time. But extraneous causes here and there have interfered with the execution of the plan, albeit without destroying it: it has given rise to significant gaps in the series, or anomalies in organic systems. This cause lies in the circumstances in which the different animals find themselves: climate, soil, location and environment, ambient or surrounding fluids, weather conditions . . . When they move from one place to another, animals change.
The plan of life unfolds in order and generality, like a global law. If we describe in local detail the organs of animals, we do not always find development of increasing complexity. Circumstances have thrown up obstacles and introduced accidents, variations, deviations, irregularities in its unfolding, which then display disorder and contingency. Lamarck takes on the task of conceptualizing the connection between the local and the global as being the greatest problem posed by living creatures: the simplicity of a law is deflected or disturbed, here and there; this is the product of circumstances.
Circumstances express multiplicity, irreducible to unity: not in number alone, but as regards site, form, time, colour or shade, matter, phase, locality . . . contingency. When we can, we reduce them to zero, nullifying and excluding them: the reign of a logic that never gets its hands dirty. Take everything away so that I can see: I can see if and only if I always look at the same thing. Nothing new under the sun. ‘In the same circumstances’ is a fine oxymoron, would one really use the word circumstances if they presented themselves in the same way? In which case, we would already have law or unity.
In their ramifying chaos they are resistant – a technicolour sunburst opposed to order. All intellectual effort in the past consisted in negotiating multiplicity from the point of view of unity or law. A simultaneously rational and irrational negotiation, even within the processes of reason. In methods and protocols disgust is sometimes a factor. Acclimatize or tame circumstances or, indeed, exclude them, in any case clearly distinguish them from thinkable knowledge – and consider them with horror or benevolence according to the state of your skin: as an object or obstacle.
You can see this negotiation in action, as though knowledge were signing successive agreements with an increasingly significant adversary. We have just read the contract of total expulsion: we must not laugh when logic speaks about the sensible – or grammar. You can see the intelligent and meticulous approach of complex cases of equilibrium in which the deviations cancel each other out or compensate for each other in an equally compensated time, you can see the circumstantial maintenance of certain deviations. You can see Laplace grouping together the circumstances which are irreducible to periodic, reversible laws and attaching all deviations and discrepancies to a hypothesis outside of the agreed scientific wisdom of the time, thus accelerating the paradoxical formation of a cosmogony. You can see Carnot finding equilibrium in a cycle and a new disequilibrium in this closed equilibrium, you can admire his invention of the motor within circumstance itself. Subtle negotiations on the sharp edge of knowledge and non-knowledge: could circumstances, always present, constitute the privileged object of their contact?
You can see Lamarck continue to negotiate. Life for him is a plan, law, unity, order. Every scientist, every politician and indeed every individual considers himself to be on the side of law and order. A common position: meaning what is general, global, vulgar and stupid. The science that I practise lays down the rules. Lamarck: life unfolds its unique plan, of increasing complexity. Why irregularities? You can group them, relegate them to another order: the world, context, climate and weather, in short the conditions of life, the inert and living environment also; in their multiplicity these rediscovered circumstances striate or marble the space and time in which unitary life is immersed. Life in turn negotiates circumstances and adapts to them for it cannot nullify them, or consider them unworthy of note, or assume that they will always, everywhere be the same, or group them into classes. It is immersed in their mixture and changes. It visits a technicolour world. Lamarck enunciates laws: great changes in needs produce great changes in actions, and if these actions endure they give rise to habits which produce new, transformed organs. In other words: in other circumstances, the same causes produce different effects. True? False?
You will discover hidden teeth in the jawbone of the whale foetus, and their indentations in the beaks of birds: law leaves behind traces of itself. The aspalax retains traces of an eye under its skin and likewise the olm, whose fossilized organ no longer even has access to light. But birds live in circumstances where they need not masticate, and moles wander about in deep pits.
Whether Lamarck is right or wrong is of no importance; the essential thing is that he distinguishes between a technicolour, detailed, multiple world, and a unitary life unfolding its legalistic plan. The latter descends into the former, as elsewhere the spirit into history, hence the variety of local avatars.
In turn, biology advances by negotiating multiplicities. The circumstantial cloud – outside life for Lamarck – somehow finds it way inside with Darwin and his successors: mixture pervades genetics and genetic material. Life itself produces circumstances that it once merely reflected. Skilful, delicate negotiation continues. It reduces the separation between the global and the local, life and the world. The connection between the local and the global is much better described as mutation and selection.
