One Speaks
'In the beginning was the Word'. The Word, Logos. But what if there were no beginning, and no Logos, only logoi in the plural? Speech, says Sinthome, does not simply instantiate the transcendental structure of language, as though language as such and in general exists before and after its speakers. The structure itself is in the individuals who speak, even as it cannot be reduced to any one individual speaker. As an emergent pattern, it has a kind of agency of its own, depending upon the relations of feedback that give it a ever-provisional substance, letting it quiver above a particular community of speakers like a rainbow over a waterfall.
That is what a language is, or an idiom, and as it quivers, it changes, too; its life does not depend upon an act of History [Geschichte], as it does for Heidegger. True, a language can come close to death, to routine, to ruts well worn; but language can also be reborn, it gives itself to other uses as it is nothing other than this giving, abandoning itself to those uses that flicker between speakers. Between them, and not in them - language is not an interior affair, but belongs to our interrelation. Between us, and floating among the assemblage of which we are a part - the network of practices, of institutions that mean our utterances are collective and never simply individual, that we must be thought together with others, as part of a whole that we speak when we speak.
Not 'I speak', the linguistic cogito then, but 'we speak'. But not that, either, for it is not that a collective subject replaces the individual one. An assemblage is not a 'we', a collection of individuals; when I speak it is to enage the 'one speaks' of language - to engage, speaking in the first person, but also to be engaged, so that it is language that speaks of itself. Of itself: but as that structure that cannot be reduced to the individuals that speak it, which has a consistency, a patterning confirmed and deepened by those movements of feedback between us.
One speaks - the collective, the quivering rainbow, rooted in nothing and spanning through nothing. Language like a swarm of midges over a river. Or like the flashing light on the river's surface. But in Deleuze's ontology, there is no river, or there is only flashing, only clouds and clouds of midges. Language nothing yet, nothing in itself, but that floats through an assemblage and cannot be thought in its absence. Nothing in itself, but still more than the individuals who speak it. Nothing - and much less than the enunciation of the Word, the Logos that stands at the beginning of everything.
Trust
No logos, as Sinthome says, but only local and emergent logoi. Logoi at different levels of scale and temporality, converging and diverging in different waves. And language as only one way in which these logoi can be thought.
The early Heidegger allows logos to translate Rede, discourse, using these words to indicate the common, shared world of which we are part and that lends itself to particular articulations. Rede is to be rigorously distinguished from Gerede, chatter; we will lose the things themselves by our idle talk. But if talk is never idle, if the logos is constituted by what we say such that language is not understood merely to articulate but to act? If the shared world is also what is made by particular uses of language (particular logoi in which language is engaged and engages us)?
Then perhaps there is a way of reclaiming for ourselves the efficacy of language, of speaking in a new way, not in a new language, but letting the old one resound differently. To disarticulate language, to discover the breaks at the level of syntax, to discover (to let there be discovered) a new style (a language within language, a rainbow that leaps up from the streaming of language) ...
Acts of reading and writing, says Sinthome, are not the acts of a disembodied spirit who would judge, select, reject, dismiss ... If the mind is the brain, reading leaves a physical trace; texts enter and interpenetrate me; I cannot have done with them even when I think I've had done with them. And so we've all been all the names in history; discourses by a million writers have coursed through us.
So too with writers, who have so many other writers in them, part of them. For a long time, I suppose a writer felt part of the tradition of these predecessors; the aim was to renew existing idioms, to give life to existing forms. With modernity, the burden on the artist changes: is it sufficient to trust the judgement of others with respect to his work? his own instinct? The latter seems more authorative than the former - and yet a modern artist like Kafka, as Josipovici has said, 'seem to have been able to develop and grow through an innate trust in the act of writing itself, in their willingness to embrace confusion and uncertainty and to find a new voice in the process'.
A new voice: the young Miles Davis tells his father he's dropping out of Julliard to play in jazz clubs. That's okay so long as you find your own style, says his father, or at least this is what's recounted in the autobiography. Your own style, your voice: then is style to be conceived in terms of individuality, as the mark of an original artist? Is it the result of deliberate effort, to be worked at or improved?
For Deleuze, style is to be thought as a way an idiom (language, music, painting ...) might be inhabited, and not in terms of the activity of a particular person. As Lecercle puts it in his account of Deleuze's thought, 'the subject is not the origin, but the effect of her style: the author does not have style, it is style that has an author, that is inscribed, and in a way embodied, in an author's name'. The subject can be understood as an individual, to be sure - as this author, this musician - but it is also a collective, an assemblage that speaks through her. 'If there is a subject, it is a subject without identity', Deleuze writes.
Then what, in this context, does it mean to place one's trust in writing, as opposed to the authoritative judgements of others? What of the significance of being found by style (of letting a new voice float through an assemblage), and affirming it in turn? In the beginning was the Word, the Logos - but what of the logoi that are born with style?
Leaning Against the Wind
An example. The 8 year old Thomas Bernhard is cycling, and cycling as far and as fast as he can. His bicycle belongs to his guardian, but he has reclaimed it as his own, painting it silver and cycling around the countryside. Today he has resolved to visit his Aunt in Salzburg, 22 miles away. It's a long trip; how can a child cycle this far, and on his own? But as little Bernhard does so, it is with the dream of joining the cycling elite, even though he's too small to reach the pedals while he is sitting on the saddle.
The 8 year old knows his trip is forbidden, that he might be punished, but he thinks his audacity will be so admired it will annul his offence. One of his stockings is torn and covered with oil; he grows weary, and the road seems to become ever longer. Then - disaster - his bicycle chain breaks, and he tumbles into a ditch. It's dark, and there are 7 or 8 miles to go, his bike is ruined and his clothes are torn ...
