Derrida on the Metaphysics of Presence

Of Grammatology, one of Derrida’s earliest works, is in part an apologetics of writing in response to a long historical preference for the spoken word.

Spoken words are the symbols of mental experience and written words are the symbols of spoken words. – Aristotle

A persistent attribute of Western thinking is the “metaphysics of presence.” Truths are eternal, but in temporal human existence the eternal manifests itself as presence. Humans live in the present; therefore any eternally true idea has to make itself known in the present. The true idea appears before our conscious minds in the immediacy of our thinking of it. Truth is eternal logos; speech is verbal representation of logos. Once truth comes to mind it can immediately be spoken. Speech and thought are nearly inseparable in time; there is no delay between thinking an idea and speaking it. Speech is characterized by presence: it is produced in the ongoing stream of moments that characterize human existence. Consequently speech has been regarded as the most authentic way of representing truth. Writing is deferred speech: there is a delay between the thought and the hand’s inscription of the words representing the thought. Writing, being not present, is not as “true” as speech.

Derrida observes other aspects of speech that lend it authority and priority. Historically, spoken language emerged before writing. Children learn to speak before they learn to write. Writing is tangibly external: it requires inscribing marks on a material surface in the world, a world that is not eternal or ideal. Speech is internal, produced inside the mouth and throat; it comes out with the breath that is intrinsic to living. I hear myself at the same time that I speak. Speech takes place in the presence of a listener, whereas text might not be read until long after it was written, if ever. Speech is present, immaterial, transparent, alive.

Derrida doesn’t try to argue that writing is as close to the moment, as present, as speech is. Rather, he directs his critique against presence itself. He doesn’t try to step out of the moment into eternity; instead, he embeds presence in a broader temporal and spatial context, undermining it from within.

The movements of deconstruction do not destroy structures from the outside. They are not possible and effective, nor can they take accurate aim, except by inhabiting those structures. Inhabiting them in a certain way, because one always inhabits, and all the more when one does not expect it.

– Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, 1967

In deconstructing the metaphysics of presence Derrida leans heavily on Heidegger, who contended that human existence isn’t a continuous presence, a perpetual living in the moment, but is rather a duration. Being in time means being embedded in an interval whose temporal horizons stretch into the past and the future. It means having been born in a particular place and time and inevitably dying in some unpredictable place and time. These horizons inevitably influence the way we live in the moment. Ideas aren’t always present either; they take shape from prior ideas and memories, work themselves out, come to fruition, become transformed into different ideas. Ideas have history and trajectory — just like human lives. The present moment is only a trace of temporal duration as it moves from the past into future.

Again from Heidegger, Derrida rejects interiority as a criterion for truth. For humans, to be is to be in the world. In earthly existence there can be no transcendence of materiality, of incarnation, of place. The Western metaphysics of presence isn’t just temporal; it’s also spacial: it presumes the direct presence of eternal truths before the mind. But if being means being-in, then human truths, like human beings, are in the world. To uncover truths in the world requires investigation, movement, interaction with the world in its extension.

Truths, rather than being always already present in the mind, move through space and time. Truths are dynamic, taking shape not only in the unchangeable and the atemporal, but also in the play of differences across space and time. There are irreducible differences between idea and word, word and speech, speaking and hearing. Human thought depends on memory, which is the trace of past moments inscribed on the mind — so in a way even memory is exterior to thought. Likewise the signifiers of language are inscribed in memory — so speech depends on the temporal delay between learning the language and using it.

In a Heideggerian framework presence no longer has priority over deferral and spacing. Material that is immediately available to consciousness doesn’t take precedence over material retrieved from memory or self-reflection or investigation. Speaking/listening isn’t a more authentic means of communication than writing/reading. Derrida doesn’t propose that writing take precedence over speech, that reflection dominate spontaneity. Rather, he calls for an end to the represssion of pluri-dimensional symbolic thought. All conceivable ways of thinking and communicating should be explored and encouraged to the fullest.

Implications? In psychotherapy, it might be less important to close the gap between client and therapist. Therapy need not concentrate solely on the present moment of client-therapist conversation; memories, dreams, reflections, even writings, can find a place in the therapeutic relationship. In Biblical study, the spatio-temporal gap between writer and reader can become a source of meaning rather than just an obstacle. And an event in which God’s presence was experienced in real time doesn’t necessarily take priority over the event’s subsequent commemoration in text.

Language is Not Linguistic?

Poststructuralists contend that all human experience is linguistically mediated — or, less dramatically, mediated by interpretive matrices that are structured like languages. That’s because humans think linguistically, and impose linguistic-type structures on everything. Language is such an all-pervading medium that we can have no assurance that human understanding of the world is true, that it directly corresponds to the underlying phenomena to which it refers. In linguistic terms, the linguistic signifiers don’t necessarily signify anything outside language itself — or, as Derrida puts it, there is nothing outside the text.

Humans are the only language-using animals that we know of. Other creatures interact with the world, but since they’re not language-users it seems pretty darned unlikely that they structure their experiences linguistically. For example, all creatures react instinctively to potential food sources, being drawn by sensory receptors specifically to stuff which that particular species can digest and metabolize. We can describe this instinct linguistically, but that doesn’t mean the creatures themselves operate according to our linguistic description.

We humans also react instinctively to foods. Newborns, who can’t yet structure their experiences linguistically, instinctively eat nourishing food and reject other stuff — though they do have the unsettling tendency to put weird things in their mouths. It’s possible that, once higher-level thought processes kick in, young children no longer react to food out of pure instinct, that thinking about foods linguistically becomes integral to their reactions. We can override our instincts; e.g., by not eating that second piece of cake and developing a refined palate for wines. Still, the taste buds and salivary glands continue to work automatically. I don’t know whether psychological research has been able to parse out the intricate interrelationships of instinct and cognitive-linguistic processing. I would tentatively speculate that at least some aspects of human experience operate non-linguistically, but that any human experience can be described linguistically if we think about it.

Once we’ve framed an instinctive reaction in cognitive-linguistic terms, can we ever again have the raw instinctive experience? I suspect we can. Much of what we do is automatic. We might be able to arrive at a conscious awareness of an instinctive act, an awareness that we may be able to retrieve at will, but meanwhile the instinct continues to operate automatically just as it always has. We can talk about going on a diet, but that doesn’t mean we don’t salivate at the sight or smell of a nice juicy steak.

We react instinctively, just like all other animals, bu we also perform distinctively human cultural acts without being consciously aware of them. Consider something like personal space. Americans feel comfortable speaking to one another up to a certain proximity; if someone gets too close we get nervous. Other cultures tolerate, even prefer, getting right up in each others’ faces. Though our reactions seem instinctive, clearly this is at least partly a cultural phenomenon, an element of social etiquette, like shaking right hands or hugging or kissing each other’s cheeks as a greeting. If personal space preferences were instinctive, they would be pretty much universal. Still, it’s possible to go through a lifetime without ever being aware of our cultural personal space preference. Once it enters our awareness we can describe the parameters of personal space in structural linguistic terms, but is it intrinsically structured this way? I doubt it. I think human interactions generate emergent collective structures that aren’t the result of conceptual-linguistic operations of the people involved. Consequently there’s no reason to assert that these emergent phenomena structure themselves like language.

Even language itself is mostly automatic. You can overhear people talking and, without even listening or thinking about it, you can understand what’s being said. You take this automatic language processing for granted until you go to a place where people don’t speak your language. You know they understand each other, but you cannot understand them. The language processing centers of your brain don’t even get activated. To you it’s a stream of human vocalization without linguistic meaning. You become more aware of the raw sounds (the strange r and u sounds in French), the rhythm (English accentuates syllables, French accentuates phrases) the volume (Americans generally speak more loudly than French people). Language is an emergent human artifact that is structured linguistically, and it operates linguistically in automated brain activities that don’t require conscious attention. A foreign language in which you’re not fluent doesn’t affect you the same way. You can pay conscious attention and try to understand as best you can, but once you stop paying attention the words and phrases recede back into nonlinguistic sound streams.

French schoolchildren study with intensity the structure of their own language — the grammar and verb conjugations and syntactical structures — in a way that American students never do. French people claim it’s because French is a more complicated language than English, but that seems unlikely. It’s just that they subject their language to more conscious scrutiny than we do. French people can probably tell you when they’re using the pluperfect, but just because we Americans can’t name it doesn’t mean we don’t use it — and use it correctly. In a way language is like personal space: a cultural medium that we don’t have to think about in order to participate in it. Language-using is second nature, automatic, unconscious — a lot like instinct, or like personal space. Language is a structured medium, but the cognitive structures by which we describe language aren’t necessarily intrinsic to language itself. The words we use to describe the structure of language are part of the vocabulary of that language, but it’s not clear we use grammatical rules when we happen to use a pluperfect construction in the flow of speech. In that sense you could say that language isn’t linguistic.