Thought visits circumstances, whereas our mind finds them hellish.
Love. – Julien has just taken Madame de Rênal’s hand: ‘The hours spent under that tall lime tree, that is said locally to have been planted by Charles the Bold, were for her a time of happiness. She enjoyed listening to the keening of the wind in the thick foliage of the tree, and the sound of scattered drops which began falling on its lowest leaves. Julien did not notice a circumstance which would have completely reassured him; Madame de Rênal, who had had to withdraw her hand from his, because she had risen to help her cousin set upright a vase of flowers that the wind had blown over at their feet, had hardly sat down again when her hand reached out for his almost naturally, and as if it had already been a convention between them’.6
They stand like a group statue; each one sitting, hand in hand, the vase standing there, a system in equilibrium. Now a gust of wind knocks over the flowers: the lowest object leaves it place, both women rise from their seats, unclasping their hands, the three elements in the system lose their equilibrium because of the chance and, it could be said, unpredictable breeze. Yet from this very circumstance genuine assurance follows. The vase returns to its upright position; instead of going off to bed, the two friends sit down again; their hands resume contact. The same equilibrium as before the wind, but quite different at the same time: convention has emerged from circumstance. A new order is produced by the chance wind. The two hands coming into contact through a physical or literal agreement return together to sign a contractual convention. The breeze brings contact, the unexpected flurry propelling the women, vase and hands from a state of rest to one of anxiety. Circumstance traces equilibrium as well as a deviation coming from the perimeter.
On the periphery of the system, its shadow: the thick foliage of the lime tree, together with a crown of sound; the moaning of the wind in the branches, the pattering of the drops of rain on the lower branches. The halo of circumstance emits background noise. Louise listens delightedly to the murmur. From this environment comes the wind, from this din comes disequilibrium, the contractual agreement is a result of the background noise.
Let us trace the genesis of the convention. Let us go back, to the same spot, in the evening, under the lime tree, on the day before. ‘Julien was speaking energetically; gesticulating, he touched Madame de Rênal’s hand which was resting on the back of one of those painted wooden chairs that one puts in gardens. The hand quickly drew back . . .’ The first contact takes place by chance, unintentionally, unplanned on both sides, because the boy was waving his arms about. The abstract word describes it no better than the concrete word: contingency literally describes a moment of contact, as if the tactile or material meeting were accompanied by opportunity, fortune, accident and uncertainty. To say, then, that contact takes place accidentally is redundant. When Cournot defines chance as the intersection of two independent causal series, he is merely describing the term contingency, he is not going beyond the word itself, or its meaning. Two sequences encounter each other, two hands touch, two paths cross: this is a combination of circumstances. That the hand is quickly withdrawn means that the unexpected gesture could not give rise to a state. The meeting cannot be reproduced and does not result in equilibrium.
Movement goes from contingency to convention. The difference between the former and the latter is hardly visible, for the two words have almost the same sense: two hands, after meeting, will come together. Ironically, from chance to intention, the path still goes by way of chance: conjunction or fortuitous coincidence is transformed into a convention by a gust of wind that confirms the equilibrium. The height of derision for someone who, reading and imitating Bonaparte, implacably follows his will: aims, duty, constant unswerving ambition, equality, all those things. The purposeful curve that tolerates no deviation is divided into differential pizzicati by chance occurrences; whereas fortune integrates minor turns of fate.
Circumstance describes three things superlatively: the imprecise surroundings of subjects, objects or substances, even more remote than the accidental; highly unpredictable chance occurrences; a tricky history of stasis and equilibrium, disturbances and returns to the original state, deviations towards the fluctuating environment. Thus the lime tree and its thick foliage, the profound darkness when evening comes, the clouds, wind, weather, the sudden breeze knocking the vase over, the gesticulation of hands and arms between bodies, the pattering of the rain, the voice of someone getting excited, conventional silence.