Reading, rereading Gathering Evidence, I imagine the mature Bernhard as an action painter, spilling great loops of paint on a canvas laid flat. Great iterative loops, again and again, but each time growing wilder, more hyperbolic, stretching the sentence. Bernhard has his eye like Pollock on the whole of the composition, but if there is structural cohesion, exemplary control, it is cohesion in collapse, and into which every detail is caught up. The book turns like a whirlwind, gathering in its massive sentences all and everything such that there is never a distinct compositional focus, and no detail matters more than any other; there's only the whole, the all-at-once that is reaffirmed on the canvas of each of his books.
So with Bernhard's narration of his cycling trip. The trip is the prose; to cycle like Kafka's Red Indian, leaning into the wind is also to write against the good sense of writing. The effort of the 8 year old to climb upon on his silver-painted bike is the same as the 50 year old who writes the last volume of his memoirs ...
The maelstrom of the prose is the maelstrom of language; Bernhard writes against the wind, against style in the effort of the prose, its forward movement as it gathers everything up in its momentum. How did he arrive at it, his style? By working at it, improving it - by mastering a literary skill? But its controlled madness, held together at the brink of falling apart, the great loops of the sentences rolling spastically forward is not the result of a deliberate organisation of language. Discord, disequilibrium: style strains language all the way to the point of breaking (but it does not break).
Standard language stammers, trembles and cries ... but Bernhard's inimitable style cannot be reduced to the brutality of his experiences. The events his autobiography reports are co-constituted by the manner of their telling; one feeds the other; his life is what his style permits, as it no longer represents the world, but enacts the forces that comprise it. Bernhard who writes as Van Gogh paints stars buried in the wells of night, or Pollock paints looping spirals - it is affect and intensity that dictates the content of his work, even his autobiography. Affect, intensity, as they lead Bernhard to select those events that enact what occurs when he begins to write.
Pitted Against Everything
In An Indication of the Cause, the second part of the English edition of the autobiography (though the first one Bernhard wrote), the 13 year old Bernhard takes up a scholarship in a school in Salzburg, even as the city is bring bombed from the air. Misery sweeps over him; he tries to hang himself. Bernhard's prose is delirious with horror. In the third part, The Cellar, the 15 year old Bernhard drops out of school and takes up a position as a grocer's apprentice in a grim housing project where he would contract tuberculosis.
'I was pitting myself against everything', he writes. Against the school and its teachers, against Salzburg, even against the dreams his beloved grandfather held for his protégé. Yes, against everything and leaning against the wind. The fourth volume, A Breath, does not tell of the first story Bernhard published in 1950, nor of his encounter with his lifeperson, with whom he travelled and as he later recalls, received terse encouragement for his writing.
By the time he published Frost, Bernhard discovers his style, or it finds him, such that as author, as writer, he is pitted against everything- against Salzburg, against Austria, against the Nazi past, against Austrian Catholicism: everything, and these selected, these drawn into the maelstrom of his narratives because of the style that found him and to the level of which he raised himself to be able to write. Ah, that style, that streaming that survives Bernhard and reaches us even in English translation.
In the Cold, the fifth volume, relates Bernhard's mother's painful death from cancer, and his own return from the sanatorium. His grandfather dies too, and he finds the death of his forebear, who laid claim to the tradition of Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, liberates his own early attempts to write. Bernhard reads his own poems to his dying mother, and it begins, that leap that takes him past the tradition of his grandfather, past philosophy and the whole of literature. A leap that braces him against the whole of what has become his past. He is the last of his line, he's been picked out. There'll be no other; his style is inimitable, but he is only a vortex in the whorl of his writing. Bernhard is a name for us of a plughole around which all of culture seems to swirl. But how did he pull out the plug?
The Hatred of Writing
It is not that Bernhard confirms, by his writing, the bygone world of which he was once a part and his own place within it. It is that this world is also born from his style: that a kind of hatred arises from the activity of writing. And this more than the hatred for Austria, the Nazis or the Catholic church. Or that swept up that hatred as part of its movement, its perpetual agitation.
Rereading, reflecting, I wonder if it is a surprise that the object of hatred was more fitting for an Austrian postwar writer than for others. The total compromise of authority, of state and church, and perhaps of the German language ... And I think that with Bernhard the hatred that is part of style (the hatred of authority, of cultural models, or of an inherited model of literary style) met with what legitimately called forth hatred in an infinite spiral, rising up into a whirlwind of loathing, and that this was the motor of the storm of his work, that let it swirl into the stormclouds of European modernity.
How did Bernhard come to trust in his style (the style that lent itself to him, and from which as a writer he was born)? Was it through his lifeperson, who supported and encouraged his writing (but discouraged it, too, when necessary - causing him to throw whole manuscripts in the fire)? Was it the memory of his grandfather, who wrote, he said, for the unborn? Or was it as he found the correlate of its perfect storm in the horror that was perpetually reborn in Bernhard's Austria, that fed back into the vast and looping sentences, and looping repetition of his books? But those same sentences were in search of the hatred that could justify them, and how could Bernhard, born of his style live but as he was pitted against everything?
In the beginning was the Word - is that it? Or is it that literature (modern literature, our eternally new modernity) writes against the Word as the good sense of language? In the end (modern literature always belongs to the end, to the last gasp) was the Word and the tearing down of the Word. And at the end, where writing was impossible (for modern literature begins with the impossibility of writing) is also the beginning, the logoi, the thousand styles of those writers who are born from the style they discovered and that discovered them.