What are the implications for psychotherapy? We do a lot of things automatically, without consciously thinking about them. Instincts, cultural practices, even speech operate mostly at this automatic level, perhaps without our ever having paid any conscious attention to what we’re doing and saying. These activities may be well-structured to the point of rigidity, but the structures aren’t directly accessible to conscious scrutiny. Calling attention to someone’s behaviors and describing them in words is to impose an interpretive framework on these behaviors that may be completely alien to the structured matrix in which the behavior patterns take shape. Even calling attention to the words and phrases a person uses means imposing a different kind of cognitive-linguistic structure on language itself. This sort of reframing of behavior and speech can be done, and we can get skilled at it. But we should have less assurance that cognitive-linguistic reframing will readily translate into the automated “languages” that govern behavior and speech on an everyday basis. Bringing a maladaptive reaction into awareness, making sense of it, assigning words to describe it, doesn’t mean that the automated structures generating the reaction will realign themselves appropriately, spontaneously making our reactions more “sensible.” This is a sad fact of which we’re all too well aware.

I’m a Real Good Listener

What the hell?
– Sam Shepard, Paris, Texas, 1984

Even if you’ve never seen this movie you might feel like you had. It begins with aerial scenes of the bleak and iconic majesty of the American Southwest. Ry Cooder’s slow slide guitar dominates the soundtrack. A man walks: he looks bad, but his stride is strong. He stops, drinks the last swig from a water bottle, drops it, walks into the void that stretches endlessly before him. He comes upon the barest outpost of human habitation. He steps inside a dark and forlorn bar; Mexican music plays on the juke box. He grabs a handful of ice and eats it, passes out. A man sitting by himself drinking a beer sees him fall and speaks the first line, almost five minutes into the film. The main character, Travis, the walking man, doesn’t say a word until twenty minutes later. That word is Paris.

Paris, Texas is one of those films about alienation in America, where the cities are as empty as the endless desert, where people are as isolated from one another as the stone buttes and mesas standing mute sentinel. This variation on the theme, written by playwright-actor Sam Shepard and directed by the German Wim Wenders, is a really good one.

Travis’s brother picks him up and drives him back to L.A. It turns out nobody’s heard a word from Travis in four years; Travis’s wife Jane is gone too — it’s obvious that something terrible must have happened. Their son Hunter, now eight, has been staying with Travis’s brother and his wife ever since. Slowly, gently, Travis becomes reacquainted with his son, who had all but forgotten him. One day Travis buys an old junker car, picks Hunter up at school, and the two of them begin the long drive back to Houston to find Jane.

Travis and Hunter follow Jane to what looks like a warehouse in a scruffy part of town. Leaving Hunter in the car, Travis goes in the warehouse. It’s broad daylight but inside it seems like nighttime. Several women are lounging; one is partially undressed. A man tells Travis he’s in the wrong place, escorts him upstairs. Two ranks of booths line a central corridor; each booth, numbered, is entered through a cloth curtain. Travis tries booth 10. He takes a seat in a dimly-lit room. He picks up the receiver of a telephone that sits on the table in front of him and places his order: a blonde girl, about 25 years old. There’s a glass partition separating Travis from the other half of the booth, which has been decorated to look like a poolside: beach chairs, umbrella, inflatable toys. A girl comes in wearing a nurse outfit. “Why aren’t you looking at me,” Travis asks her; “can’t you see me?” “Listen sweetheart, if I could see you I wouldn’t be working here.” The glass partition is a one-way mirror: Travis can see the girl but she can’t see him. She’s not the right one: Travis gets up, walks down the corridor, goes in booth 6, sits down.

Travis sits in the dim light, his eyes closed, his hand shielding his face. We hear the door on the other side open, then the girl’s voice, electronically distorted, as if we’re listening through the phone with Travis: “Are you out there? That’s okay, if you don’t want to talk, you know. I don’t want to talk either sometimes. I just like to stay silent. Do you mind if I sit down?” “No,” Travis replies. Now he looks through the glass and sees Jane, dressed in a long fuzzy pink sweater. This booth looks like a cheap motel room without the bed: she stands next to a side table on which are placed a lamp, a telephone, and an intercom speaker box. A wall-mounted TV flickers over Jane’s right shoulder.

“Am I looking at your face now,” Jane asks. Travis doesn’t answer. Jane laughs: “Oh God, it don’t matter. If there’s anything you want to talk about, I’ll just listen, all right? I’m a real good listener.” Travis is silent. “Is there something… I don’t know, is there something I can do for you?” Pause. “Do you mind if I take off my sweater?” No reply. “I’ll just take off my sweater.” She reaches for the hem and begins lifting it. “No, no, don’t, please, please leave it on.” She does. “I’m sorry,” Jane says, “I just don’t know exactly what it is that you want.” “I don’t want anything.” “Well, why’d you come in here then?” “I want to talk to you.” Pause.

Jane, who has been looking directly at Travis, even though she can’t see him, now turns her head to the side. “Is there something you want to tell me?” “No.” Jane faces forward again. “You can tell me, I can keep a secret.” “Is that all you do is just talk,” Travis asks her. “Well, yeah, yeah, mostly. And listen.” “What else do you do?” “Nothing really. We’re not allowed to see the customers out of here.” Now the perspective changes. We’re still seeing Jane, but now we see the frame of the glass, bordered by raw insulation. We realize we’re now on the other side of the glass looking at Jane’s reflection. This is what she sees: when from the other side she seems to be looking at Travis, she’s actually looking at herself. Now it’s Travis’s voice that’s distorted; we’re hearing it through the intercom in this fake motel room. He gets aggressive, essentially accusing her of being a whore. She looks frightened, says she’s sorry, maybe he wants to talk to one of the other girls; she gets up to leave. “No no, please please please don’t go.” “I just don’t think I’m the one you want to talk to,” Jane says. We flip back to Travis’s side of the glass wall. We see Jane sit back down; Travis, teary-eyed now, apologizes. “All right,” Jane says soothingly through the earphone; “that’s okay.” Travis lays the receiver down on the table and stands up.

Now we’re back on Jane’s side of the glass; her voice is undistorted, open, clear. “I know how hard it is to talk to strangers sometimes. Just relax. Relax and tell me what’s on your mind. I’ll listen. To you. I don’t mind listening. I do it all the time.” We see what she sees: dimly illuminated in the lamplight, the phone receiver sits on the table in the otherwise-dark compartment on the other side. Jane doesn’t know if the faceless man has left, or if he’s standing there, or what he’s doing…

Which Machine?

11pm: Samantha plays herself Videotronic. Choose the machine you resemble!

Most people want pretty much the same things: happiness, comfort, affection, community, health, esteem, entertainment, pleasure, money. The common wants can be fairly predictably satisfied. If you don’t know what you want, you look around and see what other people seem to want, people who seem happy, comfortable, successful — people you want to be. Demand generates more demand. The marketplace serves largely to satisfy these wants.

Then there are the “higher” and “deeper” things: knowledge, beauty, excellence, virtue. Climbing up or digging down demands effort, persistence, perhaps even self-denial. Instead of converging on what the others want, those who pursue higher and deeper endeavors diverge onto unexpected and divergent directions. Because they’re exploring the unknown, there’s no telling what will satisfy them. This a small, non-cohesive, discriminating and unpredictable smattering of individuals.

Suppose two psychotherapy shops open on the same street. One shop sells happiness, health, success, support, self-esteem. The other shop sells understanding, meaning, discipline, discovery. Both shops put a listing in the phone book, both charge the same fees. Which shop is likely to get more business? Which shop is more likely to satisfy the customers?

Temporal Unveiling

Being human means being in the world with one another. It also means being in time. The present dominates everyday life, enmeshing and engaging us in a complex medium full of things, events, other people, activities, settings, and so on. The present exceeds our ability fully to come to grips with it. Besides, the individual’s temporal horizon always overflows its bounds; past and future intrude on his interpretation of the present. Each person’s interpretive framework is shaped largely by the sociocultural context into which he is born and his individual history. But life leans into a future of potential, uncertainty, and eventually death: this future horizon beyond experience also shapes the way an individual interprets the present.