Attributes, which are implied in the substantial subject, are distributed around the stable substance. Around the attributes, there can be a variety of accidents. Circumstance hovers above like a third crown. From this remote ring a detail suddenly swoops down, disturbing the stable subject or system, changing them or not changing them; if it does, it transforms them considerably, slightly or totally. The circumstantial cloud, like a labile torus, bombards the centre with imperceptible, negligible, eliminated elements, which at times can be quite decisive. A philosophy which fails to recognize this crown would be like accounting before the invention of large numbers, medicine before germs and viruses, mechanics ignorant of atoms or particles, a message without information or sound. The cloud or torus of circumstances sometimes approaches the substantial core and destroys it as well as its attendant dependent attributes or accidents; so-called causal series can also be drowned out by it. Multiplicity prevents us from identifying subject or object, just as the morning fog hides the valley, as the burgeoning brambles in the hedgerows proliferate in the countryside, degenerating into scrub or desert when the fields are neglected.
As the moaning of wind and rain begins, the boy’s gesticulation disturbs the precise chain of the deliberate project, or deflects it, or splinters it; just as mud, sleep and greenery hide the grand strategy of Waterloo from the eyes of those who pass by.
Between the contingent moment or the chance caress and the hand given according to convention, a day goes by; a multitude of disequilibria mark the waiting with slight deviations. She loses her head, he feels his heart beating; her voice is strained, his trembles; he is beside himself with emotion. Like a river leaving its bed, the story seeks new points of stability, is churned up only to settle into a new stability. A new whole is reorganized as if from vibrations, sounds of words and heart, movements and wind: a storm is brewing, the warm breeze chases the clouds in the sky; the two women, like clouds, go for a walk: a ramble.
Imagine several marbles lodged at rest, as they are to be found in certain children’s games; a shock or vibration shakes them out of the groove, or indentation, in which they lie. Gently tilting the game this way and that you have to get them into pre-determined hollows. The random movement of the marbles on the level surface follows an interesting although unpredictable path: so little determined by simple laws that each attempt is probably like no other, original and impossible to repeat. Circumstantial bombardment makes every situation unique while the methodical pathway crosses a homogeneous desert. Thus the hours that pass between contingency and convention, marked by deviations from equilibrium or by unstable states of bewilderment and agitation, are loaded with singularity: glances, cardiac arhythmia, every action that day appears strange, unpredictable, rare, unique.
The system returns to its final state through a host of small, fortuitous jolts which cause each element to lose it local stability and push them all towards intensified repose.
Moment after moment, life, gloriously improbable, advances. Probably programmed, deliberate, ambitious, tense, in such a case, but immersed in a turbulent cloud of solicitations that we’d have to call meteorological. Lucid, with our voluble crown of circumstances, we understand or know better, our daily happiness increases – that is the adventure.
In this halo, torus or border the global plugs its connections into the local, and conversely. For a general law to apply, here and now, repetitively and predictably, we require first of all the same circumstances: proof that we distrust them and that together they constitute the totality of conditions for the said experiment. They might disturb the thread of the causal chain; in other circumstances the same causes would not produce the same effects. Elements coming from this crown have the power to disrupt the determinist system and cause it to veer off towards other consequences. In other words, the very principle of determinism implies, in its initial conditions, its own generalization, or even better, displays the world in which it is immersed and shows how it cuts it down to size in order to cross it. The legitimate series transits via the crown and negotiates its passage there before reaching its proper place. Thus the sun’s rays cross the Van Allen belt and the atmosphere, currents, clouds, moisture, and are transformed by these objects or filters, before touching us. If you change this mantle significantly, life on earth perishes. Like identity, determinism could be conceived of as stable states, at the bottom of a hole or depression: each well has its coping, its surroundings, the encompassing plain where traffic can move towards other low-lying places. Or as rare states, on the highest point of some island: every shoreline has its reefs, the sea-floor around it, the churning sea from which we might navigate towards other archipelagos.
Roads radiate out from towns – coming from remote and neighbouring cities or going towards them; forming a lattice on the ground, they channel the elements of space. They set traffic and flux in motion on the periphery where mixtures, sorting, exchanges and deals take place. The capital, the head or centre, seems to owe its existence to these outer layers, as if equilibrium were being created on a plateau or in a depression, an acropolis surrounded by a fluctuating belt that bombards the state, destroys, then shores it up again; in short, causes it to vary. The points or places of sorting and mixtures, the exchangers, may or may not be marked; the site of the centre may or may not be isolated, it being possible for the exchangers to fill the whole space. No capital? We at least have the palace. No central castle? We have the king or secretary general. Knight harbingers pass emissaries on the steps of the kingdom or throne, but does the lonely head of the president himself contain anything other than thousands of neurones and axons humming with messages like any intersection and perpetuating exchanges? Place is invaded by exchangers and the crown of circumstances; where is the subject, substratum, centre or capital to be found now? Iris wears a long trailing scarf, Hermes is recognized by his intertwined snakes: ringed with communication, a totally decentred space invading the centre.
The global (matter, energy, information . . . law) comes to a locality (cell, body, town . . . an element of the countryside) through its surroundings (membrane, skin, peripheral walls, borders . . . circumstances) where it negotiates its transit or passage through an exchanger.
Exchanger. A path allows movement in a band and in a line. Method results from an optimizing calculation. Go straight ahead but above all do not multiply senses and directions beyond necessity; choose. From several possible paths, you must choose one and stick to it. Even before making this choice, you must in addition decide on a dimension, and only one, and stick to it. Do not disperse yourself across planes or in volume; the traveller lost in the wood wanders into the clearing and climbs the trees but sees nothing but foliage. A fork in the road, like a loop or braid, defines a plane by two straight lines, or a surface by two curves; the moving object fragments. The same thing in very fine detail: optimization requires a smooth line and not bands with holes and protuberances where the moving object disintegrates through a multiplicity of minute shifts in the same space: jolts.
So the exchanger splits one line into two, and so as to avoid an intersection on the same plane, also into three dimensions, efflorescent. Left, right, between, loop, braid, up and down, over, under, knots explore places. An orderly ramble. Here optimization does not require you to cross rapidly, but rather to thread your way between: instead of abolishing space, movement creates it or makes it flourish. We would never have believed the sky so voluminous until we had seen the aurora borealis displaying its festoons: the display celebrates and creates immensity; we would never have believed our plot of earth so large before building there. The pathway passes between two others and in the process creates other paths between. Knots fashion places through which a thousand new knots can be threaded. Conveying messages gives rise to new messages. Space proliferates.
Proliferation becomes a condition for analysis or the result of its practice. To untie is to create profusion. Everyone knows that transporting a heap of sand, with spades or cranes, or moving it about, keeps on increasing its volume. Jolts create interstices between the grains like those found in the threads composing knots. What difference is there between a traffic interchange and the network of pathways that cover a country? Proliferation alone, the emptiness of the intervals. Although inflation has a bad reputation amongst thinkers, no-one can analyse without untying, no-one can untie without bringing deviations into play, nor loosen without causing an increase in volume. You sometimes write a volume on one page, three volumes on a line, a whole treatise on a single word.
The knot or exchanger, analytical itself, invents the local through similar profusion. It invents intervals between the walls of the pathways through which it passes; as a result, passing through an interstice, the passage itself gives rise to others: between its own flank and the wall. Turning back on itself, the path therefore offers new return pathways. Implication abounds and multiplies of itself. Creates its space, localities and intervals, open and closed, frontiers and continuity, and thus fills the volume that a taut, abstract thread denies by intersecting it. Splicing gives rise to a ball or doll. Cat’s paw, clove hitch, granny knot, lark’s head, sheepshank, lariat loop, eye splice, figure of eight or reef knot: the emergence of a thing in a place. I no longer think of names of knots in terms of images: how is it possible to express what a head or rose owe to the invagination of a thousand pathways? They burgeon.
The converse operation of proliferation is that of constriction. A well-tied knot can be tightened as much as you like but can still be untied. Analysis does not require us to undo knots: the old language is unhelpful, one can constrict while remaining analytical. An excellent work of art likewise constricts: creates its space, fills a volume, proliferates leaving no gaps. It is clear from this that global motion by its force creates pockets and that local implications by their richness look further afield: like a landscape of the world.
Like a bodily organ. When it looks at atlases of anatomy or embryology, the eye is reluctant to recognize the proliferation of exchangers or tight knots, in every size, filling a local volume with their branching or folds, braids and loops, envelopes or tears, windows.
Can every inert, living, crafted thing be defined as a turbulence organized into an exchanger?