The medium in which we live day to day isn’t just an array of raw stuff. Human culture and a multitude of individual conscious agents organize the stuff, linking it structurally and dynamically into meaningful patterns that extend across the world. It’s like an extremely complex verbal and nonverbal language spoken by the world. The individual can never master this language because he is embedded in it, part of its grammar and syntax. The individual can become partly aware of the language that speaks him — the norms, expectations, social interactions, and behavior patterns that shape his life. Most often this awareness results from a glitch, a kind of structural anomaly revealed when the individual finds himself out of sync with the medium he lives in. Traces of the anomaly may register as an emotional or behavioral reaction that clashes with the world and that is not immediately available to conscious understanding or verbalization. The client’s individual reaction is like a finger pointing to the world. The analyst’s job is to follow the pointing finger back to the anomaly that triggered the client’s reaction, bringing it into awareness.

The past shapes the present. Instincts that had survival value to our forebears in the evolutionary environment may or may not prove adaptive in the contemporary world. Our perceptions and understanding are shaped by the particular time and place we were born into, equipping us with a shared interpretive framework that seems like “second nature” to us. Each person’s individual history and experiences also influence the ways he interprets subsequent events, resulting in idiosyncracies in the framework that are persistent and unique but that can also be stereotypic, repetitive, inflexible. Battles fought in the past can leave scars, and the psychological battlements survive in the form of frequently-rehearsed and ritualized personal “creeds” by which we explain to ourselves why things are the way they are. The analyst, by aligning his horizon with the client’s, can expose components of the client’s interpretive framework that he carries with him from the past. By leading this joint exploration in an interpersonal context of trust and care, the therapist can help the client loosen up his framework, making it possible to experiment with alternatives.

The future also shapes the present. There’s a forward lean to life, a sense that events are always in the process of unfolding. The void looms before us, beckoning us toward the protean emptiness that is also the wellspring of pure potential. Desires and interests push us in uncertain directions toward unknown ends. Ideas are taking shape; we can’t quite grasp things; we search for the right words; awareness is dawning but hasn’t arrived yet. We have an “aha” experience – or an “oh no” experience. What does it mean? We have no words because we have no understanding – yet. The therapist can help the client bring events to their resolution, transforming ambiguity into an awareness that can nudge or totally reshape the client’s interpretive framework.

The ways in which we interpret the world, other people, and ourselves are to a large extent unavailable to our conscious awareness. We may have repressed some of it, pushing it deep underground where it lurks like a malignancy until the therapist, like a surgeon inserting some sort of psychoscope into the client’s subconscious, illuminates it and burns it away. But for the most part our interpretive process is so rapid and automatic that we aren’t even aware we’re doing it. It’s implicit; it’s “second nature;” it “goes without saying.” Because we exercise our personal hermeneutic outside of conscious awareness we can’t think about it, talk about it, evaluate it. Through conversation, through the gradual alignment of interpretive horizons, through triangulating on the world together, the therapist and the client can make at least part of the client’s interpretive framework available for conscious consideration. Once it’s out in the open, the framework becomes subject to change.

Interpersonal Hermeneutics

In prior posts about Biblical exegesis we’ve addressed hermeneutical considerations. How should texts be interpreted? Can the reader discern the author’s intent? Can we identify the interpretive community in which the text is embedded? Does every reader impose his own meaning on the text? In comments on prior posts we’ve also alluded to the importance of trying to understand what people mean by what they say and do. What are their intentions? What is she trying to tell me? Am I missing something? Am I reading things into the situation? Are we talking past each other? Does anyone really understand me? Figuring out how to “read” social interaction can framed as a kind of interpersonal hermeneutics.

Donald Davidson asserts the indeterminacy of interpretation, such that multiple interpretations can make sense of the same behavior or utterance without there being any absolute basis for determining which of the alternative meanings is the right one. Interpretation occurs within a holistic framework that includes ideas, behaviors, language, attitudes, and relationships. The interpretive framework affects the way an individual maps ideas and words onto phenomena in the world. However, the phenomena do exist independent of interpretive frameworks, so interpretation cannot float free of contact with the world. Because there is correspondence between meaning and the world, interpretations can be evaluated in terms of the individual propositions about the world. What would it take to understand what someone else means? Davidson proposes a process of triangulation, by which two people orient themselves to the same phenomenon in the world. Through triangulation it becomes possible to arrive at knowledge about one’s own interpretive framework, the other’s framework, and the world. Language is the primary medium in which triangulation takes place. Self, other and the world are inextricably linked in frameworks of meaning; knowing any one of them entails also knowing the other two.

Gadamer likewise proposes that a person can know only from inside a particular interpretive framework, which establishes the “horizon” of what the person can understand. Whereas Davidson focuses on individual interpretive frameworks, Gadamer looks at cultural frameworks that shape the understanding of individual members of a culture. Stanley Fish refers to “interpretive communities,” groups of people with shared attitudes and beliefs who essentially “write” the ways in which behavior and speech are to be interpreted. While the shared framework of an interpretive community defines meaning, the framework itself is usually unstated and inaccessible to conscious awareness. For Gadamer, the interpretive framework can be detected and critiqued only through conversation with someone who comes from another community, who understands the world through a different interpretive framework. In conversation differences in the interpretive horizons of the two people emerge, resulting in misunderstanding. Through questioning one another it becomes possible for two individuals operating within different interpretive frameworks to converge, extending the horizon of understanding for both of them.

The client in a therapeutic relationship may have an inadequate interpretive framework for understanding himself, other people, and the world. Further, he may not interpret things the same way as other people around him do. Others may interpret his behavior in ways he does not intend or realize or grasp. These interpretive gaps can result in confusion, anger, failed expectations, and a sense of isolation. There is no way to know which interpretive framework is the right one, or even the best one. However, it is possible for people with different points of view to “fuse” their horizons. Through conversation and questioning the therapist can align his own interpretive framework with the client’s, in effect seeing the world the way the client sees it. He can thereby help clarify gaps between the client’s framework and other possible frameworks. Through triangulation the therapist can evaluate individual elements in the client’s evaluative framework. By comparing understandings of worldly phenomena, the therapist and client can jointly identify differences in the ways their ideas and expressions correspond with the world. Through this conversational process, alternating between community and individual levels and between the holistic framework and the individual elements of that framework, the therapist and the client can explore the client’s difficulties in interpreting himself, others, and the world.

The Therapeutic Relationship

Yesterday I proposed that therapy is an alternative social reality. Today I explore the relational nature of therapeutic reality. Does this seem right?

The therapeutic reality is relational. It isn’t a set of techniques or procedures, nor is it driven toward the attainment of particular goals. It is the establishment of a particular kind of engagement between individuals, a dynamic situation of being with one another in a distinct sort of hetero-social reality.

The therapeutic relationship is distinct and asymmetrical. Unlike friendships or collegial relationships characteristic of ordinary social reality, the client’s perspective in the relationship is central. The therapist engages in the therapeutic relationship specifically for the sake of the client. However, the asymmetry does not extend farther than this. The therapeutic relationship need not purposely recapitulate other asymmetrical relationships in which the client has previously participated; e.g., between child and parent, student and teacher, patient and doctor, performer and coach, worker and employer, parishioner and priest. The client’s participation in such relationships may affect his perceptions of the therapeutic relationship, and the client may transfer these other stereotypic asymmetries to the therapeutic relationship. While such transferences may prove insightful in the therapeutic engagement, the therapist need not structure the relationship so as to simulate and to relive these transferences.

The relationship is based on care. The therapist cares for the client and regards the well-being of the client as his primary concern in the relationship. The therapist must establish his trustworthiness to the client, that the therapist is not attempting to exploit the client, nor to reduce the client to an object under inspection, nor to treat the client as an instrument for achieving the therapist’s goals, even if those goals refer back to the success/adjustment/health of the client. Whatever understanding or affection the therapist experiences in the therapeutic relationship is directed primarily toward the well-being of the client, not for the sake of the therapist.

The relationship moves in the direction of personal and interpersonal understanding. Every individual understands himself, the world, and other people through a particular interpretive perspective: a way of making sense of phenomena and ascribing meaning to them. Based in care for the client, the therapist tries: (a) to understand the client’s perspective, (b) to help the client understand his own perspective, and (c) to help the client understand the therapist’s perspective. In the course moving toward mutual understanding of one another’s perspectives, the therapeutic relationship emerges into a joint interpretive perspective in which both therapist and client participate. Nonetheless, this joint perspective remains asymmetrical: it arises in care for the client and for the client’s sake.

The relationship is artificial. The asymmetrical therapeutic relationship is not characteristic of everyday social reality. What occurs in the therapeutic relationship may bear little resemblance to social engagement outside the context of the therapeutic relationship. The care within which the therapist engages the client, the asymmetrical joint perspective that emerges from interaction between client and therapist: these need not serve as exemplars for establishing relationships in everyday social reality.