In the beginning, it merely serves as a global conduit. Soon, in some corner where there is not so much traffic, a sort of garage takes shape; long queues of trucks rest at night in the whirlpool, the drivers sleep there in spite of the din. The police have constructed site offices on a traffic island, to deal with wrecks and for their own services. Trees have grown in the circles of grass in the hollow of braids and bends, where the birds nest; tramps have found paradise there, protected from the world by the turbulent circumstance, frontiers you do not cross on pain of death. They live, drink, copulate and carry out small transactions with the long-distance lorry drivers under the fatherly eye of the law. The interchange, or exchanger, is now surrounded by a tall, opaque fence protecting the surroundings from noise, with the result that one sees vehicles exiting or entering through doors and windows set into the fence, the sum of the exits no longer equals that of the entries in a box that becomes blacker and blacker; are we witnessing the emergence of a place comparable to a hive, town, palace, organism, cell . . .? The interchange has invented a place through weaving knots and passages, it is creating another with stases and emboli, these stabilities creating other exchanges that . . .
A hand creates with thread or cable an eye or aperture through which to pass, thereby opens up a distinct interval. Clear, in other words neither obstructed nor blocked: the thread passes as many times as it wishes or is able, in every direction or dimension invented by the passage itself. And the gesture repeats the open eye and the between-path. This is analysis, but it ties without untying, or prepares to untie while tying tightly, clearly and distinctly. Knots create place by multiplying these between-spaces clearly and distinctly. Here, far from destroying, analysis constructs, the dichotomy or cut being constantly repaired. The in-between is superabundant there, it brings things closer to each other rather than tearing them apart.
These gestures of weaving, knitting or knot-tying have been ours since body and time immemorial: even the birds in the sky know how to knot or weave with their beaks or legs when making their nests. These are the buried origins of topology and therefore of geometry; beginnings where sight disappears into touch, where touch, sensitive and delicate, sees contours, the smooth and the separate: origins preceding the arrival of speech by an entire era.
In tying, weaving or knot-making, hand and gaze devote themselves to connecting the far and the near, or to creating varieties from a simple line: flat or voluminous, tight or loose, dense or scattered. Place begins to proliferate by the very same element that denies place, cutting through the global economically. It attaches itself to other places as it goes along, as the tacking point passes to the bowline and through it connects with the whole rigging of the ship leaving for the other end of the world.
Through their topological design, their friction and their strength, in distinction and clarity, knots weld the local to the global and conversely.
We speak with several voices. The world can be seen as localities surrounded by their neighbourhoods: circumstances, connected with each other by exchangers that themselves become places, linked to each other by pathways that radiate into the global, the more or less local status of which is difficult to determine. These propositions are valid for the inert, the living – either simple or complex – the hundred kinds of collective, formal or beautiful works of art and thought, surrounded by conditions or garlands; we should move towards a global theory of exchangers and circumstances, localities and mixtures, crowns of exchanges around the ocellated place, valid for the countryside but seeking universality. Where in all this is the passage from local to global to be found?
The sensible, the subject of this book, which paradoxically refuses to reduce it to speech – experimental science likewise owes its very birth and existence, its success in apprehending things themselves and deducing their laws, to a comparably paradoxical defence against the imperialist ascendancy of the philosophy of language which held sway in the Middle Ages – the sensible is in general both the constant presence and fluctuation of changing circumstances in the crown or halo bordering our bodies, around its limits or edges, inside and outside our skin, an active cloud, an aura in which take place mixtures, sorting, bifurcations, exchanges, changes in dimension, transitions from energy to information, attachments and untying – in short it is everything that connects a local and particular individual to the global laws of the world and to the manifold shifting of the mobile niche. Through the sensible, this unique and unpredictable place tames or acclimatizes reigns of heat, light, shock and so forth. Weight itself, or gravity passing through our posture, determines the symmetry of the sensorium and sculpts a body which would no doubt have a radial form without it. In this peripheral whirlpool in which exchangers proliferate, themselves to some extent like whirlpools, our moving relationship to the world is knotted together: a stable base, unstable audacities, the chance slight buffeting it gives the periphery, the metastability of our lives that from now on will have to be called circumstable.