Therapy as Alternative Social Reality

I’m trying to think about what kind of psychological practice I might like to launch, one that has a kind of postmodern feel to it. I begin by thinking about realities, with some references to the series of recent posts about “topias.” This is all very fluid, so please jump in with comments, suggestions, corrections, etc.

What passes for reality is an ordinary everydayness of being in the world. A major component of ordinary reality consists of tacit interpersonal agreements about ways of being toward one another. For the individual, being-toward requires adopting a social persona that enables the self to participate in ordinary social reality. Each other individual likewise has adopted an ordinary social persona, such that social engagement becomes readily navigable. It is possible to occupy one’s social persona seamlessly if s/he can pursue his/her personal agenda and rectify interpersonal conflicts or misunderstandings within the implicit channels afforded by ordinary social reality. If not, then it may become necessary for the individual to engage in a therapeutic interpersonal relation that differs from ordinary social reality.

What is therapeutic interaction relative to ordinary social reality? Therapeutic interaction can occur as part of ordinary social reality, restoring disrupted everyday relationships within the ordinary course of being toward one another. Therapeutic interaction need not be completely separated from ordinary social reality; it can erupt at any time, in any place, as a kind of ek-static interval, an a-social reality. The therapeutic milieu can also be assigned a separate social space, a site within the broader ordinary reality, like a gym or a school or a doctor’s office. Here the expectation is that therapy is designed to equip people for more effective interpersonal functioning within ordinary social reality. However, therapy exists in part therapy because of the limitations of ordinary social reality and in contrast to it, as a kind of anti-social realty. Or therapeutic interaction can take place at the margins of ordinary reality, outside of the usual social flows but not directly positioned in contrast to it: a hetero-social reality.

The therapeutic relationship need not be bounded by the interpersonal agreements that characterize everyday social reality. The therapeutic isn’t necessarily more real than ordinary reality by stripping away the social conventions preventing more direct interpersonal encounters. Nor is the therapeutic necessarily less real because it takes place outside of ordinary reality. No a priori relationship need be established between the therapeutic and ordinary reality; e.g., a restoration of the individual to ordinary reality, an adjustment of the social reality to “make room” for the individual. Because the therapeutic relationship operates outside the ordinary social agreements, it is free to establish an alternative interpersonal reality that is different from everyday reality.

The term “therapeutic” implies the treatment of a disorder. When the individual finds it difficult to live seamlessly within ordinary social reality, it’s assumed that the individual suffers from a disorder and that therapy is treatment of the disordered individual. However, social reality is built on a set of tacit interpersonal agreements rather than on some foundational or universal truth about how people are to live with one another in the world. Ordinary social reality shifts over time and place; it contains elements that are arbitrary. Because this is so, there is no reason to assert that the individual who doesn’t fit seamlessly into ordinary social reality is sick. Nor for that matter is it necessary to assert that ordinary social reality is sick. All that can be asserted is that the individual is not one with the ordinary social reality in which s/he is embedded. “Therapy” may thus be an inappropriate word. Analysis? Counseling? Consulting? Maybe we need to be clearer about what might happen in this hetero-social reality before assigning it a name.

Easter Morning on the Cap

I took the long slow run around the Cap this morning. It’s cool and cloudy, just like last time. Hoping for a change in the weather, the restaurant on the first beach is setting its outdoor tables with the good white linen and the crystal. The second beach has been freshly groomed for the season, new sand replacing what had been lost to the winter waves. Yesterday afternoon the far end of this beach was crowded, not just with beachgoers but with locals waiting for the annual Stations of the Cross procession, led by the priest up the rough and steep Chemin de Calvaire to the chapel at the top of the hill. This morning the beach is empty.

Sunday morning the bicyclists are always out in force, many of them riding through from Nice in the east or Cannes in the west. Almost all of them are men wearing official bike racers gear riding thin-wheeled road bikes. Bicycles outnumber cars ten to one on Sunday mornings.

I see a sign along the road advertising the exclusive life to be had in the Cap villas. Oddly, the sign is printed in English — maybe only the English and the Americans can afford it. The gates are open at the Hotel du Cap, so I run up the driveway to the Eden Roc restaurant at the waterfront. Some day I’ll have to stop in and have a gin fizz at the bar. Maybe I’ll try next month when the film festival is on.

In Juan les Pins I see a bearded guy in a black suit and yarmulke: today is the last day of Passover, I believe. France has the biggest population of Jews and Muslims in Europe. I’m reminded of David Sedaris and some of his fellow emigres in French class trying to explain Easter, in French, to a Moroccan woman.

It is a party for the little boy of God who call his self Jesus and… He call his self Jesus and then he die one day on two… morsels of… lumber… He die one day and then he go above of my head to live with your father. He weared of himself the long hair and after he die, the first day he come back here for to say hello to the peoples. He nice, the Jesus. He make the good things, and on the Easter we be sad because somebody makes him dead today.

Another Post

So now I’m hung up on the discussion surrounding my most recent post. I’ve felt distracted by it for a day and a half now. I felt like something was getting in my way, preventing me from moving on with what I had in mind. But maybe if I allow the distraction to become the focal point… No, better: if I allow the distraction to enter into me, or to wash over me, to dominate me… or maybe it’s an opening of the void that I try to avoid — then maybe something will be revealed, or reworked, or made explicit, or destroyed, or reterritorialized.

The event begins with a comment made by Jonathan. He begins by suggesting that I’ve misrepresented Gadamer, and he offers a corrective. He then continues by proposing that the most reasonable position in a dispute usually, eventually, becomes the dominant position. He asserts that the minority positions, being lesser positions, ought to be ignored so that action can be taken. He concludes by saying that it’s absurd to think of the Church bothering to write an infinite number of anticreeds. (This is from memory; it’ll be interesting to see how much of what I just said is really written in Jonathan’s comment.)

At this point the void opens. I find myself irked by Jonathan’s comment, distracted. The more I try to ignore the distraction, the more pissed off I get. I write a response (again, from memory): if you don’t like my distinction between Gadamer and Derrida, forget it: it’s my ideas I’m stating here, not theirs. Then I say that this sort of conversation makes me wonder why I write a blog. I say that in my opinion the best idea doesn’t rise to the top, that the best idea is usually either over most people’s heads or too far off from the usual way of looking at things, so it gets buried with the other losers in the debate. My position is absurd? Write no creeds, I say, or write an absurd creed. Finally, I say I don’t care what the church does about its creeds: it’s no concern of mine.

Thinking about my reply to Jonathan as I’ve just summarized it, I agree with everything I wrote. But it’s an emotionally charged response, an angry response. It’s the emotion that dominates my response. What’s communicated, I suspect, is arrogance: my ideas are better than your ideas; they’re over your head; I don’t care about what you care about. Now I can disavow the arrogant intentions, say that in the heat of the moment I miscommunicated. Instead I’ll acknowledge to myself that tone of my response communicates some repressed meaning that expressed itself in the void between words.

I try not to think about myself. When I do I usually get angry and depressed. Why? Because I have a sense that my life isn’t going well, that it hasn’t gone well for a long time, that I don’t really expect it to get better. I’m better off if I stick with the ideas, the readings, the writings, the conversations. I’m wary of thinking too much about the other selves who participate in the conversations because other selves remind me of my self — which I’d rather not be reminded of.

So Jonathan’s response to my post distracts me from what I’m thinking about. But it distracts me to myself. First, the interpretation of Gadamer versus Derrida has a history. In my early days of blogging I was trying to attract attention to my interpretation of Genesis 1. Why? Because agents and publishers say they’re interested in nonfiction books only if the author has a “platform” — a public reputation that draws a ready-made audience to the book. I have no platform. Though I’ve got educational credentials, though I’ve had a reasonably successful career by most standards (but not my own), though the content of what I’ve written is excellent, though my writing style is clear and snappy, none of that matters because I don’t have a platform. So rather than sending my book out right away, I decide to devote some months of my time to building a platform.

In the first week or so I came across the Church and Postmodern Culture blog, which was brand new and hadn’t yet put up its first substantive post. It says that James KA Smith is the guy behind this blog. I never heard of Smith, so I read about him on his website: he’s an associate professor at a college where I once took a seminary course; he once wrote a book that uses Genesis 1-3 to contend that man by created nature is a language user, that language isn’t just a consequence of the Fall and the resulting separation from a oneness with God, thus making verbal communication necessary. I think: this guy Smith and I have something in common; my exegesis is right up his alley. Now I’m not looking for this guy to endorse my book — I never heard of him, and I doubt his name on the back cover would sell many books. But I do think he might be able to offer some helpful comments about my book, which I could use to do some further editing before sending it off to an agent. And maybe he’d help get a little buzz going about my ideas in whatever circles he runs in. Plus maybe we can strike up a correspondence on matters of mutual interest.