Sensible, has a meaning similar to that of other adjectives with the same ending. It indicates an always possible change in meaning. The magnetic needle can thus be said to be sensible as it vibrates or seeks equilibrium around a fragile bearing. Minute promptings coming from everywhere, in quality, dimension or intensity, on every wave-length make sensibility tremble, fluctuate and sweep and dance randomly over the spaces through which things, the world and others bombard or summon it. Thus the electroencephalogram seems to look everywhere for possible calls in a white expanse, sweeping back and forth, paying no fixed attention, complete, open and intelligent because of its instability: if an ear of wheat remains to be gleaned here or there, its cautious, inconstant movement is unmissable. A thousand vibratile lashes swarm randomly around strange attractors. Both act and thought, fascinated, choose an aim and an orbit; the sensible, open like a star or almost closed like a knot to every direction, mobile in all dimensions and sweeping over the entire neighbourhood, devotes itself indefatigably to its random dance, playing its role as an exchanger until the flat hour of death.
The term visit and the French verb visiter, to visit or inspect, mean first of all sight and seeing; added to this is the idea of a distance travelled; if you visit, you go and see, and with some active emphasis, you examine and scrutinize, show benevolence or authority. Generally, in traditional philosophy, the bearer of the gaze does not move, but seated by the window, sees a tree in flower. A statue set upon affirmations and theses. Yet it is quite rare for us to keep watch while transfixed, our ecological niche includes a thousand movements, sometimes we even travel around the world out of admiration for the visible. The earth turns, our global lookout post has long since left stability behind, the sun itself, the giver of light, mobile, is apparently rushing towards another place in the universe. In most cases, the observer moves far or near, at greater or lesser speeds, and moves around the thing observed at least once. Bodies, boats, spaceships, our planet, all move; and photons set the upper speed limit; the world passes from landscape to panorama, from local to universal, rambling changes into method and vice versa. God no doubt saw the world and things, we on the other hand merely visit them: not only because of the site occupied by the body; not only by means of tools, instruments and machines; but also intellectually: each discipline, experiment or theorem, provides a view that has to be sought after, another movement. We visit the encyclopædia, if it exists, like the world, if it exists. And the speed of light limits the visible and the knowable alike, as well as our technical successes. Thus the act of visiting is equally valid for the empirical, the machine and abstraction. The visit we are just finishing here had no wish to separate them.
Nor did it separate research, control or inspection, legal and juridical activities sometimes invoked during punctilious and detailed examination. Thus warships have visiting rights on merchant ships, according to certain conventions and circumstances. Our visit did not separate scientific meaning from that imposed by force or law; nor the objects of the visit: landscapes, living bodies, persons whose visit it is appropriate to return. We have just crossed the North-West passage again, from crude or medical observation to social exchange and even to the God of theology when he wishes to manifest himself: the first attested meaning of the verb to visit.
In order to see, movements take paths, crossroads, interchanges, so that the examination goes into detail or moves on to a global synopsis: changes in dimension, sense and direction. Now the sensible, in general, holds together all the senses, dimensions and contents, like a knot or generalized exchanger. It is understood that by content we mean the different terrains through which the visit passes: places, world, statues and gardens, deserts, oceans and seas, weather, scenery at home and abroad, meadows changed into pages, the stated concrete or the claimed abstraction, the law and laws, mediæval hymns and the commandments of love, the topology of knots and the spectrum of colours . . . visits explore and detail all the senses of the sensible implicated or gripped in its knot. How could we see the compact capacity of the senses if we separated them? We have visited without dissociating the senses from the word visit. Analytical language alone unties the knot, but consequently the sensible is lost. It cannot have it both ways: separable elements and their interconnected totality.
But what must we do so that the senses are not separated? We could have visited them as a group: the group does not ever visit anything but itself and its noise, although it sometimes perceives a few fragments of what it has come to see. We would have had to assign proper names to all the participants in the journey and a character and identity to each one. Each character, with that title or name, would have discoursed, as you do, on a particular subject. Have you ever heard anyone depart from his script? A Latin name would have been given to someone holding forth on pages, a Christian first name to someone unveiling an ancient document, a Jewish name to someone describing the desert in the sun, a university title to the topologist and astronomer; a Greek would have recited the Odyssey, a Gascon would have celebrated the Garonne, and Stendhal, returning to the fray, would have told of the loves of Louise, one windy evening. Plato writes no differently. The contents in question untie themselves, one body at a time, each one burdened by speech like a wooden panel on its shoulders, on which its discourse would be written. Callicles, whose name means violence, speaks in Calliclean tones, handsome Alcibiades argues and disrupts, like the badly-behaved son of a rich man. Socrates exemplifies and interrupts, an elementary school teacher, Theetete dies as a geometer, none of them deviates from his role. A colloquium. Its subject: The Sensible. There, a psychoanalyst only ever speaks about his own institution, a representative of the analytic school discourses on the meaning or non-meaning of discourse, the resident Marxist is careful not to step outside class struggle, each one embodies his discipline, all of the named bodies fit neatly into tombs of wood or marble on which the details of their membership are engraved. Into each of these boxes, insert a cassette pre-recorded in the discipline box. The organizers of the conference press play on the control panel and everything is underway in the best possible way in the best of all possible conferences – the different disciplines express themselves. The analysis of the contents is already ‘untied’ by the separation of the bodies, the totality or set of bodies being the equivalent of the totality or set of languages. As a result, our bodies are taken out of the equation. The sensible is expressed by colloquia or language. Socrates and his friends die as soon as they hold a colloquium on the sensible, long before the Phaedo.