I send Smith a long email describing my project and how it relates to his; I point him toward the exegesis of Gen. 1 that was then up on my blog; I tell him that if he’s interested I’d be happy to discuss it further with him, email him my whole book, etc. A week goes by: no reply. I send a follow-up email, elaborating on my first one, trying to engage in conversation. This time I get a very brief reply: I’m busy with a lot of other stuff; why don’t you send your exegesis to a peer-reviewed journal. Like a form rejection letter. This pisses me off. I send him another email: if you’re too busy to read something that’s up your alley, you’ve got too much on your plate. Peer-reviewed journal? I’m not playing the academic game; this is a book for general readership. Do you think Richard Dawkins sent his latest book out for peer review before he sent it to the publisher? No reply. Smith has blown me off. Pisses me off. Now it’s no longer about the book, or the ideas, but about me. I regard this Smith guy as a possible colleague, a fellow traveler with similar interests. But he’s too fucking busy — which means there are innumerable other things that he’ll focus his attention on, but not my book, not me.

A week or so later Smith starts posting about his book on postmodernism at the Church and Pomo blog. My first reaction is to ignore his stuff; my second is to diss it in comments. But I restrain myself. I will engage in the conversation. The first post is about Derrida, whose stuff I know quite well. Smith includes Derrida in with Gadamer as two pomo guys who support the idea that texts are best read in the traditions they were written in — so the best interpreters of Scripture and the faith are those who participate in the ongoing historic tradition and community of the Church. I don’t know Gadamer, but I don’t think this is an accurate representation of Derrida. It’s like Smith has co-opted Derrida, making him a defender of orthodoxy rather than a revolutionary underminer of any sort of mainstream position. I start commenting. I engage the other commenters in discussion. I’m putting good ideas out there, linking them to others’ ideas. I’m fairly pleased with myself. Smith? He responds to others’ comments but not to mine. Pisses me off. I continue with a couple more of Smith’s posts, where he engages other pomo writers I don’t know as well as Derrida. Same pattern: thoughtful comments by me and others, interesting discussions with others, including Jason, occasional responses by Smith but never to my comments. Pisses me off. My comments are as stimulating of discussion as anyone’s and more so than most. I regard this as a personal slight now.

A couple months go by. Erdman and I have encountered each other at the Jesus Creed blog and have been commenting on each other’s blogs. He puts up a post about Smith’s book. It triggers my anger. I put up a critical comment: Smith is taming Derrida, equating him with Gadamer, who’s more prepared to accept a community’s authority, who’s a better ally for a neo-Catholic traditionalism. Erdman more or less agrees with Smith’s position. He emails Smith: we’re discussing your book on my blog; come check it out. Smith shows up, comments: this whole taming of Derrida I find boring. Asshole. No acknowledgment of my participation on the Church and Pomo debate — maybe he doesn’t even make the connection. I reply: it’s probably boring because you hear it over and over again from so many people; maybe you should pay attention. He comes back, acknowledges his tendency toward arrogance, makes another comment which I don’t remember the gist of, and never comes back again.

So now we’re back to yesterday’s exchange here, maybe 8 months after my emails to Smith. I never built a platform; my letters and proposals to the agents resulted in either a 1-sentence generic rejection or no reply whatsoever. I’ve just posted — again — the distinction I see between Gadamer and Derrida. It’s not the main point of my post — just a little side benefit. Here comes Erdman. Does he begin by talking about my ideas? No: he says I’ve misconstrued Gadamer; here’s the right way to interpret him. This time he makes Gadamer sound more like my reading of the radical Derrida — as opposed to my prior disagreement with Smith, who made Derrida sound more like his reading of the conservative Gadamer. Pisses me off. It brings back my whole history with Gadamer versus Derrida, which long ago had morphed in my head into Smith versus Doyle.

Here I’ve been trying to put my disappointment about the Genesis 1 book behind me. I couldn’t generate a buzz through my blog; I built no platform to attract the agents’ interest; my book will probably never be read by anyone other than the two people who’ve already read it: my wife Anne and an emerging pastor, the father of my daughter’s school pal, who after reading the book says “so what? what does this mean for doing church?” who has since quit the ministry, moved back to the States, and no longer responds to my emails. So like I say, I’m trying to get beyond my anger and depression about the Gen 1 book. I’ve written 3 books, none published, no prospects for any of them getting published. I can’t bring myself to write book 4. I need to make some money; I start thinking about starting some kind of counseling practice. But I want the practice to fit with my larger agendas: creation, interpretation, meaning. Meanwhile, I’ve come to enjoy the blog world for its own sake, not because it might help me build a platform. I enjoy my frequent exchanges with Jonathan and, more recently, with Jason — I think of them as my friends. I also enjoy my exchanges with others on a less frequent basis. I’m rereading philosophy and novels through a psychological lens rather than a theological one, but people seem to be reading along with me, commenting, asking questions. The process is helping me clarify my own ideas. I might also be contributing to others clarifying their own ideas. It’s a good thing, this blogging.

I’m just about ready to pull it together into a tentative pomo therapeutic praxis. I take a walk and something about the Creeds comes to mind, illustrative of something in Derrida’s deconstruction of texts, but also linking to the psychoanalytic insight that the unconscious expresses itself nonverbally. Can a text be deconstructed based not on what’s written in it, but on what isn’t written in it? Do texts reveal traces of repressed matter in a kind of shadow non-textual world behind the text? I don’t think I’ve read this idea before in quite this way. It’s a bridge between the textual guys — the philosophers and literary critics — and the spoken-word guys — the analysts and psychologists. I’m psyched; I can find the way toward what I’ve been hoping to find. And it illustrates something about the ways in which a text written within and for an interpretive community — an idea I associate with Gadamer — reveals all the texts that weren’t written, that would have been written if the community had defined its boundaries between in and out differently — a Derrida idea. So now I’ve got also the beginning of a way of categorizing what isn’t written, what isn’t said, based on these two philosophers translated into a psychological context.

But… I’m thrown back on myself. First in the allusion to the Smith disagreement. But then this other half of Jonathan’s comment: the dominant voice is usually the one that deserves to dominate; the minority voices should be ignored. I’m struck by the anomaly of his position: it sounds so modernistic, so not Derrida. Is this just sophistry on Erdman’s part, arguing for argument’s sake? But I’m also now doubly pissed. Why? Because my voice is the minority voice. My first novel doesn’t seem to resonate with the popular imagination (nobody but Anne has seen the second one). My Genesis 1 interpretation is all but invisible both to the emerging post-evangelicals and to the evolutionary scientists. Do I believe that the dominant positions dominate because of their intellectual superiority? No: I believe mine is better, but it’s either over most people’s heads or it’s just too far off from the existing interpretive paradigms. Popular tastes of the herd dominate excellence: it’s why top-grossing movies are crap, it’s why I can’t get a book published unless I’m a talk-show host. This gap between popular and excellent, between value and market value, between individual difference and groupthink, is at the heart of my project, and at the heart of my anger and depresssion. So here I’m coming forth with what I see as the leading edge of a new set of ideas that might energize me, but I’m wary. I fear that in all likelihood these ideas will meet the same fate as my books: no one will see them, they will disappear into the background noise.

So what’s Erdman’s comment say? Minority viewpoints don’t deserve consideration because they’ve been tried in the fire and found wanting; we need to move on, take action based on the official majority creeds of our culture. This is precisely the opposite of what I believe about my own minority voice, but also precisely what I see as the obstacle facing my work. And here, on my first launch of this new insight, I’m confronted explicitly with the void, the reason why my other contributions have fallen into oblivion. Or, not a void: better — I’m moving forward and all of a sudden a wall is slammed in my face.

I wish I wouldn’t subject myself to this having the wall slammed in my face, especially right at the moment of breakthrough. It’s like when I finish writing a book: the first book was thrilling; the third one was depressing because immediately the wall separating the book from all possible readers of the book jumped in front of me. Anyhow, this sense of the imminent wall makes me wish I didn’t write a blog, where I’m immediately confronted by a rejection. What I really wish, of course, is something else I don’t say: I wish the readers of my blog wouldn’t throw the wall up in my face; I wish everybody would read my blog and love it, tearing the walls down. When it doesn’t happen, I wish I hadn’t succumbed to the hope that it would.