The mind sees, language sees, the body visits. It always goes beyond its site, by shifting position. The subject sees, the body visits, goes beyond its place, and quits its role and speech. In other terms: no body has ever smelt and smelt only the unique perfume of a rose. The intellect, perhaps, and language most certainly, carry out this performance of isolation and selection. The body smells a rose and a thousand surrounding odours at the same time as it touches wool, sees a complex landscape and quivers beneath waves of sound; at the same time as it refuses the gaudy sensible to imagine at will, meditate abstractly or fall into ecstasy, to work actively or interpret its state in ten different ways without ceasing to experience it. The body leaves the body in all senses, the sensible ties that knot, the sensible or the body never remains in the same territory or content but plunges into and lives in a perpetual exchanger, turbulence, whirlpool, circumstances, maintained as such until the moment of death, when the knot is untied, loosened and analysed, when turbulence unties its bond and vanishes into the floodtide. The body exceeds the body or fails, the most recent self goes beyond the previous one, identity is freed at every moment from such dependency; I feel therefore I pass, a cameleon in a gaudy multiplicity, I become a half-caste, quadroon, mulatto, octoroon, hybrid. How is the sensible I to be described by naming a fixed speaker for each discipline represented or role played in a science or colloquium? The sensible I splinters and changes direction, wavering and various, losing its self, unlocatable rather than hateful.7 If I am legion, how do I give versions of myself, and to whom? The word slides, falters, flows from description to story, or from reasoning to evocation, fiercely loyal to the state of things that the body lives and knows, visits the exchanger, knot, whirlpool, circumstances.
With the massive, floating given of the sensible, philosophy cannot be divided: into bodies, which are statues; or names, which are funeral masks; or into roles in dialogues or conferences which are useless theatre and politics; or disciplines, which are knowledge. Philosophy protects this infinitely precious treasure, still to be discovered in spite of millennia of fervent attention: the density of meaning knotted on itself and deployed in the world, seeking without finding another patiently deferred word.
We have visited the compactness of the given.
Mingled place
Not so long ago, in Rome: The Book of Foundations,8 I described a moiré and precisely historiated landscape of blended colours – striped, brightly-coloured, damask – called the transcendental place of history, made up of bits and pieces, localities. Master and slave struggle there, or blues against greens, a stadium contains the struggle; at the doors of the stadium the ticket offices open, one must pay to enter; the person who wins, inside, blue or green, slave or master, differs from the person who wins at the periphery because the latter is in possession of the cash register: his law is not dependent on the struggle nor on the game. The game changes its rules according to place. When you move through the marbled countryside, you find that it is heterogeneous in its rules and laws, a tissue of individual localities. Of course there are long moments of homogeneity when a single law is propagated over a considerable distance, but on balance these are quite rare. In general, laws are not generalized. While the Sabine men, philosophers, are entranced by the local struggle in the stadium between master and slave, the Romans swiftly kidnap the Sabine women. The law of the street differs from the rules of the game on the field. The stadium delimits a spatial area, its periphery provides the transition towards a quite different element, the neighbouring streets introduce a third one; three laws are in operation on this chequer-board – struggle, taxation and kidnapping.
This blended, striped, mixed place reappears in this book which speaks of it alone, describes it, attempts to see it and make it more clearly visible. A transcendental space again: a diverse, differentiated, variable moiré on which a thousand shapes and colours play, in every imaginable relief; studded with splotches, criss-crossed by long and short, open, closed and broken curves; pitted with wells and valleys, pleated by mountain passes and protuberances; you must imagine this pluridimensional variety, overload it with properties. A journey becomes an adventure there, with many encounters and most unexpected happenings – there, to see is to visit. The countryside is revealed, magnificent, beneath seamless, homogeneous spaces, pillars of the law where pure reason wanders, as the precondition of these smooth volumes. A bedizened, transcendental space, conditional but not general.
The term transcendental means general in the tradition preceding Kant: the latter gives the sense of conditional and general at the same time. Kant describes the habitat of classical science, the conditions of its possibility in the subject; yet the foundation in this subject of the Newtonian world of universal laws, drawn from experience, is informed by the same generality as these laws.
We have abandoned or lost such a habitat; the same science no longer offers subjects the same consensus; the conditional figures in a range of varied circumstances. We have learned to doubt water-tight generality, we have not often, nor with the same ease, come across other universal laws. Newton was lucky, with his serendipitous discovery: we no longer mistake a winning combination for the full set of numbers.
The global appears to us as an inflated local: thus Euclidian space, or mechanical time, or time taking its rhythm from numerical series; the sun shines, nothing new happening beneath it, a yellow dwarf in a little canton where the Copernican revolution has stirred up the neighbourhood; did the one God run the same risk amongst the small individual gods, as numerous as archangels, thrones and dominions? The general hides an inflated local, in the two unities, heaven and earth; but equally so for the self: I am legion and will remain so for a long time. Can this observation be called an astrophysical revolution?
We see a pudding of localities, a tatter, a damask chequer-board; if the transcendental exists we can only describe it as a patchwork of individual places. It is true that the general, an infrequent case, sometimes occurs, but by chance, like a winning number: beneath this seamless event, the conditional remains a motley assembly of local pages, a detailed, circumstantial landscape. This blended, shimmering, bedizened place lies beneath the Kantian transcendental, which covers it with its language: a particular dilated case of the general moiré, reason ignorant of its own luck. We see seamless, homogeneous, solar, theologal, verbal space as a sudden inflation, extension or erection, a straight path. Brightly-coloured non-standard multiplicity, hyper-abstract under the usual simplified abstraction, becomes, dare I say it, the general case.
This general moiré vibrates beneath our eyes, and dazzles us with richness and inexhaustible novelty: an infinite number of shades, strange reliefs, mountains and tunnels, valleys or watersheds, unexpected events on monotonous plateaux . . . Supposing we were to call it universal variety?
Transcendental place of history in the Book of Foundations where Rome, a township or local pagus, spreads its empire over the Mediterranean universe; transcendental place of geography in the course of the visit finishing: here this shimmering place can be seen, touched on the tattooed, ocellated skin, a supple plain of common sense, the underpinning of the senses where their peculiarities mingle; it is revealed or implied in the state of things, canvases, veils, varieties; is deployed in the totality of the arts that we call music, the multiple house of the Muses; it is here when the peacock’s tail of taste or the glowing fan of aromas opens; it is here, all in all, a body in its own right stitched together with many seams, a patched, thread-bare tatter; it is here as a pagan countryside, tissue, rag, formed of diverse pagi joined together with sticking plaster, an antique document visible on land and at sea, and that one can encounter by sounding the depths of space; it is here marked on the pages of this book, written with the express aim of redesigning it; moults of skin, the quivers of hearing, fans of taste, landscapes of sight, this is the sensorial – in other words, the common sense. Here is the underpinning for an empire of empiricism.
This transcendental, excessively formal, abstract conditional, this varied set with its individual peculiarities which is the basis for the sciences, does not reside, it seems, in the subject – we do not know the path that leads there – has no resonance in our languages, but constitutes, quite simply, the common place discovered in the exercise of the senses when they attempt to forget the anæsthetizing effect of language and the social constraints of knowledge.
The transcendental presents like our world: the most abstract as well as the most immediate thing. The real – touched, tasted, seen, heard – bears a striking resemblance, as though it were its twin, to the apex of abstraction. It could even be said that language and knowledge delay the moment of their nuptials, like obligatory ticket counters at which we have to fulfil an infinite number of formalities.
After the nuptials of body and mind, we shall now celebrate that of space and time.