There’s a positive version of this wish not to write a blog too. When I’ve written my books I’ve purposely isolated myself from readers until the book is finished. I’ve also largely isolated myself from contemporary fiction and trends in the marketplace, not wanting my own vision to be distorted by what others are writing or reading. This has worked well for me: I can write page after page, day after day, like going on a long run by myself. To write in blog-sized chunks, to put the chunks up for public display and criticism, to adapt what I write to the audience — I’m not sure it’s such a good idea. Maybe when I get to this particular stage, when I’m synthesizing what I’ve read and creating my own thing, I should take that stuff off-line and do it in private. So that’s the positive, conscious, “creedal” rationale for wishing I wasn’t writing a blog. The rest of it is anticreed. Which one is true?

Anyhow, so now I string together some sentences in my comment: I sometimes wish I wasn’t writing a blog. I think the best ideas are over people’s heads, or that people are too boxed into their own paradigms to see them. The impression I’m sure this gives is an arrogant one: you assholes don’t deserve to read my blog. Partly that’s what I feel. Partly it’s the rational content, my “creed” about blogwriting and about good ideas, especially my good ideas. The arrogant part is anticreed. Also the inverse of what I wrote: maybe my stuff really isn’t very good, maybe it deserves to be buried with the rest of the loser crap. I of course have to acknowledge this possibility. To buffer myself against this suppressed possibility of my own mediocrity I overreact, adopting a posture of arrogant superiority. Which I wish I didn’t have to do. I wish the writing would just flow out from me into the world, find places to land, collaborators who help me and whom I also help on the front lines of human creatorliness, etc. etc. Instead the flows turn inward, onto the ego, and I have to confront the inner conflict of whether I’m great or mediocre, and of whether other people think I’m great or mediocre.

Now the thing about the Creeds comes to mind. I haven’t written any posts about explicitly theological topics in a long time — since I more or less gave up on my Genesis 1 book, in fact. Why all of a sudden the Nicene Creed? It illustrates a point I’m trying to make, sure. But the Christian Creed? Well, I think partly this. The people I converse with on my own and other blogs are mostly Christians. I’m not Christian. I do, however, hope for some other basis of fellowship than faith in God, a basis in creativity and excellence and difference, as well as a combined struggle against the imitative mediocrity of the mass culture. When I express this hope my Christian blogging amigos tell me I’m talking about some vision of the church they too uphold. But what about the unbeliever? What about me? Am I excluded from this imaginary fellowship? Am I irreconcilably alienated from the people I talk with all the time? Are they all together on one side of the divide, leaving me alone on the other side? Must I subscribe to the Creed in order to enter into the Elysian fields, into the fellowship of the remnant? Isn’t there room for the minority position that’s been pushed to the margins? Doesn’t everyone in the majority also have the minority position in themselves somewhere, providing an unspoken link? And can’t I too acknowledge my own affinity with the majority position, even though for me it’s not what I consciously uphold as my own personal creed? So perhaps my deconstruction of the Nicene Creed is in part an attempt to deterritorialize the fellowship, a proposal to let me in without forcing me to sign the Confession of Faith. Can we support one another? Is what I’m about to offer up here as a set of ideas going to be valued by the Christians? Can the Christians help me clarify my ideas and their application even if the ideas are secular?

Which brings me to the end of Jonathan’s response. Are we supposed to have sixty creeds? It’s absurd. This is the right Creed: it’s proven its value; it gives us the momentum to move forward together. Sure it does, but it means the Creedalists move on and I’m left behind. Okay fine, screw you then. Have no creed, have an absurd creed, I don’t give a damn about your freaking church anyhow. But what I want is a different creed. Do I want a universalist creed that includes the anticreeds? Not really. I want a creed based on a different division of the territory, a creed that believes in human creation, in excellence, in difference, etc. — the creed that gives me my forward momentum but that also seems to keep me isolated. Maybe it is the absurd creed, to create good but different stuff that probably nobody but the fellow creedalists will ever see or value. But at least there would be the remnant to take consolation among one another.

So I write my comment. I get a response from Jonathan. Okay, don’t talk about the church then. My first reaction? Since I’m not part of the church I have no right to talk about the church — meaning especially to diss the Church’s Creeds. I’m pissed all over again. I tell Anne about it. She doesn’t see why I’m so pissed. So she’s in on it too, a Christian conspiracy designed to ostracize me, to make me think I’m the one who’s paranoid. It takes awhile for me to calm down and read it again. No: I’m the one who said I didn’t care about the church. Fine, says Jonathan, let’s talk about the Nazis instead. Now I start to realize my overreaction. I relook at the whole exchange. I feel embarrassed, apologetic. Once again, I’m the asshole. I’m always the asshole sooner or later. I can’t remember if I write my next reply at this point, but I don’t think so. I think I put it aside for the night. My anger has changed to depression.

In the morning, still depressed, I see I’ve gotten an email from Jason. He says (again from memory) that he wants to know where I’m coming from. He feels like he’s been marking time on my blog, covering the same old ground, to the point where it’s getting violent. He wants to know my story. To which I say something like: fine, if you’re bored with my blog, go do something else; get violent on somebody else’s blog. I then tell him that my story is implicit in my blog already, that I’m all about creation and the difficulty of carrying on without recognition and the territorializations of the herd. Then I say here’s probably the story you want to hear, but that isn’t so important to me: agnostic, God is probably the product of human imagination, and so on. There, I say, I hope your curiosity is satisfied. End of response. Once again, the content is accurate. But the tone implies something else: if you’re bored it’s because you don’t get it. You say you want my story but you’re missing it. You only want my story to satisfy your curiosity. But of course I’m also reluctant to tell my story. It again makes me think about myself. It again sets up the test I’m bound to fail, or that Jason is bound to fail: my story as I tell it to myself, versus my story as the Christians want to hear it. I’m resentful, demoralized, isolated.

I have breakfast, I cheer up a little. I write an apologetic blog comment, I send an apologetic email to Jason. I get back to the original subject matter of the post, responding at length to Jonathan, Jason, Ron, Sam. But I sense my own momentum has been sapped. It all feels futile, like I have to force myself to think about it. And here 24 hours before I was so enthusiastic, so ready to push forward into the creative interval. Now I’m neither angry nor depressed; just sort of flatly melancholy. I feel this way fairly often: no energy, no creative flow, a vague sense of futility. And I sense the steam has gone out of the Anticreeds blog post too — the comments have drifted into some strange realm of sarcasm, resentment, disinterest. I ought to get back on the horse, write the next post in the series. But my heart isn’t in it. Maybe I’ll just quit right here. I’ve thought about quitting the blog before; maybe now is the time. But then I decide to let the distraction take over my awareness. And so here is another post.

Anti-Creeds

I’m thinking about hermeneutics and deconstruction. Gadamer, following Heidegger, oberved that writers and readers of texts operate within interpretive frameworks. A shared framework between writer and reader makes communication possible, but it also prevents the possibility of arriving at absolute knowledge independent of context. Derrida, following Nietzsche, looked for places in texts that reveal evidence of alternative interpretive frameworks. The author represses these socially unacceptable ways of seeing things but they’re still there, leaving traces in the text that the author and the intended readers may not have been consciously aware of. In a nutshell, Gadamer reveals the dominant interpretive framework while Derrida exposes the marginalized minority interpretative frameworks.

Take the Nicene Creed, a short textual summary of how the early Christian community interpreted the faith. The Creed wasn’t a spontaneous manifestation of shared beliefs; it was hashed out in contentious debate. Dissenters were excommunicated, executed, driven underground, excluded from the community. The text of the Nicene Creed makes explicit the dominant interpretive framework of 4th century Christianity, but there’s also an “anti-text” implicit in the text, an “anti-creed” that points to the losers in the debate.

We believe in one God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible. And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father before all worlds, God of God, Light of Light, Very God of Very God, begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father by whom all things were made; who for us men, and for our salvation, came down from heaven, and was incarnate by the Holy Spirit of the Virgin Mary, and was made man, and was crucified also for us under Pontius Pilate. He suffered and was buried, and the third day he rose again according to the Scriptures, and ascended into heaven, and sitteth on the right hand of the Father. And he shall come again with glory to judge both the quick and the dead, whose kingdom shall have no end. And we believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord and Giver of Life, who proceedeth from the Father and the Son, who with the Father and the Son together is worshipped and glorified, who spoke by the prophets. And we believe one holy catholic and apostolic Church. We acknowledge one baptism for the remission of sins. And we look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come. Amen.

Imagine a praxis of reading the anti-creed that goes like this: for every statement in the Creed, posit at least one opposite statement. So, from the beginning:

We believe in one God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible.

One God. What are the alternatives that could be believed? No gods: a philosophical option in every age. Two gods: the Old Testament god and Jesus’s god — this was the Marcionites’ position. Three gods: father, son, holy ghost. Many gods: paganism and gnosticism. All these alternatives to monotheism were in play during the early Christian era.

The Father. Some may have believed that God is Lord but not Father, so totally above and other that he could not enter into a fatherly relationship with mere humans.

Almighty. The Manichaeists believed that God had no absolute power over the forces of evil, which exist in eternal opposition to good.

Maker of heaven and earth. The Greeks and pagans believed that both heaven and earth existed eternally. The Gnostics believed that a demiurge created the corrupt earth by mistake.

And so on. Each tenet stated in the Creed implies at least one unstated opposing position that enjoyed significant support in the early Christian era. We can imagine a whole bunch of alternative creeds that would have incorporated one or more of the banned beliefs. “We believe in two gods…” We believe in many gods…” Five options can be stated just by changing the number of gods: 0, 1, 2, 3, or more than 3. Father versus not father gives us 2 sub-options for each of the first 5 options. So far in our analysis of the Creed we can generate 5 x 2 x 2 x 3 = 60 creedal variants. Only one is The Creed; the other 59 get lumped together in the unstated realm of anticreed. We’ve only made it through the first sentence: plenty of other unstated controversies can be identified as we continue reading. And The Creed doesn’t even cover a lot of the big debates that would take center stage in subsequent centuries: transubstantiation, the Fall, predestination, universal salvation… It’s not that consensus broke down later; it’s that nobody had thought about these issues clearly enough for a controversy to arise. The Nicene Creed describes the inclusive interpretive framework of the early Christian community. The Nicene Creed is a mandate that forcibly excludes minority positions, driving them underground, denying them a voice. Gadamer versus Derrida.

Was the dissent only an external one between disputing factions? Or by naming the tenets of the Anti-Creed do we outline the shadow world in the 4th century Christian heart, the disbeliefs of the believers, the doubts that bubbled up and that had to be pushed back down again? “I believe in no-god, my double, no more powerful than I, the first creator of what heavens and earth mean…” Do my stated beliefs imply an opposing set of vague doubts that roil underground in voiceless disarray, an anarchy of subconscious heretics that lost the battle for conscious control of my mind, forced now to employ guerrilla tactics to make their presence felt? The voice that proclaims “I believe” implies the voiceless anti-proclamation: “I doubt.”

A Rabid Mania for Originality

If the philosophers were in a position to declare the truth, which of them would care to do so? Every one of them knows that his own system rests on no surer foundations than the rest, but he maintains it because it is his own. There is not one of them who, if he chanced to discover the difference between truth and falsehood, would not prefer his own lie to the truth which another had discovered. Where is the philosopher who would not deceive the whole world for his own glory? If he can rise above the crowd, if he can excel his rivals, what more does he want? Among believers he is an atheist; among atheists he would be a believer.

– Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, 1762

Creators recognize this desire in themselves not just to be unique but to be recognized as unique. But creators are also aware that their vanity makes them vulnerable. When we were selling our house in Boulder I decided to write some unconventional “sales brochures” (here’s one that I previously posted, in case you missed the chance to admire it the first time around). I did it as a distraction from my anxieties about getting the house sold, from feeling like I could make someone buy the house if I worked hard enough at selling. It was a kind of ironic sales gesture. But I also really liked the brochures: clever, well-written, unique. One day I saw a guy who used to work for me driving through the neighborhood. “Check out my house brochure,” I told him, grabbing one out of the box in the front yard and handing it to him. He surveyed it briefly, then with a smirk he handed it back. “This is so Boulder,” he said. Asshole.

We are more grateful to him who congratulates us on the skill with which we defend a cause than we are to him who recognizes the truth or the goodness of the cause itself. A rabid mania for originality is rife in the modern intellectual world and characterizes all individual effort. We would rather err with genius than hit the mark with the crowd.

– Miguel de Unamuno, Tragic Sense of Life, 1954

I was having beers with an old friend. Rarely is it a good idea to tell your old friends about your creative endeavors. What the heck, I thought. So I told him about a book I had just finished, and I was worried about getting it published. He asked me about self-publishing; I said I thought it would be hard to get the books on the shelves so people could buy them. I told him how good I thought the book was, how important it could be. “I think everybody in the world would benefit from reading my book,” I confessed in all sincerity. He smirked. “Geez, that’s really arrogant.” Asshole.

If the man who tells you that he writes, paints, sculptures, or sings for his own amusement, gives his work to the public, he lies; he lies if he puts his name to his writing, painting, statue, or song. He wishes, at the least, to leave behind a shadow of his spirit, something that may survive him. If the “Imitation of Christ” is anonymous, it is because its author sought the eternity of the soul and did not trouble himself about that of the name. (Unamuno)

Nothing is better than “Lars the Emo Kid.” So I’ve just been told by my daughter, who’s watching some YouTube video while I’m writing this post. She wants me to watch it with her. No. Why? Because I’m doing this. But this is funny. But this is better. When? Ever? Sure, after I finish my post. Now. No.

To work for the work’s sake is not work but play. (Unamuno)

If I have to worry about whether I’m doing it to stoke my own ego or for the benefit of mankind or for the glory of God or purely for the sake of the doing, I’m being trapped in a self-consciousness that keeps me from the thing itself. Is it my fault if what I make really is excellent and unique? Is it such a terrible aspiration? Is it indulging the creator’s vanity to tell him yes, this is an excellent and a unique thing that you have made? Would you rather live in a world without excellent and unique creations?

And they keep on wearying our ears with this chorus of Pride! stinking Pride! Pride to wish to leave an ineffaceable name? Pride? It is like calling the thirst for riches a thirst for pleasure. No, it is not so much the longing for pleasure that drives us poor folk to seek money as the terror of poverty, just as it was not the desire for glory but the terror of hell that drove men in the Middle Ages to consider the cloister with its acedia. Neither is this wish to leave a name pride, but terror of extinction. We aim at being all because in that we see the only means of escaping from being nothing. (Unamuno)

I Shall Be Tepid

I shall soon be quite dead at last in spite of all.

– Samuel Beckett,

Malone Dies, 1956

Beckett is another hero of Deleuze & Guattari, or perhaps an anti-hero; where Henry Miller runs headlong through the tropics, Beckett takes the lonely trek to the polar ice caps. He gives us the musings of a nearly-catatonic schizophrenic on the verge of death — a subject that wouldn’t seem to offer much by way of character development or dialog or plot. What he gives us are the writhings of the fragmented mind and the seemingly unquenchable life force that sparks across the gaps.

I could die to-day, if I wished, merely by making a little effort, if I could wish, if I could make an effort. But it is just as well to let myself die, quietly, without rushing things. Something must have changed. I will not weigh upon the balance any more, one way or the other. I shall be neutral and inert. No difficulty there. Throes are the only trouble, I must be on my guard against throes… Yes, I shall be natural at last, I shall suffer more, then less, without drawing any conclusions, I shall pay less heed to myself, I shall be neither hot nor cold any more, I shall be tepid, I shall die tepid, without enthusiasm. I shall not watch myself die, that would spoil everything. Have I watched myself live?

Let me say before I go any further that I forgive nobody. I wish them all an atrocious life and then the fires and ice of hell and in the execrable generations to come an honored name.

I have lived in a kind of coma. The loss of consciousness for me was never any great loss. But perhaps I was stunned with a blow, on the head, in a forest perhaps, yes, now that I speak of a forest I vaguely remember a forest. All that belongs to the past. Now it is the present I must establish, before I am avenged. It is an ordinary room. I have little experience of rooms, but this one seems quite ordinary to me. The truth is, if I did not feel myself dying, I could well believe myself dead, expiating my sins, or in one of heaven’s mansions. But I feel at last that the sands are running out, which would not be the case if I were in heaven, or in hell.

I am never hot, never cold. I don’t wash, but I don’t get dirty. If I get dirty somewhere I rub the part with my finger wet with spittle. What matters is to eat and excrete. Dish and pot, dish and pot, these are the poles.

Does anything remain to be said? A few words about myself, perhaps. My body is what is called, unadvisedly perhaps, impotent. There is virtually nothing I can do. Sometimes I miss being able to crawl around any more. But I am not much given to nostalgia. My arms, once they are in a certain position, exert a certain force. But I find it hard to guide them. Perhaps the red nucleus has faded… All my senses are trained full on me, me. Dark and silent and stale, I am no prey for them. I am far from the sounds of blood and breath, immured. I shall not speak of my sufferings. Cowering deep down among them I feel nothing. It is there I die, unknown to my stupid flesh. That which is seen, that which cries and writhes, my witless remains. Somewhere in this turmoil thought struggles on, it too wide of the mark. It too seeks me, where it always has, where I am not to be found. It too cannot be quiet. On others let it wreak its dying rage, and leave me in peace. Such would seem to be my present state.

I don’t like those gull’s eyes. They remind me of an old shipwreck, I forget which. I know it is a small thing. But I am easily frightened now. I know those little phrases that seem so innocuous and, once you let them in, pollute the whole of speech. Nothing is more real than nothing. They rise up out of the pit and and know no rest until they drag you down into the dark. But I am on my guard now. Then he was sorry he had not learnt the art of thinking, beginning by folding back the second and third fingers the better to put the index on the subject and the little finger on the verb, in the way his teacher had shown him, and sorry he could make no meaning of the babel raging in his head, the doubts, desires, imaginings and dreads. And a little less well endowed with strength and courage he too would have abandoned and despaired of ever knowing what manner of being he was, and how he was going to live, and lived vanquished, blindly, in a mad world, in the midst of strangers.

My time is limited. It is thence that one fine day, when all nature smiles and shines, the rack lets loose its black unforgettable cohorts and sweeps away the blue for ever. My situation is truly delicate. What fine things, what momentous things, I am going to miss through fear, fear of falling back into the old error, fear of not finishing in time, fear of reveling, for the last time, in a last outpouring of misery, impotence and hate. The forms are many in which the unchanging seeks relief from its formlessness. Ah yes, I was always subject to the deep thought, especially in the spring of the year. That one had been nagging at me for the past five minutes. I venture to hope there will be no more, of that depth.

To Sing Doesn’t Cost You a Penny

It must have been a Thursday night when I met her for the first time — at a dance hall.

– Henry Miller, Sexus, 1962

Henry Miller is one of the heroes of Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus. In his books Miller’s hero was himself, or at least a fictional persona who narrates the stories and who calls himself Henry Miller. The first line of Sexus begins Miller’s seven-year obsession with “her.” Here’s a taste:

I will go directly to her home, ring the bell, and walk in. Here I am, take me — or stab me to death. Stab the head, stab the brain, stab the lungs, the kidneys, the viscera, the eyes, the ears. If only one organ be left alive you are doomed — doomed to be mine, forever, in this world and the next and all the worlds to come. I’m a desperado of love, a scalper, a slayer. I’m insatiable. I eat hair, dirty wax, dry blood clots, anything and everything you call yours.

I believe in God the Father, in Jesus Christ his only begotten Son, in the blessed Virgin Mary, the Holy Ghost, in Adam Cadmium, in chrome nickel, the oxides and the mercurochromes, in waterfowls and water cress, in epileptoid seizures, in bubonic plagues, in devachan, in planetary conjunctions, in chicken tracks and stick-throwing, in revolutions, in stock crashes, in wars, earthquakes, cyclones, in Kali Yoga and in hula-hula. I believe. I believe. I believe because not to believe is to become as lead, to lie prone and rigid, forever inert, to waste away. . . .

I said to myself over and over that if a man, a sincere and desperate man like myself, loves a woman with all his heart, if he is ready to cut off his ears and mail them to her, if he will take his heart’s blood and pump it out on paper, saturate her with his need and longing, besiege her everlastingly, she cannot possibly refuse him. The homeliest man, the weakest man, the most undeserving man must triumph if he is willing to surrender his last drop of blood. No woman can hold out against the gift of absolute love.

I never worried about the genius: genius takes care of the genius in a man… All geniuses are leeches, so to speak. They feed from the same source — the blood of life. The most important thing for the genius is to make himself useless, to be absorbed in the common stream, to become a fish again and not a freak of nature. The only benefit, I reflected, which the act of writing could offer me was to remove the differences that separated me from my fellow man. I definitely did not want to become the artist, in the sense of becoming something strange, something apart and out of the current of life… No man ever puts down what he intended to say: the original creation, which is taking place all the time, whether one writes or doesn’t write, belongs to the primal flux: it has no dimensions, no form, no time element. In this preliminary state, which is creation and not birth, what disappears suffers no destruction; something which was already there, something imperishable, like memory, or matter, or God, is summoned and in it one flings himself like a twig into a torrent. Words, sentences, ideas, no matter how subtle or ingenious, the maddest flights of poetry, the most profound dreams, the most hallucinating visions, are but crude hieroglyphs chiseled in pain and sorrow to commemorate an event, which is untransmissible. In an intelligently ordered world there would be no need to make the unreasonable attempt of putting such miraculous happenings down. Indeed, it would make no sense, for if men only stopped to realize it, who would be content with the counterfeit when the real is at everyone’s beck and call?

I suppose it does sound funny to hear someone say, ‘I love it, it’s wonderful, it’s good, it’s great,’ meaning everything. Of course I don’t feel that way every day — but I’d like to. And when I do I’m normal, when I’m myself. Everybody does, if given a chance. It’s the natural state of the heart. The trouble is, we’re terrorized most of the time. I say ‘we’re terrorized,’ but I mean we terrorize ourselves.

If we could still believe in a god, we’d make him a god of vengeance. We’d surrender to him with a full heart the task of cleaning things up. It’s too late for us to pretend to clean up the mess. We’re in it up to the eyes. We don’t want a new world . . . we want an end to the mess we’ve made. At sixteen you can believe in a new world . . . you can believe anything, in fact . . . but at twenty you’re doomed, and you know it. At twenty you’re well in harness, and the most you can hope for is to get off with arms and legs intact. It isn’t a question of fading hope . . . Hope is a baneful sign; it means impotence. Courage is no use either; everybody can muster courage — for the wrong thing. I don’t know what to say — unless I use a word like vision. And by that I don’t mean a projected picture of the future, of some imagined ideal made real. I mean something more flexible, more constant . . . something like a third eye. We had it once. There was a sort of clairvoyance which was natural and common to all men. Then came the mind, and that eye which permitted us to see whole and round and beyond was absorbed by the brain, and we became conscious of the world, and of one another, in a new way. Our pretty little egos came into bloom: we became self-conscious, and with that came conceit, arrogance, blindness, a blindness such as was never known before, not even by the blind.

Lie down, then, on the soft couch which the analyst provides, and try to think up something different. The analyst has endless time and patience; every minute you detain him means more money in his pocket. He is like God, in a sense — the God of your own creation. Whether you whine, howl, beg, weep, implore, cajole, pray or curse — he listens. He is just a big ear minus a sympathetic nervous system. He is impervious to everything but truth. If you think it pays to fool him then fool him. Who will be the loser? If you think he can help you, and not yourself, then stick to him until you rot. He has nothing to lose. But if you realize that he is not a god but a human being like yourself, with worries, defects, ambitions, frailties, that he is not the repository of an all-encompassing wisdom but a wanderer along the path, perhaps you will cease pouring it out like a sewer, however melodious it may sound to your ears, and rise up on your own two legs and sing with your own God-given voice. To confess, to whine, to complain, to commiserate, always demands a toll. To sing doesn’t cost you a penny. Not only does it cost nothing — you actually enrich others. Sing the praises of the Lord, it is enjoined. Aye, sing out! Sing out, O Master-builder! Sing out, glad warrior! But, you quibble, how can I sing when the world is crumbling, when all about me is bathed in blood and tears? Do you realize that the martyrs sang when they were being burned at the stake? They saw nothing crumbling, they heard no shrieks of pain. They sang because they were full of faith. Who can demolish faith? Who can wipe out joy? Men have tried, in every age. But they have not succeeded. Joy and faith are inherent in the universe. In growth there is pain and struggle; in accomplishment there is joy and exuberance; in fulfillment there is peace and serenity. Between the planes and spheres of existence, terrestrial and superterrestrial, there are ladders and lattices. The one who mounts sings. He is made drunk and exalted by unfolding vistas. He ascends sure-footedly, thinking not of what lies below, should he slip and lose his grasp, but of what lies ahead. Everything lies ahead. The way is endless, and the farther one reaches the more the road opens up. The bogs and quagmires, the marshes and sinkholes, the pits and snares, are all in the mind. They lurk in waiting, ready to swallow one up he moment one ceases to advance. The phantasmal world is the world which has not been fully conquered over. It is the world of the past, never of the future. To move forward clinging to the past is like dragging a ball and chain. The prisoner is not the one who has committed a crime, but the one who clings to his crime and lives it over and over. We are all guilty of crime, the greatest crime of not living life to the full. But we are all potentially free. We can stop thinking what we have failed to do and do whatever lies within our power. What these powers that are in us may be no one has truly dared to imagine. That they are infinite we will realize the day we admit to ourselves that imagination is everything. Imagination is the voice of daring. If there is anything God-like about God it is that. He dared to imagine everything.